“John, go get me some water from the fountain, please and thank you,” I said. I always said please and thank you. I was no damned jerk. He would grab my little canteen, run to the fountain, and pump some water out for me.
I wasn’t really thirsty, but like I said, if he was going to follow me around, I might as well take full advantage of it. His older brother Manuel was in Ernie’s class. They were friends too, so I figured I should be friends with John.
Sometimes, after he got me some water or carried my books to the edge of the town where a bunch of us were picked up and taken back to the ranches, I would even let him talk about his damn chile patch.
“I got a big chile patch,” he said. “I start growing chilies in the early spring and when I harvest them in early summer, I ask my family to help me out to make sure we pluck them really fast. They love to help me out, but I do most of the work, Della. I work really hard at it. I’m kind of master of my chilies.”
He rarely talked about anything else, so I just started talking to stop him from talking about his chilies.
“I lost all my apple trees except for one,” I said. “My dad cut them down.”
John stared quiet for what seemed like forever. “I’m sorry about your apple trees.”
His silence made me so angry for some reason. I don’t know why, so I slugged him hard on the arm and pushed him off the stump in the road.
“It’s not like I cried about it or anything,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
Our ride pulled up alongside us.
I jumped in the back with Ernie and the rest of the kids.
John walked away toward Trinidad where the mining kids would jump on the back of another truck that took them to their houses just outside of town.
He probably missed the truck that day to walk with me, to carry my books, and to sit and tell me about his damn chile patch again.
I think he missed his ride every day, but he never admitted it.
ONE DAY, AFTER SCHOOL, I told John to go get me some water.
“I’m thirsty, John,” I said. “Can you run and get me some water?”
John looked at me and said, “No. I am too tired today. We worked all day yesterday in the garden, and I think you could go get me some water for once, Della. My whole family helped me with my chilies. They’re really nice like that. My dad even put his Coors away to help me with the chilies.”
“John, I think I told you to go get me some goddamned water,” I said, doing my best to channel whatever it was that mother used to get us to do things. But John didn’t goddamned like it. I’d seen his family at church and stuff, and I saw his brothers and sisters at school. They were quiet and kind, and I don’t think John had ever heard the word goddamned before in his entire goddamned life because the look he gave me was one of terror, like Lucifer himself was going to reach up from the under the earth, grab me by my long, black ponytail, and drag me right into hell. John’s eyes widened so big that I knew I had to say, “Sorry, John. Would you like me to get us both some water?”
“No thank you,” John said. “I really don’t mind.” He walked toward the well at school and pulled up the bucket. He dripped the water into his little metal canteen and brought some over to me. Instead of walking directly back to the truck that took us home, John and I sat there and talked for two more hours.
“Can you tell me more about your chilies? You told me about how you planted them. How do you harvest them?” I asked him. Hell, I knew all of this. I was a ranchera. I knew how to harvest everything under God’s sun, but the smile that came on his face grew so wide that I too became enthralled in his story about his damn chilies, like I was there with his whole family harvesting them myself.
We were so young, eight or nine years old, but I knew what it meant to touch someone. When he began to talk, I placed my hand on his, and I never bossed him around again. All he had to do—though I didn’t know this before it happened—was tell me “no” and kindly forgive me.
Chapter Four
John
1930
ON THE FRIDAY AFTER WE STRUNG THE CHILIES UP IN THE SUN, my father walked through the door, his face covered in dust and exhaustion, just like every week.
“Coors,” he said. “Hand me a Coors.”
My mother placed a cold beer on the table for him. He showered and threw on his cut-off shorts and an old shirt that he got during their honeymoon in Mexico City. With a wave of his arms, all of his kids sitting patiently on the couch in anticipation, he ushered us outside.
Just like he had prayed to Saint Fiacre, to the Lady of Guadalupe, to Saint Joseph, we all, together, prayed:
Bendícenos Señor, bendice estos alimentos que por tu bondad vamos a recibir, bendice las manos que los prepararon dale pan al que tiene hambre y hambre de ti al que tiene pan. Amén.
Always in Spanish. Always together.
“Let’s pull them,” he said. His voice rose up like a preacher talking to his congregation. “Pull them!”
Then, slowly, like we’d been taught, we reached for the edge of the strings, pulled them off the laundry lines, two of us for each string of peppers, and dropped them gracefully into woven baskets. Mama and Papa slid their hands along the strings until all the peppers fell freely on top of each other.
Mama brought a big mortar and pestle made of lava rock out onto the dirt beneath the laundry rope and placed it next to the chile baskets on the ground. We all sat on handwoven blankets, except for baby Paulo who ran around us like a bee circling a hive trying to get in. He eventually found a spot next to Manuel and plopped down on the hard dirt to watch the family work.
My father handed one guajillo and one güero to me and one to my mom.
“Flora,” he said.
She took a little knife from the pocket of her apron and slit open the chilies. She placed the knife back into her apron, rubbed her thumb and index finger together and pinched the guajillo pepper between them. Using her long thin fingernail, she dug the seeds out of the pepper by pulling her finger backward toward the palm of her hand. She repeated the same movement with the güero, and then she handed the peppers to Manuel who dropped them in the mashing bowl and ground them up. My father handed two more peppers to my mother to deseed them. She ran her nail through them and then handed that set to Maria who pulled a thin knife from her pocket and sliced the peppers into not-too-thin sections.
They did this until they made it all the way through the güeros and guajillos and we had storage bottles full of ground and not-too-thinly sliced peppers to spice and flavor our food for the next year.
When my father pulled the anchos from the basket and handed them to my mother, I knew it was time for me and Manuel to put in some elbow grease.
“Boys, get to work,” he said.
“Boys,” my mom repeated.
The anchos shone bright black and purple in the sun. They had dried up just like the other two peppers, but they would soon find reprieve from their wrinkled skin. My mother took Maria into her kitchen along with the mortar and pestle. She placed two step stools next to the counter that lined the gas burner on our oven made of rusting aluminum and chipped porcelain. It sat on four thin legs under our kitchen window, the only ventilation for cooking that we had.
“My sweet Maria,” she said. “Lista?”
She placed the anchos in a pot, drawing their dried black skin in the water, and they began to swell to life again, like God had breathed air into the shrunken and blackened lungs of a coal miner.
“Live, anchos, live,” my mom said, signing the cross as she spoke.
She brought the water to a boil. The peppers floated to the top of the water and rode the bubbles from one end of the pot to the other. After twenty minutes, Maria and I were ready to do some real work. She pulled the bright purple anchos from the pot and dropped two into the mortar along with a couple spoonfuls of the water.
Maria grabbed the pestle and pressed hard down into the mortar, grinding the peppers as hard as she could against the roc
ky skin of the bowl. Her muscles tightened. She twisted and pushed the pestle until her arms weakened and handed it over to me. I pushed hard too, tiring quickly but not stopping until the peppers had turned to a thick, viscous paste in the mortar.
“Bueno, John, bueno,” she said.
Following suit, I did the sign of the cross. Life felt perfect.
My mom spooned out the paste into the stock that had simmered in the pot and added garlic and salt and sugar. Maria and I continued to make thick chile paste. When all the peppers were pasted and added back into the pot of stock and spices, my mother heated the water again and stirred the mixture until it made a thin, rich red sauce.
That night, we would have a big meal with ancho sauce at the center of it all. We would stew chicken and pork in the sauce with bitter chocolate to make what I thought to be the best mole this side of the Mexico and US border.
“Oh, God, this is good,” I said.
“Slap your brother for me, Maria,” my mom said, half a smile on her face.
Maria slapped the back of my head as hard as she could.
“Don’t say the Lord’s name in vain, John,” my dad said.
“But holy God, this is good,” my dad said.
Paulo reached up and tapped the back of my father’s head.
“The mine is so dark, and you all are so beautiful,” my dad said. “I never want to leave you again.”
Chapter Five
Della
1930
MY MOM SAID SHE STARTED WEARING A PISTOL IN A HARNESS strapped across her chest because of what she called, “Della’s big mouth.” I disagree with her on that. She started carrying that pistol because of the Ku Klux Klan, not me.
After we cut down our apple trees, Ernie and I drove the tractor the whole way from the ranch to Trinidad, sitting close together on the raised seat. The wind blew so cold that our faces turned bright red and caked up with drying tears.
The rest of my family crammed into the front cab of our old Chevy truck. I watched the changing leaves across the valley. The reds and oranges and yellows fell against the browning of the shallow mountains that led to the spiky peaks on the horizon. The snows had already hit the tops of the mountains and covered their rocky tips like icing on bulky cakes. I loved the fall. It spoke to me more than any other season, maybe because it’s the season that I always wished would stay around the longest but always seemed to be the shortest, sometimes summer holding onto the days too long and winter deciding to come too early. Fall made me relish the days, made me ache for them to stay.
Trinidad sat in the valley of Fishers Peak, a dominating mesa that shot out of the ground, covered in scrub oak and hard dirt, a natural landmark that marked the path of the famous Santa Fe Trail that ran from Independence, Missouri, through Trinidad, a bustling railroad and mining hub of nearly fifteen thousand people. Gentle, grass and scrub covered slopes rose gently out of the town’s city center that housed the stone covered Las Animas County building, the county library, and liquor stores whose signs saying “Liquor” had been covered up with bright red Xs over the letters. An old train line that had been converted into a small trolly ran down main street. The main train station, built up in its small-town grandiosity sat just outside of town. The county courthouse, at the center of town, rose up out of the flat ground just like Fishers Peak, but instead of rock shooting straight up, pillars of stone that rivaled the Romans’ created a grand entrance. Our little truck and tractor rolled into town like a snail entering a small mound of boulders.
A large white sign that read “Confederate Reunion Rodeo and Parade, 1930” hung from the Opera House on one side of the street to the Trinidad Hotel on the other side of the street. It flapped in the slight breeze, and crowds could be heard cheering from only hundreds of feet away.
My dad got out of the truck, helped us down from the tractor and hugged us, and led us to the cab of the truck and left the thing running so the heat from the engine would warm our skin.
“God bless Larry,” my mom said. She looked up at the sky as if in prayer, but, instead, she pointed at the sign that hung across the road. “But let’s get the goddamned hell out of here as soon as we can. Crazy is in the air. A whole lot of crazy. And this type of crazy doesn’t like us.”
LARRY WAS THE REASON WE had the car in the first place. He owned a hardware store in Denver for a couple decades and had a nice life until his wife died during childbirth, leaving him completely alone in the city. He bought a piece of land, a nice farm truck. He bought some cattle. He bought a tractor. And he planted his first season of corn and wheat. He was a true gabacho. But my family loved him.
When Larry got lonely, he drove his fancy truck over to our house and scared the sheep and mules halfway to hell when he did. It didn’t much bother the cows and the bulls, but it sure scared the hell out of the mules. They would honk and moan as soon as his truck came over the hill on the stage tracks. We knew he was coming long before he pulled up next to our old fence. He joined us for dinner two or three times a week when the harvest was good, before we had to burn down the apple trees.
Sometimes he drank too much of my father’s homemade beer and whiskey and cried because of his wife. My father would lean over the table and place his hand on his arm to comfort him. Larry would place his own hand on my dad’s, prop his forehead on both their hands, and sob.
“There’s no room for this crying from grown men,” my mom yelled.
“I’m sorry,” Larry said.
“Stop goddamned crying,” my mom said.
She stood up from the table, grabbed a wooden spoon and smacked Larry across the top of the head and then smacked my dad, leaving bright red marks on the skin of their balding heads.
“My boys don’t need to see you cry like this. Stop crying now,” she said, and as if he were one of us throwing a fit, she mimicked Larry’s whine, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about, and you, Francisco, if you don’t stop holding his hand, your friend can’t come over for supper anymore.”
“Goodbye, all,” Larry said. He felt embarrassed. “Thank you for dinner. It was lovely. I’m sorry for my drunkenness.”
“It’s not that you’re borracho,” my mom said. “It’s your damn baby tears. I’m sorry you lost your family. I truly am, but if my father were here and saw you crying in front of his grandchildren, he would beat your ass. You know that, right? And you, Francisco,” she turned to my dad, “You should beat yourself for holding this man’s hand all night long. What? What? Do you want your boys to grow up to be jotos? Pull yourself together, Francisco.”
“I think it’s okay if they cry,” I said to my mom. “I think it’s okay if they hold hands, too.”
My mother picked up her wooden spoon, pulled me up from my seat at the table, and whacked me across the ass with the damn thing.
“No, no, Della, it’s not okay. You don’t have to run this farm when you grow up. You don’t have to work like your brothers do. They can’t see this. They can’t live in a house where men cry and hold hands. They have to have families of their own someday, and they have to teach their boys to be tougher to survive in this country, this country where every white man, except for crybaby Larry here, wants to shoot us. They wear their hoods. They burn their crosses. The goddamned governor of Colorado is a grandmaster. A goddamned grandmaster, Della. He hates you because you’re Indian. He hates you because you’re dark. He hates your father because he owns land. He hates us all because we’re Cattolica. He wants to kill us. Him and every other man like him. You see, Della,” she whacked me again, this time across the back of legs, “you see. Your brothers can’t watch this cry baby and think that all white men are like him. The governor is a goddamned elected Klansman.”
“Don’t be a nina, Larry, okay,” I told him.
The next morning, in the middle of winter, Larry drove back to Denver where he would shoot himself in the head with a .22 rifle and survive, only to be shipped off to some mental hospital to live the re
st of his days eating pudding and shitting in a diaper. At least that’s how my mom described it. My father said it more gently, “Our friend will have to have others care for his needs from now on.”
“Thank God he left his goddamned truck as a gift,” my mom said. Then she caught the cruelty in what she said. To her, she didn’t mean to be uncaring. She only cared so much about the family in front of her that she sometimes failed to care about anything else. “God bless his soul. I know that if I lost you all, I’d probably shoot myself in the head too, and I got the gun to do it.”
* * *
IN TOWN THAT DAY, MY mom’s eyes moved from us to the parade coming down the road. She quickly changed from the reverent, “God bless Larry,” to, “Goddamnit! Holy shit, goddamnit. This is why Larry was a bad damned influence.”
“Kids, let’s go. Get in the truck,” my dad said. “Get in the truck now.”
A parade approached us from the end of main street in Trinidad. Boy Scouts rode on horses and waved Confederate flags in the air. Their uniforms were perfectly pressed, and they smiled like they had no bigger smiles to give. Their scout leaders rode next to them in Confederate uniforms, the Denver Hotel and the American Diner shading their eyes from the sun that had begun to drop in the west.
Men in white capes and white pointy hoods walked toward us. Children ran alongside them, and horses pulled other men in a cart behind them—men with patches on their chest and their eyes poking out from the large holes cut into their silly, pointy hoods that, to me, looked like bad clown costumes that weren’t quite finished or ready for the party.
“Let’s go,” my mom said. Before we could gather all of our things and place them into the back of our Chevy, the KKK was upon us.
“Keep your mouth shut, Della,” my mom said.
“Me? Why me? What’s wrong with my mouth? Everyone else has mouths. Why do I have to keep my mouth shut?” I asked.
“Callete la boca, Della, quiet,” my dad said. He placed his hand on my shoulder and scooped up one of my little brothers. Ernie scooped up the other.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 3
