The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [1]
On that October day, the fifteenth, the People had already begun readying for the Day of the Dead, only two weeks away. They were starting to prepare plates of the dead’s favorite snacks: deceased uncles, already half-forgotten, still got their favorite green tamales, which, due to the heat and the flies, would soon turn even greener. Small glasses held the dead’s preferred brands of tequila, or rum, or rompope: Tío Pancho liked beer, so a clay flagon of watery Guaymas brew fizzled itself flat before his graven image on a family altar. The ranch workers set aside candied sweet potatoes, cactus and guayaba sweets, mango jam, goat jerky, dribbly white cheeses, all food they themselves would like to eat, but they knew the restless spirits were famished, and no family could afford to assuage its own hunger and insult the dead. Jesús! Everybody knew that being dead could put you in a terrible mood.
The People were already setting out the dead’s favorite corn-husk cigarettes, and if they could not afford tobacco, they filled the cigarros with machuche, which would burn just as well and only make the smokers cough a little. Grandmother’s thimble, Grandfather’s old bullets, pictures of Father and Mother, a baby’s umbilical cord in a crocheted pouch. They saved up their centavos to buy loaves of ghost bread and sugar skulls with blue icing on their foreheads spelling out the names of the dead they wished to honor, though they could not read the skulls, and the confectioners often couldn’t read them either, an alphabet falling downstairs. Tomás Urrea, the master of the rancho, along with his hired cowboys, thought it was funny to note the grammatical atrocities committed by the candy skulls: Martía, Jorse, Octablio. The vaqueros laughed wickedly, though most of them couldn’t read, either. Still, they were not about to lead Don Tomás to think they were brutos, or worse—pendejos.
“A poem!” Tomás announced.
“Oh no,” said his best friend, Don Lauro Aguirre, the great Engineer, on one of his regular visits.
“There was a young man from Guamúchil,” Tomás recited, “whose name was Pinche Inútil!”
“And?” said Don Lauro.
“I haven’t worked it out yet.”
Tomás rode his wicked black stallion through the frosting of starlight that turned his ranch blue and pale gray, as if powdered sugar had blown off the sky and sifted over the mangos and mesquites. Most of the citizens of Sinaloa had never wandered more than 100 miles; he had traveled more than anyone else, 107 miles, an epic journey undertaken five days before, when he and his foreman, Segundo, had led a squad of armed outriders to Los Mochis, then to the Sea of Cortés beyond. All to collect Don Lauro Aguirre, arriving by ship from far Mazatlán, and with him, a shipment of goods for the ranch, which they contracted for safe delivery in a Conducta wagon train accompanied by cavalry.
In Los Mochis, Tomás had seen the legendary object called “the sea.”
“More green than blue,” he’d noted to his companions, already an expert on first sight. “The poets are wrong.”
“Pinches poets,” said Segundo, hating all versifiers and psalmists.
They had gone on to greet the Engineer at the docks. He fairly danced off the boat, so charged with delight was he to be once again in the rustic arms of his bon ami très enchanté! Under his arm, carefully wrapped in oilcloth, Aguirre clutched a leather-bound copy of Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In Aguirre’s opinion, the Scotsman had written a classic! Don Lauro had a nagging suspicion that electricity, this occult force, and magnetism, certainly a force of spirit, could be used to locate, and even affect, the human soul. In his pocket, a greater wonder was hidden: a package of Adams’s Black Jack chewing gum—the indescribable flavor of licorice! Wait until Tomás tasted that!
The ship looked to Segundo like a fat bird with gray wings floating on the water after eating