The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [54]
“It is.”
Huila started to snore.
Teresita sat there thinking, feeling the strangeness of it. She looked around the plain: sputtering fires, the Yaqui dreamers flickering out of view, the sleeping bodies, the pale white lozenges of the tents. She turned and stared. There was a small glowing patch in the air, like mist. She saw people there, holding books and newspapers. Reading . . . and she knew they were reading about her. She leaned toward the light and looked in their faces. The readers were far from her, yet right beside her. She said, “Hello?” But they were too far in time to hear her.
Later, she awoke.
Sixteen
THEY MADE CAMP IN A GOOD VALLEY. A stream came out of the foothills, and it was shaded by cottonwoods. A fallen old trunk had formed a dam across the water, and the pool behind it was green and cool. The branches of the fallen tree had taken on a life of their own, and the rotting dam had a row of thin trees rising from it. Fat black fish lurked in the green pool, and the outflow of the dam watered a wide green swath of grasses and wildflowers.
Teresita parked her burro beside Aguirre’s horse and looked up at him.
“Engineer?” she said. “What year is it?”
“1880,” he said.
“Is that a good number?” she asked.
She did not yet know that Yoris did not count the numbers the way the People did, and they did not pay attention to fours or sixes, sevens or nines.
Aguirre thought for a moment, then replied: “It is the year of the exodus!” This greatly pleased him. She went off to ask Huila what that word meant.
Their lives were changing every day as they traveled. They did not know that the world all around them was changing, as well. General Sherman, to the north, had just wearily proclaimed, “War is hell.” Settlers in the state of Oklahoma, like Yoris in Mexico, had begun stealing Indian land. American companies not busy embezzling the Indian Territories were heading south and buying vast land holdings from the Díaz regime.
Thomas Edison had been experimenting with long-burning filaments. Wabash, Indiana, had recently become the first city entirely lit with electric lamps. Within a year, New York City would follow. George Eastman had patented the first roll of film.
The Irish gave the world the word boycott. France took Tahiti. Singer sold 539,000 sewing machines to replace its older models, one of which already awaited Doña Loreto in the great house in Alamos: a housewarming present from the Urreas of far Arizona. Alexander Graham Bell placed the first telephone call.
In New York, Thomas’s English Muffins appeared. Ice cost $56 a ton and 890,364 tons of it were sold to tropical countries like Mexico. Philadelphia Cream Cheese was invented.
It was beside the green trout pool that the People first noticed the pilgrims. Don Tomás had declared two days of rest to feed and water the animals, to attend to the axles, and to do a little hunting and fishing. The buckaroos immediately set out to slaughter deer, quail, turtles, fish. Meat smoked and sizzled on crude spits over nearly every campfire. The sound of singing and laughter combined with the lowing of the cattle. Tomás, lying in the shade of the horizontal cottonwood grove, idly watched the smoke rise, took in the lulling music of his rolling rancho, and nibbled the delicate meat of a trout.
“Truchas,” Huila said, spitting right and left, “are full of bones.”
Walkers passed the camp in small groups. They never accepted offers of hospitality. Segundo called them rude bastards for turning down his rum and beans. After the tenth scuttling crowd passed by, he took to siccing dogs on them and aiming rifles at them to make them trot.
“We are going to the messiah!” one tattered Indian called, as if this explained everything.
“The messiah!” Segundo bellowed. “What messiah?”
“Chepito!”
“Who the hell is Chepito?”
“Niño Chepito, the messiah!”
Huila listened to this with great interest.
Niño Chepito, eh?
“I will go inspect this messiah,” she proclaimed.
“Ay, Huila,” Tomás said. “Another pendejo with