The Hummingbird's Daughter (22 page)

“We thought,” the old man continued, “we were at war with you.”

He shrugged.

“We are at war with everyone.”

He crossed his arms. All this talk to half-breeds and mestizos and Yoris. Pah!

“We are at war with anyone who does not speak Cahita, you know. Some of you speak like real human beings, and we are not at war with you. We would not kill you if we came back to burn the ranch again.”

“That’s a relief, cabrones!” blurted Huila.

Everyone laughed, even the old Yaqui leader.

“We thought we were at war with the Sky Scratcher here,” he said, gesturing toward Tomás. “We had not seen him, but we had seen him coming in dreams. All these Yoris. We thought they were the same.”

Tomás offered him a cigar. He took it and lit it from Segundo’s match. He nodded a gruff thanks.

“Why did you raid us?” Aguirre asked.

“We were hungry.”

“Cows,” said another.

“Cows!” said Segundo.

“Hungry,” the old man repeated. They thought he was surly. Some of them thought he was stupid. But he just didn’t feel like wasting too much breath apologizing to Yoribichis.

“Aguirre,” said Tomás, “how much do priests demand from us in tithes?”

“They recommend you give ten percent of your earnings to the poor, my dear Urrea,” Aguirre said.

“Ten percent,” Tomás repeated. “From now on, Cabora will provide ten percent of its harvest and its livestock to the Yaquis. If we have one hundred cows, you take ten,” he said.

The old man looked at his people. They nodded. He took his cigar out of his mouth and said, “Bueno.”

“Your people will not go hungry as long as we are here,” Tomás continued. “And the grounds of the Urrea ranches will always serve as refuge to you. Here at Cabora, at Aquihuiquichi, at Santa María. You will protect us from Indian attacks, and we will protect you from soldiers.”

The old man nodded. He and Tomás shook hands.

“I want to show you something,” Tomás said to the People.

One of the Yaqui group was a woman. She was quite beautiful, in Tomás’s opinion, but he thought almost every woman he saw was quite beautiful. She rode at the back of the group and had never said a word to him. She wore her hair long and straight, and it covered the sides of her face. And now, dismounted, she stood behind the Yaqui men, silent. Tomás knew she would make his People understand.

“Chepa,” he said, “por favor.”

He gestured toward her with one hand, and she stepped forward.

“This is Chepa,” he said.

The old man of the village murmured something to her, and she nodded, and he gently lifted the hair away from her head. Both of her ears had been cut off. Under her hair were ghastly stumps, ragged and white.

“White men,” the old Yaqui leader said.

Then he lowered her hair and turned and started walking. Each of the Indians turned and followed him. Tomás and the People stood and watched them as they walked across the hot plain, leaving the stolen horses behind, wavering in the light ripples, shrinking and seeming to break into pieces, their heads and then their hearts dripping into the quicksilver sky, until they were small pepper specks and then they were gone.

Forever after, Aguirre would say that on that day, in that place, no matter what anyone said, the Mexican revolution was born.

Book
III

THE HONEY
AND THE BLOOD

With the threat of Indian raids ended, Don Tomás turned
his attentions to developing the ranches, aided by large loans
from his uncle. He became a demon for work, spending day
after day in the saddle, supervising his construction crew
with astonishing energy. The improvements at Cabora were
made on the south side of Arroyo Cocoraqui, overlooking a
steep bluff some twenty to twenty-five feet high. . . . With
low, diverting dams along the bed of the arroyo, this tract of
land could be irrigated. . . . Don Tomás employed a sizable
crew of Indians to clear the land and then sent for Lauro
Aguirre. . . .

—W
ILLIAM
C
URRY
H
OLDEN,
Teresita

Twenty-three

THE BEES FLEW from thirty hives arranged in a wide arc along the southern boundaries of Cabora. Another ten hive boxes stood outside the main fence of Aquihuiquichi. These boxes were of pine, painted white and held above the ground on stout oak legs. Their slanted roofs were made of tin and were held firm against the wind by adobe bricks left over from the great reconstruction of the hacienda. The bottoms of the hives were a hard wood that would withstand rot. Each hive held nine panels a half inch apart, and these panels held walls of wax hexagons slowly filling with honey.

On cool days, the bees hung around the doorways to their homes in groggy gangs, only peeling away to fly to their jobs with great reluctance. At first, it would be difficult to see where they would go to find blossoms for their nectar and pollen. From above, Cabora might have seemed a desert. But the lowlands beyond the arroyo were green with irrigation water. Long rows of corn grew there, a small industry of maize and tassels and husks for tamales and dolls and cigarettes. The maize fed the three hundred workers their rations of tortillas, and the excess fed the pigs and cows, and the excess of that was sold to villages and ranchos nearby. During harvest, wagons would haul loads of corn to the Yaqui and Mayo villages in treaty with Tomás. The People fermented the corn and made the stinky mash they called tejuino, and they drank it and fought and knifed each other and vomited in the dirt and passed out facedown.

Beside the corn rows were long bright meadows of alfalfa and clover. Again, this crop fed the horses and livestock, the flowers feeding the restless bees. Beans and sweet peas on their poles and strings blossomed, as well. Guava trees. Jamaica.

All along the Río Yaqui, there were peach and apricot trees. Quince trees. Some apple trees. The mesquite bloomed. To the south of Cabora, Tomás had planted an acre of lavender. It made for a tasty honey, and Tomás experimented with its curious scent in a salve and a distilled oil. His newest project was five acres of strawberries. Old rusty food cans sprouted red, pink, and white geranium gardens before nearly every shack.

Tomás had read that asters appealed to bees, so he planted asters alongside sweet alyssum and nasturtiums and morning glories and, of course, great walls and fences covered in honeysuckle. He could tell when they were making aster honey because it smelled dark and earthy. Peach or clover honey was sweet. Lavender honey smelled like a spring wind. The honeysuckle made the People particularly happy, since it attracted holy hummingbirds, and as long as hummingbirds hovered nearby, things would be all right.

Still, farther out, in the dry wastes beyond their arroyo and windmill, the desert gave up blooms. Even the small peyote cactus bloomed, as did the nopales and the few huge saguaros that were sentinels of the great north. Wildflowers erupted from the ground without any help at all from Tomás. In the summer, the rains came, and the magical event of toads bursting from the ground followed: toads started to shoot up from the soil, blinking their happy yellow eyes, excited by the first drumming of rain. Wildflowers were sure to follow. First toads, then flowers.

Desert marigold. Threadleaf groundsel. Paleface flower. Texas silverleaf. Sage. Desert calico. Purple mat.

If you knew where to look, it was a jungle in miniature. The bees knew where to look. And so did Huila.

Fagonia. Ratany. Filaree storksbill. Indian blanket. Daisies. Phacelia. Trumpet flowers. Purple groundberries. Burrobrush. Mormon tea.

The bee boxes stood about as tall as a short man. The beekeeper’s hut was not far away, looking like the houses of El Potrero where the People lived, but painted white and with windows covered in screen to keep the bees away. Beekeepers’ suits hung on pegs inside the door, and hats with veils stitched to the brims were stacked on the worktables. In the sheds outside, pry bars and slats and empty frames and sheets of wax and knives and gloves and the curious little bellows-pump smokers. And on three sides of the house, bright marijuana plants.

But Tomás knew his bees so well, and was known so well by his bees, that he didn’t bother with veils. In the years since his epochal ride into the Yaqui villages, he had confided mostly in his bees. Loreto, delighted to be ensconced in the pretentious house in Alamos, had set about spending fortunes on lace tablecloths and lace-up boots and awful kneesocks his sons wore like little princes from an idiot’s fairy-tale book. Loreto had not managed to come out to see Cabora. She did not care to be told excruciatingly crude and vicious tales of the ride or of the debased conditions in the demesnes of the savages.

Loreto had borne him a fifth child since the reconstruction. Now the Urrea children were all gathered in the city, learning to read and do factors. They had never branded a cow or castrated a horse. At times, Tomás was thankful for this. But they had also not slept on the ground, and his oldest boy, Juan Francisco II, had not yet learned to shoot. Leticia and Martita, the girls, helped around the house, though these duties were ably handled by the wash girls and the cooks and the maids. Leticia won a beauty pageant, and Martita had pale skin and huge lucid eyes. Alberto was a happy boy, dearly loved by Loreto. He was all muscle: Tomás liked to wrestle with him and feel his rocky torso strain to lift him off the floor. The baby, Tavito, was all smiles and laughter. Tomás liked to inform diners at Loreto’s table that Tavito was born smiling.

Once a month, he rode to La Capilla, as the Alamos home was known. He bathed, slathered on unguents and eaux de toilette, suffered through delicate meals with fine little forks and thin little plates with oily businessmen and their powdered wives—every one of them holding out their pinkies as they ate. Nobody ate with a tortilla in Loreto’s house. Nobody ate pork rinds or drank beer. After these interminable dinners, Tomás bid all his gathered children good night, then took Loreto’s delicate hand and led her upstairs, where he climbed atop her and did his duties. For the first time in his life, he thought of other things as he served his bride. And when she gasped her “Oh! Oh! Eres tremendo, mi amor!” he often had to turn his head so as not to laugh. Everything felt rehearsed in Alamos. Everything felt as if the powdery ladies had given Loreto a rule book and schooled her in exquisiteness. And then, as if to pay for the sin of making love, she dragged him off to Mass on Sunday mornings, and he was more reluctant than his sons. It wasn’t long until he concocted a plan—Segundo would accompany him, and while he was being witty and courtly at La Capilla, Segundo would be whoring and drinking across town. The arrangement was that Segundo had to collect Tomás at dawn for “urgent” duties at the ranch. This, too, was an obvious contrivance, but Tomás was learning that fine society functioned by means of such pantomimes and dramas.

Bees were better companions than people.

When he came to their hives with great jugs of sugar water to fill their feeder trays, he told himself they recognized him and greeted him with affection. They boiled out excitedly, and they did seem to know him, fanning him with their wings, tenderly plucking at his face and hands with their hooked feet. He was never stung.

He took a pound of honey to each Indian village. In time, he dreamed of three hundred hives. Five hundred. One day, he would do away with horses and cows and only ride herd on vast tides of bees.

Gold poppies. Desert rose mallow. Chihuahua flax. Buffalo gourd. Menodora. Twinleaf. Desert gold. Ghostflower. Chuparosa.

Los vaqueros did not understand this flowery phase of Don Tomás’s life, and they didn’t trust the insects. Bees, to buckaroos, were evil little beasts that stung horses and cows on the rump and started mad dashes through cactus bottoms. To hell with bees, brother.

They just waited until he came back from the hives and stared, slightly nauseous, when he came to them with a dripping chunk of honeycomb in his mouth, honey drooling down his chin, dead bees and grubs stuck to his lips. He’d look up at them, chewing away like a skinny bear, and he’d say, “What?”

Between the beehives and the Arroyo de Cocoraqui, there were arrayed fields of hay, henequen, tomatoes. Beyond these were several alamos trees where the goats and pigs had pens. North of the pens began the great corrals and barn complexes. To the west was the vast plain where the cattle wandered. To the east of the corrals was El Potrero. Between the barns and the main house was the long bunkhouse where the vaqueros snored and played cards, their kitchen attached to the east. The new rendering plant was far to the east, where its stench could not overwhelm the main house. Tomás had created a factory of tallow and lard, candles and oil and glue. On the west side of the main house was the residence of the caballero de estribo, the top hand. There, Segundo lived—in his opinion, like a sultan. He had such astounding things as a couch and beds, and a cook and a girl to boil his britches and hang them out to dry in the air. In Segundo’s palace, the orders were simple: coffee all day, at any hour. Coffee and cookies and lots of beans. No honey. Much beer. The inescapable Buenaventura often invited himself into Segundo’s house and managed to end up in the guest bed without being given the least indication that he was welcome. Buenaventura amused him, like some stray dog stealing eggs. And he eyed the boy’s Urrea face and thought his dark thoughts, until one night after they’d drunk many bottles of beer Buenaventura had confessed his secret and Segundo had gone off to sleep not at all surprised. This made him happy. A real man was never taken by surprise by anything.

On the brink of the arroyo stood the great main house. It was a full three miles from the hives, but the bees had no problem finding its walls. Rebuilt with adobe and pine planks from the Tarahumara Mountains of Chihuahua, the house spread two wings east and west from a tall center residence accessed through a flagstone courtyard that was shut off from the ranch by two swinging wooden gates. In the middle of the courtyard, Tomás had recently planted a plum tree. Around it, benches and a pair of small fountains made a sheltered sitting spot for Huila and any guests who might come to visit. Tomás had had the house painted white, like his beloved hives, and the roof was made of red Mexican tiles curved to channel rain to the gutters, and Aguirre had engineered the gutters to empty into great stone pilas at every corner, where a hundred gallons of water in each could easily gather in a few days of the rainy season. Atop the adobe wall that ran across the mouth of the courtyard, Huila had planted geraniums in pots. A great nopal stood fifteen feet tall on the west side of the gate. To the east, on the left side of the entrance, a series of trellises held up honeysuckle, morning glories, sweet peas, and trumpet vines. Three stone steps within led up to the great oak front doors with relief carvings of the Urrea oak tree and wolf escutcheon, and each door had a small window with iron bars over it so those inside could espy who was knocking or shoot raiding Indians through the portholes without exposing themselves. The great broad road from Alamos had been extended to sweep past the gate. Everywhere, chicken coops.

Huila had grown older. What else could she do? She grew more tired as her days seemed at once to be longer and shorter, interminable in the afternoon heat, and shaved down to only a few good hours by the time she went to bed. She felt the rust in her backbone, the painful catch in her hips, the dull ache in the dry knot of her womb. Her eyes felt forever dry, yet her vision was wet, as if tears had filled her eyes, or some film had fallen on them. Life shifting, as life does.

She had added sacred objects to her altar, as she studied this desert land. There was the troubling seedpod of what the local healers called the devil’s claw. When she’d first seen it, she’d taken it to be the skull of some evil rat with long antlers. She had found a mummified baby rattlesnake that she kept beside her clear glass of bampo-water. It was too potent a talisman to let it stray far from a bit of clear soul-substance like that. Tomás had given her his Apache snake rattle, too. She knew these Yaqui bastards up here had some arrangement with rattlesnakes, so she was glad for the medicine. She had a pot of Tomás’s honey beside her bed as well, but that was because she liked to eat it by the spoonful. Still, its clarity was worth meditation and prayer—Huila knew that any clear substance, especially one as sticky and sweet as honey, and one that came from bees, had to have some kind of hidden meaning and sacred use. She was just too tired to get around to it.