“Not in front of the children,” was all Dolores said. She knew Daniel didn’t offer conversation as an invitation. He said what he wanted to say, and she listened. In that way, Dolores did as she cautioned her children to do.

Did she wish, some nights later, that events had reversed? Daniel killed by the military approaching from behind, undetected, deep in the Sierra? Did she wish never to know what happened to her husband, to say, He disappeared into the mountains one day and I never saw him again—he is a martyr? Not all nights.

Only the nights when Daniel came home rum-drenched, cursing the Yankee imperialists who paid him pennies while they cavorted with go-go girls in private clubs, when he dropped pesos, barely enough for milk, much less meat, into Dolores’s hand.

The blows came fast—to the face, the stomach, Dolores’s back. He’d lock the girls in their room. Carmen was old enough to hear her father’s yelling, her mother’s crying, but she stayed silent behind that door. Though Daniel had never touched the girls, they feared him, too, with a confused admiration that Dolores had possessed for her own violent father.

After the blows came kicks sometimes. With mud-caked boots. Drawing blood from a broken nose that never repaired right, from split lips and knocked-out teeth. She should have feared death but she didn’t. In the moments when Daniel appeared ready to kill her, all thought ceased, and she retracted into the shell of her arms, saw splinters of light, spinning walls, felt like a child on a merry-go-round thrust off and ready to hit the floor. Sometimes, at the crescent of raw fear, she felt free, like she soared. The pain came later.

Some men apologized afterward. She had enough friends with husbands who “got a little out of hand sometimes,” too, to know as much. Some men bought gifts and promised change. Daniel spared her that confusion, at least. Hours later, days later, in his sobriety, Daniel would say nothing of his violence. He’d ignore the bruises or the cuts, the bandages and homemade splints because they couldn’t afford a doctor. He’d pat his girls on the head and bring them wildflowers that he hid in his pockets. If there was any conversation, it was about the news on the radio. Freedom is coming, he would say. Inevitable. He didn’t mention a return to the mountains, though Dolores willed it those nights, willed it so hard.

But Daniel didn’t mention joining the fight again. He still crouched with his ear to the radio each night. He still looked out each morning toward the field before him as if the Movement would come marching through darkness right to his door. But he had settled back into work and Dolores had settled back into her previous routine. Perhaps it had all been a phase, Daniel the hero.