The Hummingbird's Daughter (2 page)

Mexico. Mexico.

The pain in her belly kicked Cayetana Chávez over. She dropped her cup. She felt a cascade of fluids move down her bowels as the child awoke. Her belly!

It clenched. It jumped. It clenched.

At first, she thought it was the cherries. She had never eaten them before. If she had known they would give her a case of chorro . . .

“Ay,” she said, “Dios.”

She thought she was going to have to rush to the bushes.

They had come for her the day before. The Chávez girls were known by everybody. Although Santana Ranch was divided into two great lobes of territory—crops to the south and cattle to the north—there were only fifty workers’ households, and with the children and grandparents added up, it made for fewer than 150 workers. Everybody knew better than to bother Cayetana’s older sister, Tía. Good Christ: the People would rather move a rattlesnake out of their babies’ cribs with a stick than go to Tía’s door. So when they came from the northern end of the rancho with news that one of the Chávez sisters’ cousins had killed himself, they’d asked for La Semalú.

Ay, Dios. Cayetana was only fourteen, and she had already learned that life was basically a long series of troubles. So she had wrapped her rebozo around her head and put on her flat huaraches and begun her slow waddle through the darkness before the sun rose.

She wondered, as she walked, why the People called her Hummingbird. Was it because she was small? Well, they were
all
small. Everyone knew semalús were holy birds, carrying prayers to God. She also knew she had a bad reputation, so calling her Semalú was probably some kind of joke. They loved to make jokes. Cayetana spit: she did not think anything was funny. Especially now. Her poor cousin. He had shot himself in the head. Her mother and father were dead, shot down in an army raid in Tehueco lands. Her aunt and uncle had been hanged in a grove of mango trees by soldiers that mistook them for fleeing Yaquis near El Júpare. The men were strung up with their pants around their ankles. Both men and women hung naked as fruit. Some of the Mexicans had collected scalps. She sighed. Aside from her sister, she was alone in the world. She put her hands on her belly as she walked along the north road. It was three miles to the cattle operation. The baby kicked.

Not yet, not yet.

She didn’t mind being called a hummingbird.

Hours later, she pushed through the shaky gate of her cousin’s jacal. He was still lying on his back in the dirt. Someone had placed a bandana over his face. His huaraches were splayed. His toes were gray. The blood on the ground had turned black. He didn’t stink yet, but the big flies had been running all over him, pausing to rub their hands. A rusty pistola lay in the dirt a few inches from his hand.

The neighbors had already raided her cousin’s shack and taken all his food. Cayetana traded the pistola to a man who agreed to dig a hole. He dug it beside a maguey plant beside the fence, and they rolled the body into it. They shoved the dirt over him and then covered the grave with rocks so the dogs wouldn’t dig it up.

Inside the shack, Cayetana found a chair and a bed frame made of wood and ropes. There was a machete under the bed. A pregnant girl from distant Escuinapa was there, waiting. Cayetana didn’t know her, but she let her move in, since the girl was afraid that she would lose her infant to coyotes if she had it outside. Cayetana accepted the girl’s blessing, then swung the machete a few times. She liked the big blade. She started to walk home.

The sun was already setting. She didn’t like that. The dark frightened her. That road was also scary. It wound between black cottonwoods and gray willows. Crickets, frogs, night birds, bats, coyotes, and ranch dogs—their sounds accompanied her through the dark. When she had to pee—and since the child had sprouted inside her, she had to pee all the time—she squatted in the middle of the road and held the machete above her head, ready to kill any demon or bandit that dared leap out at her. An owl hooted in a tree behind her, and that made her hurry.

She came around a bend and saw a small campfire off to the side of the road. It was on the south side. That was a good omen—north was the direction of death. Or was it west? But south was all right.

A man stood by the fire, holding a wooden bowl. He was chewing, and he watched her approach. A horse looked over his shoulder, more interested in the bowl than in her. Her stomach growled and her mouth watered. She hadn’t eaten in a day. She should have hidden in the bushes, but he had already seen her.

“Buenas noches,” she called.

“Buenas.”

“It’s dark.”

He looked up as if noticing the darkness for the first time.

“It is,” he agreed. Then: “Don’t hit me with that machete.”

“I won’t.”

“Gracias.”

“This is for bandidos.”

“Ah!”

“Son cabrones,” she explained. “And I’ll kill the first one that tries anything.”

“Excellent,” he said.

“And ghosts.”

He put food in his mouth.

“I don’t think you can kill a ghost,” he said.

“We’ll see about that,” she said, flashing her blade.

The small fire crackled.

“What are you eating?” she asked.

“Cherries.”

“Cherries? What are cherries?”

He held one up. In the faint fire glow, it looked like a small heart full of blood.

“They come from trees,” he said.

“Son malos?” she asked. “They look wicked.”

He laughed.

“They are very wicked,” he said.

“I am going home,” she said.

“So am I.”

“Is this your horse?”

“It is, but I like to walk.”

“You must have good shoes.”

“I have good feet.”

He spit out a seed and popped another cherry in his mouth. She watched his cheeks swell as his jaw worked. Spit. Eat another cherry.

“Are they sweet?” she asked.

“Sí.”

He spit a seed.

He heard her belly growl.

“You will bring a child to light soon,” he said.

“Yes.”

“A girl.”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“A girl.”

He handed her the bowl.

“Eat,” he said.

The cherry juice in Cayetana’s mouth was dark and red, like nothing she had ever tasted.

She spit out the seed.

“I have to go now,” she said, “it is late.”

“Adios,” he said.

Cayetana replied in the mother tongue: “Lios emak weye.” God go with you. She walked into the night. Funny man. But one thing she knew from experience—all men were funny.

She’d gotten a restless night’s sleep with the bellyache she blamed on the stranger’s fruit. Now the morning brought increased tumult inside her. Cayetana thought she could make it to the row of outhouses that Tomás had built between the workers’ village and the great house where the masters slept. But the child within her had decided it was time to come forth, announcing the news about halfway to the outhouses when the pain dropped Cayetana to her knees and the strange water broke from her and fell into the dust.

Two

HUILA HATED THE WAY her knees popped when she stood.
Crack! Crack!
She sounded like a bundle of kindling.

She made the sign of the cross, fetched her apron, and took up her shotgun. Huila’s mochila of herbs and rags and knives was packed and ready, as always. She put its rope-loop handle over her left shoulder. She packed her pipe with tobacco, lit a redheaded match from one of her votive candles, and sucked in the flame. She had stolen some good rum-soaked tobacco from Don Tomás when she’d cleaned his library. He knew she stole it—on several occasions, she had smoked it right in front of him.

The masters called her María Sonora, but the People knew she was Huila, the Skinny Woman, their midwife and healer. They called the masters Yoris—all whites were Yori, the People’s greatest insult Yoribichi, or Naked White Man. Huila worked for the Big Yoribichi. She lived in a room behind the patrón’s kitchen, from which Tomás believed she directed the domestic staff, but from which the People believed she commanded the spirits.

She felt in her apron pockets for her medicine pouch. Everybody knew it was made of leather—man leather, they said, gathered from a rapist’s ball sack. The rumor was that she had collected it herself back in her village of El Júpare. When one of the pendejos working around her or her girls started to give her grief, she’d pull the awful little warty-looking blackened bag out of her apron pocket and toss it and catch it, toss it and catch it, until the man quieted down and started watching. Then she’d say, “Did you have something you wanted to say to me?”

She felt her way out of her room at the back of the kitchen, and felt her way along the edge of the big tin table where the girls chopped up the chickens, and she went out the back door. She paused for a moment to offer up a prayer to the Maker. As María Sonora, she prayed to Dios; as Huila, she prayed to Lios. Dios had doves and lambs, and Lios had deer and hummingbirds. It was all the same to Huila. She hurried around the house, heading for Cayetana’s shack.

Cayetana heard the men on horseback laughing. Their voices came through the ragged blanket that served as her front door. She was on all fours, panting like a dog. Stuff leaked down the backs of her thighs. Two village girls knelt at the door and soothed her brow, combing her hair back with their fingers, offering her sips of water.

“Does it hurt?”

“Unh.”

She was beyond small talk.

“You will be all right, Semalú.”

They moved her back onto her sleeping mat, where she poured sweat and clutched herself and moaned. The girls had never looked between anybody’s legs, and La Semalú was too gone to worry about what she was showing them. They looked into the folds of her and feared that the baby’s face would pop out and glare at them. They made the sign of the cross over their own brows, and over Cayetana’s belly.

Cayetana grunted.

One of the girls said, “I thought it would be beautiful.”

She felt it would be helpful to dribble water from the jarrito onto Cayetana’s belly. She jumped. Kicked. They patted her hands.

“Huila’s coming. Don’t worry, compañera, Huila’s coming.”

Huila could see the men now, in the scant fire of dawning, tall on their horses. Well, no: the patrón was tall. The others were squat on their mounts beside him. He was like a giraffe among burros. Fools all. The People called Tomás El Rascacielos—the Sky Scratcher. And there he was with his idiot friend Aguirre and his pinche henchman, Segundo, out by the main gate, waiting for their goods to arrive. Well, Huila didn’t mind the goods. She liked lilac soap, and she liked the new tooth powders to clean her teeth, and she liked canned coffee and peppermints. She liked a quick snort of anís in a shot glass, and she liked cotton underpants. She did not like jujubes. The Sky Scratcher loved them, bought jujube in huge colorful sheets, and cut out little plugs of it that he fed to his horses. Jujube, in Huila’s opinion, would only pull out your teeth, and if you sucked it, it turned nasty—swampy and slick as a snail on your tongue. Damn the jujube! she decided.

Huila made her way up the low drybank where Cayetana’s ramada stood, crooked and seemingly empty. If you didn’t know a cute girl lived here, you would kick it apart as a ruin, try to use its walls as firewood. A cute girl mounted and forgotten. Huila knocked the glowing coal out of her pipe and added to her thoughts: Damn the men!

She pushed the awful blanket aside and bent into the hut. She was greeted by the same smell she always breathed when the little ones came. Old cooking smoke, and sweat, and a shitty smell, and all kinds of tang in the air. Thank Lios there was no smell of rot or infection or death in the air. Midwives did their work in many ways, in their own styles, but for Huila, it always began with the nose. Huila had seen terrible things in these huts—and every time she had, she had first smelled death.

Two little monkey girls huddled beside the mother.

“You,” Huila said. “Fetch me clean water.”

The girls scrambled out of there and ran.

“Do not fear, child,” Huila said. “Huila is here. Huila brought your mother into the world, and Huila brought you into the world. Now Huila will bring your baby into the world as well.”

“I am not afraid.”

Huila dropped her mochila in the dirt. She got down on her knees.
Crack! Pop!

She said, “Yes you are.”