Under the Feet of Jesus

Estrella, a thirteen-year-old girl, is sitting in the backseat of Chevy station wagon, crammed alongside seven of her family members. She sees a large barn come into view and wonders if this is what they’ve been heading towards all along. Sunlight is coming through the clouds, and many kinds of fruit trees are swaying in the wind. Estrella’s mother, Petra, indicates that Perfecto, who is driving, should turn the car towards the barn.

Everyone in the car is silent, assessing the barn and the weather outside. Their ability to work depends on so many things: “the car running, the health, the conditions of the road…and weather”; because of this, the family can “depend on nothing.” To Estrella, Perfecto seems uncertain.

From a nearby peach tree, Alejo sees the car coming and warns his cousin, Gumecindo, to be quiet. He’s been taking advantage of the sunset to pick peaches and hand them to Gumecindo, who acts as lookout on the ground. They’ve been having a playful argument about an acquaintance named Plato; Gumecindo thinks the name means “plate” in “gringo Spanish,” and Alejo has just informed him otherwise. Now, Alejo watches the car doors open as wasps buzz around his face, their legs dangling “like golden threads.”

Alejo sees an old man carefully climb out of the car; he looks towards the peach trees but doesn’t see Alejo. He gets back in the car and continues driving towards the barn. Inside the car, Estrella’s younger brother Ricky wakes up and asks when they will arrive. No one answers him, but Petra confirms to Perfecto that this is the place she’s been looking for.

When they reach a small, decrepit bungalow situated close to the barn, Petra announces that they’ve arrived. Estrella’s four younger siblings burst out of the car.  Estrella picks up a plastic doll that has fallen on the ground and asks her if she’s all right; then she shakes the doll’s head “no.” Running, Estrella follows her brothers, Ricky and Arnulfo, into the fields.

In her rubber sandals, Petra looks around for some horsetail weed, which is “just as good” for cleaning the cooking pit as steel wool. As she pokes the ashes of the cooking pit, she imagines the fragrance of tortillas and other dishes cooked by previous residents rising up. Behind her, Perfecto stomps on a scorpion. He enters the shack and examines the inside, looking for a place to set up Petra’s altarpiece. On the floor is a dead bird; knowing that this will upset Petra, he quickly throws it out the window.

As she’s extricating her broom from the car, Petra sees Estrella leaping around in the grass and thinks about the varicose veins in her own legs. She yells at the children to watch out for scorpions, but they don’t listen to her. Listening to “the tease of words and leaves,” Estrella runs towards the abandoned barn. She’s just turned thirteen, and both she and Petra are anxious about this “unlucky” number.

At the entrance to the barn, which is like a “cathedral,” Estrella finds her twin sisters Cookie and Perla. Bravely, Estrella volunteers to enter first. The barn seems “so strangely vacant,” and a chain hangs from the ceiling. Suddenly, the door swings open and startles all the birds living in the barn. The girls scream.

In the peach orchard, Alejo reassures his cousin that the strange noise is just cats fighting. Gumecindo is frightened and pleads with Alejo to leave; he thinks the wailing comes from La Llorona, a legendary ghost. As they walk, Alejo notices that Gumecindo’s shadow keeps “smashing” against the trees. He tells Gumecindo that they need to hit a few more trees in order to have enough fruit to sell.

In a flashback, Estrella thinks back to her “real father.” Her strongest memory of him is a moment when he peeled an orange for her during a rest stop on a long drive north to look for work. In the memory, they’ve stopped in the middle of an orange grove, and since there’s no foreman around, Petra picks some fruit. Estrella’s father takes off the peel in one piece, “as if it meant something to him to peel the orange from stem to navel.”

At the cooking pit, Petra is thinking about the past as well. Even when her marriage was beginning to dissolve, the women in the labor camp advised her not to leave her husband. He might track her and the children down and kill her in revenge, they said. Even if he didn’t, Petra would never find someone else to provide for her and five children.

In the end, Estrella’s father leaves the family to work in Mexico and soon disappears – just as they’ve managed to rent a real apartment for the first time. In Estrella’s confused memories of that period, her father often calls, promising to return soon and asking for money. As the bills pile up, Petra prays constantly and the twins begin to call Estrella “mama.” No job that Petra finds pays enough to provide the family with food.

After some time, they pack up their belongings in garbage bags and move to an even smaller apartment. Estrella chalks up her father’s lack of letters to his ignorance of their change of address. Estrella knows that Petra often thinks of him, but she’ll never know if he remembers his family in the same wistful way.

Now, Perfecto stands at the barn door and chastises Estrella for running inside. The walls are unsteady and they could have been killed, he says. He orders the children to go help Petra, and Estrella resents his commanding tone. She catches up with her brothers and punches Ricky. She remarks grumpily that Perfecto isn’t her real father.

Estrella remembers that when her family lived in an apartment, it looked out onto a freeway interchange. In the memory, Petra worries that the road is “a car wreck waiting to happen.” She looks out the window while her husband ties up his new shoelaces. She knows it’s only a matter of time until he leaves, and she finds herself holding her breath as she watches the cars spill across the road like “beads” from a “broken necklace.”

Petra is almost envious that her husband has the “spine” to leave the family, especially when she hears fantastic rumors about his whereabouts – that he’s selling peanuts in another city or walking down the streets with a glamorous woman in high heels. While Petra lies to her children about his whereabouts, he’s behaving “as if his life belonged to no one but him.”

Overwhelmed after her husband’s departure, Petra spends hours at the window fingering her rosary beads, oblivious to the domestic chaos of the apartment and the daily rituals occurring in the street beneath her. Petra bites her thumb until she draws blood. She can hear the twins banging on buckets, a game Estrella has invented to distract them from hunger. When the noise becomes too cacophonous, Petra bursts into the kitchen and screams at them to stop. Frightened, the young children hide under the bed. Estrella reprimands Petra for her outburst.

There’s nothing in the pantry except a can of Raid and an empty box of Quaker Oats. Estrella takes the box, with its cheerful mascot, and dances it in front of the twins, doing a funny routine until they stop crying. Petra runs downstairs and stands at the edge of the freeway. Her children are hungry, and she doesn’t know what to do. She remembers her own father, who worked carrying sixty-pound bags of cement, and thinks about Estrella “trying to feed the children with noise.”

In the present, Alejo and Gumecindo are sneaking past the barn when they see a small child playing near it. Gumecindo wants to leave, but Alejo insists they stop and see if the child is alright. Coming closer, they see an unfamiliar boy with a harelip; the boy glares at a space somewhere above Alejo’s head. Gumecindo is deeply uneasy. For some time the boy plays in the dirt, but then he falls and cuts himself on broken glass; he starts crying silently, and to Alejo even the hole in his shirt looks like a “speechless mouth” crying. To distract the boy, Alejo uses his hands to make shadow animals on the barn wall. Fascinated, the boy forgets about his injuries and begins chasing the illusions.

During her marriage, Petra spikes her husband’s coffee with menstrual blood, but even that doesn’t keep him from leaving. As he finishes tying his shoes he promises to be back by the end of the week, but Petra has a bad feeling. She summons Estrella to say goodbye “for now,” and the little girl pleads with Petra to hide his shoes so he can’t leave.

When Estrella first meets Perfecto, she opens the red tool chest he carries everywhere. She can’t make head or tail of the jumbled tools inside, which are “as confusing and foreign as the alphabet.” For days Estrella is enraged, as she hates the feeling that people are keeping information from her. It’s just like the schools that she occasionally attends – no matter how much she wants to learn, the teachers are more interested in checking her hair for lice. She sits at the back of the classroom, in seats reserved for migrant children who are just passing through.

Once, a teacher whose face looks like a Kleenex asks “how come her mama never gave her a bath.” Estrella has always taken pride in the tight braids into which Petra ties her hair every morning; she’s never realized that she’s “dirty.” For the first time, she sees how words can be “as excruciating as rusted nails.”

Even though his tools don’t make sense at first, Perfecto stays with the family a long time and begins to share his extensive knowledge with Estrella. He explains how to use a chisel and hammer to remove a door, and what to do if the hinge pins are stuck. Soon, Estrella knows the names of all the tools and what to do with them. When she lifts up a pry bar, she feels the “power of function” and the “significance it awarded her.” She realizes how important it is to know things, and she begins to learn to read.

Now, Perfecto asks Estrella to bring him some nails. He’s plugging mouse holes in the bungalow. He says that her exploits are making him old, and she reminds him that he’s not her father. Still, she helps him up from the floor; together they nail up a sheet to divide the room into sleeping quarters.

Once, Estrella got into a fistfight to prove that Perfecto wasn’t her father. During one stay in a labor camp, Estrella meets a girl her age, Maxine Devridge. She comes from a white family infamous for bad behavior; many of her relatives are in jail, and all the other migrants pitch their tents far away from them. As Estrella is walking home one day, Maxine asks her if she “talks ‘merican” and beckons her to the family’s shack. She’s sitting on a mattress covered in urine stains, and her dress is hiked between her legs.

In her hand, Maxine holds a comic, which she now shows to Estrella. It’s titled Millie the Model, and there’s a beautiful blond woman crying on the cover. Estrella realizes that Maxine wants her to read the comic aloud and grabs it from her. She’s never been allowed to take a book home from school, and the only book she has at home is a religious pamphlet. Estrella opens the comic but is most struck by the advertisements peddling laundry detergent, premade dinners, and sunscreen. Estrella interprets the comic for Maxine, and the other girl says that if she keeps coming over, they can read other comics her brothers have stolen.

Every day after work, Estrella and Maxine meet up at the tree by the irrigation ditch, which forms a small stream. Both girls are exhausted, and the smell of tomatoes clings to their bodies. Although they’re thirsty, neither drinks from the stream, because they know that pesticides spill into the water. Estrella thoughtfully asks Maxine if she thinks they’ll give birth to children with no mouths. To cool down, they splash water on their faces, careful not to ingest it.

The two girls are reading Millie the Model and teasing each other about the handsome hero when the smell of rotting flesh reaches them. Looking into the ditch, they see a dog carcass floating along. The corpse gets stuck on a grate. To escape the smell, Estrella and Maxine have to leave their hideaway.

Idly teasing Estrella, Maxine asks why her father is so old. Estrella replies tersely that Perfecto isn’t her father, and Maxine teases her for letting an old man “fuck your ma.” Angrily, Estrella insists that they’re not having sex; when Maxine laughs at her, Estrella pulls her hair and two girls fight viciously until Maxine’s mother pulls them apart. In the aftermath of the fight, the foreman tells Perfecto and Petra that they should leave the camp before the Devridges take their revenge. Perfecto doesn’t scold Estrella or ask what the fight was about. Everyone packs up their meager belongings and Petra dismantles the tarp and poles that constitute the family’s home.

On their way out of the camp, Estrella looks out the car window at the rows where she and Maxine had once picked tomatoes and eaten them after wiping off the pesticides. She sees the oak tree where they retreated to read comics. She even sees Maxine herself looking after the car as it leaves forever.

By this time in the present, Gumecindo is desperate to go home, especially since he knows they could be fired for being in the orchard now. But Alejo is climbing a tree in order to watch a strange girl (Estrella) washing herself and a watermelon at the irrigation ditch. He and Gumecindo have gathered fifteen sacks of peaches, which they’ll sell at the weekend market in order to make extra money. While Gumecindo begs to leave, Alejo watches the girl take her dress off and step into the water, where the fruit is floating. Gracefully, she swims to the middle of the ditch and retrieves the fruit. Lost in reverie, Alejo falls out of the tree.

Petra stokes the fire, singing to herself. Estrella returns from the stream, cradling the watermelon like a baby; this image makes Petra feels sad, even though she knows that Petra will inevitably grow older and already has to be mature for her “safety.” Estrella tells her mother to come to bed, but Petra wants to wait up for Perfecto, who has gone to the local store. In the meantime, she makes Estrella draw a circle in the dirt around the house, which she believes will protect them against scorpions.

Walking towards the bungalow, Alejo sees a biplane dusting the crops with pesticides. Inside, Ricky and Arnulfo watch the plane as well; Ricky dreams of flying the planes when he grows up. Outside, Estrella is boiling the day’s drinking water when she sees a strange boy – Alejo – approaching. He nervously introduces himself and presents Petra with a sack of peaches. Petra gives him some pinto beans to bring to his own mother, but Alejo explains that his mother is dead; he lives with his grandmother in Texas, and has only come to work here for the summer.

Estrella warns Alejo not to get caught picking fruit, and Petra remarks darkly that given their pay, the bosses are lucky they don’t burn the orchards. Estrella tells her not to talk tough unless she means it; she offers her a bite of a peach. Alejo walks away from the cabin and thinks about Estrella’s face, seeing within it “the woman who swam in the magnetic presence of the full moon.”