Free Every Step You Take by Jock Soto Page A

crying, in an empty canal that handled the overflow from flash floods and heavy rains.
    â€œHow could he do this?” she asked. “How could he do this to me?” I felt like someone had put a knife right through me—I couldn’t stand to see my mother cry. Eventually Kiko and I calmed Mom down. We hugged her and we talked to her and we took her home. I was too young to understand exactly what had happened. But as I fell asleep that night there was one thing I knew for sure: my father had hurt my mother. He had made her cry. And I was furious with him, and with the little Christmas-surprise boy named Charles.
    Charles was about five when my father brought him home to meet us that Christmas, and he did not visit our Paradise Valley home ever again. I suppose Mom and Pop must have worked something out. I have a vague memory that Mom said she was going to take Kiko and me and divorce Pop—and that then Pop realized he couldn’t live without my mother, so he stopped seeing the other woman. This seems a plausible enough script, whether or not it actually happened.
    As I write this I am haunted by the vision of my mother kneeling to trim my father’s toenails so that he can go spend the night with another woman. But I am also haunted by a scene that occurred not so many years ago, when I flew out to visit my parents in Gallup, New Mexico. Kiko had picked me up at the airport, and as we were driving to the trailer off Route 66 where Mom and Pop were living at the time, he turned to me and asked if Mom had warned me that Charles—the little Christmas-surprise boy—would be at the trailer. She had not. I was incredulous, but sure enough when we got to the trailer, there he was. My reaction was not particularly nice. When Kiko got out of our car I stayed put and rolled up all the windows and locked all the doors. I was a grown man, and so was Charles—but I acted as if I were still a ten-year-old boy who was furious at a five-year-old boy who had arrived unannounced on Christmas Day and made his mother cry.
    My father and Kiko and Charles were all skulking around outside the trailer, glancing at me nervously. They knew I was upset. My mother was waving to me, gesturing for me to get out of the car. I wouldn’t budge. She walked over and knocked on the window and asked me to roll it down. At first I resisted, but when I finally opened the window I looked Mom in the eye and asked her how she could stand this. Mom looked right back at me and said, “All has been forgiven, Jock. He’s part of the family now.” I stared at her in disbelief. Then I followed her into the trailer, still furious but thinking that my mother must be the strongest woman in the world, and a saint.
    As it turned out, Charles had been living with my parents in their trailer that year, at my mother’s insistence. My mother had forgiven my father and had accepted Charles into her home with the same warm and loving embrace she extended to everyone, because it would have offended her ideals of harmony and humanity to do anything else. I could not summon the same largesse of spirit within myself at the time, but even from beyond the grave Mom continues to teach me things—the same way she said she herself was always taught as a young girl on the reservation: by example. New lessons come from her all the time, and over the last few years I have come to understand that Mom is right about Charles. He is part of our family, and family is one of the most important things in life. These days when I consider Charles’s situation, I feel sorry for him. Truly, none of this was his fault. I have always had a father, flawed as he may be, and so has my brother, Kiko. Poor Charles never really had a father. Since my mother passed away Kiko and I have been making a greater effort to keep in touch with our half brother Charles, and he often joins us when we get together with my—and his—father. I know Mom,