No wonder she relished her sad small memories of Cabora. Blessed obscurity. Nobody was watching her. Certainly not her mother… She closed her eyes. Balance, she told herself. Control. Thoughts of her mother. Those were unwelcome invaders, for they filled her with sorrow and shadows. Teresita did not like to cry. She did not like to demonstrate that weakness to the world. Besides, she told herself, if she cried in public, some maniac would rush up and catch her tears in a bottle to sell later.
Oh, Mother.
Mother, gone and never returned, wandering somewhere in Mexico, perhaps to this day. Mother, a small shadow of memory, not real enough to have a face in Teresita’s mind, for she had left before Teresita could even speak. Driven by poverty, fear, and shame into the life of the wandering immigrant, the trudging nameless dark ones who were seen on the outskirts of every town. Still, in her dreams, when Teresita flew far over mountains and slipped down the winds to dip her toes in the ocean she had never seen with her eyes, she saw her mother. Small Cayetana Chávez. Hair done in elaborate waves, pale color painted on her Indian cheeks. Red glistening lacquer on her lips. Her mother, dancing in the wobbling glow of paper lanterns hung over plazuelas in Mazatlán. Teresita had hovered above her mother like a hummingbird; Cayetana’s dresses were red, like flowers, and they spun out around her knees as she twirled with workmen and cowboys, lawyers and butchers, all the men taller than she, and still beneath her. None of them worthy of her laughter or her touch. Mother.
Teresita could cry out, she could whisper, but never, in any dream, did Cayetana hear her daughter’s voice.
And when she moved on to another town, Teresita would fly through clouds and rain, under ice-cold stars and under the orange Mexican moon, to find her.
She pulled her hair back and tied it with a ribbon as Aguirre’s rented carriage banged toward Tucson after the game.
Well. Enough of that. It was far more amusing to remember her donkey Panfilo. It was delightful to relive the first real meals she enjoyed when Tomás saved her from her poverty and allowed her to enter his world of finery, crinolines, and shoes. Ah! Squash blossoms fried in egg and filled with white cheese! Fideo soup with chicken, lemon juice, and banana slices! Turkeys stuffed with dried mangoes, apricots, pineapple, and raisins! Platters of tiny fish sun dried and crisp, tart with lime juice and dribbled with bloodred Tabasqueño sauce! Such food. She’d thought no one had ever seen food like this in the history of the world. Before Tomás, a poached iguana and half a bolillo roll was a feast to her.
“No wonder I was a skinny child,” she muttered.
“What was that, my dear?” asked Aguirre.
She shook her head.
“It was nothing,” she said.
She pulled Huila’s rebozo over her head and hid her eyes.
If she could only control her thoughts, she believed, she might be able to control her life.
She put her hand on her father’s knee. Startled, Tomás turned to her and smiled. He patted her hand.
“It will be all right,” he said. “You will see.”
How could he tell what she was thinking? It seemed to be a father’s small magic.
Teresita laid her head on his shoulder. She sighed. He put his arm around her and noted, not for the first time, how slight she really was. How small her shoulders, how bony she felt.
“I promise,” he lied. “Our troubles are behind us.”
Supper with the Van Orders started in a slightly uncomfortable haze. The Urrea company was shown to a long table spread with a fine white cloth in the biggest hotel in town. Tomás made a great show of slipping money to various obsequious servers. Teresita had not sat at a table like this since before she had been harried from her home by soldiers and taken off to the prison. Through the windows of the dining room, she could see vague shadows of faces on the street, peering in at her. The brothers had apparently already recovered from their dustup.
Approaching the table, the party divided. Teresita and Juana sat side by side at one end of the table, and Harry wrestled his way into the seat directly across from Teresita. He was red-cheeked and confident, absurdly pleased with himself to be facing her. His mother clearly found this precious and softly nudged Teresita in the ribs, and the two of them snickered, baffling and alarming Harry. At that moment, Tomás and Van Order took the far end, and John and Aguirre formed a buffer zone between elder males and tolerant females. Harry was adrift, a free agent. Teresita was not used to being sequestered. Her usual place was directly across from her father, where she could argue the events of the day and the books they had read.
Tomás announced, “Apparently, the women have formed a union.”
Harry startled Teresita by pulling a folded picture of her from under his off-white cotton shirt. Upon seeing it, Don Lauro Aguirre cleared his throat and touched his lips with his napkin. Tomás paused in the middle of a bon mot to note, “Some cad has made a religious relic of my daughter!” Aguirre coughed. Mr. Van Order patted him on the back.
“Here, here!” he said. “You’re not choking, are you?”
Harry studied the picture as if it were a construction blueprint, as if he had secured a commission to inspect the real article and ensure that it matched the plan. For her part, the Saint did not enjoy being reviewed in this manner. Yet when Harry’s eyes turned away from her to the far end of the table, she grew impatient and anxious for his gaze to return.
The first course was served, white tureens of the Mexican soup known as cosido. The beef had been boiled gray, but the broth was clear, and onion, potato, and small red flecks of herbs floated in schools around the shoal of meat. In each bowl, a segment of corn on the cob joined the meat.
“Waiter,” Tomás announced grandly, “some red vino with the soup!”
“Certainly,” the waiter said.
The Van Orders were impressed.
Teresita sipped her water and spooned broth into her mouth. Tomás was breaking the bank now. She shook her head. She avoided the meat. She watched Harry watch the older men, his college. Juanita sparkled beside her. The men slurped like beasts as they attacked the overcooked beef.
Upheld by the heroic translations of Aguirre and John, with the occasional interjection from Juana and the generally unwelcome yet tolerated intrusions from Harry, the men engaged in a multilingual conversation that no reporter could have accurately recorded. Aguirre mentally registered an observation: For men of ideas, language is no barrier! He would include it later in one of his notorious broadsides.
“See here, Tom!” Mr. Van Order said. “This Díaz—a tyrant! You’re in America now, my friend. There is no going back.”
“No,” Tomás agreed.
“Make the best of it, boyo!”
“Indeed.”
“You must become an American citizen if you hope to make anything of yourself in this country.” Mr. Van Order gulped wine and put down his glass decisively, point well made!
“Yes, yes,” said Tomás. “I have already applied for citizenship, my dear Van Order. Both with excitement and a twinge of regret. I am now, however, in the—¿cómo se dice?”
“Probationary period,” Aguirre offered.
Tomás pointed at him. “In that. Three years.” He held up three fingers Mexican style—including his thumb. Juanita chuckled and held up three fingers American style—no thumb, only fingers. Tomás stared at her hand.
“It is a beginning,” Aguirre murmured.
Tomás changed fingers.
“Well! After three years, we will see, won’t we, if it is for the better or the worse when I become an Americano.”
Tomás and Juanita drank a mock toast to each other.
“It is very delicate,” Tomás confided. The men all leaned in. Juanita finished her soup. Harry turned back to Teresita and studied her. It was about time, she thought, as she acted irritated with him for looking at her like some sort of puppy. “You see,” Tomás said, “the political situation dictates a certain… delicacy.”
“Delicacy
,” Aguirre concurred.
“My landholdings in Mexico. I am responsible for family.”
“Families,” Aguirre interjected.
Tomás cast a censorious eye at him.
“I must make my moves quietly, lest the government take my lands, my ranchos. All is in peril, amigos. We must be discreet.”
They all nodded wisely.
The waiters made the soup bowls vanish.
The second course descended. Tomás announced, “More red wine with the meat!”
He turned to Aguirre.
“Who is lugubrious now, cabrón?” he said.
John, like Harry, watched the adults with avid curiosity: the libertine Tomás, that prig Aguirre, and his dear old papa were bright red in the face and animated with vino and manly twaddle. Romantics, all of them, romancing one another. Predictable too: war stories and fables of horseback exploits. Horses! John hated the goddamned animals and would have liked to see them all boiled in stews. Nor did he share the gents’ seeming fascination with wide-open plains and rugged savage mountains and the predations of the intriguing red man. God! A world of repetition and dull replication. John Van Order imagined himself in a city, never to smell horse crap again.
He glanced at Teresita. He liked her eyebrows. She looked permanently startled.
Down the table, his mother and the Saint were in their own cloud. John had been stunned to learn that when his mother was younger, she had been known as la Yaqui. How was this possible? Like many sons, John could not believe there was anything mysterious, unfathomable, or interesting about his mother. It was God’s commandment that parents were dull. And here, suddenly, his dowdy mother—dear though she be, the queen of popovers and pies—was positively… giddy.
“Mother,” he said. “Have you been drinking?”
He was appalled when Teresita and Juana burst out laughing at his expense.
“Teresita,” Juanita said. “What is the word for ‘serpent’?”
“Bacote. In Mayo.”
“I remember! What is the word for ‘bird’?”
“Huirivi.”
“I remember! What is the word for ‘lice’?”
“Náinari.”
They laughed out loud.
John said, “Mother!” There was nothing funny about lice! Not, at any rate, to decent ladies.
They snorted. John tossed his napkin on the table. Harry’s head swiveled back and forth, an idiotic half smile on his lips along with lamb grease.
“What are you looking at, fool?” said John.
“I do not know, brother,” Harry replied. “I can’t figure out what it is yet.”
It was all coming back to Juanita Van Order.
“Mother. Really. People are starting to look.”
“Jita se guaria?” she said to John in Yaqui.
“Eh?” he replied.
“She said ‘What do you want?’ ” Teresita translated. The women laughed. She turned to Juanita and said, “Es yecca-ara.”
They laughed again.
“What?” John demanded.
His mother said, “She says you have a big nose.”
Offended, he scooted his seat closer to his father and turned his back on the babbling woman who had apparently been reduced to savagery by this so-called Saint.
“Witch,” he muttered.
Teresita whispered to Juanita, “Omteme.”
Juana shrugged. “He is often mad, isn’t he, Harry?” Harry blushed when Teresita looked at him. “Harry.” His mother smiled. “My little bunny.” Of course, she said tabu, so he didn’t know what she’d said.
Harry had sat there holding his picture of Teresita the whole time. Now he refolded the picture and tucked it inside his shirt, next to his heart. He secretly extended his legs under the table and tapped Teresita’s foot with his own. She jumped. He looked away, but kept smiling. She scooted her feet back an inch. He reached out and tapped her again. Oh! She looked at him. He glanced at her and ducked his head but smiled so hard he looked like his cheeks would pop like balloons. He was blushing! But he tapped her foot again. She covered her mouth with her napkin and snorted. This was… she didn’t know what it was. She thought she should be outraged, yet she found it hilarious. Carefully, she put out her foot and tapped the top of his. He dropped his fork.
John turned back to them, his ears still red with anger. He raised a faux toast to Teresita.
“You ain’t much to look at,” he noted, “but brother here can’t seem to get enough of you!”
“John!” his mother scolded.
Teresita kept her eyes down, things clear. John Van Order wanted to be her beau. Well, well. Harry tapped her toes.
Ten
TERESITA WISHED SHE HAD a pocket watch like her father; this meal seemed like it had been going on for twenty hours. Her bottom hurt. She was tired. She could smell herself. She didn’t know if it was lovely or appalling. The People said it was evidence of God’s grace. But it always made her self-conscious.
Harry leaned toward her.
He said, “You healed Fulgencio Ortiz.”
“Excuse me?”
“You healed old Fulgencio. From San José! That’s how I heard of you.”
“Oh…” Now she was blushing. “I meet so many people.” It was dreadful talking about it.
“He was crippled,” Harry offered. “You made his leg straight.”
There was no way to address this kind of comment. Nothing one said was sufficient. Nothing sounded right.
“Praise God,” she finally mumbled, so self-conscious.
“But how’d you do it?” Harry asked.
“I did not,” she replied, shifting in her uncomfortable seat. “God did it through me.”
John guffawed, and she did not know if he was laughing at her or at one of her father’s japes. He never looked her way.
“It is a blessing,” she said.
Suddenly, John turned to them and said, “She’s one of them yerb women.” He grinned at her. “Working those Mexican yerbas.”
“Mind your own business,” Juanita scolded.
Harry hadn’t been drinking the wine, but he looked poleaxed by the whole event and hung his face around to stare at John. Then he swung his dog eyes back at Teresita.
“The Ortiz family lives near us,” Harry said. “San José ain’t far.”
“Yes,” said Juanita. “Their whole town reveres you.”
Teresita sipped water so she wouldn’t have to speak.
“You should move to Solomonville,” Harry encouraged. “Be near us!”
Juanita grinned at her son.
“You are so forward, bunny.”
Sadly for Harry, Tomás heard that one and turned to them for a moment and cried, “Does your mother really call you bunny, young man?” Howls of derision from the male end of the table.
Harry laid his foot against Teresita’s and fumed.
When dessert came, a bread pudding dotted with raisins and drooling a bit of sugared rum, Harry pulled a face.
“This dessert is a tad stale,” he said.
“While you,” Teresita replied, “tend to be a bit fresh.”
She lightly kicked his ankle.
After dinner, as the two families parted, Harry blushed vivid red when Teresita kissed him lightly on the cheek. Abrazos all around, hearty promises to keep in touch and to drop in at Solomonville soon for a visit.
When it came time for John to bid Teresita farewell, he surprised her by offering a very decent bow from the waist. He took her hand in his and kissed her middle knuckle, looking up at her from under his eyebrows.
“Don’t forget me,” he said.
“I might,” she replied.
“I won’t let you,” he said and tipped an imaginary hat before vanishing in the gloom.
When she finally rested her head on her pillow in the rooming house, Teresita felt almost dizzy. It must have been the sun. It must have been the rich food and the late hour. She told herself it was not, not, the Van Order boys. S
he felt light taps on her toes, though, more than once as she drifted off.
After a night of bad sleep, she was not thrilled to be remounting the creaky step to Mr. Dinges’s tiresome wagon. Tomás and Aguirre were rumpled, seemed morose. Hungover again, she reckoned. Mr. Dinges knew enough to let them all be. He busied himself by chatting with a German shopkeep riding home to Tubac. The two men seemed to have an endless supply of goodwill toward bacon and both spent many minutes expounding on every miraculous facet and permutation of bacon: Bacon and eggs! Bacon in thick slabs in saddlebags! Bacon grease on your face to cut sunburn! The smell of bacon! Bacon wrapped around fried chunks of rattlesnake! Bacon grease in a biscuit! Salted bacon lasting forever on the trail! It was making Teresita queasy.
Behind her, Tomás snored softly.
Aguirre just stared at the landscape, looking a hundred years old.
Mr. Dinges left them, tired and sunburned, on the road between Tubac and the Bosque Ranch. They dragged their bags along the path in the afternoon sun. Horned toads lay in the cactus shadows like mottled dropped pads of the nopales. They were the same colors as the gravel they rested on, and both men missed them entirely. Teresita watched a nervous javelina shake his head at them from the western edge of the wilderness, his little tusks making idle threats. The men missed this too. Crows scolded and insulted them happily as they jumped from one raggedy treetop to the next. No sign of Guapo anywhere.
“I would keep walking south,” Tomás announced. “Right back to Mexico!”
“Except,” Don Lauro replied, “they would kill you.”
“There is that,” Tomás conceded.
They skidded down the gravel slope of the road, into the mesquite shadows. They walked down the skinny trail to their sad house, and Tomás stopped abruptly. Teresita ran into his back. Aguirre, lagging behind now, didn’t notice. Tomás pulled his pistola and put his finger to his lips. There, before the house, stood three horses. Two of their heads drooped in the classic pose of the siesta, but a fine black stallion perked up and swiveled his ears toward them, quite alert.
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