The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant Page B

palapa with the soup and tortillas, and all around us the smell of smoke and chicken and burned earth. If we were lucky maybe we would see a rainbow or an eagle down below. On such a day I asked my abuelo how can something so small as a kernel of corn grow so big and feed so many, and he said to me, “It is the god inside doing this—
Pitao
. Some say that long ago,
Pitao
made us from the corn. I don’t know if that is so, but what I do know is this—without it we would not exist, and without us there would be no corn. And if we become separated? We will turn into different things. We will lose our strength, our understanding of what and who we are.”
    Abuelo liked the nighttime and even after a long day of work he would stay up after everyone else went to sleep. He liked to smoke a little yerba, listen to the night sounds and watch the stars—I think there were more of them back then. He could talk like a gecko and he tried to teach me—put the side of your tongue against your teeth, left side, and suck in hard. You hear that hollow clicking sound? But I could never get it right. I’d try and Abuelo would say, “Oh no, now you’re insulting him! It’s like this.” And they’d call right back. He always liked the darkness best.
    Once my mother brought him a kilo of oranges from el centro. Oranges don’t grow in the mountains where we live and he ate them all with the skin and everything. This is not because he was ignorant. It is because he grew up in the time of la Revolución with no father and he never forgot what it was to be hungry.
    At least once a week my abuelo would take his burro into the mountains to cut the wood for cooking. That burro is still alive and she’s older than me. When you live close with such animals for a long time they become your family. You learn all the little ways they have, and they learn yours too because in the campo there is a lot of time for watching. One of Isabel’s little tricks is to bite your ass when you aren’t looking. It is a game with her, but it hurts like hell. My abuelo was smart about this and she almost never got him, but one time she did—and bad, so he grabbed her by the lower lip, twisted it up and very close to her he said, “What, you bad burro! You think you are a wolf now? Well, look out then. I am a jaguar.” And his eyes were sparkling. She always worked hard for him and he never made her carry him on the steep trails as many others do.
    One Sunday, long before I was born, the priest called on my abuelo for a tithe. Abuelo refused to give him the money and said right there in the church that the gods he serves are not asking him for pesos. Many disapproved of this and the mayordomo’s wife accused him of being a witch. There is a brujo in our pueblo, but it is not my abuelo. It didn’t matter. Since that time, when the village council was deciding who gets to cut wood, or who is getting the water for the milpa, Abuelo was at the end of the line, and it was the same for my father. In the pueblo, you carry the sins of your family before you, and my father’s burden was heavier than most.
    If you go to visit my pueblo today and ask someone what time it is, they might hold their hand to the sky and point to the angle of the sun. If you tell them they have the wrong time they might say to you, “We follow the hours of God, not the hours of the devil.” Maybe they smile when they say this and maybe they don’t. When I was young and living there we didn’t see gringos very much, and when we did it was only hallelujahs—evangelistas. Like we needed more gods. The hallelujahs were enormous and white with dog-color hair and glass eyes and my sister and me would watch them only from a distance. Sometimes they would bring us bags of old clothes and shoes. One of the T-shirts Mamá got said “Jesus Hates the Yankees.” Whenever we were bad or didn’t