“There’s an enormous hypocrisy about all this,” she said.
“In what way?” he said.
“In good times we bring them in by the truckload. When there’s drought, the Mexicans are the devil’s creation.”
He watched her eyes and the way they followed the streambed through the trees down to the river. “Was it Watts?”
She turned her glare upon him. “I have no dealings with Mr. Watts. I suggest you don’t either.”
“If it was him, Wynona, I need to know.”
She sat down at the piano and began to play “Malagueña,” by Ernesto Lecuona. She played and played and played, hitting the keys harder and harder, until Grandfather stuffed his fingers in his ears and walked out of the room. Then she stopped and stared at me. “Get your coat,” she said.
“Where we going?”
“To town.”
“To the matinee?” I said.
“We’re going to buy some milk.”
We walked past Grandfather in the kitchen. He was at the window, his back to us, framed in the gray light, his right hand opening and closing at his side, as though he were squeezing a rubber ball, the knuckles ridging.
Mother and I drove down a dirt road into the county seat and parked at a grocery store on a side street, next to an icehouse and a cinder-block building where chickens were butchered. It was Saturday and both the grocery store and the icehouse were crowded. She pressed a nickel into my palm. “Go get you a Grapette, Aaron, but drink it in the car,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Are we breaking the law?”
“Who told you such a thing?”
I picked at my hands. “It’s the way we’re acting.”
I said we instead of you. She kissed me on the head. “You’re a good boy. Don’t be speaking bad of yourself or me either.”
I went inside the icehouse and pulled a Grapette from the cold box and paid at the counter. Through the side windows I could see the rear lot of the slaughterhouse and a sloping rivulet of feathers and chicken guts that had merged and congealed with the runoff from the ice-maker.
The men around me were bundled up and drinking beer and smoking or chewing tobacco, their clothes sour with the odor that sweat makes when it’s trapped inside wool. They were talking about the American sailors who had been drowned inside the Arizona, a subdued anger as thick as spit in their throats.
“What you doin’ in here, little fellow?” said a voice behind me.
I looked up at the silhouette of Mr. Watts. “Drinking a Grapette,” I said. “But I’m supposed to drink it in the car.”
“Where’s your mama at?”
“The grocery store,” I said. “Across the street,” I added, not knowing why.
“Getting y’all a mess of eats, is she?”
“Not really,” I replied. “Grandfather gets by on the preserves he puts up in the fall.”
“Bet she’s buying milk. Right or wrong?”
I knew somehow he had bested me and caused me to give up a secret, but I wasn’t sure how or what. He smiled down at me and stuck a long, thin cigar in his mouth, then took a kitchen match from his shirt pocket and scratched it on the butt of his revolver. He puffed on the cigar, his eyes hazy, and fitted his hand like a starfish on my head and worked his palm and fingers in my hair. “You don’t like that? If so, just say. Don’t be giving adults mean looks.”
I went back across the street with my Grapette and climbed into my mother’s car. I felt dirty all over. She came out of the store with a big grocery bag clutched against her chest. She set it on the seat between us. Inside it were three sweaty bottles of milk and two cartons of Cream of Wheat.
“What’s wrong, Aaron?”
“Nothing.”
She hadn’t started the car. She twisted around and looked through the rear window. Mr. Watts was crossing the street, his Stetson slanted sideways, his cigar poked back in his jaw. “Did that man say something or do something to you?” she said.
“He put his hand on my head, like he was wiping it on me.”
She looked straight ahead, her face tight. She started to turn the ignition, her hand shaking on the keys. The keys fell to the floor. She reached under the seat and pulled out a leather quirt. “Stay in the car.”
She opened the door and stepped outside, her hair blowing, her profile cut out of tin.
“You haven’t changed,” Mr. Watts said, tipping his hat. “As fresh as the dew, no matter the season.”
“You touched my son?”
“I don’t know rightly what you mean by touched.”
“Don’t you put on airs with me,” she said.
“I thought we were friends.”
She slashed the quirt across his face and laid open his cheek.
“Lord, woman, you flat cut loose, don’t you?” he said. He pressed the back of his wrist against the cut and looked at the smear of blood on his skin. “Warn me next time and I’ll stay out of your way.”
She began to thrash him, raining blows down on his head and shoulders, weeping at her own rage and impotence and shame while two men grabbed her by the arms and dragged her back on the sidewalk, easing the quirt out of her hand.
“It’s all right, everybody,” Mr. Watts said to the onlookers. “Miss Wynona is distraught. She didn’t mean no harm.”
People patted him on the back and shook his hand and told him what a kind and Christian man he was. I ran to my mother and hugged her around the waist, as though we were the only two people on earth.
The man from Victoria who was supposed to pick up the Mexicans never arrived. Mother fed the Mexicans and Grandfather cussed out the man from Victoria on the phone. “You’re going to he’p the war effort by not hiring wets?” he said. “I got a better way for you to serve your country. Shoot yourself.”
The sun went down and so did the glow of lights from town that sometimes reflected on the bottoms of the clouds. In the general store at the crossroads the radio with the tiny yellow dial broadcast stories about the Japanese dropping parachutes loaded with incendiary devices into our forests and grasslands. There were also reports of pamphlets that floated out of the sky and burst into flame when children picked them up. Street mobs were attacking Japanese businesses in Los Angeles.
Grandfather put on his canvas coat and tied on his wide-brimmed hat with a scarf and walked his fences with a lantern, out of fear not of the Japanese but of the evil potential of Mr. Watts, or maybe in bitter recognition that his era had passed and the injury he had done to his family could not be undone and the moral failure that characterized his life had poisoned everything he touched and saw.
That night I helped Mother and Grandfather in the barn with the Mexicans. She gave her greatest care to the woman breastfeeding her infant and held it in her arms while the mother used the outhouse. The Mexicans were a sad lot, their skin as gray as the fields, their faces like mud masks, their clothes and hair sprinkled with bits of hay that had turned yellow.
Back in the kitchen Grandfather told me the Mexicans had crossed the Rio Grande far south of us, then had been betrayed by an illegal contractor who was supposed to drive them to San Antonio.
“He took their money and left them with the clothes on their backs,” he said.
“What’s going to happen to them?” I asked.
“They’ll get caught and sent back. The government calls them ‘deportees.’”
“That little baby is mighty thin,” I said.
“Your mother worries me.”
“Sir?”
“I let her down,” he said. “She blames herself for something that wasn’t her fault.”
“She never speaks bad of you, Grandfather. Not ever.”
“Past is past. Wait here.” He went into the living room and picked up a deep cardboard box from behind the couch and carried it back into the kitchen. I heard scraping sounds inside the cardboard.