The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [19]
Huila had let her coffee go cold. She stared at him with her mouth slightly agape.
“Puta madre,” she exclaimed.
“No one knows that story,” Tomás said. “Not even my friend Aguirre.”
He shifted in his seat, wiped his eyes.
“So!” he said. “What do you think?”
She patted him on the arm.
“What’s for dessert?” she asked.
Six
THE GIRLS OF THE RANCHO revered Huila. Any one of them would have gladly been her daughter, though Huila was famously without child, or man. They said she had lost her betrothed in one of the great killings, but no one knew because no one would dare to ask. Her shadow could reach all the way across the ranch when she walked, and children rushed to cool their bare feet in the darkness of her passing.
Daily, the People were amazed that this holy woman with her yellow shawl and double-barreled shotgun, and her petrified balls of a buckaroo in her mysterious apron, was merely a servant to Tomás and Doña Loreto. They could not imagine those hands, which could bring babies forth from the womb, which could drive wicked spirits from the insane with an egg and some smoke, the same hands that castrated pigs and made teas that offended tapeworms so severely that they tumbled out of the guts of men and cows, that those sacred hands picked up Urrea plates, washed Urrea shirts, or carried out Urrea wads of soiled paper from the indoors excuse-me closet. The thought of genteel Loreto Urrea giving the great one an order was so deeply offensive that none of the People could bear to think about it much. If you were born to be a burro, they sighed, you can’t be an eagle.
Cayetana thought about Huila as she walked through the dark. The baby was heavy in her arms, and at one point she snuffled and jerked, and Cayetana whispered, “Don’t wake up! Please, don’t wake up.”
She pushed through the reeds on the far side of the pigpen. The big old sow hove to her feet and watched Semalú pass. She wiggled her flat plate nose, sniffing the air. Having launched hundreds of piglets into the world, the sow recognized a mother and a little one going by. She grunted a soft greeting.
Cayetana stopped outside her sister’s door and collected herself. She knocked. The door scraped open, and one of her nieces peered up at her.
“Get your mother,” she said.
Even though the house was only one room, and Cayetana could clearly see her sister, Tía, in the corner, her sister called out, “Quién es?”
“Soy yo,” Cayetana replied. “La Semalú.”
“Pinche Cayetana,” Tía cursed softly, already exasperated by whatever idiocy the little tramp had thought up now.
Tía pulled open the door and stared. She was only twenty-three, but she was already old. She had three children of her own. Her teeth had started to go bad, and they hurt her all the time. She smoked every piece of cigarette and cigar she could find. Cayetana had never seen someone smoke so much. And Tía, who could not possibly ingest enough cigarettes, had developed a habit that at once fascinated and terrorized Cayetana. She used her own open mouth for an ashtray, smoke rising from her nostrils as if she were some strange beast in a fireside storyteller’s cuento, before she opened her mouth and tapped the hot ash from her cigarette onto her tongue. It hissed.
“Tía,” Cayetana said, taking in a deep breath and holding her back straight. “I have been called across the ranch to work.”
“Work? Now?”
Tía sucked in some smoke, then studied the end of her cigarette: apparently, there wasn’t yet enough delicious ash for her.
“Yes. There is a . . . a pregnant cow, you see. I have to go help.”
Tía administered her ashes: Ssss!
“Liar,” she said.
“No, it’s true!”
“When will you be back?”
“By morning, I swear it.”
“Give me the girl.”
Tía took the bundle from Cayetana and accidentally dropped her cigarette. It was only an old hand-rolled, and it was only a stub, but the paper broke and the tobacco scattered at their feet.
“Goddamn it!” Tía shouted. “The baby knocked it out of my hand!”
“Sorry.”
“Look what you did, pendeja!”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“You’re not