The Hummingbird's Daughter (21 page)

Twenty-two

A FEW DAYS LATER, when Segundo rattled back onto the ranch with wagons of lumber and a dozen new men on horses and mules, no one had yet heard word of Tomás. The bottom edges of the walls of the new house were already delineated by strings, and a few sun-hardened bricks were laid in. Aguirre had drawn up plans for a grand adobe house of two floors, with its porch transformed into a veranda. It was near an arroyo, where the wily Engineer was, as Segundo arrived, plotting spillways and sewage lines with a pencil and a sketchbook. Copper tubing, he was certain, was the answer!

Segundo set the new men to work—there were fences to repair, cows to attend to, holes to be dug. Tomás had requested a new stock pond be dug, and although there was no way in hell that Segundo was going to pick up a shovel, these boys from Alamos were ready to dig. Many of them were miners anyway. They were used to it.

Aguirre was summoned, and together they paced out beyond El Potrero, until they found a declivity that could handily be deepened and expanded—its natural walls would form the shores of a triangular pond. They agreed to create a berm at the south end of the dig to transform their little vale into a dam, a spillway linking it to the old stock pond. Aguirre immediately set to calculating the potential flow from the windmill. In the margins of his notebook, he spun out columns of numbers—what if he put bass, or the colorful truchas, in this pond? Would they not all delight in fresh fish every Friday?

“His head,” Segundo said to Teresita, who now followed Aguirre like one of his dogs, “is very busy.”

“D-o-n,” said Teresita, “spells ‘Don.’”

“Fíjate nomás,” he said, which was his way of saying
You don’t say.
He wandered off toward the barn. Even though the heat was already heavy, Segundo was planning to kick off his boots and fall into a mound of hay. He stopped. “Hey niña,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Find out how to spell ‘Segundo.’”

“I’ll ask.”

“Bueno,” he said. He walked away.

Teresita ran back to Aguirre.

“Engineer,” she called. “Teach me a new word.”

“What new word do you desire to know?” he said, not looking up from his interminable calculations.

“My name.”

He looked at her. Persistent little brat. Still, this seemed a reasonable enough request.

He waved her over to him. He took up a stick and squatted. “Look here,” he said. He scratched a large T in the soil. “T,” he said. She repeated it. “E.” They went on through the letters of her name.

“Te-re-sa,” she said. “It’s like a song.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Don Teresita.”

“No no no.
Doña
Teresita. Do you see?” He scratched the word into the dirt. “You are female. Not male. Doña.”

This made them both laugh, for they both knew she was anything but a fine lady of high standing.

“Don Lauro,” she said, extending her hand.

“Doña Teresita,” he replied, taking her fingers in his and bowing.

Huila was standing behind them.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Aguirre didn’t know why, but this panicked him, and he jumped back a foot.

“I —!” he said.

“He’s teaching me to read,” Teresita said. “I wrote my name.”

Huila stepped over to the scratches and looked.

“Looks like chickens came through here,” she said. She wiped the name out with her foot. “You,” she pointed at Aguirre. “You read.”

“Yes.”

“You can teach.”

“I suppose. I have never given formal lessons —”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Huila said. “You, Lauro Aguirre, give us church.”

“Madame, I am no priest!” he protested.

“You can read—read the priest book.”

She took Teresita’s hand and led her away.

Thus did the Masonic Methodist Aguirre temporarily become the priest of Cabora. The People gathered on benches and rocks and they sat cross-legged in the dirt if they lacked a seat. Aguirre read to them from the twenty-third psalm, which comforted the People, though they asked him to put it in cattle terms, since so few of them knew sheep. Aguirre, abashed by the prospect of rewriting scripture, though he did not accept the scripture as a strictly infallible historical document, gamely bellowed, “The Lord is my buckaroo!”

Don Lauro, being Don Lauro, was quickly taken with his role as minister to the People. He instigated an afternoon salon, where he could lecture them on affairs historical or philosophical. Each day at three, they gathered near his bed under the great tree and heard talks on animal magnetism, the zodiac, the political machinations of the Díaz regime. In a lecture Aguirre had entitled “The Curious Yet True Adventures of Papantzín, Sister of Moctezuma, in the Afterlife—Known to Us as Heaven—in Company of the Great Architect Himself—Called by the Catholics by the Name of Jesus Christ,” Don Lauro told of the days when the high Aztec priests had seen signs of the end of the world. There were comets in the sky and wailing spirits in the streets; indeed, he explained, the terrible Mexican ghost, La Llorona, originally frightened the Aztecs when she made her ghastly debut in their alleys. Their calendar was coming to its cyclic end—the dreaded Nemontemi, the era between eras, had begun. And messengers had come from the coast with the terrible news that great white seabirds lay on the ocean, and upon these white-winged birds were the minions of Quetzalcoatl, bearded gods returned from the land of the sunrise. Today, all understood that these birds were ships, and the gods upon them were merely Spaniards. But the fear in Tenochtitlán, Center of the One World, was great in those ancient days.

And Papantzín, sister of Moctezuma the king, lay abed, sick with fevers and weak. So weak was she that she died. And upon dying, she found herself in Heaven.

Teresita sat, as always, in the front of the crowd, chin resting on both fists as she listened.

“Papantzín later told Moctezuma what she had seen, for Papantzín did return from the dead! Oh yes, Papantzín was sent back from Heaven with a warning—a warning to the populace about the ravages of unjust rule!” Aguirre cleared his throat and went on: “Papantzín was greeted in the land of the dead by a fair man in a white robe.” The People crossed themselves. They knew a Jesus reference when they heard it. “He took her through valleys and dales, where she saw rivers and doves.” Everybody nodded. “But the Lord took her to a dark and terrible valley. And this valley was filled with bones.” They gasped. “Bones! Human bones! Skulls. And he said, ‘Behold, your people.’ For, the Lord warned Papantzín, her own people would be destroyed through their own ignorance. Their beliefs would destroy them. And Papantzín awoke in the tomb.”

They bowed their heads.

“Can you imagine? Can you envision the deisidaimonia of the Aztecs upon her reawakening?”

They said,
What did he say?

“At first, no one would come near the tomb, for fear that she was a ghost, some demon sent to harm them.”

Teresita pressed her palms to her face.

“And then?” she blurted, but heard no answer, for the People were turning and rising, and there came the sound of snorting horses and hooves, and then they were all up and running to see the patrón.

Aguirre lowered his book and said, “Well, well.”

He was relieved that his friend was back, apparently in one piece. But he was also a bit irritated that his talk was cut short. And he was alarmed to see that Tomás was followed onto the ranch by Indians.

Tomás sat astride his stallion and smiled down at them. Both he and the horse were yellow and gray with dust. Later, the People would say he was a different patrón from the one who had left. Something in him had shifted in those days riding alone.

The Indians behind him were grim and silent, and behind them, the women and children they had taken captive commenced wailing and caterwauling as the People danced and hopped up and down before them in joy. They jumped off their horses and flew through the crowds like scattered chickens, hands in the air, though nothing had happened to them, and they knew not a face in the gathering, and their shacks were now the homes of strangers. They were home, and that was all that mattered to them. They blended in and were absorbed. The vaqueros charged in from the plains and the dogs barked. Aguirre pushed through the revelers and reached up to Tomás and shook his hand.

“Welcome back,” he said.

“Looks good.” Tomás nodded, glancing around Cabora. “Nice work.”

“Claro que sí,” Aguirre acknowledged with a small nod.

He had already snapped an order: men were pulling a bed from a wagon and were assembling it near Aguirre’s, under the big cottonwood. They set a clay jarrito full of cool windmill water beside the bed, and by the time Tomás finally lay upon it in the evening’s lamplight, they would have a plate of candied yams and cactus jelly set on the small table with the water.

Tomás gazed out beyond them all, toward the Sierra. He shook his head and looked down.

“Huila,” the patrón said.

“Señor.” She nodded. “At your service.”

“And you,” he said to Teresita.

She wiggled her fingers at him.

Segundo wandered over, his horse-bowed legs making him look like a sailor on a rocking boat as he walked.

“Boss,” he said.

Tomás smiled at him.

“I’ve been out there,” he said.

“Yes, you have.” Segundo nodded. He saw it in his face. “You liked it.”

“Oh!” Tomás said.

He had intended to tell them all of his journey. Of the mad Indian who had led him into the warrior village. How the naked runner with deer antlers tied to his head trotted backward, yelling and jabbering and laughing at him. How the runner sped away and stopped and bent over, opening his ass at him and making the rudest of sounds. How the runner peed in the road, then held his hands over his belly and made exaggerated laughing gestures at Tomás. And how, when he tired of this laughter, he pantomimed crying, rubbing his eyes with his fists, then pointing at Tomás, clearly saying
Yori crybaby!

How the runner led him to the village, and how the people came forth with their weapons and yelled at the runner, and the runner pranced and skipped and made his way straight through the village and out the other side, pausing only to waggle his bottom at Tomás before dancing out of sight.

He wanted to tell them of the fighters standing in amazement when he rode into their midst, some of them running to him, striking him with their clubs, threatening him with their machetes. How his stallion had stood still in the maelstrom, had then danced in place, had moved sideways and backward, cutting perfect squares in the center of the pueblo, the warriors falling back half-afraid and half-amused at this crazy Yori and his demonic horse. How the old man, the cacique of the people, had come forward, wearing a cross, speaking Spanish; and he wanted to tell of how they had spoken of many things.

He wanted to tell them of the stars. Of the lovers in their hellish graves. Of the Apaches and their snake barbecue.

Tomás knew suddenly that he would not tell. He had always fancied himself an untamed man, and now he had discovered he was half coyote. He had finally, over the last weeks, tasted what it truly meant to be untamed. And the coyote was doomed to live within the cage of his social standing. Tomás had no way of imagining how to set himself free.

These Yaquis didn’t help. They had understood the coyote in him as soon as he dismounted his horse. They were part eagle, these men, part hummingbird and part snake. He never spoke to their women, for the Yaquis knew him for what he was, and they knew he was already in love with them, and they knew what his love would mean when the nights came and the girls walked to their homes. They liked him too much to kill him now, yet they liked their women too much to allow them to marry a Yori, even a rich one. So they had sat with him and told him of their lives. Of the destruction of their homelands, of the Yori invasions and the starvation that twisted their children and weakened their old ones, of the massacres and hangings, the tortures and assaults. Of whole villages emptied by Mexican troops, of families marched into the sea, of children pierced by tree branches and left to rot, fed to sharks, trampled by horses. Of scalps collected from lone wanderers and sold to the state for bounty. Of fear.

After he understood them, and after he had secured the release of his hostages, he decided to bring a few of them back to Cabora so they could make their case before the ranks of his People. But as for Tomás himself, he would not try to make his own case. Who would listen to him? Who among them would understand?

With a gesture, Tomás directed the Yaquis to dismount. They got down and stood, flat-footed in the dust. The old man stepped forward. Tomás slipped off his horse and stood with the old one.

The People fell silent. Teresita pushed forward, leaned against Huila’s hip, and watched. The old leader of the village looked at the girl and said, “I know you” in the old tongue. “I saw you when the old woman was flying.” She raised her eyebrows at him.

The old man cleared his throat, and said, in Spanish, “We’re sorry we burned your ranch.”

The People all looked at each other: Huila looked at Segundo, Segundo looked at Aguirre, Aguirre looked at Teresita, Teresita looked at Tomás. Then Huila looked at Don Teófano, and Teófano looked at someone else.