The Bean Trees

  "It's a sign," she said.

  "Of what?" I wanted to know.

  "I don't know," she said quietly. "Something good."

  "I can get the pruning shears and cut one off for you, if you like," Virgie Mae offered. "If you put it in the icebox it will last until tomorrow."

  But Lou Ann shook her head. "No thanks. I want to remember them like this, in the dark."

  "After you pluck them they lose their fragrance," Edna told us. "I don't know why, but it just goes right away."

  If the night-blooming cereus was an omen of anything, it was of good weather for traveling. The morning was overcast and cool. Once again we rolled the children out of bed, and Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray came with us over to Mattie's. Turtle wanted to be carried, like Dwayne Ray, but we had the bags to deal with.

  "We'll just walk this little way," I told her. "Then you can sleep in the car for a long time."

  Estevan and Esperanza had one suitcase between them and it was smaller than mine, which did not even include Turtle's stuff. I had packed for a week, ten days at the outside, and they were packed for the rest of their lives.

  Several people had come to see them off, including the elderly woman I had once seen upstairs at Mattie's and a very young woman with a small child, who could have been her daughter or her sister, or no relation for that matter. There was lots of hugging and kissing and talking in Spanish. Mattie moved around quickly, introducing people and putting our things in the car and giving me hundreds of last-minute instructions.

  "You might have to choke her good and hard to get her going in the mornings," Mattie told me, and in my groggy state it took me a while to understand whom or what I was supposed to be choking. "She's tuned for Arizona. I don't know how she'll do in Oklahoma."

  "She'll do fine," I said. "Remember, I'm used to cantankerous cars."

  "I know. You'll do fine," she said, but didn't seem convinced.

  After we had gotten in and fastened our seat belts, on Mattie's orders, she leaned in the window and slipped something into my hand. It was money. Esperanza and Estevan were leaning out the windows on the other side, spelling out something--surely not an address--very slowly to the elderly woman, who was writing it down on the back of a window envelope.

  "Where did this come from?" I asked Mattie quietly. "We can get by."

  "Take it, you thick-headed youngun. Not for your sake, for theirs." She squeezed my hand over the money. "Poverty-stricken isn't the safest way to go."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "It comes from people, Taylor, and let's just leave it. Some folks are the heroes and take the risks, and other folks do what they can from behind the scenes."

  "Mattie, would you please shut up about heroes and prison and all."

  "I didn't say prison."

  "Just stop it, okay? Estevan and Esperanza are my friends. And, even if they weren't, I can't see why I shouldn't do this. If I saw somebody was going to get hit by a truck I'd push them out of the way. Wouldn't anybody? It's a sad day for us all if I'm being a hero here."

  She looked at me the way Mama would have.

  "Stop it," I said again. "You're going to make me cry." I started the engine and it turned over with an astonishing purr, like a lioness waking up from her nap. "This is the good life, cars that start by themselves," I said.

  "When I hired you, it was for fixing tires. Just fixing tires, do you understand that?"

  "I know."

  "As long as you know."

  "I do."

  She reached in the window and gave me a hug, and I actually did start crying. She put kisses on her hand and reached across and put them on Esperanza's and Estevan's cheeks, and then Turtle's.

  "Bless your all's hearts," she said. "Take good care."

  "Be careful," Lou Ann said.

  Mattie and Lou Ann and the others stood in the early-morning light holding kids and waving. It could have been the most ordinary family picture, except for the backdrop of whitewall tires. Esperanza and Turtle waved until they were out of sight. I kept blinking my eyelids like windshield wipers, trying to keep a clear view of the road.

  On Mattie's advice we took one of the city roads out of town, and would join up with the freeway just south of the city limits.

  Outside of town we passed a run-over blackbird in the road, flattened on the center line. As the cars and trucks rolled by, the gusts of wind caused one stiff wing to flap up and down in a pitiful little flagging-down gesture. My instinct was to step on the brakes, but of course there was no earthly reason to stop for a dead bird.

  FOURTEEN

  Guardian Saints

  We were stopped by Immigration about a hundred miles this side of the New Mexico border. Mattie had warned me of this possibility and we had all prepared for it as best we could. Esperanza and Estevan were dressed about as American as you could get without looking plain obnoxious: he had on jeans and an alligator shirt donated from some church on the east side where people gave away stuff that was entirely a cut above New To You. Esperanza was wearing purple culottes, a yellow T-shirt, and sunglasses with pink frames. She sat in the back seat with Turtle. Her long hair was loose, not braided, and as we sped down the highway it whipped around her shoulders and out the window, putting on a brave show of freedom that had nothing to do with Esperanza's life. Twice I asked if it was too much wind on her, and each time she shook her head no.

  Every eastbound car on the highway was being stopped by the Border Patrol. The traffic was bottled up, which gave us time to get good and nervous. This kind of check was routine; it had not been set up for the express purpose of catching us, but it still felt that way. To all of us, I believe. I was frantic. I rattled my teeth, as Mama would say.

  "There's this great place up ahead called Texas Canyon," I told them, knowing full well that none of us might make it to Texas Canyon. Esperanza and Estevan might not make it to their next birthday. "Wait till you see it. It's got all these puffy-looking rocks," I chattered on. "Turtle and I loved it."

  They nodded quietly.

  When our turn came I threw back my head like a wealthy person, yanked that Lincoln into gear and pulled up to the corrugated tin booth. A young officer poked his head in the car. I could smell his after-shave.

  "All U.S. citizens?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said. I showed my driver's license. "This is my brother Steve, and my sister-in-law."

  The officer nodded politely. "The kid yours or theirs?"

  I looked at Estevan, which was a stupid thing to do.

  "She's ours," Estevan said, without a trace of an accent.

  The officer waved us through. "Have a nice day," he said.

  After we had passed well beyond the checkpoint Estevan started apologizing. "I thought it would be the most believable thing. Since you hesitated."

  "Yeah, I did."

  "You looked at me. I thought it might seem suspicious if I said she was yours. He might wonder why you didn't say it."

  "I know, I know, I know. You're right. It's no problem. The only thing that matters is we made it through." It did bother me though, just as it bothered me that Turtle was calling Esperanza "Ma." Which was a completely unreasonable thing to resent, I know, since Turtle called every woman Ma something. There's no way she could have managed "Esperanza."

  We got out at the rest station in Texas Canyon. It turned out there weren't rest rooms there, just picnic tables, so I took Turtle behind a giant marshmallow-shaped boulder. Ever since I'd found out she was three years old, we'd gotten very serious about potty training.

  When we came back Estevan and Esperanza were standing by the guard rail looking out over an endless valley of boulders. A large wooden sign, which showed dinosaurs and giant ferny trees and mountains exploding in the background, explained that this was the lava flow from a volcanic explosion long ago. Along with the initials and hearts scratched into the sign with pocket knives, someone had carved "Repent."

  The setting did more or less put you in that frame of m
ind. There wasn't a bush or tree in sight, just rocks and rocks, sky and more sky. Estevan said this is what the world would have looked like if God had gone on strike after the second day.

  It was a peculiar notion, but then you had to consider Estevan's background with the teachers' union. He would think in those terms.

  They seemed uncomfortable out of the car so we stayed on the move after that, driving down an endless river of highway. After my VW, driving Mattie's wide white car felt like steering a boat, not that I had ever actually steered anything of the kind. Estevan and Esperanza didn't have proper drivers' licenses, of course--that was the very least of what they didn't have--so to be on the safe side I did all the driving. The first night we would try to go straight through, pulling over for naps when I needed to. Lou Ann had made us a Thermos of iced coffee. For the second night, I told them, I knew of a nice motor lodge in Oklahoma where we could most likely stay for free.

  Estevan and I talked about everything you can think of. He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people's shirts, just above the heart.

  "Not that I know of," I told him. It occurred to me, though, that it might be kind of appropriate.

  He told me that the national symbol of the Indian people in Guatemala was the quetzal, a beautiful green bird with a long, long tail. I told him I had seen military macaws at the zoo, and wondered if the quetzal was anything like those. He said no. If you tried to keep this bird in a cage, it died.

  Shortly after sunset we left the interstate to take a two-lane road that cut through the mountains and would take about two hundred miles of New Mexico off our trip. I wished we could keep New Mexico in and cut out two hundred miles of Oklahoma instead, but of course Oklahoma was where we were going. I had to keep reminding myself of that. For some reason I had in the back of my mind that we were headed for Kentucky. I kept picturing Mama's face when we all pulled up in the driveway.

  I squinted and flashed my lights at a car coming toward us with its brights on. They dimmed.

  "Do you miss your home a lot?" I asked Estevan. "I know that's a stupid question. But does it make you tired, being so far away from what you know? That's how I feel sometimes, that I would just like to crawl in a hole somewhere and rest. Go dormant, like those toad frogs Mattie told us about. And for you it's just that much worse; you're not even speaking your own language."

  He let out a long breath. "I don't even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of home. In Guatemala City I missed the mountains. My own language is not Spanish, did you know that?"

  I told him no, that I didn't.

  "We are Mayan people; we speak twenty-two different Mayan languages. Esperanza and I speak to each other in Spanish because we come from different parts of the highlands."

  "What's Mayan, exactly?"

  "Mayans lived here in the so-called New World before the Europeans discovered it. We're very old people. In those days we had astronomical observatories, and performed brain surgery."

  I thought of the color pictures in my grade-school history books: Columbus striding up the beach in his leotards and feathered hat, a gang of wild-haired red men in loin cloths scattering in front of him like rabbits. What a joke.

  "Our true first names are Indian names," Estevan said. "You couldn't even pronounce them. We chose Spanish names when we moved to the city."

  I was amazed. "So Esperanza is bilingual. You're, what do you call it? Trilingual."

  I knew that Esperanza spoke some English too, but it was hard to say how much since she spoke it so rarely. One time I had admired a little gold medallion she always wore around her neck and she said, with an accent, but plainly enough: "That is St. Christopher, guardian saint of refugees." I would have been no more surprised if St. Christopher himself had spoken.

  Christopher was a sweet-faced saint. He looked a lot like Stephen Foster, who I suppose you could say was the guardian saint of Kentucky. At least he wrote the state song.

  "I chose a new name for myself too, when I left home," I said to Estevan. "We all have that in common."

  "You did? What was it before?"

  I made a face. "Marietta."

  He laughed. "It's not so bad."

  "It's a town in Georgia where Mama's and my father's car broke down once, I guess, when they were on their way to Florida. They never made it. They stayed in a motel and made me instead."

  "What a romantic story."

  "Not really. I was a mistake. Well, not really a mistake, according to Mama, but an accident. A mistake I guess is when you regret it later."

  "And they didn't?"

  "Mama didn't. That's all that counts, in my case."

  "So Papa went on to Florida?"

  "Or wherever."

  "Esperanza also grew up without her father. The circumstances were different, of course."

  In the back seat Esperanza was stroking Turtle's hair and singing to her quietly in a high, unearthly voice. I had heard enough Spanish to understand that the way her voice was dipping and gliding through the words was more foreign than that. I remembered Estevan's yodely songs the day of our first picnic. They had to have been Mayan songs, not Spanish. Songs older than Christopher Columbus, maybe even older than Christopher the saint. I wondered if, when they still had Ismene, they had sung to her in both their own languages. To think how languages could accumulate in a family, in a country like that. When I thought of Guatemala I imagined a storybook place: jungles full of long-tailed birds, women wearing rainbow-threaded dresses.

  But of course there was more to the picture. Police everywhere, always. Whole villages of Indians forced to move again and again. As soon as they planted their crops, Estevan said, the police would come and set their houses and fields on fire and make them move again. The strategy was to wear them down so they'd be too tired or too hungry to fight back.

  Turtle had fallen asleep with her head in Esperanza's lap.

  "What's with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians?" I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.

  After a while Estevan said, "What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere."

  I thought of my Cherokee great-grandfather, his people who believed God lived in trees, and that empty Oklahoma plain they were driven to like livestock. But then, even the Cherokee Nation was someplace.

  "You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?"

  "I don't know. You tell me."

  "You just can't," I said. "That's all there is to it."

  On the second day we got into flatlands. The Texas panhandle, and then western Oklahoma, stretched out all around us like a colossal pancake. There was no way of judging where you were against where you were going, and as a consequence you tended to start feeling you were stuck out there, rolling your wheels on some trick prairie treadmill.

  Estevan, who had apparently spent some time on a ship, said it reminded him of the ocean. He knew a Spanish word for the kind of mental illness you get from seeing too much horizon. Esperanza seemed stunned at first, then a little scared. She asked Estevan, who translated for me, whether or not we were near Washington. I assured her we weren't, and asked what made her think so. She said she thought they might build the President's palace in a place like this, so that if anyone came after him his guards could spot them a long way off.

  To keep ourselves from going crazy with boredom we tried to think of word games. I told about the secretary named Jewel with the son who sees things backwards, and we tried to think of words he would like. Esperanza thought of ala, which means wing. Estevan knew whole sentences, some in Spanish and some in English. The English ones were "A man, a plan, a c
anal: Panama!" (which he said was a typical gringo way of looking at that endeavor), and "Able was I ere I saw Elba," which was what Napoleon supposedly said when he was sent into exile. I hadn't known, before then, where or what Elba was. I'd had a vague idea that it was a kind of toast.

  Turtle was the only one of us who didn't seem perturbed by the landscape. She told Esperanza a kind of ongoing story, which lasted for hundreds of miles and sounded like a vegetarian version of Aesop's Fables, and when she ran out of story she played with her baby doll. The doll was a hand-me-down from Mattie's. It came with a pair of red-checked pajamas, complete with regular-sized shirt buttons, that someone had apparently sewn by hand. Turtle adored the doll and had named it, with no help from anyone, Shirley Poppy.

  We bypassed Oklahoma City and headed north on I-35, reversing the route I had taken through Oklahoma the first time. We reached the Broken Arrow Motor Lodge by late afternoon. At first I thought the place had changed hands. Which it had, in a way: Mrs. Hoge had died, and Irene was a different person, a slipcover of her former self. She had lost 106 pounds in 24 weeks by eating one Weight Watchers frozen dinner per day and nothing else but chamomile tea, unsweetened.

  "I told Boyd if he wanted something different he could learn to cook it himself. Anybody that can butcher a side of beef can learn to cook," she explained. She had started the diet on her doctor's advice, when she decided she wanted to have a baby.

  Irene seemed thrilled to see Turtle and me again and insisted on feeding the whole bunch of us. She made a pot roast with onions and potatoes even though she couldn't touch it herself. She told us Mrs. Hoge had passed away in January, just a few weeks after I left.

  "We knew it was coming, of course," she said to Esperanza and Estevan. "She had the disease where you shake all the time."

  "That was a disease?" I asked. "I had no idea it was something you could die from. I thought it was just old age."

  "No," Irene shook her head gravely. "Parkerson's."

  "Who?" I asked.

  "That's the disease," she said. "I notice she's talking now." She meant Turtle, who was busily naming every vegetable on Esperanza's plate. She named them individually so it went like this: "Tato, carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot, tato, onion," et cetera. Toward the end of the meal she also said "car," because underneath all the food the plates had pictures of old-timey cars on them.