Free Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain

in a tree. On hot days the schoolteacher’s wife would come over to sit on the steps with us and list the disadvantages of a tin roof: hot in the sun, noisy in the rain. Our roof never leaked, even during the rainy season when mud washed through the streets in waves and people ran about with pieces of cardboard held over their heads.
    Nearly everyone in San Antonio kept pigs. In the morning we’d see blood on the pigs’ ears where vampire bats had fed during the night; everyone slept with their windows closed. The pigs at our end of the village ran loose during the day, rooting through the garbage and corn husks in the gutters along the street and getting into people’s gardens. At night, and in the heat of the day, they slept under our house, the only one on stilts in that part of the village. We could hear them snuffle and grunt below us. Shelly and I came in one day and found our cousin Cedric lying face down on the floor. He’d found a knothole and was peeing through it. We were thrilled: The path to the outhouse was overgrown and I had seen snakes there and once, I swear, a bumblebee the size of my fist. Why use the outhouse when we could pee through the floor? Our mother put an end to this plan.
    The house had two rooms, furnished almost entirely with hammocks. From the start I loved the feeling of being suspended and at the same time held tight. At night we lit the brittle, dark green mosquito coils under our hammocks. You balanced each coil on a little metal stand and lit the outside end with a match. They burned for about eight hours with a strong, unpleasant smoke designed to drive away mosquitoes. In the morning there’d be circles of gray ash on the plank floor. When the floor got dusty we washed it down with water Shelly and I carried from the river in red and blue plastic buckets, proud that we could carry two at a time.

    The muddy green Rio Hondo was slow moving, with trees and vines draped over its banks. We bathed in it near our house, where a clearing along the bank led down to the remains of an old dock, slippery with river slime. Shelly and I were the only ones in the village with bathing suits. The boys swam at a dock by the ferry, in shorts, and the girls wore old cotton dresses. Further along the bank, under a huge tree, the girls showed us a deposit of green clay they used on their hair. You scooped out a handful and rubbed it on; it made your hair soft and slick. Around the swimming hole grew ‘sensitive plant,’ a low plant with mimosalike leaves that shrank and wilted when you touched them. A few minutes later it came back to life. I used to sit on the bank, water running off my braids, brushing my fingers over the leaves.

    We ate with my mother’s friends, Froylan and Balbina. Balbina had a wide face and dark, glossy hair that she kept short in front and long in the back, so that her face was fringed with curls. She wore flowered dresses over her soft, rounded body. Froylan was lean and wiry. They had three children: Maely, a son, who was a year younger than I was, and two daughters, Teti and Mirna. Their house had two rooms, a dirt floor, a thatched roof and a yard with custard apple trees.
    The door that looked into the backyard was always open; chickens and sometimes a pig would wander in to look for food. Just behind the house stood the thatched cooking shed where Balbina made tortillas, taking a ball of corn dough and patting it, over and over, between two pieces of plastic bag. The corn had a dry, almost chalky smell. Balbina cooked the tortillas on a round sheet of blackened steel set over the fire pit. When the first side was done she flipped the tortilla neatly with her bare fingers.
    We ate rice and beans. We ate this for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes there was an egg, sometimes Froylan brought fish from the river. The fish were called bocasgrandes, ‘big mouths,’ and Balbina fried them till they were crisp, and served them with rice and beans. Shelly and I craved