A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Jessica Spotswood

But even in our most formidable forms, we couldn’t compare to the vastness of the desert sky. It is a sacred thing even on the most ordinary of nights, with Mamá huddled over her colcha embroidery and the vaqueros singing Spanish love songs around the fire.

  On first sight, that sky was where fear came to rest. It was a sleeping beast we tried not to wake as we stumbled alone in the darkness, catching cactus spines in the heels of our naked feet as the coyotes screamed in the moonlight. My sister Maria Elena was screaming too, only I didn’t know her as Maria Elena then, and I didn’t know why she was screaming. I hadn’t yet seen the damage, the way her foot was turned in on itself.

  I’m not sure where we would be now had Papá not found us that night. At first glance, we must have looked like a creature with three heads huddled together under a mesquite tree, all fixated on what were once the hands of old women and were now those of young girls.

  Of course, he knew who we were. What we were. Everyone always does. There has rarely been a time when our appearance hasn’t been preceded by our reputation; our arrival comes with a change in the air, a scent on the breeze that brings both peace and desolation. But Papá had a young wife with a baby she’d just buried in his baptism gown, so when he found three monsters disguised as little girls, he took us home to his morose wife, who didn’t seem to mind that the stench of death still lingered in our hair long after she bathed us with yucca root. After all, death was something she’d seen her fair share of, and besides, we have just as much to do with life as we do with death. Or so she reminds herself when she thinks we aren’t listening.

  But that’s the thing about monsters; we’re often in places you don’t expect. Or want.

  We’ve always been depicted as old women, as if we’d sprung from the depths of hell as hideous spinster crones with hunched backs and clawed fingers crippled with arthritis. Mamá says that’s just an interpretation and we shouldn’t pay no mind to silly stories folks got in their heads; no one can dispute that my sister Rosa is the prettiest girl this side of El Paso. And Maria Elena’s leg might cause her trouble, but I dare you to look at that sweet face and tell me there isn’t beauty there. If I’m honest, though, I think I preferred our previous form to this one. At least then the mortals knew to leave us well enough alone.

  It’s late now. I can feel my eyelids getting heavy, and I know I need to start making my way back home if I don’t want one of my father’s peónes finding me tomorrow morning when they bring the cattle out to pasture. The thought of them finding me asleep in the desert like some lost lamb, with dust gathered in the folds of my serape and my dark hair unraveling from its plait, makes me cringe. I was never much one for the nighttime; that’s Rosa’s time. When the moon is full and the village asleep, my sister roams the plains with her hair flying loose in the warm desert wind. My time is day, with the cocina alive with heat and noise and the smell of bread baking in the horno lingering in the air. And Maria Elena, the youngest of us all, her time is the morning, when the sun is just a whisper in the sky. That’s what Mamá calls us: mañana, día y noche. Morning, day, and night.

  From where I sit I can barely make out the ranch in the dark. The flickering light of a solitary oil lamp burning in a window is the only indication that the house stands there at all. I glance down and examine the thread I hold protectively in my hand. Right now, it’s a deep carmine color, dyed such by Maria Elena’s careful hands. But according to those stars burning high above my head, that color is soon to fade. With that thought, I shiver in the dark, and even I’m unsure whether it’s because I’m cold or afraid.

  I start down the hill, zigzagging past the puffs of white yucca flowers that stand out against the night like floating apparitions. As I approach our adobe home, I can just make out Rosa’s pretty hair in the moonlight. At first, I think perhaps she is waiting for me, as if our roles are a torch we have to pass off, as if day has to hand the sun over to the night. Then I see James. I freeze, and my wool skirt catches in the spines of a lechuguilla plant.

  It’s been a few years since Texas won its independence, and though Papá still doesn’t trust the Americanos, with their harsh dialect and strange trading wares, James is different. James has been here all his life — even before my sisters and I were found wandering in the desert. He is as much Tejano as we are. That is, if we are Tejano at all.

  James gently tilts Rosa’s chin and leans his face toward hers, and I look up again at the stars, embarrassed by the intimacy of it. The sky makes even the desert look small; though it was the desert that could have killed our mortal forms on that first night, it was the sky, so black in its infinity, that we feared.

  I wake the next day to the sounds of Maria Elena hard at work on her loom. As usual, I have slept through most of the morning. I stretch and then rise to roll up my bed to put it away for the day. We sleep on sheepskins covered with wool blankets. They make for soft and pliable beds.

  Walking into Maria Elena’s weaving room is like pushing into a spiderweb; a catacomb of interwoven strands of yarn hangs from the ceiling and across the smooth adobe walls in brilliant shades of red, yellow, and green. In the center of it all stands the loom, stretching high over Maria Elena’s small head.

  Maria Elena insists that this lifetime is her favorite. It’s true that she says that about every place we’ve been, but Maria Elena lives for beginnings. New place. New people. New day. She’s often awake far before the crow of el gallo echoes across the rancho, setting to work on her loom before the sun has peeked up over the horizon.

  I make my way into the room and find the loom has stopped. Maria Elena’s head is bent and she has a tiny thread cupped in her hands. Hearing my footsteps, she looks up. Her expression is one of hope and sanguinity. “One of the villagers gave birth this morning,” she says, holding the thread up for my inspection.

  I gently pluck the thread from Maria Elena’s dainty grip, but I don’t have to look very closely to see that it isn’t going to last very long. The thread’s intended green hue has already faded, the color slowly being replaced by a shimmering silver with which I am all too familiar. Even if I hadn’t already read it in the stars last night, I would know. The child’s only fate is death.

  Maria Elena’s face falls when I shake my head. If we wait any longer, the mother’s thread will begin to turn as well. If nothing else, lifetimes of experience have taught me this. “Go wake up Rosa,” I say. “They won’t last until tonight.”

  Maria Elena sighs. I watch as she makes her way through the labyrinth of threads that fill the room and block the door. I have to admire her agility; she somehow manages not to catch that leg of hers on even one loose thread.

  I open my hand and peer at the thread Maria Elena just gave me. It sits curled in my palm, quiet and complacent, like a docile garter snake. Most of Maria Elena’s threads are thick like ropes and just as sturdy. But this one is feeble at best. A weak little wisp of a thread that is growing more iridescent with every passing minute. It is so fragile, its color so faint that I fear if I drop it, I’ll never be able to find it again. And neither of my sisters has the capability to help me either. Maria Elena weaves the threads. That’s her role. It is my job to decipher which ones need to be cut.

  It is Rosa who must cut them.

  The uneven thumping sound of my younger sister’s steps draws my eyes to the door. Maria Elena’s face emerges from the web of threads, quickly followed by our elder sister, Rosa, though she certainly doesn’t look much like herself. I stifle a laugh and she glares at me, shaking her foot free from a tangle of threads and rubbing her hands sloppily over her tired eyes. Rosa is typically the epitome of refinement; that she resembles such a disaster in the morning is the only reason I can bear to love her.

  Rosa stretches her arms over her head and yawns noisily. “Well, where is it, then?”

  Maria Elena points at me before shuffling to her loom and sitting down heavily. She runs her hands up and down the length of her impaired leg, kneading the sore muscles there, and I
feel a twinge of guilt at having asked her to wake Rosa.

  My older sister peers at the frail thread I hold out to her. “It’s ready, then?” she asks me. I nod and then I hear it. We all do. It starts as a low thrumming sound, as if someone has reached over and plucked the string of a harp or a mandolin. The thread has begun its death song.

  Rosa gives an irked nod, and a pair of large shears appears in her outstretched hand. She leans over and plucks the thread with the glinting edge of one of the shears’ sharp blades. I want her to examine it, as if she can check the thread’s vitalidad as well as I can, but that isn’t Rosa’s role. And it isn’t her way, either. With barely a sigh of hesitancy, Rosa instructs me to pull the tiny thread taut. She cuts it in half with a quick snip of those mighty shears. I let them go, and the two pieces flutter to the ground like wounded birds, the silver sheen fading to a dull, lifeless brown. The task now complete, Rosa turns on her heel and ducks through the labyrinth, swinging her shears in time with her steps.

  There is something that I find particularly frightening about those shears. Perhaps it is simply the rigid way she wields them. They once called her She Who Cannot Be Turned, and it was a proper moniker if there ever was one. There is no compromising with Rosa. Things are black or white with her; it is life or death. There is no in-between. Folks around here are swayed by the silk slippers on her dainty feet, the tortoiseshell comb that rises from the back of her elegant head like a crown, but they shouldn’t be. Rosa is as empathetic as a wild animal. As benevolent as a disease. If she is a queen, she is one to be feared more than beloved. And the mortals used to know this. They used to fear her. They used to fear us. But, as I’ve learned, it is quite difficult to fear three young girls, especially ones that come in such beautiful and fragile forms as my sisters.

  I glance over at Maria Elena. Now crouched on the ground, she is running her hands over the threads that carpet the floor, as if she can find the tiny thread by mere touch. “You read the stars last night, didn’t you?” she murmurs.

  I hesitate, considering my answer before I speak it aloud. My younger sister is all heart. She makes up for the sympathy that Rosa lacks. Perhaps it comes with the territory. It is, after all, by her small hands that the threads of life are spun. She needn’t burden herself with the responsibility of determining the fate of another living soul. That is my job. And she certainly doesn’t need to know the real reason I was out there, that it had very little to do with the brief life whose thread we just cut. So instead, I merely nod and allow my sensitive sister to grieve the short life as she pleases.

  I still find it strange to look at my sister and see the face of a twelve-year-old girl staring back. And yet, despite the freckles that splash across her turned-up nose and the perfect ringlets that spill down her back, I can still see every lifetime we shared circling her brown irises like the rings of an ancient tree. Maria Elena has the eyes of an old soul, eyes that are, at the moment, brimming with tears.

  I pat my sister’s head, waiting for her sorrow to pass. I can tell by the patch of sunshine moving across the floor that the morning has faded into day and it is time for Maria Elena to pass the torch to me.

  “Maybe I’ll go see if Mamá needs help preparing for the fiesta,” she says, wiping her eyes before winding her way out of the room. My heart, in all its wretched glory, stops at the mention of tonight’s celebration.

  “Or you could see about the ristras,” I call. Maria Elena’s callused fingers make her particularly gifted at stringing the chili peppers we hang to dry in the sun. Mamá says they have healing powers, but I usually can only finish a few before my fingers burn from the peppers’ caustic bite.

  I move through the room methodically, filling a willow basket with the threads that are fated to be cut tonight. They are easy to find, those flashes of silver amid a sea of color. My sister’s threads haven’t always been so brightly hued. I assume that it’s a consequence of our surroundings. Colors exist here that can’t be found anywhere else. Things aren’t just yellow in the desert; they are saffron flowers on the top of a prickly pear cactus, golden sands encircling a sole mesquite tree. And red isn’t just red; red is the carmine dye made from crushed cochineal insects and chili peppers warm from the sun. Blue is the heart-shaped blossoms on the indigo plant and black the pitch of the piñon tree and that frighteningly dark desert sky.

  I don’t think about the lives that are attached to the threads I’m collecting. It is a method I perfected lifetimes ago, but it seemed easier then, when we damned the gods to fates befitting their sins. Tucked into the band of my skirt is the thread I’ve carried since yesterday, when its strands began to shimmer. Try as I might, I can’t ignore the life that is attached to this one. I wind one end of the thread around my finger and watch as another red strand fades to silver.

  By midday, our pueblo ranch is a bustle of movement and noise. Maria Elena sits among a gaggle of old women basking in the sun in the placita. The women’s cheeks are as withered as the blistered skins of the chili peppers resting in their laps.

  “Come, sister,” Maria Elena calls joyfully, setting her ristras to the side. “You’ve finished in time to help Rosa with her dress.” My head suddenly rushes with a vision of my older sister in her bridal gown, a Spanish lace mantilla cascading down her back. It aches, the weight of it all: knowing the stars gave me no such image. It came solely from my own head.

  My sisters were more than happy to let Mamá turn them into her good little mijas.

  I watched as Rosa’s face became beautiful under Mamá’s proud gaze, as Maria Elena became strong. Even the names she gave them were telling. Maria Elena’s name means “beloved shining light,” and Rosa was named for the pink flush of her cheeks. Their tongues easily adapted to the cadence of Mamá’s language; their hands lent themselves to menial tasks like cooking and cleaning. Every morning Maria Elena fetched water from the nearby river; every evening Rosa swept the earthen floors. Under Mamá’s gentle guidance, my sisters weren’t monsters anymore. But me? My hands were clumsy, my tortillas misshapen, my torrejas either doughy or burned. My monster, it seemed, would not be so easily tamed.

  I follow Maria Elena’s tottering steps, listening to the sound of the vaqueros driving the cattle farther down along the riverbed. They say only the promise of dancing with a pretty girl can persuade one of those wild cowboys to dismount from his horse, which perhaps explains the menfolk’s unusually jovial tones. The whole ranch has been bewitched by the possibilities surrounding tonight’s celebration, and all the while, my thoughts are consumed with the thread I hold clenched in my fist.

  We escape into the cool retreat of Mamá’s bedroom only to find it filled with many of the other women with whom we share a home — women who insist we call them tía and abuela, though they share no kinship with either Mamá or Papá. I catch a glimpse of Rosa in the center of the room, but she is too busy being doted on to pay much attention to me. The women greet Maria Elena warmly, pressing sweets into her hands. There isn’t a soul in the village who doesn’t love Maria Elena. And who could blame them? My softhearted sister with her tottering gait gives them life. And though death flows through Rosa’s fingers like river water, she also brings them peace. She eases their suffering and puts an end to their pain. Besides, Rosa is so beautiful it is easy to overlook the scent of death that lingers on her skin.

  But me? I’m not beautiful and I’m not broken, and as a result, my wickedness isn’t quite as easily forgiven. After all, if Maria Elena is birth, and Rosa death, then I must be everything in between. I am turmoil and loss. I am drought and starvation. I am lost love and lost chances and lost hope. It is my hands that tie knots into their lives. And for this sin, the women choose to celebrate my sister’s boda around me, avoiding my eyes as if I am the monster their children fear at night.

  Rosa’s bridal gown lies across the wooden bed where Mamá and Papá sleep. It is one of the only real pieces of furniture we own, and that alone makes it opulent and grand.

&n
bsp; “Is the dress not beautiful?” Mamá says in that soft voice of hers. I nod, running my hands over the heavy silk brocade; even my crooked stitches marring the hem can’t diminish its beauty. There is something about Mamá’s voice that makes me ache for my younger sister’s pleasant disposition or my older sister’s striking beauty. It is a voice I know I will yearn for throughout the many lifetimes that follow this one. Mamá strokes my hair until her hand gets caught in the tangles along the back of my head. It hurts when she pulls her hand free, taking some of my unruly hair with it, but I don’t say anything. Mamá named me Valeria, which means brave. Because what else could I be?

  Later, when the church has been draped in flowers fashioned out of corn husks, and the feast is ready for tonight’s celebration, I am finally allowed a reprieve from the revelry. I am given strict instructions to change into the dress Mamá made for the occasion, but instead I escape through the front gate, my steps startling the chickens clucking nervously in the yard.

  When I see James, his hat is tipped low on his head, and all I can see is the back of his sun-kissed neck. In his hands he holds a baby rattlesnake, its tiny head clasped gently between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Spooked the vacas a bit,” James says cordially when he finally notices me. The snake is beautiful, its long muscled back patterned in dark octagonal splotches in a multitude of browns. “I should probably kill it, but that seems a bit cruel, don’t you think?” He holds it out to me, cradling it in his hands in a way that is far too reminiscent of the way Maria Elena held out that thread to me this morning. I run my finger down its head, and the snake darts out its tongue.

  I glance at James’s boots. They are covered in dust and mud from last week’s rare desert rains. “You don’t quite look the part of the groom, do you?” My attempt at gentle teasing falls short. My voice sounds flat and lifeless, as if it derives from a place of sorrow and bitterness. I take a breath, nostalgic for a time when the cold burned my lungs, and even the simple act of breathing was painful.