1935
IT WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MORNING. THE SUN SHONE SO brightly that everyone seemed to have forgotten that just a few days earlier we had been hit by another dust storm. For the first time in a very long time, hope filled the air instead of dust. April 14, 1935.
We actually went to church that morning. My mom, like me, never really loved the idea of church, men standing on a pulpit and telling us how shitty we all were when we knew they were drinking and masturbating up a sandstorm of their own when they left the altar. Plus, she didn’t grow up a Christian like my dad did. I think that stuff is transferred from generation to generation. Somehow trauma and grief and upheaval and migration moves from father to daughter and mother to son. It sticks in our blood and follows us. But we went to church that morning. The sun had been so bright and the sky so clear that my mom agreed to join everyone in our community for prayer. I think she really wanted to feel the hope too.
“With just a few rainstorms, we could be lifted out of this, let us pray,” the priest said, and everyone prayed. It felt real that time, however. Birds flew by the stained-glass windows and sang. Little squirrels jumped from tree to tree. I know this sounds like some kind of scene from “Snow White” or some bullshit like that, but that’s how it felt that day, hopeful and joyous.
After church, we changed out of our dress clothes and split up on the ranch. Dad did things he hadn’t been able to do. He moved the pigs from one pen to another, cleaned out the original pen, and then moved them back. Ernie sat on the edge of the front porch and drew. I never really knew he had that in him, this need to draw, but he drew the horizon.
The little boys ran and played, and my mom took a well-used broom out and pushed all the dust off the windowsills and began to clean the outside of the house for the first time in years.
I walked through the crops. I let my hand graze the edges of the alfalfa plants and corn and beans. What I had done a year before made me so proud. Our crops were strong. We were making money again.
Three nights earlier, I couldn’t sleep and heard my mother and father whisper at the kitchen table. Their voices drifted quietly back and forth to each other as if only their ears could catch them. That night too, I heard it again, which may be the reason that my mom went to church with us that morning. In the dead of night with only the coyotes calling out on the plains, they were nearly giddy.
“We’re clear, Benita,” my father said to her.
“Clear of what? Is this some kind of guessing game because I’m not a child and I’m not a goddamned mind reader,” my mom replied.
“We have paid off all of our taxes this year. We are clear. We even made some money. It’s a miracle,” my father said. “It’s a miracle. We sold enough pork and beef and alfalfa to other ranchers to pay it all off. We own the land. It’s ours. We have been so blessed by God.”
“Yes, Francisco, we have been blessed,” she said. “But not by God. We haven’t been blessed by the crop God or anything like that. We haven’t been miraculously spared, Francisco. We were blessed with the smartest damned daughter in the whole county, hell, the whole state,” she said. “That was our blessing. That smart-ass girl in the bedroom.”
With this, these words that came from my mom’s mouth, I fell backward onto my pillow and prayed. The praise felt like too much to handle. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. I wanted her to take it back. I wanted her to say something sarcastic and even demeaning. I prayed for her to follow it up with something like, “Only if that damned girl would clean up after herself or stop reading so much or learn how to talk to people without being so blunt.” But she didn’t; her praise hung in the air, and it was too much for me.
Three days later, I walked through the fields, proud. At that point, when all of Las Animas County believed we had made it through, my mom’s words settled in nicely. I could handle it then. The praise. We had made it.
And then the air grew very cold, and I felt like the world had gotten darker and scarier in an instant. The winds came back, and with them a cold, cold air that ran across my body and literally, and I mean goddamned literally, sent shivers up and down my spine. Within minutes, the temperature dropped. It dropped thirty degrees in a matter of an hour from the Dakotas to Texas and to our little Las Animas County.
The wind carried something dark with it. Across the eastern plain of the valley, a mountain of a cloud stormed toward our home. Black and dark and opaque, thousands of feet tall and hundreds of miles wide, the massive dust storm raced toward us. It swallowed up the world, and if I believed in the wrath of God or the end of days, this cloud of moving dust that looked darker than the darkest pit would be what I would imagine. There was nothing behind it, nothing to the side of it, and nothing above it, only black.
Screams came from the fields.
My father ran from the distant bundle of cows that just stood there like the world was completely fine. He smacked them all on their big black and white asses and begged them to run with him. A bull followed him, and the rest came too. On his way to the barn, he scooped up both of my little brothers, ran with them toward the house, and handed them off to Ernie who grabbed them in each of his arms and ran toward the cellar door that led down below our home and into our smoker room and cold storage.
“Della, adelante!” my mom shouted to me from the kitchen window and then disappeared out of sight onto the porch and then into the cellar basement. The black wall of night that came in the middle of the sunniest, clearest day in months moved across the earth like the sky had fallen onto the ground. My father ran out of the barn, closed the doors, leaving a few cows still standing in the fields and waved to me to run with him.
We clasped hands one hundred feet from the cellar door and ran together toward our family, Ernie and my mom held one of the cellar doors each, the wind doing its best to rip the rusty, metal frames from their grasps. We jumped down into the cellar and locked the doors above us. Complete blackness blotted out the last bit of light that stretched through the cracks in the foundation and the cellar door seams. The wind howled, and I have never seen the dark so damned dark. It got cold down there. My little brothers cried until their tears ran out. My father held me, and Ernie held my mother who in turned held the little ones.
With their heads in their hands, the whole county sat in church and sang the praises of the Lord and believed the minister when he said the worst had come and gone. Just a few minutes earlier, I ran my hands across the stalks and down into the dirt and wore a proud smile on my face. We had made it through. We were all in the clear, just like my dad had told my mom a few nights earlier. As they say, just when the world seems darkest, the light will come through. But sometimes, just when the world seems brightest, the darkness descends.
We huddled in the belly of the house. The storm lasted longer than I could imagine a storm could ever last. I was scared.
Out of nowhere, without any warning, a small stream of light fell through a crack in the foundation. Then, following it, like an army of little specks of hope, more light came through, and the world outside became quiet. My dad pushed as hard as he could against the doors, but he needed Ernie and me to get the first one open.
Outside, the blue skies had come back, but the Black Sunday cloud had left a blanket of dust so thick that it felt like deep snowfalls, powdery and consuming. The cows and pigs called out from the barn. They lived through it, those that followed my father into the barn and stayed put. A few others lay dead under a mound of sand in the fields, their hooves sticking out from the piles, lifeless markers of a Dust Bowl that had changed our lives forever.
Men, trapped, and having given up hope, killed themselves with shotguns when they looked outside and the only thing they could see was black. A woman drowned her children in a bathtub because she thought it was the end of days and wanted them to go to heaven without suffering. Ernie said that our neighbor took one of his pigs for a wife and made love to it through the storm and then carved it up and ate it afterward.
And then there were the truths that came. Most everyone quit. They packed up and left Las Animas County. They left their ranches, all of their possessions, and even some livestock and walked away. The depression, the Dust Bowl, and Black Sunday had killed any lasting hope that they had. Like a mass exodus, they lined the roads with starving children and walked northwest to Denver or Colorado Springs to stand in line and hope for handouts.
My mom took the boys inside the house. Their faces were covered with dried creek beds of tears that cut through the dust on their cheeks and necks. My dad, Ernie, and I, walked toward the crops. At first, we could barely see them. The drifts had covered the outer edges of our alfalfa fields. The outer three rows of alfalfa had been covered and lost. We climbed above and through the graveyard of crops that circled the inner rows of corn and beans. When we got to the center of the first field, the dust had begun to thin. All the inner crops still poked out from the soil, and the beans were alive in the earth. On the outside, wild grass poked through the sand.
This time, we believed we had made it again. Most hadn’t. We had. We owned our ranch, and no one, not even the US government could take it from us.
My father hugged us both.
Only if it would rain.
Chapter Twenty-Four
John
1935
I HAD PACKED UP A SACK FULL OF CLOTHES, SOME SCONES FROM my grandmother’s pantry, wishing she made tortillas like my mother did, shoved my bag beneath the porch, and waited for nightfall. The plan was to sneak away in the middle of the night. Manuel would keep Paulo safe. He would take care of our younger brother. He would stay. I would run to the Chavezes. I would start work in the mines. I could. I was fifteen years old, and they would let me. They always needed young strong men in the mines. I would do what my father did. I was proud of how hard he worked, and I could convince Della to stay in Trinidad, and in a few years, we could get married and have children and live at the edge of the raggedy peaks of the mountains.
Night came. I woke Manuel to say goodbye.
“I’m leaving, Manuel,” I said. “I’m running back to Trinidad.”
Manuel pulled himself up from our bed and sat on the edge of it. He rubbed his eyes and ran his hand through his thick, black hair and then down over his face.
“Johnny,” he said. “You don’t have any money. How will you get there?”
“The trains,” I said. “I’ll hop the trains. It’s easy. I’ll go down to the rail yard tonight, hop a train to Ogden, Utah, and then hop a train to Denver. From there, I’ll walk to Trinidad if I have to.”
Manuel sat quiet for a long second. He closed his eyes, rubbed them with his palms, opened them, and then he put his hands on my shoulders and said, “Okay, hermano, but be safe. Give Della my love and Ernie a hug from me.”
He stood up and gave me a big hug. Then he pushed me toward the door.
“And don’t kiss too much. Your lips might fall off,” he said. He was not funny. He never was, but I chuckled under my breath because he knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to kiss Della. I didn’t know what it felt like, but I wanted to do it over and over and over.
I slid out of the thin crack of the opened door and through the living room toward the back entrance of the house. It was hot outside. The middle of summer. My grandfather had left the back door open to capture the breeze rising up off the surface of the cool Truckee river just a few hundred feet away from the house.
“Goodbye, Paulo,” I whispered into the night air. “Goodbye, grandma, and goodbye you fucking asshole.”
I ran as fast as I could around to the front of the house and six miles to the train station. There, I crouched down and walked among the monstrous engines and flatbeds until I found an open door to a large cart filled with piles of stale hay. All of the farms in the Midwest and in Colorado were growing hay, selling it for nothing, and then dying under the weight of sand. This car held the remnants of a yield that no one wanted. It smelled sour like yeast and mold, but I climbed in anyway, threw my bag down, and lay against the thick, wet and clumpy pile of a wasted harvest.
I FELL ASLEEP IN THE car. When it shifted and began to roll, I only wanted to make sure that it was heading east along the tracks. East would get me closer to Della. East would get me away from my grandfather. And East would take me home to Trinidad. To the mines and my new life.
I sat quiet with my head between my knees until the train began to move. I stood up and pulled the car door open. It creaked at its hinges and cried out along the track of metal at the bottom and top of it. I sat down, just like I had seen train hoppers sit, legs flailing in the wind and hands pressed down against the floor of the car. I was on my way. I looked down the train toward the engine, and like mine, ten or twelve other pairs of legs bounced along the railway.
With a mix of sleep and watching the landscape fly by—the terrible cliffs of the Rocky Mountains, the high fields of their summit valleys and the flattening out into the plains of Colorado that stretched all the way across the middle of the country—the train pulled into the Denver hub and stopped. I had picked the exact train I needed to pick. I knew, right then, that with this luck, I had made the right choice and that my life would go back to being one full of smiles, even though my parents and brothers and sister wouldn’t be in it, not immediately, at least.
My life was going to be okay.
I imagined Della saying, “I miss you, and I think I love you.” It would probably come out more like, “Damnit, John, I miss you. And I goddamned think I love you,” so I imagined her saying it that way, and I smiled saying that over and over again on the train for miles and miles.
I hopped another train, made sure it pointed south, and got lucky again. A few hours later it pulled into Pueblo, Colorado, only eighty-five miles from home.
The train stopped, I ran across the tracks, hopped the security fence, and then ran toward the parking lot.
“Is anyone going to Trinidad? I could use a ride,” I said aloud for two to three hours, both in Spanish and in English. I gave up hope and to started walking down the road toward Trinidad, when a man in his late thirties yelled, “Vamos, nino.” He waved me over to his truck. Five other men sat in the bed.
“We’re going to the mines for work,” one of the men said. “It’s the only place to get a job anywhere right now.” The depression had hurt everyone. The mines, however, for men who were willing to work away from their families and risk their lives below the earth’s skin, kept running. And someone was always dying in the mines, so jobs became available.
“Yo también,” I said. Some men nodded. Others didn’t.
The truck rumbled down the road, and within three hours, right when the sun fell behind the Rocky Mountains, we pulled into Trinidad. I walked along the road toward our home, climbed in the through the barn window and fell asleep on the sawdust. I would head to Della’s the next day, rested and ready to kiss her and become a man.
I woke up with the rooster. The sun shone in from the morning. Dust had caked the windows since we’d left and found its way into the house, too. All of our old furniture had a thick layer of it on top. The house looked like it hadn’t been lived in for a decade though we left less than two years earlier. Cobwebs fell all around like tinsel from trees, and my mouth was caked with mud, a mix of saliva and the detritus of dying fields.
I walked to the well and pulled up two buckets of water. Alone in the high plains that used to be covered with fertile wildflowers, I stripped down to nothing and washed myself, using the soap I had stolen from my grandfather’s home. I wasn’t going to be stinky when I saw Della. I was going to be fresh. I pulled fresh clothes from my bag, dressed, and began the walk back into town, where I hoped to find Della at school.
I ached for my mom and dad, but the thought that I could start life again in Trinidad with Della, the Garcias, and my job made me happy. At fifteen years old, I was becoming the man my father and mother would be proud of.
Trinidad was Trinidad.
One- and two-story buildings. Two bars. One for miners. One for ranchers. Two diners. A town square. And that’s about it.
I walked toward the window of the three-room schoolhouse where I knew Della would be. I grabbed an abandoned railroad tie and dragged it over to the base of the school and stood up on it. I peered in. And there she was. Ernie sat behind her. It was like seeing family. Warmth rose up from the base of my neck to my ears and then to my temples. The teacher talked in the front of the class. I knocked once. The teacher turned to me. She tilted her head and stared like she couldn’t make out who I was through the blurry glass and daylight that shown through. She squinted.
Della and Ernie began to turn their heads toward me, and my heart raced with joy.
Everything went black.
With a sore head, and a gut-wrenching pain in my stomach, I woke up in the back of my grandfather’s truck.
He leaned over the seat. “We got twenty more hours in this car together. I want you to remember one thing. You try this again, and I’ll send Paulo to the orphanage. Got it, Johnny?”
Dried blood caked on my cheeks. And I could no longer imagine the good life that I had created in my head.
Chapter Twenty-Five
John
1938
“I MET A GIRL,” MANUEL SAID. “I’M GOING TO MARRY HER.”
He told me this the last time we ever harvested chiles. He had placed a long weed in his mouth and mumbled it to me with his teeth gritted together to hold the weed in place. He held a chile in his hand, ready to pluck it, but waited to do so until I said something.
I’d never felt more alone than I did at that moment. He was nineteen years old, I was barely seventeen, and it had been five years since we moved to Reno. Manuel was my only real family anymore who remembered it like it was.
There were small flashes of green against brown along the Truckee River that fall. Everything had begun to die except for the tall evergreens that seemed to stand and taunt the sage and grasses and the scrub oaks.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 12
