The Hummingbird's Daughter (14 page)

Fifteen

THE SECOND DAY WAS SLOWER than the first. Tired, sullen, frightened, bored, sleepy, sore, chewing grit between their teeth, raising a monumental stench of offal and piss, spoiling grease and sweat, pig stench, horse stench, mammalian breath stench, dog pelt, droppings of every hue and size, burning trash, beans, charcoal, the Exodus recommenced even more slowly than it had launched itself. Wagons creaked into line, banging into other wagons. Children fell to the ground, hungover vaqueros slipped off their saddles and were kicked by the horses. The cows tried to go back to Ocoroni. The whole enterprise wobbled like some headless snake.

The third day started well, but it collapsed into chaos when they reached the Río Fuerte. True to its name, it was the Strong River. Unexpectedly, it was running high after summer’s great rains, and the carts and wagons stalled and sank in mud, then started overturning in the flood. The vaqueros were able to whistle and harry and drive the livestock across the river, but the wagons were stuck. Cows and horses hove onto the opposite bank a half mile downriver. Aguirre enlisted the aid of a ferry raft that pulled across the river by means of a thick hawser strung between cottonwoods on the opposing banks. The raft could carry only one wagon at a time. Tomás paid the ferryman with coin, beans, a mule, and one rifle.

Already exhausted, they settled on the banks and watched all day and all night as the raft crept back and forth across the water. It took twenty-five hours to get them all across—the last two hours mostly taken up by Aguirre and Tomás arguing with the ferryman that he could carry the bee wagon without being killed. He demanded some of the bees’ marijuana to do it, and he insisted on wearing an entire bee suit, all heavy canvas and mesh veils.

“If you fall off the raft,” Aguirre warned, “you will assuredly drown.”

But no one fell off and nobody drowned.

They made camp by ones and twos and all fell asleep as the chocolate waters of the Río Fuerte shouted and gibbered beside them. It sounded mad, possessed. Water had never sounded so wicked to the People.

Before bed, Tomás was roused by a pair of Rurales. They asked if he had a doctor in his camp. He had Huila, which was as good. Teófano hooked his cranky mules back up, and Huila climbed aboard, and Aguirre and Segundo joined them, and they all went west.

There, under the last red explosions of sunset, they found a minuscule village called San Xacinto. It was a mere scattering of huts and a broken old adobe that was once a trading post. Now, it was a slumping and charred ruin. Black vigas crumbled in shattered mud walls.

“Apaches,” said the Rurales.

“Note the propensities of the savages,” Tomás intoned.

Beyond San Xacinto, on the outskirts, if there could be an outskirt to a town of seven huts spread out over a dusty mile, there stood a forlorn mud shanty with a roof apparently made of planks, palm fronds, and banana leaves. Huila thought there were sacks of beans lying in the dirt before the house, but she soon realized they were bodies.

Segundo whistled.

Huila peeked into the house. Inside, there was a still-smoking brazier filled with whitened charcoal. She shook her head. Made the sign of the cross.

She addressed a Rural.

“Sir,” she said. “The healer tried to do a limpia.”

“Some limpia!” he said. “What kind of cleansing kills everybody?”

“Well, he didn’t realize the charcoal would poison them. The house was closed when you came, correct?”

“Closed.”

She raised her hands.

“He meant to cleanse them, and he killed them.”

The Rural said, “I hope they paid him well. This family will never have another worry.”

Huila prayed for the dead all the way back to the camp, and for the soul of the inferior curandero. It was not her place to say if he belonged in Hell. Many of the People believed you came back after you died. She would watch for him, see if she recognized him.

Huila had been trying to teach Teresita to dream.

Dreamers, Huila said, held great knowledge, and much medicine was worked in the dream time. But it was hard to learn to dream, or at least to dream beyond the confines of the peasants’ dreams. It was nothing to dream of plates of food, or of great beasts that chased you slowly across the hills, or of flying like a lazy butterfly. Even to dream of such things as realizing you had gone to church with no clothes, and everyone was looking at your bottom, but the priest had not yet noticed and you were hoping to get out before he did—everyone had these dreams.

But Huila was talking about something wholly other, some dream that no one could explain. Where you could walk into tomorrow, or visit far cities. Having never seen a city, Teresita could only imagine it was tall and shiny, like mountains of quartz, and many Yoris hurrying around on trains, though she had also never seen a train. They were like oxen, Huila had said, only dark and terrible, with clanging bells in their heads and fire in their bellies, and they screamed and spit smoke and sparks.

“I do dream,” Teresita complained.

“Not these dreams.”

“How will I know what kind of dream it is?”

Huila smiled.

“Child,” she said, “when you dream a dream that is not a dream, you will know.”

Dream a dream that is not a dream, Teresita thought. More of Huila’s riddles. It meant nothing.

“Everyone,” Huila said, “is given these dreams. Even unbelievers. Even those not learning what you are learning. Even Yoris are given these dreams! The secret is, not everyone learns to enter the dream and work with it. We must—we have no choice. It’s simple: without the dreams, we cannot converse with the secret.”

The secret. What secret?

When you wake up crying, Huila said, you have been there. When you wake up laughing. When the dead come to you. When you have miscarried, and you dream that you have met a strange young person who might often reach for you and touch you, you have been there. Not only have you been there, but you have met your child’s soul. When you dream of hummingbirds. When your lover is far from you, and for a moment you open your eyes and you can see the room where he sleeps, you have gone. When your ancestors come for you, and you travel with them to another town. When your dead father forgives you; when your dead mother embraces you. When you wake up and smell a foreign odor in your bedroom, a strange perfume, or smoke, or a scent of mysterious flowers, then you have been there. You might awaken with dew on your skirt, or with feathers in your hands. You might still taste a kiss on your lips.

“Angels travel these regions,” Huila said. “And souls. God can speak to you there.”

Don Teófano warned: “Or the devil himself.”

Huila nodded.

“Or the devil.”

This sounded entirely too complicated to Teresita. Not for the first time, she felt Huila was asking too much of her. She was starting to want to forget being a girl at all, much less a healer. She spent idle moments thinking about what fun it would be to dress up like one of the vaqueros and ride a big horse all day, jumping fences, chasing bandits and steers, fording rivers, shooting her trusty six-gun.

She felt guilty, but she stayed away from Huila’s wagon for a day. She ate with Antonio Alvarado Cuarto’s family, happily cuddling with her mother’s old friend Juliana Alvarado, listening to stories about what her mother had been like. Wondering if this was what a family was.

And now they were north of the Fuerte, in the lands that so vexed them, and they learned an alarming lesson: the landscape of their fears looked exactly like the land they had left behind. The mountains asserted themselves gradually. They were learning to travel, so that their mornings were faster, and their passage more sure. By the time the landscape started to transform, they felt more ready, aware of where the riders were spaced, or where the riflemen rode, fully practiced in swirling into a circular encampment.

Still, the carts yowled and moaned, formed voices that wailed as if the souls burning in Hell were shouting. Axles swollen from the river ground steadily against the wood frames that held them, and as the grease wore away, the hideous screeches grew louder and more prolonged. A blue haze began to spread among the wagons, and someone said, “Do you smell something burning?” The third cart in the straggling conglomeration of carts that wobbled behind the last big wagon burst into flames as the axle overheated. “Caray!” the driver hollered, standing on his seat and gesturing at the fire. “Caray!”

“Get off, you idiot!” the cowboys called as they first tried to swish water from their canteens on the flames, then rode in circles looking for water to carry in their hats. The driver unhitched his ox and stood aside as the wagon exploded into a bonfire.

“Caramba,” he said, shaking his head.

Somewhere, they crossed into Sonora.

The air changed around them. The heavy wetness of Sinaloa bled away gradually, until, one night, they found themselves sneezing and blowing their noses, blood in the cloths. They had never felt air as dry as this, and the women’s hair and the cat’s fur crackled with small lightning as if they were all enchanted. Segundo sidled up to Tomás and said, “Boss, the men, they have rocks in their noses.”

“This wind,” Urrea said, “it dries your snot.”

Somehow, Segundo understood that the soul could be next.

Everyone watched everything. It was as if they had lived their entire lives with their eyes closed. Each rock in the path seemed as new as the mud and stones of Genesis.

They saw cacti grow tall as giants, shaped like purgatorial souls raising their arms to the mercy of God. They saw skeletal slaughtered wagons rotting beside the road. They passed through and around tiny squalid pueblos, and the naked children of these villes ran from them in terror or ran to them in hunger. Dogs fought their dogs.

They crossed a shallow stream, its water curling away from the wheels of the wagons, throwing wobbling patterns of light onto the horses’ bellies. Teresita jumped from side to side of Huila’s wagon, staring at each exciting new detail of the land around her. A field of yellow blossoms. A stand of sunflowers taller than the horses. A vast nopal cactus, big as a tree. “Get me a ladder!” Huila and Teresita said at once. Fine black bulls behind a fence. A startled deer breaking and running, the various straggling dogs trailing the riders speeding away behind it, caterwauling. Gusts of butterflies blew out of the bean fields as if the wind had been painted and had shattered into white chips.