Woman of Light (71)
When they had first arrived by cattle car in Saguarita, the girls had walked to Santa Isabel Church, where they slept on the wooden floors between the pews and the kneelers. They did not trust anyone, and were fearful of hospitality. On that first night, Sara imagined a great fire overtaking their bodies in the church, the flames scorching the fat-fleshed bottoms of their feet as if they were held to the blaze by demon spirits. She woke screaming, alerting the nearby mayordomo to their existence. He was a kind man named Benjamín Jirón, and he looked upon the small girls as if he’d discovered rare and starved twin rabbits resting in his church. He was beside himself with sorrow as he lifted first Maria Josefina and then Sara, one over each of his shoulders, carting them to the home he shared with his wife, Eulogia, beside the little church. They fed them calabacitas and fresh tortillas and heated acequia water for washing. Sara pleaded to know the whereabouts of Angelica Vigil, that long-lost cousin their mother had so desperately remembered. They eventually discovered that Angelica Vigil had fallen ill several years earlier and gone to live farther south in the valley, but by all accounts, she was certainly deceased by now and had no family left to speak of. Benjamín and Eulogia would have kept the girls, raised them as their own, but they had so little to spare. In the end, the archdiocese offered to find the girls employment within the homes of the few wealthy families of Saguarita, who were always looking for poised domestics. Benjamín sobbed into his large fists as he told the little girls the news—they were to be separated, split sisters between households.
On their last night together in the mayordomo’s home, Maria Josefina looked over at her sister from the hay-filled bed on the dirt floor. She clutched a corn-husk doll given to her by Eulogia. “Hermana,” she said. “I don’t want to be without you. I’m afraid.”
Sara slowly swiveled her dark eyes toward Maria Josefina. “I know,” she said, trying to sound strong.
“We can run away again. We don’t have to be apart.”
Sara looked into the room’s darkness. A crucifix on the wall appeared to tilt. “We can’t,” she said. “We are too little to run again.”
Several hours later, Sara woke to the sounds of Maria Josefina sobbing in her sleep. Like a dog kicking through her dreams, her arms crawled in the air.
“What is it?” Sara asked breathlessly.
Maria Josefina told her that she had seen their mother standing against a brick wall. There was the crack of gunpowder and her mother quickly turned, facing the firing squad as the bullet entered her skull, tore through her head, driving in from her right temple, erupting like shattered glass behind her eyes. The outside world seeped in, her mind flooding with light.
“Push it away,” Sara had said. “When the bad dreams and pictures come up, push them down, as far away as you can.”
Maria Josefina was shaking with fear, but she tried as her big sister suggested, placing the dream of her mother in a deep and hidden box within a room of her mind, a place she’d swear never to go.
And in this way the girls began to forget their mother and father.
* * *
—
Sara was the first to hear of the dances. Several of the domestics from other families had been attending them on Friday nights.
“They’re coal miners,” she told her sister, as they stood outside the church that afternoon, passing between them the last of their cigarette. “Alicia from Antonito says some of these guys have a lot of money to throw around, and some of them she claimed will get rich.”
Maria Josefina, who by now went by what her employer called her, Maria Josie, stammered as she blew the last of the cigarette smoke from her poised mouth. “And what’s it to us?”
“That’s how we can leave Saguarita,” Sara said imploringly. “Get out of these wretched houses, these horrible chores for no pay and nothing but moldy beds and stale tortillas.”
Maria Josie scrunched her face with what Sara suspected was skepticism. Above them, the sun was a thick sphere of heat in the last days of summer—the air smelled of roasting corn and the wetness of hay.
“Suit yourself, hermana,” Sara said, peering into the mountains. “But I’m getting out.”
* * *
—
They went together the following Friday. Maria Josie agreed reluctantly. Each sister crept from her back-house bedroom and sprinted across pastures of moonlit grass, the dirt soggy beneath their feet. The night shined silver on their black hair and the cows mooed bombastically as the girls rushed to the glowing cinderblock dance hall on the edge of town. The gray structure was illuminated in an empty field—gated by red willows and a burned-out barn. The music could be heard from several yards away, something stringed and bouncing, buried lyrics of French or perhaps something else. Sara was never too sure when it wasn’t English or Spanish or Tiwa, the languages of her childhood, the sounds of her parents.
There were far more men in the concrete dance hall than neither Sara nor Maria Josie were used to being around at once. Their gamy and smoky stench rose from thick-shouldered bodies in faded denim and leather suspenders and earth-worn hats. These men of varying heights and weights, facial features, some bearded and some not, they swarmed the rectangular building with an elevated stage, sidelong mantels, and an overhanging white scaffolding. The pine floor vibrated with the stomps and twists of dancing men, those few women from Saguarita and the nearby villages moist-faced with perspiration, the air humid with human sweat and fogged breath. The band rumbled onstage, music heavy with mandolin and fiddle. Sara laughed at the giddiness of their world.