The Hummingbird's Daughter (39 page)

“Did you enjoy being alive?”

Huila thought about it.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then,” Teresita said, “you will enjoy your death.”

Huila smiled. Closed her eyes. “This isn’t so bad,” she said.

She gestured for Teresita to come closer. Teresita touched the edge of Huila’s bed with her knees. She took Huila’s hand in hers.

“I wish you could stay,” Teresita said. “I will miss you.”

She could feel the faint pulse of Huila’s old heart through the bones and thin leather of her hand. Huila’s blood was cool and slow, almost blue in her veins. She squeezed Teresita’s hand.

“They’ll bury you in my coffin,” Teresita said.

Huila smiled.

“I like that,” she said.

Teresita prayed. Huila must have fallen asleep, for she snored a little, mumbled in her sleep. Her dreams were full, Teresita knew, of her dead parents, her dead brothers and sister, her dead lover. All the doorways unlocking before her, all the hallways swept clean, the lamps being lit. The gate to Huila’s garden coming unlatched. The old woman jumped.

“Girl?” she said.

“Aquí estoy,” Teresita whispered.

“Do you want my shotgun?”

“No.”

“Do you want my tobacco pouch?”

“No, thank you.”

“You know where my herbs are.”

“Yes.”

“Use them.”

“I will.”

Huila sighed, long and dry.

She reached out her hand. Put three cracked hard objects in Teresita’s hand.

“What are these?”

“Buffalo teeth! From long ago!”

Huila closed her eyes.

“I am tired,” she said.

“I know.”

“May I go now?”

Teresita leaned forward and kissed the old woman on the cheek.

“Go,” she said. “Everything is all right.”

She patted Huila’s hair.

“Relax, old woman. Your work is done.”

A tear rolled down Teresita’s cheek.

“You brought goodness to this world.”

“Did I?”

“You lived with honor.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Don’t worry. Go to sleep. When you wake up, you will see deer.”

Huila’s eyelids fluttered.

“Fall asleep. I love you. Fall asleep.”

Huila stiffened. Her eyes opened once. Then she was gone.

Forty-three

ALREADY, THEY WERE COMING. You wouldn’t have noticed them at first, and you wouldn’t have noticed them at all if you didn’t know where to look. The word had already carried far across the llano and into the hills. They came in small groups to see the living dead girl. In among the workers’ shacks, you would spot a few new bodies huddled in the shadows. There would be a strange woman among the girls washing laundry. Alien children stood at the edges of the crowds, watching the house.

When Tomás rode his horse out to some business in the fields, he didn’t look down, didn’t give any hint that he was aware of the new ones on his land. But he watched carefully, while not watching, looking out of the corners of his eyes, studying motions and faces, gaits and strides, like a madman accumulating data for some fabulous new theory of the world, maniac proof of forces and plots swirling around his head, infiltrating his ranch. He didn’t want them to know he was watching them, though he could feel them watching him back. He didn’t know what they wanted, what harm they might have brought with them, what dark designs.

For all he knew, they had come to kill her, come to attempt to set some aberrant cosmic scale aright. Or they had come to marry her, to pet her, to follow her. No one knew she was insane, sitting in her room like a mannequin, staring into the infinite depths of the corner of two white walls, seeing devils and angels and babbling horrible foolishness about bones and dreams. These superstitious types, they were starving for miracles.

He could not scientifically explain Teresita’s resurrection, but he knew there was a reason for it, a
reasonable
reason. But these people, who saw the faces of Jesus Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe in burned tortillas, were a rabble frantic for something, anything, to make their shopworn world a little more special. They wanted to believe there was something more, some heaven awaiting them after their lives of idiotic toil. And they seemed to think his daughter could somehow bring them closer to this myth. He knew the price would be dear when they discovered that she was simply human, after all.

He shoved his heavy Colt revolver into his pants, and it rose across his belly at an angle, dark blue and cold, rosewood handgrip like a spurt of blood on his stomach, piratical and ready to hand. And in a scabbard, dangling at his left hipbone, a great knife with a buckhorn handle, stropped bright and sharp, close to his hand and ready.

Days had passed since they’d buried Huila. Teresita had stayed in the courtyard near the plum tree, showing no interest in the burial of the old woman. Lauro Aguirre would have been the perfect man to speak some final words over the grave, but he was in El Paso, trying to incite the Mexican revolution from the safe confines of the United States. He published broadsides and wrote incendiary tracts denouncing President Díaz, and if he had come to the funeral, he himself might have been a candidate for interment beside the old woman. So Tomás had muttered a few vaguely remembered religious platitudes, then had tossed in a rude handful of rocks and dirt. It clattered on the wood like a fist knocking on a door, and several of the People stepped back, lest Huila rise like Teresita and scold them all. But that day it was fated that the dead remain dead.

When the Urreas returned from the funeral, they found Teresita lying facedown on the flagstones. They thought she had died again, and a great wailing started to ascend, but when they hurried to her side, they found her merely asleep. Her hands were tucked under her body, and her face was turned away from the sun.

“This,” Tomás said, “I cannot bear.”

Gaby wiped his sweaty brow with a bandana.

Teresita opened her eyes.

“You are awake when you sleep,” she said. “To awaken is to slumber.”

They shook their heads, took her under the arms and lifted her. She did not resist.

“The world is cold,” she said. “Everything is ice.” She patted the stone wall. “See how it is all melting?”

“Get her out of here,” Tomás said. “I can’t hear any more of this!”

They hustled her up to her room, laid her on her bed. She rose immediately and went to her chair and sat, staring. Tomás came into the room and leaned against the wall.

“She’s gone mad,” he said.

Gabriela said nothing.

“Life is death,” Teresita announced.

They backed away from her.

“The flesh is the dream.”

“Go,” Tomás whispered.

“Father?” she said. “I am friends with God.”

They quietly closed her door and latched it so she could not roam outside and come to further harm.

Tomás sat at the breakfast table. He couldn’t eat. He sipped a glass of thick tamarind juice and spooned chunks out of a fat raft of papaya. Gabriela drank coffee and cut the top off a boiled egg in a small silver holder. He nibbled the pale fruit.

“Is she locked in her room?”

“Sí, mi amor,” Gaby replied.

“Good.”

“This can’t go on,” she said.

“No.”

“Not much longer.”

“No.”

And Teresita appeared beside him, leaning on his left shoulder.

“Father,” she said.

He jumped, spilling his juice. He watched the heavy glass float to the floor and strike, divide in six even sections and bloom, throwing the shards in all directions, the brown-orange essence of tamarind gouting in thick ropes of fluid, spattering, each spatter forming new blossoms on the floor, the entire spill a bouquet blooming within a bouquet. He could hear nothing.

“Father?” she said.

Gaby threw herself from her chair and left the kitchen as Tomás nodded, watching the juice spread between the clay tiles of the floor.

“Prepare yourself, Father,” Teresita said.

“For?” he murmured, looking at her bare feet: toes filthy, nails black with dirt.

“Riders approach.”

The cooks listened to everything, ready to report to the pilgrims what the dead girl said.

“Yes?”

He looked at her sad thin face. Black eyebrows. He thought: Gaby must teach her to pluck them before they grow together.

“Teresa,” he said, “there are no riders.”

“Riders,” she replied. “A wounded man.”

“Is this a prophecy?” he said.

“It is.”

“I see.”

He took her elbow in his hand: he could have cracked the bones like walnuts in his fist.

“How did you escape from your room?” he asked.

“I am no prisoner.”

He tried to lead her away from the table. He could not move her.

“Why don’t you rest awhile?” he said.

“Riders. Tomorrow morning,” she said. “You will not have time to eat.”

She pulled her arm from his grasp and went down the hall. He followed. She opened the front door and went to the plum tree. She lay down in its shadow and seemed to fall asleep. He moved to the garden wall and peered over it, one hand on the butt of his gun. No one was visible. The ranch looked empty, as if a plague had swept in from the llano and killed them all. The edges of the buildings already flaking, adobe coming apart in the wind, walls smoking away to powder in the endless cycle of the days.

The next morning, Tomás ordered eggs fried with beans. As soon as the platter was placed before him, the thunder of riders rumbled through the house. He threw his napkin aside and hurried down the hall as the voices rose in alarm outside the door. He pulled his revolver and followed it out the door. Two riders on panting horses circled before the gate of the courtyard until one called, “Two more coming! With the wagon!”

A Yaqui worker had been kicked in the head by a mule. The wagon came rattling, and the men pulled the convulsing worker out and laid him on the ground. He writhed and foamed and they stood about him staring at his agony. Blood dropped from the crack in his head. They shrugged, spat. What could they do? He was doomed.

Teresita came forth, unbidden.

She walked between the men, pushing them out of the way. She said nothing. She knelt and took dirt in her hands. She spit into the dirt, rubbed it in her palms, making a red mud. She bent to the man and rubbed the mud across his brow, whispered a prayer over him. His feet, then his hands stopped jerking. He rolled onto his side, clutched his head, opened his eyes. He shook his head, smiled, rose. He shook her hand.

“What did I tell you?” she said to Tomás.

She walked back into the house.

One of the riders adjourned to the cookhouse and ate some cold beans. He got drunk that night and bought a whore. He didn’t think about the miracle, nor did he mention it to his friends or his women and when asked about it later, had no memory of it. The other rider lived off the ranch, and he lay beside his wife that night and told her of the strange doings at Cabora: they had brought a man without a brain to the ranch, and Teresita had poured mud in the empty skull and he had risen and danced a jig. Fire could be seen in her eyes.

The next day, his woman spoke to others at the laundry basin. Her husband had taken the corpse of a man who had been beheaded to the grave of the dead Teresita, at Cabora. A mysterious Yaqui elder had told them to bury the man beside the body of the young witch, and three hours later, she had risen from the grave with the man in her arms—he had a new head, and it was made of red mud!

Ten women listened to this tale. From these ten, thirty retellings radiated. From these thirty, three hundred versions of the story emanated, dribbling down the grand arroyo, sliding along the banks of the Río Mayo, the Río Yaqui.

The medicine men started out for Cabora, where they hoped to see Teresita, the risen dead girl. On the road, they met a band of Lipans heading to the sierras. Among them were two boys twisted and pale with fever. Over a meeting fire in the lee of a crumbling cinder cone, the elders told the Lipans about the girl in Yaqui lands who had risen from the dead and who filled the skull of a scalped warrior with mud, thus bringing him to life and at the same time teaching him the secrets of the earth. This warrior could now speak to the deer, could understand the words of the rockslides and the sandstorms.

The Lipan leader ordered his people to follow the old men to Cabora.

Teresita did not dream of them coming toward her. She did not see the villagers and the Lipans. She did not see Don Antonio Cienfuegos steering his wagon toward her from the hills, bearing his dying wife. She did not see Pancho Arteaga, the border bandit, coming to see her about the bullet lodged in his left buttock. She did not dream of the whores, Petra and Paloma, coming from Guaymas in a cart with their pox sores, or the García family from the silver mines with their father in a travois, or the nameless mother walking out of the wasteland with her dead baby wrapped in a tatter of blanket and slumped on her shoulder.