The Last Karankawas
Kimberly Garza
for Dad,
for Lindsay,
and especially for Mom
Mama, let me go—she speaks What every smart child knows— To get grown you unlatch Your hands from the grown & up & up & up & up She turns—latched in the seat Of a hurricane. You let Your girl what? You let Your girl what?
I did so she do I did
so she do so—
Girl, you can ride
A hurricane & she do & she do & she do & she do —YONA HARVEY, “HURRICANE”
THE QUEENS OF SANTO NI?O
In the parking lot of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, in the cool dusk—which is a lie already, because it is never really cool, not even on this January evening, since this is Texas and, more specifically, this is Galveston—we wait. We stand on the concrete, ducking into windows of one another’s parked cars to chat, or we sit inside with the AC blasting, or we lean against the walls and watch twilight draw shadows like a dark veil around the church. We are there before even the priest arrives to unlock the doors or the volunteer choir sets up their amps and microphone stands.
We prowl for things to do, tasks to help with. Some of us, like Yoli Sandoval and Tagay Macasantos, cart in vases of flowers from our new Buicks. Some of us, like Gloria Rivera or Marlo Suayan, arrive in hand-me-down Hondas with roses clipped from our backyard bushes—red, always red, for the holy day. We arrange flowers on the altar, or at the feet of the Blessed Mother’s statue, or beside the portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for whom this church is named. (When we think about that, we place more flowers by the portrait.) Some of us, humming with the energy of Santo Ni?o feast day, buzz about distributing paper programs—the programs we have used since we started this event many years ago. The pamphlets are battered, creased from our hands, pocked by inkblots and typos where we list the schedule of the Mass, the Tagalog prayers we will say together, the Tagalog songs we will sing. We place copies in each pew. We sit or kneel on the cushions, our fingers pressed to rosary beads. We tune our guitars and warble a few chords of the opening song. O Santo Ni?ong marikit, sanggol na handog ng langit.
Our voices—in song or in gossip—echo in every corner of the Catholic church on Broadway and 13th, which had been quiet before we arrived. We do very little quietly. And yet we quiet when Maharlika Castillo walks in. We turn to watch. She has that effect. She strides into Sacred Heart purposefully, with her daughter—Carly, is that her name? yes—by the hand.
Hello, we call out to them, and ask Maharlika, Kumusta ka na?
“I’m fine,” she replies in pointed English. We flinch. We can’t help it. Her English is sharp, intentional, a knife aimed at us. From her new crooked smile that shows teeth to this language she chooses in place of ours, she has built an arsenal; she wages war against us and the world.
* * *
Once she was kind to us. When she arrived, she found us almost immediately, as every FOB does—bonding first with the ones who worked at the hospital. We walked her through the corridors and buildings of John Sealy and the larger complex, taught her where the supply closets and cafeterias were, where to purchase scrubs, how to update charts and input medical data for UTMB system-wide. We instructed her on the Spanish phrases she would need to learn (?Cómo se escribe su nombre? ?Tienes seguro médico?). In our homes we passed her platters of sticky rice and whole fish fried crisp; when she wept with homesickness, we rubbed her shoulders, shushing her as we, too, had once needed. And on this feast day, the one day of the year when the Filipino community emerges from every sweaty corner of Galveston to unite and honor our patron saint, Maharlika was always there. She read at the podium. Sang in the choir. Served plates of pancit and adobo at the after-party. Was it just two years ago that she was last here? That she was one of us?
Maharlika, we used to say with admiration, marveling at the rare, beautiful name that means in our tongue something akin to nobility, to being of a line with royal blood. Maharlika.
But she is exalted now, or thinks she is. That is probably our fault.
She washed up on this island with a nursing degree and a job at the hospital despite having never set foot in America before. We thought she was embracing a new life, as we had. Unlike us, she had family here—her mother, who had immigrated long before. We did not really know her mother, and when she died of cancer not long after Maharlika arrived, we felt no sorrow, but we went dutifully to her funeral Mass, prayed the novena for her in Maharlika’s apartment in Fish Village.
We should have noticed it then, but we didn’t. Should have seen the shape Maharlika’s grief took—curled up sideways on the couch, cheek to the padded arm, slippered feet tucked beneath her as if she hadn’t the energy to take her shoes off. How she burst into sobs in the middle of shift-change meetings or standing in the Walmart checkout line. We should have seen that her grief was lasting. We did not expect that when the next loss came—her man—it would shift again, reshape itself into a grief for the old ways, her old lives in which she belonged to someone. A mother. A man. A country. When she was a child of something tangible in the world. Years from now, it will seem so obvious to us that she was never meant to be a mother or an immigrant.
* * *
“Carly,” she says to the daughter, “sit here. Practice the prayers.” In the front-row pew she has claimed for herself—Yoli Sandoval sees her coming and scoots her brood of five way down, hissing at them to move faster—she hands the girl our program. Carly clutches a rosary. She is six years old.