The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [48]
But no one fell off and nobody drowned.
They made camp by ones and twos and all fell asleep as the chocolate waters of the Río Fuerte shouted and gibbered beside them. It sounded mad, possessed. Water had never sounded so wicked to the People.
Before bed, Tomás was roused by a pair of Rurales. They asked if he had a doctor in his camp. He had Huila, which was as good. Teófano hooked his cranky mules back up, and Huila climbed aboard, and Aguirre and Segundo joined them, and they all went west.
There, under the last red explosions of sunset, they found a minuscule village called San Xacinto. It was a mere scattering of huts and a broken old adobe that was once a trading post. Now, it was a slumping and charred ruin. Black vigas crumbled in shattered mud walls.
“Apaches,” said the Rurales.
“Note the propensities of the savages,” Tomás intoned.
Beyond San Xacinto, on the outskirts, if there could be an outskirt to a town of seven huts spread out over a dusty mile, there stood a forlorn mud shanty with a roof apparently made of planks, palm fronds, and banana leaves. Huila thought there were sacks of beans lying in the dirt before the house, but she soon realized they were bodies.
Segundo whistled.
Huila peeked into the house. Inside, there was a still-smoking brazier filled with whitened charcoal. She shook her head. Made the sign of the cross.
She addressed a Rural.
“Sir,” she said. “The healer tried to do a limpia.”
“Some limpia!” he said. “What kind of cleansing kills everybody?”
“Well, he didn’t realize the charcoal would poison them. The house was closed when you came, correct?”
“Closed.”
She raised her hands.
“He meant to cleanse them, and he killed them.”
The Rural said, “I hope they paid him well. This family will never have another worry.”
Huila prayed for the dead all the way back to the camp, and for the soul of the inferior curandero. It was not her place to say if he belonged in Hell. Many of the People believed you came back after you died. She would watch for him, see if she recognized him.
Huila had been trying to teach Teresita to dream.
Dreamers, Huila said, held great knowledge, and much medicine was worked in the dream time. But it was hard to learn to dream, or at least to dream beyond the confines of the peasants’ dreams. It was nothing to dream of plates of food, or of great beasts that chased you slowly across the hills, or of flying like a lazy butterfly. Even to dream of such things as realizing you had gone to church with no clothes, and everyone was looking at your bottom, but the priest had not yet noticed and you were hoping to get out before he did—everyone had these dreams.
But Huila was talking about something wholly other, some dream that no one could explain. Where you could walk into tomorrow, or visit far cities. Having never seen a city, Teresita could only imagine it was tall and shiny, like mountains of quartz, and many Yoris hurrying around on trains, though she had also never seen a train. They were like oxen, Huila had said, only dark and terrible, with clanging bells in their heads and fire in their bellies, and they screamed and spit smoke and sparks.
“I do dream,” Teresita complained.
“Not these dreams.”
“How will I know what kind of dream it is?”
Huila smiled.
“Child,” she said, “when you dream a dream that is not a dream, you will know.”
Dream a dream that is not a dream, Teresita thought. More of Huila’s riddles. It meant nothing.
“Everyone,” Huila said, “is given these dreams. Even unbelievers. Even those not learning what you are learning. Even Yoris are given these dreams! The secret is, not everyone learns to enter the dream and work with it. We must—we have no choice. It’s simple: without the dreams, we cannot converse with the secret.”
The secret. What secret?
When you wake up crying, Huila said, you have been there. When you wake up laughing. When the dead come to you. When you have miscarried, and you dream that you have met a strange young person who might often reach for you and touch you,