I slugged Manuel as hard as I could, right on the back of his neck. He fell forward. His face slid across the dirt and rocks. I stared down at him, wishing he would never get up, so he could never get married and could never leave me alone with my grandparents and Paulo.
But he got up. He placed his hands in the dirt, pulling them in from where they had braced him, the body’s instinctual movement to protect the skull and face. He pushed up slowly like a prize fighter using every extra second within the countdown to gather himself before fighting again.
He twisted his body toward me once he got to his feet. And he slugged me hard. The jaw that my grandfather had broken wiggled and cracked on impact, but it did not break this time. I swung back, connecting with his nose. When he recovered and turned back toward me, I tackled him.
Our bodies rolled together from the edge of the chile garden to the banks of the Truckee River, and we tumbled in, floating downstream with the current, our elbows and knees and hands and ankles slamming into the rocks beneath the white-tipped current. Somehow, before we nearly drowned, we both landed two more solid slugs to each other. His fist barreled into my ribs, cracking two of them, and mine hit his testicles, a low blow I would have never meant to deliver but the shift of our bodies in the water moved his cajones right in front of my fist at the wrong time.
We both began to take in water, ending our fight. Our arms reached out, flailing to grab anything to stop our drifting, and we tried to dig our feet into the mud at the bottom of the river to stand up. Manuel threw his arms around a boulder and held on. I grabbed his legs on my pass by him. He held onto the rock. My feet searched for solid ground beneath me. My toes dug into the mud and the balls of my feet pressed hard against the rocks beneath them. Manuel did the same, and we both gained our footing and walked to the bank, nearly a quarter mile from our chile garden.
We lay there in the sun. Our clothes clung to us, heavy and wet and full of sediment. My ribs stabbed me with each breath, and Manuel coughed up way too much water to have taken in.
“Lo siento, John,” Manuel said.
He rolled over in the mud and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“I didn’t mean to meet her. We’re getting married, and I’ve joined the Army.”
That son of a bitch.
I wasn’t surprised that I hadn’t heard about any of this—the wife, the army. I was just angry, and so lonely, long before he even told me. I had been lonely since the day my parents died, and it wasn’t Manuel’s fault, not at all.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s her name.”
I turned my aching body toward my older brother.
“It’s Ida,” he said. “Ida Luna Macias.”
“That’s a pretty name,” I said.
“She’s a pretty girl,” Manuel said. And he smiled so big.
“The Army?” I asked.
“Yes, I have a wife to support,” Manuel said. When he said wife, I could feel his excitement rise up out of him.
“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ll be a great husband.”
Manuel and Ida got married one month later in the church. She was a year younger than me. I guess they met at church too, and her dad was happy to have his firstborn married off—fewer mouths to feed. That would be Manuel’s job now.
Two weeks later, Manuel left for boot camp. After boot camp, I saw him for a little bit before he got shipped to school and then to somewhere in the Pacific Ocean to live on a big boat.
I was completely alone. My grandpa ignored me besides making sure I could never run away again by threatening to stop caring for Paulo if I tried, so I didn’t. I only lived inside my own mind and dreamed of someday joining Manuel somewhere far away.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Della
1940
THE WAR IN EUROPE HAD BECOME NATIONAL NEWS. OUR PRESIDENT said we didn’t have anything to do with it, so we would stay out of it, but, for some reason, recruitment had jumped in Colorado, posters splaying across windows. I guessed it had jumped all over the country. You know, just in case, right?
I did not cry that day. I told myself that if I cried, he would die. If I held it in, he would live. I’d always felt some strong form of intuition, and it always seemed to work the way I saw it, so when I gave Ernie a hug, I told him that I would see him soon enough and that if any of the little boys got in trouble, I would whip them with anything I could get my hands on. He laughed and gave me a hug.
My mom half hugged him and half shook him for signing up.
“You don’t have to do this. They haven’t called you yet. We’re not even in this war, idioto,” then she tapped his face again, this time holding her hand there in a caress. Ernie had grown tall. Some gene had passed its way down through the Chavez line and Ernie benefited from it. He stood a solid foot above my father and a foot and a half above my mother who was still able to give him two big slaps across the face when he told her that he had enlisted in the United States Army.
“You’re only half American, pendejo,” she said. Then she gave him one final slap across the face before he leaned down, lifted her little body off the floor, and hugged her until she cried, just a little. When he put her down, she wiped away the tears and said, “If you make it back here, I’m going to kick the living shit out of you, Ernesto. If you don’t, I’m going to kick the living shit out of your father for not locking you up in the cellar.”
She had somehow found a giggle in her voice. And then had somehow found a smile. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pushed him on the train that would take him east to some humid place in Missouri for boot camp.
My father just stood and watched. When Ernie boarded the train, he looked back and waved at all of us. The steam engine kicked into gear, and Ernie waved as the train drove off. Later that night, I found my father in the corner of our newly purchased store stacking piles of grain and salt so high that if one fell, it could knock him out cold.
I think he missed the fields since we sold our land, but I don’t think he missed the worry of ranching, the stress of the yield, or the unpredictability of the weather or the random sickness that could kill a herd of cattle. I knew at that moment, however, that he would have walked the fields and dug his hands into the dirt. He cried in the corner, a soft whimper insulated by the large sacks of salt and grain.
I put my hand on his shoulder. He touched it with his. I was always his favorite child, I had thought, but in that moment, I realized something. A parent’s favorite child will always be the one they might lose. He could lose Ernie, his oldest boy, and that made him love him the most.
“I can help in the store now, dad. I’m almost done with school. When I graduate, I can work here with you,” I told him.
He lifted his eyes up to me and stood. He put his hands on my shoulders hard like he was trying to push me into the floor.
“This will never be your store, Della. Someday you will tell me about things that you have done, and I will be amazed, and I will believe it all,” he said.
MY MOM WOULD TELL ME someday, maybe when her breast cancer came on strong, that my father was the best man she had ever met in her life. She would tell me that when she saw him, she fell in love with him immediately. It wasn’t his dashing good looks, she would note. He had rough skin and somewhat of a pock-marked face that had gotten that way after he had suffered through a few years of large pimples, leaving his cheeks and his forehead rough with divots, scarred from those years of his life when his friends in the field would make fun of him and call him names like boil man or lumpy.
My mom was beautiful. She had coral-colored skin with black-as-night hair. She would tell you she was full Indian, but when asked what tribe, she would say, “We’re long away from knowing that stuff. We’re long away from that. My mother said we were Utes. My father said we were slave Indians. All I know is I’m full Indian from New Mexico and I don’t know what I should know about all of that stuff.”
She would tell me that when she saw my father for the fi
rst time, he was kneeling in the middle of the street as horses and shitty old Ford Model Ts zoomed by him. He called to a scraggly hound who had never been truly loved—matted hair melding together with bald spots falling on sharpened ribs that poked through his skin and coat could tell you that. He knelt and called to the mangy dog. People driving by harassed him. They honked. They told the stupid spic to get out of the road. He didn’t. He stayed on his knees until the dog came to him. Then he scooped it up, ran off the road, and found water and scraps from the butcher for the dog.
She didn’t see him in town for months after that but when she did, he was standing sweaty and covered in salt next to the driveway where farmers came and bought day help.
“Shovel pig shit. Who wants in?” the farmer said.
Some full white man, she would say, asked what the wages would be and when the farmer told him, he walked way. “I’m not shoveling pig shit for that little money.”
“I’ll do it,” Francisco said. Before the man asked his name, he had jumped into the back of his trunk, sat down, and smiled.
She’d tell you that, at first, she didn’t know what to think of him. She’d never seen a man like this before. Where she grew up, the men were beaten down so badly by the United States and liquor that standing up, at times, took too much effort.
That day she waited for him to get dropped off again. With her light skin and dark eyes, she told people she was Irish. This didn’t help her case too much back then, but it helped her clear a few hoops. Sugar. Coffee. Milk. She held those things in her hands and waited for my dad to come back.
When he did, she walked up to him and said, “Shoveling shit is not a good job.”
He smiled at her, and this is when she saw his dimples rise out from the pock marks and his eyes glow just from looking at her. She’d seen versions of that look that men gave her, but this one was kinder, softer, full of admiration.
“It’s a job,” he said. “I’ve shoveled enough shit now to buy land out there across the plains where its cheap and where the government is basically giving it away for nothing. Want to marry me and live there with me? We could have a family.”
She would tell you that his brashness turned her off immediately, but that is a lie. She loved how brave he was, how honest, and how sincere.
“Okay, if I can have one cow for milk,” she said. That cow would later become Ernie’s cow. “And if you will always let the wild grasses grow.”
ERNIE RODE AWAY ON THE train. My father cried in the shop. And my mom stayed in the kitchen and cooked fried steak for the family. She made a plate for Ernie. No one touched it. We ate, praying that someday soon he would join us again.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Della
1941
MY MOM SAT ON THE PORCH AND WATCHED THE ROAD AND looked toward the east every dawn and every dusk. The Colorado plains reached out toward the east. The few crops we still had came back. The wild grasses grew so tall that my mom and I could walk through them and disappear in the hair of the earth’s scalp.
“I’m just watching watching the sky,” she’d say.
“You’re watching for the mailman, mama,” I’d say.
“Callete tu boca, Della,” she’d say over and over again. “Your mouth will only get you in trouble.” Then she would go back to watching the long, dirt road that led to Ernie somehow.
I had been writing essays to get into schools back east. I’d find their addresses in a huge book at the library, send them a letter for information, wait two months for their responses, and then fill out any information they asked me to, send the letter back, and then wait again. I only had the option to apply to the oldest schools on the east coast because the book had been printed thirty years before I was born. There were hundreds of newer, easier to get into colleges that were scattered across the east coast and the rest of the country, but I had absolutely no clue about any of that.
A letter came that day. I jumped up, hoping that it would be from one of the universities. I thought about those letters every damned day. I dreamt about them. Once I had a dream that I was one of those letters. I began my journey on the shoreline, felt hot in the hands of the mail deliverer that picked me up from a desk in a college admissions office, though I pictured the office to look more like the interior of the local drug store, but what did I know? I traveled in cars and trains across the country until I hit Trinidad and was placed in Mr. Edmond’s hand and delivered to our front door one hot afternoon. I had become that traveling letter of hope. That’s what all of those letters had become to me.
That day though, Mr. Edmonds did not smile when he jumped out of his ratty old truck that doubled as his mail truck and feed truck. He held a letter in his hand and had seemed to slow down the closer he got to our porch. My mom, the quickest person I had ever met in my entire life, stood up, placed her hands on her hips, and yelled, “Turn around, Mr. Edmonds, turn around, and get the hell off our property. I don’t want your goddamned letter. Turn around and walk away, or I will get Francisco’s shotgun and I will shoot your hand straight off your arm.”
“Sorry, Benita,” Mr. Edmonds said. “Legally, I have to deliver this. I will just put it right here.” He believed my mom’s threat. He was smarter than I had ever given him credit to be. He placed the letter on a wooden post and ran back to his truck and drove away.
My mom couldn’t do it, so I went and opened it. It was not a letter of hope that had traveled from colleges in the east. When I read it, which I would have had to do anyway for my family, for the first time in my life—like all those people who think they’re so damned poetic say—part of me died too.
My mom never read that letter the day on the porch. She saw my face, and then she did something I never expected her to do. She walked slowly over to me, knelt down on the ground, wrapped her arms around me, and cried with me. She was silent, a skill very foreign to her, and when we finally moved, she grabbed the letter, walked with me to the house, placed the letter on the front table, took me to bed, and lay with me until our tears dried up the next morning. The most silent moments of my entire life were spent in her arms that night.
In the late afternoon, my father came inside. He saw the letter, and though his English wasn’t perfect, he made out what it said. He howled into the night, and found us in bed, clutching my little brothers around his waist and then disappearing into the darkness of the house with them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Della
1941
I WENT TO SCHOOL, ALL THE WAY THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL, something very rare for a rural half Indian and half Spanish rancher’s daughter to do back then, but I did, and then I left. I left in 1941, a twenty-year old girl on a train bound for the east coast.
I stood on the inside flap of The Pinon, the Trinidad High School Yearbook, in a photo parallel to the principal and equal to his photo in size. I stared off the page, toward the Atlantic, under the words: Most Likely to Succeed. It took me longer than I wanted. But raising enough money just to get myself out there, to have enough to pay for food for a few months before I could get a job at college—all that extra shit took time. But I did it.
Most of my classmates didn’t. Most of them got stuck there, breaking their backs and dying young of liver disease or heart failure from the lard that made its way into every tortilla, into every batch of refried beans, and into the fry bread that always seemed to make it onto the table for every meal. The booze killed a lot of them. But goddamnit, I got my little ass out of Las Animas County.
I boarded a train at the station in the middle of Trinidad. I sat there, before the train began to move, before the whistle blew, before the fire had been lit, and before I really believed I was doing what I was doing. My mom and dad sat outside the window of the train and waved. My dad battled to hold back his tears, and my mom elbowed him in the belly. I could see her mouth move.
“Don’t be a joto, Francisco,” she said.
When the train started to move away from them, I saw her
duck her head onto his chest. He wrapped one arm around her and led her into the station. I did not cry. I felt that I should, but I didn’t feel sad. I would miss them, of course, but the only thing I felt was so much goddamned excitement to see the rest of the country and go to school and be around other girls who wanted to learn that I could barely keep my ass in my seat.
Trinidad’s short buildings were so worn from the beating of the winds and the snow that sat wet and powerful on them for five long months each winter; they all looked so ancient already. The roads were cracked, and the cars were old too. There was so little money in that town.
“Adios,” I said.
When the town got smaller—sitting like a tiny skin blotch in a valley of speckled flesh—I felt like I had boarded a train out of a town where time didn’t exist and where it would never move forward, stuck in a future that would never change and stuck in a past that had never changed.
Everything in me knew that the turning wheels of the train would take me to a place where time moved forward. Where life didn’t begin, live, and die at the bottom of a mine, or with hands under the belly of a cow, or with a rake on the top of the fickle fields. A smile rose up from my gut and stayed permanently on my face as I barreled toward Denver where I would board a much larger train and head east to Mount Holyoke College for Women. The east was a different world. It was the place where the stock market rose and fell and where the President lived.
WHEN I FINALLY GOT TO Mount Holyoke, I walked through a metal arch, twisting above me. Black metal flowers dropped down on both sides and were connected by two large pillars of handcrafted stone that shot up out of the earth like guards welcoming me in. The gates under the arch had been flung open as if they waited for me to join them.
Despite my excitement, there was a part of me that wanted to turn around. Me, Della Chavez, I did not deserve this welcoming. I had come from the stalks, stables, and land of the KKK. Hadn’t some of that come with me, lining my dress or covering my shoes, or hanging on to my skin? Wouldn’t everyone see that? I touched the gates. They felt hard, just as hard as the metal that had been molded and wrapped around our fences at home. This grounded me, like I stood on the same earth as I did thousands of miles away at home.
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 13
