The Last Karankawas(72)
The cat seems unconcerned; Beeb wonders if she is ill, although Mr. Alvarez swore she wasn’t the day he brought her back to the house, when Beeb hugged him and wept with joy and he looked uncomfortable but patted her shoulder kindly. He was on his way to pick up his wife now that the roads were clear. Winifred licks her paws daintily, so Beeb looks at the trees for them both. The trunks are the same as before: thick and dark, the bark rising in ridges that would scrape soothingly against her hands. “But the roots, Winnie.” They have swallowed fifteen feet of salt water, and nothing can survive that. Though Winifred inside her cat carrier cannot possibly do so, Beeb points through the windshield, “Look up, Winnie,” see death by drowning in the branches, once heavy with green leaves, now stiff and brown and brittle.
oleander
Nerium oleander. Evergreen shrub or small tree of the family Apocynaceae, the dogbanes. Toxic in all its parts, but Eva Rivera knows this, has warned her grandson Aaron since he was tiny. “Go wash your hands now,” she says to Aaron, who stands a few feet away running his fingers over the fuchsia blooms. He is six now; she is watching him while Russell works and Yvonne naps, swollen with her second. “What do I always say about these flowers?” He is still a child and requires teaching. As all men do.
“They’re poisonous, Grandma,” Aaron says dutifully.
“And in Spanish? ?Cómo se dice poisonous?”
“Ven—venso.”
“Venenoso. Good.”
Aaron dashes inside to wash his hands—she hopes—and Eva eyes the brown snails on the walls, the palm trees all around. A cruel world her grandson has found himself in, with plants that look beautiful but can kill, men who smile as they lie, children who leave you again and again. But she has to teach him. She has hopes for Aaron, and for the sibling on the way. For the ones Jesusmaría and Carly may have, now that she is finally wearing his ring. Eva has no Sight, not like old Se?ora Castillo does, but she wishes she did. She would like to know if the baby is a boy. She prays it is, for then his life—like Aaron’s—will be an easy one. A simple blossom like an iris or a bluebonnet, unsnarled by vines, untainted by the veneno of gift or exceptionality or womanhood.
Seawall, the
“This is where we first met, you and I.” Magdalena murmurs it, lifts her hands high as she does. “Remember, Cesar? Remember how beautiful I was, how handsome you were in your swimming trunks?”
Her long-dead husband hovers ahead: a blurry blaze like the shimmer of heat above asphalt. She never thought she could see the dead. All her life her Sight came mostly in feelings, prickles across her palms or deep in the corridors of her ears. But one day, as she approached Sacred Heart for daily Mass, she looked over at the Bishop’s Palace and spotted a man on its roof. He was clinging to the near-vertical slant of the uppermost turret, splayed across as if he had been thrown down from a height, though he was four stories up. He wore an old-fashioned dark suit, a shock of crisp white at the collar, a wide-brimmed hat, and no shoes. Though he was far away, he looked straight at her and Magdalena at him, feeling him vibrate through her like the plucked string of a guitarrón. She sensed not wildness or fear in his gaze but a weary resolution, a satisfaction. By the time she drew his name out from the vibrations—Isaac—he was gone. She has never seen him again but has seen others. Cesar, many times. Her son, just once.
Now she and the shivering blaze of Cesar turn together to look at the Seawall. The wall constructed in 1904 to protect the island from future hurricanes (Editor’s note: “Never again,” they are wailing, they are chanting as they pour concrete and crushed gravel over the pilings for the wall, as they pump in a slurry of sand and water and grit and raise the level of the entire city more than sixteen feet; “never again,” they say, “never never never again”), pero both she and Cesar know that it will not serve. The wall rising seventeen feet high but not high enough for the rush of salt water that is to come. How soon, quién sabe. Months? Years?
“Can you tell me, Cesar? Can you hear anything from that side?”
No answer, of course, because Cesar is dead and his voice silenced forever, his hair and beard littered with gravel from crushed oyster shells. He didn’t want this in life. Como él quería, they buried him just up the road in the 65th Street cemetery, in a tasteful oak coffin with ivory pillows, his favorite cowboy boots and a navy suit she and Marcos bought secondhand. Even Ike had attended the funeral, looking at her with quiet eyes from across the top of his wife’s hair. Catherine admired the cowboy boots, commented on them, her gaze steady on Magdalena’s, knowing. She knew about Magdalena and her husband, had known all along. And now Cesar does, too. At times when he appears to Magdalena, his eyes burn into her, but of course he does not speak, can no longer insist that she is loca, bruja, has invented this history for herself from nothing, that she is nothing more than a Galveston woman with a long, muddled bloodline of tejano y mexicano y conquistador e indio y quién sabe. As if her father had lied to her, and his father before him. In this life, she held her hands over her ears when he screamed, “None of this is real.” He screams it now, through his gaze; he echoes what Carly says at times, when she is home between her shifts and staying at Jesusmaría’s apartment, in the quiet moments when Magdalena speaks to her of blood, of a native history she carries. “None of that is real, Grandma.”