by Rishi Reddi
Ram thought that Jivan had selected this time to raise the issue so that they would not have to look at each other. The shoveling, the silt, the glare of the summer sun would provide a distraction. “But I will stay, bhai-ji,” Ram said respectfully.
“Come, Ram. It will be good for you. Old friends will be there.”
Ram forced himself to be cheerful. “You go, bhai-ji,” he said. “Take everyone else.”
“You must forget this sadness. Within two years you will once again be with your wife.”
“You are right,” Ram said vaguely, not wanting to argue. He was puzzled at his own inability to rouse himself from the sadness. Had he wanted to stay in California after all, without going back? Had he wanted Padma to live here permanently, like Kishen did? “It does not matter so much that Padma could not come,” he lied. “Only two years. But I prefer to stay on the farm next week. And no one else need look after the farm and animals.”
“Ram,” Jivan said. He had stopped working and was leaning against the handle of his spade. The man did not like to be thwarted.
“Bhai-ji,” Ram said, bending to clear the silt from his shovel. He could feel the weight of Jivan’s gaze. But he knew that Jivan realized he would not be moved.
Ram drove the others to the train depot in Karak’s car. It would be Rosa’s first time at the gurdwara. Other men had married now, and would bring their wives and young children: Mexicans, Anglos, Negroes. Leela held Federico’s small hand as he climbed aboard the train. Long after the adults had settled themselves in their seats, she leaned out the window and waved at Ram, her long hair pulled back in a braid, her eyes bright with excitement about the train ride. He felt a pang of regret. She had asked him, over and over, why he would not come.
THE NEXT MORNING, Ram heard the rattling of wooden wheels, and when he stepped around to the front of Jivan’s home he saw Alejandro driving his wagon up the dirt path of the Eggenberger farm. Adela was sitting next to him with a basket on her lap. He watched her climb down, carrying the basket, and knock on the door. When there was no answer, she opened it and leaned her head inside. Ram was too far away to hear, but he saw Adela look back at Alejandro, heard her call out. He drove off without her. Adela went inside. It was not his house, Ram thought; it was not his concern.
Ram milked the cow, mucked out the animals’ stalls; he fed the chickens at noon; at dusk he left oats for the horse and mules. Still Alejandro did not come back. Adela remained in the Eggenberger house alone. He thought of her touch on his arm those many months ago. The thought of speaking to her again, after his failure in San Francisco, shamed him. But when he saw the dim lamp glowing in the window of the house, he finally walked across the field and knocked on the door.
“I saw the light,” he said, when she answered the door. He was comfortable with simple Spanish now. He could speak well enough to give orders, to describe weather or soil, to tell a short tale, to fall in love. She seemed relieved to see him. “Have you eaten?” he asked.
“Where did they go?” she asked, ignoring his question. “Rosa asked me to come to measure for new curtains. I have been waiting all day.”
“To the temple in Stockton.”
“There is a holy day?”
“Yes,” he said. He did not want to elaborate on it. Why would she need to know such things?
“They will be away three days. Have you eaten?” he asked again. After these many months he would have liked her company, in particular.
“They left no food. Alejandro said he would be back before dark. I don’t know what has delayed him.”
“Come and eat supper with me. We will see him when he arrives.”
They ate by lamplight on the porch, which offered a clear view of the Eggenberger house. Ram had made chickpeas that Kishen Kaur had grown in her small plot at the back of the house. He put out spoons and forks for Adela’s sake. He didn’t know what she would think of seeing him eat a roti by hand. He was nervous as she tasted the food. He had always been proud of his cooking; Kishen had complimented it. The men in Hambelton used to be glad when it was his week in the rotation. But what did Adela know of Hindustani food?
She could not stop eating. “I did not have dinner,” she explained, after he had finished his meal and was watching her eat more. He thought she would not be able to admit that she liked it, because of the unnamed thing between them, because of the touch that he had rejected near the barrio, because of something they both wanted.
But she surprised him. “It is delicious,” she said simply.
He felt light-headed.
“Why did you not go with them?” she asked.
He could have said, Who would have taken care of the farm? But the words did not come. He merely shook his head. Let her make of that answer what she would.
The hum of cicadas swelled, then faded. An owl hooted in the distance.
“My husband would also cook,” Adela said. This was not the response Ram expected. She had never spoken of him before. The air grew heavy.
“Why have you come here?” Ram asked. He confused himself. Did he mean to the farm that evening, or Fredonia? He had asked the question, but he did not know what he asked.
“The curtains,” she said, surprised. “Why have you?” she stammered. “You mean to the Valley?” she asked. Ram thought of Hambelton and shook his head.
They laughed, but it sounded hollow. Perhaps they were both too hurt to say. There was a boundary between them, a border they could not cross, a line in the earth.
“I came because he died,” she said.
“Who was he?” Ram asked, and realized this was the correct question. This was the answer he really wanted. Who had her husband been?
“He made shoes for the horses on the hacienda. My father was the caretaker and the trainer.”
“Your husband did not farm?” Ram asked. He had assumed something else.
“Miguel was a blacksmith, working for the patrón. Papá found him that job. But Miguel was filled with hope for a new México, where he could hold his head high, a new future for the people. Villa and Carranza were fighting on the same side then. It seemed possible.”
He did not dispute her. What did he know of war? She continued. “One afternoon Señor Villa and his army came to our village, and Miguel went to hear him speak. When he returned home, there was a strange look in his eyes. He collected his clothes and rolled them inside a blanket. I asked him, what was he doing? Did we not have our families here?” She shrugged her shoulders. “Did he not want to stay with me?
“But they had guns and horses and big dreams and so many followers. If you looked in their faces you could see they were the poor from the countryside, who did not eat enough, who worked their entire lives for nothing. President Díaz was snuffing the life out of them, one man, one woman at a time. He did not win his election fairly, he had done nothing but stolen the country from the people.”
She was angry—he could see that in her eyes—but her expression was so stoic. She was speaking to Ram, but also she was not. He wondered why she was telling him these things.
“I did not have children. My younger sisters were married and living with their husbands. When I saw Miguel tie his blanket in a bundle, I added my mortar and pestle and cooking pot and told him that I was bound to him for life. He could not leave without me. He had to accept what I said.
“The men and horses traveled by train and fought whenever Villa told them. When there was room, the women traveled in the front cars. But usually we rode on top of the boxcars with the children. We fought Díaz’s Federalists all over Sonora and Chihuahua, trying to control the railway.
“My husband marched in front with his rifle. I marched in back with the women, but he knew that I was there. I brought water when he needed. Some of us fought side by side with our husbands. At each day’s end we washed the wounds and helped bury the dead. It seems silly now, but we were fighting for our dignity, for justice, for a voice in our country. For a time when we would always have fo
od on our tables. When the rich and powerful would not cheat us.
“We fought that way for three months. Then everything changed. Miguel was shot down in the countryside. The bullet went straight to the heart. The blood spattered everywhere. The rocks, the railroad tracks. The men around him. I saw it happen. I ran to where he fell, picked up his gun, and started shooting too.
“We dug a hole for him by the side of the rails. Darkness was coming and it was not safe. Our fighters wanted to leave. But I searched for two sticks, tied them into a cross, and stuck them into the dirt, even though I knew the wind would blow them away before the morning.”
She spoke without crying. Ram was frozen in his seat. How did she tell this story without a tear, without a whimper, as if it belonged to someone else?
“In that moment, God failed me. I do not tell this to mexicanos: sometimes I cannot believe in God. For how can such a thing happen if God were to exist? I kept Miguel’s gun close to me. I fought against the Federalists, but when one of our men tried to put his hands on me, I pointed it at him too.
“‘Señora, now I will be your man’ he said. When I did not go with him, he threatened to kill me. No one would have gone against him.” Adela’s voice quivered. Finally, he saw feeling in her dark eyes. An unfiltered despair, the acceptance of the cruelty of life on earth. She looked directly at Ram, as if challenging him to ask her more. He was quiet. He did not want to know more.
“The next day we rode through another village. It had been almost four months since I had left home with Miguel. But that was at a different time; now Villa had gone mad, raiding village after village, putting innocents to death. We heard that in one town, he had rounded up the women and tied them together and set them on fire in the middle of the square. One of them had dared to question him about the death of her husband.
“I wanted to leave and return home, but I did not know how. One day as we marched onward, the soldiers riding before us set the buildings aflame. I realized where we were. It was my own place; it was the hacienda where my father used to work. I heard some of the men say that Villa was putting villagers to death, that he had taken two men who had refused to join their band and had them shot in the middle of the square. I did not wait to find out if such a story could be true. In my heart, I knew it was.
“Without telling any others I ran toward the burning hacienda and caught one of the escaping horses. I rode north to Los Algodones, where my madrina lives with her husband. She had told me to come to her if I was ever in trouble. She has always been my savior. I have always known the way to her home, even as a child: It is not far from the dunes that lay between El Norte and Baja, where the land is like one country. Abandon the train tracks before the border and walk west, past the dance hall to the grove of mesquite. There stands a tree with a double trunk, twenty meters high, the tree that everyone knows. My madrina’s home is five hundred paces north. When I arrived, the horse was stumbling, foaming at the mouth.
“I stayed for many months while she nursed me back to health, listened to my stories, held me when I cried. One day a letter arrived from Esperanza. ‘Come and stay with me, Adelita. Your own house is waiting for you here,’ she wrote.
“My madrina encouraged me. ‘Be with young people again,’ she said. ‘Perhaps find another husband. Go back among the living.’”
When Adela finished speaking, Ram did not know what to say.
“You do not believe me, Ram?” she said, after moments of silence.
“I believe you,” he said. She had told him so much. He felt it was a gift.
The sun had set now, the evening had turned chill, and Alejandro still had not returned. They realized he was not coming. “Perhaps something has happened with the wagon,” she said. “He does not like me much.” She gathered the plates before Ram could say no. She helped him scrub the dishes in Kishen’s tub. He sensed she wanted to work alongside him, that with the telling of her story, she felt unburdened.
“Buenas noches, Ram,” she said, drying her hands on her skirt. “Thank you for the food. Gracias.”
He could not meet her eye. “It is nothing.”
He didn’t watch as she walked back to the Eggenberger house. On his cot outside, in the darkness, he could not sleep. She loomed too close. He could not remove from his mind how she had told him of herself, reaching across a border, how she had become real, unpolluted, clean. What had he thought before? He could not remember. The moon was full, illuminating everything: the alkaline earth, the scrub, the growing cantaloupe, the Eggenberger house. In its glow, the distance between the two homes seemed like nothing. He remembered her crying in the shed by herself when she nursed the mare. He felt her tidal pull across the ancient ocean bed.
Now he rose from the cot and walked the distance between the houses. He did not know if he would knock, or just stand for a blessed moment and then return. When he drew close, the door opened. How long had she been watching him?
Had he ever hesitated about the touch of her foreign skin? He stepped forward and embraced her, burying his face in her hair. When he pulled away, she leaned forward and kissed him. Then he felt sure of himself.
He led her to the back room, and they lay on Karak and Rosa’s bed. The smell of the desert earth came to him: the fields that he had tilled, the lands he cultivated as his own although they were not. The scent of her skin, the smoothness of her hair, her humanness, this overwhelmed him. To be touched, after five years, as if he were somebody, this overwhelmed him too.
It was only in the morning that he wondered: Had he gone to Karak’s bed out of bitterness, as a way to be his equal?
23
THEY CONTINUED. IT WAS NOT ONLY THAT ONE WEEKEND, WHEN THEY embraced in the animal shed, aware of the horses’ soft warm breath, or on his rickety cot outside, which he feared would fall underneath them, or back again in Karak’s home. It went on and on, after the family came back from Stockton. He would see her on Sundays after he talked briefly with the men at Fredonia Park, while Karak and Jivan stayed with the others. He could sense Karak’s eyes following him as he left.
They met in the back room of the dressmaking shop where Adela worked. Mrs. Belvidere had trusted Adela and given her a key. Adela attended the early morning mass on Sundays and joined Ram afterward. Ram did not know if she felt guilty about this. Weekly, when the Anglos were at church and there were few eyes to spy him coming and going, he and Adela would spread a blanket on the floor in the little-used storage room.
She did not ask about his life before California, although he knew that Rosa would have told her of it. She did not ask him why his first hours in the Valley had been in the doctor’s shack. Although she might have known that too. He did not ask her about the man whom she had threatened at gunpoint, who had dared to approach her after her husband’s death. She never told what she did to him.
They were surrounded by scraps of cloth, reams of material, spools of thread, the extra sewing machine. Mrs. Belvidere had been a child in Georgia during the Civil War. She did not discard things. They felt protected by her collections, by the trust that the imposing woman had placed in Adela.
They lay among the unmade clothes and the striped sunlight that shone through the blinds. The fabric was witness to their communion, a life outside society. It was witness to everything. His blood would quicken at the thought of that room; it would race if he walked past the street with Karak on a weekday errand.
Did Adela think of it in the same way? He did not know. She had purchased a sheath so that a baby would not come; he imagined that was her concession to his life in India. She neatly folded the blanket when they left. She locked the door so they would not be discovered and showed him the hidden exit from the back. How was it that she was not ashamed? It was the looser morals of western women, he concluded. In America, so much freedom and power was given to them.
He had always thought himself an honorable man. He had spent years condemning Karak’s visits to the brothels, how free he was with women. The simpli
city of his condemnation had been a luxury. He had never before felt temptation. Now pieces of himself were scattered everywhere, and he could not gather himself up and make himself whole.
The first time he realized that Karak knew, they were climbing back into the car to go home from the park. A moment before Jivan joined them, Karak looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “You have a new interest, is it?” Ram looked away, he could only look away, but Karak slapped Ram’s knee affectionately, forgiving the transgression and dismissing it all at once, as if Ram’s infidelity were nothing. Ram was filled with a hot shame, a knife in his gut as he thought of Padma, but he could not help going back to the Mexican—that was how he thought of her in those moments. The Mexican. He felt shame for that too.
He sensed Jivan growing more and more distant with him, but he was not certain. Did the man know about him? Was he disgusted? He had spoken with Jivan so often about Padma, about his son. Ram began to avoid Jivan, never spending any time alone with him. One day Jivan asked Ram to drive him into town. As they passed the barrio, Jivan said, “You know that area well, don’t you?” Ram’s muscles tensed.
Ram said only “Bhai-ji,” and his heart hammered against his ribcage. Of course he did not know the barrio well; he did not go there openly, the Mexican men and Adela’s family would never tolerate it. But he knew what Jivan meant. He did not wish to lie, to him of all people.
Jivan did not meet his eye. “I wish you did not know it well. But a young man has certain needs.” Jivan sighed. “We must survive. We do not always have the luxury of keeping our values as if we lived among our people.”
Ram did not know what to make of this comment. He felt a judgment in Jivan’s words, but he felt better now that Jivan knew. Ram was, in a way, once more an honest man, as if he had stepped out of the shadows into a circle of light.
