The Hummingbird's Daughter (41 page)

Two thousand pilgrims gathered at Cabora to form the first camp. In two weeks, the camp swelled to 5,000. One month later, the count was 7,500 pilgrims—and 1,250 vendors, gawkers, fugitives, soldiers, and whores.

Reporters found the ranch infested with 10,000 campers.

El Monitor
reported with some alarm that Teresita was preaching “extremely liberal views.” She was quoted as saying, “Everything the government does is morally wrong.” A colonel in the army, Antonio Rincón, took two hundred Yaquis, men, women, and children, prisoners, and carried them in the gunboat
El Demócrata
and dropped them in the ocean between the mouth of the Yaqui River and the seaport of Guaymas, all of them perishing. In the presidential palace in Mexico City, President Díaz first read of the atrocity in Lauro Aguirre’s El Paso newspaper. The article was written by Teresa Urrea.

When the group of Mexican reporters arrived at Cabora, they were astounded to see the stinking, heaving, smoking mass of bodies. They had been sent by Díaz, increasingly alarmed by the Yaqui troubles in the north, and hearing more and more disturbing accounts of the “Girl Saint,” this female
writer of propaganda.
On his orders, they had traveled north to write a satirical series of stories about the fanatic hick Joan of Arc and her tattered minions in their sandy kingdom. They had been told to expect a tumbledown peasant’s hovel with naked savages prancing about, shaking spears. But Cabora was a vast estate, and the main house rose white behind adobe walls. A veranda ran the length of the house, and to the west, a round chapel rose to a red-tiled roof that stood above the roofline of the main house. Atop it, a small wooden cross. It looked like a lighthouse positioned on an island in a sea of human flesh.

The leader of the expedition, a political writer of some renown in Mexico City, was completely bald. When Buenaventura led him to Don Tomás, he found a frantic man who dashed across the ranch with no seeming sense of direction.

“What do you want?” barked Tomás.

“We have come to see the saint,” the reporter replied.

Tomás glared at him for a moment. “There is no fucking saint on this ranch!”

He was later quoted by the reporter in
El Imparcial:

“The day I believe my daughter to be a saint is the day she causes hair to grow on your ——head!”

Thus welcomed to Cabora, the reporters threaded their way through the crowds and found themselves standing before the porch where Teresita attended to the pilgrims. She greeted them and invited them in. They remained in her company behind closed doors for the next several hours. When they wrote their articles, they alarmed President Díaz further by extolling her virtues, reporting several miracles performed in their presence, and suggesting that the government attend to native rights in the issue of the land thievery and genocide currently taking place along the Río Mayo and Río Yaqui valleys. But the part of the story the People most delighted in was the part about the bald reporter. Before he left the ranch, he sought out Tomás. He didn’t say a word to him. He only bent toward the patrón and rubbed the peach fuzz that had appeared on his head and laughed.

Forty-five

SHE ROSE IN THE COOLNESS of the earliest morning. Teresita could no longer go out to the sacred spot to pray or burn sage. Instead, she stared out her window at the heaving shadow of the masses, as if hills had slunk toward her home in the dark and lay without, breathing. She would wash her teeth because it felt wrong to pray with a dirty mouth. She knelt in the dark and lit candles and prayed. Her altar was bare—no santos. She knelt before a bare wooden cross. Huila’s glass of water was to the right of the cross. A small picture of the old one stood in a silver frame to the left, not as a saint, but as a reminder of all she had learned. Far to the right of the cross, beyond the few candles in their small cups, stood a figure of Guadalupe, standing on her moon, roses in her cape. Teresita did not pray to her, though she did like to say good morning.

It was half past four in the morning.

After her prayers, which were painful because her knees protested being pressed to the tiles of her floor, she pushed herself up and went to her basin and washed. She did not like to take long baths anymore, for fear that the maids would still take her water away and sell it.

She carried an oil lamp and made her way to the kitchen, where she ate a light breakfast with the cooks. Lately, she had gotten weary of meats of all kinds. Even fish made her feel poisoned. She sometimes ate eggs—it was hard not to like eggs scrambled with cactus and salsa. But she mostly ate bananas and chicken fideo soup—broth and noodles, no meat. She liked rolls dipped in coffee, perhaps a few slices of goat cheese and some boiled mango in a bowl. Guayaba, prunes, papaya when it came, prickly pears, tortillas with butter.

At six she greeted Tomás and Gabriela and often helped serve them their breakfasts. Then she retreated to Tomás’s library and attended to letters, hoping for some from her dear “uncle” Aguirre. Since her awakening, she had not found time to read literature. She had wanted to read the Spanish versions of Mark Twain—picaresque boys! That would be so amusing! But the time never seemed to offer itself to her. She often opened the scriptures at random, to see what God’s message to her that day might be. His random directions to her were occasionally baffling—Leviticus 14, for example, and its orders to kill a lamb and put its blood on somebody’s earlobe and on somebody else’s thumb. What, Lord? She kept these arcane passages from Tomás.

After God had spoken to her through the Book, she went outside, offering greetings to those gathered at the door. Usually, the day began with well-wishers and pilgrims who had come to shake her hand or offer an endearment. They brought her gifts—a chicken, a basket of cookies, a small stone idol of a heathen god, a nugget of gold, a knit shawl, a writhing pink piglet (she was always partial to pigs), a donkey, five pesos wrapped in dirty cloth, locks of hair tied in ribbon and offered to her as a manda to bargain for God’s blessings, the wrapping cloth from a dead infant brought as the most valuable thing the mother owned. Teresita accepted all gifts, even the ones that were too dear. She knew that the giving was the important thing. If she turned away their presents, she would really be turning the giver away. So Segundo ate the cookies. The coins and gold went to Tomás—she did not know what he did with them. She didn’t want to know.

Father Gastélum sometimes appeared on their porch on these early mornings. She knew he was watching her for irregularities and heresies. She did not disappoint him—when she began to preach against priests, he turned crimson and scribbled in his notebooks.

“For God,” she preached from her porch, “religions are nothing, signify nothing. Because positive religions are generally nothing more than words—words without feeling. Religions are practices that focus on the surface of things, that affect only the senses, but that fail to touch the soul, and fail to come from the soul. For that reason, these words and practices fail to reach our Father. What our Father wants from us is our emotions, our feelings. He demands pure love, and that love, that sentiment, is found only in the selfless practice of love, of good, of service.

“We are nothing compared to our Father. Without doubt, the honeyed words pronounced by our lips don’t even reach our hearts. How could they reach God’s ears? How can we hope to love God if we can’t even love our neighbors? We don’t even see God! A black cloud hides Him from us!”

Like the Protestants they called “Los Aleluyas,” the People shouted, “Amen!”

“Let us do good,” she preached. “Let us love. This is the only religion. Let us put aside our hatred and take up love. Yes, brothers and sisters—the doing of good is the only prayer that God requires. Work!”

Gastélum cried, “What of clergy? What of the Mass?”

“Priests love because they are ordered to love.”

“How dare you!”

“I don’t need Rome to tell me how to love.”

Tomás, on that morning, invited the good father into the house for some coffee and the latest magazines.

“Ay, hija,” he hissed at her as the affronted priest huffed into the parlor.

Teresita extended her hand toward the crowd.

“This, Father,” she said, “is the true church.”

He looked out at the beggars, filthy rabble, dying, crippled, insane; he looked upon the horse thieves and bandits, the whores and the idiot children tied to posts, at the malformed and the criminals; he saw Indians and peasants and fat bastards from Arizona desperately herding their sick children. Beyond, soldiers and Rurales watched from their horses. Drunks fell among the bushes.

“Wonderful,” he said.

He slammed the door.

By 9:00 a.m. the healings and advising sessions had begun.

A girl from Guaymas with an issue of blood. Teresita saw a dull glow in her womb the size of an apple. She rubbed the girl’s belly and whispered the Lord’s Prayer in her ear. They laughed.

Blindness.

“But your eyes are gone,” she told the man.

“I thought you could grow me new eyes.”

“You left your eyes on a barbed-wire fence!” she said.

He hung his head.

“I was drunk and riding in the dark.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh well.”

A man with a twisted arm, lame from a mule kick.

Old bullet wounds to the back.

Tuberculosis.

Sadness.

Pregnancy needing a blessing.

The crowds had grown so large that Tomás had hired assistants to manage the flow. Teresita sat on a kitchen chair on the porch, and the helpers brought the thirsty forward all morning. Bloody cough. Diarrhea. Festering leg wounds. Pain. More pain. Unfocused pain in the belly. Lumps in the breast. Nipples drooling clear fluid. Rotten teeth. Blood coming from the rectum.

“Do you need to see my
fundillo?
” the man asked.

“No, thank you,” she replied. “Your description was adequate.”

A child who could not stand or speak.

A dead infant wrapped in burlap.

“Mother,” Teresita said, “I cannot raise her.”

“Can you bless her?”

“Let us bless her together.”

She called for Segundo and his boys to take the mother and the infant to the cemetery and help her bury her child.

By lunchtime, her hips and knees and back hurt from bending to all the pilgrims in her hard chair. She rose painfully and stretched. Raised her hands over the crowd and blessed them.

“I will be back soon,” she said.

They applauded. They called her name. Someone threw flowers at her feet. A few hours later, she returned for more.

Teresita was so sore on some evenings that she limped. Her throat was parched. Strawberry juice always made her happy—especially if there were pieces of strawberry floating in it.

They talked or sang or read to each other until supper at nine. Teresita often sat and listened to the day’s news as her father rattled the paper and declaimed. She ate fruit for supper, and she ate quickly. She was in bed by nine-thirty. She was often startled to remember she had gotten in bed without praying, but was too tired to get back up.

On Sundays, she sat in the courtyard and enjoyed the flowers. Then she went up to her room and opened her inkwell and took up her pen. Otherwise, she only had time before she went to bed, squinting in the light of a candle, and she would often fall asleep with her head on the page. On Mondays, a buckaroo would carry her articles to Alamos and post them to Texas.