The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [49]
“Angels travel these regions,” Huila said. “And souls. God can speak to you there.”
Don Teófano warned: “Or the devil himself.”
Huila nodded.
“Or the devil.”
This sounded entirely too complicated to Teresita. Not for the first time, she felt Huila was asking too much of her. She was starting to want to forget being a girl at all, much less a healer. She spent idle moments thinking about what fun it would be to dress up like one of the vaqueros and ride a big horse all day, jumping fences, chasing bandits and steers, fording rivers, shooting her trusty six-gun.
She felt guilty, but she stayed away from Huila’s wagon for a day. She ate with Antonio Alvarado Cuarto’s family, happily cuddling with her mother’s old friend Juliana Alvarado, listening to stories about what her mother had been like. Wondering if this was what a family was.
And now they were north of the Fuerte, in the lands that so vexed them, and they learned an alarming lesson: the landscape of their fears looked exactly like the land they had left behind. The mountains asserted themselves gradually. They were learning to travel, so that their mornings were faster, and their passage more sure. By the time the landscape started to transform, they felt more ready, aware of where the riders were spaced, or where the riflemen rode, fully practiced in swirling into a circular encampment.
Still, the carts yowled and moaned, formed voices that wailed as if the souls burning in Hell were shouting. Axles swollen from the river ground steadily against the wood frames that held them, and as the grease wore away, the hideous screeches grew louder and more prolonged. A blue haze began to spread among the wagons, and someone said, “Do you smell something burning?” The third cart in the straggling conglomeration of carts that wobbled behind the last big wagon burst into flames as the axle overheated. “Caray!” the driver hollered, standing on his seat and gesturing at the fire. “Caray!”
“Get off, you idiot!” the cowboys called as they first tried to swish water from their canteens on the flames, then rode in circles looking for water to carry in their hats. The driver unhitched his ox and stood aside as the wagon exploded into a bonfire.
“Caramba,” he said, shaking his head.
Somewhere, they crossed into Sonora.
The air changed around them. The heavy wetness of Sinaloa bled away gradually, until, one night, they found themselves sneezing and blowing their noses, blood in the cloths. They had never felt air as dry as this, and the women’s hair and the cat’s fur crackled with small lightning as if they were all enchanted. Segundo sidled up to Tomás and said, “Boss, the men, they have rocks in their noses.”
“This wind,” Urrea said, “it dries your snot.”
Somehow, Segundo understood that the soul could be next.
Everyone watched everything. It was as if they had lived their entire lives with their eyes closed. Each rock in the path seemed as new as the mud and stones of Genesis.
They saw cacti grow tall as giants, shaped like purgatorial souls raising their arms to the mercy of God. They saw skeletal slaughtered wagons rotting beside the road. They passed through and around tiny squalid pueblos, and the naked children of these villes ran from them in terror or ran to them in hunger. Dogs fought their dogs.
They crossed a shallow stream, its water curling away from the wheels of the wagons, throwing wobbling patterns of