The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [137]
Huila was dead.
And she herself was dead.
Now alive.
Dizziness took her again. She braced her hands on the hot wall.
She remembered the Mother’s voice, before they sent her back, saying, “This gift we give, you must take back to the children. You may never profit from it, but give it freely.”
And she had cried, “Don’t make me go!”
“Your work is not done.”
“Let me stay with you!”
“You must go back.”
And she fell into her hot heavy stinking body. Not dreaming, returning. The lilt of wings in her veins melted back into meat and the slowness of blood. Her fingers slipped down her own fingers, as if they were empty gloves. She saw the blows that felled her. She saw the box and the cold face of Huila.
“No,” she said.
And the vision expanded. She saw herself, inert and leaking a sweet pink scent. And the house girls bathed her in the tin tub, and the water came off her smelling too of roses. Everything she touched smelled like a fresh bloom. And the girls, after she was back in her bed, took the rose bathwater and put it in bottles and sold it to the pilgrims. And now the pilgrims smelled her. They drank her dirty water, blessed themselves on their foreheads with her smell. Hundreds of strangers passed her odor among themselves and used it to make signs of the cross as the little bottles went from hand to hand.
“I did not ask for this,” she whispered. “Please do not do this to me.”
But she knew it was already done.
She pushed away from the wall and looked back out the window.
“Teresa!” a crooked man shouted. “Help me! Have pity!”
And she did have pity. Perhaps pity was all she had.
“I will come to you,” she said. “I have brought you a gift.”
The pilgrims who sipped her essence from their little bottles were moved in strange unwelcome ways, tasting her though they’d never seen her. Hoping they might be blessed while thinking of the naked flesh the water had touched, while rolling her dirt and perfume on their tongues. Those who had smelled her, tasted her, poured her water over themselves, felt they owned her. She was now their lover, their saint, their mother, their friend. It was already too late to return to her old life.
And these pilgrims had continued to pour into Cabora, the thieves, the gypsies, the curious, the insane. Revolutionaries and spies circled the paddocks. Apaches lurked in the arroyo. Prostitutes came to be absolved and start life anew, or to open their legs in the barns and the bunkhouse and the shacks. Yaquis scattered rose petals saved from their Easter ceremonies. Highway bandits mingled among the believers and the fanatics, come at first to steal from the pilgrims, some of them converting and throwing their guns into the arroyo, where the Apaches promptly collected them. Drunks slept in the shade of the kitchen. They sniffed the air for the scent of roses. They fought with fists and knives out among the cattle. They stabbed a bull to death and left it to rot. Some preparatory students from Alamos drank their first mezcal and stoned a burro to death for fun. The cottonwood tree under which Aguirre had once slept was somehow knocked down, and once down, it was hacked with machetes and hatchets into firewood, its branches stripped to build ramadas in the dirt. The chickens that had slept on Aguirre’s bed frame were slaughtered and eaten. The fence around the corn milpa fell. Horses, children, drunk old men trampled the maize plants. The hungry stripped ears of corn off the stalks and boiled them in fires fueled by the dead cottonwood and tumbled fence posts. Huila’s extensive herb garden withered under a constant spray of urine from the wanderers. Her cilantro was gone in two days, sprinkled into salsa and over fetid beans to rescue their flavor. Her sage was not used for smudging or praise, but smeared on goat meat, stolen chickens, lizard meat.
“Don’t worry,” Teresita called to them. “I am coming to you