The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [109]
“Child!” Huila shouted.
She grabbed Teresita. They struggled.
“Let me go!”
“What are you doing, child?”
“God told me to walk around the house!”
“What?”
“God told me to walk around the house. Now let me go.”
“Are you insane?”
“Let me go!”
She tried to pull away from the old one, but Huila was too strong for her. She pulled Teresita in off the road and wrestled her to the bench in the courtyard.
“I must go, let me go!”
“Teresa! Stop!”
“God hasn’t told me to stop yet!” Teresita shouted.
Then her eyelids fluttered closed and she became rigid. She leaned back against the wall and began to shiver, as if a cold wind had suddenly hit her.
“Tomás!” Huila shouted. “Please! Someone!”
Teresita trembled.
After ten days, Teresita reappeared in the big main doorway of Cabora’s central house. She blinked in the light of the courtyard. She had been locked in her room, sleeping, and silent when awake. They thought she had gone mad, or fallen into some wicked witchery. Gabriela and Tomás ran to greet her, but it was as if she were blind and could not see them.
“God spoke to me,” she said. “His voice is like the voice of a young man.”
Huila kissed her cheek and sent her back inside.
Teresita climbed the steps to her room. Huila looked at Tomás and Gabriela and put her finger to her lips. They crept back inside, and they whispered to the maids and the cooks to stop working and leave. They silenced the great house, and when night fell, they crept to bed early and whispered to each other, careful to keep their laughter quiet.
When Teresita awoke, they fed her great plates of food. She drank milk and tamarind juice. She ate steak and fried cactus, beans and potatoes boiled in chicken broth. Tortillas and cheese and crisp lettuce with lemon juice. Then Huila joined her and they ate pudding and cake.
Tomás said, “So! What did God tell you?”
They stared at him until he looked away.
He didn’t speak of her journey again.
Thirty-four
PERHAPS, DEEP IN HIS HEART, Tomás wanted no one to be wild if he himself could not run free. Even now, on many nights, he slept under the cottonwood, near a small fire, with his head on his saddle and nothing between his back and the hard Sonoran dirt but his thin blanket. When Gabriela called, of course, he was a fine gentleman, and he slept beside her in the soft ancient Urrea bed, smelling her delicate scents, her soapy hair. Listening to her soft little snores and sighs. He was particularly gentlemanly when he made his advances, which often began with a single flower plucked from Huila’s vines outside their house. A small flower and a little grin, and she would say either “Ay, Tomás” or “Mi Chiquito”—my little one. She rightly suspected that “Gordo” was not a name for love play.
And when he went to Alamos, a place becoming delightful to him in spite of his conversion to more feral ways, he was finer still. He squired Loreto as if he were her loyal husband. He wore his dark suits and his golden vests, drooped watch chains across his flat belly, and waxed his mustaches until they swept out and up, bold and heavy as any bandido’s. He traded his boots for gleaming flat shoes, which he always had polished on the corner near the church, and, on his sharpest days, he affected a cane with a silver nugget for a head.
There was no shortage of such ornaments, for Alamos was in the heart of silver country, and the Urrea mines were ripe with ore. Even after Tomás had sent Don Miguel his share of the profits, and after he had paid his miners, there were nuggets to spare. And gold. Santa María and Aquihuiquichi gave up crops of henequen and corn, and their cows formed considerable herds, which Segundo drove to Alamos and Guaymas and even to the American border, where Arizonans and Texans bid for them in Nogales and Tucson, even as far away as El Paso. Aguirre’s projects employed workers from each of the arroyo’s villages, and men from the Yaqui towns came to work. Logs were dragged from the hills; cut boards came from mills in Texas. Vast adobe works bristled near each of the small dams Aguirre designed.