The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [139]
Two thousand pilgrims gathered at Cabora to form the first camp. In two weeks, the camp swelled to 5,000. One month later, the count was 7,500 pilgrims—and 1,250 vendors, gawkers, fugitives, soldiers, and whores.
Reporters found the ranch infested with 10,000 campers.
El Monitor reported with some alarm that Teresita was preaching “extremely liberal views.” She was quoted as saying, “Everything the government does is morally wrong.” A colonel in the army, Antonio Rincón, took two hundred Yaquis, men, women, and children, prisoners, and carried them in the gunboat El Demócrata and dropped them in the ocean between the mouth of the Yaqui River and the seaport of Guaymas, all of them perishing. In the presidential palace in Mexico City, President Díaz first read of the atrocity in Lauro Aguirre’s El Paso newspaper. The article was written by Teresa Urrea.
When the group of Mexican reporters arrived at Cabora, they were astounded to see the stinking, heaving, smoking mass of bodies. They had been sent by Díaz, increasingly alarmed by the Yaqui troubles in the north, and hearing more and more disturbing accounts of the “Girl Saint,” this female writer of propaganda. On his orders, they had traveled north to write a satirical series of stories about the fanatic hick Joan of Arc and her tattered minions in their sandy kingdom. They had been told to expect a tumbledown peasant’s hovel with naked savages prancing about, shaking spears. But Cabora was a vast estate, and the main house rose white behind adobe walls. A veranda ran the length of the house, and to the west, a round chapel rose to a red-tiled roof that stood above the roofline of the main house. Atop it, a small wooden cross. It looked like a lighthouse positioned on an island in a sea of human flesh.
The leader of the expedition, a political writer of some renown in Mexico City, was completely bald. When Buenaventura led him to Don Tomás, he found a frantic man who dashed across the ranch with no seeming sense of direction.
“What do you want?” barked Tomás.
“We have come to see the saint,” the reporter replied.
Tomás glared at him for a moment. “There is no fucking saint on this ranch!”
He was later quoted by the reporter in El Imparcial:
“The day I believe my daughter to be a saint is the day she causes hair to grow on your ——head!”
Thus welcomed to Cabora, the reporters threaded their way through the crowds and found themselves standing before the porch where Teresita attended to the pilgrims. She greeted them and invited them in. They remained in her company behind closed doors for the next several hours. When they wrote their articles, they alarmed President Díaz further by extolling her virtues, reporting several miracles performed in their presence, and suggesting that the government attend to native rights in the issue of the land thievery and genocide currently taking place along the Río Mayo and Río Yaqui valleys. But the part of the story the People most delighted in was the part about the bald reporter. Before he left the ranch, he sought out Tomás. He didn’t say a word to him. He only bent toward the patrón and rubbed the peach fuzz that had appeared on his head and laughed.
Forty-five
SHE ROSE IN THE COOLNESS of the earliest morning. Teresita could no longer go out to the sacred spot to pray or burn sage. Instead, she stared out her window at the heaving shadow of the masses, as if hills had slunk toward her home in the dark and lay without, breathing. She would wash her teeth because it felt wrong to pray with a dirty mouth. She knelt in the dark and lit candles and prayed. Her altar was bare—no santos.