The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [127]
She ordered the house girls to soak cloths in water and herbs and place them on Teresita’s face.
The doctor from Tucson arrived after five days. He was a great blond American with thinning hair, and he conferred with his Mexican counterpart, both of them bent like cranes over Teresita’s body. Her hair had grown so long that it reached her feet. No one knew when this had happened. Gaby laid it out along the sides of her body. The doctors often had to lift her hair and move it out of the way when they tried to examine her.
They could not force liquids into her. Her lips would not part, and when they tried to pour water in her mouth, it ran out the sides in rivulets. Her skin dried; her lips chapped. Her heart, drying in the desert within her, became weaker each day, almost mute. Both doctors swarmed over her pale stone chest with their stethoscopes, trying to find a beat. When they held a mirror to her lips, she could barely make a fog on the glass.
Her body grew hard, stiff as a plank of shaved pine, all her bones sharp and unforgiving in her shrinking flesh.
One of the buckaroos mentioned to Segundo that Millán had taken a stallion and not come back.
“When?”
“Almost a week ago.”
Segundo rounded up two Apaches. He never spoke a word of it to Tomás or anyone else. They rode fast and hard, because Segundo knew Millán would try to get home to Sinaloa. And when Segundo returned, his eyes were black with some awful secret, and the People said he carried two ears in a bandana, and he laid those ears on the table of the patrón and walked back to his sister’s house, where he slept for two days.
He had returned on a different horse from the one on which he’d left. They said he rode three horses to death chasing Millán. The Apaches never stopped when he returned—they rode past Cabora without a glance. The People saw them and whispered terrible theories.
Segundo was quiet after his long journey. Only once did he say anything, and those who heard him did not know if he was talking about the manhunt, or if he was just drunk. They were drinking, waiting for a pig to barbecue in a rocky pit in the ground, and he had squatted among them, drinking from an American whiskey bottle. And, in the middle of the party, he had said: “If you hang a man upside down over a small fire, his brains boil in his head until his head bursts.” Greeted with silence, he had drunk more whiskey and said, “Good night.” The People had watched him go back to his small house and slam the door.
For twelve days, Cabora slept like Teresita.
Maguey cutters left their machetes hung on nails and stayed in their huts. The cowboys let their cattle wander the llano, hungry and thirsty and dusty. The only things moving were Tomás and the doctors, and when the doctors took him aside and told him there was no hope for his daughter, Tomás mounted his stallion and rode wild toward the village of Bayoreca, then out to the foothills, toward Navojoa, then back. He wept and cursed where no one could see him.
When he returned, he called for Segundo.
“I want a coffin made,” he said. “I want the best wood and the smoothest silk.”
Segundo hung his head and said, “Sí, patrón.”
When he left through the front door, he had to push through a crowd of field hands and workers, of vaqueros and wash girls. All the children from the workers’ village shoved into the courtyard. Buenaventura stood in a corner, back pressed into the seam between two walls. He held a cigarette in his fist, in the manner of the outriders, cupping the glowing coal with his palm as if sheltering it from a great wind. He raised his eyebrows at Segundo in a silent question. Segundo shook his head.
The American doctor, unable to do more, packed his bags and left.
On the thirteenth day, Tomás awoke