The Hummingbird's Daughter (24 page)

“You are Gabriela,” Tomás said, rising and bowing slightly.

“I am.”

“An angelic name,” he cooed, “for an angelic young lady.”

She regarded him and did not smile.

“I am Tomás Urrea,” he said.

“Yes, I know.”

“You do?”

“We all know you, Don Tomás.”

“And why did I not know you?” He wagged a finger at Señor Cantúa. “You have kept this angel a secret, Maestro.”

“I have been away,” she said. “Studying.”

“You went to school?” Tomás said.

“Yes, Don Tomás. These are modern days. Women attend college.”

She smiled a little.

“Delightful,” Tomás murmured.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have work to do.”

Tomás bowed again. Buenaventura and Segundo rose as she left the room.

“Chingado, Cantúa,” said Segundo. “Qué guapa!”

Señor Cantúa nodded, and he sighed again.

“I will bring your soup,” he said.

And he did.

On the long ride home, Tomás would occasionally state: “Gabriela!”

Segundo and Buenaventura, wisely enough, only nodded.

Twenty-six

HUILA SAID: “Allí viene el hechicero.”

She had led them north, into the Pinacate desert. The two armed riders were baffled the whole time, but they were happy to get away from hammering nails and building fences and hauling dead cows into the stinking rendering vats. They had almost forgotten what made them buckaroos in the first place. Don Teófano had steered the wagon where Huila had commanded him to go. They asked questions of peasants at stick-and-mud huts in the burning wasteland, and Huila seemed to follow an invisible map made of dreams and stories as they left the main road and followed narrow paths that threatened to break the wagon’s axles. Don Teófano was worried about water, but Huila found a tanque by following butterflies and mockingbirds until she saw a dragonfly. So Huila’s maps, Teresita realized, were drawn across the sky, as well.

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 had six wings. Manuelito pointed to the wings and said, “I had to find a way to show motion in wood.” He smiled. “It is a good carving,” he said.

On his bed lay a guitar. Teresita picked it up and strummed it.

He served them a tasty stew made from goat and desert tubers and sage. Don Teófano gobbled his so fast he got a bellyache. Manuelito poured them cups of mint tea.

“What do you wish to learn?” Manuelito asked.

“Plants,” said Huila. “She wishes to heal.”

He sat back, rubbed his belly.

“Plants are a big responsibility. How many plants do you know?”

“I know thirty plants,” Teresita boasted.

He sighed.

“A good herb doctor knows a hundred plants. An hechicero knows one thousand plants at the very least.”

She was stunned.

“How long does that take?” she asked.

“Not long. One and a half lifetimes could prepare you.”

“More stew?” Teófano asked.

“Help yourself.”

“But I am smart,” Teresita said.

“Being smart does not always mean anything in matters of spirit,” Manuelito said.

“You are a strong girl,” he added, “and you are also a wild boy.”

A wild boy! She was so shocked by this that she just stared and blushed. What sort of insult was this?

“Are you insulted?” he asked.

“No,” she lied.

“You are a boy. Did you not know?”

“How am I a boy?” she asked, her toes curling beneath her.

Manuelito said, “Why is my hair long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“You’re an Indian.”

“I am also a woman.” He took a great gulp of tea. “Why do you think we wear our hair long like this? Among my people, it is so the men might honor our sisters and the women within us. And you know we are the fiercest warriors in the world! My brothers will happily cut out an enemy’s guts while he is alive and let him watch dogs eat them!”

“Dios mío!” said Don Teófano. These damned Indians!

“And then they’ll set fire to him and laugh at his screams.”

“I hope they don’t come to visit while we’re here,” Teresita said.

Manuelito laughed.

“Still,” he said. “Still. We are both man and woman. My brothers can be tender as mothers with their infants. Women can fight like tigers. Do you see? We are all a mix of each. Power starts when you strike the proper balance. Believe me when I tell you that the woman part of you is the better part. But you are also a man.”

He put his hand on her face.

“It doesn’t mean you are not very pretty.”

Teresita loved Manuelito.

They stayed for two weeks. He told her what she could share with others, and what she couldn’t share. He told her he had a wife and two sons at a ranchería not more than three days’ ride from here, but the medicine was not to his wife’s liking, so she lived near his mother and grandmother and their husbands beside a small pond at the foot of a ridge he called La Espina del Diablo.

“Is that where you rode in from?”

“It was.”

“I thought you were off at war, or on a raiding party.”

“I was eating chocolate cake and drinking buttermilk and trying to make a third child.”

“Make a daughter.”

“I would love to make a daughter! I can’t wait to get back! I have work to do!”

“Manuelito,” she warned, becoming his teacher for a moment, “don’t let your wife hear you call that work.”

They laughed.

He told her stories as they walked. Huila and Teófano, in the meantime, lounged and smoked and lied to each other and played cards. The two riflemen spent their days hunting rabbits and sleeping. They had hidden a few bottles of tequila in their bags, and these gave them reason to sleep.

He took her out to the shade of a scraggly tree with yellow flowers on it. They sat in the gravel, and tiny leaves and small yellow petals rained down on them. The tree was alive with bees. Manuelito said nothing. Neither did Teresita. He gestured up at the bees with his eyebrows. She listened. She could hear the bodies of the bees scraping around in the flowers. After a while Manuelito began to chuckle. So did Teresita. Soon, it seemed that the muttering of bees was the funniest thing they had ever heard. They sat there laughing out loud. They occasionally nudged each other and collapsed in hilarity. They wiped their eyes and laughed some more until they were crawling around gasping for air and weeping from how hard they laughed. Finally, lying on his back and clutching his aching ribs, Manuelito said, “You pass.”

Teresita learned to walk slowly by pacing beside Manuelito. They spent their days strolling the desert, and he told her about each plant they met, and what it was like, and what it could do, and what other plants it liked and which it hated. Which plants were its relatives. Which plants could give you crazy dreams. He taught her which plants could kill as well as heal. He was often barefoot.

“I like to be in contact with my mother,” he explained.

Teresita surprised Manuelito with a secret weapon of her own: pencils and a couple of Aguirre’s notebooks. She sketched the plants in the notebooks, and she scratched their names and their details onto the pages. Manuelito was astounded by this. He made her teach him to write his name, and she showed him the letters. He held the pencil in his fist and made wobbly letters, then beamed at his name when he was through. They put the page on the wall of his house. When she was done with her studies, she had two hundred plants listed in her books.

“Why do I pierce my ear?”

“I know! I know that one! Huila told me!”

“Well?”

“You pierce your ear to show God you are no longer deaf! You are ready to listen!”

He was surprised.

“Very good,” he said. “Now, here is another question. Why is it my left ear?”

“I do not remember.”

“Because the left side is the side of the heart.”

“If it is the side of the heart . . .”

“Then I show the Creator I am truly, deeply, listening.”

Teresita nodded.

He continued: “Christians don’t like the left side, but Indians do. Christians have forgotten their hearts. When a medicine woman hugs you, if she means it, she will move you to the side and put her heart on yours. Does Huila do this?”

Teresita laughed.

“Huila does not hug.”

“Too bad for Huila,” he said. “You should teach her.”

They walked.

“Have you noticed,” he asked, “how the Yoris hug?” He used the word from her own language. “They never put their hearts together. They lean in and barely touch the tops of their chests, and they hang their asses out in the wind so none of the good parts touch. Then they flutter their hands on each other’s backs. Pat-pat-pat! One-two-three! Then they run away!”