The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [144]
He nodded. The girl on the pallet strained her arm toward him. He reached out with one finger and touched her hand. She clutched his finger.
“You are very pretty,” he said to her. “Will you marry me?”
She grimaced and shouted.
It sounded like Yot!
The mother laughed.
“She says no. You are very old and hairy for her. She is laughing.”
Cruz tipped his hat to the girl. He smiled down at her.
“What is her name?” he asked.
“Conchita.”
Conchita pulled at his finger and made her sounds. He gently pried his finger out of her grasp. He winked at her. She flung her hands over her mouth.
“Has she seen the saint?”
“No, señor. Not yet.”
“Why not.”
The woman extended her hand.
“Many pilgrims,” she said. “Many pilgrims.”
A screen of mesquite trees obscured his view of the house.
“If this saint is real,” he said, “we will carry Conchita to her.”
“Gracias, señor,” she said.
“Adios, beloved,” he said to Conchita. “We could have been happy together. I leave with a broken heart.”
Yot! She laughed.
Feo!
He nodded to her mother and walked on. Stopped. Came back.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“We’re from Tomóchic,” José said.
It meant nothing to her.
“In the Sierra Madre.”
“Ah!”
She was afraid of the Sierra Madre. It was a place of crags, ice, Apaches, wolves. She shuddered. Surely, these men were warriors.
“I am the leader of Tomóchic,” Cruz said. “I am Cruz Chávez. I am the Pope of Mexico.”
Conchita drew a squealing breath and laughed again.
“Benditos sean,” her mother whispered.
Cruz made the sign of the cross over them. He hefted his rifle onto his shoulder and walked away. His warriors followed, blessed by the Lord, reconciled, holy in this day He had made, and ready to shoot.
They came in sight of the great house, and it shimmered in the light.
The pilgrims were arrayed before the home, spread far. Smoke and dust. The Tigers wandered through the camps, looking down at the sick and twisted, the merely old and the truly lame. Blind children. Limp babies. Some of the small camps had corpses wrapped in cloth from head to foot and being loaded onto wagons. And hucksters—men selling Teresita scapulars—wandered the yards. Men sold tin pictures of the Saint and her small angels. Women sold tacos, small woven crosses made of black string, ears of corn, fermented-maize beer. A soldier stumbled into Cruz. He laid the barrel of his rifle against the man’s shoulder and said, “Leave this place.”
The man swallowed once and hurried away.
“This,” Cruz said to a salesman. “This picture?”
“It is the Saint. One peso.”
“One peso! For a picture?”
“Yes, yes, but this picture will stop a bullet.”
They walked on.
Cruz led them through the throng. He pushed his way ahead of the many who waited before her door, and when they started to protest, he looked down at them and they fell silent. When he took his place at the front of the crowd, they scooted back, made room for him. He took off his hat. He squatted on his haunches and laid his rifle across his knees. With the rest of them, the sick and the curious, the crooks and the mothers, the blind and the dying, he waited for her to appear.
Forty-seven
TERESITA CAME OUT THE DOOR, wiping her hands on a cloth.
Cruz watched her move—she was light on her feet. She flowed out the door almost before he saw it was open, her dark dress seeming to materialize from the darker space within. Yet when she stopped, her roots seemed to plunge deep into the earth, as if she were drawing water up through the crust, as if she were a slender alamo glittering in the wind. He approved.
“Pretty,” José said.
Cruz nodded. He didn’t feel it was right to show too much enthusiasm for her looks, but he noticed them. Still, he warned José: “That’s enough of that.”
Her hair was pinned up, and her face was clear. She was slender, and he could see a light fuzz of hair along the hinge of her jaw.
She smiled at the crowd and said, “Where should we begin?”
They cried her name and reached for her,