The Hummingbird's Daughter (20 page)

Twenty

TOMÁS HAD LEFT THE TENT intended for Doña Loreto behind, and Huila and the house staff moved into it, spreading their blankets over the cots. Don Lauro set up a bed frame under the cottonwood near the wrecked ranch house. He assembled the iron headboard and footboard and set a small table with an oil lamp beside the bed, set a rifle leaning against the table, and a gunbelt hanging off the headboard, which really looked like a black iron fence, all bars and crossbeams, and he slept there at peace in the night breeze. When he awoke in the morning, chickens were perched above him on the headboard, clucking softly and making purring sounds like rotund cats.

The workers of Cabora had fled after the Yaqui assault, and their small huts and rattling cabins stood empty beyond the corrals and the barns, and the workers from Sinaloa wandered to these houses and chose among them. This village was almost identical to the one they had come from—two ragged rows of shacks in a field with thin board and paper-wall latrines stinking in back, small pigpens behind these. The little street even held the same muddy puddle of donkey pee. People moved into these houses in the same order they had lived in the last village. Don Teófano, Huila’s helper and mule driver, started on the left side of the street, farthest west. He saw himself as a sentinel and guardian of the village, though it would have taken a stick of dynamite exploding outside his door to wake him. Each family humbly bent to enter the low doorways and lay on the straw sleeping mats and took the former owners’ fleas as their own. They soon named this neighborhood the same as their old neighborhood, El Potrero.

Those who overflowed this street—the cowboys and the ones who outnumbered the shacks—took shelter in the small unburned stables or slept under, in, and around the wagons. Teresita slept with Huila. Scorpions came down the walls at night, creeping out of the palm fronds and weeds the old workers had woven into roofs. Lizards also came down the walls, geckos and funny little multicolored creatures that did push-ups at each other, then scampered across the wood and bricks in furious battles.

Engineer Aguirre had taken charge of Cabora. How could they remake the main house with no lumber? Adobe. They had clay, and dirt, and mud, and hay. Certain vigas and crossbeams, charred black, but still solid. Muscles and hands and feet.

They raked the charcoal and the ruin out of the main house, and Aguirre was delighted to find the foundation sound. The bricks had withstood the fire, and the hardwood struts and supports were too dense to burn. The porch and the stairs were in good condition, and the fireplaces and chimney still stood. While half of Aguirre’s crew salvaged what they could from the burned house, the others used boards pried from the fences and the back of the near barn and a pair of dismantled work sheds to frame up long lines of adobe bricks. They lay on the ground like chocolate cakes. Teresita and the other children made games of stomping the clay and straw mixture in vats, the mud curling through their toes.

The Engineer found a load of copper pipe in the work sheds they took apart, and he immediately dedicated his afternoons to the design of a system that would bring the windmill’s green water from the cattle’s mossy trough to the center of El Potrero and the vicinity of the house. When finally laid out, the pipes on the ground created grids that the children made into a vast hopscotch game. Water drooled steadily into barrels at the near end of El Potrero’s dirt alley, and pattered into a vast clay jar near Aguirre’s bed, creating a delightful and refreshing atmosphere for him when he lay reading, covered with Huila’s coneflower salve to ward off mosquitoes. When he blew out his lamp, he watched the vivid skies, the immensities of the blue-white stars, the strange streaks of light when meteors unzipped the heavens. By match light, he consulted his small atlas of the stars, searching out the mysterious shapes of the zodiac. When the moon rose over the appalling black teeth of the sierra, Aguirre unbuckled a long leather case on his bedside table and pulled open a brass telescope to stare at La Luna’s shadowed ravines and canyons, her craters and deep dead oceans. Europeans had always seen a man in the moon, something the Engineer had learned in El Paso. But his parents had always seen a rabbit on the moon’s face, and this is what he saw every night, the hare on its hind legs, ears hanging back, seeming to nibble the edge of this ghostly satellite.

Sometimes, Teresita stood at the far edge of Aguirre’s lamplight, watching him read.

The People thought him quite mad, sleeping outside like that in Urrea’s big bed, with chickens perched above his head and toes, and camp dogs starting to congregate near him in greater numbers every night—with his white nightshirts and his spyglass, his books and his clay-pot fountain burbling noisily all night. When the barn cat decided he loved Aguirre above all men, and Aguirre let the little beast sleep on the end of his bed, they were scandalized. But Teresita found Aguirre fascinating.

The colored auras around some people had returned, still faint but somehow clearer at the same time. She was starting to see things, as Huila had said she would. But mostly it wasn’t anything magical—she was just old enough to notice what she had never noticed before. Recently, for example, she had noticed bulls pushing cows around the land from behind. Then she had seen horses pushing mares. And when she’d told Huila what she’d seen, Huila had pulled her behind the barn and told her what the animals were doing. And Teresita had shrieked in horrified delight, and they had laughed like two little girls.

And Huila had shown Teresita how to milk a cow, for she had only milked goats, and Huila had said, “You have no teats, but you will. Mine, ay mi hija, mine hang as loose as this cow’s! They start out big, but they end up long. Bendito sea Dios.” Teresita giggled at the old woman’s rough talk.

Teresita had never noticed how many of the workers on the ranch had rotten teeth, or missing teeth, or twisted jaws and collapsed lips where their teeth had been. She had not seen the limps all around her—the injured feet and ankles, the legs twisted by injury or disease. Three different men in El Potrero had damaged arms—two crooked arms like twisted branches, and one hand missing half its fingers and bent into a dark claw. Missing eyes and white eyes and wandering eyes and crossed eyes. The vaqueros were scarred and some of them had lost thumbs or forefingers. She was astounded. The world was wounded in ways she had never seen.

Dogs ran on three legs.

What was this?

Dead chicks lay in the coops, being dismantled by insects.

No matter who she asked, no matter how many of the People, even Huila, even Aguirre and the seemingly omnipotent cowboys, nobody could explain why there was suffering, why there was pain or death or hurt in the world. It drove her mad with frustration to hear that suffering and disease were “God’s will.” Or the cowboys’ philosophy that life was just hard, and you clenched your teeth when it hurt and didn’t bitch and if it got too bad you rode out into the country and waited it out like a wounded coyote or a mountain lion. These answers frustrated her, too. Huila was the worst. Teresita was learning, to her undying shock, that the old one didn’t have answers for everything. There were actually mysteries too deep for the old woman, and Teresita was not comforted by her serenity in the face of these unknowns. Teresita didn’t dare say it aloud, but it was not enough to burn sage or sweetgrass or cedar, it was not enough to kneel, to dip holy water onto her forehead, to recite mysteries of the rosary or sing the old deer songs or raise an offering to the four directions. Didn’t it drive Huila crazy to ask questions that were never answered? Oh, but she already knew Huila’s reply, she didn’t even have to speak—Huila would have told her
There are some questions you don’t ask. There are some questions that are not given to you to be answered.

Teresita wandered in a daze of seeing. Aguirre, in his big bed on the sand, in his small wobbly globe of light, his piles of books, may not have been the most puzzling thing about Cabora, nor of the great land of Sonora beyond the gates. But he was puzzling enough.

One morning, Aguirre awoke at dawn. His chickens were standing watch above him; he had learned to turn them on the rail so their rears faced out and away from him, and the ground at the head of the bed was rich with their droppings. Five dogs crowded in near the foot of the bed, sleeping on their backs and piled against each other, their legs splayed drunkenly and their ears flapped akimbo like soft wings. Ticks hung off them like fat berries. And Teresita was sitting on the mattress, petting the cat.

For some reason, Aguirre blurted, “I beg your pardon?”

“Good morning,” she said.

He held the sheet up to his chest.

“B-buenos días,” he stammered.

“What do you read at night?” she asked.

“Of late, I have been revisiting the Quixote,” he said. The chickens clucked. The dogs scratched. Aguirre thought: What a very peculiar scene.

“May I see it?” she asked.

“The book?” he said.

She nodded.

He sat up straighter and tried to pat his hair down with his hands. He fingered his whiskers. Then he took a clay cup and sipped water from it. He put the cup down and picked up the book, smiled at it once as if it were a well-known friend, and handed it to her.

The book was heavy in her hands. Its cover was soft leather. She liked the way it felt to her fingers. The letters were bright gold.

She touched the title with her finger.

“This?” she said.

“The title,” he explained.
“Don Quixote de la Mancha.”

She touched the first, small word.

“This?”

“Don,” he said.

“Don. Like Don Tomás?”

“Or Don Lauro,” he said, hoping to remind her of his own standing. The child was strangely familiar with him. It barely seemed respectful.

“Don.” She smiled. “Tell me the letters.”

“D-o-n,” he snapped, looking about to see if anyone was watching this absurd little school lesson.

“D!” she breathed. “O! N! Don.”

She laughed. It was her first word. She had learned to read a word.

He took the book back and riffled the pages. He stopped. “There,” he said. He showed her the page. “Look here,” he said. He pointed to a line.

“What does it say?”

“Urrea.”

“Where?”

He pointed out the letters to her.

“Is this Don Tomás?” she cried.

“No, no. This is hundreds of years ago. But it is Don Tomás Urrea’s ancestor.”

“There is an Urrea in this book?”

“Yes, there is. And Don Quixote notes that he is quite powerful.”

“Is there an Urrea in every book?”

Aguirre laughed.

“Heavens no!” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, hopping off the bed. “You should get up, Don Lauro. It’s getting late.”

She put the book down, waved once, and ran off in a whirl of yapping dogs.

Twenty-one

SEEMINGLY LOST on the red plain, his long shadow merging with the tormented wrenchings of the black cacti and ocotillo, came the lone rider. His sombrero formed a dense oval of shadow around his face, and his knife at the base of his spine threw sparks where it peeked from its deerskin scabbard. When he came upon pack trains, he tipped his hat, and when he approached other solitary wanderers or small lines of Indians, he unsheathed his rifle and held it across his lap.

Tomás had eaten rattlesnake in a small group of Apache hunters, hunched down with them around a small smoky scrub fire. They wore loose baggy pants and red bandanas around their heads. They had great handsome noses and crinkly eyes. The skins of the snakes were pegged out in the sun, and the pale violet and pink meat was skewered on sticks and turned in the flames. They ate off their knife blades, and they gestured at Tomás with their blades, and pointed to the fire and to him, and they all laughed. “You bastards,” he said. They all knew, without sharing words, that it would be greatly entertaining to place him in a fire and watch his meat sizzle, too. The Apaches muttered to each other and laughed, rubbing their faces and shaking their heads at this foolish white man. They liked him. He made them coffee. They liked that, too. When it was time to part, they tied a fat rattle to a thong and put it around his neck. They stood around threatening him with their knives and giggling, and he pulled out his rifle and pointed it at them. Everybody thought this was hilarious.

He slept that night off the trail. He tied the stallion to a paloverde tree. He had heard of these trees, but had never seen them. They didn’t seem to have much in the way of leaves. Their trunks were green and tender. He dug his initials into the wood with his thumbnail: T.U. He shook his rattle to scare away any javelinas or coyotes. Then he found a cutbank in the arroyo that formed a half cave, and he rolled out his blankets in the cool sand under this shelter. He dragged together brush and skeletons of dead chollas that looked like hollow logs with small windows in them. He built a little fire and pissed in a hole and cooked the haunches of a jackrabbit he’d shot, the great back legs looking like long turkey drumsticks. He rubbed salt onto the crackling meat and ate it, though the center was raw and vivid pink. Boiled coffee and poured a generous dose of rum in it. Jujubes for dessert.

Watching the sky, he tried to pray, but felt like a hypocrite.

Riding the trail the next day, he came upon the gates of a hacienda, La Paloma.
DON WOLFGANG SIEBERMANN, PROP.,
the sign said.
CATTLE, MAGUEY, HENEQUEN, COTTON.
He ventured under the tall crosspiece over the road, upon which was nailed a cow skull. Horseshoes were arrayed down the vertical poles. Tomás had heard Don Miguel mention the Siebermanns—Don Wolf was known behind his back as El Alemán.

Tomás saw a group of vaqueros in the distance, gathered in a blinding patch of bare ground surrounded by dispirited horses.

He rode to them.

They turned and regarded him.

Ten men. Six of them held shovels. Between them, a mound of fresh dirt, and beside it, a second mound next to a deep hole.

“Buenos días,” Tomás called. “I am Tomás Urrea, from the hacienda de Cabora.”

The men looked at him and rested their arms on their shovels.

“Don Tomás,” one of them said, and nodded.

Tomás thought them oddly surly.

“I was tracking renegade Yaquis,” Tomás said.

They all looked at each other.

“Yaquis?” the leader said. “That’s very bad business.”

“They burned my ranch,” Tomás said. “You might warn Don Wolf to be careful.”

“Thank you for the warning, señor.”

They stared.

“We haven’t seen any Yaquis, though.”

Tomás looked in the hole.

“Anything else?” the foreman said.

“No . . . no.” Tomás squinted. Something moved in the hole. “Gracias. I will be on my way.”

“Good day,” the man replied.

The diggers took up their shovels again and bent to their tasks.

“May I ask what this project might be?” asked Tomás.

“Don Tomás,” said the foreman. “We have been digging since dawn.” He wiped his brow. “You’re a patrón. You know how it is. If the patrón orders it, we all obey and don’t ask questions.”

“Commendable attitude,” Tomás noted. “And what was your order, if you don’t mind my asking?”

The foreman dropped his shovel and went to his horse. He took a canteen from its saddle and took a sip of hot water.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a labor issue. These never cease.”

“Ya lo sé.” Tomás nodded. “No end to labor issues!”

“Sí, señor. Well, you see . . .” He wiped his mouth, took another sip, sighed, corked his canteen. “Don Wolf is strict, as one must be with these people. They are shiftless and untrustworthy. If your grip loosens, there is nothing but trouble.”

“That’s right,” added one of the diggers. He threw in a shovel-load of sand: a great puff of dust rose out of the hole.

“Two workers fell in love,” the foreman continued. He shrugged. “They rut like animals, these peones. But Don Wolf is caring for the herds—cows and horses and his workers, too. So when it’s time to wed, Don Wolf is looking out for the healthiest pairings, you see. He has an infallible eye for selecting mates.”

“Breeding!” the digger called.

Dirt fell in the hole.

“These two were denied permission to marry. But, ni modo, señor. They got married anyway.”

Tomás felt cold slide down his spine.

The foreman gestured toward the far mound.

“That’s her in there.”

“Don Wolf,” the digger said, “wanted him to see her buried first.”

“Before we buried him.”

Tomás saw it then: one foot kicking weakly as the dirt fell into the hole.

“You buried them alive?” he said.

The men all stopped working and looked up at him blandly.

“Sí, señor.”

“She went in first. He fought like a dog,” the foreman said. “But we were too many for him. It took a long time. By the time she was covered, he had collapsed. It was easier to get him in the hole once she was buried.”

Tomás said, “Might I buy out this man’s contract?”

“You want to save him?”

“I have money. I can pay.”

The foreman shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Besides,” said the digger, looking into the hole. “He’s stopped kicking. I think he’s dead.”

“You see?” said the foreman. “Too late, señor.”

Tomás turned his back on them and rode slowly toward the gate.

“True love!” called the digger. “They’re together forever now!”

The shovels made their silvery sounds as they let slip their pounds of gravel into the lonesome grave.

Tomás put his hands on his rifle, then thought better of it and took the reins in his fists and spurred his stallion and rode as fast as he could down the pale road and toward the wicked Yaqui hills.