The Hummingbird's Daughter (37 page)

The American doctor, unable to do more, packed his bags and left.

On the thirteenth day, Tomás awoke from a terrible dream of fire and shouting. He pressed his fists to his temples, then turned to Gaby. She slept in white, her thick hair pulled back and tied with red ribbon. He pulled the bow free and she opened her eyes. His eyes were wet with grief. She smiled and put her hand on his face. “It will be all right,” she said. And, “Come here, let me show you.” He rolled on top of her—her strong body held him up. They made love.

Huila awoke and felt as if she might eat.

Segundo paid three times the usual amount to a carpenter in Bayoreca. The old man had agreed to work around the clock and to deliver a coffin of oak and fragrant pine, lined in pale silver silk, in two days. Segundo rode back to the ranch and collected Buenaventura and they went to the hills.

Tomás, like Huila, thought he could finally eat something. He sat at his breakfast table and ate boiled mango with a spoon. Then he drank a cup of coffee, and ate three eggs fried with beans and chorizo. He ate tortillas. He ate white goat cheese. A slice of melon. A second and third cup of coffee with milky Mexican pralines and a slice of cactus candy. Someone brought him last week’s paper from Alamos, and he sat reading as his delightful Gabriela picked at one poached egg and some toasted bolillo. Té de canela, her favorite cinnamon tea.

One of the housekeepers approached the table shyly and stood there.

It took Tomás a moment to notice her. He glanced over his paper and said, “Yes—you may clear my plates now. Thank you.”

He went back to his paper.

She stood there.

He looked at her again.

“Sir?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Teresita, sir?”

“Yes?”

“She’s soft.”

He put down the paper.

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

“Señorita Teresita,” she repeated. “She’s gone all soft.”

“Soft.”

“All soft in her bed. All floppy.”

He jumped to his feet and ran upstairs.

The room was still murky and dark. She lay on her back, her arms now loose and falling over the edges of the bed. He was afraid to approach her.

“Teresita?” he whispered.

The room was so silent, it could have been filled with cotton.

“Hija?” he said.

He crossed to her, sat in the chair, and took her wrist. It was soft. Cold. Her hand flopped loosely at the end of her wrist.

He squeezed it, seeking a pulse, but the river of blood within her body had stilled.

He laid his head on her chest, but her heart was silent.

He went into the hall and called for the Mexican doctor, who came upstairs with his bag and knelt beside the bed and listened and prodded and held the mirror to her lips. Her mouth was turning pale blue. He tapped her eyelid with the edge of a metal tool: it remained still.

“Doctor?” said Tomás.

Gaby stood in the door with her hands over her mouth.

The doctor sighed, then lifted Teresita’s hands and crossed them over her chest. He stepped over to Tomás and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Teresita,” he said, “is dead.”

Forty

HOW QUIET IT IS.

She could have guessed that death would be quiet, but this is a stillness that feels like early morning, perhaps after a snowstorm, though she had never seen a snowstorm when she was alive.

She is sure she knows what snow is now.

“Oh! Deer!”

The deer leaps in a green land that was not there before. Flowers. She follows. The deer is gone, and water stands before her: golden fish.

Coyote drinks from the pool and looks at her with happy yellow eyes. She watches his fur ripple. He looks to his left, and she follows his gaze and beholds the Mother standing in the shade of a tree.

“Did you bring me a ladder?” she asks.

They laugh.

They embrace.

No mother has ever held her in her arms.

Trees she has never seen twirl silver, purple, golden leaves that fall and take flight as butterflies.

She sees the three old Yaquis from her dreams walking in the distance.

“They are so nosy!” says the Mother.

The walk to Itom Achai’s humble home is short.

He has a small garden. His door is open. Light pours from his windows. He steps out—he has painted a blue line down one cheek.

“Do you know me?” he asks.

“God,” she says, kneeling.

“I am.”

He puts out His hand and lifts her to her feet.

His hair is a long braid of waterfalls, honeysuckle, comets. She sees eagles in His eye. When He speaks, she hears music and laughter.

“Take this cup, Daughter,” he says in Cahita.

“You speak the mother tongue?” she asks.

“I speak in every tongue,” He says. “I am everyone’s Father.”

She smiles.

The cup He hands her has reflections of stars in it.

“Drink. You thirst.”

She drinks.

“I have a gift for you,” He says.

God brushes back her hair and hands her a rose.

Forty-one

DEATH WAS SOMETHING the People understood. It’s not that they were happy Teresita had died. It’s that they were relieved that someone, anyone, had died. Their spell of dread was broken. They could finally weep with real feeling, and while weeping, they could plan their wakes and their prayers and sew their dresses and arrange their gatherings. They could dream of the beauty of the funeral, for surely the patrón would throw a funeral to rival their best weddings. All could agree that weddings were the best entertainment on the ranch, followed by first Communions and confirmations (presided over by the somber Father Gastélum), followed by the fabulous quinceañera coming-of-age parties where fifteen-year-old girls got to dress in virginal white gowns and dance with older men who would slip them pesos and gifts. Secretly, however, funerals were far and away the favorite Cabora pastime. Shows of grief, like piropos, were an art. Secretly, in the dark corners of their huts, the People were already practicing faints, contortions, and taciturn sighs. Already—at the well, at the supply shed, at the corrals—people were saying: “I knew her best.”

Inside the main house, it was chaos. Tomás felt as if he had lost his footing, as if his home had tipped on its side, and his boots could not find purchase on the boards or the tiles. He walked from wall to wall, from doorway to doorway, steadying himself, clutching the corners to keep himself upright. His insomnia returned in these days. The bed seemed too hot, too narrow, and he would move through the gloom of the house in his white nightshirt like a ghost, move out into the front courtyard and filch plums from the tree and stare at stars and stretch out on the rough wooden benches.

Gabriela was silent in her grief, remembering the nights she had lain beside Teresita and whispered her secrets, had closed her eyes and flown. Her body now thirsted for that flight again. It was as if she had always lived in a desert, and she had tasted water once. Now, there was no way to taste that water again.

Huila sank back into silence.

Teresita’s body spent the first night in her bed, the white sheet tucked up under her chin, the shutters latched shut, with a solitary candle burning in the corner.

In the morning, the women came for the body. They collected it and carried it gently down to the kitchen. They laid it out on the big metal table.

Gabriela had already sent one of her own dresses to the seamstresses, who came first to the body, to measure it and drape it to ensure their work fit Teresita for the funeral. Then the women took Teresita’s old clothes off the body, stripping it naked. They brought tubs of warm water to the table, and they washed her body with folded cloths and ragged orange sponges. They made sure her face was clean, and they prayed as they washed the body itself, chanting holy words over it, ritually purifying it for the long journey ahead, calling on God and the saints to have mercy on her soul. When the bath was done, they pressed white towels to the body’s skin, to mop up the water. Then they covered its nakedness with undergarments and a shawl.

Gabriela came to it next, with her brushes and combs. She stroked Teresita’s hair until it glowed in the kitchen light. She used her best combs to hold the hair back from the body’s face, anchored it with hairpins, and asked one of the girls to help her make a thick braid, which they laid out beside the body.

The seamstresses returned and worked their dress onto the body, struggling somewhat with its stiffening limbs. After they were gone, Gabriela returned with face creams, powder, lip color. She made the face pale, covered the bruises. She drew in thin black lines around the eyes, painted the lips pale pink, brushed rouge onto the icy cheeks.

When it was painted, powdered, combed, and dressed, they carried the body into the parlor. Vaqueros had hauled most of the furniture out of the room, and they had set up a wooden table in the center, with a white crocheted cloth covering it. A small satin pillow was at one end, to hold up her head. Candles lit the room. In the morning, they would open the double doors to the outside, so mourners could shuffle through for the viewing. That night, the wake would begin with teams of people sitting watch over the body, praying rosaries. Tomás and Gaby would sit first watch.

Teresita’s body was set out on the table. They wrestled its hands into a prayerful clench and rested them on its chest. They wrapped the hands in a rosary, so Teresita looked as if she were praying in death. The rosary held her hands together. Gaby laid the braid over her shoulder so it rested beside her praying hands.

Teresita’s body spent the second night on the table in the parlor, in the company of murmuring mourners until three in the morning, when it was left alone and the candles were blown out.

The two best shovelers were dispatched to the small graveyard where the victims of the Yaqui raid and three vaqueros and five infants were buried. They dug a perfect hole for Teresita, making sure the edges and corners were straight as if cut with a knife. The pile of dirt beside the hole was shaped as well, its flanks pyramidal in the morning light.

Segundo’s coffin arrived after breakfast. It came on the back of a small wagon, covered in cloth to keep the dust off its shiny sides. Tomás and Segundo helped the carpenter carry the coffin into the room where the body lay on the table. Old women traded shifts watching over it, praying, lighting candles. The carpenter faltered when he saw Teresita’s white face. After he put down his end of the coffin, he crossed himself.

They pulled the cloth from the wooden box, and they admired the craftsmanship. Not a nail could be seen. The wood glowed with many layers of wax. The silk within was tacked in so it formed soft-looking puffs of material. Tomás nodded his approval, stroking the wood.

The carpenter asked for a moment to pray over the body. Tomás ushered the old women out of the room and quietly shut the doors.

Teresita’s body spent the third night in the company of friends and family. Gaby sat with her, then Fina Félix. Juliana Alvarado came late, and then Gaby’s father, Mr. Cantúa, came all the way from Guaymas. Old Teófano, Jefe de Plazuelas, muttered a rosary over her deep in the night. At three o’clock, Buenaventura stood in the corner farthest from her, and stared at her face. And in the morning, the women of the rancho returned to pray her through her last day.