The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [128]
Huila awoke and felt as if she might eat.
Segundo paid three times the usual amount to a carpenter in Bayoreca. The old man had agreed to work around the clock and to deliver a coffin of oak and fragrant pine, lined in pale silver silk, in two days. Segundo rode back to the ranch and collected Buenaventura and they went to the hills.
Tomás, like Huila, thought he could finally eat something. He sat at his breakfast table and ate boiled mango with a spoon. Then he drank a cup of coffee, and ate three eggs fried with beans and chorizo. He ate tortillas. He ate white goat cheese. A slice of melon. A second and third cup of coffee with milky Mexican pralines and a slice of cactus candy. Someone brought him last week’s paper from Alamos, and he sat reading as his delightful Gabriela picked at one poached egg and some toasted bolillo. Té de canela, her favorite cinnamon tea.
One of the housekeepers approached the table shyly and stood there.
It took Tomás a moment to notice her. He glanced over his paper and said, “Yes—you may clear my plates now. Thank you.”
He went back to his paper.
She stood there.
He looked at her again.
“Sir?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Teresita, sir?”
“Yes?”
“She’s soft.”
He put down the paper.
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
“Señorita Teresita,” she repeated. “She’s gone all soft.”
“Soft.”
“All soft in her bed. All floppy.”
He jumped to his feet and ran upstairs.
The room was still murky and dark. She lay on her back, her arms now loose and falling over the edges of the bed. He was afraid to approach her.
“Teresita?” he whispered.
The room was so silent, it could have been filled with cotton.
“Hija?” he said.
He crossed to her, sat in the chair, and took her wrist. It was soft. Cold. Her hand flopped loosely at the end of her wrist.
He squeezed it, seeking a pulse, but the river of blood within her body had stilled.
He laid his head on her chest, but her heart was silent.
He went into the hall and called for the Mexican doctor, who came upstairs with his bag and knelt beside the bed and listened and prodded and held the mirror to her lips. Her mouth was turning pale blue. He tapped her eyelid with the edge of a metal tool: it remained still.
“Doctor?” said Tomás.
Gaby stood in the door with her hands over her mouth.
The doctor sighed, then lifted Teresita’s hands and crossed them over her chest. He stepped over to Tomás and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Teresita,” he said, “is dead.”
Forty
HOW QUIET IT IS.
She could have guessed that death would be quiet, but this is a stillness that feels like early morning, perhaps after a snowstorm, though she had never seen a snowstorm when she was alive.
She is sure she knows what snow is now.
“Oh! Deer!”
The deer leaps in a green land that was not there before. Flowers. She follows. The deer is gone, and water stands before her: golden fish.
Coyote drinks from the pool and looks at her with happy yellow eyes. She watches his fur ripple. He looks to his left, and she follows his gaze and beholds the Mother standing in the shade of a tree.
“Did you bring me a ladder?” she asks.
They laugh.
They embrace.
No mother has ever held her in her arms.
Trees she has never seen twirl silver, purple, golden leaves that fall and take flight as butterflies.
She sees the three old Yaquis from her dreams walking in the distance.
“They are so nosy!” says the Mother.
The walk to Itom Achai’s humble home is short.
He has a small garden. His door is open. Light pours from his windows. He steps out—he has painted a blue line down one cheek.
“Do you know me?” he asks.
“God,” she says, kneeling.
“I am.”
He puts out His