The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [13]
“Jefe,” he called.
Tomás sat on the top rail and laughed as the pinto bucked off another vaquero. His kind of horse.
Loreto had given Tomás a smart pair of tight black trousers with silver conchas arrayed down the outsides of his legs. He wore a short leather vest and white shirt, his black boots with silver and gold spurs, and a big Montana-style gringo cowboy hat he’d bought off a buckaroo riding through the country with a posse in a futile hunt for the horse-thieving bandit Heraclio Bernal, the Sinaloan Thunderbolt.
“I look too good,” he told Segundo, “to mount a hardheaded horse today.”
“Boss, I have somebody here.”
Tomás glanced at the old man. He was in sorry shape. His peasant’s pants were tattered, his lips sunburned and peeling. The back of his shirt was black.
“This cristiano has seen better days,” Tomás noted.
He hopped down from the rail and stepped forward. The reek from the old man pushed him back.
“Tell him your story,” Segundo said.
“Ay señores,” said the old man, so used to begging for mercy from powerful hacienda bosses that he wrung his hat in his hands before him even though there was no hat. “Mine is a tale of woe.” His head shook, and his eyes looked half-crazy to the vaqueros. Cayetana settled in comfortably. A story!
Tomás offered him a small, obligatory smile.
“And?”
He had come walking from across the Sonoran border. He had lived in his ranchería near the Yaqui River since he was born there, sixty-six years before. Military men appeared one day with a deed from the government that his land had been sold to a gringo investor who intended to run sheep on the land and harvest peaches irrigated with Yaqui River water. When the old man had resisted, he had been tied to a fence and horsewhipped. He and his wife had been sent forth on foot, and their ranchería was now the home of an Irishman from Chicago.
Tomás and Segundo looked at each other.
“You walked here from Sonora?”
“Ehui.”
“Ehui?” said Segundo.
“It means yes,” Tomás said. “In their tongue.”
“Indians.” Segundo spit.
“How many days?”
“Many.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Not for days.”
Tomás put his hands on his hips.
“And your wife, old man?”
“Dead, señor. I left her beside the road three . . . no, four days ago.”
Tomás whistled. He took off his hat and put it on the old man’s head. It sank past the man’s ears.
He said, “I am sorry.”
Tomás gripped the old man’s arm—it felt like a stick with some flan pudding flung over it.
“Can you help me?” the old man asked.
“Of course, of course. You are welcome here.”
“My wounds, sir . . .”
Tomás turned him, looked at his blackened shirt.
“Let’s see,” he said.
He and Segundo pulled the shirt away from the welts left by the whip, and the flesh made a soft ripping sound, and clouds of hideous stench escaped, and cascades of fat white worms fell out of his shirt.
Segundo skipped away.
Tomás said, “Jesus Christ!”
The old man sank to his knees, as if the shirt and the worms were the only things keeping his wound sealed, and indeed, blood began to drip off his back, falling on the ground behind him as he knelt.
“Boys,” said Tomás, “get this pilgrim to Huila right now.”
“He’s going to die,” said Segundo.
“If he dies—but you’re not going to die, are you, my friend, you are too strong to die, you’ve come too far to die, cabrón!—but if he dies, bury him well and . . . bury him with my hat!”
This was a gesture that would be of more interest in the bunkhouse and the workers’ village than the pestilence of worms raining from the old man’s back.
Two of the buckaroos brought a wagon and loaded him on it muttering, “Easy,” and, “There you go, viejo.” The wagon headed for the house, and the old man weakly waved his hat and cried, “Gracias! Gracias!”
“I’d like to find that Irishman,” Segundo noted.
“You just want to whip a gringo,” said Tomás.
“That’s true,” said Segundo.
Tomás’s head was tingling. His bride, Loreto, in league with the house girls, had assured him that if he put lemon juice in his hair, it would turn even blonder in the sun. But