Under the Feet of Jesus Read online

  Alejo held on to the peach. Tonight the two cousins had managed fifteen sacks of peaches though Gumecindo complained about every minute they spent in the orchard. They would sell the peaches at the flea market on Sunday, and Alejo knew his griping cousin would pat the outline of the bulging billfold in his pocket contentedly. Alejo watched her follow the watermelon downstream until it was close enough to the edge and she could reach for it. But it slipped and bobbed idly away.

  —Almost, Alejo whispered.

  —You seeing things again?

  Alejo knew Gumecindo found the dark and the screaming hours before frightening. His cousin had not stopped talking of La Llorona and the ghosts of her drowned children, and Alejo was forced to hear the stories with every tree he climbed. No, Gumecindo wanted him to hurry not because of the Foreman or loss of employment. La Llorona was more threatening.

  —There’s a girl over there, Alejo whispered.

  —It’s the sun, ’mano. Fried your sesos.

  Alejo could barely make her out before the twilight turned her into a silhouette. She hadn’t even looked around.

  —Pronto, ’mano. Estoy pensando en garrapatas, no garranalgas.

  —Ssssh.

  —I’m hungry.

  It was probably not as smooth as he imagined and it took less than a minute, the way she gathered her printed dress up and over her bare buttocks, to the small of her back, over her neck, and onto the weeds.

  —You’re cooking tonight, Gumecindo said, and he promised himself he would work scrubbing the Hamburger King floor with a toothbrush before accepting another fruit-picking job again.

  She sliced through the cool irrigation water, opening her legs like a frog to propel herself to the watermelon, the bulbs of her buttocks bobbing. The water was quiet and licked around her in velvet waves as the moonlight broke like chipped silver. It was then that Alejo lost his footing. The branch gave way under his weight and cracked and he slipped through the foliage in a rustle. For a moment, Gumecindo didn’t know what hit him.

  Te vengo a decir adiós, No quiero verte llorando. Petra whispered the lyrics under her breath as she poked the dying cinders of the fire, and the ash collapsed upon itself. Estoy viendo tus ojitos que de agua se están llenando. In the waning cast of embers, she watched her daughter come forth from the well of darkness where the lines of eucalyptus trees intersected. Estrella cradled a watermelon like a baby and this vision saddened her. Petra bent to scratch a mosquito bite swelling. She wanted her children to stay innocent and honest, wanted them to be as content as when they first arrived somewhere; but she forced them to be older for their own safety. The song lingered like the taste of vanilla on her tongue. Petra watched her daughter growing right before her eyes.

  —Tu espalda está toda mojada, she said.

  Estrella’s long hair clung to the sides of her face, wetness dampening the back of her dress. At first Estrella thought the mother had been waiting for her. Instead, when she eclipsed the glow of light from the fire to place the watermelon on the table, she realized her mother’s stare went off to the road. It was only then that Estrella noticed the missing wagon.

  —Where’s Perfecto? she asked, and bundled her black hair up. Though the winds had died down, the dampness of her dress was giving her chills and she gave her back to the warmth of the dying fire.

  —Gone to the ranch store to start some credit, the mother replied. Estrella drummed the melon so that the slapping sound distracted her.

  —If Perfecto doesn’t come, we can eat the melon in the morning, Estrella said. She headed for the room where the children slept, where she would snuggle between the warm bodies of the twins.

  —He’ll be back, the mother replied.

  —Come to bed, Mama.

  —Yo no quisiera separarme de tu lado ... She poked the fire. Estrella?

  —Yeah, Mama?

  —Perfecto killed a niño de tierra. She raised the stick in the direction of the porch. It was still warm from her grasp.

  —Aquí? Estrella asked, staking the soil right in front of the porch and the mother nodded and Estrella guided the stick and began the demarcation around the house while the mother sang softly. She grated the stick against the rocky soil, dragging the stick to the side and then to the back of the house where the verses of the song were lost in the chorus of crickets until she returned to the point from where she first began then retraced the line again for a deeper, more definite oval. The mother believed scorpions instinctively scurried away from lines which had no opening or closing. Estrella never questioned whether this was true or not. She handed the stick back to the mother.

  —Come inside, Mama.

  —In a minute.

  —Don’t you ever get tired? Estrella asked.

  —And? The mother turned to study the daughter, then returned to her accustomed vigil. Ojalá Diós lo permita, Pa’ estrecharte entre mis brazos, Pa’ estrecharte entre mis brazos.

  Alejo trampled through the soft soil of the peach orchard with quick, sure steps. By the time he reached the long line of eucalyptus trees, the morning fog had dissipated and he could see a coil of smoke rising not much farther down the road. He put down the sack he carried and rested, and he took in the scent of seawater salt and burning wood and damp air. Between the rows of trees, Alejo caught sight of the biplane. A few miles east a white biplane zipped over the acres of grapes. Its buzzsaw motor descended, low, straight. The plane dusted the crops with long efficient sprays of white cloudy chemicals, then ascended to dust another row farther away on the horizon. The birds, with their blank and nervous eyes, began to caw.

  Ricky called Arnulfo to come see the biplane. He stood at the window of the bungalow and pointed out the plane to his brother, his hair stuck straight up from a full night of sleep. In the distance they could see it over the treeline of tall eucalyptus. Ricky motioned with his hand its smooth turn and whispered to Arnulfo, because the twins were still asleep, that he wanted to be a pilot and fly a biplane just like that one. Arnulfo yawned, tasted his sleep, then returned to a bundle of blankets that made up his bed.

  Alejo lifted the sack and flipped it over his shoulder. His high-top tennis shoes disturbed the leafhoppers who jumped out of the way and his shoes snapped the twigs and molten leaves and a few birds flew out from under the fallen branches of the eucalyptus. Their wings spread then glided over Estrella as she gripped the handle of the blackened bucket she was removing from the fire. The handle was wrapped in rags, and her face glowed warm from the steaming water. The other bucket of boiled water was cooling for the day’s drinking. She dipped an enamel cup, and drank the lukewarm water. She stared over the lip of the cup at Alejo approaching, carrying a bulky sack.

  He wore black shoes that stuck way out in front of him. She noticed right away how big his feet were. He was bigger than his trousers and the cuffs rode high above his ankles. He walked over to the mother, her sweater sleeves pulled up, a steel pot between her knees, intent on cleaning the pinto beans, picking out the pebbles with an experienced eye.

  —Buenas, cómo ‘stan? His voice was not manly, like her father’s, or authoritative like Perfecto’s, nor did his voice sound like the other men who sat around a bonfire on a Saturday night, passing a bottle and talking about home and the loves left behind. He rubbed his throat. The kindling snapped in the pit where coffee boiled. Smoke, cold, garlic and coffee smelled.

  Estrella cracked some twigs in two, stuck a few in the fire. It looked like he swallowed something that stuck in his throat. It looked like he had swallowed a stone.

  —My name’s Alejo y estoy muy lejos de donde nací. Como la canción Mixteca, he joked. He placed the sack of peaches on the makeshift table for the mother to accept. For you, he said, Please take them, and the mother smiled, shook and emptied its contents. The lush peaches thumped on the wooden table, one rolling off the edge until Estrella broke its fall. As Estrella weighed it with the palm of her hand, Alejo stood nervously, his fingers in his pockets, his thumbs sticking out.<
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  —We got here right before the store closed, said the mother. In the empty sack, the mother poured six tin cups of pinto beans from a ten-pound sack that Perfecto had managed to get out of the store owner after snaking the man’s backroom toilet until it flushed. She rolled a few flour tortillas in half, added them to the contents of the sack.

  —Llevalos a tu Mama, she said, from us.

  —My mother’s dead, and Alejo cleared his voice, but the stone of his throat did not go away, My grandma’s in Texas. Then he added, I’m here with a cousin, saying it because he thought for a moment she would take the beans back as if not having a mother meant he had no family. He held the bag like a noose.

  —They brought us on a bus, me and Gumecindo and the others, Alejo continued, and his words jumped and bumped into each other and he felt his face grow hot. Estrella flipped her long black hair to the side, and bit the peach with a deep ravenous bite.

  —Don’t let them see you take the fruit, Estrella warned, licking a finger that dripped with sweet juice. The skin between her thick eyebrows gathered into a thunderbolt when she bit again.

  —For the pay we get, they’re lucky we don’t burn the orchards down. This came from the mother.

  —No sense talking tough unless you do it, replied Estrella, which gave Alejo the idea that this is the way they always talked with one another. Estrella held up the fruit close to the mother’s mouth.

  —Great peach, Mama, and the mother bit into the meat of the peach, raised her eyebrows in surprise, and nodded in agreement.

  Ricky dove from the porch, his arms extended and circled the table, then swooped down with one quick precise move and clawed a peach like a hawk would a rodent.

  —Star can’t get me, Star can’t get me, Ricky chanted.

  —You wish, Estrella replied, and sucked the wooden pit.

  He thanked them again most graciously and walked until he was out of sight and then he turned back to see the coils of smoke. Alejo did not really see Estrella’s face, her pierced but bare earlobes which were long and oval. Did not see the deep pock scar above her eyebrow from a bout of measles or the way her eyes had green specks like her father’s. What he saw was the woman who swam in the magnetic presence of the full moon, a woman named Star.

  Two

  The white light of the sun worked hard. Even the birds wavered on light of the sun worked hard. Even the birds wavered on the crest of the heat waves. Under the leafy grapevines, the grapes hung heavy. She had readied the large rectangular sheet of newsprint paper over an even bed of tractor levelled soil, then placed the wooden frame to hold the paper down. Now, her basket beneath the bunches, Estrella pulled the vine, slit the crescent moon knife across the stem, and the cluster of grapes was guided to the basket below.

  Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips, the sun a flat orange behind her. The sun was white and it made Estrella’s eyes sting like an onion, and the baskets of grapes resisted her muscles, pulling their magnetic weight back to the earth. The woman with the red bonnet did not know this. Her knees did not sink in the hot white soil, and she did not know how to pour the baskets of grapes inside the frame gently and spread the bunches evenly on top of the newsprint paper. She did not remove the frame, straighten her creaking knees, the bend of her back, set down another sheet of newsprint paper, reset the frame, then return to the pisca again with the empty basket, row after row, sun after sun. The woman’s bonnet would be as useless as Estrella’s own straw hat under a white sun so mighty, it toasted the green grapes to black raisins.

  Alejo snipped his own flesh and dropped his knife. He pressed the wound between his lips, tasted mud and salt and tin and then heard a lost child’s wailing over the hundreds of rows. The vast field of grapevines was monotonous—without beginning, without ending—always the same to the piscadores and then to their children. Another child had wandered off and he could hear the scolding of a mother who was so relieved to find her daughter, she was angry.

  Alejo thought of his own grandmother working in Edinburg, Texas, ironing, babysitting, cleaning houses, cutting cucumbers with lemon, salt, and powdered chile to sell at the Swap Meets, or making tamarind and hibiscus juices to sell after Sunday mass. She would do anything to allow her grandson to get schooling. Right this minute, as he pressed his lips to his wound, he imagined his grandma walking down Chávez Street, cutting across the park to get to the bus stop. Alejo readjusted his L.A. Dodger cap and tried to set the wooden frame with one hand. The other, with its torn skin, seemed painfully useless.

  Estrella was not more than four when she first accompanied the mother to the fields. She remembered crying just as the small girl was wailing now, The mother showed pregnant and wore large man’s pants with the zipper down and a shirt to cover her drumtight belly. Even then, the mother seemed old to Estrella. Yet, she hauled pounds and pounds of cotton by the pull of her back, plucking with two swift hands, stuffing the cloudy bolls into her burlap sack, the row of plants between her legs. The sack slowly grew larger and heavier like the swelling child within her.

  Today was Alejo’s turn to bring the lunch. He had packed burritos made of fried potato and French’s mustard wrapped in flour tortillas, with fresh jalapeños crunchy like apples, that he and Gumecindo ate quietly under the shade of the grapevines. His Dodger cap rested on his knee.

  Estrella sat under a vine. The sun shone through, making the leaves translucent. She could see their bones. And she could see the inside of her water bottle when she held it up to measure its contents. The water was tepid with particles floating like pieces of exploded stars in space and she drank in deep gulps, long and hard.

  Alejo struggled with a piece of newsprint paper. His grandmother had reassured him, this field work was not forever. And every time he awoke to the pisca, he thought only of his last day here and his first day in high school. He planned to buy a canvas backpack to carry his books, a pencil sharpener, and Bobcat book-covers; and planned to major in geology after graduating. He loved stones and the history of stones because he believed himself to be a solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth and not some particle lost in infinite and cosmic space. With a simple touch of a hand and a hungry wonder of his connection to it all, he not only became a part of the earth’s history, but would exist as the boulders did, for eternity.

  Estrella remembered the mother trying to keep her awake, but the days were so hot, and the sun wanted her to sleep so badly, she became cranky and angry. Finally, the mother gave in, laid a four-year-old Estrella right on top of her bag of cotton, hushing her to sleep and Estrella never realized the added weight she must have been on the mother’s shoulders as she dragged the bag slowly between the rows of cotton plants. At least this was how she remembered it: being lulled to sleep by the softness of the cotton, palms pressed together under her cheek, and the mother’s pull almost gentle and pleasing, remembered how good it felt to close her eyes, to rest, to be this close to the mother’s pull.

  A young boy of ten hobbled onto Alejo’s row. It was the same boy, he recalled, who mimicked the hawk a few days before. Alejo greeted him with a wave of his cap, but the boy continued walking, punching holes in the soft soil with his steps, barely lifting a hand to return the greeting.

  Ricky found Estrella’s row. He looked feverish and she put down her basket of grapes and pressed the water bottle to his lips, tilted it to the sky, asked him where is your hat and where are Arnulfo and Perfecto Flores anyways? No sense walking home when the sun is the meanest. You don’t know how to work with the sun yet, she told him and she set him down under the vines. Sit until you hear the trucks honking, go that way, okay? Estrella turned and pointed, but her eyes fell on the flatbeds of grapes she had lined carefully, sheet after sheet of grapes down as far as she could see. Her tracks led to where she stood now. Morning, noon, or night, four or fourteen or
forty it was all the same. She stepped forward, her body never knowing how tired it was until she moved once again. Don’t cry.

  Estrella carried the full basket with the help of a sore hip and kneeled before the clusters of grapes. The muscles of her back coiled like barbed wire and clawed against whatever movement she made. She closed her eyes and pulled in the memory of the cool barn, its hard-packed clay floor where she had gathered straw to sit, her knees to her chin. The swallows ticked their claws against the slope of the roof, the breeze wheezing between the planks like wind blowing over the mouth of a crater. All the day’s clamped heat, all the cramping of her worked muscles would ease and hum above her like the music of a windpipe and she opened her eyes and spread the grapes and did not cry.

  Alejo’s grandmother had reassured him; he came from a long line of intelligent people, not like his cabeza de burro father, God rest his stupid soul; seize the chance and make something of yourself in this great and true country. He imagined her at the market by now, carting a few discarded Reader’s Digests for him to read, fingering the crookneck squash or maroon yam she would roast in foil on top of the comal and eat with a little margarine for dinner while sipping her daily cup of hot pinole or the cornsilk tea she said was good for her kidneys. His grandmother’s hands turned cold at night and if he were home, he would be rubbing them with camphor balsam as thick as vaseline right this minute, then wrapping them with a towel warmed in the oven. He took her words seriously and wanted to do what was needed to continue the line and tried not to think of tomorrow. Alejo hoped she had received his money order.

  The piscadores heard the bells of the railroad crossing somewhere in the distance and they stopped to listen. The trabajadores like Señora Josefina who might be thinking about what to make for dinner; Ricky, his arms clasped over his stomach, thinking of a Blue Bell ice cream sandwich, artificially flavored; or Gumecindo who might be planning his Saturday night. Piscadores like Florente of the islands who might be pinching his nostrils to blow his nose; Perfecto Flores who might be thinking how hard this work is for such an old man; the children who might be pulling and tugging the rope tied to the waists of their weary mamas so they wouldn’t get lost; Arnulfo who might be afraid of the snakes that loved to jump out at him by surprise; Alejo who might be searching beyond the vines, and Estrella who might be kneeling over the grapes with her eyes closed—all of them stopped to listen to the freight train rattling along the tracks swiftly, its horn sounding like the pressing of an accordion. The lone train broke the sun and silence with its growing thunderous roar and the train reminded the piscadores of destinations, of arrivals and departures, of home and not of home. For they did stop and listen.