I am that I am...

                             

   “Do you believe in God, Dr. Phield?”
   “Do you?”
   “Yes.”
   “What brings that question up?”
   “Religion seems to be at the center of various controversies lately: there’s debate over the freedom to practice it; over what is incontrovertible religious mandate; over the definition of sin; and what is valid biblical injunction—almost everything but about God, as in belief, or no. What do you make of it?”
   “You’ve come up with a question maybe more complex than the answer,” Dr. Phield says, then pauses before saying,” because through the course of man’s existence, he has come to meld ‘belief’ and ‘faith’—the bookends of religious text—as a single entity, but by the same token, he separates ‘mind’ from ‘heart,’ the one which demands proof, and the other which accepts spiritual things unconditionally without it.
   “Because it’s also his nature to question the conditions under which he survives. The Bible was open to interpretation from the start: In the beginning, if you will. As were the Vedas, the Analects, the Dao, and so on. As man identifies with the godhead physically and spiritually, he joins and becomes ‘God.’ He’s calling the shots now. Scripture is his cliff notes, carefully selected for self-worship, for autonomy, no longer responsible to an extraneous god.”
   “That sounds like Nirvana or Satori or one of those conditions.”
   “Sure, except that man assumes that he has acquired the privileges of God: like jealousy, prejudice, ethnic cleansing, and outright appropriation and murder. Even if man believes he can make those things right in the end, in his heart he knows that only God can.”
   “You didn’t learn that in Sunday school.”
   “Judging from the shape the planet’s in, nobody learned much in Sunday school.”
   “Once, I thought you could. I sent my kids to church. I thought religious education was indispensable.”
   “And?”
   “My youngest son says he doesn’t think he believes in God.”
   “He’ll wrestle with that self-argument his whole life. You seem to be having a related mental issue of some sort.”
   “Well, the benefits of faith are sporadic and maybe clear only to a few. The end-game is apocryphal, to coin a phrase.”
   “You mean, like heaven or hell?”
   “Well, yeah. It’s not clear to ordinary mortals how heaven’s going to be ‘heaven’ without carnal fulfillment. And how can hell be any worse than what goes on here?”
   “Well, humans tend to identify hell mostly with physical pain, or disfigurement, or torture; but people who are deathly ill or are being victimized under horrible circumstances weather that type of torment with hope and a paradoxical cheerfulness. Obviously, there are various types of hell. What’s your version?”
   It’s hard to reveal yourself to someone else, especially when you don’t believe in open confession. That’s not “pick and choose” religion: Christ said, “Confess to the Father in secret.” But Phield is not a rock—he’s iron. For those of us who will never meet the Pope, or Billy Graham—or Jimmy Carter, for that matter, Phield will more than do.
   “I tried to undo the wreckage of my marriage. Divorce was painful. But even in the wake of all that antagonism and betrayal and condemnation, neither one of us could let go. We talked about re-marriage.
   “I went to see her one day and she was on the sofa crying. She did all the talking. She described—in tears and near-hysteria—in graphic detail, the abortion that she’d just gone through that morning. A friend took her. I hadn’t even known she’d been pregnant.
   “The ensuing days were hazy. It was hard to face her, as it must have been for her to face herself, or me. I used to pride myself on never having been floored by a punch until that day. It didn’t help that at that time I was drinking more than I should have. I procrastinated. Distance between us widened. One day I went to see her and she was gone. The house had been sold. And nobody knew, or would tell me where she was.  The saleslady at the real estate office gave me a note in an envelope that said,
  ‘I’ll be in Texas waiting. I know you’ll go back some day. It won’t be any trick to find me. We’ll probably both be dead.’
   “And I never did find her. I tried. But she was even smart enough to know where I’d begin to search. The kids told me that she reassured them in a letter to each one of them, that she was fine. They drifted away from me little by little, too. I’ve always felt that there is something I missed: something I should have said or done, and that someday I’ll step into an empty hole and disappear, too.”
   Phield cups his hands and looks out the window with a wistful look on his face. No one is exempt from Job’s lot. He says, "How long has it been?"
   "Twenty-five years." 
   "At this point, what pains you the most?”
   “Not knowing. Not knowing she was pregnant.  Not knowing about the abortion until I had been left out of the decision. Did she want to be free of the responsibility, or did she want me to be? What choice would I have made if I’d been asked to contribute? Was there a correct choice? Did I care too much or not enough? Did she? Where did she go?”
   “Maybe to the same hell you’re in.”
   “How can I make things right if I don’t even know what I’m guilty of?”
   “You can’t, even if you know. You’re not God.”
Noe.

Mi casa es su casa...

   Troy said, “Ah lissen’ ta yawl tawk back thien ‘n’ Ah thank Ah eevan got a lee’le smorter mahsailf.”

   I showed him how to fill out an application form with the right way to answer those tricky multiple choice questions by which employers weed out an outer fringe (i.e., ethnics, senior citizens, educational and penal system reboots and the handicapped) who they believe can’t adapt to emerging capitalist technocracies. Being unremittingly non-comformist myself, I’ve learned by innumerable and varied trials, how to fill out those insufferable catalogs of racism and condescension—by answering lie with lie. He got work wearing a vest with a name tag on it, but felt uncomfortable when some guy sitting in the john making noises like a pig knee deep in shit called him by his name when he was cleaning in there. Phield gave Troy some pointers on how to study for a GED so that he could go to a trade school and he nailed work as a welder before he even finished the study; and now he makes more money in a year than I ever made in at least the best five of mine.

   He bought a house with a double garage and then built an addition to the back with the approximate dimensions of Fred’s old apartment. It’s uncanny. The table that sits in the middle of the room looks amazingly like the one that we used to play cards on at Fred’s. When Troy got as many of us as he managed to contact to come to his housewarming, Uri got him (with support from Troy’s wife Anna) to change the dreadful mauve paint on the wall that I’m positive now contributed largely to our frequent bouts before with group depression.

   Anna said, “Try to clean up a little. I plan to use it a couple of times a week.” Troy made her quit working and now she sells lotions to the ladies; it’s kind of a cover for their own gabfest.

   Anna (R.N.) was part of the glut of health workers at the start of the recession that got her laid off from a 40 dollar an hour job (that she had for exactly 2 days short of 3 months) and took one in fast food for minimum and helped put them back on their feet. About life, she might have invented the phrase, “It is what it is.” She’s a jewel.

   Colby and Jefferson took jobs out of town and they dropped in for a few minutes. We’ll have to iron out some kind of schedule if Troy wants to restart the group.

   Phield was in New York, but he called and talked to Troy first, then Troy put him on speaker: “As charter member of this Shakespearean if not Biblical heterogeneity, I certainly hope to utilize my rights of attendance as often as my schedule permits.” He pronounces the ‘ch” in “schedule” as the common digraph “sh,” the way the British do.

   Troy said, “Ah need yawl’s hailp gittin’ Doctor Phiel’s drift mos’ o’ th’ tahm.” He got enough of it to get his GED though. His awe of Phield is not unjustified.

   Jap arrived. We got as giddy as a Valley Girl on her first date. He didn’t disappoint: “My embolism for Dr. Phield remains unhinged. It is quite expiring to hear him import his wisdom among his carabinieri without a soupcan of contraception nor dismay.”

   Jap has a five year old son Hammond by a former relationship, and when he married, Ham became Big Brother to the boy and girl that Jap was just working on then with Meg. He brought Ham with him to the housewarming, and while we—Troy, Uri, Anna and Greta (one of Anna’s friends) and I—were sitting at the table drinking coffee, Ham burst in and sat down in an obvious funk on the couch.

   Anna said, “What’s the matter, honey? Are my kids giving you a hard time?”

   And Ham said, “Marnie said that boys are nasty and don’t have a pretty bushina like girls do. And that their tentacles hang down like turkey swaddle.”

   Anna looked at Troy and said as she got up, “No more TV in their bedrooms! Or computer!”

   The rest of us grinned like Cheshire Saps and looked at Ham as if he’d just read us the Rosetta Stone.

Noe.

It ain't nostalgia, but it's something.

   One night, seven years ago, I guess, I was sitting at home stone cold sober with not a whole hell of a lot going on―and on a New Year’s Eve to boot―and I thought it would be fun to start a blog. The name that I gave it was either serendipitous, or pretentious, or just plain stupid.

   Because the next day, I tried to change the name to something a little catchier, less derivative, and less lofty in terms of aspirations, but every name I chose (I found out by researching, this time), had already been taken. And this one, as luck would have it (golly goober!), had not. I didn’t have a hair in my ass about what I wanted a blog for, and in the course of trial and error, I decided that I would write 26 stories, each one about somebody or some inspiration whose name or title each began (in sequence) with a letter of the alphabet from A to Z. The idea was to attract some attention to a book that I’d written, the cover of which has adorned the margin of this blog from the beginning.

   I’m proud to say that I was successful on both counts: and I don’t know what the other guy who bought Muchácho thinks of it, but I almost put it on my list of favorite books (because when you spend two years writing a book and it’s not a favorite of yours, you’re either completely egoless or somebody else wrote it for you) but I didn’t think anybody would get the joke. So, at least, a 50% favorable rating ain’t bad at all. And there are two other covers going in the margin as soon as I get to it (if I haven’t forgotten how to do it). And the 26 stories are done. And I start a lot of sentences with “And” because somebody once told me it was biblical. And I checked it out. And it’s true.

  So now it’s New Year’s Eve (seven?) years later. And I haven’t made an entry in this blog yet this year. And I feel that I should.

   In some years, on New Year’s Eve, I made some predictions for the coming months and published them here. I’m not going to make it this year (although I’m still sober), but I’ll work on them tomorrow and publish them here as “The Book of I say…'uh...'".

   Have a Happy New Year!

Noe.

...and omega...

Benjamín wore his pants pegged and his shoes curved upward to a point. If he had lived in the 40s, he would have worn a suit jacket, preferably striped, with padded shoulders—and a watch on a chain, and a feather in his wide-brimmed hat. In 1961, with his duck-tail and sideburns, he was a fading remnant of the pachúco style, not the subculture that it’s widely considered, but the part of the chicáno mainstream youth that refused to relinquish their persóna to the blanket of peonage and its attendant debasement under Mexican rule that even immigration to America had not helped their parents to escape.

   He was the worst (according to some sources) of the bad enough culture that was mainly tolerated because of their fruit picking abilities. The vátos that wore jeans and polo shirts to school like the Anglos and sometimes even made it past the ninth grade, considered them trash. The difference between a kid that couldn’t read enough English to fill out an employment application and one that could, only to have it wadded up and pitched as soon as he turned his back, was just barely moot. But there was a sense of embarrassment rising through Mexican-American society about someone of the same race as them who displayed his ethnic fixation too blatantly, like the pachucos.

   Benjamin was tried and convicted in a court of law of being no more than himself; his honor, more sacred than his life, had no one to defend it.

   The trial lawyer, Guzmán, asked Póncho, the next to the last witness, if he knew Benjamin before the incident that forced these proceedings.

   Poncho said, “I’d seen him around.”

   “Had he seen you?”

   “I guess.”

   “Was there any show of hostility between you?”

   “We didn’t talk to each other.”

   “Did you try?”

   “No.”

   “Why?”

   “Because he was from the bárrio from the other side of town, and they didn’t like anybody who wasn’t from there.”

   “Did he belong to a gang?”

   “They said he was one of the Zorros.”

   “What were you doing in his neighborhood?”

   “Just passing through.”

   “A witness says you circled the block twice.”

   “He called me a bad name. I asked him why he called me that name.”

   “Is that when you threw the empty beer bottle at him?”

   “I didn’t throw nothing at nobody.”

   Poncho and his buddy, B.J., told identical stories. The prosecutor asked B.J. who it was that threw the bottle. B.J. was the last witness for the defense.

   B.J. said, “I was driving. I didn’t see nobody throw nothing.”

   “Were you drinking beer?”

   “No.”

   “Who threw the bottle then?”

   “It could’ve been anybody. Maybe it was them.”

   “By them, you mean Benjamin and Raúl?”

   “Yeah.”

   “Is that what started the fight?”

   “There wasn’t no fight. We drove away.”

   “How did you wind up in a fight later, out in the country in the middle of nowhere, five miles from the barrio?”

   “They followed us. We stopped to see what they wanted and they started a fight. Raul cut Poncho with a knife.”

   “Is that when you shot Benjamin?”

   “I don’t know. We were fighting and before I knew it there was a gun in my hand. It wasn’t my gun.”

   “How did it get in your hand?”

   “I must have took it off of him.”

   “You never got out of the car! Poncho got back in after Raul cut him, but you shot Benjamin while you were sitting in the driver’s seat. You never even got out of the car when you dropped Poncho off at the hospital. You were hiding in your brother’s house when you were arrested two days later.”

   “I don’t know what happened, man! All I know is that those guys were going to kill us. I don’t remember carrying no gun, but if I was the one that killed that bastard, it was self-defense.”

   There was a name—lost in memory now—in those days for baiting and luring Zorros out to beat them up. Nobody was ever punished for killing one. It doesn’t help to remember. Benjamin wasn’t the one being tried for murder back then, but he was the one found guilty. The only truth that came out of that courtroom was that he was dead.

Noe.

  

You

"This above all: to thine own self be true…

You wonder why people make the choices that they do, why they choose something—a career, a relationship, an art—to immerse themselves in to the point of obsession. Circumstances often make you trim your aspirations; otherwise, the world would be short of reliable plumbers and electricians. It’s a strange cultural tableau where singers and comedians can find jobs quicker than welders. When, along this hard road, does anyone find room for self-indulgence?

The party was subdued this year. Three of us had quit drinking altogether, and the rest just weren‘t in the mood for revelry. Fred is moving to Florida, and he’s sold or given away every stick of furniture that he owns including the chairs four of us sat on, and the table where we have stared at each other over cards or a less than brilliant personal theory more than once, but this time with “farewell” bursting at the seams.

Phield was there. He had not been expected to attend because he’d gone to New York to talk to a publisher, but he made it back to town earlier than he had anticipated because he walked out on the bargaining table. It seems that his techno-thriller evolved into a very literary work about a Mohican’s search for love in a digital age. The publisher wanted to have company hacks rework it into a story about a Native American cyborg who goes serial with a mechanical dick. When you tell Phield that the Mohican tribe was a literary invention of James Fenimore Cooper, he said, “That was the whole point.” He fired his agent, too. He said he was going to let his novel age and then he’d look at it when he was older, and maybe give it a last “hurrah!” Phield was only twenty-eight. He owned a Barney Rubble lunch box full of options.

Fred said to me, “You used to write good. Whatever became of that?”

I met Fred in college where we attended a few of the same classes, including one English course which turned out to be the campus paper. It was a surprise to me, but Fred wanted to get next to one of the female editors. It didn’t work out for Fred, but it was a sea cruise for me. I enjoyed writing then. I said, “Nothing. I’m just one of millions who can make a sentence with words. I don’t have Phield’s creativity.”

Fred said, “They always read your work in all the classes as an example of how it’s done. Everybody said you were going to make something of yourself one day.”

I said, “’One day’ was a short time for me even then. In school you’re always considered a work in progress. But I was forty when I went to college: too late a spring for blooming. Windows of opportunity get painted shut as the years pass.”

Phield said, “You wouldn’t have liked kissing ass any more than I did.”

Colby said, “A lot of us don’t know what it’s like to have those kinds of choices. It would be nice to be able to say, ‘Once, I had some talent.’”

Phield said, “You might have a greater gift than any of us. Wanting to do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a talent for it, just as never having thought of doing it doesn’t mean you don’t. There are janitors walking around with Faulknerian irony trying to dig its way out of their skulls.”

Nobody has yet suggested that this group continue under different auspices. Fred’s ability to attract divergent personalities is a trait none of the rest of us possesses. Phield said that Freddie put us all under a microscope in the search to find himself. Maybe Fred did. He’ll spend his thirtieth birthday with his daughter who lives with his ex-wife and whose sixth birthday is on the same day as his. We keep losing the best of us.

Jap got up from the floor where he was sitting with Jefferson and Ray and Uri with his back against the wall. He said, “We can all encumber, with some wisteria, the double entendre of your epilogue, Dr. Phield. I studied musical notarization for years in my youth.”

Phield said, “Why’d you give it up, Jap?”

Jap said, “Greater exogenesis arose. Childish things tend to fall into disabuse.”

One of the rewards of group friendships like this is learning how to keep falsehood in subjunctive mood. It is a study of self. An added benefit to us all was learning a new language. Jap raised all our I.Q.s at least three points. He is the most real of us all.

He said, “Uri extemporized on the paucity of future symbiosis at his habituation. Your servant warms to this prognosis.” He bows.

Phield looked around to the others and then to me. I shrug, approvingly. Phield nods at Jap. Jap smiles at Fred.

Fred says, “It gets hotter than hell in Florida. I’ll probably spend my summer vacation here.”

Some things should never end. But they do: childhood, first love, marriage, faith. Friendships will endure—as long as they are tendered with the truth.

…and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” William Shakespeare.

Noe.

The Boy From Planet X

He regained consciousness on the hot sand of an unknown shore. Coming to a sitting position with his back to land, the ocean in front of him and the beach to either side had a quality of endlessness, like the deepness of space. His throat was dry and there was a taste of sea water in his mouth, or of the way he thought that sea water tasted like, since he had never been outside of the small town in Ohio where he’d been born. His legs wobbled under him when he got to his feet and turned away from the water. In front of him now was what looked like the fairway of the fourteenth hole at the country club where his father once tried to encourage him to learn how to play golf. He didn’t have time to dwell on this mystery because coming up the fairway was a contingent of about a dozen people, all females of varying ages and appearances, all talking at once, led by a girl dressed like a beachcomber and pointing in his direction all the while.

He stood waiting until they arrived and stood in a bunch in front of him except for one who was trailing a few steps behind trying to keep up. The girl who had led them up to him said, “You’re awake! Can you talk? Can you understand me?”

He said, “Yes, I can talk! I can understand you fine!”

She said, “Who are you?”

He said, “I’m Xaviér . Who are you?” He pronounced his name in the Spanish way, with the “X” pronounced as an “H.”

Someone in the group said, “We’re asking the questions here!”

A girl dressed like Tinkerbell said, “What are you?”

He said, “I’m a boy! Are you blind?”

An astonished murmur went through the group, and here and there could be heard, "What did he say?” and “It can’t be!” and “There’s no such thing!” and “What’s a boy?” all in girl voices.

They parted to allow the one who had fallen behind to come through. She was dressed in black and white like Mother Ophelia at St. Ignatius, and she went all the way around him-as if she were inspecting him for clues-before she stopped in front of him, puzzled, catching her breath. She said, “Where did you come from?”

He said, “From my house!”

Excitement rose through the bunch again and the nun had to quiet them down, but a girl dressed like Annie Oakley came up and said, “He says he’s a boy.”

The nun rubbed her chin and said, “Yeees! I heard about one a long time ago! It could be! It just could be! Let’s take him to the queen.”

Xavier was tired and thirsty. The prospects of walking back across the golf course were discouraging: the fourteenth hole alone was a par five, but it was as if just having heard what was said made it so, because he blinked his eyes and they were all standing in front of a woman who was dressed like Dame Edna.

Morgan, the girl who had found him, said, “Magical, wasn‘t it?” smiling at him.

The queen (as they all called her) said, “My, my! What have we here? A boy, you say! What’s your name, boy?”

Xavier said, “The same as it was the last time somebody asked me!”

“And impertinent! How do you spell that?”

“With an ‘X’!”

The crowd—larger now with girls in all kinds of brightly colored costumes and dresses, including one in a wedding dress trailed by four bridesmaids and two flower girls—rose indignant saying, “Oh, no! Never! An ‘X’ is an ‘X’. The nerve! What planet is he from? And what is that smell?”

The bride said, “You strange, smelly little creature! You have a lot to learn!”

Xavier said, “No more than you! You need a groom! My dad says it takes two to tango!”

The bride broke up in tears and ran to the queen. The crowd shrieked, saying, “The cheek! Eek! A mouse! What’s a mouse? What’s a groom? How do you tango? Who’s his dad?”

The queen said, “He’s too radical! Morgan, take him back where you found him!”

Just wishing didn’t get them all the way across this time, so they had to cross the eighteenth hole, but it was only a par three. Morgan said, “Do you feel different?”

Xavier said, “Different from what?”

She said, “How do you be a boy?”

“I just am.”

“Show me what it feels like to be a boy.”

He takes a piece of string out of his pocket and asks her for her chewing gum. At the same time that he leads her off the fairway into the rough, he pastes the gum to the end of the string. Getting down to a crouch, he goes along brushing tall grasses away with his hand until he finds what he’s looking for. He drops the gum ball into a hole and releases the string a little at a time until he feels a slight tug on the end of it and he starts to pull the string back up. Soon, the gum appears at the mouth of the hole with a giant, black tarantula following it. He says, “Put your hand on the ground palm up.”

She reluctantly bends down and does what he told her, and when he pulls the gum up onto her palm, the tarantula follows. She does not move. Her face turns pale, then green, then beet red, almost the match of her hair, but she is too paralyzed to pull it away. She gasps, “I’m scared!”

He takes the tarantula and puts it back close to its hole, and says, “That’s a large part of being a boy. When you learn to live with it, you become something else.”

She says, “You’re an asshole!” and punches him in the stomach.

And it has to be the heat and the thirst and the pain in his belly that makes him faint away and slowly come to again—and when he opens his eyes, he’s in his bedroom lying on his bed with all his clothes and his shoes on, and he heads for the outdoors thinking, That’s the last time I have pizza for lunch with jalapéňo peppers on it!” It’s the first day of summer.

The new kid next door is taking practice swings at a ball on a tether, and Xavier goes up and says, “Hey, butch! Wanna go to the park and play ball with the other guys?”

And the kid turns and says, “My name isn’t ‘butch,’ and I’m not a guy, and you’re an asshole!” and she slaps him upside the head, and in doing so, her baseball cap falls off and her firehouse-red hair streams out around her shoulders and she snorts off toward the swing almost invisible under the cascading willow tree.

And he picks the cap up and follows, only because he has just turned eleven, and he can’t tie himself to the mast by himself.

Noe.

The Fetterman Massacre...

The farm—all two hundred acres of prime cotton land from the time when that much could support the self-delusion of “squire”—is still there. It seems suspended in time and desert quiet (as was once all of southern Texas), remote, where during planting season, a static plume of listless dust follows a lone tractor as it plows and sows into what once yielded, and still only reluctantly will yield little more than huisáche and mesquite. Water has to be piped in from the Rio Grande thirty miles away to soften this hard land into giving up something other than catclaw and quelíte. J.D. Fetterman bought it from a failed rancher as a parcel, out of which came out the bits and pieces that J.D. sold and gave away, and which became Curry, three churches, and the Curry graveyard. The fields, bordered by deep-rooted woods on the east, and distance and the loneliness of Echo to the north, zig-zag their way west around the upper edges of Curry. From their center, you can almost read the burg’s history like the strata on cliff rock laid bare by wind and sand.

A month after J.D. moved his family—his wife Consuélo, two boys and two girls—into the new colonial (revived) home, he buried them in the Curry cemetery, all dead of cholera after a week’s visit to Consuelo’s relatives in Matamóros.They were buried in a plot fifty yards away from the space where Wilhelmíno Cruz’s mother, his only brother, his two oldest and one younger son, along with a stillborn baby girl and a baby boy were already buried. J.D. had a place reserved for himself beside his beloved wife. Will didn’t need a reservation, since at the time, his family were the only Mexicans buried in the Curry cemetery in a space demarcated by two wide roads: one used for maintence vehicles and the other for the hearse. Other Mexicans, with overweening pride, had themselves carted off, or were carted off, to the graveyard at Las Múlas, where schoolboys with shotguns and .22s weren’t allowed to mistake Mexican headstones for rabbits, or the townspeople to bury their horses and their dogs, when they buried them at all.

Will, his three oldest sons and his brother Omár, cleared the land with mule and harness for J.D. They started shortly after the turn of the century and had half of it done by the start of the first war. At the end of it, J.D. was rich from the war’s demand for cotton and living alone in his mansion; and Will had one less son who would never come home from France. The rest of his family died off at a rate no less than expected for Mexicans with their congenitally weak lungs, and an intrinsic rate of inability to rise above their station.

Will himself thought that except for a Mexican’s share of bad luck, he had it good. He had built the house he was living in, not much bigger than the shacks he had built for the rest of the hired help but with tar paper over the plank walls. He raised his own vegetables, livestock for meat and pork, and chickens. His wife and daughters helped feed the help, both seasonal and permanent, for a few pennies

One of the men, a fellow named Daniél Fernández, lived with his wife in one of the shacks, but when his wife, who helped in the housekeeping for J.D., started having children, they moved to a good house inside Curry. After Daniel’s third child was born, he was made foreman, a position that most had conceded to Will, but which he had never been formally installed with. Sometime after the birth of Daniel’s fourth child, J.D. became very ill and moved back east with a sister, and Daniel moved his family into the Fetterman estate.

J.D. didn’t survive to see the end of the second war. Nether did two of Will’s boys. One never made it out of the South Pacific, nor the other out of Italy.

A week after J.D.’s burial at the Curry cemetery, Daniel billed Will for rent. One hour after that, Will began moving his family into a cheap house on the outskirts of Curry that had once housed the appurtenances of maintenance for the Southern Pacific. The last birth in relation to the life of Will Cruz on Fetterman land was a kid, which Will delivered himself and carried in his arms into Curry with the dam walking beside him.

In later years some men accused Will of spite and envy for refusing to help Daniel out before he slid the business toward bankruptcy. Some even hinted at Will’s ingratitude towards J.D. for letting J.D.’s family down. They thought that Daniel had been running the business for the sister back east who didn’t know anymore about farming than Daniel did, and maybe even that the blue-eyed fair-haired traits of Daniel’s children which had drawn sly snickers through the years were just ironically coincidental with J.D.’s own. J.D.’s sister died a week before the farm went into receivership, and the last of J.D.’s fortune and hers were divided among the five Fernandez boys in trust with Daniel’s wife. It was enough to keep them until one of them grew up and developed the skills to run the farm.

Will would only say, “Pride is as useful as your eyes and ears are.”

One day he began work on a wooden frame five feet from the shack his family was living in. It was after the war, and by then the four girls were working as housekeepers throughout Curry, and his sons were pumping gas, and working in the fields just as he was. It’s hard to tell what he ran out of first: money, strength, or desire. He managed to get tar paper around the front and both sides of the house that had begun to take shape. The back could wait on another generation.

He said, “It is good to be first in some things. I will haunt this house before anybody else will,” and one hour after he had hammered in the last nail, he went inside his own house and laid down and died.

Noe.