Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  Praise for Let the Wild Grasses Grow

  “Johnstun knows his terrain well, creating a palpable sense of the sky and soil, grasses and wildlife of the mesa—and the winds of change that swept through the nation for two tumultuous decades. A tender evocation of grief, hope, and dignity.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “In Johnstun’s Let the Wild Grasses Grow, Colorado has a successor to Kent Haruf. This is a beautiful and expansive novel about two Hispanic families, their struggle to survive the Depression and racism, and their struggle to find love and their place in the world during World War II. A propulsive read.”

  —SEAN PRENTISS, author of Finding Abbey

  “Unflinching and beautiful, Let the Wild Grasses Grow is easy to fall into and hard to shake. It is at once lyrical and cinematic, an unexpected combination that perfectly sculpts the paradoxes of growing up and falling deeply in love in a country that both despises and needs you. This sweeping story spans a lifetime of tenderness, pain, adventure, and hope. The characters are sharp and witty, tough and warm, and so well drawn that I already know I will reread this book over and over, just to fall in love with them again, to watch them grow again, to mourn their losses, and to root for their triumphs. Do not miss it!”

  —LEIGH CAMACHO ROURKS, author of Moon Trees and Other Orphans

  “A multilayered, emotional novel that weaves history and family stories, from the Dust Bowl to World War II, seen through Hispanic eyes. Though it contains vivid depictions of the hardships and despair of the times, the power of hope, love, and community shines through these pages. Della and John are well-drawn characters that, by the end of the book, will feel like friends.”

  —TERESA DOVALPAGE, author of Queen of Bones

  “An epic romance that spans from the Dust Bowl through World War II. It begins with a historical and agronomic view around Trinidad, Colorado, a southern farming town, and indeed that’s where the wild grasses grow—but by the time the book ends, you will have traveled under the sea to the Pacific Theater of World War II and slipped into top-secret decoding rooms in Washington, DC. This novel tells the story of two Americans overcoming loss and prejudice who are bound together by love, by ambition, by intelligence and desire. This is a love story for people who love the earth, the dirt, the sky, and destiny written in the stars.”

  —DANIEL A. HOYT, author of This Book Is Not for You

  “A universal survival story that follows childhood friends into adulthood as they drift apart through the Great Depression, then reunite during World War II. Steeped in heart-wrenching historical detail, Johnstun’s Colorado landscape evokes a sense of place and home so richly that you can feel that scorching sun, see those waving fields, taste that Dustbowl dirt. A timeless and diverse western Americana love story that will make you yearn for sunsets, hot chiles, tall grasses, and home.”

  —LEAH ANGSTMAN, author of Out Front the Following Sea

  “While Let the Wild Grasses Grow is an incredible and endearing story that follows the struggles of two Hispanic families through the Great Depression, WWII, and one of the worst eras of societal racial prejudice, it is also a beautifully written narrative that speaks about universal issues we are still defining and working on today—like family, race, immigration, and love. The conflicts that are overcome in this book, though in an earlier time period, give us hope that we can get through the terrible problems of today.”

  —SEAN DAVIS, author of The Wax Bullet War

  Let the Wild Grasses Grow

  Let the Wild Grasses Grow

  A NOVEL

  Kase Johnstun

  TORREY HOUSE PRESS

  Salt Lake City • Torrey

  First Torrey House Press Edition, October 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Kase Johnstun

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Torrey House Press

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  www.torreyhouse.org

  International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-51-5

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-52-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021930393

  Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

  Interior design by Rachel Buck-Cockayne

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are on homelands of Southern Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.

  To my grandma and grandpa Cordova, I miss you daily. And to my wife and son, I love you so much.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Torrey House Press

  Prologue

  1927

  “WHY DO THE COYOTES HOWL AT NIGHT?” I ASKED MY FATHER.

  “They howl for you, mija,” he said. We sat outside on a mound of wild grass and looked at the stars, listening to the cows moan and the coyotes howl.

  “Why would they howl at night for me, Papa?” I asked. I wanted to believe him, but I also wanted the truth.

  “Because they want you to sleep soundly knowing that you are protected,” he said. To me, his story was flimsy.

  “But the coyotes eat baby sheep, Papa. If the coyotes eat baby sheep, then I think they would eat a little Della for sure.” I was convinced that I tasted better than sheep. I bathed and cleaned my armpits and even washed all the other places that I knew my older brother Ernesto forgot to wash because he always smelled.

  “They would not eat a baby Della, mija, b
ecause I will always protect you,” he said, but his story had already begun to falter. His tone changed a bit. I could feel him get a little uncomfortable with my questions. He shifted on the mound and became quiet. He hoped that I would give in and move on. I would not.

  “But, Papa, you don’t howl at night, except for sometimes when you and Mommy play your game in your room when you think we are asleep. So if you don’t howl at night, and you will always protect me from the coyotes, and the coyotes do howl at night, tell me the truth, Papa, why do the coyotes howl? And, Papa, please, no me meintas.” I said. I loved games, but I loved solving them more than playing them.

  “Oh, mija, okay, coyotes howl at night because they call to bring their pack together and, sometimes, to warn other packs that this land is theirs. They are territorial. They want to protect what’s theirs. So, it’s how they talk. It’s how they protect each other. Just like us,” he said. “I should have known to not give you a simple answer.”

  My father placed his hand on the back of my neck, the soft skin between thumb and index finger cradling the ridged bones of my spine underneath my hair. The night, to me, in Colorado always felt so full but also so empty at the same time. There were so many stars, and the Milky Way looked as if God himself had taken a paintbrush and swiped white across the black, but, at the same time, the spaces between the stars felt so vast, so full of unanswered questions, so full of riddles bigger than I could solve.

  “You tell me it’s how they talk to each other. It’s like how we talk, but different. If we knew coyote, we would know when they were going to attack our calves. We could tell them, Señor Coyote, please don’t eat our calves or our baby sheep because we need them. We could know their words. We would understand their howls. We could talk them out of attacking our calves. We could win,” I said, proud to have figured it out.

  And then I tried it. I stood and looked up at the moon, I pointed my head to the sky, and I howled to the coyotes, “I know your language now. Stop eating our calves!” My howls cut into the night, and I heard my father muffle a laugh. I cut him a mean look to shut it, just like mother did whenever she wanted anyone in the house to shut their mouths fast. He covered his mouth, but I could still see a smile at the edges of his hands.

  I howled and howled until the coyotes howled back. Then I kept howling. I howled until everyone in our family, even my mom with the baby boys in her arms, followed me out into the night. The stars shone bright in the Colorado skies on the high plains outside of Trinidad, Colorado.

  Chapter One

  Della

  1929

  I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD. WE STILL HAD THINGS THEN. GOOD things. Extra things. Our fields were full as we walked through them, and I picked apples that hung low from one of the thick trees that lined up and down and up and down our land. I loved those apples.

  My mom, for some reason, loved the stinky, wild grasses that grew on our property. She loved them, wouldn’t stop talking about them. But I hated the smell they gave off, like rotting butthole.

  “Always leave the grasses to grow free around the crops. That’s how God wanted the earth to be,” she would say when my dad planted his crops in the spring. “Don’t take all of their home from them.” My mother didn’t believe in the one Christian god, always saying that having one god “seems kinda selfish, don’t ya think?” and she rarely talked about her upbringing and its spiritual roots, only saying, “when my tribe was forced North, we stayed and dug into the earth,” but she always brought up God when she talked about the grasses and the earth, like there was no way she could separate the two. “Let the wild grasses grow. They’ve always grown for some goddamned reason, so we should let them grow. You hear me, Francisco?”

  And my dad did. He always let the grasses grow, for her.

  I SAW MY FATHER’S WORRY grow in the long, thin lines of wrinkles on his face. I was so young, but my dad, the proud Francisco Chavez, began to worry at nights. He would sit alone in the corner after dinner and drink his homemade beer that he brewed out in one of the cattle barns.

  There were always so many apples for us, but no one bought them anymore. I remembered how we couldn’t grow enough of them. We used to sell them like crazy. Then that stopped.

  “It’s all going straight to hell, ‘Cisco. It’s all going straight to hell,” my mom would say at dinner. She would walk around the dinner table and curse. Her little frame, not much bigger than that of a child, not quite reaching the five-foot mark, spun around the house like a late-summer tornado in a whirlwind of “shits” and “damns” and “holy hells.” We learned to stay out of her direct path.

  “We’ll be okay, Benita. We’ll make it through,” he’d reply. His face, unlike my mother’s whose lips and forehead twisted with each emotion she felt, stayed calm beneath his dark, pockmarked skin. I could see that he worried, and I could hear what he really meant—that he hoped it would be okay. He gave her a simple answer, just like he’d always given me and wished it would stop the conversation. It never did.

  “Goddamnit, ‘Cisco. Goddamnit,” my mom would yell.

  “It will be okay, Benita,” he’d say. I wanted to believe him.

  “Shit, mom, listen to dad,” I said once, and I got a light slap across the back of the head by my brother Ernesto, Ernie for short. He did it so that my mom didn’t need to, protecting me from her quick, sharp hand.

  “Knock it off, Della,” he’d say, covering his mouth to hide his laughter.

  MANY MEN TRIED TO STEAL the harvested apples from our barn. My father and brother chased the thieves out with pitch forks and knives.

  “You thieving spics don’t deserve this ranch. Your dirty-blooded wife should go back to the reservation!” the men would yell with a pitchfork nearly straight up their ass.

  Those men were lucky my dad and Ernie chased them off because my mom was in the bedroom loading a shotgun, one that my dad took the shells out of every time it happened so that she had to find them, load them after, and run outside. He saved her from jail, or death, by hiding those shells.

  ONE DAY, MY FATHER ASKED me to pick as many apples as I could. After, he asked Ernie to take me back up to the house and come back to help him.

  “But I want to help too,” I yelled to him. I didn’t know what Ernie was going to do, but I wanted to be a part of it.

  My father reached up, held my hands in his, and said, “You did great today, Della; you have saved so many apples. You are a hero to them.”

  My belly felt warm with pride as I skipped into the house.

  The orchard had been picked bare. The rows and rows of apple trees stood empty-handed on the earth above the rocky soil. At the edge of the orchard, the Colorado grasses ran for hundreds of miles toward Kansas, and the sun dropped pink hues on the fields. It was a beautiful end to a day of work.

  My father turned away from me with that same calm but worried look and walked toward the farthest tree in the small orchid. He held a big, sharp axe in his hand. From the kitchen window, I saw him take a long swing into the tall apple tree.

  I ran down the stairs and past my mom who did her best to reach out and grab me. “Della, goddamn it, stop,” she called out. But I didn’t. I ran as fast as I could toward the middle of the orchard. My mother’s footsteps hit the dirt only a few feet back.

  I stopped in front of my father’s axe. He brought it back behind his ears and nearly swung it deep into my neck, but, instead, he balked and slammed the sharp metal blade into the ground in front of him shouting, “Mierda, Della, mierda. I could have killed you, mija.”

  He left the axe dug into the dirt and wrapped his sweaty arms around my neck where it would have hit. Instead of sharp, slicing metal, warm skin covered my cold body.

  “Papa, why do you want to kill our apple trees?” I asked him. “They are my favorite. They are the best thing we have. I love the apples, Papa,” I said. I wrapped my arms around his belly and pleaded for him to come inside. “I will make you pie with them. I will make you jam with them. I will
cut them up and put salt on them for you, just like you like them, Papa.”

  I felt his tears drop down onto my hair. They wetted the thick black hair of his arms that met my forehead. They fell on my cheek and merged with mine like two tributaries meeting at the mouth of a river.

  “No, mija, no, the apples must go,” he said.

  My mom stood on the other side of him near the edge of the house. She dropped her head into her hands for a moment, and then reached out to me to come to her. My dad swung me around with his torso and set me free toward her. I walked into her open arms. She pulled me into her side. My tears turned from warm to cold and fell from my eyes to her thin shoulder that held my cheek. Her black hair, usually pulled back into a ponytail, fell around my shoulders and face and covered me up like a blanket of soft straw. She could be so hard, but she could be so soft too. We turned together toward the house, her arms draped over my shoulders and my stomach, twisted and achy from crying.

  The sound of metal hitting wood thwapped behind us.

  From the sky, a dark stormfront moved in front of the sun. Like the axe cut into the first apple tree, the dark clouds cut into the blue sky. One half of the sky was blue, the other half black.

  From the small kitchen window, I saw the first tree drop to the ground and Ernie swing his axe into another. Only trunks remained where tall, strong trees stood the day before. The orchard turned from what looked like a full, warm beard on the face of the earth to wiry stubbles of wooden whiskers across our land—rough and uneven and dark.

  My mom held me. She prayed. She said sorry to the gods. Everything, and I mean everything, during my childhood was religious, the mix of Catholicism and Indian prayers, even though she really believed in none of it. We cried together.

  “A sacrifice so we might live. Dios mio,” she said.

  I watched my dad and older brother chop down trees for two days, and I hated them more and more every time they raised their weapons into the air and swung them downward into the trunk of a tree.

  I told myself that I was going to watch and remember everything: every swing, every slice, every cut, and every tree that fell to the ground. And I did. I watched and watched and watched. When they came in for lunch or for dinner, I scowled at them with as mean as eyes as I could. I wanted to chop them down with my anger, the two men I loved most in my life. I wanted to slice them open because I didn’t know why they did it, even though they tried to explain it to me.