The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [129]
His hair is a long braid of waterfalls, honeysuckle, comets. She sees eagles in His eye. When He speaks, she hears music and laughter.
“Take this cup, Daughter,” he says in Cahita.
“You speak the mother tongue?” she asks.
“I speak in every tongue,” He says. “I am everyone’s Father.”
She smiles.
The cup He hands her has reflections of stars in it.
“Drink. You thirst.”
She drinks.
“I have a gift for you,” He says.
God brushes back her hair and hands her a rose.
Forty-one
DEATH WAS SOMETHING the People understood. It’s not that they were happy Teresita had died. It’s that they were relieved that someone, anyone, had died. Their spell of dread was broken. They could finally weep with real feeling, and while weeping, they could plan their wakes and their prayers and sew their dresses and arrange their gatherings. They could dream of the beauty of the funeral, for surely the patrón would throw a funeral to rival their best weddings. All could agree that weddings were the best entertainment on the ranch, followed by first Communions and confirmations (presided over by the somber Father Gastélum), followed by the fabulous quinceañera coming-of-age parties where fifteen-year-old girls got to dress in virginal white gowns and dance with older men who would slip them pesos and gifts. Secretly, however, funerals were far and away the favorite Cabora pastime. Shows of grief, like piropos, were an art. Secretly, in the dark corners of their huts, the People were already practicing faints, contortions, and taciturn sighs. Already—at the well, at the supply shed, at the corrals—people were saying: “I knew her best.”
Inside the main house, it was chaos. Tomás felt as if he had lost his footing, as if his home had tipped on its side, and his boots could not find purchase on the boards or the tiles. He walked from wall to wall, from doorway to doorway, steadying himself, clutching the corners to keep himself upright. His insomnia returned in these days. The bed seemed too hot, too narrow, and he would move through the gloom of the house in his white nightshirt like a ghost, move out into the front courtyard and filch plums from the tree and stare at stars and stretch out on the rough wooden benches.
Gabriela was silent in her grief, remembering the nights she had lain beside Teresita and whispered her secrets, had closed her eyes and flown. Her body now thirsted for that flight again. It was as if she had always lived in a desert, and she had tasted water once. Now, there was no way to taste that water again.
Huila sank back into silence.
Teresita’s body spent the first night in her bed, the white sheet tucked up under her chin, the shutters latched shut, with a solitary candle burning in the corner.
In the morning, the women came for the body. They collected it and carried it gently down to the kitchen. They laid it out on the big metal table.
Gabriela had already sent one of her own dresses to the seamstresses, who came first to the body, to measure it and drape it to ensure their work fit Teresita for the funeral. Then the women took Teresita’s old clothes off the body, stripping it naked. They brought tubs of warm water to the table, and they washed her body with folded cloths and ragged orange sponges. They made sure her face was clean, and they prayed as they washed the body itself, chanting holy words over it, ritually purifying it for the long journey ahead, calling on God and the saints to have mercy on her soul. When the bath was done, they pressed white towels to the body’s skin, to mop up the water. Then they covered its nakedness with undergarments and a shawl.
Gabriela came to it next, with her brushes and combs. She stroked Teresita’s hair until it glowed in the kitchen light. She used her best combs to hold the hair back from the body’s face, anchored it with hairpins, and asked one of the girls to help her make a thick braid, which they laid out beside the body.
The seamstresses returned and worked their dress onto the body, struggling somewhat with its stiffening