The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [6]
She spit out the seed.
“I have to go now,” she said, “it is late.”
“Adios,” he said.
Cayetana replied in the mother tongue: “Lios emak weye.” God go with you. She walked into the night. Funny man. But one thing she knew from experience—all men were funny.
She’d gotten a restless night’s sleep with the bellyache she blamed on the stranger’s fruit. Now the morning brought increased tumult inside her. Cayetana thought she could make it to the row of outhouses that Tomás had built between the workers’ village and the great house where the masters slept. But the child within her had decided it was time to come forth, announcing the news about halfway to the outhouses when the pain dropped Cayetana to her knees and the strange water broke from her and fell into the dust.
Two
HUILA HATED THE WAY her knees popped when she stood. Crack! Crack! She sounded like a bundle of kindling.
She made the sign of the cross, fetched her apron, and took up her shotgun. Huila’s mochila of herbs and rags and knives was packed and ready, as always. She put its rope-loop handle over her left shoulder. She packed her pipe with tobacco, lit a redheaded match from one of her votive candles, and sucked in the flame. She had stolen some good rum-soaked tobacco from Don Tomás when she’d cleaned his library. He knew she stole it—on several occasions, she had smoked it right in front of him.
The masters called her María Sonora, but the People knew she was Huila, the Skinny Woman, their midwife and healer. They called the masters Yoris—all whites were Yori, the People’s greatest insult Yoribichi, or Naked White Man. Huila worked for the Big Yoribichi. She lived in a room behind the patrón’s kitchen, from which Tomás believed she directed the domestic staff, but from which the People believed she commanded the spirits.
She felt in her apron pockets for her medicine pouch. Everybody knew it was made of leather—man leather, they said, gathered from a rapist’s ball sack. The rumor was that she had collected it herself back in her village of El Júpare. When one of the pendejos working around her or her girls started to give her grief, she’d pull the awful little warty-looking blackened bag out of her apron pocket and toss it and catch it, toss it and catch it, until the man quieted down and started watching. Then she’d say, “Did you have something you wanted to say to me?”
She felt her way out of her room at the back of the kitchen, and felt her way along the edge of the big tin table where the girls chopped up the chickens, and she went out the back door. She paused for a moment to offer up a prayer to the Maker. As María Sonora, she prayed to Dios; as Huila, she prayed to Lios. Dios had doves and lambs, and Lios had deer and hummingbirds. It was all the same to Huila. She hurried around the house, heading for Cayetana’s shack.
Cayetana heard the men on horseback laughing. Their voices came through the ragged blanket that served as her front door. She was on all fours, panting like a dog. Stuff leaked down the backs of her thighs. Two village girls knelt at the door and soothed her brow, combing her hair back with their fingers, offering her sips of water.
“Does it hurt?”
“Unh.”
She was beyond small talk.
“You will be all right, Semalú.”
They moved her back onto her sleeping mat, where she poured sweat and clutched herself and moaned. The girls had never looked between anybody’s legs, and La Semalú was too gone to worry about what she was showing them. They looked into the folds of her and feared that the baby’s face would pop out and glare at them. They made the sign of the cross over their own brows, and over Cayetana’s belly.
Cayetana grunted.
One of the girls said, “I thought it would be beautiful.”
She felt it would be helpful to dribble water from the jarrito onto Cayetana’s belly. She jumped. Kicked. They patted her hands.
“Huila’s coming. Don’t worry, compañera, Huila’s coming.”
Huila could see the men now, in the scant fire of dawning, tall on their horses. Well, no: the patrón was tall. The others were squat