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THE ONE-YEAR WHEAT

The slope · the year the old cura died

(Old Castile, near Soria · 1456–1487)

I was two years old the first time I knew that I was me, and it was when my hands were in the mud by the door of our house.

The mud was cold. It was heavy after many layers had formed up in my hands. When I closed my hands, it pushed up between my fingers. I moved my hands under the mud and watched the mud move. Then it happened. Those were my hands. I was the one moving them.

I forgot that feeling of I am the same day. It never happened again. Not in thirty-one winters, and thirty-one winters was all I got.

My mother used to tell a story about me. She said I took longer to open my eyes than other babies. And once I opened them, I didn't close them. I didn't like to blink.

She used to joke around saying, you know how you have to blow on a newborn's face to make it blink? I keep blowing and blowing on mine, many times. Nothing. It gave her a bad feeling, she said. She crossed herself since we were catholic and said Ave María Purísima every time she told it. Then she laughed a little.

She had another story too. As soon as she lost sight of me, I went to the mud. Or to a puddle. Or to the water trough. I sat there for hours. I didn't cry. I didn't call for her. I just sat there with my hands under the water until she came and got me. I always liked the water.

*

My father's land was bad. My grandfather's land had been bad before that. By the time the land came to me, nobody in the house complained about it anymore. Complaining about the land was like complaining about winter.

Our land was a slope. Five bancales, a type of terraces, one above the other, like steps, with more stone than dirt. Below the slope was a valley where the rain from the area gathered up, it always came late and came little.

I learned to sow before I learned to count. What I know about numbers, I learned measuring grain by the fanega that is how we called our bushels. The fanegas were almost never full.

Every spring I dug stones out of the slope. Every winter the slope grew new ones. I don't know how. I carried the stones to the edge of each bancal and stacked them into a low wall. The wall held the dirt when the rain came. Without the wall, the rain took our dirt down to the valley and gave it to somebody else.

I knew that slope better than I knew my own face. The top bancal dried first. The third bancal held water in one corner, so I sowed that corner last. The bottom bancal had the best dirt, because it was the dirt that ran away from all the others.

Every morning I walked the slope with a stick. I pushed the stick into the ground. If it went in easy, it was time. If it didn't, I waited.

That was my whole trade. The stones, the stick, and the waiting.

*

I married Mira the year the old cura died. That is the only way I know how to count the years of that life. Mira came from farther down the river.

Mira and I had four children. Two of them stayed. Andrés came out quiet, like me. The girl came out like Mira. That is why I loved the girl more. You don't say that. But I did many times.

All four were born in the same room. Two left that room in their mother's arms. Two left it wrapped up. After a few years it became a habit. I just didn't look at that corner of the room anymore.

*

The good year started like every year. It started with a March rain that promised nothing. Since the rainy season started in May.

But that rain didn't leave. It rained for three days. It stopped. It came back the next week. Then it came back again the week after.

Every morning I went out to look at the wheat on the slope. I looked at it the way you look at someone getting better from a sickness. You don't say anything. You don't want to ruin it.

By the middle of May the slope was green. It was a green I had never seen on my land. Not on my land, not on my father's land and not in my grandfather's land.

Mira came and stood in the door with the girl on her hip. Both of them were amazed by the wonderful view. Mira didn't say anything either. The two of us stood there for a long time and looked at the slope. For the first time since my grandfather, it looked like the slope was going to give.

And it gave.

*

We reaped for over two weeks. My cuñado came to help, Mira's brother. Two men from across the river came too, because we couldn't finish it alone. We had to borrow a cart.

I had to learn things fast that I had never needed before. Where do you keep that much grain? Who do you sell it to without getting robbed or it going bad?

The señor up the hill sent his men for his share. They took his share. And there was still grain left. That was the part I couldn't get my head around. They took theirs, and there was still some left over. I was not a man of numbers or business.

With that year’s sales I put a new roof on the house. I bought Mira an iron olla. It was a stove pot as heavy and big as a small child. Mira used that olla until her last day, and then she left it to our little girl.

We ate meat that winter. Not once. Several times.

And I saved the few maravedís coins that were left. I saved them for the next year, which was bad. And for the year after that, which was worse. And for the year after that. The maravedís coins were long gone.

*

It never happened again. I sowed the slope fourteen more times. Fourteen times it was the same as always.

But I don't remember those fourteen years as bad years. I counted them from the good one. This is the third year after. This is the seventh year after.

The people in the village did the same thing, and they didn't even know it. When they wanted to place something in time, they said: it was around the years the wheat came in on the slope.

They weren't talking about me. They were talking about the weather. But I heard it, and I kept quiet, and it lasted me the whole day.

*

I died in my thirty-first winter, in March. The rain had soaked the third bancal, and I was fixing its wall when the wall came down on me. All of it. The stones I had stacked myself. My cuñado dug me out. Something inside me was broken. It took nine days.

Mira sat with me the last three nights. Mira didn't cry in front of me. Not once. I was grateful. I didn't tell her, because by then I could hardly talk.

The last thing I did was close my eyes. It was hard. It had always been hard.

And what I kept was not the harvest.

It was the weight of the iron olla when I lifted it to give it to Mira. It was the sound of that first March rain on the straw, the rain that promised nothing. It was Mira in the door with our little girl on her hip, not saying anything.

And it was the cold mud in my hands, from when I was very small and didn't know yet that my hands were mine.

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