Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [202]
“If you don’t need me here, I’ll check on the fields.”
She didn’t want him to leave. “The runaways? Are we—”
“They’ve all been accounted for. Miguel ran into Jacobo and Yayo on the road and spooked them. The lieutenant found them cowering in a ditch. He left a couple of soldiers here for the night.”
She looked at Miguel. With soothing waters, she’d pour everything she’d learned about medicine and healing in two decades over her son’s scalded, torn, and broken skin, and through his cracked lips. She remembered how Meri had fought her, as if she didn’t want Ana to touch her. Unlike her, Miguel lay terrifyingly still even as she and Conciencia poured liquids and daubed unguents over him. She covered the worst burns on his face, ears, neck, arms, and right leg with shredded-potato poultices. With her pocketknife, she snipped the spines along the edges of the largest aloe leaves, sliced them open, and placed them facedown on his limbs until he looked like a bizarre half-man, half-plant creature.
“I’m washing your hands now,” she said. He lay immobile, hardly complaining even though she was sure he was in terrible pain, but at last he responded to her voice. She’d keep talking to him until he was healed, if she needed to. “The aloe will feel cool,” she said as she adjusted the leaves on his leg, his foot.
He moaned as if in the midst of an anxious dream. His lashes and brows had been singed to the skin. “Don’t try to open your eyes now, mi niño,” she said. “I’m covering them with this cloth to keep them moist.”
Conciencia brought a tisane with lavender and cane juice. It had been effective when Meri’s throat swelled from crying. Ana now had to insert a finger into Miguel’s mouth to separate his lips enough to dribble in the liquid drop by drop.
Conciencia hung a curtain to isolate Miguel from the other patients. Lamplight quivered along the outer reaches of the wall. Ana dropped more tisane into Miguel’s mouth and spoke to her son. If she was silent, he dropped into lifelessness. Only her voice roused him.
“Drink, hijo.” He swallowed the sweet potion. “You’re home, hijo mío. Drink the guarapo, te lo ruego, por amor a Dios.”
She wanted to keep her voice strong and confident but heard her desperation, the fear that all her skill with brews and concoctions might be useless. “Help me, Lord,” she said. “Help him, sweet Virgin. Help us, dear Jesus.”
Until earlier that night, she hadn’t spoken to God with such conviction in a long time. She couldn’t count how many sins she’d committed over her lifetime. Of one thing she was sure, though. Twenty years on Hacienda los Gemelos had whittled away her faith until she didn’t trust God.
“I’m washing your feet now,” she said to Miguel.
Just as she’d stripped her body of frills and fripperies in two decades in Puerto Rico, she’d shed religious belief in much the same way the conquistadores did, for expedience. They arrived in the New World with priests and incantations, but the history of the conquest was strewn with their atrocities, their false promises, rape, their bastards, plunder, and murder. They lost their moral center, compromised their faith in the New World. They then erected gold-encrusted cathedrals in the Old World to turn humanity’s eyes toward beauty and away from their sins.
She dropped more liquid into Miguel’s mouth. He gurgled, swallowed. She recalled her last moments with Ramón as she and Siña Damita worked on him on the cart that drove him toward his death. Ana had never forgotten his expression whenever his eyes rested on her—hatred, even through his pain, the same look as Inocente’s the last time she saw him. Ramón’s cries pierced through her like accusations. He knew that he wouldn’t survive. He’d been dead a long time, had become a ghost, El Caminante, caught in the snare of her ambition, unable to free himself.
Miguel wheezed, groaned. Ana blotted his lips, adjusted the bandages and aloe leaves. “I have not been a very good mother to you,” she said. Just as she was not a good wife to Ramón. She was glad that she was alone and no one could