The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [157]
“Good God,” said Tomás. “What is that?”
“Lice.”
“Lice!”
“You’ve never seen lice?”
“No, Teresa, I have never seen lice! What do you think I am, a peasant?”
“Hardly, Father,” she said. “I had lice.”
“You did?”
“Everybody outside of the big house has lice.”
“No!”
She looked up at him and wondered what it felt like to be so ignorant of the world.
“Look,” she said. “They bit him so much he scratched until he tore his scalp. It got bad. All rotten.”
Tomás went to the table and took a gulp of wine. Poured himself some more.
“Poor boy!” he finally said.
The boy sniffled. Teresita sat him in a chair and pulled away his pus-shellacked jacket. She put cookies on a plate and poured him some of her clotty milk.
“When did you eat?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where are your parents?”
“Dead.”
“Who takes care of you?”
“Dogs,” he said.
Tomás made a sound in his throat.
Dogs!
He went to a drawer and brought out a piece of chocolate. He handed it to the boy.
“My own parents are dead,” he offered.
“Really?” the boy replied, looking up at him. One eye was wobbly. A louse appeared in the boy’s eyebrow. Teresita plucked it off and popped it between her thumbnails.
“Get scissors,” she instructed.
Tomás searched through the house until he found some big scissors in Huila’s old bedroom. They had left it untouched all this time. No one had the heart to clear it out.
“Good,” she said. “Now, put some water on the fire. Get some of the purple flowers from Huila’s room. They’re hanging in the middle of the room. Break off a fistful and put them in the water while I cut his hair.”
He rushed back into Huila’s room and looked through the bundles of herbs hanging there. He found the purple ones.
“Leaves too?” he called.
“Just the flowers, please.”
“Right.”
She bent to the boy’s hair and carefully snipped away the stiff locks.
“You will look a little funny,” she said, “without hair. But we will take away your lice.”
“As long as I don’t stink.”
“We will take away your stink,” she promised.
Tomás tossed the dried flowers in the water.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Come.”
He went to the chair. Teresita had snipped away most of the boy’s hair, leaving gooey bristles among which the sluggish lice could be seen.
“Pluck,” she told her father.
“Pluck what?”
“Lice.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not kidding. Pluck them and pop them.”
“But I’ll get pus on my fingers!”
“You can wash your hands.”
“But it’s disgusting!”
“No, Father. Letting an orphan suffer is disgusting.”
“Chingado,” he said.
He gingerly pinched one of the awful little beasts and popped it between his nails. It was oddly satisfying.
“Got the bastard,” he noted.
“Good work.”
He caught another one. It was funny, but if you smelled the stink of the boy’s rotten head long enough, you stopped noticing it.
They plucked lice for so long that the boy fell asleep under their fingers. Tomás wiped so much pus on the front of his pants that they had two ugly stains. For the first time in his life, he felt—well, saintly.
Unexpectedly, Teresita disrupted his thoughts by saying: “Jesus washed dirty feet, you know.”
She went to the pot of purple water and set it on the table to cool. The boy was snoring. When the water was cool enough, Teresita soaked white cloths in the tea and began to gently dab at his wounds. He jumped, but kept snoring.
“We don’t even know his name,” Tomás said.
“Let’s hope he’s not another Urrea,” she said.
She was grinning.
“That’s not funny,” Tomás muttered.
They washed the pus off his head. She smeared a pale yellow ointment on the wounds, and she wrapped a white bandage around his head.
“What shall we do with him?” she asked.
“Why are you asking me?”
“You are the patrón,” she pointed out.
“I am not in charge here,” he said. “I have lost control of everything.”
She picked the boy up in her arms and carried him to the parlor. She laid him down on the couch and sat beside him, patting his skinny chest.
“Get me a blanket,” she said.
Tomás ran upstairs and pulled a blanket