The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [136]
She straightened a lame man’s arm.
Unless they fed fluids to her, she would not remember to take in water or juice. She still had not eaten solid food.
“You do not believe in God,” she told her father. “Then you do not believe in love.”
“Love!” he shouted. “What then of death? What of hunger, disease? What of your beloved Yaquis being slaughtered in the hills!”
“Love is hard, not soft,” she said.
She wandered into the vaqueros’ bunkhouse and laid her hands on a man who had sores on his legs. He sighed.
She told Gabriela: “The Virgin is as tall as I am. She warned me that love caused more pain than war.”
That day, Gaby noticed the smell of roses coming from Teresita. She took her to her room, filled the bathing tub, and washed her. After she had toweled Teresita off, the smell was stronger than before.
“The Virgin,” she said, “still laughs about the ladder.”
But no one understood her; there was no one left who knew the story.
Forty-four
IT WAS LIKE A SUNRISE. She awoke one day and turned her head and looked in the corner of her room. There, her workbench held jars and leather pouches. Above, from the beams, hung her old dried herbs. And, as if it were any other morning, she tested herself.
Centaurea: boiled into a tonic to break fevers.
Jojoba: eases inflammation.
Verbena: sedates patients, stops blood from spilling.
Adormida: halts spasms.
Ruda: the uncivil little cousin that insults tapeworms out of the gut.
She smiled, enjoying the test. Early mornings were always hers alone. She lay there and worked her memory.
Estramío: the “Herb of Satan.” Terrible odor, oval fruit, breaks into ten capsules. Ten ounces of leaves can make a tea strong enough to kill the largest man. Cured in the sun, rolled into cigarettes, these same leaves ease asthma, eye pains, epilepsy, and consumption.
She could smell herself, but it was a strange odor. It was . . . roses! How odd. She never wore perfumes.
She sniffed her armpits: rose scent. How sweet. The house girls, maybe even Gaby herself, had washed her. They must have put some rose cream on her. Or perhaps they daubed her with rose cologne from Gaby’s bedroom. But when?
She sat up, leaned forward over her knees to wait out a sudden attack of dizziness. When it passed, she stood and walked to the pitcher on the washstand in the corner. She poured water into the blue-edged bowl, tied her hair back, and washed her teeth. Then she washed her face. Goose bumps rose on her flesh.
She stepped to her closed window shutters and grabbed the handles, made hot as the sun burned into their outer surfaces. It was a small ritual she had, a small way to hold back the day—keeping her eyes shut and waiting before flinging the shutters wide. And she did it now, waiting one extra beat.
She was already throwing the shutters to the window open when she sensed it, and it was too late, and the full blast of sun hit her eyelids.
Her eyelids rose slowly, and she gasped. Before her, the land was full of bodies.
Below her, people milled on the ground of Cabora, and the mass of bodies extended from the front-porch gates to the far bee pastures. Faces turned to her. All movement stopped. Fingers rose to point her out. Pilgrims knelt. Old ones lay on pallets in the dirt. Children ran and shrieked. Soldiers sat their cavalry mounts. The clatter of cooking stilled. It became so quiet she could not believe she had not heard the noise before.
“There she is!” someone shouted.
“There! In the window!”
A woman cried, “Teresita!”
And another, “Heal me!”
And a third, “Santa Teresa!”
She flung herself back from the window and pressed herself to the wall, the scent of roses billowing up out of her nightgown. She suddenly knew, to her