by Laura Resau
The worst of it was, her children were sent to an orphanage. “One tiny moment they gave me to kiss my children goodbye. How could I know that might be the last time I’d hold them? The last time ever?” She thought of her children with every breath she took. All she could do was pray that people were treating them well. She prayed that the oldest remembered the name of their village. Then maybe they could leave the orphanage and live with their relatives.
“Ahhh, Helena, they say they will free me next month. Can you believe it? After ten years! But you know something? My stomach is full of fear. I fear going back to my village. I fear that my children will be there…and feel shame for me. And at the same time, I fear that they won’t be there…that never again will I see them.”
In silence we sat until the guard’s footsteps sounded in the hall. He opened the door, coughing, and handed a heavy jar of water to us. We drank in gulps, doña Three Teeth and I, passing the pitcher back and forth. Then he set down a clay plate with a few tortillas and a bowl of black beans. The tortillas were stale and the beans cold, but that didn’t matter. We shared the food, nibbling like rabbits, trying to make it last longer. Of course, my cell mate had only three teeth, so she had no choice but to chew slowly.
I left the last tortilla for her, and the last bit of beans. But she refused. “No, love, you take it.”
“No, please, you.”
“No, you!”
So we tore it in half, and in half again, and again, until the tortilla pieces were the size of my little fingernail. And when we tried to part it further, we fell into a fit of laughter. Oh, such a fit that the guard’s face appeared at the door’s window to see about our uproar. Who knows what he thought when he saw us rolling on the floor? Rolling and laughing so hard that tears rolled down our cheeks.
Once he left we caught our breaths and our laughter faded into sighs. Night fell, and we lay on the dirt floor with our braids overlapping. Above us, a fly buzzed through the air. This close to doña Three Teeth, I caught a whiff of her real smell. It pierced through the stench of old sweat and mouse droppings. Her smell made me think of a fresh lime. A lime just sliced open, tart and sweet in a fine spray.
I told her about Ta’nu and Loro and Aunt and María, the beings I loved in this world. When I imitated Loro shrieking “¡Ánimo!” she giggled like a young girl. After a moment, I said, “Tell me more about your village. About when you were a child. When everything was good.”
She talked and talked. As her words poured out, she seemed lighter. Her voice turned warm and soothing as lemongrass tea.
I closed my eyes and let her paint pictures of the green fields around her village. Of the mossy springs where they collected water. Of the secrets in the mountain forests. I listened to the shhhhhhh shhhhhhh sound her voice made when she talked of the spirit waterfall. A waterfall that you could hear but not see. The sound of moving water had sung her to sleep as a child. And it sang me to sleep there in our cell. It made me forget about the floor beneath me, cold and hard. It made me forget about the rats scuttling in the corner and the cockroaches crawling over my ankles.
In peace, I slept.
Clara
Night after night I lay under my scratchy blanket, staring at the wooden beams in the ceiling. It took hours to fall asleep, and even when I slept it was only halfway. During the days since the fight with Pedro, I hadn’t been walking in the mountains. Instead, I stayed in the yard by the shacks, watching the chickens fight over bits of old tortillas. Sometimes I helped my grandparents work, but mostly I sat alone on a wooden chair, feeling bored and sorry for myself, wishing for a TV. Some part of my mind was always thinking about Pedro, replaying every conversation we’d had, regretting some things I’d said, wishing I’d said others.
Jewels had no soul. They were only mirrors, brilliant colors. I thought about the song’s words from all angles, like a puzzle. What they made me think of was the fake miniature neighborhood at the spring fair and the feeling that my life in Walnut Hill was reflections on the surface of water. Flat, like Abuelita’s life before her first soul flight.
One night, about a week after the fight with Pedro, no matter how many times I changed positions, sleep would not come. Had I forgotten how to sleep? Was it a skill that you could just forget? I sat up, threw my pillow against the wall, and stepped out of bed onto the cold wooden floor.
Outside, the night held tiny water droplets. They hung in the air and pressed on my skin. There was a fuzzy halo around the half-moon, and only a few stars flickered. Most of them were hidden behind clouds. The air smelled musty, like a forgotten corner of an attic. Clothes on the line moved in slow waves, and beyond that, mist drifted over the mountains. The air was so thick that flying seemed almost possible—swimming through the night.
A voice called out, “Clara.”
It was Abuelita, walking toward me.
“What are you doing up, Abuelita?” I asked, surprised.
“I’m going to give you a limpia, mi amor.”
“A limpia?”
“Limpia means clean. Clean inside, in your spirit. We will blow away the clouds, lift up the fog.”
In the moonlight, we collected ruda and basil and white flowers from the garden, in a basket. In her curing room, Abuelita lit candles on the altar and began chanting in Mixteco in a low, soft voice. I stood still while she brushed the wet herbs over my head and neck. Little droplets of water trickled down my forehead, tickled my face, ran over my shoulders, down my arms. I giggled, then shivered, and then my breathing fell into the rhythm of her chanting.
Through half-closed eyes, I saw her take a mouthful of mezcal. Then, in a burst like Coke exploding from a just-opened bottle, she sprayed it all over me.
The shock of cold wetness.
Tingling skin.
Every inch of my body woke up, as though I’d just leaped into a swimming pool.
Then the tears came, warm, out of my eyes, down my face, and I heard myself sobbing, for so many things—for rolling my eyes at Dad’s stories, for yelling at Pedro, for all the people who’d crossed the desert, their abandoned villages, the families they’d left behind. Wave after wave of cold mezcal soaked me until I was drenched.
Finally Abuelita stopped, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and chanted again softly. She made crosses in the air with her hands over my head, chest, and stomach. Then she gathered up the wet herbs in the basket and led me along the edge of the cornfield, up through the wild grasses, and into the woods at the base of the mountain. When we reached the stream, we stopped.
The water ran fast, with little flecks of white foam spotting the blackness. She handed the limp herbs to me and whispered, “These have passed over your body, over your spirit. They have taken out all the mal aire—all the bad things. Now the mal aire is in these plants. Throw them in the running water, mi amor, and watch the current carry them away.”
I tossed the herbs into the water. The stream swallowed them up. Above us, in the branches, something moved. There, on a twisted tree limb, stood a large white bird, watching us. A heron, it looked like. It had a long neck and long legs and a peaceful air. It gazed at me with fondness, like an old friend who could guess my thoughts. I was about to point it out to Abuelita, but before I could open my mouth, the bird spread its great wings, rose up, and disappeared into the trees.
That was when I knew it, as though the heron had somehow flown inside me and spoken to me. You are like your grandmother. You are a person who looks deeply, into the insides of things.
I whispered “Thank you” to the heron. My spirit animal, I thought with a shiver of pride. An animal who could fly across borders and over walls, who could see forests and deserts and fields spread out below.
Abuelita and I walked back, and with every step, I grew lighter and lighter. It wouldn’t have surprised me if with the next step I’d floated right up into the air. By the time we reached the field, the clouds had broken up. The half-moon was as clear as a paper cutout. Luna clara. Clear moon.
More and more stars came out from the mist until pinpoints of light spotted the entire sky.
The next morning, I sketched another picture for Dad. The background dissolved into shadows, purple-blue night air with wisps of trees, a glimmer of light off the stream. At the center, under a glowing moon, the heron rising. Underneath I wrote, with confident strokes, Your Daughter, Clara.
After the limpia, other things became clearer—unexpected things. Things I’d never thought much about before. I started to appreciate washing dishes outside, how the sunlight shone through droplets of water and made starry reflections on the sink and turned the bubbles into heaps of rainbows. I began helping Abuelita more with other chores too—making tortillas, carrying big containers of water from the spring, walking to neighbors’ houses with a sack strapped to my forehead, full of dried beans, bananas, and tomatoes to trade. She showed me how to string the herbs up to dry, and we tied them to the kitchen rafters, where they dangled just below Loro.
In my notebook, I sketched the herbs, their leaves laced with networks of veins. Some leaves’ edges were smooth arcs, others jagged like the teeth of a saw. Leaves of all sizes, fuzzy and silver, or slick and green, nearly black. I labeled them with their names and healing benefits. I felt thirsty for everything Abuelita knew. Her knowledge was a cool stream that I could dip a cup into and drink up.
During the day I focused on working and learning, but at night Pedro started taking over my thoughts. I saw my feelings for him more clearly now. They were like an obsidian butterfly, fragile and solid and glittering, impossible to ignore. I sketched a picture of an obsidian butterfly for Dad and labeled it Pedro and Me.
In the mornings I started helping Abuelo gather firewood and pile it onto the burro’s back, and chop down weeds along the path to the cornfield using a long machete. Who knows what Mom would have said if she’d seen me strutting down the path swinging a knife as long as my arm? She always worried that I’d cut off a finger from something as simple as chopping carrots or slicing a bagel. A few mornings after the limpia, I came outside and found Abuelo standing behind a thick log set on its end, as high as his waist. He held a big wooden club with both hands and moved it up and down in the hollowed-out tree trunk. I came closer and saw that it was smooth inside, and half full of coffee beans.
“Try it, Clara,” he said. He held the club out to me and sat down on a little wooden chair, sweat dripping down the sides of his face even though it was still morning. Lifting up his hat, he smoothed back his hair and wiped the moisture off his face with a faded red bandanna.
“What does this do to the beans?” I asked. The club was heavier than I’d thought. It threw me off balance at first, like when you pick up a bowling ball.
“It takes the skins off,” Abuelo said. “Next we’ll separate the skins and beans, then roast them, then grind them. Part of it we’ll sell at the market, and the rest we’ll use in our own coffee.”
How could someone so old do this work for hours? At first I felt as clumsy as a dog trying to use a pencil. But eventually I fell into a rhythm, pounding slowly and listening to Abuelo’s rough, comfortable voice.
“This work is nicer when you have someone to talk with,” he said. “Your father used to help me. We had two of these logs. Side by side, we used to work.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“Oh, when I realized he wasn’t coming back, I sold it in town.”
I wiped the sweat from my face, pulled off my sweater, and tossed it onto a cardboard box. How could Dad have left his father alone? How could he stand to never hear Abuelo’s hyper little laugh? It didn’t make sense. “Abuelo,” I said. “Why do you think my dad left here and never came back?”
Abuelo looked at me for a minute from under the brim of his hat. “Ay, m’hija! I was hoping you would tell me.”
“He doesn’t talk about it,” I said. I gripped the club to begin pounding again.
Abuelo stood up now, took a handful of coffee beans, and sifted the skins through his fingers. His palms and fingers were solid calluses from years of hard work. I’d always figured that Dad’s calluses had come from the landscaping business. But those calluses must have started here, in Yucuyoo. The bottom layer of tough skin on his palms had grown thick right here, while he pounded coffee beans next to his father.
“Now comes the part that your father always loved best,” Abuelo said. “Separating the beans from the skin. And see? What luck! There is just the right amount of wind for this today.”
We spread petates out over the area between the kitchen and the outhouse, a flat stretch of dirt where the chickens usually scurried around. Then, using a gourd, Abuelo scooped out the beans from the tree trunk and threw them up into the air. The wind caught the lighter bits—the dried wispy skins—and carried them off toward the banana trees. The beans were heavier, and they fell onto the mat. They were the part we needed.
Abuelo handed me another gourd. “You can use this one, m’hija.” I took it and noticed words carved on the bottom. Enrique Hector Luna Estrada, Yucuyoo, 1980. It had been Dad’s.
Abuelo saw me running my fingers over the letters. “Enrique was your age when he carved that.”
I tossed a gourdful up into the air, imagining I was Dad, before he had any idea he’d be moving to the U.S. and marrying an American and having a daughter. The wind caught the beans and held them in the air, hanging there by sunlight, as if the beans and skins were deciding: Stay or go? And the heavy beans fell, while the skins flew off in waves, rising and falling and making small circles in their flight toward the trees.
Abuelo threw another gourdful into the air and squinted into the sun, watching the skins disappear. “The day after Enrique left was a little windy like today. I got up early to pound the beans before breakfast. I waited for him to come out and help. I waited and waited. He never came.”
“He didn’t tell you he was leaving?” I couldn’t believe it—Dad would get mad at me if I rode my bike down the block without telling him first!
“No. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing our faces when he said goodbye. He knew he would be leaving us all alone. He was the only child we were able to have. He slipped away in the middle of the night.”
“How old was he?” I asked.
“Sixteen, nearly seventeen. He was restless, you see. I think he saw his life here stretching out forever, harvesting coffee and barely making enough money for food. A few months before he left, he told us something in a serious voice. ‘A friend of mine is going to Arizona to work,’ he said.
‘And I’m thinking about going too.’”
Abuelo was sitting down now on the mat, surrounded by shiny beans. I threw the last gourdful into the air and watched the skins fly away. I sat down next to him, cross-legged, and felt the sun warm on my face.
He rolled a few beans around in his hand. “Clara, I have only seen your grandmother cry one time. And that was the day Enrique told us he might leave. The only time, m’hija. She sat there by the fire and a single tear slipped out. Months later, on the morning after he did leave, I had breakfast alone with your grandmother. And do you know what she told me? ‘He will be gone for a long time, years and years.’ ‘But no,’ I told her, ‘he’ll be back as soon as he saves up money.’ She put her hand over mine and shook her head. And then I cried enough tears for the both of us.”
Abuelo began collecting the beans and dropping them by handfuls into a tin bucket. I started to plunk them in too.
I thought about how Pedro’s face grew red and angry when he talked about men in the village leaving. “Were you angry at Dad?”
“Mostly sad. That is where the wind has taken him. Like the coffee skins. Why struggle against it?”
“But he could’ve visited you, at least!” I would’ve been mad.
“He hasn’t forgotten us. From time to time a postcard comes. Always blank. Empty of writing but full of shame. And every once in a while an envelope comes with some money and photos in it. Never a m
essage, just the return address.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps he hoped that one day we would ask him to come home. Or perhaps that one day we would ask his daughter.”
The bucket of beans was full to the brim now. Abuelo heaved it up and carried it to the shed. He walked into the shadows at the back corner and dug out a small wooden box from a pile of tools and crates.
I opened it and pulled out a thick pile of postcards. One from Arizona—sunset over cacti. Then one from California—the beach and palm trees—postmarked a few months later. Then one from Washington State—giant pines.
“This must have been when Dad was traveling around,” I said. “Picking fruit and vegetables for money.”
Abuelo took out a thin stack of photos from the bottom of the box. “Look at this, m’hija. When you were born he sent us this.” He pointed to a baby picture of me, swaddled up, a fat little ball, in the middle of Mom and Dad’s green bedspread.
The photo was familiar—it hung on the family room wall at home. On the back were my name and birthday, written in Dad’s precise handwriting. The next picture was me, two years old, picking a purple crocus. And four years old, digging in a sandbox in a red sweater. And then baby Hector, plopped down in the surf at Ocean City. And on and on until the most recent, fourteen-year-old me, drawing in my sketchbook on the couch, so intent on what I was doing that I was caught off guard by Dad taking the picture. My mouth was slightly open in surprise and my eyes looked wide and confused—I was hovering between my inside world and the outside one.
“I didn’t know he sent you these, Abuelo!”
I flipped through the rest of the postcards now, all the places Dad had worked.
“And how lucky that he sent them. That is how we knew your address. This spring, your grandmother told me that she felt your restless spirit. Searching, she said. She would get out of bed at night and wander outside. Night after night, like a jaguar. She said she could feel you better then. One morning she said, ‘Come to town with me to mail a letter.’ You see, she had asked Pedro to write it the night before.”