The Hummingbird's Daughter (30 page)

His face was a shade of red they had never seen.

Gabriela herself, humiliated and afraid, faded back into the house and hid in her room. Huila stood and muttered, “Tomás,” but he could hear nothing. He dragged the horses back and forth by their mouthpieces, seeming to want to wrestle them to the ground, bite their throats as if he were a wolf. And he raised the whip to threaten Loreto, almost struck her with it, and ordered her to be gone, gone now, and never return.

He threw the whip into the carriage and slapped the horses and watched as she sped away.

No one went near him.

As the crowd drifted off, Millán said to Buenaventura: “I thought he had no balls until today.”

Buenaventura walked away from him and headed for the rendering plant.

Millán turned around and walked backward and watched Teresita go into the house.

Thirty-three

WHERE THE OLD DESERT RIVERS struggled through the arid land, where the Gila steamed to nothing, where the Yaqui and the Mayo cut relentlessly toward Guaymas and the sea, and the old father Colorado surged toward its delta at the head of the Sea of Cortés, the desert turned green. For three years, crops wilted or sprang up, unfurled leaves or burned black and collapsed. The Yaqui lands, forever fertile and alive, swarmed with crows; ibis followed cows between the rows of green, spearing insects disturbed by the cattle’s incessant grazing. And where a Yaqui plow sliced the earth, the white birds followed the farmer and plucked mole crickets, worms, beetles from the curling dark wave of the soil.

Some of the villages did as they had always done—communal fields of corn, beans, tomatoes or chiles, melons, squash, grew near the water. These milpas fluttered deep green in the dawn light, the land beneath them aware of its duty.

The army collected Yaquis from unprotected villages and herded them toward the sea. No one knew where they went—whole families vanished overnight. The devil, children said, was a gringo.

Tomás knew the stories were true. He had ridden out, deep into the north, deep into Indian territory, past Aquihuiquichi. There, he saw a patrol of soldiers leading a walking line of Yaquis into the desert. He spied Captain Enríquez among the cavalry, and he spurred his horse toward his old friend.

“Oye!” Tomás called.

Enríquez turned in his saddle and smiled.

“Don Tomás!” he said.

The old friends shook hands.

“What is this?” Tomás asked.

“Bad business,” Enríquez said. “Bad business.”

“Where are you taking them?”

“It is better not to ask.”

Tomás watched the tired Yaquis shuffle away.

“And their land?” he asked.

Enríquez repeated: “Bad business, my friend.”

He didn’t want to talk.

Then came a man atop a mottled horse. His buckskins were dark with filth and grease and blood and sweat. He rode near them, and Tomás smelled him. His long rifle rose high before him like a lance. His hat was tattered and drooping. The filthy rider wore a necklace of finger bones. Tufts of hair bobbed in the wind all over his saddle. He nodded once at Tomás.

“Enríquez,” Tomás said. “Are those . . .”

“Scalps,” Enríquez said.

“Por Dios!”

Enríquez squeezed his friend’s arm.

“Go home,” he said. “Go home, Tomás. This is a bad business, and you don’t belong here.”

Tomás gazed into his friend’s eyes, and there he saw a parched dead landscape.

“Go home. Lock your gates.”

Enríquez turned his horse away from Tomás and fell in behind the scalp hunter.

Tomás watched them until they were melted into the land and were no more.

Huila had found another grove of cottonwoods, down the bluff and across the arroyo from the great house. Aguirre’s men had planned to dam this portion of the arroyo, but Huila had pulled up his stakes and broken his strings, and when he’d come to complain, she had awaited him with her shotgun and her tobacco pouch, and she had called him a Yoribichi and a son of a bitch. Not being a fool, Aguirre had bowed to her and moved his staking project downstream, where the water would not drown Huila’s trees.

When Teresita had first visited this place, Huila had pointed to the trumpet vines snaking up the bushes and tree trunks. “Hummingbirds love these,” she’d said. “I see them every morning. God can reach me here.”

The second time there, Teresita pulled her skirts aside and stared at her feet. All this time wearing socks and shoes had turned her feet white. They looked soft and somehow uncooked.

“Our power comes from the earth,” Huila said. “Itom Achai sends us life through the ground. Look at the plants! Why do they have roots? Do they have roots in the air?”

Teresita smiled and shook her head. She could recite Huila-speak in her sleep.

“Look at the Yoris.” Huila spit. “Shoes, boots, wagons, floors. They don’t remember the earth.”

She planted her feet wide, sagged on her knees a little.

“Stand inside the earth. Feel yourself standing inside it. Once you connect with the earth, nothing can move you. Not a hurricane, not a thousand cowboys.”

She bobbed.

Teresita thought Huila looked as if she needed to go to the bathroom.

“Go on,” said Huila.

Teresita clutched the ground with her toes, set her heels deep in the sand, then the balls of her feet, then the outside edges.

Huila had tried to teach her this most basic lesson of power before. Teresita had seen it work—Huila sometimes planted herself and dared the vaqueros to push her off her feet. Two, three at a time, laid their shoulders to her and shoved, but she could not be budged. This caused great hilarity among the children and the old people, watching the little dried-up woman withstand the assaults of strapping gunmen and wranglers.

“In the earth,” Huila said. “Say it. I am in the earth.”

“I am in the earth.”

“And the earth is in me.”

“And the earth is in me.”

They breathed. They felt their lungs fill with sky, and they let the dark clouds inside them flow out. Then they connected to the earth.

“Lift the toes, and press with the balls of your feet.”

“I feel silly.”

“Part of being a medicine woman is feeling silly.”

Teresita stood before her, digging into the ground with her feet.

“Now, push into the ground with the inside of your foot, all the way to the heel. You’ve got prongs in your heels, like a pitchfork. Two on the inside, two on the outside. Plug in the two on the inside of your heel. Push into the earth. Then you have roots, child. Do you see that?”

“Roots. In my heels.”

“Yes. Plant them. Deep in the soil. Your roots.”

Huila breathed out in a long swirl of nose whistling.

“Feel the earth, keep the integrity of the heart. Keep the spine in line. Let your heart shine. Relax, don’t strain. The white man always has to strain. Has to flex his muscles. Be soft. Be like water. Water is soft, and it is the most powerful force on earth.”

The Sonoran sun came through the tree branches and burned into Teresita’s head. Crows laughed at them in the distance. A snowy egret cut across the sky, looking for some cattle to visit.

“Let your knees bob a little. There, connect. The earth’s strength will spiral up your legs, to the inside. You’ll feel it bring your knees together. Feel it? Now, feel those outer roots on your feet. Push your heels all the way in. Now the rest of your foot. You’re standing in the earth now. Another flow of power is going up the outside of your legs. Feel it spiral. Soon, nothing will be able to overpower you.”

“I can’t be hurt?” Teresita said.

“I never said that. We’ll all be hurt, child. We will all be hurt. What I said was: they shall not overpower you.”

“I think I understand.”

“I doubt it.”

Crazy old woman.

Teresita shook her head.

“All right, I don’t understand.”

“People always want to
understand
everything,” Huila sniffed. “Do you understand how the sun works? Yet it rises every day, whether you understand it or not. Do we understand how the vine makes a grape, and the grape makes wine? No. You don’t need to
understand
any of it. What I want you to do is to remember it and believe it.”

“I will remember.”

“Do you believe?”

“I don’t know.”

“That is Faith,” Huila said. “Faith, like Grace, is a gift, you see. It’s one of those riddles nobody can
understand.
Niña—God gives you the gift of believing in God. If you cannot believe in God, then how can God punish you for your lack of Faith?”

“I don’t know.”

“Damned right, you don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

Teresita thought for a moment.

“Faith,” she finally said.

“Correct.” The old one nodded. “Believe. You might never get explanations.”

“And if I cannot believe, what then?”

“Then,” said Huila, “God sends foolish old women like me to try to help you.”

They held hands as they walked back toward the rancho.

Huila had once shown her the way the male’s bone penetrated the female’s cave. “Ugly old thing,” she’d said. “Looks like a boiled turkey neck. But it feels good inside the fold.” And now Huila knew Teresita was ready to work the births.

Huila and Manuelito had shown her all the herbs already—she knew the most basic of the plants. But Teresita knew the work was deeper, greater than brewing teas, binding with roots. Huila had insisted that she was too young for the work—until now.

Teresita knew why. Huila was tired. She needed help for the first time in her life. As Gabriela had mysteriously replaced Loreto in the main house, so did Teresita see that she herself was mysteriously taking over for Huila.

They trotted to a small cabin on the outskirts of El Potrero. The girl within screamed as if being flayed, and Teresita’s hairs rose on the back of her neck. The girl lay, with her legs up and wide, and her belly heaving and quivering. Huila rubbed her between her legs with an ointment that turned her vagina yellow. The mattress beneath her was wet and stained, and heat rose from the liquid as if they had just brewed tea between the girl’s legs. There was little hair until the baby’s head parted her and its own black pelt filled the gap. Blood.

Teresita swallowed.

“Ay Dios!” the girl cried. “It hurts! It hurts!”

She reached down and clutched the dirt with both hands.

Huila said, “You see? We always reach for our mother.”

She chanted, whispered, called the child forth. When the girl screamed, Huila slapped her hands together three times and rubbed her palms vigorously, heating her hands. She set her palms on the mother’s belly and rubbed.

“Calm, calm, child,” she cooed. “Feel my hands. Feel the warmth.”

Huila gestured for her knife.

Teresita reached in Huila’s mochila and pulled out a slender knife sharpened to a terrible cold gleam. Huila had her pull the girl’s legs far apart and, with two flicks of her bony hands, sliced the birth passage open. Blood sprayed and the baby slid forth, facedown, in a spurting of awful fluids into the old one’s hands. The baby swam, fell, climbed. Teresita didn’t know what it did—it simply was. There and writhing, red in the face, seemingly covered in wax, some pale salve from deep inside the mother’s own wetness, its tiny fists already punching at the new world. The mother crying, Teresita crying, the baby crying, and Huila whispering, “Shhh. Shhh. Quiet now. Shhh.”

Huila had Teresita press a poultice to the birth canal as she wiped the baby down.

“Look at the size of his balls!” said Huila.

She used her birth knife to slit the cord, and she tied off the end sticking out of the boy’s belly and wrapped the remainder in a white cloth. The little one was on his mother’s chest by the time the afterbirth oozed onto the ruined mattress.

The next day, they delivered twins.

Kneeling there behind Huila, Teresita learned all she needed to know of pain and wonder. Days and nights of shouting and terror, the dark awful joy when the skin ripped and the bowels released, and the meat stink of birthing came out of the girls. She pulled the pink-red envelopes out of the mothers, watched Huila slice apart the cords with her small knives, wrapped the cords into bundles and put them in small pouches for the mothers. She learned the truth about the Mystery. She learned that miracles are bloody and sometimes come with mud sticking to them. She learned that women were braver than men. Braver and stronger. She learned that she herself could one day stretch open as wide as a window, and it would not kill her.

At one point, after the cord had been tied with string and the slime wiped away with leaves and cloth, Huila nudged Teresita, and Teresita leaned forward and said her first birth prayer, whispering to the new one who still remembered the stars and the lights, “Your job is to survive.”

Connected to the earth, she understood the words. They were terrible and true.