Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (43 page)

That’s what a couple relatives had advised and Bill tried to say what was bothering him, that the mine that Slick had stepped on was American and that the fact he was in a dangerous place was because he was in an army that was American, and it didn’t seem to be the same thing as what they were saying about past folks fighting Indians for democracy and it didn’t seem right somehow.

But nobody really heard him; they just asked him about his job with Kerr-McGee, told him the company had built itself another building in Tulsa, Kerr’s gonna screw those folks in New Mexico just like he has folks here being Senator. Ida and Bill visited for a while, comforted his folks for a while, and then they left for Milan.

By the time, they got back to their mobile home, Bill knew what he was going to do with the bundle of sticks and feathers. He’d been thinking about it all the way on 1–40 from Oklahoma City, running it through his mind, what Slick had died of. Well, because of the bomb, stepping on the wrong place, being in a dangerous place, but something else. The reason was something else and though he wasn’t completely sure about it yet he felt he was beginning to know. And he knew what he was going to do with the bundle in the cupboard.

The next morning, he put it in his lunch pail and went to work, reporting to the mine office first. He changed into his work clothes and put on his yellow slicker because they were going down that morning and he was glad for that for once. He took that paper bag out of his pail and put it in his overall pocket. After they went down he said he was going to go and check some cable and he made his way to the far end of a
drift that had been mined out. He stopped and put the bundle down behind a slab of rock.

He didn’t know what to do next and then he thought of what Pete had said. Say something about it.

Well, Bill thought, Slick, you was a good boy, kind of wild, but good. I got this here Indian thing, feathers and sticks, and at home, at home we got the corn by your picture, and Pete and Mary said to do this because it’s important even if we’re Okies and not Indians who do this. It’s for your travel they said and to help us with our life here from where you are at now and they said to maybe change things in a good way for a good life and God knows us Okies always wanted that. Well, I’m gonna leave this here by the rock. Pete said he didn’t know exactly all the right Indian things to do anymore but somehow I believe they’re more righter than we’ve ever been led to believe. And now I’m trying too.

So you help us now, Slick. We need it, all the help we can get, even if it’s just so much as holding up the roof of this mine that the damn company don’t put enough timbers and bolts in, Bill said. And then he stepped back and left.

When Bill got home that evening, he told Ida what he had done, and she said, Next spring I’m gonna plant that Indian corn and Slick, if he’s gonna help hold up the roof of Section 17, better be able to help with breaking up that clay dirt too.

Bill smiled and chuckled at Ida’s remark. Nodding his head, he agreed.

HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES

I was fourteen years old when Abuelita requested my help. And it seemed only fair. Abuelita had pulled me through the rages of scarlet fever by placing, removing, and replacing potato slices on my temples; she had seen me through several whippings, an arm broken by a dare jump off Tío Enrique’s toolshed, puberty, and my first lie. Really, I told Amá, it was only fair.

Not that I was her favorite granddaughter or anything special. I wasn’t even pretty or nice like my older sisters and I just couldn’t do the girl things they could do. My hands were too big to handle the fineries of crocheting or embroidery and I always pricked my fingers or knotted my colored threads time and time again while my sisters laughed and called me Bull Hands with their cute waterlike voices. So I began keeping a piece of jagged brick in my sock to bash my sisters or anyone who called me Bull Hands. Once, while we all sat in the bedroom, I hit Teresa on the forehead, right above her eyebrow, and she ran to Amá with her mouth open, her hand over her eye while blood seeped between her fingers. I was used to the whippings by then.

I wasn’t respectful either. I even went so far as to doubt the power of Abuelita’s slices, the slices she said absorbed my fever. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?” Abuelita snapped back, her pasty gray eye beaming at me and burning holes in my suspicions. Regretful that I had let secret questions drop out of my mouth, I couldn’t look into her eyes. My hands began
to fan out, grow like a liar’s nose until they hung by my side like low weights. Abuelita made a balm out of dried moth wings and Vicks and rubbed my hands, shaped them back to size, and it was the strangest feeling. Like bones melting. Like sun shining through the darkness of your eyelids. I didn’t mind helping Abuelita after that, so Amá would always send me over to her.

In the early afternoon Amá would push her hair back, hand me my sweater and shoes, and tell me to go to Mama Luna’s. This was to avoid another fight and another whipping, I knew. I would deliver one last direct shot on Marisela’s arm and jump out of our house, the slam of the screen door burying her cries of anger, and I’d gladly go help Abuelita plant her wild lilies or jasmine or heliotrope or cilantro or hierbabuena in red Hills Brothers coffee cans. Abuelita would wait for me at the top step of her porch, holding a hammer and nail and empty coffee cans. And although we hardly spoke, hardly looked at each other as we worked over root transplants, I always felt her gray eye on me. It made me feel, in a strange sort of way, safe and guarded and not alone. Like God was supposed to make you feel.

On Abuelita’s porch, I would puncture holes in the bottom of the coffee cans with a nail and a precise hit of a hammer. This completed, my job was to fill them with red clay mud from beneath her rosebushes, packing it softly, then making a perfect hole, four fingers round, to nest a sprouting avocado pit, or the spidery sweet potatoes that Abuelita rooted in mayonnaise jars with toothpicks and daily water, or prickly chayotes that produced vines that twisted and wound all over her porch pillars, crawling to the roof, up and over the roof, and down the other side, making her small brick house look like it was cradled within the vines that grew pear-shaped squashes ready for the pick, ready to be steamed with onions
and cheese and butter. The roots would burst out of the rusted coffee cans and search for a place to connect. I would then feed the seedlings with water.

But this was a different kind of help, Amá said, because Abuelita was dying. Looking into her gray eye, then into her brown one, the doctor said it was just a matter of days. And so it seemed only fair that these hands she had melted and formed found use in rubbing her caving body with alcohol and marijuana, rubbing her arms and legs, turning her face to the window so that she could watch the bird-of-paradise blooming or smell the scent of clove in the air. I toweled her face frequently and held her hand for hours. Her gray wiry hair hung over the mattress. For as long as I could remember, she’d kept her long hair in braids. Her mouth was vacant, and when she slept her eyelids never closed all the way. Up close, you could see her gray eye beaming out the window, staring hard as if to remember everything. I never kissed her. I left the window open when I went to the market.

Across the street from Jay’s Market there was a chapel. I never knew its denomination, but I went in just the same to search for candles. There were none, so I sat down on one of the pews. After I cleaned my fingernails, I looked up at the high ceiling. I had forgotten the vastness of these places, the coolness of the marble pillars and the frozen statues with blank eyes. I was alone. I knew why I had never returned.

That was one of Apá’s biggest complaints. He would pound his hands on the table, rocking the sugar dish or spilling a cup of coffee, and scream that if I didn’t go to mass every Sunday to save my goddamn sinning soul, then I had no reason to go out of the house, period.
Punto final.
He would grab my arm and dig his nails into me to make sure I understood the importance of catechism. Did he make himself clear? Then he strategically directed his anger at Amá for her lousy ways of bringing up daughters, being disrespectful
and unbelieving, and my older sisters would pull me aside and tell me if I didn’t get to mass right this minute, they were all going to kick the holy shit out of me. Why am I so selfish? Can’t you see what it’s doing to Amá, you idiot? So I would wash my feet and stuff them in my black Easter shoes that shone with Vaseline, grab a missal and veil, and wave goodbye to Amá.

I would walk slowly down Lorena to First to Evergreen, counting the cracks on the cement. On Evergreen I would turn left and walk to Abuelita’s. I liked her porch because it was shielded by the vines of the chayotes and I could get a good look at the people and car traffic on Evergreen without them knowing. I would jump up the porch steps, knock on the screen door as I wiped my feet, and call, Abuelita?
Mi
Abuelita? As I opened the door and stuck my head in, I would catch the gagging scent of toasting chile on the
placa.
When I entered the
sala
, she would greet me from the kitchen, wringing her hands in her apron. I’d sit at the corner of the table to keep from being in her way. The chiles made my eyes water. Am I crying? No, Mama Luna, I’m sure not crying. I don’t like going to mass, but my eyes watered anyway, the tears dropping on the tablecloth like candle wax. Abuelita lifted the burnt chiles from the fire and sprinkled water on them until the skins began to separate. Placing them in front of me, she turned to check the menudo. I peeled the skins off and put the flimsy, limp-looking green and yellow chiles in the
molcajete
and began to crush and crush and twist and crush the heart out of the tomato, the clove of garlic, the stupid chiles that made me cry, crushed them until they turned into liquid under my bull hand. With a wooden spoon, I scraped hard to destroy the guilt, and my tears were gone. I put the bowl of chile next to a vase filled with freshly cut roses. Abuelita touched my hand and pointed to the bowl of menudo that steamed in front of me. I
spooned some chile into the menudo and rolled a corn tortilla thin with the palms of my hands. As I ate, a fine Sunday breeze entered the kitchen and a rose petal calmly feathered down to the table.

I left the chapel without blessing myself and walked to Jay’s. Most of the time Jay didn’t have much of anything. The tomatoes were always soft and the cans of Campbell soup had rust spots on them. There was dust on the tops of cereal boxes. I picked up what I needed: rubbing alcohol, five cans of chicken broth, a big bottle of Pine-Sol. At first Jay got mad because I thought I had forgotten the money. But it was there all the time, in my back pocket.

When I returned from the market, I heard Amá crying in Abuelita’s kitchen. She looked up at me with puffy eyes. I placed the bags of groceries on the table and began putting the cans of soup away. Amá sobbed quietly. I never kissed her. After a while, I patted her on the back for comfort. Finally: “
¿Y mi Amá?”
she asked in a whisper, then choked again and cried into her apron.

Abuelita fell off the bed twice yesterday, I said, knowing that I shouldn’t have said it and wondering why I wanted to say it because it only made Amá cry harder. I guess I became angry and just so tired of the quarrels and beatings and unanswered prayers and my hands just there hanging helplessly by my side. Amá looked at me again, confused, angry, and her eyes were filled with sorrow. I went outside and sat on the porch swing and watched the people pass. I sat there until she left. I dozed off repeating the words to myself like rosary prayers: when do you stop giving when do you start giving when do you … and when my hands fell from my lap, I awoke to catch them. The sun was setting, an orange glow, and I knew Abuelita was hungry.

There comes a time when the sun is defiant. Just about the time when moods change, inevitable seasons of a day,
transitions from one color to another, that hour or minute or second when the sun is finally defeated, finally sinks into the realization that it cannot, with all its power to heal or burn, exist forever, there comes an illumination where the sun and earth meet, a final burst of burning red-orange fury reminding us that although endings are inevitable, they are necessary for rebirths, and when that time came, just when I switched on the light in the kitchen to open Abuelita’s can of soup, it was probably then that she died.

The room smelled of Pine-Sol and vomit, and Abuelita had defecated the remains of her cancerous stomach. She had turned to the window and tried to speak, but her mouth remained open and speechless. I heard you, Abuelita, I said, stroking her cheek, I heard you. I opened the windows of the house and let the soup simmer and overboil on the stove. I turned the stove off and poured the soup down the sink. From the cabinet I got a tin basin, filled it with lukewarm water, and carried it carefully to the room. I went to the linen closet and took out some modest bleached-white towels. With the sacredness of a priest preparing his vestments, I unfolded the towels one by one on my shoulders. I removed the sheets and blankets from her bed and peeled off her thick flannel nightgown. I toweled her puzzled face, stretching out the wrinkles, removing the coils of her neck, toweled her shoulders and breasts. Then I changed the water. I returned to towel the creases of her stretch-marked stomach, her sporadic vaginal hairs, and her sagging thighs. I removed the lint from between her toes and noticed a mapped birthmark on the fold of her buttock. The scars on her back, which were as thin as the lifelines on the palms of her hands, made me realize how little I really knew of Abuelita. I covered her with a thin blanket and went into the bathroom. I washed my hands, turned on the tub faucets, and watched the water pour into the tub with vitality and steam. When it was full, I
turned off the water and undressed. Then, I went to get Abuelita.

She was not as heavy as I thought, and when I carried her in my arms, her body fell into a V, and yet my legs were tired, shaky, and I felt as if the distance between the bedroom and bathroom was miles and years away. Amá, where are you?