The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [84]
Teresita enjoyed the ride, though she did not enjoy the sun, which burned her skin more easily than it did Huila’s or Teófano’s. She kept her yellow rebozo wrapped around her head and enjoyed the roadrunners and tarantulas and lizards on either side of the trail.
When they found the teacher’s house—it looked to Teófano like another sad stick hut—Huila declared, “We are here.” There was no one home. They made camp near the hut—the riflemen were ordered to camp on a hill removed from the holy man’s home—and they waited two days. Huila watched the east. “He will come out of the sunrise,” she told them.
On the third morning, the medicine man returned.
He sped toward them in the eye of a saffron storm of dust, his charging pony a small hard dot beneath him. The heat waves made him wobble, vanish, reappear. Sometimes his horse disappeared in a flutter of light, and all they could see was his figure, small in the distance, with a red shirt, seeming to hurtle through the air as if he were flying. His dust plume rose in a wedge behind him like the smoke of a prairie fire.
He reined to an abrupt halt and dismounted as his dust caught up to him and parted like curtains.
“His name is Manuelito,” Huila said.
His hair fell below his shoulders. Teresita was surprised to see that he was tall, as tall as Don Tomás. She had expected a little bent man, like the tomato pickers among the People. His shirt was red, and the cloth wrapped around his forehead was red. His earring hung from his left ear, a dangling chain with a gold nugget at the end. Around his neck were thongs with teeth and beads and a chain with a silver cross. A deep blue cloth was wrapped around his waist. His boots were black and rose to his knees. He wore a long knife at his belly on a leather belt that vanished beneath the blue cloth of his other belt.
He pulled the red bandana from his head and shook out his hair.
“Manuelito,” Huila said.
He stroked his horse. Wiped sweat from it with his head rag.
“I am Huila,” she said. “From the rancho de Cabora.”
He nodded.
“Huila,” he said. “The Skinny Woman.”
“Not so skinny anymore,” she said.
He laughed.
“We have come,” she said.
He nodded. Went around his horse, rubbing.
“For what?” he said.
“We require your teaching.”
“For whom?”
“For the girl.”
He looked at Teresita.
“She is white.”
“I am Indian,” she said.
“You’re no Indian!”
He turned his back on her. Huila knew the routine. The medicine people always refused you. You usually had to ask three times.
Manuelito walked up to Teresita and stared at her. He lifted her hair and held it to the light. He took her hand in his—his gesture was brusque, but his touch was soft.
“White,” he said. “What little Indian blood you have will fall out when your first month begins.”
Teresita stamped her foot.
“I am many things,” she said. “But if you need to know, I have already bled, and I am still Indian!” She had her finger in his face.
Manuelito nodded.
“I can teach you,” he said. “Want to eat?”
Inside, the hut was decorated with colorful blankets on the walls. A great cross made of cholla skeletons and saguaro ribs hung among them. A hawk feather dangled from one arm, and a striped owl feather from the other. The floor, too, was covered in rugs. Wood carvings of birds lined the shelves. “I like birds,” Manuelito said. In the center of the table, a carving of a blooming cactus, painted green, with small white slashes to indicate thorns. The single flower jutting from its crown had five petals and was red, with a yellow center. Rising from this flower was a blue hummingbird, attached to the flower by its delicate beak. It