More than any river, p.6
More Than Any River, page 6
On the farm the bare-boned trees drank thirstily, and seedlings grew until the fields were gushing with winter squash, onions, and beets. Marie welcomed the mud that stuck to her boots as she trudged back and forth between the field and the truck. In boxes ready for transport to Sacramento and the Bay Area, she packed butternut squash, cauliflower, and beets, leafy greens poking out the sides.
Those were the raw gifts for the punishing labor, the tenderness that accompanied the disking and plowing. Just as they’d packed the fruit gently in summer, they stacked and tied chard so the leaves spooned up against each other, carrying it to the wheelbarrow in a bundle like a baby to keep from breaking leaf or stem. At night they ate the produce they’d planted, harvested, and cooked. Lupe pan-fried the chard with onions and added them to their potatoes for lunchtime tacos.
“It’s all about time,” John told Marie, handing her a jar of honey. “How to take what there is never enough of and make the most of it in the slower months.” Like the honeybees European settlers had brought with them to the valley. Kimura Farm was the perfect environment for them to pollinate and produce honey.
In the morning Marie slathered some of it over almond butter on grainy wheat toast, bringing a bit of summer to her winter breakfast.
10
Lupe heard the heavy sound of boots on the porch before Manuel entered and set them just inside the door so they wouldn’t dirty the floor she swept clean every night before bed. He rubbed his hands by the woodstove and breathed in the smell of rice and onions.
“Tengo hambre,” he said.
Lupe, standing at the stove, turned around and kissed him. He smelled of chopped weeds and sweat.
“¿Como se fue?” she asked, turning back to stir the chicken and rice. How did it go was the question she asked every night he returned from the field. Manuel got home later than she did because as foreman he had jobs to oversee.
He stood behind her, his body, just a little wider and taller, eclipsing hers.
“Bien, bien,” he said. “Que rico, arroz con pollo.” He was looking forward to dinner, but first he would slip into the tiny bathroom for a shower.
After his shower he took a seat at the table and swallowed deeply from the glass of water she set at his place. Lupe sat down and passed him a container filled with warm tortillas. He took two and helped himself to the chicken and rice.
“We’ll go to the church after dinner,” he said.
She nodded. For almost two years, they had been trying in the bed tucked into a corner of the room, and lately had taken to visiting Father Larry to pray for a baby.
“What did you pick today?” he asked.
“Cavó,” she corrected him. Dug, not picked. “Onions and leeks. They were muddy.” Mud that embedded itself in the green layers of leek, like bright ribbons the women of Jalisco weaved through their braids. “¿Y tu?”
“Helped John replace the belt on a tractor,” he said, “And soaped the broccoli for aphids.”
“You should have brought me some soap,” she said, wiping her hands as if they were still muddy.
He laughed. “Gracias por la cena.” Thank you for dinner. He took their plates to the sink, where he washed them and set them in the drying rack, while Lupe wiped the stove and table. Then he put on his boots and they closed the door behind them. It was already growing dark, and it would be dark in the morning when they got up to return to the field.
The headlights flashed on bare branches as Manuel drove through the orchard. Out on the levee road the right side dropped off to the slough, and the left to the olive orchard of the neighboring farm. During the day the rows of dun blue olive leaves cheered her, whereas now the trees were hunched in the darkness like an unknown future.
Manuel drove slowly along the levee to town, where he turned into the parking lot of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic church.
They were about to knock on the parish door when Lupe heard a noise behind the building.
“Escucha,” she said. Listen.
“Gato,” he said. Cat. But Lupe heard the more persistent sound of a crying baby.
Suddenly she was a little girl, hearing the baby cry less and less as her mother hurried them toward the border. By the time they reached Arizona the crying had ceased altogether. Lupe moved instinctively toward the sound, sure that this time she could save the baby. She stumbled along the side of the building, Manuel close behind.
“¿Adonde vas?” he asked, alarmed that she was moving away from, not toward, the safety of Father Larry’s door.
She wondered if it was her imagination that made her see a small lump on the concrete steps. There was silence, and Lupe approached the shape with her hands held out. They closed on the sides of a duffel bag. She saw the outline of a face peering out and jumped back, colliding with Manuel.
“¡Dios mio!” she said, even as she reached down and felt a thick blanket wrapped around the baby inside the bag. She lifted the duffel from the step, the baby let out a wail, and Lupe cried out too.
It was a girl. Lupe was not sure how she knew this in the dark.
Gracias a Dios, it had stopped raining the day before. Lupe touched her cheek to the baby’s, expecting her face to feel cold, but it was warm and wet with tears. The bundle hadn’t been there long.
Manuel stood behind her, squeezing her shoulders and whispering, “¿Como? Como?” Then he let go and walked the perimeter of the yard, reaching out in front of him. Lupe might have been scared, watching her husband search for a hiding person, except that she knew there was no one there.
Manuel led Lupe and the baby around to the front of the church and knocked on the parish door, and after a moment it opened. Larry stood in the doorway in the white-collared shirt and black pants a priest wore under his robes. His white hair was swept back on either side of his balding head, and his glasses were slipping down his nose.
Father Larry stared at the duffel. “We pray for a baby and a month later you show up with one,” he said to Manuel, opening the door wide so they could step inside.
“It’s no joke,” Manuel said, turning to Lupe. “¿Con permiso?” he asked his wife.
She held out her arms, and he pulled out the baby, letting the duffel drop to the floor. The colors of her blanket reminded Lupe of the one Mamá had wrapped around her baby brother in Jalisco. “Someone left her behind the church.”
“That can’t be,” Larry said. “It’s dark back there.”
“I know,” Manuel said.
Larry headed for the phone. “I’ll call the police.”
Manuel stood cradling the baby, who hadn’t peeped since Lupe had picked her up.
Larry hung up the phone and walked over to peer at her. “I’ve baptized a lot of them,” he said, “but I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”
Manuel turned to his wife. “Neither can we,” he said.
The baby was still looking up into Manuel’s face with dark, curious eyes when a female police officer arrived. He told the officer about how they’d found the bundle, then asked, “What will you do with her?”
“I’ll call Social Services, and they’ll come get her.”
“Where will they take her?” Manuel asked.
“She’ll be cared for while we wait for a parent or legal guardian to claim her.”
“And if no one claims her?” His eyes searched Lupe’s.
“Then Social Services arranges for the adoption.”
“What if the parent is ilegal?”
“The parent wouldn’t face criminal charges. We just want to speak with her, or him, and get as much information about the infant as possible.”
“Has this happened before? You seem to know a lot about it,” Larry said.
“First time for me,” the officer said, “But yes, it happens.” She looked down at the baby. “I’m going to return to my car and make the call to Social Services. It could take them a while to get here.”
“A while?” asked Larry, glancing at the television that had been blaring ever since he answered the door.
“An hour maybe,” the officer said. “Are you okay with her?” she asked Manuel and Lupe, who both nodded.
“I’ve got some milk,” Larry said after the officer closed the door. “But I don’t have a bottle.”
“Of course you don’t have a bottle,” Manuel said, more to the baby than to Larry, then seeing his wife’s face, handed Lupe the bundle, which Lupe offered her finger, and the baby began to suck.
They were on their second round of the news and the baby had tired of Lupe’s finger when they heard the knock at the door.
When Larry got up and opened it, a woman with long brown hair and a pale face stood in the doorway, a diaper bag slung over her shoulder. “Hi,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Sherry.”
As she entered she looked at the baby, who had resumed her crying. Pulling the bright blanket away to reveal a yellow onesie, she said, “No more than a couple of days old. A girl?”
“Creo que si,” Lupe said. I think so.
“We’ll feed her first, then check to be sure.” Sherry dropped the diaper bag onto a chair and pulled out a bottle in a Ziploc bag, along with a can of formula. Washing her hands in the kitchen, she asked Larry, “Do you have a jar or a glass bowl?”
Larry pulled out a bowl, which she filled with water and popped in the microwave. She poured the heated water into the bottle and scooped in some formula, twisted the lid tightly, and shook it.
Squeezing a drop of formula onto her wrist, she handed the bottle to Lupe.
Lupe took the bottle and held the nipple to the baby’s wailing mouth. She clamped down, sucking noisily, and Lupe sank onto the couch where they had been watching the news with Larry. For a moment the only sound in the room was the faint bubbly squeal of milk being sucked from the bottle. Lupe tilted up the bottle as the baby drained the milk.
Manuel told Sherry the story. “The officer said the parent will not be arrested if she comes forward.”
“That’s correct,” Sherry said. “The parent has fourteen days. We encourage them to come forward because the more we know about the baby the better. She—assuming it’s a girl—was surrendered, for the most part, according to the law.”
They looked down at the baby, who had fallen asleep with the nipple of the near-empty bottle in her mouth. Lupe, Manuel, and Sherry watched her sleep, while Larry’s eyes wandered back to the television.
Manuel chuckled. Lupe had always thought of priests as being above their parishioners somehow, but Father Larry wasn’t that way, and he and Manuel were always bantering.
“What?” Larry asked.
“Your job is not finished,” Manuel said.
“I know.” Larry grew serious and pressed his hands together. “My job is not done.” Because after Sherry took the baby, Lupe, Manuel, and Father Larry would have to pray. Pray that the mother did not change her mind and return, pray that this baby would survive.
On the return to the farm, Lupe fell back in the truck seat and closed her eyes.
She was a girl running across the desert to keep up with Mama. Cristina was fast, burdened as she was with a backpack, the baby in a sling, and Lupe’s little brother. She pulled him by the hand while he cried for her to stop.
“I’m tired, Mamá,” he wailed.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “If we do we’ll be left to die.”
That made Lupe’s brother cry harder. Their older sister Juana, who had been lagging, sprinted ahead and grabbed the boy’s free hand, so that together she and her mother swung him along. Juana carried the gallon jug they’d emptied of water, and Lupe carried the one whose last cup Mamá would divide between them after dark, when they finally stopped to rest.
The moment the coyote who’d taken Mamá’s meager savings showed them the hole in the fence, that was the beginning, not the end, of their hardship. When he delivered them to Mamá’s cousin Cristina in Arizona he threatened to take them back to the desert and leave them if they didn’t pay him more money. Cristina pulled all the crumpled bills from a pitcher and handed them to him, and although it wasn’t the amount he’d demanded, the coyote left.
Mamá had given the last of the water to her children, and her milk dried up. That night the baby, who’d been listless for days, stopped breathing. Mamá held her ear to the baby’s face, shook her gently, breathed into her mouth.
Finally Mamá stopped, tears and snot streaming down her face as she held the baby tight to her chest. The children huddled around her on the pillows Cristina had laid on the floor. Lupe was the last to fall asleep, drifting off to the sound of Mamá weeping.
Later, she woke to Juana announcing, “Papá!”
And there he was. Papá, who’d survived his own border-crossing months before, had arrived at Cristina’s after taking three buses to get from Northern California to Arizona. While their little brother snored, Lupe and Juana held on to their parents, who clung to each other and wept with the baby between them. After a while they started whispering, and when Lupe and Juana tried to listen, Papá waved them away.
“Time to sleep,” he said.
Slowly he and Mamá stood up. Papá took some silverware from the kitchen drawer and the altar candle Cristina had lit for the baby. When Lupe and Juana tried to follow them to the sliding door, Papá shook his head, but they watched through the glass.
Mamá laid down the baby wrapped in his blanket, and she and Papá started hacking at the hard dirt in the yard with forks. The girls were still watching when an hour later they had a hole just deep enough. Not wanting to draw attention to themselves and their family on this side of the border, they buried the baby in Cristina’s backyard.
Lupe started to cry. “She can’t breathe under the dirt!” she whispered to her sister.
Juana shook her head and held Lupe in an awkward embrace.
Finally the girls crept back to the pillows, lay down on either side of their little brother, and fell asleep. They woke what seemed moments later to pink light and their parents still outside, sleeping spooned up to each other beside their baby’s grave.
The sun was creeping like a spider over the horizon when Papá counted out the money in his tattered wallet, setting aside what he needed to buy bus tickets for his family. What was left he dropped in the pitcher Cristina’s cousin had emptied for the coyote. Then Mamá, Papá, and their children rode for three days with empty bellies: first a bus across the border into the desert of California. Then another bus on the wide-laned highway crammed with cars, up over mountains that looked as dry as Mexico, across a basin devoid of green, except for the rows and rows of crops where eventually Lupe knew they would stop. They did, in the San Joaquin Valley where they followed the crops from town to town and one migrant camp to the next.
Lupe could still call it up, Mamá and Papá hacking at the dirt with forks. And the camps, the sickening heat, a bandana that hadn’t kept the spray from entering her nostrils, the bitterness in the back of her throat. The sharp edges of metal, hands like the scavenging yellow beaks of gulls.
When there were no crops to be picked, Papá tried to hide his worry by whistling with his tongue behind his teeth. On those days he would take Lupe to the dump, which was like a ruined kingdom. A tractor smoothing the mountain of garbage scattered gulls. A glint of color from a broken toy, buried in the pile of soggy mattresses and worn-out brooms, distracted her from the unbearable smell that, made worse by the heat, was a reminder that cream would turn and animals would shrink from their skins.
Once in the middle of summer it rained. The air cleared and puddles formed like a moat around the mountain of garbage. Papá handed Lupe a single yellow glove from the pair they split and told her to grab hold of the strip of metal sticking out of a pile. Sharp edges penetrated the hole in her rain-soaked glove. Together they pulled, and the strip lengthened, but they couldn’t tug it loose, so Papá bent it back and forth until the metal grew hot in the crease and broke.
Papá knew an old man who earned his living hauling people’s loads to the dump, and they slid into the cab of his truck for a ride to the metal recycling plant twenty miles down the road. Their scraps were meager compared to the mound of metal in the yard, above it a demolished car dangling from the spider-like claw of a crane. But a muscled man in coveralls handed them a few dollars, and that night there was chicken with their usual dinner of beans and tortillas.
Fall came, and they moved on to vineyards. Their father was usually out working by the time Lupe, Juana, and their little brother woke up, but one morning he was waiting outside when they left for school.
“No grapes to pick today, Papá?” Juana asked as they walked along the side of the road.
“Es una huelga,” their father said. A strike.
A few days later on the way home from school, Lupe, Juana, and their brother ran across field workers hiding in the vineyards.
“¿Qué pasó, Papá?” Juana asked when they got home.
“Ilegales,” their father said. “Hired to break the boycott, but Border Patrol is coming to arrest them.”
The next time Lupe passed workers hiding in the vineyards, she was scared, remembering the desert, the greedy coyote, her baby brother’s grave. She had always imagined Border Patrol riding the banks of el Rio Grande on horses, wielding guns and machetes, and it wasn’t until she was in high school that she discovered they were just men in uniform.
She and Juana spent those years not in school but making their way ever so slowly down a row of crops. In the spring and summer they pulled potatoes from the ground. Their fellow worker, un hombre their father’s age, told them about the men in uniform. He said it was a laborer, female like themselves, who years ago had demanded they arrest ilegales like the ones Lupe had seen hiding in the vineyards. The woman laborer had hitched a ride up to Orange Grove and found seven officers sitting around headquarters playing cards, and only after she rallied college students to protest outside the building did Border Patrol get up from their card game and drive down to arrest the workers so they couldn’t cross the picket lines.
