Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  I slathered the goo in every crevice I could find. It got on my hands, and my face, and my hair. The afternoon was hot, which meant the glue would dry quickly, so I waited beneath the shade of a mesquite in the neighboring lot that also belonged to Apá.

  When the glue dried, I poured another bucket of water and called to Rubi on the other side.

  “Yep,” she said, reluctantly.

  It was impossible. I bought more tubes of caulking, and instead of cutting just the tip, I cut the entire tube in half with a knife and used a spatula to cake it on with angry strokes, and still it leaked. I couldn’t figure out why. The hardware store ran out of tubes, so I went to another one in a nearby town. I called back home for the family to wire more money.

  “Just leave it,” Apá said, that time with a little more anger in his voice.

  But I couldn’t. It gripped me. I wanted to do at least one thing right to make up for all of the other mess I felt partly responsible for putting my mother in. I felt that if I fixed the windows, I would somehow also fix everything else, that if I fixed his house, he wouldn’t need her comfort as a substitute. Every day at the same time, a thunderous clap of rain would come, and with it, the small pool of water in the living room. I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t let it go. I walked by on my way to the kitchen and stared at it through the corner of my eye and quickly walked away. The windows were faulty by design; it was obvious Apá was not an engineer. No amount of caulking would keep the water out. They were large, they let in all of the sun—too much sun. I wanted to cover them up with brick so they would stop mocking me.

  The outside wall on which the three large windows were mounted was made of limestone. By its very nature, limestone is porous. Even if I managed to seal the windows, the wall itself would eventually let all the moisture slowly seep through the plaster, which was already beginning to peel.

  I should have known from the beginning that it was hopeless. The house was telling the story I was trying to avoid, the story my father denied—that life was still, after so many years, hard in Mexico, and would be so (again) for Amá. Frustrated, I climbed up to the roof and sat there for a long time. I didn’t think of it as my town anymore, as I had when I longed to return for so many years. I played with the dog, who lay down next to me and gently licked my shoe. He was loyal and kind even though he hardly knew me. I decided to take him down. There was no point in having him protect the house if all he could do was bark. I tied a rope around his chest. He was heavy. He kept moving in the air as I lowered him. I was afraid the rope would wrap around his neck and he would choke. When he touched the floor he went straight to the small garden in the middle of the courtyard and sniffed the plants. He touched the dirt with his paws and rolled around in it, his belly raised to the sky.

  *

  In Tepechitlán, there were no large stores like Walmart where you could get all of your things at once. You went to the market for your meat and vegetables, you went to the cheese person for your cheese, the fish person for your fish, and so on. I got my hair cut by a woman who had been there ever since I was little and remembered cutting my hair as a child. “I can’t believe it’s you,” she said as I sat on her old chair and she began cutting away. Life should have seemed quaint, simple, and stress-free if you had enough money to get by. We would be sure to send them enough money every month so they could live comfortably.

  Comfortably.

  Even though Apá had his occasional flares of frustration, I could see that he was always aware of how he behaved. We each knew we were being watched by the other, and we were careful.

  Sometimes I could see his lips tightening as if to scream, but he wouldn’t. I could see his body tensing up, but nothing would follow. It was obvious in how he carried himself; he held the steering wheel tight with both hands, kept looking in the rearview mirror even if there weren’t any cars behind us.

  I wanted to see the good, although I wasn’t sure I was capable of seeing anything else anymore, simply in order to convince myself it was the right thing to do.

  When I spoke with Amá on the phone, I spoke about the things she did not have in the U.S. that she would in Mexico. She would have her water brought right into her kitchen every morning in large jugs instead of hauling it herself from the grocery-store vending machines. Tortillas would be steaming hot and delivered daily on the back of a motorcycle, as would propane, as would the cheese—everything was fresh and made only a few miles away. I didn’t tell her that sometimes the gas would go out, so you had to wait until the truck came by the next day to cook. I didn’t tell her that Apá was using the same stove they bought thirty years ago that wouldn’t light, and never cooked the food well. I didn’t tell her that the water from the well we used to shower was calcified and would make her hair fall out. Nor did I mention the sad faces on the delivery boys, who looked numb from driving the same route day after day, collecting a few pesos in their outstretched hands and softly saying thank you.

  *

  As the days rolled on, Rubi and I spent more and more time alone in our room. We stayed longer in the mornings and made love like we had never before. We hardly ever slept with clothes on because it was hot, and even when we woke, I would prance around naked on my toes in that large sunlit room. I opened the windows and let a cool breeze saunter in through the lace curtains that matched the seafoam green of the windows, which still leaked, but I tried not to think about them.

  Every morning I went to the windowsill to see a collection of bugs that had died overnight—roaches, centipedes, beetles, spiders, and sometimes a small scorpion. I picked them up and studied them carefully. I didn’t know why they died near the window. Maybe they were drawn to the light coming from the streetlamps outside. I imagined that they knew something we didn’t. Each night, another little cluster gathered.

  I started writing again because I forgave myself and could at last, with a little alcohol, quiet the maddening guilt I had no business in keeping but kept nonetheless. I kept my flask nearby, and sat on my usual chair in the courtyard, where the sun’s heat made me switch directions every ten minutes. I had gotten significantly darker, and the afternoon rain every day made my skin supple and tight.

  But inside, I was still writhing. I drank to calm myself. I tried to believe that if I carried on with my day peacefully, if I took my coffee up to the roof with a book, that I could make it through summer, that life wasn’t so bad there. I wanted to stay as long as I could to finish more work on the house, but also to continue observing Apá.

  Apá and I got into fights, then made up, then fought again. Sometimes it wasn’t about anything important, we just wanted to be right. We were the same person in different bodies, I feared.

  Deep down, I knew that he was still the same person I knew growing up, but I managed to pretend I didn’t notice, and perhaps this time I drank in order to keep it to myself, in order to not speak. I could see it in him when we went up to the ranch to herd cattle. How he unleashed himself on a scared calf whose hoof was caught on a fence, its large eyes bulging from its head, darting in all directions, its lips curled back to reveal its large crooked teeth, until someone finally told him to stop kicking and whipping the poor animal.

  *

  A cousin of mine got married during our last month in Tepechitlán. Apá waited outside the church during Mass because he still considered himself a devout Protestant and refused to attend a Catholic service. At the reception, el tamborazo started playing, so we hit the dance floor, and to my surprise, so did Apá. We danced all night. I had never seen him drunk. I took all of my cousins onto the dance floor, all of my aunts. No one knew the real reason I was in Tepechitlán and why I was so insistent on getting everyone off their chairs to dance. For one night I wanted not to have to tell my body what to do and just let something else do it for me. They knew Apá was fixing up his house and that I was helping him, but no one put two and two together that it was in preparation for Amá.

  I moved from side to side for a c
umbia, I rocked closely with Rubi at my arms during a norteña, and I jumped up and down when a tamborazo or a banda was playing. I was almost never sitting down, and my feet hurt from the new handmade boots Apá and I got fitted for three weeks prior, but I didn’t care.

  Apá requested a song from the mariachi and pounded his fists on the table when it started playing. “That’s a real song right there, not those chingaderas they play today. Arriba Zacatecas!” he said as he cocked his head back and let out a loud yawp. I laughed and slapped him hard on the back, and he slapped me back with a heavy hand as well. The lights were spinning from the disco ball, and my feet kept moving. I remembered a line I had written earlier that day—“neither of us knew what we wanted but would do anything to have it.” I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.

  When it ended, we stumbled out onto the street along with the band. It was a warm summer night, and the town, though small, was still buzzing with activity. Apá didn’t know how to hold his liquor as well as me. He kept mentioning his ranch in the mountains, and the cattle, and the proper way to mount a horse. We walked home together like father and son, both drunk, one trying to forget and the other trying to remember.

  [Fourth Movement as Swimming Lesson]

  My father taught me and my brothers to swim by throwing us into the river.

  “Use your hands! Use your feet!” he would scream at the edge of the water, his thick legs bulging out of his jean shorts. I wondered if I would ever have legs as thick and hairy as his.

  My brothers and I thrashed in the water like three angry roosters. Roosters that were bred only to fight, who could kill each other with nothing but their bodies aimed toward the exact outline of their death.

  I flailed in the water, trying to come up for air. I could see him a few feet away. I knew I wouldn’t drown. I knew he wouldn’t let me. But he said if I was to learn, I had to come close.

  12.

  Four months before Amá’s departure, we considered everything that she owned.

  We slowly started taking things from her. Each of her children kept something when they stopped by. Although she knew what we were doing, we didn’t clear out her house all at once, nor did we do it fast. The number of her possessions shrunk in such a way that she hardly noticed they were gone. One day, there was no longer a frame, or a stool, or a couple mugs. It was like a bowl of holy water slowly being emptied over time when people dipped their fingers to make the sign of the cross as they entered.

  Sometimes I took things when she wasn’t there because I knew she wouldn’t want to let them go.

  I took her plants. First the small ones, then the large dracaena, which was almost as old as me, and much taller.

  We thought that if we did it slowly, it wouldn’t hurt as much. Still, no one talked about it directly. We took things as if we were borrowing them and would quickly bring them back; we believed we were doing her a favor.

  But it wasn’t always so indirect.

  “It’s fine, you can just buy another one in Mexico,” I said, “I’ll buy you another one in Mexico,” and threw her toaster into a box to be donated. She wanted to keep more than she could take on the plane.

  I almost wished that her departure could happen instantaneously, and that we wouldn’t have to drag it out so long. That she would be gone from one day to the next, taken back to Mexico sometime in the night. As callous as that sounded, perhaps if it happened like that, we would be sedated by the blow of the impact. Our minds would be in a fog, and we would use other parts of ourselves to function, the parts that made certain things automatic, like eating and breathing, things that run only on adrenaline and not on any kind of thinking. Maybe that way we wouldn’t know the difference between being asleep and being awake. That’s what we wanted, to be at that place that time had healed without having to go through time.

  But in truth, which one was worse: the long, sustained grief of waiting for the day of her departure, or an immediate vanishing? Each day was a new kind of suffering. Time moved fast and slow at once. I held my breath when I hugged her, and sometimes held it a little longer even when our bodies no longer touched. Sometimes it was hard to breathe.

  *

  Apá kept asking about the actual date she would arrive, but we could never give him a straight answer.

  “Sometime in November for sure, Apá. . . . Sometime in January. . . . Sometime in February,” I said to him on the phone. He wanted a definite answer. We kept pushing the date back because we needed a little more time, prolonging our small mementos, trying to decide when each of us had had what we needed to prepare for our sustained absence from her.

  Everything felt like an ending. We wanted one last time—one more birthday together, one more Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s.

  It was her birthday in October. She’s a Libra. We decorated the backyard to surprise her. I hung bright ribbons above our heads and blew up matching balloons to make a kind of bouquet in the center of it all. Again, another ending, but we never called it that. It was her last birthday together with her children. And I thought, how did we manage this kind of unity, when everything around us was coming apart?

  She turned the corner into the backyard, and we yelled “Surprise!” but it wasn’t a surprise to anyone. We just pretended that things were still new to us. The food was served, and I sat on her lap to take a picture, even though I was heavy and the days of me on her lap were long over. We took lots of pictures, nobody said why. We ate and washed our plates. We sang happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. She opened her gifts slowly and folded the tissue paper one by one as she always had done, to save for another occasion.

  It felt like there wasn’t any noise, like we were in a show and someone had hit the mute button. We could see our mouths moving, our heads thrown back in laughter, but nothing came out.

  Then out of nowhere, either to change the mood or because Amá saw the moment differently than we did—as one of joy—she threw a fistful of cake across the room. She smeared another piece of cake on her oldest son, who in turn grabbed another piece and ran to smear it on me. We all jumped for the cake and grabbed fistfuls and threw it at each other. We couldn’t stop laughing. We ran back and forth through the backyard, darting past each other with cake and ice cream in our hands. Our hair was thick and sticky with frosting. Our faces looked like failed clowns on a Tuesday night, but the difference was that we were laughing. No one was spared, not even the kids. There was cake on the ceiling, frosting on the walls, and ice cream, so much ice cream. Our sides hurt from laughing so much, and as soon as we settled down, we would erupt into raucous laughter again when we saw each other’s faces still covered with cake.

  When we were done laughing for good, we each took our respective sighs, those deep sighs you take when nothing is left inside of you, the kinds of sighs that come up from the deepest wells of your body. We spent the rest of the night cleaning, chuckling a little here and there as we gawked at all the places cake could hide. We still felt the residue of that primal strumming in the depths of our stomachs that could at any moment tip us to the edge of uncontrolled laughter again, and did. It was like the silence after a single piano key is struck, which isn’t really silence but something else—our memory, perhaps, carrying the note long after it’s actually ended.

  *

  I didn’t know how we set a date, but eventually we did: February 22, 2016. It almost felt good to see a date to that thing which we couldn’t name. I could see it in my head and prepare myself. I could give it a shape, a substance. I remembered a line of a poem I had written years before—“It is possible to only see things that have been given names.” When I wrote it, I didn’t know how much it would come to mean; I didn’t have a container for it. But it finally made sense—it had a name, February 22 took up space. There was a weight to it; a shadow.

  *

  Her house was a repository. She’d kept everything over the years because she didn’t know if one day she would need it for immigra
tion, meaning that one day she might have to prove her presence, prove that she was actually here for all those decades—a utility bill, a rent receipt, a check stub, or a painting I made in the second grade. Prove her presence. But none of that was needed anymore.

  We sat down in her living room with boxes stacked in the middle and went through them, paper by paper. It got to the point where we had to begin clearing things out. With each cleaning session, her house got bigger and bigger. It started to look empty as soon as the larger furniture was gone. Soon there would be no trace that she was ever there except for the smudges on the doors, the walls, and the grease stains on the stove that no amount of rubbing would erase. Seventeen years we’d lived in that house, paying our rent month after month, and never once was Amá late.

  On the day we were to hand over the keys, she sat on the driveway, the spotted sun through the branches speckled over her, while we finished loading the last truck. I did one last walk-through of the house. Before I closed the door, I ran to my old room, and inside the closet I wrote down in a dark corner, with a thick black Sharpie, “We were here.” If they painted over it, I wouldn’t care. The words would still be there beneath the paint, even if no one could see them.

  She reduced everything she owned to four suitcases. That was all she could take on the plane. In them was the inventory of our madness. We spent hours, days, helping her decide what she truly needed, which was a difficult question to ask. In 1993 she came to the U.S. by foot, with nothing but the clothes on her back, and she would leave through the air with a little more than that. What did she have to show for all of it in the end?