Chapter 14

Anmoore, West Virginia

April 1936

“No, Julia. For the last time, you can’t go. I won’t permit it,” Mercedes said. She was angry but too weary to raise her voice.

“I’d like to see you try to stop me!” her daughter shouted. She started down the steps in front of the house. “I’m eighteen, and I can do what I want, and go where I want, when I want!”

“Antonio, please,” Mercedes pleaded, “say something about this.”

Antonio was sitting in a porch chair, with a café con leche and a cigarette, staring across the road at the shuttered smelter. He passed many afternoons that way. He and the boys did a little odd job here and there, which brought in some occasional money, but the family mostly survived on the produce from the garden in their back yard for food and barter.

“Antonio!” Mercedes snapped. “I’m talking to you.”

He slowly turned his head to look in her direction. Julia stood defiantly on the gravel walk leading out to the street. One hand clutched the pillowcase into which she had stuffed some clothes and tied closed with garden twine. The other hand was planted firmly on her hip. An unemployed son of one of the unemployed smelter workers sat on an old motorcycle at the curb.

“There’s no reason to fight with her, Mercedes,” Antonio said, sighing. “She’s right. She’s old enough to do as she pleases, and there’s really not a thing we can do about it.”

“As long as she lives in our house, and eats our food—” Mercedes started, but Antonio cut her off.

“Oh, Mercedes, it’s not like she and Luis and Manuel are children, living here because they want to. They live with us because there’s not a job in the whole damned country. Where are they supposed to go?”

“But I—” Mercedes started again.

“But nothing,” Antonio interjected, quickly growing irritated. He wanted to be left alone. “Why shouldn’t she get out and see some of the country? And what good does it do any of us to have her sitting around here sulking?” He looked out to Julia. “Go on, girl. Go. Don’t just stand there.”

Mercedes stormed back into the house. The screen door smacked shut behind her. Julia laughed and ran out to the young man on the motorcycle. He crammed her pillowcase luggage into a saddlebag and mounted the bike. Julia climbed on behind him, wrapped her arms tightly around his waist, and pressed her pelvis hard against his lower back. Antonio looked blankly at the smelter as she waved a quick goodbye and they sped off down the street.

Mercedes slowly lowered her bony frame into the kitchen chair. She opened her letterbox and filled her forty-year-old fountain pen. Her brother Antonio had sent her the bottle of black ink so she could keep writing to him. She muttered under her breath, consumed by frustration: “Such a girl! The boys all are growing into such fine young men, but that girl! Poor, sweet Pilar dead in her grave all these years. She never had a chance after I left, and Julia behaves like such a demon. And Antonio. Just useless. I don’t know, Lord. I don’t know. Why does my path always circle back to pain and disappointment?”

She stared at the blank sheet of writing paper. Her thoughts refused to be contained or organized. After writing, “My dear brother and sister-in-law,” she could add no more. Mercedes slipped the sheet and her pen back into the box, stood up from the table, got her change purse, and went out to the porch.

Antonio sat gazing absently across the street, a cigarette burned nearly down to the fingertips in which he pinched it.

Mercedes’ feelings about her husband were such a jumble, and she ricocheted from one to the other. They seemed to have a life of their own, separate from her will. The anger and frustration had abated as she attempted to write the letter. As she saw Antonio sitting there, broken and lost, she felt more sad for him than she did for herself. She stopped and put a hand on his shoulder. “How are you, Segundo?” she asked.

He chuckled twice, and a hint of his Gallego half-grin crept into the corner of his mouth as he looked up at her. “I’m still here. Don’t know whether that’s a good thing or bad.”

“That’s the truth,” Mercedes said. She patted him on the shoulder and managed a melancholy smile down at him. “I’m going to post this letter, and then I’ll stop to buy a bag of flour. Do you need tobacco? We have money enough for both at the moment.”

“No,” Antonio said as he poked around in the same leather pouch he had on that Christmas Eve in the courtyard at Las Cepas. “Better save what you can. I have enough tobacco here for another day or two, and I don’t know whether that fencing job down at the Rodríguez place will come through this week or next.”

“Until later, then,” Mercedes said. She plodded down the stairs and out to the street. Antonio watched her until she disappeared around the corner, two blocks away.

A good woman, he thought. The best I ever knew. I should’ve taken her home when I still could.

* * *

“Mama! Mama!” twelve-year-old Pilar shouted as she ran into the house. “I got another postcard from Julia!” Mercedes shared none of her daughter’s enthusiasm as the girl handed her the card. “Look where she is she now!”

Mercedes studied the water-coloured photograph of a square and cathedral on the front of the postcard. It looked like some place in Castile. “In Mexico City, or she was anyway. Constitution Square and the Cathedral,” Mercedes said languidly.

“It’s very pretty!” Pilar exclaimed.

“Dear Pilar,” Mercedes read. Julia always addressed her postcards only to Pilar, but she wrote in Spanish so Mercedes could read them as well. “We crossed into Mexico a week ago and now are in Mexico City. It is a beautiful city and a beautiful country. I am glad I speak Spanish because almost nobody speaks English here, but it is hard to understand them. They use lots of different words for things, and they pronounce all their c’s and z’s like s’s. I really don’t like how it sounds. But I like the people here. They all are very warm and welcoming, especially when I tell them mama and papa came from Spain. They do not much like Americans, and they think of me as Spanish. I am running out of room on this card, so I will stop. We are going to see the Pacific Ocean! Un abrazo fuerte”—a strong hug, which was the usual Asturian farewell—“Julia.”

“I want to go to Mexico!” Pilar howled. “Can we go? You and me and papa? Can we, please?”

“Maybe one day, Pilar,” Mercedes said, sighing. “But today, we need to pick all those tomatoes and beans out there and start canning them for winter.”

“Oh, mama, I don’t like picking beans and tomatoes,” Pilar pouted. “It’s hot, and those vines make me itch.”

“Well, somebody has to make sure we have food to eat this winter,” Mercedes said. “We can’t all sit on the porch or go sightseeing across the continent.”

“Oh, mama,” Pilar whined. She sank to the kitchen floor like a rag doll.

Mercedes took her by the wrist and pulled Pilar back to her feet. “Now go in there and change into your work dress. I don’t have time for your foolishness.”

* * *

The enormous disk of the orange-red sun sinking into the Pacific Ocean was the most magnificent thing Julia had seen in her life. She and the young man with the motorcycle had almost no money, so they were sleeping on the beach. They had spread one of their wool blankets on the sand. A cluster of bushes and scrubby trees sheltered them somewhat from passers-by.

“You love me, don’t you, Rico?” Julia asked as they entwined themselves under the other blanket. “You really love me and want to marry me, don’t you?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, Julia,” Rico said as he struggled with the clasps on her bra. “But, you know how it is. I don’t have any work, and we both live with our parents.”

“I know all that, but some day, right?” Julia asked. She shifted her body to restrict his fumbling with the bra. “When the Depression is over? It can’t last forever. Then we’ll get married and move out on our own? Won’t we?” She had given herself to him whenever and wherever he wanted, from the first time he answered affirmatively when she asked if he loved her. That had been somewhere in Indiana, two days out of Anmoore. Julia wanted desperately to believe him, about the love and the future, despite his obvious reluctance. Her life with her parents felt like a prison, and a man and marriage the only tunnel under the wall.

“Sure, Julia,” Rico said. He shoved his free hand down the front of her underwear. “Sure we will.”

She placed a hand on his between her legs and looked into his eyes. “I love you, Rico.”

He glanced away quickly. “I know, Julia. Me too.” This dry crumb was enough to sustain her hope. And she knew for a fact that none of Rico’s previous girlfriends had given him sex. She figured that had to count for something.

After they finished, or Rico did anyway, they cuddled beneath the blanket on the sand. The low, rhythmic crash of the surf whisked Julia quickly off to sleep, and she slept so soundly that she was surprised to see morning had arrived when she next opened her eyes. Rico snorted, rolled onto his other side, and tucked the upper blanket around his neck as Julia slipped from their makeshift bed.

Julia stood and stretched, and savoured the cool breeze against her body. She looked around and saw no one, so she walked naked down to the blue sea. The water was cold as it washed over her feet, but she felt giddy as a child to be so far from Anmoore, so free, and standing alone on a beach looking at the Pacific.

She waded out to her knees, and then to her waist, laughing aloud each time the new surge of waves crashed into her. When she was chest deep, Julia dove into the next white-cresting wave. She swam under the water for as long as she could hold her breath, cocooned in the silence of the sea. When her head popped to the surface, she could no longer touch the bottom with her feet. She was beyond the breaking waves, bobbing among the swells rolling with determination toward the beach. Julia treaded water and watched the swells slide past and the long, broad leaves of the palm trees along the shore waving slowly in the morning breeze.

When her arms and legs began to tire, Julia rode the swells, and then the waves, into the beach. She sat in the sand with the last cool bit of each dying wave creeping around her. She could not breathe in enough of the salty air and the clean, white sunlight to satisfy her. Her head and heart felt cleansed and buoyant. Her life felt light and carefree to a degree it never did when she was at home. There, she was always enveloped by her parents’ suffocating despair and the sense that she would never escape to a life of her own.

When her suntanned skin was dried by the breeze and the sun, Julia ambled back to the still-sleeping Rico, put on the colourful cotton skirt and billowy-sleeved white blouse she had bought at the market in Mexico City for thirty US cents, and strolled along the path at the back of the beach beneath the palm trees.

After a few minutes, Julia came upon a tiny, ancient woman, her face wrinkled as a dried apple, sitting on the low stone wall by the path. Despite the muggy summer heat, building already at this early hour, the woman wore heavy leggings, a long woolen skirt, a sweater, a knitted cap and ragg gloves. All were black or dark grey. Dry, white tendrils of hair curled from beneath the cap. The woman slowly looked up at Julia as she passed, stuck out her hand, and said: “Ayuda me.” Help me.

Julia dug into her pocket and produced a few peseta coins. She placed them in the gloved hand and said: “Buen día, señora.” Good day, ma’am.

The woman nodded, mumbled something incomprehensible, and then turned her gaze to the ocean.

Julia walked on, smelling the ocean air and feeling sun on her skin. I could just walk forever, she thought. But then she worried that Rico would wake and wonder where she was, so she turned and headed back, the weight of the unhappiness she never seemed able to shake off for more than a little while seeping over her again.

Rico was awake when she returned to their campsite, lying on his back under the blanket with his arms folded behind his head. “Good morning beautiful,” he said and reached a hand out toward her. Julia joined him under the blanket for what had become the morning routine. She rolled onto her side, and Rico pushed up her skirt and shoved himself inside her. She was not in the mood, and it felt particularly oppressive after her glorious time in the ocean and walking alone on the beach, but she knew it never took him long. Quickly, she felt his final thrust and heard the three grunts—always three this first time in the mornings—before Rico rolled away and started looking for his clothes.

“You love me, don’t you, Rico,” she said without turning to look at him.

“Yeah, of course I do, Julia.”

* * *

Rico left her in Guadalajara. Julia kept talking about marriage, and they started arguing frequently. When he got drunk one evening and slapped her across the face, as they stood screaming at each other on Avenida Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, she declared that she never wanted to see him again. Rico got on his motorcycle, tossed her pillowcase full of clothes onto the sidewalk, and rode off into the night.

Julia called home, collect. Mercedes would not speak to her. She heard her daughter’s voice and handed the telephone receiver to Julia’s brother Luis.

“He did what?” Luis shouted angrily when she told him that Rico was gone.

Mercedes was not surprised by his tone.

“I told you that bastard was no good,” Luis reminded Julia.

“I know, I know,” she cried into the telephone. Julia was standing in a phone booth at a Guadalajara hotel where she could never afford to sleep. “Can you … can you borrow a car and come get me, Luis?”

Luis was silent on the other end of the line.

“Luis? Are you still there?” she asked.

His voice was flat. “Yes, Julia. I’m here.”

“You know I hate to ask you,” she said. “It’s such a long way. But I only have about fifteen dollars left, and there’s no other way I can get home.”

“Okay. Okay, Julia,” Luis said. “Jorge got his old jalopy running again last week. I think it’ll make it there and back. We’ll scrape together some money for gas and leave tomorrow.”

Her brothers knew Julia carried some invisible burden. They did not understand nor even really ponder it. They simply sensed that some inner turmoil Julia could not manage drove her behavior, and each felt he needed to protect her and defend her, no matter how outrageous her actions.

“Oh, thank you, Luis,” Julia said. She was deeply and genuinely grateful. She hated having to impose on her brothers, but calamity seemed to be her constant companion. “Thank you,” she said again. “I always can count on you to save me when I’ve gotten myself into a mess.”

“You need to stop getting yourself into them, Julia,” Luis replied after a pause.

“I know, Luis. I’m sorry.”

“Do you have some place to sleep?” her brother asked. “If we do nothing but drive, it’ll take us at least four days to get there.”

Julia laughed. “Don’t worry about that, Luis. I’ll manage. I’ve been on the road alone before. Worst case, I’ll find some nuns to take me in. They’re all over the place here.”

“Okay, Julia,” Luis said. He was annoyed and concerned, but also a little impressed, by his sister’s cavalier attitude. “How will we find you?”

“Just go to the Cathedral,” she said. “You can’t miss it. I’ll hang around there like one of those Gypsy women mama always told us about and watch for you.”

It did not sound like much of a plan, but there was nothing else Luis could do. “Alright, Julia. Be safe.”

“I will, Luis. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Well?” Mercedes asked when Luis returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. He and Julia had been speaking English, and their mother did not understand the half of the conversation she heard, though she suspected its content.

“She and Rico had a fight in Guadalajara, and he left her,” Luis said as undramatically as possible.

Mercedes felt simultaneously faint and furious. She leaned on the back of a kitchen chair. “Oh, Mother of God, what’ll she do now?”

“It’s okay, mama,” Luis said reassuringly as he put a big hand lightly on her back and encouraged her to sit in the chair. “Jorge and I will take his car tomorrow and get her. You know how much she’s traveled on her own, so she’ll be okay, like she always is. She has some money and, thanks to you, she speaks Spanish.”

A small smile crept onto Mercedes lips. “Asturian, at least,” she said.

Luis laughed. “Well, it’ll do, mama,” he said. “Now, I have to go tell Jorge about our sudden travel plans.”