He’d hold up his hand and pretend to grab some of the wind. Keep my money here, me, he’d say. Right here.
The furrows between the trees were all damp black stripes in the lighter sandy soil. These trees were run off the ancient canal system, streaming out of the squat cement towers that stood at the head of each row.
The dried foxtails and milkweed were thick in a few places, seeds blowing in the breeze. My father had no help to hoe out the furrows, to clean the weeds as we had done. No way would my brothers’ kids do that work, in the summer. It was different for them.
At USC, I had met Jane, who was from a cotton farm in the Central Valley—Buttonwillow. We were the only farmer’s daughters, though it took weeks for us to admit it to each other. She asked about the sickle-shaped scars on my wrists. “Orange trees have thorns,” I said. When we were in the dorm lounge, listening while the other girls complained about finals, we smiled at each other. Writing Latin terms or doing endless math problems was never going to be as hard as hand-weeding the rows between trees or tomatoes or cotton.
The earth stretched out for miles, it seemed, when we moved between like a child army, hoeing up the foxtails, bending to pull out milkweed.
When I was a senior in high school, and I got sloppy, my father made me come out in the evening and do over my rows. “You miss some,” he said, pointing down the aisle of trees to where green weeds were scattered like thin hair. “Go back and pull again.”
I had said, “This isn’t a plantation.”
“Oui,” he said, his face never changing. “I grow you.”
My boots were loud along the dirt and gravel, and rustlings skittered under the trees. Lizards and snakes were asleep. Night birds. Rats and mice.
A rush of air past my head, and I ducked. The white-faced barn owl that lived somewhere in the eucalyptus windbreak flew overhead, coasting on the wind, and his snowy startled face was above me for a moment, a ghost that used to frighten us all when we were children. Then he disappeared into the darkness.
Rats screamed when they were snatched up from dry leaves that rattled like maracas.
On the other side of the trees to the east, between my father’s land and Agua Dulce, was the asistencia, the small church not big enough to be a mission, but a wooden chapel and burying ground. Rebuilt after the 1862 flood, and only used by those of us in the groves. My father and Gustave had buried Glorette there, in a coffin nailed together by the two of them, in the presence only of our family, in a hole dug by my brothers.
It was as if she had never existed. She had never worked, never paid taxes, never put her name on a government list.
“Ain’t no need to call the cops,” my brothers had said. “We find out who done it.”
But nobody ever had.
I remembered standing there with the red rose blossoms, as we all dropped petals into the hole. Victor was stone-faced, gray as a statue, his eyes set into deep smudges. A man who couldn’t have enough of her beauty and had to take it away? Or another woman—some woman Sisia said had been competing with Glorette in the alley?
The sky was lighter over the riverbed, and the chain-link fence at the bottom of the incline, that had barbed wire rolled along the top like an endless Slinky.
On the last five acres to the east, my father had put in drip irrigation when an ancient pipe collapsed. The white PVC had been nothing but trouble, he said. Now gophers were eating their way through it, and I could see far in the distance a square of trees that looked half-dead—brown as toast, their leaves probably curled tight as cigarettes.
There was an ancient wooden picnic table out here, next to a small shed that held pipe and old smudge pots. Behind me was the eucalyptus windbreak, where I’d slept with Marcus. I didn’t know, he murmured. And then—not a baby, but a collection of blood.
I hadn’t sat out here for years. This was where I’d sat in 1983. When I came home in late October, after my first months at college in the Ivy-Covered East.
The brick buildings. My dorm room with radiators like accordion bellows. The journalism workshop where I’d met Skeet Howard. In my mind, to make fun of his arrogance, I called him the Scion of the Midwest. His dark straight hair in feathers along his ears, pale pale skin, Chicago bars and newspapers and how he didn’t want to write for a paper, he wanted to own one. Political science and journalism double major. You guys are lame—you can’t make money writing for somebody else. The party after the last day, when we all drank from little airplane bottles of vodka. Hey, what are you anyway? The girl touching my shoulder, saying, Fantine Antoine, wow, that sounds European. Does your dad work here at the college?
Yeah.
I heard they hired two brilliant scientists from Portugal and Belgium.
Yeah. I was born in the Algarve region.
Wow—I was born in Sandwich. I hate even saying it!
Later, when I left with Skeet Howard, he said, Algarve, huh? But somebody from your dorm said you were from Maui.
I lived there once.
Why would you leave paradise?
Paradise is subjective, I said.
He wanted to sleep with me, and I’d slept with him because I wanted to try it. Most people were gone for fall break, leaving those of us who stayed for the workshop. I looked at the sycamore leaves underfoot, cradling ice crystals. I had never seen as much glitter as what spread across the lawns all around us. His dorm looked like an abandoned brick castle and I went up to his room with him.
It wasn’t like with Marcus. The bed was narrow and the springs were sharp against my back. The whole place smelled like beer. Bottles lined the windowsill.
It was over in a few minutes, and he was panting. Something in my face he didn’t like, and I didn’t look away. He went toward his dresser—pale buttocks like a marble statue, like a skinny David—and lit a joint. The smoke drifted into the path of the heater and then flew upward like a spirit. Like the spirits of drowned people my father said lived along the rivers in Louisiana.
That’s not how I thought it would feel, he said. Being with a black girl.
What are you talking about?
Your nipples are brown. It’s brown under your hair. Look down.
My breasts had actually felt big and tender, swaying when I walked. My nipples were sore and darker than I’d ever seen. I folded my arms. Everything on him was red. The flush across his chest. His dick swayed thin and purplish.
I’ve been in locker rooms. White girls are pink. Everywhere. My sister is pink.
Yeah, nice that you study your sister. But I’m not your sister.
You think you can just make up stories about what you are?
You don’t know what I am. I’m going home.
No, you’re not. He stood between the beds, blocking the way to my clothes, which I’d folded neatly. Like a good girl. My jeans. The fisherman’s sweater I’d always wanted, and never been cold enough to wear at home.
Brown sugar. Shit, that’s what you are. Brown sugar.
I hit him in the chest, like a good girl, and that was wrong. I knew how to hit, from my brothers. Should have aimed for the right eye. He caught my wrist and held it tight. Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir, he sang.
What are you supposed to be? Not a rapper.
I’m supposed to be fucking you. Mocha chocolate ya-ya.
I pushed hard against his chest with my other hand. Not raping me.
It’s consensual, he said. The Scion. You came up here. You took off your clothes.
The first time, I said, and he fit the fingers of his right hand around my neck. You think the campus cops are gonna ask which time you wanted it?
He put the fingers of his left hand into my loose hair and pulled tight, so that my throat pushed even harder against his palm.
I was pinned down on the floor by his needle dick. Long and thin. It hit something inside me. A sharp pain. The dirty carpet burned my shoulder blades. Oh, yeah, yeah, brown su-gar. Just like a black girl should.
He wouldn’t shut
up. Voulez-vous of course you do stop faking.
I said the words to myself while he labored, his fingers tight around my throat. I will kill you. I will take you out.
Speak some French, he said. Now. He stuck a finger from his left hand in my mouth.
I bit down hard and he fell off of me. I stood up, but every time I moved toward my clothes, he blocked me. He smiled. Fool. I waited until he turned slightly to pick up my panties. I grabbed one of the beer bottles. Green. St. Pauli Girl.
I swung it at his temple. Where my brothers said the skin was thin. Don’t hit no fool on top of his head. Too hard. Yeah. Specially if he got a fro.
He went down like a shot pig. His legs melted.
The wetness on my thighs was already cold. How long would he stay out? No blood on his head. I pulled my shirt on, my sweater. On the dirty dorm carpet his hand was limp and turned upward.
Pink fingers. Curled like june-beetle grubs in my mother’s garden under the dead leaves.
His roommate’s poster of Bob Marley stared at me. The joint still smoldered. A rush of heat like I’d swallowed vodka, my chest opened up and I wanted to kill him. I felt my father’s rage inside me. Enrique Antoine. Holding the piece of wood. Hitting Mr. McQuine in his already-bloody temple. Finishing him.
I crouched down and felt the moisture trickle from inside me. What if he was faking and I reached for the panties and he grabbed my wrist like a horror movie?
I held the bottle with my right hand and pulled the silky cloth from under his knuckles. The panties I’d bought in the city, the first sexy thing I’d ever owned.
His mouth was open. Pink. Red. Kick him where it counts, my brothers always told me. I didn’t want to kick that damp shriveled thing. It only did what his brain told it to do. I wanted to kick his brain.
The bottle opener was on his cheap plywood dresser. A dormitory. I’d wanted to be here in the East so badly, in this room, in this sweater like the girls wore in Seventeen, with those icy leaves outside.
I touched my finger to the sharp end of the bottle opener. Open his cheek and see the yellow fat and silvery membrane—like a chicken. He’d never killed a chicken. I squatted beside him and ground my feet into the dark wet spot near his leg.
Good. All your babies are dying here in the nasty carpet beside you.
The tip of the opener on his forehead—a tiny dent that filled with blood—under here was the brain that told him who I was. What he thought he could do to me.
I was an Antoine. Fantine Xavierene Antoine.
I stood and spit on him from high above. My saliva landed on his chest. But I froze—my father had killed a man. If he knew, he would drive his truck two thousand miles and kill this boy. I began to shake, across my back, and I turned away.
I went down the stairs. His car was a Porsche, brand-new and black. He told us in workshop how his father bought it for him when he got into this place. The bottle opener left long jagged pile-ups of paint like crinkly ribbons.
A fleur-de-lis. I made a spiky flower and then threw the bottle opener in the Dumpster.
The bus station was freezing. It took me five days of riding to get home. When I got here, I walked from the downtown Rio Seco station to Sarrat. It was five in the morning, and my father was just opening the gate.
Coyotes laughed in the distance now. My father’s truck was coming up the road along the chain-link fence. The coyotes laughed again, their own eerie language I had been hearing all my life.
My father drove a 1985 Chevy truck now. The front grille was a squarer grin of metal than the old Apache’s—when I was very small, and the Apache came up the hill toward the house, I’d always make believe a huge fish was swimming toward me in the blurry dusk. Open that mouth wide and swallow us, like Jonah and the Whale.
I pictured the Porsche hood one more time. The flower. Then I waved and stood up, so my father and Gustave could be sure it was me.
My father’s left arm rode on the open window, his hand a dark starfish splayed against the white truck door, wary and stiff. Then he lifted it to wave back.
“Look like one them boys,” my father said when the truck stopped near the shed. “Thought you was Victor or that other one. One just come back.”
“Fonso,” Gustave said, getting out of the truck slowly. “That one.”
“The tank top,” I said.
“Oui,” my father said. “Don’t look like you, no.”
He reached into the cab and brought out two blue coffee mugs.
My father kissed me on the cheek and sat down at the table. My uncle Gustave did the same. I poured the coffee. The wind blew cooler now, and the cottonwood leaves turned themselves over the way they did. My father held out his mug and I took a sip—beyond black, sweet with sugar, a slide of midnight down my throat.
Gustave studied me, waiting.
They looked like brothers now because they were old men. When the Mississippi rose up in 1927 and took away their mothers, Gustave had saved my father’s life even though he was seven and my father four, and now that they were so old, their faces had the same severe formality, the same deep grooves like parentheses around their mouths.
There were no childhood pictures of them, though I knew my father had been lighter and a bit shorter, and his forehead more square. But now they had faced the same sun and wind for more than seventy years, and eaten the same food, and made the same movements all day.
I took a deep breath. Their eyes were green and blue, turquoise long buried in rock, and narrowed from all those decades of squinting into the sun and watching.
I told them everything. I started with Victor, that he had come to see me in LA, that he had won concert tickets and found the picture of his mother.
Then I told them about Grady, and Sere Dakar, about the finger and La Paloma. I didn’t tell them about “Poinciana,” or Gecko Turner. My father got up and brought his bandanna from the truck cab, wiped his forehead. Gustave didn’t move.
I told them about Dimples and the Golden Gopher, and how Victor went back for the picture and someone had shot someone else.
“Them boys,” Gustave said. His chest rose and fell under the khaki workshirt. Boys. To him, they were not yet men at all.
I told them about Marcus, and the money, and that someone was bleeding.
“They come home, we take care of bleedin,” my father said, turning away from me to look at the river. “But what we gon do with that one boy?”
“Jazen?” I said.
“He ain’t Sarrat,” my father said.
“He grew up in New Orleans and on the Westside,” I said.
“Who his grandmère?” Gustave murmured.
I said, “His mother is Juanita, but she went back to New Orleans. He kept asking Alfonso about an uncle. Someone Alfonso stayed with before when he got in trouble.”
My father shrugged slowly, and said, “They ain’t got nowhere else but here if they want money. Find out who shot who.”
Then he looked back at me. “Victor keep callin you, but he don’t talk? Like he fear of the other?”
“He calls, which they wouldn’t hear, and then he just lets me listen, and he says things that only I would know about. Like he wants me to know where they are.”
“What he think you gon do?” My father didn’t smile. He wasn’t joking.
“I don’t know.”
He looked back out to the river, and then he got up, and so did Gustave and I. We walked over to the truck. My father picked up his old rifle from the front seat.
“You get the gopher?” I asked.
Gustave nodded. He said, “That one gopher done wreck the pump. A whole acre dry up in three day. He too smart for the trap. A old man. We sit there a long time till he poke his head up.”
My father opened the metal toolbox welded inside the truck bed and laid the gun inside. The metal gopher traps were like medieval torture instruments, with their white flags which we always joked about when we were kids. I propped my boot on the old chrome bumper and s
wung myself up into the back.
The truck bed was still warm. I stretched out my legs as the shovels and hoes and pickax rattled beside me. Fresh dirt on the shovel. The gopher buried in his own hole.
When I’d told my father and Gustave about Victor, about all of it, each image was like a puff of smoke from a pipe, lingering around us. I felt like now that the words were out in the air, the boys would come home, and the men would make things right.
Water was running on one last grove to the west, pouring from the towers and sliding down the furrows, shiny and black as liquid obsidian. My rivers.
When I was small, and cried that my father took Lafayette and Reynaldo to the river to hunt, to catch crawfish in the muddy tributaries, my brothers brought me to the grove closest to the house and said, “Look here, Fantine, you got your own river now.”
They had dammed up one of the furrows with rocks and pebbles and a bit of cement, made a stream and poured small stones and even some aquarium gravel to line the bottom, and they must have dumped crayfish and minnows they’d caught at the river into the stream. It lasted only a little while before the water evaporated, but I sat beside it for those few days and nobody could get me to move. I must have been about six. I lay on a blanket, read, and watched the fish dart along the bottom. I heard my brothers laughing in the trees, but I knew that was how much they loved me.
When we pulled up at the barn, my brothers were gone. I got out of the truck bed and said, “I’ll see you up at the house.”
The big pot outside had been put away, and the porch was quiet. When I got inside, only Cerise and Clarette were in the kitchen.
“Your maman sleep,” Cerise said. “All the boys are in the back room, and Danae’s sleepin in your room. Lafayette and Reynaldo musta gone for more beer.” She was holding a glass of Coke, and I could smell the rum in it.
The gumbo steamed up into my face. Pepper and heat. People who didn’t live in places like this couldn’t understand how good it felt to eat spicy hot food. We ate in silence, and the heat blossomed inside my chest, radiated along my ribs.
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