Sound Of Gravel, The (31 page)

The day of Alejandra’s party, Mom was tweezing her eyebrows in the mirror when she confided that she had gone to the doctor the day before. She’d missed her period. I was stunned. She was thirty-eight. Holly was just five months old.

“Mom, don’t you think you should wait until you stop nursing before you get pregnant again?” I said the words as gently as I could, but my irritation was obvious. “We can barely afford to feed everyone in the family now.”

She put down the tweezers, gazed at me, and calmly and matter-of-factly said, “Ruthie, you just have to have faith.”

No, you don’t, I thought. You also need money and a husband who’s not a deadbeat. But I didn’t say anything.

“When you’re doing what God wants you to do, life will always work out for the best. Don’t worry. He will always take care of us.” She smiled warmly and turned back to her reflection.

I smiled too, politely, as if I were in the presence of a woman whose cockamamy notions were too charming to be challenged.

“God wouldn’t send us another baby if we weren’t ready to take care of it.” She adjusted her hair. “I’m ready. Let’s get the kids in the truck.”

*   *   *

“BUENAS TARDES, PÁSENLE,”
Alejandra said with a forced grin when we arrived. She was in the midst of rolling out a tortilla and motioned us in with flour-covered hands.

“Buenas tardes,”
Mom blared in an exaggeratedly thick American accent, a clear signal to every Spanish speaker within earshot that she was not available for conversation.

With two-year-old Leah on my hip, I scanned the party, already in full swing with ranchera music blaring. The women were decked out in their Sunday best, in nylons and pumps, looking as if they’d all chipped in for a single tube of red lipstick and then just passed it around. Through the window I saw dozens of dark-haired children playing in a tiny backyard enclosed by barbed wire, and my platinum-headed brothers and sister ran outside to join them.

In Spanish, Alejandra told Mom that everyone was waiting for us outside, so we made our way to the backyard, where we found Mexican men and women sitting in white plastic folding chairs. The only non-Mexican was my stepfather, who wore his trademark red polo shirt, tattered jeans, and a gleaming silver belt buckle. Lane stood conversing in Spanish with a few of the guests, his large, protruding stomach making him look as if he were in the last trimester of his own pregnancy. The sight of him made me ill. I considered snatching Mom’s keys and making a beeline from the party, but realized that as long as I stuck close to her, I was safe. Whenever more than one wife was around, good manners kept Lane from paying much attention to either of them. “It could cause conflict,” he always said.

A star-shaped piñata floated into the yard on the end of a rope held by Matt. Maria, who’d walked out with him, rushed up to me, hugging two bridal magazines close to her chest. “Ruthie, I found the bridesmaids’ dress that I want,” she yelled over the music, beaming. The color was royal blue and the design included everything from puffy, gathered sleeves to a flower made from the same material as the sash. I was thrilled.

We turned our attention to the piñata. A line of children from shortest to tallest was already forming, which put Elena second. When it was her turn, Maria’s aunt blindfolded Elena with a red bandanna, spun her around three times, then let her swing the stick. Matt and another man raised and lowered the piñata to confuse Elena, but she still managed to give it a better whack than a lot of the older kids who followed her. “Did you see me hit it two times?” she yelled to Mom and the rest of her audience.

“I saw it!” Mom smiled back.

Soon it was five-year-old Micah’s turn, and then the twins Alex and Junior, who were six. The three had become inseparable, always spending the night at each other’s house and riding bikes down gravel roads, Micah still with his training wheels. “Hit it now, Micah!” they yelled as my brother swung wildly, missing the target by a mile. Both of Alejandra’s boys found this hysterical, while poor Micah looked hurt and humiliated.

The stage was set for an older, heavyset boy to properly destroy the papier-mâché creation, and with one swing from him, candy went flying in every direction. Great dust clouds were kicked up by all the kids who rushed in, shoving each other, stepping on the little ones’ toes and even grabbing candy from their hands.

Micah stood motionless in the center of the swirl, as if in the eye of a hurricane. He watched the chaos of the children around him with amazement. Whenever he gently reached for a candy he’d spied, another child either got there first or snatched it from him.

I sat Leah on the ground near Mom and Holly and pushed my way through the craziness, picking up dusty candy along the way. “Here, Micah. Put these in your pocket.”

He took the candy from me gratefully, saying thank-you in his typically soft and formal voice. Moments later, one of the wilder kids crashed into him, knocking him to the ground. After a moment of silence, he started to cry. Micah was not the sort to draw attention to himself, and his cries were normally so soft they went ignored. But not that afternoon. With a force that suggested he had been saving up those tears, Micah wailed deeply, earsplittingly, as if he’d been wounded.

“Micah, please,” I said, my eyes searching for Mom.

The wailing continued, and with each scream, his pain became a bit more my own, until I found it unbearable. I gathered him up and ran with him in my arms to the side of the house, holding him for a long time as I waited for him to calm down and watched for Mom to come console him. I sat him down against the house and noticed we were both trembling. I struggled with shaky hands to unwrap a candy for him, wiped his tears away, and then unwrapped a candy for myself.

“You need to stop crying, Micah,” I panted, my heart in my throat.

“Why?” he asked quietly, no longer breathing heavily.

“Why do you need to stop crying?” He nodded. “Because … I don’t know. Because the other boys will tease you.”

“Bu-bu-but that kid pushed me down.
He hurt me
.”

“But it was an
accident,
Micah. That’s all.” I turned up my blouse so I could wipe his cheeks with the underside of the fabric. “There’s just too many kids for that little yard.” Micah and I stood together for a long time. Finally he seemed to have calmed down. “Let’s go,” I said. He came, but slowly. “Come on, you’re not hurt that bad.”

I reached for his hand and led him back to the party. Before long, raindrops began to fall. Mom wanted to beat the downpour and get home. She whistled for her brood to help load up the truck.

First to arrive after me was Micah, now giggling, his tears a distant memory. “Hey, Mom, can Alex and Junior spend the night at our house?” he asked, breathless from a game of tag. Mom said she didn’t mind since we had room in the truck. Lane was staying at Alejandra’s that night, and Matt was off somewhere with Maria. So my three sisters piled into the front seat with Mom as the rain began to fall, and I sat in back with the boys.

Above, the sky seemed a deeper black than usual, and by the time we turned off the highway onto the dirt roads of LeBaron, jagged orange and yellow lightning bolts sliced through the sky and lit up the Blue Mountains. The rain was torrential.

I opened up the hide-a-bed in the living room for the three boys before retiring to Mom’s room. I tossed and turned to the sound of the storm until I heard all the boys in the living room snoring soundly. I rolled into Mom’s side of the bed against her thick back, and at last fell asleep.

37

I woke up the next morning in Mom’s bed by myself. Micah, Alex, and Junior were already up and buzzing around the living room. A slice of sunlight shone through the thin curtain over the bedroom window, carrying with it dancing particles of dust.

“Hey, Mom,”
Micah yelled at the doorway, jolting me out of my haze. He stood at the threshold wearing a swimsuit. I rolled over and pulled the blanket over my head.

“Hey, Mom,”
Micah repeated in a voice only slightly less ear-piercing. It was too hot for a blanket, even at eight thirty, and I threw it off.

“Don’t talk so loud,” I heard Mom whisper as she laid Holly down in her crib. “You’ll wake up the baby after I just got her back to sleep.”

“Hey, um, Mom?” Micah whispered.

“Yes?”

“Can we go swimming outside in the ditch?”

“I don’t know. It’s pretty early to be outside swimming already.”

“Bu-bu-but, Mom?”

“Yes. What, Micah?”

“It’s already sunny.”

I closed my eyes as tight as possible, wishing for just a few more minutes of sleep.

“Mom!”

My eyes popped open again. It was Aaron.

“Ssh!” she replied.

“I’m going into town to look for my bike. I can’t find it anywhere.”

“Okay.”

He turned, ran down the hallway, and out the kitchen door. My eyes fluttered closed again.

“Mooooooommmmm. Pleeeeease,” Micah begged. Alex and Junior had joined him and were dangling off one another. So much for sleep, I thought. I got out of bed and ran my fingers through my tangled hair.

Leah was already awake and standing in her crib wearing nothing but a disposable diaper. She reached for Mom to pick her up. The tiny room with three boys, two babies, and Mom felt stifling and crowded. I tiptoed past them to the bathroom.

“Hey, Mom—”

“Before you go outside, put your dishes in the sink,” she said to Micah. Then: “And you need to get up, Ruthie.”

I stopped as I opened the bathroom door and leaned my head against it heavily. “I’m … up. I just walked past you.”

“Oh, you’re up, huh?” Mom said sarcastically as she walked down the hall in her royal-blue bathrobe with Leah in her arms. She glanced at me as she passed. “Then help me clean up this kitchen.”

“Oh, shit,” I muttered under my breath.

“I heard that.”

I walked into the kitchen without looking at her and took my place next to the stove. Mom silently left the room to get ready for the day. She had already begun heating a pan of water for me to use to wash the dishes, and the sight of it filled me with dread. Flies buzzed around my ears, and I turned to find the kitchen door wide-open behind me, which meant that I would spend the rest of the day swatting flies. I closed the door, then picked up a wet washcloth from the sink and began to wipe up droplets of honey, scraps of bread, cereal grains, and spilled milk.

The water on the stove started to boil, so I pulled out a clean dishrag from the shelf, lifted the pan of hot water off the stovetop, poured it into the sink and mixed it with cold water from the faucet. Preoccupied by my thoughts about the upcoming weekend, I washed the dishes to the sound of the boys splashing in the ditch outside. It was conference time again, and the yearly festivities were in full swing. I wished I had a phone so I could call my friends to find out what the plans would be.

I heard the first few squeaks of a cry from Holly in the bedroom, and then Mom preparing to nurse her as I looked over my shoulder at Micah’s bright blond head in the front window, the sunshine making him appear almost fluorescent. Shirtless and untroubled was the world of boys, I thought. I stood there with my hands in the murky hot water and longed for the freedom to play like a carefree child. I wondered what had happened to my ditch-splashing years, which seemed so far behind me now that I was fifteen.

I rinsed the last plate, set it in the dish drainer, wiped my hands dry, and walked outside. The splashing I’d heard outside the kitchen window stopped as the boys left the ditch to shuffle off to Alejandra’s house.

I went back inside and tried to lose myself in tasks—sweeping the hallway, gathering up the kitchen garbage and setting it in a bag by the door, checking in on Mom. I peeked around her doorway silently, finding her propped up in bed reading a romance novel while she nursed Holly. She wore a thin, pink-and-blue-plaid cotton blouse and polyester pants. Elena and Leah lay on their bellies at her bare feet, coloring in the same coloring book. Mom’s face was a picture of contentment.

The whole house was quiet as I tiptoed back down the hall to the kitchen. Suddenly I heard splashing in the ditch again, the sound of a child running quickly through the water, and then a single set of bare footsteps running up the gravel driveway. My eyes darted to the kitchen window, where I saw a dark-skinned figure racing toward the house. It was Alex, who, not a second after I spotted him, threw open the kitchen door. His chest, hands, and face were covered in mud. He gasped, almost too out of breath to speak.

“Micah—”

“What is it, Alex?”

“Micah and Junior are in trouble,” Alex panted. He looked down at his hands, rubbed his muddy palms together, and nervously shuffled from leg to leg.

Trouble. The boys were in trouble. The word suggested something annoying but harmless, that Micah and his friends had been caught picking our neighbor’s unripe pecans. I felt myself rehearsing my well-worn scolding speech, but Alex stopped me.

“We were havin’ a mud fight in the road, and I was throwin’ mud at them, and they ran away from me and tried to cross the fence into the alfalfa field to get away, and—”

“Ruthie,” Mom called, having overheard us in the bedroom. “Go outside and see what’s goin’ on with those boys.”

I stepped outside the open door onto the square cement slab. The morning sun stung my eyes, and I shaded them with the flat of my hand as I scanned the road and neighboring orchards and fields. I saw nothing. But my gut felt uneasy. Something was really wrong.

I turned back to Alex, who was still standing just inside the kitchen door, watching me, his muddy face desperate and confused.

“I can’t see the boys. What happened? Show me where they are.”

He stepped outside the door, stood next to me, and pointed to the road, at a spot between our homes. “They’re over there, behind those big bushes.”

I looked in that direction but could only see a cluster of giant tumbleweeds caught on the fence.

“Ruthie, I think Junior and Micah”—Alex let out a heavy breath—
“are getting shocked,”
he whispered, his eyes filled with dread.