One morning, when she was out walking, she flung a stone at a passing cottontail, near a mesquite tree, caught it in the head, stunned it temporarily, hobbled over on a walking stick to finish it off, but tripped in a pothole and broke her leg. ‘I wish I’d gotten that creature,’ she told the doctor, ‘I’d have died happy then.’ What disturbed her the most was that the cottontail had been left to the black birds, the carcass swooped down upon quickly — there wasn’t even a skin to be found. The doctor laid her up in bed for months but others brought her rabbits to skin. Propped up by pillows, she laid old grain sacks around her to contain the blood and hides. The Virgin of Guadalupe stared from the bedside table. When my grandmother was finished she laid her head back on the pillow and muttered a melody of strange prayers to the small white statue. She insisted on wearing a big straw hat, even in bed.
My grandmother tried to get Mam to learn how to skin rabbits, learn the skill, preserve the tradition, but my mother wasn’t interested.
Geraniums grew up from old paint pots that were hung from the porch of the house. A cow skull, decorated merrily with colours, was hung near the front door in front of the rusty fly screen. On top of the roof was a weather-vane that never moved anymore, simply pointed east, even in the strongest of winds. My father climbed on the roof and tried to get it to move — Mam had asked him to fix it so she could watch the direction of her winds — but it wouldn’t budge. During the wedding a drunk had climbed up on the roof and played the guitar for them, but he fell and landed sideways on the vertical spindle, cutting himself and leaving a nasty scar on his ribcage. His wife said that the cut never healed, that he still felt the breeze roll through the wound and that my father — by virtue of being a gringo — should pay him some compensation. Seeing the man outside the town bar, my mother pointed to his ribcage: ‘Which way’s the wind blowing today, Benito?’ The man reared up his leg and let out a giant fart, to the delight of some men squatting on the ground. ‘I think it’s heading south,’ she simply said, as she turned and walked away. That night she left a plate of beans outside the man’s house — it was fair compensation, she said, and the only compensation he would get.
When she walked around the town the local boys still flung big glances at her. Maybe they thought that the man in the big brown hat was some sort of wicked apparition, that one morning they’d all wake up and he’d be gone as easily and as mysteriously as he had come.
But they saw her settling into her new life, bit by bit. Her hair grew out. She began growing vegetables near the porch — tying herself to the soil. It was rough and bitter work, kneeling down in patterned dresses, mangy dogs scrabbling around the fence, dirt so hard that it ripped out the underneath of her fingernails. She gave the job a tolerable accent with a little tequila, sipped from large bottles as she worked on her hands and knees. When dust was kicked up in her face she spat it out on the ground. Still, she was raven-haired and beautiful. Men still found profligacy rising up in their groins. They sat on porches opposite the house, waiting for her to stand up from her work so the sunlight could filter through the thin dress, give an outline of a round breast, a long leg, a back arched with her hands on the lower buttocks to loosen and stretch herself. Somebody took to dropping off chocolate on the doorstep late at night, wrapped in big cubes of ice to keep it from melting. Dishes of pollo en mole and flowers appeared with oblique handwritten notes. She ate the chocolate and the chicken dish and shoved the flowers in vases, didn’t search the admirer out, she wasn’t bothered, she was happy. Secretly she wondered if it was my father who was leaving the presents on the doorstep.
Another sign to the local men that she was no longer available came when she bought the chickens. They arrived one day in wooden crates, eight hens and a rooster. A chicken pen was put together from scrap wood. She named the chickens after people in town. The mayor was the fattest, with a huge fleshy chin wattle. It laid very few eggs. Many of the birds were named after men who went across the border to work on vast oil derricks and ranches in Texas, coming home with fistfuls of money. The part-time barber was a strange chicken, without a head comb, bald as could be. And the barber’s wife was a wild one who flew up in the air at the slightest of sounds.
There was also an odd rooster that never crowed in the morning. She called him José after a local character whose lips had been sewn together when he lost a bet in a bar. Even after the stitches were taken out José never said a word. He walked around silently with his ebony hair slicked back with cooking grease, his mouth in a sneer, the bottom lip peppered with scarholes. When he passed my parents’ house José stared at his namesake rooster with a great brown bitterness. One morning they found the bird strangled on the front doorstep with a note in Spanish that read: ‘Now we speak.’
My mother grew to adore the chickens in the same way that my grandmother adored rabbits. Two groups of them — one raised for eggs, the others for sale — and every now and then some were butchered and cooked. My grandmother did the butchering, deftly pressing her fingers on the point of a neck, cracking it. Mam watched the weather and tied the best times for egg-laying in with its vicissitudes. The colours of the wind had a lot to do with it. Her lazy black wind was a fitful time. The brown one, riverwise, carried nothing but problems, the river coming from somewhere foreign and unfathomable.
My grandmother laughed at her daughter’s curious superstition, wondered why she didn’t attribute the brown wind to Benito and his beans. ‘Are you my daughter at all?’ They sat out on the porch and talked to the chickens as they pecked at the ground, some strange sort of soap opera developing amongst them, particularly when breeding was going on. The new rooster was named ‘Obispo Michael’ after my father, who sometimes came out from his darkroom to watch the spectacle of breeding, tucking his hands into his waistcoat and rocking back and forth in pleasure. ‘That’s a fine method I have there, I must say,’ he said. My grandmother eyed him suspiciously and said something about Riley and the dry bullets of new revolutionaries — she was expecting a grandchild any day, but the only grandchild would be years coming, in another country, almost another universe.
While my mother tended to the animals the old man worked on his photographs. He borrowed a truck, used most of the remaining money on another week-long journey to buy supplies in San Antonio. At the back of the house he built a darkroom — he always claimed it was the finest of its kind in the northern hemisphere. In a place of great light — light that swept its way in a hard yellowness over the land — not a chink got through. He put double doors in. The second door bolted from the inside so that when he was developing the photos wouldn’t get ruined. He saturated himself in red light. Only my mother was allowed in. For a joke he hung above the door a chastity belt he had found in a rubbish dump. A sign in Spanish read: ‘No Entry Beyond This Point.’
Sometimes drunks came hammering at his door. They were fond of reaching up and tucking their empty bottles into the belt. The bottles clanged together like an odd doorbell, but he seldom answered. The coterie of drunks would hang around outside, mouths flapping away under thick black moustaches. They were often looking for money — any man who could afford to take photographs had to be rich. He didn’t have much to give, but he set up a row of hammocks for them outside the door of the darkroom. The men lounged there and shared precious cigarettes, speculated on the nature of his photos. They listened to the floating voices of my mother and grandmother as the chicken opera developed in the yard, Obispo Michael going hell for leather whenever he got the chance, a couple of delighted screams rising up when he went after the barber’s wife who, in real life, had a cleft palate and a tendency towards body odour.