They always told stories of men from Chal sending money for their families. When Josué and Marcos had been sick, we couldn’t afford to buy medicine. Sometimes to buy rice was too much.
“In los Estados, everyone is rich,” Papi said.
Many men in our village had gone. They lived in towns called Arizona, Arkansas, and Texas. They called on the telephone at Doña Yoly’s tienda and made their families rich. In Arizona, Arkansas, and Texas, children attended school. Hospitals accepted the sick without money. Everybody wore shoes.
In Chal, Papi tended the corn with Daniel and me and served as a civil patroller for the army. All the men did. They guarded against subversives who came from the mountain to buy food or steal a cow. The men resented the duty because the army didn’t pay them. But they did it, or they got hung by a tree like Gaspar Xic or shot like Pablo Chocoj.
My oldest sister Marta asked Papi when he was coming back from los Estados.
Papi said when he earned enough for me and Daniel to continue school. And to pay for Marta and Yanira to get married. That was when he’d come back.
But that didn’t happen. At first, he wired money to help pay the smuggler who helped him in the journey. He called once a month on Sunday afternoon and we talked to him on the telephone at Doña Yoly’s tienda. The last call came from California, when he was gone for two years. Everything seemed the same. He talked about work and money he was earning, how he was able to help his family. But the next Sunday, we heard nothing. Or the Sunday after that. We didn’t know if he was alive or dead. If he forgot about us or was in trouble. We became like an unplanted hillside in heavy rain, slipping down, down, with no roots to hold us.
Life was difficult with no father to help. Our village was high up in the Cuchumatanes Mountains with only one dirt road to the next village. The capital city of Guatemala was a twenty-hour bus trip. There was only the one telephone, in Doña Yoly’s tienda. Everyone waited in line to talk. We walked to the public well to collect water. We had no electricity in our homes.
I tell you this so you understand how it was.
After Papi left, a man started helping Mamá with repairs to our house. We called him Tío Eldon. Tío Eldon walked with a cane due to one leg being shorter than the other, and his breath smelled sour. But he always gave my brother Daniel and me a Chiclet, so we didn’t mind having him around.
Tío Eldon asked Mamá what project she needed to have done and she said, “Nothing.” Then she looked around and saw things. He brought wood to build Mamá a table and six chairs so we didn’t need to kneel to eat. Five for us and the baby, and one for him. He put in a metal faucet and running water came into our yard.
“Why does he help us?” my sister Marta asked Mamá the first night we ate dinner at the new table. It felt strange to sit on a chair, as if we were eating from a pew at church. “Does he expect you to pay?”
Mamá didn’t have money to pay Tío Eldon. Sometimes she invited him to eat with us and he did. Mamá was grateful jobs needing to be done were finished. She chopped firewood and sold it to pay for food. Marta and Yanira worked for Doña Yoly, in her house and her tienda. Daniel and I worked in the corn field. Even so, Daniel and I didn’t have shoes so we couldn’t go to school. I practiced reading and numbers at home, with books Padre Andrés from the church gave us. I kept the house neat and tidy.
Usually the oldest girl made the tortillas, but in our family, the job belonged to me. Every morning, I took the prepared corn to the tortilla mill to have it ground into masa for the day’s tortillas. On the Feast of Candelaria, I climbed out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb Marta and Yanira. My feet found the straw mat that covered the floor next to our bed. Mamá splashed water on her face from the pan near the stove while I lit the match for the morning fire. Smoke curled up to the blackened thatched roof. Ears of last year’s harvest hung from the rafters.
I walked down the lane to the tortilla mill. The thumping sound of the mill’s engine welcomed me as I opened the door. The señora poured the lime-soaked kernels into a chute at the top of the mill and the machine crunched and sputtered, kneading the kernels into soft masa. I paid the señora as the machine squeezed the masa through a tube and into my plastic bowl. Balancing the bowl on my head, I closed the door.
I didn’t see the man standing under the tree down the path until he stepped in front of me. I jumped enough from surprise that the bowl of masa tipped off my head and bounced to the ground.
I bent to scoop the masa back into the bowl and placed it back on my head, standing still to let it balance. “Do you always come here this early?” Tío Eldon asked. I nodded with care not to upset the masa. He put his head closer to mine. “Isn’t it dangerous? With guerrillas in the mountains?”
We never said the word guerrilla out loud. Papi taught us that. “The civil defense patrol will protect us,” I said.
“I’m a patroller,” Tío Eldon said. “I can protect you.”
He was talking to me like I was a grown-up, instead of nine years old. Maybe he got confused between Marta and Yanira and me.
We walked towards home, with Tío Eldon rocking left to right when he stepped on his bad leg. Chal was waking up. Today on the Feast of Candelaria, we would go to church. Men passed wearing good white shirts, and women with shawls covering their heads for early mass. Our house came into view, not far. Wood smoke rose from our chimney and swirled in the brightening sky. Isabel and the girls and Daniel would be awake, hungry for tortillas.
Our house was less than twenty steps away when Tío Eldon stopped, dug the tip of his cane into the dirt, and leaned into it. “You know, Rosalba. I’ve been thinking. You don’t look like your older sisters or Daniel or Isabel. You don’t look like your Papi or Mamá.” He tapped his stick three times into the dirt and chuckled as if remembering something. “You look like girls from the hamlet of San Rolando.”
I had never been to San Rolando because the army burned it to the ground.
“San Rolando is where your Papí found you,” Tio Eldon explained. “Wrapped in a sling like a little tamalito. In a deep ditch. That’s why your eye is funny.” He pulled down one of his eyes with a finger and my face got hot. No one was supposed to tease me for my eye that drooped, but they did.
“Your Papi, Chelo, brought you around to each house asking if they wanted a baby. Nobody wanted a girl baby because they’re not strong enough to harvest corn or cut sugar cane. Besides, everyone had enough babies. So Chelo took you home to Mamá Delma.”
I was confused. Papi found me in a ditch?
“Delma, your mamá, didn’t want you at first. She said, ‘Only a witch could survive what the army did to San Rolando.’ Killing everyone and burning it to the ground. But Chelo insisted. ‘This girl is not a witch. She’s a miracle. If we don’t take her, she’ll die.’”
The outline of his face became wavy like someone was holding my head down in a bucket of water. My ears started to ring. I took the bowl of masa from my head and held it in front of me with two hands like a wall. The ringing in my ears became louder. “I wasn’t born in Chal?”
Tío Eldon cleared his throat. “Delma wanted to tell you. Oh, how she wanted to tell you. Chelo didn’t want you to feel different.”
The ringing in my ears became louder. “What do you mean ‘in a ditch?’”
Tío Eldon looked off toward where the village of San Rolando used to be, where the only thing left was ruins of the church. “Chelo knew your father, Juan Jorge. It was the bad time everywhere. Worse than now.” Tío Eldon shrugged. “Delma treats you like her own. You shouldn’t complain.”
I wasn’t complaining, although I felt I might be dying. My soul seemed to be floating to the sky, away from my body.
The door to the house opened and Mamá came out. She was dressed in her same corte and hüipil, her hair tied in a long braid. But she wasn’t my mother. She was someone else. Delma. How could I be nine