Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (16 page)

As the train braked and squealed into the station, with bellowing gusts of dust and steam swirling around her window, Madrina looked up and saw the statue of a lone Indian perched on the peak of the dome of the train station. He wore a small headdress of feathers and a loin-cloth. He stood in perfect balance on one foot, with his other outstretched behind him. With his arms, he grasped a bow and arrow at the very moment of release, aiming east toward the city.

She knew it was a statue, but it reminded her of the Kikapu she used to see in the mercado in Múzquiz, selling their leather crafts and dry shredded beef for
machacado.
It seemed such an odd place for an Indio, as if his arrow was aimed at her, bringing forth a torrent of memories of the Mexican home they had left behind. He was a sentinel of memory, greeting every visitor as an emissary of a vanished world. It gave San Antonio the eerie feeling of a city frozen in time.

“Y el pobrecito, tan solitario,”
Madrina adds—“Poor thing, so alone up there.”

The poor Indian had been abandoned on the dome, keeping a lonely vigil over San Antonio de Bejar.

 

 

The whole Garcia family moved to San Antonio because Uela and Juan José had found a house big enough to reunite the whole familia. From the days in Palaú, when they had first worked together on the family
granja,
my grandfather and his father-in-law had nurtured a dream of starting a commercial produce farm closer to a city, giving them access to bigger markets than they could find in the villages or towns of north Mexico. Abuelo Jacobo treasured his son-in-law’s honesty and tireless labors, and the old man was one of the few people with whom my otherwise taciturn grandfather could pass hours talking. Now, it might be possible to realize that long-held dream. Uncle Frank, Abuelo Jacobo’s oldest son, had been married and living in San Antonio for several years. Two of his brothers, Santos and José, who had their own families, worked with him in a machine shop he had opened on Guadalupe Street. Slowly, the Garcias were making their new home in the south Texas city.

The new Santos-Garcia home on Burr Road was just beyond what were then the northern outskirts of the city, near where the stream of the Rio San Antonio grows into a wider river from a large network of underground springs. The sprawling wooden house, shaded with big furry-leafed Chinese elm trees, was part of Fernridge, the large estate of Col. George Brackenridge, a prominent banker, city father, and scion of an old family of early San Antonio settlers. The house, big enough to accommodate several families, came with Juan José’s new job as caretaker for the complex of submerged greenhouses that were the colonel’s passionate amusement.

The Santos and Garcias remember the house on Burr Road in San Antonio as the first real home for the family since Palaú. Mexico was still swept up in violent whirlwinds of bloody change. Presidents changed with the seasons. Local government officials were more corrupt and vengeful than ever. Tía Pepa, who had moved back to Mexico with her husband, Anacleto, wrote them often of the politically motivated hijackings on the roads of Coahuila. As a foreman of the mines at Barroterrán, Anacleto had been threatened several times by various unionists who sometimes wanted the mines closed in strikes, sometimes wanted them kept open to draw out coal to sell for arms.

“Puras locuras mexicanas,”
old Abuelo Jacobo would say with disgust, listening to Pepa’s letters read aloud to him by Uela. “Pure Mexican madness.”

But finally, here was a lasting respite from the revolution and all the wandering it had cost them. The daily calendar of the household revolved around an interminable pageant of meals, all of which were served in two sittings, for the young ones first and the elders last. My father woke up to the same sound every morning. With a rapid battery of ear-piercing slaps, Uela’s hands patted the flour
masa
into dozens of tortillas for the dawn breakfast that sent her brothers and Juan José off to their work or school.

The house slowly filled up with the soothing roasted-flour aroma of tortillas on the heavy iron comal. Breakfast was tacos with egg and potatoes with chile. Usually, dinner was
fideos,
a spicy Mexican pasta cooked with cilantro, cumin, and, once or twice a week, some cuts of beef for extra flavor. Today, my father cannot bear the sight of
fideos.

There weren’t many Mexicans in that part of the city. They were mainly downtown and on the west side. Many older Anglo families, along with a new and growing business class, had long ago settled in the verdant north side neighborhoods of Alamo Heights, near the Fernridge estate. Most of the Mexicans to be seen in the streets there were domestic help.

Uncles Jesse and Gilbert began the new academic year at Alamo Heights Public High School and they were the first and only Mexicans enrolled, which Uncle Jesse remembers helped to toughen them up early in life. “We didn’t even speak one word of English,” he tells me, laughing, as we sit together in his living room in San Antonio, decorated with laminated homages to some of his most memorable catches: a red snapper, a bass, a marlin.

“We couldn’t understand a single thing the teacher was saying.”

There were fights. Their bicycle tires, already patchworks of plugs, were slashed. Once, Uncle Jesse found the word
Meskin
scratched into his school desk.

“But he made friends with all the girls!” my aunt Fela says of Uncle Jesse, her husband, speaking of a time long before they met. “That’s how he got through that school!” Uncle Jesse runs his leathery hand through his short-cropped gray hair, smiling.

When I ask, Jesse says Abuelo Juan José loved to spend early evenings on Burr Road in the greenhouse, when the tea-colored light from the lamps cast webs of shadows and made the whole glass enclosure glow green. From down the hill on the porch of their house, you could see Juan José’s shadow moving across the glass, which looked pearly because of the condensation.

In sepia-colored pictures of the greenhouse from the estate archive, long braids of orchids hang like garlands in a column in the middle of the room. Great palms line the sidewalks like standards. There are Japanese plum trees in full flower, ivory-barked persimmon, miniature china berry. Taped to the back of one photograph of a stand of lilies is a sketch in my grandfather’s hand of where those flowers were to be planted that year.
Plano de azucenas,
it says, tracing a cross that went from one end of the frosted glass walls to the other, connecting the two doors in the middle of the hall with purple irises mixed in with the lilies.

Abuelo wore a suit and tie to work in the garden, a suit that my aunt remembers smelling of loam and plant resins. While he was clipping and trimming, he scrutinized every branch and leaf with a chemist’s deliberation. My father said Abuelo usually stayed extremely quiet and concentrated while he moved from plant to plant, looking for the smallest blemish, gathering clumps of cuttings and petals in a bag hanging from one arm as he went along. As he watched his father from behind a large potted cactus, the sound of Abuelo’s steady breathing, of his boots rasping and echoing against the moist soil on the paving stones, was calming. Playing throughout the greenhouse with my uncle Raul and aunt Connie, it smelled of mint, camphor, lavender, and eucalyptus, unless they ventured too close to the acrid ammonia cloud that hung over the compost box. In the middle of a game of hide-and-go-seek or tag, they were always dazzled anew whenever the pipes that ran along the high vaulted ceiling would begin first to rattle, then hiss, and then the entire greenhouse would rumble and fill up with fog so thick that my father could hold his hand in front of his face and not see it.

Everything that surrounded them—palms, lilies, ferns—was gradually shrouded in an opal-colored neon haze, and they wondered to each other if this was what heaven looked like all the time.

 

 

Good wood is like a jewel, Tío Abrán, my great-grandfather Jacobo’s twin brother, used to say. Huisache burns fast, in twisting yellow flames, engulfing the log in a cocoon of fire. It burns brightly, so it is sought after for Easter bonfires. But it does not burn hot, so it’s poor wood for home fires. On a cold morning in the sierra, you can burn a whole tree by noon. Mesquite, and even better, cedar—these are noble, hard woods. They burn hot and long. Their smoke is fragrant. And if you know how to do it, they make exquisite charcoal.

Good wood is like a jewel. And old Tío Abrán knew wood the way a jeweler knows stones, and in northern Coahuila, from Múzquiz to Rosita, his charcoal was highly regarded for its sweet, long-burning fire.

Abrán was one of the last of the Garcias to come north. Somewhere around 1920, he finally had to come across the border with his family. He was weary of the treacheries along the roads, from robbery to rape, that had become a part of life in the sierra towns since the beginning of the revolution ten years earlier. Most of the land near town had been deforested and the only wood he could find around Palaú was huisache. To find any of the few pastures left with arbors of mesquite trees, he had to take the unpaved mountain road west from Múzquiz, along a route where many of the militantes had their camps. Out by the old Villa las Rusias
,
in a valley far off the road, there were mesquite trees in every direction as far as you could see. He made an arrangement with the owner of the villa to give him a cut from the sale of charcoal he made from the mesquite. But many times, the revolucionarios confiscated his day’s load of wood, leaving him to return home, humiliated, with an empty wagon.

Aside from Tía Pepa and Tío Anacleto, who had returned to Mexico by then, he had been the last of the Garcias left in Mexico, and he had left reluctantly. On the day he arrived in San Antonio with his family, he had told his brother Abuelo Jacobo, “If there was still any mesquite that was easy to get to, we would’ve stayed.”

He said he had come in search of the legendary Texas cedar stands. And he found them sixty miles north of San Antonio. Here was a broad swath of hill country that had been rocky grassland until the middle of the nineteenth century. That was when the charcoal industry based in Austin had planted miles of cedar, from Kerrville to Buda, to support the growing demand for fuel, as more and more settlers arrived from the north. Eventually, that part of Texas became a cedar forest, a forest which is still growing, pushing farther south past Austin and closer to San Antonio. Jacobo and his family went there despite the
sentido
among some family members that this was “Gringo” country, where Mexicans were not welcome.

And perhaps they knew this to be true, for it had been in cedar country, growing pecans and corn and raising goats, that the very first Garcias to come out of Mexico had first settled. Abuelo Juan José’s brother Uvaldino Santos had settled north of Austin, in Elgin, a town that sat at the edge of the forested hill country, looking north onto the vast Texas flatlands that ran all the way to the Red River.

Like these early settlers, I have always been drawn to the ridges and canyons of the Texas hill country and its infinite cedars. The silence of the cedars seemed familiar to me. Along the road from Sister-dale to Grapevine, a two-lane, farm-to-market highway that runs like an artery through the middle of the hill country, I have heard the wind slowly wrapping itself around the draping flat branches of the cedars. Even the birds seem to fall quiet there. Uncle Gilbert remembers how he walked with his father and his uncle through hills full of cedar on the land Abrán had found to make his charcoal in Spring Branch, Texas, northwest of San Antonio, “It always seemed chilly up there, like you were up in sierra country,” he says now.

On one of those days, the whole tribe made the journey from Burr Road, and Juan José, Abuelo Jacobo, and his sons all helped Tío Abrán on his first large order of charcoal for a buyer in Austin. A pit the size of a small house had already been dug when they arrived. Abrán had meticulously lined it with chalk and lime, and then everyone helped stack the cedar in precise rows, alternating directions, until the pit was nearly full. Making charcoal involves an alchemy of dirt, wood, fire, patience, and prayer. If all of these are not in impeccable balance, the final result is a pile of ash.

As the wood was being stacked, Tío Abrán moved around the pit in slow circles, sprinkling droplets of kerosene from a paint can onto the cedar with his fingers. After the wood was anointed, Abrán, already in his early sixties, stepped gingerly across the latticed cedar trunks, dusting them with handfuls of what he called his
polvo mágico,
or magic powder, a combination of sulfur, coke, and other secret ingredients. The pit was lit with long branches, flaming at their ends, which were pushed down as far as they could to the bottom of the pile. When the smoke began to be visible at every corner, but before flames engulfed the wood, the whole pit had to be covered with a large mound of soil, shoveled quickly from every side.

Then, Tío Abrán would forget about it and walk away, saying it was bad luck to watch too closely. For days, the mound smoldered and shifted as the earth around it grew warmer with each hour. Uncle Gilbert sat near the mound while my grandfather cleared the area of twigs and dry brush, as if he feared the pit might explode and rain fire on all the surrounding terrain. After all, there was an enormous ball of fire consuming everything just beneath their feet, sucking in air through the dirt.

Maybe the fire they had started would never be put out.

“That was the first time I saw him nervous, afraid of something,
preocupado,
” Uncle Gilbert recalls today. “We couldn’t convince him it was all under control.”

Two days later, the air took on a subtle scent of embers and Tío Abrán announced the partially collapsed mound was ready to be uncovered. As my great-uncles helped him shovel the dirt off from the top of the pit, just beneath the surface they saw the glistening ebony chunks of fresh charcoal, smelling sweet of cedar and crackling like black ice beneath their feet. Juan José stood off from the pit, furtively looking on from beneath a lone oak tree. There was no explosion and the invisible fire had subsided. But he had already told Uela he was ready to return to San Antonio.