Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (42 page)

“This is what you are looking for?” Señora Florencia didn’t seem surprised.

It had been a very long time since I had seen the maroon silk, threadbare and delicate, the white “spiders” carefully embroidered across the length and width of the sari.

Señora Florencia said, “I sent Señora Mary’s belongings to her son in San Diego. But I kept this. She herself had spread it on this table as the altar cloth but I knew it was not hers. There is no feel, no touch of Señora Mary on this cloth. But if you touch it …” She unclenched my hand, freeing the sari corner, and pushed it across the silk. “No, no. Do not become tense. There is nothing to fear. Close your eyes and be strong. Touch this silk. Don’t you see her? A woman. She has the face of the Chinese women in my Rogelio’s book with pictures from China. She is working on this cloth. She has tears in her eyes. I do not know why.”

“Because one son will be sent away, never to see her again.”

“
¿
China está cerca de la India, no?”

I shook my head. No, I told her. China isn’t all that close to India. And I began to cry. For the loss of my mother, for my own ignorance of the land my mother had been forced to leave.

“This cloth,” Señora Florencia was saying, “it is so full of life! But I must tell you, Señorita Kamal, I am sorry, but a piece is missing!”

I knew all about that missing piece. The sari had a piece missing from it even before it was given to Mary Crawford. Even before mother and I had moved to California. The sari was cut in Wisconsin. It happened when my kindergarten teacher in Milwaukee, Miss Betty Paul, had arranged a spring pageant called “Costumes of Many Lands.” The note I had brought home one March afternoon read,

“I get to carry a bow and arrow! And wear moccasins! Real ones with beads and all!” I was thrilled.

My mother was appalled. Her lecture for the next fifteen minutes was garbled between explaining about Indian “like me, like your father, like our families, like the Indian part of you,” and the first people of the Americas, “as usual, misnamed, mistreated by these conquerors.” Her outrage at the word “costume” was part of the tirade.

Costume-fostume! Indian princess! What does she think we are? Some kind of actors? Circus performers? We wear clothes just like everybody else. Not costumes. I will make you a jbabloo, a special Parsi dress for my special little Parsi girl in America. You are not too old or too big yet for a jhabloo.”

But, according to mother, a real jhabloo needed a Chinese embroidered silk cloth and so she had taken her scissors to the gaaro and cut off three-fourths of a yard. She had sewn the short straight sleeveless dress and crocheted a white silk cap for my tight black curls within two days.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Señora Florencia. “I know about the missing piece. My mother cut it out to make me a dress. When I was about six years old.”

“Yes, but I too cut a piece from this material. For Rogelio. He never wraps up his neck or covers his head when he goes out in the cold. He is always catching a cold. So I took a piece of this cloth because he said he liked it. I gave him a piece of this cloth to wrap around his neck. I will try and get it back for you and sew it on again but as I told you, the last I heard from him he was going to Peru. And he always gives away everything.”

Señora Florencia didn’t look overly upset or apologetic about the missing piece from the sari. The scarf was most probably now in the possession of an alien who had made contact with Rogelio on Macchu Picchu.

“I never answered my mother’s last question. About being an American.”

“Rogelio says that even people from other stars come and live here. All over. In the North and Mexico and Guatemala and Chile and Cuba and everywhere. I asked him if they were angels and he said, ‘Why would angels want to live here?’ I told him that he knows nothing. Even if he reads all the time and sleeps only three hours a day. This earth, she is good to live on. Here. And in your mother’s country. The place where your ancestress, la China, lived. Where you live. I see all these places on the television. Help me to clear this table. The candles and the Virgencita are from my mother’s house. I will fold up this cloth and then you can take it back with you.”

I looked at the sari being used as an altar cloth. The maroon silk and the stylized spiders looked comfortably, quietly at home on that table.

“Señora Florencia,” I said. “I already have a piece of this sari in the dress my mother made. Another piece is most
probably in Peru. Let’s just keep what’s left of this sari here. In Oaxaca. When you dream of la China Poblana, Mirrha-Catarina, maybe you will also dream of the rain falling on my mother’s garden and of my Chinese great-great-grandmother, whose name I don’t know. And maybe one day I will come back and visit you for a longer time. And sit in your garden.”

“Yes,” said Señora Florencia. “You are right. This is a good place for this cloth to rest for some time. With an old woman, in her old woman’s house, with an old woman’s herbs and flowers and dreams. All the way from China to India to Mexico!”

SIMON J. ORTIZ

Bill and Ida lived in the mobile home park west of Milan. They’d come out with Kerr-McGee when the company first started sinking shafts at Ambrosia Lake. That would be in ‘58 or ‘59. He was an electrician’s helper and Ida was a housewife, though for a while she worked over at that 24-hour Catch-All store. But mostly she liked to be around home, the trailer park, and tried to plant a little garden on the little patch of clay land that came with the mobile home.

She missed Oklahoma like Bill did too. He always said they were going to just stay long enough to get a down payment, save enough, for some acreage in eastern Oklahoma around Eufala.

That’s what he told Pete, the Laguna man he came to be friends with at Section 17. Pete worked as a lift operator, taking men into and out of the mine, and once in a while they worked the same shift and rode carpool together.

You’re lucky you got some land, Pete, Bill would say.

It’s not much but it’s some land, Pete would agree.

He and Mary, his wife, had a small garden which they’d plant in the spring. Chili, couple rows of sweet corn, squash, beans, even had lettuce, cucumbers, and radishes, onions. They irrigated from the small stream, the Rio de San Jose, which runs through Acoma and Laguna land. Ida just had the clay red ground which she had planted that first spring they’d spent in New Mexico with lettuce and radishes and corn, but the only thing that ever really came up was the corn
and it was kind of stunted and wilty looking. She watered the little patch from the little green plastic hose hooked up to the town water system that started running dry about mid-June.

One Saturday, Pete and Mary and Bill and Ida were all shopping at the same time at the Sturgis Food Mart in Milan, and the women became friends too. They all went over to the mobile home park and sat around and drank Pepsis and talked. Ida and Bill didn’t have any kids but Mary and Pete had three.

They’re at home, staying out of trouble I hope, Mary said.

Bill had a younger brother nicknamed Slick. He had a photo of him sitting on the TV stand shelf. Bill was proud of his little brother. He passed the photo to Pete and Mary. Slick was in the Army.

In Vietnam, Bill said. I worry about him some but at least he’s learned a trade. He’s Spec-4 in Signal. Slick’s been kind of wild, so I know about trouble.

Ida took Mary outside to show her her garden. It’s kind a hard trying to grow anything here, Ida said, different from Oklahoma.

I think you need something in it, Ida, to break up the packed clay, Mary said. Maybe some sheep stuff. I’ll tell Pete to bring you some.

The next weekend Pete brought some sheep stuff and spread it around the wilty plants. Work it around and into the ground, he said, but it’ll be till next year that it will be better. He brought another pickup load later on.

Ida and Bill went down to Laguna too, to the reservation, and they met Pete and Mary’s kids. Ida admired their small garden. Slick was visiting on leave and he came with them. He had re-upped, had a brand new Spec-5 patch on his shoulder, and he had bought a motorcycle. He was on his way to another tour.

I wish he hadn’t done that, Bill said. Folks at home are worried too. Good thing your boys aren’t old enough.

In the yard, the kids, including Slick, were playing catch with a softball. He wasn’t much older than Pete and Mary’s oldest. Slick had bright and playful eyes, handsome, and Bill was right to be proud of his kid brother.

I’m gonna make sure that young jack-off goes to college after the damn Army, Bill said.

After that, they’d visit each other. Ida would come help Mary with her garden. A couple times, the kids went to stay with Ida when Bill worked graveyard or swing because she didn’t like to be alone. The kids liked that too, staying in town or what there was of it at the edge of Milan at the mobile home amid others sitting on the hard clay ground. The clay had come around to being workable with the sheep stuff in it. Ida planted radishes and lettuce and carrots and corn, even tomatoes and chili, and she was so proud of her growing plants that summer.

One afternoon, up at Section 17, Bill got a message from the foreman to call Ida. They were underground replacing wire and he had to take the lift up. He called from the pay phone outside the mine office.

Pete held the lift for him and when he came back Bill said, I gotta get my lunch pail and go home.

Something wrong, Bill? Pete asked. You okay?

Yeah, Bill said, something happened to Slick. The folks called from Claremore.

Hope it’s not serious, Pete said.

On the way home after shift, Pete stopped at Bill and Ida’s. Ida answered the door and showed him in. Bill was sitting on the couch. He had a fifth of Heaven Hill halfway empty.

Pete, Bill said, Slick’s gone. No more Slick. Got killed by stepping on a mine, an American mine—isn’t that the shits, Pete? Dammit, Pete, just look at that kid.

He pointed at the photo on the TV stand.

Pete didn’t say anything at first and then he said,
Aamoo o dyumuu.
And he put his arm around Bill’s shoulders.

Bill poured him some Heaven Hill and Ida told him they were leaving for Claremore the next morning as soon as they could pack and the bank opened.

Should get there by evening, she said. And then Pete left.

When Pete got home, he told Mary what had happened.

Tomorrow morning on your way to work, drop me off there. I want to see Ida, Mary said.

You can go ahead and drive me to work and take the truck, Pete said.

That night they sat at the kitchen table with the kids and tied feathers and scraped cedar sticks and closed them in a cornhusk with cotton, beads, and tobacco. The next morning, Mary and Pete went by the mobile home park. Bill and Ida were loading the last of their luggage into their car.

After greetings and solaces, Mary said, We brought you some things. She gave Ida a loaf of Laguna bread. For your lunch, she said, and Ida put it in the ice chest.

Pete took a white corn ear and the cornhusk bundle out of a paper bag he carried, and he showed them to Bill. He said, This is just a corn, Bill, Indian corn. The people call it Kasheshi. Just a dried ear of corn. You can take it with you, or you can keep it here. You can plant it. It’s to know that life will keep on, your life will keep on. Just like Slick will be planted again. He’ll be like that, like seed planted, like corn seed, the Indian corn. But you and Ida, your life will grow on.

Pete put the corn ear back into the bag and then he held out the husk bundle. He said, I guess I don’t remember some of what is done, Bill. Indian words, songs for it, what it all is, even how this is made just a certain way, but I know that it is important to do this. You take this too but you don’t keep it.
It’s just for Slick, for his travel from this life among us to another place of being. You and Ida are not Indian, but it doesn’t make any difference. It’s for all of us, this kind of way, with corn and this, Bill. You take these sticks and feathers and you put them somewhere you think you should, someplace important that you think might be good, maybe to change life in a good way, that you think Slick would be helping us with.

You take it now, Pete said, and I know it may not sound easy to do but don’t worry yourself too much. Slick is okay now, he’ll be helping us, and you’ll be fine too.

Pete put the paper bag in Bill’s hand, and they all shook hands and hugged and Mary drove Pete on to Section 17.

After they left, Bill went inside their trailer home and took out the corn. He looked at it for a while, thinking, Just corn, just Indian corn, just your life to go on, Ida and you. And then he put the corn by the photo, by Slick on the TV stand. And then he wondered about the husk bundle. He couldn’t figure it out. He couldn’t figure it out. He’d grown up in Claremore all his life, Indians living all around him, folks and some schoolteachers said so, Cherokees in the Ozark hills, Creeks over to Muskogee, but Mary and Pete were the first Indians he’d ever known.

He held the bundle in his hand, thinking, and then he decided not to take it to Oklahoma and put it in the cupboard. They locked up their mobile home and left.

Bill and Ida returned to Milan a week later. Most of the folks had been at the funeral and everything had gone alright. The folks were upset a whole lot but there wasn’t much else to do except comfort them. Some of the other folks said that someone had to make the sacrifice for freedom of democracy and all that and that’s what Slick had died of, for. He’s done his duty for America, look at how much the past folks had to put up with, living a hard life, fighting off
Indians to build homes on new land so we could live the way we are right now, advanced and safe from peril like the Tuls’
Tribune
said the other day Sunday, that’s what Slick died for, just like past folks.