The Irony And The Treasure
By Tess Lojacono Lily’s father had always been sick. Not sick in the sick-in-bed kind of way, but sick in the harsh, mystical way that those of Spanish descent embrace illness. There was a Frieda Kahlo-ishness, a hushed stigmata quality to it. Suffering was a way of life, a way of atonement. The more one suffered in this life, the more assured one could be of getting a reward in the next. And even though her father claimed he would never be allowed into heaven, they all knew that one day he would be swept aloft, like a prophet or a nun or a priest.
Though you couldn’t tell by looking at him, ever since the war, Jesus Vega was never without pain. Lily’s mother used to say, “Not on that side, Honey. You know Daddy can’t hear in that ear.” Or, “Don’t ask Daddy to take you. You know he doesn’t like to drive at night because he can’t see from one side.”
“What difference does that make?” Lily asked. “It’s dark on both sides.”
“Don’t be smart!” Her mother would reply. But how does she know, Lily wondered? She doesn’t even drive.
And sometimes, “Let’s keep the noise down! You know Daddy can’t stand noise.” That last one may not have been because of World War II exactly. Lily didn’t know why being in a war hadn’t made him more used to noise, but maybe the noise of children was different.
Her father didn’t talk about his battle experience. World War II was something they had to learn about in textbooks. Jesus Vega preferred instead, to reminisce about college life, that incredible opportunity provided by the GI Bill. Often he would regale the family with his stories at the dinner table, a row of eager faces turned toward him.
“That was a great bunch of guys,” he’d chuckle, shaking his head. “Now, they were men! Always trying to get me to go drinking with them! But I never went, well, seldom went, anyway.” He winked at Mum.
“Why not Daddy?” Lilly always asked.
“Oh, he preferred to read,” Mum chimed in. She knew her cues as well. “They used to call him ‘Gandhi’ because he’d sit in an upper bunk, wrapped in a sheet and read by the light of the bulb,” Mum returned to her spaghetti. “You know, with those wire rim glasses he used to wear, and he was so thin...”
“Everyone was thin back then!” he said, surprised.
“Who was Gandy?” Bell chirped, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Everyone laughed.
“Dad, tell us the story about the guy with the ears,” Paul said.
“Oh!” Jesus leaned forward in his chair. He used a tortilla to wipe up the remains of his sauce, burnt and sweetened with too much brown sugar. “You know, Gus was a big guy. Big and angry.”
“What was he mad about?” Bell asked.
Dad looked thoughtful. “Some people came home from the War relieved, and some came home mad.” This seemed to satisfy 6-year-old Bell. “Anyway, he and I never really got along. Then one day, he was in a really bad mood. It was raining, we’d skipped most of our classes--I don’t remember what set him off—but he went after me!” Here Dad laughed. “He pushed me against an open window, hard. So there I was, hanging out backwards, three floors up. So what could I do? He had these really big, I mean really big ears. And I had to grab onto something!”
Lily covered her mouth with her hand. “To keep from falling out?” she whispered.
“Yes. Exactly! And when he still wouldn’t let go, I ripped as hard as I could!”
Everyone gasped, as they always did.
“They didn’t come all the way off, but still…”
Jesus Vega attended Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh. A number of World War II vets were enrolled there. Lily supposed it was natural that they should gravitate to one another. They were men masquerading as boys. Their similar experiences held them together while setting them apart. They laughed at the urgency with which their professors described assignments; scoffed at baby things like pledging fraternities. And when it rained and their injuries caused them pain that no one but a vet could imagine, they’d set their steely jaws, grow quiet and pointedly look at something in the distance, anything but each other. Their unexplained absences were never questioned.
It was a miracle that Lily’s father was able to attend university; even more of a miracle that he was able to get the one thing that he needed to be accepted into the program: a transcript of his grades from Falfurious High School.
He had never actually graduated from high school. In Falfurious Mexicans were not allowed to pass. The collective intelligence of the day pronounced anyone less than a gringo unable to grasp sufficient amounts of knowledge to warrant a diploma. And, like many Mexicans on the migrant circuit, Lily’s father’s pride only allowed him to attend school when he had a pair of shoes and he wasn’t picking anything. The two rarely coincided.
But fortune would not allow the lack of a diploma to stand in the way of education. Her father declared that his high school principal mistook him for someone who had climbed a tree one afternoon, a tree outside of a school window. This tree climber saw the principal embracing one of his teachers; one of his married teachers and the principal saw the climber. Suddenly, Jesus Vega had his transcript and it turned out that he’d been an ‘A’ student! (Lily never asked her father how he knew about the tree incident if he wasn’t the one who climbed up there.)
Transcript in hand, Jesus chose a college up north. He wanted hills and trees and cool breezes in a distant land. It appealed to his adventurous spirit.
He tried to convince his best friend, Armando, to go with him. “You can’t stay here in Falfurious just because you don’t know what’s out there! Your soul will shrivel up and die!”
“My soul, eh? You worried about my soul?” Armando laughed.
“No, I’m worried about my soul and if you’re up there with me, I know I’ll stick it out.”
“Tell me again, Jesus, what’s so bad about living here?”
Eventually Armando agreed to go, but at the train station the night they were to leave, he appeared at the last minute, out of breath and told Jesus he had changed his mind. Why go so far away when there was a perfectly good college in Brownsville, the next town over? Jesus Vega understood. It was too foreign, too scary for a Mexican who’d never left the barrio to move across the country, enroll in school up north. He forgave his friend, because just as Armando was unable to leave, he was unable to stay.
Going up north. It was a journey to the Promised Land! Lily’s father longed to get away from the stinging prejudice of the gringos in Falfurious. He was tired of having to knock on the porch of a gringo’s house instead of on the door. He didn’t like being called “boy”. He wanted to become something, to show them--to show them all! Passion fueled his desire for success and Duquesne University offered the way.
Lily’s father liked the anonymity of a big school. He liked that it was Catholic. He studied theology and English and history. He studied science and genetics. While he traveled back and forth from Pittsburgh to Falfurious every summer, he formed a plan. He would write.
The man who owned the hardware store in Falfurious, had the misfortune to comment on Jesus Vega’s plan. “Eh? Jesus? A writer? As a writer you’ll make a fine shoemaker!”
That did it. As he removed his fist from Mr. Smith’s nose, wiped the blood on his blue jeans, Jesus Vega vowed that he would write. God damn it! If only to get back at those thickheaded gringos and their superior ways! Day and night he dreamed of his meteoric rise. He would be rich and powerful, drive expensive cars, wear fine clothes. Success would be his sweet revenge!
Then he met Lily’s mom.
“Oh,” Mum liked to say, “I almost didn’t even go to that St. Patrick’s Day dance! I wasn’t going to, but Ida Mae begged me! She said she couldn’t go, wouldn’t go without me!”
“Then what happened, Mum?” Lily obediently prompted her mother.
“Well, there he was! Just standing there on the other side of the room. I took one look at him and said to myself, ‘That’s the one. He’s the one for me!’ When he approached me and asked me to dance, it was a dream come true!” She sighed.
“Wow.” Lily would always interject a comment at this point.
“Honey, you just know when it’s the one!”
Lily remembered this every time she came across something that she ‘just knew’. The first time she spied a cockroach, Lily knew at once what it was. She’d never seen one before in her life, but there it was, scampering across her kitchen floor. It might as well have had the words COCK ROACH etched into its shiny back. And when her fiancé changed his mind, she knew just by looking at his sleeping countenance that he was going to bow out. Or when she found a dead man in the empty lot. She could tell just by looking—the body was there, but the person had already gone.
It turned out Mum was the ‘the one’ for Jesus too, although maybe not right away. Mum claimed the only reason he married her was because his mother shamed him into it.
“He wouldn’t have married me on his own; he was on his way home! We had said goodbye and I was looking into going to college myself when I got the call. It was all Mama Trina!”
“What do you mean, Mum?” Lily knew what she meant.
“Well, we dated for four years. Mama Trini said it was a sin for him to take up my best years and then leave me to die, an old maid. She said it would bring shame on the family name. So he called me up and proposed over the phone!”
Once, when Lily was feeling irritable, she said, “And you still married him, knowing that he only asked you ‘cause his mother made him do it?”
Mum gave Lily a piteous look. “Honey,” she said, “When you love someone you marry him no matter what. Love and pride are two separate things.”
Lily thought this must be true. Mum had jumped on a plane and into the life that was offered--a volatile, passionate, financially unstable lark of raising children and living on dreams. Jesus had nothing with which to lure her, save himself. No money, no property, just a burning desire to write and no clear idea of how he would support a family in the meantime. Mum didn’t care. She was in love.
Jesus Vega’s grand plan evolved into the dual careers of teaching high school to support his family and writing novels each summer to stoke his angry quest for fame and fortune. Looking back, Lily was amazed at her father’s fortitude.
In addition to pounding away at the Underwood in a stuffy little bedroom all summer, he undertook a heroic amount of “yard work”. To Lily’s father this meant mowing five and six acres of ground, uphill and down, never stopping for a rest or a drink of water. He used a gravely mower, pushing and pulling at it, making his muscles burn. Whenever a neighbor had the nerve to start up his riding mower, Jesus Vega would nod grimly, smile. “That’s it, Bob! Don’t walk! You have to mow an entire quarter acre! Sit! Sit!” Then he’d mow a little higher into the woods, pull down four more trees, for good measure.
Lily’s father cleared his woods, more and more each year, ripping out trees by their roots with only a bull rope and her older brother, Paul. He cut the trees into firewood and stacked them in cords; between the straight trees he left standing. When he was using the chain saw on a downed tree, the children would form a respectful audience. Lily remembered wanting to cheer him on. It was like watching a gladiator. Her father’s muscles rippled as the chain saw screamed. Wood chips flew. Oscar and Boo, the two youngest, would scurry to a safe distance, covering their ears--reluctant to leave, afraid to come any closer.
This physical labor did nothing to calm Jesus Vega’s fury. He sent off manuscript after manuscript with no result. It was a tedious process. Lily’s father felt having a family slowed him down. “Why did we have all these children?” he would mutter, mashing another rejection before hurling it away.
Mum only smiled. “Our greatest blessings? Tell me Jesus, which one would you rather not have had?”
It was a trick question and he knew it. Still, it would take Lily’s father his entire life to realize that he liked the life he’d lived, better than the one he’d always fantasized about.
This was the irony of his life. The irony and the treasure.
