Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

And Father Bill stood behind the car door, the reflecting sun retreating to the west and the shadows of the giant spruce in the yard merging with the already bruising—black and blue and purple—skin that circled his eye and nose and cheek bone.

  “Paul,” Father Bill said.

  “Not another word, Father,” my grandfather said. His eyes twitched when the word “Father” came out of his mouth. “Get back in your car, leave now; this is not your church.”

  Maria swung a fist toward my grandfather. He dodged it and gave her another slap across the face.

  Pain struck Father Bill’s face. It wasn’t empathy for one of his parishioners. It wasn’t the church that hurt.

  In me, I knew. And though I lay there, pressed into the hot blackness of driveway, I knew what was going on. It became clear in Father Bill’s wince when my grandfather hit my sister. Father Bill wasn’t there to talk to my grandfather about God. Not at all.

  “Maria?” I said. “Father Bill?”

  And with that, my grandfather let me up off the ground. Somehow he knew I was no longer against him, not completely at least.

  At that point, my grandma came out of the house with Paolo beside her. The ten-year-old boy ran toward Maria. His tears wetted the blacktop for a moment and then dried away.

  “Let her go,” my grandmother said, following her husband with her eyes.

  And he did.

  Maria gave little Paulo a hug. And then me.

  The pain in my broken jaw ran out of me for a moment, the thickness thinning while I watched Maria climb into Father Bill’s car. They drove away, a long way away. He would leave the church. They would get married and move to Elko, Nevada.

  In the moment in the driveway when I saw my older sister drive away, I felt the first real sense of relief that the world had ever given me since my parents died.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Della

  1934

  I WANTED TO FIX IT ALL. EVEN AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE, I WANTED to fix all the problems that had been unfairly laid on my parents’ shoulders, so I started reading—a lot—about farming. My father would watch me read. He’d never learned to read himself. He would glance from me reading to our small fields of alfalfa that covered the earth outside the window. If the alfalfa died, the cattle and pigs and sheep would die too.

  The little boys weren’t old enough to go to school in 1934 when I started grabbing the Farmer’s Almanac from the library and taking it home with me to study. The newspapers did a good job showing how the whole middle of the country had been swamped by dust and dead crops.

  My dad lingered over my shoulder while I read the almanac, wondering what in the hell a fourteen-year-old girl wanted with it.

  “Maybe you could teach me to read it, mija?” he asked once.

  “Yes, yes, I could, papa,” I said.

  He milled around, rubbed his hands through his thinning hair, and muttered, “Nah, you can’t teach an old perro new tricks, darling Della.”

  Then he went outside with a glass of milk from Ernie’s cow and watched the dust blow by. He was sad, but he wasn’t drinking, and this had softened my mother to him. She would join him on the porch, place her hand on his knee. They wore handkerchiefs across their faces to filter out the dusty breeze.

  The dust was ugly, but it made for the most beautiful sunsets. It layered the sun in oranges and yellows and sometimes greens, dark reds, and browns swirling together across the horizon.

  Exactly four months before the Dust Bowl would give Colorado its biggest blow, when the winter had yet to leave, I sat down at the table with a piece of paper and tried to fix things for everyone. Of all the things I read in those almanacs, I learned that how you place your crops and how you rotate them can make them stronger, more durable, and give them more endurance against the dry climate. I learned it made a difference in what you grew too. Some crops are weak. Some crops are strong. And my mom was right about the wild grass. As a natural weed, it dug its roots deep into the earth and kept the soil from floating away.

  “Keep the grass where it goddamn belongs,” she always said, so I kept that in mind the whole time.

  I began to draw. I started with two large rectangles that mirrored the crop fields outside the kitchen window and a large circle to the west of them that outlined a perfectly proportioned image of the grazing fields. Then I began to divide the rectangles up, first converting the two rectangles to four squares and the four squares into eight rectangles. And I didn’t stop with them. I divided the grazing fields up too, tracing rectangles along the edge of the outer fence and drawing stick figures to represent the cattle in the middle of the triangles. At the edges, I colored in wild grass as a border.

  When my father came inside from work each night, he found me sitting there drawing. He always did his best to not let me see the worry on his face, to wipe it away with the cloth that cleaned his face.

  “What’re you drawing?” he’d ask me each time.

  “My crops,” I told him.

  “Not your crops, Della, my crops,” he said. “They’ll never be your crops, Della. They’ll be Ernie’s crops.”

  This used to piss me off for the longest time. What the hell? They could be my crops. I could work them. I could work them strong. But I didn’t say anything, just let it go as old machismo bullshit that ran through his old Mexican blood.

  “Can I have a look?” he’d ask.

  “Nope, these crops on this piece of paper are my crops, so since they’re not your crops or Ernie’s crops, I’ll keep my crops to myself,” I’d say.

  I could see that he wanted to get angry with me, to tell me to watch my mouth, but I knew he didn’t have the energy for it, so he just kissed my head, the smell of sweat and dirt and soap falling off him.

  Truth was that I am, and I always have been a perfectionist, and I didn’t want my dad seeing my crops until I had figured out exactly how to fix it all. I studied the almanacs, I drew, I crumpled up my school papers that I used the backs of to do my drawings. There wasn’t any spare paper laying around those days, and paper was not highest on my parents’ shopping list for sure.

  I drew a proportionately perfect rendering of their entire property, parceling it out in plot after plot, and marking each plot with numbers from one to twenty-two. This seemed like the way to start, to draw exactly what we had and what was still growing. Over the last few years, we had lost a lot of land to the dust. It had eaten the edges of what was once rich soil and slowly eroded away, the wind carrying the topsoil away to the west, so I didn’t start with what we once had but what we had now.

  Then I lined out a chart. On the top row, I wrote in the names of crops and the cattle. Down the left-hand column, I filled in the numbers, twenty-two in all. In the intersecting cells, I scribbled in the next three years of upcoming crops 1934, 1935, or 1936 next to the crops of Alfalfa, Corn, Beans—beans, a crop they hadn’t grown in years because it didn’t sell at a high enough yield to grow compared to corn or alfalfa—and livestock which had been divided into three cells at the top of the chart, fenced in by a horizontal slash and then vertical slashes through it. I left the pigs in the barn. They could survive on any leftovers, but the cattle needed to be fenced in or they’d wander off in search of food and either get killed or die in the mountains, starving because they were too stupid to stay put.

  I crumpled the paper up, threw it in the garbage, grabbed another, and started over. My hands shook as they rushed over the drawing, the pencil gliding across the paper’s yellowish surface. Teeth bit my lower lip, eyes dry from barely blinking as I drew out the plots again, shifting the sizes of the area of the plots and then drawing the chart again, matching the crop with the plot with the year, a shuffling of growth. It had become one of those moments when I knew I was close to cracking it, to figuring it out, to finding the answer—to fixing the problem that lay in front of us and to saving our farm. Blood trickled from my lip and onto the paper.

  When my father came out of his room and saw the bubbles o
f red on my chin, and my red eyes, he tried to tell me to stop, using his stern voice that didn’t really seem too believable.

  “Della, stop, you’re hurting yourself,” he said.

  “No, Papa,” I said. “Not yet.”

  Again, I tossed the goddamned paper in the garbage. This time, however, before starting again, I ran out into the fields. I ran as fast as I could, the quick burst from the table scaring the living shit out of my dad who dribbled hot coffee on his chin and said “Della, que pasa?” as the door shut behind me.

  In the alfalfa field, I stopped at seven different spots, dug my hand into the soil, and siphoned the dirt through my fingers. I did the same thing in the middle of the corn and in the middle of the beans. There was a difference. Huge differences.

  I dug my fingers into the soil that surrounded our cattle. This time, instead of pulling the soil up, I pushed all of my fingers straight down into the rich earth.

  “We’ve got all of this,” I said. “It’s rich. It’s been turned over by those stupid cows.”

  I stood among the longhorns. They roamed around me. Some, in the darkening of the day, lay down on the earth. Manure covered the ground in brown and green splotches. The cattle had lived there for years, eating and shitting and roaming and copulating. They’d had no need to move them—the soil on the top of the world, more than six thousand feet above sea level and in a valley that had never really been harvested over the millions of years of its life. The smell of manure. The ripeness of the earth. The sun setting over the Rockies.

  “Goddamnit, that’s it,” I said. “Holy hell. I got it.”

  I stood and breathed in. Then I looked east out over the plains at the dust clouds of the earth.

  The kitchen, the warmth of the world in one little room, had been filled with my mom and brothers and dad by the time I came back in.

  “Corn,” my mom said. “Time for the corn.” She had become impatient with me. The corn should have been made twenty minutes before while I stood with my fingers in the dirt. I reached for my pencil and paper, but my mom shot me a glare that said, “Nope. Nope. Not if you want to keep your fingers, mija, adelante.”

  I heated a large cast iron skillet over the open burner, the one freed up from the beans that had been transferred to a bowl to be passed around the wooden table. I dropped a teaspoon of lard into the pan. The sizzle sounded so lovely against the laughs and chatter of the kitchen. My father, standing next to me, watched the lard sizzle over my shoulder and then placed his hand on my head and kissed my sweating brow. We always shared this. The lard became a thick, full liquid that spread out across the pan. It lacquered the base and I dropped in the corn.

  The cold corn danced across the cast iron base, the yellow and orange against a black canvas and the beauty of a year’s worth of work. I loved watching it every time I cooked it. The corn cooked so fast—so effortlessly, so durably. I reached out my hand, and my dad placed a bowl of crispy, moist pork bits scraped from the edges of the pork pan into them. I dropped the pork into the corn, pushing the corn to the edges of pan, continuing to sear the corn’s skin. Then I saw it, right there before I stirred the corn into the frying pork, right there in the pan that I had always used to cook.

  The rich juices from the meaty chunks at the pan’s center had already begun to seep out from the center and hydrate the corn with its fat and flavor, decreasing the heat and friction between the yellow and orange kernels and the sizzling hot cast iron pan. The rich, fatty juices from the chorizo melted into the dry, crispy corn. The corn sucked it all in and became moist again, at first, losing its water in the pan but then replacing it with the richer, greasier fluid that would give it so much flavor.

  I quickly stirred the pork together with the corn to finish my job, to serve the family, and get back to my pencil and paper. When the skin of the corn had gotten crispy and the interior warm and soft, I pulled it from the burner and dumped it into the same bowl my dad had used to transfer the pork.

  My family sat, ate, and talked. I remained quiet. My mind turned over. The thought of the soil outside circled through it again and again.

  When dinner had been eaten, when the dishes had been washed in the bucket, and when the family sat at the table, my brothers reading and my mom knitting, I pulled another piece of school paper from my bag and began to draw again.

  I quickly plotted all of our land and filled in the chart. The alfalfa—the strongest and most durable crop of them all—would shift along the edges of the cattle and around the beans and corn in the now twenty-three different plots in their field over the next few years, beginning with the planting in early 1934. My father knew about shifting crops. He was a good rancher, but I, at fourteen years old, knew more. He could not read the farmer’s almanac.

  I moved the weaker crops to the center where they would be protected from the waves of dust that rolled across the oceans of the plain states. I loved it. Like the corn pulling the juices from the meat.

  I finally had what I needed to let my dad in. I pulled the piece of paper off the table, moved his book out of the way.

  “We’re going to make it through dad, but we gotta plant beans too, and we got to shift all the alfalfa to the edges. It’s the toughest crop. It will hold the burn back, and the rich beans and corn will feed it from the centers just like the pork in the pan—it’ll feed the corn and the mierda will feed the alfalfa and the beans will feed us all, including the earth,” I said.

  I handed him my drawing and chart.

  He lifted his coffee mug to his lips. He smiled a real smile. I could see that I had given him hope, too. Not just hope, belief.

  He hung the piece of paper on the wall next to my photo and nodded his head.

  Then he turned to me and said, “You will be something that I can never imagine, and someday you will tell me what you have done in this life, and it will be spectacular, and I will believe every word of it. And, from now on, you will never work in the fields again, basta.”

  He gave me a big hug and told me that he loved me.

  “You will only read, study, and write from now on. Your younger brothers have been cradled too long. They can take your place in the fields. This ranch will never be yours. I will strip you of your love for your hands in the dirt. Lo siento, Della.”

  I cried.

  He patted my head.

  He put on his boots, and in the middle of the evening, he headed out to the fields to begin the shifting of the earth.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  John

  1934

  MANUEL AND I HID IN OUR CHILE PATCH.

  After Maria left, we found a patch of dirt, hidden near a tree along the Truckee river, about half of a mile from my grandpa’s house.

  My jaw healed. It took a long while, but it healed, and my grandfather never hit me again. Manuel rarely talked. He just worked hard, keeping the ranch clean, keeping his head down, and nodding a “yes” to my grandpa whenever he got asked to do something. He ate. He worked. He slept next to me in bed. He remained so quiet, only smiling when little Paulo, who had begun to really grow, would run to him and punch his older brother in the gut for fun. Manuel would buckle over, fall to the ground, and act like Paulo really hurt him, though I knew he couldn’t. Just like my dad, Manuel was lean and sinewy and strong.

  Manuel and I planted the guajillos and güeros and anchos, just like my dad did. We dug our hands in the dirt, the soil much richer outside of Reno along the Truckee than it ever was in southern Colorado. We prayed to the saints. We covered up the seeds. Then we sat and looked at the sun and talked about mom and dad. Manuel talked to me then under the spring sunlight, and then he told me that he blamed himself for letting our mom get out to help our dad. He was the oldest son, and he should have done it.

  “I should be the dead one. Mama would still be on this earth with us. Maria wouldn’t be gone. Paulo wouldn’t have the wrong woman raise him to forget who we are,” he’d say, over and over for years when we planted chiles. “I should be
the dead one.”

  I didn’t say anything to him. I just listened. I didn’t want anyone to be the dead one.

  We visited that chile patch even when we weren’t planting or harvesting. Just to be brothers. We never took Paulo. If he meant to or not, he would spill the beans and tell our grandma—he was kind of a little shit. Our grandfather would surely then drive his tractor out to the patch and dig it all up. I know he would have.

  That day, however, on our way back from the chilies, the postman caught us on the road.

  “Hey, Cordova boys,” he said. “Take this to your house for me, will ya. It’ll save me some time. I’m hungry and ready to get home.”

  Manuel grabbed the mail from the postman. He scanned the letters, and then he held one out to me, and he said, “Look, your lover wrote you, sweet boy.” He handed me a letter then he ran home with the rest of the mail, yelling, in earnest, “Don’t let grandfather find that! I promise. It will lead to nothing good.”

  I saw Della’s handwriting on the outside of the letter. My heart froze. She had written me back. My knees crumbled, so I grabbed onto a nearby fence post to brace myself. And then, with more fear than I thought existed in me, I opened the letter.

  Dear John,

  I miss you, and I think I love you.

  Always,

  Della

  I held Della’s letter in my hand. I ran my fingers over the letters, the words, the one sentence. Della wasn’t the type to spray the letter with perfume, if she even owned any, and she wasn’t the type to put on lipstick and kiss the letter. Her mom wouldn’t even allow that stuff in the house. Wasted money, is what Señora Chavez would say. I could hear her saying it.

  But I thought I could smell a hint of her on the page. It had to have taken the letter two weeks to get from Trinidad to Reno, but, somehow, I could smell apples when I opened it up. I believed that I could.

  I knew then that I had to escape back to her.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Della