The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [42]
messenger. These moral and intellectual qualities were a
living, palpable contrast to the vice and ignorance in
which she had been raised.
—LAURO AGUIRRE,
La Santa de Cabora
Thirteen
EVERYONE PREPARED for the great leaving.
Segundo lent Buenaventura fifty pesos. Segundo had also given the boy a swayback horse that was destined for the rendering plant and a job herding cows and mules and horses to far Sonora.
“Your pistol is a piece of shit,” Segundo told him.
“I will buy a new one.”
“You would have to work for a whole year to pay me back my fifty pesos and also buy a new gun,” Segundo told him.
“I will work.”
“And what will you do until you earn the money to buy a good gun?”
“If my pistol does not shoot, I will beat them over the head with it.”
Segundo laughed.
“Them!” he said. “Who?”
“Everybody.”
“Eres bien machito, cabrón,” he said.
He took a rust-pitted Colt from the armory and put it in one of his abandoned holsters. He tossed the pistol across Buenaventura’s frayed old saddle.
“Now,” he said, “you must work for two years.”
“I need bullets.”
“Two and a half years.”
Tomás and Aguirre loaded Loreto and the children on a carriage aimed for Don Miguel’s home. “I will write to you,” she promised, a gesture recognized as symbolic, since there would be no place to send a letter if she could write. Still, Tomás was no fool in romance, even with his wife, and he vowed: “I shall lie awake every night until your letters come to me, my angel. And even when they come, I shall not sleep, for I will be breathing in your scent and kissing your precious tears from the pages!” Segundo nudged Aguirre in the ribs and tipped his head at the ejaculations of the master. “Es suave, este hijo de puta,” he noted.
Loreto caused a white hankie to flutter at her slightly swollen nose like a trapped moth as she sniffled. Secretly, she was thrilled: she was through with horses and the stench of cattle. Au revoir, picturesque vaqueros! Adieu, pigs, Indians, scorpions, and dust! She and her children would live in a city from now on, with cobbles, signs, schools, stores, parasols, china. Restaurants! Certainly, there would be restaurants in Alamos! She already saw herself perching on a wrought-iron chair and sipping an exotic tea, while all about her, people spoke in the intoxicating if baffling manner of Lauro Aguirre.
Loreto mopped at her eyes gently as the carriage pulled away. Everyone waved until they were small with distance and vanished to each other, except for Segundo, who saw them until they were over the crown of the hill.
“At last,” Tomás startled the Engineer by saying, “we are free!”
Segundo seconded his boss’s sentiments with a pious pronouncement: “The hardships of the journey are not for fine ladies or children.”
Aguirre noted that behind them, scores of women and children were tearing their small homes apart and fastening their sad scraps onto two-wheeled carts.
They had studied the route for days. Don Miguel had ordered great topographical maps from Mexico City, and they were printed in vivid colors on oiled sheets that flopped heavily and hung from the edges of the dining room table. Aguirre attacked these maps with rulers; he charted useless radii with a silver compass. The trail seemed clear enough to Tomás and Segundo. They would skirt the western edge of the Sierra Madre, heading north until they could veer to the left and enter the safety of the mining city of Alamos, or they could veer right and enter into wilder lands of the Urrea ranchos. There, marked in black oil pencil by the Patrón Grande before the maps arrived at the house, were the vague empires of the northern Urrea confederacy: Cabora, Santa María, Las Vacas, and Aquihuiquichi.
“By God,” Aguirre said. “You own the entire world.”
“Four ranchos!” Tomás said. “I have four ranchos!”
“And a silver mine,” the Engineer reminded him.
Segundo, gobbling all the snacks the cooks could carry, smiled. He ate nanchis, sun-dried fish, pig cookies, skinny fired taquitos, orange slices with red pepper powder and salt, prunes, chicken gizzards.