The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [75]
“Chepa,” he said, “por favor.”
He gestured toward her with one hand, and she stepped forward.
“This is Chepa,” he said.
The old man of the village murmured something to her, and she nodded, and he gently lifted the hair away from her head. Both of her ears had been cut off. Under her hair were ghastly stumps, ragged and white.
“White men,” the old Yaqui leader said.
Then he lowered her hair and turned and started walking. Each of the Indians turned and followed him. Tomás and the People stood and watched them as they walked across the hot plain, leaving the stolen horses behind, wavering in the light ripples, shrinking and seeming to break into pieces, their heads and then their hearts dripping into the quicksilver sky, until they were small pepper specks and then they were gone.
Forever after, Aguirre would say that on that day, in that place, no matter what anyone said, the Mexican revolution was born.
Book III
THE HONEY
AND THE BLOOD
With the threat of Indian raids ended, Don Tomás turned
his attentions to developing the ranches, aided by large loans
from his uncle. He became a demon for work, spending day
after day in the saddle, supervising his construction crew
with astonishing energy. The improvements at Cabora were
made on the south side of Arroyo Cocoraqui, overlooking a
steep bluff some twenty to twenty-five feet high. . . . With
low, diverting dams along the bed of the arroyo, this tract of
land could be irrigated. . . . Don Tomás employed a sizable
crew of Indians to clear the land and then sent for Lauro
Aguirre. . . .
—WILLIAM CURRY HOLDEN,
Teresita
Twenty-three
THE BEES FLEW from thirty hives arranged in a wide arc along the southern boundaries of Cabora. Another ten hive boxes stood outside the main fence of Aquihuiquichi. These boxes were of pine, painted white and held above the ground on stout oak legs. Their slanted roofs were made of tin and were held firm against the wind by adobe bricks left over from the great reconstruction of the hacienda. The bottoms of the hives were a hard wood that would withstand rot. Each hive held nine panels a half inch apart, and these panels held walls of wax hexagons slowly filling with honey.
On cool days, the bees hung around the doorways to their homes in groggy gangs, only peeling away to fly to their jobs with great reluctance. At first, it would be difficult to see where they would go to find blossoms for their nectar and pollen. From above, Cabora might have seemed a desert. But the lowlands beyond the arroyo were green with irrigation water. Long rows of corn grew there, a small industry of maize and tassels and husks for tamales and dolls and cigarettes. The maize fed the three hundred workers their rations of tortillas, and the excess fed the pigs and cows, and the excess of that was sold to villages and ranchos nearby. During harvest, wagons would haul loads of corn to the Yaqui and Mayo villages in treaty with Tomás. The People fermented the corn and made the stinky mash they called tejuino, and they drank it and fought and knifed each other and vomited in the dirt and passed out facedown.
Beside the corn rows were long bright meadows of alfalfa and clover. Again, this crop fed the horses and livestock, the flowers feeding the restless bees. Beans and sweet peas on their poles and strings blossomed, as well. Guava trees. Jamaica.
All along the Río Yaqui, there were peach and apricot trees. Quince trees. Some apple trees. The mesquite bloomed. To the south of Cabora, Tomás had planted an acre of lavender. It made for a tasty honey, and Tomás experimented with its curious scent in a salve and a distilled oil. His newest project was five acres of strawberries. Old rusty food cans sprouted red, pink, and white geranium gardens before nearly every shack.
Tomás had read that asters appealed to bees, so he planted asters alongside sweet alyssum and nasturtiums and morning glories and, of course, great walls and