Woman of Light (31)
Maria Josie leaned over the creek and gazed at her rippled reflection in the water. She hated her curled brown hair, her full breasts and dull black eyes. She took stock of her body, the unfamiliar meaty thing it had become. The pain in her womb had eased, but her breasts ached as if they had been gutted and stuffed with stones. Her body disgusted her. Why couldn’t she separate from it? Maria Josie then thought of the man she’d once loved, their last dinner together. He was a German named Hauenstein. He sat across from her at the long oak table with his knife and fork gracefully working red potatoes. He was much older than Maria Josie, and when he’d first shown interest in her at the market on Sundays, she’d brushed it off as politeness, a certain type of kindness shown by Anglo men toward pretty Mexican and Indian girls. But months stretched on, and Hauenstein cornered her with compliments, firm hands resting against her back, brushing her skin as he reached for jars of molasses, sacks of flour. He’d slipped vials of gardenia perfume into her dress pockets and rolled coins into her satchel, until, finally, she swam to him across the river dividing his section of Saguarita from hers. “He didn’t want to marry me,” she told a kind stranger years later, “when I told him about the baby. He put something in my food, a poison.”
Above Maria Josie, on the bridge, the man and his son continued to speak their language. It seemed they were in an argument. The young man was mouthing off, smoking tobacco and allowing his legs to dangle over the bridge. His fishing line trembled. Careful, La Llorona will get you. As a child, Maria Josie was terrified of the Weeping Woman, who flew through moonlight along rivers and lakes, snatching naughty children and drunk, cheating men. Once, during a long summer, as she swam the river Maria Josie thought she glimpsed the water witch, all in black, a Spanish veil shielding her face. She was hunched over, climbing the side of the rock wall like a broken insect. Impossible, Maria Josie thought, and swam faster, so hard it seemed her heart would stop beating.
Maria Josie worked her dress with a bar of Ivory soap. Her arms hardened and deadened in the freezing water. She imagined she was a machine, thrusting water back and forth, nothing inside her to ache—only gears to rust, trivets to repair. She finished the dress, laying it flat across a sun-worked rock. The creek made an enormous sound, echoed between the banks. The water was brackish and reflected the evening sun. There were many white gnats. Maria Josie could clearly see the man and his son on the bridge. The father had gathered their tin pails and poles and carried these things to the creek’s banks. The son walked sullenly behind, his chin tucked toward his chest. Leaning onto her elbows, Maria Josie pivoted her legs, one tucked behind the other, and watched. The stone lining the creek was a smooth gray-blue, pretty like shadows. The father and son were happy in the new spot, and a cottonwood tree released seeds like snow.
But the air turned. A frigid gust from the north, spitting gravel and shards of grass against Maria Josie’s face and arms. Darkness curtained the sun, and the wind screeched along the creek’s surface. The trees bowed and lost their leaves and weak branches. Maria Josie’s hair thrashed her mouth and eyes, causing tears to roll down her face. A rumbling sound erupted upstream, a hideous gargling. In the Lost Territory, every spring, the arroyos flooded in sudden and violent ways. Entire cattle herds were swept away while work trucks floated like toy ducks. Maria Josie noted the creek’s height against the bridge. She tilted her face to the left, felt the wind change in a flat, tepid way, and within seconds, the stream had swelled, bombarded by menacing muck. A flash flood, the water rushing, endless and dim until it reached the banks and pulled the man’s son into the stream.
He hollered only once, something like Papa, before his mouth and eyes were overtaken with sludge.
Maria Josie dove into the rising water. She kicked after the young man, her legs tangling inside the long, knotted train of her nightgown. The water was so cold and so deep that Maria Josie was robbed of her breath. With stunned and paused lungs, she thrust herself toward the adolescent boy, his curly hair lowering and rising in the murky water. He was lanky and thin and they were propelled near a grouping of boulders. The boy almost seemed like an oversized doll. He floated facedown, and when Maria Josie finally reached his smooth ankle, he’d lost one shoe and a sock. With both arms, she wrapped herself around the young man’s middle, trying to pull his head above water, but against the current, he was too rigid and slick. She kicked inside her black nightdress, aiming their connected bodies into the looming boulder. Their backs smacked into the surface. Maria Josie gazed at the young man. He still had his baby face, and was only fourteen or fifteen years old. He had long eyelashes and large bluing lips. Maria Josie cradled his head with her palm, hoisting his body onto shore. The boy breathed, and his back grew larger in his flannel shirt, stretched over his rib cage, but he wouldn’t wake up.
“Please,” Maria Josie said in Spanish. “Don’t die. You don’t have to. Not now, young man.” She flopped him onto some grass and tried shaking and yanking on his arms and face. She crawled beside him, stared into his face. Why didn’t he wake up? Maria Josie screamed and her throat burned with voice. It felt as if a loose patch of her tongue had floated into the sky like a kite. “I said you don’t need to die. It’s too early.”
Maria Josie understood then that she wasn’t yelling at the boy. She was arguing with Death. Somewhere, perched on a rock, she was certain skeletal Do?a Sebastiana was waiting with her wagon of souls parked along the tree line. Her bag was already heavy. She didn’t need any more. She wore a long, lacy gown, the hood pulled around her skull, her arms folded like wings. Had she been watching them all along? Maria Josie had felt her hanging around for weeks, since the day her baby had died inside her, and all she could do was weep.