Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  They didn’t talk at first, just looked at each other’s faces. How much each had changed. They forgot I was there, they forgot they were in the airport and began wandering away toward the door, holding each other still side by side as they walked, her good arm wrapped around his waist and his arm around her shoulder.

  It was at that moment that I was somewhat convinced that things would be okay, that this was the right choice. Maybe he had changed. I was determined to see it in his face, how he looked at her and how she looked at him. They needed each other the way they did in those first years before the kids arrived, when it was just them in that lonely house on the mountainside with a single room, a dirt floor, and a plastic tarp roof.

  With Amá there, Mexico felt like home at last. How long I had waited for that moment. There was no need to go back to that abandoned house in the mountain where she was born and tear off my clothes, to lie on the dirt floor in the sun.

  *

  Inside the taxi, Amá’s bad arm was pressed against Apá, who was still holding his arm over her. He had not let go of her since she arrived. Did he hold her like he cared, like he was afraid she would be lost again?

  Amá turned around and smiled at me. It was sincere. I knew she was still thinking about her other children back home and what they were doing. But she smiled because she wanted to show me that everything would be okay, she was reassuring me that it was the right choice. Don’t worry, I know your father.

  On the flight, she said, “I’ll tell you everything,” by which she meant she would tell us if he hurt her. I was desperate to believe her.

  *

  Soon enough we were home. Home. After the three hours of those winding roads, after stopping at a town halfway for breakfast, after anticipating this moment for years, we arrived at Apá’s house, which was now Amá’s house too. No more renting, no more landlords, no more “Don’t use thumbtacks because we won’t get our deposit back.” Each brick was hers, and the dirt beneath was hers too.

  Amá stepped out of the van. She looked around with dismay. It was the dry season, and on top of that, the government had burned the edges of the roads to prevent fires. The earth was scorched. The air was dry. The vegetation was dead. I could feel it in my throat, and my lips were parched.

  I knew there was a dry season and a rainy season, but I had always visited during the rainy season, when the pastures were green, the cows were fat from all the new grass, and the flowers were in abundance.

  “Well, this is it, your new home,” said Apá, anxiously looking at Amá for any reaction.

  “Yeah,” was all she said, raising her eyebrows high above her forehead.

  We entered the courtyard, which was dirty. Apá lifted up his hands as if he was in church, or making the gesture for a touchdown, and said, “What do you think?”

  And Amá said, “It’s big,” and I nudged her forward.

  We entered into the large common area, and I could see Amá staring up at the tall ceiling and shrinking a little from the enormity and emptiness of it all. All of his pleas had finally worked: there we were, showing Amá her new house. He won.

  We took her room by room and showed her all the work we had done over the summer—the new tiled floor, the plastered walls, the new door between her room and the bathroom, and even the windows Apá had fashioned.

  After a while I stopped looking at her face. I didn’t want to see what I knew was there deep down, regret.

  Her arm was throbbing with pain from the trip. It hung even lower. She couldn’t lift her shoulder to take off her coat, so I helped her with it. Apá looked on, unsure of what to do—whether to help or just let me do it. He reached, but I flicked my palm and he eased away. “I got it,” I said.

  *

  Amá hadn’t seen her sisters since we left Tepechitlán in 1993. We drove into town, and Amá pointed at all the things that had changed. Things people who never left hardly noticed because it changed gradually.

  We had become experts in the language of reunions. Amá’s sister Beatrice was out in her garden, watering her dahlias and strawberries.

  “Hola, tía, I’m back,” I said.

  “Hola, mijo, it’s so good to see you again. I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Yeah, tía, and you’ll never guess who I brought,” I said, pointing to the truck.

  Beatrice squinted, but she couldn’t make out who was in the passenger seat. The windows were dirty, and there was a glare from the sun. She put on her glasses and walked over.

  “No,” she repeated over and over. “No, it’s not her, it’s not her, is it?” she said as her eyes welled up with joy.

  Amá stepped out into the clarity of the bright morning. Next to each other, I could tell they had lived different lives. The sun in Mexico felt harsher. Beatrice, though only a few years older than Amá, looked worn down. Her hair was almost completely white, and her hands were spotted with the smudges of old age. Amá’s face looked nourished, moisturized, and still had the remnants of her youth. I could hardly believe that they were only two years apart. They’d had similar lives: they’d both worked, they both had husbands who were distant, and they each gave birth to about the same number of children. The difference was that one stayed behind and the other left in 1993. “What were you thinking, getting pregnant. You can hardly feed the kids you have,” Beatrice had said, all those years ago. How strange that a small conversation, a single sentence, could change so much. I looked at Beatrice’s children, my cousins, and saw myself in them. They were happy, they lived within their means, they were all close, and now that the grandkids had come, they were even closer.

  I imagined my life had Amá never left. Maybe I would have married at a much younger age. I would be working at a restaurant, or selling at the market, or as a bricklayer, which is what many of the men in my family did, which was noble and honest work but back-breaking. How strange to think that I would have never known English, that Spanish would be my only tongue. Maybe I would be happier than I ever was now, tending a small flock of sheep and a horse, fixing an old dirt bike on the weekends. I kept thinking, What if . . . what if . . . what if . . . ?

  Beatrice and Amá held each other for a long time, much longer than Amá had held Apá. She needed her sister. From now on, my siblings and I couldn’t provide what her sisters, her new friends, the new grandnieces and nephews could—a touch.

  I thought I knew something about distance, something about separation, but it began to dawn on me just how little I knew. Yes, Apá was away, and yes, there were times that I missed him more than others, but his departure and Amá’s departure were nothing alike. Watching Amá and Beatrice embrace formed a large knot in my throat and sank deep into my stomach. I would soon learn the real price of distance. I would soon learn exactly what it meant to be away. But for the time being, I brushed it aside. This was a happy occasion.

  We went from house to house to see all of her sisters. Each time was the same—disbelief, followed by tears, followed by hugs, and finally laughter. Everything was new, everything was exciting, which also meant that for the moment everything was fine. All of the sisters gathered for a picture. We took so many pictures that you could probably put them together for a movie, and their movements just might make sense together. Her sisters cooked whatever Amá wanted on that first day, and Amá wanted anything that reminded her of the days when she had nothing, of the days that made her leave Tepechitlán in the first place.

  *

  I wasn’t just there to say goodbye. I had a purpose. We saved up in order to buy her all new appliances to make her life a little easier. We went to all the furniture and appliance stores in town as well as the next bigger town over, looking for the right things. We didn’t care if people thought we were presumptuous or if they thought my mother was too good for whatever Apá already had in his house. They didn’t mean anything to us. Multiple hauling trucks reversed into Amá’s driveway to deliver the large shipments of sofas, a stainless-steel fridge shipped from the U.S., a
new stove, a bedroom set, other kitchen appliances like a microwave, coffeepot, pans, and other bric-a-brac for the house. The big trucks lumbered back, knocking over a few potted plants, holding up traffic in the narrow streets while the neighbors looked on.

  “Are you sure we can afford this?” Amá said at the furniture store, looking at the price tag of another armchair I thought she would like for when she read her Bible.

  “Don’t worry, Amá,” I said.

  Buying her things made us feel better—new curtains, frames in which to hang her pictures of us, area rugs, even a new Whirlpool washer and dryer. And again, men came in with their large trucks to the house to drop off the larger appliances. They dollied them in and whistled as they walked through the door, saying, “You got a nice house, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” she said. And it felt good to hear her speak of it as her house.

  Every time I ran out of money, I called back home for another wire and stood at the bank, uneasy, as people pretended not to look at each other. Most of the town ran on U.S. dollars earned by people working up north who would wire it back to their family. It was one of the main reasons Tepechitlán still existed. Every day the line of people would form, waiting for the money earned by distance and sacrifice.

  Apá started growing more frustrated with each new purchase. Why now did we suddenly have enough money for a new washing machine, when he had been asking about one for years? Why now did we suddenly have enough money for all the things to make their lives easier?

  “We don’t need a new washer, what’s wrong with the one we have already?” he said as I was hooking up the new washer to the wall.

  “Dad, that washer doesn’t work, it’s coming apart and it spills water all over the floor,” I said. It was the one I had shipped to him years before with money I earned over the summer, when I was a teenager.

  “There, all done,” I said and turned on the new washing machine, but he complained that it didn’t wash like the old one and made a rough gesture with his hands, moving them back and forth like an angry bus driver on a winding road, alluding to the violent thrusts his old washer would make on the spin cycle.

  “This one hardly makes any noise,” he exclaimed, “is it even on?”

  “Yes, Dad, that’s the point, it’s on but it’s quiet,” I said.

  “I don’t know, I don’t think it works as good as my other one, which would thrash the clothes around like this,” he said, and made the same winding gesture with his arms.

  “I know, Dad,” I said. “But this is for Mom.” And with that he was silent.

  The last thing we bought her was a cell phone with service to the U.S. I sat with her on a park bench at the town’s plaza. We held the phone between us as I showed her how to turn it on, how to call, how to message. I wanted her to be a single button click away, to seem like she was right there next to me. It was our lifeline.

  “Do you understand, Amá?” I said.

  She nodded. “Yes, mijo, I get it.”

  We sat there going over the phone’s other features as we ate a mango with lime and chili powder sprinkled on top. The kiosk in the center of the plaza was made of lime and volcanic stone, the same stones Apá used to build his house. It was pretty, almost a coral pink, and it aged well.

  We made a video call to the U.S. just to try it out. In the little screen her only daughter appeared. The phone came in and out of service, sometimes freezing the image into a collage of disjointed pixels—our faces frozen in a blur. Amá smiled and waved into the camera, and her daughter waved back. She could almost reach out and touch her.

  I ended the call and Amá lowered the screen. “This is good,” she said.

  It wasn’t as great as I had hoped it would be, the connection wasn’t as strong. They said in a few years they would install more towers for faster service, but that was just a rumor going around town. I knew we probably wouldn’t video chat much in the future. We finished our mangoes and drank the sour lemon juice collected at the bottom, puckering our faces, and Amá said we looked like the disjointed pixels on the phone, which made us laugh a little.

  “I’ll come see you often, Amá,” I said.

  “I know you will, mijo, I know you will.”

  I held her hurt arm as we walked around the plaza, gently massaging it as we walked. She was still wearing brand-new clothes; it would take her another week or two before she had to wear the same thing twice. By then things wouldn’t be new, things would settle into their normal rhythm, as they had when I spent my summer with Apá. Nothing I saw in that week could be trusted because everything had that newness about it, and that newness could hide what was actually beneath the surface. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything.

  *

  On my last day in Tepechitlán with her, sitting on her couch, looking at old pictures of us, it didn’t feel like a beginning or an end. It felt like a middle—worse still, it felt like we were going nowhere, like we were a large engine capable of great speeds but perpetually idle, perpetually shifted into park. But wasn’t that what we wanted? For once to stay still?

  I knew that if I had a child, she and her grandparents would be strangers to one another. If they ever did meet, my child would cower in the face of her own grandmother, and they would probably not understand each other. Despite my greatest efforts, my child would most likely not know Spanish, and Amá and Apá would not know English. In person, there were other ways to communicate—with your body, with food, with music. But through the small screen in a video message, what other ways of communication existed beyond waving, and saying “Hi” and “Sí” and “No,” if that was all the language you had in common? Yes, we would visit, and try to visit often, but my child would always be someone else, someone missing.

  To my child, my parents would simply be those people with whom I would spend Sunday afternoons talking on the phone. And I can imagine myself passing the phone over, angrily commanding her to talk with her grandparents, and I can imagine her refusing, just like I did. It would start all over again.

  I packed my things and slid my suitcase next to the door. It was a way of announcing something I could not bring myself to say out loud. Amá sat on the edge of the sofa, which was still new and hard. She looked down at the new tile. She looked even smaller in that great room.

  “I’ll be back to see you often, Amá.”

  “I know, mijo. Don’t worry, I know your father.”

  In a way, leaving then was harder than when she left the airport. Perhaps because I was still with her, I hadn’t officially performed my goodbye, my departure. Everyone else back in the U.S. had already gone through this. I, however, merely witnessed the separation. But now it was my turn. How did the rest of the family do this without breaking in half? How could they find strength in their legs to carry them back to their cars, to drive the hour back home, and to lie down on their beds at night?

  I hugged my mother, but she couldn’t bring herself to lift up her arms.

  “Tell me everything, promise me,” I said into her ear.

  “I promise, mijo, I’ll tell you everything.”

  She didn’t turn around when I stood up. She sat on her couch with her back to the door. I had performed a version of this goodbye with her many times before—the first night I didn’t come home from a party, the night I was married, when I left for Michigan. But none of it could have prepared me for how to leave her like this. My family, all we did for generations was leave each other. To depart was in my blood, to live longing in the absence of another was ingrained into me. And yet.

  With her arm still dangling to the side, she looked older. What about her would be different the next time I came? Would she shy away from the camera whenever cousins would come over to take pictures to bring back for us? I walked to the door, and she still didn’t turn around. I was doing, perhaps, what my body was preparing its entire life for—the gift of its hardest leaving. My mother was better at it than me, or perhaps she’d had harder ones than this. She could do i
t while sitting still, on the edge of a couch, facing away from me. She could do it without saying a word. She was doing something with her hands, cradling her grief. She held it all in her small body. My leaving was still in its infancy. It made loud noises, it would board a large airplane and pound the walls of a bathroom stall, staining it with a little blood until security was called.

  Amá was doing it how my great-grand-father León had done it, how her father Jesús had done it, and how I would one day learn to do it. Apá took my luggage and walked to the truck. As I walked through the door, I turned around one last time to see if she was looking, but she wasn’t. I turned and closed the door behind me.

  16.

  I didn’t say anything to Apá on the way back to the airport.

  [Fourth Movement as Ethics and Juice]

  I used to sell oranges door to door with Apá, and I used to think it was embarrassing. I wasn’t ashamed, just embarrassed. There’s a difference. He never had a steady job, but you could say he was a hustler of household wares, fruits, and old tools we also sold at flea markets. We drove from town to town, sweeping a hundred miles in a day, hitting all the familiar Mexican neighborhoods down I-5 through Northern California. He always carried a pocketknife to give people a taste—the pulp bursting out as if it was wound up inside like a spring.

  He taught me how to hold money, “like a man,” as he would say. He licked his large thumb with a stack of singles in his palm, flipping them faster than my eye could keep up. It looked like a small fan spinning in his hand. I licked my skinny thumb just like him and pretended to count. It took a while, but I got pretty good. One day we bought a truckload of sweet corn and sold it all in a day—my pockets were bursting with singles, and I liked to take them out and break change when people paid with a big bill. He bought me a small knife so that I too could spring open an orange. I cut myself, and before the blood had a chance to erupt, he said “Don’t you dare cry.”

  Sometimes, when we spread out to knock on doors, and if I was far enough away from him that he wouldn’t notice, I would sell a sack of oranges and keep a few dollars for myself. A finder’s fee. I knew what work meant, and I figured I deserved even a little for myself.