The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [133]
Huila thought about it.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then,” Teresita said, “you will enjoy your death.”
Huila smiled. Closed her eyes. “This isn’t so bad,” she said.
She gestured for Teresita to come closer. Teresita touched the edge of Huila’s bed with her knees. She took Huila’s hand in hers.
“I wish you could stay,” Teresita said. “I will miss you.”
She could feel the faint pulse of Huila’s old heart through the bones and thin leather of her hand. Huila’s blood was cool and slow, almost blue in her veins. She squeezed Teresita’s hand.
“They’ll bury you in my coffin,” Teresita said.
Huila smiled.
“I like that,” she said.
Teresita prayed. Huila must have fallen asleep, for she snored a little, mumbled in her sleep. Her dreams were full, Teresita knew, of her dead parents, her dead brothers and sister, her dead lover. All the doorways unlocking before her, all the hallways swept clean, the lamps being lit. The gate to Huila’s garden coming unlatched. The old woman jumped.
“Girl?” she said.
“Aquí estoy,” Teresita whispered.
“Do you want my shotgun?”
“No.”
“Do you want my tobacco pouch?”
“No, thank you.”
“You know where my herbs are.”
“Yes.”
“Use them.”
“I will.”
Huila sighed, long and dry.
She reached out her hand. Put three cracked hard objects in Teresita’s hand.
“What are these?”
“Buffalo teeth! From long ago!”
Huila closed her eyes.
“I am tired,” she said.
“I know.”
“May I go now?”
Teresita leaned forward and kissed the old woman on the cheek.
“Go,” she said. “Everything is all right.”
She patted Huila’s hair.
“Relax, old woman. Your work is done.”
A tear rolled down Teresita’s cheek.
“You brought goodness to this world.”
“Did I?”
“You lived with honor.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Don’t worry. Go to sleep. When you wake up, you will see deer.”
Huila’s eyelids fluttered.
“Fall asleep. I love you. Fall asleep.”
Huila stiffened. Her eyes opened once. Then she was gone.
Forty-three
ALREADY, THEY WERE COMING. You wouldn’t have noticed them at first, and you wouldn’t have noticed them at all if you didn’t know where to look. The word had already carried far across the llano and into the hills. They came in small groups to see the living dead girl. In among the workers’ shacks, you would spot a few new bodies huddled in the shadows. There would be a strange woman among the girls washing laundry. Alien children stood at the edges of the crowds, watching the house.
When Tomás rode his horse out to some business in the fields, he didn’t look down, didn’t give any hint that he was aware of the new ones on his land. But he watched carefully, while not watching, looking out of the corners of his eyes, studying motions and faces, gaits and strides, like a madman accumulating data for some fabulous new theory of the world, maniac proof of forces and plots swirling around his head, infiltrating his ranch. He didn’t want them to know he was watching them, though he could feel them watching him back. He didn’t know what they wanted, what harm they might have brought with them, what dark designs.
For all he knew, they had come to kill her, come to attempt to set some aberrant cosmic scale aright. Or they had come to marry her, to pet her, to follow her. No one knew she was insane, sitting in her room like a mannequin, staring into the infinite depths of the corner of two white walls, seeing devils and angels and babbling horrible foolishness about bones and dreams. These superstitious types, they were starving for miracles.
He could not scientifically explain Teresita’s resurrection, but he knew there was a reason for it, a reasonable reason. But these people, who saw the faces of Jesus Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe in burned tortillas, were a rabble frantic for something, anything, to make their shopworn world a little more special. They wanted to believe there was something more, some heaven awaiting them after their lives of idiotic toil. And they seemed to think his daughter could somehow bring them closer to this myth. He knew the price would be dear when they discovered that she was simply