The Importance of a Piece of Paper

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  A few nights later, Pancho sat on a vegetable crate in the barn oiling his leather chaps when the lights flickered. He glanced out the door and saw them flicker again in the house. He wondered if it was the storm clouds blowing in or his sister messing around with the fuse box in the pantry on the back porch. Sometimes she’d plug in the iron, the microwave, the coffeepot, and other things all at once and a fuse would blow. Anything, he guessed, to fill her time when she wasn’t with Jaylen.

  He didn’t mean to be cruel to her by sleeping in the barn. To his mind, she just didn’t understand how much it hurt him that she would go with a gringo. She was certainly old enough to remember what happened to their uncle Tranquelino. He clearly did. He must have been around ten years old when his uncle had gone down to the newly opened farm assistance office. It was a time when drought threatened everyone’s livelihood—cattle, sheep, and horses were all near starvation and without assistance would die. Because his uncle couldn’t read English, the government clerk refused to give him an application, and shortly after that, with the first serious snowfall, the entire flock had starved and frozen to death in the foothills. Only the gringos, who spoke English, got the assistance money to buy grain and hay. At his uncle’s funeral a few weeks later, he couldn’t help thinking that the loss of his sheep had something to do with him dying. Didn’t she remember that incident and so many others over the last twenty years, and if so, how could she overlook those events and still like someone who had the same malicious blood and cold heart as the ones who stole so much of their land?

  He turned from the barn door and took a vanilla cherry soda pop from the cooler, drained the bottle, and flung it into a fifty-gallon oil barrel to his right. He looked at the black clouds gathered on the horizon. It was going to be heavy, he thought. The pipe gate on the dirt road at the far end of the property glimmered in the lightning’s intermittent glare. It was closed. In the flashes, he saw his neighbors’ cows huddled in sheds and in the fields under trees—a few dull-brained cows, too stupid to know better, grazed on the shoulder of the dirt road that ran from the house through the fields up to the main village road. He should’ve graded it with the tractor blade, banked it away to the edges so water would drain to the sides. He took a couple of harnesses from the pegs on the tack room wall and started waxing them. The thunder and smell of coming rain made him feel content, and on nights like this he didn’t mind being alone.

  Zapata watched him from the stall, chortling with pride because earlier Pancho had brushed and combed him and he seemed almost conscious of how he shimmered like black obsidian. “You getting too big of a dang head,” Pancho told him. “Lots of people heard about your running. Have to give odds now... you willing to put up our savings?” The horse whinnied excitedly as if he understood. “I’ll put up what we have, you know that... we’re going for broke, ole buddy...”

  He was going to enter Zapata in the big state fair race and it was going to cost every penny he had. The purse was a half million dollars. There was no way Zapata could lose. Pancho was already planning in his head to add more stalls, more white pipe fence rails for training, buy more land, hire help. Pancho put the rags and wax cans away and petted and brushed Zapata one last time, then scooped a little of his favorite grain into a pail and watched him chomp it up with powerful jaws. He pulled the dangling lightbulb chain, shut the doors, and for the first time in weeks, went into the house to eat a warm meal and take a nice bath. Maybe it was time to make up with his sister. When he passed her bedroom, he stuck his head in and said, “Good night... and I love you, Sis, you got a crazy brother, thanks for understanding and hanging tough with me... sweet dreams.”

  Late that night, they were asleep and didn’t hear Zapata neighing frantically, rearing to fight off the lightning flashes and thunder. They didn’t hear the boards of his stall splinter when he kicked them apart and they didn’t see him rush blindly out of the barn, crazed with fear and wildly galloping from the rumbling that kept following him. He couldn’t outrun it but he kept trying, racing across the field, onto the road and out the gate that had been left open and was now whipped back and forth by the wind, clattering and scaring Zapata even more.

  Earlier in the evening, Jaylen had come in late from filling out research grants at the university. He had opened the gate, but since it was raining so hard he thought better of getting back out of the car to close it. He was in a hurry to get out of the rain and minutes after he parked and ran in to his trailer, Zapata flew through the gate, the rain beating against his black shimmering coat like stinging bees.

  Zapata galloped onto Main Street at the very moment Jose Velarde was barreling through in his Mack truck packed tightly with livestock. He was going to sleep at home tonight, then leave at dawn for the Amarillo stockyards. He was listening to a Mexican radio station and singing along with it, hurrying to get home to his wife, to a late supper and a warm bed. The windshield wipers were on high but rain still blurred the windows. Just then, while Jaylen was snuggling into bed under the feather blanket, and Pancho was in his bedroom asleep, a pencil and paper with which he’d been figuring up winnings and a horseman’s magazine open on his chest, and Marisol was in her bed dreaming, Jose felt his truck hit something like a deer or stray cow. When the windshield wipers swung left and briefly cleared the window, he saw the head of an animal on his hood. It was a grotesque sight. Despite the blood still splattering his windshield, he could clearly make out a horse’s head. He gasped with horror, made the sign of the cross, and screeched over to the shoulder of the road.

  Pancho had a fitful sleep, tossing and turning, images of Zapata racing in his mind around a dirt track over in Sandoval, a small town forty miles northeast. He showered, shaved, and pulled out a clean pair of underwear, socks, an ironed shirt, and a pair of jeans from the bureau drawer. After dressing he set the coffeepot on the gas stove and then woke up Marisol. She came out in her housecoat and they sat at the table sipping coffee and eating buttered toast. He asked her about going with him to the race in Sandoval.

  She clasped his hand on the table and smiled. “Give me a minute to wash up and get ready and I’ll fix us something.” They had two cups of coffee, a glass of orange juice, and scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and green chili rolled in a tortilla.

  When he went into the yard he found the blanket he had draped over Zapata and wondered how it got there. From a distance, he saw the splintered stall door and immediately rushed to the barn. The other horses were there but not Zapata. He tracked the fresh hoofprints to the gate and beyond, where a group of men in a truck met him. They were old friends. They stopped and got out before he reached them and stood watching him. Without a word, his friend Alejandro led him to the bed of the pickup and pointed to the blood-soaked sheet. Pancho flung it off and saw Zapata’s head. His mouth struggled to form words but none came.

  He couldn’t move. Suddenly he looked around at the fields and trees and everything became explicitly clear to him. His breath quickened. The light became intense, the colors more vibrant, the air heavier in his lungs. He wanted to erase that moment. Something in him seized up and darkened his heart and he felt incapable of thought or feeling—he was numb—as if molten lead coursed through his veins.

  He wasn’t aware of walking back to the gate. He saw himself as though hovering above himself, outside of himself; he saw himself studying how the rain had not erased the tire ruts from Jaylen’s car, how its wheels had spun ruts in the soil all the way to his trailer. There were small puddles of rain in Zapata’s hoofprints. The sun glimmered in them. He felt the urge to kneel on the muddy ground and drink from the pools, hoping crazily that maybe Zapata would appear when he rose and turned and looked at the fields. He saw the smooth, dress-shoe prints that could only be from Jaylen’s loafers. There was a set of prints on one side of the gate but none on the other. “That fucking gringo!”

  Through the heaviest and deepest and hottest silence he’d ever experienced, the voice of one of his friends came: “Pancho,
let’s go to the house and talk to Marisol.”

  Pancho started for the house but not to talk with Marisol. One of his friends raced across the fields. Another went toward Jaylen’s trailer. The others waited by the truck. Pancho walked behind his house, got a bucket of arsenic, his rifle, and a box of bullets, and then started the tractor and drove back to the men in the truck, who were watching him the whole time. Pancho was thinking of nothing; his mind was like a plank board, hard, unfeeling. He saw his hands on the rifle, felt its weight, heard the sputtering belching sound from the tractor’s smokestack, heard the soft muddy sucking as the tractor tires moved him nearer and nearer to his mark.

  Jaylen came out just in time to get in his car and drive far enough up the road to park and witness Pancho bulldoze his partially built home. He turned the tractor and leveled the stack of lumber piled on the side. Alejandro and Marisol came out of the house. The rest of the men watched in disbelief as Pancho crushed the new fencing around Jaylen’s place, upended the small trailer where Jaylen slept, and flattened the small storage building filled with supplies and fixtures; he smashed the stacks of drying adobes under the blue plastic tarp, and demolished every standing structure above ground.

  He jumped off the tractor and poured the arsenic down the well. He then shot Jaylen’s bull calf that had innocently roamed across the field thinking it was feeding time. He went across the road, set the sights on his rifle, and aimed at the butane cylinder tank. He shot. A small puff of smoke popped from the pipe going into the tank, and then a roar of plumed fire came up. Seconds later the tank exploded.

  Pancho steadied his elbow on his knee and aimed at Jaylen, standing by the back of his car. Just as he was about to shoot, Marisol came up behind him, grabbed the rifle, and embraced him. He fell forward to the ground on knees and arms, trying to catch his breath and sobbing. “He didn’t want to get his shoes dirty! He left... the...”

  “I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry, so sorry, Panchito...” She cradled him and wept.

  Alejandro approached. “The sheriff’ll be coming. We’ll take him to our house. He’ll be safe there.”

  Marisol nodded. Behind Alejandro, she watched Jaylen drive away, hating him.

  She waited until they had gone over the rise, then she walked across the field and entered the house. The phone was ringing. It was Adan.

  “Jaylen called on his cell, he’s filing criminal charges against Pancho. What the hell happened there this morning?”

  “Zapata’s dead,” Marisol whispered.

  “Oh my God,” Adan cried. “Was it something—”

  “He left the gate open and...” But she was crying too hard to finish her sentence.

  Later, when Adan called Jaylen and asked him to drop the charges, Jaylen said, “It’s not only criminal destruction. Your brother keeps talking about land grant rules. And I still haven’t seen them. I’ve been told this is a land grant property, I know that supposedly there were certain stipulations to abide by, but I haven’t seen the paper. I’m doing what I’m doing because I love this land. I love that place, it’s what I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid. I want to make it my home. But if I’m ever going to be at peace, I have to see that paper that says I have to close that gate.”

  “There is a charter, dating back to the king of Spain, and it does—”

  “I want to see the charter...”

  Adan said, “My father used to study it for our property boundaries. It said to the cottonwood trees and the ditch, over to the mound of rocks, and back to the river is our land. And it does say you have to close the gate behind you, so your neighbor’s livestock—”

  Jaylen cut in, exasperation in his voice, “You’ve seen it, I haven’t. When I bought the land I thought it was mine, I could do what I wanted with it. I wanted to break off my portion from the land grant and make it like any other piece of land. Maybe that road is mine, maybe I don’t have to close the gate, maybe you don’t really have the title to the land, maybe there is something else you’re not telling me. Private property is what I know, Adan, I can use it any way I wish and not be wondering if I am doing something wrong. You said the road belongs to the community, that I can use only so much water, that I can use the common pasture, but it’s all hearsay.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s legal.”

  “You’re telling me what’s legal?”

  “Not me, my lawyer, talk to him from now on. I’m sorry, Adan.”

  Adan called Marisol and told her Jaylen was taking the villagers to court, forcing them to prove they in fact had the title to the land. There had never been a need to record the titles at the county office, but as soon as Marisol found the land grant papers she would do just that. First, she had to locate them. This shouldn’t be a problem, she thought, somebody in Agua Dulce had to have them, the older people would know.

  “Produce the papers in court,” Adan said, “and it’s over sooner than it started.”

  The next morning, Monday, she called a general meeting at the community center to organize an official canvassing project, and for the next few weeks Marisol and others went visiting. They questioned farmers mending fences, asked the older men warming themselves by the pool hall woodstove, stood outside the Valdez Meat Market and stopped women coming out with groceries; notices appeared in the small 4-H farming paper, queries were posted at the livestock auction house, and word spread between every waitress, bartender, and drunk. After two weeks of grueling searches, and though the papers had passed through everyone’s hands in the village at one time or another, no one knew who had them.

  On the first day of court in the town of Socorro, Jaylen Maguire, dressed in a blue suit, and three distinguished lawyers with bulging briefcases sat at the table. Surveyors with scrolls of plot maps were seated behind them. On the other side of the courtroom were the old people from the village, with Marisol sitting by herself in a chair in front of the table. As she walked back from the judge’s bench, after handing a list of names to the judge, she stared coldly at Jaylen, but despite her anger, she couldn’t help but feel sad about what had happened. During the next ten days, though she couldn’t return the look, she often felt his eyes on her.

  One of Pancho’s friends had given Marisol a note in court. It instructed her where to meet him later. During a two-hour recess, she went to where the note directed her and sat under a cottonwood tree by an abandoned, crumbling adobe house. Instead of Pancho, however, it was Jaylen who drove up. He parked and walked up through the yard and stood next to her. “You do pretty good as the town’s counsel,” he said. He was trying to sound up-beat but an undertone of sadness weighed down his words.

  “You do pretty good betraying people.” Her words were clearly bitter. “We welcome you into our community, and this is what you do.”

  He knelt on the ground next to her and took her shoulders. “It’s a legal formality, Marisol. I love you, and I’m sorry this had to happen—this is not in any way a reflection of the love I have for you.”

  “Get your hands off me!” She slapped him away.

  A half mile away, still hiding in a hayloft from the law, Pancho was all set to leave and see his sister when he saw a flock of crows scatter from the cottonwood tree where he had told her to meet him. He could see Jaylen and Marisol through his binoculars. As he walked back to his car and drove off, Jaylen didn’t know that Pancho had been watching them the whole time.

  During the next few days Marisol resumed her role in court, calling one resident after another. They all testified about how their families had originally come from Spain or Mexico—their lineages boasting famous Spanish explorers and Plains Indians— and how the land had been handed down from generation to generation to the present time. Sometimes the witnesses had to be excused to use the bathroom, or an afternoon was wasted as testimonies trailed off into long-winded stories describing heroic exploits and tragedies, even sinking to rumors about a woman’s indiscretions, or scoldings of so-and-so
for moving away and abandoning responsibilities, or reports of how so-and-so was a no-good loafer, but eventually, nine days after the trial had started, all the villagers between the ages of forty and ninety had told the court their stories of seeing and reading the land grant papers.

  Jaylen’s lawyers argued, with a hint of derision in their tone, that although the testimony was impressive and would make for a good historical story, it hardly belonged in a court of law. No one had produced the documents needed to prove ownership, and any argument based on something that clearly did not exist required no litigation at all. But in the spirit of benevolence, they were prepared to offer a plan that would help the villagers settle their confusion and insure against future mix-ups.

  They petitioned the court to create a corporation of the land grant holders, giving each villager a certain number of property shares, and those who wanted to sell, could sell; others who didn’t would not have to. The corporation would be run by a commission charged with soliciting members’ input on issues affecting the village and with decision-making on its behalf. The judge adjourned, saying he would assess the matter and reconvene in a week, whereupon he would have a ruling.

  The day after Jaylen had met Marisol out in the woods, he quit showing up for court. Marisol thought it was because of their fight and for her it was more comfortable without him in the courtroom. Now, at least, she didn’t have the constant feeling that he was watching her every gesture.

  The truth, however, was that on the evening of the day Jaylen had met Marisol, he had spent the last hours of daylight cleaning up the destruction Pancho had caused. Too tired to head back to his motel room miles away in Belen, he decided to nap a bit in his sleeping bag and then maybe go into town later.