The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [39]
“Don’t touch,” she said.
Teresita stayed quiet. Sometimes, asking Huila questions was a bad idea. The old one repositioned her hands above the bush about four inches from the leaves.
“Now what?” Teresita said.
“Wait.”
A few minutes passed.
“How long do I wait?”
“We could wait all night,” Huila said.
Teresita sighed.
Huila said, “Are your hands hot?”
“My hands are always hot.”
“Do this.”
Huila clapped her hands together three times, then rubbed her palms briskly. Teresita copied her. Huila put her hands above the plant. “Now,” she said.
Teresita put out her hands. Nothing.
“Close your eyes,” Huila said.
“I don’t feel anything.”
“Don’t talk, feel!”
“But Huila —”
“Feel!”
After another interminable minute, Huila told her to slap her hands together again. Very tiresome. Teresita clapped three times, rubbed, put out her hands, already thinking about how wonderful it was going to be to escape from the old madwoman and play donkey slide with the kids in the village. Then it happened.
She gasped.
The little ugly bush began to push against her hands. It was as if cool smoke had billowed from the leaves. Cold smoke. Fog. And it rolled softly against her palms, trying to lift her hands. She laughed.
“You feel it.”
“I do!”
She opened her eyes. She clutched her hands to her chest. She gazed down at the homely little hedionda bush. It was one of many, almost invisible, a lowly weed. A trash plant cluttering any landscape. Cows wouldn’t even eat it. Around its base, small grasses wobbled in the breeze, and quail tracks formed small Y shapes in the yellow dust. Small blue blossoms in its shadows, and beyond them, cacti with red flowers. Down the arroyos, wild melons twined their vines around rogue mango trees. Sunflowers. Dandelions. She gawked. She grew dizzy with color. Color filled her mouth like agua de jamaica.
“Everything speaks, child,” Huila said.
Teresita was laughing.
“Everything is singing.”
One of Huila’s mysteries was: “You are not always meant to understand, only to accept.”
“I want to understand,” Teresita replied.
“Only Itom Achai truly understands. It is our job to wonder. Wonder and obey.”
Teresita wondered how she was to obey what she didn’t understand.
Huila told Teresita to pierce her ears. Teresita was thrilled that Huila was interested in making her pretty. But Huila didn’t care if she was pretty or not. Huila told her: “You must pierce your ears to show God you are no longer deaf. You have not only been blind, but deaf. Punch holes in your ears to show God they are open, and you are ready to listen. God doesn’t care if you think you’re pretty!” But she gave her two beautiful gold hoops to wear once she had done the ritual.
Twelve
THE MYSTERIES OF THE MAIN HOUSE were as indecipherable to the People as Huila’s commandments were to Teresita. Commands, ideas, plans, and whims wheeled over their heads like the constellations. Even Huila was periodically baffled by the world of the Yoris. She sometimes looked to Segundo when her own understanding failed her. Between them, they could usually make out a pattern.
Saturday morning, Segundo rode over to the village and he parked his horse in the middle of the street and smoked until the workers came forth and gawked. Huila made her way quickly from her sacred spot and looked up at him, too.
“Do you know what?” he said.
They were immediately afraid. Why would Segundo come to address them? Was there to be a flogging? Had there been a massacre? Were the Apaches coming back? Was everybody fired? Had war broken out? A Mennonite missionary had moved through the ranchos assuring them that Jesus Christ would return to earth by 1880—maybe He was early.
“The bandits are gone,” he said. “Except in the north.”
The north. Nobody liked the north.
“The warrior Indians are also gone. Except . . .”
“In the north,” they murmured.
Segundo shifted in the saddle, and it made its three hundred leather sounds. Teresita stood next to the horse and held Segundo’s boot and looked up at him. She spun his spur. It sounded like tiny Christmas bells.
Buenaventura