Sanctuary Line (22 page)

I had spent many more hours of that summer practising how to drive. Teo would join me now whenever he could, though he never again asked for the keys. But mostly I was
alone at the wheel and in the landscape through which I drove. The lake glinted on the left- or the right-hand side, depending on which direction I was going, and then there were the apple trees. Because it was late in the season they were filled with the Mexican pickers, Teo among them, their cotton shirts splashes of colour through the branches. Sometimes I could spot him on a ladder or in a field, other times he was hidden.

Recently I have become aware of how far this house really is from Sanctuary Line – the public road – of how long the lane is. I drive it each day and watch the old sugar maples cruise by the car windows. I drive it at night and see the two paths of the narrow track picked up by the headlights of the car and wonder if on that particular night the headlights were illuminated or if the driver navigated by the light of the moon.

Without making a statement of withdrawal, Teo and I abandoned the game. Neither of us had properties worth defending anyway, so we sold out to Mandy, her brothers, and a couple of their friends. Mandy, I think, had all the railroads. Shane had Boardwalk and Park Place. Neither of us could win, and we knew it, but that wasn’t what made me want to walk away. I had lost interest in everything but
Teo’s face across the table, the intensity of his regard. The days were growing shorter and we hadn’t much time.

Walking up the beach, he told me about his grandfather.

“An old man,” he said, “very old. And always poor. We are, all of us, very poor.” He spoke the word
poor
in two syllables. “But a great man,” he added, “a fighter for the revolution.”

He said the word
revolution
with such vehemence, it made the term electric and meaningful to me. But this was something so far from my own small realm of experience there was nothing I could say about it.

“Neither one of us has a father,” I said. “I don’t really remember mine.”

“No.” Teo stopped walking for a moment. “I can’t remember either. But my mother said he was a good man.”

I was pleased that Teo couldn’t recall his father. It made what was developing between us feel even more important, less accidental. The fact that we were semi-orphaned was a link between us, one that could never be broken. “And your school?” I asked.

“There I am good.” He smiled. “I will go to agricultural college. This” – he moved one arm back toward the fields and orchards – “this is how I will make money for that.”

“Will you come here then, to go to college?” I had been gradually gaining a bit of knowledge of his life in a country that, until only two weeks ago, was connected to sombrero hats and what I had learned about certain vanished tribes when I studied the explorers in grade school.

“No, no, I will not come here. Here I can only be a worker.” We had taken off our shoes and were walking on the edge of the sand where the cool water touched our feet. I remembered our little paper boats but did not bring that memory to his attention.

“You dance with your mother,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “we dance. She has taught me, and sometimes we dance for tourists, for money.”

“With your mother?”

“No, she has only taught me. At home I dance with other young people she has also taught. We have special clothing. And shoes.”

I imagined there might be girls involved in this dancing, and this troubled me a bit, so I didn’t ask. He would be graceful: the dancing would be electric, like the revolution, but I didn’t want to discover any more about it. By now we had come to the rocky part of the shore. I stumbled, and he held out his hand and clasped my bare upper arm to steady me. The first moon of the autumn was rising, large and orange in the sky. A silence fell between us, and when he dropped his hand I moved in front of him and continued to walk along the shore. We rounded the point where the platforms of ancient limestone moved out into the lake, and eventually we came to a large smooth area where the sand was more plentiful than it was near the house. There was a log here where one could sit, and the cold remnants of a half-burnt campfire made by Shane or Don sometime earlier in the summer.

Teo wandered through the moonlight collecting kindling, and when he had found a fistful of twigs he dropped them on the partly charred wood and produced a packet of matches. I knew that he sometimes smoked in the bunkhouse with the men, and I remember the glow of the lit match in the shelter of his palm, how adult and masculine the image seemed. Once the fire was blazing, he sat beside me on the log, his arms on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him. The moon had diminished in brightness because of the fire, and now everything outside of the circle of warmth had become darker. Teo began to hum softly, and then he sang:

“La Chamuscada” le dicen ’onde quera,
porque sus manos la pólvora quemó
entre las balas pasó le pelotera,
la “revolufia” sus huellas le dejó.

I asked him to tell me what the words were saying.

“‘La Chamuscada.’ The Burnt One. A song from the revolution about a woman. A
soldadera
. A woman fighter. The burnt one, they call her everywhere,” he translated, “because gunpowder burnt her hands. The revolution left its mark upon her.”

His grandmother fought, he told me. It was how she met his grandfather. “He was only my age, she a few years older. Now she is dead.” He hummed the tune for a moment.
“My grandfather was only fifteen when he went to fight. The rest of his life, the rest of their lives were not so important because they remembered always this fighting. My great-grandfather too. He went with Pancho Villa in the mountains when the Americans were looking for him, for Pancho Villa. And my great-grandfather, he took his son with him.” Teo turned to look at me. “My grandfather was younger than you and me are, and he was in the mountains fighting to keep some small bit of land for a farm.” He stopped talking and threw a stone he had found in the sand into the path the moon was making on the lake. I wanted to ask who this Pancho Villa was, imagining him, because of his name, as a Mexican covered by a blanket and wearing a sombrero.

I wanted to ask, but I didn’t, out of embarrassment, I think. The history I knew was so narrow it concerned only the British Isles, their kings and queens, their wars; that and the folk history of my own family. Instead, I told him that my uncle, too, had gone to be a soldier when he was very young, that he had had to run away to do this. “He didn’t go with his father,” I added. “And there wasn’t any war then.”

“You see, we are not so young:” Teo seemed almost defensive. “We are not too young to have love.”

“No,” I said, though whether in refusal or agreement I wasn’t sure.

He only kissed me twice after that; once when I said the word
no
and again a few moments later. It is foolish and sentimental to suggest that something like that can alter one’s outlook completely, but it seems to me that that is what happened. There was a whole life in those kisses, I think now, or at the very least a full young adulthood. There were the letters we would never get to write to each other. There was next summer and the one after that. In my weakest moments, barely awake at dawn, I think there may have even been the possibility of us operating this farm together in those kisses, tending the orchards and planting the fields, and perhaps some children waiting to be born. I realize that this is all an indulgence. How would we have managed it, after all? The immigration papers, the long road of schooling and changing ahead of both of us before immigration could even have been thought of. There would have been his family, and mine, both objecting vigorously, the complete incompatibility of our winter childhoods. His Catholic religion. My utter lack of any religion at all. Any one of those things could have left us staring at each other in the cold light of day; the combination of these factors, any rational person must admit, would have made anything I imagined impossible.

And yet we keep these things, don’t we, these unresolved touches in the dark? I bring the girl I was that night back to life as I tell you this, her astonishment in the face of shared love. She walks right up to my elbow, completely
empty of the hard knowledge she would gain only hours later, and for a moment or two I am able to see everything through her eyes, the way the beach looked, and the smooth surface of Teo’s palm when he held my hand as we walked back to the house, my sudden awareness that the keys to the car were still in the pocket of the shorts I was wearing and had been wearing when I drove up and down Sanctuary Line that afternoon. I bring that girl back and with her comes Mandy, innocent of love or war, asleep in her yellow bedroom in the house, her dreams a concoction of summer dances, disturbing poetry, and new fall fashions.

The car was parked at some distance from the house, which was a good thing because, careful as we were about closing the doors after we slid into the front seat, and in spite of the fact that I didn’t turn on the lights until we reached the end of the long drive, I feared the noise of the engine starting up might have alerted someone, though I knew the one most sensitive to noise, my aunt, was safely across the lake. As it was, we drove undetected down Sanctuary Line until we came to a public boat launch where we could park. Teo put his arm around me and I placed my head on his shoulder, aware that if he had been a boy from the pavilion and not from Mexico it would have been him, not me, behind the wheel. We caressed each other and talked, comfortable now with the affection that was growing between us. The radio softly played the songs that were popular at that time, and among those songs were lyrics describing
the end of summer and the separation of lovers. We were quiet when songs like this played. Neither one of us spoke about our own impending separation, the miracle of the present, this intimacy taking precedence over anything that might happen next.

“He never went with Pancho Villa to the mountains, my great-grandfather,” Teo told me. “I said that because of all those stories your uncle tells. I think you will love me if I have stories too.” He put his hand on the back of my neck under my ponytail. “Maybe you cannot love me if I tell you only we are poor and my grandfather did nothing but work till he died of a cough, and my great-grandfathers had no barns that blew away or lighthouses, or even any land” There had never been any gunfights, he confessed sadly. He said their lives – the lives of everyone he knew – were unimportant replicas of other unimportant lives being lived all around them. The people simply worked and then they died. And, surprised to find myself feeling womanly and adult, I ran my fingers over his cheekbone. I didn’t care about the gunfights or the mountains. When I had said the word
no
down at the beach, it must have been in response to a premonition of what would happen later that night because everything I felt sitting beside him in the car was simple and natural and affirmed. He opened my blouse and placed his face and then his mouth on my small breasts and, though I was startled by this, nothing in me wanted to stop him from doing it. He kissed my hands and placed them
under his shirt on the silk of his own skin near his waist. Then he carefully closed my blouse, button by button, with his mouth on my mouth. I was aching under the spell of this transformation, this evolution of feeling. For the first time I knew that there existed a state of being that was both unbearable and hungered for.

There have been a few men in the intervening decades, and I have known physical pleasure and satisfaction, but the ghost of Teo – a boy I was just beginning to know – has always stood between those men and me in any room we entered. Maybe I was hoping to resurrect his ghost in them, or maybe that’s not it at all. But I have stayed with no one I have touched for longer than a few months because not one of them, in any real way, has truly touched me.

Later, when we returned to the farm, I slowly eased the car back into its spot near the end of the lane and we walked hand in hand across the lawn, skirting around the picnic table where the Monopoly board glowed in the moonlight. There on the grass, Teo tried to teach me to dance in the way that he and his mother danced, but I was awkward and stumbling and finally he threw his hands up in mock despair and laughed at me. Then we danced in the slow way that teenagers at the pavilion had been dancing all summer long, while Teo quietly sang once again the sad song about
la Chamuscada
. I asked him if the Burnt One had died, and
he said no, she didn’t die, at least not then. The house was dark and silent. Everyone is asleep, I thought, and Teo and I had no business being out here in the dark alone together long after he should have been in the bunkhouse and I should have been in the narrow bed across from Mandy’s in her room. Tomorrow Teo would have to be back in the trees; the harvest was in full swing and each evening trucks filled with produce departed for the city. Tomorrow I would begin to pack up my summer clothes in preparation for my return to the red brick house and to school. Still we stood with our foreheads touching and our arms around each other swaying in the dark as if this were the most natural thing to do at one o’clock in the morning in the vicinity of orchards. From the window beside this table I can see exactly where we stood, though the fences have fallen into disrepair and the trees are mostly dead and choked by weeds. He kissed me once more, and this time his tongue began a slow exploration of the inside of my mouth. It was in the middle of this kiss that we became aware of lights in the drive and quickly drew apart, hurrying behind a cedar bush beside the house as my aunt’s car came to a halt ten feet from where we were standing.

I will never know exactly why my aunt decided to make the return trip in the middle of the night, but at that moment I thought it was because she couldn’t bring herself to believe my uncle would be able to properly oversee what was going to take place in the kitchen. She doesn’t trust
him, was the thought I recall passing through my mind. Teo was still holding my hand when we saw their bedroom window blaze with light, then close down to darkness again. My aunt reappeared in the moonlight and hurried across the yard, passing within three feet of us as she moved toward Teo’s mother’s trailer.