The Hummingbird's Daughter (17 page)

Seventeen

THOUGH SOME STAYED BLISSFUL and delivered with the peregrinos of Niño Chepito’s evangelical camp, the rest of the People felt lean and ready to travel on. They had grown used to the road and the ground and the open sky. They had grown disciplined, awakening quickly at first light, starting their many fires and cooking faster every day, and they leapt to their wagons and carts and fell into order without speaking. Like children in a classroom, they had each found their spot among the many, and they did not deviate from it. Their new sense of organization was a joy to them. The Urrea ranch had transformed itself, again, into a morning spiral that curled and curled and then opened to spill them away from each encampment in a long steady flow. They were as synchronized as ants.

“Perhaps,” Don Teófano suggested, “in Cabora, the milk is sweet as honey.”

“What if,” an old woman offered, “the honey tastes like milk?”

“I don’t think I’d like that, comadre,” he said.

They all voted: sweet milk was better than milky honey.

“Where does this land of milk and honey come from?” Teresita asked in the wagon one day.

“The Bible,” said Huila.

“Can we read it?”

“The priest can read it,” Huila said. “We don’t read it.”

“Why not?”

“We just don’t.”

“Priests,” said Teófano, “go to school to read that book.”

“Why can’t we?” Teresita insisted.

“We’re not priests,” said Huila.

“But you said we do holy work. We work medicine and pray to the saints and the Virgin and the four directions.”

“Don’t be a pest, child.”

“Aren’t we the same as a priest?”

“Who?”

“Curanderas!”

“You are not a curandera, child.”

“Medicine women!”

Huila laughed.

“Women,” she said. “You’re just a sprout. And when you are a woman,
you won’t read that book!
”

“Why not?”

“Ay, niña! Women are not
priests.
Now stop this silliness.”

Teresita just sat there, staring.

“Do you read?”

“Are you crazy, child? Why would I read?”

“But —”

“Reading,” Huila said, “is for men. Like babies are for women, books are for men.”

“White men,” Don Teófano said. “I don’t read.”

“Rich men,” Huila corrected. “Lauro Aguirre isn’t any whiter than you are!”

“Doña Loreto?” Teresita asked. “Does she read?”

Huila shook her head.

“The patrón reads for her. He reads to her from books, or he reads to her from the newspaper when he thinks she can understand it.”

Teresita laughed out loud. That was just stupid.

“You are learning what you need to know,” said Huila. “Who needs books? Who needs to learn Yori foolishness?”

“I do.”

“Why?” The old one laughed. “Do you hope to become president of the republic?”

“Why not?” Teresita insisted. “I could.”

“God in Heaven,” Huila sighed.

After all this talk about God, all this struggle to learn sacred secrets, here was a book God had written for them to study, and they didn’t think she would read it? She stared at Huila, the most perfect old woman she had ever known. Huila, of the cigars, of the shotgun, of the terrible black sack of men’s balls in her apron. Huila, the source of power. Yet imperfect after all, made stupid by the rules of some Yori man—Teresita imagined him, whoever he was, riding one of those phantom trains they talked about, making rules and reading newspapers. She looked Huila in the eye, turned, and spit over the edge of the wagon.

“Girl!” the old woman said, but Teresita had already hopped down off the wagon.

She shuffled along beside it and untied her burro. She mounted him, saying, “You want me to be as stupid as little Panfilo!” The burro waggled his ears upon hearing his name and trotted off to the side, steered by Teresita between wagons, walkers, riders, cows, toward the edge of the great cattle drive, where she could flank the slowest cows and make believe she was a vaquero.

“I will read,” she said out loud.

She kicked her burro in the ribs: he bucked up his heels once and charged ahead, long ears laid back along his blocky skull. “Go, Panfilo!” she ordered.

Soon she found Segundo. Her head was about as high as his boot as she trotted along beside him. He looked down and was startled to see her staring up at him.

“What,” he said.

“What is in books?”

He scratched his head. Shrugged.

“Stories, I guess. Poems? Things like that.”

“I want to read!” she shouted.

He laughed.

“You’re a girl,” he said. “Besides,
I
don’t even know how to read. Reading isn’t for people like us.”

“Hmm.” And she galloped away.

Books, Segundo thought. What’s next?

When Teresita found Buenaventura, she told him, too, that she wanted to read. He said: “You’re just an Indian. Indians don’t read! If they don’t teach white girls to read, what makes you think they’re going to teach a little Indian anything?”

He waved her off with one hand.

She fell away from the crowd, letting her little Panfilo slow down and wander off to the side again. She let his rope reins fall loose, and he stood there confused for a moment. When he realized she wasn’t prodding him along anymore, he was more than happy to drop his head into the grass and weeds beside the path. He let out a long contented sigh and ripped up mouthfuls of dandelions.

Teresita sat on his back and watched them go. Huila’s big wagon was already around the bend. The carts and horses and wagons rattled along. She wasn’t going to cry. She would just wait there and starve, die all alone and let the buzzards take her apart. Nobody would know what had happened to her.

Or maybe a warrior would come along.

Yes, a warrior from one of these ferocious northern tribes. She could probably join them, forget she’d ever learned Spanish. Learn to hunt. Marry a young man of the tribe. Disappear. Nobody cared anyway.

She sat on Panfilo until the entire cattle drive was down the road, and she watched them diminish, and they went around the bend and vanished, until the only things to mark their passage were the clouds of dust and the fading noise. The last to vanish was the bee wagon. Its happy beekeeper reclined at a comfortable angle on the seat and waved as he rolled along. Panfilo raised his head and looked around. He swung his head back and stared at her. He snorted.

After a while, when the land had become silent, Teresita picked up the reins and nudged him with her heels. He reluctantly pulled his lips away from the weeds and shuffled down the trail, his head nodding as he walked. “I’ll show them,” she promised. “I’ll show everybody.”

A coyote in the hedionda bushes yipped and yodeled.

Panfilo started to trot.

Ahead, at least six miles away from Teresita and Panfilo, Tomás rode beside the Engineer Aguirre.

“Tell me,” said the patrón, “you who are a world traveler.”

Aguirre pushed off this epithet with a sound like
Pah!
“Texas,” he interjected, “and Mexico City are hardly the world!”

“It’s enough of the world for our purposes,” said Tomás. “What I’m curious about is the differences between Sinaloa and the north. Have you an opinion, my dear hijo de puta?”

“I have a certain fame for my repertoire of opinion.”

Tomás smiled. “Although it is true that you are insufferable and irritating, and rightly famed for your endless posturing and platitudinous pontificating —”

“Bastard!”

“—I still would like to ask you: in your experience, what are some of the differences between ourselves and the blasted north?”

“Ah,” said Aguirre, as if this were too vast a subject to broach. “Differences.” He raised his hands in a symbolic surrender. “Where could I begin?”

“Anywhere.”

Aguirre regarded him.

“Have you noticed, my dear Urrea,” he said, “that you Sinaloans are provincial rubes?”

“No.”

“Oh well, you are bumpkins. And here is an example, since you asked. In Sinaloa, you might have noticed, you have the habit of adding the prefix ‘el’ or ‘la’ to people’s names. For example, you call your dear bride ‘La Loreto.’”

“So?”

“El Lauro,” said Aguirre, touching his own chest.

“So?”

“La Huila, El Segundo. That peculiar little girl—La Teresita.”

“So?”

“So it is wrong. Incorrect. Bizarre, in fact. It’s as if all of you give yourselves some royal singularity. The Tomás Urrea has arrived. The Lauro Aguirre is here.”

“Doesn’t everybody talk like that?”

Aguirre shook his head.

“Have you not read a book?” he asked.

“Books are one thing,” Tomás sniffed. “Talking is another. Books don’t ever say ‘chingado,’ for example. Aguirre chingado.”

“Just wait, you imbecile. They will when the minds of the population are freed. But they will never refer to anyone as ‘The Tomás.’ Pendejo.”

Tomás clopped along for a while, thinking.

“That’s interesting,” he said.

“I thought so,” Don Lauro replied.

Clop clop cloppa clop.

“Whereas the North Americans,” Aguirre announced, “have no gender in their language.”

Aghast, Tomás let out a small puff of air.

“No ‘el’?” he said. “No ‘la’?”

Aguirre, quite satisfied with his latest astonishment, said: “No. They have the following word:
the.
”

“As in tea?”

“Not té! The!”

“No male, no female?”

“The!”

“C’est bizarre, mon ami!”

“Los gringos,” Aguirre lamented, “are hermaphrodites.”

They had noticed, over the last few miles, columns of biblical smoke rising over the hills before them.

“What do you suppose that is?” Tomás asked.

They stopped and unfolded their small maps and studied the horizon.

“Volcano?”

“Not on the map,” Aguirre said. “Perhaps a grass fire.”

Now, as they moved ahead, the smoke columns grew darker and more solid. Segundo, who had seen these columns miles before anyone else, trotted up to them and tipped his hat.

“Gents,” he said.

“Good old Eye of the Buzzard,” said Tomás. “What have you to report?”

“Looking at that smoke,” Segundo said.

“What do you see?”

“Smoke.”

“You are a fountain of information,” Aguirre said. He stopped his nag and pulled the heavy big map out of his bag. The other two reined in beside him, and they each sat within a puddle of shadow cast by their own hats. “Look here,” Aguirre said. “We’re near the ranch.”

Segundo was staring into the distance.

“Crows,” he said. “Lots of crows circling around the smoke.”

“This is Cabora?” Tomás asked the Engineer.

“This valley ahead of us.” His companion nodded. “I believe we are home.”

Tomás turned in his saddle and peered into the distance behind them.

“We’ve gotten a bit ahead of the wagons,” he said. “I hate to ride into the ranch without them.”

“They’ll catch up,” Segundo said.

They could smell the smoke when the wind whipped a slender banner of it over the hill.

Aguirre spoke up: “Let’s just ride up there and look,” he said. “Let’s see the great Cabora. Investigate this conflagration.”

Tomás flicked his reins once, and his great dark steed bobbed its head and paced away.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Jefe!” Segundo called. “Let me gather a few of the riflemen. This is Yaqui territory—we ought to be careful.”

“We don’t need any riflemen,” Tomás called back. “How many days have we been on the road? The only Indians we’ve seen have been beggars and children. There’s no danger here!” His horse seemed to engage some soft gear within itself, and it moved away smoothly, speeding up gradually as it approached the slopes.

Aguirre followed.

Segundo said: “We ought to have rifles.”

Teresita came upon a wagon pulled to the side of the road. A fat mule skinner sat up on the box, his floppy hat smashed on his head like a collapsed brown cake, portions of tattered brim melting down his face and sticking to his sweat. Six mules bobbed their heads and snorted, nipping at each other in their traces. Tarpaulins covered dusty hills of goods behind the skinner, and he bristled with weapons: he held a shotgun across his lap, and she could see crossed bandoliers of bullets on his chest, and a scabbard held a rifle near the big wooden brake lever beside his leg.