The Hummingbird's Daughter (36 page)

She looked up at him from her small chewing and crinkled her eyes at him. Oh my God! he thought. He didn’t know what it was about her that made him more insane: her belly or the pale friction of her thighs; the small of her back or her armpits.

Huila staggered in from the garden and dragged a chair away from the table with a loud screaking.

“Good morning,” Tomás said.

“Hnf,” Huila grunted.

“Buenos días,” Gabriela said. “Cómo amaneció usted?” she asked.

Huila shrugged.

“Café,” she said.

The cooks hurried to bring her a cup. Tomás looked up at Gabriela and raised an eyebrow. Gabriela smiled.

“Feeling chatty, are we?” said Tomás.

“Ay, Gordo,” Gabriela chided.

Huila slurped her coffee. Her hand shook.

“Where’s my damned bread?” she said.

“You already had some,” the cook said.

“I want more.”

“Coming,” called one of the girls.

“Huila,” said Tomás, “I am in love.”

Gabriela blushed.

“Love,” Huila said, “and burial shrouds both come down from Heaven.”

Tomás and Gabriela looked at each other.

“Well,” he said. “Good point.”

He sipped his coffee.

Huila said, “Every monkey to his own rope.”

“I see,” he responded.

Huila dipped her bread and sucked it into her mouth. She pointed at Gaby.

“You,” she said. “Where is the girl?”

“Teresita?”

“Where is she?”

Gaby shook her head. “I haven’t seen her,” she said. “She must still be out at prayers.”

Huila looked up from her cup. Her eyes were clouded, blue-white on their edges. She stared over Gaby’s head. Looked once into her eyes. She said “Ay Dios,” then slowly fell over. When she hit the floor, she made a dry sound, like empty burlap sacks thrown to the floor of a barn.

Teresita cupped the water in her hands and ran it up her legs. It curled over her knees and ran down her calves in rivulets. She smoothed her cold hands up over the knobs of her knees, and the water was delicious on her thighs. She gasped and smiled and leaned her head back, letting the sun touch her throat. The dirt was already warm to the touch, and she dug her fingers into it. She curled her toes in the gravel bed of the creek, felt water bugs skim over her feet, ping into her ankles, then sweep away.

Huila, she thought.

“Get me a ladder,” she whispered. It made her laugh.

She lay back slowly, laid her back on the good earth and felt it press her up toward the sky. The earth always offered you up to the sky. She lifted you, when all the time the People thought she pulled you down. Clover heads loomed above her face like trees.

Huila, she thought.

She closed her eyes. Hummingbirds somewhere were making their kissing sounds. Their thrum.

Huila.

And again:
Huila!

Teresita opened her eyes.

“Huila!” she said.

She grabbed her shoes and leapt to her feet and turned to run back to the house.

Millán stood between her and the trees. He smiled at her. She half crouched, feeling like a wildcat, certain she could leap over him, leap into the trees, speed away from him. He was breathing hard. His eyes glittered with joy—he was giggling.

“Where are you going?” he said.

Thirty-eight

SHE WAS LIMP. He shook her—her head wobbled as if he’d broken her neck. He pulled her skirts down around her legs and looked over his shoulder.

No money.

Damn it.

Millán squatted on his heels and looked around. Not good, killing the boss’s daughter. Well, hell. If he got back to the barn, he could slip out a good horse and be halfway to the Río Mayo before they even knew he was gone.

Too bad he didn’t have enough time to hide her.

Huila’s collapse sent a wave of dread through Cabora. The People hurried in from the fields when they heard. They collected their children and hid them inside their huts. They watched the sky to see if some dark rider did not come from the mountainous east, now that their protector was fallen.

When she dropped, Tomás kicked back his chair and dropped to his knees beside her, taking her old head in his hands and lifting her, as if he could gaze life into her rolling eyes. Gaby froze, hands over mouth, too afraid of the old one to touch her or even approach her. The cooks cried out and wailed, and some of them ran out the door before Tomás could stop them, raising the alarm —“Huila fell down!”

It felt as if an eclipse had begun, portions of the sun being bitten away, as if the devil’s mouth could no longer contain its hunger for light.

“Huila’s dead!” they shouted.

“She’s not dead, damn you!” Tomás shouted. “Help me!”

But who could help him? Huila was the one he would have turned to in such a crisis, and now the great physician herself was limp on the floor, drooling, her hair slipping out of its braid.

“What do we do?” one of the girls said.

Tomás looked at Gabriela. She shook her head violently, put her hands up before her.

“I don’t know!” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t know either,” said the girl. “Should I splash water on her?”

He shrugged.

“Cover her,” said Gaby.

“Good idea, mi amor!” Tomás cried. “Get me a blanket!”

The girls hustled out of the kitchen and came back in a moment dragging Huila’s own rebozo. Tomás draped it over Huila’s reedy chest.

“Put her in bed,” said Gaby.

“Sí, mi amor!” he replied. “Bed!”

Tomás and two of the girls lifted her. He felt as if he could have pitched her to the ceiling—she weighed less than a bundle of sticks. Gaby led them as they shuffled sideways, trying to collect Huila’s limp arms, which flopped open and caught on doorways and furniture. Gaby held open Huila’s bedroom door. The group stalled there for an instant, since none of the house girls had ever passed through that portal. Tomás, too. But they forged forward, the girls dipping their heads as if they’d entered a church, and they laid her on her narrow cot. She opened her eyes once, when they lowered her head to the pillow, and gasped a terrible, phlegmy sound, bubbling and whistling in her throat.

Tomás took her hand in his.

“Don’t worry,” he said, feeling like a fool. He looked at Gaby. “I wish Aguirre were here,” he said. “He would know what to do.”

“Teresita,” Huila whispered.

Gabriela said: “Teresita!”

Tomás, as if it had been his own idea, shouted: “Teresita!”

And the vaqueros were sent out on their horses to find Teresita, the only one who would know what to do to save Huila.

Segundo would never forget what he saw when he entered the grove.

The shadows were soft, rolling and tossing like waves. The clover had some blossoms, and the bees moved across the ground like sparks from a campfire. Spiderwebs billowed in the tree branches, looking like the sails of those ships he had seen in Los Mochis so many years before. Iguanas the size of dogs frowned at him from the shade. The little creek was green as it meandered along the fold in the earth that was the floor of the grove. And there, lying on her back, was Teresita.

It took only a moment to see it all, but it felt later as if he had stared at her for an hour.

Her head lay in the water. It was only as deep as her ears. He could see her small gold earrings in the water, the fuzz of dark hair at the hinges of her jawline. Her long hair was pulled downstream by the current, fanned out like a great flow of blood. Her eyes were slightly open, her lips were parted. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth and from her nose. Her legs were bare, and the front of her dress was torn. Her palms were upturned, and her fingers were curled. She was twitching slightly, her feet kicking like the feet of a sleeping dog that dreams of running after rabbits. Her mouth opened and closed. But what frightened him were the butterflies.

Blue and white and red-yellow butterflies had settled on her. Butterflies stood on her open arms, slowly flapping their wings as if trying to lift her into the trees. Butterflies perched on her belly in a rough circle. Butterflies stood over her eyes, opened their wings, and covered her brow. A single hummingbird hovered near her left hand, then flew up and out of sight through the trees, gone in a flash of burning green and metal blue.

Segundo knelt beside her and collected her in his arms. The water ran off her body and soaked his pants. “Don’t die,” he whispered. “Segundo is here.” He carried her to his horse and laid her facedown over the saddle so he could mount. Her hair hung down the far side, and the horse turned its head and stared at it. Segundo rose into the saddle and worked her back up into his arms. “Come on, you bastard,” he said to the horse, and he steered with his knees as he tried to cradle her the way he would have held a foal just fallen from its mother’s womb.

He rode back to the house with Teresita in his arms. He could feel her breathing, but she never made a sound. Her body vibrated: he thought of guitar strings. When he walked his horse through the front gate and into the little plum-tree courtyard, the People let out a terrible cry that rose and rose and brought Tomás running.

He gently took his daughter from Segundo’s arms and carried her inside.

The People felt night coming fast now. They ran to light candles. The cowboys were breaking open casks of mezcal and getting mournfully drunk.

Huila was already forgotten.

Thirty-nine

THUNDERING, MILLáN RODE SOUTH, his horse covered in foamy sweat. He did not sleep that first night. He stepped into a cantina on the old road back toward the Río Mayo, and the thin Indians there turned as one and glared at him, thinking him a hangman, perhaps, or a bandit there to burn their hovels. He bought pulque, awful and milky, but the cheapest liquor he could find. It burned his mouth, seared his throat. Could they tell what he’d done? What the hell did they care what he’d done? As he counted out more coins, his hands shook. Oh, Christ—Don Tomás was going to kill him as sure as the sun rose. “Otro,” he ordered. The surly barkeep poured a bit into a clay cup. He held his breath and swallowed it. Coughed. If he could only get as far as Rosario! He’d skirt Ocoroni, of course. He’d be needing a new horse soon; this one was going to drop from its punishing charge. He didn’t think to steal money from the bunkhouse, and the girl didn’t have any money in the pockets of her skirt. He dipped his head. He’d steal a horse. It couldn’t be any worse for him if they caught him than it already was. Culiacán? Could he go to Culiacán? Probably not. Rosario. Sweet Rosario. If he stayed far away from Tomás’s cousin Don Seferino Urrea, then the Millanes de Rosario would help him. All he had to do was get south of town, to Escuinapa, and across the bridge into Nayarit. Nayarit, if he could only get to Nayarit! Tecuala or Acaponeta! The Indians stared at him. “What!” he bellowed. They put their hands on their machetes. He bolted for the door. Lightning ripped the silent sky and the west went red as open meat and the coyotes yipped and frolicked and he whipped and whipped his horse as he tried for home.

Segundo moved his bedroll out of his house and went to sleep at his sister Juliana’s house. He refused to eat for the first two days, then slurped at coffee cups full of chicken broth. Several of the vaqueros saw him sitting outside her door on a crooked wooden bench, holding yellow baby ducks to his lips, disconsolately hiding their heads under his whiskers.

In Segundo’s absence, Tomás was forced to send lesser hands to Alamos to fetch a doctor. Buenaventura came back to Cabora and went to Segundo’s abandoned house. Doña Loreto had telegrams sent to Tucson, requesting the services of a gringo doctor. Then she sent a telegram to El Paso, so Aguirre would know of the tragedies on the ranch. She went to church and arranged for a novena to be said for Teresita. Gabriela drifted back and forth between Teresita’s room and Huila’s room, helpless and panicked, reduced to putting cool wet cloths on each of their foreheads. Tomás sat by his plum tree and drank. Fina Félix said her chickens laid black eggs.

Teresita lay on her back, lost in her coma, alabaster white and unmoving. The only signs of life were her shallow breathing, and her left hand, which slowly curled and lifted to her mouth and formed a fist there. They called to her, shook her, spoke sweetly to her in her sleep, but she did not wake, did not smile. Bruises spread under her skin—bruises on her face, on her throat, across her ribs, and down the small of her back. Tomás sat beside her and took her unclenched hand and read to her from her favorite books, but she did not smile or give any sign she heard his voice. Gabriela kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her hot dry lips. Nothing stirred. Morning and night, Gaby took a silver brush to Teresita’s hair, and when more blood trickled out of Teresita’s nose, she wiped it with soft paper that looked, pinked and crumpled, like rosebuds in the wastebasket.

Her lids cracked open and hung halfway up her eyes. They could see the iris and pupil of each eye, rolling back and forth, as if they were untethered from her body, sliding helplessly in her skull.

“What does she see?” Gaby whispered.

“Nothing,” Tomás responded. “She sees nothing.”

And the doctor, when he arrived from Alamos with a nurse and Buenaventura, repeated it: “She sees nothing. She is as one dead.”

Buenaventura almost touched her.

Huila awoke and asked to see her.

Tomás and the doctor formed a litter for her of brooms and blankets and carried her into the room. She was too weak to rise, but she lifted her head from her pillow and looked on Teresita and released a small chuff of sorrow—her desiccated voice puffing into the air like dust from the harvest. She sobbed and raised a hand toward Teresita. Then she put her head down and seemed to sleep. They carted her back to her own bed and laid her down again.

She ordered the house girls to soak cloths in water and herbs and place them on Teresita’s face.

The doctor from Tucson arrived after five days. He was a great blond American with thinning hair, and he conferred with his Mexican counterpart, both of them bent like cranes over Teresita’s body. Her hair had grown so long that it reached her feet. No one knew when this had happened. Gaby laid it out along the sides of her body. The doctors often had to lift her hair and move it out of the way when they tried to examine her.

They could not force liquids into her. Her lips would not part, and when they tried to pour water in her mouth, it ran out the sides in rivulets. Her skin dried; her lips chapped. Her heart, drying in the desert within her, became weaker each day, almost mute. Both doctors swarmed over her pale stone chest with their stethoscopes, trying to find a beat. When they held a mirror to her lips, she could barely make a fog on the glass.

Her body grew hard, stiff as a plank of shaved pine, all her bones sharp and unforgiving in her shrinking flesh.

One of the buckaroos mentioned to Segundo that Millán had taken a stallion and not come back.

“When?”

“Almost a week ago.”

Segundo rounded up two Apaches. He never spoke a word of it to Tomás or anyone else. They rode fast and hard, because Segundo knew Millán would try to get home to Sinaloa. And when Segundo returned, his eyes were black with some awful secret, and the People said he carried two ears in a bandana, and he laid those ears on the table of the patrón and walked back to his sister’s house, where he slept for two days.

He had returned on a different horse from the one on which he’d left. They said he rode three horses to death chasing Millán. The Apaches never stopped when he returned—they rode past Cabora without a glance. The People saw them and whispered terrible theories.

Segundo was quiet after his long journey. Only once did he say anything, and those who heard him did not know if he was talking about the manhunt, or if he was just drunk. They were drinking, waiting for a pig to barbecue in a rocky pit in the ground, and he had squatted among them, drinking from an American whiskey bottle. And, in the middle of the party, he had said: “If you hang a man upside down over a small fire, his brains boil in his head until his head bursts.” Greeted with silence, he had drunk more whiskey and said, “Good night.” The People had watched him go back to his small house and slam the door.

For twelve days, Cabora slept like Teresita.

Maguey cutters left their machetes hung on nails and stayed in their huts. The cowboys let their cattle wander the llano, hungry and thirsty and dusty. The only things moving were Tomás and the doctors, and when the doctors took him aside and told him there was no hope for his daughter, Tomás mounted his stallion and rode wild toward the village of Bayoreca, then out to the foothills, toward Navojoa, then back. He wept and cursed where no one could see him.

When he returned, he called for Segundo.

“I want a coffin made,” he said. “I want the best wood and the smoothest silk.”

Segundo hung his head and said, “Sí, patrón.”

When he left through the front door, he had to push through a crowd of field hands and workers, of vaqueros and wash girls. All the children from the workers’ village shoved into the courtyard. Buenaventura stood in a corner, back pressed into the seam between two walls. He held a cigarette in his fist, in the manner of the outriders, cupping the glowing coal with his palm as if sheltering it from a great wind. He raised his eyebrows at Segundo in a silent question. Segundo shook his head.