The Hummingbird's Daughter (7 page)

“Hey!” he said. “Watch it.”

He moved an inch away from her.

“You don’t live here,” she said.

“Hell no. Don’t live here. Don’t live anywhere.”

“Ocoroni?”

“No.”

He spit.

“You mean you’re just—wild?”

She loved him.

“That’s right,” he sneered. “I’m wild, like that bronco, and don’t forget it.”

They watched the cowboys together.

“Why are you here?” she finally asked.

“Him. Urrea.” He put a twig in his mouth like a cigarette and said, “That son of a whore is my father.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Don’t be stupid.”

Teresa looked back at Tomás. He kicked one leg over the top of the rail and jumped down, landing with his arms in the air and bowing as the vaqueros applauded. “Ahora, chavos,” he announced, “I am going to my little house for a little bottle of beer and some sweet little kisses from the little lips of my little wife.”

“To go with your little pecker,” Segundo said.

The boys whistled at Tomás as he walked away.

Teresita said to the skinny kid with the hat: “Stay here.”

Fifty yards ahead of Teresita, Tomás was diminished in perspective, and he looked like a doll. She held up her hand and squinted her eye and it looked as if she held him in her grip. She smiled.

He was worried. She could see it all around him. She only caught the vaguest suggestion of color around some people, and then only as she looked askance at them. It was sometimes this way with her, but when she had asked Tía why she saw these penumbras, the response was a kick and a glare. She did not raise the topic again.

Tomás had worry leaking out from under his hat like smoke. Along with these purple clouds were some baffling vibrations that, for reasons she couldn’t explain, looked to her as if they came from a lemon. He clutched his hat and yanked it off his head, and a great polychromatic upwelling spiraled into the sky. It wobbled as he drew his sleeve across his brow, and then he was charging up the porch steps and vanishing into the shadows of the big house. The door slammed.

Teresita knew she was not allowed to follow. She knew that a field worker caught inside the house would be in real trouble. But she was not there to steal. She would simply go in the door and call for him, and when he came, she would tell him she needed to talk to Huila. Like Tía said.

She put her bare foot on the first step and tried it. It seemed solid enough. The only steps she had ever climbed were the solid stone stairs that led into the church. She stepped up, and stepped up, and was on the porch without incident. She was amazed by the technology of the doorknob. It was clearly a fine object, a thing of shining brass and an egg shape made of some white thing that could have been a stone or a giant pearl or that thing they called ivory. She grabbed the doorknob and pulled. Nothing happened. She pushed. She tried turning it, and there was a click that alarmed her, and then the door seemed to open of its own volition, and she followed it as it swung inward, its greasy hinges silent and fluid, and she was inside.

She was amazed to see that the patrón didn’t have a dirt floor, and she stood fascinated by the wood planks under her feet. In the village, the really good housekeepers sprinkled lemon juice to wet down the ground dust and make everything smell fresh. But this floor was beyond any juicy sand. It shone, too, as if there were a thin flood of creek water upon it.

And there was perfume in the air, not lemons. Teresa slid the door shut and took inventory of the many fabulous objects before her. She did not know what Yoris called the fluttering white things that hung in the windows, but they were gauzy, and she could see light through them, as if they had been made of moth wings or ashes.

The walls were white. Pale green geckos moved across them and vanished behind a series of framed paintings of burros. These were Doña Loreto’s melancholy studies, each burro endowed with huge teary eyes that bespoke a sorrow and a nostalgia for better times. Candles and oil lamps fluttered, even though it was midday. Teresita didn’t know if she should blow them out to save the patrón the cost of fresh oil and new wicks.

She reached out her foot and touched a thick carpet. Teresita had never felt anything like it. She stepped onto it and sank her toes into its plush surface. Gold and red designs twined their way around its edge, and its rich blue had roses and vines somehow woven into it.

A harried-looking woman suddenly appeared and said, “You, child, dump this and replace it!,” shoving a sloshing chamber pot into her hands and then vanishing down the hall. “Fúchi!” Teresa said, and she put it down on the nearest couch.

A muted heartbeat arrested her attention. She looked around for the source of the sound. She saw a tall wooden tower in one corner, and it had a narrow glass door, and a swinging gold pendulum flashed inside. She walked to this strange square tree and looked up at its face. It was round, and across it, a blue moon seemed to float, followed by a swirly yellow sun. She did not know numbers, so the icons on its face meant nothing to her. She put her hands upon the wood column and felt it ticking. She put her ear to it to listen to such a wondrous thing.

Tomás came hurrying out of his office, waving a letter of credit over his head, already starting to call out for someone to fetch Segundo, and remembering that his spurs were still on and Loreto did not allow spurs in the house, when he skidded to a halt and beheld Teresita in congress with his big clock.

“How in the devil did you get in here?” he demanded.

She looked up at him serenely. “I followed you.” She turned back to the clock. “This tree has a heart,” she said.

He blinked. Looked at her more closely. He knew he’d seen her before. If Loreto saw her dirty bare feet on the rug—well!

“What, might I ask, are you doing?”

“I have been talking to this tree, but it won’t answer me.”

He smiled.

“It must be a very rude tree,” she said.

He laughed.

He stepped up to the clock and looked at it. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Clocks are rude.”

“This is a clock?”

“Yes, it is. It is a grandfather clock.”

She seemed delighted by this information.

He thought he should be having her whipped or something, but he reached into his vest pocket instead. He didn’t know why. “Look here,” he said. He pulled out his pocket watch and clicked open its lid. It played a small bit of Mozart. She gasped.

“It is the grandson watch!” Teresa exclaimed.

He laughed once more.

“Make the music again.”

He clicked the lid shut and reopened it.

“Be careful,” she warned. “When it grows big like the grandfather, it won’t fit in your pocket.”

What an amusing little creature, Tomás thought.

Teresita looked around the room.

“Patrón?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Where do you keep your chickens? Do they sleep here?”

“No, no. They sleep in the henhouse.”

“Your chickens have their own house?” she whispered.

He noticed the appalling chamber pot on the couch. His eyebrows rose. His household was, apparently, falling apart. He would have words with the maids about it as soon as he dealt with this small invader. He clapped his hands twice. The harried woman stormed out of the hall and cried, “Sí, señor?”

“This young lady,” he said, “seems to have wandered into the house by mistake. Could you fetch her a cool glass of juice, then see her out?”

The maid goggled at Teresita.

“I like juice,” Teresita said.

“It looks like this is your lucky day,” Tomás said.

The maid stepped forward to grab Teresita.

“Sir?” Teresita said.

He looked at her.

“Does Huila live here?”

He bent to her and said, “Huila. What do you want with Huila?”

“I need to ask her something.”

He squatted before her, careful not to impale his buttocks with the starry rowels on his spurs.

“What do you need to ask her?”

“I don’t know who I am,” Teresita said. “My aunt told me Huila would know who I am.”

Tomás stared into the face of this strange little girl. Then he looked up at the maid. Then he looked back at Teresita.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Teresa.”

“All right, Teresita,” he said, rising. “Let us go find Huila for you. Let’s find out who you are.”

He took her hand and led her down the hall toward the kitchen.

She said, “Do you have any cookies? I like cookies.”

He laughed again.

Teresita was amazed to see huge black cooking pots hanging from hooks on the walls of the kitchen. Tía had one big pot, one dented small tin pot, and a pan. Here, there were skillets, and there were pots as small as coffee cups, pots as large as bathtubs. A metal ring hung from the ceiling, and on hooks all around it hung more pots.

Tomás looked around and said, “Where is Carmela?”

“Carmela the cook, sir?” one of the girls asked.

“Right. Is she sick?”

“She no longer works here, sir,” the girl said. “She left us three years ago.”

He stood there and tried to hide his surprise.

“Oh,” he said.

Teresita looked around with her mouth open. A mesh sack of onions dangled from an iron hook, yellow as tallow. Beneath this galaxy of pans and onions was a white metal table. This was where the girls chopped up the chickens and the meat with great cleavers that hung in rows on nails in the wall.

Tomás pulled a chair up to this table and helped Teresita climb up. The frazzled house girl from down the hall ladled a measure of tamarind juice from a clay barrel and poured it in a glass. She set the glass before Teresita.

“Gracias,” Teresita said.

“Cookies, please,” said Tomás.

A plate appeared with two fat gingerbread pigs lying on a folded cloth napkin. Teresita saw that among the rich, even food got a blanket. She bit off one pig’s leg and chewed.

“Thank you,” she said to Tomás.

“Oh, it’s my pleasure,” he replied.

They shook hands.

“I must get back to work,” he said. “But the girls will attend to you. Girls? Huila, please.” He patted Teresita’s shoulder and said, “Do call again.”

They listened to him jingle as he went back down the hall.

The maid scrunched her nose at Teresita, then went to Huila’s door at the back of the kitchen and knocked.

Eight

ONCE, OVER BREAKFAST, Tomás had told Huila his dream of the night before: he had fallen from the roof of the barn, and just as he was going to hit the ground, he had begun to fly. And he flew like this, only a foot above the ground, as if he were scuttling along in shallow water, only occasionally touching the ground to propel himself along. Then, as he glided over the tomato and cotton fields, he had come upon a giantess dressed all in white with a red skirt, and he had swum under her hem and up her great white legs. Loreto was upstairs, so he felt free to say such barbarities: barbarities, after all, were a fine art among the witty gentlemen of Sinaloa.

Huila had answered him with a baffling tale based on disturbing evidence that the flesh was the dream, and that death was the awakening, and then she had demanded to know details even he was not willing to discuss over scrambled eggs: had he actually entered the giant woman’s privates, and if he had, did he find them to be meaty, or a starry void? Huila had not relented. “I didn’t have the dream,” she said, “and I’m not the one who is prancing around with his chile in his hand.” Tomás had nearly spit coffee then, and he cried “Huila!” in his most affronted voice. Seemingly deaf to his outcry, she demanded an accounting of all the places in his life where the numbers four and six had revealed themselves.

Tomás, forever after, reminded himself to keep his dreams a secret.

Now, Huila beheld the small one eating her cookies and thought twice about how she should proceed. Ah, Saint Teresa herself. In the Urrea house, many ears were always listening. While this child, she could see right away, had the Hummingbird’s hair—in spite of its strawberry-blond streaks—the rest of her was all Tomás. She glanced around the kitchen. The girls were watching the child as they worked, making eyes at each other. Surely, they were all thinking Teresita should be spanked, and her family charged with an offense for letting her in the main house. Some haciendas right there in Ocoroni would shoot trespassers and even their mothers and fathers.

Huila herself wondered how the child came to be in the kitchen and not back in the yard. Tomás, she thought, was soft. Perhaps, in some way he did not even suspect, he had recognized the child as his own. If he had been paying attention, he would have seen his own eyes staring right back at him. But the Yoris, they didn’t notice the things right before their faces. They were too busy looking over the horizon.

“Teresita,” she said.

“Yes?”

“How do you like your cookies?”

“Good.”

“No,” Huila corrected her. “When an adult asks you a question like that, you must answer politely, and say thank you.” It was a child’s job to learn.

Teresita watched her lips, watched the small vertical wrinkles that went up to the base of her nose.

“The cookies are good, thank you,” she said.

“Very nice.”

Huila finished her coffee.

“Give me a bite,” she said. Teresita held her cookie to the old one’s lips. “Gracias,” she said.

“De nada,” Teresita replied, already having absorbed her first lesson.

Huila rose.

“Can I talk to you?” Teresita asked.

“Let’s take a walk,” said Huila.

Huila carried a great straw basket.

“I have a hankering for agua de jamaica,” she said.

Teresita matched her stride for stride as they walked into the trees.

“I’ve never had agua de jamaica.”

“Never?”

“No.”

Had these people never taught her anything?

“What do you drink at Tía’s house?” Huila asked.

“Water. Nothing.”

“No wonder you don’t know who you are,” Huila said. “People like that.” She bent through the rails of a fence and pointed. “The hibiscus tree.” They went there and Huila said, “Pick the flowers. We’ll fill the basket, then set the flowers out in the sun to dry.”

Teresita plucked a red hibiscus from the lowest of the branches. She pinched off the bottom of the flower. She licked the bead of nectar from it. Huila smiled. She had done that when she was a girl.

“When the flowers are dry,” Huila said, “we boil them with sugar. That’s agua de jamaica.”

“How much sugar?”

“How much do you like?”

“A lot.”

Huila smiled.

“Me too,” she said. “So we’ll put in a lot of sugar! It needs sugar. It’s like this pinche life, you see—so tart. It stings your mouth. You have to feel around inside it with your tongue to find the sweetness.”

This was Teresita’s second lesson.

Late in the day, Teresita made her way back to Tía’s shack. She had saved one pig cookie for her auntie, and it was crumbly but still whole in Teresita’s one pocket. The tired cotton pickers were hauling their heavy sacks of bolls out of the dusty fields, their prickled hands bloody and scabbed. The chile pickers had red eyes and runny noses, their eyelids puffy from the burning juice. Butchers lay together in the shade of a cottonwood, stinking of blood and fat, passing a cigarette and a clay jug of pulque. “Adios!” they called, and Teresita called back, “Adios!” Nobody but those Sinaloans said good-bye instead of hello when they saw each other.

Don Teófano, the handyman and occasional mule skinner, carried three planks over his old shoulder and walked along the track, bouncing as the ends of the wood bounced, making a rhythm that made his whole body bob as he walked. “Adios,” she told him. He raised a hand off the boards, then slapped it back down when they started to tip off his shoulder. His sharp sweat smelled almost exactly like the leaky pine boards, and Don Teófano made his way into the distance in a cloud of turpentine and pitch.

Teresita watched the girls older than she was: girls with jugs of water balanced atop their heads; weary laundry girls, smelling of soaps and salts, their boiled hands and feet white as mushrooms, and their hair escaping from under their tightly bound scarves; the evening cook on her way to the main house, her best church clothes on her back, and frazzled huaraches on her feet—her only good shoes hung off her fingers as she rushed to work. “Adios!” Teresita knew that the cook’s boyfriend, one of Segundo’s buckaroos, would be there at ten at night to greet her and walk her back to her house seven doors down from Tía’s.

“Adios!”

The ones with sick children and dying old ones brought them out into the gentle sunset. They’d been locked inside their stifling houses all day, and it was their first chance to feel a cool breeze. A curled old woman lay huddled in a wheelbarrow, wrapped in her rebozo and looking like a puppy. Writhing young men tied to chairs with hemp rope raised their palsied hands and pointed at the birds with their knuckles. Great cascades of drool fell from their chins, and they shrieked and laughed at the crows, the donkeys, the scampering children, the astonishment of the reddening sun. Mothers smoothed their unruly hair with old stiff-bristled brushes. “Adios!” Teresita called to them, and they called back, “Os!” and “Dos!” and “Awoss!” and reached for her as she went by.

And there was Segundo, slouched on his mount, and watching it all with a small smile on his lips. “Adios!” she called to the big vaquero. His dark hat turned toward her, and one finger rose and touched the brim.

Teresita had told Huila that Tía called her mother a whore. “That is not correct,” Huila told her. And Tía also called Teresita a whore. “That is a sin,” Huila said.

Teresita pushed through the crooked door of the shack. Tía was sitting in the one chair at her small table. Teresita’s bedding was wadded up against the wall. Tía’s children were still outside.

“I wish I had a cigarette,” Tía said. “Did you see any cigarette butts lying around out there?”

Teresita shook her head.

“No, Tía. But I brought you something else.”

She pulled the cookie out of her pocket, brushed off some lint, and handed it to her auntie.

“Oh?”

Tía actually smiled for a moment. She grabbed the cookie and bit off its head and closed her eyes. She knew she should save the rest for her children. Any mother would save it. She took another bite. The children were small—they’d need less of the cookie than she did. Didn’t she deserve it? A little bit of cookie after all this shit she had to live with? One last nibble, and—ah cabrón!—the cookie was gone.

“Do you have another?”

“No, Tía.”

Tía drummed her fingers.

“Where did you get it?” she asked. She was thinking that perhaps La Tunita might have a cigarette. She knew women who traded kisses to the vaqueros for smokes, but she was not going to do something like that. Not kisses.

“Huila gave it to me,” she said.

“Where did you see Huila?”

“I went and found her.”

Tía looked at her.

“What do you mean you went and found her?”

“You told me to go ask Huila who I was, so I did.”

“
What do you mean you went and found her?
Did you go to her at her work? Was she visiting someone?”

“No.”

Tía was scaring her a little. The crumbs of the cookie were still in the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were too bright. She bent to Teresita and grabbed her arms.

“What do you mean, then? What do you mean?”

“Tía. Tía, stop. I went there. To the house.”

Tía simply froze. Her eyes seemed to look far beyond Teresita. Then she looked back into her eyes.

“The house,” she whispered.

Tía let her go. “You Goddamned idiot,” she said. “Oh, you little fool.”

“I —”

“Shut up!” Tía tore at her own hair. “Shut up!” She turned in every direction, as if she could find a hidden door in one of her walls. “Goddamn you!”

Her boy came through the door. She wheeled on him and screamed: “Get out! Now, pendejo!” He glanced once at Teresita and ran back outside.

Tía took up her heavy wooden spoon.

“You stupid little shit,” she said.

“Tía?”

Tía snagged Teresita’s hair as she tried to escape, and she twirled her hand in it, forming a painful knot that pulled Teresita’s scalp taut.

“Ay!” she cried. “Ay, ay!”

And the spoon fell.

Hitting the ground awoke her.

Tía had carried her outside and tossed her over the top of the pigpen fence.

“If you are going to act like a pig, then live with the pigs. I’m through with you!”

The People did nothing. They stepped back into their huts and dropped their blankets over the doorways. Tía ushered her children inside. Teresita rolled over and got up on her knees. Pig shit burned in her welts.

Tía reappeared.

“And don’t you die on me!” she said. “Do you hear? That’s all I need, more trouble like that!”

The rough door slapped shut.

Teresita felt golden ants swarm her. A rush of tickling up her arms and legs, relentless feet strumming her tissues like guitar strings. Her eyes closed.

Then she was falling. Falling through the earth, through the spaces between the stones, into the deeper nothing of the sky. Falling, where the sky itself became small again and was contained inside her own eye. Falling through her eye into the place where dreams harden into stones and become the ground.

Corridors of flame.

Obsidian rooms.

Her days rose about her, from womb to playtime, from this moment to far ahead of herself: womanhood and mirrors. Rings of light fell through houses she did not know. She sparked inside herself, her brain sputtered like a roman candle, whirling, fire, whirling, sparks—