The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [79]
Huila’s moon blood was long gone. But she could feel the blood coming on in the girl, the blood and all its power, coming down through the girl the way floods came down the arroyo. All the medicine people knew when the time of the moon was coming. The girls’ lights grew brighter. Their breaths carried scents like distant flowers. Blue, copper, fire colors flew above their heads, and some of them bent the world around them as they walked. It was like looking through a curved glass. Butterflies and hummingbirds, even bees, knew when a girl was coming into her holy days.
Every morning, Huila prayed about Teresita.
Everything was in place. She rubbed her eyes, she picked up her snake mummy. Something was coming.
Twenty-four
CABORA WAS RUSTIC, compared to La Capilla and Alamos. But Aquihuiquichi was prehistoric compared to Cabora. There was no great house. The land was rocky and severe. Their one windmill creaked and moaned day and night, and it sucked a brownish trickle out of the earth, and horses, steers, and workers collected it from the rusty troughs dug into the sand under three gnarled mesquites. With no Segundo to keep the vaqueros working, nobody attended to the buildings or the rudimentary barns. Goats wandered in and out of the huts. Garbage piled up between the buildings, and pigs snorted there, adding their stink to the mess.
Teresita slept in the shack of Don Teófano and his niece. She considered it an exile. The shack was up a rise from the twelve other houses. It lay between two huge pale boulders, and these kept the house shielded from the sun for much of the day, and the one good thing about it, aside from the fact that Teófano kept his plot spotlessly clean, was that the structure retained the night’s coolness long into the morning. In winter, when the desert turned cold, the rocks radiated sun heat into the night. They also diverted the wind. Teófano said they made the shack into a small fort, since he’d only have to shoot out the front and back walls in case of Indian or bandit raids. Of course, the boulders were also home to rattlesnakes, and Teresita learned to walk carefully when she exited the front door. It was common in the morning to find three or four snakes languidly taking in the sun on tall rocks at either side of the house.
Don Teófano hung an old blanket between his and his niece’s side of the shack and Teresita’s. When she disrobed, he was careful to step outside. He waited out in front at night until she had blown out her candles and gone to bed before entering and taking off his huaraches. He slept in his pants and shirt. When it was bath day, once a month or so, the niece boiled water and filled a laundry tub, and Teresita stayed outside, scandalized that Teófano was in there naked. This gave her fits of giggles.
Her arms were muscular from milking and working hoes in the bean rows and she had discovered an affinity for birth when a pregnant barn cat had sought her out in her hour of distress. Teófano wanted to drown the cat, but Teresita threw a tantrum and covered the animal with her body, then took the cat into her part of the shack. Teófano was so appalled that he immediately moved himself and his niece out to a storage shed at the foot of the slope that had once held beans. When his niece fell in with a buckaroo, the man moved in with them, and Teófano had to survive the indignity of hearing their amorous scuffling in the dark.
Teresita helped the cat bring five babies into the world. Within a few months, coyotes had eaten them all, and the mother had returned to the barn to kill mice and fight with the old tabby who ruled the hayloft. But Teresita had discovered a calling. She had wondered what her work would be. Huila had trained her in all these things, then sent her off to be a peasant in the dirt. Abandoned. But not now. Not