What Mothers Do

1

In the same year I was born, the dam broke and the river expanded her banks and swept our small house away. It was not my house yet, and because the river took it, it was never my house. My mother was still my house at the time, though she would not be for long. And there begins my story, and who I would eventually become.

Of course, I do not remember except the one thing near the end. All the rest is according to my mother.

2

According to my mother, the water came in the late afternoon as she and I were on our way back to the house. We had been to visit a neighbor, an elderly woman who had no man to care for her. Her husband had died a few months earlier at the age of one hundred years and one day.

We had brought the woman some foodstuffs in a basket: flour tortillas and a half-moon of red-rind cheese and some salt and some small potatoes from our garden. My mother gave her the basket as well so she would not have to carry it back.

My mother said the woman accepted the basket gratefully and held it in her lap, but that the woman folded the tortillas around the half-moon of red-rind cheese and handed it back to her. Then she said, “You will need this for your journey north.”

The statement did not make sense, my mother said, for no journey was planned, but the woman was very old and it would be disrespectful not to accept the gift. So my mother accepted the tortillas and cheese and would have more than me to carry back after all. But we stayed to visit for a short time because it is rude not to do so.

But, my mother said, after only a few minutes she tried to make our excuses and leave. “My husband will be home soon, and he will need his dinner."

But sitting in her little wooden rocking chair, the old woman tapped her wooden cane on the dusty wooden floor of her little wooden house. She smiled a toothless smile and brushed my mother’s concerns aside with a wave of her hand. “It does not matter. It is only time.”

Because the woman had been rumored to know things about Time that others do not know, we stayed for a while longer. But when my mother bowed her head in seeming respect and said, “Yes, abuela,” she glanced also at her most prized possession: a small watch that dangled upside down from her only silver necklace.

When she told me the story the first time and every time thereafter, my mother said, “I knew it was only time but I knew also that time passes and that the passing matters. And I knew how long it would take for us to walk down the mountain trail and back to our house. And I knew when your father would be there.”

So, she said, she mentioned two other times to the old woman that my father would be home soon. But both times the old woman repeated her response and refused to give us permission to leave without being disrespectful.

The fourth time, my mother did not ask. The fourth time she lifted me ahead of her, still in her belly, and rose from the rickety wooden chair. Clutching the tortillas wrapped around the flat side of the half-moon of red-rind cheese in one hand, she rubbed her other hand gently over me through her skin and said to the woman, “I must go now.”

The woman looked at her and nodded. “Yes, now is the time.”

And we left.

3

From the old woman’s house we went up the mountain trail for a short distance of maybe a hundred yards, and where the trail crossed the saddle, she said, she paused and put one hand above her eyes and peered at our house in the distance and then off to the left of our house.

My father was not yet in sight, she said, so we were all right.

We started down the much longer trail from the saddle, and we started across the flat, and when we were halfway to the house across the flat, she saw my father some distance from the house, on another angle but about the same distance away.

She raised the hand with the tortillas and cheese and waved, she said, and he waved back, and both he and we continued toward the house, although from our different angles. She said it was as if we were all walking together but a quarter-mile apart.

But when he and we were both much closer to the house, she said, he stopped. He turned to look away to the south from where the river flowed, for that river flows south to north, and he bent forward for a moment and put his cupped hands to his ears.

4

My mother laughed, she said, thinking my father was mimicking a chicken or some other lesser animal. He was obviously delaying himself, she said, so we could win the race, so she and I continued toward the house. She was happy, she said, that we would at least be inside the house before he would arrive and that she would have the bowls in her hands. She might even be able to put them on the table before my father came through the door.

But before we reached the house, she said, he straightened again and turned to face us and waved both hands high over his head. His mouth opened wide and he yelled something she could not hear because in that moment his voice was lost in a roaring that had arisen from somewhere beyond him to the south, and then he started toward us and he was running.

So, she said, we stopped to wait for him.

The roaring was like a very close train, she said, rumbling past on a very loud track, and for that reason she looked to my father again, who was running so fast he was stumbling sometimes over rocks.

And before he reached us the water swept through in a massive wall that was much taller than the house. As she watched with me nestled safely inside, the water reached out with one foaming arm and uprooted the house and pulled it into itself and took it north in pieces, complete with the bowls and the table on which she had hoped to set them and the stove with the low fire inside it and the posole pollo and the pot from which she had hoped to serve it.

Where the house had stood there was nothing.

5

My father reached us, she said, and touched both her arms gently to make sure we were both all right, and after the water blew past the three of us continued to the small shed behind the empty place where the house used to be.

She kept the extra blankets there, she said, in an old trunk that she did not want in the house any longer so my father had moved it to the shed the day before.

We sat on the trunk side by side, my mother and I and my father, and in the next half-hour the sun went down and the river resumed its naturally shallow flow and my father agreed that yes, finally it was time to walk north. South and east and west there was no family and little work.

That was the moment that defined where I would be born and where we would live. And where we would live, coupled with another event, defined who I would become.

6

On that same night, my father died from the bite of a snake.

First, my mother said, my father crouched next to her beneath an old mesquite tree. For her head he had formed a pillow with his black leather jacket—the jacket that was his most valued possession—and between and beneath her legs he had spread a blanket that was folded twice. That was to be my first bed.

But the mesquite tree beneath which he crouched and she lay was surrounded by holes. Because of the little horseshoe mounds around the holes, my mother said, my father had identified them as homes for the prairie dogs. Which is what they were.

But the snake had taken up residence.

I was born, and soon afterward I became who I will always be.

7

My mother said as I lay on the blanket my father prayed to the Holy Mother to bless the blade of his pocket knife to make it clean, and when he was satisfied she had heard his prayer, he severed my connection to my mother.

But in the commotion and the racket that ensued, the snake was annoyed and bit my father on the back of his lower right calf as he crouched.

It was nobody’s fault, my mother said.

But I knew whose fault it was.

When I annoyed the snake to that degree, my father became my first victim, and the black jacket became my most valued possession.

That was the first thing I knew separate of her.

8

So, she said, with the tortillas and the half-moon of red-rind cheese tucked safely into one pocket of my father’s jacket, which still lay beneath her head for a pillow, she held me to her breast for my first meal with her right hand and caressed my father’s sweating, stubbled cheek with the other, thereby easing my entrance into the world and his exit from it.

That is what mothers do.

9

Sometime after the daylight came and went and the darkness came again, my mother said, she picked up the jacket with the tortillas-and-cheese bundle in one arm and me in the other and again we started north.

All that remained was for me to learn where I belonged and how to wear the jacket like a man.

That was 31 years ago, and here I am.

*******

About the Author

Harvey Stanbrough was born in New Mexico, seasoned in Texas and baked in Arizona. For a time, he wrote under five personas and several pseudonyms, but he takes a pill for that now and writes only under his own name. Mostly.

Harvey is an award-winning writer who follows Heinlein’s Rules avidly. He has written and published over 110 novels, 10 novellas, and over 290 short stories. He has also written 19 nonfiction books on writing, 9 of which are free to other writers. And he’s compiled and published 5 omnibus novel collections, 29 collections of short fiction, and 5 critically acclaimed poetry collections.

These days, the vendors through which Harvey licenses his works do not allow URLs in the back matter. To see his other works, please key “StoneThread Publishing” or “Harvey Stanbrough” into your favorite search engine.

Finally, for his best advice on writing, look for “The New Daily Journal | Harvey Stanbrough | Substack.”