The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (20 page)

“Who told you that?” their mother had asked them. “Yoeme, I suppose.”

“No,” Lecha had said, “I just know. Nobody likes Indians.”

Later, when the twins were less frightened of the old woman, Zeta had asked, “Why did you leave your children?” and Yoeme had clapped her hands together and cheered the question so loudly even Lecha had blushed. They knew their mother’s accusation that Yoeme was a bad influence on them was true. “Our mother told us it was trees, cottonwood trees,” Lecha said. They had been sitting on the ground in the garden next to the house pulling weeds. Yoeme stopped the weeding and tilted her head back slightly and squinted her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “trees. The fucker Guzman, your grandfather, sure loved trees. They were cottonwoods got as saplings from the banks of the Rio Yaqui. Slaves carried them hundreds of miles. The heat was terrible. All water went to the mules or to the saplings. The slaves were only allowed to press their lips to the wet rags around the tree roots. After they were planted at the mines and even here by this house, there were slaves who did nothing but carry water to those trees. ‘What beauties!’ Guzman used to say. By then they had no more ‘slaves.’ They simply had Indians who worked like slaves but got even less than slaves had in the old days. The trees were huge by the time your mother was born.”

“But why did you fight over trees?”

“Hold your horses, hold your horses,” Yoeme had said. “They had been killing Indians right and left. It was war! It was white men coming to find more silver, to steal more Indian land. It was white men coming with their pieces of paper! To make their big ranches. Guzman and my people had made an agreement. Why do you think I was married to him? For fun? For love? Hah! To watch, to make sure he kept the agreement.”

But Guzman had been only a gutless, walking corpse, not a real
man. He had been unwilling to stand up to the other white men streaming into the country. “He was always saying he only wanted to ‘get along.’ ” Yoeme slid into one of her long cackling laughs. “Killing my people, my relatives who were only traveling down here to visit me! It was time that I left. Sooner or later those long turds would have ridden up with their rifles, and Guzman would have played with his wee-wee while they dragged me away.”

“But your children,” Zeta said.

“Oh, I could already see. Look at your mother right now. Weak thing. It was not a good match—Guzman and me. You understand how it is with horses and dogs—sometimes children take after the father. I saw that.” And so Yoeme told the twins. It had been a simple decision. She could not remain with children from such a man. Guzman’s people had always hated her anyway. Because she was an Indian. “We know,” Lecha said. “We know that. But what about the trees?”

Oh, yes, those trees! How terrible what they did with the trees. Because the cottonwood suckles like a baby. Suckles on the mother water running under the ground. A cottonwood will talk to the mother water and tell her what human beings are doing. But then these white men came and they began digging up the cottonwoods and moving them here and there for a terrible purpose.

“I STILL SEE THIS,” Yoeme said. “Very clearly, because I was your age then. Off in the distance, as we were approaching the river. The cottonwood trees were very lovely. In the breeze their leaves glittered like silver. But then we got closer, and someone shouted and pointed. I looked and looked. I saw things—dark objects. Large and small, swaying from the low, heavy branches. And do you know what they were—those objects hanging in the beautiful green leaves and branches along the river?”

The two little girls had shaken their heads together, and when they looked at each other, they realized they knew what Yoeme was going to say.

Bullets, she explained, cost too much. “I heard people say they were our clanspeople. But I could not recognize any faces. They had all dried up like jerky.” Lecha had closed her eyes tight and shaken her head. Zeta had nodded solemnly.

“So you see, when I decided to leave that fucker Guzman and his weak children, your mother was the weakest, I had one last thing I had to do.” Here Yoeme clapped her hands and let out a little shout. “It was one of the best things I have ever done! Sooner or later those long turds would have ridden up with their rifles to hang me from the big cottonwood tree.”

Lecha and Zeta had looked in the direction the old woman pointed in the yard near the house. Only a giant white stump remained. “What happened to the big tree?” Zeta had wanted to know.

“Well, you don’t think I was going to let that tree stand next to this house as long as I was alive, do you?”

Yoeme had waited until Guzman had gone off to buy mules in Morelos, and then she had ordered the gardeners to get to work with axes. At the mine headquarters they had only cut down six of the big trees before the foreman had called a halt. Fortunately, while the foreman was rushing to the big house to question the orders, the gardeners had been smart enough to girdle the remaining trees. Yoeme had paid them to run off with her, since in the mountains their villages and her village were nearby. She had cleaned out Guzman’s fat floor safe under the bed where she had conceived and delivered seven disappointing children. It was a fair exchange, she said, winking at the little girls, who could not imagine how much silver that might have been. Enough silver that the three gardeners had been paid off.

Guzman had later claimed he did not mind the loss of the silver, which a week’s production could replace. But Guzman had told Amalia and the others their mother was dead to them and forever unwelcome in that house because she had butchered all the big cottonwood trees. He could never forgive that.

The twins were solemn.

“I did not let myself get discouraged. All these years I have waited to see if any of you grandchildren might have turned out human. I would come around every so often, take a look.” They were on the porch now, and Dennis, their pinheaded cousin, the son of Uncle Ringo, was sitting on the step, eating his own snot. Yoeme waved her hand at Dennis. “They had all been pretty much like that one,” she said, “and I was almost to give up hope. But then you two came.”

“But you wanted to get rid of one of us.” Lecha had let go of Yoeme’s hand in order to say this.

The old woman had stopped and looked at both of them. “I wanted to have one of you for myself,” she said.

“But you didn’t get one of us.”

“No.” Yoeme had let out a big sigh. “I didn’t even get
one
of you. Your poor mother was too dumb for that. And now do you see what I have?”

The twins had looked at each other to avoid the piercing eyes of old Yoeme.

Yoeme laughed loudly. “I have you both!” she said in triumph, and from the bedroom inside they could hear their mother fumble for the enamel basin to vomit blood.

WHEN ZETA WAS ASKED about her childhood or her family, she replied only that it was all vague and uninteresting to her. This was the truth. But she also realized that she had come to be where she was through a strange and long series of events that were her childhood and youth.

They had arrived in Tucson in the early summer of their fourteenth year. From the train in Nogales they had taken a taxi to the bus depot. Their father had been waiting. They had talked in low voices, all the way from Hermosillo, about Uncle Federico’s “big finger.” They had avoided any discussion about what would happen next. Their father had not come to their mother’s funeral, but then they had been separated for over ten years. He had sent a telegram immediately, by way of the mine at Canenea, announcing that the girls were his daughters, and he was now claiming his legal right to them.

Lecha had easily identified their father in the waiting room of the bus depot. He was standing apart from the rest, in starched khakis, polished half Wellingtons, reading
The Wall Street Journal,
Far East edition. Lecha had laughed. He did not disdain the poor Indians in the bus depot so much as they simply did not exist for him. He had never
associated Amalia with the Indians; as far as he was concerned, she had been white. Lecha had always joked that if their mother and they had been chunks of iron feldspar, he would have been far more engaged, far more excited than he had ever been. Zeta was not so sure. Their father had been almost sixty when they were born. When he came to Potam to survey the ore formations and new shafts, he always took the girls along. That had been their visit, their time together with him. Lecha had been the one who had gone running to him with the chunk of iron feldspar in her hand. Zeta had watched from a distance.

He had taken the dark, heavy rock and had pretended or perhaps
had
examined it, but without any interest. Lecha had not let his lack of response interfere with her excitement over the glitter and sparkle in the stone. But Zeta had realized then nothing there mattered to him—not the shafts or the ore samples red-tagged for him by the mine foreman, not Lecha’s excitement; though Zeta did believe he was concerned with relieving his sense of duty. After the separation, their grandpa Guzman had maintained the mining engineer had married their mother because he had been worried the partners had become dissatisfied with him and were about to hire a new geologist.

The rumors and reports had arrived in Canenea that while the mining engineer could still name the formations and the ore-bearing stones and rocks, and could recite all of the known combinations for that particular area, his calculations on the maps for known deposits and veins had been wrong; he had directed the miners to nothing. When other geologists had been called to evaluate his projections and the samples and assay results, they could find no fault with his work. They could not account for the absence of ore in the depths and areas he had designated. They had of course been reluctant to pass judgment upon a “brother”; the geologists had discussed at length the “scientific anomaly.”

Yoeme said the veins of silver had dried up because their father, the mining engineer himself, had dried up. Years of dry winds and effects of the sunlight on milky-white skin had been devastating. Suddenly the man had dried up inside, and although he still walked and talked and reasoned like a man, inside he was crackled, full of the dry molts of insects. So their silent father had been ruined, and everyone had blamed Yoeme. But Lecha and Zeta had sensed the truth years earlier. They had both felt it when they walked with him and he had lifted them into his arms: somewhere within him there was, arid and shriveled, the imperfect vacuum he called himself.

Yoeme had been contemptuous of the innuendos about witchcraft. What did these stupid mestizos—half no-brain white, half worst kind of Indian—what did these last remnants of wiped-out tribes littering the earth, what did they know?

Yoeme had not wasted a bit of energy on Amalia’s ex-husband. The geologist had been perfectly capable of destroying himself. His ailment had been common among those who had gone into caverns of fissures in the lava formations; the condition had also been seen in persons who had been revived from drowning in a lake or spring with an entrance to the four worlds below this world. The victim never fully recovered and exhibited symptoms identical to those of the German mining engineer. Thus, Yoeme had argued, witchcraft was not to blame. The white man had violated the Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart.

Zeta could feel an empty space inside her rib cage, an absence that had been growing even before their mother died. She felt a peculiar sadness when she remembered their father, the detached white man who smiled and spoke and who was a dead man already.

ZETA HAD HOPED she might be with her father long enough to learn something more about the emptiness inside her. But the day she and Lecha stepped off the bus in Tucson, Zeta had seen it was too late. Their father had already purchased their train tickets to El Paso. He had greeted them formally, holding them both to his chest awkwardly, his body and arms rigid. He was pleased to see them both looking so well. He did not know how to express his condolences to them at the loss of their mother, but they must not worry. That subject finished, he had directed the porter to a taxi with their trunks and boxes. Driving to the hotel, he had told them he regretted the boarding school in El Paso was run by Catholic nuns, but there had been no other choice unless the girls went East to school. He told them he thought God was of no use. They had rooms at the Santa Rita Hotel if they did not want
to spend school vacations with him at the ranch west of Tucson. He preferred the Santa Rita himself. Money had been deposited for them in a bank in El Paso. The mother superior would see that they got their school uniforms and whatever else they might need.