Country folks, as usual, swore inventively at the baking May temperatures of their countryside fields this year.
Some planted early, sure rain was eminent. Others waited, costales (gunny sacks) filled with seed carefully protected from rodents.
Despite features of modernismo, fields were being splayed across hard-to-reach,
boulder-fenced mountainsides.
It’s slash-and-burn for Paco Arias and his family, though only two of us were dodging the sky’s celestial bonfire.
Campo lore had warned of a searing estiaje (dry season), and right now Paco and I took cover beneath a crook-branched mesquite. There, it was quiet. Nothing moved, not even insects, just the shadow of a single zoplote (buzzard) hunting on unmoving wings that molded flight from a high, slight breeze we cannot feel.
Paco and I — despite my rank-horse-bent back — have been repairing barbed-wire, bolder-based, huisache-spined fencing that kids, rain and wind-storms wrecked, strings of fencing leveled since last October.
Paco and I — he much more swiftly — have been lacing tall huisache branches into the upper strands of the barbed wire. Controlling stock — and curious interlopers.
His extended family — meaning some 20 people — and I became acquaintances in Rancho Santa Cruz in 1964 as a result of government financial recklessness that resulted in another financial depression.
Most of the family’s menfolk are clearing and burning off other fields, and most of the kids are in school, though several are working with their parents, doing other chores.
We’re working a series milpas (cornfields), some of which will also grow squash and beans when the rains arrive regularly on the area called Arroyo Gordo. A misnomer, for none of the arroyos here are fat, or wide. Most are just deep enough to make fencing across them a clumsy, rock-crowded, mean piece of work that generates inventive choruses of swearing.
We’re sitting, panting in the mesquite shade to doctor thirst that’s strangling us — me at least. Paco is almost as bad about water discipline.
He’s talking about his days as an alambrista — fence jumper. When he’s around North Americans— not often — and plunged deep into his cups, he sometimes speaks of “dumb f..king spics.”
At those times, one has an almost uncontrollable urge to reach out and gently hush him. Normally, he is a pleasant, funny man with a fondness for practical jokes, and distinguished by an imaginative rural resourcefulness. Though rough and certainly flawed in several ways, as we all are, he has no call for such self-abnegation.
Many city people light out for other places in May. For those who stay it’s often a time of restless parties, edgy conversations, twitchy emotional thresholds. At sidewalk cafes, even the young are skittish, blinking at the faintest breeze, eyeing strangers impatiently.
Yet May is a truth-teller. The early winds have raked the mountain-scapes raw, reduced everything to basics. What’s left is the hard impressive skeleton of the land, rearing ledges and ridges now altered by different colors and opened spaces to seem like magnificent primordial beasts taking eloquent ease.
And in the midst of this mid-May inferno, abruptly the hollow, rising saw of chicharras — cicadas, the “rain-callers,” reminding us of June’s rush of heavy moisture.
But now, I groan, getting slowly to my feet, and Paco swears. We go back to gingerly setting fence. Yanking straight the tangled ribbons of barbed wire, my companion hooting at nests of scorpions and black widows that favor rock walls for shade and the barest hint of lingering, hidden dampness.