What the Moon Saw Read online

  “The way you listen, the way you look.” Then, almost shyly, he added, “And because I’m looking for it too.”

  Pedro and I spent the next few days following the goats, on the lookout for any nook or cranny that might lead to the waterfall. He suspected that it was underground, and I thought he was probably right.

  During those days we talked excitedly, to make up for our time apart. We talked about God, the universe, souls, life after death, ghosts, spirits, aliens. He told me tales about the rain serpents that live in lakes in the mountains, the lightning and thunder gods who send storms out of the caves, the little frog goddesses that announce the rain, the moon goddess, the sun god, and their children, the stars. He made me tell the plots of all the extraterrestrial movies I’d seen. He had some ideas about spirits and aliens actually being one and the same. He sang songs, and I sat close to him, strumming the guitar at the wide part as he moved his fingers along its neck. Then I breathed in deeply the strange sweet smell that clung to him.

  One afternoon, we were huddled under a rock shelter, watching the sheets of rain come down. The goats were gathered near us, sopping wet, pressed against the rock.

  “That day at the market, you spoke in Mixteco to my grandmother,” I said. “I didn’t know you spoke it. Before that, I only heard older people speak it.”

  He was sitting next to me, wearing a black plastic garbage bag to keep the rain off. I was wearing the yellow plastic poncho Abuelita had given me.

  “My mother always speaks Mixteco to me,” he said.

  I thought for a second. “My dad doesn’t speak it. At least I don’t think he does.”

  “That’s because he went to school. When he was young, the teacher smacked children’s hands with a stick if they spoke Mixteco.”

  “That’s horrible!” I shivered under my poncho and rubbed my hands over my goose-bumped legs. “How come your mother speaks it?”

  “She never went to school. She worked at home with her mother and grandmother.”

  I imagined five-year-old Dad on his first day of school, his skinny legs in goatskin sandals and a little palm hat. I saw him speaking his own language and then smack, being hit on the hand. The shock, the sting, the red mark, his eyes welling up with tears.

  And Dad years later, with his mustache and a few silvery hairs, wet eyes, watching me come in shamefaced through the glass doors at four a.m. Dad speaking Spanish to me in front of my friends: “¿A qué hora regresas, Clara?” When will you be back, Clara? He would not let me out the door until I answered in Spanish. “A las nueve, Dad.” At nine, Dad. And I’d sigh and roll my eyes and slam the door behind me and wait for my embarrassment to slowly fade.

  I began asking Abuelita to tell me the names of the herbs in Mixteco whenever we made medicines. Every time we prepared an herb, she had me rub it between my fingers and smell it and feel it. Pericón with its tiny yellow flowers—yuku taxini in Mixteco—for women giving birth. Sweet sauco—ita tindoo—for colds and flus. Bitter hierba amarga—yuku tuchi—for stomachaches and anger. Some herbs we hung upside down from the rafters to dry for teas. Others we dropped into glass bottles of mezcal, where they’d stay until next year, when she’d strain out the leaves.

  Maybe I would be here next summer to strain the leaves out myself. But as soon as the thought surfaced in my mind, I pushed it down again. I didn’t want to think about this summer ending. I didn’t want to think that all this could go on without me. The dishes would get washed, the tortillas made, the coffee beans ground. And I was afraid that when I went back to Walnut Hill, the old Clara would come back, the foggy moon, clouded and confused.

  Early one morning, while I was outside at the sink splashing cold water on my face, Abuelita called my name. Her voice sounded urgent. I dried my face on my shirt and ran to the kitchen. She was picking out dried oregano leaves and carrizo roots from the rafters and dropping them into a basket with other herbs.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I need your help, mi vida. Listen.”

  I heard the clip-clop of a burro. Usually they just plodded along, weighed down with sacks of corn or firewood, but this one seemed to be galloping. Its footsteps were growing louder, closer.

  “Someone’s coming with a child to be cured,” she said.

  “She might have been stung by a scorpion.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. We had no phone, and neither did the neighbors.

  “I feel it,” she said. “Put some water on to boil, mi amor. Then start brewing this basket of herbs.”

  I’d never seen her move this fast before. She began grinding garlic and chocolate on the metate. I ran outside with the clay pot for the water.

  The burros drew closer. There were two of them. One carried a woman and a baby, and the other carried the two boys who had been teasing Pedro at the market—Felipe and Diego. They looked pale, their eyes wide open. The baby girl was about a year old, and she shook with sobs in her mother’s lap.

  Abuelita came outside and moved her hands over the baby, who was wrapped in a black shawl. “Where was she stung, Verónica?”

  The mother wiped her own tears away and pointed to a small red mark on the back of the baby’s tiny star-shaped hand.

  Abuelita led us into the kitchen. I started to boil water. Meanwhile, Abuelita rubbed garlic on the sting. From our pot of warm milk on the fire, she dipped a cupful and mixed it with chocolate and ground garlic. The mother took it, her hand trembling, and poured it into the baby’s mouth. About half dribbled down her chin. She coughed and sputtered hot chocolate everywhere.

  “How long ago was she stung?” Abuelita asked.

  “Just fifteen minutes ago. She was crawling on the floor while I was making tortillas. She turned over a basket in the corner and then screamed and I saw the scorpion run into a crack in the wall.”

  Abuelita rested her hand on the baby’s damp, red forehead while the mother continued trying to pour the milk into her child’s mouth. When water began bubbling, I dropped the herbs from our basket into the pot and stirred it with the wooden spoon.

  The boys stood stiffly in the corner, watching everything quietly. The little one, Diego, said in a small voice, “Is our sister going to live?”

  Abuelita touched his cheek. “Scorpion venom acts in different ways on different people, mi amor. And some scorpions have powerful venom, and some have weak venom. One never knows what will happen. What you can do now, child, is pray for your sister.”

  Diego moved his hands to his leather Virgin Mary necklace and his lips started moving. I couldn’t help noticing the difference between the bratty Diego at the market and the one in front of me now.

  Abuelita rubbed more garlic on the baby’s hand until the tea had steeped. I poured some into a cup and blew on it.

  “Add some honey, then see if it’s cool enough,” Abuelita told me.

  I did as she said and took a sip. Even with two spoons of honey, it tasted strong and bitter. Potent.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Give it to the baby.” Abuelita kept on rubbing the garlic and massaging the baby. The little girl was calming down. Abuelita seemed to be soaking up the pain and squeezing it out, giving the baby waves of relief.

  I held the cup to the little girl’s mouth. Without words I begged her to drink. And she did! She drank the entire cup without spitting it out, even though it was as bitter as lemon juice.

  The strange thing was that I could feel the baby’s pain. It was heavy, like a stone pulling her down. I kept stroking her head, trying to take out the blackness and send her calm blue waves, to give her the lightness of a leaf in the wind. I was the heron, rising up with my wings, lifting both of us up, light as air, above the pain. Every flap of my wings pushed the pain farther away, and we soared over treetops in the cool sky.

  After a while her whimpering stopped. I couldn’t say how long exactly. I couldn’t even tell you if it was seven minutes or seventy minutes. At some point the baby took a deep breath, ya
wned wide with her whole red face, and looked around the room. Suddenly she was curious as a puppy and kept trying to slide off her mother’s lap.

  The mother’s eyes were wide, amazed. “Should I let her down?” she asked me.

  I looked at Abuelita.

  Abuelita nodded and sat down in her little chair, watching the child carefully. The girl staggered in a one-year-old way around the kitchen, grabbing at tomatoes in a basket, hitting a wooden spoon against clay pots. When she heard Loro whistle from above, her face lit up, and she glanced around to see where the sound was coming from. Finally she looked up and discovered the giant green bird walking along the rafters. She squealed and laughed, her head thrown back. She looked off balance, and I jumped up and caught her just as she toppled backward. She tilted her face up at me and giggled and played with my hair, trying to stick my ponytail into her mouth. It’s strange how life can switch from scary to funny in seconds, how one minute it seems as fragile as a butterfly and the next, as solid as obsidian.

  Diego and Felipe sat on the floor by their sister, playing with her. I noticed that while Felipe, the older one, was laughing, a few tears escaped his eyes. Every few minutes he gave his sister a hug, until she squirmed out of his grasp.

  They ate breakfast with us, quesadillas filled with cheese and orange squash flowers. Abuelo came back with the firewood and a sackful of wild mushrooms. Some were sea green and some fiery orange. “Fresh-picked mushrooms,” he said. “Your father’s second-favorite food.” I’d thought it was bacon cheeseburgers, but instead of saying anything I just smiled. I’d have a lot to ask Dad about when I got home. Abuelita tucked the mushrooms inside the quesadillas along with the flowers and cheese. Usually mushrooms taste like dirt to me, but these tasted like forest secrets. Like sunsets hiding in tree hollows.

  Felipe kept stealing looks at me as we ate, and I wondered what he was thinking. I wasn’t annoyed anymore over what he’d said at the market. How could you stay annoyed with someone you’d just seen crying and praying over his baby sister?

  After breakfast, I poured the rest of the tea into a bottle and wrapped up a bundle of the herbs for the family to take home.

  “One cupful three times a day, before meals, for the next three days,” said Abuelita.

  I handed the package and the bottle of herb tea to Felipe.

  He looked at me for a moment like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. “You saved my sister’s life, Clara,” he said finally.

  “It wasn’t me, it was Abuelita,” I said.

  Abuelita laid her hand on my shoulder. “It was both of us, but mostly God and the spirits and the herbs and chocolate and garlic, and you boys praying, too.”

  The mother touched our hands lightly. “Felipe and Diego will bring over a sack of corn and vegetables for you tomorrow,” she said. “Thank you both.”

  After they left, Abuelita and I went to her garden to cut lemongrass for tea. “Now do you understand, Clara? Why your spirit was restless?”

  I thought for a moment. “Because I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what it was. Something hidden. The thing that makes me feel alive.” My words came out soft, but certain. “I’m a healer, like you.”

  Abuelita nodded. “You know, if you accept, it will take dedication. Some people prefer to float on the surface of life. They do not look deeply. They do not listen deeply. As a healer, you will see things that make you freeze in terror. You will see cold things, heavy things, death. Knowing this, do you accept?”

  The heron was inside me, rising up bravely. “Yes.”

  “That is good.” She picked a leaf of hierba buena and rubbed it between her fingers, releasing the smell of mint. “Those who do not accept cut off something that wants to grow inside them. Like this hierba buena. Cut off the stems, yet the roots will continue to grow underneath the soil, spreading wide and deep. Little sprouts will spring up everywhere. A person could spend her whole life trying to cut them off. What you have chosen is good, Clara. To let your talent grow, tend to it, give it room to spread, value it.”

  “What if other people don’t understand?” I thought of Samantha, of what she and other kids would say.

  “Perhaps they will see that your talent is good for them, too. Perhaps they will help it grow.”

  That night I drew a picture of a hierba buena plant for Dad, its roots deep in the earth, its leaves in the sunshine. I am a healer.

  The next day, when the boys came to deliver the sacks of food, Felipe walked up to where I was washing dishes outside at the sink. It had just stopped raining, and now the sunlight came through the banana leaves. Droplets were still clinging like glass beads to the leaves.

  “This is for you, Clara,” he said, holding out a carved gourd. I wiped my hands on my shorts and turned it over in my hands. Patterns of deer and rabbits and birds were etched on the outside. “I made it myself,” he said. “My dad taught me before the last time he left for Chicago, two years ago.”

  “Thanks, Felipe. It’s beautiful.” I ran my fingers over the ridges. “What does your dad do in Chicago?”

  “Works.” He shrugged and looked at the ground.

  “Doing what?”

  He skimmed his fingers over the top of his hair. His haircut looked like the Astroturf on a miniature golf course, short and spiky, only about a half inch long. It was shiny and stiff with hair gel that smelled perfumy and made my nose itch. Finally, he said, “Well, the truth is my dad was doing construction last summer, then they laid him off for the winter, then he was cleaning bathrooms, then he lost that job, and now he’s out of work. That’s why he hasn’t called us for a while. Because he’s out of work.” He pressed his lips together. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  “Okay.”

  “Me and Diego ask him to come home every time he calls, but he says he can’t because then what would we live on? But I tell him I’d live on tortillas and salt and water if he would come home.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just looked at his eyes and tried to understand how he felt, the way I’d felt his little sister’s pain.

  “Clara. You know what dream I have sometimes? Usually I dream it right before I wake up in the mornings. I find a secret passage to Chicago that gets me there in a couple of seconds, and then I see my dad and walk toward him. But before I get to hug him I realize, Wait a minute, this is impossible. And he disappears and I find myself back here in Yucuyoo with roosters crowing.”

  He kicked at the dirt with his big clomping Nikes and fiddled with the hem of his Chicago Bulls T-shirt. His legs were chunky under a pair of baggy basketball shorts. “I’m sorry about that day at the market, Clara.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s just—I thought—I didn’t know you were a healer.”

  “Actually, I just found out myself,” I said.

  “My mom says you have the same gift as your grandmother.”

  “Well, I hope I can use it like she has.”

  “And you know what me and Diego noticed? That you look just like her. Especially how your cheeks push up your eyes when you smile.”

  “I guess we look a little alike.” I didn’t mind so much that he’d mentioned my chubby cheeks.

  “You remind us of Marcos, too. He’s the last stranger who came to Yucuyoo. When you leave us, we’ll miss you just like we miss him. People will be talking about you for years, Clara.”

  “But I’m coming back soon,” I said.

  He looked at me doubtfully.

  “I am,” I said.

  “Eh! Felipe!” Diego yelled from the burro. “Let’s go!”

  Felipe touched my hand lightly. “I hope so.” Then he left.

  I traced my fingers over the carvings. My hand looked like someone else’s hand, rough and red from the harsh dish and laundry soap. My fingers and palms were callused from holding hot clay pots and flipping steaming tortillas and carrying heavy baskets from the market and climbing over rocks and strumming guitar strings.
/>   I liked the way my hands looked. I liked the way they felt. These weren’t nail-polished hands that could belong to any other girl in Walnut Hill. They were my grandmother’s hands, healing hands, working hands. Maybe they had fewer lines and wrinkles than Abuelita’s hands, but in the bones, they were the same.

  “I think Felipe likes you,” Pedro announced, pausing in the middle of a song.

  “What do you mean?” I set the pencil down on my sketchbook and looked up.

  “When you saved his sister’s life…”

  “I didn’t, Abuelita did,” I said. “I just helped.” I shifted positions on the rock, pulled my legs out of the water, and folded them, my knees under my chin.

  “All he talks about is you. Clara this. Clara that. Like you’re his new best friend.” Pedro’s face held a sour expression. Even though he was sitting just across the stream from me, he seemed far away.

  “Well, at least he’s not teasing you about me anymore, right?”

  Pedro shrugged. “He has a giant TV. Did he invite you over to watch it yet?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t feel like watching TV anyway.”

  “His father’s working in your country. He sends back money and brings presents when he visits. He hasn’t forgotten about his family yet.” Pedro stood up and walked away, to the steeper part of the mountain.

  He threw a rock over by a wandering goat. It glanced up at him and moved closer. He threw another rock, harder this time, not to guide any goat, just to throw.

  He picked up a huge rock, nearly the size of a watermelon, and lifted it with two hands over his head. His face was red and straining. He hurled it over the cliff. It bounced from boulder to boulder. Pieces chipped off here and there, flying away. He breathed hard.

  “You’ll probably start hanging out with Felipe now,” he said, “watching TV with him, maybe taking him back to your country to see his father….”

  “Pedro, that’s not true.” I saw the silvery thread between our souls stretching, getting thin and weak again.

  “He has three pairs of Nikes,” Pedro said. “Seven baseball caps. He doesn’t have to work. He doesn’t smell like goats.” He picked up another big rock and hurled it over the cliff. It split like thunder on the rocks below.