THE LAND, UNENDING by Analía Villagra

Sofia is not the prettiest Insfrán sister. She is darker, smaller than Carolina, lacks Ramona’s bright smile and nearly blonde curls. She does not possess Carolina’s dazzling voice and musical talent nor Ramona’s ease in conversation. Their mother can dispassionately list Sofia’s many flaws and shortcomings; it is as though with each pregnancy her body had improved its process, produced better and better progeny, but of all the girls Sofia speaks the best English, and so it is she who will be set upon a boat and shipped north to America. There are not enough men left in the country for all of them, their mother concluded. The family has a cousin – second, third, perhaps not a cousin at all but a close family friend – Hipólito Saguier Gaona, a doctor in Washington, DC. Surely he and his wife, an American!, know eligible men who will take an interest in a young woman with ink-pot eyes and steel-dark hair, with a facility for language if not for conversation, who can cook if not entertain. Her mother has spoken to his mother who has written to him and received an affirmative reply, yes, send the girl, we would be happy to welcome her into our home.
The doctor and his wife have a small child, five or six years old, and Sofia’s mother is sure she can be useful in such a household.
“But only be as useful as a cousin would be,” she reminds her quiet daughter. “You are not their servant. They are family, or near enough, and they are extending a favor, not charity. I am paying your passage myself, you owe them nothing.”
She pinches Sofia’s chin lightly between her thumb and forefinger, then tilts it up and kisses her once on each cheek and waves her off.
The boat will take her south down the Río Paraguay to the Río Paraná and then to Buenos Aires where she will board another, larger ship and sail north, finally, up the Atlantic coast of Brazil, across the Caribbean and the southeastern United States to Baltimore, and finally by stagecoach to Washington, DC, the capital. She has traced the route on a map in one of her father’s old books, in awed silence listened to the shush of her fingertip over the page, moving up and up.
The journey is long and dominated by the sloshing of her stomach.
She imagines she can hear the lapping of it against the inner walls of her ribs and skin, but no, the sound is that of the actual water smacking ruefully against the side of the boat, releasing a fine spray of briny water that clings heavily to her clothes and hair. At night she runs a fingernail over her face and flicks away the dusty white grains. Nothing ever quite dries. One of the sailors, he’d been on the riverboat crew too and changed ships with her in Buenos Aires, watches her rigid posture as she clings to the railing and he offers her something wrapped in a dirty handkerchief. He speaks to her in Guaraní, and though she can only answer in Spanish, she chews the thumb-sized chunk of ginger at his instruction. Maybe it helps, maybe the sharp jolt of it on her tongue and between her teeth distracts her from the seasickness, either way, some relief. There are stops and storms, this unending journey, but, Sofia reasons, at least the physical discomfort distracts her from any of the deeper fears that threaten the hazy border of her subconscious – she will drown, she will shipwreck on some uncharted island, her cousin will turn her away – she is afraid, in short, of the myriad ways a woman can vanish in the world, but she is too sick to give them name, and so as she vomits clear liquid over the edge into the water, she is grateful.
The sea itself is wondrous. Hundreds of dolphins, their leaping gray bodies covering miles of ocean. At night she watches the bright, changing face of the moon drifting its way across the star-spangled sky. Once, in the distance, dark clouds and sharp slashes of lightning darted like jagged scars toward the earth. Her stomach coils even tighter around itself in anticipation of the pounding storm they sail toward, but she cannot help but admire the fearsome beauty of it. Even during storms she drags herself up to the deck for fresh air. To see the face of danger is somehow less frightening than sitting in her little coffin of a room and only feeling it. During tempests the ocean goes dark, burnt clay-colored, throbbing brown and ash like all the blue in the world has fled elsewhere, and when it clears the blue returns, winking innocently. The Paraguayan sailor gives her more ginger and some mint too. He pats her hand and murmurs. I’m okay, she tries to say but her teeth stay clenched.
They stop somewhere in the Caribbean – Barbados, Cuba, Florida – she is not entirely sure where they are, only that she feels a flicker of temptation – to disembark, to disappear. If she, small woman alone in the world, is doomed to slip through the cupped hand of history like a droplet of water, better to do so on her own terms, and the sea here is nearly still, clear and dazzling blue and she can keep down more than broth and the shoreline glints with sand like diamonds and she can practically hear the lullaby rustle of the palm trees. It will not be beautiful like this in Washington. She has spoken to a few sailors, a few of her fellow passengers. Washington is a hot swamp in the summer, all sticky air and mosquitos, and frigid slush in winter, carriage wheels and boot heels stuck in the icy mud. It smells like burning to this day, one person claims, six years after the war. She smiles and thanks them for the information, tries to smile anyway, poor green-sick girl. The streets of Asunción turn muddy in the rain too, that does not concern her, but the cold? Of course she has heard of winter, seen blocks of ice imported from the highlands of Argentina, read descriptions of it in Dickens’s novels and accounts of Sir Shackleton’s Antarctic voyages – she prefers the latter, why bother with fictive marvels when the world itself is marvelous? If she were brave she would yearn to see such wonders as she has read about, pyramids and snow-capped mountains and jungles hiding ruined temples. She is on an adventure already, America! Her sisters were jealous of her, not as jealous as they would have been had their mother sent her to Paris or Madrid or New York, but jealous all the same. Her mind alights on the idea of adventure, but her body trembles and quakes. She is afraid, too afraid to sneak off the ship, too afraid to alter the fate set out before her.
It takes weeks, and when they arrive at last at the Port of Baltimore, Sofia is a blank slate, everything she was emptied into the sea, into another lifetime. It is February, winter here on the wrong side of the world, her damp clothes and damp coat not enough, the insulating layer of salt and grime not enough. Her breath is a weak cloud straining from her lips and she closes her eyes, imagines herself a whale, spitting a magnificent jet into the air. Her trunk has been set on the dock, a bag hangs from each of her stiff, frozen hands, and a neatly dressed man approaches her. His dark hair brushes the tops of his shoulders then curls gently upward. His eyes are a pale, anemic gray, the color of the frigid, overcast sky.
“Sofia?” he says, “Eres tú?”
He is younger than she expected. When she opens her mouth to answer, only air rattles out, has she spoken at all in the past week, her throat is ruined by stomach acid and disuse.
“I’m Hipólito,” he says. “It is good to see you have arrived safely. Let’s get you home. We will draw you a bath there, get you some hot tea.”
He touches his own throat, he understands. He waves a porter over to her trunk and takes the heavier bag from her, grasps her lightly at the elbow with his free hand, negotiating them out of the small crowd.
The carriage clatters out of one city and into another, this new city she wants so much to see, but her vision is blurry, no, it is not her eyes, the city itself is a blur, foggy and almost entirely gray. When they arrive at last at a house, the ground beneath her feet is gloriously, decadently still.
“Come along,” he nudges her gently
The house is small and narrow, squeezed into a row of other narrow houses.
Hipólito leads her up the stairs and points left, to the back of the house, “Our rooms are back there,” then to the right, “and this is yours.”
A bed, a dresser, a clawfoot tub. The window overlooks the street but it is not so busy, Hipólito assures her. A broad-shouldered woman with faded red hair enters and pours a steaming bucket of water into the almost-full tub.
“I’ll be up with a bowl of stew,” she says.
“Thank you, Mrs. O’Neill,” Hipólito replies.
He backs out of the room.
“Please, you must be exhausted. Eat, rest. We will talk more tomorrow.”
Sofia pries herself loose from her stiff clothes like an oyster shucking its own shell and sinks gratefully into the warm water which blackens quickly with the accumulated filth of her hair and skin. When she steps out she imagines she leaves the ocean behind, the brine and the bile, the sloshing waves and the silent, slithering fish. Mrs. O’Neill returns with a tray, and it is all Sofia can do to stay awake long enough to eat the soft potatoes and rich shreds of beef, the crusty bread and the hot, honeyed tea before she rests her head on the pil-low and her eyes close. It cannot be more than midday, but she falls instantly asleep.
She wakes to the little boy, perched like a sparrow on the edge of her bed. In her wavering half-awareness he is more cherub than boy, haloed by the weak winter light. The light darkens, the sun slipping behind a cloud as she rises to alertness, and the child sharpens into focus. His hair and skin are the same smooth copper color, she could believe him a wood carving rather than a real boy if not for the pink lips, the dove-gray eyes. His name is Nicolas, he tells her, stressing the first syllable rather than the last in his frank, American accent. He wants to know her name, if she is hungry. Hungry does not describe her – she is wrung out, leeched of all that would nourish a body and hold it upright. How to tell this bright, twittering little bird that she is a ghost. She creaks out some pained syllable, and he takes her hand. “You must come to breakfast with me.”
She swings a shawl around her shoulders and follows the boy down the stairs to the back of the house where she smells warmth, hears a rolling burble of something, oh please, food.
“There you are,” Mrs. O’Neill says to the boy. “Stop accosting our new friend here and eat your breakfast. Wiley little elf.”
She winks at Sofia, who thinks she might cry and must look it, for Mrs. O’Neill guides her to a chair and places a bowl before her.
“Eat up, dear. You look half-starved yourself.”
The food is the color and texture of paper slurry, but it is hot and Mrs. O’Neill adds a sprinkle of sugar. Hipólito comes into the kitchen in search of coffee.
“Look at the hungry wolf our boy dragged down for breakfast,” says Mrs. O’Neill, pinching Nicolas’s cheek.
“Nicolas, you cannot rouse our guest like that,” says his father. “I am sorry,” this, to Sofia. “However urgently my son may insist, you are welcome to ignore him and dress before you descend.”
Sofia pauses the shoveling of gruel into her mouth to modestly tug at her shawl, but she cannot stop eating, and Mrs. O’Neill wordlessly refills her bowl. Nicolas pops up from the table, yelling that he must fetch something from his room to show her.
Sofia smiles. “At any hour, it is nice to be so welcomed. Is the boy’s mother awake yet, your wife, sir? I’d like to meet her.”
“She was not my wife, and she is no longer with us.”
“Taken by the angels,” Mrs. O’Neill says, crossing herself. Childbirth, she explains, poor dear, though neither she nor Hipólito comment on the couple’s unmarried status.
Later, the older woman will confess to Sofia she had heard rumors the good doctor had a wife back in his country or that the young lady had a husband abandoned in Virginia or Kansas, but the pair was softspoken and kind, so who was she to worry about the bounds of propriety? She cared for them and their baby and their home. It was she who brought hot water and towels when Louise struggled through a second birth three years ago, an ordeal neither she nor the infant would survive, leaving Hipólito alone with his small and spirited son.
Though Sofia feels depleted by her journey, scraped clean like the inside of a gourd by so much loss and so much distance, at twentyseven she is young enough to recover quickly. She allows Nicolas to drag her from her room day after day. They wander erratically about the house, here the parlor, dull, back upstairs to his room, down again and outside to the frozen rectangles of wood that are vegetable boxes when spring thaws the icy soil, up to his room again to show her his books. When Nicolas goes to school, Sofia stands shyly next to Mrs. O’Neill in the mornings to chop carrots or fetch wood to boil big pots of laundry. Mrs. O’Neill tsks at the red cracks that jag over Sofia’s hands from the hot water and rough soap.
“You are too young and pretty for this,” she says. “We must find you a good man.”
Sofia blushes – does she know Sofia has been sent here to do just that? To find a man in this country where there are men still living? She must know. What else would Sofia be doing here.
“I am happy enough helping you.”
“Psh. All young ladies want their own household.”
The hours are bleary and dull, only the ache in her shoulders and hands to distract her, but better the muscle pain, better the sting of skin burnt by heat and lye than memories. Sofia stays up late and wakes early. Never mind the shadows beneath her eyes like silvery storm clouds, she hates to sleep, hates the bright dreams – home, warmth, her sisters, her mother, her cousins before they marched off with everyone else and like everyone else did not return. She wakes in a sweat, gasping as though she is drowning in the salty dew of her own body.
“Sofia?”
Hipólito has cracked open her bedroom door. He holds a candle and shadows dance over his face.
“Forgive the intrusion, the impropriety I mean, but you yelled. May I?”
She pulls her knees and quilt up to her chin, and he sits at the edge of her bed, touches the back of his hand to her forehead then brushes a finger beneath her eye to gently flick away a tear.
“We have seen terrible things,” he says. “Not long after I arrived here I went to Chancellorsville, then Gettysburg. On the battlefields,the hospitals, men in pieces, and the grass dark with blood. I imagine it was the same at home.”
She has not seen as much as he has, nor as much as Carolina, the only one of them brave enough to volunteer at the Hospital de Sangre in Asunción, who would return home limp and dirty and refuse to say a word about it.
“It is over now, though,” Hipólito says. “You are safe here. The dreams will recede, eventually, like a tide. You will be able to sleep, I promise, but until it comes naturally I can give you a few drops of something if you like.”
“That is kind of you, but no. I think I can sleep.”
He takes his candle and goes. Now that she is safely on land, her dreams are haunted by home – a city like this one of wide streets and low buildings, their walls pocked by mortar blasts and crumbled in the corners, the echoes of sobs, but her city was hot, the heat of the sun beaming down on grimaces of pain, it is a terrible shock to wake in the cold. She hates the dreams, but they are the only time she sees the faces of her family. She cannot conjure up their images in her mind during the day, as though they were apparitions, as though they never existed at all.
With Nicolas she feels something resembling happiness. The boy is exhausting, all energy, all talk, constant constant chatter, and though Sofia’s English is good she has never had to absorb so much of it and so rapidly. It makes her dizzy sometimes, as though she is still on the ship, the infinite ocean glimmering and rocking beneath her. She must look adrift because the boy will stop, “Miss Sofia, Miss Sofia, are you listening?” She is, she assures him, go on.
Sometimes, as they all sit together in the evenings by the fire, she reads to him – in English for her benefit, then in Spanish for his. The doctor tries to remind the boy of his native tongue, but he is often gone from the house, busy with his patients and his private preoccupations. Once, while making shadow puppets before the hearth, Nicolas laughs his high, twinkling laugh, and Mrs. O’Neill looks up from her knitting and clucks her tongue.
“Spitting image of his mother in this light.”
And Hipólito winces, that must be it then, the boy’s visage pains him, someone so merry and innocent and alive wears his beloved’s face. Sofia has seen Hipólito in the narrow alleyway beside the house with the daughter of the baker from the market, the girl’s skirts bunched around her waist like dirty laundry, the whole mess of her pounding rhythmically against the brick to the steady beat of his hips, wisps of hair sticking to her flour-dusted skin, sweaty despite the chill in the air. After the girl slides back onto her feet, he gives her a few coins. Once, as she left the alley, straightening her skirts and jingling the coins in her palm, she saw Sofia, held her gaze, and winked. The memory and the heat of the fire make Sofia redden.
Winter melts into spring, with clear skies and a green so tender and delicate Sofia holds her breath each time she goes outside. Hipólito takes her and Nicolas to walk along the tree-lined Mall and visit the exhibits in the red castle National Museum building. Later he sneaks them into Ford’s Theater to see the Army Medical Museum collection, the grim shelves of saws and bandages evoking a flurry of questions from Nicolas that his father looks unprepared to answer. Sofia, stomach in her throat, takes over, speaking softly of saving lives with quick thinking, of temporary pain and eventual recovery.
Some evenings, Sofia and Hipólito are left alone before the fire after Mrs. O’Neill shuffles Nicolas off to bed. Mostly, they sit in silence, but occasionally Hipólito will inquire after Asunción, city of his birth, his home. About a particular market, a plaza, a tailor shop. Did she know his family, he asks. She met his mother briefly before her journey. He has not been home in many years. He left in ’63, before the war. Is he lucky to have left when he did, to have watched the Americans tear one another open on the battlefield instead of watch his own people fall? Is he lucky to have welcomed his tiny American son into the world mere months after Solano López sent troops across the Argentine border, sealing Paraguay’s fate as Hipólito’s own future was settled safely far away?
She is taken aback when he sits across the kitchen table from her one late afternoon and takes her hand.
“You have been so good a companion to us, the house is fuller since you joined us. Nicolas – ” his voice catches. “Since his mother died, Nicolas has felt the absence of such female tenderness as you have given him. We are so glad of you and wish you to remain with us. What I am trying to say, dear Sofia, is would you be my wife, will you marry me?”
His face is full of earnest pleading but not with love. Sofia thinks of Louise, who shared his bed and bore his children – why was she never his wife? It does not matter. Hipólito is a mystery she chooses not to unravel. He is not her mystery.
“I am sorry,” she says, slipping her hands from beneath his and clasping them together in her lap. “I am not ungrateful for all you have done, and Nicolas is precious to me.” She pauses and considers her words. “I do not wish to marry you.”
“Is this not why your mother sent you here? To be married?”
“I am sorry.”
She cannot stay, how could she stay? She loves the little boy, his delighted and constant narration, stories of his day in which his imagination and gossip he has overheard bind together, twisting and braiding until the mundane sounds magical and she wants to live not in this world, cold and gray and dotted with forlorn bearded men with empty sleeves and pinned-up pant legs, but in his. She has seen Hipólito flinch at the men too, in the brief twitch of his face she sees his memories of removing limbs. Of hacking while men bite down on sticks and scream. She has seen his saws. She remembers the screams and moans from the Hospital de Sangre back at home. They are all trapped by the howling, bloodied ghosts of wars.
She cannot marry him, nor can she simply walk away. She is a guest, not a prisoner, but she is in his care, bound to him by the responsibility levied upon him by their mothers and by the conventions of society which declare her weak and in need of protection.
She packs slowly and in secret, each day picking an item or two to include – removing, replacing, what do any of these objects really matter to her? Clothes to cover her, jewelry to sell, a book or two from home with Spanish words to cradle at night, though English day in and day out no longer strains her ear, no longer leaves her depleted by evening. She wishes she had some coins in her pocket. She thinks uneasily of the baker’s girl, her wink.
She knows it is time when the bag is full. She slips into the kitchen for a loaf of bread, then out the back door and into the hazy night. The patchy dark city is dotted with yellow streetlamps casting shadows and light upon the empty streets. She is not sure if she is afraid. How to find fear in the heaviness in her chest that is also sadness, the flutter that is also excitement. Another adventure, by land this time rather than by sea. She is nervous but she has her feet steady on the ground and her wits about her. She finds a room near Union Station, she knows better than to travel at night. She exaggerates an accent and says, Oui monsieur, hoping to be memorably French should the good doctor inquire after her. She sleeps fitfully, fully dressed, and boards a train for Pittsburgh in the thin light of dawn. From Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, from there a wagon heading out of town. A journey with no aim has no end. She is not quite to the state border when she learns an old farmer is looking for a cook and housekeeper, and she pulls her bag from the wagon and walks the six miles northeast of town.
“Don’t you look road worn,” Patrick Leggett says to her when he opens the door to the wood-slat farmhouse. “Well, come on in. I’m sure you’ll do.”
He is maybe sixty, tall and broad-shouldered as a bear, one swipe from his big paw could toss Sofia to the other side of the room, but he hunches over, years of hard labor or years of shrinking down to the people around him have curved his spine. She steps over the threshold but they remain in the front room.
“Come on in,” he says again, unsure, it seems, how to proceed.
Sofia conjures Mrs. O’Neill in her mind and tries to channel her.
“How about you show me the kitchen,” she says. “I’ll make us some tea and toast.”
He looks grateful at least one of them knows what to do, and he murmurs his appreciation as he leads her to the back of the house. The fire in the stove has gone out, but there is a small pile of firewood beside it and a bucket of water from which she refills the kettle, aware of the movement behind her, Mr. Leggett leaning forward to come help her lift the heavy pail then thinking better of it, remembering why this woman is in his house. While the water heats, she takes in the room, the sparse pantry shelves and the sacks of what she assumes are apples and potatoes below them, the biscuit box, the long wooden table and bench, the empty tin plate and cup at one end, the place occupied now by Mr. Leggett, his usual place she assumes, the meagerness of his presence suggesting the absence of those who might once have shared this space with him.
“I did not realize I had tea,” he says when she places the cup before him.
“I brought it,” she says.
He sips. “Now that’s a nice treat. Delicious.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Leggett.”
“Patrick,” he says.
The farmhouse is not designed for guests or help, upstairs is a row of three rooms and Patrick gives Sofia the one at the far end that used to belong to one of his boys. In the middle is the empty room shared by his two younger sons, all three killed between ’63 and ’65, he tells her, one right after the other. Sofia’s first thought surprises her, it is: and you? He is not so old, and he was younger during the war. Where I am from, she wants to tell him, being fifty or sixty would not have saved you. Old men, little boys. All our men, she thinks, all of them, her own father spared from taking up arms only by dying before the war began.
“You must miss them,” is what she says aloud.
The following morning, she wakes before the dawn, the air and sky and grass all tinged a heavy, dusty blue, the color of the uniforms she found neatly folded in the bottom drawer of her dresser, which she’d closed with proper reverence, crossing herself and leaving them be. In the kitchen, she assembles biscuits, which bake quickly, and she leaves them on a plate under a cotton cloth. She sets the coffee pot over the fire and goes out. The night before Patrick mentioned a leak in the barn roof. In the half-light, the barn is a weathered navy shadow a short walk across the yard, and the animals are quiet when she arrives. A horse, a few hogs, a flock of chickens muttering and rustling to themselves, low clucks and snuffles, no one ready to wake quite yet but cognizant of the warming light and the stranger pacing the empty stall below the small hole in the wooden shingles. A thread of weak light beams down on her, illuminating the swirls of dust and minute flecks of hay. She remembers the hole above their sitting room, fistsized, after the Brazilian occupation. She is outside on a ladder, hammer in hand, nails in a tin cup on the top step, when he comes outside.
“What’s that in the biscuit?” he asks.
“Anise,” she answers. This too, she brought, the little green seeds in a pouch in her pocket like a talisman.
And roof repair? She learned a lot of things, she tells him, in the six years her country was at war, squeezed to near-nothingness by the alliance of their neighbors. They go inside and she joins him for a fresh, watery cup of coffee. She tells him how it was for them, all the men gone: outside the city the women working the fields and driving the cattle; in the city fixing damaged buildings, running the shops and markets. He looks impressed with her. She had cousins with a ranch, she adds. She does not know much but she can learn, she can help in the house and on the land. He takes her up on it, extends his hand across the table to her to shake, and she blushes with her own brashness but her grip is firm.
There is much to learn. Sometimes Sofia follows the hired man who comes to help now and again, but she prefers the days with Patrick, who insists she not only watch but try each task he describes to her – pluck the chicken eggs from the nest box, fork more fresh hay for the horse, take the mallet and drive in the loose fence post before the pigs get out and root up everything. The hand plow, he concedes, is too heavy for her, but she can hoe and weed and plant the kitchen garden, which he has not bothered with in years. He is a patient teacher, his words slow and deliberate, and she feels like a child, a good feeling, how long has it been since she has been permitted to be ignorant, to be wide-eyed and learning? He teaches her to navigate between the rows of crops newly budding from the spring ground – here the corn, the alfalfa, the clover, the wheat. She walks the acres, cropland and apple orchard, until it is as familiar as any city street. He tries to teach her to check the horse’s hooves, to slip the bridle over its long snout, but she blanches at the long, wild tongue licking over large, white teeth. She is afraid of it.
“You can’t ride?” he asks.
She shakes her head, sweaty palms gripping the fabric of her skirt.
“I thought your cousin had a ranch.”
“You don’t ride cattle,” she says but winces, knowing she has exaggerated her experience, she never spent much time at the ranch, had not even been back out to the countryside after the war started. She wonders if the herd is still there or if the beasts were swallowed by the suffering mouths of soldiers before the war swallowed the soldiers too.
“Grab the saddle,” Patrick says. “You ought to know how to ride.”
They go outside. He ignores her trembling, the silent and mortifying tears, and helps her onto the horse’s back. From that day on, no matter the work that must be done in the fields or the house, before they lose daylight he nods in the direction of the barn and she, shoulders slumped, drags her way to the tack hung on the wall, to the longlegged beast and its devilish eyes. She learns.
The farm is bountiful, but there are some things it does not provide, and a couple of months after she arrives it is time to go to town for supplies. He has only the one horse, so they walk while he leads the animal, hitched to a small cart stacked with eggs and apples saved to sell in the spring. After so much open space, so much breeze ruffling through tender green leaves and birdsong and the earthy-clean smell of the barn, Sofia is shocked by the town, the tottering little outpost now overwhelms her senses with its streets of churned-up dirt, rows of clapboard buildings a stone’s throw from one another, the creak and grind of wagon wheels, the stench both human and animal. She knows it is unchanged from when she first disembarked, right here in front of the general store, she – city girl who grew up in one capital city then moved halfway across the world to another – had found the town tame then, sleepy and small. How quickly the farm has changed her
His goods sold, Patrick parts from her to take a broken harness to the tack shop for repair. Sofia browses the shelves of the general store, points to nails, salt, blocks of butter. The woman behind the counter holds out a sun bonnet.
“I thought I recognized you from a couple of months back, but you look like tanned leather. Mr. Leggett got you cooking over a campfire outside or something?”
Sofia puts a hand to her cheek. “Do I look so different?”
The woman chuckles. “City girls. You don’t know what to do without the shade of all those great buildings. Don’t worry, dearie, you look no worse than one of our farm wives, but you unmarried house girls have to have more vanity than those old workhorses. They come into town as sun-crisped as their men.”
Sofia self-consciously clasps her hands together, grateful for the simple cotton gloves hiding the unfeminine calluses on her hands, evidence of her transgression, she was meant to be a housekeeper not a field hand. The life that feels natural to her in the insular tranquility of the farm is unnatural here in the rest of the world. She buys the hat. She wears it around town, she likes the shadow it pitches over her face, she could be anyone beneath its demure shade; back at the farm, though, the bonnet stays atop her dresser. She sets out early each morning, the spectral glow of the young sun yawning slowly up from the horizon. Sofia has seen fields and woodlands, flaxen sameness then tangled green alternating back and forth out of train windows as she chugged by, but these same blocks of land look different from her vantage now, walking slowly over the acres. She likes the western side of the property best, fields shimmering playfully in the sunlight, the furrows between the crop rows, the hidden footpaths that turn to clay-like mud after the rain and harden into knots when rain has been a long time coming. The wheat grows high and wavers around her calves like ribbons of crinoline. She closes her eyes as she walks through it and feels both elegant and alone, and there is pure delight in the sensation. She is an angel, a spirit of the field, Santa Sofia, patron saint of the weeds and dirt clods of this farm. She is lost and mysterious, vanished and grounded into the earth itself. She is filled with awe.
A creek borders the field, shallow and colorless where it abuts the crops but broader and blue as it coils away into the forest, a dense and dark copse of trees within Patrick’s claim, though to Sofia it seems the cool wildness of it defies claims of ownership. Can a person own a place only by saying so? She comes across other people in the woods sometimes. An older, muttering woman she also sees in town when they go every other month or so and who Patrick assures her is crazy; men in tattered clothing who she keeps clear of; children playing; an Indian man; a Black family, man, woman, small child stepping gingerly though they are free now – “free,” Sofia understands, is a wide word, a word with shades. The people could be real or fictions, she does not know, so deeply does she distrust her own eyes, her own mind, in the cavernous twilight beneath the black gum and sweet oak. In the whispered cool between the gnarled gray trunks the world is held captive, trapped eternally in the pause preceding an exhale, an unexplained and directionless magic. Real or not, Sofia says nothing to Patrick about the time she spends in the forest, only brings back roots and leaves the old woman pointed out to her – she must be real, for Sofia makes teas and sprinkles herbs on their meals and they do not die, guts twisted and poisoned, the woman must be real and benevolent.
The late summer heat is thick and sticky, sweat rolling down their spines and clutching their clothes to their skin. When Sofia must bake bread it grows even hotter inside the house. Though she flings open the windows and doors, the heat yawns lazily through the rooms and will not leave. They sit out on the porch, remaining there even after the sun fades into the ground, even as the grip of the darkness grows tighter and tighter and Sofia can no longer see Patrick save the soft, pulsing glow of his pipe. Sofia herself has no such beacon, does he know she is still outside with him?
“You never say much about your family,” he says.
“My father died in ’63.”
A tugging breath, perhaps a drag on the pipe, perhaps a pained wince, ’63 the year of his first lost son.
“That was before our war,” she continues. “It was a fever.”
She considers herself lucky in a way – to have lost her father before the war, when the family’s grief could be individual, not the grief of a nation, the grief of generations haunted by ghosts of the past, ghosts of the future, babies never to be born to men who would never come home. She tells him she has a mother and sisters, no details, no names. She tells him six years of war decimated her country.
“So little left,” she says before again going silent.
He does not press. Is he even really listening to her, or is he lost in the moth-wing haze of his own recollections? It happens. He drifts away. She has seen him sitting on one of the beds in the room between them, always with an object in his hands – now a soldier’s cap, now a rough carving of a bird, an old button. After a few months she had moved the uniforms from her dresser to the middle room, the sepulcher, laid a sprig of rosemary on top of them, and somehow he knew they were there for she has seen him kneel before the open drawer, press a palm to the homespun, and exhale as though he can breathe life into the empty clothes. There are three wooden crosses beneath a red cedar to the northwest of the house even though only two of the bodies made it home, three matching crosses and a headstone – three sons and a wife, the inverse of her own family, Sofia realizes, a mother and three girls living, time and fate and memory swirling all of them around. More than once, Patrick has called out to her while they work. “So – ” he says. Son, she knows he is reaching for. “Sofia,” he says finally, always soft, surprised – by her presence, by his error.
The work is hard, her body exhausted by day’s end. When she crawls beneath her quilt, the weightiness of it is a comfort despite the stiff heat, and she sleeps in blissful peace. Gone are the memories of women mourning the ghosts of sons and fathers, cousins and grandfathers, boys and men. Maybe it is better to forget the dead. In the heat of summer, dust coats the roads, wispy specks of hay stick to her sweat-damp arms and legs, making them itch, her eyes blink rapidly with the sting of tiny foreign objects and the assault of the unrelenting light. For all the physical discomfort, compounded by the ache of her labors in the field and around the house, Sofia likes the heat. The strain of her muscles and the fearsome beam of the sun plants her firmly inside herself; where the ocean voyage had shaken her loose from her bones and the shocking cold of winter froze her to stone, in the warmth of work and summer she is liquid and joyous. She is so accustomed to the thick air and the press of her damp underskirts to her legs that she is surprised by the sudden appearance of fall. Surely the change was gradual, but by the time she notices, the air has a sharp snap to it, the sky is still a startling blue but the sun is sleepy, cradled lower in the sky, the trees casting elongated golden shadows over the gleaming wheat and the plump pumpkins of the kitchen garden. The harvest is nearly upon them and the work, never ending, takes on a giddy urgency.
She cannot place the origin of the whispered word, more than a word, a siren call – west! As the sun slips down into the distance, she watches the fields and forests cast burnt orange like flames, and tries to imagine what lies beyond. The hazy boundary of her vision is no boundary at all but the land, ongoing, unending. After a lifetime in Asunción, going no further than a day out of the city to her cousin’s small ranch, the world has revealed itself as infinite and she is hungry for it. Greedy eyes, greedy imagination. She must have heard the western talk in town, for there are always travelers passing through, families and young men, some brash, some tired, all headed west. Some talk of immeasurable unclaimed territory, waiting for crops just as soon as someone clears it of Indians and buffalo, they say, and Sofia startles at the casual ease of it, just clear it, sweep away all that lives there like so much dust on a veranda. Others do not stop at dreams of the Great Plains, they will cross the mountains to California they say, to gold and the Pacific. At the mention of an ocean, Sofia’s stomach bobs and dips, but she imagines whales exhaling jets of water flecked with glittering gold – eager young men have explained the process, she knows the precious ore is in the mountains and rivers, but she prefers her gilded vision to images of pickaxes whacking against sparkling rocks. America is all enchantment and unfounded hope, and Sofia is too worldly to believe in it, and yet, and yet – the feeling of being swept away! Life has been all violence and toil, do they not all deserve to escape into wonderment?
In town she also hears whispers that Patrick will marry her, he must, mustn’t he? A man and a woman running a farm together, there is no other proper path. She is the same age as his sons, God rest their souls, but no matter, he is a good strong man, and the farm yields well. She is a lucky girl. Sofia had thought of them as partners until then, never considered – she thinks of his hand giving her a fatherly pat on the shoulder, the way his eyes misted when he handed her a stack of his youngest son’s cotton work shirts to wear. He is thoughtful, paternal, but what if he hears the murmurings too, what if they seed ideas she would rather he not entertain? She decides again, quicker than before, that it is time to go. She packs lightly, seeds and sewing supplies taking the place of the books she leaves atop her dresser. What will Patrick do with them, she wonders. He cannot read her Spanish books, he will have no reason to keep them, and she, will she forget the words she was born into, will she lose them as a tree loses leaves, budding a new set when spring finally returns?
She steals nothing from Patrick but a name, McAllen, not his name but his mother’s, he had shown her the front page of the family bible, told her the stories of generations, trailing off as his line will trail off, sons buried and gone. She loves him, this she decides as she walks away from the house in the steely-blue predawn light, she loves the farm, their work, the wordless days toiling from sunup to sundown, communicating only with a nod of the chin or the point of a finger. It is all so easy and peaceful, how could she want more, but she does. She does not want peace, she wants movement. She is a snake, itching to shed its tired old skin, rubbing the dull shadow of itself off against a nubby branch to be reborn.
She cannot catch a stagecoach from town, everyone would know – and why can they not know? Secrecy is a desire more than an imperative at this point, she glows and crackles with the magic of her own vanishing, her disappearance from the face of the earth once a fear and now an aspiration. After the days-long walk three towns over, she climbs into a coach, Sofia McAllen, a farmer’s widow, with convincing knowledge of seed varietals and hay quality to prove it. The ring she wears is her mother’s, a simple gold band with a creamy, dented pearl, installed on her finger just where her mother hoped it would be but without the husband her mother intended her to find in this vast and prosperous land.
Her destination is undefined. She wants only to slip, unseen, into the immensity of this country, its lush forests and gilded fields. She stops in St. Louis and finds work with a tailor mending clothes, staying only long enough to pay for a train ticket. At the station she sees locations she has heard of – Salt Lake City, Sacramento. She sees possibilities she had not considered. Chicago, Omaha, New Orleans.
She takes the train south. She cleans offices and serves coffee at the Cotton Exchange where her services are noted with appreciation by a slovenly, drunken accountant. She straightens the papers around him while he sips from a heavy glass; bolder, she neatens the wayward numbers in his ledger too, and what can he do for her, he asks when he finally lifts his whiskey-heavy head, wipes the drool from the corner of his mouth. He meets her by the river on the outskirts of town and teaches her to shoot a gun. She has good aim. A natural, he calls her.
People still move west, carried on a current of gilded dreams, promises of gold mines and riches, they march toward the falling sun. Sophia, pockets firmly anchored with coins and a small pistol, heads for the train station again.
“What’s in Texas?” she asks at the counter
The man shrugs. “Cows. Cowboys.”
Cattle. Like her cousin has, or once had, the past so murky and unsure. She buys the ticket. No gold then, but animals, longhorns someone will tell her later, ambling across great, grassy plains in the towering heat.
The train takes her as far as Houston and then she is back in a stagecoach again, traversing dry grasses and dusty soil until she arrives in San Antonio, an ungainly settlement too wild to be a city and too busy with people to be prairie. She is struck by the smell. New Orleans was dense and wet, steaming with fecundity; Texas is all air, all expanse – does openness have a smell? – the people sweat and animal manure are shot through with the scent of tumbling winds.
She does not stay in the center of town, preferring the outskirts where she can see the bluestem and the switchgrass undulating in the breeze, can watch the pop and dash of the jackrabbits. She finds work and lodging at a tavern run by a woman with smooth brown skin and slick, dark hair: she is Mexican the men say over cups of warm whiskey and plates of warm food, no, she’s an Indian say others, and though their speculating voices carry, the woman does not react, only refills their glasses and aims glares of deadly warning at those whose hands wander to her backside or Sofia’s. There are other places to go for that – in the early hours they feed the rangy, slumberous girls too – but the tavern sates only one sort of hunger.
Sofia listens for the stories of the cattlemen, the cowboys and ranchers who shepherd thousands of steers north to Abilene and Wichita. When she brings the food to their tables, they tell her of outrunning fires and stampedes, surviving arrow wounds and fording tumultuous rivers swollen with rain. These are stories to impress women and children, mythmaking tales, and they are not what Sofia craves. She backs away and glides like a soft wind around the tavern, refilling whiskey glasses, swiping her rag over the crumb-flecked tables, eyes cast downward, invisible, and this is when the men share memories amongst themselves – of quiet nights and glowing embers on a fire, of grasses in rippling shades of yellow, green, and blue, of the siren song of the unbroken plain lulling them into a stupor until a mesquite tree breaks the endless uniformity and gives the flat world perspective again. Sofia, too, is lulled, rapt by the incalculable breadth of this country, the vision of oceanic grasslands stretching as far as she can see.
She and the woman talk sometimes. Not at night, when they are worn ragged and mopping up after the last of the dripping drunks, but in the mornings as they prepare to open for breakfast, heating chicory coffee and scrambling up eggs. The woman tells her about the mountains of western Texas, rolling red rocks and spears of sharpedged plants.
“It is hot out there too,” she says, “but the heat feels clean. Not like here, where it’s heavy and soggy. The desert heat lifts you.” And she opens out her arms like a bird taking flight before returning to her work.
Sofia tells her about crops, the hopeful golden order of wheat fields, the cozy shade of apple orchards, the loamy dark yellow-brown of the soil. Neither woman appears in the landscapes they describe, only the plants, the sun, the wind, as though it all exists without human witness, which it does and doesn’t. The woman asks Sofia nothing about where she came from, and Sofia asks her nothing in return. At first, she misses the nights reminiscing before the hearths in Washington and on the farm, but soon she comes to appreciate that here she is allowed to make herself without the weight of the past, no story but what comes next.
In her free time, she wanders the nearby prairie, twinkling by then with bluebonnet, and practices with her pistol. She carefully lines up targets as the accountant did, rusted cans and the broken bottoms of ale bottles set atop a rotting log. Once she tires of this static procedure, she wanders through the grasses, weapon loaded at her side. She shoots the heads off of coneflowers, dispatches small branches from the trunks of trees. She is shocked by how easily she lifts her arm and fires, unapologetically ripping mayhem into the neat and peaceful scene. How eerie the silence after a shot, the crack of ignited gunpowder loud as thunder but followed by nothing, no wail, no scream, disappearing with meek quietude into the limitless fields.
“What is it you are aiming for really?” the woman asks one morning as Sofia returns with a clutch of bobwhite quail dangling from her fist.
Sofia looks north, in the direction of the Chisolm Trail, heart beating rapidly as a stampede of hooves.
The woman assesses her. “It’s dangerous, you know. Come on inside, let’s see something.”
They go to Sofia’s room where she still has the homespun shirt and trousers that once belonged to Patrick’s son. She puts them on. The woman pulls her hair back and with her hand shades Sofia’s eyes as a hat might.
“My brother drives cattle,” she says. “He’s headed out soon, we can talk to him tonight.”
This lad’s looking for work, is what the woman says to the man whose face is darkened with sun and dirt. Sofia, hair tucked into the collar of the shirt, stares down at her feet as the woman instructed, quaking with giddy joy when the brother grunts an assent, tells her to be ready in the morning. When dawn blinks bleary through the thin curtains of Sofia’s room it is time to go, and the woman pulls scissors from her apron and reaches for Sofia’s hair.
“No,” Sofia says.
“Short hair and a hat covering your pretty eyes and they’ll take you for a boy.”
“No,” Sofia is firm.
The woman sighs and plaits two braids instead.
“I suppose they’ll assume you’re an Indian boy. Either way, don’t talk.”
“For how long?”
The woman shrugs.
“I don’t want to live as a boy,” Sofia says. “I know there’s freedom in it, but I want my freedom and my self.”
The woman sighs, but there is a hint of a smile on her lips. Fine, she mutters, but counsels muteness for long enough that the men see she can ride. And shoot.
It is no great thing to stay quiet, most of the men speak little; it is no great thing to ride a fair pace away from the others, though Sofia stays in shouting range of the woman’s brother, who does not shout but signals and points, herding her as she herds the longhorn, teaching her the job in a way she is used to learning, with silent watchfulness and wordless gestures. She is unsteady on her horse and painfully sore after long days in the saddle. She cannot hide her grimaces from the laughing men, but she swallows back her cries when she remounts, chokes down the feeling that she is splitting in two.
She improves. The grasses flutter in the unruly prairie wind, their movement iridescent and alive, and Sofia is reminded of the sea, her journey to this continent, her body again borne roughly across a dazzling expanse – her poor body, bruised as soft fruit, tired as a yellowed tomato vine plucked of all its lovely red bounty. It does not take them long to figure her for a woman, if indeed they were ever fooled. Why should we let you stay, they ask, why should we ever let you leave, tongues licking lascivious lips. She pulls out her pistol and shoots a rabbit mid-leap. The younger men stare wide-eyed, the older ones laugh and clap her shoulder. “You’re all right, kid,” says one, and Sofia must turn her face away, so the budding tears are visible only to the indifferent plain.
They ride on through the haze of dusk, and she stares out at the roiling slate gray clouds on the horizon, silvered through with bright flashes, lightning winking its far-off threat, the hint of a funnel, cloud kissing toward the earth. She has been told about tornados but has yet to see one dancing over the prairie, and she wonders what will happen if it touches down, imagines herself dragged up into one, gripped tightly in its dark whirling nothingness. Maybe she will be lifted from her saddle and flung into the heavens, or maybe the storm ahead of them will ease and the clouds shatter apart so the sun can glow honey-warm over the land, and she will live on, out in some distant, unimaginable place.

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Analía Villagra’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Bat City Review, Ecotone, New Ohio Review, and The Iowa Review.