swam by, and while I waited in the sun I pondered over his legend.
And there were good times too, gay times before the awful storm that broke over our house. When the people of Las Pasturas came to town for supplies, they always came to visit with my parents. When they came my father was happy, not only because they were his people, but because they were a happy people. They were always laughing, and the men’s eyes were always bright with the sting of whiskey. Their talk was loud and excited, and there was a song in it. They even smelled different from the people of the town, or my uncles from El Puerto. My uncles were quiet and the odor around them was deep and quiet, like damp earth. The people from Las Pasturas were like the wind, and the fragrances they carried on their clothing shifted as the wind shifted.
The people from Las Pasturas always had stories to tell about the places where they had worked. Sometimes they talked about picking cotton in east Texas and about running whiskey into the cottonfields of dry counties. Sometimes they talked about picking broom corn, and as they talked and laughed I could see the rows of green broom corn and I could smell the sweet scent it left in their sweaty workclothes. Or they would speak about the potato fields of Colorado, and the tragedy that befell them there. They left a son in the dark earth of Colorado, crushed into the tilled earth by a spilled tractor. And then, even the grown men cried, but it was all right to cry, because it was fitting to grieve the death of a son.
But always the talk would return to stories of the old days in Las Pasturas. Always the talk turned to life on the llano. The first pioneers there were sheepherders. Then they imported herds of cattle from Mexico and became vaqueros. They became horsemen, caballeros, men whose daily life was wrapped up in the ritual of horsemanship. They were the first cowboys in a wild and desolate land which they took from the Indians.
Then the railroad came. The barbed wire came. The songs, the corridos became sad, and the meeting of the people from Texas with my forefathers was full of blood, murder, and tragedy. The people were uprooted. They looked around one day and found themselves closed in. The freedom of land and sky they had known was gone. Those people could not live without freedom and so they packed up and moved west. They became migrants.
My mother did not like the people of the llano. To her they were worthless drunkards, wanderers. She did not understand their tragedy, their search for the freedom that was now forever gone. My mother had lived in the llano many years when she married my father, but the valley and the river were too ingrained in her for her to change. She made only two lasting friends in Las Pasturas, Ultima, for whom she would lay down her life, and Narciso, whose drinking she tolerated because he had helped her when her twins were born.
It was late in the summer and we were all seated around the kitchen table making our plans to go to El Puerto for the harvest when my mother with strange premonition remembered Narciso. “He is a fool, and he is a drunkard, but he did help me in my hour of need—”
“Ay yes, that Narciso is a gentleman,” my father winked and teased her.
“Bah!” my mother scoffed, and went on. “That man didn’t sleep for three days, rushing around getting things for Ultima and me, and he never touched the bottle.”
“Where was papá?” Deborah asked.
“Who knows. The railroad took him to places he never told me about,” my mother answered angrily.
“I had to work,” my father said simply, “I had to support your family—”
“Anyway,” my mother changed the subject, “it has been a good summer at El Puerto. The harvest will be good, and it will be good to see my papá, and Lucas—” She turned and looked thankfully at Ultima.
“This calls for a drink of thanksgiving,” my father smiled. He too wanted to preserve the good spirits and humor that were with us that night. He was standing when Narciso burst through the kitchen door. He came in without knocking and we all jumped from our seats. One minute the kitchen was soft and quiet and the next it was filled with the