The Girl at Concordia

By three the heat lay on Concordia like a flat hand. The Casa Grande el Alto sat up on its rise, adobe the tan of old bone, blue shade pooled cold under the portal; below it the vines and the peach and the quince stepped down in dusty terraces to the pale seam of the river, and past it the mountains stood violet and bare in the shaking light. Out of the black mouth of the kitchen came the smell that told the hour better than a bell: chile roasting, sharp and sweet-burnt — old Herlinda Carrillo turning the blistering pods on the comal with bare fingers, an olla of frijoles muttering thick since morning, a tray of membrillo cooling to garnet on the shelf.

And the girl was not in the kitchen where she belonged. She was flat on the acequia bank with her whole thin arm in the current to the elbow and a scrap of paper going soft in her other fist — a fair, sandy, serious child of twelve, the pale grey eyes taking the exact measure of a thing and giving nothing back. The paper was a freight bill she had lifted off her father's table because the sum at the bottom was wrong by nine reales and she wanted to be the one who found it. She had found it. She was lying in the shade of the wall correcting a grown man's arithmetic in her head and listening, the way she listened to everything, to the whole valley arguing over her head about what would become of it.

Down the vine rows two field men worked the leaves — Cruz Duarte, gray and rope-muscled, a machete-nick puckered white across one forearm, and the younger one soft-faced beside him — and their talk came up the terrace. "Padre Ortiz has the list open again in the plaza," said Cruz, not straightening. "Forty families signed for Chihuahua before the snow. The Herreras. The widow Luján."

"Go to what?" said the younger, Tomás. "More desert, and the Apache worse every year. My cousin took the padre's promise to Senecú, and the Mescaleros had his mules and his eldest boy inside the month."

"Going to be Mexican, and keeping what's ours by keeping the flag over it." Cruz straightened this time. "You heard the padre read it off the treaty paper. Article Eight, Article Nine — the Americans put their own signature to it, that a man who stays keeps his property, his grant, his faith. Fine words. But the tenth article, hombre — the one that named the old Crown and Mexican grants outright and swore to honor every last one — that one the American Senate struck clean out in Washington before they would sign, so it is nowhere in the paper at all. You know what that leaves? It leaves your grandfather's grant and mine and the widow Luján's worth precisely what some American judge in a court that hears no Spanish someday says they are worth, with the burden on us to prove a paper the King's clerk wrote a hundred years dead. Padre Ortiz says: go to Chihuahua, keep the flag you were born under, and keep the ground under it too, because here they have already cut the ground loose from the flag with a pen."

"And how much of that ground is mine anyway, Cruz? A hoe and a debt." Tomás flicked a beetle off a leaf. "The master takes his half in Spanish here or his half in Spanish in Chihuahua. The only thing that crossed the river was the flag over the man who collects it. Here at least the water is sweet and the peaches are ours to steal."

Neither of them shifted the other a hair, and neither had thought he would. They went on down the row still inside it, the old man's fear and the young man's shrug going with them like two dogs that will neither stop fighting nor leave each other.

Across the yard the gossip ran the other current, between the water jars and the kitchen door.

"The Herreras signed the padre's list," Refugio said, low. "And the widow Luján."

"The widow Luján would follow a list off a roof," said Herlinda, and did not slow her hands.

"But they say the land papers won't hold now — that the Americanos—"

"The papers hold for whoever pays a lawyer to make them hold, Refugio, and not an hour past. Take the membrillo in before the children have the whole tray."

"And the Ochoa girl's promised to the Frenchman with the store. Her not sixteen."

"That," said Herlinda, "I believe. God help her."

Through the gate then came the road on four hooves — a muleteer, Encarnación, dust to the eyebrows, walking a string of blown mules and calling for water and an audience both. "¡Agua! Three days from the Paso and the road talks of two things, neither of them the war." He drank from the jar Refugio brought and dragged a forearm over his mouth. "Gold, in the American California, pulled from a millrace with the bare hand — and by spring this road will be nothing but wagons chasing it, a thousand, ten thousand, every fool wanting flour and a mule and a bed and not one able to find water if it bit him. And the cholera come with the first of them — two dead at the ford this week. Drink upstream, viejo, and pray." He grinned, gap-toothed, and did not wait to be agreed with, because he did not care whether he was; he watered his mules and spat and told the same news to the next roof down.

Margarita lay in all of it — the grants and the hoe, the padre's list, the Ochoa girl, the gold and the cholera — and sorted it quick and cold, the only way she knew. The wagons were money. The rest was weather. She had decided already, at twelve and without a word to anyone, that the family would not sign the padre's list; she was only working out how to say so at supper and make it sound like her father's own idea.

Her mother came down the orchard wall, and the yard tilted toward her as a room tilts to the one who owns it — the singing stopped, Refugio found the jars fascinating, Encarnación swept off a hat not clean since Chihuahua. Juana María: tall, the español cream gone gold at the forearms from a sun she flatly refused, a wide handsome face that had settled its arguments long ago.

She came down past the flat piece of ground east of the vines where nothing was planted because nothing would take there, and she did not look at it, and there was no reason on earth that she should. In six years her husband would raise a chapel on it — San José de Concordia el Alto, the first church on this bank of the river, built for her because she had asked for somewhere to hear Mass without crossing water to do it. In eight years, on a cold February morning, the deer would kill her. She would find it as a fawn with a broken leg and carry it home herself and feed it by hand for a year, and it would grow, as tame things do, into something that had never learned to be afraid of her; and one winter morning in her own yard it would put a horn into her belly, and the wound would go bad, and she would be nine days dying of it. They would carry her the fifty steps into the chapel she had asked for and put her under its floor. And then the town, being a town, would begin handing them its dead — the neighbors first, and then strangers, and then the whole hard century: a gunfighter shot in the back in a saloon, Buffalo Soldiers, the Chinese who laid the rail and had nowhere else to go, Jesuits, a section of Mexican revolutionaries, sixty thousand souls in the end, tumbled together on the ground where she was walking now with her mind on a freight bill and her daughter in the ditch. They would keep calling the place Concordia, long after the vines and the house and the family were gone off it. The whole city would come to say the word and mean the graveyard. A woman's private plot of dirt became the city's necropolis, and no one asked her, because by then she had been in it eighty years.

She saw the freight bill in her daughter's fist before she saw her daughter.

"Whose is that?"

"Papá's. It's wrong by nine reales. The teamster or the clerk, I can't tell which yet." Margarita still did not get up. "I'll know by supper."

Juana crouched — the good dress made it an event — and put her ringed hand in the cold beside the girl's, and for a moment said nothing, and let the chile smoke and the doves work the pomegranates. "You heard the muleteer."

"A thousand wagons this year, and ten thousand the next." The girl watched the water. "Every one of them out of Missouri with the gold fever and no notion that the Jornada between here and the California diggings will kill any man who can't buy corn and mules and water off somebody who kept some. Papá should send to Brazito and the Mesilla farms now, this autumn, while the maize is four reales the fanega and no one wants it, and buy all of it, and hold it in the granary. Come April, when the first wagons come through with their animals staggering, four reales is gone. It will be a dollar the fanega, two dollars, whatever a frightened American with gold in his head will pay not to bury his mules in the desert — which is to say anything at all. The gold is in California, Papá. But the road is here, and the road runs on corn, and we are the ones with the acequia and the corn. Let the fools chase the metal nine hundred miles. We will sell them the getting there."

Her mother looked at her — one beat, and in it something passed that was not praise, praise being cheap; it was recognition, the look you give a thing that turns out to be your own kind. "You worked that out from a muleteer and a freight bill."

"And the peaches." Margarita finally sat up, sleeve streaming. "Everybody talks about the gold. Nobody talks about the road. The road is ours; there is nothing for it but to hold it."

Juana did not say you are not going to be a peach. She did not have to; the child had just said it herself, in her own coin, and to say it now would only be the mother stepping on the daughter's first true sentence. The smell shifted across the yard — Herlinda had the roasted chile in the molcajete now, grinding it down with garlic and a little fat, and that raw pepper sharpness cut across the burnt-sweet; a mule stamped at the gate; a dove came down hard into the pomegranates and set the whole tree ticking. Juana dried her hand on the cloth from her sleeve and looked at the river a while, the two of them side by side over the ditch, before she spoke.

"They ran their border down that water," Juana said, low, almost to herself. "It won't hold. Next flood the river jumps its bed and Ysleta goes to sleep Mexican and wakes up American, nobody having moved. Nothing here holds by itself, hija — not the land, not the flags, not us. Somebody has to keep a hand in it." She was quiet a moment, watching the current. "Pesa, el aguantar. A las niñas nadie les avisa. Yo te aviso." It gets heavy, the holding. Nobody warns the girls. I am warning you.

"I know," said Margarita. She did not, yet, but would.

Three rows down, Cruz Duarte straightened to ease his back and watched the two of them at the ditch — the doña and the girl with their hands in the one cold water — and knew exactly what was being handed over up there, and did not envy it. He turned instead to his own boy, eight years old and dragging a hoe too big for him down the row, and gave him the Duarte half of the same afternoon.

"You see the doña's girl at the ditch, m'ijo? She is learning to keep all this." He tipped the hoe-handle at the vines, the terraces, the great house on its rise. "You watch me instead. Every spring, you and I, before the light, we break the acequia open by hand so the water runs down to those vines. That is the holding they do not teach up in the big house — because it is ours to do and theirs to own. Nosotros aguantamos el agua; ellos aguantan la tierra." We hold the water; they hold the land. "The same word, m'ijo. Not the same life. Learn the ditch anyway. The ditch is the one thing in all of it that will not lie to you."

The boy understood perhaps a tenth of it, and would spend forty years coming to the rest — the very forty the girl at the ditch would spend coming to her own half — two children on the one hot afternoon being taught the one word from its two opposite sides, and the word would carry them both the whole way, and pay out, at the end of the long road, to only one.

They stayed like that, two hands in the one cold current — except it was never only two. Juana had lain over this cut at this age with her mother's hand beside hers, and that one with hers, back and back; and it came to Margarita, without words for it yet, that this was not a line of women handing a thing down a row. It was one hand, kept in the same water, putting on a new body each generation and doing the one identical thing — the way the snowmelt was not new water each spring but the same water gone up and fallen and come round again out of the cold. She was not being handed the holding. She was the holding, come round into a fresh pair of hands.

The words were the lossy part. Pesa, el aguantar — three dry words with a whole drowned world folded inside them, and she would spend sixty years unfolding that little sentence into floods and coffins and a wall across the river, and never get the whole of it back out, because you never can. The doing is whole; the telling is lossy; and the gap between them is the exact size of the life it takes to close it.

She could not feel the future in the cold, only the cold. But the cold was the future — the same current, not yet arrived at the rest of them — and downstream, in rooms not yet lit, the ones were already leaning in: a boy she would live to hold on her own knee, who would count gold in a burning city; and past him a dark-eyed man she would never meet, at a desk, who would put his hand in no ditch but spend his life rowing back up the water toward her, building her from a porch and a photograph and the shape of a voice — reaching for her in the very minute she lay here reaching, without knowing their names, for them. Two hands in the one cold current. Only ever the two. Only ever the one.

— Coda: the ditch (terza rima) —

Snow that will never fall on her falls white
past Santa Fe, and comes a season later
cold along her wrist in the flat noon light.

They ran a border down the middle of the water.
The water declined it. By the June of the flood
it crawls a hundred acres into the other

country, and takes the line off like a hood.
Pesa, el aguantar — three words, and a drowned
world folded in them, handed down the blood

from hand to hand and never wholly found,
because the doing's whole and the telling's thin,
and the gap's the size of a life. She is not bound

to the rope. She is the rope. The cold going in
at her wrist is the future, only not yet come
to the rest of them. Downstream, in rooms unlit, begin

the ones who lean: a boy with gold gone numb
in his fist in a burning city; and past him, far,
a dark-eyed man at a desk, rowing up the same

current toward her, building her from a scar,
a porch, a photograph, the shape of a voice —
reaching, this minute, for exactly where they are,

as she reaches down for them, without a choice,
without their names. Two hands in the one cold.
Only ever the two. Only ever the one.