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By Root 969 0

Huila’s sacred grove of cottonwoods, and found a small holy spot of her own. She prayed, though she was unworthy of God’s ear. She waited until hummingbirds began their rounds, and she told them of her sorrows. They buzzed and rang around her head, hummed and sang their songs, songs too fast for any human ear to hear, songs that came to her like sharp kisses in the wind. Bees hovered at her eyes, her lips. Crickets clung to her rebozo and tinkled like small bells. Cicadas rose from the earth and cracked their shells and screamed around her as she walked. Coyotes followed her. Jackrabbits hid in the creosote bushes and watched her pass. Roadrunners trotted in front of her and behind, like an honor guard, waggling their tails, the leaders often looking back at her as they ran through the brush. The desert was alive at her feet. She crossed the shell-like prints of the javelinas’ hooves, the long swirls of the sidewinder’s passing. Rattlesnakes lifted their heads and flicked their tongues at her as she passed, but they did not rattle. Clover blossomed. And she walked on, walked alone, for hours—walked weeping over her brother, praying for forgiveness, praying to be found worthy. She walked until the sun burned her dizzy, and she had to lie beneath a mesquite tree or a paloverde, gulping hot air like water, sometimes falling into fretful sleep, jagged dreams.

Buenaventura mended slowly. Although his arm had come down from over his head, it was weak, and his hands shook. His left leg was painful, and he limped. He would limp for years to come.

He was quiet, polite. He addressed Tomás as “sir” and Gaby as “doña.” He didn’t speak at all to Huila. When he saw Teresita, he hung his head or left the room.

One day, Tomás sent for Teresita.

A kitchen girl knocked on her door and called, “Teresita? The patrón? He wants you in the library. Por favor?”

When Teresita opened her door, the girl flinched and hurried away.

She came down the stairs. Gaby smiled up at her. Reached out and touched Teresita’s hand. Teresita drifted by as if in a dream. She no longer invited Gaby to her room. She had not seen Fina Félix since that bad day. They would never again sleep beside her. There would be no more flying trips.

She went down the cool stone hall and entered the library. Huila drowsed on the small leather couch, her crutch propped against her knee starting to slip. Tomás sat in his great chair, smoking a thin cigar. Standing before him was Buenaventura. He was dressed in his best brown suit, and he clutched his hat before him in both hands. The hat was shaking.

Tomás said, “Please repeat what you were saying.”

Buenaventura cleared his throat.

“Sir,” he said. “I would like permission to move to Aquihuiquichi. I . . . I would like to leave the ranch.”

“Oh, Buenaventura,” Teresita said. “Please don’t leave.”

He stepped away from her.

“My, my condition,” he said, “makes it hard for me to ride or to do my, my work. And,” he looked at the floor, “I think it would be better, sir, for me to be gone from here.”

“I love you,” Teresita said.

Her brother dropped his hat and held both shaking hands up before him.

“Please!” he said.

“All right, all right,” Tomás said. “Enough.”

He pointed at Teresita.

“Never again,” he said.

He pointed at Buenaventura.

“Go,” he said.

She took her food to her room. Sometimes, she crept out at night, after they were asleep, and she ran through the moonlit fields. Coyotes paced her, ran invisible all around her, calling to her. And the dead, too, ran beside her. They cried out to her, the lost elders and the murdered children, the massacred grandmothers and the slaughtered warriors. They called to her, sang with the coyotes, raised hymns that sounded, in the forgiving dark, like far wind in leaves, like water rippling in a still cove, like the calls of some nearly forgotten migrating birds. When she thought God could hear her, she asked Him, “Why have you left me here alone?” The only answer she received was the parched midnight wind.

Book IV

THE CATASTROPHE

OF HOLINESS

An Indian woman was