The Journal of Antonio Montoya Read online

  “We went to fiesta once,” José said. “My mother wouldn’t let my father drive on the way back, and when we got home she threw rocks at him.”

  Epolito grunted, and Ramona could hear the springs in the chair as he moved his body. “Your father could never sit still when he was a boy. He was like one of those little dogs that always run around barking at the wind. Your mother should have hit him in the head with one of those stones.”

  Actually, Loretta had hit him in the head. One of the rocks struck José Sr. in the forehead hard enough to make him stagger backward and fall down hard on his butt. He had sat there with his legs splayed and his mouth open, blood running down his face and dripping off his chin onto his pants. José was standing on the trailer steps next to his mother, and he thought that she had killed his father. After a few seconds of silence, Loretta let out a little squeal and hurried over and helped her husband to his feet and into the house. She cleaned his face with a damp rag while José Sr. mumbled about his stupidity. Later, after getting José Sr. to lie down, Loretta sat by herself in the living room and stared out the window for a long time.

  “José,” Epolito said. “Instead of walking in circles, go into the kitchen and get a chair. I don’t know why your Tía Ramona has only one chair in here anyway.”

  Ramona watched José walk into the kitchen. He looked at her and said, “Grandfather wants me to bring a chair.”

  “That’s fine, José,” Ramona said.

  He came to the table and picked up the chair their grandmother had been sitting in. “Tía,” José said softly, “what does a little bit dead mean?”

  Ramona looked at him for a moment. He was a thin boy, not so tall, with black hair that needed cutting. He looked like any other boy to her. “I don’t know what it means, José,” she said.

  “Do you think since Grandmother and Grandfather are here that my mom might come?”

  Ramona saw Loretta sitting up in her coffin, threading the rain from her hair. Ramona thought that if she wasn’t being haunted, it was possible a part of her had always been blind. She smiled slightly. “And what about your father?”

  “My father too.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ramona said.

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “What I’m sure of, José, is that your grandfather would like you to be with him. Go visit with him.”

  José turned and went into the other room, and Ramona heard her grandfather say, “Here, José. Put it next to me.”

  Ramona remembered the year she lived with her grandparents. She had been in the first grade at the elementary school, and although the school was no more than a mile away, her grandfather made her ride the school bus that stopped out on the highway. Each morning, she would leave the house with her grandfather, who would walk a few feet behind her all the way to the bus stop. There, he would stand by himself with his hands deep in his pockets, staring off at the mountains. He never spoke to the other children, who kept their distance, and Ramona would stand awkwardly between them and her grandfather as if caught between two worlds. When the bus arrived, he would always exchange a few words with the driver, and Ramona, as the bus pulled away, would look out the window at her grandfather, his head bent, walking home. In the winter, she could see his breath.

  “Look at how green the mountains are, José,” her grandfather said in the living room. “Even after so little rain.”

  Instinctively, Ramona looked out the kitchen window. She could see the leaves of the cottonwoods still dripping water. The sky between the branches was blue. She could hear the sound of birds.

  There was only silence from the living room for a long time, and when Ramona finally roused herself from the chair, she walked to the sink and washed her face over and over with warm water. She felt exhausted, and after drying her face, she stood for a moment staring out the small window. She pushed the glass open and could feel the breeze on her face and the smell of wet earth. A truck started up across the road and pulled out of the village office, its tires caked with mud. Ramona took a few deep breaths and walked quietly into the other room. Her grandfather was asleep in the chair, his chin down on his chest, a rumbling noise coming from his open mouth. José had dozed off too, his body bent sideways, the side of his face resting against the arm of the stuffed chair. José’s eyes opened, and for a second he looked at his aunt before the eyelids fluttered and closed. Ramona looked into her own bedroom and saw that her grandmother had chosen to lie down there. She rested far to one side of the bed with her hands folded neatly over her breasts.

  Ramona went into the last room of the house, where there was a small cot. She lay down in her clothes and covered herself with a thin blanket. She stared at the water-stained vigas, at the clods of dried adobe between the latillas that still dropped dirt when the wind blew hard. When Ramona thought of ghosts, and since her childhood this was seldom, she always thought of La Llorona.

  As a child, Ramona, like every other child in Guadalupe, had been told the tale of La Llorona a thousand times. La Llorona, who in life had drowned her own children, walks the creekbeds and arroyos and ditches and wherever else there is water, calling out for her lost children. Since the entire village of Guadalupe was criss-crossed with irrigation ditches, to be out after dark was an uncommon risk. La Llorona could be anywhere: in the call of an owl, in the coyote’s shrill bark, or in the water as it flowed from field to field.

  The year Ramona turned nine, she saw La Llorona. She was certain of the age even now because it had also been the year that Emilio Silva, an old man who lived by himself next to Ramona’s parents, had been seen by his neighbors chasing after his chickens with a torch he had welded together. He had caught many of them, and his flock had scattered, running into the road and into Ramona’s yard with burnt, smoldering feathers and an expression of the apocalypse in their small red eyes. Emilio later told his neighbors that he had done such a thing because at night, when trying to sleep, he could hear his chickens talking to each other and was unhappy at what they had to say. It had been the autumn of that year, and Ramona and her mother and her father and little Flavio had gone into the foothills to pick piñon. It was there that Ramona had seen La Llorona. She was standing beneath a tall pine tree that grew by itself at the upper edge of a large open meadow. From where Ramona had stood, she could see how black and long La Llorona’s hair was and how her dress, which was startling white, fell from her neck to her ankles. Ramona had watched this woman watch her for a long time, and when her parents had returned from the woods with a bag heavy with piñon and Flavio held sideways in her father’s arm, she had asked her mother who the woman beneath the tree was. Her mother had looked and seen nothing, and with an uneasy expression on her face, she had gathered their things and they had left the hills quickly.

  When Ramona thought of ghosts, she thought of La Llorona: a lost soul who walked the hills and creeks in search of children. She certainly did not think of her grandparents or her sister-in-law, Loretta. She was not uneasy in their presence, but their being there made her feel as though her life hadn’t moved. Her grandparents had returned home as though they had never left, and Ramona wondered if they would ask her when she was leaving. She thought that the idea of death was to let the living go on, not to have to eat enchiladas with one’s dead relatives.

  Ramona woke with her heart beating rapidly and the heavy sound of silence in the house. She felt disoriented from sleeping in a room she seldom used, and for a moment, she had absolutely no idea where she was. She lay on the cot for a little while, letting her heart calm and her memory return. When Ramona was as composed as she thought she would become under the circumstances, she sat up and swung her legs off the cot. She rubbed her eyes and brushed her hair back from her face. She thought that with her black dress now quite wrinkled and her hair tangled about her face, she must look like a witch.

  The living room was empty, and in the kitchen Ramona found her grandmother peeling green chiles at the sink and crying. There was the s
mell of onions and garlic and lard.

  “There’s some coffee, Ramona,” Rosa said, not turning from the sink.

  “What’s wrong, Grandmother?” Ramona asked.

  “Nothing, hija. I get sad sometimes. It’s nothing to worry. I’ve become like the weather.” She turned on the tap and rinsed a chile. Ramona could never remember seeing her grandmother cry. She’d been a woman who’d always kept moving.

  “Take some coffee, Ramona,” Rosa said, “and go sit down somewhere. This has been a hard day for us all.”

  Ramona poured a cup from the pot. “Where is José?” she asked.

  “He’s out walking with your grandfather.”

  Ramona leaned back against the counter. She took a drink of coffee and felt a coffee ground on her tongue. She didn’t want to think about what José and her grandfather taking a walk might mean. She put her cup down. “Let me help you,” she said.

  “No,” Rosa said without looking at her granddaughter. “You go somewhere else now. I can do this by myself.”

  Ramona picked up her cup of coffee and went outside. She sat in an old wicker chair under the large cottonwood. It was late afternoon, and in the hours Ramona had slept the sun had dried up much of the moisture from the morning rain. The sun was still high in the west, but where Ramona sat she was shaded by the branches of the tree. She could feel the high grass on the calf of her leg and hear water running in the irrigation ditch that ran along the edge of her property near the road.

  Across the road, Ramona could see the back of the village office, a new building that had been constructed just a few years ago. Off to the side of the village office was an old adobe that was engulfed in weeds and abandoned machinery. The roof of the building sagged in the center, and even from so far away, Ramona could see how bloated and caked with tar the roof was. She noticed that the one door stood open, and she thought that the interior must be full of skunks and bats and should probably be locked up so that children wouldn’t wander in.

  Ramona had painted the building a few months ago. She had sat alone in her kitchen, as she always did, with her paints and a white canvas and closed her eyes for a long time. And then, for no particular reason, the old adobe had come to her. When she finally picked up her brush, she began to make indecipherable gestures that eventually resolved into the slanted frame of one of the windows in the adobe. She had worked in a frenzy and completed the painting by midafternoon. Much of it resembled her other paintings, something caught as if in a photograph of things that no longer lived. But there was something else in this one. She had caught a whisper of life with her brush, as if the painting wished to speak, and none of the words would be Ramona’s. Unfortunately, Ramona had no idea how she had done this. She put the picture with the others in the shed where her grandfather had once kept his chickens and his geese.

  Ramona brought her cup to her mouth and watched Flavio’s truck pull off the highway and onto the dirt road that ran between her house and the village office. He drove slowly by and parked beside Ramona’s pickup. Ramona watched her brother climb out of the cab and wondered how, with the same blood in their veins, they could be so different. Where she was tall with legs that were long and slender, Flavio was short and slightly bow-legged. It was as if their father had jumped a fence and brought back one of them from somewhere else. The only way in which Ramona thought they might be alike was that they both tended to be quiet and spoke with reticence. But even then, Ramona had always thought that her brother shared this trait with her only because his brain was the size of a small stone.

  Ramona watched Flavio walk across the boards that she had laid over the irrigation ditch, and she saw that her brother was beginning to put on weight. He walked toward her with his eyes staring down at his feet. When he stopped, just a few paces from where Ramona was sitting, he looked past her at the house. Flavio could see where the plaster had pulled away from the wall in places and how the wood was rotting beneath the window frames. He could smell the sweet odor of chile and garlic.

  “Hello, Flavio,” Ramona said.

  Flavio looked sideways at his sister. “Ramona,” he said, “I came to take little José.”

  Ramona emptied her coffee on the ground between them. “Take José where?” she asked.

  Flavio coughed and cleared his throat. After Martha had told him that Ramona had taken José home to live with her, he had driven to Loretta’s parents’ house, still in a state of shock. At one point, while he was drinking a beer and eating a pork tamal, Loretta’s mother had approached him and with her two hands clasped to her full breasts, she had asked, “What will become of little José?” Fulfilling Ramona’s notion regarding the size of his brain, Flavio had answered, “Don’t ask me. Ramona has taken him.” Silence followed this statement, which seemed to have been heard by everyone in the room. Loretta’s relatives wanted to know what Flavio’s sister, who had never married and did nothing but paint her pictures and who lived amongst them like a stranger, was going to do with a child. Flavio had answered with a variety of shrugs and facial expressions that had told no one anything. When he finally felt he could leave the wake without being noticed, he drove Martha home and then went straight to Ramona’s. He thought that what he was trying to do was ward off certain disaster, but he was also curious about just what had possessed his sister to take José.

  “I think it would be better,” Flavio said, “if little José was around other children.”

  “You don’t have children,” Ramona said. This was not where Flavio wanted the conversation to go. His and Martha’s lack of children had always been a torment and a mystery to him. Both had wished for children from the moment Father Leonardo had clapped his hands together in mock delight and pronounced them man and wife so many years ago. After three years of marriage and more sexual encounters with Flavio than she thought humanly possible, Martha had come to the conclusion that she had inherited her mother’s muteness in her womb. She drove to Las Sombras alone one day to see a woman who knew of such things, and the woman told her that there was nothing wrong with her, that the fault must lie with her husband. Not knowing how to tell Flavio this news, she had placed the results of the tests in Flavio’s lunch box, where he found it after feeding his cows at noon.

  When he returned home that evening, he placed the papers on the table and asked his wife just what it was he had found with his tamales. Embarrassed, Martha told him that her female organs were fine and that she was sorry. Pleased that his wife was well, Flavio didn’t grasp until a few days later just what it was she was sorry about. Months later, Flavio, alone, drove to Las Sombras, where a young doctor did a sperm count for him and pronounced him a complete man with enough lively sperm to populate a small South American country. For a year after that, Flavio and Martha, in the darkness of their bedroom, made love in so many different manners that Martha would sometimes find herself blushing even when alone in her kitchen cooking. And yet, nothing happened. Flavio had finally reached the sad conclusion that his and Martha’s insides must be like acid and base, like rain on snow. Something died when his sperm swam inside his wife.

  “Ramona,” Flavio said, “I didn’t mean for José to live with me.” Which was true. Flavio had now spent so many years alone with his wife that the thought of a child made him uncomfortable. Flavio reached in his shirt pocket and took out a cigarette. He lit it and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. “There are other relatives,” he said to his sister. “On Loretta’s side.”

  Behind Flavio, across the road, Ramona saw two figures walk out of the abandoned building beside the village office. One was a stout man of medium height, and the other was small and thin and was carrying something in both his hands. The two walked slowly across the field toward Ramona’s house, and she could now see that it was her grandfather and José. She looked up at Flavio and thought that he smoked his cigarette the way a woman in a city might.

  “Flavio,” she said, “this has been a difficult day. And I know that you mean well.” From inside
the house came the clatter of a pan falling to the floor.

  Flavio looked toward the house. “What is José doing in there?” he said. He looked back at his sister, who was staring past him. Flavio turned his head and saw José approaching the road before Ramona’s drive. He could also see that a few yards behind José was an old man. Flavio thought there was something familiar about this man.

  “Do you see him?” Ramona said in a whisper. “Tell me, Flavio, that you see him.”

  “Who?” Flavio said. “José or that viejo?” Flavio squinted his eyes. “Who is that?” he said, and for the first time all day, which seemed to have lasted forever, Ramona felt something heavy lift from her. She leaned back in her chair and found herself smiling.

  José ran across the road. “Tío,” he said. “Hello, Tío.” Flavio ignored his nephew and continued staring at the old man, who had just reached the far side of the road. I know that old man, he thought.

  “Tía,” José said, “we found this.”

  In José’s hands was a book. Ramona could smell mildew and saw the water stains on the cover and how the cloth had been chewed by rodents. She thought that it must be covered with bat droppings.

  “Why are you carrying that, José?” she said. “It’s covered with filth. Take it inside, but keep it out of the kitchen. And wash your hands. Wash them twice.”