The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [135]
“I am no prisoner.”
He tried to lead her away from the table. He could not move her.
“Why don’t you rest awhile?” he said.
“Riders. Tomorrow morning,” she said. “You will not have time to eat.”
She pulled her arm from his grasp and went down the hall. He followed. She opened the front door and went to the plum tree. She lay down in its shadow and seemed to fall asleep. He moved to the garden wall and peered over it, one hand on the butt of his gun. No one was visible. The ranch looked empty, as if a plague had swept in from the llano and killed them all. The edges of the buildings already flaking, adobe coming apart in the wind, walls smoking away to powder in the endless cycle of the days.
The next morning, Tomás ordered eggs fried with beans. As soon as the platter was placed before him, the thunder of riders rumbled through the house. He threw his napkin aside and hurried down the hall as the voices rose in alarm outside the door. He pulled his revolver and followed it out the door. Two riders on panting horses circled before the gate of the courtyard until one called, “Two more coming! With the wagon!”
A Yaqui worker had been kicked in the head by a mule. The wagon came rattling, and the men pulled the convulsing worker out and laid him on the ground. He writhed and foamed and they stood about him staring at his agony. Blood dropped from the crack in his head. They shrugged, spat. What could they do? He was doomed.
Teresita came forth, unbidden.
She walked between the men, pushing them out of the way. She said nothing. She knelt and took dirt in her hands. She spit into the dirt, rubbed it in her palms, making a red mud. She bent to the man and rubbed the mud across his brow, whispered a prayer over him. His feet, then his hands stopped jerking. He rolled onto his side, clutched his head, opened his eyes. He shook his head, smiled, rose. He shook her hand.
“What did I tell you?” she said to Tomás.
She walked back into the house.
One of the riders adjourned to the cookhouse and ate some cold beans. He got drunk that night and bought a whore. He didn’t think about the miracle, nor did he mention it to his friends or his women and when asked about it later, had no memory of it. The other rider lived off the ranch, and he lay beside his wife that night and told her of the strange doings at Cabora: they had brought a man without a brain to the ranch, and Teresita had poured mud in the empty skull and he had risen and danced a jig. Fire could be seen in her eyes.
The next day, his woman spoke to others at the laundry basin. Her husband had taken the corpse of a man who had been beheaded to the grave of the dead Teresita, at Cabora. A mysterious Yaqui elder had told them to bury the man beside the body of the young witch, and three hours later, she had risen from the grave with the man in her arms—he had a new head, and it was made of red mud!
Ten women listened to this tale. From these ten, thirty retellings radiated. From these thirty, three hundred versions of the story emanated, dribbling down the grand arroyo, sliding along the banks of the Río Mayo, the Río Yaqui.
The medicine men started out for Cabora, where they hoped to see Teresita, the risen dead girl. On the road, they met a band of Lipans heading to the sierras. Among them were two boys twisted and pale with fever. Over a meeting fire in the lee of a crumbling cinder cone, the elders told the Lipans about the girl in Yaqui lands who had risen from the dead and who filled the skull of a scalped warrior with mud, thus bringing him to life and at the same time teaching him the secrets of the earth. This warrior could now speak to the deer, could understand the words of the rockslides and the sandstorms.
The Lipan leader ordered his people to follow the old men to Cabora.
Teresita did not dream of them coming toward her. She did not see the villagers and the Lipans. She did not see Don Antonio Cienfuegos steering his wagon toward her from the hills, bearing his dying wife. She did not see Pancho Arteaga, the border bandit, coming