After the sun had nearly set, Pidre glanced back from his perch, bridle in hands. “The Land of Early Sky,” he said, pointing with his hat to a low brown flatland, clasped by an arroyo, the stars reflecting over running water. “Pardona.”
Simodecea stepped down from the cart, gripping the length of her dress with her shooting arm, motioning for the girls with the other. They moved to the edge of the cart—first Maria Josefina, who told her mother that she didn’t need help and hopped down in an athletic feat of red booties and dirt. Then it was Sara, who stood at the edge of the cart and stared across the land. Her eyes scanned with uneasiness, an expression Simodecea recognized in herself. A clenched mouth, flared nostrils, a distorted mirror.
Sara said, “But there’s no one here, Mama. Everyone’s gone.”
It was only then that Simodecea peered deeper through twilight. The land was sleeping in muted green and blue tones, no firelight, no sweet sting of smoke. In the vast grounds far off and slumped sat a complex of clay homes and an adobe church. They were hollow, empty, the blue doors and windows blank. The wind rippled the sands beneath their feet. Simodecea told her girls to keep at her side.
Pidre had stepped away from the horses and cart. He walked forward, centered by generous mountains and empty dwellings. A skimp black dog crossed his path. He whistled and the animal came near, nudged its glistening nose into his palm before skirting away. Pidre walked faster, the clinking sounds of coins in his trouser pockets mixed with the crunch of his boots on rocky soil. It wasn’t long before he was running, moving smaller and smaller away from his wife. He ran toward the cemetery under red willows as if being chased by oblivion itself. He began yelling in Tiwa, asking for anyone, someone, then changing dialects, begging for a response. Simodecea reached down and held her daughters’ cool shoulders against her waist. She watched in anguish as her husband leaned over a grave, crossed himself before touching the faded white marker.
“Grandma,” he said, “we are here. I’ve brought my daughters. I’ve brought my wife. We’ve come to see our Early Sky.” He told Desiderya how much he missed her and loved her, pushed his hands through the dirt. He made a fist and tossed soil into the night. Pidre wept then, low and quiet, dripping onto the ground.
Maria Josefina tugged on her mother’s dress. “Where did everyone go, Mama?” she asked, looking upward with sorrowful eyes.
“I don’t know, my baby,” said Simodecea, who stared beyond the deserted Pueblo at the bluish mountain, railroad tracks like scars etched into its back.
Pidre stood from Desiderya’s grave. He wiped his face with quick hands. He called out to his daughters and wife to come near. “Your great-grandma,” he said. “This is her grave. This is her resting place, and her village. I will take you to the river where I was baptized, where she found me.”
Simodecea stepped forward. She hung her head. With certainty in her heart, she knew bad days were to come.
TWENTY-FIVE
A Life of Her Own
Denver, 1934
The booming shouts and footsteps of Lizette’s brothers ricocheted throughout their Fox Street home. Not even the inviting smells of warming tortillas and beans, fried eggs and potatoes, could offset the stomping of boy feet over hard oak, the barks of Where’s my sock? My turn in the washroom. Who left the icebox open? We need more milk. Having her own room was Lizette’s only luxury, but she suspected that had to do more with being in a woman’s body than anything else.
From the moment she opened her eyes in the still-dark mornings until she closed them at night, Lizette worked. It had always been this way. She had stopped attending school in the fifth grade to work in a candy factory downtown, where she rolled turquoise-colored sweets at a large metal table with a dozen other girls from the Westside and elsewhere. The owner was a cowboy named Rickson who had gotten one of the elsewhere girls pregnant, a fourteen-year-old named Marilou. He didn’t claim the baby, and Marilou grew huge with what she suspected was a little boy. Lizette never found out what happened to Marilou and her baby, because by her second year in the factory, her mother made Lizette stay home with her youngest brother, Marcelo, while Teresita rode on a truck bed three days a week to Eaton, Colorado, where she picked beets with other mothers from their block, one hundred pounds for a dollar a day.
* * *
—
“Wake up, Lizzy!” shouted her brother Antonio, who had strode into her bedroom in cowboy boots and a bandito mask. From the end of her brass bed, he let out a huge belch and giggled frantically. He gripped the bed frame and shook it with all his might. Lizette groaned and told him to get the hell out of her room. She said Goddammit, Antonio! and stood from her bed.
“Don’t forget,” said Teresita as Lizette stepped into the kitchen and grabbed an apple from the table. “Lucrecia is dropping off her twins this afternoon. You’re watching them.”
Lizette opened her mouth full of mealy fruit. “No, I’m not.”
Teresita shot her daughter a merciless look. She whacked one of her son’s hands away from the stove, where she was flipping tortillas over the black comal. “Yes, you are, and you don’t have a choice.”
Lizette took another bite. She was used to her mother forgetting that she had her own obligations. Not everything, she thought, revolved around family. “Mama, in case you’ve forgotten, I’m at the dressmaker’s all day today. I’m not going to be here.”
Teresita shrugged. She tied her white apron strings around her waist. “So? Tell her you’re busy.”
At that moment, Lizette’s father walked into the kitchen with a pastry in each hand. He smiled at his family through sugar-powdered cheeks.
“Papa,” said Lizette. “I can’t watch no stinking twins today. I have work.”
“Okay, mija,” her father said, and reached for his work boots beside the door.
Teresita began shouting at Eduardo, telling him he was always a pushover. Lizette imagined she was somewhere else, a big white house that was all her own, a quiet place to keep her fine dresses and fur coats and books filled with facts, all the things she wanted and deserved in life. At the very least, she thought, lifting her brother Miguelito from the floor and moving him away from the back door, she had Alfonso. Once they were married, he would take her away from this life of endless chores and little brothers. Once they were married, she’d finally know what it was like to have a life of her own.
* * *
—
In a bad mood and rushed, Lizette arrived fifteen minutes late for her shift after missing the streetcar when her mother made her change a diaper before leaving. Natalya was behind the counter at the edge of the dress shop, glasses on and a cigarette burning.
“You come late today, like every other day,” she said, without looking up. “I hire you to help, and this is how you repay me?”
Lizette wanted to yell out that it wasn’t her damn fault, but if there was one thing she had learned about Natalya—she didn’t like excuses. “It won’t happen again. I’m very sorry.” Since she had started working for Natalya, Lizette had given most of her laundry route to a woman down the block named Sensionita, who at nineteen had three babies and a husband who had been fired from the smelter after a long bout with flu.