The Night Gardener

by Kate Gessert

Silvia lies in bed, sweating in the warm August night, still hoping the sky will clear. Diana and Berto press close to her, Berto with his toes curled against her leg. She caresses his damp, silky hair and imagines glossy leaves. She has to get out there soon, while the moon is high.

     She dozes and wakes again a little after two, with moonlight streaming across the bed. Heaping up the coverlet, she tucks it against her children, hoping it feels enough like her body, and slides out of bed. She pulls her nightgown off, puts on her darkest work clothes and walks quietly into Luis’s room. As she touches his shoulder, his eyes open slowly. “M’hijo,” she whispers. “I’m going now.”

     Her son grins up at her. “Say hola to the chiles, Mami. I’ll take good care of everybody.” He closes his eyes.

     She takes a navy-blue cloth bag from the hook by the back door, slips out and locks the door behind her. The five blocks at night are habit now, and she walks quickly, but not too quickly, down the dark side of the street, close to trees and buildings. After several long hot days indoors, she loves being out in the soft night air. At a sudden rustle, she jolts with fear and shrinks against the nearest bush. A cat leaps from a tree and runs across the street. Her fear is heavy with adrenaline, almost a thrill, and for a moment she wonders what chances she might take if it weren’t for the four children sleeping in the house behind her: Luis, almost a man at seventeen; twelve-year-old Marta, confiding one minute and defiant the next; eight-year-old Diana, still struggling to get beyond the morning they took her father; and five-year-old Bertito, the baby of the family.

     Once she reaches the garden gate, Silvia switches on her penlight to see the lock. Though it is safest to do everything by moonlight, the small beam saves minutes of fumbling. And once she is inside, she’ll melt into the shadows of leaves and branches. Besides, they have no reason to raid a community garden in the middle of the night.

     She walks along paths that thread among the garden plots, her steps springy on the bark chips. She comes to the pale waxy heads of cabbages, the fine-textured, dark waves of taller and shorter chile plants: her garden. Home. Silvia grew up gardening with her family in Oaxaca, raising corn for neighboring villages until U.S. corn glutted the market, and she has worked here in this Oregon garden for the past five years, often with Bertito on her back and Diana at her heels. Above her loom the ten-foot corn plants of her neighbor’s plot. This darkness doesn’t frighten her. In the garden, she is safe.

     She moves among the chile bushes to check their progress. Brushing past, she smells the pungent scent of cilantro that has self-seeded among them. Although the chile fruits are still small, the plants are sturdy. Poblano chiles hang low, dark and chunky. Chiles de agua rise pale from tall branches. Oddly, she never thought of chiles as looking like penises until Miguel was taken away. Now she notices it all the time. Early jalapeños dangle from wide-spreading bushes. Soon these chiles will turn bright red, fiery hot.

     She turns on the sprinkler beside the chiles, and water glistens in the moonlight. Though she has mulched the plants thickly with leaves, they still need regular watering. Growing chiles in western Oregon is risky. If the weather turns rainy and cloudy, as it sometimes does late in summer, some varieties won’t ripen. This year Silvia asked the community garden board for extra space to dedicate to chiles, and now she has a two-plot garden. Miguel brought the seeds of chile de agua, her favorite, back from Oaxaca a few years ago, and she and her fellow gardeners trade seeds of traditional Mexican and Guatemalan varieties, testing year by year which ones ripen fastest here and develop the best flavor. But this year she can’t experiment. She has to sell a lot of salsa.

     With the cloth bag over her shoulder, she gathers cilantro and cuts a cabbage head, luminescent in the moonlight like a huge, milky rose. She will ask Luis to buy fish, and she’ll make fish tacos with cabbage and cilantro. The thought makes her mouth water. Tomatoes are just beginning to ripen, and she finds two small red fruits on the Siletz vine. On nights like these, when the moon is fullest, she can distinguish not only white, light, and dark, but also the reds and yellows of ripening fruits. The longer she works by moonlight, the better she can see.

     Tucking the vegetables carefully in her bag, Silvia sets it beside the path. She moves on to a weedy bed of lettuce and marigolds, surrounded by the low wooden fence Miguel built last year to keep marauding nutrias out. Lettuce is their favorite snack. On her knees, she works her way through the soft, moist soil, tugging at the base of sowthistles and hairy cat’s-ears. The spicy fragrance of marigold leaves surrounds her. She wonders, are scents more vivid in the garden at night? Or is her sense of smell keener? Textures flicker under her fingertips: the rippling of lettuce, jagged edges of sowthistle. Across her garden she hears the soothing hiss of water hitting the chile leaves.

     After she finishes weeding the lettuce, she moves methodically down the tomato row, on her knees again. A tree frog sings hoarsely from the nearby corn. Once she and Miguel are back together, she thinks, she’ll introduce him to night gardening. They can work together and make love among the vegetables, their bodies scented with the plants.

     But when will that be? And where? She looks up at the moon, the layers of filmy cloud rippling past it. Standing up, she wipes her hands on her pants, digs her watch out of her pocket and squints. Almost four, still too early for raids, from everything she’s heard. They come to your house first thing in the morning, the way they did with Miguel. All the same, she’d better get home. When Diana wakes up screaming, Luis can usually calm her, but not always. Sometimes only Mami can help.

* * *

Even after she has cooked everyone breakfast and they’ve all left the house, Silvia is still groggy. Luis is working at the grocery store, and Marta has taken Diana and Berto over to Zoraya’s house. They’ll go swimming at the city pool.

     She draws her fingers along the cool, smooth steel of the double oven, then rubs the metal clear, running a cloth over the glossy face, the glass windows where she can watch the cakes rise.

     When Miguel gave her the oven, two birthdays ago, she was both delighted and worried. How could she be so lucky, lucky in love with this man who had loved her for so long, who respected her work? And how could he spend so much money on her gift when there were bills to pay? Electricity, rent, saving for Luis’ application to the DACA program. If he could get in, he would be able to work legally, maybe even go to college. But the application fee was $495.

     Miguel seemed to guess her worry. “Ay, querida!” He smoothed Silvia’s hair back from her face. “This is your burro that will carry your business into the future. It’s good for all of us.”

     It happened just as he predicted. More and more orders poured in for Silvia’s baptism cakes, her wedding cakes, birthday cakes, chocolate chile cakes, tres leches mounded with whipped cream. Though most of Silvia’s customers spoke Spanish, she also had a growing number who didn’t, and she could talk with them pretty easily. She and Miguel spoke Spanish at home with their children, but they had picked up a fair amount of English from intermittent ESL classes and 14 years in the U.S. Miguel was especially fluent in roofing-related English, one of the reasons he was promoted to foreman last year and got a substantial raise.

     He told Silvia later about the speech his boss had made, to go with the promotion. “’Without you, Mike, I couldn’t talk to half the people who work for me. And I’m happy you have been with us so long so long without falling off a roof. No broken arms and legs – you’ve saved me so much money! Now I want you to pass on your sense of safety to everyone else.’” Miguel chuckled. “As if it was contagious. I have you and our children to live for. I can’t make other people feel the same way. They do or they don’t.”

     With Miguel’s raise and all the cakes, they could afford to move down the street to a house that had one more bedroom. No yard, but tall, south-facing windows for Silvia’s beloved houseplants. They could send more money to their families in Oaxaca and also open a savings account. They paid for Luis’ DACA application and he was accepted to the program when he was 16. With his new legal status, he got a weekend job working at a tree nursery and immediately started saving money for the renewal, two years ahead. It would cost another $495, a lot of young trees to haul around, but Luis was determined to pay it himself. Bertito was already reading and writing a little bit in kindergarten, and Diana was a third-grade soccer star, a super-goalie. Marta’s attitude toward middle school was tolerant if not enthusiastic. Their family was thriving.

     Silvia had never seen Miguel at work on the roofs. It would be too frightening, and anyway, the roofs were all over western Oregon. She imagined him striding up a sloping roof the way he moved across a dance floor – confident, almost cocky, his legs steady beneath him, a lithe, compact man with carefully combed hair and a wide smile. But roofing was dangerous, especially in wet weather on mossy shingles. No matter how careful you were, sometimes your luck ran out. On bad days she had imagined him broken, unconscious. She had imagined losing him.

     When she did lose him, it was the other way, the way she had tried not to think about.

* * *

She sighs and opens the freezer. If she drinks just a small amount of coffee every day, this bag of Colombian will last for weeks. She sets water on to boil, folds a paper towel into the drip cone, and adds a teaspoon of coffee. The water hisses as it heats. This is Poco’s signal. He chirps from his cage in the sunny window, between the jasmine and the Queen of the Night. When Silvia opens the door, Poco starts out along his preferred route, edging sideways down a long, woody stem of the cactus, his grass-green and yellow feathers half-hidden among its dangling leaves. Her grandmother grew Queen of the Night when Silvia was a little girl in Oaxaca. The plants are awkward-looking but beautiful in bloom, and she has cherished this one for many years, ever since she brought a small piece home from an Oregon dentist’s waiting room. When Poco reaches the tip of the stem, she holds out her finger and he jumps on, his tiny claws pinching her skin. He hops up along her arm to her shoulder and cuddles against her, rubbing his head on her neck and purring like a brightly feathered kitten.

     “Ay, chiquito,” she says softly. “You and Luis are the men of our house.” She sits down at the kitchen table with her list of orders. “Today we have tres leches with strawberries and pineapple for the Murillos’ anniversary, and a chocolate birthday cake for Madison from Diana’s fourth-grade class. ‘I just love those whipped-cream mountains,’ says Madison’s mother. ‘I’ll put little angels on top.’ Both cakes are getting picked up in mid-afternoon, so we have plenty of time, cariño. Maybe even a nap…”

     Silvia pours hot water on the coffee to moisten it, waits, then pours again and lets it drip. It smells so good that drinking it seems almost secondary. She heats a little milk. She tries to focus on these things she enjoys, but slips back into memory. The lovebird moves restlessly on her shoulder.

* * *

If it wasn’t for Alvaro, none of this would have happened. Every time Silvia thinks of him, fury flashes through her. It does no good. No one can find him, not even La Migra.

     Alvaro, Miguel’s cousin. His childhood buddy, who swam with him in Arroyo des Colibris, the creek that meandered through their village and long ago ran dry. Alvaro who was always in trouble. With women, mostly. His only legal trouble that Silvia knew of was a drug arrest in Yuma, Arizona four or five years ago. The police had stopped Alvaro’s car. For no reason, he said. But they found half a kilo of marijuana in the glove compartment. Though Alvaro said a hitchhiker had left it there, the car was seized and he went to jail. He had a green card, and when he was released from jail, Immigration told him he could stay in the country as long as he checked in with them every six months.

     Miguel sent bus money and Alvaro came to Oregon. He stayed a month or so and then returned to the Southwest.

* * *

Silvia pours coffee and hot milk into her small, crooked mug, the one Diana made her for Mother’s Day. Lovebirds with curly eyelashes are painted around the outside, and there is a pink heart inside on the bottom. She adds a pinch of cinnamon and froths the milky coffee with a whisk.

* * *

Last year, something else went wrong in Alvaro’s life. He didn’t tell Miguel and Silvia any details, but he stayed with them for a couple of months, a very long time for Silvia. He got in her way, hanging around the house and messing things up. When she asked him to help – wash dishes, walk the kids home from school – he always thought of something else he had to do. Eventually he went back to Arizona, which was a big relief. If only that had been the end of it…

* * *

She had almost finished planting when Miguel was taken. The chiles were already in, but she had decided to wait one more week for the tomato seedlings to grow taller. Back then, in the middle of May, they were still in little pots along the south and west windowsills of the house.

     It was 5:30 on a Wednesday morning, just getting light. Silvia was sleeping and Miguel was in the bathroom when someone rapped on the front door. Half-asleep, Diana trotted into the living room and opened the door.

     Two big men charged past her with their guns drawn. She shrieked and Miguel came running out of the bathroom. “Down on the floor!” They snapped cuffs on his wrists and ankles, while Diana screamed and sobbed. Luis ran into the room and Silvia followed, terrified. She had always known that La Migra might come, especially with this pendejo president. But with all the thuds and screaming, it sounded like a gang attack. Marta and Berto ran after her.

     Suddenly Luis was also on the floor, handcuffed beside his father. Diana kept sobbing and Bertito joined in. Poco squeaked frantically from his covered cage in the kitchen. Marta put her arms around her little brother and sister and shepherded them into the back bedroom.

     “Hombre!” yelled one of the men, a tall, fat one, leaning over Miguel. This man and the other, shorter one wore blue-black tee shirts that said POLICE ICE. “You missed your check-in!”

     “I don’t know what you mean,” answered Miguel. He sounded dignified, Silvia thought, even on his face in handcuffs and pajamas.

     “Last month in Phoenix, remember?”

     “I live here with my family,” Miguel answered. “I am living in Oregon. I not living in Arizona.”

     Luis lay on the carpet, silent. Silvia stood frozen by the couch. By now she knew who they were after. But she also knew her husband would never say, “You’re talking about my cousin.”

     The shorter man, whose head was shaved and oily-looking, pulled a small photograph out of his back pocket. “This is you!” He thrust it in front of Miguel’s nose. Silvia peered down at the blurry picture. Alvaro did look quite a bit like Miguel—the dark, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones.

     “Get back!” The shorter man waved his gun at her.

     “Careful!” shouted Miguel. “Please,” he said in a lower voice, “is all mistake. This isn’t me. My name is Miguel.”

     “So show me Oregon ID.”

     “I have driver’s license.”

     The man pointed his gun at Silvia. “Get it.”

     “In the back of my top bureau drawer, mi amor,” Miguel told her.

     She brought it quickly and the man snatched it out of her hand and turned it over. He snorted. “This expired in 2012!”

     “Could be fake,” added the tall, fat one, looking over the other man’s shoulder.

     Silvia’s voice shook. “This is Miguel, my husband. He is father of our four children. He is obeying always the law. He is not who you look for.”

     “We’ll see about that.”

     “But…” Should she show them his matrícula consular? But that was Mexican ID. It might make everything worse.

     The tall man moved in close, looming above her. “Maybe you’d like us to take the kid too?” He gestured toward Luis.

     “My father has done nothing wrong,” said Luis, struggling to sit up. Although his voice cracked, he spoke loudly. “Please leave him alone.”

     “You shut up!” the tall man said.

     He and the shorter one wrenched Miguel to his feet and dragged him out the door, slamming it behind them. Silvia stared at the door, tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t even kiss him goodbye, not even touch his hand. With the cuffs on his ankles, all he could do was hobble, and he was still in his pajamas, the blue ones with space ships that she had given him for Christmas. She could hear the younger children sobbing in the bedroom, and beside her, Luis was still trying to get up. She helped him to a sitting position and looked down at his handcuffs. How was she ever going to get them off?

     The shorter man threw the door back open. He leaned over to unlock the cuffs, and when Luis scrambled to his feet, shoved the boy so hard in the stomach that he landed crooked, on the floor again.

* * *

Silvia shakes her head hard to clear away the images. According to the lawyer, nothing more can be done.

     Taking her mug of coffee along, she peers into the refrigerator. Strawberries, cream, eggs… Poco trills, prancing along her shoulder. Everything she needs is here. “Day by day,” she tells the bird. “Yesterday the Diazes paid me for the lemon sheet cake, and Luis used the money to buy avocados and tortillas for dinner, and ingredients for today’s cakes. We’re cutting it close, but with the cakes and Luis’ wages, and the garden, we get by. And in fall, there’ll be salsa from all those chiles. I hope so, anyway. No more DACA savings for now. The money Luis and I make is for food, our family savings for rent and utilities. Lawyers, doctors if we need them…” Or tickets to Mexico. This is what she can’t say out loud, even to Poquito. She shivers and sets her coffee down. She lifts the bird back in his cage, washes her hands, and takes out baking pans, bowls and measuring spoons.

     A time may come, will come, when she can’t do this any more. They’ll run out of money. And Miguel can’t send them any. He is still looking for a job in Oaxaca. Or she and the kids will miss him even more than now, so much they can’t bear it, and they’ll all leave together. Leave their friends, their nice house, the kids’ schools, the opportunities, especially for the three youngest, who were born here and are U.S. citizens.

     Worst of all, La Migra may catch up with her as well. She has always been careful. But now you don’t have to do anything wrong. Just be here without papers. Now she understands, too late: Don’t open the door! Don’t let your kids open the door!

     But until it happened, how could Diana know, pobrecita?

     They all still have nightmares, but Diana most of all. She sobs and mumbles in her sleep, and Silvia carries her to the bed she used to share with Miguel and sleeps curled around her daughter, patting her back. Fairly often, Berto and Marta join them before morning.

     This is her own nightmare: Immigration returns and they take her away. Her children are home and they see. First their father, then their mother.

     Or she is here alone. The kids get home, they open the door and the house is empty. No one left but Poquito.

     It would be safer to move, of course. But where would they go, all five of them? And to leave this good house, so close to the community garden, with decent rent…  No, her job is to stay home. She doesn’t have control over much, hardly anything, but she can at least keep herself from getting grabbed off the street, out of a store. Working in the garden at night is fairly safe, and they need the food. But days are high-risk. She will do her best to be here every day when her children come home. With open arms.

     She thinks of Miguel in Oaxaca, homesick, tired of looking for work, but at least he isn’t still talking about trying to get back over the border. Silvia told him what the lawyer said, about the danger of a U.S. prison sentence for “illegal re-entry after removal.” She told him he could help them all much better if he was free in Mexico. But she knows he misses them and feels humiliated that he can’t be here and take care of everyone.

     Enough! She is measuring sugar and flour, working on automatic pilot. Yet she must concentrate. A moment’s inattention can ruin a cake.

     The summer morning is warming up. The jasmine flowers smell sweet in the sunny window. Silvia switches on the overhead fan and puts on a CD, Los Angeles de Charly. She sways as she works. She remembers dancing with her husband, his steps precise, guiding her, his hand firm and warm on her waist.

Kate Gessert’s publishing background has been in nonfiction: The Beautiful Food Garden, a book about landscaping with fruits and vegetables, as well as articles for Horticulture, Organic Gardening, Utne Reader, and others. For several years she wrote Undercovered, a column for the Eugene Weekly about the impact of U.S. wars on Afghan and Iraqi civilians. She lives in Crow, OR, with her husband and a garden of flowers, food plants, and natives. She is a writer, teacher, gardener, shepherd, mother, and new grandmother.