The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [158]
When he sat on the floor for a moment to think about his night, he fell asleep beside them, and that’s where Gabriela found them all in the morning, dreaming together in the cool orange light of dawn.
Book V
THE OUTER DARK
Was she an illusion, this young nervous girl,
vibrant and sweet, sweet and tenacious, who carried
in her eyes a turbulent flame, as stimulating as a
ration of gunpowder and liquor, yet as benign, placid
and lulling as the smoke of opium . . .
The Saint of Cabora!
Had those eloquent eyes—whose radiance bathed
her face in a nimbus that ignited miraculous
enthusiasms in the poor pilgrims who came to her from
distant mountains—had these eyes suggested to the
villages of Sonora, Sinaloa and Chihuahua that they
should begin revolts that could only be stopped by
drowning them in fire and blood?
—HERIBERTO FRíAS
Tomóchic
Fifty-two
THE FIRST SIGNS OF REVOLT seemed mild. Excited Mexicans mixing their religion and their tequila. A rock flew through the presidente municipal of Navojoa’s window. A lone Rural was chased out of a nasty little village by a gaggle of angry grandmothers with sticks. The old bodies of two Indians that had hung in an alamo beside the road to Sal Si Puedes for two years were cut down and buried.
Soon, however, things got more interesting.
Soldiers on patrol were often greeted with cries of “Viva La Santa de Cabora!” The commanding general of the Fort Huachuca garrison outside Tucson noted the wearing of Teresita scapulars among the natives, and he put it in his report to Washington. A Prussian land-grabber not far from Cabora was burned out one night. The local People said his house had been hit by lightning, and by “the great power of God.” Rurales thought they saw charred torches in the ruins.
Father Gastélum had been riding the Chihuahua circuit now for months, having escaped the heat of Sonora and the idiocy of the “Girl Saint” and her rabble. His difficult transit carried him up the Sal Si Puedes ravine into the sierras, and over into the Papigochic region, home of the Tarahumara and the recalcitrant Tomochitecos. He preached at the Tomóchic church once every two months. He had been appalled to find a wooden carving of Teresita in their chapel. The imbeciles had lit candles to her. They had pinned silver milagros to her pathetic rebozo, some scrap they had wound around the statue. Heresy!
In Chihuahua City, he made his reports to Governor Carrillo, and he sent a telegram to Mexico City and an incendiary report of heresy to the Vatican. Father Gastélum promised himself he would stop this blasphemous movement if he had to set fire to Cabora himself.
Lauro Aguirre wanted to go home, and he wanted to see Tomás again, and he wanted to observe the transformation of Teresita firsthand. But at this point, he knew he would be stood before the first available Mexican wall, or worse, hung from the first tree a cavalryman happened to lead him to. From the relative safety of El Paso, Texas, he wrote an endless series of articles, pamphlets, editorials, and broadsheets extolling the virtues of Yaquis, of revolt, of the Saint of Cabora. He castigated and reviled Díaz, and he occasionally ducked down alleys to escape Mexican assassins and goons sent up from Ciudad Juárez to try to silence him. But he would not be silenced. He published his newspaper, El Independiente, in a small shop in the heart of downtown. Most of his workers were fellow refugees who had fled from the Díaz regime.
Aguirre clipped articles from gringo newspapers and magazines, most of them mad and inaccurate, steeped in bigotry and cynicism. Friends mailed him bits