Home Front Lines

by Brenda Sparks Prescott

  “That was what I was planning anyway.” Tomasito distributed the bowls on the table. What a change in him. I had never known him to set a table in his life as long as a woman was around. Perhaps he was dead. “Now that I’ve seen you. It’s longer from here, but it’s easier to get a vessel out of one of these provinces.”

  “What about the Russians and the Americans?” Rosita asked.

  “These are our waters,” Tomasito replied. “We don’t have to worry about them. It’ll be the Cubans that we’ll have to dodge. Besides, I’ve been in a rehab camp. What better credentials for the Americans?” He rested his hands on the back of the chair opposite us. “But where’s Lola?”

  I shifted in the stiff chair and looked at Abuela. This was a family matter. She understood and inclined her head to tell her husband to join her in the back room.

  After they left, I said, “She’s off feeding the Russians.”

  “The Russians are more important than her hermanito?”

  I shrugged.

  “Sit down. We have our own tale to tell,” Rosita said.

  Tomasito pulled out a seat and moved the dinner bowl aside after sitting. He propped his elbows on the table. Rosita turned to me, but I was as tired as I was hungry and had no desire to explain things. She waited, but I can be patient if I have to be.

  “Well?” Tomasito switched his eyes between us.

  Finally Rosita started. She spoke of the Russians and their secrets and their threats to the family. Our brother’s eyes grew wide when she finally got to the children.

  “You didn’t tell your husbands?” he asked, wonder slowing his words.

  “Calixto García,” Rosita said.

  Tomasito scanned the room as he took in the family code that he himself had used. He brought his attention back to us and nodded. “I will join them. In Miami. I will look after them.” He picked up the bowl and carefully placed it back as part of the dinner setting.

  “Of course you will,” Rosita said.

  They were both liars. We had no idea where the children were or where they would land, and Tomasito could barely take care of himself, let alone motherless children. I could have pointed that out but decided to let them have their little moment of fantasy. After all, it was my fantasy, also.

  “Well, then. Nothing we can do right now. Let’s eat,” Tomasito said. “Abuela!”

  She immediately appeared in the doorway. How much she may have heard, I couldn’t say. And at that moment, I no longer cared.

  “I can eat a goat,” he said.

  “Oh, you,” she said with a swoosh of her hand.

  You could tell she held much affection for our hermanito. She disappeared and returned with a big pot of stew. Paco followed on her heels. Something about this moment made me suspect I might never see this charming brother of mine again. My heart thumped but strangely was calmed by the smell of Abuela’s stew. She heaped a spoonful of yucca and goat-tail bones in his bowl and moved on to Rosita. After serving all of us, she went out back again and returned to set a cup of steaming brown liquid beside my bowl. No one else received one.

  “Pardon me, Abuela, but what’s this?” I asked.

  “For your headache.” How did she know?

  She frowned at me and pointed to the ridges between her eyes.

  Tomasito laughed. “Careful. I told you what happened to me when I drank one of her concoctions.”

  “You turned into a goat?” I asked, and everyone laughed. I sipped the sweet tisane. We were in expert hands.

  After dinner, Chucho brought in his wife to meet us. Her yellow shift was faded but clean. Spots of rain darkened the hem where it had hung below her jacket. She had a habit of bunching the dress at the waist and smoothing it out again. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and had the brassy look of a bad henna job. What I could’ve done for her if I had the time. Our brother rose to offer his seat to her, but Abuela insisted that he sit and rest his injured arm. Chucho’s wife, Berta was her name, stood by the door, as it was the only place for her in the crowded room. She hardly spoke until I thought to ask her whether a notice had been sent out immediately when Tomasito was declared dead.

  Berta glanced at her husband as if asking for permission to speak. He nodded once. “Oh yes, Señora. All our guests are accounted for at all times.” Her hands were pressed flat at her sides, as if she were reciting her catechism.

  “We received no notice,” Rosita said. “Did it go to our parents?”

  “No, Señora. They told me to send it to the gentleman who signed the original papers.”

  A fire burned near my heart, but I had to be sure of my suspicions. “Do you remember the name?”

  Berta’s eyes searched the thatch roof above for her answer.

  “Was it Ramón Fernandez?” I asked.

  “Señora, that’s it. I remember now because our youngest is also named Ramón and he makes his R big like a balloon like this gentleman did. Of course, our Ramón had only seven years, but already . . .” Her voice trailed off as she stared at Rosita.

  My sister had blanched whiter than a christening dress. I thought she was going to faint. I reached out to her, prepared to catch her if she flopped out of her chair. This was certainly the limit: not only had Ramón sent our hermanito away, he then kept silent about his supposed death, even when he knew we were frantic for information.

  “I’ll kill him,” I said.

  My words seemed to revive Rosita. She put a hand to her throat, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the sky beyond the low thatched roof. We call this her martyr pose.

  “I’ll handle him,” she said.

  Please. As if she would do anything to him that really mattered.

  “You know this Señor Fernandez?” Chucho asked.

  I glanced at Tomasito, who was watching Rosita closely without expression. How mature he looked. He had become his own man in those two short months. He must’ve also learned some lessons about trust, because Chucho’s question made clear that he had never revealed Ramón’s connection to him and our family.

  “Intimately,” Rosita said.

  She lowered her chin and opened her eyes but didn’t say anything more. That was all right. We had a long ride back over the mountains to address the subject of her traitorous husband.

  Chucho soon escorted his wife home, leaving behind a promise to return to help with whatever needed to be done. In a household that probably retired soon after dusk, we kept the front room alive with family chatter late into the night. We quickly decided that we would leave all our provisions with the Ramírez family, either for their own use or to help speed Tomasito on his way. As much as we wanted to linger with our precious brother, those other absences and uncertainties tugged at us. We would leave for home in the morning.

  My DeSoto had drawn notice when we arrived, which added to my concern for our brother’s safety. He assured us that everyone in the batey knew about him and his hiding place. It was only a passing official or a nosy campesino from another settlement that might cause upset. In any case, late at night, after the storm had passed and the singing night insects were joined by the steady drip of back country vegetation shedding its shower, Chucho returned to unload our car. A few provisions, such as the American dollars, were stashed in compartments hidden in the DeSoto’s body. I retrieved those goods myself. Our hosts admired the ingenuity and extent of our resources.

  I offered Diego’s pistol to my brother. My husband liked him and wouldn’t begrudge him the gun. He, though, was concerned with our safety, especially after he heard the tale of the bandit brothers. Rosita showed off her Derringer, which evoked snickers from the men. Tomasito decided that we would need the protection of the pistol more than he would. Besides, two of the authentic ration books for the Havana province would pay for adequate, and more modern, firepower for his needs.

  Every time I thought of leaving Tomasito behind I could scarcely breathe, but Rosita seemed to be her old animated self. Tomasito spoke so cheerfully of joinin
g our kids in Miami that we were happy to let the uncertainty of their exact whereabouts slide. He waved his injured hand around as if it were whole, and his face glowed when he spoke of living out in the light again. We continued to drink our fill of our brother. Our hearts tugged toward home and the fate of our children, but that night we had eyes only for Tomasito.

  After a miniscule amount of sleep on pallets in Abuelo’s front room, we clumped together out in the last night shadows in the valley and hugged and cried and hugged again. The light of dawn struck the mountains with its golden rays. Clouds gathered on their crowns and wisps of mist danced among their lower heights. At last the sun peeped into our bowl of shadows and we knew we must go. We would return home with one question answered but many more to ask. Tomasito agreed to wait for word from us before taking off for his new land, but I could see in his eyes that he would jump into the first seaworthy vessel he found with the first set of men he hoped he could trust. That Tomasito was always reckless as a boy, but he had made it that far. He worked his angels overtime, I thought as we finally got in the car.

  He closed my door, and I took his hand before starting the DeSoto and turning it around in the small clearing. I stopped in front of him so Rosita could also clasp our little brother one last time. She took his good hand in both of hers and pulled him quickly toward the car.

  “What are you doing?” My voice was harsh with surprise.

  “Come with us.” Her fingers clutched Tomasito, and her voice came out equally harsh, but with something else. “We can hide you. I will take care of Ramón, and then you can be free again. Come. Now.” She tried to hang onto him with one hand while reaching for the door handle with the other. Tomasito snapped his hand out of her grasp and jumped back.

  “Drive,” he commanded.

  Rosita reached out to him as I floored it. The wheels spun in the mud and the rear fishtailed twice, but both Tomasito and I knew that Rosita was capable of all kinds of romantic foolishness at a time like this. A quick getaway was our only hope of leaving without more antics. She hung out the window, her arm stretched back toward the batey long after it disappeared from view.

  After that, our journey home was uneventful except for a punctured tire in the mountains, which I fixed. Please. That was child’s play, even with little room between the road and the rocks that rose high above our heads. We found our bandit friends’ platform empty, the feed bag gone, when we passed it in the late morning. Given my sister’s last minute histrionics, I thought it best to leave any discussion about Ramón to after our return. Look what had happened to our family. I had every right to run down that worthless slug and her, too, for bringing him into our lives. Despite my resolve, I would have pounced if she had brought him up, but she didn’t mention her husband. Not once. When she broke her quiet, it was usually with a memory of Tomasito, the wave in his hair, his impish smile, his infectious laugh.

  Back on the highway, just as we were again feeling comfortable with our surroundings, I had to crawl for a while behind a truck laden with tobacco leaves, a harvest that smelled like the cigars the leaves would be rolled into. Suddenly a rock shot into the windshield. Rosita jumped and yelped, and her breath immediately turned into sobs. Virgin of Charity, you would’ve thought it was a real gunshot straight into her heart, the way she carried on. It was only a stone. It left a small nick that didn’t even craze, although we would have to watch it.

  As we returned deeper into familiar territory on the northern coast, we again passed the man dressed in a straw hat and red pants on the tractor. He now had a passenger on the fender and was heading toward Havana. I honked. We waved as we sped past. A few more kilometers, and I turned off the highway and headed across town to my home.

  Woman Waving to the Future 4

  PLANE ENGINES RUMBLED overhead as Lucy sat at her dressing table and filed her nails. The radio on Sonny’s side of the bed played Top Forty hits. The station would suspend the music for President Kennedy’s speech, which would begin in about an hour. Would he confirm the wives’ intel about a crisis in Cuba? She wanted to be on the right track, yet she hated its inevitable destination. She had been Tony’s age when she and her family had listened in stunned silence to the radio set in the living room as President Roosevelt described the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Now she was the mother. Now she had to stay calm and reassure her children that they would be all right regardless of the news from the president. She waited for Erica to finish her shower. Her daughter should have been in the tub in the main bathroom, but she was convinced that the incessant throttling up and down of takeoffs and landings at the air base meant that planes were falling straight toward their house. She believed this despite Tony’s repeated explanations of engine mechanics and the illusions of the Doppler effect. Lucy didn’t blame her. With an evening shift in the winds, the planes tacked to a new compass point and sounded as if they might leave tire marks on the flat roof of their house. Ordinarily, huge blocks of quiet separated the roar of the Air Force aloft, but now the caravan of craft arrived and departed in intervals of less than a minute. Lucy knew, because she had finished her nails and was watching the second hand spurt around the alarm clock.

  The shower stopped. “Mommy?”

  “Still here.”

  “Mommy?” Erica’s voice pitched higher. She was so close to hiccup-weeping all the time now.

  “Still here,” Lucy said louder. She clicked off the radio and went to slide the bathroom’s pocket door a little wider. “Here I am.”

  Her daughter jumped at the sound of her voice and draped the towel in front of her. She still wore the purple shower cap. Her stance suggested that easy panic warred with the newly acquired and fierce desire for privacy.

  “Hurry up, missy. Put your pj’s on.”

  Tony was at the dining room table, constructing sentences with the week’s spelling words. He had showered right after supper. Lucy wished Sonny was home and getting ready to watch the speech with them, but he had been gone more than forty-eight hours without a call. She and Betty Ann had assumed they would get together for the big announcement, but as they scrabbled back and forth about who would host, it became clear that each wanted to be near her own phone. Each imagined her husband wrangling a moment at a phone, and each wanted to be home to receive the call. The wives could talk with each other afterward. And since no formal officers or leaders had been elected by the other wives, they would look to Lucy and Betty Ann to devise the course of action once the president had spoken. Another plane screamed overhead. The crescendo and diminuendo of engines signaled the efficient movements of the US Air Force. Crescendo? God, she was thinking the way Betty Ann’s husband talked.

  Erica struggled with the arm holes of her pajama top. She had fit into the baby doll top just two months ago, but it was already too small. The ruffles on the sleeves made her arms look scrawnier than they were. Time for that fall necessities shopping trip. Lucy imagined shopping for underwear as a nuclear mushroom bloomed on the horizon. She shook off the thought as Erica scooted past her. She had left the damp towel heaped on the floor and the shower cap on the toilet seat. Lucy called to her as she rounded the corner into the hallway. Her daughter either didn’t hear her—yet another jet roared overhead—or she pretended not to and disappeared. Lucy let her go. She didn’t have to engage in every skirmish. A sigh escaped her as she picked up the towel. She would have to watch that in front of the children. She would have to appear stronger than she felt.

  After tidying the bathroom, Lucy settled down with the kids in the living room. Tony’s long limbs folded into his father’s recliner, and Erica sat cross-legged with a deck of cards on the floor. She pleaded with her brother to play War with her, but he was absorbed in a new Fantastic Four comic book and ignored her. Lucy shook her head when appealed to, so Erica bent over and laid out the seven piles of solitaire. In this way they would listen to the president and, God willing and with no more interruptions by the network, would continue on with the regular r
outine of To Tell the Truth and I’ve Got a Secret. At that point, Lucy would argue Erica into bed. God willing.

  At Tony’s age, Lucy knew that the attack on Pearl Harbor was terrible but had no idea how much it would change everyone’s lives. Sonny’s crew still had to stagger the planes so they couldn’t all be easily targeted like the ones that had been parked in straight rows on that December day. Our nation was outraged at the cowardice of the preemptive strike by the Japanese, but would the president consider it a loss of honor if he used the same tactics? She prayed he would. She prayed again that the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs had pointed him and his advisers to a third way.

  At Tony’s age, she had dreamed of the drama and spontaneity of an artist’s loft in Greenwich Village. What did her children dream of? Would they have the chance to see them come true?

  Walter Cronkite announced President Kennedy. The president sat at a desk, his face drawn into a mask of deep seriousness, and addressed the nation.

  Good evening, my fellow citizens:

  This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned land. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.

  Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up. And having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this Government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.

  The characteristics of these new missile sites indicate two distinct types of installations. Several of them include medium range ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead for a distance of more than 1,000 nautical miles. Each of these missiles, in short, is capable of striking Washington, DC, the Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Mexico City, or any other city in the southeastern part of the United States, in Central America, or in the Caribbean area.