The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [103]
And after loving, they slept entwined. He wrapped his long arms and legs around her, his fist clenched in her wild hair, his face buried there and smelling her as he dreamed. Before dawn, they awoke making love. He was already inside her, moving slowly, and neither of them even awake. And when he awoke, he too wept.
She had only been living at the ranch for a few weeks, but it was already hers. She had won it. She saw it in his face. In his smile. In his laughter. In the grimace of delight when he was atop her. Their love was destiny. She stood tall. She was ready to face whatever horror came. For her home. For her man.
Rattling, wheels spitting wedges of rock, the black carriage skidded sideways and rocked. The two horses foamed at the mouth, their lashed sides gleaming with sweat.
“Bastard!” Loreto cried, her voice echoing all across the startled landscape, cowboys and cows, mockingbirds and horses, children and dogs astounded by this outburst. Her hair was a tangle, an explosion around her head. Her skirts were hiked up, revealing her white legs.
Huila hit the ground three times with her cane, as if applauding.
Loreto’s arm rose. The whip snapped.
“What have you done to me,” she demanded.
Tomás held his hands out before him.
“What have you done to me!”
Her finger uncurled and pointed at Gabriela.
“Is this the one?” she said.
Tomás stood tall again and said, “Mi amor —”
“Don’t you talk to me like that!” Loreto shouted. “Not in front of her!”
The cowboys were starting to laugh behind their hands. To the men, this was more amusing than shooting coyotes, or seeing a bareback rider bucked off. Millán, the former miner from Rosario, grabbed his crotch and squeezed it. “Bitch,” he said to his companions. They moved away from him. Millán made them nervous.
Tomás knew he needed to take command of the scene, or he would be no man in the eyes of his cowboys.
“I am the patrón!” he bellowed. “I do what I please!”
He gestured wildly as he declaimed. “Yo soy el que manda aquí!”
“You give commands, do you?” she answered. “Did you order this tramp into your bed?”
He yelled. And she yelled back at him, and he yelled back at her: accusations and recriminations fouled the air. He was no man; she was less than a woman. And she was no wife; he was never a true husband. If she had been a wife—then there would have been no need for Gabriela. If he had been a husband, a man of any kind whatsoever, she wouldn’t have turned away from him. They danced like this with everyone watching until the whip flew again and he caught it, wrenched it from her hands, and threw it to the ground.
The watchers were astonished.
“You,” he said. “Get off my land.”
“Tomás . . .”
“Get off my land now. Go away. Don’t ever come back.”
The People were aghast. They would tell this over and over, at supper, over their morning coffee, in the fields, in bed: the patrón ran Doña Loreto off the ranch. He banished her from Cabora. He didn’t care what the Church said. If he saw her at Cabora ever again, he would divorce her. He was macho, after all. He was todo un hombre, they said, with a certain respect he had not earned before. It would have been better, the men said, if he had struck her. The women said nothing.
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