The Hummingbird's Daughter (4 page)

“You will translate,” Tomás told Aguirre, who was trying to chew through a sheet of jujube.

“Claro que sí,” Aguirre replied as Cayetana’s siren call of agony rose and fell, making the ears of the horses swivel. Far in the distance, the carefully wrapped bride of Swayfeta raised one hand and waved.

Huila vigorously rubbed her hands together to make her palms hot. You had to have hot hands in this line of work if you were going to do any good.

Cayetana was lying there naked, her belly run all over with red marks like dead rivers in a desert. Huila had seen two thousand like Cayetana. She put her hot hands on the girl’s belly, and Cayetana gasped. Huila rubbed.

“There,” she said. “Does that feel good?”

Cayetana could only grunt.

Huila nodded.

“Calma,” she said. “No te apures.” You had to talk to them as if they were skittish horses. “No problems,” Huila assured her. “No worries at all.”

“My sister,” Cayetana gasped, “calls me a puta.”

“A puta!”

“She says I’m a whore.”

“Hmm.” Huila reached behind her and took a soggy mass of cool wet leaves and pressed it into Cayetana’s opening. “Too bad you aren’t. You’d have some money. A better house to live in than this!”

“Then I’m not a puta?”

“Do you believe you are a puta?”

“No.”

“Then you are not a puta. Push.”

“Ay!”

“Push!”

“Ay, ay!”

“Rest.”

“But Huila —”

“Rest now.”

“Huila—I have been bad.”

Huila snorted.

“Who hasn’t?”

“The priest said I was a sinner.”

“So is he. Now rest.”

These girls, when the pain started, how they babbled! Huila preferred the old women of twenty-nine or thirty, those pushing out their sixth and seventh babies. They were mostly quiet. Pain was no discovery to them. These little girls, they thought they were the first to ever feel a twinge! It made them go insane. Ay Dios. Huila was getting old and tired of all of it.

They heard uproar outside, male voices laughing, singing. The wheels of the wagon going by. Cayetana craned up.

“Just men,” said Huila. She patted Cayetana back down. “Just those damned men. Pay them no mind.” She heated her hands again, and moved them in circles upon the child’s belly. “One day,” she said, “the world will be ruled by women, and things will be different.”

This comment shocked the two observers more than the birth itself.

“Forgive me!” Cayetana wailed.

“For what?”

“For my sins.”

“I’m no priest. Go to confession for that. Now let’s have a baby.”

“Huila!”

Huila put her hands beneath Cayetana, and thought for the two-thousandth time that it was like catching a fresh egg coming from a hen.

“Your child,” she said, “is here.”

And in a moment that seemed like forever and no time at all, Teresita came falling into the world. She did not cry. As Huila wiped her face, she looked, as she always must, very closely. She had seen few signs of late, and she didn’t expect a sign here in this poor shack with this poor little Hummingbird. Yet the infant had a red triangle on her forehead. Red triangles, Huila knew, were reserved for the powerful ones. She herself had been so marked.

Teresita opened her eyes and stared at the old woman.

“Hello,” said Huila. “Go to your mother.”

She laid cloths soaked in herbs between the young mother’s legs. The cloths shaded pink and Huila pulled them away and put a new pad in their place. She had manzanita tea to clean out Cayetana’s birth canal. She had a flask of cotton-root tincture to slow the bleeding. Vervain would open the black nipples. And now, as the baby’s mouth sought her mother’s breast, Huila wiped the new mother with a soothing yerba mansa.

Huila fished a banana out of her mochila and peeled it, sitting in the dirt. “Ah,” she said, “a banana.” She took a huge bite and chewed it happily. Later, she would offer up thanksgiving prayers to God and to her patron saints. But right now, she needed her breakfast.

“Are you happy, child?” Huila asked.

The two girls had closed in on Cayetana, and were fussing over the infant.

“Happy?” said Cayetana. She had never thought of the word as it related to her. Happy? What would happiness feel like?

“I think so,” she replied, finally. “I think I am . . . happy.”

Huila wondered if Tomás had remembered to have chocolates shipped to the ranch. Cómo me encantan los pinches chocolates! she thought. When women ran the world, the palaces would be made of chocolate!

She said nothing of the red triangle.

Four

TIME! AY, DIOS. Cayetana kept asking herself where the time went. This year, that year, almost two years gone. Now she couldn’t even remember giving birth, though she did remember deciding to never do it again. She was careful to take the dark potions Huila brewed from roots that served to keep her womb hollow.

At sixteen years old, she was old enough to be married and to be facing the appalling ancientness of her twenties. And yet her own fate seemed almost secondary. The old ones warned that the new century was coming, and with it, the end of the entire world. 1900! Cayetana could not imagine such a frightening date—all those empty zeros. Lutheran missionaries had said Jesus Himself was riding out of Heaven on a fiery horse, and, apparently, all the dead would leap out of the ground and kill everybody. A wandering Lipan held a short council with the People and told them that the end would be different: the white men would all die and the dead Indios and the buffalo would return. He had given Huila three buffalo teeth and promised that these awesome beasts would be back. The People had never heard of buffalo. “We didn’t know they’d left,” noted Don Teófano.

“What of the mestizos, like us?” asked Don Nacho Gómez-Palacio. The Lipan had pondered it and said, “Half of you will probably die.” The question of the day, after that, was: will half of all of us die, or will half of each of us die? The men were comforted by the thought of their bottom halves living.

Cayetana didn’t think she would live long enough to see the century turn—how long was it? She counted on her fingers, lost count, said, “It’s a long time.” Her daughter, crawling on her dirt floor, heard her voice and said her favorite word: “Cat!”

“Be quiet,” Cayetana said.

“Cat!”

The child spoke early, and when she did speak, it was often that word. She called Cayetana a cat, she called pigs cats and trees cats, and the mockingbird was also a cat.

“Cat! Cat!” the baby shouted.

At four months, she had wanted to explore, but could only manage to crawl backward. With a deep red face, the triangle on her forehead turning a ruddy carmine with her exertions, she would roll onto her belly and back out of the ramada and find herself outside, and she would start to wail. Cayetana could not help herself. This was funny. She had finally found something to laugh about.

But the pissing, the caca—first black, then green, then yellow—and the vomit. Por Dios! Fúchi! The child sucked at her teat for long slurpy gulping sessions, then turned her head and puked burning hot whey all over Cayetana’s front. She did not appreciate that. And the nursing! Ay, ay, ay! Qué barbaridad! Her nipples were chafed, cracked. Her hardened breasts were constantly aching. And the blasted child popped out little teeth almost immediately, and she bit Cayetana hard. And the disgrace of the milk, sometimes running down her front in two long stains before she even noticed it, everybody, she was sure, looking at her and snickering. The baby, the baby, the baby—it was always the baby. Uy, la niña! She’s so cute. She’s so strong. Look how she stares in my face! Look at her little red triangle on her little head! Not a word to Semalú—not a good morning, a how are you, a how are you feeling.

Cayetana peeked out the blanket door and looked at the rancho. The corn and maguey were green as far as she could see. The distant cotton and squash and bean fields were emerald, egrets and ibis walked among the rows like little blots of snow. Of course, she had never seen snow, but she had heard someone mention it, so she made a point of repeating the word often so she would seem wise and knowledgeable.

How she wished she could be out there picking some chiles and feeling the sting of the juices making her hands swell. The nightmare of the sun and the burning in your eyes were not as bad as the slavery of motherhood. She looked back at her daughter and relented. The child was lying there kicking happily, holding a ball of cloth and babbling at it.

Sometimes, a feeling came over her, a feeling like wanting to weep, but not for sadness. This happened when she nursed, after she winced from the pain and the child closed her eyes and made small fists and suckled. But like happiness, love was a thing Cayetana guessed at.

She had named the baby Rebecca. Names, everyone agreed, were important—look at Segundo. Like prayers, Cayetana imagined names built spirit ladders that led to the heavenly realms, that with enough names, you could simply rise, like Segundo, to a position of power. She made an excellent long name for her daughter, but since she had not yet baptized her, and because she couldn’t write, she had to repeat the name to herself to keep it straight.

Niña García Nona María Rebecca Chávez.

“Afuera?” said the child. “Sí?”

“You are not going outside.”

“Afuera? Afuera!”

“Quiet.”

“Cat?”

“No,” Cayetana said.

To her horror, her daughter’s hair was showing light streaks—almost blond.

Cayetana had tried, at first, to pluck all the light hairs, but they spread, a weed, an incrimination, a combination of her mother’s obsidian curls and the golden and auburn straight hair of Tomás. Cayetana could not imagine what might happen to her if Tomás took note of this poor bastard girl. Even worse, what if Doña Loreto, his elegant wife, noticed?

Chela, also known as the Little Cactus Fruit, La Tunita, was hanging wet clothes on the bushes in the sun.

“Tunita,” Cayetana called.

“Qué hubo, Semalú?” Tunita said. She had three girls of her own.

“I’ll take down your laundry for you if you’ll watch the child,” Cayetana said.

Tunita wiped sweat from her brow with the back of one wrist and said, “All right.” She sent her girls running up to Cayetana’s hut, and they pushed past Cayetana like little geese, squealing.

“Gracias,” Cayetana called as she stepped down the drybank and crossed the creek. She crept up on a big apricot tree outside the corrals and watched Tomás and the vaqueros work a pinto in the ring. She often spied on the men of the ranch, watching them talk and smoke and laugh. She crouched in the dusty berry bushes and pushed away from her face a drooping branch with nasty little rocky apricots, dangling like earrings.

Segundo came forth, leading an old man with no hat.

“Jefe,” he called.

Tomás sat on the top rail and laughed as the pinto bucked off another vaquero. His kind of horse.

Loreto had given Tomás a smart pair of tight black trousers with silver conchas arrayed down the outsides of his legs. He wore a short leather vest and white shirt, his black boots with silver and gold spurs, and a big Montana-style gringo cowboy hat he’d bought off a buckaroo riding through the country with a posse in a futile hunt for the horse-thieving bandit Heraclio Bernal, the Sinaloan Thunderbolt.

“I look too good,” he told Segundo, “to mount a hardheaded horse today.”

“Boss, I have somebody here.”

Tomás glanced at the old man. He was in sorry shape. His peasant’s pants were tattered, his lips sunburned and peeling. The back of his shirt was black.

“This cristiano has seen better days,” Tomás noted.

He hopped down from the rail and stepped forward. The reek from the old man pushed him back.

“Tell him your story,” Segundo said.

“Ay señores,” said the old man, so used to begging for mercy from powerful hacienda bosses that he wrung his hat in his hands before him even though there was no hat. “Mine is a tale of woe.” His head shook, and his eyes looked half-crazy to the vaqueros. Cayetana settled in comfortably. A story!

Tomás offered him a small, obligatory smile.

“And?”

He had come walking from across the Sonoran border. He had lived in his ranchería near the Yaqui River since he was born there, sixty-six years before. Military men appeared one day with a deed from the government that his land had been sold to a gringo investor who intended to run sheep on the land and harvest peaches irrigated with Yaqui River water. When the old man had resisted, he had been tied to a fence and horsewhipped. He and his wife had been sent forth on foot, and their ranchería was now the home of an Irishman from Chicago.

Tomás and Segundo looked at each other.

“You walked here from Sonora?”

“Ehui.”

“Ehui?” said Segundo.

“It means yes,” Tomás said. “In their tongue.”

“Indians.” Segundo spit.

“How many days?”

“Many.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Not for days.”

Tomás put his hands on his hips.

“And your wife, old man?”

“Dead, señor. I left her beside the road three . . . no, four days ago.”

Tomás whistled. He took off his hat and put it on the old man’s head. It sank past the man’s ears.

He said, “I am sorry.”

Tomás gripped the old man’s arm—it felt like a stick with some flan pudding flung over it.

“Can you help me?” the old man asked.

“Of course, of course. You are welcome here.”

“My wounds, sir . . .”

Tomás turned him, looked at his blackened shirt.

“Let’s see,” he said.

He and Segundo pulled the shirt away from the welts left by the whip, and the flesh made a soft ripping sound, and clouds of hideous stench escaped, and cascades of fat white worms fell out of his shirt.

Segundo skipped away.

Tomás said, “Jesus Christ!”

The old man sank to his knees, as if the shirt and the worms were the only things keeping his wound sealed, and indeed, blood began to drip off his back, falling on the ground behind him as he knelt.

“Boys,” said Tomás, “get this pilgrim to Huila right now.”

“He’s going to die,” said Segundo.

“If he dies—but you’re not going to die, are you, my friend, you are too strong to die, you’ve come too far to die, cabrón!—but if he dies, bury him well and . . . bury him with my hat!”

This was a gesture that would be of more interest in the bunkhouse and the workers’ village than the pestilence of worms raining from the old man’s back.

Two of the buckaroos brought a wagon and loaded him on it muttering, “Easy,” and, “There you go, viejo.” The wagon headed for the house, and the old man weakly waved his hat and cried, “Gracias! Gracias!”

“I’d like to find that Irishman,” Segundo noted.

“You just want to whip a gringo,” said Tomás.

“That’s true,” said Segundo.

Tomás’s head was tingling. His bride, Loreto, in league with the house girls, had assured him that if he put lemon juice in his hair, it would turn even blonder in the sun. But so far, all he had was an irritated scalp and the tangy scent of a salad.

“Is my hair more blond yet?” he asked.

“Not quite,” said Segundo.

“Don’t be negative.”

Now, a rider came from the west. He wore a straw hat that was almost conical, and he had a sad old shotgun tied across his back with twine. Rope sandals.

“Now what!” Tomás cried.

Cayetana, her movements making shushing noises in her bush like the breeze, shifted to see the next amazement.

“That rider is on a mule,” Segundo said.

A straw hat and a mule: this was a guaranteed laugh getter for the vaqueros.

“Don Tomás Urrea!” the man called.

Tomás stepped forward.

“At your service, caballero,” he said.

The boys giggled. Horseman. Haw! Muleman, maybe. Tomás cast a surreptitious glance back at them to silence them.

“I bring a message from your uncle, Don Miguel Urrea.”

“Yes?”

“The Rurales approach!”

“Rurales!”

“Mounted Mexican rural police, sir!”

“Will wonders never cease.”

The rider nodded.

“You’re not from here,” Tomás said. “I hear an accent.”

“I am from the land near Pátzcuaro,” the man replied.

“Which town?”

“Parangarícutirimícuaro, sir.”

All the giggling cowpokes fell silent and stared.

“What did you say?”

“Parangarícutirimícuaro,” the rider replied.

This won a round of applause from the assembled men.

As the rider and his mule headed back toward Ocoroni, Tomás took up his favorite topic. He always had a favorite topic. These days, he was fascinated by bees.

“These Mormons,” he told Segundo, “in the land of Ootah.”

Christ, thought Segundo, not the bees again.

They climbed back on the fence. The vaqueros recommenced their torment of the spirited pinto pony. It was as if the last two apparitions had never materialized at all.

“Yes,” Tomás said, “bees.”

Nobody gave a shit about bees.

“They have tamed bees.”

“Right.”

“Tamed bees, docile as cows. They provide honey, you see, and wax. They are tame. They probably come when the Mormons whistle.”

“Such miracles,” Segundo offered.

Presently, two riders came down the road. Ocoroni, Tomás mused, must be the crossroads of the world.

“Ah! Los Rurales, at last!” said Tomás.

They were a sight, these two. They came forward on huge sorrel mounts, their fancy saddles flashing silver in the sun. They wore full charro outfits—tight tan pants, tight tan jackets, red bandanas, and vast Mexican sombreros worked with silver thread.

“What are these pendejos going to do, sing us a serenade?” Tomás said.

They wore crossed gunbelts across their chests, and they had Winchesters in their scabbards. Segundo thought their spurs were the biggest he’d ever seen.

“Greetings,” Tomás called out.

They reined and stared down at the patrón.

“We are Rurales,” one of them said. “I am Gómez, and this is Machado.”

Tomás nodded.

“So you are the mighty Rurales,” he said. “Lieutenant Enríquez of the cavalry told us you would be coming one day. It has been two years, my friends!”

“He’s Captain Enríquez now,” said Gómez. Machado just sat on his horse and said nothing. “It is better not to see us,” Gómez boasted. Machado smirked.

“Good for Enríquez,” said Tomás. “Would you care to dismount? Have some water, or some tequila? A bite to eat.”

Gómez shook his vast sombrero.

“We do not drink on duty,” he intoned. “Nor do Rurales fraternize.”

Fraternize, Tomás thought. He doesn’t even know what that word means.