Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, late 1940s. Alba Martinez awoke at her husband’s first stirrings. She slipped her dry brown feet into her chancletas and moved through the thin gray light that seemingly welled out of the still objects and sleeping forms of her five sons, heaped in their bed across the single room of their three-sided house. She shivered and glanced at the milky vista framed by the broad ragged opening. The sun was still an hour away. The withered picket fence was almost lost against the charcoal sweep of the hillside across the road, while the crest of the land was only beginning to darken against the coming dawn. She lit the wood in the stove and the leaping flame drew the last of the black night to itself and devoured it. The crickets and treefrogs blanketed the hills with their cries.

It was an unusually chilly morning. She stepped lightly to the cabinet near the sleeping boys and pulled out her sweater; she drew it quickly around her house dress, her broad sunburnt shoulders, and hugged it to herself as she stared into the chinks of the stove at the shifting firelight. She fingered the thin wool absently, remembering the day Lucio brought it home from the American canteen at the base. It had been her birthday. She prepared and fried a meager omelette, edging it onto a chipped plate on the stool beside the stove to worry with her fork as she continued making breakfast.

Lucio groaned from where he sat at the edge of mattress, leaned over and spat into the bedpan, rubbed his face. Alba glanced at him and quickly set his omelette on the table, scooped grounds into the coffee pot, filled the water chamber and set the pot on the stove, then hefted the battered tin buckets of feed out from under the sink. As Lucio chewed at his omelette, she stepped into the gray outdoors and carried the feed around to the yard in back. The two goats skittered towards her, bleating, pale wire-haired motion against the darkness. Two— not three. Not any more. Alba looked into their eyes as they lifted their heads to butt lightly at her legs. They had strange eyes, stranger by far than a cat’s, and this morning they sent a chill through her with their questions. Where is Nona? Is she coming back? She scattered the feed and the eyes lowered as the goats bowed their heads to scrabble and nose the earth. She set the bucket down as she scanned the fence, clearer now in the gathering light, to find the telltale streak of blackened blood. Where, in the suffocating heat of the late afternoon before, Lucio had knocked Nona down in a rage and killed her.

He’d come back from the air base bent practically double from the day’s work and found his new hoe in the dirt, its handle chewed and splintered. Alba had been tending the stove when she heard his bellow of outrage: the hours, horas de puta that he’d put breaking his back digging ditches for the Americans to buy his tools and now the bitch pregnant goat had ruined them. She stumbled out back to find him facing the fence, kicking Nona over and over, her hooves tossing feebly in the air and scratching at the soil, head thrown back against the pickets and shuddering, eyes searching the sky, tongue lolling. “Lucio, por Dios, dejala!” He grasped the top of the fence for support as he finished her off, panting with the effort, his torso rising and falling as he paused to gather strength for the last few blows. His shirt was black with sweat, and thick threads of Nona’s blood lay about seeping into the brown earth. Alba turned, sick, and rushed back into the house.

Now she turned away again, this time to tend to the chickens in the wire cage across the yard and against the back of the house. The hens clucked softly and gathered at her feet, pecking at the falling seeds. The rooster in the corner cocked its fierce head, combs trembling, keeping one eye on the puttering hens, the other on the paling sky. Lucio was on the other side of the plank wall, dressing for work. His belt buckle clanking once, hard, on the floorboards. Alba sucked her teeth at the sound and shook her head, knowing that now at least one and soon all five boys would be awake.

 “Dios,” she murmured, as the sound of clattering, colliding wood and heavy workboot steps shook the meager frame of the house. He was collecting his shovels, which had been propped into the corner by the wide opening. He normally left them in the shed out beside the chicken enclosure, but after the ruin of his other tools he grew fearful about losing them to a thieving neighbor so he brought them inside.

She had watched him from the stove the night before as he leaned them gingerly in place, brooding. She knew that if he wanted to truly protect his investment he’d have thrown them in the tall cabinet in the far corner, away from the entrance. But likely the thought to bait his neighbor must have flashed like a tear of lightning in the thundercloud of his mind, still roiling and murderous from the afternoon’s violence. Moncho just might have the cojones to sneak up to the house, right up to the maw of the entrance, if he so happened to catch a glimpse of the shovels just leaning there within easy reach. He’d come in the morning twilight, just before he expected Lucio to be awake. Only Lucio would be laying in bed in the darkness eyes wide and ringed with hate, and he’d see Moncho clear as a shadow against the dirty sky, reaching for his fate.

Alba knew his thoughts even as she watched his own shadow against the sky, as he refined his trap, laying the shovels against the corner post just so, adjusting the long pole handles to be visible from the road. “El propio Diablo,” she had whispered under her breath over the simmering pots. The Devil himself. Then a tender remorse clenched her throat and dropped like a stone into her very being. “Ay, Lucio. Lucio.”

She’d served dinner to man and sons without a word, then sat to eat her own on a low wooden stool a pace from the table and closer to the pots on the stove; as the sound of shifting young feet on the floorboards and chewing and sipping and swallowing filled the house, Alba had thought about Nona’s ripe, low-hanging belly. She’d been looking forward to the birth— she hadn’t seen a newborn goat since she was a little girl.

Her thoughts had turned to her own stillborn, little Renaldo, and tried to imagine him struggling to make a space for himself between his boisterous older brothers at the table. Who would relent and make room first, she wondered. Tito and Julio would wordlessly huddle to make a barrier even as they mimicked their father between forkfuls, peering by turns at his sullen aspect and then some far horizon, their smooth young brows soon to be marred by those lines of abstract manly concerns. Martín and Efraín might pause long enough in their whisperings and nudges, their fast and fickle bondings and fallouts, to let their little brother into the fold. But first they’d play at keeping him out, forcing him to push his way in, goading him on and laughing.  His tiny pressing fingers would appear first, then his hands, caramelitos, splayed against his brothers’ sun-darkened shoulders to pry them apart inch by inch to make room for his snarling, laughing little face below a head of thatched black hair, eyes bright with triumph as he shouldered in and threw one leg over the bench, then the other, settling in to let his gaze dance over the plates of food on the table before him.

Alba closed her eyes, passing a hand over them, dropping the fork in the other into the pot on her lap. She felt her imagination ebb in the welter of the little room open to the grinding sound of critters and treefrogs in the night. Try as she might, she couldn’t truly add Renaldo’s face to the roster in her mind. It was always the face of one the younger boys she superimposed; Martín’s or Efraín’s or Adán’s warm full cheeks and moist flashing eyes, lips pursed or open and hollering, blotting out Renaldo’s compacted purple features, as still and bruised as a fallen apple, carried off by the midwife. She looked out to the fence in the darkness, suddenly very tired. Blessed with five, she thought.

Perhaps it was good that God took him back.

Photo credits:
Jack Delano. Member of a Sugar Cooperative, vicinity of San Piedras, Puerto Rico, January 1942
Rogelio Doratt. Coquí Frog, USDA/APHIS/WS/National Wildlife Research Center
MegaPixel2007. Goat eye