The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [67]
The workers of Cabora had fled after the Yaqui assault, and their small huts and rattling cabins stood empty beyond the corrals and the barns, and the workers from Sinaloa wandered to these houses and chose among them. This village was almost identical to the one they had come from—two ragged rows of shacks in a field with thin board and paper-wall latrines stinking in back, small pigpens behind these. The little street even held the same muddy puddle of donkey pee. People moved into these houses in the same order they had lived in the last village. Don Teófano, Huila’s helper and mule driver, started on the left side of the street, farthest west. He saw himself as a sentinel and guardian of the village, though it would have taken a stick of dynamite exploding outside his door to wake him. Each family humbly bent to enter the low doorways and lay on the straw sleeping mats and took the former owners’ fleas as their own. They soon named this neighborhood the same as their old neighborhood, El Potrero.
Those who overflowed this street—the cowboys and the ones who outnumbered the shacks—took shelter in the small unburned stables or slept under, in, and around the wagons. Teresita slept with Huila. Scorpions came down the walls at night, creeping out of the palm fronds and weeds the old workers had woven into roofs. Lizards also came down the walls, geckos and funny little multicolored creatures that did push-ups at each other, then scampered across the wood and bricks in furious battles.
Engineer Aguirre had taken charge of Cabora. How could they remake the main house with no lumber? Adobe. They had clay, and dirt, and mud, and hay. Certain vigas and crossbeams, charred black, but still solid. Muscles and hands and feet.
They raked the charcoal and the ruin out of the main house, and Aguirre was delighted to find the foundation sound. The bricks had withstood the fire, and the hardwood struts and supports were too dense to burn. The porch and the stairs were in good condition, and the fireplaces and chimney still stood. While half of Aguirre’s crew salvaged what they could from the burned house, the others used boards pried from the fences and the back of the near barn and a pair of dismantled work sheds to frame up long lines of adobe bricks. They lay on the ground like chocolate cakes. Teresita and the other children made games of stomping the clay and straw mixture in vats, the mud curling through their toes.
The Engineer found a load of copper pipe in the work sheds they took apart, and he immediately dedicated his afternoons to the design of a system that would bring the windmill’s green water from the cattle’s mossy trough to the center of El Potrero and the vicinity of the house. When finally laid out, the pipes on the ground created grids that the children made into a vast hopscotch game. Water drooled steadily into barrels at the near end of El Potrero’s dirt alley, and pattered into a vast clay jar near Aguirre’s bed, creating a delightful and refreshing atmosphere for him when he lay reading, covered with Huila’s coneflower salve to ward off mosquitoes. When he blew out his lamp, he watched the vivid skies, the immensities of the blue-white stars, the strange streaks of light when meteors unzipped the heavens. By match light, he consulted his small atlas of the stars, searching out the mysterious shapes of the zodiac. When the moon rose over the appalling black teeth of the sierra, Aguirre unbuckled a long leather case on his bedside table and pulled open a brass telescope to stare at La Luna’s shadowed ravines and canyons, her craters and deep dead oceans. Europeans had always seen a man in the moon, something the Engineer had learned in El Paso. But his parents had always seen a rabbit on the moon’s face, and this is what he saw every night, the hare on its hind legs, ears hanging back, seeming to nibble the edge of this ghostly satellite.
Sometimes, Teresita