Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  This is it? That’s all we get. Pinche bullshit, is what that is.

  I flipped to the back of the magazine. On the second to last page, there were two puzzles. On the top of the page, it read: Interactive Animal Stroop Effect Experiment.

  Below the title there were instructions: Have someone count out time in seconds. As soon as you see the pictures, identify the animals as fast as you can and write them on a piece of paper in order. When you have finished, say finish to the person counting time. The time it took you to name the animals will be your initial time. Then move on to the second set of animals and repeat. When finished with the second set of animals, subtract the first time from the second to create a difference. This is your final score. Flip to the next page to see how you compared to other men who have taken the test.

  Below the instructions, the first test had pictures of twenty animals with the name of the animal printed on top of the picture. A penguin picture had the word “penguin” written on it. A bear picture had the word “bear” written on it. A cat had “cat” on it. Twenty animals in four rows of five.

  I didn’t have anyone with me to count the seconds it took me to do it, so I imagined a place in the corner of my brain that would do the counting while I named the animals, a little room in my brain that felt separate from the other part of my brain that would read the text. Then I began.

  Penguin. Cow. Pig. Bear. Turtle…Giraffe. Pig. Spider. Horse. Bee. Part of my brain counted while the other wrote down the names of the animals. It was easy. It was supposed to be, though I don’t think many people could count at the same time while playing the game. I had started doing that when I was four years old. I would talk to my dad in the rows of apple trees, help him pick them from the branches, and count how many we were picking.

  “Nine hundred seventy-eight apples today, dad,” I told him when we gathered them up into the baskets and threw them in the cart.

  “I didn’t hear you count them,” he said, “but I believe you.”

  He smiled and kissed my forehead and tossed me a sweet apple from the top of the pile.

  “Nine hundred seventy-seven now,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  He always said he believed me, and I know he did, but one night after dinner, I heard my dad rustling around outside. He was thumbing through the baskets of apples. About twenty minutes later, he came back in, walked into my room, sat on the bed and said, “How do you that?”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “How do you count, pick, and jabber your mouth all day, all at the same time?” he asked.

  “I just find a little room in my head for the counting and it counts for me,” I said.

  “Nine hundred seventy-seven,” he said.

  “I know, dad,” I said.

  He tucked me into bed and walked out of the room shaking his head.

  It took me eight seconds to write down the names on the piece of paper. Of course, I got them all correct. A baby could do that.

  The second test was the one that really tested this supposed Stroop Effect, supposedly. There were twenty animals in five rows, but instead of their actual name printed on them, a different animal name was printed over each animal. A cow picture had the name “spider” printed on it. A bear had “bee.” A pig had “dog.”

  I started the time in my head again and began.

  Nine seconds. It only took me nine seconds, the timer in my head going off when I finished. I checked to see if I got any wrong. I didn’t.

  It’s easy to subtract eight seconds from nine seconds. There was a one second difference between the first test and the second test. I was kind of disappointed they weren’t the same and that my time had slowed.

  Jesus, Della, what are you? Some kind of idiota or something?

  I flipped the page over to read what the average man had scored.

  It read: most men need to take the second text on average of three times before they are one hundred percent accurate. When they are one hundred percent accurate, the average difference between times is eleven seconds.

  “Hah!” I yelled out into the quiet library around me. “The average man is a pinche burro!”

  The librarian shushed me.

  “Pinche burros!”

  “Quiet, Della,” she said.

  I giggled inside.

  Then I flipped to the last page of the magazine. It was full of very tiny listings. Job listings and services offered. Two little lines stuck out to me.

  Universities in Pennsylvania and New York looking for smart girls. Scholarships available for the most needy.

  And then there was an address to write for more information.

  My heart exploded. I knew I was getting away from the ranch since my dad had told me a hundred times that I would never work it when I grew up, that it would be Ernie’s to run and that I was too smart to be a ranchero, but I had never known how to get there.

  Now I had found the map.

  IT CAME SEVEN MONTHS AFTER John and his brothers and sisters had been torn from our house in the middle of the night. It was grey and yellow, and the handwriting on the outside looked synthetic, like it had been stamped on. If it wasn’t for the slight smear from the rain that dropped on it between the mail carrier’s bag and the mailbox, I would have thought it was stamped.

  To:

  Della Chavez

  Trinidad, Colorado

  From:

  John Cordova

  Reno, Nevada

  I didn’t know who in the hell John Cordova was, but it only took a second to put my twos and twos together and figure it out. The old man had changed their names to Cordova. “A proud Spanish name,” I could see the old bastard mouth with his lips emphasizing the “S” in Spanish.

  I didn’t tear the letter open, though I wanted to. I ran inside, grabbed a knife, and slid it through the folded seam at the top, doing my best to not tear the edges. I could feel John in it. Since he left, he had grown even more important to me. Those walks to the truck after school had become so lonely. Ernie and I walked together, of course, but Ernie was a lot like John. He was so quiet and rarely said anything back. Ernie, unlike John, didn’t say a lot back because he wasn’t listening. John listened. I could feel him, his neck turned toward me with the honest intent to grab everything I said and keep it inside him. I learned once he left that he was the only one that I wanted to hear what I had to say.

  I had just turned fourteen years old when I got the first letter. And holy shit, I never thought that that boy who followed me around, said so little, and never said a word in school could express himself so well. His writing. Holy shit. He was smart.

  Dear Della,

  The last few months have come and gone like both a bucking bronco and the slow movement of water through a creek without a current. It moves quick because my grandpa makes Manuel and me and Maria work the ranch all day and go directly to bed after dinner. We have no family time like we used to except for when we climb under the covers together and look up at the ceiling and out the window and talk about our escape back to Colorado.

  We won’t come though because mis abuelos have really cared for little Paulo. We have to stay and look after him. I fear that my grandfather will turn on him someday, and I could not live with it if he hurt him.

  Maria takes the worst of all of this. My grandfather hates her because she has dark skin like my dad. He whips us. He backhands us whenever we speak at the table.

  I miss you. I think about those times together in the fields on Sundays, and I dream about them. I put myself in those memories when I fall asleep at night. I can smell your apple tree in my dreams, and I miss your laughter.

  All my love,

  John

  I read the letter and then I imagined John next to me on all of those long walks from school to the truck and our treks through the hay fields and our talks by the apple tree that my father had saved for me. He was so quiet, but his brain was thinking these beautiful things. His heart was talking about love and th
e smell of the apple tree.

  I put the letter down, grabbed a piece of paper from my school’s supplies, and started to write him back, but everything I wrote seemed so goddamned infantile compared to the way he put his feelings down on paper. I could solve puzzles and do algebra without a hint of effort, but, it turns out, I could not write about my feelings or love. Damnit. Because I wanted to.

  Dear John,

  I hope to see you soon. I like the apple tree, too. I am lonely on my walks. I hate your grandfather. What an asshole.

  If I could be in the fields with you, I would do it today.

  Ugh. That’s awful. I had never felt so stupid in my entire life, like an idiota responding to Shakespeare. I tried to write three more letters, each one worse than the previous one.

  When I finally sealed up the letter, wrote John’s address on the outside, and licked the sealer, the letter read:

  Dear John,

  I miss you, and I think I love you.

  Always,

  Della

  And then I put it in the mailbox and sat on our porch until the mailman picked it up and took it away to Reno.

  Chapter Twenty

  John

  1934

  RENO WAS HARD FOR ALL OF US, BUT IT WAS HARDEST ON MARIA. Her skin would not lighten. Her face would not change. No matter how much gunk my grandfather slathered across her face, no matter how hard he tried to rub it in, she had the rich, dark Garcia blood from my father that, to me, looked so beautiful on her, like the surface of the richest soil of the earth where my father’s chiles grew bright crimson and purple.

  At times, at church, my grandfather deserted my sister, very tactfully, because he would never want to be seen as cruel by his fellow church members. Many times, he would ask Maria to do a special chore before Mass, warming up to her for a couple hours before church, playing on her desire to be loved by him, a young girl who had lost her father and craved the attention. The chore would take all morning of her devoted efforts to get it done. Meanwhile, the rest of the family would get ready, climb in the Cadillac, and go to Mass where my grandfather would shake everyone’s hands, wish them peace, smile a charming smile, piously drop twenty dollars in the floating tithing basket, and return home just while Maria finished up washing all the baseboards in the house or letting out all of my grandpa’s waistlines or, even, doing something fun like adding trim to hers and her grandmother’s dresses to fancy them up—letting her do something she liked so it didn’t seem as though she was only there to be a Cinderella-like slave. She loved Mass like my mom did and wanted to do adoration too, but he wouldn’t let her because she would have to sign in, and everyone would know the dark girl was his granddaughter.

  When he ran out of things for her to do, we all walked into church together and he would find a pew that only had room for five people. He systematically ushered five us in and left Maria standing in the aisle. My grandfather waved Maria away, not even looking at her. She found a spot in the back corner of the church, alone, her face full of sadness.

  I once tried to join her. I jumped up and began to shuffle my body over the bent knees of my family. And I got a solid whack against the back of my neck. My grandfather’s knuckles stained my skin purple and black for days. Manuel had tried once too, the oldest of us doing his best to protect his sister, but so very quickly, my grandfather quietly led him out of the church, ripped off his belt, and gave Manuel a solid beating to the back of his calves, showing all of us that even our oldest brother could not defy him. It only made Maria sadder, knowing that we had both suffered for trying to be with her.

  She began to get up very early, do her chores, and go to Mass on her own, returning before we had all finished breakfast on Sunday morning with light in her eyes.

  My grandfather did his best to extinguish the light. He yelled at her. He told her that she could not use the family name when she was out of the house. He whipped her for not being there in the morning when he woke up. He called her names. He did everything he could to break her, but once she had gone to Mass on Sunday, the light would not go out. She had found a place away from him, where he could not hurt her, for one hour a week, and that was all she needed.

  AT FIFTEEN, AFTER A YEAR of his abuse, Maria left.

  On those Sunday mornings when my grandfather made her sit away from the family, she wouldn’t come home right after Mass. At first, she would stay at church for an extra hour, praying and saying the rosary. My grandfather stopped caring. He didn’t like her around. As the weeks went on, she stayed longer at the church, not coming home until dinnertime. She’d told me she had begun to help clean the church for Father Bill, a young priest, and that he was paying her under the table to do so. I was just glad to see her come home with a smile because the rest of the week she would have to deal with my grandfather’s cruelty.

  And she did smile when she came home from church, a smile big enough and steady enough to walk past my grandfather as he scolded her on her way into the house, saying she didn’t deserve God the way her whiter brothers did. He’d known that the church was all she had, and, with his cruel words, he did his best to try to strip her of that happiness too.

  ONE SUNDAY, ALMOST TWO YEARS after my parents died, in the dusty heat of late July, a car pulled into our driveway after we had gotten home from Mass. I sat on the front steps and shucked corn, my fingernails full of the thin hair of the inner, white husks. Manuel cleaned the barn. Paulo lay inside beneath the fan and played Rummy with my grandmother. My grandfather walked out from behind the house and met the car in the middle of the freshly laid blacktop that he had become so proud of; his house was the only one in the neighborhood with a smooth, black driveway. Like a game of chicken, he walked toward the car, both him and the car stopping only feet before colliding.

  The sun reflected against the windshield, making it difficult to see who sat behind the wheel, the glare like a bright white curtain that lay diagonal across the glass. The light breeze that had kept me just cool enough to bear the heat, the threads of corn husk weaving through my fingers, had suddenly stopped when Maria popped out of the passenger side door.

  She tried to walk past my grandfather in a straight line toward me, but he caught her by the arm and yanked her back toward him so hard that I feared her arm might break again. I stood up. I ran to them both. I held my finger in the air, and I shouted.

  “Leave her alone, abuelo!”

  With his other hand, the man slugged me in the face so hard that my cheek split open, and the sound of my jaw breaking echoed across the dry earth. At fourteen years old, I had no chance against the strong, fifty-year-old man.

  He held my sister so tightly, his lighter skin pressing fleshy caverns into her brown arm. Then he hit her hard, holding her up from falling only to smack her again.

  My eyes burned. I couldn’t talk. The bones in my mouth rattled with each shot of sharp air that I pulled in.

  The driver’s side door of the car opened and Father Bill stepped out of the car. His white face reddened in the sunlight. Red patches of anger mixed with quickly pinkening skin.

  Blood seeped into my eye. The liquid burned. My grandfather held me down on the ground with his foot, his knee bent above me, Maria gripped in his hands. He slapped my sister again, right in front of Father Bill.

  The young priest did not move. Instead, he just rubbed his white collar with his left hand and patted the sweat off his forehead with a cloth with the other hand as if my grandfather didn’t hold his granddaughter in the air and his grandson on the ground.

  I thought of scorpions and snakes roaming beyond me, smelling my blood and inching closer to me.

  Father Bill took a few steps toward my grandfather.

  The sun hung above us at midday.

  “Paul,” Father Bill said. My grandfather’s birth name was Paulo, and if you wanted an ass whoopin’ you would call him by his given name. Father Bill, knowing the man who stood his ground in front of the priest’s car, called my grandfather Paul.

/>   “You’re a good Catholic man. This violence doesn’t suit you. Now does it?” the priest tried to be confident, to persuade my grandfather to listen to him, but his voice gave him away. What should have been a statement came out as a quivering question, “Now does it?”

  My grandfather remained silent.

  The priest walked up to him. He set one foot down in front of the other with purpose. Like he was climbing the pulpit, the Bible at the top, already opened for him to read and his flock out in front of him waiting for him to speak, he walked with confidence. His black shirt tugged at the edges of his rounding belly. He stood in front of my grandfather, his head held high like he himself were the same Word of God that he was in Mass, standing on the blacktop with the same bravado and divine authority.

  My grandfather backhanded Father Bill’s bright, red face. His big knuckles cracked the man’s nose.

  The priest fell to the ground. He looked across the dirt and into my eyes. We lay level with each other. A trickle of blood fell from his nostrils, and I could see it in his face, the shock of never having been hit before in his life. The widening of his eye lids. Then the squint when the pain came on. And then, yes, tears from the man who stood in front of the pulpit every Sunday and warned against God’s wrath.

  His fingers scraped the newly paved driveway. His forearms pushed him up off the ground. He came to his feet. I wanted him to fight back, to at least throw a punch. He didn’t. He walked slowly back behind the driver’s side door of his car.

  The pain in my jaw became thick like lava, hot and viscous and flowing in and out from my skull to my toes. Maria swung in his arms. She tried to smack my grandfather. She tried to hurt him.