The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [61]
Tomás jumped off his horse and rushed into the triangular corner of the demolished barn. He came out with a child in his arms. The child was covered in blood. It was alive, though its head seemed to be made of some soft cloth, and it flopped on its shoulders and an old wound was dried into a hard scab.
“Take him to Huila,” Tomás said, and a rider tenderly wrapped the child in his coat and spun and galloped back out of the long valley.
The cows were gone.
Aguirre pointed: an empty suit of clothing, spread across the ground as if someone had run out of his own clothes.
A woman’s shoe with a broken glass of milk in it.
A dead man on a mattress floated in the stock pond like a sailor dreaming of home. They watched as the mattress slowly tipped and sank, the man’s stiff hand waving once as he settled into the black water. They were startled to hear frogs. They were startled to hear anything. They had imagined the entire valley to be silent, but it was alive with sounds. Somewhere a dog barked. The flies raised their high cry. They suddenly heard chickens. The crackling of the many fires. Crickets. Doves. The many fat crows, gorging themselves on cooked flesh, laughing from the trees. Then, slowly, they heard the sound of human sobbing.
Survivors came forward, alone and in pairs. No Urreas lay among the few dead—the family had cleared out to make room for Tomás. No, they were comfortably waiting in the great house in the city, unaware of the destruction of their ranch. The only family members awaiting them at Cabora were old ghosts, tossed from their graves by the violence.
Tomás was stunned when a man with his left eye missing stumbled out of the stock-pond reeds. Like the madman they had seen so many days ago on the road, this man was without pants, his white shirt stained with old blood. But it was a different face under the blood, the frank pockmark of the empty socket collecting sun: Tomás could see the inside of the man’s head. He turned away and put his hand over his lips.
“Yaquis!” the man wailed. “They came out of the soil like devils!”
“Help this man,” Tomás said.
A woman, inexplicably, came forth from the trunk of a cottonwood. Her arm appeared, then her torso, and her legs. Two children materialized before them, holding hands. The men who first saw them shook their heads, rubbed their eyes. Had this boy and girl been standing there the whole time? Had they been rendered invisible by the great destruction around them? More people came out of ruts in the ground, out of a small orchard, out from behind agave plants where they had hunched like rabbits or armadillos, the color of the sand, breathing shallowly and clutching the earth.
“Yaquis,” they said.
“Llegaron con el amanecer, gritando como diablos. No montaban caballos. Vinieron corriendo, a pie, brincando como venados, volando como buitres.”
The main house had been a large affair, built of wood and whitewashed adobe. The walls had cracked and fallen in, etched with terrible black shadows from the fires, the heat of the twisting red coals so fierce that none of the riders could go near it. Puddles of copper and brass on the fallen porch revealed where doorknobs had melted.
“Look here,” Aguirre called.
The insides of the house had been ripped out and scattered, like the innards hung in the tree, broken and thrown with a kind of rage that was still frightening though the raiders were gone. Shattered glass, broken crockery, broken chairs and tables and gutted pillows coughing feathers into the breeze, hollow clothes like phantoms, massacred nightgowns. Murdered books flapped on the ground.
Aguirre stood beside a big overstuffed chair. Stacked carefully in it were all the crosses and crucifixes gathered from the main house. The family Bible and a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe nestled there, along with a small statue of Saint Francis.
“They