The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [138]
She wrapped her rebozo around her head, to respect the sun as Huila had taught her years before.
“Where is Lauro Aguirre?” Teresita asked, eating her third plate of eggs and nopal cactus.
She gulped black coffee, orange juice, tamarind juice. She had eaten yellow cheese and mango, papaya, and guayaba paste. She ripped tortillas apart and devoured the eggs with them.
“This is delicious!” she cried. “I could eat all day!”
Tomás stood away from the table, his hand on the butt of his pistol, watching her. He had forgotten to comb his hair. The vaqueros had awakened him with a report of pilgrims from Chihuahua killing a draft horse and butchering it beyond the eastern gates. Gaby sat at the end of the table and stared.
“Aguirre,” he said, “is in Texas.”
“Doing what, Father?”
“Fomenting revolution, no doubt,” said Tomás.
Teresita scooped up a wad of beans and stuffed it in her mouth. She patted her lips with her napkin. Licked her fingers.
“How so?” she said.
“Aguirre has started a newspaper,” Tomás said. “He publishes political stories.”
“Politics,” she cried.
Tomás glanced at Gabriela.
“Yes,” he said.
“I love politics, Father,” Teresita exclaimed. “I will write for Uncle Lauro.”
“But,” he sputtered, “what do you know of politics?”
“God gave this land to these people,” she replied. “Other people want this land and are stealing it.”
She drained her coffee cup and put it in the middle of her empty plate.
“Politics,” she said.
The pilgrims destroyed the little plazuela. Don Teófano could not keep them from kicking over the painted stones, from stealing the benches, from breaking apart the gazebo for firewood. They overran and crushed the small gardens in the cracked wheel rings. The lowest branches of the whitewashed alamos trees were stripped in three days and burned. Within a week, the entire space was full of tents and lean-tos.
Segundo and his men discovered two government snipers in the cottonwood grove where Teresita had been attacked by Millán. They roped the men, confiscated their Hawken rifles, and dragged them to the main house, where Segundo and Tomás sat in judgment over them in a hasty trial held in the kitchen. Tomás voted to allow the men to go free.
“Tell your masters,” he said, “that we spared you.”
“We won’t be so easy on the next sons of whores that come around here,” Segundo added.
They rode the two halfway to Alamos, then tossed them off their horses and cut them free.
“Don’t come back,” Segundo warned.
That day, Tomás ordered the building of a small chapel beside the main house. He couldn’t have Teresita wandering the ranch without protection, and she didn’t want guards, and she would not stop her morning prayers or whatever the hell it was she did in Huila’s damned old cottonwood grove. He ordered cases of brandy and tequila. He smoked. He screamed at the builders to hurry, hurry, get the no-good church finished. Now.
And the word spread, no matter what fences Tomás mended, what walls he ordered built, what chapels he grew out of the cracked earth. They walked from the shores of the sea. They rode the new rail lines from Arizona to Guaymas, then rented wagons and came east. They filtered down from the high peaks and the darkened canyons of the sierra. They ate cactus, snake meat, crows. They ate dogs and stale bread and they ate nothing. They carried sacred cornmeal, or they carried sacred pollen, or they carried sacred tobacco, or they carried rosaries and Bibles, holy water, rattles, deer skulls, medicine bundles. They bore weapons and they came naked. They carried their dying and their dead, pulled travois with withered old women thrusting their bone-knob knees at the sky. They dragged sacks with bloated infants caught in the burlap like wounded seals. They bound their green stinking limbs in banana leaves, in foul bandages, in hemp ropes, tied their crushed arms to their sides, made slings of old clothing and aprons. They bound their split feet together and hobbled. They packed herbs in dank eyeholes where they had been shot or stabbed, where wire had sliced their