The Hummingbird's Daughter (11 page)

“We could wait all night,” Huila said.

Teresita sighed.

Huila said, “Are your hands hot?”

“My hands are always hot.”

“Do this.”

Huila clapped her hands together three times, then rubbed her palms briskly. Teresita copied her. Huila put her hands above the plant. “Now,” she said.

Teresita put out her hands. Nothing.

“Close your eyes,” Huila said.

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Don’t talk, feel!”

“But Huila —”

“Feel!”

After another interminable minute, Huila told her to slap her hands together again. Very tiresome. Teresita clapped three times, rubbed, put out her hands, already thinking about how wonderful it was going to be to escape from the old madwoman and play donkey slide with the kids in the village. Then it happened.

She gasped.

The little ugly bush began to push against her hands. It was as if cool smoke had billowed from the leaves. Cold smoke. Fog. And it rolled softly against her palms, trying to lift her hands. She laughed.

“You feel it.”

“I do!”

She opened her eyes. She clutched her hands to her chest. She gazed down at the homely little hedionda bush. It was one of many, almost invisible, a lowly weed. A trash plant cluttering any landscape. Cows wouldn’t even eat it. Around its base, small grasses wobbled in the breeze, and quail tracks formed small Y shapes in the yellow dust. Small blue blossoms in its shadows, and beyond them, cacti with red flowers. Down the arroyos, wild melons twined their vines around rogue mango trees. Sunflowers. Dandelions. She gawked. She grew dizzy with color. Color filled her mouth like agua de jamaica.

“Everything speaks, child,” Huila said.

Teresita was laughing.

“Everything is singing.”

One of Huila’s mysteries was: “You are not always meant to understand, only to accept.”

“I want to understand,” Teresita replied.

“Only Itom Achai truly understands. It is our job to wonder. Wonder and obey.”

Teresita wondered how she was to obey what she didn’t understand.

Huila told Teresita to pierce her ears. Teresita was thrilled that Huila was interested in making her pretty. But Huila didn’t care if she was pretty or not. Huila told her: “You must pierce your ears to show God you are no longer deaf. You have not only been blind, but deaf. Punch holes in your ears to show God they are open, and you are ready to listen. God doesn’t care if you think you’re pretty!” But she gave her two beautiful gold hoops to wear once she had done the ritual.

Twelve

THE MYSTERIES OF THE MAIN HOUSE were as indecipherable to the People as Huila’s commandments were to Teresita. Commands, ideas, plans, and whims wheeled over their heads like the constellations. Even Huila was periodically baffled by the world of the Yoris. She sometimes looked to Segundo when her own understanding failed her. Between them, they could usually make out a pattern.

Saturday morning, Segundo rode over to the village and he parked his horse in the middle of the street and smoked until the workers came forth and gawked. Huila made her way quickly from her sacred spot and looked up at him, too.

“Do you know what?” he said.

They were immediately afraid. Why would Segundo come to address them? Was there to be a flogging? Had there been a massacre? Were the Apaches coming back? Was everybody fired? Had war broken out? A Mennonite missionary had moved through the ranchos assuring them that Jesus Christ would return to earth by 1880—maybe He was early.

“The bandits are gone,” he said. “Except in the north.”

The north. Nobody liked the north.

“The warrior Indians are also gone. Except . . .”

“In the north,” they murmured.

Segundo shifted in the saddle, and it made its three hundred leather sounds. Teresita stood next to the horse and held Segundo’s boot and looked up at him. She spun his spur. It sounded like tiny Christmas bells.

Buenaventura was hiding in a thicket, trying to brush fat biting ants off himself.

“Bandits. I kind of miss them,” Segundo said. “Have you heard tell of La Carambada?”

“No.”

“This is a true story.”

Tía tipped ash into her mouth and tapped her foot: this was a waste of her time.

“She was my favorite bandit of all,” he said. “She held up wagons and coaches. She carried a great Colt forty-five, and when she had the men out of the coach and lined up, stripped of their gold and even their pants, she would pull out one of her chichis.” The crowd gasped. “Oh yes. She would show the men her chichi, and she’d hold the gun to their heads, and she’d say, ‘What do you think of this, cabrón?’” The People looked at each other uneasily. Huila made a mental note: La Carambada—heroine of Mexico. Segundo laughed. “Can you imagine? All those idiotas trying to think up the right thing to say.”

“I hope she shot a few of them,” Huila said.

Segundo smiled.

“What a woman!” he said. “Maybe they have more like her up north.”

Don Teófano said, “Excuse me, but I have work to do.”

“Not today, you don’t.”

“Why? Is it Easter already?”

“No. The patrón has given you all the day.”

“For what?”

“To reflect.”

“On what?”

Segundo flicked his cigarette away.

“You need to decide your own fates.”

“Fate?” said Teófano.

“Fate!” said Huila.

Segundo delivered a sober version of the elaborate story of the recent elections and the debacle of the Sinaloan candidate and his unexpected fall at the hands of Don Porfirio Díaz. Buenaventura wandered closer, amazed more by Segundo’s spurs and black saddle and pistolas than by the story.

“What’s that got to do,” he called, “with anything?”

“Don Tomás has been in meetings for days with Don Miguel and the engineer Aguirre,” Segundo said.

Aguirre.
Segundo and Buenaventura together sneered at each other. Buenaventura was so delighted by this that he nearly did a little jig.

“And they have decided that the rancho must be evacuated. Tomás and Doña Loreto and the herds of cattle and horses, and the vaqueros, of course. We’re going to have to move to where it’s safer. They’re after our patrón. Se lo van a chingar,” he noted.

“Go?” said Huila. This was all news to her. “Go where?”

Segundo turned in his saddle, offering a touch of drama to the crowd. He looked beyond the main house into the distance, beyond the trees.

“What do you think?” he said.

“North!” shouted Teresita. Thanks to Huila, she was used to answering spot quizzes by now.

They rocked back on their heels, touched their hearts, their foreheads.
North!

Segundo nodded down at them.

“North, to Sonora. You must decide which of you will go with us. You have today and tomorrow. Go to church. Pray. Decide.”

He turned his horse.

“Whoever braves the journey will find work when we arrive in Sonora. Those of you who stay will be under a new patrón.” He spurred his mount and said, “Good day.”

“Segundo!” Huila called.

He stopped and looked back.

“Where in Sonora?” she demanded.

“Don Miguel has a great home in Alamos. A city. Loreto and the children will go there. The rest of us are going to one of the ranches. Probably Cabora.”

Cabora!

Nobody had heard that word before.

They rolled it on their tongues as Segundo rode away.

Cabora . . .

Those who had not heard Segundo speak knew what he’d said before they ate breakfast. For the first time, the lives of the workers of the rancho were about to change. Knowing this gave them all an instant and deep nostalgia for the smallest of details that they had previously ignored. It was the only life they knew, in the only place they knew, and now they had to change.

“I have squandered my days,” Don Teófano announced, then went to ponder the stock pond. He had not looked at a dragonfly in thirty years. He was certain there would be no dragonflies in Sonora.

Tía collapsed in her shack and shook.

Huila marched to the main house. Sonora! By God, there was plenty of work to do before they went to Sonora! She had to pack her saints, her herbs, steal some more pipe tobacco from Tomás, get some more shells for her shotgun. Sonora! Yaquis!

Teresita wandered off with Buenaventura.

“You going?” he asked.

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’m going,” he said.

“Good.”

All over the ranch, the People were looking as baffled as infants or young monkeys. Even vaqueros were to be found in odd corners, tossing lariats at fence posts and fingering the ropes, as if ropes were fated to become arcane objects of the ancient past. Segundo was discovered on Sunday joining several little girls in a game of hopscotch.

On Monday, they were amazed to find men already shutting down the ranch. The patrones moved so fast! Things happened as if by themselves, or by invisible agents of change. Tools and goods were going into boxes. Seeds filled burlap sacks. Favorite fruit trees were dug up and mounted on wagons, their root balls wrapped in old blankets and wetted down with buckets of water.

Women swept out their dirt floors each dawn, thinking this might be the last dawn of the world. The dust flew from their doors with tenderness. They meditated on the dirt. Even Tía, one day, said, “Dust. It is probably mentioned in the Psalms.”

Padre Adriel arrived that week with flagons of holy water, and he blessed things until he was weary. He blessed the wagons and the two-wheeled carts. He blessed donkeys and mules, horses and goats. He even blessed the she-pig. He blessed hoes, shovels, axles, children, hats, metates, shoes. He did not bless pistolas, though he did bless rifles. “Rifles hunt deer,” he said, “but pistolas hunt men.” He heard confession in the barn.

When he saw Tomás, he said, “Do you wish to make a confession, hijo?”

“Padre,” Tomás replied, “my only confession is that I do not believe in confession.”

Eggs and tortillas became a new astonishment. The Sinaloans had heard that Sonorans indulged in the unspeakable atrocity of eating flour tortillas. Flour! Any human being knew that tortillas were made of corn. So they regarded their pieces of tortillas with sorrow—serving as spoon and fork and napkin all at once, their humble little maíz tortillas, with their loose skins and their delicious burned spots, had revealed themselves at last to be family members more loyal than sisters or brothers. Long after a fight with a brother, even after a funeral for a sister, you could scoop up some fried beans with a tortilla de maíz. And when you didn’t have beans, a pinch of salt in a tortilla was a great meal. How could you eat salt in a wad of flour? Did not Padre Adriel say they were “the salt of the earth”? Nobody was sure what it meant, but it clearly related to the tortilla.

For a time, men stopped kicking their dogs. Once they allowed themselves this kindness, emotions without number flooded their chests. These feelings convinced some men that they were dying of hideous ailments like heartworms or the evil eye. Soon, making love became so overwhelming that their flutes drooped. The men feared weeping in front of their women so deeply that their bones would not rise. The women, however, wanted loving more than ever. Now that they were being torn away from their homes, they wanted to be pressed to the earth and worked upon it like masa on the comal, they wanted to feel the rocky flanks of the earth grow soft in that mysterious moment when the ground opened them and swallowed them. They would lift their skirts high and offer the men the tender promise of their legs, but the only ones who bit their flesh were fleas. The men merely hung their heads and scratched the dogs behind their ears.

The vaqueros were not overconcerned. They spun the occasional spur, scratched their names on the walls of the bunkhouse. They were more than willing to offer their services to the frustrated women of the village. They enthusiastically kicked every dog in sight.

Book
II

WHERE THE SKY
FORGOT TO RAIN

We should say that what most powerfully caught the
attention of the people were the moral and intellectual
qualities of the girl. They intensified the power of her
virtues, the powers of her soul; at the same time, these
features caused the people to see in her a saint, a celestial
messenger. These moral and intellectual qualities were a
living, palpable contrast to the vice and ignorance in
which she had been raised.

—L
AURO
A
GUIRRE,
La Santa de Cabora