Woman of Light (17)

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“Whatcha see?” Luz asked Diego a couple of years later as they stood on a granite boulder. It was 1924 and she was eight years old. The land was stretched with the movements and temperament of sleeping volcanoes, high desert dust, and that lengthy coal vein beneath their feet. “A trap?”

Diego was bent over a long crevice in the earth, his back to his little sister. He was hatless with dark hair spiked above his neck. They were among purple wildflowers, tall grass, and red willows, the laughter of a stream. Those mountains over there, their mother would say, pointing southbound. Your grandfather was born of those mountains, and these mountains here, she’d add, they cradle the Rio Grande. She taught the children to hold their hands against the sunlight and wind, to feel the sensation of home against their palms. Santuario, she’d tell them, as they hung laundry on the line, picked chokecherries from the riverbanks, collected sage and oshá from the roadsides.

That morning, there had been a note across their schoolhouse door. Mrs. Oberdorf was sick, Diego read, and the children were not under any circumstances to enter the one-room schoolhouse, which seemed more like a barn to Luz than a place for learning. She hated the way Mrs. Oberdorf made her feel. She spoke to the children in the mining camp very slowly, as if they couldn’t understand English, and only Anglo students were allowed to sit near the front. Spanish and Indian and all the other languages weren’t allowed, and Diego, who often blurred several languages at once, frequently received a ruler to the hand or even a whack across the face. But on this mild morning in early October, school was canceled and Mrs. Oberdorf was at home coughing up blood into a washbasin, Diego claimed. Hopefully a consumptive.

Diego soon let out a wild yelp at the edge of the human-sized fissure in the rock. The air was cooler above the crack, resting there like oil in water. He had taken his coiled walking stick and banged around the insides of the earth. “Holy smokes!” he yelled and knifed into the gap, retrieving from the depths a baby rattlesnake wrapped around the warped end of his stick. “Look,” he said to Luz, raising his staff, the snake motionless and draped.

“Nasty,” Luz said. “Move it away from me.”

“This is no ‘it,’?” Diego said. “She’s a girl, can’t ya see?”

“Nuh-uh.” Luz shook her head. “Why was she down there?”

“Because someone wanted her gone,” Diego said. “But I’ll save her.” The baby girl snake unraveled herself, stretching the entire length of her scaled body down the stick until her forked tongue poked from her mouth and grazed the edge of Diego’s right hand. “Reina,” he said. “That’s what I’ll call you.”

Diego raised the stick vigorously as if against a great sea, unintentionally smacking an overhanging branch. An angry hum exploded from the mummy-wrapped nest now lying cracked at his feet.

Wasps poured into the sky.

“Di-ego,” Luz stammered.

“Run,” Diego hollered. “Fast, and into the water.” He unhooked Reina from the stick and brushed wasps from the snake’s face before sliding her into his book bag.

Luz tore down the mountainside, her booties kicking up stones and loose dirt as she padded the ground in her little footsteps. The morning sun was shifting into afternoon, a large hot globe with wasps all around, as if Luz’s eyesight had cracked into yellow and black. Her heart pounded drum-like in her chest, and she called out to Diego across the land. “Are they getting you, Brother? Are they?”

Then, jump. Splash. A red hot pain turned cold.

Stung and swollen, somewhat dry but still mostly wet, the children came over the hillside toward their block of company cabins. Their mother was away in the big town, Saguarita, as she was every Wednesday, selling jars of chokecherry jelly in specially woven baskets. Their father was deep underground in the coal mines. He worked the winds, the sunless shafts where men were often blown to bits, suffocated, trapped. The miners kept yellow canaries in square cages, their lungs and the lungs of their wives and children all webbed in nighttime-colored muck.

“I’d rather die by a bear,” Luz said matter-of-factly. She felt pain around her left wrist and her own neck, but couldn’t find any marks, and as they rushed home, she pleaded with the mountains not to let a creature so obnoxious as a wasp kill them dead. “At least that’s extraordinary.”

Diego spoke with a strange mindfulness in his voice. “Don’t say that, Little Light. Gives me a bad feeling.” They were going to be fine—just needed some salve, he explained, and Diego knew where his mother kept it in the kitchen with all her tinctures and dried flowers, roots and herbs. He had been bitten by snakes and spiders in the past, and he recognized that certain insects and some plants were filled with poisons. “Ways to protect themselves, really,” he told his little sister. “They don’t do it to hurt us. They just don’t want to die themselves.”

“Nobody wants to die,” Luz said. “But you don’t see me going around stinging and hurting people.”

As they walked alongside the outer edge of the cabins, Diego gently pulled his little sister’s braid. “Someday you might.”

They came over the rocky hillside, looking down at their one-room cabin, the third on the left, away from the coal furnaces. The air was choked with black smoke, and all around freshly cleaned clothes blew across wiry lines, dirtied once again, absorbing dust.