The secret was my grandfather, more or less. His name was Cruz Archuleta, and he had worked the blast furnaces at CF&I for thirty-eight years, most of them as a keeper on the A furnace, which meant that when it came time to tap the iron he was the man who opened the hole and let it out. He had burn scars on the backs of both hands that looked like somebody had dripped candle wax on them, and a way of standing with his weight on his heels that I have only ever seen on men who spent their lives near something that could kill them. He retired in 1977 with a gold watch and a pension, and he lived with us in the little brick house on Spruce Street that he had bought in 1946, which was really his house, not ours, though nobody ever said so.
In June of 1982 he had a stroke in the garden. He was tying up tomatoes. My mother found him on his side between the rows with one of the cloth strips still in his hand, and he was in the hospital at St. Mary-Corwin for three weeks and in the rehabilitation wing for five more, and when he came home in August he was somebody else. That isn't fair. He was himself, but himself locked in a room with a bad door. His right side didn't work right. His right hand curled up against his chest like he was holding something small, and his right foot dragged, and he could walk maybe ten steps with a four-footed cane and someone holding his belt from behind. Mostly he sat in the recliner in the front room or lay in the hospital bed my mother had rented and set up where the dining table used to be. And he couldn't talk. Not really. He knew what he wanted to say, you could see that, you could see it come up in his face and get to his mouth and turn into the wrong thing. He'd want water and he'd say "window." He'd want the television turned up and he'd say "Eloy, the, the, the," and pound his good hand on the arm of the chair. Or he'd say "Sí, sí, sí," which meant everything and nothing. The therapist at the hospital, a tall woman with a gray braid, told us that this was called aphasia, and that the words were still in there, they were just filed in the wrong drawers, and some of them might come back.
The strange thing, the thing that made my mother cry the first time it happened, was that he could sing. Not talk, but sing. The therapist said that was common too; singing lived in a different part of the brain from talking, and sometimes it came through when nothing else did. He couldn't ask for a glass of water, but he could sing every word of "Volver, Volver" and "Cielito Lindo" and "Las Mañanitas" and, for reasons nobody in my family could ever explain, "Ghost Riders in the Sky," all the way through, in a voice that had gotten thin and high but still knew where every note went. When he was happy he sang. When he was frightened he sang. When he woke up from his nap he sang, quietly, to the ceiling, and that was how you knew he was awake.
My mother was a licensed practical nurse at St. Mary-Corwin, on the medical floor. Her name was Socorro, which means help, and she said it was the most embarrassing name a nurse could possibly have and she'd gotten tired of the jokes by her second week. Before my father was laid off she worked days. After he was laid off, and especially after he left for Wyoming, she moved to the three-to-eleven shift, because evenings paid a differential of forty cents an hour more and because it meant she could take my grandfather to his therapy in the mornings and be there when the visiting nurse came on Tuesdays. Forty cents an hour was sixteen dollars a week. In 1983 in Bessemer that was a week of groceries, if you didn't buy meat.
So the arrangement was this. My mother left for the hospital at two-thirty. Mrs. Baca from next door came over and sat with my grandfather from two-thirty until I got home from school at three-twenty, and my mother paid her in tamales and in rides to the doctor. Then it was me. From three-twenty until my mother got home at a quarter to midnight, I was in charge of Cruz Archuleta. I gave him his four o'clock pills from the plastic box with the days of the week on it. I helped him to the bathroom, which neither of us talked about. I warmed up the plate my mother left in the oven and cut up his meat and sat with him while he ate it with his left hand. I watched television with him and put him to bed at nine, or tried to, and then I sat in the kitchen and did my homework and listened to the house until I heard my mother's Pontiac in the alley.
My mother made me promise. She made me promise the first day, in August, standing in the kitchen with her car keys in her hand and her white nurse's shoes on, and she made me promise again every so often after that, whenever she looked tired enough to think about it.
"You don't leave him," she said. "Not to go to the store. Not to go to Gilbert's. Not for anything. If something happens you call Mrs. Baca, and if Mrs. Baca isn't home you call the operator, and you stay with him. You hear me, Eloy? You're the man of this house from three-twenty on. I know it isn't fair. I know. But you're what we have."