The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [141]
“Let us do good,” she preached. “Let us love. This is the only religion. Let us put aside our hatred and take up love. Yes, brothers and sisters—the doing of good is the only prayer that God requires. Work!”
Gastélum cried, “What of clergy? What of the Mass?”
“Priests love because they are ordered to love.”
“How dare you!”
“I don’t need Rome to tell me how to love.”
Tomás, on that morning, invited the good father into the house for some coffee and the latest magazines.
“Ay, hija,” he hissed at her as the affronted priest huffed into the parlor.
Teresita extended her hand toward the crowd.
“This, Father,” she said, “is the true church.”
He looked out at the beggars, filthy rabble, dying, crippled, insane; he looked upon the horse thieves and bandits, the whores and the idiot children tied to posts, at the malformed and the criminals; he saw Indians and peasants and fat bastards from Arizona desperately herding their sick children. Beyond, soldiers and Rurales watched from their horses. Drunks fell among the bushes.
“Wonderful,” he said.
He slammed the door.
By 9:00 a.m. the healings and advising sessions had begun.
A girl from Guaymas with an issue of blood. Teresita saw a dull glow in her womb the size of an apple. She rubbed the girl’s belly and whispered the Lord’s Prayer in her ear. They laughed.
Blindness.
“But your eyes are gone,” she told the man.
“I thought you could grow me new eyes.”
“You left your eyes on a barbed-wire fence!” she said.
He hung his head.
“I was drunk and riding in the dark.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh well.”
A man with a twisted arm, lame from a mule kick.
Old bullet wounds to the back.
Tuberculosis.
Sadness.
Pregnancy needing a blessing.
The crowds had grown so large that Tomás had hired assistants to manage the flow. Teresita sat on a kitchen chair on the porch, and the helpers brought the thirsty forward all morning. Bloody cough. Diarrhea. Festering leg wounds. Pain. More pain. Unfocused pain in the belly. Lumps in the breast. Nipples drooling clear fluid. Rotten teeth. Blood coming from the rectum.
“Do you need to see my fundillo?” the man asked.
“No, thank you,” she replied. “Your description was adequate.”
A child who could not stand or speak.
A dead infant wrapped in burlap.
“Mother,” Teresita said, “I cannot raise her.”
“Can you bless her?”
“Let us bless her together.”
She called for Segundo and his boys to take the mother and the infant to the cemetery and help her bury her child.
By lunchtime, her hips and knees and back hurt from bending to all the pilgrims in her hard chair. She rose painfully and stretched. Raised her hands over the crowd and blessed them.
“I will be back soon,” she said.
They applauded. They called her name. Someone threw flowers at her feet. A few hours later, she returned for more.
Teresita was so sore on some evenings that she limped. Her throat was parched. Strawberry juice always made her happy—especially if there were pieces of strawberry floating in it.
They talked or sang or read to each other until supper at nine. Teresita often sat and listened to the day’s news as her father rattled the paper and declaimed. She ate fruit for supper, and she ate quickly. She was in bed by nine-thirty. She was often startled to remember she had gotten in bed without praying, but was too tired to get back up.
On Sundays, she sat in the courtyard and enjoyed the flowers. Then she went up to her room and opened her inkwell and took up her pen. Otherwise, she only had time before she went to bed, squinting in the light of a candle, and she would often fall asleep with her head on the page. On Mondays, a buckaroo would carry her articles to Alamos and post them to Texas.
Forty-six
THE TIGERS OF THE SIERRA had left their village of Tomóchic and followed the River of Spiders as it flowed west and down, falling in rapids and cataracts until it bent away from their path, as if the desert below were too extreme, too hot for water, and the river shied away to hide in