The Guardians (4 page)

When I return from work, after my shower, I do my homework in my cuarto, so my tía's sleep is not disturbed. I go to school. I go to work. I go to church. Meanwhile we wait for my father. He will decide if I stay or not but for now I want to stay.

My aunt had left the truck keys on the kitchen table. Truck keys and one aguacate. My aunt is good at rationing even while she knows we are not starving; although we have our share of arroz y papas all week. And of course, every day, beans, every which way you want to have them— first in the pot like soup; that's the best. You sprinkle a little diced onions and with a rolled-up corn tortilla—a man could not ask for much more in life. We can't add chorizo to them anymore because my tía says one day it will give her a heart attack.

Avocados are just about the only thing my tía doesn't grow in the garden that we can't live without. She has one of those green thumbs.

We get all kinds of chiles, tomatoes, yellow, red, and green for salsa, three varieties of squash, a patch of watermelon, and corn.

Mis padres thought my tía Regina had won the lottery with this property All summer, from harvest to harvest, Mami kept badgering my father, “Why don't we settle down like your sister? Why can't you get us something like that? Por favor, Rafael—your sister did it by herself Why can't we?” My poor mother; she was never happy Who could have been, working in la pisca like we did, pulling up tomatoes, artichokes, cotton, grapes … pues, todo, pues, Santo querido.

That day in my tía Regina's kitchen, which is dark even in the daytime but from the window over the sink you can see the mountains, I decided to eat only the avocado. I picked out two corn tortillas, the hardest ones. Little sacrificios prepare me daily for the course I have chosen. I added a hot salsa of chile árbol that my tía makes so delicious, but that was all. (I tried not to enjoy it too much.) I ate the whole avocado because no matter what I try, once you cut one open, the leftover portion will turn black and go to waste. I've heard all kinds of trucos as to how to prevent that—cellophane, aluminum foil, cut the pit out, leave it in, Tupperware. My tío Osvaldo in California swore that the only sure way to keep an open avocado from spoiling was to place the open part flat down on a piece of cardboard. My mother's brother, he had picked avocados in California all his life so I accepted his word. Until I tried it. It did not work. But back then, when Tío Osvaldo was still alive, I was just a little boy. What did I know of life then?

One day my mother got word that Tío Osvaldo was dying of pneumonia. He had been working for a flower rancher near Fresno, allá in California. We were working the garlic pisca near Watsonville when the message came. Mami took me with her to see him. Tío Osvaldo was laying there in un jacalito. It was typical of the ones we migrantes were assigned in the labor camps. Since my earliest memory such a shack would be called home. There wasn't electricity in that one.

How does someone die of pneumonia picking flowers, Santo? You could die of heat exhaustion and overall fatigue. This everyone knew. My uncle was only twenty-nine years old. He was very strong and had never been sick. When we found him, he was trembling to death under a blanket another migrant had lent him. It was one of those soft colchas depicting whole scenes—an adobe house in front of a big yellow moon,
a tiger looking at you, the Seven Dwarves dancing. This one had la Virgen de Guadalupe with a white face. The owner of the blanket did not want it anymore with the smell of death on it, so my mother let me keep it.

Before we left, a woman told my mother that my uncle died because the men were forced to stand all night in a shallow lake on the property. The rancher did not want them running away. The story sounded almost unbelievable but Mami said almost was not good enough. She wept real hard over her brother but she said she was also weeping over the things in life that we had to put up with.

That night of the red car y el hombre with the ponytail, after el Shur Sav closed and I went directly home, all the luces were off, even el portal light. La Winnie Tuerta, as my tía was now calling her, was lying quietly outside the door. The winds were blowing dust, knocking cans and chairs down and tools around. Inside, there were no potatoes and eggs on the stove kept warm for me. There was the owl I'd been hearing for the last week.

I knocked on my tía's bedroom door. She was in bed, covers to her chin, la eerie luz of the portable TV next to her bed illuminating her face and the volume turned down. She tried to smile. “I was thinking we might want to go to the city tonight and have dinner out,” she said.

“Go out?” I couldn't imagine doing something like that without it being an occasion.

“Yes, like a celebration,” she said.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked. (I do try to avoid such extravagances, Su Reverencia.)

“Your birthday, of course, mi'jo,” my tía said. My birthday was not until March—a month and a half away.

It was the first time she called me “her son.” It should not have been a big deal so that I noticed—even teachers at school called me “mi'jo”—but suddenly I felt hypersensitive. I looked around my tía's room. There was a draft. Algo. I reminded her that my birthday was a ways off. “Your good grades, then,” she said next. Exams were not for another week.

“We could go to Applebee's or Chili's, if you like,” she said, “or to the Taco Tote. You like that place, don't you, hijo? We're celebrating the trip we're going to take to the capital as soon as you graduate—how about that?”

My hands had turned cold and then my ears. If only she would have
gotten on with it, just said what she knew. I had never been all the way in my tía Regina's bedroom before. It was smaller than my own. There was the dresser that had belonged to my grandmother, back from her days. It looked antique. The headboard matched. Over the headboard was a small plaque of la Virgen de Guadalupe. There was a color picture of a young soldier on the nightstand. The nightstand did not match; it was modern, of unfinished pine. I was looking around, feeling my body grow cold, first my arms, then down my legs, remembering again for the second time that day how my tío Osvaldo had died. I fought the hunger so familiar en mis entrañas and waited to hear what my tía had to say whenever she got the courage to say it. I started staring at a mancha in the corner on the ceiling. “Does the roof need repairing there?” I asked. She did not answer.

My palms hurt. Sometimes I wake at night and they throb as if they have been punctured. I look but there is nothing unusual about them. (You know how long I have prayed for that grace.) I brought my right palm up and scrutinized it. “What's wrong with your hand?” Tía Regina asked. “Did you hurt it at work?” I shook my head and put the hand behind my back. (I do not doubt, Padre Pío, that she knows about my affinities with my Savior.) El Cura Juan Bosco said I had to wait until I finished high school. The days do not pass fast enough. I have already chosen los Hermanos Franciscanos.

My dad and my tía are a lot alike when it comes to not trusting the Church. “Millions,” they each say, like they had been saying it all their lives, “millions of mexicanos among the faithful, living in poverty. And the Church—so rich.” “Religion is the opium of the masses.” Mi papá liked to quote Marx. At my age, he joined guerrilleros to fight the government.

My tía is a good woman, Su Reverencia. She does not know that I know, but she was a virgin widow. I heard my mamá tell my father about it when I was a child. They both laughed. Maybe they had no use for aires of purity. But nothing about the room I found myself in that night or the news we were both preparing for—one to pronounce and the other to accept—was more than what it was. It was just our lives. My father was gone forever. Like crumbs of bread, bits of his soul had been leaving traces for days. A bit had landed on la Winnie la Tuerta's eye and taken it. Another had hummed the young hawk to sleep on the road. Still another piece was now in the owl's throat outside the door at that very moment. And my father's soul was causing la Winnie to howl
like she had never howled before. The howling of a dog is an announcement of death. We could not possibly go to a restaurant pretending cheerfulness to ease the ache that my father's soul had dispersed all around us like motes in a ray of light.

Tía Regina, she is so simple. (Am I simple, too, Padre Pío?)

Slowly I made my way to her bed that night, crawling like a little cat to one side and put my head on the pillow next to hers that smelled of lilacs or jasmine. The scent of flowers in the desert, even from potpourri, was always disorienting. I was dizzy and closed my eyes. I felt Tía Regina breathing hard until her sobbing began. And while I cried like that later, in my room, many times, that night I went to sleep to the sound of her copious weeping.

Copious.

It is one of the many beautiful words I learned from reading your most venerated teachings. Yes, I know what it means.
Copious
as in “And yet there will be more.”

As always, your devotee tan desmerecido

REGINA

Today I ate three tunas, one after the other, while I looked out at the snow covering the tops of los Franklins, gleaming like white frosting. I gave a little piece of the cactus fruit to la Tuerta, who was sitting there staring with her one eye. She ate it right up. Sometimes the dog forgets she's a carnivore by nature. Although it's midwinter and all the prickly pear cactus is dormant, I had a stash of peeled tunas in the freezer in a plastic zipper bag for a day like today, when my spirit needed a boost.

I came up with a new idea of how to earn a little extra money. I have a boy to send to college now and that's something to think about. The idea came to me when I started making use of the costal of pecans I collected from under my trees one weekend. First I baked two pies, then three, then the rest of the night I was baking pies. It gave me something to do when I couldn't sleep.

I wrapped a pie and took it to school as my way of thanks for Miguel Mike Mr. Betancourt. I'm not sure what to call him. Everything about my pie was homemade. It had a golden crisp crust y todo. All I know how to bake that always come out right are pies. I entered my pies one year in the county fair. I didn't even get honorable mention. Still, they're pretty good.

“Wow,” the teachers in the lounge said, one after the next. I had to let them know it wasn't for them to share but for Betancourt. “Uh-huh,” said Cindy López. She gave a look to Michelle Montoya. They're this year's student teachers. They think no one knows that Michelle dated Betancourt at the beginning of the year. The first week of school those two got together. Before September was over, so were they. What's this vieja
fea think she's up to? they must've been saying to each other with their eyes.

I found Miguel out in the teachers’ parking lot on his cell phone. He seemed real happy about the pecan pie and stuck a couple of fingers in to taste it right away. “I'm gonna leave it in my car,” he said, smiling, meaning he didn't want to share it with no one. It's winter, which for us means not cold but not hot, so the pie would survive there. “I got more at home,” I said. All the pies were lined up as if on display on kitchen win-dowsills and counters. No one was gonna eat them. I don't have the appetite with all my anxieties these days. That's when I got the idea to go into the pie-baking business.

When I had a break, instead of having lunch, I went home, got one of the pies, and took it to the school and set it out in the teachers’ lounge. “Wow,” the teachers said again. “Who's
this
pie for?” someone asked, trying with all his might not to help himself to a piece. “It's for auction,” I said. “Bidding starts at two dollars, no tax. Hecho en casa y con aceo.”

“That means one hundred percent homemade good. I'll bid two dollars,” said Miguel, who had just come in the door so I hadn't seen him. “Regina's pies are to die for!”

That's how the whole enterprise got started. The pie ended up going for five bucks and, since that was set as its market value—as the math teacher explained it—the others would be that price. Pie-baking will keep me from getting too depressed.