Candlelight Bridge, page 4
“How did you escape?” He wanted to shout: How could you desert the one thing I love?!
“I didn’t escape,” Bing Sam said. “They demanded a ransom of five thousand Gold Mountain dollars and sent me to retrieve it. I have five days, or they’ll kill Baba and Mei Yin.”
Yan Chi clenched his fists, resisting the urge to strangle him. “Then why did you waste time coming here? Five days is barely enough time to get to Hong Kong and back.”
“That’s what I came to tell you: our account at the wui gun is empty. Rumors always have more gold than men do. We saved many American dollars, it’s true, but most of it went to my father’s new house…and Mei Yin’s dowry.”
Yan Chi understood his friend was reminding him of the debt he owed his future in-laws. He didn’t resent this. It was a fact of life: to marry was to accept obligations. “Of course, my father will give what he can, but he too spent his savings on the wedding.” He pictured the white pearl skin and black silk hair of Mei Yin, lone woman in a cave full of men, and regretted that the price of her life was already spent on a wedding that might never happen.
He tried to think what his elder brother would say. He clenched his jaw. “Here’s what you’ll do: you’ll convince the wui gun to lend you the ransom. You’re a member after all, and isn’t this what the wui gun is for, community support of our men overseas?”
Bing Sam nodded rapidly. “Of course, of course. But won’t you come with me? It’s a lot of money, and I fear they’ll say no. People never say no to you.”
Yan Chi shook his head in humble denial, though the compliment secretly pleased him. “I don’t know about that. But if you think it’ll help, I’ll go with you.”
Bing Sam’s shoulders sagged with relief.
Yan Chi grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the pond.
Bing Sam flinched. “Aiya! That hurts. What’re you doing?”
“You can’t go to Hong Kong and ask for money looking like a beggar. We must clean you up.”
Bing Sam relented, let Yan Chi push him to his knees at the water’s edge, and gazed up with unwavering trust. Here was Yan Chi’s chance to be a hero. He might rescue Mei Yin yet.
He shoved his future brother-in-law’s ruined face underwater, and an unsettling thrill shot through him at this momentary power. Not that Yan Chi intended to drown his friend. But he was tempted to hold him under just long enough to sample the terror Mei Yin must have felt when her only brother left her behind.
3. The Rattle
Christmas Day, 1910 – Chihuahua, Mexico
One soldier dragged Candelita from the house by her long braid, then another kicked her in the ribs as she lay in the dirt. She tried to scream but instead opened her eyes to the splotchy dark of early morning, gasping for air, blood pumping fear into her ears. She felt another kick and knew what had woken her: her little sister whining and pedaling her feet, caught in her own nightmare. If Graciela woke, she was sure to declare, “Want a song!” expecting Candelita to soothe her with the lullaby about barefoot angels. The thought irritated her. Her mouth felt empty of songs.
Irritation gave way to guilt. Poor baby had no idea that today they’d leave home forever. She clasped one churning foot and rocked it. “Sh-sh-sh. It’s just a bad dream, mija.”
Bad dreams or not, real soldiers would return soon enough. Even once her family left Mata Flores, they could run into soldiers anywhere. What good would singing do then?
She usually loved the final hours of night, starlight drifting through the only window, the smells of clay floor and hearth ash, Mamá’s sighs and Papá’s snorts across the room. She felt safe nestled amid her siblings on the big mattress, one arm curved over baby Graciela’s doughy flesh. She was used to Lalo’s stinky frijole farts, and she didn’t even mind Miguel’s crusty toes near her face (though he once kicked so hard her nose bled).
This time, though, the dark hush before dawn gave her a new sensation: both lonely and expectant. Poised between the comfort of home and the coming journey into the unknown, she sensed possibilities that might be hers alone. Such ownership was hard to come by in a family of six, and scared as she was, she savored her solitude as she tiptoed from the casita’s relative warmth out to the chilly courtyard.
She hauled the water bucket up from the well and rinsed her face, spluttering at the freezing shock, then tilted her head back to find the night’s final star: Venus, goddess of love and beauty. A solitary star, unlike the 46 stars on Our Lady of Guadalupe’s blue rebozo. Venus belonged to her alone.
She re-entered the house with a shiver, re-braiding her hair by feel. Mamá was kneeling before the hearth, blowing the faint orange light of wood coals into flame. As always, her mother greeted the morning in silence, yet the family answered her unspoken call, rising one by one.
Till now they’d always moved in rhythm with sun, season, and each other. Now they spun too fast, bumping into each other, stirring the hearth’s flames into confusion as they packed.
There must’ve been important decisions about what to take, but later she’d only recall those that gained significance because they called up memories of the desert: Mamá’s bone-handled butcher knife, Miguel’s silver whistle from the Grito de Dolores festival, Papá’s jingling spurs from his days as a vaquero, Graciela’s faceless cornhusk doll, Candelita’s vihuela. Mamá told Lalo to leave his rusty old lucky horseshoe behind. He dropped it with a clang and shrugged at the family chorus of “Sssh!”
That’s when she understood, they were never coming back.
“Keep moving, Candelita!” Mamá scolded.
“But I packed last night.”
“Don’t talk back!”
She clenched her jaw but did as she was told, refolding the only extra clothes she was bringing: her Christmas skirt and blouse. Already hopelessly wrinkled. “¡Tch!”
“Where we going, Candelita?” Graciela demanded, cranky over being woken at “night.”
Candelita turned a helpless look to her mother, who nodded. No need to keep the secret from the little ones anymore. They’d be gone before the village woke.
So she spoke the words aloud for the first time, “We’re going to America.”
“Where’s that?” Graciela asked.
“North.”
“Where’s north?”
Candelita pointed up.
“Heaven?”
Candelita laughed. “Not exactly.”
“Why are we going?”
“We can’t be here when the soldiers come back.”
“Why?” Clearly no answer would shut up this frustrated little apestosa staring up at her, arms crossed, forehead a question mark.
How could she explain that war was coming, that men were needed to do the killing and dying, that Papá didn’t want to be one of them? Instead, she sniffed the air, gave a sly smile, and asked her own question, “Smell that?”
“What?”
“Mamá’s champurrado!”
Graciela hopped with joy, legs still kicking as Candelita picked up the little stinker and set her down in a corner. Mamá lifted a bubbling pot from one of the hearthstones encircling the fire, poured the champurrado into mugs, and handed them around. They gathered cross-legged round the hearth in the gloom, deeply inhaling the steam of corn masa and chocolate as if to memorize it.
“Who’ll come for you, Papá, the good soldiers or the bad?” Lalo’s voice startled the quiet.
“Not so loud, mijo,” Papá murmured. “Most soldiers are neither good nor bad. They just want to feed their families. Some want to eat now. Others want to eat in the years to come. And when people get hungry, they all can be dangerous.”
“Pues, aren’t you too old for the army, Papá?” Lalo said.
“Don’t be a tonto,” Candelita said. “Thirty-one’s not old.”
Papá cupped a hand atop her head. “If this war really gets going, they’ll need every man they can get.” He looked at Miguel and gulped air as if to say more.
Mamá cut him off, “¡Basta! You’re scaring the baby.”
Candelita turned worried eyes to Graciela.
But her baby sister jutted out a pointy chin and said, “I’m not scared!” What a relief to realize this was true. Her sister was too young to understand words like war or die.
As for Candelita, it wasn’t the dying that scared her but the leaving. She wanted to feel excited about traveling to a new place, making new friends, starting a new life. Yet those were only ideas. Home was real.
***
They all took a last look around the single smoky room of the half-empty casita. Mamá pinched her nose, squeezing the inner corners of her eyes. She reached down to pat Graciela’s face and said not to worry, she was only sorry she had to leave her largest pots behind. Candelita looked at the plump iron bellies hung on the wall, and her stomach gurgled at the thought of eating Mamá’s cocido, sucking fat from the beef bones, slurping cumin-rich soup from the corncob she always left for last.
She swallowed the memory and said, “The poor house will be lonely without us.”
Lalo, who seemed excited by this sudden upheaval in their lives, gave a crooked grin. “The mice and cucarachas will keep it company.”
“And the spiders.” Miguel sent his fingers crawling up Graciela’s arm.
“Nooo!” Graciela tightened her grip on Candelita’s neck.
Candelita slapped his hand, but he only laughed. Why must Miguel always make things harder?
Papá stood at the closed door, finger to his lips, reminding them to keep quiet. Then he opened the door and beckoned them into the grey chill of the courtyard. Mamá emerged last, clutching the doorknob till he gently pried her fingers loose. She reached up to cup his cheeks in her palms. He did the same in return, and they pressed their foreheads together. They did this sometimes, as if to transfer their secrets to each other without revealing them to anyone else.
Mamá gave Papá a firm nod. He gave her a firm kiss. Then he eased the door shut and led them out of the courtyard, single file: Mamá, Miguel, Lalo, and then Candelita bringing up the rear with Graciela in her arms. They shuffled out of the pueblo in silence.
The Rivera family had sold their burro months ago, so they carried everything.
Papá bore a mochila of firewood on his shoulders, a machete at his belt, and something hidden in his waistband which he kept tucking and re-tucking. Nobody asked what it was.
Mamá shouldered a pack full of cooking gear with long spoons sticking out the top, and alternated slinging a basket of clothes and blankets from one arm to the other.
A strap across Miguel’s forehead balanced the sack of food on his back: beans, potatoes, chiles, dried beef machaca. Over his shoulder hung a satchel, boasting the only two books he hadn’t sold to help pay for their supplies: Don Quixote de la Mancha, which he’d gotten at school—stolen was more like it, though only she knew that part—and a Spanish translation of Call of the Wild, which Papá had given him as a gift when his teacher recommended him for preparatory school.
How jealous she’d been.
Miguel always promised to let her read his books once he was done, but he never seemed to finish. “You wouldn’t understand them anyway,” he always said. She’d resorted to sneaking them from his satchel while he was off with friends. Don Quixote wasn’t bad, though she felt impatient with the idea that men, even old ones, could do whatever they wanted: go on adventures or fight battles, even silly ones. She sympathized more with Buck, the brave dog in Call of the Wild, who ended up on a journey he had no say in.
Lalo carried whatever didn’t fit elsewhere: Candelita’s vihuela strapped to his back and a bag of two live chickens swinging from his fist, angry little heads poking through two holes near the bottom. Like Jack London’s Buck, the hens began this journey under protest, though after an initial squawking struggle in which many feathers flew away, they fell into stunned silence.
She carried only Graciela. Her parents acted like this was the easy job. But it seemed to her Graciela was as much a burden as any other—more, if you considered her squirming.
Graciela clutched only her cornhusk doll, which weighed next to nothing. Still, she acted dissatisfied with her lazy place in the caravan. Candelita often carried her to and from church, the market, and most fiestas. Sometimes Graciela faked sleep for the privilege. But on this day, she wanted her mother, though Mamá’s arms were too full to hold her.
They weren’t quite out of the village, when Graciela took to whining, kicking, and trying to wriggle from Candelita’s grasp. “¡Quiero Mamá!”
Candelita squeezed her tighter, looked around the sleeping village in alarm and whispered, “Shhh! You have to stay with me, mamis!”
The endearment seemed to make Graciela madder. “I want Mamá!”
“¡Cállate!” Miguel hissed. “You want the rurales to arrest us?”
Graciela’s eyes grew round as an owl’s, and she burst into tears.
Candelita kicked at Miguel. “Nice work.”
He dodged her foot and held up his hands. “¡Cálmate, señorita, cálmate!”
“Don’t worry, mamis,” Candelita said. “No one will arrest us.” It would take her years to realize it wasn’t the word “arrest” that scared Graciela, only the easy rage of their big brother.
Graciela hiccuped back to sleep, cheek bouncing against her shoulder with the rhythmic comfort-and-pain, comfort-and-pain of skin on bone.
The sky was a purple bruise sparkling with tears. Venus was gone. Candelita refused to look back, but it was no use. She would never stop seeing it: the only home she’d ever known, squinting after them, its red mouth twisted shut in confusion as they left it behind.
***
Home must have become dangerous indeed if leaving it for this enormous silence was their sole option. They left behind all signs of villages, ranches, or churches, of humans, cattle, or horses, headed deeper into the desert than Candelita had ever been.
She had no idea the world was so wide. The flush of dawn awoke the distant mountains, which spread their wings to rise from the edge of a flat valley spread with squat bushes, unruly cactus, and stray rocks. The only sounds: the pad of bare feet and slap of Papá’s loose boot sole. Creosote bushes marched alongside, spaced perfectly as a parade. Mamá said those bushes were called gobernadoras, because they ruled the desert—she said the leaves were good for curing foot fungus. The winter sun was small and cool, yet her thirst grew as dust salted her mouth.
“When do we get to Rica?” Graciela asked.
“Los Estados Unidos de A-me-rica,” Lalo corrected her.
Graciela shook her head at the ridiculously complicated name.
“Are you kidding?” Miguel said. “America is far.”
“Not too far, mija,” Candelita said. “El Paso is next to Juárez, and that’s here in México.”
“It might take weeks,” Papá said in his distracted way.
Mamá gave him a hard look, opened her mouth, slammed it shut. She turned a grim stare into the shimmering desert. Papá was usually so quiet that nobody discouraged him from talking when he chose. But she understood Mamá’s irritation. To walk for weeks? Impossible.
“Wait and see, Graciela,” Lalo blurted. “You’ll love America! It’s full of magic!”
“Magic?”
“You dream it, they have it: bathtubs of hot water if you’re cold, boxes of ice if you’re hot, cities sparkling with lights when it’s dark. And to take you there? Trains that go on forever.”
“México has all that too!” Miguel said. “We’re just too poor to afford it.”
“Trains?” Graciela said.
Candelita made chugging noises. “Chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka…”
“Woo-woo!” Lalo hooted.
“¡Cállate!” Mamá said. “Listen!”
A high-pitched rattle cracked the silence. Candelita glanced sideways and saw a fat snake the color of dead leaves coiled between two rocks, nose pointed at her, tail vibrating a warning.
She froze.
“What?” Graciela’s voice startled her so much she almost threw her at the snake in anger.
“Keep walking, Candelita,” Mamá said. “No-no, don’t run! Just walk naturally.”
She tried not to cry as she struggled to remember how she normally walked. Papá circled behind the serpent, tossing her a wink before he crept up on it, forked stick in one hand, machete in the other, and struck fast: trapped the head with the fork, chopped it off in one stroke, and leapt back. The headless beast’s tail rattled on, and her heart clenched in horror.
Papá said, “Don’t worry. He’s dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
It seemed nothing frightened Papá, despite his quiet ways and Miguel’s accusations of cowardice. But was fearlessness enough? Papá used to break wild horses at the rancho, animals possessed by demons till he roped them tight, ran them dizzy, and cast them into the dust. But his courage hadn’t stopped one wild bronco from stomping his back and breaking him, ending his job—and any hope Papá might pay for Candelita to finish school. Now he’d killed a snake, but that wouldn’t prevent the next one from killing him. Then what would happen to them all?
Mamá dropped her pack, rummaged inside, and pulled out her bone-handled knife. She whipped the snake’s length against the ground to stop its writhing, gutted the entrails, and cast them aside. Her movements had a ruthlessness, a certainty Candelita admired but felt sure she would never know. Mamá pointed the knife at her, presenting the bloody tip like a priest presenting the blood of Christ. “You’ll help me butcher this beast for dinner.”
Candelita had carved many a fresh kill before—chickens, pigs, rabbits—but this felt different, slicing up a snake that almost sank poisonous fangs into her moments ago. Not that she was still scared. Not at all. She enjoyed cutting this monster to bits.
Lalo smirked, “Can I give Graciela the rattle before you chop that up too?”
