The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [45]
Fourteen
THE MAIN HOUSE’S CARRIAGE was followed by the ranch wagons, in turn trailed by more than fifty overloaded carts. Each wagon and cart had a driver, including Huila’s wagon, whose mule driver was Don Teófano. There was also a wagon with one hired cook, to spare the household help any undue strain on the journey.
Wagons carried beds, stoves, the sewing machine, weapons, salt, slabs of jerked beef, wheat, maize, several hundred pounds of beans, salt cod, dried shrimp, chile peppers, bags of brown sugar, pots, pans, soap, tubs, water, vinegar, olives, rice, green bananas, limes, oranges, candy, tobacco, medicines, Huila’s vast storehouse of herbs, onions, garlic cloves, clothes, guitars, machetes, trumpets, caged parrots, dolls, rifles, huaraches, underpants, spyglasses, love letters, Tomás’s library packed in crates, picks, shovels, scythes, whetstones, bridles, harnesses, a rocking chair, the grandfather clock.
Straggling along behind this mobile flea market came the ragged children who could ride, some of them on ponies, one or two on old plow horses, one on a big pig, and Teresita, on a burro.
The edges of day were pouring mercury, burning, upon the hills.
Don Tomás, at the head of the column, sat tall on his horse and felt, like arrows, like bullets, the eyes of all his people focused on his back. He had never felt so alone.
Behind them all, a flatbed wagon whose mule driver was covered in a tent of mesh. It was the fellow from Parangarícutirimícuaro. Whining and humming behind him, seven hives full of bees. Tomás had concocted a smoker that pumped marijuana fumes into the hives, and the bees were relaxed and enjoying the ride. The wagon driver had red eyes and a foolish grin on his face, and he occasionally bent down and pumped a blue-white cloud of smoke into his own face.
Falls, then. Tripped horses, peones falling off their carts and splitting their heads. Ten escaped cows thundering through the willows. A wheel fallen off a wagon.
By noon, several of the cowboys had spied a lone coyote running down a dry wash, and they set out after him, firing their rifles as if to kill the devil himself. Spooking the cows, yet unable to stop, they flew over the hills like maniacs, like frantic dogs, only to slink back to the master, their heads bowed and their tails dragging. Nobody hit the coyote.
Over the hills until the ranch was out of sight. Every mind full of what it loved the most, each person certain he had lost that thing forever. Fresh mango. January sixth, the Day of the Three Kings. The Day of the Dead. Tejuino, the fermented maize beer. Fried coffee beans. Sex in the sugarcane field. Sex in the barn. Sex in the stock pond.
They made only nine miles that first day, and when they stopped, they felt as if they had traveled one hundred or more. They could have walked home and been there before midnight, yet they felt as if they were cast adrift in the most foreign land. They were grim and pale with trail dirt, their massive cloud of heraldic dust leaning far ahead of them on the evening breeze, already traveling three times the distance they had been able to go.
Crows, attracted by the stink and the tumult, spied on them from the treetops, hopping along from tree to tree, peeking out from between the ragged leaves. And buzzards, attracted by the flapping crows, hypnotized by all the wandering meat beneath them, circled and dreamed of putrescence and death, the deliciousness of rot. And unknown and unseen, to the north of the trail only five miles away from the rancho, three dead men grinned under the soil, shot by Rurales for their scant gold and their boots, buried hastily and half-eaten by beetles and voles, tunneling wildcats and foxes, these three leathery travelers vibrated underground as the people passed, shook in their