by Nan Cuba
“I hope I’m not bothering you,” she says, though she’s come during my office hours. She slides into the chair I’ve chosen for its discomfort; guests don’t stay long when their seat wobbles and feels like pavement.
“How’s your mother,” I ask, afraid Cornelia’s expecting special treatment. I can’t help with financial aid or enrollment in a sophomore course without its completed prerequisite. Still, it’ll be hard to tell Terezie Jr. no.
“As Grandma says, we’re ‘made from the same dough.’ Which reminds me,” she pulls a box out of her book bag, “Grandma wanted me to give you this.”
A shoebox tied with grosgrain ribbon, from Albina. I haven’t seen her in twenty years. Josef died a while back, but I can’t remember when. “Does Albina live here?”
“Uncle Cyril set her up in one of those country clubs for old people. As she’d say, ‘It is going on good so far.’ I say, I’m going to miss Babička like hell when we move. Now, open it,” she adds, pointing. “I’m starving.”
I almost cry when I see the kolaches: prune, peach, poppy seed. People sell what they call kolaches, but I’ve never found any like Albina’s: pastry somewhere between biscuit and pancake; butter, sugar, eggs, almond extract harmonious as a Kachina dance song.
Cornelia reaches for one of the poppy seed. “To your health,” she says, and I almost drop the box. She closes her eyes while she chews.
I pick a peach one and picture Sam at the piano with Terezie, their songs this delicious. I take a bite and see Cyril swinging his hoe in a cotton field, then Sam knee-deep in the creek holding a gasping bass.
“Speaking of health,” Cornelia says, “you’ve heard mine’s on its final countdown?”
“Yes, and I’m sorry,” I sputter. “But I understand you’re getting a transplant.”
“It’s the only wish on my Christmas list. I’m being embarrassingly good this year.”
“When are you and your parents moving to Rochester?” Is she still taking classes, I wonder. What’s going on with Kurt and Hugh? Does she blame me for the hold up? Is that why she’s here?
“We’re hoping I won’t turn blue before the semester’s over. Then it’s ta-ta to Texas.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” I say, standing, my discomfort obvious. “Please thank your grandmother for the kolaches.”
“Mom’s right,” she says, grabbing her bag. “You’re ‘one tough customer’.” She stands, throws a strap over her shoulder. “But I see why everybody likes you.”
She definitely wants something.
“You knew Mom in high school. I’ll bet she kicked ass, right?”
I picture Terezie in her brogans, clomping along the hallway. “Yes. Your mother was formidable.”
“Afraid of you, though.”
Me? I grip the desk, nudging my coffee cup, catching it as a few drops spill.
“Legendary, is what Mom says.” Cornelia shrugs. “Fact is, you’d never pack a house, but I guess I could see that.”
She moves to the doorway then turns, her amethyst eyes incredible. “Thanks for letting me crash your part-ay.” She whistles, her raised eyebrows mocking. “Hey, I had to see what you were like, okay? Can I come back?”
“Of course. You’re welcome anytime.” I wave, trying to remember if I’ve ever said these words before.
CHAPTER 6
1961-1963 AND 1913
IN SEPTEMBER, the high school principal’s office called each time Sam was absent. Sometimes my mother lied, assuring the secretary that he was sick at home. Other times she said, “I have absolutely no idea where he is. Why don’t you try to find him?” Sam always freely admitted where he’d gone, places like the Austin bat caves or my grandparents’ house at Rockport; girls, of course, were involved. “You don’t care what this does to me,” my mother would argue, red-faced. My father’s response was typical, another question: “What would happen if you needed Mama and couldn’t find her?” Finally, one night he whipped Sam, then grounded him.
When my father called Sam into the master bedroom, I buried my face in my pillows. I could still hear everything, since my room was adjacent.
“Listen,” my father said when Sam protested. “You’re right.” He cleared his throat. “You’re almost grown. I don’t have much time left to teach you.” He sighed. “As for what I’m about to do, it’s hard. But that doesn’t keep me from doing what I’m supposed to.” He walked several steps. “Let’s say this has to do with the way you set priorities.”
I imagined welts, my brother’s flesh swollen, stinging. I counted five licks, then ten. Sam made no sound, and my father kept going—eleven, twelve, thirteen. Still, Sam was silent. After twenty licks, my father was panting. “Go to your room,” he wheezed.
As Sam crossed the hall, my father closed himself in the bathroom. The sound of running water couldn’t drown out his weeping as I tiptoed past, toward my brother. But Sam’s door was closed, so I stood listening, then I called him.
“Go away!” he growled. “Mind your own goddamn business!” Then something hit the door. I ran.
For the next two weeks, Sam dutifully obeyed the rules for his grounding, returning home after school, reading alone in his room. The last night, our whole family relaxed. At dinner, my father complimented him while he sat, watching.
But a month later, the high school called again. That night, when my mother told my father, he slumped, moaning, “Good God.” He stepped backward, staring into the corner. “Even a dog learns after a while.”
On each child’s birthday, my mother walked us three blocks to a neighbor’s front yard, and we sang “God Bless America” as we raised the American flag, its sagging stripes curled around the pole in the heat, a limp swirl of cubist patriotism. When Kurt, ignoring Sam, would tell Hugh and me to salute, my palm reluctantly rose to my chest, while Hugh would imitate a Boy Scout, three fingers pressing his forehead, his elbow a wing. Saturdays in the den, Kurt made even Sam stand during the national anthem when the television signed on, its circular test pattern an icon. Sundays were sacred, filled with enough ritual to appease any god. After church services, we ate lunch at my grandparents’ (Ruby cooked, Otis served, early on), took an hour nap, then went to the farm: Jesus and Granddaddy ruled.
From the time Kurt, Sam and Hugh each turned twelve until the month they left for college, they underwent a puberty rite as pre-determined as a Coahuiltecan ritual. From the first Monday of summer vacation until the Friday before school opened in September, my brothers spent their days learning regimen and fortitude chopping cotton at the tenant farm.
Sometimes my mother allowed me to come when she dropped them off, their meatloaf sandwiches in paper sacks squashed under their muscled arms. One morning when Kurt told Sam it was his turn to unlatch the gate, Sam said, “You wish,” and Kurt nudged him into the fence. On the other side of the creek, a rusty pickup sat parked next to the field. Cyril Cervenka, third generation of the family that worked the farm, stood at the field’s opposite corner, his movements detectable only when his hoe’s blade glinted a modified Morse code. As our car pulled away, Sam snatched Kurt’s lunch and ran toward the creek. Kurt shouted, “You’ll be sorry if I have to come after that.” My mother, used to their bantering, grateful to drop them in what amounted, in her mind, to a giant playpen, shook her head as she turned onto the main road.
At ten o’clock, Sam sat against a huisache, his elbows propped on bent knees, plopping mustang grapes into his mouth. Kurt and Cyril worked their hoes along adjacent rows of cotton plants. Sam’s right palm stung where blisters swelled with fluid.
On this, their second day, Sam and Kurt more than likely hadn’t weeded as many rows combined as Cyril had managed by himself. It really chaps my ass, Sam thought, imagining the coming months. Slaving was for people who didn’t crater in 115 degrees and could do the same goddamn thing over and over without puking. For a lousy quarter an hour! He’d complain, but the timing wasn’t right. Kurt had started dating Miss Fuck-Me-Please, and even th
ough Sam had been lying low, last week he’d gotten in hot water again. This time, he’d pawned Mom’s Lalique bowl (found in a hall cabinet, like trash for Goodwill; how was he supposed to know?) so he could see Jerry Lee Lewis in Lubbock. Our father didn’t whip him—Sam would gut up for that again only if he had to—but he got so mad during his responsibility speech (that and duty, his two favorite words), Sam had decided he’d go along again for awhile. Until now.
“Sam,” Kurt yelled, “if your butt isn’t next to these plants by the time I count to ten, this’ll be…” here he shook his fist, flexed his jaw, “in your face.”
Sam flipped a grape then looked up, catching it on his tongue. He shut his eyes, chewed, and positioned his shoulder blades among the huisache’s angles of gnarly bark. This ought to be fun, he thought. Better than breaking our backs over those damn plants.
“One…two…three...”
Cyril’s hoe swung up, down, hitting the ground in rhythmic clicks. A crow landed on the cedar fence, cocked its head, bobbed, cawed.
“Four…five…”
Sam squeezed a grape until the pulp popped loose, then sucked.
“Six…seven…eight…”
Cyril stepped forward, chopped, stepped, chopped, his straw hat’s brim tilted against the sun. A dishrag’s dripping corners hung below the hat, water and sweat beading in his eyebrows, soaking the shoulders of his long-sleeved shirt.
“Nine…ten.”
Sam rose, smiling, to meet his brother; he raised his fists. As he deflected Kurt’s punch, he skipped sideways; Kurt moved in corresponding steps. Each time their bodies rubbed, bumped, or jabbed one another, Sam’s smaller frame swelled. He teased, winking, nodding between dares: “Come on.”
Kurt’s face reddened in blotches; his grunts and pants increased with Sam’s taunts. The pummeling against Sam’s stomach and cheek hurt but was expected. Kurt, taller, fifteen pounds heavier, usually won these bouts. As Sam was forced off balance, Cyril’s elbows pumped at plants a few rows over, that hat’s wet skirt the last thing Sam saw before he went down.
Afterward they stood, weak, breathless, until Kurt brushed at dirt clods stuck to his jeans, then walked toward his row of weeds and cotton. “Too bad,” Sam shouted. “I was ready to chop again ‘til you came at me like that.”
Kurt reacted like Sam knew he would: He stopped, and he laughed. “You bastard,” he said. He wiped his hairline with the back of his hand, flipped sweat onto the dirt. Sam wheezed his giggle, clutched himself, toppled onto his side.
Cyril dropped his hoe, ambled toward the ‘49 Ford pickup parked next to the fence. He reached over the lowered tailgate, unscrewed the top of his tin cooler, turned the spigot and filled the lid. He sucked gulps, filled it again, set it on the truck’s fender. He removed his hat and the dishrag, drenched the cloth, bathed his face, his neck. He sat next to the cooler, his legs falling lazily open, and between more sips, he stared past the brothers at something invisible to Sam, something far away.
“Sam,” Kurt called, “come back to work and I’ll find a hanky for your head as cute as Cervenka’s.”
My biceps need work, Sam thought, and my chest could use some sun. He took off his t-shirt, draped it through a belt loop. He picked up his hoe, swinging at weeds with determined whacks, triceps straining.
“So, you think he’s queer, or what?” Kurt said as he chopped in the row next to Sam. Each nicked root echoed: tap.
At the end of the field, Cyril stood, poured, drank, his head tilted back. Sam imagined his belly filling with sluicy coolness.
He remembered seeing Cyril two years before in the high school hallway, his textbooks carried in a ratty briefcase and no noticeable friends, even though there’d been other Czech students. Wasn’t he in the band? The guy played basketball, for sure. Cyril’s quick fakes had been legendary.
Cyril repositioned his hat, brushed his palms across his jeans then ambled toward his hoe, which lay in a furrow near Sam. His face turned toward the barn, then forward again. He moistened his lips, stretched his arms behind his head, then above it, finally swinging his hands. The guy made walking a sport, Sam thought.
“Or maybe,” Kurt continued, “he’d rather screw one of his daddy’s sheep.” An eyebrow lifted; he scratched his head.
Sam knew Kurt wasn’t comfortable around Cyril—all that aloofness and ease in this crop-and-animal place. But insulting Cyril not only might be dangerous; it wasn’t right. “Shut up,” he said. He was sure Cyril had heard.
Sam worked alongside the others for an hour, this time without talking, their hoes’ clips and soil shuffling like soft brush beats. Sometimes one stretched, holding his breath, then released it, satisfying as a belch. Grasshoppers rattled free of the plants, chirring. Once when Sam tilted, arching his back, a buzzard circled three times, disappearing toward the railroad tracks.
o
The blisters on Sam’s hands throbbed. Sweat dribbled down his forehead, burning his eyes. When his nose dripped, he sneezed, dropped his hoe, wiped his face with his itchy t-shirt. He walked to the truck for a drink, the water tinny in its metal lid, quenching. Then he soaked his head, the water stinging his neck, shoulders. Oh, he thought, and put on his shirt.
Cyril leaned toward the cotton plants, his hat shadowing his face, that dishrag protecting his neck, his shirt-sleeved arms pumping, his body drifting. Like a damn machine, Sam thought. Kurt, on the other hand, swatted weeds like flies, his body all strains and jerks, the sun roasting his arms.
In a minute, they joined Sam at the truck. Kurt got a drink then opened the door, stepped, grunting, onto the running board, and grazed his hip on the gearshift knob as he threw himself across the seat. Too much Budweiser and armchair football, Sam thought.
After Cyril doused himself, he sat beside Sam. He stared, unblinking, toward the field’s opposite border at a silhouette of trees, a green mesa amidst the sky and scrub.
“See something?” Sam asked, peering.
“Great horned owl. Listen—”
“Shit, you can’t see that from here.” Crows—Sam had no idea how many—squawked like ducks. Another one appeared, plunked itself among the maze of limbs and leaves. “Those, genius, are crows,” he said.
Cyril seemed not to notice Sam. “Look, in the top branches of that middle sycamore. Its face is heart-shaped.”
Sam searched the center trees, each visible limb, trunk crook. “Man, there ain’t nothing there.” He shoved Cyril, who bumped the side of the truck.
Cyril waved a balancing arm, scowled. “The crows are diving at the owl because it eats their babies. I’d say there are five of them, gathered around him at the tank.”
“Tank?”
“The caliche cow pond on the other side of those sycamores and poplars.” He pointed, and as if commanded, the owl rose and flew, five crows darting, diving at its head, swatting with their stiff-legged feet, as it drifted forward.
Ten feet overhead, its body floated, a deformed moon swimming through blue. Its short wings agitated then stiffened, fluttering, then grew still.
Kurt stayed in Austin the next summer. When Sam arrived alone at the cotton field, Cyril might have already chopped a full row.
“How’s it going,” Sam would’ve said.
Cyril nodded then, his hat brim tracing a check mark. If he noticed Sam’s change to a long-sleeved shirt and gimme cap, he didn’t let it show. He clipped weeds again.
Sam got a hoe out of Cyril’s pickup, chopped along an adjacent row. Flipping short taps, he almost kept up. By Nugent and Pelton standards, Sam thought, Cyril was strange enough to get talked about, picked at like his own parents harped at him. But Cyril’s difference came from his foreignness, while Sam’s otherness was tied to “unacceptable” habits like telling what he honestly thought, remarks others labeled “disrespectful,” while he called them truths. “Sam’s on another wavelength,” our mother said.
Sam swung his hoe with minimum effort, having developed an instinct for where and how hard to ch
op. Each thump signaled a clip of Johnson grass. He squeezed a cotton boll, marveling that a bloom could be so soft, so fibrous, perfect as store-bought socks. An hour and three rows later, he took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve; sweat beaded again. He aimed his face into a rustle of wind as a jet unfurled a smoky rope.
Thirsty, he dropped his hoe, strolled toward the cooler. Unscrewing the top, he heard a shuffling come from the uncultivated area beyond the fence. A scrawny jackrabbit, short-haired with jumbo ears, tipped forward off its back legs, lifted its head, stared. Ears flattened, it lurched then loped—back legs folding, stretching—fifty feet along the fence. Between posts, it stopped, raised its stringy ears, checked Sam a second time. Another frantic toss of limbs, then it bounded across the field. Sam noticed small trails of worn undergrowth. Had rabbits made them? As if called, Cyril appeared.
“Are those some kind of animal trails?” Sam asked, pointing.
“Yeah,” Cyril said. He took the lid, poured.
“What kind?” Sam flicked a grasshopper off his sleeve.
“Rats and field mice. They’re all over.” Cyril bathed his head and neck with his dishrag.
Sam drank, pulled a Boy Scout scarf from his hip pocket, copied Cyril’s routine. “Saw a jack rabbit over there a minute ago.” Cyril’s eyes moved in close: telescopes. Sam shifted, his heel sinking into loosened earth. What was the guy thinking? Didn’t he ever blink?
“You ought to see them at night while my father’s plowing. Even the babies get at the loosened roots.”
“You ever eat any?”
“They’re too tough. But Mom and Terezie fry up cottontails with garlic and onions. For rabbit, we say králík.”
Sam pictured Cyril’s sister: tall, stomping, heavy-heeled shoes echoing, man’s shoes, he suspected. Her eyes, the same near purple as poker chips, glared at anything daring to block her way. A scar stretched from beneath her nose through her lip, from falling off a horse, someone had said, but Sam thought “cleft palate?” then “no, of course not,” and finally came to admire the lip’s puffiness, its exposed underside. Once, she leaned, listening to a friend; then out of some primitive, childlike need for stimulation, she stroked the rosy mark, back and forth, up to the nose, down again.
