Sacrament

I want to say twelve, although I hope it was earlier whenI came home and found my mother asleepmy mother asleep under the single-stitchedafghan it took her three years to make.It took her years to learn how to make tamales because mygrandmother was secretive and wouldn’t waitshe wouldn’t wait for my mother to show up,she’d finish the tamales by noon and brew a pot of coffee.Always with a cup of coffee, because tamales are too rich.Often my mother had to guess what was in what,what was in the tamales was manteca, swaths of it,so much lard, my mother didn’t believe itshe didn’t believe I would want to help her. Not with themeat, it was too fatty. Not with the chiles, they were too hot.The chiles were so hot, we wore gloves to removethe stems and seeds. Gloves to peel back the fatlike peeling back the corn husk slowly to check the masa.Another coffee cup of water poured anywhere inside the pan.The towel to tuck them in stained red, everything stained red.T-shirt, hands, my jeans, the kitchen table,forks, knives, and even the masa hardened on the floor was red.Hardened on the floor were shreds of meat, husk hair,pork grease, and crumbs of the cookie I atethe cookie, a little pig from the bakerywhere we ordered fifteen pounds of masa.Fifteen pounds of masa, I beat and coaxed with myhands, bright red every Christmas, a gift for my family.A gift for my family: uncle, cousins, tías one and two,a rite to my mother, the tamale pot stuffed into a snowbank to cool,the pig, chiles, and manteca. A ceremony to her hands,her hands with the wrinkled knuckles, scarred from psoriasis. Those handsthat wrote down exactly how many bags of chiles, pounds of pork, blocks of manteca,corn husks, the hours from start to finish. Her hands were the first to hold me

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