“Holy hell, absolutely not, Flora,” Señora Chavez said. “Absolutely not.”
“Can I?” I asked.
“Sure, John, sure,” she said. “You can help Della cook and keep her mouth shut.”
Señora Chavez walked to the counter in the kitchen and began to slice the apples. Della and I stood with wooden spoons over two hot cast iron pans.
Della played with the food more than I have ever seen anyone play with food before. She sectioned off squares of corn, about ten in all. She made them all exactly the same size in less than a few seconds.
“See, they make a pattern,” she said. “If you section it all off in sixteenths, you get a lot more crispy edges. It’s like a game to me. I hate cooking, so I try to figure out exactly where the hottest section of the pan is and make sure every piece of stupid corn touches it. It’s the only way I can handle cooking while ERNIE sits on his butt over there.”
I smiled. “Do you have more salt?” I asked.
Della pointed to a sack above the oven on a shelf.
“Butter?”
“We have lard?”
“Okay.”
“Why would you need extra?”
“Because it tastes better.”
“Chilies?”
“No, John, we don’t have any goddamned chilies,” Della said.
The whole room went silent for a long second. Señora Chavez somehow reached back from cutting all the apples with what seemed like a third hand and smacked Della across the back of the head, and everyone laughed while my mom did the sign of the cross and held on to her crucifix, letting go of the slightest smile.
I dropped some more salt and lard into the corn, stirred it, and then let Della section it off to make sure every piece of corn touched the hottest spot and tasted exactly the same. It’s like she had figured out a formula that I had never thought of.
Within twenty minutes, we all sat down at the dinner table. My mom led the prayer, though no one asked her to, but, at the same time, no one complained.
“And to hell with the damned Klan,” Señora Chavez said.
“To hell with them,” my dad said.
“To hell with them!” Della said.
And then, to everyone’s surprise, my mom piped in, “Dear Jesus, to hell with those goddamned Klan. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.”
We all ate.
Della squeezed my hand underneath the table, and somehow, it became one of my favorite days in my life. Right then. Life felt good.
My parents laughed over a few beers. Della’s dad slowly drank whiskey in his sling and moved up to the table to join us. Ernie and Manuel left the table early and went out to the deck. Maria took care of the three little boys, cradling them in her arms, letting the adults talk. And Della and I walked again out to her apple tree to sit and watch the stars flow across the sky.
The grit from the mines couldn’t find us. The KKK didn’t exist. The dry, dying earth sat beneath us like a cradle, and our parents’ voices and laughter fell out of the window of the tiny ranch house under the Colorado sky.
I imagined that this could be our life forever. We were friends. All of us, friends.
Della talked and talked and talked. She talked about puzzles and the land and how she was going to break away some day and live somewhere else.
And this broke my little heart.
I wanted nothing to change, ever.
Chapter Nine
Della
1933
ONE MORNING, THAT WINTER, MY MOM LET US ALL SLEEP IN, even my father, who moaned when he turned from side to side in his bed. She did what she always did. She made coffee. She fried eggs from our chickens. She made tortillas and placed them in a warming towel to keep them fresh for all of us.
The ravaging dust of dead, drifting soil rolled across the country, and all the ranchers in southern Colorado could see it sweeping its wide brush of destruction a year before it hit them. It devastated Oklahoma and then Kansas, Colorado’s neighbor to the east. The dry winds and smell of the deepest drought could be tasted on the shifting winds of the Gunnison River Valley.
My parents were scared. My father began to drink a little bit more. The Depression had hit hard, but prohibition had lifted in the early thirties, so money was scarce, and food was scarce, but liquor was now available everywhere.
“They won’t feed you, but they’ll give you booze,” my mom said. “The last ten years, the government said, no, let’s not let those people drink. But now, when times are shitty as hell, they let us drink. Drink, drink, drink away! Plenty of food, no alcohol. No food, what the hell? Let them get drunk with their empty stomachs. Let them drink when they are hungry and wondering if they will eat that night. And then let’s tax it!”
“It’s getting worse,” my dad said. “The soil is getting worse. Every day, every week, every month.”
“Keep the wild grasses growing, Francisco,” my mom said.
My father started drinking and pacing. He would work all day in the barn and in the fields, and then he would come in for a simple dinner of tortillas, beans, and sometimes fried corn—that’s all we ate for years, along with a few apples from my apple tree. Then he’d pour a little bit of whiskey, slosh it around in a glass like he was continually making sure that it was still there, and pace, back and forth and back and forth until the wooden path had worn so smooth that I avoided it when I wore socks in the house to not slip.
He paced and grimaced. His mind sat on the fields and yields they might bring. There were five years of this before the Dust Bowl began to strip the land of middle America. It was the only thing anyone ever talked about.
At school, the teacher just talked about the dry-ass land. Kids, that’s all they talked about too, because that’s all their parents talked about.
John? Well John never really talked.
“What do you think about the land, John,” I asked him one day while he carried my backpack from school to the truck that took us home.
“It doesn’t really hurt the chilies,” he said. “The dryer the better for the chilies.”
“You and your chilies, John,” I said. “You’re going to turn into a damned chile.”
The layer of dust had eaten up fields from Missouri to Colorado, from Oklahoma to New Mexico, and from Kentucky to Wyoming. The farmers killed it. They planted too much. They sold too much. They did it to feed their families.
We had two fields and a whole lot of Texas Longhorns that many men had tried to steal in the night. They snuck in, they rattled around in the field, and they cut our fences, but my parents didn’t sleep during those years. Within minutes of hearing sounds in the quiet night, my dad ran outside with a shotgun in his hand, and my mom followed shooting her long-barreled shots into the air like she was Benita the Kid.
To my parents, if the world had been doomed, us being children wouldn’t protect us from damnation, so my dad paced back and forth and back and forth, sloshing his whiskey in his glass first, and then four or five drinks in, sloshing his whiskey in his belly.
“I’m gonna go walk around the barn and fields,” my dad said.
“Can I come with you?” I asked him.
“Sure, Della, venga,” he said.
“No, she is not walking around with you, Francisco, unless you want me to strap this gun of mine around her waist. Do you want that, Cisco?” my mom asked.
“No,” he said. “Della, stay here. Ernie, come with me.”
They went on patrol every night for two years.
We only lost two steers and one cow throughout those years. After the first five or six failed attempts, men stopped trying, but my parents had already stopped sleeping. They worried more about the Dust Bowl than any stupid men trying to steal their cattle. They could shoot those men, but they couldn’t shoot the black storms of dust that started to roll violently toward us.
At one point, I think we ate corn for three months straight. My mom did her best to vary the taste. She wou
ld make corn fritters, which were my favorite because I made apple sauce from my apples and spread it across the tops of them, sharing the sauce with my whole family and feeling like I had done something special. She would make corn tortillas, of course, though all of us would rather have flour tortillas because of the taste. We were flour tortilla types of people. She would fry corn, crispy and black on the outside and sweet on the inside, in a big cast iron skillet and sprinkle it with salt and pepper and just a little bit of cheese from the cows. We would have done anything for a big batch of ancho chiles, but we had none, so we ate corn for every meal for months at a time.
Drunken, one night, my dad got mad. He paced back and forth and back and forth and cursed God for betraying his family.
“What do you want me to do, God?” he screamed into the air. “I pray to you. I protect my wife and family like you tell me to. I work hard all day long, and all you give me is corn and dust. I’m not ready to return to dust. From dust to dust. Dust kills. Dust does not give life, but I will give blood. Will blood feed my family? Will blood dampen the soil? Will blood make the ground rich? Will blood make my little girl grow?”
And then he stopped pacing, walked outside and into the fields with his shotgun, and loaded it with two shells, one for each barrel. He looked old in the moonlight. Wrinkles found his eyes and hugged them tightly. The last few years had been hard on him. He did not want us to know how hard, but mom talked about everything in front of us. It would make my father a little uncomfortable. He would look down at the ground when she talked about how we had so little money and how all the kids would have to stop going to school to help out around the ranch.
“It will never end. We will never live without all the worry again. We will always eat corn,” she’d say. “I’m so goddamned sick of all the corn—I got corn coming out of my ears and asshole.”
Outside, he looked down to the ground like he was to blame for the Great Depression, the oh-so-cheap cost of the wheat and corn and beans and milk and cattle, like he was to blame for the dust that rolled across the plains toward them.
“We are the early birds, but we never get the worms, we never even see the worms. Hell, I’d eat worms if we saw them. The ground is too damned dry. They have crawled to the center of the earth where there is something to eat besides goddamned corn.” My mom ranted as she watched my father walk outside with the shotgun in his hand.
She knew that the Great Depression wasn’t my father’s fault and that the erosion of the farming soil from Kentucky to Colorado wasn’t his fault either, but she had to talk, she had to complain, she had to bitch and moan. Bitching and moaning made her feel better. It was like air to her, like meditation.
“Should I go with dad? Can I, I mean, can I go to him?” I asked.
“Stay right the hell here, Della, and shut your mouth so I can talk. This man out there walking around drunk with a shotgun and this girl of his wants to go out and talk to him,” she said to me.
“He won’t hurt me,” I said.
“Not on purpose, he won’t,” she said, shouting out the now open window. “But he’s borracho and stupid right now, and he has a shotgun, understand, Della? You’re so smart, but sometimes you think too much, and sometimes you think you can solve every damned riddle. You can’t.”
“Dad just feels bad that he can’t feed us anything but corn, beans, and bread, on special occasions,” I said.
That night, drunker than I’ve ever seen him, he looked older under the light of the moon. His shoulders had fallen a bit. He slumped. I had never seen him slump.
We all gathered around the kitchen window and looked out at the man who had slung the shotgun over his shoulder and walked over to the fence next to our cattle, our lifeblood, our last bit of anything worth anything. He pulled the gun down from over his shoulder. At first, he held it in front of him.
My mom gasped. I knew what she was thinking. We all knew. The man from Denver shot himself. During that time, men killed themselves everywhere. They didn’t care if children found their bodies. They didn’t care at all. There has never been suicide in the country like there was then.
TWO DAYS BEFORE MY DAD walked out of the house and toward the cows, we all stood in a line in downtown Trinidad and waited for things like salt and pepper and toilet paper, all the stuff we could have easily bought before. We had also taken one of our steers into sell. They had become our only real source of money between the time we planted the crops and the time we harvested them, a whole farming year. We sold milk from our cows too, but it wasn’t enough, so my dad took one of his best, fattest cows and sold it for dimes on the dollar.
The trains rolled through town less and less. They had nothing to carry from us to Denver or from Denver to us, but they still came once or twice a week. The train station sat right in downtown, and we could all hear it roll toward us out of the mountains.
It chugged along and began to slow down before the train station. And then the screams came. I left the line, although my mom told me not to, and I got five or six lashes from her wooden spoon that night for doing so, but I ran toward the screams. When I got to the women who cried out into the hot day, I looked down.
Two men had waited for the trains to come. They lay and waited on the tracks. The train screeched toward them, the conductor yanked on the brake, and smoke spit off the tracks.
The last thing the men did was lift their heads just slightly to greet the train. When the train stopped, their bodies had been split in quarters. Some of them remained trapped under the steel, bloodied the wheels, but the other parts had been tossed forty or fifty feet away from the tracks, staining the fields around them.
OUT THERE, THAT NIGHT, DAD lifted his shotgun in the air and pulled the trigger twice. The deafening sound of gunfire sent me to my knees and Ernie out into the night after my dad. When I stood up again, I saw my father put his hand out toward Ernie to make him stop, and then he loaded two more shells into the gun, climbed over the fence and into the pasture, and stopped again, raising the gun barrel upward one more time.
MY FATHER WALKED OVER TO one of the biggest cows that we had left and shot it in the head. It dropped hard, scattering dust for twenty feet around it, and then he walked over to another cow and dropped it too. Two dead cows at the end of my father’s drunken shotgun.
He waved Ernie over. They grabbed the mules in the middle of the night, threw straps around their thick bodies, and dragged the dead cows into the barn. They didn’t come in that night, not at all except to grab whiskey, Ernie out there drinking with my father and cutting up cows for the butcher. Meat sold well, but once it was gone, it was gone. It took another couple years to grow a big calf to a big cow, and we only had a few cows left to breed, so I don’t know what the hell my dad was thinking, but I knew he shouldn’t have shot those cows. We were down to less than ten at that point, and my mom was hell set on the fact that we were at the end of times and that the tide would never change. To her, we were in hell with no way out, and my dad just shot two of our last few cows.
She went on a rant before heading to bed, not only with her words but also with her little body. Her hands dug so far into her hips that I was scared she just might squeeze her guts right out of her butt. I just stood there and placed my hands on my hips too and tried to scrunch my face, doing my best to show her that I wasn’t with her or against her—mainly to show her I sure as hell wasn’t against her.
“Great, now we won’t have milk to sell because of El Borracho. That man, in our entire marriage has been the best man I’ve ever met, but he has some loco in him too: cries with friends at the dinner table, shoots las vacas in the middle of the night, and loves his daughter more than his boys. Lo siento, Della, but that’s weird,” she said. It didn’t bother me. I took it as a compliment.
“And I love him more than I love you, mama,” I said.
She smiled and said, “I know, Della, I know.”
She never did say anything to him about it though. I knew she understood his lo
co and that she would take my dad’s kind of crazy over other men’s kind of crazy, the beating-their-wife or lying-down-on-the-train-tracks kind of crazy. He didn’t like other women, and he never paid for sex outside of the home, and, hell, he made his favorite daughter work in the fields just like he made his boys because he needed the help and because I asked him if I could. The fields, to me, were like giant puzzles that I couldn’t complete without really thinking about it, like working with tall thin dominoes, pulling corn and completing the game. My mom loved his kind of crazy, I think.
THE NEXT DAY, MY DAD and Ernie were gone before I got out of bed. They must have left long before dawn, never sleeping until they were done cleaning and sectioning out the cows the best they could before handing them over to the butcher.
I spent the day picking corn from the stocks, hauling the blackened and yellow and orange corn in a basket back to the house. I shucked the ears, dug my nails deep into the husks and yanked them off in one downward shred with my hands. I watched the sun drop down behind the tall peaks of the Rockies, my nails digging into the meat of the corn cobs and shedding the rich corn into a large metal bowl, enough corn to feed that family for days.
I waited for my dad and brother to come home, and when they did, I could smell pigs before I could see them.
They rode in the back of the truck that bounced along the road toward the ranch, and when Ernesto and my father stopped the truck, the smell overcame me. Pigs. I hated pigs.
I wanted to give the men hugs, but I couldn’t. I could tell that they had been wrestling with those filthy beasts to get them into the carriage.
“Come here, Della,” my dad yelled. I did, with hesitation. I didn’t want to touch those pigs. I walked over to them. In the back, there were at least ten piglets running around. I admit, they were cute, but they stunk. At the back of the carriage, huge sacks were filled with beef. He had killed two cows, sold one, had the other one butchered and brought home for us. He used the money from the first cow to buy the pigs. Pigs were cheap. Cows were not. Pigs would eat anything. Cows needed fresh alfalfa. I got it. I just didn’t like it, but I did like carrying the beef to the barn and salting it down, curing it to keep it as long as we could. I did like ramming the sticks into the ground with Ernie. We strung up barbed wire from stick to stick and laughed about how stinky the pigs were but also about how cute they were.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 5
