Rain of Gold

by Victor Villaseñor

  “Not one word,” whispered Doña Guadalupe to her family. “Did you hear me, Carlota? Not one word.”

  “But why do you say that just to me, Mama?”

  “I’m not saying this to just you, Carlota, but to everyone,” said her mother.

  “Exactly,” said Doña Manza, making the sign of the cross over herself without even realizing it until it was too late. “Remember,” she said, “to respect a fallen star takes much more dignity than to admire the rising sun.”

  None of the girls said a word, and the silence grew out over the plaza. Most of the people in the plaza didn’t really like their ex-mayor but, still, the sight of him touched their hearts. They wanted to see him strong so they could feel good about hating him.

  And the power, the arrogance with which his wife Doña Josefina walked beside her husband to the little decorated altar, moved the people’s hearts.

  “She’s a good woman,” said Doña Manza, wiping her eyes.

  “Yes, she is,” said Doña Guadalupe. “She’s el eje de su familia.”

  Hearing this, Lupe was amazed. There could be no higher compliment for any woman. El eje was the center of the home; it was the hub from which all the spokes of power flowed out to the rest of the family, like the umbilical cord from a mother to her child.

  “Well,” said Don Manuel, having shuffled his way up to the little altar, “bring, your bride up, Don Tiburcio, and let’s get this service going.”

  He tried to smile, showing the people that he was still a man to be reckoned with, but his lower jaw quivered and he just wasn’t able to bring it off.

  Lupe and the girls cried all through the ceremony. Don Tiburcio and Sophia stood side by side, looking so beautiful. And sometimes it looked like Don Manuel just didn’t seem to know where he was, or what he was supposed to do next. At one of these awkward moments, Don Victor reached out, handing the ex-mayor a glass that looked like it was full of clear water.

  “Excuse me,” said the proper little man. With both hands trembling, he took the glass and sucked down half of its contents.

  It was straight tequila, and Don Manuel had never drunk alcohol in his life. It hit him like a lightning bolt, burning all the way down to his stomach. His eyes bulged and he gasped for air, letting out a blood-curdling cry.

  Josefina rushed to his side, but the ex-mayor shoved her away, bellowing like a bull.

  “¡Ay Chihuahua!” he roared. “That’s fire! Give me another!”

  “No!” begged his wife. “It will kill you, querido.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Don Victor poured him another glass over his wife’s protests and, drinking this glass down, he bellowed again.

  “Tequila! The blood of los mejicanos! ¡Ayyyy Chihuahua!”

  The people laughed, and the ex-mayor, who’d come out of his house smelling of death, now stood up straight, performing the rest of the wedding with gusto.

  After the ceremony, the music started and the women gathered by the bride, and Doña Guadalupe hugged Sophia close. The men gathered around the groom, and they finished off the bottle of tequila.

  It was getting late, so Sophia and Don Tiburcio said their goodbyes, mounted their two little mules, and they were off on the quick-footed animals, going out of the plaza and up to the main road. They were going over the mountain to Batopilas for their honeymoon.

  “Be careful,” shouted Doña Guadalupe. “Don’t camp where you can get surprised by bandits!”

  “Don’t worry,” shouted Don Tiburcio. “I’ll take good care of Sophia, Doña Guadalupe.”

  “God be with you!” called her mother.

  Lupe watched after her sister and her husband, looking so beautiful on their little, decorated white mules. They reminded her of the little clouds that she’d seen pass hand-in-hand, like silent lovers over the cathedral rocks.

  The following day, Victoriano took his father up to the base of the cliffs to show him where he and Don Benito had found the pocket of gold. That night, they all got together under the ramada and had a family meeting.

  “As I see it,” said Don Victor, “Victoriano is right. It’s going to be too difficult to uncover that pocket, so we’re going to have to work the waste below the mine. And in the meantime, I’ll go down the mountain and find work so I can pay for our food; that way we can save all the gold we find.”

  “Can I go with you?” asked Carlota. “I’ll cook and clean for you while you work.”

  “What do you think?” asked Don Victor, turning to their mother.

  “Oh, Mama, please, say yes!” screamed Carlota.

  Doña Guadalupe smiled, figuring that maybe this way her husband would be sure to return. “All right,” she said.

  Don Victor opened his arms. “Then you’ll come,” he said to Carlota, and she flew to his arms.

  “How much gold will we need before we can go?” asked María.

  “That will depend,” said their father, “on how we decide to go—by ship up the Sea of Cortez, or by train up to Nogales. But anyway, the more gold we have, the easier it will be so we don’t get stuck like so many thousands at the border.”

  “Remember,” said their mother, “Doña Manza’s sister is still at Nogales, with no means to get across.”

  “I figure,” said their father, “that if we’re lucky and work hard, it’s going to take about a year.”

  “A year? But the bandits will come and steal whatever we got!” said María.

  “No, they won’t, I swear it!” said Victoriano. Ever since his encounter with death, he’d become braver instead of more cautious.

  Don Victor looked at his son. “No, mi hijito, your mother and I don’t want you being brave. We want you staying alive.” He breathed. “Tell me,” he said, “what do people do up here with the rats when they store their corn?”

  “Well, you board the corn up the best you can, but you just figure that the rats will take so much,” said Victoriano.

  “Exactly,” said their father. “And that’s what we got to do here. We have to hide our gold so when the bandits come, they’ll find just a little corn and go away without harming us.”

  “Will that work, just giving them a little corn?” asked Lupe.

  These were the first words that she’d spoken. Everyone laughed.

  “Oh, no, mi hijita,” said her father, “by corn, I meant a little gold.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, blushing.

  The following morning Lupe went down the hill and across the creek to the piles of waste below the mine with her father, Victoriano, Carlota, María and Esabel. They worked all day in the hot, bright sun, pulling and digging and searching for good ore. At the end of the day they had a couple of piles of rock, about the size of a cow’s head, and they lugged it down the barranca, across the creek, and up the hillside through the deserted village to their home. There, behind the boulder, their father and Victoriano and Esabel pounded the rock with hammers until it was all down to the size of peanuts.

  After dinner, Lupe and her mother and sisters went at the peanut-sized ore in their dark stone metates, grinding it with their fist-sized stones called tejolotes until it was down to coarse sand. That night, Lupe went to bed with raw knuckles and tired arms and legs. Working the ore from sun to sun was a lot harder than anyone had anticipated. They were trying to do by hand what the American mining company had done with a huge crushing plant and strong chemicals and thousands of hands.

  The following morning, Lupe stayed behind and she helped her mother and sisters pound the ore with the big, iron spikes that they’d found in the ruins of the American crushing plant. They worked under the ramada like a little factory of women while her brother and father and Esabel went down the hill to work the piles of waste again.

  By noon, Lupe and her mother and sisters had the ore down to fine sand, and they now began the long, tedious process of washing it in flat pans by swishing it around and around with a little water and washing off the dirt and lighter elements.

 
By the time the men came lugging up the hill with more rock from the waste that afternoon, Lupe and her mother and sisters had a little color. It was as yellow and as shiny and fine as the gold taken from a stream that had taken nature millions upon millions of years to reduce from rock to fine sand.

  “Well,” said Don Victor, “you keep working like this every day, and I think we can do it. And when I leave, I’ll take this little bit of color with me and buy some mercury to send back up with Don Tiburcio so you can clean the gold completely and form little nuggets. The nuggets will be easier to hide from the bandits, and also easier to take with us when we go north.”

  They looked at the tiny bit of gold that they’d accumulated. After two days’ work it was smaller than the size of a thumbnail. Lupe thought of the thirty mules with two bars of gold each that the Americans had taken out of the canyon three times a year, and she thought of the whole pocket of gold nuggets that Victoriano and Don Benito had found under the waterfall. She thought of the new tunnel of gold that Manos had said he’d seen with veins as big around as his arm, and she felt that they were so small—inadequate—and yet, very determined.

  “Yeah, we can do it!” Lupe heard her father say once again. “And who knows, maybe as we dig down deeper into the waste, we’ll find better ore.”

  The weeks passed and on some days Lupe would accompany her father and brother and Esabel to the waste. Lupe’s deer would go with her and he’d stay by her all day long, nibbling off the vines and brush that had grown back over the entrance of the mine.

  The people saw them working the waste, so they got baskets and hammers and joined them. Soon, every day, there were well over a dozen people working the huge pile of rock, looking like tiny dark ants against the towering barrancas of broken rock.

  Late one afternoon, some dogs went after Lupe’s deer. The young buck was fast, and he fended off the first two dogs, but the others would have gotten him if Lupe’s father and brother hadn’t thrown rocks at them. The people who owned the dogs got angry, and Don Victor told Lupe that she’d have to take her deer home.

  “Lupe,” said Don Victor that evening after dinner, “come, let’s go outside so we can talk.”

  Lupe glanced at her mother, but then followed her father out of the ramada. She watched him bring out a little sack of tobacco and a booklet of cigarette papers. He loosened the strings of the little sack and tapped the tobacco out of its mouth. The leafy brown tobacco looked like a fat worm as it gathered on the thin white paper.

  “You know,” he said, rolling the cigarette and licking it with the tip of his tongue, “I once had a little deer, too.” He put the sack of tobacco in his shirt pocket and he brought out a big wooden match.

  “Was it a fawn?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes, she was just a little fawn. I raised her with a bottle, so she grew up thinking I was her mother. She followed me everywhere and slept with me every night until she got too big to bring into the house.”

  “That’s what I used to love to do with my deer, too,” Lupe said excitedly. “And what happened to her, Papa?” Suddenly realizing she’d never used the word “Papa” before.

  Her father blew out a long cloud of blue-white smoke. “Unfortunately, she got too big and started to roam and some dogs attacked her, maiming her.”

  “Oh, no!” said Lupe.

  “Yes, mi hijita,” he said, “and this is what we have to talk about.”

  A cold chill gripped Lupe, taking the breath out of her.

  “Mi hijita,” repeated her father, “I had to take my deer up into the mountains and let her go.”

  Lupe could feel her heart pounding. She just knew where this conversation was going.

  “It took me three weeks just to nurse my deer back to health,” said her father. “And after that she had a limp and couldn’t run fast anymore. So my older brother told me that I should turn her loose, but I didn’t want to because l loved her. But my brother insisted and so did my mother, telling me that my deer had a better chance in the wild where there were other deer. So, I finally agreed.

  “My brother and I took my deer and we travelled for two full days. We saw coyote signs and bear markings but still, we continued higher into the mountains. I really wondered if my little deer would be any safer here among these beasts than she would be among the dogs in town. But my brother told me to notice how strong she was getting and to watch her ears and see how she flicked them when we stopped. He assured me that she would get wild up here again and would be able to protect herself much better than in town where dogs and coyotes were so plentiful and she’d become too tame for her own good.

  “That evening some deer came by our camp, and my little deer just ran off and joined them as if it were the most natural thing for her to do. Seeing that, it was hard, I tell you, but l loved her and I knew I’d done the right thing.”

  Don Victor stopped. He saw that Lupe had tears in her eyes.

  “You’re trying to say that I should turn my deer loose, too, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I saw what happened with those dogs. Today could’ve been—”

  “But my deer is male!” she said. “He has horns and he can defend himself!”

  “Yes,” said her father, “but no deer is a match for a pack of dogs. And, also, these horns that he can defend himself with are the very reason he might hurt you some day.”

  “But he’d never hurt me! He loves me!” she said.

  “Mi hijita,” he said, “love can only go so far. He’s a mature animal now and he’s in season. He needs to find a mate or, believe me, he’ll turn on you as surely as the sun comes up.”

  “You tricked me!” she yelled.

  “But querida, I love you, and I know what a male deer can do when he’s in season.”

  “No!” she yelled. “You left us! You have no right to tell me what to do!”

  And she turned, running off to get her deer so her father couldn’t take him away from her.

  Don Victor sat there, stunned. Never in all his life had he ever seen so much hate in a little girl. And he knew that he should get up and run after her and thrash her with a belt for being disrespectful, but he was just too brokenhearted to move.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  And so her heart was ready to break once again but then, to her surprise, each new peril only showed her a deeper mystery in this dream called life, la vida.

  The right eye of God was just coming up over the jagged horizon when Carlota came out of their lean-to. She was wearing her new dress, and she’d put white powder on her face, neck and hands and red coloring on her lips and cheeks. Seeing her, everyone burst out laughing.

  “Don’t you dare laugh at me!” commanded Carlota. “I’m going with Papa, and I want to look civilized!”

  “But,” said Victoriano, trying not to laugh, “you look like a Tarahumara Indian dressed for a funeral!”

  “No, a clown!” laughed María.

  “Enough,” said their father, bringing up one of the little mules that he’d borrowed from his son-in-law.

  Don Tiburcio was also going down the mountain with them. He was still below, saying goodbye to his mother who wasn’t feeling well.

  “You look just fine, mi hijita,” said Don Victor to Carlota. “But I think that you should maybe save your best clothes and your fine face-paints for when we get closer to town, querida. You see, we’ll be walking through nothing but jungle for days and we’ll only pass a few little rancherías here and there.”

  “Who cares?” said Carlota, eyes dancing with gusto. “I want to look my best when we go out of the canyon so Lydia and Rose-Mary will choke with envy!”

  Don Victor burst out laughing. “All right, if that’s what you want,” he said. He turned to his wife who was standing by the bougainvillea at the entrance of the ramada.

  Lupe was at her mother’s side. Seeing her father turn toward them, she hid behind her mother. Ever since her father had tried to take her deer away from her, Lupe had been avoiding him, thi
nking that he was, indeed, that evil, bear-like spirit she’d seen enter their canyon that first day.

  “Well,” said Don Victor to his wife, “I guess we’re ready to go.” He took a big breath. “It will take us at least five days to get down and then Don Tiburcio another week to get back with the supplies. He’s a brave man.”

  He reached out to take his wife in his arms. Lupe moved away so he wouldn’t touch her.

  “Lupe,” said her mother, “now come around here and hug your father goodbye, too.”

  But Lupe wouldn’t move. Doña Guadalupe reached around and got hold of Lupe by her left ear, pulling her around to the front. Lupe cringed in pain.

  “Oh, please,” said Don Victor, “she doesn’t have to hug me if she doesn’t want to.”

  “But she wants to,” said her mother, twisting Lupe’s ear all the more. “She has to understand that you are right about her deer. Now hug your father goodbye,” said Doña Guadalupe, pulling Lupe about.

  “For the love of God!” said Don Victor. “Let go of her, woman!” He yanked his wife’s hand away from Lupe, taking his youngest into his arms. “Oh, mi hijita,” he said, “I love you so much. I’m sorry this happened.”

  Feeling her ear freed, Lupe hugged her father, crying desperately. Doña Guadalupe smiled, realizing that she’d gotten what she wanted.

  Just then, Don Tiburcio came up the pathway with the other mule. “It’s time to go,” he said anxiously.

  Quickly, he took Sophia aside and told her of his mother’s condition and how to attend to her.

  Don Victor told María and Esabel goodbye, then went over to Victoriano. They looked at each other at arms’ length, as men do, and then hugged, heart-to-heart, in a big abrazo.

  “We must hurry,” said Don Tiburcio. “We have a lot of ground to cover before dark!”

  Don Victor let go of his son, threw another kiss to his wife, and started up the path with Carlota at his side. Socorro got hold of her two boys and started up the pathway, too.