I WAS MAD. I WAS “damn mad” like my mom use to say before she flew through the house and gathered me up when I said or did something stupid. Like trying to feed a chicken to a cow because, hell, I liked beef—just like my dad did—a lot more than I liked chicken, so I might as well have given the cow and me what we wanted. The cow could get a chicken. I could get more beef, so I swooped up a dead chicken that we had killed for our dinner and threw it into the field where one of our dogs seized it and ran off for his lunch.
“No cow wants to eat chicken, Della. Now you’ve lost the chicken. Now we have no more meat from that chicken, and I’m damn mad about it! Holy shit, girl, feeding a chicken to a cow?”
* * *
“YOU ARE A TREE MURDERER, Papa,” I said that evening before he pulled me outside toward the stumps of our orchard.
“Just let the grasses grow. Promise me that,” my mother said.
My father nodded at both of us, accepting that was all he could do.
“You are a tree murderer,” I said.
With that, I saw that rare anger that comes from the belly of a kind man. He grabbed me by the elbow, and we walked across the stumps of apple trees. They seemed to cry to me. I did not want to look at them. Not at all. I only wanted to kick and hit and bite my father. When we got to the end of the orchard, in a corner of the ranch that could not be seen from my furious perch in the kitchen, one apple tree stood alone.
“This is for you, my smart, mija,” he said. “You are too smart for this world. Someday, you must leave this place.”
He sat down onto the base of the tree where the brown earth reached up to meet the trunk. The round surface roots pushed the ground up, and the thick bark climbed up the tree behind his body. His body relaxed into the tree, his back finally rested after two days of swinging an ax, and he exhaled.
I fell down next to him.
He wrapped his arms around me.
“Mañana, we will burn this all to plant wheat,” he said. “But we will protect your tree. And we will let the wild grasses grow around the farm. Then we will go into town and sell everything we have.”
The night sky moved slowly over us, the storm avoiding our home. The stars followed its edge like dolphins riding the crest of a wave. The sky was full and empty all at the same time, just like my heart. The Great Depression had finally hit rural Colorado, and it hit us hard, my father’s wrinkles growing and growing like weeds in the corn fields that year.
Chapter Two
John
1929
AT NIGHT, I SAT UP AND LISTENED TO MY MOTHER COOK. IT PUT me to sleep and made me feel comfortable and happy in my bed next to my brothers and sisters.
The slice of her thick, sharp knife skinned potatoes, and the smell of diced tomatoes cut the air. A slim light fell through the jaggedly thin crack between our bedroom door and the broken door jam, or, more correct, between the bedroom door and the splintered edge of the wall that shut all four of us in. Manuel was the oldest. He was older than Maria by two years, older than me by almost three years, and older than Paulo by seven years. He was my best friend. He always seemed like a man to me, long before he was one.
My mom separated the pinto beans from the pebbles that found their way into the large canvas sack that my dad, Tomas, bought from Henrique the bean seller down the road. The four of us fell asleep every night to the sound of a butter knife tapping the top of the table and sliding across the fake wood. Clap, slide, clap, slide, slide. Our loud breath in each other’s ears. I loved them all.
My parents put us all to bed early on Friday nights, so they could talk and drink cold beer and laugh. When I would wake up, their talking sounded like waves, crashing and rolling up and down on the ocean’s back. And the smell of food, of tamales steaming, of beans cooking, of chicharrones sizzling in a pan, and of cheeses baking in the oven, made me want to stay forever in the moment when my dad laughed and my mom cooked. When they said things like, “Those boys are going to drive me to the insane house,” or, “That girl has the courage and sassy mouth of her mama, but because she’s darker than you she won’t have it so easy.”
My mom was beautiful, a very light-skinned woman from Northeastern Mexico, where most of the indigenous population got routed out and killed leaving only a few of the old-country people there to carry on the dark skin. When she came to Colorado in the early 1900s, people didn’t even think she was Mexican. Her skin was fair. She had blue eyes. She was treated good, and she got away with being white when she wanted to. Hell, her mom and dad made it to the US with no problem, just walking across the border, though the border was a different thing back then. Americans wanted Mexicans to build the railroads and dams, practically inviting them in with open arms, until it all got built, making them illegal after.
The eastern slopes of Colorado were no picnic though.
My dad was darker, not super dark like the Mayans or any of those flat-faced people that he used to talk about, but dark like Montezuma. And he was strong. So strong. He used to put his arm out for us to hang on, all four of us dangling from his biceps that were built in the mines.
I would wake up and peek through the crack between the door and the wall. My mom, with her apron roped around her, would adjust the knobs on the oven to bring the temperatures down, to keep the food warm and to keep the beans cooking through the night. As soon as those knobs were in the right place, my dad would slap my mom on the butt, pick her up with one arm, and carry her to their bedroom. I don’t think they planned on having all of us kids, one right after the other.
We were real serious Catholics though. Babies came when the Lord wanted them to come. That’s what my dad always said.
MY MOM, EVERY NIGHT AT 10:50 p.m., would pack up her purse, dropping her old Spanish Bible from her grandmother into it, throw on a shawl even during the hottest summer months when Trinidad baked in the night, and walk two blocks to Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church. The church had been around since the century turned, so in the late 1920s when I was a boy, it had already begun to wear down. The wooden siding had darkened from bright white to dark yellow and gray. The desert winds, filled with sharp fingers of sand, stripped a lot of the paint off, and exposed the old wood that sucked in the rains and began to soften. The spire had begun to tilt.
My mom said that it tilted toward Bethlehem to honor the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. My dad, when it came to any other matter would tease my mom about her answers, but he wouldn’t dare tease her about her faith because he would get a slap from her, and he feared “getting a slap from the baby Jesus” too.
Mom left at night and performed adoration. Someone always had to keep watch on the eucharist, sitting in church and praying, so my mom did what she felt was her duty. She relieved Father Ronald every night at 11 p.m. so he could go and drink some whiskey before going to bed.
“It’s my duty to help Father Ronald. He deserves a drink with all the sinners out there. You two, especially,” she said. She pointed at me and Maria. “You two are troublemakers.” She laughed and then pointed directly at Maria, “Stop being a troublemaker. You can’t get away with it.”
She would take me with her sometimes. I didn’t mind. I’d fall asleep on the pews, thankful for a fair and righteous God who protected us.
She’d push open the large wooden doors, all the weight of her little frame leaning into it, hang her coat on the rack next to the Holy Water, dip her middle finger in the clear liquid, perform the sign of the cross so largely that God could see her do it from heaven, walk up to the front row of the church, and kneel down—the Eucharist in perpetual adoration in a humble amber that hung on the wall behind the altar.
In a few minutes I’d be asleep.
“Get up, John. Time to go home, mijo,” she’d say later. In her face, you could see the love of Jesus and her gratitude for my father’s mining job and the food on our table and for her kids.
Most of the time, she had to wake up Father Ronald before we left, but this didn’t bother her, “He’
s tired from tending his flock. He’s praying in his dreams.”
“He’s borracho,” my father once said. And he got a slap across his head.
“If he’s drunk, it’s because of children like yours and men like you, always judging people and talking during Mass,” she said.
She went there every evening, even on Christmas and Easter. She’d throw on her shawl and walk to the church. Even when my dad finally got a car and offered to drive her in the snowy months, she said no. To her, adoration began the second she left our home. If the car engine, rumbling outside the church doors, woke Father Ronald then she would not be completing her adoration in the way the baby Jesus wanted her to do so. She loved her Lord. She adored him.
My father, however, worshipped in a different way, mainly because he feared his Lord.
“I did enough to go to hell before I turned thirteen years old,” my father would say. “I need to spend the rest of my life making up for it.” At Mass, when my father sang, he sang louder than any other person, belting out the lyrics of “Silent Night” and especially “Storm of Terror, Grief and Error,” thinking that the Lord was speaking directly to him. If one of us broke our gaze during the ceremony of transubstantiation, my dad would flip his ring around on his hand and give us a whack on the skull. If we cried because of it, he would whack us again. He feared hell. And he didn’t want to wear the sins of his children on his shoulders along with his own.
“Callete la boca,” he’d say.
“I wasn’t talking,” I’d say.
“You’re talking now, aren’t you, niño, so cierralo,” he’d say.
But once Mass ended on Sunday morning, my father seemed to open up his wings and fly, really relaxing for the first time all week, except for those late nights when he sat and sipped on Coors and talked to my mom in the kitchen while she prepped meal after meal.
When Mass was over, he’d throw as many of us children on his back as he could and swing us around and tickle us and play hard until he fell asleep on the couch, his head resting on the yarn-covered pillow, in the late afternoon. After he woke up, his quiet and sad demeanor woke up with him. The stress of heading back into the gold mines where he would spend the next four days in a mining camp filled his blood. He and a hundred other men from Trinidad would wake up around 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning, meet up at the train station, jump in the back of a freight box or flat car and ride the twenty-two miles to the mine. They would begin work at 5:00 a.m., work sixteen-hour days and clock out on Thursday evenings to ride the train car home. It took my dad all of Friday to gain his strength to sit in the chair on Friday night and tease my mom with a cold Coors in his hand. It took him until Sunday afternoon to gather the fortitude to play with us kids, though he always gave us plenty of love through large hugs and tosses of hair when we walked by the kitchen table.
MY FATHER HAD A GARDEN in Trinidad. He grew corn and chile peppers. The desert corn grew in the spring, and we harvested it in the early summer. It was black and red and green because it didn’t have all the water in it. Colorado didn’t have the water. It was the high plains. My mom would fry the corn in olive oil until it became crispy and crunchy. She mixed it with everything to add more weight to our meals. We were poor, so corn and frijoles came with every meal. They filled us up. Helped us grow.
But it was always about the chiles for my dad. He loved them as much as he loved his family, and he loved us all a lot.
My dad grew them in the summer. His chiles grew really good in the dry air, but they didn’t like the sun. It’s true. They’d dry up in the direct rays.
“They’ll shrivel up like old ladies’ boobies,” he’d say to us, and then do the sign of the cross to ask for forgiveness.
Once the peppers began to sprout from the plant, my dad yelled to us kids, “Get out here now! It’s time to cover them up, mijos!”
I loved hearing that. We ran as fast as we could to him.
He lay a ten-by-ten-foot blue tarp that he stole from the mines on the ground outside our house before breakfast, usually the first Sunday that it really felt like summer. That week, if the temperature hit the mid-nineties before Sunday, I knew my dad laid in his bed in the mine dormitory and thought about his chile peppers and wished that he were home to save them. I could see his smile.
“John, get out here, mijo, get out here!”
We all spread the canvas out on the ground. He stuck four thick, large pieces of dead wood into the ground at the four corners of the chile garden.
“Let’s work,” he said. His smile made all of us smile.
My mom hugged his shoulders. She knew. I knew. We all knew that he spent his life in the dark mine dreaming about the days he could live and work in the sun with his family.
He nodded to us all.
“Raise it up, raise it up,” he said.
We all grabbed an edge of the canvas, raised up on our tippy toes to not rub the tops of the pepper plants with the blue, scratchy covering, and tied the corner of the canvas to the dead wood. The canvas covered the plants and kept them from drying up in the hot sun. The anchos and mirasol (that eventually became the guajillos), the super-hot güeros all lived in the shade until he would yell to himself in the early summer, “Let’s harvest the beautiful boobies,” giving the sign of the cross.
Little Paulo, my younger brother, held his end of the canvas so tight that we lifted him off the ground when we pulled it up into the air. When his grip gave out, he fell to the ground and landed on his head.
At the end of the spring, when it started to get really hot, we harvested the chiles. My father took a basket to the garden on Sunday afternoon, right after leaving church. He wore cut-off canvas shorts, ragtag from the mines. He never let us help him, at first. We wanted to. We felt like we deserved to. We spent the spring watering the chiles and rewrapping the canvas around the wooden posts after a windstorm. We felt entitled to help pick the harvest, but my father ushered us inside the house and walked out toward the chile garden, his rough, mine-wrinkled hands wrapped around the thick handle made of bent sticks.
He spent the whole afternoon in the garden picking the chiles. If he was in a hurry, he could have picked them all in ten minutes or less, but he wasn’t.
He began with the guajillos and ran his fingers along the bright red skin. Before he picked them, he would touch their shiny green stems and whisper a prayer to Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners and vegetables.
“My dear guajillos,” he said. “My dear guajillos.”
With a slight twist of his wrist, he tore the stem from the plant and moved on to the next chile. When he finished the guajillos, he moved on to the florescent, yellow güero chiles. He said a prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico.
When he got to the anchos, he held the biggest of the three peppers in his hands, the purple and reds matching his mine-stained eyes, and prayed to Saint Joseph, the patron saint of fathers. His hands held the dark green stems like they held a baby, swaddling them with his fingers and palms.
With his basket full, he walked back toward the house and bathed the peppers in hot water in a giant porcelain bowl for ten minutes.
“Oh, my peppers,” he said. “The mine is so grey, but you are so beautiful.”
“What are you all standing around for? Help me with these,” he said, smiling.
We pulled the anchos, the guajillos and the güeros from the water. Each of us, except for Paulo because he might hurt himself, held a very long string, probably six feet long, with a needle tied to the end of it. My father placed all the peppers on a giant towel, wrapped them up, and did his best to drain all the water he could from their bright bodies. He divided them up among us all.
We drove our needles through the stem of the first pepper and then stuck it in fully through the next one until our strings held a long row.
He waited for me to finish up my line of chilies and hung them perpendicularly across our laundry line. When they all were attached, we clasped hands—this
time with Manuel and mom included—and we said the prayer for the blessing of the harvest in complete unison.
“Almighty Lord God, You keep on giving abundance to men in the dew of heaven, and food out of the richness of the soil. We give thanks to Your most gracious majesty for the fruits of the field which we have gathered. We beg of You, in Your mercy, to bless our harvest, which we have received from Your generosity. Preserve it, and keep it from all harm. Grant, too, that all those whose desires You have filled with these good things may be happy in Your protection. May they praise Your mercies forever, and make use of the good things that do not last in such a way that they may not lose those goods that are everlasting, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
“My beautiful hanging boobies,” he said. Then the sign of the cross. “You give us life.”
We all went back inside the house. Then he fell asleep on the edge of his bed and rested for the long week ahead in the gold mines.
It was the best week of the year for him, for us, but the world, outside of home, ached for help. Della and her family, I knew that the Depression had begun to squeeze them hard. That’s why I always walked her to the truck that took her home. You know, I wanted to make sure she was okay and smiled. She liked the stories about my chilies, so I think that helped some too.
Chapter Three
Della
1930
I USED TO BOSS THIS BOY AROUND AT SCHOOL. HE WAS QUIET like Ernie and my dad, so I liked him immediately. And he liked me, so I figured that if he was going to follow me around all over the place that I should get some use of him.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 2
