The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  After Shonnie died, Joseph took to calling Iona his only heir. Most of the property that his father had owned belonged to Joe Jr., for he had bought out the shares of his younger brothers. The eldest son felt a responsibility to the legacy of Joe U. Medina. But his own hand-built home was already given over to Iona and her husband, and she stood to get all the land and the restaurant building too. As for the money he’d saved during his life, Joseph did not trust the banks to hold it. He buried jars of cash on his property, careful not to use metal lids since the lids might be picked up by a thief’s metal detector. To mark the locations of the stash, he gave Marianne sketches of trees and other objects. One of his drawings pictured a beaver-chewed log, which took her weeks to recognize.

  Costilla County, where the Hispanos are clustered, is the poorest county in Colorado, according to government statistics. For the three thousand–plus residents, the median household income in 2008 was $25,000, and 10 percent of workers were reported to be unemployed. But if Joseph’s finances were a barometer of the economy, barter, an activity without cash, was a significant part of the picture, and other earnings were being squirreled away under the mantle of self-employment. For as long as Anglos have been in New Mexico, they have complained that Hispanos did not care about making a dollar. T-ana’s Restaurant, Marianne’s domain, had a modest cash flow, but the freewheeling Joseph Medina, who waited on tables and sang on the weekends, had no ambition to amass or consume money. He was not lazy. He worked to survive, to be his own boss, to be in tune with the seasons of life and to connect viscerally to the land as his ancestors had.

  Joseph’s landscape commenced behind the restaurant, on the far side of a fence made from lashed-together saplings. There was a shed with a small sawmill, some well-worn farm equipment, and then hayfields, which he was preparing to harvest. His land extended east to a spring-fed pond containing a few trout. On summer evenings after work Joseph would cast for fish, clambering through the willows on the banks of the pond and trying not to fall in. Like Shonnie, he couldn’t swim—too bad, since the water was great, with a fine floating view of Mount Blanca. Proceeding east, you left Joseph’s property, yet the landscape was still his own, because historically the Hispanos’ rights had extended to the top of the Sangre de Cristos, a mile into the sky from the valley floor and covering probably fifteen or twenty miles of terrain between his house and the crest. Over the past century and a half the access to the resources of this land—its timber, game, water—had been denied and then partially restored to the descendants of the original pobladores. Today Joseph Medina was going to make an expedition to the summit of la sierra, a little lord reclaiming his right to cut firewood. But before leaving, he had to bale and stack his hay crop.

  Late August 2007, a shimmering day in Culebra. Cut and raked, the hay lies in thin rows on the green stubble. In the neighboring lot, two big-bellied men on a wagon are handling bales thrown up by two younger guys who follow on foot. A couple of magpies, black and white as if cassocked, are fluttering, hopping, foraging at the edge of the field. The lazy crow of a rooster somewhere. Hollyhocks blooming, both red and white, the wine and the wafer. The redolence of hay on a summer afternoon, and the more delicate, intermingling wafts from the great untended prairie to the west. Novelist Willa Cather had responded deeply to the hybrid smells. “[T]he lightness, that dry aromatic odour,” she wrote of the prairie. “The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.”

  Joseph usually brought his hay in by himself. Marianne could help, but was less cooperative since the time her foot got caught in a trailing strand of baling twine. She was dragged many yards, her screams unheard over the noise of the tractor and the chugging baler. Since he had hurt an arm and shoulder a few years ago, Joseph worked with a smaller wagon and slung up the scattered bales with his good arm. Obviously it would go faster if he drove the tractor and someone else picked up the bales. A ready man was at hand, but Joseph hated asking for assistance. If you want to, he’d shrug, looking away. Soon enough the work in the field was done. A rancher and his sons arrived and took all the hay, paying Joseph cash.

  After lunch he took his battered truck on the county road east toward San Francisco. The rabbitbrush was yellow in the haze. Through the village, past the forlorn church and the half-hidden morada, the road climbed into the foothills of what used to be called the Culebra Range. My dad took us there as kids, Joseph said, glancing at the morada. In his speech he had a slight, stop-and-go syncopation, from the Spanish. There was a private room, I remember. . . . It was too scary for me as a kid.

  Why did you take your own kids then?

  I took the kids because of my dad, he said. One year during the Passion procession, he had carried the cross to the little calvario behind the morada. This information came from Marianne, since Joseph volunteered very little. Two or three sentences in a row was a lot for him.

  Joseph Medina had mellowed. In a photograph from his younger days, which shows him roofing a house, he’s wild-haired and bare-chested, his arms pop menacingly, and he looks like he’d be happy to climb down and rip you a new one without any provocation. He was a brawler, he admitted, and was known for having a bad temper. But when I fought, Joseph said, I would also be the protector of kids who got picked on. If no longer trim, Joseph was still plenty muscular, and being short had never been a problem for him. Oh, you want to go a few rounds with me? he’d offer, not quite kidding, the old reckless gleam flashing in his eye. Around guys he’d grown up with, sometimes he would growl and pretend to be angry, just to see them flinch. The rough fun of Culebra.

  By the age of fifty-six, a man has learned a few things about life, or else life has forcibly taught him. Age, marriage, a religious conversion, the death of a child—the chippy self was gone, and a sadder and more humble Joseph went up into the mountains. He never finished grieving for Shonnie, his sister Chavela said. It hit him like a ton of bricks, agreed family friend Celina Gallegos. He didn’t recover from it. I think it was a grief he couldn’t stand. And now that he knows that I have it, put in his sister Wanda, he’s scared for me, poor guy.

  Shifting on its springs, the truck passed Rael Road, which runs down and dead-ends at San Francisco Creek. The surname Rael is not unusual in Hispano territory. Investigators of crypto-Judaism notice when they hear it, though, for Rael is thought to have been shortened from Israel. Joseph didn’t know if any Raels were living there now.

  He came to the bars of a swinging metal gate, got out, unlocked it, and locked it behind him after he had driven through. From here to the top of la sierra was private property owned by an Anglo named Hill, who was the latest in a long line of Anglo landholders. The original proprietor of the Sangre de Cristo Grant, Charles Beaubien, provided deeds to the Culebra settlers in 1863. Describing both private lots (extensiones) and public lots (such as the Vega), the deeds included permission to gather wood and graze livestock in the uninhabited uplands. These rights were curtailed when land companies bought up the mountain tract. In the early 1900s, both parties to the dispute filed lawsuits and title actions. The Hispano custom of sharing resources perplexed the American judicial system, which repeatedly sided with the wealthy advocates of private property.

  In 1960, the mountain tract, now whittled down to some eighty thousand acres, was taken over by a redheaded lumberman named Taylor, who fenced off and patrolled the gravel roads, leading to incidents of gunfire and racially tinged vigilantism. The Taylor family sold and another owner came and went; the legal case turned into an American Bleak House. At last, in 2003, a lawyer from Denver named Jeffrey Goldstein, who’d worked without charge for twenty-seven years, convinced an appeals court to restore the access rights to the heirs of the settlers, provided they still lived in Costilla County and could prove their descent from an original title-holde
r. Gate keys were issued to three hundred tenacious Culebrans, among them Joseph Medina.

  Up on the mountain, the piñon, juniper, and scratchy vegetation of the foothill zone gave way to the bigger trees of the mixed-conifer zone: spacious ponderosa pines appeared, with their handsome checkerboard bark; white-barked fir, blue spruce, and graceful, pale-skinned aspens; and now and then a Douglas fir. The vehicle bounced across small, braided streams at nearly every bend in the steep, stony track. Tucked into the dark forest, the mountain ash flashed its bright red, inedible berries. Not even the bears eat ’em, Joseph remarked.

  Occasionally he would stop to point out fruits on the bushes and plants that people traditionally gathered for food and medicine. Wild rose hips (champe), for example, a fruit with an enormous seed, and a spray of ripe raspberries. He got out to pick some. A chipmunk with a mushroom in its mouth scampered by, pleased as punch. This is our Walmart, Joseph said. We lived off the mountain and we fended for ourselves. After Taylor fenced it off, we had to come here and poach our food. . . . Now that we’ve got our mountain back, we can survive.

  If you killed a deer, he went on, you would hang it in a cool cave so the meat wouldn’t spoil—he knew where the caves were—and you’d come get it later. When he was younger, Joseph got into canyons up here where no one had ever been. Some of his backwoods lore had a secondhand feel, such as his story about old-time sheepherders who would hang their game forty-five feet up in a tree—forty-five feet, he stipulated, just above the range of the flies. Joseph had started to expatiate, you see, and was becoming less like himself and more talkative as he went higher. Squatting, dipping a tin cup into a pine-scented stream, looking about for wildlife, grabbing deep breaths from the thinning air, the vessel of his family’s pain imbibed the wilderness.

  Hill, the current owner of the mountain tract, employed Joseph during elk season as a hunting guide. Men from Texas and New York flew in for a few days every fall and Joseph would take them to places where they could get a sure shot. Elk hunting took place near the tree line, at the edge of the spruce–fir zone around ten thousand feet, where the animals would come out in the open late in the day. Wearing his Western hat, mustache, and boots, his cell phone on his belt, Joseph would play the part of the affable hunting guide. The guide reaches in for the steaming heart and liver while the sportsman stands by admiring the trophy rack. Once or twice Joseph referred to rich people and to Hill’s ranch as a rich man’s playground, but no envy was apparent. These were simply facts.

  The Culebra mountains had a raggedy look on top. Since the previous owner had logged the stands of pine, in the 1990s, there were skinned patches on the shoulders of the peaks. With characteristic ambivalence Joseph said, They raped the mountain. . . . But logging and thinning restores the big trees. A temporary benefit of the logging was that the aspens, so brilliantly yellow in fall, had invaded new areas. Also, the heirs who came from Culebra to collect wood or wild plants could make use of the logging roads.

  After parking the truck next to a pile of slash, he gave a couple of toots on his elk call. Nothing was stirring in the August heat. Elk-hunting time was October. He took out his binoculars and scanned the slopes and gorges. In October they’ll be everywhere, they’ll be coming out of the woodwork, he said. On foot, Joseph climbed higher, steeply into the alpine tundra and boulders, his thighs brushing by the last stunted specimens of Engelmann spruce. The afternoon clouds threw oblong shadows across his path, and the whole of San Luis Valley spread out beneath him. Turning around, you could see a white blaze on the mesa in San Luis far below—the Stations of the Cross Shrine.

  After a few minutes Joseph gasped, having to sit down. He couldn’t go any farther. Your strides are longer, he said. The color of the boreal carpet was chartreuse. It swept upward to a band of gray shale at around twelve thousand feet—and still the rock went higher, until scraping the patches of blue.

  A pika, the cute little rodent of the crags, squeaked piercingly. A pika shows itself in profile so that its omniscient sideways eye can keep you in sight. In this severe place you feel stripped down and open. When monotheistic religion began, it had only three elements, recapitulated here: Man, the unforgiving material of Earth, and God. That was enough for Judaism to work with, but Christianity added an intercessor, a scapegoat to bear the weight, who was Jesus. If, light-headed and lofty with such thoughts, you focus on the pacing of your boots, you realize that the footing is surprisingly spongy because the moisture from the winter has never departed, and the tiny plants, entwined in a mat, cushion the way between you and the rock.

  A pair of northern goshawks, dark against the sky, floated over the top of their range, then abruptly tumbled through the air, swooping on each other. A pika’s ear is whorled like a marine creature, like a nautilus. Marine fossils can be found on top of la sierra, Joseph noted. He was waiting contentedly on a lichen-spotted boulder near the treeline. As a Jehovah’s Witness, he was inclined to take mountain fossils as evidence of Noah’s Flood rather than of tectonic and evolutionary processes. Joseph lived in a scripted, ordered universe, not too different from the medieval Catholic universe, where the sublunary struggles of human existence rose zone by zone into the realms of perfection and peace. That said, Joseph really was very tolerant of other people’s understandings, as Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to be.

  It was time to head down, since thunderheads were massing. The katsina spirits are welcome except for the lightning they cause, which can be dangerous on the heights. Joseph had brought a chain saw for the firewood he meant to gather. When the truck got stuck in a wet spot halfway down, he cut the wood there and put it in the bed for weight on the rear wheels. In due course he arrived at the gate, unlocked it, and locked it behind him.

  A gorgeous field of tall sunflowers was growing near Rael Road. Although they looked like they must be someone’s crop, they were wild sunflowers on uncultivated bottomland by the creek. Joseph said that his father had owned that property for a brief while. When the man his father had bought it from changed his mind, Joe U. generously agreed to sell it back.

  He pulled over and walked into the field, hundreds or perhaps thousands of yellow heads nodding above his. As the clouds writhed and darkened, he thought of an article he had read about environmental experiments conducted on sunflowers. Harnessing the plants’ vigorous growth, scientists have planted sunflowers in contaminated soil, where they draw the unwanted chemicals and metals into their tissues. Poor people, who haven’t gone to school—they knew that sunflowers can detoxify soil, Joseph said. Just as his radiant Shonnie had done by sucking the bad from people’s hearts and shining the good from her own.

  As soon as his truck was moving again, Joseph turned off the engine. He let the vehicle coast through San Francisco. He always did it on this road to save gas, he said. Silently he rolled past the morada and the church. The weary gray face of Mount Blanca did not move from the horizon to the right. Passing fields and acequias, the truck hardly had to brake because the road had no traffic. After three or four miles of downhill running he came to an intersection and a stop sign, a short distance from T-ana’s Restaurant.

  Joseph looked over with a small smile. Might as well spend some of that Jewish money, he said, and turned the ignition key.

  The plan from the moment he made that quip was to end this book there. But just two months later, guiding an elk hunt, Joseph Medina sat down in the woods and toppled over, killed by a heart attack. That morning, Marianne had asked him to bring her aspen leaves from la sierra. She wanted some cheerful aspen leaves for her vase. His funeral service was held at the Kingdom Hall on October 20, 2007.

  Marianne had three sets of ashes. She had kept Shonnie’s ashes all along and now she had Joseph’s ashes, and also her father-in-law’s, which had been in Joseph’s custody. She mulled over what to do with them. Wanda’s death, in the spring of 2009, spurred her to act, because the Medina brothers and sisters would be gath
ering in Culebra for Wanda’s funeral.

  In late June, following Wanda’s service, the family members went up onto la sierra in their trucks and four-wheel drives. They got permission from Mr. Hill to visit a picnic spot, once the site of an old corral with good grass and a creek. Medinas and Martinezes had enjoyed it for generations, when they had access. We’d camp there when Shonnie and Iona were kids, Marianne said. They rode their horses up there.

  Marianne was in charge and didn’t discuss with her relatives that there would be no ceremony or remembrances during the spreading of the ashes. We [Jehovah’s Witnesses] don’t do no prayer, no nothin’, she said.

  Opening the three boxes and taking out the three plastic bags, she marveled at the distinctly different qualities of the remains. The grandparent, Joe U., had made ashes that were dark and crumbly. Her husband’s were gray, solid, and very heavy. Shonnie’s ashes were fine and nearly white.

  They did Shonnie’s first. Shannon took the first turn with the ashes because she had been so close to Shonnie. Next Joe U.’s, spread by one of the sons, who cried. Then Joseph’s, with Dorothy breaking down as she sprinkled the burnt genes of her eldest boy on the landscape. Taking her turn last, Marianne finished up. That was Marianne Medina for you. She came along after people who were flagging and who needed help, and she finished up.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *

  My profound thanks go to the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for awarding me a fellowship and providing vital support for this book. Thanks also to my intrepid literary agent, Lisa Queen; and to my editor, Starling Lawrence, for seeing the value of my work, past and present.

  This project was ten years in the making, if I count the time since I started to write about genetics. A number of people helped along the way, doing more than was asked and/or inspiring me. More or less in order of their service, they were: Ted Friedmann, Steve Petranek, Sarah Richardson, Victor McKusick, Brad Margus, Wayne Grody, Ed McCabe, Ginger Weber, Georgia Dunston, Leena Peltonen, Neil Risch, Funmi Olopade, Lawrence Brody, Carey Winfrey, Terry Monmaney, Teresa (Tess) Castellano, Lisa Mullineaux, Jeffrey Shaw, George Casias, Ricardo Velásquez, Maria Clara Martinez, Paul Duncan, Mike Multari.