The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [104]
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