He was 52 years old, empty-handed, and owned a land that nobody wanted. When the husband died, his family divided up the cows, the good frogs, the cart with new wheels, and the little money that was left in the wardrobe drawer. Remedios was left with what no one fought for because no one believed it was worth fighting for.
A piece of dry hill 3 km from the town with an adobe hut without a door. And a skinny ox, so old and so bony, that the older brother-in-law laughed when he saw it and said that that animal was worth more served than working. The whole family laughed. Everyone except Remedios stood there staring at that cinnamon-colored ox, with sunken eyes and bone-marked sides , and felt something she couldn’t explain at that moment, but which she would understand very well in time.
He felt that they were both the same, abandoned, forgotten, and yet still standing. If ever in your life you were left with what nobody wanted and then the whole world had to swallow the words they told you, stay here. Comment below where you are watching this from. Write your city and state, because this story is here to stay where people need it.
Leave us a like and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next stories. In the inland villages, in other times, stories like this were told among dirt roads and skies that threatened not to release a single drop of rain. Remedies. She had been married to Candido for 27 years. 27 years of quiet marriage, the kind that doesn’t make noise, the kind where both know their place and do n’t ask questions that could complicate what already works.
Candido was a man of few words and much work. He would get up before the sun, return after the sun, and in the good years he left Remedios with the certainty that there was someone who would not abandon her. Certainty isn’t worth much when the body fails. A pain in his chest that came at night and in three days ended everything that Candide had built in the time allotted to him.
Cándido’s children , from a previous marriage, appeared on the second day after the burial. There were four of them. Herbacio, the eldest, who spoke for everyone with that authority, from whom he was born believing that the world belongs to him. Dolores, the middle one, listened with her lips pressed together and her eyes calculating.
The other two, Fermín and the youngest, whom everyone called “the short one,” did what Gerbacio said because they had always done it and it was too late to change. Remedios was not the mother of any of them. She arrived in that family when the children were already grown boys and they received her as one receives a change of times, with resignation and without affection.
Candido was the thread that kept them in the same room. When the thread was cut, what remained was the truth of what they had never been. Herbacio arrived with a piece of paper in his hand that a village scribe had written. He said that the land, the cattle, and the property were the inheritance of the legitimate children, that Remedios, as the second wife and without children of her own, received what the law entitled her to, which was little, and what Cándido had noted in the only document he made in his own
handwriting before dying, which was less. What Candido had written for her was the piece of hill. Nobody liked him. Because nobody had ever wanted him. Arid, stony land, with no nearby stream, not enough shade, with the ground so hard that the hoe bounced off the surface as if hitting bone instead of earth.
Cándido had received it from his own father decades ago and had always said that one day he was going to do something with that hill. But one day it was postponed year after year, until there were no more years. The ox was called Canelo. He was 12 years old or older. Nobody knew exactly how many because the one who had counted was no longer there and the one who remained didn’t care.
He was large in stature, one of those oxen that you look at and guess, that in his good times at most, but the good times had passed and what remained was an animal with his back saddled from so much work, the ribs visible under the dull hair and that calm and deep gaze that old animals have, as if they had learned to carry the world without asking to be told why.
Herbacio pointed at him and said that that ox was destined for the slaughterhouse, that feeding him was throwing money away, that if Remedios wanted to keep him it was her problem, and that when he died of hunger she shouldn’t come asking them for anything. Dolores nodded. The short one and Fermín looked at the ground.
Remedios did not respond at all. She grabbed the ox’s rope, picked up her suitcase with the two changes of clothes and her mother’s shawl that she had kept for 30 years, and left through the door of the ranch, which was no longer hers, without turning her face, because turning her face was losing something that she still had left and that she thought she would need completely for what was coming.
The road to the hill was a dirt road, narrow, with stones sticking out of the ground that forced you to go slowly. Remedios walked and Canelo followed her with that even and slow pace of oxen, who learned that haste is useless . Sometimes the animal would lag behind for a moment, lower its snout to smell the earth as if searching for something to remember, and then resume walking beside it.
Remedios left him. Nobody should be in a hurry when they don’t know where they’re going. The shack was what they had said it was. Four chipped adobe walls, without a door, with a roof of old beams that someone had covered with dry palm fronds years ago and that time ate away until it left more gaps than covering.
The floor was made of packed earth, darkened by the dampness of many winters, with a long crack running across the main room from one end to the other, as if the house had tried to split but hadn’t quite made up its mind. Outside, the hill stretched out, barren and silent. The earth was ash-colored among the stones, with dry grass that crunched under the shoe and some scattered prickly pear cacti that were the only things growing without anyone inviting them.
The sun beat down with the force of treeless earth that holds the heat without giving shade and returns it multiplied to whoever is below. Remedios put the suitcase on the ground, let go of the rope to the ox which began to look for grass among the stones. with the patience of someone who knows that what is, is what is .
And she stood there looking at that place that was hers. He felt no hope, he felt no strength, he felt the exact weight of the situation, without embellishment, without deception. She had arrived in the land that nobody wanted with an animal that nobody respected, and she was 52 years old with no one in the world waiting for her at the end of the day.
But he also felt something quieter and smaller, like an ember, that remains after the big fire goes out. He felt that there was no one there telling him what he could and could not do. Nobody looking at her with Dolores’ eyes, calculating, nobody with Gerbacio’s voice, deciding, only the hill, the ox and her.
And that, as strange as it sounded, was more than she’d had in a long time. The first week was for reconnaissance and controlled hunger. Remedios had what she carried in her suitcase: some corn flour, piloncillo, salt, and whatever she found in the shack after patiently checking every corner . A clay jar broken in half that could still serve as a container, an iron hook nailed to the kitchen wall.
where someone had hung things that were no longer there. Two short candles stored in a rusty can under a floorboard and an empty Xle sack that was used for carrying. Water was the first problem. There was no stream on the property, no visible well, nothing that promised water nearby. Remedios spent the first day walking around the perimeter of the hill with Canelo, who walked behind her.
The two of them were silent, she looking at the ground, the stones, the color of the earth in each part, as if she were waiting for the earth to tell her something. He didn’t say anything that first day. But the second time, while checking the lower part of the hill, where the terrain made a small dip before rising again, he noticed something.
The soil there was a different color, darker, more compacted, and between two large stones that had rolled and remained together, as if someone had placed them there, there was moisture; it was not running water, it was nothing that could be taken or used, it was only the sign that underneath there, deeper than the eye could see, water existed. remedies.
He knelt down, put his fingers in the cold, damp earth between the stones, and stayed there for a moment, feeling that cold as if it were a promise that still had no date. He went to the village on the third day to look for what he needed and, incidentally, to face what he knew he was going to find.
The town was the same as always, the main dirt street with the church at the end and Don Macario’s store , at the crossroads where everyone who had something to say gathered. Remedios entered with her head held high and her shawl arranged, because appearing hunched over would only confirm what everyone already believed. Don Macario saw her arrive and before she opened her mouth he put on the face of someone who already knows what he is going to hear, but says it anyway.
He said he had heard about the distribution. He said it was a shame. He said that the hill had been rocky for as long as he could remember, and that Remedios was a clever woman who would surely find a way to fix things. The words sounded kind, the tone did not. Remedies. He bought it and could pay for it. matches, soap, hemp thread, a thick candle, and a packet of quelite seeds were hanging on a hook behind the counter.
He asked if Don Macario knew anyone who knew how to dig a well. The man looked at her with an expression that was meant to be discreet but wasn’t, and told her that digging in that hill was throwing money away, that that land didn’t produce water because it never had. Remedios put the purchases in Ixle’s sack, said thank you and left.
On the way back he passed by Gerbacio’s house . He was in the hallway and saw her walk by. He said nothing. Neither did she. But when he reached the hill and found Canelo lying in the meager shade of a large prickly pear cactus, calm as someone who knows he has to save his strength for work and remedies, he felt something settle in his chest.
I wasn’t going to waste energy on what the people thought. I was going to spend my energy on what the hill could offer. The second week brought peace. She appeared along the path behind the property, the one that connected to the next hill, which Remedios didn’t know existed, until she saw a small, hunched woman walking among the prickly pear cacti with the determination of someone who has walked that path since before there was a path.
He must have been 70 years old or more, with dark, wrinkled skin from a lifetime of sun exposure, white hair under a worn palm hat, and a rope satchel that he carried crossed on his chest with the naturalness of someone who had always carried it. Her name was Paz and she lived on the hill opposite, a little over 1 km away along the path, in a small house that she had built herself 40 years ago with her own hands.
and no one’s help, because no one had offered help. He said all this in the dry, direct voice of someone who no longer feels the need to embellish things. He said he had seen smoke coming from the shack the last few days and that smoke on abandoned land was something worth checking out. Remedios offered her coffee, the little she had, and Doña Paz accepted it without ceremony.
They sat outside because inside it still smelled musty and empty. And the old woman looked at the whole hill with the eyes of someone who knows how to read the earth as others read a book. After a long silence, which was not awkward, but rather the silence of someone who is really thinking, Doña Paz said that the hollow in the background had a mantle.
Not superficial, not easy, but I had it. She said that she had known that hill since she was a girl, because her mother’s family had owned land nearby and that in years of heavy rain, water would spring up on its own at that low point in the terrain before draining into the stream on the main road.
Remedios listened without interrupting, with the attention of someone who knows that the words she is hearing are worth more than the time they take. Doña Paz said that digging a well at that spot wasn’t madness, it was work. Hard work, weeks of work, work that would cost a woman alone more than seemed fair, but possible work. And she said that she knew where and at what depth, because she had seen it done when she was young.
And the old folks still knew those things that nobody knows now, because nobody takes the time to learn. Before leaving that afternoon, Doña Paz left what she had in her satchel on the floor of the hut. round bean seeds, spineless prickly pear cuttings, which she said produced large, sweet fruit, a bunch of holy herb, and a blue corn tortilla wrapped in a rag, which remedies she ate that night with the quiet gratitude of someone who has been eating little for days and hasn’t told anyone.
The well started the following week. Remedios dug with the pickaxe she found hanging in the hut. An old but good tool, made of solid iron, with the wooden handle replaced more than once over the years. He landed at the exact spot that Doña Paz had indicated. Between the two large stones, following the darker soil downwards.
The first few days were rocky and frustrating. The pickaxe bounced off the rock and the advance was centimeters per hour. The hands of the remedies that knew the kitchen and the needle, but not the beak, blistered on the second day. On the third day, the blisters burst, leaving sores that burned with sweat. She continued.
Canelo always stayed close, lying 2 meters from the hole, with the half-closed eyes of an old animal, resting, but not sleeping completely, as if he were keeping watch. There were days when Remedios would stop at midday with her body trembling with exhaustion. He would sit next to the ox and lean his back against the animal’s warm side.
And the ox didn’t move, it just kept breathing slowly and steadily, as if to say that it was there and that it was going to stay there. On the tenth day of digging, the soil changed. It became softer, darker, with that fresh smell of earth that holds water underneath. Remedios felt it at the peak before she saw it with her eyes.
The next day, at a depth of just over 3 meters, the bottom of the hole became damp. The next day there was a puddle. Remedios put her hand in and felt the cold water on her palm. She took it out wet, looked at it for a moment and then laughed. a lone laugh, with no one to hear it but Canelo, who raised his head and looked at it with that serious expression of an ox who doesn’t understand laughter, but accepts that it exists.
It was a small well with little water at first, which took hours to refill after the water was drawn. But it was water. It was water in the land that nobody wanted, on the hill that everyone said yielded nothing. Doña Paz arrived the next day as if she knew, which she probably did , because people who live a long time reading the land learn to read also what happens on top of it.
He looked at the well, he looked at Remedios and nodded his head in that gesture that is worth more than any congratulations. He said that now the real work was coming . The following weeks were one of learning and slow transformation. Doña Paz would come along the back path three times a week, always with something in mind, always with a lesson that she delivered without beating around the bush and without expecting Remedios to thank her with words, because she was too old for that .
He taught her how to prepare flowerbeds in stony soil, mixing the soil from the hill with cinnamon manure, which he gathered every morning with a shovel. He taught him that the spineless prickly pear cactus planted in rows served as a living fence and food at the same time, that its fruit was currency in the market and its pads were food for the ox in times of scarcity.
He taught her to read the color of the sky at dawn to know if the day would bring dry heat or humidity, and to plant according to that reading, because arid land like that does not forgive those who sow at the wrong time. He also taught her about Canelo. Doña Paz looked at the ox with that slow attention that evaluated everything.
He checked its hooves, looked at its teeth, ran his hand along its back and neck, and said that this animal had more years of work ahead of it than Gerbacio thought, because oxen of strong constitution last longer than men who underestimate them, and that what it needed was not the trail, but quality food, rest during the hottest hours, and for someone to take the time to care for its legs with beef fat so that the hooves would not crack on the stone.
Remedios did all that and Canelo answered slowly, as old animals answer, without haste, but without lies. The hair gained shine, the sides filled in. He began to lift his head more firmly when Remedios arrived in the morning, as if he knew that her morning meant the beginning of a day that had meaning.
It was in the fifth week that Remedios took the ox to work the land for the first time. He had prepared a large stone bed between the two stones of the well and towards the west, where Doña Paz had told him that the light reached well all morning and the afternoon brought shade from the rocks. The ground was still hard, stony on the surface, but beneath the layer of stone the earth was looser than it looked, sandy and dark, the kind of soil that holds rainwater longer than clay.
Canelo hailed the wooden plow that Remedios had bought second-hand at the market in a neighboring town with the last few cents she had left. Hello slowly, with that firm and even step that working oxen do not lose, even as the body ages. And the earth opened in furrows that smelled of dampness and promise.
Remedios followed behind the plow, guiding and encouraging the ox with short words and a calm voice, in the same way that Doña Paz had taught her. Because an ox that is worked calmly works better and lasts longer. By the end of the morning, he had 20 meters of open furrows in the ground that no member of Cándido’s family would have bet could be sown.
Remedies. She wiped her hands on her apron, looked at what she had done, and thought about gerbacio. Not with anger, not wanting him to know , she just thought of him and smiled slowly, without anyone seeing her, which was exactly how she wanted to smile. The town began to notice before Remedios even suggested it.
People in the countryside have that invisible antenna that picks up changes in the land of their neighbors, because everyone’s land is connected in some way that cannot always be explained. First it was the muleteer who was passing by on the main path and saw the well. Then it was Don Macario’s wife who told the godmother.
Then came the comments in the store, which at first were of amazement mixed with skepticism of the kind that says something exists, but still doesn’t believe it will last. Gerbacio found out through Dolores, whom he overheard at the market. He arrived at the hill one Thursday afternoon without warning, riding the horse he had taken from the distribution point, with the expression of someone who comes to verify something he doesn’t want to find, but needs to know.
He stopped at the entrance to the property and looked around. He looked at the shack that now had a new wooden door that Don Macario had given him on credit in exchange for nopal when it started to produce. He looked at the flowerbeds planted with beans, which were already showing green leaves in the rows. He looked at the row of prickly pear cactus planted as a fence on the side of the hill.
He looked at the well with the stone rim. that remedies she had built single-handedly, stone by stone. And he looked at Canelo, standing on the side of the field with a fuller body and shinier hair than when he had dismissed him. He said nothing. He stayed on the horse looking for a while that seemed to Remedios exactly the time needed for a man to see that he was wrong without anyone having to tell him.
Then he left. Remedies. He continued weeding the garden bed where he stood, as if no one had arrived and no one had left, because the bean did not wait for visitors and the earth did not understand other people’s pride. But then the drought came. That year the sky closed in August, which was when the hill needed the seasonal rains for the beans to finish filling their pods. It closed and didn’t open.
The grass along the path turned yellow and bent down towards the ground. The streams in the surrounding area first dwindled to a trickle and then to nothing. The ranchers in the town started selling cattle because there was no fodder and what little remained was worth little because everyone was selling at the same time.
In Don Macario’s store, there was only one topic: the drought, the beans, what was going to be lost. People with long faces and short words, because when the land doesn’t yield, words also dry up. It was then that the people understood something that Remedios already knew from the day she found the water among the stones.
She had a well, not the kind of well that depends on the rain of that year, a well that reached the deep mantle of the hill, to the water that accumulates for decades under the stone and that the drought of a season does not reach. Water that went down slowly and came up slowly, but it was there.
Meanwhile, the farmers in the village watched the beans shrink due to lack of water. The stonemasons of Remedios continued to receive the bucket that she took out of the well morning and afternoon and carried on her shoulder to the furrows. It was harder work than anything I had ever done before.
Twice a day, the bucket full, the path between the well and the flowerbeds, the water carefully distributed at the base of each plant so as not to waste a single drop. Canelo helped in the only way he could. Remedios improvised a system with a rope and an old iron ring she found in the shack. And the ox pulled the full bucket from the bottom of the well to the surface, stopping when it felt the pull of the rope, constant and calm as always.
His strength , where hers could not reach. The two working together in the way that things that need each other work, without either of them having to announce it. The harvest came in November. She was modest. No one would guess it was the harvest of a large ranch or a woman with resources. But while the village fields were left with beans lost to drought, the stonemasons of Remedios delivered what they promised when the earth opened up in furrows.
Four sacks. Four sacks of black beans, dry, clean, selected bean by bean by the hands of Remedios, who learned slowly and learned well. Doña Paz arrived on harvest day without anyone calling her. He sat on a stone next to the stonemason and watched Remedios and Canelo working together.
She was pulling up the plants and he was carrying the sacks tied to his sides with a rope. The old woman didn’t help, she didn’t say anything, she just looked with that expression which, for her, was the greatest form of congratulation that existed. Finally, when the four sacks were piled up in the hut, Doña Paz said that arid land is not dead land, that arid land is land that is kept for those who have the patience to search and that water that no one sees is more valuable than water that everyone sees.
Because when the sky fails, the one below finds remedies. He took the beans to the village market that Saturday and sold them in 2 hours, not because they were cheap, but because they were the only beans in the region that had not suffered from the drought and the women who bought them for their families knew it.
Don Macario left the store to see her and stood there silently with his arms crossed, watching as the sacks of remedies were emptied while vendors from other towns sat with poor quality merchandise that nobody wanted. Then he went in to look for her and told her that if she had more the following year, she should talk to him first, and that he would guarantee her a price.
Remedios said she would think about it. He said it with the calm voice of someone who no longer needs anyone to guarantee him anything, because he learned that the only true guarantee is the one that one builds with one’s own hands on one’s own land. Hervacio appeared on the hill two weeks after the market. This time he did dismantle it.
This time he did enter the field. He looked at the flowerbeds, now empty of the harvest, but ready for the next planting. He looked at the well with its firm rim. He looked at the prickly pear cactus that was already producing ripe fruit on its highest pads. He looked at Canelo, fat and shiny, resting in the shade of the shack, which now had a new roof from the mine, which Remedios had bought with the money from the market.
Gerbacio spoke with the voice of someone who chose his words before arriving and still couldn’t find the right ones. He said that perhaps they had been harsh with the distribution, that he had thought that hill was useless, and that if Remedios needed anything, they could talk. Remedios listened to him standing at the entrance of the shack, her apron dirty with dirt and her arms crossed.
He replied that the hill was indeed useful, that what was useless was the one who underestimated it, that he didn’t need anything from it, because everything he had needed he had found there in the earth, in the water that no one saw, in the ox that no one respected and in the wisdom of an old woman who came along the path when no one else appeared, that if he wanted beans for his family the following year, he should come to the market like any other person and pay the price they were worth.
Hervacio did not respond. He mounted his horse and rode off down the village road with the demeanor of someone who doesn’t want to be seen leaving, but he’s already gone. The town knew before he arrived, because in small towns things that happen on the land arrive flying along the dirt roads before the horse can even reach a gallop.
And the version that arrived was the same as what had happened, without embellishments, without exaggerations, because the truth sometimes needs nothing to make the greatest story that exists. Doña Paz arrived the next day with the satchel. As always, he sat in the corridor of the shack, which now had rustic wooden benches, which he had made from the planks of the old cart, which he found buried in the undergrowth.
at the bottom of the property. He drank the coffee that Remedios served him. He looked at the hill, which was green in the flowerbeds and gray in the unworked parts . He said that next year the well had to be enlarged and a cistern built to store rainwater when it came, and that with a cistern and a well, that hill could yield twice as much as it did this year.
In between, he took a piece of paper and a short pencil from his apron pocket and began to write, because among all the things he learned that year, he had learned that knowledge that is written is not lost even if the body gets tired. Canelo was sleeping in his corner of the corridor, breathing that calm rhythm of a peaceful animal.
The prickly pear fruit shone red and yellow under the afternoon sun. The well in the hollow held the water that the hill had held since before anyone came to claim it. And she would write down remedies, plan, and count seeds for the next planting. With the serenity of someone who discovered that the biggest world of his life was exactly in the place where everyone told him there was nothing.
Years later, when people asked her how she had done what she did, Remedios always answered the same thing: that she did nothing, that the land wasn’t waiting for someone to act, that the hill had water before she arrived, that the ox had strength before Gerbacio even looked at it, that the old woman had the knowledge before anyone went to ask her for advice, that she only arrived with enough time and the necessary desire to gather what was already there, and that sometimes what the world calls failure is just
arid land that hasn’t yet found the person who knows how to find the water within it. People who look down on what they do n’t understand, sooner or later sit at the table where they eat what they didn’t sow. People who work what they were left with, even if nobody wanted it, sooner or later have their own table and a harvest to fill it with.
Remedios knew it from the first time he put his hand at the bottom of the hole and felt the cold water of a hill that everyone had surrendered except him. If this story touched you, share it with someone who needs to hear it, because what they left you, however little it may seem, can be exactly enough if you know what to do with it.
Subscribe to the channel and let us know in the comments which moment touched you the most. Was that when he found the water? When Gerbacio returned with the wrong words, or was Canelo the ox that everyone wanted to send to the slaughterhouse, and turned out to be the most loyal co-worker that Remedios had on that hill.
I want to know, and until the next story.
