Crossing Purgatory (19 page)

They spent that night trying to sleep in shifts but not sleeping, really, listening to the hum outside and inside, to the pop of grasshoppers dropping from the chimney vent into the fire that Benito had stoked. He, Teresa, Paloma, and Hanna occupied the placita. Thompson and the boys remained at the main house with the Upperdines. Teresa had pleaded with Benito to retrieve the boys, but he thought they would be frightened by the insects. On his arrival earlier from the field, grasshoppers had fallen from the sky like hail, pelting him and amassing on his hat, eating through the sweat-soaked brim until it literally fell from his head. By the time he had reached the compound, his shoes were caked with the crushed bodies of insects and a stench rose up from the ground where they stacked like cordwood against the walls and overflowed the trough. No, leave the boys with Captain Upperdine and Genoveva, he'd told Teresa, and she glared at him in silent assent, accusing, as if it were through some sin of his that the plague had been visited upon them.

Sometime around midnight, grasshoppers chewed through the window coverings and began flowing into the room, swarming over the tortilla basket. The women pounded them with brooms while Benito shuttered the window with planks.

Morning, the wind that normally rose with the sun remained still. Benito lay on his bed listening to the sound from outside, the incessant clicking of mandibles as grasshoppers in numbers uncountable moved about the placita and beyond, stripping the valley of the Purgatoire. No one had slept. Eyes focused on the roof beam, Benito tried to find reason for hope. Apart from sore muscles, a few cuts and scrapes, no one had been injured in their rush to salvage what they could of the harvest. As far as he knew, the pests were not harmful to the animals, carried no disease. They inflicted no permanent damage to the soil or to the grasslands; they could not stop the river from flowing, the sun from shining. No, they could have been visited by far worse a curse. Had the locusts arrived a month earlier, the crop too green to pick, nothing could have been saved. Yet, still, in the core of his feeling, he could not help but question whether the insects had been some kind of theological judgment on his emigration from the Plaza, a foretaste of trials to come. He could not allow himself to dwell on such thoughts. He rose and went out into the morning.

Everywhere, insects crawled, carpeting the enclosed compound a half-foot deep. His chickens moved among and over them, pecking, gorging. He inspected his storage shed, found the door held firm and he confirmed that for the most part what he had been able to cram inside remained unmolested. But outside, the hay bin sat empty, not a blade remaining of what had been left unprotected; and beside the bin, a pitchfork rested on the fence, its handle gnawed to the iron shaft by the grasshoppers attracted to the sweat-infused wood. His boots crunched as he walked across the placita, insects popping. Teresa and Paloma came to the door and watched with unbelieving eyes the scene before them. Paloma had left a lace shawl hanging to dry from the line and, scanning the courtyard, she looked at it now in horror. She marched across the courtyard and pulled the shawl from the line in tatters, shook off the grasshoppers, ran to her father, slipped and almost fell in the squash of insects. She held the rag to Benito's face, screaming, crying “Look. See what you've done?”

The fields denuded, the hillsides reduced to stubble, Benito crossed a naked, desolate landscape on his way to the Upperdine house to collect his boys. Birds everywhere, a feast. In his field, a coyote brazenly grazed on the grasshoppers, casually glancing up as he passed within three yards, its stomach distended, unable to flee even had it wished to. Benito inventoried the damage as he walked, an uncomplicated assessment. Nothing remained in the field.

M
IDMORNING THREE DAYS FOLLOWING THEIR
arrival, the locusts rose in a mass, hung like a low mist over the valley, and drifted southeast with the prevailing wind. Dead grasshoppers crushed under the feeding swarms littered the countryside, rotting in the sun. Birds, raccoons, skunks, all came into the fields day and night, but they could not eat fast enough and a great stench rose from the ground. Benito shoveled three cartloads of the insects from his courtyard and buried them in trenches he'd dug along the rows of his fruit trees. The trees, barren of leaves and fruit, gave the orchard the feel of midwinter. Benito prayed the trees would recover, and he fertilized with the remains of their tormenters.

Afterwards, Benito's chickens laid eggs with red yokes that smelled of the insects on which they had gorged, and the two boys and Paloma gagged the first time they tried to eat one. But Benito knew hard times were ahead and he refused to waste the eggs, so Teresa experimented with pepper flakes, goat cheese, anything to make them palatable.

Over the course of another few days, they cleared the areas surrounding their living quarters and the winds carried off the stink. Benito and Thompson retrieved the salvaged corn from indoors and they all resumed the work of preparing it for grinding. They toiled in grim silence, the adults among them fully aware of their lack. They'd all endured hungry winters, times of famine and scarcity, and the possibility again loomed on the horizon, dark and foreboding as the locust swarm. Grasshoppers had found their way into Upperdine's storage shed through knotholes in the planks and from beneath the ill-fitted door. Several bags of grain had been lost before Thompson noticed the incursion and plugged the entrances. On final tally, Benito calculated they had saved perhaps one-half of the harvest. Bitterly, he thought of his labor that past spring. While Upperdine had been on the trail, he'd worked to exhaustion, sowing more acres than he thought possible for one man. And now, half lost to pests. He'd brought his family, his young boys north for this? On the Plaza del Arroyo Seco, in times of trial, the community would have come together as one to pool their foodstuffs, suffer and survive together. No one would have greeted summer with fat on their bones. But the Americans he knew little about. Genoveva, he trusted and loved. John he respected. The others? Who knew how they would react to hardship?

Teresa understood Benito's worries, intuition and years of marriage conspired against his intent to keep private thoughts private. When they had completed the harvest, when they had surveyed the bags of meal, the sacks of dried pumpkin and squash they'd wrestled from the grasshoppers, calculated the dressed-out weight of the hogs and the ox they would fatten for slaughter, with what no one had a clue, when Benito and Teresa had returned home and slumped onto the porch step, discouraged and disillusioned, she put the question to him.

“Perhaps,” she paused, and continued, “perhaps best to return home. Maybe try again next year.”

Benito bristled. Home, she'd called it. After all his work to build the placita, it stung that she still considered the Plaza home. And he hated to hear spoken the thoughts he'd been silently debating.

“It is not possible. No.”

“You spoke before even thinking through what I've suggested,” Teresa said.

That was inaccurate. Benito had been mulling the option since the first grasshopper dropped onto the brim of his hat. But hearing Teresa proclaiming the Plaza “home” had set his mind. If they sought winter refuge in the Plaza, they would never return. One branch on the pear tree. How does one branch divide between two boys? Or, should Paloma never marry, two boys and one daughter? Here? Chickens, goats, good water, three rooms and more to build. A field, a garden. Return to his one branch on the pear tree?

“Never,” Benito repeated, more to himself than to Teresa. “I will be buried here, on this land.”

18

T
hey met at Upperdine's the following week to decide how the harvest would be split. After an early supper, light, just a thin soup and tortillas, as if already training their stomachs for shortage, Captain Upperdine stood and leaned heavily against the table.

“We'll require rationing,” Upperdine said, a foregone and obvious conclusion to Benito. But the Captain had assumed the role of trail-master in time of crisis, so Benito knew enough to not interrupt.

“Way I see it,” Upperdine continued, “only fair way is to split it up according to bodies. Now, the two young ones we'll count as one full growed man, so that means Benito gets a four-tenths share, two tenths for me and Genoveva, one tenth to Thompson.” Upperdine paused to glance at Hanna, her swollen belly. “Two and a half to the Lights and the final one-half to next spring's seeding.”

Finished, Upperdine looked from Benito to Thompson for approval. Benito remained silent, staring into his folded hands. The Ibarra family would take its allotment and make do.

“I don't require a full share,” Thompson said.

“That won't hardly do,” Upperdine said.

“I won't starve,” Thompson answered evenly. “Next spring, we have the Ibarra acreage as well as yours to put into production. We need additional seed corn.”

Thompson's tone was matter of fact, rational, and to Benito's ear perfectly logical. The man thought like a farmer, and Benito considered Thompson's foresight a virtue, but he also saw in his selfless gesture a certain ambition for the future that put Benito ill at ease.
We
need seed corn, he'd said. What were Thompson's plans? What were his deepest desires? Was he even conscious of them?

“It's settled, then,” Upperdine said. They rose from the table and the women, who had not spoken during the meeting, cleared dishes and later followed the men out onto the porch, the collective mood subdued, and listened to the distant chatter of insects, and other night songs, a bird calling, the high-pitched grunting of a frog. Benito thought how pleasant these familiar sounds compared to the terrible clicking of the locusts. Teresa began humming a slow, melodic tune, a lullaby, soothing and a little sad.

Hanna smiled and swayed gently, and massaged her stomach. Her eyes wandered from the porch and she pointed to the bare shadow of a shrub, leaves stripped by the grasshoppers. There, a chicken egg in the tangle of low branches, and she stepped from the porch and bent to retrieve it and stood abruptly, dropping the egg, splattering it. She turned toward Genoveva. Hanna nodded to her, and Genoveva went to Teresa and whispered something and the two women led Hanna away, toward the placita. At the edge of the lamplight, Teresa turned and motioned to Paloma.

“Come, you can be of help as well.”

Paloma looked with apprehension at her mother but rose and followed them into the night. Benito, too, had noticed the communication and accompanied them back to the placita, and drew water for them to heat, and collected clean rags. He set the rag bundle and one final bucket of water just outside the door where the women could retrieve them when the time came. With his thumb he made the sign of the cross above the lintel and then he rejoined Thompson and Upperdine and the others, who were completely oblivious to the pending delivery. When informed by Benito, Thompson jumped to his feet and started for the placita.

“Where do you hurry?” Benito called into the dark. “These things take time.”

Benito roomed his sons in with Captain Upperdine. On the porch, he found Joseph still sitting, back against the wall, legs extended out, hat pulled down over his eyes.

“Coming?” Benito asked.

Joseph at first ignored him, but when Benito did not leave, he lifted his brim to look out at Benito with one eye. “I'll just make do here.”

At the placita, Benito built a small fire beside the well and sat close beside it. Sometime late, the door of Hanna's quarters opened and Paloma took up the last of the water. From inside came inhuman sounds: deep, extended lowing; sharp keening; breathing like the snorting of a bull. Benito watched Thompson grow more agitated as time passed. He paced the courtyard, and as the moaning increased in volume, his pace quickened until he broke into a trot around the perimeter of the three standing walls, finally vaulting the partial outer wall out into the night and then back into the compound, lap after lap until, finally breathless, he slumped down beside Benito.

Benito remained perched on the edge of the water trough, whittling. The shavings accumulated at his feet. He thought about the demands of birthing. A difficult undertaking. After Paloma, he had not desired additional children, had not wished additional trials for Teresa. Benito was the fifth male of his father's seed, the first three born by his mother's sister. She had given birth to his brothers in the old way, her wrists bound with a leather strap hung across the roof timber. She pulled up as the contractions came, pulling, pushing, pulling, pushing. After her third son, the bleeding would not stop. She lay in bed, blood soaking through the mattress stuffed with corn husks, dripping onto the dirt floor beneath. After two days, drained white, she died. His fourth brother and he were the products of his father's new wife, the younger sister of his first. Time and again, growing up, he observed what childbearing demanded of a woman, the trade, how a small spark of life passed from the mother to each child she bore until, sooner or later, her inner flame seemed to dim and grow cold.

A few sharp cries sounded from the women's quarters, and with the frail light of morning a baby's yelp, sputtering at first, growing into a plaintive wail before softening. And so, Benito thought, an infant comes into the frontier. Thompson and Benito approached the door of the birthing room and heard Teresa's soothing reassurances and a baby's gurgle. Paloma came to the door and reported that all was well and asked for fresh water.

Benito brought the water and the men fell to chores, Thompson to attend the stock while Benito made coffee and stoked the fire in their quarters and heated broth in the kettle. He carried three cups of coffee and a cup of broth on an earthenware platter to Hanna's room and tapped on the door with the toe of his boot. Teresa answered, looking at once both weary and buoyed.

“You remembered the
atole
. Good.” Earlier in the week, Teresa had made a batch of the cornmeal drink for Hanna to soothe her spirit and to fortify her following childbirth.