The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [25]
“Oh,” he said.
Teresita looked around with her mouth open. A mesh sack of onions dangled from an iron hook, yellow as tallow. Beneath this galaxy of pans and onions was a white metal table. This was where the girls chopped up the chickens and the meat with great cleavers that hung in rows on nails in the wall.
Tomás pulled a chair up to this table and helped Teresita climb up. The frazzled house girl from down the hall ladled a measure of tamarind juice from a clay barrel and poured it in a glass. She set the glass before Teresita.
“Gracias,” Teresita said.
“Cookies, please,” said Tomás.
A plate appeared with two fat gingerbread pigs lying on a folded cloth napkin. Teresita saw that among the rich, even food got a blanket. She bit off one pig’s leg and chewed.
“Thank you,” she said to Tomás.
“Oh, it’s my pleasure,” he replied.
They shook hands.
“I must get back to work,” he said. “But the girls will attend to you. Girls? Huila, please.” He patted Teresita’s shoulder and said, “Do call again.”
They listened to him jingle as he went back down the hall.
The maid scrunched her nose at Teresita, then went to Huila’s door at the back of the kitchen and knocked.
Eight
ONCE, OVER BREAKFAST, Tomás had told Huila his dream of the night before: he had fallen from the roof of the barn, and just as he was going to hit the ground, he had begun to fly. And he flew like this, only a foot above the ground, as if he were scuttling along in shallow water, only occasionally touching the ground to propel himself along. Then, as he glided over the tomato and cotton fields, he had come upon a giantess dressed all in white with a red skirt, and he had swum under her hem and up her great white legs. Loreto was upstairs, so he felt free to say such barbarities: barbarities, after all, were a fine art among the witty gentlemen of Sinaloa.
Huila had answered him with a baffling tale based on disturbing evidence that the flesh was the dream, and that death was the awakening, and then she had demanded to know details even he was not willing to discuss over scrambled eggs: had he actually entered the giant woman’s privates, and if he had, did he find them to be meaty, or a starry void? Huila had not relented. “I didn’t have the dream,” she said, “and I’m not the one who is prancing around with his chile in his hand.” Tomás had nearly spit coffee then, and he cried “Huila!” in his most affronted voice. Seemingly deaf to his outcry, she demanded an accounting of all the places in his life where the numbers four and six had revealed themselves.
Tomás, forever after, reminded himself to keep his dreams a secret.
Now, Huila beheld the small one eating her cookies and thought twice about how she should proceed. Ah, Saint Teresa herself. In the Urrea house, many ears were always listening. While this child, she could see right away, had the Hummingbird’s hair—in spite of its strawberry-blond streaks—the rest of her was all Tomás. She glanced around the kitchen. The girls were watching the child as they worked, making eyes at each other. Surely, they were all thinking Teresita should be spanked, and her family charged with an offense for letting her in the main house. Some haciendas right there in Ocoroni would shoot trespassers and even their mothers and fathers.
Huila herself wondered how the child came to be in the kitchen and not back in the yard. Tomás, she thought, was soft. Perhaps, in some way he did not even suspect, he had recognized the child as his own. If he had been paying attention, he would have seen his own eyes staring right back at him. But the Yoris, they didn’t notice the things right before their faces. They were too busy looking over the horizon.
“Teresita,” she said.
“Yes?”
“How do you like your cookies?”
“Good.”
“No,” Huila corrected her. “When an adult asks you a question like that, you must answer politely, and say thank you.” It was a child’s job to learn.
Teresita watched her lips, watched the small vertical wrinkles that went up to the base of her nose.
“The cookies are