The Gift of Women by George McWhirter

reached his ears and the force shot him across the length of the aqueduct. Strong as a breaker from the ocean, smashing out of its confinement, banging him from side to side, skinning his elbows, while he closed his eyes and imagined he was in the ocean far away where the water from the apantle went.
    Walking home with his machete from his day’s work in the cane fields, he imagines he keeps the apantle company on part of its long course toward the ocean. He can hear its distant crash in the rush of the aqueduct as he crosses on one of the stone walls used for going into town. Cuautlenses pass on the other side and greet him, going out.
    He doesn’t live in Cuautla, he lives on a shrunken milpa over the other side of the Pan American Highway, where it climbs the slope out of Cuautla toward Azúcar de Matamoros and the new Panteón . There, he will be buried because the old one, which is much closer to his home, lies filled to the brim. If he turned into a cicada or a firefly, he could take up residence in the trees above the old Panteón and hurtle past his sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters like a green grenade, lobbed out of their family’s long history of dying in this town, which he has never left for the ocean. No, not once, although he is certain the apantle reaches it on his behalf, joining up with other comrade waters for companionship on the journey.
    He sings about the lonely rivers until he reaches the pulquería , where he stops every night after quitting the cane fields. In the pulquería , he releases his hooked machete and sets it along the side of the table. The pulquero behind the serving hatch dips his head to look and check who he is. The pulquero nods his head at the machete, turns his head to the side like a bird while pursing his lips into a beak, as if trying to work out if the machete is set there for convenience or for business.
    How many years has he looked through that hatch at Don Mateo the same way?
    If Don Mateo sat with the machete dangling at his side, it might trip someone passing, or bother him by bumping on the floor every time he moved, or knock against him on his way to the lavatory – even swing in front of his fine flow of yellow piss. No one will steal it. Not with square eyes behind the hatch keeping an eye on all the machetes laid as carefully as cutlery on the sides of the tables. Too many machetes, too confusing for a thief to take a pick.
    Fausto, a much-younger relative, shuffles in and sits down opposite Don Mateo with his back to the hatch, where he will go to order his mug of pulque and one for Don Mateo. Fausto doesn’t like to see the pulquero ’s face and the look that says, ah ha, Fausto has to sit with Don Mateo whether he likes it or not.
    As a nephew, his sister’s son, with more great-nephews for Don Mateo on the way, he needs Don Mateo’s permission to add to the small building space Don Mateo has allotted him on Don Mateo’s milpa . Fausto feels crowded in his little home, crowded in the pulquería, and that is what galls him every night when, at some juncture, Don Mateo tells him about how listening to the apantle makes him feel free because it flows all the way to the sea.
    Every night, sure as the fifth mug of pulque , Don Mateo will say, “God bless the god Quetzalcoatl for inventing this pulque . Down through the ages it pours to us, just like our apantle to the sea.”
    His nephew, Fausto, knows Don Mateo has worked on this salute to pulque and to the apantle for years before he got the right words, almost as many years, months and days as Fausto has waited for permission on the extension. But Don Mateo gets drunk, forgets, falls into bed after Fausto carries him home and drops him into it. Then, when his uncle wakes up, he thinks it is the same day as the day before.
    Fausto’s aunt, Doña Celestina has begged Fausto to be in the pulquería for when he must carry Don Mateo home across