The Hummingbird's Daughter (18 page)

He leaned over the side and spit tobacco.

“Is that it?” he said.

“What?”

“That desgraciado cattle drive. Is that all there is?”

“Sí, señor. I’m the last.”

She sat on her donkey, peering up at him.

He drew a long knife from his belt and cut a chunk of tobacco off his plug and stuffed it in his mouth. Brown drool colored his lip and gray beard. He leaned over and spit: it barely missed Teresita. His right cheek was split by a red scar that went from his eyebrow to his chin. It vanished among the whiskers, and where it vanished, the whiskers were white.

He held the big knife up and said, “Boo!”

He laughed.

“I am not afraid,” Teresita said.

He laughed some more.

He shook the knife at her.

“Uy!” he said. “Uy! Uy!”

She thought he was acting foolish.

He put the knife away.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“Cabora.”

“Cabora? Never heard of no Cabora.”

“It is our new ranch.”

“You don’t have no Goddamned ranch, you little pinche Indian girl. What are you, an Indian?” He took his knife back out, held it up to his scalp, cried, “Eeee!”

He laughed again.

“Indian!” he said. “You’re an Indian, aren’t you?”

“Good-bye, sir,” she replied.

Adults should know how to behave.

“Hey,” he said. “See this? See it?” He pointed to his face. “What are you, Apache? Yaqui? See this face? Yaquis did this to my face. How you like it?”

He moved his knife up and down his face, making squishy noises with his mouth.

“Yaquis!” he said. “Wanted my eye!” He spit—it flew over her head and splattered on the ground. “What are you, Yaqui?”

“Good-bye, sir,” she repeated. She nudged little Panfilo in the ribs, and the donkey snorted to life and trotted away.

“Yaquis!” the skinner shouted after her. “They cut off men’s feet and make them walk until they bleed to death! You little savage! Come back here! Yaquis hang men upside down from branches, put their heads in fire. I seen it! Burned their brains out! Come back here, I’m not done yet!”

She shook the reins and made the burro break into a run.

The last thing she heard from the mule skinner was his laughter. She was happy once she caught up with Huila.

Tomás cleared the summit long before Aguirre and Segundo could catch up to him. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. But he slowly started to understand. His stallion spun in circles. Tomás had to wrestle him to a standstill.

He removed his hat and fanned it before his face, futilely trying to swipe some of the smoke stink away from him. He kicked his right leg over the pommel and slid off the saddle, then he went down on one knee and stared. He plucked a stalk of grass and put it in his mouth.

Segundo galloped up to him and dismounted in a cloud of dust.

“My God,” he said.

Aguirre trotted up to them and let out a small cry.

“There must be some mistake!” he said. “Surely . . . this must be the wrong valley . . . ?”

Tomás stood, tossed the grass to the ground.

“There’s no mistake,” he said.

He pulled his revolver from his holster, checked the cylinder: fully loaded. He looked at Segundo. “Go get me the riflemen,” he commanded.

Eighteen

THE RIDERS SPREAD OUT along the ridge, both vaqueros and hired guns, their Winchesters in their hands. One, a Frenchman, carried a huge Henry long-range gun, its octagonal barrel casting blue lights in the sun. He peered down into the valley with his hunting scope, but Segundo had already seen that it was too late.

Cabora was in a wide valley that opened onto a plain that stretched as far as any one of them could see. The patchwork of tilled fields and cattle pasture gave way to desert tans and yellows. Mountains to the east, hills to the west and north. Green creek beds crisscrossed the terrain. And toward the center, beneath its crown of writhing smoke, beside a dark chasm in the earth, lay the wreckage of the ranch compound.

The wagons from Sinaloa stalled on the backslope behind the riders, collected in the hollow like water. The People eddied among their animals, and no one knew what was above them, though they all watched the smoke columns writhe. They made the sign of the cross, clutched hatchets, butcher knives, old guns. Soon, word started to drain back down to them, falling from switchback to switchback, coming down the hill. “The ranch is gone,” they said. “Cabora is gone.”

Above them, Tomás remounted.

He and Segundo rode down into the valley with Aguirre taking up the rear. The riders fanned out behind him, all guns at the ready.

The main buildings still smoldered in the distance, their walls already gone in the fire, nothing but a charred chimney rising above the plain. The fences were down; some scattered livestock still grazed. The barns were burned, the workers’ shacks smoking. Dogs, shot down and left beside the road, lay like mottled and softened rocks. A dead man bent over a fence post hung loose as laundry, blood thick and black and clotted all over him, his pants ripped away, an arrow inserted in his fundament. Flies sang like a wire in the wind, a high pitch, a terrible hymn.

Tomás snapped his fingers and pointed at him.

“Get him off there,” he said.

A pig squirmed in the dirt, punctured by a fistful of arrows, transformed into a porcupine of agony, the arrows rustling and clacking as the pig groaned and dragged itself. Segundo drew his revolver and fired one shot into the pig’s head. Aguirre jumped. “Por Dios,” he said.

Segundo told one of the riders to take it back to the cook wagon.

They came upon a charred body in the ruins of the first burned shack. It was black and red and brown and yellow and white, but mostly black. Its mouth was open in a silent scream, or some thought a yawn, and others thought it was laughing, and its claws were hard as carvings and raised to the sky and its legs were dark bones and raised as if it could run up the columns of smoke and enter Heaven.

All the horses were gone.

The well was collapsed, the stones of its rim kicked down its throat. Intestines were hung like garlands from the cottonwood nearest the ruins of the main house, and none of them could tell if it was the inside of man or animal hung there and made crisp by the sun. And still, the windmill turned, its blades picturesque against the violet distance, its rhythmic squealing eerie in the great quiet of the valley. Hay bales smoldered. The hills were lilac in the late sun, the crops almost black in the distance. The men covered their mouths and noses with bandanas against the stench of death.

Tomás jumped off his horse and rushed into the triangular corner of the demolished barn. He came out with a child in his arms. The child was covered in blood. It was alive, though its head seemed to be made of some soft cloth, and it flopped on its shoulders and an old wound was dried into a hard scab.

“Take him to Huila,” Tomás said, and a rider tenderly wrapped the child in his coat and spun and galloped back out of the long valley.

The cows were gone.

Aguirre pointed: an empty suit of clothing, spread across the ground as if someone had run out of his own clothes.

A woman’s shoe with a broken glass of milk in it.

A dead man on a mattress floated in the stock pond like a sailor dreaming of home. They watched as the mattress slowly tipped and sank, the man’s stiff hand waving once as he settled into the black water. They were startled to hear frogs. They were startled to hear anything. They had imagined the entire valley to be silent, but it was alive with sounds. Somewhere a dog barked. The flies raised their high cry. They suddenly heard chickens. The crackling of the many fires. Crickets. Doves. The many fat crows, gorging themselves on cooked flesh, laughing from the trees. Then, slowly, they heard the sound of human sobbing.

Survivors came forward, alone and in pairs. No Urreas lay among the few dead—the family had cleared out to make room for Tomás. No, they were comfortably waiting in the great house in the city, unaware of the destruction of their ranch. The only family members awaiting them at Cabora were old ghosts, tossed from their graves by the violence.

Tomás was stunned when a man with his left eye missing stumbled out of the stock-pond reeds. Like the madman they had seen so many days ago on the road, this man was without pants, his white shirt stained with old blood. But it was a different face under the blood, the frank pockmark of the empty socket collecting sun: Tomás could see the inside of the man’s head. He turned away and put his hand over his lips.

“Yaquis!” the man wailed. “They came out of the soil like devils!”

“Help this man,” Tomás said.

A woman, inexplicably, came forth from the trunk of a cottonwood. Her arm appeared, then her torso, and her legs. Two children materialized before them, holding hands. The men who first saw them shook their heads, rubbed their eyes. Had this boy and girl been standing there the whole time? Had they been rendered invisible by the great destruction around them? More people came out of ruts in the ground, out of a small orchard, out from behind agave plants where they had hunched like rabbits or armadillos, the color of the sand, breathing shallowly and clutching the earth.

“Yaquis,” they said.

“Llegaron con el amanecer, gritando como diablos. No montaban caballos. Vinieron corriendo, a pie, brincando como venados, volando como buitres.”

The main house had been a large affair, built of wood and whitewashed adobe. The walls had cracked and fallen in, etched with terrible black shadows from the fires, the heat of the twisting red coals so fierce that none of the riders could go near it. Puddles of copper and brass on the fallen porch revealed where doorknobs had melted.

“Look here,” Aguirre called.

The insides of the house had been ripped out and scattered, like the innards hung in the tree, broken and thrown with a kind of rage that was still frightening though the raiders were gone. Shattered glass, broken crockery, broken chairs and tables and gutted pillows coughing feathers into the breeze, hollow clothes like phantoms, massacred nightgowns. Murdered books flapped on the ground.

Aguirre stood beside a big overstuffed chair. Stacked carefully in it were all the crosses and crucifixes gathered from the main house. The family Bible and a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe nestled there, along with a small statue of Saint Francis.

“They saved all the religious artifacts,” Aguirre said.

“They’re Catholics,” Tomás replied.

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

He went to one of the survivors.

“Where are all my cowboys?” he asked.

“They ran away.”

“Where are all my workers?”

“They have fled.”

“Who was in charge?”

“No one was in charge.”

“What can you tell me?”

“They came on foot. They took the cows, the horses. They took some women.”

“Yaquis?”

“Yaquis, patrón. Yaquis.” The man pointed to the west. “They live right over there, about ten miles.”

“What? You knew them?”

“Oh yes. We knew them well.”

Aguirre butted in. “But why?” he said. “Why would they do this?”

The man shrugged.

“They said they were hungry,” he said.

Tomás patted him on the arm.

“The wagons are coming,” he said. “They’ll feed you.”

“Sir?” the man said.

“Yes?”

“Would you be angry with me if I resigned my position?”

Tomás just walked away.

Segundo picked up a charred framed picture of unnamed Urreas.

“What next,” he asked no one in particular.

The wagons and carts slowly creaked over the ridge and started down into the valley. Huila, kneeling in her wagon, had laid the soft-necked infant on folded blankets, but its eyes were already cloudy and blue, and it shuddered and let out a last breath, then collapsed. Huila thought of a sheet furled over a bed, swelling high, then collapsing as the air escaped. Flat. That was how the child left this world.

How many dead trailed behind her? She could not count. All the ones who died of fevers and pox, for lack of Yori pills. The sad mothers who died screaming and their babies, dead inside them. Dead cowboys with bullets in their hearts. She watched Teresita stare at the tiny body in the wagon, and she said a prayer, for the girl would learn the terrible truth now, that you could not save everyone—you could save only a few—and the rest were doomed, as you yourself were doomed, to lie in the dirt before you could ever be ready. She pulled a cloth over the infant’s face.

The business of rebuilding had already begun. At the ranch, the men dug the graves and laid the charred and tormented dead into the ground. Across the dreadful plain, Huila had already organized the cooks, and Segundo had posted two guards to stand by the tent all night with weapons cocked and ready before riding back to be with Tomás, and Teresita had moved in near Huila in case the warriors returned. In iron pans balanced on flat rocks by the tall fires, the cooks melted lard, boiled water. For supper they ate caldo de ajo—garlic soup: all their stale bread that hadn’t gone to the pigs or the goats floated in beef broth, salted and peppered, the garlic cloves soft in the broth like little fish. And they ate arroz con pollo, the fresh chicken mixed with prairie fowl the vaqueros had shot that day and the day before, boiled with rice and a pinch of saffron. In the morning, they would breakfast on peeled and diced beavertail-cactus pads, lard-fried beans, and their last eggs. It smelled like a festival.

Tomás, standing on the charred front steps of the ranch house, could see the campfires of his people far across the land. He stepped down and walked toward the impromptu graveyard they had scraped out of the soil beyond a stone wall that meandered toward the skeletal windmill that whined and screaked in the drying wind. Green water chugged out of the ground, spitting from an iron pipe and into rusted troughs, where the horses set their heads to drink, drifting across the sand and dust without escort by ones and twos, as if they were interested in the fate of the ranch house, curious about the battle.

The men around him cried for blood. Vengeance was in the air. They muttered and cursed, they called out their rage, spoke of filthy Indios, of savages. Yet Tomás wondered why there were not more bodies. Why had the Yaquis allowed so many to escape?

The Cabora plain was empty, dry. The Sinaloans were in their first desert, and the desert frightened them. There was no cover—few trees broke the sere waste, and beyond, the peaks were savage and violent, unsoftened by green. Elemental colors, vivid hues that shouted to them of copper and blood. This was a wicked place, they were certain, and this attack was only the first. “War,” they were saying.

“Kill the women and children,” Tomás heard one vaquero proclaim.

Aguirre joined him on the steps.

“Que en paz descansen,” he said. May they rest in peace. It was a standard blessing.

Tomás nodded.

“A dark day, amigo,” Aguirre said.

Tomás extended his hand before him.

“Four graves,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Four.”

“Yes, four.”

“Why not ten, Lauro? Why not a hundred?”

“I —” Aguirre started to say, then fell silent. “I don’t know.”

“This was a Yaqui war party,” Tomás said. “They could have wiped out the whole llano, I’m certain.”

“I couldn’t say. You are the expert in this matter. Yaquis?” He shrugged. “Well.”