And I worked it out into the last of the daylight and sat down hard on the cab step, because behind that false panel, wrapped in an old serape to keep the dust off, was a life I never knew my father had.
There was a cigar box of photographs, black and white, curled and cracked. A little adobe house with a tin roof. A woman in an apron in a doorway, squinting into the sun with her hand up to wave. Barefoot kids in a dirt yard. A church I did not know. Every face in those pictures was a stranger to me, and yet I could see my own father in the cheekbones of half of them.
There was a cloth pouch, and when I loosened the string there was nothing inside but dirt. Just a handful of dry red dirt, tied up and carried for forty years. And there was a cassette tape, no label, in a case worn smooth from handling.
My daddy crossed over from Coahuila when he was seventeen, and that is about the whole sum of what he ever told us of it. Not one story. Not the name of the town, not the family he left, nothing. We grew up figuring he just did not have any people, or did not care to. I sat in that truck and understood I had it exactly backwards. He had people. He missed them so bad he could not so much as say their names out loud, so he sealed them up in the wall of the truck he all but lived in, and carried them a million miles up and down this country, close enough to touch, where not one of us would ever catch him hurting.
It took me a while to turn up something that would still play a cassette. When I finally did, I sat in that yard with my own boy, his grandson, and pushed it in. It was the voice of a woman, old and thin and far away, singing in Spanish. A lullaby. My grandmother, singing the song she must have sung over my father when he was small, put down on tape God knows how before he left so he could carry her voice with him. He never let one of us hear it. He just listened to it alone, in the truck, for forty years.
Duermete mi nino, duermete mi sol. My boy, who is thirteen and mostly cannot be pried loose from a screen, went dead quiet and made me play it three more times.
We are going down there this summer, my son and me, to Coahuila, with that pouch of dirt and those photographs. I mean to find that adobe house if it is still standing, and put the dirt back in the ground it came from, and see if any of those barefoot kids in the pictures grew old down there and might want to meet the family the quiet one made, all those miles away, and never stopped missing them for a single day.