The Final Gift

I

Agnes was a sharecropper’s daughter. Her family migrated to California in the back of a flatbed truck during the Dust Bowl exodus of the 1930s. Half-starved and only 9 years old, she worked alongside the rest of the family, gathering cotton in the fall, harvesting potatoes in the spring, and picking peaches in the summer. They moved around with the work, living in ditch bank camps along with half a million other migrant workers.

They were fortunate. Circumstances changed and they eventually found permanent work in Gilroy, California, Garlic Capitol of the World. We had a running joke in our family; that you didn’t need signs to find your way to Gilroy. All you had to do was roll the windows down.

Agnes married the son of the farmer where her family harvested garlic. She was 12 and he was 17. The way the story goes, her father had a shotgun that he was all to willing to make use of when it became obvious that the farmer’s son had been up to some hanky panky with his daughter. The farmer’s son found the prospect of marriage far more appealing than the shotgun, and that is how my mother came into this world.

They had seven more daughters, with one son who died in infancy. Lloyd, the farmer’s son, became an important man in the community. He inherited the farm, prospered, and eventually became Sherriff of Gilroy.

Lloyd seldom spoke. But when he did, it was never without a great deal of forethought. My mother told me this, with reverence, as if bequeathing a priceless gem of wisdom. I have keen memories of my grandfather’s house, of a large man with thick gray hair brushed straight back from a high forehead, a black moustache, and the smell of pipe tobacco. He wore lumberjack flannel and cowboy boots, and walked a steady pace in a house full of noisy daughters and grandchildren. Of the uncles I have no memory, except for an occasional shadow tucked away in a corner, out of depth amid the overpowering dynamics of my mother’s kin.

My mother also told me that Lloyd was a hard man to live with, with high standards and a heavy hand. It was whispered that he beat Agnes, which I chose not to believe because I worshiped him. But in my mother Lloyd met his match, something she was very proud of. Her stubborn Portuguese blood beat as hot as his, and she would not give in to his rule.

She ran away with a soldier on leave when she was 17. This unfortunate man never knew what hit him. Soft spoken, kind and gentle, he could not believe his good fortune; that a woman of such beauty would chose to be his bride. He was hopelessly in love, but no match for her fire. Their love was doomed.

And that is how I came into this world.

II

‘You better get over here.’ My sister answered the phone when I called to check on Mom. ‘The doctor was just here. He said …..’

She broke down then and could not speak, could not tell me more. I knew anyway. I was expecting this. I packed, got in the car, and started my last journey home.

There are several miles of unmaintained gravel and dirt road between the highway and Mom’s place. This road changes between visits. The gullies shift, and I had to constantly be on the lookout for stray boulders that would wash down from the mountain.

I usually greeted her with something like, ‘When are you going to get that road paved, Mom? Geez, I didn’t think I’d make it this time.’

And she would say something like, ‘Well, if an old crone like me can drive that road without all the moaning and the groaning, then by Gawd, so can you. And here’s your coffee. Be sure you drink it this time.’ It was a ritual with us. I’d complain about the road and she’d put me in my place. It was how we said, ‘I love you’.

Mom made a hobby of getting six cents out of every nickel, something I did not appreciate during those long winter nights when I visited, shivering under layers of quilts while listening to the packs of coyotes howling and yipping outside in the snow. She would not use the central heating, no matter how cold it got. Instead, she fired up a huge wood burning stove in the great room before the rest of us would even think of getting out of bed. One of our chores was to chop and stack the firewood when we visited, a concession to her not quite five-foot, 86 pounds of meanness. It was hard to imagine that she would not be there at the door with my coffee, greeting me with a clever new insult, just to let me know she loved me.

And who would get the fire going? Mom was the only one who could work that stove.

She had created a sanctuary of her home, Dolly’s last stand, surrounded by high desert foothills at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. And that is where she chose to die. She had moved there 30 years ago with her husband Harlan. He built her a Spanish style hacienda at the top of a hill, with a red tiled roof and a covered porch in front, where they could sit in the shade and look out over the Mojave Desert. They set up housekeeping in a tent while the house was built. They brought home a miniature Chihuahua and named her ‘Coco’. She became their baby. This was back in the days when they had plenty of energy and enthusiasm, a by-product of their love, and each small detail of their life was a thing of wonder and bounty to them.

I didn’t visit much in those days, and neither did my sisters. Dolly and Harlan were content with their own company, and if any of us had the inclination to give it much thought, we would have said that we were all quite happy with the long distance relationships. It was a phase in our lives when events had caused each of us to go our own way for a time, as sometimes happens in a family. This would change as the years went by, as each of us cycled through spouses, careers, and personal tragedies.

In the mean time, Harlan and Dolly enjoyed their solitude, taking Coco for walks along the dry river beds that ran between the canyons, through the sage, yucca and Joshua trees that grew there. This was before the surrounding land had been developed, and the coyotes still ran wild in the foothills each night.

The years went by, and the family went through another phase and longed for home. My sisters and I brought our children and husbands to Mom’s for the holidays, the only time in the year when we could have all our favourite foods in one helping. Mom had her tricks to liven up the meals; an additional ham with a pineapple glaze to accompany the Christmas turkey, a can of mushroom soup in the gravy; chopped oysters in the stuffing; and a special dish made with canned yams and fruit cocktail, with heaps of brown sugar and butter on top, baked until the sugar melted and formed a crust. By request, she always made a pot of Portuguese beans and another of her special rice pudding to have with the leftovers in the days that followed. I would bring the pumpkin pies, Maria would bring the apple pies, and Patty always brought a huge tub of hot potato salad made with bacon.

These meals were followed by long walks in the desert, with our husbands and our children, and a small herd of Chihuahuas, Coco’s descendents. Once, we came across a baby rattlesnake. It was a warm Thanksgiving that year, at the end of an unusually late Indian summer, and the snake had wandered onto the trail, probably confused at the unseasonable warmth. Harlan and I threw stones at it, thinking it a threat to the dogs and the children. But we kept missing, with a glancing blow now and then, while the children stared in morbid fascination and the Chihuahuas screamed with excitement. The poor thing slithered off, slightly bruised. We felt foolish, and Mom shook her head in disgust.

I visited Mom on my own, once, longing for solitude in the desert hills. On that visit, I found the ruins of a small cabin hidden behind a red sandstone outcropping. All that was left was a square of foundation stone and a fireplace. I sat on one of the walls, wondering about the people who had lived there. I closed my eyes and focused on a woman surrounded by a bevy of children. At some point, I merged with the woman, becoming a participant in a romantic story, of days of pregnancies, and birthing, and raising a hardy brood, and of long winter nights in the loft with a husband who loved me dearly. My thoughts were sweet and pure, and my life was wholesome and simple as I dwelled for a time in that place.

I was forced back into the world by thoughts of my failed marriage, and for some reason, thoughts of Dad. He too had left, in his own way, after years of sorrow and disillusionment. I wondered how that was for Mom, how different her story of lost love was from mine. I knew what it was like to lose a husband to infidelity. But my father had left when his personal daemons overcame his will to live. How does one cope with that? Did she, like I, consider herself betrayed? At least I knew who the enemy was.

There are no romantic stories, I thought. It’s all an illusion, just like my fantasy about this cabin. It was probably a miserable life for them. The husband most likely came home tired, dirty, and in pain from his long days of hard work. He would be grouchy, hungry and demanding, because that’s just the way life is, at the end of the day. It’s the suffering and hardship that most people focus on, and it’s the people that are the closest to them that they generally take it out on.

That was a very bad time for me. I loved my husband, and foolishly wanted him back. Instead, I had this bleakness of the soul that crawled into bed with me each night and made me sleep with him.

That was the year that Coco died. Mom told me that Harlan wept like a baby. It was hard to imagine this because Harlan was such a big strong man who had always been emotionally solid. It took a lot out of him, and seemed to really slow him down. He retired, and a year later, on the first day of spring, his heart gave up.

According to Mom, Harlan was not supposed to die first, and she was angry with him because of it. Mom was going through another round of chemotherapy at the time, and she kept telling us how worried she was about him.

‘He couldn’t piss in a bucket if I didn’t show him where to point it,’ she would tell us. ‘What would he do without me?’ She made us promise to look after him. I thought of him sitting in his big easy chair, watching TV with his remote control, and calling to Mom to bring him a dish of ice cream. She would bring it to him, mumbling, ‘Why doesn’t he get off his lazy butt and get it himself,’ and ‘Gawd knows he needs the exercise,’ and ‘I hope you choke on it,’ when she handed it to him. I knew they both loved these little moments, and would not have it any other way.

But on that morning, she had left him at the kitchen table with his cup of coffee, saying that she was going back to bed to read her book. When she came back an hour later, he was gone.

With his death, she felt that there was no point in fighting the inevitable. She decided to let the cancer have its way. And once Mom makes up her mind about something, it will not be changed.

The road up to her house had been levelled since the last time I was there. One of the neighbours had done it, an act of kindness following Harlan’s death. All the gullies had been filled in with gravel and there were no boulders. I had nothing to complain about when I arrived.

My youngest sister opened the door. I could tell she had been crying, but she smiled and gave me a hug.

‘How is she?’ I asked.

‘Sleeping,’ she told me. ‘Go in and see her. She’s been asking for you.’

Mom looked so small and childlike, surrounded by quilts and Chihuahuas. She woke when several of them growled at me, tiny rumbling tremors under the quilts.

‘Hush!’ she yelled at them, surprisingly feisty. ‘Well, I see you made it. You didn’t get lost this time?’

‘No, Mom,’ I laughed and sat next to her on the bed.

You could not be sad around Mom. She would tell you to leave and get a handle on it. It just was not allowed. But there was something I wanted to ask, a mystery that had troubled me for a very long time, something we had not once, in our entire lives together, discussed.

‘Did you and Dad love each other?’

A little girl had snuck into the room. I had seen her before, hiding in the shadows. She looked a bit like me, with my father’s slim build and my mother’s dark eyes. When I asked that question that was so important to me, she started crying, uncontrollably, which took me by surprise. Mom put her arms around her, and told her of course they loved each other. She told her what it was like for them when I was born, things I did not know, how they lived in a converted chicken coop, just a single room with a bed, and an outhouse that they shared with the landlady. She said none of this mattered, that it was heaven for them, especially because of their beautiful new baby girl, their first born daughter. On and on she talked, on into the night, telling me about the days when I was a baby and they were so much in love.

In time, the little girl stopped crying. She wiped her nose and her eyes and left the two women to themselves. I have not seen much of that little girl since then, although she does let me know that she is still with me.


Mom died in her sleep the next day, in her own bed, in her home in the high desert, surrounded by her dogs and her three daughters, those she loved the most.

It’s all gone now, Mom, her cooking, the warm fire in the wood burning stove, Harlan, my Dad, Lloyd, Agnes. Even the coyotes have left. There is no reason to go back. I keep my memories with me, though. They make me smile, and sometimes they make me sad, but they always give me hope and courage. They are special, those memories, meant to be cherished, and the most special of all is the gift she gave me at the end; that she loved my father and he loved her.