The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [60]
He removed his hat and fanned it before his face, futilely trying to swipe some of the smoke stink away from him. He kicked his right leg over the pommel and slid off the saddle, then he went down on one knee and stared. He plucked a stalk of grass and put it in his mouth.
Segundo galloped up to him and dismounted in a cloud of dust.
“My God,” he said.
Aguirre trotted up to them and let out a small cry.
“There must be some mistake!” he said. “Surely . . . this must be the wrong valley . . . ?”
Tomás stood, tossed the grass to the ground.
“There’s no mistake,” he said.
He pulled his revolver from his holster, checked the cylinder: fully loaded. He looked at Segundo. “Go get me the riflemen,” he commanded.
Eighteen
THE RIDERS SPREAD OUT along the ridge, both vaqueros and hired guns, their Winchesters in their hands. One, a Frenchman, carried a huge Henry long-range gun, its octagonal barrel casting blue lights in the sun. He peered down into the valley with his hunting scope, but Segundo had already seen that it was too late.
Cabora was in a wide valley that opened onto a plain that stretched as far as any one of them could see. The patchwork of tilled fields and cattle pasture gave way to desert tans and yellows. Mountains to the east, hills to the west and north. Green creek beds crisscrossed the terrain. And toward the center, beneath its crown of writhing smoke, beside a dark chasm in the earth, lay the wreckage of the ranch compound.
The wagons from Sinaloa stalled on the backslope behind the riders, collected in the hollow like water. The People eddied among their animals, and no one knew what was above them, though they all watched the smoke columns writhe. They made the sign of the cross, clutched hatchets, butcher knives, old guns. Soon, word started to drain back down to them, falling from switchback to switchback, coming down the hill. “The ranch is gone,” they said. “Cabora is gone.”
Above them, Tomás remounted.
He and Segundo rode down into the valley with Aguirre taking up the rear. The riders fanned out behind him, all guns at the ready.
The main buildings still smoldered in the distance, their walls already gone in the fire, nothing but a charred chimney rising above the plain. The fences were down; some scattered livestock still grazed. The barns were burned, the workers’ shacks smoking. Dogs, shot down and left beside the road, lay like mottled and softened rocks. A dead man bent over a fence post hung loose as laundry, blood thick and black and clotted all over him, his pants ripped away, an arrow inserted in his fundament. Flies sang like a wire in the wind, a high pitch, a terrible hymn.
Tomás snapped his fingers and pointed at him.
“Get him off there,” he said.
A pig squirmed in the dirt, punctured by a fistful of arrows, transformed into a porcupine of agony, the arrows rustling and clacking as the pig groaned and dragged itself. Segundo drew his revolver and fired one shot into the pig’s head. Aguirre jumped. “Por Dios,” he said.
Segundo told one of the riders to take it back to the cook wagon.
They came upon a charred body in the ruins of the first burned shack. It was black and red and brown and yellow and white, but mostly black. Its mouth was open in a silent scream, or some thought a yawn, and others thought it was laughing, and its claws were hard as carvings and raised to the sky and its legs were dark bones and raised as if it could run up the columns of smoke and enter Heaven.
All the horses were gone.
The well was collapsed, the stones of its rim kicked down its throat. Intestines were hung like garlands from the cottonwood nearest the ruins of the main house, and none of them could tell if it was the inside of man or animal hung there and made crisp by the sun. And still, the windmill turned, its blades picturesque against the violet distance, its rhythmic squealing eerie in