The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [121]
“Ay, tú!” chided La Fina.
Teresita called all these boys “Pancho,” for she didn’t know who some of them were, and “Pancho” seemed funny to Fina.
“Gracias, Pancho!” she called back to Doroteo Arango.
He tipped his hat.
Rudolfo Anaya the First, on a horse-buying trip from the far Llano Estacado, said: “The kachinas have blessed you, Teresa.”
She turned and walked backward and watched him circulate into the gloom.
“Gracias, Pancho.”
Fina laughed.
“What a cute boy,” Teresita said.
“They’re all cute boys!” Fina Félix enthused.
“Well, that is one Pancho I would like to see again!”
Teresita watched for Anaya as she came around the circle, but he seemed to have vanished. As she strained to find him, she came face to face with Millán. He stepped in her way so she had to stop.
“Your tits taste like sugar, don’t they?” he asked.
“Excuse me,” she replied.
She walked for a half circuit, trying to catch up to Fina, but she felt ill. She pulled out and went to Huila’s bench and sat beside her and put her head on the old woman’s shoulder.
“Piropos,” she said, “are so stupid.”
To maintain the plazuela’s integrity during the workweek, Tomás had to create a new position at the ranch: Don Teófano was named Jefe in Charge of Plazuelas.
Thirty-seven
HUILA NO LONGER ROSE EARLY. For the first time in her life, she slept through the dawn. She no longer knelt to her prayers, nor did she go out to her grove to address the Creator and the Four Directions. When Huila awoke, she would lie, sometimes for an entire hour, as if her dreams had taken too firm a grip on her and refused to let her go. When she finally did rise, she did so slowly, and in a strange trance. She had always been grouchy, but this was different. She was unapproachable now.
One morning, when Teresita was nearly done with her breakfast, Huila appeared in the kitchen. She went to Teresita and touched her cheek.
“Girl,” she said.
Then she went to the opposite end of the table and spooned three, four, five doses of sugar into her coffee, and she broke the bolillos and shoved them in the cup, and she slurped the dripping mess and let the coffee run down her chin. Teresita asked one of the kitchen girls to attend to Huila’s face. The girl stood over the old one with a cloth, and she darted in like a bird and mopped the coffee and melted bread off the old woman’s chin.
“You think I’m old,” Huila said. “The wind is old,” she huffed, “yet still it blows!”
“Yes, Huila,” they replied.
“The sea is old,” Huila said, “and it still makes waves!”
“I have not seen it yet,” Teresita said.
“Ni yo,” said Huila.
She looked as if she was falling asleep.
Teresita, still restless, decided to go outside for a walk.
Others rose early at Cabora. Tomás, though he no longer needed to greet the dawn, awoke by force of habit—now that his wildfire of lovemaking with Gaby had abated, as all fires must one day fade, just a bit, still bright, still warm, but now safer and not threatening to burn down the house. He lay in bed wondering what to do with himself. Books and ledgers were not like horses or cows. They did not need to be fed, or brushed, or watered, or milked. They did not need to be broken, or driven, or shot, or branded. The books just lay on desks and waited for his pen.
Often, he turned to the sweetness of Gabriela’s arms. He could lose himself in her as if he were riding out across the hills. The smell of her lulled him, almost enough to put him back to sleep.
The vaqueros, too, rose early. Unless it was Sunday and they were in the bed of some young harvest girl in the shacks of El Potrero, the cowboys were pulling on their boots in the diminishing dark. Aside from their need to work, and their curiosity about the day, they had no desire to lie in the smoky gloom of the bunkhouse, listening to other men groan and belch and yawn and curse, smelling the cheese stench of their stiff socks. In wooden beds, stacked three deep, no windows to speak of, and the