The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [62]
“They’re Catholics,” Tomás replied.
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
He went to one of the survivors.
“Where are all my cowboys?” he asked.
“They ran away.”
“Where are all my workers?”
“They have fled.”
“Who was in charge?”
“No one was in charge.”
“What can you tell me?”
“They came on foot. They took the cows, the horses. They took some women.”
“Yaquis?”
“Yaquis, patrón. Yaquis.” The man pointed to the west. “They live right over there, about ten miles.”
“What? You knew them?”
“Oh yes. We knew them well.”
Aguirre butted in. “But why?” he said. “Why would they do this?”
The man shrugged.
“They said they were hungry,” he said.
Tomás patted him on the arm.
“The wagons are coming,” he said. “They’ll feed you.”
“Sir?” the man said.
“Yes?”
“Would you be angry with me if I resigned my position?”
Tomás just walked away.
Segundo picked up a charred framed picture of unnamed Urreas.
“What next,” he asked no one in particular.
The wagons and carts slowly creaked over the ridge and started down into the valley. Huila, kneeling in her wagon, had laid the soft-necked infant on folded blankets, but its eyes were already cloudy and blue, and it shuddered and let out a last breath, then collapsed. Huila thought of a sheet furled over a bed, swelling high, then collapsing as the air escaped. Flat. That was how the child left this world.
How many dead trailed behind her? She could not count. All the ones who died of fevers and pox, for lack of Yori pills. The sad mothers who died screaming and their babies, dead inside them. Dead cowboys with bullets in their hearts. She watched Teresita stare at the tiny body in the wagon, and she said a prayer, for the girl would learn the terrible truth now, that you could not save everyone—you could save only a few—and the rest were doomed, as you yourself were doomed, to lie in the dirt before you could ever be ready. She pulled a cloth over the infant’s face.
The business of rebuilding had already begun. At the ranch, the men dug the graves and laid the charred and tormented dead into the ground. Across the dreadful plain, Huila had already organized the cooks, and Segundo had posted two guards to stand by the tent all night with weapons cocked and ready before riding back to be with Tomás, and Teresita had moved in near Huila in case the warriors returned. In iron pans balanced on flat rocks by the tall fires, the cooks melted lard, boiled water. For supper they ate caldo de ajo—garlic soup: all their stale bread that hadn’t gone to the pigs or the goats floated in beef broth, salted and peppered, the garlic cloves soft in the broth like little fish. And they ate arroz con pollo, the fresh chicken mixed with prairie fowl the vaqueros had shot that day and the day before, boiled with rice and a pinch of saffron. In the morning, they would breakfast on peeled and diced beavertail-cactus pads, lard-fried beans, and their last eggs. It smelled like a festival.
Tomás, standing on the charred front steps of the ranch house, could see the campfires of his people far across the land. He stepped down and walked toward the impromptu graveyard they had scraped out of the soil beyond a stone wall that meandered toward the skeletal windmill that whined and screaked in the drying wind. Green water chugged out of the ground, spitting from an iron pipe and into rusted troughs, where the horses set their heads to drink, drifting across the sand and dust without escort by ones and twos, as if they were interested in the fate of the ranch house, curious about the battle.
The men around him cried for blood. Vengeance was in the air. They muttered and cursed, they called out their rage, spoke of filthy Indios, of savages. Yet Tomás wondered why there were not more bodies. Why had the Yaquis allowed so many to escape?
The Cabora plain was empty, dry. The Sinaloans were in their first desert, and the desert frightened them. There was no cover—few trees broke the sere waste, and beyond, the peaks were savage and violent, unsoftened by green. Elemental