The Hummingbird's Daughter Read Free Page B

warty-looking blackened bag out of her apron pocket and toss it and catch it, toss it and catch it, until the man quieted down and started watching. Then she’d say, “Did you have something you wanted to say to me?”
    She felt her way out of her room at the back of the kitchen, and felt her way along the edge of the big tin table where the girls chopped up the chickens, and she went out the back door. She paused for a moment to offer up a prayer to the Maker. As María Sonora, she prayed to Dios; as Huila, she prayed to Lios. Dios had doves and lambs, and Lios had deer and hummingbirds. It was all the same to Huila. She hurried around the house, heading for Cayetana’s shack.

    Cayetana heard the men on horseback laughing. Their voices came through the ragged blanket that served as her front door. She was on all fours, panting like a dog. Stuff leaked down the backs of her thighs. Two village girls knelt at the door and soothed her brow, combing her hair back with their fingers, offering her sips of water.
    “Does it hurt?”
    “Unh.”
    She was beyond small talk.
    “You will be all right, Semalú.”
    They moved her back onto her sleeping mat, where she poured sweat and clutched herself and moaned. The girls had never looked between anybody’s legs, and La Semalú was too gone to worry about what she was showing them. They looked into the folds of her and feared that the baby’s face would pop out and glare at them. They made the sign of the cross over their own brows, and over Cayetana’s belly.
    Cayetana grunted.
    One of the girls said, “I thought it would be beautiful.”
    She felt it would be helpful to dribble water from the jarrito onto Cayetana’s belly. She jumped. Kicked. They patted her hands.
    “Huila’s coming. Don’t worry, compañera, Huila’s coming.”

    Huila could see the men now, in the scant fire of dawning, tall on their horses. Well, no: the patrón was tall. The others were squat on their mounts beside him. He was like a giraffe among burros. Fools all. The People called Tomás El Rascacielos—the Sky Scratcher. And there he was with his idiot friend Aguirre and his pinche henchman, Segundo, out by the main gate, waiting for their goods to arrive. Well, Huila didn’t mind the goods. She liked lilac soap, and she liked the new tooth powders to clean her teeth, and she liked canned coffee and peppermints. She liked a quick snort of anís in a shot glass, and she liked cotton underpants. She did not like jujubes. The Sky Scratcher loved them, bought jujube in huge colorful sheets, and cut out little plugs of it that he fed to his horses. Jujube, in Huila’s opinion, would only pull out your teeth, and if you sucked it, it turned nasty—swampy and slick as a snail on your tongue. Damn the jujube! she decided.
    Huila made her way up the low drybank where Cayetana’s ramada stood, crooked and seemingly empty. If you didn’t know a cute girl lived here, you would kick it apart as a ruin, try to use its walls as firewood. A cute girl mounted and forgotten. Huila knocked the glowing coal out of her pipe and added to her thoughts: Damn the men!
    She pushed the awful blanket aside and bent into the hut. She was greeted by the same smell she always breathed when the little ones came. Old cooking smoke, and sweat, and a shitty smell, and all kinds of tang in the air. Thank Lios there was no smell of rot or infection or death in the air. Midwives did their work in many ways, in their own styles, but for Huila, it always began with the nose. Huila had seen terrible things in these huts—and every time she had, she had first smelled death.
    Two little monkey girls huddled beside the mother.
    “You,” Huila said. “Fetch me clean water.”
    The girls scrambled out of there and ran.
    “Do not fear, child,” Huila said. “Huila is here. Huila brought your mother into the world, and Huila brought you into the world. Now Huila will bring your baby into the world as well.”
    “I am not