Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (17 page)

And he didn’t want to take any of Tío Abrán’s new charcoal back to town.

 

 

On the morning after Madrina arrived in San Antonio to stay, she went out for a walk on Burr Road after breakfast. It was astounding to her how little dust there was. So much of her life in Mexico had been lived in a world of swirls and eddies of infinite dust. In the mornings, you could wet down the ground around the house with water drops from a full bucket, but within an hour, the scirocco haze of dust would return. In San Antonio, the streets were paved and the ground alongside the road was planted with grass that held the dust down.

As she went through the gate of the yard in front of the house, she saw a small truck parked across the road, about twenty yards down the hill. As she walked closer, she could make out the shape of a large cage, with thick bars, that sat high off the cab bed of the truck. Along the side of the truck were painted the words: WOLF BRAND CHILI. As Madrina got right up to the truck, she took a quick step back in fright.

Inside the cage, a lone wolf, crazed and panting, circled the small space so quickly that, at first, he looked like a smudged, bluish blur.

When he stopped for a moment, Madrina saw where he had nervously bitten the fur off his hind parts until the wounds were raw and red. Elsewhere along his long, emaciated body, the hair was falling off in patches. His gray eyes had the piercing look of a mute scream, and the cage smelled of old food, feces, drool, and spoiled blood. In Palaú, the whole family used to pause on the nights when they heard the packs of wolves howling from the sierra. Madrina says it was less like singing and more like talking, like a conversation in an old language of the mountains everyone but the wolves had forgotten to speak. She knew the ranchers and goat farmers battled with them as their greatest nemeses. But the wolves were a part of God’s wild creation that always seemed beyond human control.

As she looked into the eyes of the animal, it felt as if the wolf was looking back at her, like it knew her, she said later. In the quiet morning air, the animal’s panting was the loudest noise until she heard her own heart beating, accelerating like a hummingbird’s. And then the world went black.

When Uela saw Madrina from the porch, she was still quivering stiffly in the midst of her seizure in the middle of the road, while the wolf looked on from inside its cage. As the seizure gradually began to subside, there was a small lace ribbon of spittle falling to one side of Madrina’s mouth. Her head cleared and she opened her eyes to see her father, sister, and brother-in-law gathered around her. They seemed to be floating in a silky, coffee-colored light.

The morning air was clear and there was a faint scent of newly cut grass. She could hear the paws of the wolf scratching against the iron floor of the cage, but she did not want to look at him. It did not seem like Texas or Mexico anymore. It was as if all of that had been left behind. She felt she had been transported even farther north, to where the sky looks silvery and the sun seems farther away than she had ever imagined possible. She felt lighter, as if she had been returned to the body of a child. The three stood over her, wordless, waiting for Madrina to make her own way out of the fit.

A strange thought came to her in that moment. Time seemed to be moving more slowly, and her body was covered in a cold dew.

We have been taken to Purgatory, she told herself. And soon the chastisements would begin.

Zona de Niebla

When he had been well, he told his stories like a jeweler etching on a stone, careful to set up his lightning bolt punch lines. He said he had been trained by the best. Growing up, he had spent a lot of time in Nueva Rosita with Abuelo Juan José’s sister, la Tía Chita, who was famous for her ability to tell jokes for hours; whether in the afternoon while she was making hundreds of tortillas for a
quinceañera
fiesta, or late at night, sitting in the cool courtyard of her house with a circle of
comadres
during a lunar eclipse.

 

San Antonio de Bejar wears its glistening halo of creeks, streams, and rivulets like an ageless crown, as if this place at the edge of the arid country west and south has been vouchsafed by time, receiving a long span of years with the grace of a thousand springs and endlessly flowing water. Maybe it is an accidental oasis. To the north of the city, there is a wide swath of impermeable igneous rock, jagged ridges of red Texas granite from Grapevine to Llano. To the west, there is desert, to the east are wetlands, bayous and swamps.

San Antonio lies over an enormous limestone aquifer, a vast earthen filter made from the dense sediment of accumulated eons of fossil remains. Over millennia, the husks and membranes of millions of dead organisms were pressed into rock that was porous enough to let the rain wash through, ever more cleansed as it went. And the earth became hollowed out like a honeycomb. As a result, a half mile beneath the ground, there are rushing crystalline rivers and a seemingly infinite reservoir of sweet water.

Agua dulce.
That’s what the old Mexicans called fresh water. Sweet for drinking, like a
néctar de mango
in the withering hot Mexican summers. Sweet for the crops, for the furry okra vines, the blood-red stalks of sorghum, all the bristling cotton and bright yellow chayote squash.

The Santos and Garcias were river people. Wherever they lived, they had always been close to
agua dulce.
They didn’t really know oceans, and there weren’t any lakes where they had come from in Mexico. But for some, the Gulf of Mexico held a certain mystique. Uncles Jesse and Gilbert, who built an amber-lacquered wooden boat, would fish in the Almagorda Bay, expressing something else, perhaps some tincture of Spanish mariner’s blood left in them.

When you come from a land of wet-weather arroyos where water is scarce, you develop a special appreciation for fresh running streams. Arroyos crisscross all of northwestern Coahuila, and over the years most of them acquired names of endearment, referring back to sometimes only dimly remembered tales. On the road to the Rancho Los Generales, at Arroyo Pato Viejo, or old duck, someone once found a nearly featherless mallard, lost in the high Mexican desert on its migration back to
El Norte.
At Arroyo Papalote de Oro stood a battered, rusty tin windmill that had once drawn so much water it was deemed to be made of gold. These dry creeks run with water only once every few years when gulf storms stall against the eastern face of the Sierra Madre and drop all their rains in one curving flume on the sloping eastern face of the mountains. Then every bleached wash of alluvial gravel and rocks runs opalescent blue and jade green, eventually leaving behind finger-shaped tadpole pools with silvery guppies and perch the size of the palm of your hand.

Back in Palaú, the Rio Sabinas, with its long bank-to-bank colonnade of giant arched cypresses, had run through the pueblo just one hundred yards from the Garcia house. It was the same clear river that rushed past
el Nacimiento de los Indios,
the settlement in the mountains where the Kikapu Indians lived, and further downstream it passed by Nueva Rosita and Sabinas, and the Villa de San Felipe, where, according to Uncle Sid, the familia Santos had originally come from.