Lourdes had run up ahead with the other children and called out to her mother, “I think they had a hurricane, too!”
Surely Lourdes was right; a hurricane must have swept through. It had picked up the crude shacks and thrown them on the ground in splintered and broken pieces. Misshapen steps led up to shanties cobbled together to form a communal roof and floor separated only by walls of wattle.
Some of the women cried. For this, they’d journeyed thousands of miles over sea and land and sea, yet again? Valentina and Dolores dropped the sack of rice on the ground. Valentina made her way to the first shanty. She stood outside the door, afraid of what was on the other side. Lourdes held onto her mother’s sleeve. Valentina took a deep breath and was immediately sorry. She buried her nose in her shirtsleeve.
They entered their new home. One large room with a wood floor. No bed. Not even a shelf. A plain wood table with benches. Valentina was never happier to see a table in her whole life. Lourdes dropped her bundle on top of it.
“I hope it’s better at the end of the row.” Dolores stood in the doorway.
“Let’s take your rice to your new house,” Valentina said.
They passed round brick ovens with the insides burnt black from smoke, which they would later learn had been built by the Portuguese who had once been sugarcane workers like them. They looked inside a wood barrel.
“Rainwater,” Valentina said. “I hope there is a river or stream nearby.”
The smell became stronger as they walked. Dolores would soon realize her terrible mistake, but it wasn’t Valentina’s place to advise her. Look what happened the last time she stuck her nose into someone’s business.
Las puertorriqueñas were exhausted but there wasn’t time for rest. They had to unpack a few things and set about preparing dinner. Dolores talked about how hungry she was and how she couldn’t wait to cook up a banquet for her husband and son. Valentina had seen that stick of a husband of hers, hadn’t she? But then, they were all sticks, weren’t they?
“Mami, it smells so horrible,” Lourdes said.
She shook her head at her daughter.
“A little longer, Valentina,” Dolores said.
Something must be wrong with Dolores’s sense of smell. She claimed the last shanty and her new home. It was empty except for the usual insects. The woman next door watched them through the cracks in the wattle.
“Damas, I wish I’d drowned in the ocean,” the woman said.
“Don’t say that! This is the dama who lost her son at sea.” Dolores glanced at Valentina.
“Ay bendito, you’re that mujer,” the woman said. “Lo siento, but I still wish I had drowned in the ocean.”
“You’re attracting el mal de ojo.” Valentina wished it for the woman.
Dolores squashed a bug with her heel. They dropped the sack of rice on the table.
“How am I to cook? In Puerto Rico, even the poorest peona had a fogón.” Dolores wiped her hands on her skirt.
“Once upon a time, I had a stove.” Valentina recalled it like a dream, but it came out of her mouth like a lie.
“Bueno, at least I have rice.” Dolores patted the fifty-pound sack.
“Dolores, if you could share some of your rice with me, I would really appreciate it.” Valentina blinked tears from her eyes.
“Rice? You should have bought some at the store.”
“I know, I know, but I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I can give you something in return, or I can sew something for you.”
“You can sew? That’s wonderful,” Dolores said. “Of course I can give you rice.”
“And a little sugar?”
“Sugar? I hope you brought a needle with you,” Dolores said. “And thread.”
Valentina spread her mantilla on the table and helped Dolores lift the sack; the rice spilled like seed pearls on the black lace. Valentina thought she’d never seen anything so pretty.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
WE ARE MEN, NOT CATTLE
On the first day, the Puerto Ricans learned that sugar was called poho. They also learned to hate the men on horseback who shouted at them in Portuguese, which they didn’t understand; they learned to despise the boss, who was called the luna, and fear the plantation police with their guns and truncheons. The wagons rode over dirt roads no better than the trails in Puerto Rico. Only in Hawaii five minutes and already they were separated from their families, cabrones! Hombre, a man should be allowed to collapse! Instead they were loaded onto wagons like cattle! ¡Malditos cabrones! Vicente glanced back at the road that led to Valentina and Lulu. He hoped that Valentina would find a pretty little house with a bit of dirt where she could plant vegetables and herbs, and that Raulito would turn up soon.
Some of the Puerto Ricans like Vicente had their own machetes, but for those without, the cost of the machetes would be added to their accounts at the plantation store. At the luna’s bark, the cane workers bent to the cane. Vicente reached for a stalk and chopped it twice, then tossed it on the ground. He was so thirsty and the heat inside the cane so intense that he was sure he was in hell. When it began to rain, he cut a dozen more stalks before stopping. Surely they wouldn’t be expected to work when they could barely see the cane.
“Hana! Hana!” the luna shouted, and galloped off to round up the Puerto Ricans who had ceased to work. He and his henchmen rode up and down shouting “Hana! Hana!” By now los puertorriqueños knew it meant, “Work! Work!”
•
It was evening when the guards led los puertorriqueños off the cane fields. They didn’t have the energy to complain, even among themselves. They passed men still at work, and somebody said they were Japanese.
Vicente saw Valentina’s trunk in the dirt. He asked one of his compatriots to help him carry it.
Valentina told Lourdes to watch for her father from the open door. She’d planned to wave her hand around the hovel and say to Vicente, For this, you made us leave Puerto Rico? I left my sister and parents and Evita for this? I lost Javiercito for this? But one look at her husband, wet and exhausted, his hands blistered and swollen, one look at him, and instead she handed him a drying cloth.
For dinner, she served him a piece of bread and beef jerky.
When they finally lay together on the feather mattress, Vicente thought that he’d never been so tired. Lourdes was asleep on the floor, her face smushed on a bundle. He told Valentina how somebody had stood next to Raulito on the pier in Oahu and now that man was here but Raulito wasn’t. He must have been sent to another plantation, perhaps in Oahu. Damn the Americans! These malditos cabrones americanos doing things so slapdash, not giving a damn about the Puerto Ricans, but when had they ever? And did she know there was a woman who was left with a child and no husband to support her, her husband someplace else, just like Raulito?
“Poor things! How can they survive?”
“She’ll think of something.”
“You mean selling her body to the sugarcane workers? She won’t earn enough fucking peones for a bowl of rice.”
Vicente turned to look at his wife in the candlelight. “Valentina! You’ve never talked like that before! It’s not like you.”