Rise Do Not Be Afraid Page 4

  The man with the shiny shoes and the white suit took Malinche Santistevan-Matthews into a corner where only the Schlitz beer light followed. He had made his choice. The red light blinked around and danced with them. Malinche Santistevan-Matthews looked up and the man began to lean in. The devil knew that Aresando was coming, but the man in the white suit did not care. The devil outweighed him by fifty pounds. The devil leaned into Malinche Santistevan-Matthews, someone rolled a strike, Rafael Trujillo let his hands go and disappeared into the piano’s voice, Apollonio and Nomio stopped playing; there was something furious on the piano, the sound of Aresando’s feet on the oak floor running toward the red light. Otherwise, the night was quiet as everyone watched.

  Behind El Rio Lounge there was a bare spot at the center of a ring of cottonwoods. The ground was frozen, and the huge man had taken off his coat. The people of Santa Rita circled both of them. Aresando looked small, the red light still followed the man in white. He cast a shadow that was not his form, but no one noticed because among the trees he looked bigger than before. Samuel yelled out to his son.

  “His ring. Don’t let him hit you with his ring.”

  The man’s left hand glittered gold, but on the smallest finger of his right hand he wore one ring, a large red stone bulged from the gold band. Aresando knew the man in the white suit would come with his left hand first, but it was the right hand that he watched.

  The devil had not spoken since he arrived, but when he did the December air smelled of dead cats.

  “You’re mine,” he growled.

  It was the last good year. Everyone was gathered there on the last night of 1955. The devil had meant that they, all of them, were his, but no one knew that then. They did not know he meant to take something that had taken more than two hundred years to build. The devil comes like bad water through the oldest and weakest parts of a place.

  It’s true what they said. Jesus did view Jerusalem and weep over it. It was an act of mercy before his own death. Every great place has tumbled. All people, sometime in their history, have been conquered. It was the last good year.

  No one blamed Aresando, he had come home from the war two years earlier, crazy and full of death. They only remembered that he was the only one who was not afraid.

  Jesus viewed the town on that last night of 1955. He wept over Santa Rita. He did not weep to save the town or to cleanse the devil’s bad water. Even the great lake city of the Aztecs fell, but only the place died. The people lived and so too did memory. The devil’s intent was not to kill Aresando because he could not. So, the devil seeped like water into the cracks of things. Things rot from the inside out. Much ended on that night.

  Jesus ascended after they stripped him and cast lots for his belongings. Santa Rita would not be saved until she too had been stripped, her possessions divided. That is how things had always been.

  The devil was in things, and Jesus wept over the town so that its loss would be the people’s salvation.

  A Reed Being Tossed by the Wind

  Nomio first left for the high camps when he was ten. He worked with Carillo, the best of the herders. Years later, Carillo would be kicked by a horse, it was the blow that would end his life.

  All was not tragedy though. Blue Lake was deep and cold, the water glassing to a rock cliff; in the center of the glassy water there was an island with stunted pine growing. From the lake El Rito Azul spun cold through a great mountain meadow and then dropped south through a canyon before losing its name and turning east with the ancient river that cut the canyon where Santa Rita bloomed. The nights were cold and in the deep trees there were bears crying into the dark. The bears sounded human, a deep cry that comes from loss. In time the big bears would disappear from this place. There is no knowing like that of your demise, and perhaps those great hump backed bears knew it then and sang their end into the pines and alpine meadows. In time the sheep would disappear from this place too. Unlike the bears they would not be mourned, but a few would remember them, how they emerged like ghosts from the tree fog of an early morning, the way they scattered themselves across the meadow and up the ladera. Old memories would emerge of Carillo and his sombrero lifted above his gray head. In the green distance of those memories, at the edge of the meadow Carillo’s dog would look back. He loved that dog, and the pinto dog, in its way, returned the affection, watching its master for the waving of his hat. It was by that waving that he would move the sheep wherever Carillo wanted them. Carillo was the one who taught Nomio how to take the world in. Both of them pointed with all their fingers, there was always too much to see. The sheep scattered across the meadow and up the hillside where everything moved toward the horizon and became the memory that both men would hold forever.

  There is no way of knowing the mountains and the cold deep lakes. Each high place has its own spirit that was born into it, but there is something more to a place, what the human brings to it. This thing is not the piano that was loaded on the back of a wagon and delivered to Blue Lake behind six giant horses. It isn’t the cabin of wood, mud and stone chimney that was built on the west side of the lake, opposite the reflecting cliff. The piano would be tossed into the lake by some drunken hunters from Kansas. They wanted to see if it would float. It did not. The following summer when the herders returned, they knew what had happened. Everything is harsher and more beautiful up high. The piano was crafted in New York City by a father and son. The date etched above the keys gave the year. By giving it that birth the two piano makers must have anticipated its death, they sought to mark its existence. 1896, No. 7 etched into brass was the piano’s name and for a time it played opposite the crying bears, not as beautifully or as mournfully but drifting the same song into the night.

  This thing which Nomio had always sought to identify was more than memory. The cabin burned, the chimney remains, and he rarely thought of either. Even the piano is secondary. He always tried to remember the song, but that fell too because Nomio knew the singer was the important thing. He observed that the human voice, if the song was right and it was sung beneath a living tree, that the sound of that voice would live as long as that tree. We all need a tree to shelter us, to preserve us.

  Nomio would look out across the great meadow and in the green wind-tossed reeds along El Rito Azul he would see his friend Carillo who loved his dog because that was all he had. He would see that autumn when the herd was almost home, the road clogged with sheep, and he would see the canela horse that Carillo rode, in the green reeds he saw the dog’s anticipation as the sombrero came into Carillo’s hand. The road was clogged with sheep and the gringo from Texas could not get through with his camper. Carillo lifted his hat and pointed straight ahead, and the dog knew to clear the road. The Texan rushed through and did not pause after he ran over the pinto dog. Carillo yelled at them but they did not stop. From his scabbard the .30-.30 came up to his left shoulder and he emptied it into the Texan’s truck and camper. Nomio was twelve the year that happened, his second year with Carillo, his last. No one died. The Texan took a ricochet in the shoulder and his wife got broken glass in her eyes. Carillo was already old by then, but he was sent to prison for five years. He got out and never worked up high again. It was a July when the horse kicked him as he was loading her into a truck. Nomio was with the herd, alone, somewhere near Los Brazos on his way to Blue Lake. He found out about his friend’s death a month later.

  He was ten years old when he met Carillo, twelve the year the dog died, and 43 years later as he watched the reeds along El Rito Azul being tossed by the wind it came to him that it only takes one reed of grass to remember your life.

  We Played the Flute for You but You Did Not Dance

  Pelayo had been gone since 1910 when he told Adelaida that he would be back soon, he said he was going for seed to plant grain. At first, he had meant to come home, had actually gone off for barley seed. He reached the mill where he used to come with his father. He remembered those days. The horses turned and turned. The grain became flour, and a
s they turned Pelayo remembered that novillo, the day the bueyeros came. By spring his father had butchered the entire herd. The bueyeros had their own animals, none of them were worth eating. The trail from Mississippi had left them all hollow and hungrier than the bueyeros. The bueyeros fed their animals with his father’s hay that winter. They promised to repay him for his kindness. By spring his father’s cows were gone and the bueyeros had saved his soul for their version of the same God. His father had no animals, the bueyeros had over a hundred, now fat, but no place to feed them. Enos’ meadows were thick and low, cut by the river of stone, the grass thickest in the shade of the ancient cottonwoods. In exchange for his meadows the bueyeros left Pelayo’s father with a canvas tent and the small plot beneath a crooked cottonwood, the home Pelayo was leaving.

  Enos had died the year before, a runaway wagon, horses that had been spooked by a boy hunting along the road, a gunshot got them running. Nomio was seven, riding with his abuelito, neither strong enough to pull the horses in. Enos saved what he could before the wagon smashed into the cottonwood where the road turned at the edge of what used to be his meadow, the cottonwood where the steer had hung years before. Enos threw Nomio from the wagon into the grass and the boy was not hurt. He tried to jump himself but was too late. The horses had made the turn and the wagon did not go with them. He jumped and rolled toward the cottonwood, but the wagon followed. They had buried his father in the bueyero’s cemetery and there was someone, a bueyero, responsible for praying him into heaven.

  Pelayo watched the horses turning, knew that with one sack of barley he could plant all that was left him and still not use all the grain. Had he known about the two youngest he would have turned around, but he did not. He rode south across the llano toward the still pulsing star his father had watched. For all he knew the star was dead. He told himself that the star was dead as he rode that night. The pulsing star was dead and only its light remained, pulling him away.

  The devil did not kiss her, but afterward the men were prone to leaving, disappearing really. Afterward, the wind began, and the snow melted with it, like it had always done, but this time it did not stop. Some say it was the wind that drove the men away, made them crazy. Everything blew away it seemed. Pelayo had been the first and the men knew of him, how he kept riding and did not return. He had died the year before in a good bed. Noah had built his ark, but the men of Santa Rita had no such vessel with which to weather the wind and the water that rose with it.

  There among the dust and swirling husks of men, the women stood. It’s not a secret; the women were stone, and the wind did not enter.

  Adelaida Arroyo had married Pelayo in 1894. By the time he left for seed she had five children and his last name. Nomio was her oldest. After his father left, he would leave their adobe early in the mornings and walk the train tracks just up the dirt road from the adobe house. Along the tracks he would pick up pieces of coal that had spilled over the night before as the train rocked through Santa Rita on its way over the San Juans. When there was a need for wood, he would offer to chop it for his mother, but mostly Adelaida chopped it herself. Nomio was nine. His mother did everything and he helped her as best he could, with his bits of coal, opening gates, sending water into the ditches. It was June when the baby and the other boy became sick. Adelaida prayed the girl into heaven and the boy back to health. When the fevers and the funeral passed there was nothing left to eat. Nomio had kept the wood box full, the fields wet, but there was nothing for the wood to cook and it would be autumn before the beans and potatoes would come in.

  The girl that died was almost two and the boy that lived turned one while the fever was still with him. Mana Virginia came and the two women began to slice potatoes into thin slices. The potatoes stained their hands white, as if they were made of salt. The women would take the slices, dip them in vinegar and one by one place them like communion on the hot skin of the two children. There was no cure for the fever, no ice left in the soterrano, the potatoes held the vinegar and the vinegar cooled the skin. The potatoes would turn black and the women would begin again. Virginia, in those two weeks, delivered six babies and after each one she would return to Adelaida’s house and the two women would work far into the night. Neither slept. Finally, there were no more potatoes to slice or fry. There was no meat.

  The girl died before dawn of the twelfth day. Nomio rose early, his mother was praying, and the small house held her voice in the quiet blue dark before dawn. The birds began singing. There were no clocks. The days were already long, and the sun was coming when the girl died wrapped in her mother’s prayers and birdsong. Her name was Sebastiana.

  Adelaida’s house was empty and abandoned in 1956 when all the other men began leaving. One day the wind began. They had expected it; the wind always came. They went to bed with the wind rattling their tin roofs. In the morning one man would return to his home beaten to death, his body stiff and tied to a pale horse. They would lose everything in that wind. They had expected the wind to melt the snow and for the water to rise. They could not have known they would melt and wash away too.

  When all the money was gone the men began to sell to each other and to the bueyeros. When the land was gone and the new fences erected, the bottles appeared beneath them. In the cantina there was music. The songs were about them and their life, but too much had changed. No one danced.

  Cassiano Casias was the worst fisherman in the world. He had only taken up fishing lately. His wife, at first, did not question him. The other men had begun to drink and fight after the man in the white suit had fought Aresando. Cassiano, however, chose to fish and this was perfectly fine with Fabiola. She never understood why he dressed up to go fishing, his clothes perfectly ironed, a tie, even his good shoes. He always came home empty handed. Fabiola would put the puela on the stove every afternoon as he left, just in case, but there were never any fish, never any moss hanging from his hook or mud on his good shoes. She suspected it almost immediately, but she didn’t know until she saw some boys follow Cassiano to the river. There were four of them, Blaesilla’s children. They had lost their father in an accident at the lumber mill in Costilla, unloading a wagon when the lumber shifted and fell on him. He did not die immediately, he rode home, ate dinner and went to bed forever. Blaesilla had told him to call on Mana Virginia, but he said he would be fine, that only his leg hurt. The youngest of the four boys, Patricio, was a month old then. As Fabiola watched her husband walk toward the river, the boys would duck behind trees and fall into the grass like dead birds every time Cassiano seemed to look back, all except Patricio who was lagging behind his older brothers, following only because that was what he had been told to do. The boy seemed more interested in grasshoppers, but he kept behind the other three, steadily losing ground until all of them were out of sight.

  The three older boys came back before Cassiano. They were laughing and making motions with their hips, their faces contorted like treetops pushed by a hard wind. Later, Patricio came out of the trees carrying one of Cassiano’s shoes. He walked slowly, his focus completely on the shoe, his small hand over its opening. Fabiola thought that maybe her husband had fallen in. She was surprised that she did not feel sad about this. She walked across the vegita and met Patricio near the acequia.

  “Donde? Como?” She pointed at the shoe.

  Patricio said he found it by the river where the naked man and his tia Theodata were fighting in the grass. Fabiola grabbed the shoe from Patricio. He looked more sad than scared. A gray brown chapulin, the kind that can fly, hopped from the shoe onto Fabiola’s apron. Patricio thought about reaching for it, but Fabiola had already begun to walk toward the river to confront the world’s worst fisherman. She took off her apron and threw it over a cedar fence post. It stayed there for years, slowly evaporating. Sometime between taking off the apron and reaching the river she turned around and went back to the house. She placed Cassiano’s shoe on the cold stove next to the unused puela. She walked out and never went back.

  It wa
s probably wrong to say that the women were like stone. Stone does not live well; it waits for the earth to consume it or the spring river to tumble it away. The women were not stone. They were something more than that, much more. They were like dancing, each paced differently but always moving with a rhythm that even good men cannot find. Those women were like dance, and in all the dust of men leaving, drinking too much, fishing poorly and wind blowing, they made their own music which they moved to.

  All the men had promised their wives cedar trunks, it was the romantic thing to do in those days, to protect the women’s nice things from the dust and moths. The women in that time were powerful, and their daughters inherited those cedar trunks, heavy and overflowing with books.

  Mark Well How the Lilies Grow

  Dear Nonnatusia,

  All those kids, all of us kids in one classroom. Do you remember how Mrs. Trujillo had us teach the little kids to read? You were always the smartest, but do you remember that girl that no one could teach to read. Her mom sent her to school with the nuns and she came back with syllables missing from her name. She still couldn’t read. I remember her always jumping on the big rock by the swings. She would jump up there and sing, or at least pretend to sing. She’s not like that now. She is pretty holy. I saw her at church, she sat two pews behind you and to the left. Your blue dress sure was beautiful. My uncle Nomio told me there is a lake as blue as your dress and that is why I’m writing. I won’t be going back to school after the rodeo like we always do. I’m not even going to the rodeo. I’ll be up high with my tio looking after the sheep. I’m gonna carve your initials into a tree. I promise I won’t change like that girl that used to jump on the rock. My uncle Nomio said his friend Apollonio was singing about our school closing. That the big kids wouldn’t be able to go there anymore. Samuel and Elle from up the road said the same thing. If Mana Virginia says it, then for sure for sure. Maybe you already heard all this. I’m only telling you so that they don’t take syllables from you too. All the kids from that school talk funny. They sound like rocks on tin. I love your name, all the vowels and it can have four or five syllables, depending on how you hear things. I hear five. Nonnatusia, I could say that all day. I hope you don’t think I’m a little off or anything.