I withdrew my hand. “Your back is very cleverly disguised as dry.”
“You see?” she said in a tone of triumph.
As she finished her eggs she said she was even more impressed by my English, which she thought I spoke better than most Americans she had heard. She said I must have attended a good school.
I had to chuckle at that. I told her how Reuben and I had ridden horseback to a two-room regional schoolhouse six miles from the ranch. Each room had its own teacher, one for the kids in first through the sixth grade, the other for the smaller number of kids in grades seven to twelve. Only a handful of students ever made it to the tenth grade or above. None of the first-graders—except for me and then Reuben—could read at the time they started school. My aunt had taught me to read and letter by the time I was five, then did the same for Reuben.
“So you and your cousin had a…how do you say ventaja? No, wait…advantage. That is correct? You had an advantage upon the other students. You must have achieved easily to grade twelve.”
“Not exactly,” I said—and immediately gave myself a mental kick in the ass. It would’ve been easier to say sure we did, and let it go at that. But now I’d roused her curiosity and had to explain.
“My aunt didn’t think the teachers at the school were educating us very well,” I said, “so she took over the job of teaching me and Reuben herself. Truth to tell, she was a better teacher than they were. She’d drill us in arithmetic every morning. She’d give us grammar tests. She’d make us read a few pages aloud from some book she’d pick at random from the shelf, and every time we came to a word we didn’t know, she’d make us look it up in the dictionary. Every week she assigned a different book to each of us and we had to write a report on it.”
“She deserves praise. What is her name?”
“Ava.”
Lynette came to the table to replenish our coffee and clear away our dishware. She complimented Daniela on her outfit, saying she really liked her sandals. Daniela thanked her and said she had been admiring Lynette’s auburn hair and asked if she ever wore it in a French braid, which she thought would look very attractive on her. Lynette said she didn’t know what kind of braid that was, and so Daniela showed her how to plait it, demonstrating the technique with her own long hair.
I was glad for Lynette’s interruption—it got us off the subject of my school days. I’d told the truth about my aunt Ava’s decision to assume our education herself. I just hadn’t told the full reason for it…
I was fourteen, Reuben was twelve, and for weeks he’d been getting teased every day by a husky fifteen-year-old named Larry Rogerson. I’d kept out of it because Rogerson hadn’t laid a hand on him; his teasing was all verbal. Besides, a bully was something every kid had to deal with at one time or another, and Reuben knew as well as I did that he had to handle it himself. Then one day Reuben took a peppermint stick to school and at recess Rogerson snatched it away from him. I didn’t see that—I was tossing a football with some of the other boys—and I didn’t see Reuben try to kick Rogerson in the balls and only get him in the leg. But a lot of the other kids saw what was going on and their sudden shouting made me look over there to see Larry Rogerson holding Reuben in a headlock with one arm and beating him in the face with his other fist. Reuben was always on the skinny side but he never did lack for sand, and even as Rogerson was pounding his face he kept trying to kick him.
I ran up and punched Rogerson on the side of the head so hard I thought I broke my hand. He went sprawling but scrambled to his feet and came up with a buckknife, open and ready. He managed to cut me on the upper arm before I caught him by the wrist and tripped him to the ground and got the knife away from him. I straddled his chest and pinned his arms under my knees and held the tip of the blade to the base of his neck. My hand hurt like hell and blood was running down my arm and the sight of it had me in a fury.
“I oughta kill you,” I said. “I could do it easy.”
As soon as I said it I knew it was true. It would’ve been easy. It was one of those moments when you realize something about yourself that you hadn’t known just a second earlier, something as true as it can be and that changes the way you see yourself from then on, the way you see the whole damn world.
Rogerson knew I could do it too—it was in his eyes. That’s what saved his life. If I had detected the smallest doubt on his face I would’ve shoved the blade in his neck to the hilt and he would’ve died learning the truth. But he already knew it. He lay there staring at me in big-eyed terror, too afraid to even breathe. Maybe he was thinking how different a knife could be when it was in somebody else’s hand and at your own throat.
I became aware of the silence around us and looked up to see the other students gawking, and I saw that they all knew the truth too. Even the two teachers standing there with their mouths open. They knew.
I cocked my arm like I was getting ready to stab the blade into him. He made a half-whimper and turned his face to the side and I jabbed the blade into the ground next to his neck, close enough for the handle to press against his skin. I left it there.
I got up and stared around at the others and every pair of eyes cut away from mine, including the teachers’. My sleeve was sopped with blood. Rogerson kept his eyes on me and didn’t move. Reuben stepped up beside me and gave him the two-finger horns sign—fuck you.
Nobody said anything as we walked over to the open shed where our horses were tethered and I got a bandanna out of the saddlebag and ripped open my sleeve and Reuben tied the bandanna around my gashed arm. Then we mounted up and rode for the ranch.
Neither of us spoke till we were halfway home, and then Reuben said, “You’da damn sure done it too.”
I looked at him but didn’t say anything.
“You’da done it,” he said. Grinning.
When we got to the house and Aunt Ava saw our condition, she took us to the kitchen and told us to sit down, then fetched her small shoebox of medical supplies. She gave Reuben a handmirror and a bottle of iodine to treat the cuts on his face himself, and while she sewed up my arm I told her what happened.
She’d never been one to make a display of her feelings. She rarely smiled or frowned, never raised her voice, never openly fretted about anything. I’d never heard her laugh and I couldn’t even imagine her in tears. She listened to our accounts of the fight without comment or any kind of look I could read—except when I was telling how I threatened to cut Rogerson’s throat, and for a flickering moment she looked like she might smile. I didn’t tell her the part about how I’d known I could do it as easily as I’d ever done anything, but I had a hunch she knew it. All my life I’d had a strange sense about her, a feeling that she knew things having to do with me that I didn’t know myself, like some gypsy fortune-teller who’s reading the cards she dealt you. It was like she could see through my flesh and bones and down into some part of me so deeply hidden I couldn’t even tell what it was.
Reuben told me once that he loved his mother very much but she always seemed like a stranger in some ways and he couldn’t help being a little afraid of her. He thought his father was kind of scared of her too. I didn’t know about that, but I was never afraid of her—I was only mystified. And always would be.
She’d baked a sweet potato pie that morning and she let us have a big slice of it with a glass of milk, which had us gawking at each other, since it was almost dinnertime. When my uncle came in from the range at noon and she told him what happened he was enraged. He wanted to ride over to the Rogerson place and kick the elder Rogerson’s ass for raising a boy who’d pull a knife in a schoolyard fight. My aunt dissuaded him. No real harm had been done, she said, and Reuben and I would not be going back to the school anyway. She said she didn’t believe we were learning very much from the teachers and she had been thinking of tutoring us herself, and now she was decided on it.