The Hummingbird's Daughter (38 page)

Forty-two

THAT LAST DAY found Teresita in the company of five praying women. The sun was already moving down the western sky, and four old ones knelt around the table, and Fina Félix sat in a chair near the door. All of the women prayed as one, calling to the Virgin to bless Teresita. None of them saw her eyes open.

They prayed on for another minute, dogged and blind to anything but their folded hands, offering up the pain in their knees to Jesus, as a gift, as an offering to trade against Teresita’s safe passage to Heaven.

“Mother of God,” an old voice piped.

And all answered: “Pray for her.”

Teresita sat up.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

A screaming eruption of women fled the room, a howling explosion of rosaries and candles, a stampede.

“God save us!”

“She lives!”

“The dead are walking!”

Fina Félix, for the second time in her life, ran all the way to her father’s ranch.

Animals bolted.

Donkeys kicked.

The women burst out the doors and fell over each other as they ran and shrieked.

Buckaroos fell from their horses.

Chickens, driven to a feather-dropping panic by the screaming women, blew through Cabora in a frenzy of wings and squawking.

“The dead!” the women cried.

Vaqueros tumbled out of their siestas and drew their weapons and commenced firing on the little graveyard, shouting, “Kill the dead! Kill the dead!”

Women fainted.

Tomás ran outside, his pistol in his hand.

He saw his men shooting at the graveyard and he started firing, too.

“Where are they!” he bellowed. “Where are the bastards!”

Segundo stepped lively and let loose with two barrels of a shotgun.

“Apaches!” he yelled.

“Rurales!” hollered Teófano, and he popped off a round with his old revolver.

“The dead! The dead!” the old women sobbed.

“Jesus and Mary, the dead!”

“What?” Tomás yelled as he reloaded. “What!”

“Ave María Santísima, Purísima!” Tía Cristina the torta lady testified.

Buenaventura ran up to Tomás and shouted, “Who are we shooting at!”

“I don’t know!”

“Teresita!” one of the women was blubbering, kneeling in the dirt and striking herself in the chest, flinging dust in the air.

Tomás stepped to her, holding his pistol up and away from her face.

He shook her, stared into her eyes.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“She’s awake!” the woman bellowed.

“Who is?”

“She is.”

The woman pointed to the doors of the parlor.

“No.”

“No chingues,” Buenaventura cursed.

Tomás staggered into the parlor, and his pistol dropped from his hand and thudded on the floor.

Teresita sat in the middle of the table, unblinking, her face showing a vague, reptilian curiosity as she scanned the room. She looked at the candles, and the coffin, at him.

Gaby shoved in behind him. Segundo, children, Teófano, Buenaventura.

“What is happening?” Teresita asked.

Tomás sputtered.

“Oh no. No,” he said. “No, you must be kidding.”

Teresita yawned.

“Why am I on this table?” she asked.

Buenaventura whistled, and Gabriela felt faint and leaned on the doorframe.

“This is your wake,” Tomás managed to say.

“My wake?”

“You’re dead!”

“I am?”

“Oh Christ,” said Segundo.

She turned to stare at the coffin.

“And this? What is this, Father?”

“This is your coffin,” he said.

“No.”

She shook her head.

“I will not sleep there,” she said.

She looked at him with a mild expression.

She said: “Someone will soon die, though. You can use it then. Expect a funeral in five days.”

She lay back down and closed her eyes.

“It was a long trip,” she said.

Even Tomás, then, made the sign of the cross.

They led her to her room.

She was terribly cold. Her passing chilled the air as if they were taking a block from the ice wagon into the house. She never blinked. Her head turned on her neck like a machine as her eyes took in the alien details of her home. The family didn’t know she could see through them. Their flesh to her was a shadow, and their bones danced within, visible to her as legs seen through a dress when the sun is bright. And deeper, still: the marrow in their bones glowed like thin wires of fire. Their skulls each held a clot of light, a charcoal ember. The burning marrow caused their bones to gleam within their flesh like narrow pink lamps.

She said, “I am tired. I have come a long way. Have you been there yet?”

Tomás coughed. How was one to be a father to a dead girl? Did one scold her? Correct her?

In her room, she lay back on her bed. She stared at the ceiling and disregarded her weeping father, the trembling Gaby, and the terrified house girls.

She said, “I am thirsty.”

They brought her water. She gulped it. They brought another glass. She took it in both hands and gulped it, too. Then she closed her eyes.

She looked dead again, save for her breathing.

They backed out of her room, fled silently down the stairs, hid in different parts of the house alone, drawing the curtains and pulling down the blinds, unable to speak of this moment, afraid somehow to face the day.

The next day, they found her sitting in the chair in the corner of her room. She still wore the burial dress. When Gaby tried to help her remove it, Teresita languidly slapped her hands away. When they brought her food, she left the plates on the floor. She drank more water. She never spoke.

“Really,” Tomás said. “This is too much.”

She said, “I will see Huila now.”

Tomás had been standing on the other side of the room, watching her stare into space. When she spoke, he jumped. “She is not well,” he replied.

“I know.”

“Are you strong enough?” he asked.

“Strong?” she said, never looking at him.

He stepped across to her and took her hand in his. She slowly turned her eyes to his hand and regarded it coolly, as if it were a lizard crossing her path.

“I can see your bones,” she noted.

He let go of her icy fingers.

“Daughter,” he said.

She said, “Am I?”

He was stung. He backed away from her. Put his hands in his pockets.

“You frighten me,” he said.

“I will see Huila now.”

Gabriela took one arm, and Tomás the other. They maneuvered her downstairs and along the hallway.

“Your womb is ripe,” Teresita told Gaby.

They opened the door for her, and Teresita walked through as if struck blind. She held her hands before her chest, palms out, fingers slightly curled, as if she were feeling the air that encapsulated things, as if she were seeing the color of the world through her skin.

The room smelled old. Musk and dust and death were in the air. The others held back at the open doorway, as if they were afraid to breathe that cloud of stink. But Teresita did not seem to take notice of it at all. She stepped in and closed the door behind her.

Huila, dry as a skeleton in the bed, stirred when the door latched shut. She was asleep, her old chin sprouting thin white whiskers. Teresita laid her hand on the old one’s head, then she sat in the corner. Huila jumped and snorted. She opened her eyes, craned her head on the pillow. Her eyes squinted, then popped wide.

“Where are the chickens!”

“There are no chickens, old woman.”

“Who is cooking supper, then!”

“Supper has been taken care of.”

“Nobody cuts off a chicken head like me.”

“You are the best at handling chickens.”

Huila snorted. Jerked. Looked over.

“You,” she said.

“It is I.”

“Have I died?”

“No.”

“Is this Heaven?”

“Hardly.”

“Are you a spirit?”

“We are all spirits.”

“Have you come back to take me to Heaven?”

“No.”

“Hell?”

“No. Wherever you are going, you must go alone. No one takes you.”

“I don’t like that!”

“You and I do not make the rules.”

“Things would have been different, let me tell you.”

Teresita said: “I am alive. They did not keep me.”

Huila laid her head back down. Sighed.

“Well,” she said. “That’s good.”

“They told me I had work to do.”

Huila nodded.

“They like to keep busy,” she said.

Huila seemed to sleep for a minute.

“Get me a ladder,” she said.

Neither of them laughed.

They were quiet for a time.

“I’ve seen people come back before,” Huila said. “Once when I was a girl.”

Teresita nodded.

“Will I come back like you?”

“I don’t think so,” Teresita said.

Huila coughed.

“Can you help me?” she asked. “Spare me from death?”

Teresita scooted her chair across the floor, leaned forward in her seat, and passed her hand up and down the old woman’s body.

“No,” she said.

“Will I die now?”

“Yes.”

They were silent again.

“I don’t want to die.”

Teresita closed her eyes.

“I know,” she said.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Will I be afraid?”

“Oh no.”

Teresita could hear her father whispering to the people outside the door. All around the house, they were still shouting. She could hear that silly Fina Félix crying and carrying on.

Teresita said, “Do you know how it is when a child needs to go to sleep? How a child fights and bargains. Asks for a story, or cries, or suddenly needs water to drink because she won’t go to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“But you know it is time. For whatever reason—it is time for the child to sleep. It’s late, or she needs to get up early in the morning, or she is ill. You have to make her go to sleep, sometimes against her will.”

“Yes.”

“This is how it is with God and us. God has to put us to bed, and we don’t want to sleep yet.”

Huila swallowed. It made her feel terribly sad. “Will I like being dead?” she asked.

Teresita opened her eyes.