The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [106]
Huila and Manuelito had shown her all the herbs already—she knew the most basic of the plants. But Teresita knew the work was deeper, greater than brewing teas, binding with roots. Huila had insisted that she was too young for the work—until now.
Teresita knew why. Huila was tired. She needed help for the first time in her life. As Gabriela had mysteriously replaced Loreto in the main house, so did Teresita see that she herself was mysteriously taking over for Huila.
They trotted to a small cabin on the outskirts of El Potrero. The girl within screamed as if being flayed, and Teresita’s hairs rose on the back of her neck. The girl lay, with her legs up and wide, and her belly heaving and quivering. Huila rubbed her between her legs with an ointment that turned her vagina yellow. The mattress beneath her was wet and stained, and heat rose from the liquid as if they had just brewed tea between the girl’s legs. There was little hair until the baby’s head parted her and its own black pelt filled the gap. Blood.
Teresita swallowed.
“Ay Dios!” the girl cried. “It hurts! It hurts!”
She reached down and clutched the dirt with both hands.
Huila said, “You see? We always reach for our mother.”
She chanted, whispered, called the child forth. When the girl screamed, Huila slapped her hands together three times and rubbed her palms vigorously, heating her hands. She set her palms on the mother’s belly and rubbed.
“Calm, calm, child,” she cooed. “Feel my hands. Feel the warmth.”
Huila gestured for her knife.
Teresita reached in Huila’s mochila and pulled out a slender knife sharpened to a terrible cold gleam. Huila had her pull the girl’s legs far apart and, with two flicks of her bony hands, sliced the birth passage open. Blood sprayed and the baby slid forth, facedown, in a spurting of awful fluids into the old one’s hands. The baby swam, fell, climbed. Teresita didn’t know what it did—it simply was. There and writhing, red in the face, seemingly covered in wax, some pale salve from deep inside the mother’s own wetness, its tiny fists already punching at the new world. The mother crying, Teresita crying, the baby crying, and Huila whispering, “Shhh. Shhh. Quiet now. Shhh.”
Huila had Teresita press a poultice to the birth canal as she wiped the baby down.
“Look at the size of his balls!” said Huila.
She used her birth knife to slit the cord, and she tied off the end sticking out of the boy’s belly and wrapped the remainder in a white cloth. The little one was on his mother’s chest by the time the afterbirth oozed onto the ruined mattress.
The next day, they delivered twins.
Kneeling there behind Huila, Teresita learned all she needed to know of pain and wonder. Days and nights of shouting and terror, the dark awful joy when the skin ripped and the bowels released, and the meat stink of birthing came out of the girls. She pulled the pink-red envelopes out of the mothers, watched Huila slice apart the cords with her small knives, wrapped the cords into bundles and put them in small pouches for the mothers. She learned the truth about the Mystery. She learned that miracles are bloody and sometimes come with mud sticking to them. She learned that women were braver than men. Braver and stronger. She learned that she herself could one day stretch open as wide as a window, and it would not kill her.
At one point, after the cord had been tied with string and the slime wiped away with leaves and cloth, Huila nudged Teresita, and Teresita leaned forward and said her first birth prayer, whispering to the new one who still remembered the stars and the lights, “Your job is to survive.”
Connected to the earth, she understood the words. They were terrible and true.
Huila had her own rituals, her own way of doing things. Strangely, she had become less and less interested in the workings of spirit, plants, medicine. Her body hurt, and her thoughts were quiet and melancholy. She grew less patient—she was capable of taking her cane and striking the maids when they behaved foolishly.