The Importance of a Piece of Paper

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  “Give me a little leeway on this, sis, I need to know,” Pancho insisted.

  “All right,” she said. She put down her fork and gazed beyond his shoulder through the window above the sink to the eastern fields and treetops. “I think we should leave him in peace and let him have those twenty Adan sold him and be done with it. Put the whole affair behind us, we still got over eighty acres and that’s plenty to work.”

  It was the last statement Pancho ever thought she’d make and it completely unsettled him. A hail of cold-hot energy soared through his veins and immobilized him for a few moments. “You have a thing for him, don’t you... that’s what’s been bothering me... you and him.”

  She looked up at Pancho. “If I do?” The words came out wrong. She’d learned over many disputes with Pancho never to confront him in this manner. “Pancho, it’s done, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Ain’t nothing done,” he growled. He got up without finishing his food and went to the door. “I’m staying in the barn from now on. There ain’t nothing to say between us, least not till you come to your damn senses.”

  That evening Marisol kept the lights burning in the kitchen hoping he would come in. It was midnight and still raining. She showered and sat on the couch in the parlor. She could hear the crows cawing in the cottonwood trees, a blowing rain drafting arid scents of slaked soil and aromatic prairie sage through the house crannies. She went into her bedroom and put on her long nightshirt, imprinted with wild horses running across the prairie. She returned with a woolen blanket that she laid on the couch. She knelt by the fireplace and set a cedar log on the grate, lit some kindling, and got a fire going. She stood with the blanket wrapped around her, watching until it caught, and then she sat back on the couch. She inhaled and held her breath, and after a few moments, let it out with pleasure, releasing the day’s exhaustion and stress. She combed her hair before the fireplace and then snapped a green scabbard from the aloe plant and peeled its smooth, taut skin with her fingernails, rubbing the peeled side on the scratches and small cuts on her arms and legs. After a while she threw the aloe frond into the fire and unscrewed the cap from an old bottle of Vick’s mentholated ointment and massaged it over the length of her legs, deep into her sore muscles. She sat quietly for a spell, allowing the salve to permeate her aching limbs. Before she dozed off, she decided she was going to meet Jaylen on better terms.

  The next morning, Marisol was startled awake by Pancho, who was riding the tractor close to the parlor window. He went around twice and then headed off to the fields. She sensed it would be a long time before he set foot in the house.

  She dressed, made herself a cup of coffee, and sat at the table. She caught herself glancing repeatedly around the kitchen as if she were trying to remember something she had to do, and when she brought her cup up to sip from it, her hand trembled slightly. She went into the parlor and looked through the window at Jaylen’s place. She saw he had parked an old trailer on his property for temporary living quarters. His car was parked beside a stack of new lumber and another pile of adobe bricks. She needed to get busy doing something and moved with impatient expectation, going from one room to another and back into the same rooms she had just entered. She felt a surge of adrenaline and decided to go for a walk in the Bosque to release it. She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and set out for the riverbank, feeling a happiness she hadn’t felt in years.

  About a half hour into her walk she spotted Jaylen a quarter mile out heading her way on the ditch bank. They neared each other but didn’t wave or give a greeting until they were a few yards apart. Jaylen began, “I was going south along the riverbank and I met up with your brother. I was exploring upriver, trying to keep within eyesight of a partridge I had frightened from a bush, when I suddenly came upon him.”

  She didn’t respond. She looked off into the trees bordering the ditch.

  “I didn’t fully introduce myself. I’m Jaylen Maguire, an archeologist at the university.”

  That’s how it started, and it grew from that day with them strolling the riverside and talking for a few hours. They walked and sat in some places and walked again, and Marisol thought to herself, with Jaylen’s voice in the background, that this was how two people began a romance—natural as the breeze blowing her black hair across her face, the sunlight dappling the leaves and glowing in the spaces between arroyo sage and cedars, and a beaver carrying a branch, paddling along the inside edge of the ditch. She looked at the fading colors in the fields beyond her and saw the snowcapped ridge of the Manzano Mountains to the east, and like all things in nature, she felt the intimate hints of change coming over her thanks to Jaylen.

  Over the next few weeks they walked and held hands, discovering new paths that wound and wove endlessly through the Bosque. Gradually they found thickets where they could kiss. They saw each other as frequently as they could. He worked three days a week, and the other four he was with her walking the riverbank.

  They’d rest on fallen tree trunks, talking about his past and hers. Sometimes they jogged, other times she rested in one place watching the river and he went off running by himself and returned to her an hour later. With the passing days the leaves changed from faded green to yellow-brown and grayish gold and softly floated on the air around them, settling on the path they’d worn down on their walks. One Saturday morning they packed lunches and climbed the mesa to the west. It was an all-day hike. He picked wildflowers and she taught him their names. Coyotes stared at them, migrating birds flew overhead, deer perked up their ears at their passing in the distance, and toward late afternoon they walked alongside one of the irrigation canals and spotted carp and catfish in the muddy water. They nestled on the bank in tall river grass and watched big black-and-white Canadian geese glean seeds from grass growing on sandbars in the middle of the river. She taught him how to say the Spanish words amor, confianza, niño, pescado, and sometimes they were completely still, holding each other, mesmerized by the river, whose tiny wavelets enfolded seamlessly into one another in a dance of oneness.

  On warm evenings, lying faceup on a huge fallen tree trunk in the Bosque, they gazed into the sky until the big moon rose over the Manzanos and floated up to the sky. One morning they drove to Albuquerque and lunched near the university. They went swimming in the gymnasium’s heated pool. Jaylen took her shopping and bought her a turquoise bracelet with their names etched on the inside. Later they went to a movie about a couple falling in love and afterwards ate at a sushi bar.

  This was how their lives entwined through the month of October, and Marisol never imagined the autumn days could be as sweet as they were with him.

  One afternoon Pancho saw his sister walking on the riverbank with Jaylen. Anger twisted in his chest like a knife. He used his field glasses to spy on them and saw Marisol laughing hard at something Jaylen said. Pancho saw his sister’s lips moving, and he would have given anything to hear what she said. She turned and did not look back as she hastily cut through the brush and climbed over fallen tree branches away from the winding path in the Bosque. She scrambled up the ditch embankment to where she could see Pancho’s truck parked nearby in a field.

  On one level everything seemed impossible—Adan selling his part of the land, his sister dating this gringo. Pancho’s only solace was knowing that if Marisol wanted to be with Jaylen, she would have to leave with him and live somewhere else, and he knew she would not do that.

  In the fall moonlight, he saw her watching him through the kitchen window as he and Red Wind, a sixteen-year-old Navajo boy, worked with the horses. Red Wind rode Zapata and Pancho trotted him around in a circle on a lead rope, training Zapata to stop, back up, go forward, turn sideways, and resume his gait. He fell into a trance while he watched Zapata go round and round, and summoned the face of his father. Guadalupe had never said much, but Pancho knew he wouldn’t approve of Marisol dating a gringo. The two cultures seldom mixed. Whether anyone admitted or talked about it openly, the ill feelings between
Hispanics and gringos were real and present. The differences went deeper than mere cultural customs; there was long-standing, deep resentment toward Anglos for what they had done to Chicanos in the past.

  Pancho remembered hearing something about Jaylen being an archeologist and he wanted to tell him he wasn’t impressed. In Pancho’s opinion, he was nothing more than a grave robber digging up old relics and selling them to museums. And his brother Adan was no better, because he had no understanding of family loyalty.

  Pancho spent the next week in the barn arranging harnesses, bridles, reins, ropes, saddles, and blankets in the tack room. He oiled his mom and dad’s old saddles, stitched the edges where the leather fringe had worn thin, replaced bronze rivets with new silver ones. He limbered his new ropes, standing twenty feet back lassoing a bale of hay, roping and pulling the slack tight as motes of fine dust exploded in the air in the sunshine that slanted through the window and door. He replaced stall sideboards the horses had chewed on, and each rusty nail he yanked out screeched like the pain he carried inside himself. He salvaged the boards he could, sawing the chewed grooves straight and sanding the brittle splinters smooth. He nailed the one-by-six planks back, spacing them six inches apart. While he worked the smell of alfalfa and manure comforted something in him. He gathered kindling in the Bosque, chopped wood, and stacked it by the side of the house. The woodpile was perfectly even on all four sides, hardly an inch of any log sticking out from the rest.

  The more he worked with Zapata, the more the ache in his heart slowly worked its way out of him. He rode bareback, lightly slapping the reins against his rump. Zapata bolted up the dirt road bordering the fields north of the house. Pancho turned him around, heeled his flanks, and felt that familiar calm ripple through his body as Zapata galloped, the muscled, brute velocity between his thighs thrusting him forth below the trees, the wind in his face, and his frustration scattering behind him like autumn leaves.

  In the Bosque he chainsawed a clearing beside the riverbank where he and Zapata could lounge. One afternoon he was sitting on the ground, eyeing the glimmering river as it coursed south, when he saw Marisol and Jaylen walk by in the distance. A razor-sharp stone lodged under his skin pierced him. He knew this gringo didn’t appreciate what he had. His purchase had no significance for him beyond owning a nice house in the country. But to Pancho, it meant past generations of relatives sacrificing whatever was necessary to guarantee the farm stayed in the family. From the youngest children to the grandparents, they shared the unspoken conviction that selling any part of the farm would bring dishonor to the family.

  When he was a boy, he remembered his mother and father going off at daybreak to work as cotton pickers in order to pay the land taxes. They all worked extra jobs to pitch in and pay the taxes. What they grew they ate or used to maintain the livestock and seed the land for the following year. There was never a year when the farm made enough money to support the whole family, and everyone had to hire out to other ranchers to make ends meet. Each family member was as much a part of the land as their breath was to their survival. It was a spiritual connection, and that’s why he couldn’t understand Adan selling his part.

  He mounted Zapata and walked him around the clearing, bordered by sparsely spaced Russian olive trees, sand cedars, and sage. He prodded his right heel into Zapata’s side making him turn right, applied left-knee pressure to turn the horse left. After enough of this patient discipline he smacked Zapata’s flanks and they abruptly climbed an arroyo slope. Pancho clamped his legs around the horse’s belly, clenched his mane, and leaned low on his neck as Zapata broke into a headlong charge, rounding trees and dodging branches. He gracefully took the tree-lined curves, leaped over fallen limbs and roots bulging up in the path, lengthening his stride down a straightaway stretch.

  On one occasion he found himself five miles south of the farm when he slowed, loping east along the irrigation ditch, then swinging north a while and west again to come in from the dirt road that led to the house. He had looped around to check out the twenty acres by the gate that now belonged to the gringo. He finally reined in, rearing to a dusty stop. He wasn’t expecting to see Jaylen, so he dismounted and checked everything over. There were the surveyor’s stakes and small yellow and red flags marking the twenty-acre boundaries. He walked around examining the grass, sifting dirt through his hand, and squinting his eyes as he scanned the fields and checked the irrigation ditch, all with the deep penetration of someone wanting the images before him to be eternally imprinted in his memory.

  As the days drew on, Pancho noticed the increasing activity at Jaylen’s place. Crews of Mexican laborers arrived in pickups to dig out the foundation footing for the house. Two backhoe men came out and trenched the septic hole; trucks from the Belen lumberyard dropped off pallets of supplies and covered them with blue plastic tarps. More day-laborers showed up to dig ditches, plumbers roughed in copper water lines and plumbing pipes, masons stacked cinder blocks and adobe bricks at various spots around the house corners.

  He saw Jaylen come and go every few days, always wearing a suit, tie, and black dress shoes, and carrying a backpack with a laptop computer and books. He’d arrive early in the afternoon and wouldn’t come out of the trailer until an hour or two later, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. He’d usually eat his lunch sitting on the bricks, and then he’d walk to the river with a pair of binoculars dangling from his neck.

  One day Pancho took three ponies he was training for a rancher in Belen and went to the river. Jaylen was walking on a path in the Bosque, heading back to his trailer, when Pancho came around a corner riding Zapata so fast he almost ran Jaylen down. Jaylen stumbled to the ground trying to get out of the way and Pancho towered above him on Zapata, the horse stamping and snorting dangerously close to him. Pancho warned him to be careful about roaming the Bosque—deer came down to feed on the grass, and he didn’t want to shoot Jaylen by accident. Though he frequently saw Marisol and Jaylen walking together, he never caught them in an intimate way. But he had his suspicions. And sooner or later, when he did catch them, it’d be hell to pay for both.

  In the meantime, he occupied himself around the farm. He repaired the roof gutters on the barn, set the woodstove over the concrete slab he poured, and built a wall to keep the heat in the small room he was now sleeping in. He was up early changing plugs and checking oil and hydraulic fluid on the tractor. He attached the plow to the rear and pressed the lever that was supposed to lift it, but it didn’t work, so he took off the crusty hydraulic hoses and replaced them with new ones. One week Pancho fixed the fence line along the west side of the fields; the next week he set in posts for new pens for the pigs and goats and the black Angus bull he’d won off a wager. He had big plans to start his own herd. He and some friends had gone down to the auction house in Albuquerque and had jammed a stock trailer with yearling calves they planned to breed to the Angus bull.

  He drove his tractor to the post office in town and was happy to find in his mailbox his application from the state racing commission. On the way there and back he had to pass Jaylen’s place, and seeing it made him think about his father and the way things were before. The last time they were together they had gone down to Onate’s Feedstore, and after getting grain for the horses and cows, they had gone to Annabel’s next door—a restaurant run by three sisters—and had breakfast. With their coffee, eggs, bacon, and hash browns with red chili powder sprinkled over all of it, they sat and chatted with the girls. They were the friendliest of people, all smoking and talking simultaneously: A woman sitting on a counter stool next to Pancho told him of her toothache; another woman sitting next to his father had had her fill of her man drinking and was leaving him. There were photographs of champion horses on the walls, horse calendars and trophies on a small shelf, and all of the counter stools were occupied by farmers in denim overalls with grimy feed-store baseball caps or by callous-handed, growl-timbered ranchers smelling of alfalfa and manure, vexed by the latest political bill tha
t was taxing farmers out of existence. And because it had been so unseasonably dry over the last few years, with the rains coming so late when they did come, there were always some farmers who had just filed for bankruptcy or were preparing to. They would tell Pancho how lucky he was, that unlike stunted corn or baked fields with shriveled wheat that had driven them out of business, his colts would always be wanted, as Zapata was sure to be one of the champions with his photo on the wall.

  The hot days that were bad for them were good for Pancho. With the leaves now fading into reds and yellows and the Bosque looking more beautiful than ever, Pancho took advantage of the weather. He and Red Wind took the horses swimming in the Rio Grande. To challenge Zapata, they rode him hard, bareback all the way to the other side of the river. The rest of the horses followed. On the other side of the bank, with the horses freely grazing in the brush, they sat and ate burritos on the bank.

  “I used to pray here. Not anymore though, gave up on it,” Pancho said, looking across the broad shimmering surface of the water. He wasn’t expecting a response because Red Wind seldom gave one. It was his nature to listen, and Pancho liked that; often they’d go days without a word between them.

  But he did reply this time: “He bothers you.”

  Pancho knew he meant the gringo and he didn’t want to talk about it. He stuffed the rest of the burrito in his mouth. Red Wind smiled at him because green chili was dripping all over Pancho’s shirt. Pancho picked him up, they grappled a second, then Pancho lifted him and tossed him into the river. They took off their boots and jeans and swam for a while, pointing out a falcon on a branch, a blue heron in the sandbar grass.

  They rode back at a lazy pace, side by side. Pancho said, “They been kind of dating, walking and talking each afternoon. What do you think about that?” He looked up and pointed an index finger like a pistol at a line of snow geese. He squeezed the trigger. He kicked Zapata in the flanks and they roared across the high water, laughing and splashing, letting loose all their frustration.