The Hummingbird's Daughter (40 page)

She straightened a lame man’s arm.

Unless they fed fluids to her, she would not remember to take in water or juice. She still had not eaten solid food.

“You do not believe in God,” she told her father. “Then you do not believe in love.”

“Love!” he shouted. “What then of death? What of hunger, disease? What of your beloved Yaquis being slaughtered in the hills!”

“Love is hard, not soft,” she said.

She wandered into the vaqueros’ bunkhouse and laid her hands on a man who had sores on his legs. He sighed.

She told Gabriela: “The Virgin is as tall as I am. She warned me that love caused more pain than war.”

That day, Gaby noticed the smell of roses coming from Teresita. She took her to her room, filled the bathing tub, and washed her. After she had toweled Teresita off, the smell was stronger than before.

“The Virgin,” she said, “still laughs about the ladder.”

But no one understood her; there was no one left who knew the story.

Forty-four

IT WAS LIKE A SUNRISE. She awoke one day and turned her head and looked in the corner of her room. There, her workbench held jars and leather pouches. Above, from the beams, hung her old dried herbs. And, as if it were any other morning, she tested herself.

Centaurea: boiled into a tonic to break fevers.

Jojoba: eases inflammation.

Verbena: sedates patients, stops blood from spilling.

Adormida: halts spasms.

Ruda: the uncivil little cousin that insults tapeworms out of the gut.

She smiled, enjoying the test. Early mornings were always hers alone. She lay there and worked her memory.

Estramío: the “Herb of Satan.” Terrible odor, oval fruit, breaks into ten capsules. Ten ounces of leaves can make a tea strong enough to kill the largest man. Cured in the sun, rolled into cigarettes, these same leaves ease asthma, eye pains, epilepsy, and consumption.

She could smell herself, but it was a strange odor. It was . . . roses! How odd. She never wore perfumes.

She sniffed her armpits: rose scent. How sweet. The house girls, maybe even Gaby herself, had washed her. They must have put some rose cream on her. Or perhaps they daubed her with rose cologne from Gaby’s bedroom. But when?

She sat up, leaned forward over her knees to wait out a sudden attack of dizziness. When it passed, she stood and walked to the pitcher on the washstand in the corner. She poured water into the blue-edged bowl, tied her hair back, and washed her teeth. Then she washed her face. Goose bumps rose on her flesh.

She stepped to her closed window shutters and grabbed the handles, made hot as the sun burned into their outer surfaces. It was a small ritual she had, a small way to hold back the day—keeping her eyes shut and waiting before flinging the shutters wide. And she did it now, waiting one extra beat.

She was already throwing the shutters to the window open when she sensed it, and it was too late, and the full blast of sun hit her eyelids.

Her eyelids rose slowly, and she gasped. Before her, the land was full of bodies.

Below her, people milled on the ground of Cabora, and the mass of bodies extended from the front-porch gates to the far bee pastures. Faces turned to her. All movement stopped. Fingers rose to point her out. Pilgrims knelt. Old ones lay on pallets in the dirt. Children ran and shrieked. Soldiers sat their cavalry mounts. The clatter of cooking stilled. It became so quiet she could not believe she had not heard the noise before.

“There she is!” someone shouted.

“There! In the window!”

A woman cried, “Teresita!”

And another, “Heal me!”

And a third, “Santa Teresa!”

She flung herself back from the window and pressed herself to the wall, the scent of roses billowing up out of her nightgown. She suddenly knew, to her horror, that her own flesh was exuding the smell. Her own sweat had turned somehow to rose water. And Huila was dead! It was coming back. It was there, behind her eyes, starting to form.

Huila was dead.

And she herself was dead.

Now alive.

Dizziness took her again. She braced her hands on the hot wall.

She remembered the Mother’s voice, before they sent her back, saying, “This gift we give, you must take back to the children. You may never profit from it, but give it freely.”

And she had cried, “Don’t make me go!”

“Your work is not done.”

“Let me stay with you!”

“You must go back.”

And she fell into her hot heavy stinking body. Not dreaming, returning. The lilt of wings in her veins melted back into meat and the slowness of blood. Her fingers slipped down her own fingers, as if they were empty gloves. She saw the blows that felled her. She saw the box and the cold face of Huila.

“No,” she said.

And the vision expanded. She saw herself, inert and leaking a sweet pink scent. And the house girls bathed her in the tin tub, and the water came off her smelling too of roses. Everything she touched smelled like a fresh bloom. And the girls, after she was back in her bed, took the rose bathwater and put it in bottles and sold it to the pilgrims. And now the pilgrims smelled her. They drank her dirty water, blessed themselves on their foreheads with her smell. Hundreds of strangers passed her odor among themselves and used it to make signs of the cross as the little bottles went from hand to hand.

“I did not ask for this,” she whispered. “Please do not do this to me.”

But she knew it was already done.

She pushed away from the wall and looked back out the window.

“Teresa!” a crooked man shouted. “Help me! Have pity!”

And she did have pity. Perhaps pity was all she had.

“I will come to you,” she said. “I have brought you a gift.”

The pilgrims who sipped her essence from their little bottles were moved in strange unwelcome ways, tasting her though they’d never seen her. Hoping they might be blessed while thinking of the naked flesh the water had touched, while rolling her dirt and perfume on their tongues. Those who had smelled her, tasted her, poured her water over themselves, felt they owned her. She was now their lover, their saint, their mother, their friend. It was already too late to return to her old life.

And these pilgrims had continued to pour into Cabora, the thieves, the gypsies, the curious, the insane. Revolutionaries and spies circled the paddocks. Apaches lurked in the arroyo. Prostitutes came to be absolved and start life anew, or to open their legs in the barns and the bunkhouse and the shacks. Yaquis scattered rose petals saved from their Easter ceremonies. Highway bandits mingled among the believers and the fanatics, come at first to steal from the pilgrims, some of them converting and throwing their guns into the arroyo, where the Apaches promptly collected them. Drunks slept in the shade of the kitchen. They sniffed the air for the scent of roses. They fought with fists and knives out among the cattle. They stabbed a bull to death and left it to rot. Some preparatory students from Alamos drank their first mezcal and stoned a burro to death for fun. The cottonwood tree under which Aguirre had once slept was somehow knocked down, and once down, it was hacked with machetes and hatchets into firewood, its branches stripped to build ramadas in the dirt. The chickens that had slept on Aguirre’s bed frame were slaughtered and eaten. The fence around the corn milpa fell. Horses, children, drunk old men trampled the maize plants. The hungry stripped ears of corn off the stalks and boiled them in fires fueled by the dead cottonwood and tumbled fence posts. Huila’s extensive herb garden withered under a constant spray of urine from the wanderers. Her cilantro was gone in two days, sprinkled into salsa and over fetid beans to rescue their flavor. Her sage was not used for smudging or praise, but smeared on goat meat, stolen chickens, lizard meat.

“Don’t worry,” Teresita called to them. “I am coming to you now.”

She wrapped her rebozo around her head, to respect the sun as Huila had taught her years before.

“Where is Lauro Aguirre?” Teresita asked, eating her third plate of eggs and nopal cactus.

She gulped black coffee, orange juice, tamarind juice. She had eaten yellow cheese and mango, papaya, and guayaba paste. She ripped tortillas apart and devoured the eggs with them.

“This is delicious!” she cried. “I could eat all day!”

Tomás stood away from the table, his hand on the butt of his pistol, watching her. He had forgotten to comb his hair. The vaqueros had awakened him with a report of pilgrims from Chihuahua killing a draft horse and butchering it beyond the eastern gates. Gaby sat at the end of the table and stared.

“Aguirre,” he said, “is in Texas.”

“Doing what, Father?”

“Fomenting revolution, no doubt,” said Tomás.

Teresita scooped up a wad of beans and stuffed it in her mouth. She patted her lips with her napkin. Licked her fingers.

“How so?” she said.

“Aguirre has started a newspaper,” Tomás said. “He publishes political stories.”

“Politics,” she cried.

Tomás glanced at Gabriela.

“Yes,” he said.

“I love politics, Father,” Teresita exclaimed. “I will write for Uncle Lauro.”

“But,” he sputtered, “what do you know of politics?”

“God gave this land to these people,” she replied. “Other people want this land and are stealing it.”

She drained her coffee cup and put it in the middle of her empty plate.

“Politics,” she said.

The pilgrims destroyed the little plazuela. Don Teófano could not keep them from kicking over the painted stones, from stealing the benches, from breaking apart the gazebo for firewood. They overran and crushed the small gardens in the cracked wheel rings. The lowest branches of the whitewashed alamos trees were stripped in three days and burned. Within a week, the entire space was full of tents and lean-tos.

Segundo and his men discovered two government snipers in the cottonwood grove where Teresita had been attacked by Millán. They roped the men, confiscated their Hawken rifles, and dragged them to the main house, where Segundo and Tomás sat in judgment over them in a hasty trial held in the kitchen. Tomás voted to allow the men to go free.

“Tell your masters,” he said, “that we spared you.”

“We won’t be so easy on the next sons of whores that come around here,” Segundo added.

They rode the two halfway to Alamos, then tossed them off their horses and cut them free.

“Don’t come back,” Segundo warned.

That day, Tomás ordered the building of a small chapel beside the main house. He couldn’t have Teresita wandering the ranch without protection, and she didn’t want guards, and she would not stop her morning prayers or whatever the hell it was she did in Huila’s damned old cottonwood grove. He ordered cases of brandy and tequila. He smoked. He screamed at the builders to hurry, hurry, get the no-good church finished. Now.

And the word spread, no matter what fences Tomás mended, what walls he ordered built, what chapels he grew out of the cracked earth. They walked from the shores of the sea. They rode the new rail lines from Arizona to Guaymas, then rented wagons and came east. They filtered down from the high peaks and the darkened canyons of the sierra. They ate cactus, snake meat, crows. They ate dogs and stale bread and they ate nothing. They carried sacred cornmeal, or they carried sacred pollen, or they carried sacred tobacco, or they carried rosaries and Bibles, holy water, rattles, deer skulls, medicine bundles. They bore weapons and they came naked. They carried their dying and their dead, pulled travois with withered old women thrusting their bone-knob knees at the sky. They dragged sacks with bloated infants caught in the burlap like wounded seals. They bound their green stinking limbs in banana leaves, in foul bandages, in hemp ropes, tied their crushed arms to their sides, made slings of old clothing and aprons. They bound their split feet together and hobbled. They packed herbs in dank eyeholes where they had been shot or stabbed, where wire had sliced their eyeballs and infection and worms had destroyed their sight. Their brown and red gums dripped blood when they spoke her name. They left blood and bandages, pus and teeth, abandoned dead and feces all along the trails and roads that led to Cabora, snaky lines in the dirt, where a thousand feet hurried and crept, marching tirelessly to be near Teresita. Soldiers bivouacked near the ranch abandoned their posts and hid among the pilgrims.