Lords of the Wind

Yxta Maya Murray

He caught up to him at the corner of La Posada. And that’s where he, you know, hit him. With a flashlight, on the back of his head.

—Man describing the murder of union organizer Nagi Daifallah, from the documentary Fighting for Our Lives (1975)

We knew the wind was different when we got up that morning. The dust was already blowing and visibility wasn’t all that great.

It was frightening because you couldn’t see. They dismissed school early. I was supposed to walk home and my mom came to the school to pick me up. Once I got into the car you could probably only see maybe a block ahead of you, if that.

Everybody was trying to cover their faces. You were walking against the wind. You couldn’t breathe. I got sand in my eyes and my mouth.

The trees had a definite bend to them. The wind was pulling limbs off the trees.

My mother and I got home. We stayed in the house. We tried to close off doorjambs and windows with towels because the sand and dust were coming in.

We hunkered in the house for so long, just waiting for it to end. We were scared. We’d never experienced anything like that.

The sound, it was a kind of roaring. My mother got a little panicky.

It was almost apocalyptic. The sky and everything was brown and orange. The dust blocked out the sun.

Oh my God, we thought. Where did this come from?

—Interview with Lisa Tumey, Bakersfield, June 15, 2023

You want me to tell you about the day of the dust?

I see, you’re a writer. Doing a story. And here I was, thinking you came to see me about your hands.

Hands, honey. Didn’t you see the sign on my door? That’s the business I’m in. The hand business.

No, I can’t conjure those ghosts with you this morning. Got a day of patients ahead of me.

Oh, Marisol said I’d tell you all about the typhoon, huh?

That woman is a bug in my bourbon. She collar you at the Fiesta Market? You must have wandered into the cheese aisle and bumped into her mouth.

Yeah, I remember it. The Great Dust Storm of 1977.

Wiped out Lamont, Arvin, Bakersfield. Sand made the sun bleed. Buried houses, cars, orchards, cattle. People. The living and the dead.

I’m a scientist, so I don’t go in for superstition. Still, with everything we’d gone through, it was hard for some of us not to see the storm as the curse of a chisera.

Reason some people believe brujería made the wind deadly that year is there’d been devilry done in this town. There’s no denying that the people of Lamont were long overdue for a blood atonement.

I’m talking about what happened to Nagi. But I guess you don’t know about him. Seeing as you’re not from around here.

Well, I can’t have old Marisol chomping off my head because I didn’t give you a minute . . . but if you want to know about that spell of bad weather, you’ll need to hear about what came before. I have to sit down for that.

No, ma’am, slow down. I’m not giving you the details of the dust just yet. It’s like I said. I’m going back to the time I knew Nagi Daifallah. I’ll bring you to the place you want to be but we’re taking the long way, because I’m an old woman with a story and that gives me some prerogatives.

This was in the spring of ’73, right when the UFW had set up the Terronez medical clinic in Delano, after the grape strike there had ended.

Yes, the United Farm Workers. You’re in UFW territory, you know that, right?

I was seventeen years old. My parents and I had spent the past two months picketing the DiGiorgio ranch, a grapes, plums, and pears hellhole that sat right by Lamont. My papi nearly got blinded when one of the overseers sprayed his face with pesticides. We’d harvested every crop in San Joaquin and knew the evil that lay at the heart of those groves, so after my father’s assault we did all we could for Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong. Licked envelopes, made phone calls, patched up protesters—which is what I was doing that day at the clinic. Dolores hired me to sweep the facility. But one thing led to another, and pretty soon I was triaging the patients coming through the door injured by a combine or a grain auger or a police officer.

One bad, busy night we had a truckload of victims from a Filipino farmworker camp that’d been taken by arson. Nurses handling three burn patients at a time, doctors sprinting from one smoke-inhalation case to another. In the middle of the commotion, a dark-eyed man, twenty-one years old but no taller than me, stumbled in. He’d jammed his right hand under his armpit, a red stain seeping through his white shirt. A sawbones treating the second-degreed shoulder of a young gal yelled at me to tend him. When I approached this stranger, he sat very still in a corner with his back straight as a scalpel. I managed to persuade him to unclench his fist. As his fingers spread, it was like a rose’s petals opening in the rain. The hand had been flayed from defense cuts—the wounds you get when you raise your arms to defend your head while somebody’s beating you.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Trouble down in El Rancho Farms.”

“You striking?”

He winced as I pressed gauze to the blood spilling through his knuckles. “Yes.”

“Haven’t seen you before. You from Tehachapi? Wasco?”

“From Yemen,” he said.

“Yemen . . . ?” I didn’t know even the tiniest bit about the world outside of Kern.

“It’s in the Arabian Peninsula,” he said.

I shook my head, peering up at him, shy. Even as he suffered from the pain, he had this beautiful face. Shiny like a new penny.

“Middle East,” he said.

“All the way from out there,” I said, trying to sound like a woman of the world. The puncture wounds over his metacarpus had stones and dirt in them, which I teased out with tweezers. One of the gashes went deep. I tried to get medics to stitch him but they hurried past me with pale, tight faces.

“If you get a needle and thread, I can show you,” he said.

“Oh, no, my mama says I can’t even darn a sock.”

“It’s quite simple.”

I ran to the cupboard, got the supplies, and disinfected him while he explained how to debride the dead tissue, do the sutures.

I threaded the needle with my tongue until he told me to stop because of the germs. Next part went even worse. I mangled him good so his hand looked like leftovers from Sunday supper.

“How you know how to patch people?” I asked him as I worked.

“From fighting with the English back at home. I learned field dressing from manuals and Gray’s Anatomy.” He breathed the pain out through his teeth. “That’s why I came here, to study medicine in San Francisco.”

I could only understand every other word he said. “You going to be a doctor?”

“I wanted to be but now I don’t know.” He stared at his blood oozing out of his hand. “America is different than I expected.”

“Something tells me you shouldn’t give up,” I said.

He looked at me sideways, then smiled until I saw dimples. “Why not?”

I wrapped up his Frankenstein mitt with a big bandage. “So you can fix this mess I made.”

He laughed and said thank you.

“Thank you, Violeta,” I said.

“Thank you, Violeta. My name’s Nagi.”

He winked at me as I bolted off to help a doc with one of the burn cases, and he stayed around, doing his own ministering. I mopped up messes and carried water but also watched as he moved quietly from cot to cot, tucking people in and replying in murmurs as the smoke-blackened scapegoats ranted to him about the wickedness that rules the Central Valley.

I started to see Nagi around town in the weeks after. Lamont’s a little place, though we grow all kinds here—citrus, strawberries, tomatoes, eggplants, melons, peppers. We ranch cattle, sheep, and goats. For all that work, we’ve got no money. No decent housing, no services. Who the hell would come to this cow town unless they didn’t have any better options? But Nagi’d got an education in being an outsider, first in occupied Yemen, and then when he moved here to train as a physician and wound up hiring on as a field hand at El Rancho Farms. He’d joined the picket line at Rancho the year before, then Chavez hired him to translate for the Arab workers, of whom we have quite a few in these parts. I’d sometimes catch him at the lavandería or the markets, his face kindled with concentration as he decoded Fred Ross or Ben Gines’s words for the pickers who broke their backs for two bucks an hour.

One day in June, the UFW priest came to Lamont to hold a mass, and my mother, Marisol—yeah, the lady who sent you to me is my troublemaking madre—she wanted him to bless my father’s eyes, which had been failing ever since the overseer’d poisoned his face with heptachlor. Mama had tried to cure Papi by blowing sacred smoke over him but neither that nor the doctor’s pills from the clinic stopped his corneal burns from slowly scarring over or the pesticides he’d absorbed from killing his liver. Our people weren’t exactly Catholic and not precisely Mexican either. My mother’s grandmother descended from the Seed-Gatherers, whom some call the Yokut people, a sparse but surviving Delta tribe whose shamans made difficult magic. Many an evening I’d find myself holding a sprig of burning sage and singing my great-great-abuela’s sickness songs over my father. But the mysteries of ischemic cell damage and necrosis vanquished our most powerful spell work. Even though we were wary of the Catholics because they had the cruelest god, Mama became so desperate for a cure she dragged us to the UFW service.

“Goddamn it, just let me eat my pupusas,” Papi said that morning as she’d nagged him away from the breakfast table and made him and me walk with her to a vacant lot next to the Franco orange groves. Here, the UFW bishop wore his black-and-red robe and high hat and swung around the censer while our neighbors held out their babies for benedictions. The line to get to the big guy stretched for about half a mile, and it was hot already. While the bishop yelled a sermon about how the sin of capitalism had turned this once-green valley into the growers’ own Sodom and Gomorrah, I looked past the mujeres whispering their rosaries to see a man with eyes like starlings standing to the side of the crowd. Nagi. A group of men who worked Franco’s oranges circled him, and I watched as he nodded and took notes while they told him about the rat shacks they lived in, the barbed wire around their camps, the lack of plumbing, the seizures DDT’d given them, how they picked till their hands went numb, how union organizers couldn’t even visit them in their own homes.

It didn’t occur to me that he was Muslim. Shames me now but I didn’t even really know what a Muslim believed. Couldn’t understand that his showing up and paying his respects at a Catholic rite proved he was an open person, a caring person. All I could think was, I liked him. When that crew dispersed, I wandered over.

“Violeta,” he said.

His shining gaze made me feel bold. I’m sitting down now but if I stood back up, you’d see I’ve got bandy legs, and I didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds back then. I usually didn’t run around shaking my peaches on the theory that nobody wanted to pluck ’em, but I’d stitched his hand up and somehow it felt like that part of him belonged to me now. So I stared straight into his fine, new-penny face and I took up that hand in my own. He’d taken off his bandage and I eyeballed my sutures in the palmar aspect. They weren’t a thing of beauty but he was healing fine.

“Maybe you would like to be a doctor too,” he said.

“Me?”

“You have a gentle touch, a healer’s touch,” he said.

Hoo! I didn’t know what to say. He took my breath away.

“Violeta!” my mother yelled right then. “Let’s go.” Even as the bishop had stood up on his hind legs and hollered how there weren’t ten righteous white men to be found in the Central Valley, she’d lugged my dad to the front of the line and ordered the padre to make the sign of the cross on both his eyelids.

“I’ll see you later,” I said.

“I hope so,” Nagi said.

I floated home on the wings of girl hormones while my mother muttered about how the priest didn’t know how to do a good sacrament, that he’d rushed it like it was a cheapo blessing she could buy for fifty cents from the old bats who muddle with scarabs and sweetgrass at the back of the lavandería.

That night, to placate Eagle and Crow for our offense of seeking aid from the Anglos’ god, she made a necklace of marigold flowers, put them around my neck, and made me sing a medicine song in the name of my father, who knelt before me while holding a lily in his hand.

I’d always loved taking part in my mama’s devotions, which were beautiful and connected me to all my grannies. But this time was different. While I swayed and chanted, I saw our worships as if they’d suddenly been thrown under the bright lights of the Terronez Clinic. If Nagi had read about field dressings in Yemen and wanted to study medicine in the big city, maybe he’d think that a girl who prayed to giant birds in the sky was a couple peppers short of a peck.

“This stuff doesn’t work, you know,” I muttered while my mother sprinkled Papi with tap water she’d charmed with a crystal.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she said, growing red in the face.

“It ain’t scientific. You might as well tap-dance while balancing a honeydew melon on your head and singing ‘Git Along, Little Dogies.’”

Mama’s eyes kept widening till she looked like she’d stuck a thumb in a socket.

Later that night, she threw the pans all over the kitchen while I hid in my bedroom and kissed my pillow, pretending it was Nagi. My father ripped my blanket off me and ordered me to massage Mama’s feet while she wept in terror that I would be punished for my heresy by getting sent to a hell filled with claw-footed diablos who’d peck me to endless death.

Looking back, I wish I hadn’t said a single sideways word to my mother, even if none of her remedies would ever work. Papi went blind a few months later and died four years after that.

“Huelga! Huelga! Huelga!”

That’s what we were all chanting on the day I saw Nagi again, more than a week after the mass. Hundreds of us gathered at the Baxter strike. Baxter was one of the biggest farmers and distributors of table grapes in the world, and still is. The Delano action had ended in ’70 with decent contracts but our agreements had lapsed after three years. That summer, the safety and health fix-its the growers agreed to disappeared overnight—the breaks, the bottled water, the shade, the food, the medical care. Worse than that, Baxter had joined with the Teamsters to push the UFW out. Then the growers scabbed us out by hiring poor undocumented Mexicans, even little children.

I wore a red-and-white shawl and a big straw hat and a black flowy dress that Mama had made me. Marisol had on black overalls and a white T-shirt and a red hat that looked like a fire hydrant. My papi popped on some sunglasses because his eyes hurt. He held his picket over his head while my mother and I danced around with our comrades. We shimmied and boogied, laughing until tears streamed down our faces. A strike can be a wonderful thing. A time of delight and feeling that rebel blood running through you.

A eso campos van los niños campesinos

Sin un destino, sin un destino

Son peregrinos de verdad

Problem was, the growers had gotten court orders saying our protests were illegal. One minute, I was jitterbugging with Mama and the next, thirty police officers were pushing their bellies through the crowd and slapping cuffs on anybody they could.

“Viva la causa!” my mother hollered as they arrested us, while my father belted out the lyrics to a Woody Guthrie song. “¡Sí, se puede!”

We all got separated, though we didn’t stop roaring Viva! Women cackled through the windows of police vans. Old men thrust their skinny arms in the air while doing the two-fisted Brown Power salute. Teamsters had shown up by this time, waving the American flag. A UFW dude with cojones big as bowling balls grabbed a horn and shouted, “¡Chavez sí, Teamsters no!” We kept up the chant while deputies tossed us into paddy wagons and carted us off to jail. I landed in a stinking lockup along with tough biddies and worn-down heroes, everybody hoarse from yelling and going cross-eyed from having to take a piss. Lying there splay legged, with my dress dirtier than a latrine and sweat streaming down my face, I suddenly sat up straight like I’d been pulled by the hair. Because who did I see across the cell but my prince, with those dark, gleaming eyes?

“Nagi!”

His smile fluttered toward me like a dove. He stood from his squatting position and made his way over.

“I saw them take you,” he said, scooching between me and a vaquero sleeping under his big hat. “You hurt?”

“Not more than anybody else.”

“Why do you look so happy? You are arrested.”

Instead of saying, Because I love you, I took up his hand, the one I’d stitched.

“In a month or two, it will be fully healed,” he said, as we studied his scar. “The Palmar aponeurosis is still intact.” He used my finger to trace the triangle beneath his knuckles. “You see, it holds the muscles and the fascia together.”

We sat there quietly for a while. I felt bold again.

“Nagi, tell me that thing you said before, about how I could be a doctor.”

“You could be a doctor, Violeta.”

“But you told me that you didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Yes. It’s too difficult here.”

I watched him—the beads of sweat on his temple, the bruise I just now saw beneath his left eye. He had large, full lips. A tiny mustache. Big ears.

Our hands almost intertwined.

“You said I had a healing touch,” I whispered.

“Did I say that too?”

He brought his fingers up to my face and stroked my cheek.

In the middle of that weary huddle, listening to police officers rattling our cell bars with their billy clubs, my heart began to sing.

I didn’t run across Nagi for a while after that. I know now that he’d become a picket captain and was organizing in Stockton for Chavez and Dolores. But I thought about him all the time. It felt like he was always somehow watching over me. To impress him, or this idea of him sort of mystically floating around me and keeping an eye on my doings, I rode my bike to the tiny Lamont library. I paged through all three of its outdated medical books. Not that the idea of my becoming a nurse or a doctor seemed in any way realistic. I’d dropped out of high school two years before. It’s hard to do your lessons when you pick sixty hours a week. But I wanted to live up to my maybe, someday lover.

I spent most of the rest of that summer reading. Not real medical books, like Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine or The New England Journal. My mother had figured out my new enthusiasm and got hold of a box of nurse romances from an Arvin garage sale, and I kept it under my bed. Passion in the Pharmacy. A Surgeon’s Splendor. A Nurse’s Heart. Sounds ridiculous now but that was my way into medicine. I read romance novels about doctors and RNs saving people’s lives and falling in love and, after a while, I imagined myself wearing a white coat and married to Nagi.

Meanwhile, my parents and I kept going to the rallies, the protests. There was a big one in late July at Giumarra farms. But whereas that earlier Baxter protest had been almost like a party—a party where you could get your teeth smashed in, mind you—this one was different. You could feel the hate. It was thick in the air. Sour on the tongue.

About five hundred people were there. My parents and I marched at the edge of the farm while the Teamsters, who’d hung back and snickered with the deputies during our previous actions, faced off against us now.

“You stink! You smell!” those Jimmy Hoffa numbnuts shouted. “I can smell your stink from here!”

Scuffles started up here and there. I saw deputies kicking at Mexicans and laughing. Then, all at once, it was like ten fights broke out at the same time. Less than fifty feet in front of me, a sheriff dragged a lady by the hair and she was totally limp, with her lower lip hanging down and her eyes rolling up white.

“Time to go,” my mother said.

“Yeah,” Papi agreed, pulling me by my shirt.

That’s when I saw Nagi in the crowd. He had his arms up around his head, defending himself while an Anglo hit him on the shoulders with a baton—I don’t know if the guy was a Teamster, a grower, a police officer, or what.

“No!” I screamed.

I ran toward Nagi. I saw his mouth open, his gnawing teeth. Then the world burst into a thousand puzzle pieces.

A large, heavy man had hit me in the chest. I fell to the ground. My head landed on a rock and I blacked out.

Woke up a few hours later. Maybe the next day? When I finally came back around I was lying on a blanket in our living room. Magnolia blossoms and lilies surrounded me head to foot. My parents sat on their knees and sang prayers to the Virgin and Father Eagle and the goddess Tlazoltéotl.

Nagi kneeled next to them. He had pink scrapes on his face from his beating and stayed quiet as a shadow while my mother rubbed me with cod-liver oil and commanded a thousand gods to heal me.

I turned my head to the wall. Wanted to explain to Nagi that I didn’t believe in old-time religion and that I’d read the scientific library books so he’d be proud of me.

All I could do was cry. That sweet man bent down and touched my cheek, like he had in the prison. His lips moved. He was saying words, Arabic words, that I couldn’t understand.

I never saw him again.

Two weeks later, Nagi Daifallah was murdered by Deputy Gilbert Cooper, an officer of the Kern County Sheriff’s office. The killer was a six-foot-tall white man who weighed two hundred pounds, whereas Nagi was five feet and a buck at most. Happened on August 15, 1973. At around one in the morning, over at the Smokehouse Café here in Lamont. Cooper and his gang drove up to find a crew of UFW folks eating breakfast after a long meeting. The officers arrested one of the group without any good reason and when the men protested, Cooper beat Nagi on the back of the head with a heavy metal flashlight. Smashed him at the base of the skull and severed his head from his spinal cord. Probably suffered brain and somatic death then and there. Cooper wanted to make sure, though. His buddies dragged Nagi on the ground by the feet, so my sweetheart’s head bashed into the pavement over and over. Nagi was pronounced later that night at the hospital.

We held a funeral for him. I was well enough to go to that. Thousands of us took turns shouldering his casket on the four-mile march from La Paz to the Bakersfield airport so we could fly his body home to Yemen. During the procession, the mourners were silent, except for our Arab brothers, who honored his memory with their tender praying.

While I marched for Nagi, I carried one of my romance books in my coat pocket. A Surgeon’s Splendor. Later, when we set up his altar in front of the Smokehouse Café, I put it up there, though I never explained to anybody what it meant.

Afterward, I wasn’t right, mentally. I sat in bed and scratched at myself until I bled.

My mother tried to heal me. I stuck my head under a pillow while she’d do a rain dance, the way her great-grandmother had taught her.

Fetching a stone from her garden, she held it in her hand. She leapt up, crouched down. She pounded her feet. Demanded I join along.

I just wanted to die.

“Go away, Mama,” I said.

Deputy Cooper was never charged. I don’t know what happened to him. Things being as they are, I’m sure he went on to live a nice long life.

I took it too hard, if there is such a thing. I yearned to slumber in the painless embrace of my ancestors. It’s probable that I was suffering emotional lability resulting from a concussion, along with clinical depression. Still, I couldn’t make my way to suicide, seeing how I had to keep alive for Marisol and Papi. So I went to Bakersfield City College instead. In ’75.

That first eighteen months of schooling nearly broke my mind on account of the culture shock and residual cognitive dysfunction. But even after my mental damage cleared, I was still like a trout learning how to tango. I studied the white man’s words. His books, his knowledge. My teachers taught me that wisdom isn’t a gift handed down by our grandmothers but instead is a set of rules locked in a box that you have to dig through miles of your own dirty ignorance to get to. So, for example, there’s the distributive law of mathematics, saying that any number you multiply by the total of two or more numbers will be equal to the total of that number multiplied by each of the numbers separately. Or there’s the law of conservation of mass, holding that in chemical reactions matter will stay the same and not be created or destroyed. Now Mexicans and the Seed-Gatherers know that any number you multiply by the total of two or more numbers will only really be equal to the total decreed by your overseer. And that when you are dealing with a reaction, matter will be created or destroyed depending on whether you are strong enough to bear up under the bitter weight of whiteness for another day. But, being spirit-murdered as I was, I liked my teacher’s rules as I found their disgust at nuance and ambiguity refreshing.

Somehow we scraped together the tuition. Mama got a job as a secretary for the UFW and then Chavez himself. The union gave me a scholarship. After limping through my introductory courses, I learned math and physics through years of hard, even obsessed, work. Once my father passed away, I remained haunted by his eyes as well as the feathery touch of Nagi’s fingers on my cheek. For them, I was going to be a nurse, like in A Nurse’s Heart. But when I got to Fresno State, my chemistry professor thought I showed some promise and put me on the premed track.

I came back for the winter holidays in ’77. Papi had died the year before. I’d returned to help my mother through the sorrow of Christmas, to cook tamales with her and stick a star on the top of the tree. Put an extra plate at the head of the table, where my father used to sit.

I didn’t need to worry so bad about Marisol. She wore her UFW T-shirt like widow’s weeds and used her secretary’s perch to boss hundreds of harried farmworkers who had to go through her to confer with the great man. Whenever I’d arrive back home from finals or on a weekend between internships, she’d make a cross on my forehead with holy water. Instead of arguing with her like I once had, I’d stand there as stiff and dumb looking as Gerald Ford, my head full of post-Newtonian rationality that judged her fairy work as so much gullible bunk. She was hurt, I could tell. But I was a swanky educated lady now and she didn’t complain.

On the second night of my Christmas visit, I went to bed after washing the dinner dishes. I lay in bed, trying to lull myself to sleep by whispering the periodic table. Around three o’clock, my memories crawled up onto my chest, blinking their big eyes at me. I reached under my bed and pulled out the box of nurse and doctor romances that had stayed where I’d stowed it as a lusty teenager. Thumbing through the books, I felt my lost rage thrumming through my dried-out veins. It was like Father Eagle and Mother Crow had flown back into the branches that had always crisscrossed above me, and which I had lost sight of while my neck bent to my studies. The old, angry joy of my ancestors beat through me, as painful as a knife slicing through the palm of my hand. Deputy Gilbert Cooper, I wish death on you, I prayed. People of Lamont, I curse you to never forget the name of Nagi Daifallah. And if the gods answer my vesper and overthrow this city, I don’t care if the righteous are taken along with the wicked.

Next thing I knew, it was late in the morning. I woke to the sound of wind.

Yeah, what you’ve been waiting for so patiently. This is my memory of the storm.

All the strands and tendrils of the air flew to our little spot in the world. They whirled together, first slowly and then at greater speed. While the clouds collected, zephyrs flapped their black wings and dove to the ground, picking up dust and tossing it to the heavens. Spinning faster and faster, the monsoon exploded into a tidal wave that crested Bear Mountain, careened over Bakersfield, and hurled into Lamont.

Outside, I saw the dust scratch at the sun until it bled red and orange. Palm trees twisted and splintered. Boards flew off our neighbor’s roofs. Across the street, I made out the hazy figure of a man or woman walking a dog. They crouched and scuttled to avoid getting punched off their feet by the air. The gale picked up an ebony fog of dead crickets and blew it all over town.

I ran into the living room, calling my mother’s name. Found her in the kitchen, a wad of wet carrots falling from her hands as she stared through the window.

“This is bad,” she said.

Just then, a hunk of dirt slammed against the glass panes, hard as a rock. BAM!

We screamed and ran to her bedroom, jumping under the blankets. Sand wriggled under the doors, blowing onto the bed, shimmying up the sheets. The lights fritzed and an eerie night-in-day covered our eyes. The wind sang out. A keening. A moaning. The same as La Llorona. Mama shrieked into my neck as a bicycle and a mailbox smashed through our windowpanes. But I lay there, smiling and sobbing at the same time, vengeance for Nagi bubbling in my heart like hot champagne.

The following day, we woke up to another dark sky, a fresh load of wind. Then, toward the later morning, there was silence.

Our windows swarmed with dirt and sludge. Thick, wet balls of sand blocked the front door, which we had to force open. Outside, the earth had piled up in hills all along the south sides of the houses. Trees lay crushed in the middle of the street. Swamp coolers had crashed through car windshields, knocked through a couple roofs. A pepper of crickets sprinkled over the ruins. Later, we’d learn about how freeways were buried, how people died in car accidents. My mother turned from the scene of the wreckage and gave me a long, quiet stare.

“You look different,” she said.

I shrugged.

“You look stronger,” she went on.

I stayed button lipped and only squeezed her hand.

“Have you been praying?”

“Yes.”

“What did you ask for?”

“Nothing, Mama.”

She held my eyes for another moment, then sighed, as if I had safely returned after a long and dangerous journey.

“I will always love you, Violeta,” she said.

Marisol still lives in the same house, though I tried to buy her a new one in Merced. She says she likes to remember my dad eating tamales in our old, busted kitchen.

After she retired from the UFW, she started handing out cheese cubes at the Fiesta Market, where she buttonholed you. She helped me pay for Berkeley, then I got a residency at Stanford. Specialized in hand surgery like the sign says.

Why hands?

Wouldn’t make any sense if I told you my reasons. Though I’m glad I made orthopedics my practice, because you never saw so many accidents out here. Tractors, mowers, hay rakes, it’s like they’re designed to disarticulate the extremities. The farm worker’s life is a hard one, even with all our protests and the new laws. Nagi’s death couldn’t change that.

Not enough people know about Nagi, so maybe you should write about him and not about the storm. He was a man who cared about other people. People who weren’t necessarily the same as him. People that might even think he was a little different, a little odd, being from so far away.

I didn’t know him that well, so maybe it’s strange that I’ve carried a torch for him all these years. I never married anybody. I’m not that easy to be with, seeing how the stiffness that settled into my marrow after his death never loosened back up.

Reason why my mother sent you here is because she’s damned proud of me and not on account of the medical degree. She wants a fancy LA writer to know I’m a straight-up bruja from a long and powerful line of seed women and that my broken heart was strong enough to blitz this town like God did with Sodom and Gomorrah. I can tell you that the creed of the hand surgeon—which requires her to investigate, diagnose, and respect plain facts—would reject this etiology of the storm faster than the dust that once carried the crickets to tarnation. But I’ve got a million miles on me now, and in all these years I’ve learned that I do not know every little thing about what lies above and below the busy antics of mankind. When Deputy Cooper killed my darling boy, it was a piece of sin I never saw the likes of before or since. If there is a heaven, then the Mohammed or Christ that haunts it surely would have suffered when he saw Nagi dragged through Lamont’s streets like a shot deer. And if there are older gods who care about Brown and Black people, maybe they did hear my call. I am a healer and it’s against my oath to wish harm on any person but part of me does hope those deities got so angry at the silence of justice and the dead eyes of the law that they scattered the earth’s children with their fierce breath. Maybe we weren’t alone in our grief, and Nagi was finally revenged by the lords of the wind. I’d like to think my mother’s dioses indígenas honored that good man’s murder by bringing down the sky, which cried like a woman as it ripped the skin off the world.