The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [36]
Tomás rubbed his face.
“Well,” he said. He nodded. He had always been afraid of ruining the ranch, and now, in the one gesture he had been sure would preserve it forever, he might have annihilated everything.
Tomás leaned in and, in a conspiratorial tone of voice, inquired, “Do your department stores sell honey?”
“Honey?”
“Claro que sí! Honey! Have I told you of my experiments with the honeybee and the golden honey?”
Tomás rushed to his desk and produced a candle that was decorated along its entire length with small hexagons.
“Honeycomb!” Tomás cried.
“Rolled like a small burrito,” noted the Engineer.
“Honey is the grand industry,” Tomás sighed, sitting back.
After a while, they began sketching designs for new, scientific beehives, the brandy making all lines curved and crooked and possible.
Eleven
IF THERE WAS EVER UPROAR on the ranch, Teresita seemed to be in the middle of it. She ran in a pack of little ruffians, and they bedeviled the bulls in their paddocks, climbed trees, hid in bushes and pelted Rurales with rocks. Teresita already rode horses—albeit on the saddles of the buckaroos. All the wranglers seemed to enjoy her scrappy company, and they taught her naughty corridos on their guitars. She could strum—badly—and sing ditties about lonesome cows and bandits and wicked city women who left their sweethearts broken and drunk in countless cantinas from Yucatán to Nogales. Lately, Teresita’s favorite game was piling six children on the back of a long-suffering donkey and sliding down its backside before scrambling aboard to do it again. In this way, they passed many minutes of hilarity, while the burro idly imagined the pleasure of kicking them over the fence.
That morning, when Huila made her move on Teresita, the sun was not yet risen. Huila carried her new double-barreled shotgun, and she had her objects in her apron pockets: tobacco, a folding knife, her apocalyptic man pouch, red matches, a bundle of sage, a bone, and her three buffalo teeth. She puffed a pipe Don Tomás had given her—its tobacco, cured in liquor, was as tasty to her as a cake.
She stepped up to Tía’s door and rapped on it three times.
“Quién es?” Tía called.
“Huila.”
Silence.
“What do you want?”
“The girl.”
More silence.
The door scraped open, and Teresita came out.
“It is time,” Huila said.
Teresita took her hand, and they walked away.
They passed the swampy pool of donkey pee in the road. They walked quietly through the scattering of workers’ shacks. Huila’s shotgun cut back and forth before her like some queen bee’s antennae, seeking evildoers. Around them, the muffled sounds of women rising in dark homes, unfolding their envelopes of wax paper and butcher paper and, for the poorest, their banana leaves. They took green coffee beans and threw them on heated skillets with a handful of sugar if they had it, so the sugar would burn and char the beans brown. The tinkle and dark scent filled the air, both sweet and bitter.
All these women, Huila thought: Mothers of God. These skinny, these dirty and toothless, these pregnant and shoeless. These with an issue of blood, and these with unsuckled breasts and children cold in the grave. These old forgotten ones too weak to work. These fat ones who milked all day. These twisted ones tied to their pallets, these barren ones, these married ones, these abandoned ones, these whores, these hungry ones, these thieves, these drunks, these mestizas, these lovers of other women, these Indians, and these littlest ones who faced unknowable tomorrows. Mothers of God. If it was a sin to think so, she would face God and ask Him why.
“The Virgin came to your people,” Huila said.
“My people?”
“Oh yes. The Mayos saw La Virgencita before the priests came.”
Teresita stopped and stared