Read Online Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Chelsea Cain
Tags: United States, Fiction, General, Social Science, History, Literary Criticism, Girls, 20th Century, American, Biography, Essay/s, Literary Collections, Social History, Social History - 1960-1970, 1960-1970, Hippies - United States, United States - History - 1961-1969, Hippies, Girls - United States - History - 20th Century, Girls - United States
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corn was up to our knees. The men dug a hole in an open corner of the field. They lowered the body into it on the canvas sheet. Some of the women crossed themselves. Then the men patted down the soil and marked the grave with a stick. Afterwards everyone milled around and exchanged theories about who the dead man was and what had happened. A drug deal gone bad, people thought. Maybe an escaped convict.
I was seven, Shelly five, when we spent five months in the village of San Antonio, Belize. The year was 1974. My mother had been there before, during the summers that Shelly and I spent with our father. My uncle, her older brother, was doing research on Mayan agriculture and she’d helped construct and plant his experimental raised-field system.
Little is conventional about my mother. Before I was a year old she’d taken me to a march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. By the time I was in second grade and Shelly in kindergarten, we’d stayed in a Canadian commune, an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tree house, a tepee and a white Dodge van named Hippo. My mother thought nothing of taking us out of school to go to Belize for the winter.
What I remember of this time lodged itself in my mind without the help of a journal. At seven I still had trouble writing my last name; it would never have occurred to me then to try to burn a moment into my memory, to catalog events. What I remember is free of logic and of chronology. I remember that my uncle and his family were with us for Christmas, that we decorated a tree branch with red construction paper, that my aunt made donuts. In February, at Carnaval, young men with their faces covered in charcoal and sacking ran through the village throwing stones. In April, Shelly had a birthday party and cracked her pinata open with a stout stick.
San Antonio was a grid of dirt roads lined with small, whitewashed houses. The river, the Rio Hondo, ran along the east side and jungle bordered the rest. My uncle’s field stood at the south end. To walk home from the field, Shelly and I took a path through the jungle, where we sometimes saw leaf-cutter ants, each hefting a scrap of bright green. Out in the sunlit front yards little boys stood in their underpants and waved machetes as tall as they were. Behind the houses women in bright cotton dresses hung laundry out to dry by size, the underthings always farthest from the street. Inside, some of the houses had pages of magazines plastered up for wallpaper. Our friend Ruby lived near the south end of town, in a house with faded turquoise trim and a yard full of red hibiscus.
Up a low hill sat the general store where you could buy bottles of Coke and orange Fanta, cans of sweetened condensed milk, green mosquito coils, girls’ frilled underpants with the days of the week embroidered on the bottom, pigs’ tails cured in brine. Below the store, to the right, was the ferry across the Rio Hondo. It ran on underwater cables and had to be cranked by hand. In the shallows by the ferry dock we trapped minnows in empty liquor bottles baited with raw tortilla.
To the north of the store was the schoolhouse, the largest building in San Antonio. Bats nested under the eaves, and I had seen boys knock them down with broomsticks and beat them to death. Further along, to the left, stood the house of Dona Dominga, who made a candy called coco brut , which she sold from her living room. At the end of her street we had once watched a man process chicle , gum gathered from trees in the jungle. He cooked it outside in a huge pot, stirring it with a wooden paddle. Down a low hill, in the opposite direction, was our house, the last before the river.
The house we stayed in had been made for the schoolteacher. It became vacant when he built his own just across the street, a modern building with cement block walls and a tin roof. The old house stood on stilts. It had an old-fashioned palm roof that let in the breeze: My mother said it was like sleeping
I was seven, Shelly five, when we spent five months in the village of San Antonio, Belize. The year was 1974. My mother had been there before, during the summers that Shelly and I spent with our father. My uncle, her older brother, was doing research on Mayan agriculture and she’d helped construct and plant his experimental raised-field system.
Little is conventional about my mother. Before I was a year old she’d taken me to a march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. By the time I was in second grade and Shelly in kindergarten, we’d stayed in a Canadian commune, an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tree house, a tepee and a white Dodge van named Hippo. My mother thought nothing of taking us out of school to go to Belize for the winter.
What I remember of this time lodged itself in my mind without the help of a journal. At seven I still had trouble writing my last name; it would never have occurred to me then to try to burn a moment into my memory, to catalog events. What I remember is free of logic and of chronology. I remember that my uncle and his family were with us for Christmas, that we decorated a tree branch with red construction paper, that my aunt made donuts. In February, at Carnaval, young men with their faces covered in charcoal and sacking ran through the village throwing stones. In April, Shelly had a birthday party and cracked her pinata open with a stout stick.
San Antonio was a grid of dirt roads lined with small, whitewashed houses. The river, the Rio Hondo, ran along the east side and jungle bordered the rest. My uncle’s field stood at the south end. To walk home from the field, Shelly and I took a path through the jungle, where we sometimes saw leaf-cutter ants, each hefting a scrap of bright green. Out in the sunlit front yards little boys stood in their underpants and waved machetes as tall as they were. Behind the houses women in bright cotton dresses hung laundry out to dry by size, the underthings always farthest from the street. Inside, some of the houses had pages of magazines plastered up for wallpaper. Our friend Ruby lived near the south end of town, in a house with faded turquoise trim and a yard full of red hibiscus.
Up a low hill sat the general store where you could buy bottles of Coke and orange Fanta, cans of sweetened condensed milk, green mosquito coils, girls’ frilled underpants with the days of the week embroidered on the bottom, pigs’ tails cured in brine. Below the store, to the right, was the ferry across the Rio Hondo. It ran on underwater cables and had to be cranked by hand. In the shallows by the ferry dock we trapped minnows in empty liquor bottles baited with raw tortilla.
To the north of the store was the schoolhouse, the largest building in San Antonio. Bats nested under the eaves, and I had seen boys knock them down with broomsticks and beat them to death. Further along, to the left, stood the house of Dona Dominga, who made a candy called coco brut , which she sold from her living room. At the end of her street we had once watched a man process chicle , gum gathered from trees in the jungle. He cooked it outside in a huge pot, stirring it with a wooden paddle. Down a low hill, in the opposite direction, was our house, the last before the river.
The house we stayed in had been made for the schoolteacher. It became vacant when he built his own just across the street, a modern building with cement block walls and a tin roof. The old house stood on stilts. It had an old-fashioned palm roof that let in the breeze: My mother said it was like sleeping
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