Woman Hollering Creek (14 page)

Ay, but now look. Nicked and split and callused—how is it the hands get old first? The skin as coarse as the wattle of a hen. It’s from the planting in the
tlacolol
, from the hard man’s work I do clearing the field with the hoe and the machete, dirty work that leaves the clothes filthy, work no woman would do before the war.

But I’m not afraid of hard work or of being alone in the hills. I’m not afraid of dying or jail. I’m not afraid of the night like other women who run to the sacristy at the first call of
el gobierno
. I’m not other women.

Look at you. Snoring already?
Pobrecito
. Sleep,
papacito
. There, there. It’s only me—Inés.
Duerme, mi trigueño, mi chulito, mi bebito. Ya, ya, ya
.

You say you can’t sleep anywhere like you sleep here. So tired of always having to be
el gran general
Emiliano Zapata. The nervous fingers flinch, the long elegant bones shiver and twitch. Always waiting for the assassin’s bullet.

Everyone is capable of becoming a traitor, and traitors must be broken, you say. A horse to be broken. A new saddle that needs breaking in. To break a spirit. Something to whip and lasso like you did in the
jaripeos
years ago.

Everything bothers you these days. Any noise, any light, even the sun. You say nothing for hours, and then when you do speak, it’s an outburst, a fury. Everyone afraid of you, even your men. You hide yourself in the dark. You go days without sleep. You don’t laugh anymore.

I don’t need to ask; I’ve seen for myself. The war is not going well. I see it in your face. How it’s changed over the years, Miliano. From so much watching, the face grows that way. These wrinkles new, this furrow, the jaw clenched tight. Eyes creased from learning to see in the night.

They say the widows of sailors have eyes like that, from squinting into the line where the sky and sea dissolve. It’s the same with us from all this war. We’re all widows. The men as well as the women, even the children. All
clinging to the tail of the horse of our
jefe
Zapata
. All of us scarred from these nine years of
aguantando
—enduring.

Yes, it’s in your face. It’s always been there. Since before the war. Since before I knew you. Since your birth in Anenecuilco and even before then. Something hard and tender all at once in those eyes. You knew before any of us, didn’t you?

This morning the messenger arrived with the news you’d be arriving before nightfall, but I was already boiling the corn for your supper tortillas. I saw you riding in on the road from Villa de Ayala. Just as I saw you that day in Anenecuilco when the revolution had just begun and the government was everywhere looking for you. You were worried about the land titles, went back to dig them up from where you’d hidden them eighteen months earlier, under the altar in the village church—am I right?—reminding Chico Franco to keep them safe.
I’m bound to die
, you said,
someday. But our titles stand to be guaranteed
.

I wish I could rub the grief from you as if it were a smudge on the cheek. I want to gather you up in my arms as if you were Nicolás or Malena, run up to the hills. I know every cave and crevice, every back road and ravine, but I don’t know where I could hide you from yourself. You’re tired. You’re sick and lonely with this war, and I don’t want any of those things to ever touch you again, Miliano. It’s enough for now you are here. For now. Under my roof again.

Sleep,
papacito
. It’s only Inés circling above you, wide-eyed all night. The sound of my wings like the sound of a velvet cape crumpling. A warm breeze against your skin, the wide expanse of moon-white feathers as if I could touch all the walls of the house
at one sweep. A rustling, then weightlessness, light scattered out the window until it’s the moist night wind beneath my owl wings. Whorl of stars like the filigree earrings you gave me. Your tired horse still as tin, there, where you tied it to a guamuchil tree. River singing louder than ever since the time of the rains.

I scout the hillsides, the mountains. My blue shadow over the high grass and slash of
barrancas
, over the ghosts of haciendas silent under the blue night. From this height, the village looks the same as before the war. As if the roofs were still intact, the walls still whitewashed, the cobbled streets swept of rubble and weeds. Nothing blistered and burnt. Our lives smooth and whole.

Round and round the blue countryside, over the scorched fields, giddy wind barely ruffling my stiff, white feathers, above the two soldiers you left guarding our door, one asleep, the other dull from a day of hard riding. But I’m awake, I’m always awake when you are here. Nothing escapes me. No coyote in the mountains, or scorpion in the sand. Everything clear. The trail you rode here. The night jasmine with its frothy scent of sweet milk. The makeshift roof of cane leaves on our adobe house. Our youngest child of five summers asleep in her hammock—
What a little woman you are now, Malenita
. The laughing sound of the river and canals, and the high, melancholy voice of the wind in the branches of the tall pine.

I slow-circle and glide into the house, bringing the night-wind smell with me, fold myself back into my body. I haven’t left you. I don’t leave you, not ever. Do you know why? Because when you are gone I re-create you from memory. The scent of your skin, the mole above the broom of your mustache, how you fit in my palms. Your skin dark and rich as
piloncillo
. This face in my hands. I miss you. I miss you even now as you lie next to me.

To look at you as you sleep, the color of your skin. How in the half-light of moon you cast your own light, as if you are all made
of amber, Miliano. As if you are a little lantern, and everything in the house is golden too.

You used to be
tan chistoso. Muy bonachón, muy bromista
. Joking and singing off-key when you had your little drinks.
Tres vicios tengo y los tengo muy arraigados; de ser borracho, jugador, y enamorado
 … Ay, my life, remember? Always
muy enamorado
, no? Are you still that boy I met at the San Lázaro country fair? Am I still that girl you kissed under the little avocado tree? It seems so far away from those days, Miliano.

We drag these bodies around with us, these bodies that have nothing at all to do with you, with me, with who we really are, these bodies that give us pleasure and pain. Though I’ve learned how to abandon mine at will, it seems to me we never free ourselves completely until we love, when we lose ourselves inside each other. Then we see a little of what is called heaven. When we can be that close that we no longer are Inés and Emiliano, but something bigger than our lives. And we can forgive, finally.

You and I, we’ve never been much for talking, have we? Poor thing, you don’t know how to talk. Instead of talking with your lips, you put one leg around me when we sleep, to let me know it’s all right. And we fall asleep like that, with one arm or a leg or one of those long monkey feet of yours touching mine. Your foot inside the hollow of my foot.

Does it surprise you I don’t let go little things like that? There are so many things I don’t forget even if I would do well to.

Inés, for the love I have for you
. When my father pleaded, you can’t imagine how I felt. How a pain entered my heart like a current of cold water and in that current were the days to come. But I said nothing.

Well then
, my father said,
God help you. You’ve turned out just like the
perra
that bore you
. Then he turned around and I had no father.

I never felt so alone as that night. I gathered my things in my
rebozo
and ran out into the darkness to wait for you by the jacaranda tree. For a moment, all my courage left me. I wanted to turn around, call out,
’apá
, beg his forgiveness, and go back to sleeping on my
petate
against the cane-rush wall, waking before dawn to prepare the corn for the day’s tortillas.

Perra
. That word, the way my father spat it, as if in that one word I were betraying all the love he had given me all those years, as if he were closing all the doors to his heart.

Where could I hide from my father’s anger? I could put out the eyes and stop the mouths of all the saints that wagged their tongues at me, but I could not stop my heart from hearing that word—
perra
. My father, my love, who would have nothing to do with me.

You don’t like me to talk about my father, do you? I know, you and he never, well … Remember that thick scar across his left eyebrow? Kicked by a mule when he was a boy. Yes, that’s how it happened. Tía Chucha said it was the reason he sometimes acted like a mule—but you’re as stubborn as he was, aren’t you, and no mule kicked you.

It’s true, he never liked you. Since the days you started buying and selling livestock all through the
rancheritos
. By the time you were working the stables in Mexico City there was no mentioning your name. Because you’d never slept under a thatch roof, he said. Because you were a
charro
, and didn’t wear the cotton whites of the
campesino
. Then he’d mutter, loud enough for me to hear,
That one doesn’t know what it is to smell his own shit
.

I always thought you and he made such perfect enemies because you were so much alike. Except, unlike you, he was useless as a soldier. I never told you how the government forced him to enlist. Up in Guanajuato is where they sent him when you were busy with the Carrancistas, and Pancho Villa’s boys were giving everyone a rough time up north. My father, who’d never been farther than
Amecameca, gray-haired and broken as he was, they took him. It was during the time the dead were piled up on the street corners like stones, when it wasn’t safe for anyone, man or woman, to go out into the streets.

There was nothing to eat, Tía Chucha sick with the fever, and me taking care of us all. My father said better he should go to his brother Fulgencio’s in Tenexcapán and see if they had corn there.
Take Malenita
, I said.
With a child they won’t bother you
.

And so my father went out toward Tenexcapán dragging Malenita by the hand. But when night began to fall and they hadn’t come back, well, imagine. It was the widow Elpidia who knocked on our door with Malenita howling and with the story they’d taken the men to the railroad station.
South to the work camps, or north to fight?
Tía Chucha asked.
If God wishes
, I said,
he’ll be safe
.

That night Tía Chucha and I dreamt this dream. My father and my Tío Fulgencio standing against the back wall of the rice mill.
Who lives?
But they don’t answer, afraid to give the wrong
viva. Shoot them; discuss politics later
.

At the moment the soldiers are about to fire, an officer, an acquaintance of my father’s from before the war, rides by and orders them set free.

Then they took my father and my Tío Fulgencio to the train station, shuttled them into box cars with others, and didn’t let them go until they reached Guanajuato where they were each given guns and orders to shoot at the Villistas.

With the fright of the firing squad and all, my father was never the same. In Guanajuato, he had to be sent to the military hospital, where he suffered a collapsed lung. They removed three of his ribs to cure him, and when he was finally well enough to travel, they sent him back to us.

All through the dry season my father lived on like that, with a hole in the back of his chest from which he breathed. Those days
I had to swab him with a sticky pitch pine and wrap him each morning in clean bandages. The opening oozed a spittle like the juice of the prickly pear, sticky and clear and with a smell both sweet and terrible like magnolia flowers rotting on the branch.

We did the best we could to nurse him, my Tía Chucha and I. Then one morning a
chachalaca
flew inside the house and battered against the ceiling. It took both of us with blankets and the broom to get it out. We didn’t say anything but we thought about it for a long time.

Before the next new moon, I had a dream I was in church praying a rosary. But what I held between my hands wasn’t my rosary with the glass beads, but one of human teeth. I let it drop, and the teeth bounced across the flagstones like pearls from a necklace. The dream and the bird were sign enough.

When my father called my mother’s name one last time and died, the syllables came out sucked and coughed from that other mouth, like a drowned man’s, and he expired finally in one last breath from that opening that killed him.

We buried him like that, with his three missing ribs wrapped in a handkerchief my mother had embroidered with his initials and with the hoofmark of the mule under his left eyebrow.

For eight days people arrived to pray the rosary. All the priests had long since fled, we had to pay a
rezandero
to say the last rites. Tía Chucha laid the cross of lime and sand, and set out flowers and a votive lamp, and on the ninth day, my
tía
raised the cross and called out my father’s name—Remigio Alfaro—and my father’s spirit flew away and left us.

But suppose he won’t give us his permission
.

That old goat, we’ll be dead by the time he gives his permission. Better we just run off. He can’t be angry forever
.

Not even on his deathbed did he forgive you. I suppose you’ve never forgiven him either for calling in the authorities. I’m sure
he only meant for them to scare you a little, to remind you of your obligations to me since I was expecting your child. Who could imagine they would force you to join the cavalry.

I can’t make apologies on my father’s behalf, but, well, what were we to think, Miliano? Those months you were gone, hiding out in Puebla because of the protest signatures, the political organizing, the work in the village defense. Me as big as a boat, Nicolás waiting to be born at any moment, and you nowhere to be found, and no money sent, and not a word. I was so young, I didn’t know what else to do but abandon our house of stone and adobe and go back to my father’s. Was I wrong to do that? You tell me.