Sound Of Gravel, The (23 page)
“Well, Kathy, I don’t think we have any reason to keep up with our visits. Your children seem safe in your care,” she said, sounding not entirely convinced, “and you haven’t given me any reason to believe otherwise.”
Without another word, she pulled a stapled packet of paperwork from her briefcase, clicked her pen open, and scratched a few things on the first page.
When she looked up again, the caseworker considered Mom’s expression for a moment. Mom’s mouth had dropped open, and she’d been left speechless by the new development. The woman offered Mom a few things to sign, then rose and began making her way to the door.
“Good luck,” the caseworker said. She scanned Mom’s face one more time, then looked at me and smiled sadly. In a moment she was gone.
“Ruthie, I’ll never let myself get into that kind of trouble again.” Mom jumped from her seat as soon as the woman pulled out of the driveway. The worry vanished from her face, immediately replaced by a gaiety that seemed to promise nothing but better days ahead. Soon, she opened the freezer and pulled out a carton of pecan-praline ice cream, one of her favorite treats, scooping it out with a tablespoon into pastel-colored cones.
That same week, Mom neatly tore a check from a checkbook, placed it in an envelope, licked the envelope shut, closed her eyes, and sighed deeply. She’d finally paid back her parents for loaning her and Lane the money to buy the trailer. Mom beamed for days, and we all basked in the light of her warm glow.
Being off probation emboldened Mom. She demonstrated a new confidence, which had its downsides, as I learned a few weeks later. “We’re moving back to LeBaron, this time for good!” she announced. “We don’t need doctors for Meri anymore, do we?” She said this as if it were a wholly positive development. “The government’s not gonna control me. I don’t want to be livin’ in Babylon when it collapses.” She shook her head. “And it’ll be good for you kids to be near your dad. Lane can make us some money renting out this trailer”—she clearly loved her plan—“and I can still get Social Security for Luke.”
Mom’s enthusiasm was powerful. It swiftly carried us back to our adobe house in Mexico, where her merriment continued.
Right after we moved back, Lane showed up unexpectedly. “Well, hello there,” Mom said, her eyes shining when she heard the scrape of the kitchen door that always announced Lane’s arrival, the same scrape that sent me fleeing the kitchen.
From down the hall I heard him say, “I need some help takin’ Mexican workmen into the States.” The tone of his deep voice didn’t match Mom’s lighthearted greeting. “Some people I know need some workers to help on construction sites in New Mexico.”
“We just moved back here,” Mom said, her merriment gone.
“Well, I know, but you and the kids can stay with me in Albuquerque, and the kids can work too. Susan and Alejandra are already there with their kids. Ever’body’s workin’ to help the family.”
We’d been in LeBaron for less than a week and would be back in Babylon before the month was out.
For Lane, taking Mexicans to the States meant ripping out the built-in seating areas in the camper and placing boards over the hole, creating a small cavity underneath. Mom’s assignment was to somehow construct a comfortable bed for her children to lie over the boards. We would cross the border at night, when my siblings and I were asleep, and with three Mexicans hidden beneath us.
We planned to pick up our stowaways in Casas, and my first thought when I saw them was that they’d never fit in Lane’s hidden compartment. Two were tall and lanky, but a third was stout with a large belly. They were standing against an adobe wall when our headlights first illuminated them. They squinted in our direction, waved, and took last drags from their cigarettes. Lane told them they could sit in the back till we reached the border. He and Mom were squished together in the front cab with Elena and Micah. Matt, Luke, Aaron, and I lay in the top bed over the cab.
Somehow we all fell asleep on that tiny mattress. A screech of tires woke me up. Then, the truck began to fishtail, throwing me first against Aaron and then the wall. I had almost pulled myself to a seated position when the truck hit something large that generated a tremendous thud. The tires squealed again and I crashed forward into the window. It didn’t break, but we heard the sound of something shattering underneath us, then the truck came to a sudden stop.
In the eerie silence that followed, I looked up to see my brothers piled together against a window. Below, I watched one of the Mexicans jump out of the camper door onto the highway and the other two quickly follow. My brothers and I jumped out next and ran toward the passenger’s side of the truck, finding Mom standing outside and leaning through the passenger window with a crying Elena in one arm. With the other, Mom scooped up Micah, and I was relieved to discover that all three were fine.
“What happened?” I yelled.
“I think we hit a horse,” Mom replied quietly and calmly. She sat Micah on the ground and shook glass from the plastic feet of his pajamas.
I stepped back to see that the truck was parked sideways in the middle of the two-lane road, its windshield completely shattered. A huge gash was in the left front fender, and a headlight had been torn from its casing. Lane’s boots crunched over broken glass as he came into view. In the beam of the one good headlight, the road ahead looked completely red, covered in blood. I saw Mom’s jaw drop open and then followed her gaze to the road and the headless body of a white horse, its hooves black and legs lifeless. The horse’s head lay on the other side of the highway, its eyes still wide with a look of shock.
It took Lane and all three of the Mexicans to drag the horse by its legs to the side of the road. Then one of the men lifted the head and placed it next to the body. Lane wiped blood from his hands with a greasy towel he found behind his truck seat, brushed glass out of the seats, and told everyone to get back in the truck.
Eventually, we made it to an auto parts store in Juárez, slept in the camper until the establishment opened the next morning, and then stood around most of the day waiting for the new windshield to be installed. By nighttime, we were in line for the border crossing.
Predictably, the line moved slowly, and with every inch we crawled forward, the breathing of the men below me grew heavier, and the smell of their sweat stronger. I could tell that what we were doing was serious business and that the whole family would be in trouble if we were caught. I didn’t know exactly what would happen if the border police found the men at the bottom of the truck, but I was sure my siblings and I would be taken away from Mom.
I felt confused. Through the camper window, I stared at the back of Mom’s head in the front seat, watching it come in and out of the light as we inched forward, and I remembered her promise not to get us all in trouble again. I realized then that I couldn’t count on her promises and began to wonder why she didn’t seem able to protect my siblings and me. I just couldn’t understand it.
A cold fluorescent light shone through our camper’s dark windows when we reached the border. Faces of patrol officers appeared, and I felt my heart race and my body shake. The border men circled the camper and approached from behind. A few seconds later, they flung open the camper door, and their voices went silent as they peered inside. I watched the beam of a flashlight dance from Matt’s face to Aaron’s, to Luke’s. I closed my eyes tightly just before the beam reached my own face.
“What nationality are all these kids?” said a deep, thickly accented voice.
“American,” replied Lane.
“Are you carrying any goods with you purchased in Mexico?” the deep voice continued.
“We only bought a few souvenirs for some family, that’s all.”
There was an interminable pause.
“All right. Looks good,” said the voice, and he shut the camper door.
After a few more exchanges between Lane and the patrolmen, I heard the engine rev and felt the camper accelerate, and soon we were in El Paso. That next morning we dropped off Lane and three exhausted and dazed Mexicans at a job site, and then Mom drove us to meet up with her sister wives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“This can be your contribution to the family income,” Lane said to my stepsister and me. Maria and I looked down at the table filled with pine nuts, our eyes barely disguising our contempt. I don’t know what I had expected when I’d overheard Lane say “the kids can work too,” but it definitely wasn’t selling pine nuts on the side of the road in Albuquerque.
Polygamists from LeBaron had a long history with pine nuts. Each fall, families would pack up their kids, make their way to the border, pick up a few Mexicans, and drive to one of the dense mountain forests in New Mexico, Nevada, or California. There, they would pick pinecones, separate the
piñones
from the cones, then sell the
piñones
to stores or to restaurants in the area. The money they made from this was usually enough for a family to pay for a year in Mexico. Now Lane had decided we would be doing it too.
Lane unloaded the camper onto a cement slab that sat next to a mobile home he had rented. With one bedroom and one bathroom, the single-wide was roughly half the size of the one we’d had in El Paso. Still, this one was newer looking and hadn’t been in a fire, so I was satisfied—until I realized that Alejandra’s family, not mine, would live there. Polygamy protocol dictated that first wives always had first pick of living quarters, and Alejandra had reasonably chosen the single-wide. Mom and the six of us would be staying in the camper for the rest of the summer.
I slept with Mom and Elena on the top bed that jutted over the cab of the truck, except every third night, when it was Mom’s turn with Lane. On those nights, I was demoted to the mattress in the camper’s lower level and a restless night with four brothers in one bed. I was eleven years old, old enough to realize that our situation was ridiculous and humiliating. I also realized that things could have been worse: Susan and her family were staying in an even smaller dwelling nearby. The conditions there were so cramped—Susan and all her children slept on a single foam mattress surrounded by enormous brown bags of
piñones
—I actually found myself grateful that Lane had married Mom second.
Marjory, Lane’s new fourth wife, didn’t come to New Mexico with us. Lane had been spending less and less time with her, which seemed to make Mom happy. Mom said Marjory was busy visiting her adult children who lived in California. Of the three families living in Albuquerque, Alejandra’s had the nicest living situation, but I quickly realized that her privilege was a mixed blessing. Yes, she had a bathroom and shower, but she had to share both with two other families, who could use her facilities at any time. And hers was the only full size kitchen too. The atmosphere while the three women tried to prepare meals for all their families in that tiny space at the same time was always tense. Waiting for dinner meant huddling among three sets of siblings, suffocating and sweltering, in front of a TV, especially with three women cooking in a hot kitchen.
One of the worst aspects of the pine-nuts experience was the food. We could rarely afford meat and certainly weren’t allowed to eat the nuts we were selling. So we ate beans and rice, always, at every meal. Anything seemed preferable to sitting in a crowded camper and eating a bowl of beans and rice—even selling pine nuts on the side of the road.
I came to see something liberating in Maria’s and my pine-nut stand at the far corner of the Safeway parking lot, a spot we had chosen for its being near a busy intersection. People coming from any direction could see our card table, as well as our signs, the words
PINE NUTS
written large enough that drivers wouldn’t confuse us with a lemonade stand. We sat for hours on end under a tattered green umbrella waiting for cars or the odd Safeway shopper to stop by. Sometimes, when the boredom overwhelmed us, Maria and I would fill plastic bags with pine nuts, one pound in each, measuring them out with the help of an old, rusty, white scale from a grocery store. We also poured pine nuts into Dixie cups, which we sold for fifty cents apiece. We never had many customers, although people often stopped by to ask what those odd-shaped, little nuggets were, as if they’d never seen them in their lives. I would launch into a long and detailed description of what pine nuts were, where they came from, and how they were picked and sorted. Anyone who stood there and patiently waited through my pitch was rewarded with a single nut as a free sample.
Lane dropped us off with our card table each morning, and he drove by to check on us once a day too. And at the end of every day, Lane collected what little money we had made from our sales. He continually reminded us to give him each and every penny of our proceeds, but soon enough Maria and I learned to skim off the top. We were just pocketing what we felt we were due, nothing more than the allowances other kids would get, or so we told ourselves. As soon as we were sure Lane was gone, we would slip off to a nearby McDonald’s and blow a few dollars on cheeseburgers, ice-cold Cokes, and ice-cream sundaes.
One day, I noticed Maria hiding more money than she usually spent on lunch and asked her about it.
“You can cut open old Polaroids, put the money behind the picture, and then tape it up so no one will notice.” She smiled proudly.
“What are you doing that for?”
“I’m saving up money.”
“Why?”
“So I can run away from home.”
This took me by surprise. Maria hadn’t complained about her home life before. I wondered if she wanted to run away because Lane was abusing her the way he’d been abusing me. Maria was thirteen and had already developed a woman’s body. She wore her long, dark brown hair in two braids that went down the length of her back. Her flirtatious, almond-shaped, brown eyes were already earning her a great deal of attention, as were her full, perfectly shaped breasts that bounced under tight cotton T-shirts, and her pear-shaped bottom. Whenever she walked across the street to McDonald’s or walked anywhere in public, men whistled and called out to her.