SEEDFOLKS (4-GONZALOL) by Paul Fleischman

GONZALO


The older you are, the younger you get when you move to the United States.

They don’t teach you that equation in school. Big Brain, Mr. Smoltz, my eighth grade math teacher, hasn’t even heard of it. It’s not in Gateway to Algebra. It’s Garcia’s Equation. I‘m the Garcia.

Two years after my father and I moved here from Guatemala I could speak English. I learned it on the playground and watching lots of TV. Don’t believe what people say-cartoons make you smart. But my father, he worked all day in a kitchen with Mexicans and Salvadorans. His English was worse than a kindergartner’s. He would only buy food at the bodega down the block. Outside of there he lowered his eyes and tried to get by on mumbles and smiles. He didn’t want strangers to hear his mistakes. So he used me to make phone calls and to talk to the landlady and to buy things in store where you had to use English. He got younger. I got older.

He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza and talk-there aren’t any plaza here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around the apartment all day, in and out of rooms. Talking to himself, just liken a kid in diapers.

One morning he wandered outside and down the street. My mother practically fainted.

He doesn’t speak Spanish, just an Indian language. I finally found him standing in front of the beauty parlor, staring through the glass at a woman with a drier over her head. He must have wondered what weird planet he’d moved to. I led him home, holding his hand, the way you would with a three-year-old. Since then I’m supposed to baby-sit him after school.

One afternoon I was watching TV, getting smart on The Brady bunch. Suddenly I looked up. He was gone. I checked the halls on all five floors of the apartment house. I ran to the street. He wasn’t in the bodega or the pawnshop. I called his name, imagining my mother’s face when she found out he’d fallen through a manhole or been run over. I turned the corner, looking for the white straw hat he always wore. Two blocks down I spotted it. I flew down the sidewalk and found him standing in front of a vacant lot, making gestures to a man with a shovel.

I took his hand, but he pulled me through the trash and into the lot. I recognized the man with the shovel-he was the janitor at my old school. He had a little garden planted. Different shades of green leaves were coming up in rows. Tio Juan was smiling and trying to tell him something. The man couldn’t understand him and finally went back to digging. I turned Tio Juan around and led him home.

That night he told my mother all about it. She was the only one who could understand him. When she got home from work the next day she asked me to take him back there. I did. He studied the sun. Then the soil. He felt it, then smelled I, then actually tasted it. He chose a spot not too far from the sidewalk. Where my mother changed busses she’d gone into a store and bought him a trowel and four packets of seeds. I cleared the trash, he turned the soil. I wished we were farther from the street and I was praying that none of my friends or girlfriends or enemies saw me. Tio Juan didn’t even notice people-he was totally wrapped up in the work.

He showed me exactly how far apart the rows should be and how deep. He couldn’t read the words on the seed packets, but he knew from the pictures what seeds were inside. He poured them into his hand and smiled. He seemed to recognize them, like old friends. Watching him carefully sprinkling them into the troughs he’d made, I realized that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not faraway or confused. He’d changed from a baby back into a man.