What the Moon Saw Page 10

  “Is that why Pedro’s father left?”

  “In a way.” She unpinned the shirt I’d pinned up and turned it inside out. “Like this, mi amor. So the sun does not fade your lovely clothes.”

  “Oh.” I felt like a two-year-old around her sometimes when she was doing chores. All I knew how to do was throw clothes into a washing machine, the hot setting for towels and sheets and T-shirts and pajamas, and the cold setting for nice clothes.

  “Years ago we people of Yucuyoo sold our coffee to a company. And this company sold it around the world. Imagine. People in far-off lands drinking coffee I picked with these hands!” She stretched out her fingers, red from the cold water and harsh soap. “And then, the trade rules changed. The companies began buying coffee from other places. Our coffee prices started to fall. They fell and fell like a dying bird. Oh, it was a terrible shock. You see, it began to cost more to grow the coffee than to sell it. That is when Pedro’s father left. That is when many men started leaving. Because there is no way to feed a family with nothing.” Abuelita pinned up the last shirt, my art shirt, splattered with red and yellow paint.

  “Who changed the rules? Why?”

  “I will tell you a story that happened years ago. Here, in our land, by the marketplace. There was a high stone wall, and on the other side, a tree. A huge old tree, as wide as I am tall. A tree whose branches gave shade for the grandmothers to gather and talk, for the children to play. Then one day a man came to town and bought the piece of earth on the other side of the wall. Oh, he was not a bad man, but he was a man who stayed inside his walls. He did not understand that this tree gave us shade and joy. He did not understand that the roots of the tree spread out beneath us all. That the branches spread high over us all. No, all the man knew was that the tree would make a fine table and fine chairs in his house. So he had his sons chop it down. Since that day, the grandmothers and children no longer gather in the cool shade.”

  Abuelita sighed. For a moment it didn’t seem like she had a powerful jaguar inside her. She looked like a small, old, tired lady. A sad feeling stayed inside me all afternoon until late that night, in my bed under the wooden rafters. Falling asleep, I saw a tall stone wall. From the other side of the wall came music, notes from Pedro’s guitar. I tried to climb over the wall. I tried to dig under it. I tried to knock it down. Finally, I gave up and sat against the wall and listened, and that’s all I remember.

  “You should have flown over it,” Pedro said when I told him about the dream.

  “I forgot you could do that in dreams,” I said.

  “You can do anything.”

  A picture flashed in my head, me stepping forward and kissing Pedro on the mouth. It shocked me. Where did that come from? Do I want to do that? But Pedro was…Pedro. I imagined him standing next to Mark G., code name Kram, the third-coolest guy in my grade. I imagined Mark looking at a place beyond my head, too cool to actually look at me. He wore his attitude like another layer of name-brand clothes, his real self buried somewhere far beneath. And I saw Pedro, looking into my eyes, into the inside of me, making me feel like an oyster with a perfect pearl in its center. Then I pictured Samantha looking at Pedro’s outfit with her nose wrinkled up. Clara, he is so not your type. Not anyone’s type.

  I pushed the pictures out of my head. I wasn’t in Walnut Hill. I was here. Walnut Hill had its own set of rules. But those rules were flimsy and didn’t make sense and I didn’t have to follow them, did I?

  I looked at Pedro’s face, rosy and damp with sweat. “You’re right,” I said. “I can do anything.”

  We spent the morning looking for hummingbirds, just to watch them dart and swoop around from flower to flower, sticking their long tongues into the spirals of petals. We’d counted sixteen so far. Pedro started talking about Marcos, and I felt like he was talking about an old friend.

  “Marcos collected stories from our village and put them together in a book.” Pedro said this with a proud smile. “And he taught us other stories, stories from before the Spaniards came. When there was a great civilization here.”

  He talked for a while. The thing that caught my attention most was that hundreds of years ago, his ancestors worshiped a hummingbird god, and a feathered serpent god, and another called Smoking Mirror, and a goddess called Obsidian Butterfly.

  “What’s obsidian?” I asked.

  He scanned the ground for a few seconds, then picked up a tiny shard of glassy black rock and held it up. I imagined a butterfly made of this, something so airy and delicate and sharp and strong.

  “Tomorrow let’s find pieces of obsidian,” I said. “We can lay them down in the shape of a butterfly and leave them on a rock as an offering.”

  “An offering to who?”

  “To the Obsidian Butterfly goddess!”

  Pedro smiled. “Marcos always had ideas like that too. He said we should be proud of our ancestors.”

  Our ancestors. Was Pedro including me with him and Marcos? His ancestors are Dad’s ancestors, I thought, which means they’re my ancestors too. This gave me a shiver of pride and made me feel close to Pedro and close to Dad, even though he was thousands of miles away.

  That afternoon, Pedro and I sat on a rock side by side, cooling off our bare feet in the stream. Pedro was playing his guitar and humming softly. Underneath our legs, a line of ants trailed along the bank, carrying pieces of leaves twenty times their size. Each one looked like a sailboat, struggling to stay steady in the breeze. “Look at them!” I said. “Isn’t that neat?” As I said this, I remembered how I’d been wishing for someone to point out neat things to. I smiled and tucked my chin into the crook of my elbow and breathed in the smell of the sunshine and sweat on my skin, and felt the ocean filling me. You can do anything, Clara. Again, the picture of me kissing Pedro crept into my head. Did he ever think about kissing me? The way he sang to me made me think he might.

  Pedro looked like he was thinking about something else. He played some more, and sang the song about the galaxies and jewels, the first one he’d ever played me. I had drawn pictures of this song in my sketchbook—diamonds and emeralds and sapphires spiraling with stars. That was how I thought of our time together, something glittering, as big and important as the Milky Way.

  Pedro kept playing, but stopped humming, and said, “Clara. Do you understand what the words to my songs mean?”

  My brain started sifting through bits of his other songs. It was hard; I’d always listened more to how he sang the words, with so much feeling. I heard the words, but I’d never thought about the layers of meanings beneath them. At the core, they had to be about how he felt toward me. I felt like chocolate in the sun, a sweet, melting feeling. This is it. This is the precise, magical moment he’s going to tell me he likes me.

  I took a deep breath. “I guess—mostly they’re about…” I was going to say love, but my mouth wouldn’t form the word, and I felt my face flush. Luckily he was looking down at the ants. “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Listen carefully, Clara.”

  He kept playing the song, but now sang the words extra clearly.

  “Jewels had no souls

  They were only mirrors, brilliant colors…

  “See, Clara, the words show how wealth isn’t important, how it distracts us from important things. The way the money in your country distracted my father. These are songs of protest. Songs to unite the poor people to stand up against the rich.”

  My heart was starting to sink right down to my feet. “What are you talking about?” I whispered.

  “Marcos says the rich treat us like those ants”—he pointed to the endless line of leaf pieces moving in the shadow of our knees—“doing backbreaking work for the people lucky enough to be born with money.”

  This was what Abuelita had tried to prepare me for, I realized. But I hadn’t expected it to feel like this. I’d been flying with the stars, and suddenly, bam, I was knocked down.

  “You mean they’re not about…love?” I asked in a small, humiliated
voice.

  “They’re about love…,” he said, and paused.

  I held my breath and waited.

  “Love for justice and dignity,” he said.

  But they weren’t about love for me. I wanted to tear up the galaxy picture in my sketchbook and throw the pieces at him. “Pedro, those are just Marcos’s words coming out of your mouth. They’re not how you really feel.”

  He looked confused. “Who cares whose words they are? They’re true.” He stood up, picked up his shoes, and slung his guitar over his back. He looked at me for a second as if I were a math problem he was trying to figure out. Then he said, “Forget it. Let’s go. It’s going to rain.”

  I didn’t move. I didn’t think my legs would work. All this time, I’d thought every song he’d sung had been a gift especially for me. How stupid I was, to listen to every song as though I were hypnotized. I’d trusted him with my most secret things, things I would never tell Samantha. And all along he’d really been lecturing me about politics. What I wanted now was for him to hurt the way I was hurting. I raised my chin and said in a voice that didn’t sound like my own, “You wish Marcos were your dad because you don’t have one anymore.”

  He looked like I’d slapped him. His mouth fell half-open in disbelief. Then he shook his head and said slowly, “Your father’s no better, Clara. He ran away too.”

  “He didn’t run away.”

  “Yes, he did. And found an American wife and had a kid and forgot about Yucuyoo.”

  “He didn’t forget.”

  “Then, Clara, why didn’t he ever come back to visit? Not once in how many years? Twenty years?”

  “You don’t know anything about my father!”

  “It’s a small village. Everyone knows everything.”

  I picked up my sandals and slipped them on even though my feet were dripping wet. I fastened them, fumbling. Pedro had a point, although I wasn’t going to admit it. Why hadn’t Dad ever returned? I searched for a way to defend him. “Maybe he felt guilty,” I said finally, “because for all those years while he was illegal he couldn’t go back. He had to work and save money and learn English. And it would have been dangerous to cross the border again. People die crossing. And then when he married my mom, and he finally became legal—maybe he was afraid people here would be mad if he showed up.”

  “None of the men care once they leave,” Pedro said.

  “But he did try to remember Yucuyoo,” I said, hearing my voice grow louder. “In his own way.” Every nature walk Dad and I had taken was an echo from his past that he’d shared with me. And I’d stopped going. There was the tea he made for me when I was sick—chamomile and oregano and lime and honey and garlic. When I got older I refused to drink it and demanded normal cold medicine, bright red syrup in a bottle. All the bits of his past that he offered, I rejected. “I’m the one who didn’t care.”

  My body tingled with some kind of furious electricity. I stood up and faced Pedro.

  He stood there, hands awkward at his sides.

  I picked up my backpack and turned away. I ran down the trail, half tripping over rocks as I went. My backpack bounced clumsily against me, and I hoped he wasn’t watching me stumble along with my arms out, trying to balance. I was a wounded bird, crashing through tree branches and vines. The rain began, and I slipped and slid downhill as the ground spit up mud at me. My skin felt raw and cold, but I didn’t bother stopping to put on the plastic poncho. I let the rain pelt me like hard little bullets.

  By the time I made my way across the stretch of cornfield, I was hungry, thirsty, tired, and angry. Angry at myself for being so stupid. I want to go home, I thought. I want to go back to where I understand things.

  It was still drizzling a little when I reached Abuelita, out in the yard. She was holding a bloody machete and standing over a freshly killed chicken on a tree stump. It was headless and some of its feathers were stained red. She dipped it into a pot of steaming water for a minute, then pulled it out and tore out feathers by the handful. Then she slit open its skin, pulled the guts out, and plopped them into a bucket. Chicken blood and goop dripped from her hands. My appetite disappeared.

  She looked up and noticed me gaping. “Chicken soup for dinner tonight, mi amor. And chicken in chocolate-chile sauce for lunch tomorrow,” she announced.

  I felt my lip curl up. “At home we buy chicken already plucked and cleaned and wrapped in plastic. You can buy a package of all legs or all thighs or whatever you like best.” My voice sounded like the popular girls’ voices, talking about whose clothes were cooler or whose parents’ car was more expensive or whose DVD collection was bigger.

  “What about the feet and guts?” she asked, curious.

  “I don’t know—maybe they just throw them out—make dog food with them or something.”

  “Or diet dog food!”

  I didn’t laugh.

  “Well, Clara, here we use most of it. Except for the beak, of course, and the feathers, and some of the innards. And always, we boil the goodness out of the bones in a soup.”

  That night, when Abuelita handed me a big bowl with a chicken foot sticking right out and bits of fat floating around, my stomach turned. At first I thought the foot was a decoration like parsley, but then I saw Abuelo sucking and chewing on his. I ate a lot of tortillas and some of the broth, but I stuck the foot in my pocket to throw down the hole in the outhouse later. Abuelita probably knew, but I didn’t care.

  They talked about the coffee harvest, switching to Mixteco at times. I stayed silent. My hand touched the slimy, bumpy chicken foot in my pocket. I ran my fingers over the soft claws with their rubbery ridges and felt very, very far from home.

  That night in bed I let Pedro’s words come back to me, hard and powerful, like punches. I let his eyes come back too, frustrated and honest. His face, its shadows and light, its curves and dips. I wanted to sketch his face again and again. How had this feeling snuck up on me?

  I wondered if I would ever smell his shoe polish again, its sharp, sad scent. That smell brought back another memory of Dad. We were living in an apartment in Baltimore at the time. Even though Dad was doing plumbing and pool cleaning for the apartment complex, he still polished his work boots in the mornings, out on our little balcony. In nursery school one day, bratty Allison S. had been bragging about how many birthday presents her grandparents had given her—all four grandparents. I remember lying and saying I had five grandparents, just to beat Allison. That afternoon I sat on my usual place on the balcony, cross-legged on the Astroturf, watching the rain, wondering how I’d gotten ripped off with only two grandparents. Mom was inside unloading the dishwasher.

  “Mommy!” I called inside. “How come I only have Grand-mom and Pop-pop, and Allison has four?”

  “You have four also, hon,” she called back. “The other two live far away.” She started loading the dirty dishes from the sink. Her hair was long then, and she wore it in a high ponytail that bounced around as she moved.

  “I want to see them!” What I really meant was I want presents from them!

  Her ponytail stopped bouncing and she walked to the sliding glass door, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Tell that to Daddy, Clara,” she said softly. “They’re his own mommy and daddy. He hasn’t seen them for almost fifteen years.” She looked at me through thick glasses that made her sad eyes look twice their normal size.

  Imagine not seeing your parents for so long! I sat outside on the balcony, watching water drip from the rail, sipping my orangeade. The smell of rain blended with the shoe polish odor from the box of stained rags that Dad kept under the lawn chair. Poor Daddy.

  Every once in a while another wave of sadness would hit me, usually at times when Dad was hurt. Once he slipped on the ice in the driveway and couldn’t get up until I came over and helped him. Another time he got twenty-three hornet stings from a nest he disturbed out back. He ran into the house with panicked eyes, and his whole body grew redder and more swollen by the second. Or, the most recent time,
in May, when I walked in the sliding glass door at four a.m. and saw him standing in the shadows, his face wet. For the past couple of years, whenever a feeling of tenderness would float up to the surface, I’d try to push it back down again, like an inner tube that you jump on, and for a moment it goes underwater, but it always rises up again.

  Here’s the last thing he said to me, at the airport, while we stood by my pile of bags, waiting to board: “Clara, from the moment I crossed that border, I put all my memories of home in a box and sealed it shut. For almost twenty-five years the memories moved around inside, pressing on the walls, leaking out here and there. When you left the house that night, the box exploded, and all the memories shot out and lodged themselves all over—in our house, our yard, our furniture, on me, on you. And since then I can’t look anywhere without seeing a memory, and I know I will never be able to collect them all together and shut them in again.”

  Over the loudspeaker, they announced rows fifteen through twenty-four. I was row nineteen. Mom hurried over from the gate where she’d been giving the flight attendant special instructions about me and began picking up my bags. “Get your ticket ready, sweetie. You’ve got your wallet? Your travelers’ checks? The credit card?” and on and on, while Dad hugged me and whispered, “Clara—you’re my pathway home.”

  Abuelita yanked a giant weed out of the soil, then paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead. Her hand left a small streak of mud just under her hairline. I didn’t say anything about it—I thought it looked nice. I pulled out a few small weeds, careful not to disturb the roots of the chamomile flowers. I tossed them onto our pile of wilting leaves, which was growing into a small mountain.

  Yesterday I’d felt like one of these uprooted weeds, but this morning I’d helped fix a tasty breakfast and washed the dishes and fed Loro and done a pile of laundry, and all this made me feel useful. I didn’t even care that the harsh laundry and dish soap made my hands red and swollen and sore. Today, I decided, instead of wandering around the mountains, I would help Abuelita. And of course there was another reason: I was afraid of seeing Pedro, afraid he would say hi in a cold voice with a cold face, or worse, that he might not say hi at all.