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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “What Remains” Down in the Dirt, v143 (the March 2017 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Study in Black the Down in the Dirt July-Dec. 2016 collection book		get the 418 page Jan.-April 2017 Down in the Dirt issue anthology 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

El Balo

Kitta MacPherson

    It was still dark, too early to rise. In the stillness, Balo thought about his garden and how it would soon glisten in the morning sun.
    He imagined striding through the coffee field under a clear blue sky, his arms akimbo, his fingers brushing the coffee’s soft green leaves. The plants were now as tall as the boy. Their white, sweet-smelling flowers stretched around him, with bright green buds peeking from beneath. The searing heat of the sun bled through his sombrero. He pressed the moist black earth under his feet as he headed uphill. The nine-year-old felt as though he were glowing. He knew that his coffee plants, along with his tiny side plot of maiz, plantanos, frijoles negroes, chiltipin, and jalapeno, were lush and well established in this, their second year. He had started early in the spring, waking when it was still dark. It had taken him three months to dig the holes and map the rows, crawling on his hands and knees at dawn and dusk before and after school. He knew that when the coffee beans grew red, he would pick them and make good money. Ahead, in his imagining, he spied a multitude of bright green buds, dotting his field of view. The field was not his, or his family’s. Grandma, his abuelita, rented the two acres, along with many more, from Señor Dominguez, a man who didn’t seem to work but lived in a big house in Misantla, a village below his family’s home on the mountain. The coffee, corn, banana, and bean plants, though, were a different matter. They belonged to Balo.
    He was startled by a sound like the one a jaguar must make. At least that’s what he thought a dying jaguar might sound like, based on an account by his tio Jose of an encounter with the animal last year in a jungle in the south. This sounded like a band of screaming jaguars and it hurt his ears. He was confused. He wanted to hide from the roar. And he wanted to see what the noise could be. He leapt from the petate mat he slept on, throwing off his zarape, and ran through the center of his long house to his front door. He was about to knock away the whittled tree branch that held the door closed when a sound reached him that was more fierce than the roar. “¡Deténgase!” Grandma yelled, sweeping up behind him, her arm, like steel, yanking him from the door. “There’s a hurricane outside,” she said, her chocolate eyes staring him down. “It will blow you away.” She looked at the thin, small child, the third of her son’s four sons. With his sharp, alert features, and his thick, straight black hair streaming down his back, he reminded her of his father, Martin, her oldest son, at the same age. Balo’s golden brown skin was that of his mother’s. The woman’s eyes started to moisten. She steeled herself. This child was tougher and more stubborn than any of the others. He was like her.
    The huracán whipped Balo’s town of Salvador Diaz Miron for two days. The boy and his family — his brothers, Constantine, Jaime, and Eusebio, Balo’s father, Martin, and Martin’s three brothers, the brothers’ wives and babies, and Grandma – confined themselves to the windowless, sturdy stone home for the duration. When the wind whipped up and shrieked, Grandma stared at the roof as if she was looking through it at the sky and mutter words in her Totonac Indian dialect, a language known only to her.
    The house where Balo and his family stayed was dark. He could see the glow from the kitchen where Grandma burned an oil candle as she prepared food. It was just enough light to allow him to reach for a pouch he had secreted, spy its contents, and poured it out into his palm. These were his marbles. He had spent many hours of many days under a clump of trees near his home flicking them into a ring shaped in the dirt by a stick. He would play with his brothers and friends on hot afternoons when most of the work was done. Most of his marbles, about a dozen of them, were either red brown or golden amber. His “shooter,” the largest marble, was his favorite. He used this one to ricochet the others out of their confinement so they could be reclaimed as his. This one was the color of the sky with a swirl of white, like the clouds. He never said the word aloud, especially when playing with his brothers, but he called this one his cielo, his heaven. He clasped it now and held it up before his face. He squinted to look into it. He imagined riding the swirls of that world.
    The wind of the hurricane continued to roar. Sometimes his tios’ babies would cry but they would be soothed by the coos of their parents. He could hear his grandmother, too. She didn’t speak but the sounds of her labor reached him. The snap of the branches as she thrust them into the fire, the whoosh of the water droplets she spilled as she balanced the cookpot above the flames, the thud of the wide flat stone she used to break the corn kernels and make the corn meal – these formed the rhythm of his day. His family did not fear the ocean during the storm for it was very far from their home. Their worry focused on what normally was a clear, gentle brook that forked off a river in the valley and ran about 100 yards from their home.
    On the second day of the storm, the wind did not complain as much. Rain pelted the house. And water – brown, frothy liquid — rolled under the inner walls like a stealthy invader. Balo watched the water pool at the wall’s edges and then disappear as the dirt floors drank it in. Grandma walked through the house, examining the floodwater.
    “Don’t touch it,” she told Balo, strolling back to the kitchen.
    Late in the evening, someone banged on the front door. Grandma heaved it open. Balo’s tio, Rigoberto, his wife, Alicia, and their children, Santiago, Beatriz, and Heliodoro, raced inside. They were drenched. The children looked startled, as if they had been asleep. They were in their nightclothes. They settled in a corner of the house and were quiet.
    Balo woke at dawn on the third day. He could not hear the wind. His grandmother was in the kitchen. Balo dashed to her.
    “It’s over!” he shouted, nearly dancing.
    “Eat,” she said. “Then we’ll see.” She did not look happy.
    Balo could barely eat his fried tortilla, he was too excited about going outside again. He dipped the fried corn meal in a cup of hot coffee, gulped it down and headed for the door. Outside, the world was a mess. The normally neat field beyond his house was strewn with broken branches. He heard water rushing. He looked to his right. The brook near his house, always so docile, had swollen to the size of a river. Water was flowing like rapids just feet from his Tio Rigoberto’s wooden house. Rigoberto’s roof was gone. He remembered hearing Grandma tell Rigoberto when he was building his home that it would never last in their part of the country. At the time, Balo didn’t know what she meant by that. As he rounded the devastated home, he spotted Alicia’s tiny herb garden – or what was left of it. The oregano and cilantro plants were flattened as if a giant had walked by. He thought then with horror of his coffee plants.
    He had to walk for an hour up the mountain to get there. He feared what he might see. The scene which came into view as he raced the final few yards up the curving path was worse than he had imagined. Large, garish patches of dirt like a man’s bald spots dominated the field. These were where coffee plants had been. The rest were broken at their bases and flattened to one side on the ground. They looked as though they had given up fighting and gone to sleep. A bolt of anger shot through him. “No!” he shouted. Furiously he kicked at the dirt with his feet. Then he ran to see the smaller plot to the side of the field. All his beautiful, special plants — his maiz, plantanos, frijoles negroes, chiltipin, and jalapeno – were destroyed. Most were uprooted. His body became a river. Alternating currents of anger, then sadness, then hopelessness flowed from his chest, up through his parched throat, to his eyes. He hadn’t cried in a long time. Now, he couldn’t help it.
    “Why?” He cried out to the sky. “What a waste.”
    He spent hours walking the rows and studying the plants, looking for survivors. It was a total loss. Time passed. The sun moved to the other side of the sky and the light fell on the ravaged field sideways. He knew it was time to walk home.
    By the time he reached his house, he felt as if he was a dried husk of corn drained of its pulp. He was empty and hard. His grandmother stood outside, pulling clothes out of a pot of boiling water. She reached into the hot water without wincing and grabbed a man’s blue shirt. She wrung it out and draped it on a rope strung between two poles.
    “Your garden?” she asked.
    “Gone,” he said. “All gone.”
    She remained silent and kept at her work.
    Balo looked at her and cried, “I worked so hard! For nothing!”
    His grandmother looked at the boy’s face, caked with dirt and streaked with tears, his eyes puffy from crying. “Life is very hard,” she said. “You need to know that. You will grow other things.”
    The boy stood very still. “No, abuelita,” Balo said. “I will never plant again.”
    The schoolhouse of Salvador Diaz Miron was a modest structure. Like Balo’s house, it was made of large, round brown stones that had been dragged from the riverbed during dry seasons. It was longer, though, and divided into four rooms. There were no windows. A rusty, gray petroleum generator at the rear powered fluorescent lights that hummed and flickered overhead. The rooms were cool. Balo liked to watch Señor Reyes step under the light at his schoolroom’s center. He was not a tall man but he looked strong. He had broad shoulders and arm muscles you could see through his starched dress shirt. The teacher wore pants so his leg muscles were not visible, but Balo’s brothers had seen Señor Reyes kick a soccer ball clear across the schoolyard once. He wore gold-rimmed glasses which softened his sharp features – prominent cheekbones and a hawk-like nose. His hair was thick, black and short. He was from Mexico City. The teacher’s cheap watch gleamed as it caught the light, looking as though it were made of real gold. His sonorous voice filled the room as he read aloud one of Balo’s favorite fables about a young woman’s search for her child on a wild mountain and her conversations with clever foxes she meets along the way. Balo’s elder brothers hated school and had already dropped out. Balo loved his classes. He enjoyed writing his name in script with his yellow pencil on the spotless white sheets of looseleaf paper Señor Reyes distributed to the class each morning. Balo wrote the capital “B” of his first name with a flourish that made Señor Reyes smile when he walked by his desk. When Señor Reyes stood at the front of the class and talked about numbers, Balo could see them in his mind. When Señor Reyes spoke about dates and events in Mexican history and asked the class questions, Balo’s hand always shot up first. The numbers of math, the dates of history, even the letters that spelled words all lived in his head together very comfortably, the answers appearing whenever they were needed. It made Balo happy. He was nearly finished with third grade. He liked thinking that, while he grew, his knowledge would, too. He saw his head filling slowly, like the goblets holding dark wine at his tio’s wedding.
    Balo didn’t like the way his classmate, Pedro Morales, sneered at him and turned away when he entered school each morning. Balo knew he didn’t smell – he washed himself every morning with the cool rainwater collected by the cistern outside his house. And his hair was long, but combed. Most of the children wore uniforms – the girls in white blouses and dark blue skirts, white anklets and shoes, and the boys in white button-down dress shirts, dark blue slacks, socks and shoes. Balo didn’t have a uniform. He had a few cotton T-shirts, all made with multi-colored horizontal stripes. And his pants, his only pair, were made of thick, coarse canvas. He cinched them around his waist with a rope. The pants were baggy and reached only to his shins. He hated his clothes. He had asked his grandmother to make him longer pants from a different fabric. She said the rough canvas was good enough. Anything longer, she said, would just get dirty. Balo didn’t own any shoes.
    One morning, as Balo headed toward the entrance to school, Pedro jumped out, as if he had been waiting inside. Pedro was tall and thin, with dark eyes that gleamed a funny way when he looked at you. His black hair was parted to the side and shiny, like a silly actor Balo remembered from a movie he had seen with his brothers. Pedro’s uniform and his black leather shoes looked new. “You can’t come in here!” Pedro said, blocking the door. He was shouting. He contorted his face, looked at Balo and said, “You are nothing.” Balo stared at his feet. He lifted one sole for examination and spied specks of dried mud. He had walked to school, after all, along the same dirt path he always followed. He felt strange, as if his mind and his body were on fire. He tried to talk but stammered. “But...” Balo started. “But...” he tried again. He couldn’t get the words out. He wanted to explain that there was no money for items like clothes and shoes in his family, especially for him. He didn’t know why things were the way they were – no one had ever explained. He didn’t know where to begin. No, he thought. This boy would never understand. He turned and ran. He sped along, retracing his path. After a quarter of an hour, he reached home. His grandmother was frying tortillas in the kitchen when he walked in. She looked up at him without expression, as if he had interrupted her in the midst of a thought so compelling she didn’t want to let it go.
    “No school today!” he said, looking away. “Señor Reyes is sick. I feel sick, too.”
    She said nothing, pressing on with her work. Balo flung himself on his sleeping mat and curled up. He slept. Later, he heard a rapping on the front door. He didn’t know what time it was. He heard his grandmother’s voice.
    “Balo,” she said, “come in here.”
    Balo rubbed his eyes and stood up. He entered the kitchen. Señor Reyes was seated on a chair by The Rock, a huge, table-shaped slab of granite Balo’s family used for their meals. His grandmother had told him long ago that they decided to build the house around it rather than move it. Grandma handed Señor Reyes a cup of coffee.
    “Gracias, Señora,” the teacher said.
    The strong, sweet smell filled the room. Balo hung his head. He liked Señor Reyes and he was embarrassed about leaving school. Now his grandmother would find out that he was lying, too. Señor Reyes smiled at Balo.
    “He is a good boy,” Señor Reyes said, looking at Balo’s grandmother. “He is very smart.”
    Then, looking at Balo, the teacher said gently, “What happened today?”
    Balo froze for a moment and thought hard. He knew he wasn’t afraid of a fight. He had been too embarrassed to talk to Pedro. He looked at Señor Reyes again and studied his kind face. He decided to take a chance. The truth was the truth. He told the teacher about Pedro and how his teasing had gone on for so long. He couldn’t stand it anymore, he said. Señor Reyes turned back to Balo’s grandmother. She was cooking and her back was turned.
    Señor Reyes continued: “My wife and I, we love children. I am sad to say that God has not blessed us with our own.”
    He paused and swallowed. “Señora,” he said.
    He did not speak and waited for Balo’s grandmother to turn and face him.
    “Please. Let Balo live in town with us. We could teach him everything he needs to learn. He is a bright boy and he could go very far. We would teach him to pray and bring him to church. We would love him. I give you my word.”
    Grandma kept stirring the pot of beans but she was looking at him now, frowning. She looked furious. “Please go outside,” she said to him. “I must speak with the boy.”
    Señor Reyes slowly headed to the door. As he reached it, he turned and smiled at Balo. He looked sad. Then he looked at Grandma one more time and said, “Please think about it.”
    When the door closed again, the old woman turned back to her task and spoke softly, as softly as Bardo had ever heard her speak. “Go,” she said, without turning around. “Go!”
    As Balo pushed the door open, he thought he heard his grandmother draw in a great breath. He looked back once more. Grandma stood erect and silent, her back still turned. He moved into the sunshine.

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