The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [168]
Teresita rose slowly and peered around.
Tomás looked at her for a moment.
“I love you,” he said.
They could hear distant tumult: great hootings and cursing.
Tomás took another sip of wine and looked under the table at Gabriela and Juan Francisco.
“Where do you suppose my supper is?” he asked.
He looked at his daughter again. She pulled out a chair in defiance of the bullets and sat beside him. He nodded, then. He knew what he would do.
Fifty-five
THE END BEGAN QUIETLY. Enríquez, in his command tent beyond Cantúa’s old restaurant, took out his fountain pen and parchment. The pilgrim his men had arrested swung in the alamos trees, already attracting crows eager to eat his eyes. Enríquez had eaten a platter of beans and broiled pork. He drank milk with the meal. Then he sat at his small folding table and composed his report of the policing action at Cabora, the estimated number of hostiles—he put the number of indigenous rebels conservatively at twenty-five hundred out of an occupying force of eleven thousand supporters. He recommended immediate action—though, if possible, leniency for Tomás Urrea and his household in the ensuing unfortunate campaign.
Enríquez sealed the letter with wax and delivered it to a courier, who rode fast and delivered it to a mounted patrol that took it on to Navojoa. There, the letter was given to a telegraph operator, and Presidente Díaz was reading its contents by suppertime on the fourth day.
That was not all that he read. Padre Gastélum had written a blistering letter to Rome demanding the excommunication of the heretic Teresa Urrea, of her father, and of Cruz Chávez and all his apostate flock in Tomóchic. He had followed this with a telegram to Mexico City reporting on the brewing uprising in Tomóchic.
At Gastélum’s urging, Governor Carrillo had included a report with the stolen canvases. In this report, he warned of the revolt now starting to sweep the Indian of the Papigochic. Valuable mining and timber lands were at risk should yet another Indian war be allowed to ignite. Worse yet because it was a war of fanatics, inflamed by the witch, Teresa Urrea of Sonora. These reports had arrived within days of the Enríquez telegram. Díaz was swift to respond. A force of one hundred riders from Chihuahua and Sonora assembled. They united in the desert and began their ride to Cabora to put an end to the insurrection.
At dawn, Cruz Chávez and a light militia party began to trot down the banks of the River of Spiders, and by eight o’clock they were dropping out of the sierra. The men were indistinguishable from the land that held them. They stretched their bodies between the boulders of the slopes, lay in the pathways of snakes without moving, allowed lizards to slink along the lengths of their weapons, felt the small claws pluck at their knuckles as the reptiles of the valley took the sun on the stocks of their Winchesters.
And they inserted themselves into the bushes and stands of nopales, settled into languid crouches that became comfortable as they configured themselves to match the twists of the branches and trunks, as they let the cool squares and triangles of shade soothe their backs, the creases and ripples in their clothes matching the shifting patches of shadow until they vanished.
And they settled themselves along the trunks of alamos and willows, along the crooked pillars of the pines and the wilder, more passionate extremities of the mesquites. Their rifles, wrapped in tattered cloth, tied with flowers and weeds, grasses and leaves, lay along their quiet bodies like branches and deadfall. They sucked pebbles and chewed grass.
Indians on the road had warned them that this was the spot. Those riders of the government who sought to silence the power of God—and the daughter of God—with bullets would pass by here. All armies ultimately crossed this nearly dry streambed.
They were the Tigers, and they waited like tigers,