The Hummingbird's Daughter (5 page)

“We are accompanying a prisoner.”

“Oh?” said Tomás, looking around.

“He’s coming,” said Gómez. “In a wagon.”

“Who is it?”

“El Patudo.” Bigfoot.

The men looked at each other. El Patudo. They found El Patudo? The famous bandit?

“Where did this big-footed fellow make his home?” Tomás asked.

“Guamúchil.”

They all knew the patrón’s limerick,
There was a young man from Guamúchil, whose name was Pinche Inútil.
To the consternation of the Rurales, the men all broke out laughing. “Viva Guamúchil!” one of them cried. Gómez thought they were laughing at him, and he put his hand on his revolver. Tomás didn’t help when he said, “Gómez, my good man, did you say El Patudo hails from Parangarícutirimícuaro?”

The vaqueros started laughing again.

“I don’t hear anything funny,” Gómez said.

He was starting to think this Urrea smelled like lemons.

Segundo said, “Son pendejos, estos cabrones.”

Gómez understood that: he and Segundo were clearly cut from the same cloth. Gómez nodded. Rich men and their little cowboys. He grinned.

“I can see that,” he said.

Soon enough, the wagon came around the bend. A fat Rural sat on the bench and worked the reins on two stoop-shouldered mules whose heads nodded sadly with each hoofclop. The wagon was a flatbed, and something was tied in the back, but there was no cage on it, nor a prisoner chained to the boards.

“Where is our miscreant?” Tomás asked, still jolly in spite of the visit from the maggoty pilgrim.

“In the wagon,” said Gómez, sounding as if he were addressing a moron. “In the jar.”

“Oh hell,” said Segundo.

“Jar—surely you’re joking,” Tomás said.

“I never joke, Mr. Urrea. We cut off El Patudo’s head and put it in a chemist’s jar. In rum.” He lit a crooked cigarette. There was no regulation that said he couldn’t smoke. “We are touring the province with it. A lesson.”

All the vaqueros crowded around. They had not seen a cut-off head before. Cayetana wanted to look away, but like all Mexicans, was eerily appeased and relieved by death.

Gómez continued: “Let the people see we are serious. And the bandits.”

The wagon came forth, and they could clearly see a large apothecary’s jar made of glass, with a glass lid that looked like a Russian church spire, all held down by crisscrossed ropes. Within, a dreadful soup of pale gold rum and the bouncing bobbing black head of El Patudo.

“There’s meat hanging off it!” one of the boys shouted.

The bandit’s head was still turned away from them, looking as if El Patudo was staring back along the road he had just traveled, remembering Ocoroni with fond nostalgia and hoping to return to it one day. A frilly lace of gray and pink flesh hung in tatters from the stump of his neck.

The wagon stopped, and the mules shuddered, and the rum sloshed, and the head slowly turned to regard Rancho Santana. Cayetana yelped. It was the man with the cherries from that night years ago.

“So,” Tomás finally said. “If this poor fellow was known as Bigfoot, why did you bring us his head?”

Five

AS HE SAT IN HIS OFFICE tallying the payroll—how was he supposed to feed all these people?—Tomás turned over a leaf of his fat ledger and jotted his new favorite word,
Parangarícutirimícuaro.
It would become one of his cherished lessons: his children would be tormented with that word for years, having to pronounce it without hesitation to prove to Tomás that they had mastered their oratorical skills. He composed a greatly hilarious poem:

There was a young man from Parangarícutirimícuaro,

Oh to hell with it.

A servant girl spoke from the doorway:

“Patrón? It is time for supper.”

“Supper!” He looked out the window. It was dark already! He’d been sitting there squinting by the blubbery light of an oil lamp, and he had not noticed.

“Allí voy,” he said.

“Sí, señor.”

She left a small cloud of cinnamon in her wake.

Tomás took a fine house coat from a wall hook and flung a few drops from his washing bowl onto his face. He slicked back his lemony hair and smoothed out his whiskers. He poured himself a token copa of rum, in honor of the beheaded bandit, and walked into the dining room. There, he was startled to find the long table set for one.

“And my bride?” he called.

The cinnamon girl appeared and said, “She was not feeling well, sir. Things of women.”

He nodded sagely. These things of women were apparently terrible and unpredictable. The tossings of the baby within, no doubt. His first child was already asleep in a cunning little wooden rocking bed that reproduced the soothing rolling of the sea and was painted pale blue with orange seashells along its sides. A squat girl from Leyva was paid solely to sit and rock the child at night.

Tomás regarded his supper. The girls lit candles. He sipped his rum. He wondered if the old man with the wormy back had survived—he had forgotten to ask Segundo.

Tomás looked at the servants and the cooks and the empty room and the long table.

He raised his glass to them all.

“Cheers,” he said.

The child was asleep, wrapped in a rebozo and lying on the straw mat in the dirt. Cayetana huddled in the middle of the floor, eating a bit of rice and a chicken neck from a wooden bowl. She dug the tiny wads of meat out of each vertebral compartment, thinking of them as small presents at some fantastic birthday party. When she was small, chicken necks were haciendas, and she was a giant, pulling out Yoris and eating them as they screamed between her molars.

She glanced at her child. If she didn’t do it now, she would never do it.

When she finished eating, she wiped her fingers on her skirt, and she put the bowl on the rough wooden table one of the vaqueros had made for her. He had recently been traumatized by hearing that American cowboys called Mexican vaqueros “buckaroos.” It made him feel sad, philosophical even, and he had turned momentarily generous.

Cayetana’s things were bundled in the tatty door blanket of her ramada. She blew out the candles and gathered her child in her arms. She didn’t even look around—there was nothing to see. She hurried to her sister’s house.

Tomás called, “Excuse me!”

The girls charged out of the kitchen to attend to him. “Sir!” they cried in a panic. What if the meat was rotten? What if the tortillas were cold? What if the coffee was weak?

“Call Huila, would you?”

“Sir!”

They hurried back to the kitchen and tapped on her door. Her small room was beside the back entrance of the house.

“What!” she shouted.

“It is the patrón,” the cinnamon girl said. “He has asked for you.”

Huila went out to the table, limping a little. Her hip was inflamed. She could see the bones in her mind: they glowed red like fireplace pokers. Oh well! The hills are old, too, and they are still covered in flowers.

“What do you want?” she said.

Tomás smiled at her. Her insolence was somehow correct and appealing to him.

“María Sonora,” he said.

“Huila.”

“Huila, yes, of course. I am lonesome.”

Huila scratched her hip and said, “Huh.” She looked at all the food on the table. “Soon, you’ll be lonesome and fat if you keep eating like this.”

“Join me?”

She scraped a chair back and fell into it.

She shouted, “Another plate!”

A girl stumbled forward and set china and silverware before her and almost tripped hurrying out.

“They fear you more than they fear me,” Tomás said.

Huila poured herself some coffee. Five spoons of sugar, a splash of boiled milk.

“They
respect
me,” Huila said.

She pointed at his glass of rum and crooked her finger. He handed it over. She sipped.

He grinned and spooned beans onto her plate.

“Y yo?” he asked. “Do they respect me?”

She forked one of the thin steaks from the platter and ripped off a piece, wrapped it in a tortilla. Ate. Dipped a rolled tortilla in her soup, nipped off the end and chewed. Slurped her coffee. Picked up a yellow chile with two fingers and bit it: her brow instantly popped out beads of sweat. She collected some beans on the tattered tortilla and ate them, licked her fingers. She was delighted to discover a saucer of white goat cheese, and she pinched up a pyramid of it and shook off the drooling fluids and popped it in her mouth. A spoonful of soup: bananas! With lime and chile and chicken broth! She grunted.

More coffee.

She finally looked at him.

“Have you done anything respectable?” she asked.

“I saved the wormy pilgrim,” he said.

“Well, you sent him to me. I saved him.”

Tomás hated the sound of chewing, and Huila chewed like some machine.

“How is he, by the way?”

“Smelly.”

She slurped her coffee, leaned back, closed her eyes, and belched almost inaudibly, letting the gas escape through her teeth in a snakelike hiss: “Tssssst!”

“And you,” she said, “what do you care if an old ranchero lives or dies? Why do you like the People so much? Aside from the girls. Everybody knows why you like the girls.”

He cleared his throat. This girl business was best left unanswered. But the rest of it. At last! Something to talk about!

“The People!” he said.

“That’s what I said. Are you deaf?”

“Don Refugio,” he finally replied.

Don Refugio Moroyoqui never explained himself. Even when he was teaching little Tomás how to tie a rope, or how to carve a pair of pistol grips out of twin windfall branches, or when he taught Tomás how to make jerky in sun racks that they could hammer apart later for feasts of machaca, he stayed quiet even while speaking. A particular knot could be tied but one way. The grain of the wood allowed but one shaving. Some roads, despite appearances, went in only one direction. Don Refugio did not speak of dried-out riverbeds.

Tomás followed the old Indio around and studied his curious ways. He had learned to ask simple questions, like “What is that?”
A ball-peen hammer.
“Where did these blue eggs come from?”
Quail.
“How do Indians say water?”
Bampo.

Don Miguel, the great patrón, found it somewhat odd, though he had also learned to rope cows from an old Indio in the 1820s. What boy didn’t have his old Indian to teach him? What girl did not have the old washerwoman to teach her to make teas from weeds? How many hacienda babies had been nursed by old Guasave and Tehueco nannies? Besides, Don Miguel had been far too busy running the ranch and raising his own boys to worry about what Tomás did to keep himself busy. As long as the Indian kept Tomás out of his way, Don Miguel was grateful.

No one, not even Don Miguel, would have asked Don Refugio to explain himself, anyway. He had survived Bácum—that was enough to make them shy around Don Refugio, even afraid. It had already been ten years, but the screams still seemed to echo in the valleys. Massacres were nothing new, but this one had been infected with a kind of genius that made it worm its stench and its crackle into the dreams of the People for years. He was tiny and black as old walnut wood, with snowy tousled hair and white whiskers that hung over his mouth and were shaded yellow and brown at the ends from his smoking. Frail, perhaps, but he had survived.

Little Tomás was up before dawn, as usual, investigating. A roulette wagon was still parked outside the house, its mounted gambling apparatus standing erect like a big wooden pinwheel. It was only half-covered by a white cloth and was a fascination: machinery of any kind was still miraculous. Cigar butts and empty cognac bottles lay about the wagon in a scuffle of mess. Tomás collected bottles: one red, two green, and one blue. He looked through the blue bottle at the world. He hid a few cigar butts in his pockets to share with Segundo after lunch.

These roulette wagons went from hacienda to hacienda, bringing gambling and liquor with them. They didn’t dare roll through the countryside in the dark. Their strongboxes enticed deadly attention, and highwaymen could spring out at any moment, guns blasting away. So the wagons tied off at a main house and kept the party going all night.

The cavalry had been riding past with a few prisoners from the city when they had seen the lights and heard the uproar—their officers were snoring now on the patrón’s couches. Their nasty little horses were standing, heads drooped, already flicking their tails at the biting flies. One cavalry rider sat astride his mount, asleep. The women prisoners were squatting in the dirt, a chain running from neck to neck. They were covered by their rebozos, so they looked like small lumps, or a sort of cattle waiting to be herded to market. Tomás gazed at them through the blue glass. He knew they were being dragged north to Guaymas or south to Culiacán or to some field somewhere to be executed. This was the way of the world—Tomás didn’t know yet to feel bad for them.

As Tomás looked at their hunched forms in the blue light, he saw Don Refugio come striding his way.

Don Refugio had heard the racket all night, the idiotic shouts and forced laughter of the damned Yoris. Don Refugio didn’t like yelling. He knew that Yoris having a high time could quickly turn, and it paid to keep an eye on them.

The soldiers at Bácum had rounded up the townsfolk at gunpoint. They’d kicked the People, shoved them. The church doors were open, and the People trusted Christ, so they went in, thinking they had been offered refuge. The soldiers made strange jokes: “Praise Jesus,” one said. A mother at the far edge of the crowd could not control her screaming child. The little boy jumped and kicked. A soldier shouted, “Silencio!” But the boy would not cease his screaming. The soldier stepped forward and smashed the mother in the face with the butt of his rifle. She fell like dropped laundry, and the boy, suddenly silent, bent to her and poked at her still form.

Don Refugio said, “Captain? May I retrieve that child so he doesn’t get away?”

And he had been waved on, to collect the small victim. Don Refugio took the boy in his arms. He backed through the cactus hedge behind them, a solid wall of twenty-foot-high nopales, silently, never getting a thorn, and there he held the boy and watched as the soldiers slammed the doors and nailed them shut and the people within began crying out as they realized their fate and buckets of burning pitch were flung into the shattered windows and the cries rose to insane shrieks and frantic pounding as the 450 bodies within ignited.