The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [68]
The People thought him quite mad, sleeping outside like that in Urrea’s big bed, with chickens perched above his head and toes, and camp dogs starting to congregate near him in greater numbers every night—with his white nightshirts and his spyglass, his books and his clay-pot fountain burbling noisily all night. When the barn cat decided he loved Aguirre above all men, and Aguirre let the little beast sleep on the end of his bed, they were scandalized. But Teresita found Aguirre fascinating.
The colored auras around some people had returned, still faint but somehow clearer at the same time. She was starting to see things, as Huila had said she would. But mostly it wasn’t anything magical—she was just old enough to notice what she had never noticed before. Recently, for example, she had noticed bulls pushing cows around the land from behind. Then she had seen horses pushing mares. And when she’d told Huila what she’d seen, Huila had pulled her behind the barn and told her what the animals were doing. And Teresita had shrieked in horrified delight, and they had laughed like two little girls.
And Huila had shown Teresita how to milk a cow, for she had only milked goats, and Huila had said, “You have no teats, but you will. Mine, ay mi hija, mine hang as loose as this cow’s! They start out big, but they end up long. Bendito sea Dios.” Teresita giggled at the old woman’s rough talk.
Teresita had never noticed how many of the workers on the ranch had rotten teeth, or missing teeth, or twisted jaws and collapsed lips where their teeth had been. She had not seen the limps all around her—the injured feet and ankles, the legs twisted by injury or disease. Three different men in El Potrero had damaged arms—two crooked arms like twisted branches, and one hand missing half its fingers and bent into a dark claw. Missing eyes and white eyes and wandering eyes and crossed eyes. The vaqueros were scarred and some of them had lost thumbs or forefingers. She was astounded. The world was wounded in ways she had never seen.
Dogs ran on three legs.
What was this?
Dead chicks lay in the coops, being dismantled by insects.
No matter who she asked, no matter how many of the People, even Huila, even Aguirre and the seemingly omnipotent cowboys, nobody could explain why there was suffering, why there was pain or death or hurt in the world. It drove her mad with frustration to hear that suffering and disease were “God’s will.” Or the cowboys’ philosophy that life was just hard, and you clenched your teeth when it hurt and didn’t bitch and if it got too bad you rode out into the country and waited it out like a wounded coyote or a mountain lion. These answers frustrated her, too. Huila was the worst. Teresita was learning, to her undying shock, that the old one didn’t have answers for everything. There were actually mysteries too deep for the old woman, and Teresita was not comforted by her serenity in the face of these unknowns. Teresita didn’t dare say it aloud, but it was not enough to burn sage or sweetgrass or cedar, it was not enough to kneel, to dip holy water onto her forehead, to recite mysteries of the rosary or sing the old deer songs or raise an offering to the four directions. Didn’t it drive Huila crazy to ask questions that were never answered? Oh, but she already knew Huila’s reply, she didn’t even have to speak—Huila would have told her There are some questions you don’t ask. There are some questions that are not given to you to be answered.
Teresita wandered in a daze of seeing. Aguirre, in his big bed on the sand, in his small wobbly globe of light, his piles of books, may not have been the most puzzling thing about Cabora, nor of the great land of Sonora beyond the gates. But he was puzzling enough.
One morning, Aguirre awoke at dawn. His chickens were standing watch above him; he had learned to turn them on the rail so their rears faced out and away from him, and the ground at the head of the bed was rich with their droppings. Five dogs crowded in near