Nacimiento was sitting out the dry season on his porch. Why he was called Nacimiento was a mystery, perhaps some confusion with the paperwork when he was born.
And you shouldn’t really call it a porch either for, under that which served for a roof, there was only hardened earth. Earth hardened by feet, often enough bare feet, those of his mother and his mother’s mother. Now, though, there were only his feet and from where he sat, on a chair made of sticks by his father or his father’s father, he could see three other dwellings, all more or less the same, all as empty as the one behind him.
There was, however, the rooster, standing, as was his wont or, at first light, strutting, the board between a couple of stumps, a board that had once nearly bent beneath the weight of three generations when, as sometimes happened, all had found time to sit at the same time. Nacimiento, in the quiet of daybreak, could almost see, and taste, the celebrations of times past, the freely flowing pulque he himself had made.
The rooster, of course, remembered none of this, but he was not as alone as the man, for those were his chickens out there, clucking pleasantly to themselves, picking and pecking, subsisting on bugs now that there was nothing else. He was quite a rooster. If a lean, hungry dog came by he taught him, in a flurry of feathers and claws, that he’d be well advised to keep on going. The rooster also kept his chickens happy, every last one of them.
But, for reasons not quite understood, the rooster had attached himself to the man. To the man now watching a blurred sun rise out of land that, at a distance, seemed a dry cloud rolling towards it; a smear, as of dirt on the face of a man bent to the earth but, in this case, on the sky. To the man now thinking that, perhaps, his time had come.
Not to follow his ancestors into another life, another death, but to leave the land. Land so thin and dry the Mexicans hadn’t bothered to break it up into tracts so he whose handful of hectares it now was might be tempted to sell it for less than it was worth. There was no less than it was worth. Still, the land without worth was not only in Nacimiento’s lungs. It was in his blood. In his bones.
Yet, perhaps now was now, for it wasn’t then, not any longer.
‘Perhaps’ was the most likelihood Nacimiento could muster. He had thought that thought before, but now was different. The dry season was the driest in memory, one that might foretell a time in which the rains that hadn’t come this year wouldn’t come the next. Or the next. But, whether the rains came late or didn’t come at all, Nacimiento was pretty sure that, old as he was, now was now, for he still had the strength.
“What do you think, gallo, is it time?”
In recent years Nacimiento had developed the habit of talking to the rooster who never answered, but usually, his eyes fixed on the man or his head slightly cocked, listened. And now, as came naturally to his kind, the man was thinking about time as well as distance and, having thought about the ‘when,’ he thought he’d better give some thought to the ‘where,’ not to mention the ‘how.’
The first barrier was speech, that which a man who had come to study him had pointed out, rose in a breath, or a little cloud, in pictures of those who had gone before.
Yet, wherever he went in the little known world out there, Nacimiento knew he wouldn’t have any trouble being understood by animals, animals with whom he could, hopefully, find work. He knew how to speak with his face as they knew how to listen with theirs. At least every animal he’d ever met had. Besides, he didn’t want to mumble his words to men, words only he spoke now, for nobody out there would know who, or what, he was and there was no reason why they should. No. That was best kept to himself, that he was the last speaker of the words everyone had spoken when he was a child, everyone in a scattering of dwellings now emptied, with the exception of one.
Nacimiento was watching the dust rise between the dwellings and wondering what had happened to those who had once raised it. Time had taken the ones who had been big when he was small. And his brothers and sisters had, one by one, left, gone to the paid, the underpaid, harvests down the coast, and they had not returned. On good days he allowed himself to hope that they had gone on to work very similar to what they’d just done.
On and on, like the wanderers they had once been, the wanderers they probably should have remained.
He didn’t want to think they had opened their mouths when they shouldn’t have, that they had looked up from their work in the wrong way at the wrong time. Even if they hadn’t done either, or both, they might have caught something from the unfamiliar bodies they were packed with, from the one outhouse meant for all. Nacimiento, as a young man, had worked the camps at harvest time. He’d been glad enough to leave when the job was done. And then, as others hadn’t, he’d come back.
He hadn’t liked the crowding, the dirt, the noise of the machinery. The unfamiliar Spanish fired at him in brief commands. Might as well leave with a handful of dirty pesos, he’d thought. Better than months later, empty handed.
He’d returned, as if it had happened all at once, during a single harvest, to a dying people and, though he hadn’t thought about it at the time, a dying language. His parents, who spoke no other, had long ago gone to join his ancestors where they might, at least, be understood. His last sister, even the girl he had liked had not, that year, come back from the harvest. He knew he would never know what had happened to them and now, after years of wondering, he didn’t really want to know. After so many nights and days, one or both would have found the chance to come back, if only to see if he was alive.
If the time had come, he would not take his animals. They were unsalable, not good for much more than he was. Here, they would live out their natural lives. They were used to fending for themselves. They knew where the weeds were. The water. And until, one by one, they were gone, they would have each other. He would have no one to worry about as he lay awake. Maybe on the road, en camino as they say in Spanish, he might even run into his sister or the girl he had cared for, though both must be… What? Old women. With daughters. With granddaughters. And those were the best of possible fates.
The first step was to get it together. Clothes that, if a little ragged, were clean, for he had long ago learned how to wash them. His knife, so he could cut up what he found to eat, and who knew what else, if he had to. The next step was to take the first step. In which direction? The only direction in which the track, la brecha, which led to the back road, la terrecería, went. Out of la Sierra Madre. Toward that which passed for a real road, la secundaria.
And then?
Before dawn Nacimiento left the sticks and barbed wire that passed for a gate hanging open, poured out the water that would last them till they found their own, and got his things together. His movements seemed, even to himself, soundless. Dreamlike. He said goodbye in his language, and theirs, to his four legged friends and left. But he’d hardly come to the bend in la brecha that led to la terrecería that led to la secundaria before the rooster came running after.
“What’s this, old man?” asked Nacimiento, not the rooster.
He who was so full throated when the sun showed the least hesitation about rising, looked up without a word. In general, there’s not a lot in a rooster’s eyes, but there was in this one’s and Nacimiento could easily read it.
“But have you thought about your chickens?” he asked. “They’ll be lost without you.”
After this truism, Nacimiento turned and hit his stride, only to hear those familiar claws falling in behind.
“Listen, gallo,” said Nacimiento, after he’d turned in mid-step. “They’ll have their eggs. I won’t eat them this time. Most of them, the ones the coyote doesn’t get, perhaps the ones they hid, will hatch and there’s sure to be a rooster among them. But it won’t be you. Have you thought of that? Why he might not even know how to crow without you to teach him, even if he has got something to crow about. All those chickens to himself.”
The rooster, neither challenged nor amused, had nothing to add to what he already hadn’t said, and Nacimiento knew that if he stood there, hardly at the bend in la brecha, much longer, chattering in a language that no one had understood for years, he would feel small and smaller beneath the rising sun, so small he might as well go back where he came from.
In the end, he tucked the big bird under his arm and continued. He could always trade him for a bus ticket to the harvest.
It was, after all, that time. There would be work, the underpaid work that was always there this time of year. And then he would have, if he had watched it closely—didn’t drink it or let it be taken from him—pesos in his pocket. Pesos he could take with him, wisely distributed between several pockets and his shoes, as he went on.
And on, as might be in his bones after all.
And so he arrived in time for the harvest. None of the country people objected or even thought it odd that Nacimiento carried a rooster under his arm. Many of them, perhaps all, had swung one by its legs on the way to market. True, this one slept at the head of the man’s blanket and followed him at his work in the field, but what did it matter? They’d seen odder.
El jefe, though, objected. He wasn’t paid to watch a man mumble to his rooster at midday when he gave them all, men, women and children, but not a rooster, their half hour to eat the little they had.
“Get rid of that thing, Nacimiento, or I’ll get rid of it for you. Cut its throat or…”
But Nacimiento, however dangerously, ignored him. And he hadn’t been let go for, as other opportunities in a changing world had come along, and not everyone had to go to the harvest, they were short-handed. He hadn’t even had to use his knife which, he was sure he could use as well, perhaps better, than el jefe could use his.
The harvest in, Nacimiento rode the bus back with the others, none of whom he knew as none knew him, the old man who could still do a day’s work. He watched them step down, alone or in family groups, underpaid father, unpaid children, the mother who might have parted with more than she received, and finally, almost but not quite the last, he himself stepped down. He was on a real road now, a genuine carretera with trucks roaring north and south, some of them, the ones headed north, stuffed with people just like the ones he’d been working with, the ones who had had enough.
Nacimiento covered his rooster’s head and ignored the howl, the whip of air as a truck passed, and headed south, not that there was anything out there, in front. It was simply an easy direction to keep track of. He didn’t like the idea of wandering back roads that, however peaceful, led you back where you came from. On la carretera, no one stopped him to ask where he thought he was going. An old man with a rooster under his arm was an everyday sight and it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that he wasn’t just going to market.
On the other hand, por otro lado as they say in Spanish, there might be work this way. The mines, somewhere off to his left, he didn’t want to enter. Some who’d left before him were certainly still there, down deep, flat as tortillas. The grapes, somewhere off to his right, he knew nothing about and he knew you had to know something about grapes to work with them.
No. Nacimiento had to keep on, and on, until he saw animals he was familiar with, animals who were all you could put on land you couldn’t get anything out of, and he kept on until he saw them, practically on the horizon. He turned off the road first chance he got and followed the dirt into the afternoon. Hours later, he came to a house in the middle of nowhere, a real house. He had no expectations of sleeping under its roof. He would sleep in what shelter the cattle had, if any. But it would be nice to know there was a house near.
He stopped a good distance off and hallooed, for it was best not to go right up to a door in the backcountry. That was a good way to walk into something you didn’t want to walk into, to catch something in the chest you’d be better off without.
He hallooed again, but there was no response. It was nearing the end of his first day on his own and night was not far. He circled the house until he found the well. He lowered the bucket, raised it, offered it to his rooster, who drank deep. Then he drank, just as deep, and man and rooster looked at each other as if to ask which one was the crazier, which had made the biggest mistake. El gallo, thoughtfully, opened his beak but, after second thoughts, nothing came out.
Nacimiento heard the truck grind up on the other side of the house.
He didn’t want to come around too quickly, to appear to be looking for trouble. He didn’t want to come around too slowly, like someone who’d already broken in. He decided the best thing was to make his way back through the brush and the cactus to the dirt road, to approach as if coming by for the first time.
“Hay trabajo?”
“Is there work?” he asked in his best Spanish, as he came up behind the man unloading his truck.
The man turned and looked at him. Nacimiento was not going to lower his eyes just because he was being added up like that.
“Not for a man too old to do it,” said the man.
Nacimiento nodded without saying anything with his expression. He dropped his rooster, who fluttered to the ground and went looking for the nearest bug. He finished unloading the man’s truck as he watched. Nacimiento knew he was the stronger, for he had seen the man struggle.
“Well. Okay,” said the man. “Maybe there is work. Clean up the outbuildings as much as you can before dark. Make a place for yourself there. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
The man showed him what he meant by cleaning up and indicated with a wave of his hand a place where Nacimiento might sleep. He hadn’t said anything about the rooster. Either he hadn’t noticed him or didn’t give a damn if a man carried a rooster or not as long as he was willing to work for the little he intended to pay him.
Nacimiento did as he’d been told, cleaning a kind of shed that hadn’t been cleaned in years. When it was too dark to work and he was covered in dust, inside and out, he lay down and pulled his scrap of blanket over him. His stomach was not very big for it was used to going without. Still, as it spoke to him, he wondered why the man had not fed him. The rooster, however, had found plenty of bugs and even a kernel or two of something better.
The next day the man found work enough for him to do, for the sun revealed a place completely neglected.
“Find the cattle,” he said finally. “I’ve lost track of them. Count them. Feed them. Water them. Bring them closer if you can. You should have a dog instead of that rooster. I don’t much like dogs. If I had, I would have put him in charge of the cattle. Come to think of it, I don’t like roosters. Yours isn’t so bad, but keep him away from the house. Understand?”
The man would always be asking Nacimiento if he understood. Maybe he thought his slow, careful Spanish meant he was stupid.
It took Nacimiento a couple of days to find the cattle. They weren’t in the best of shape, hips and shoulders jutting, cactus stuck to their faces. They’d kept together, probably out of despair, but that had made it easier to find them and to get them back. They didn’t know Nacimiento, had never seen him before, but he knew how to talk to them, with his face, with his hands, after a language they’d never heard had turn their heads toward him. Soon enough, the cattle were keeping an eye on him, to see what he, without a sound, would say next.
They didn’t mind the rooster who followed Nacimiento and pecked around them when they came to a stop. Sometimes, he even hopped up on their backs as if there might be better pickings there but, judging from the way he looked around, it seemed he was really just up there for the view.
Nacimiento got them back near the house, found where they could be fenced in at night and went on to find an old well, one not used by the house, and lugged water to an old trough. He saw how he could, with a little channeling, get the water to them without the carrying.
“I see you’ve got them,” said the man. “Not looking too good, are they?”
Nacimiento agreed with a look, it seemed, the man could understand as well as his cattle. The man might know he’d neglected them; Nacimiento could only wonder why.
“I’ve got to fatten them up if I’m going to sell them. Take the pickup tomorrow,” said the man, handing him the keys. “See what you can find. I’m not going to pay for feed if you can find something they can eat.”
Nacimiento had never driven before, though he’d seen it done often enough and the next morning he had no trouble tooling about the dirt tracks. He found what graze he could at a considerable distance, cut it with an old hand scythe he’d found and sharpened and brought back riches the cattle had not seen in some time.
They were grateful. They began keeping an even closer eye on Nacimiento. Food. Water. This man, they decided, was worth more than the other. As he foraged for them, day after day, what graze there was nearby began to recover and he was able to let them out now and then. It wasn’t long before they were putting on weight.
The rooster who, though he’d stuck with him on travels which, Nacimiento knew, he didn’t really like, was also filling out. Once more he had something to crow about, and he did. Remembering what the man had said, Nacimiento did his best to keep his rooster at some distance from the house, carrying him off a way before he felt he had to call the sun up.
“Here, gallo, crow all you want. Maybe some lonely chicken will hear you. Keep an eye out for the coyotes. They’re sneaky, as you know. Hard to hear, hard to see.”
This was said in Nacimiento’s native language, which was really the only human language he had ever heard, so the rooster, though he didn’t so much as incline his head, understood as well as he ever had. And Nacimiento carried him out, day after day, before dawn so, soon enough, the rooster had the idea of the thing and went off by himself to a little rise where he would be the first, each day, to see the sun answer his call.
And not only the sun. After a few mornings calling in the dark, a distant, very distant, rooster answered. And, naturally, he answered the other of his kind. There might be nothing to fight over. A wasteland. It was just talk, back and forth for a while, and then, an agreed upon silence.
Nacimiento heard the rooster, heard the other, heard their dialogue and wondered if his might wander off to join, or confront, the other. Where there was a rooster, there would be chickens. And then, in a flurry of feathers and claws, his rooster would give them grounds on which to make a choice. Him or me. But, so far, the far apart roosters had just crowed at each other as if that would be enough, neither of them relishing the knock down, drag out, competition, the fight to the death.
Strangely, during the day, though he heard voices from the house, women’s voices, Nacimiento never actually saw anyone other than the man. Before his day began, or after it ended, he puttered around where he might see who shared the house. But it was not to be. Never, it seemed, was he to see the source of female voices, though someone, twice a day, set out a bowl of scraps for him, as if he were a dog, though, more and more often, even when he was off foraging in the pickup, he was hearing their voices.
Likewise, no matter how far away Nacimiento carried his rooster, the man seemed to hear him. He didn’t remark upon it, but he could tell by the way he looked at el gallo that, for some reason, he hated him. He despised him. Maybe he was something of a cock himself with his unseen females. Nacimiento didn’t know.
What he did know was that, one morning, lying under his blanket a little late, he realized his rooster had not crowed, not at any distance. Nacimiento pulled on his pants and found his way out to all the little rises the rooster favored for his call to the unrisen sun and his challenge to the other. He came back, searched around the outbuildings, even around the house, approaching closer than he ever had.
He had not heard a rifle, a handgun or a shotgun. He was pretty sure the man could not have chased his rooster down and wrung his neck. It was possible a coyote had snuck up on him, nabbed him at the height of his full-throated crow and shaken him to death. That would explain the lack of a body. Yes, that must be it. A coyote had followed his cry to the source, killed him on the spot and carried him off. Unless, hearing a rival, el gallo had pictured all those unseen chickens, just waiting, and strutted off without so much as an adiós.
Then the coyote got him. And then, though he had never shown much energy, the man had run down the coyote, scared him into dropping the rooster and, though he was already dead, but just to make sure, wrung his neck.
Nacimiento’s mind, on a back road of its own, was going in circles. He stopped it. He lay still in a silence he had long known, a silence that had returned.
He had hardly realized how much el gallo meant to him. Now, every morning, he was a little lost. Long ago he’d lost all he could talk with, now he’d lost the last he could, really, talk to. Suddenly he was…as if, in a difficult and unfamiliar situation, he’d been searching for words throughout his body…alone. There was no one else.
Perhaps it was time again. That time.
At that moment Nacimiento realized he hadn’t been paid, not a peso, for his weeks of work. He approached the house and knocked.
“I need my pay,” said Nacimiento in his clearest Spanish, when the man opened the door.
The man seemed a little surprised to see him so close, as if he might be trying to look over his shoulder to see what might be snatched and run off with or, worse, to catch a glimpse of his soft-voiced women.
“You’ll have to wait,” said the man, stepping in front of him. “I’ve sold the cattle. They’re coming for them this afternoon. I’ll pay you when I’m paid and then, well, I won’t need you anymore.”
The two men looked at each other. Once more, Nacimiento was not going to look down just because he was being looked over. They looked at each other a little longer, for the man wasn’t going to be stared down either, not by someone he’d taken in off the road, given work.
“Come back when you see them trucked off,” he said and closed the door.
Nacimiento, his bit packed, watched the cattle loaded and came back.
“I didn’t sell them all,” said the man. “I mean they didn’t take them all. They’ll pay when they take the rest. Then I’ll pay you.”
Once more Nacimiento and the man looked at each other. Nacimiento could see the man’s heart cut out, held up to the sun, great sweeps of rain already on the horizon, or, perhaps, just his tongue cut out. That would leave him as speechless as Nacimiento was in a world that was giving every indication of outliving him along with all the others.
“See if you can’t fatten them up a little,” said the man, “the ones they didn’t take. You see, they took the best.”
Nacimiento bedded down as usual under his scrap of blanket and talked, softly, to the rooster who wasn’t there.
“Gallo, the man’s a liar. He’s got me to work for nothing and I’m probably not the first. When I went out to pee, I could hear the women, softly laughing. The joke’s on me, gallo, and not just on me. On all who know how to make a chair out of nothing or keep a few head of cattle where nothing will grow. On all who run after the harvest.”
Nacimiento knew he would find what he could for the man’s cattle, even if he had to reach through a fence somewhere and cut someone else’s grass. He’d drive around in the man’s wreck of a pickup as if he had nothing better to do.
“Yes, it’s a wreck, gallo. If it weren’t, I’d be nervous driving it. He’s not much richer than I am. Maybe ten times. Ten times nothing. The poor robbing the poor while the women talk and look the other way. And laugh. Maybe I’ll just keep on in that wreck of his. There’s nothing on it, nothing to say it isn’t mine. Besides, who would care whose it was? I can’t see them pulling me over at the crossroads.”
“Hey, campesino! Where did you steal such a beautiful wreck? We can see just by looking at you, it isn’t yours. You’re not worth half as much. Come on now, out and show us your papers.”
“Think of it, gallo, papers. Certificates of this, of that. Papers I couldn’t read and no one else would want to. Yes, I’ll take the man’s wreck of a pickup, go looking for my sister, the girl I used to like. I’ll kidnap them while I’m at it—one crime on top of another—take them back to our scattering of dwellings, speak their language. My language. That will make them happy.
“Yes,” he added, “they’ll cover their mouths a little, but not their ears. They’ll giggle, they’ll laugh…
“They’ll forget the supermercado down the street, the music everyone would be better off without, the men who gave them orders in Spanish, the fancy tiles they swiped when they were down on their knees. Down on their knees, that’s where they’ve been all these years, gallo. Down on their knees. And I, where have I been? My feet in the dirt, my head bent beneath the sun, unpaid …”
Before dawn, Nacimiento slept then, at the usual hour, he wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard el gallo, not as near as before but not as far as the other. It was him himself. No doubt. Perhaps, in his way, answering him at last and repeating, as was his habit, what he had just said.
“The time, the time, has come, yes, the time, the time has come!”
Yes, thought Nacimiento, the time has come and outside, splashing a little cold water on his face, he thought it again. Yes. I’ll find something for the cattle, the ones who are left. They need it. They deserve it. I won’t poison them or cut their throats to get back at the man. No. But then, when my work’s done…
Yes.
Unless, as the Mexicans say, por otro lado, if he’s killed the other and tread all those chickens, my gallo might, might, be halfway here. He wouldn’t want to find an empty shed.
No.
Michael McGuire was born and raised and has lived in or near much of his life; he divides his time; his horse is nondescript, his dog is dead. Naturally, McGuire regrets not having passed his life in academia, for the alternative has proven somewhat varied, even unpredictable. “McGuire’s writing is hauntingly thoughtful, inexorably true.” – Publisher’s Weekly
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