The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [41]
Teresita wandered off with Buenaventura.
“You going?” he asked.
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’m going,” he said.
“Good.”
All over the ranch, the People were looking as baffled as infants or young monkeys. Even vaqueros were to be found in odd corners, tossing lariats at fence posts and fingering the ropes, as if ropes were fated to become arcane objects of the ancient past. Segundo was discovered on Sunday joining several little girls in a game of hopscotch.
On Monday, they were amazed to find men already shutting down the ranch. The patrones moved so fast! Things happened as if by themselves, or by invisible agents of change. Tools and goods were going into boxes. Seeds filled burlap sacks. Favorite fruit trees were dug up and mounted on wagons, their root balls wrapped in old blankets and wetted down with buckets of water.
Women swept out their dirt floors each dawn, thinking this might be the last dawn of the world. The dust flew from their doors with tenderness. They meditated on the dirt. Even Tía, one day, said, “Dust. It is probably mentioned in the Psalms.”
Padre Adriel arrived that week with flagons of holy water, and he blessed things until he was weary. He blessed the wagons and the two-wheeled carts. He blessed donkeys and mules, horses and goats. He even blessed the she-pig. He blessed hoes, shovels, axles, children, hats, metates, shoes. He did not bless pistolas, though he did bless rifles. “Rifles hunt deer,” he said, “but pistolas hunt men.” He heard confession in the barn.
When he saw Tomás, he said, “Do you wish to make a confession, hijo?”
“Padre,” Tomás replied, “my only confession is that I do not believe in confession.”
Eggs and tortillas became a new astonishment. The Sinaloans had heard that Sonorans indulged in the unspeakable atrocity of eating flour tortillas. Flour! Any human being knew that tortillas were made of corn. So they regarded their pieces of tortillas with sorrow—serving as spoon and fork and napkin all at once, their humble little maíz tortillas, with their loose skins and their delicious burned spots, had revealed themselves at last to be family members more loyal than sisters or brothers. Long after a fight with a brother, even after a funeral for a sister, you could scoop up some fried beans with a tortilla de maíz. And when you didn’t have beans, a pinch of salt in a tortilla was a great meal. How could you eat salt in a wad of flour? Did not Padre Adriel say they were “the salt of the earth”? Nobody was sure what it meant, but it clearly related to the tortilla.
For a time, men stopped kicking their dogs. Once they allowed themselves this kindness, emotions without number flooded their chests. These feelings convinced some men that they were dying of hideous ailments like heartworms or the evil eye. Soon, making love became so overwhelming that their flutes drooped. The men feared weeping in front of their women so deeply that their bones would not rise. The women, however, wanted loving more than ever. Now that they were being torn away from their homes, they wanted to be pressed to the earth and worked upon it like masa on the comal, they wanted to feel the rocky flanks of the earth grow soft in that mysterious moment when the ground opened them and swallowed them. They would lift their skirts high and offer the men the tender promise of their legs, but the only ones who bit their flesh were fleas. The men merely hung their heads and scratched the dogs behind their ears.
The vaqueros were not overconcerned. They spun the occasional spur, scratched their names on the walls of the bunkhouse. They were more than willing to offer their services to the frustrated women of the village. They enthusiastically kicked every dog in sight.
Book II
WHERE THE SKY
FORGOT TO RAIN
We should say that what most powerfully caught the
attention of the people were the moral and intellectual
qualities of the girl. They intensified the power of her
virtues, the powers of her soul; at the same time, these
features caused the people to see in her a saint, a celestial