Like Son Read Free

do.
    “So, Dad, can we talk now?”
    I watched as my father responded by retrieving a black Sharpie from his jacket pocket. He took several napkins from our table’s dispenser, unfolded the white squares, and spread them out on the table in front of him. As we waited for our food, he mapped out a diagram of what he was leaving me in death:
    His blindness.
    I would inherit my father’s ticking time-bomb vision.
    I’d always known my father had been dealt a particularly bad set of eyes, but now he told me the specifics of his deteriorating eyesight. By the time he was seven he’d needed Cokebottle glasses. As a teenager, he’d required a magnifying glass to read the Bible as his mother insisted he do each Sunday morning …
    These details didn’t make sense. I’d just picked him up from the V.A. hospital. He’d fought in Vietnam.
    “Wasn’t there an eye exam when you got drafted?”
    “Once Uncle Sam found me, nothing mattered except trying to get me killed.”
    And then he started in on a rant about how Vietnam had never been his war to fight, about how he’d grown up in Mexico with no clue he’d been born in the States, so why should he have had to go to war for this country? And, unbelievable as it may have seemed, it was true—he really hadn’t known he was a U.S. citizen until he was drafted. He also hadn’t known until he was eighteen that when his mother was pregnant with him, his family had gone north as braceros to build railroads. 1943. Chicago. And—yet another detail you’d figure most people would know about their own lives—he hadn’t learned until he was a grown man that he’d once had a sister. Rosario Maria Guadalupe Cruz. My father’s sister Rosario had been four years old when the family went north. And when the family came home less than a year later, she was no longer with them.
    Rosario met tragedy while she and her newborn brother were living with their parents—along with thousands of other government-indentured Bracero Program laborers—in a Chicago railroad company’s shantytown. Their makeshift home was constructed out of barely modified old train cars located on a dusty stretch of land adjacent to a strip of railroad. The living and working conditions were barely one step from slavery. My father’s mother was a proud woman; she didn’t like leaving her home country to be so shamed. Hard work didn’t upset her, but a lack of dignity did. She had wanted to be treated with respect. And she longed to spend more time with her newborn son, she wished she didn’t have to leave him every day with the old woman who came to the shantytown each morning before dawn and watched the workers’ children for a hefty cut of their pay. My dad said that his mother once admitted that in Chicago, after a particularly trying day of breaking stone into gravel to be laid out under the tracks, she had cursed God for giving her such a trying life. She told my father she’d forever regret that moment of weakness because, a few days later, in what she interpreted as retribution for her ingratitude, the railroad—that angry and almighty steel-and-oil God of industry—threw thunderbolts at her.
    Quick rumble flash, a supply train derailed. Heavy weight skipped thick tracks. Screech metal snapped. Rattle impact, the train crashed into the perimeter of the shantytown. In the bright-sunshine middle of the day. It was a pretty day. A very pretty day. The camp was near-empty. Most everyone was working far from there. Few were injured. Only one died.
    Rosario had been playing by the side of the railroad.
    My father’s mother, devastated by her little girl’s death, refused to speak a word of their time in Chicago. She forbade her husband or anyone else ever to mention it. As it turned out, the gods weren’t done with the family yet.
    One afternoon five years later, the trio settled back into their life in Mexico, my father, now a young boy, was helping his father tend to the family’s small farm. His