The Last Karankawas(19)

Ofelia de los Santos nods but doesn’t say that, yes, she, too, lives in Fish Village. The name makes her wince, though Hector is particularly proud of his neighborhood, where every street is named after a different fish. Albacore, Barracuda, Marlin, Tuna. They live on Bonita. She looked up bonita once and saw something sneering, full of stripes and fins with jagged edges. It was ugly. She thinks Galveston ugly, too—its faded brick buildings, tourist surf shops and cantinas in gaudy colors along the waterfront, the waves of silty brown, and the smell of salt seeping in everywhere. She knows, deep in her heart, that she is being stubborn. That it is her longing for the Valley churning, driving her scorn for this new place. And still.

But it is not ugly to her Hectorcito. He loves it, this island where he has grown up so far away from his father’s family in the Valley. (Ofelia blames his mother.) Hector told her Galveston’s story was like that of New Orleans, a shipping port that became the beating heart of the coast. Hub for sea trade of cotton, farming equipment, yellow fever, immigrants. First place in Texas to have electricity, and a telephone, and baseball. Decimated by a hurricane in 1900 that killed eight thousand people. A site of tragedy. He speaks of the city’s history and beauty when he takes her on walks around Fish Village, or down the Seawall, or west along the Strand district. Up until now, Ofelia only saw tourists with ill-fitting bathing suits and wilting brown leaves of palm trees. (She admits to herself that this is all she really wants to see.)

“Oleanders!” Ofelia de los Santos, she of the steady constitution, jumps at Beeb’s shout. Beeb reaches out to a tree and plucks a white blossom, tucking it beneath her cap.

“You should wipe off your hands now,” Ofelia says absently. Memory bites like a needle prick. The oleanders of Brownsville. The bright blooms and slender green leaves calling for fingers to reach out and break them apart and come away with gummy sap. Fingers that could be sucked on. Leaves mangled like lettuce between baby teeth.

Beeb nods. “Yes, they’re poisonous, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

The parents brought him to her, the curandera of Boca Chica Boulevard, as her mother had been before her. She recalls the toddler, the tousled dark hair and gray-blue tinge to his skin. He was cooling in his father’s arms as Ofelia Vaca scanned frantically the remedios behind her—eggs white and brown, jars of albahaca and palma Christi, crucifixes of wood and leaf and steel—but she was moving quickly as performance, already knowing none would help, that no gift could bring the dead to life. His father was screaming.

It was fifty years ago. It was yesterday.

Venenoso, Magdalena said one day as they walked down Albacore; she pointed to a pink-blossomed tree in the front yard of the house across from hers. The owner, an older man Ofelia had not met, stood by the tree and saw her pointing. When he raised a hand in greeting, Magdalena only lifted her chin in response. Ofelia simply replied, Yo sé. She did not tell her friend she had made un veneno once, just once, for a man who paid heavily and brought her oleanders. Do no harm, she had sworn before her mother and the Virgin Mary. But he begged, and she needed the money.

She touches an oleander now and envisions the flowers sitting in the bowl of Ofelia Vaca’s molcajete, soft petals against the bite and grit of volcanic rock. When she crushed them with the pestle, they curled into wet ribbons and cast off a damp, sweet scent. The man watched Ofelia Vaca pound the flowers down into a paste, and then he began to shake vigorously. He fled from the shed and never came back. She buried the paste in the lot behind her house, dousing the ground in holy water and yerba buena. She went to confession every day for a month.

Oleanders—yes, she supposes she loves those about Galveston, too. How they bear both beauty and death.

“Oh, this one is lovely, don’t you think?” Beeb asks, tugging on her elbow. She is gesturing to a marble grave marker twelve feet tall and half again as wide; Beeb flicks her flashlight beam to the top. A winged woman with a crown on her head clasps a robed baby in one arm, hugs a young girl in the other. They stand upon a columned pedestal flanked by cherubs. GRESHAM—JOSEPHINE ARDETH. 1848–1933.

Beeb swats at mosquitoes. “That’s us up there, by the tall tower.”

Ahead, candles flicker; flashlight beams bob. Ofelia sees the shift of bodies—living ones—in a huddle near a fifteen-foot obelisk that seems the center of the graveyard. Did that obelisk exist during Josephine Gresham’s time, in Old Galveston? Had she looked at it as she walked through this cemetery, laying flowers on someone’s grave, contemplating her own?

“That’s a pretty name, Ardeth,” Beeb murmurs, still eyeing the monument. “Nice for a middle name.”

“It was her maiden name,” Ofelia says. She is sure of it, doesn’t need a whisper to tell her so. She knows without a doubt that Josephine Ardeth gave up her life to be a Gresham. That she had propped her past life upon the windowsill of her husband’s house, her chin in one hand, staring out at the buggies and riders passing on what would soon be Broadway.

Beeb looks at Ofelia from the sides of her eyes. “Pretty name,” she repeats. “My married name is Macaraeg—not pretty, but it means brave. What’s yours?”

“De los Santos.”

Beeb nods solemnly. “Ophelia of the Saints. That’s a blessed name. A holy name.”

Is it? wonders Ofelia. De los Santos was Roland’s name, which she took when they got married, when she had given up healing. Before that, she had only ever been Ofelia Vaca, curandera of Boca Chica Boulevard. Roland had been Of the Saints but also a lawyer, well regarded, and though he respected the old ways, he did not want to be married to them. Basta, querida. We’re in a better time, aren’t we? We can come out from the Dark Ages.