The Hummingbird's Daughter (6 page)

He often told Tomás that Bácum had taught him one lesson: sinners were not the only ones fated to burn.

But mostly, Don Refugio talked to Tomás about hammers and horseshoes.

He came forward. “Muchacho,” he called. “Qué hay aquí?”

Tomás shrugged.

“Nada,” he said.

The maidens stood up, like the horses, hobbled by their neck chains, clinking and shuffling, looking at the ground. Don Refugio saw that each of the young women had filthy bandages on her left arm, matted and stuck to a stump. Jesucristo! He had heard of this. Scalps, ears, noses, hands. These were salted and shipped away in wooden crates, though nobody knew where they went. Some son of a dog in an army office opened a ledger and counted each arm and made a little red check. No doubt his handwriting was beautiful. Don Refugio spit. He cursed.

Tomás scurried after him when he trotted off.

“Go away.”

“Why?”

“Leave me.”

“Why?”

Don Refugio went in his shack and exited, dragging a rickety wooden chair along the ground. He carried a small red can.

“What’s in the can?”

“Go away.”

“What did I do to you, old man?”

“Go away now.”

“Why are you mad at me?”

“I am not mad at you.”

Don Refugio went to a scraggly old cottonwood and set the chair beneath it. Tomás dawdled, wondering what Don Refugio could possibly think he was doing. It was almost time to get to work. This was no time to sit beneath a tree.

“What are you doing?” he called.

“Nothing. Sitting. I’d like a cigar,” he said. “Do you have one?”

“I do.”

Tomás pulled one of the cavalrymen’s cigar butts out of his pocket.

“You shouldn’t steal,” Don Refugio said. “And you shouldn’t smoke. Toss it here.”

Tomás pitched it underhanded. It fell in the dirt, and Don Refugio rose from the chair, bent to it, looked at it, flicked off some dust. He wiped the wet end on his sleeve.

“Yori spit,” he said. He made a monkey face of distaste. Tomás smiled.

Don Refugio pried the cap off the red can and poured the kerosene over his head. He smelled sharply of juniper and fever. He put the cigar in his mouth. Pulled out a wooden match. He stared at Tomás, who was already starting to shout. “You, boy,” he said. “Don’t be like your fathers.” He struck the match and exploded in flame.

The heat knocked Tomás down. He sat up and stared as Don Refugio burned without moving, his hand held up and holding the burned match as it charred. The cottonwood caught on fire, its trunk blackening, the branches over Refugio’s head snapping and sparking. Startled locusts exploded in flame and flew from the tree in a halo of comets.

Tomás stood and screamed. But the roosters were crowing. The chickens and the turkeys and the ducks were making their morning racket. The dogs were barking, the burros were braying. The crows were squabbling. It took the People a long time to hear him. Inside the big house, the patrón and his guests never awoke.

Huila had let her coffee go cold. She stared at him with her mouth slightly agape.

“Puta madre,” she exclaimed.

“No one knows that story,” Tomás said. “Not even my friend Aguirre.”

He shifted in his seat, wiped his eyes.

“So!” he said. “What do you think?”

She patted him on the arm.

“What’s for dessert?” she asked.

Six

THE GIRLS OF THE RANCHO revered Huila. Any one of them would have gladly been her daughter, though Huila was famously without child, or man. They said she had lost her betrothed in one of the great killings, but no one knew because no one would dare to ask. Her shadow could reach all the way across the ranch when she walked, and children rushed to cool their bare feet in the darkness of her passing.

Daily, the People were amazed that this holy woman with her yellow shawl and double-barreled shotgun, and her petrified balls of a buckaroo in her mysterious apron, was merely a servant to Tomás and Doña Loreto. They could not imagine those hands, which could bring babies forth from the womb, which could drive wicked spirits from the insane with an egg and some smoke, the same hands that castrated pigs and made teas that offended tapeworms so severely that they tumbled out of the guts of men and cows, that those sacred hands picked up Urrea plates, washed Urrea shirts, or carried out Urrea wads of soiled paper from the indoors excuse-me closet. The thought of genteel Loreto Urrea giving the great one an order was so deeply offensive that none of the People could bear to think about it much. If you were born to be a burro, they sighed, you can’t be an eagle.

Cayetana thought about Huila as she walked through the dark. The baby was heavy in her arms, and at one point she snuffled and jerked, and Cayetana whispered, “Don’t wake up! Please, don’t wake up.”

She pushed through the reeds on the far side of the pigpen. The big old sow hove to her feet and watched Semalú pass. She wiggled her flat plate nose, sniffing the air. Having launched hundreds of piglets into the world, the sow recognized a mother and a little one going by. She grunted a soft greeting.

Cayetana stopped outside her sister’s door and collected herself. She knocked. The door scraped open, and one of her nieces peered up at her.

“Get your mother,” she said.

Even though the house was only one room, and Cayetana could clearly see her sister, Tía, in the corner, her sister called out, “Quién es?”

“Soy yo,” Cayetana replied. “La Semalú.”

“Pinche Cayetana,” Tía cursed softly, already exasperated by whatever idiocy the little tramp had thought up now.

Tía pulled open the door and stared. She was only twenty-three, but she was already old. She had three children of her own. Her teeth had started to go bad, and they hurt her all the time. She smoked every piece of cigarette and cigar she could find. Cayetana had never seen someone smoke so much. And Tía, who could not possibly ingest enough cigarettes, had developed a habit that at once fascinated and terrorized Cayetana. She used her own open mouth for an ashtray, smoke rising from her nostrils as if she were some strange beast in a fireside storyteller’s cuento, before she opened her mouth and tapped the hot ash from her cigarette onto her tongue. It hissed.

“Tía,” Cayetana said, taking in a deep breath and holding her back straight. “I have been called across the ranch to work.”

“Work? Now?”

Tía sucked in some smoke, then studied the end of her cigarette: apparently, there wasn’t yet enough delicious ash for her.

“Yes. There is a . . . a pregnant cow, you see. I have to go help.”

Tía administered her ashes:
Ssss!

“Liar,” she said.

“No, it’s true!”

“When will you be back?”

“By morning, I swear it.”

“Give me the girl.”

Tía took the bundle from Cayetana and accidentally dropped her cigarette. It was only an old hand-rolled, and it was only a stub, but the paper broke and the tobacco scattered at their feet.

“Goddamn it!” Tía shouted. “The baby knocked it out of my hand!”

“Sorry.”

“Look what you did, pendeja!”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“You’re not working. You’re going whoring.”

“I —”

“Who are you going to see now? Another Yori?”

Cayetana backed away one step.

“I —” she said.

“Lárgate,” her sister snapped, which was as rudely as the People could say
go away.

“I will,” Cayetana said.

On her way, she stopped and picked up her bundle of things she had hidden beyond the pigsty. She would be afraid on the road, but she had been on the road before. She blessed Huila, and she appealed to the spirits to watch over her as she walked. She said a prayer for her child. When she got to the fence, she followed it to the big gate and slipped out onto the road to Ocoroni.

She walked fast. She never looked back. All she could think of were cherries. El Patudo’s head. The dead. She was going to walk until she could think of nothing at all.

Seven

THE CHILDREN OF THE RANCHO were up before Huila, sitting in the cool dirt of their doorways, playing with marbles if they had them, small stones if they did not, chewing the crusty rind of an old tortilla, holding cunning little dolls twisted together from maize husks, unaware of God or the spirits; or they were killing doves with stones and slings and bringing the slaughtered birds to their mothers, who would pluck them and cook them. The doves’ breasts on the greasy plates looked like the noses of Indians cut off by marauding Rurales. The Urrea children and Doña Loreto were the last to rise.

It was a good, bright day—the breeze carried high peach clouds with blue bellies, and the smell of salt drifted to the People all the way from the invisible sea. Huila had seen wraiths crossing the far hills, lines of the dead walking home. Others might have seen the passing shade of clouds on the hills, but Huila was not fooled. Those shadows were dead Comanches and dead gringos and a few Mexicans leading their sad ghost horses. Some of those poor bastards were going to find the road that led to Hell. Oh, well—you should have been better children to your Father, and better fathers to your children. Cabrones! Ay Dios! Huila had quartered an orange and left it under her special tree. It never hurt, for example, to leave the Maker a snack. And not some rotten onion you were throwing out, either! It didn’t bother her that the coyote gobbled them as soon as she’d finished her prayers and walked away. Who was she to say that God did not use the coyote’s teeth to chew His gifts?

She rocked along like the pendulum of the main-house clock, her bad hip singing inside her. Her rebozo was pulled about her head, her great black hair spiked with lightning bolts of white was twirled in a tight bun—no man ever saw her hair hanging free. Huila knew, even at this old age, even skinny as she was, with her belly pooched loose and empty above her rocky hips, that if any man saw her hair flying loose, he would be overcome with desire for her. A love that might never die out. Bola de bueyes! The girls of the rancho said you could see the stars in Huila’s hair. Huila kept her devastating secret hidden as an act of charity.

Oh, but her back hurt when she bent to pass through the fences.

As she was bent nearly double, getting her leg through and pulling her skirt along so none of the vaqueros could look up in there and see her bloomers, she saw the tall girl lying in the dirt. Huila went to her and looked down. “Child,” she said.

The girl looked up at her. She was barefoot, as all the children of the workers’ village were. Her legs were scabbed with old mosquito bites, scratches, and holes from where she’d yanked out ticks. None of the children wore undergarments until they were older than seven, and they squatted wherever they were and flared out their rough dresses to make puddles in the dust.

“What are you doing?”

“Ants!” the girl said. “I’m watching ants!”

Huila squinted and finally saw the ants. Well now, her eyes were weaker, too. She hadn’t even noticed the ants.

“Mochomo,” Huila said.

“Ehui,” the girl replied.

So she knew the mother tongue.

“You don’t look like an Indian, child.”

“What do Indians look like?”

Huila laughed.

“Us,” she said.

The girl shrugged and turned back to the ants.

“Who is your mother?” Huila asked.

“The Hummingbird. She is gone.”

“Ah! You’re Nona Rebecca Chávez.”

“I am Teresa.”

Huila looked down at her. “I remember a different name.”

Teresa rolled over and looked up at Huila. Her front was filthy, and she had dirt on her chin. “Huila,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I see you in church.”

“Oh?”

“The Father told us about Saint Teresa. In church. Remember?”

“Yes. Wasn’t she the one who flew? Did she smell like flowers?”

“She loved God more than anyone else in the world, and God let her do miracles. Now I love God more than anybody in the world. I like Saint Teresa. I am going to be her.”

Huila smiled.

“You don’t love God more than I do,” Huila said.

“God loves you as much as He loves me,” Teresita said. “But I love Him more than you do. I do.”

“Mira, nomás,” said Huila. “Pues, qué bueno.”

“Yes, it is good.”

“Don’t kill those poor ants, then.”

“Oh Huila! I am not killing them. I am praying for them.”

Huila laughed.

“All right, then,” she said. “Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

Teresita turned back to the ants.

“You seem more like Saint Francis to me than Saint Teresa,” Huila said.

“No,” said Teresita. “He’s a boy. I’m a girl.”

Huila turned to walk away, paused, and said, “How old are you, child?”

“Six.”

“And is your life good since La Semalú left?”

“No, Huila.”

This life was only meant for us to endure, not to enjoy, Huila thought. Joy was for rich men and Yoris. Huila pulled her rebozo tighter. If you were born to be a nail, you had to be hammered.

“Be strong . . . Teresa.”

“I am.”

Huila walked on, pausing just once to glance back.

Tía had one egg. “One fucking egg for all you fat pigs?” she yelled. The children all knew to say “Sí, Mamá.” She sent her boy out to the mango huerta to steal one of the Urreas’ iguanas. She could possibly be flogged for it; she didn’t know—it couldn’t be as bad as stealing a chicken. But what was she supposed to do? And when the boy came back with a writhing green lizard that whipped them all with its tail, and Tía took her rusty meat-cutter’s knife to saw at the lizard’s neck, Teresita scrambled out from her small spot and rushed out the door. She didn’t understand why, with mangos and peaches, prickly-pear fruits and plums and leftover beans in the buckaroos’ tin plates, Tía could never find anything to eat. Segundo, the big mean vaquero, once even showed her which flowers you could eat. Even if she wasn’t allowed to steal squash from the gardens, nobody cared if she stuffed her mouth with yellow petals. They’d laugh and say she looked like a deer.

Tía had stopped waiting for word from Cayetana long ago, and she had even abandoned her hope that one day a letter might come with money in it. That little whore! She had left this half-breed bitch in her house and hadn’t had the decency to leave a pound of beans or a chicken. Nothing. What was she supposed to do, boil rocks?

Teresita peeked in the door to find Tía stirring a pot. Tía studied the ash clinging to her cigarette, and tapped it onto her tongue.
Ssss!
“What do you want?” she said.

“Is that the iguana?” Teresa asked.

“What the devil do you think it is, you idiot? Did you see any other food here? Did you think I’d murdered my own children to make stew to feed you?”

“No, Tía.”

“No, Tía.”

“Am I an Indian?”

“We are the People.”

“But what am I?”

“A little pig that eats too much.”

“Tía . . .”

“Don’t bother me with stupidity. What am I, what am I! What kind of ridiculous question is that?”

“I just want to know, Tía.”

“If you’re so curious, go ask your good friend Huila! Can’t you see I’m busy?”

Ssss!

“Does it taste good, Tía? The cigarette?”

Tía studied the crooked cigarette and smiled.

“This mierda is the only good thing in my life,” she said.

Teresita had learned to put her body to sleep at night. Her smacks and bruises ached when she lay down—Tía liked to spank, and she wasn’t shy about using the wooden spoon. Teresita had to take charge of the uproarious parts of herself too naughty to be quiet at bedtime. Each night, Teresita would concentrate first on her feet, tired and sore from walking on rocks and hot dirt all day. She would order them:
Feet, go to sleep.
Feet were the least of her problems—you can always get your feet to sleep. She could feel the golden glow come over her toes and spread to her heels, and the pain would be replaced by the soft tingle of sleep. Once the feet were becalmed, she could bring the glow up her legs, smoothing it like cream over her sore spots.
Legs, go to sleep.
And the legs, too, would sleep.
Hips, belly, go to sleep.
And now the glow was inside her, warm as a full meal, heavy in her gut, and it throbbed a little with her heartbeat. She would go this way up herself and down her arms. It was the hands that caused the most trouble, those bad twins, always inciting each other to misbehave. She would have to be cross with them, scold them a little to get them to stop fidgeting and plucking and scratching.
Hands! I told you, get to sleep!
The hands were such a task that she fell asleep soon after, tired and happily numb.

On the day when Teresita set out to discover who she was, she by chance went to the same fruit tree her own mother had once leaned against. Teresita’s hands went to the spots below where Cayetana had first gripped the trunk, and she looked out at the same corral, where Tomás was perched atop the same rail with the same vaqueros. Segundo was breaking a nasty little bronco, and the boys were laughing and shouting and waving their hats at the horse when it got too close to the fence. Above Teresita’s head, furious cicadas assaulted the high branches of the fruit tree, fondling its fuzzy globes.

The next development of the day announced itself with a hiss.

“Psssst!”

At first, she thought Tía had discovered her and was eating a cigar. She glanced over—a gray cowboy-hat crown appeared over the edge of the watering trough. It looked as if the hat was floating along by itself, or being held aloft by a ghost.

“Hey!” the hat said.

“What!”

A freckled face atop a gangly neck appeared beneath the hat, now revealed to be ridiculously huge on the boy’s head. It looked to Teresa as if his jug ears were the only things keeping the hat from falling to his chin.

The boy nodded at her once, then cut his head toward the corral, then made some kind of O shape with his mouth.

“What?” she repeated.

The kid wiggled his eyebrows, then jutted his chin at the corral.

She sniffed dismissively and moved back around to her side of the tree. What a strange and rude boy! She wanted to look at Don Tomás again. Don Tomás had never spoken to her, but he did wink once when she was walking into church. He never attended Mass, but he accompanied his fine wife and their children to the church, then spent the morning sitting in the little plazuela of Ocoroni, eating sliced fruit with chile powder that came in cones of wax paper.

“Oye, tú!”

“What?”

“Girl!”

She looked around the trunk. The boy’s head rose and fell, the hat casting a reflection in the green water of the trough. He looked like some kind of puppet show.

“Is that him?” he said.

“Him?”

“Is that him, I said. Him. You know, the Sky Scratcher. The patrón.”

“It is,” she said.

“I knew it.”

The boy turned his eyes back to Tomás and stared raptly. Teresa had never seen a look like that. She decided to investigate.

She walked over to the trough and squatted beside him and nudged him with her elbow.