The Importance of a Piece of Paper Read online

  “Oh well,” he heard himself say, and sipped the last of his coffee. He pulled on a light faded cotton jacket over his denim overalls, patted his straw sombrero onto his balding gray-haired head, and before going out he wiped down the kitchen counters, hung the dishrag over the sink faucet, and turned off the light. He took her prize-winning rose from the bell jar inside the china cabinet and put it in his jacket pocket.

  Outside, in the tractor shed, he pulled the choke and coaxed the gas pedal until, on the third crank, it sputtered and coughed into a low unsteady idle. He backed out slowly across the front yard, went alongside the sheep pens and around the barn, behind the house and along the orchards to the fields to the west. His headlights swept across the wall of cottonwood trees and, underneath them, the evergreen bushes Matilda had planted, and briefly lighted his handiwork—warped planks set on sawhorses lined with mason jars full of screws and washers, spools of baling wire, ancient tools, and rusting machinery parts.

  The sheep bleated in the sheds. He drove past the mesquite corral where his three old nag horses whinnied and rubbed their sides on the stick fence. They’d all be fed already if Matilda were still with him.

  He imagined her having coffee and toast, stripping a few ears of corn to check if they were ready for picking, tinkering with the tractor’s carb, scraping off hardened dirt from the disc blades, snipping ripe tomatoes and chili peppers from the garden, slapping off dew from freshly picked garden vegetables against the sink sides. Matilda had his same wonder and love for farm life, and he couldn’t express in words the immense satisfaction that welled up in him when he was in the field with her, shovels in their hands, soil under their sneakers, sweat pouring down their brows and backs.

  His shepherd, Buster, came bounding out of the apple orchard to his right. He remembered how the dog had chased the truck to the chapel, dashing with tongue lolling the whole way. It was the farthest Buster had ever followed him, and while the priest gave his eulogy, Buster stood outside barking and scratching at the door. Everyone heard the dog but ignored him. Guadalupe was mortified, and in any other situation he would have given Buster a few good smacks, but he knew the dog was suffering some kind of trauma. Buster was up on the seat next to him now.

  He turned the tractor onto a dry path between the rows and headed west of the house, to the open fields. He passed her vegetable garden.

  The burly guttering of the tractor put him into a trance and he barely noticed Buster jump down. He let his mind ease into the exhaust stack’s smoky incantation. It hypnotized him, droning in his bones and churning up more memories of Matilda when she had planted the windscreen of bamboo along the southern border of the fields. After that, she laced honeysuckle vines into the chicken wire, and it weaved over completely until you couldn’t see the wire, leaving only a boundary bursting with aromatic flowers. The horses lounged next to it, tails swatting at the honeybees and ears perked alertly on the dazzling hummingbirds flitting in the blossoms. The headlights shone on water gushing through a break in a furrow at the end of the field. He reached back to feel for the shovel behind the seat.

  The light crept up on the mountain crest to the east. Everything was waking up. It was Matilda’s spirit in the plants. Sometimes before sunrise Matilda would sit in the semidarkness on the back porch steps and her eyes would glow with a brilliant sheen when she saw the mallards, red-tailed hawks, and crows gliding in at daybreak and congregating in the fields. It gave her a joy few other sights scarcely came close to—after meditating like that, she’d enter the kitchen, cheeks flushed and chilled, her eyes brighter than the morning sun, humming an old country song clear as a cathedral bell, ringing throughout the rooms with the immense pleasure of being alive.

  He intended to patch the break, then close the sluice gate and irrigate the next field. There was still enough moonlight to see by so he turned off the tractor lights, put the gear in neutral, climbed down, took the shovel from the rope sling, and started rebuilding the dirt clods along the furrow, packing it solid.

  From the channel brush came the sound of startled birds flapping frantically. It was Buster again, coming in from roaming the riverbank. He had crept up on mallards serenely floating in the ditch and barked as they scattered airborne. Sometimes he’d come back soaking wet and dirty with stickers and weeds in his coat, black nose scratched and bleeding from squirrels and wild cats, breathing hard, clutching an old muddy boot, a dead river rat, or bird in his mouth. In eleven years hardly a day had passed when Buster wasn’t up on the seat beside Guadalupe as he ploughed and furrowed the fields. Clearing the dark treetops at the river, the geese wavered up toward the white moon. Seconds later, Buster came sprinting his way in a headlong rush from the Bosque.

  Guadalupe heard him but didn’t turn. Bent over, intently patting muddy shovel-scoops against the furrow side, he was caught off guard when Buster jumped on him, and he stumbled, losing his eyeglasses in the mucky water and dropping the shovel when he tried to regain his footing. He took a step forward, then back, and groped around for them in the water, his old, calloused hands turning up mud and pebbles but no glasses.

  Meanwhile, Buster scrambled up on the tractor seat, wagging his tail and turning around excitedly. He barked at Guadalupe, lunging forward and bumping the gear stick, engaging it in low gear. The tractor moved, big back tires rotating slowly in the mud, catching little traction, sinking but catching now and then, and then inching forward. Guadalupe looked up and saw only a dark blur closing in on him. He tried to step out of its way, but he fell in the water and cut the bridge of his nose on the shovel blade. He toddled to his feet, lifted his right leg, and planted it momentarily on the slick muddy furrow side but slipped again.

  The tractor tires churned slowly in the ooze, the motor humming hot, iron joints grunting, couplings grinding, bolts and washers straining as it inched forward in the mire, the droning groan of the engine laboring, the tires digging in deeper. The exertion of the vibrating tires loosened the furrow sidings, and water broke free, flooding around Guadalupe as he struggled to stand in the mud. The tractor suddenly caught hold of a rock and jumped forward. Guadalupe groped at the air hoping to grab some piece of the tractor and climb back on and turn it off. Then it leaped forward again and scooped him into its front-end bucket, which had tilted at an upward angle when Buster bumped the lever, lifting Guadalupe off his feet and carrying him now as if he were a branch. The tractor lurched then paused, moving until it went over the field boundary and crossed the road. Guadalupe struggled to escape—his body was half out of the bucket and he was ready to push himself off onto the ground when it butted him up against a tree.

  There the tractor stayed, burying its tires in the soil, cleats chewing at the soft dirt, the sounds of loosening metal joints like a pig’s snout snorting fiercely, biting and grunting at the earth with implacable hunger, slowly grinding deep wheel ruts into the dirt up to the axle, everything a blur to Guadalupe except his own imminent end. With the bucket’s blade crushing his ribs, he knew he was going to die pinned against a tree, gazing straight ahead but unable to make out anything distinct except a gray light over the fields. He closed his eyes. Mixed in with the numbing of his body and his bewilderment was the fragrance of purple flowers, the smell of the manure and horses, and the panic that he still needed to talk to his children.

  The idling tractor became inaudible. He felt heat flush over him, followed by a lightheaded euphoria. From the thick brush and trees of the Bosque, floating across the fields, came an old Mexican ballad, his favorite to dance to as a teenager with Matilda. He just had enough energy to open his eyelids to slits, but he could just make out the silhouette of a woman floating on the water. For a moment he thought it was La Virgen de Guadalupe, his namesake saint. She came across the fields and he desperately wished he had found his eyeglasses as she neared him. He was filled with the greatest delight, certain it was Matilda. Then he realized that he was her favorite flower, the one she had nurtured for over fifty years. He was the special
flower in Matilda’s garden, her cherished fragrant prairie bloom, which she came forward now to take and carry away in her hand.

  The Three Sons of Julia

  Julia set the bag down on her kitchen counter. She had bought garlic, lemons, avocados, Mexican sodas, red chili powder, red onions, lettuce, carrots, olives, and goat cheese. She had picked a variety of bruised and damaged fruits from the discount basket, apples pecked by birds, peaches and apricots that were blemished by weather and were small but sweeter and closer to what fruit tasted like when she was young. These were the fruits that had stayed on the boughs waiting patiently for a hand—the way her heart had waited, counting off the days every time she stepped out into the morning toward the bus stop for work and every time she returned from work, walking down the dirt road that had always seemed to her like a tunnel taking her further back in time. No sidewalks, no street lamps, dirt running right up to the foundation of the houses. Dogs ran wild, sniffing at scents from beans steaming in pressure cookers, red chili and sausage sizzling in frying pans, recently butchered pigs and goats’ bones—she loved her barrio’s ancient customs and even had a few primitive rituals of her own.

  When her three sons were infants and one of them had a fever, she’d sit on the bed and lay him on his back between her legs. He’d play with strands of her long black hair cascading down her shoulders below her elbows. She’d rub him gently, massaging him affectionately like tortilla dough, working out the fever with her hands. Pulling and pressing, she’d soothe his body, tenderly mashing her face in his shoulder, nuzzling her strong brown hands under his arms, poking her fingers into his hollows, pushing at his hips, raking his back with her fingernails, rubbing his neck, pushing as if she were trying to move him uphill, away from the fever.

  She now wished sometimes that she had someone to massage her pains away. She was prematurely graying, her complexion was harsh, wrinkles converged on her face from all sides, she was overweight, but most lamentable, she didn’t have the optimism needed to enjoy life anymore. Washing laundry at the hospital all day for the last thirty-eight years had worn her out. But today she was full of energy, she didn’t feel lonely as she usually did, wasn’t thinking about her exhaustion or her body wanting to flop down on the bed and nap. All she cared about when she finally reached her two-room house and wearily stepped up on the porch clutching her groceries was that her sons were coming today.

  She saw her oldest, Ramon, not as the successful investment banker he was now, but as the thirteen-year-old she held in her arms one summer evening during a dirt-lot football game. He had hurt his back and could not move. She’d gently rolled him over, lifted his legs again and again, dug her fingers into his shoulder blades, fingering the grooves along his spine with one hand while rubbing his neck with the other, until he became water sifting through her hands—free and loose and coursing again, out the door into the yard to resume his game.

  Her middle son, Omar, now twenty-eight, had been touched by the angels and did not recognize the same reality as others. Instead, he spoke with the wind, was attached to plants and animals, drifting happily in other zones usually inhabited by spirits. He lived with her and spent his days murmuring at the breeze, mimicking frogs, chasing grasshoppers and lizards in the yard. Looking into his eyes, she saw his mind—a gold-winged butterfly fluttering in a permanent world of rainbows.

  Darker in disposition was her youngest, Terrazo, twenty-six and passionately proud of being a rebel. When he was eighteen, he had slapped a drug dealer in the face and was shot by his bodyguard. He managed to drive home, where Julia cut the bullet out from his stomach, applied herbs, and knelt all night at her altar praying to La Virgen. She never told him that she believed her prayers carried him like a branch in a river raging toward death back to the shore of this life to her arms. Her promise to God that night for sparing his life was that she would sacrifice her own aspirations and dreams in devotion to her sons.

  She kept that promise and it now seemed fulfilled by their love on this day, the Fourth of July, the first time in nine years they would all be under her roof again. She’d been marking off the days on the calendar—the ones preceding the Fourth were x’ed with a black marker, the Fourth was circled in blue. The three large candles she had bought a week before still burned on her altar; every morning she lit the incense and asked God for one day with all her sons, and now her prayers had been answered and the day had finally arrived.

  She checked the pot of beans and red chili simmering on the stove and covered them. She went into her bedroom, coiled her long graying hair into a bun at the back of her head, rubbed herbal salve on her ankles and hands that ached from arthritis, took her special turquoise blouse and red skirt from a cardboard box beneath her bed, and dressed. Then she went back to the kitchen, stood by the window over the sink, and started making her salsa and green chili.

  She watched through the window as she prepared the salsa, lingering on the house where Eloy used to live. He had started with one small restaurant years ago and now had them all over town. He bought a million-dollar home in the rich part of town and moved. Julia sometimes cleaned homes for extra money, but never a million-dollar house. It must have a lot of empty rooms and what good is one’s dwelling if it is always empty. Life passed too quickly to spend your money on big empty houses. The boys had been infants not too long ago and she too was getting on; she felt it in her bones and muscles.

  Beyond her small adobe home in the barrio, on a winding dirt road by the Rio Grande, was the hospital. She knew that on the twelve floors above the laundry where she worked, doctors and surgeons were trying to keep people alive. They could cure anything but lack of love, and not having love in their lives was, to her mind, what made people sick.

  She could smell their loneliness every morning in the sheets, the doleful odors of sickness and death in the fibers. She could visualize the child who had broken his bones on a skateboard because his mother or father didn’t come home until ten each evening and the house was too empty and lonely to be in. She could smell the faint perfume of a woman who had been in a car accident, out drinking because her boyfriend no longer loved her; and the man dying from liver problems, his grief permeating the sheets. They all came from empty houses, lonely places. She’d sometimes go upstairs during an emergency to deliver sheets to a certain ward and see patients in excruciating agony in their rooms; then, hours later when she’d be called in again to change the sheets, she’d find that the patient had died, but the room was still filled with their loneliness.

  Yes, life was all too short, and gazing out the window, seeing her reflection in the glass—graying hair, tired brown eyes, chapped lips—she smiled thinking her children had taken the best of her, absorbed her in their pores. She had poured her life into them, urged out sad aches from their hearts, protected them in a violent world, and given them happiness.

  Familiar barrio kids went past her view. They ignored the dogs, who barked and meanly cowered behind their fences because kids had pelted them with enough stones to teach them that if they ventured out, they were going to feel pain. She inhaled sage and garden fragrance and it momentarily dizzied her, much like copal and myrrh transported her during Mass. A stray cow wandered into the field of grass between her house and her neighbor’s. With a smile she recalled how Ramon, now thirty-three but six at the time, had been outside with other kids peering at a steer through the slats of a livestock trailer. One of them accidentally elbowed the trailer door latch and freed it. She saw it in her mind, running wildly down the road as people dashed after it the way they did in Spain during the chasing of the bulls. The best part was that a dog had locked its teeth into the steer’s tail, and it veered this and that way trying to lose the dog, but the dog clung fast, flying through the air as though it had wings. It was the funniest scene.

  Up the road, shirtless men and their girlfriends in tank tops flapped back the tarps to their red, white, and blue tents, opening for business with impressive fireworks displays. She didn’t
particularly like firecrackers, but nothing and no one was going to spoil her day. To her left, crows flew from the mist bordering the river a half mile away. The trees were submerged in fog except for the one huge branch she could still see, magically floating like a green feather suspended midair. In fields extending out from the riverbanks, buckskin and palomino horse heads appeared poised on mist, but as they grazed forward, tails and legs slowly revealed themselves.

  Kids laughed as they threw firecrackers at Mr. Montez, who was watering his front lawn. He went to hose them down but they dashed away, climbing like goats over stacks of fruit and vegetable crates. They thought they had gotten away, but Julia watched as Mr. Montez quickened his pace, rounded the corner of his house, caught them in the open, and drenched them. He laughed as they scattered. The road started filling with others: shiny lowriders; daughters in nice clothes driving to their parents’ for a visit; denim-clad, hard-hatted laborers rattling by in old trucks pieced together from junkyard parts; shy clerks in modest attire walking to bus stops; adolescent boys walking with their girlfriends giggling into their cell phones. The world was waking up, and her special day was finally starting.

  The pressure cooker’s whistling steam startled her. She turned from the window and there was Omar, standing near the stove in his pajamas and staring at it with wide eyes. After feeding him and helping him dress, she sent him outside to play on the wide stretch of grass beside the house, where he rolled from one end to the other, over and over.

  Julia was stirring ground beef into the chili when Ramon, his wife Susan, and their daughter Lila walked in. She set the wooden spoon down and turned, wiping sweat and hair strands from her forehead.

  “Mama, cómo estás?” He hugged her.

  “You look so handsome,” she said. He filled the kitchen like a beautiful giant and she admired him proudly.