Hunger's Brides Read Online Free PDF

ended the children’s rides, before my turn, as he thundered off on a long ride of his own.
    Abuelo, for his part, stayed away for weeks sometimes. I came to think of men as a variety of migratory bird. Father on his noble and secret missions. Grandfather, reading, riding between the two haciendas, mending fences, tinkering with his little hydraulic projects—windmills, watering ponds, catchment basins.
    It must have been the next spring, during one of those rare planetary conjunctions that brought Father and Abuelo to the hacienda at the same time. On the hill above the house Grandfather had recently installed a millpond to be replenished on windy days by the small windmill he’d had the workers build to his specifications. One morning he took me out with him right after breakfast. Though the ground in Nepantla was dry, he explained, the real problem was not the scarcity of water but rather the swiftness of its drainage. For this I must be wary of dry streambeds.
    I knew this already.
    â€œImagine, Juanita, flash floods from a blue sky! Boulders, trunks and mud all washed down in massive swipes.” This was dramatic even for him. “And so, in a way—no?—Time itself has gouged these ravines. As with an adze—there—in its fist. See how, between the arroyos, the high ground runs like roots? Are they not like the buttress roots of cypresses?”
    I felt strangely anxious to know what he was leading up to.
    Did I know that the people of this place once believed our volcano held up the sky? Here he included the heavens in the generous sweep of his arm. “They saw SmokingStone as a tree, rooted in the earth, its plumes of smoke and steam as branches supporting the heavens.” His eyes met mine.
    â€œWe live, Angelina, in the Manoa of legends and—”
    â€œI know, Abuelo, and you are its El Dorado.”
    He put his arm around me then. We looked out over the world he had helped me to see, that I still see as if through his eyes. The stage of the horizon and the forms beyond. The dry, grassy hills, the blond camber of their narrow spines. The orchards rising up from the ravines. Intersecting diagonals of deep green mango trees and avocados. Volcanoes that were lovers, who were really cypresses….
    â€œAbuelito!”
I cried, eager to please him. “See how the hills are like snakes now?—see the diamonds on their backs, their green bellies.”
    He looked down at me as if surprised, and with a sober nod of that great head replied, “Why no, Juana Inés, I had not, until now.”
    And then he began to explain that we would be leaving Nepantla. The land was even richer up at the other hacienda. With my mother tending it, we would earn nearly as much as the two places combined.
    â€œAbuelito, you’re not leaving us?”
    â€œNo, no, child, not I.” I should have guessed, then. “You’ll like it up there. Just as much as here.”
    The message in all this was clear enough, I thought, with his parables of the tree, the mountain that changes yet abides: Permanence in change. I would soon read as much in Heraclitus. I wanted to shout, Of course I will love the other place, Abuelo—it has your library. Touched by his concern, I kept this to myself.
    But that wasn’t what he was trying to say at all.
    Abuelo and I were looking back down at the ranch house. He was quiet a moment. A thread of mesquite smoke rose from the clay chimney pipe. A loose tissue of other such threads trailed up from the plain. Ewes bleated in the high corral of
ocotillo;
little red flowers budded among the thorns. There was the sweet scent of mesquite, and also of sage. And in the big laurel spreading its shade over the south wall a flock of
urracas
raised a castanet racket of the usual chatter….
    It was one of the rare times Abuelo talked to me of my father. “Did you know, child, that I was the one to introduce him to my daughter? With you here