Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “This, this God business of yours.”

  He stood shaking his head with a sour look on his face.

  “God?” she said.

  “God!”

  He looked like he was smelling something foul. “I don’t want you spoiling this house with your fanatic God complex.”

  She reeled.

  “Do you hate God so deeply?” she asked.

  “I hate your obsessions. I want them to be absent from now on. No sainthood in my house.”

  “Father!” she cried. “It is my calling!”

  “No. No. Not here, not now.” He stormed out of the room, then stomped back and held a finger in her face. “Yes, you were the Queen of the Yaquis. What did it get you? Nothing!” He crossed his arms. So did she. “What will you be now? Queen of America?”

  He had the audacity to laugh in her face and dismiss her rudely by walking away.

  So Teresita had cause to lead the little Apache pony out of the corral and leap upon his back on many days. His skin would quiver when she mounted, as though her body were sending an electrical charge through his. The climb did not impress him. Crags and defiles were his steady diet—he swallowed miles tirelessly. He knew mountains.

  All up in those high hills were Mexican copper miners and Indians. Over in the hamlet of May Queen, she visited the Garcia family. Their father, Don Bonifacio the Elder, had just broken his ankle at the Morenci copper pit, and without his efforts, the family could not afford to eat. Yes, the mountain was paradise. But even in paradise, the Mejicanos were often hungry.

  She set his ankle and rubbed aromatic herbs upon it to lessen the swelling. Then she bound it tightly in long dark roots with soil still clinging to them, with crushed leaves soaked in alcohol packed directly on the flesh, and then wrapped the whole thing in white cloth. He would always walk with a cane, but he would walk.

  She dropped by the Calvillo home, the Fernandez house, was delighted to meet Aguirres who had never heard of Don Lauro. The Dawsons had secretly helped Apache warriors escape the cavalry in the old days, and they cooked her beans with fried nopales. She drank tea and coffee and orange juice. She ate pan dulce and cookies and slices of sweet potato pie. Doña Calvillo took to calling her La Cookies. The neighbors in that Morenci block made it, as they made everything, into Spanish: La Cúquis.

  She crept through valleys no one had homesteaded. She shivered deliciously on the banks of small creeks that fed into the San Francisco River. Secret tributaries where trout loafed in shadows beneath trees that had arrowheads in their heartwood. She perched on boulders in the clear streams and watched the trout drift backward with the current until they got near a drop-off, where the water—like languid softened green glass—swelled and foamed white and plunged. And when the fish were almost to the point where they would be dashed backward down the falls, they would flick their tails lazily and shoot upstream to begin again. Teresita, drinking yerba buena tea from her flask, always laughed when the fish seemed to look at one another and ask, How did you like that?

  One day, she discovered a New Mexican gold miner named Silver City Slats. “For my rib bones pokin’ out! I was al’ays skinny!” He had poached a calf from Tomás’s field. She didn’t care. The stinky old man walked like a mule and had one milky eye.

  “I can fix your eye,” she offered.

  “What’s wrong with my eye?”

  He delighted her by uncovering his simmering pot of son-of-a-bitch stew.

  “This here’s my own recipe.”

  It was made of tongue, brain, kidneys, marrow, and stomach lining. Cooked with vicious red chiles from Hatch. He’d cut some carrots, wild onions, and watercress into it. Added a few roots and a purple turnip. He served himself a great glob of stew on a tin plate and was astounded when Teresita turned down his invitation to grub with him.

  “Find any gold?”

  “I’m inches away.”

  “How long have you looked?”

  “Twenny year.”

  She rode on.

  No one knew where she was, so no one worried about where she went. She stood on the lip of the copper mine pit watching hunched men the color of earth struggle up and down the dirt ramps. On the far side of Morenci, she and Caballito Urrea found ancient stone circles and squares, the ruins of eldritch homes of a people who had, perhaps, seen Coronado himself and his gleaming conquistadores struggling into the mountains. They might have died at the Spaniards’ hands. She found a half-shell temple that had a small altar cupped within it, and on the altar, a mummified rattlesnake. She knew it to be sacred, but if the good people of Clifton found it, they might see it differently.

  It wasn’t lost on her that some of the mountain católicos did not approve of her. They were calling her the Witch of Cabora rather than the Saint. Witch, Saint—neither meant much to her. Still, it shook her profoundly when she’d been buying some licorice in the Hygienic Market and a child had whispered, “¡Es la bruja!” and her mother had grabbed the child’s hand and yanked her away from Teresita’s side. Better to keep the village of the ancients a secret. If she was being selfish, so be it. It gave her a place to pray.

  Caballito Urrea spent his time eating columbines and yellow wildflowers. The only ones who could bother them here were ground squirrels, which waddled up to sit beside Teresita and wait for her to distribute cherries or peanuts. Whistling little fussbudgets.

  And the ghosts. But the ghosts kept to themselves and stayed out of sight.

  Sometimes she slept in the sun with the Apache war pony standing over her, sniffing the air. She was very tired. She found that if she stared at a small nugget of cloud in the sky, she could make it unfold and spread out above her. The clouds opened their wings like hawks, hovered, drifted away. And, when she was absolutely sure no one would see her, she cried.

  To avoid censure, Segundo called Dolores his wife, and they moved into a small clapboard house to the side of the church, close enough to the rail lines to hear the clanging and chuffing of the trains. Groaning ore trains came right through the center of Clifton, carrying their precious green rock down to the burning plains. Segundo liked the sounds of trains. They made him happy. He liked to sit at the picturesque little station and smoke and watch the locomotives come and go.

  But nothing made him happier than Dolores. He called her mi chatita, for she did have a bit of a pug nose. He was convinced that all men desired her, and he turned nervous from keeping an eye on her whenever they walked to the store or went to church. As everyone else was praying, Segundo was casting an outraged eye all about him thinking, ¡Pinches cabrones! Thinking: I see you, you filthy little bastard! It made him tense. One of the Smith family noted to the padre after Mass: “He’s a tetch snorty.”

  And Dolores, who had never felt love in her life, was blessed with utter amnesia. She had no memory of her former ways and suddenly believed herself to have always been an upright Catholic woman of the highest moral standing. For her own sanity, she stayed away from the tremendous doings at the Urrea ranchito. She preferred to believe that Tomás had never existed and was now being played by a handsome actor.

  Teresita meant to ask Tomás how he felt about Segundo and Dolores, but she didn’t get a chance. Breakfasts were boisterous affairs with wiggling children arrayed along each side of the table—some calling Gabriela Mámi and some calling her Doña and some calling her Gaby. It amused Teresita to call her Mother, and Gaby in turn was delighted to call her my child, and Gaby sat there glowing like the Madonna at her end of the table, Segundo as crusty as a bowl of chicharrónes enjoying his second morning meal at Tomás’s left hand. Teresita often took her food in the kitchen with the cook, Mrs. Smith. She was a virtuoso of this new thing the Urreas had never seen before, los pancakes. They called them panquéquis. Mrs. Smith baffled everyone by calling them splatter-dabs.

  Eggs, brown and still warm from Misteriosa and Aunt Ca-Ca Maker, fatback bacon slabs, fried beans, cheeses, onions, tortillas cooked in lard and lying like tawny magic carpets bene
ath the drooling eggs, diced nopal cactus, melons, oranges, coffee, and watery milk. A platter of pan dulce, all pale yellows and tans and pinks and sparkling with sugar. Teresita was stung that nobody seemed to notice she was standing at the chopping block eating her fruits and her cream clots and sweet rolls, but her father was suddenly out the door with comedic bellows and outrageous orders barked at scuffling men from Solomonville and Safford, the whole ruckus drowned out by hammering and shouting and cattle lowing and horse shrieks.

  Then, lunch: fried steaks, gravied pork chops, and more beans, more tortillas, bowls of fideo soup, chicken legs—poor Mr. Ochoa was dismembered for the platter—fried tater wedges, great stacks of chiles and jícama in lime juice and leaves of lettuce under dribbles of oil and lemon and salt, cilantro, pickled hot pepper carrots, boiled eggs crunchy with salt and blushing pink from chile powder, deviled eggs (another Mrs. Smith secret project), tomato slices from the backdoor vine, yellow rice with bits of onion and festive red tatters of fried tomato, more coffee and milk and now tea and sarsaparilla in bottles and orange sodas and clay pots of steaming hot chocolate. Fish soup and fish albóndigas and catfish fried in cornmeal on Fridays, the barn cat finding ingenious ways to invade the house and lurk conspiratorially under the table on these evenings. Bowls of canned peaches ended these feasts, along with ginger and cinnamon cookies in the shapes of animals, chocolate squares and rum cakes and strange things called scones all studded with raisins that Tomás did not like one bit. Visitors often joined the tribe for these lunches—that ol’ Dr. Burtch ate like a sparrow—and Teresita was of greater interest to strangers than to the family itself. Before she could engage her father in a satisfying debate about Dracula or the latest attempted raid by Teresistas on Ojinaga, it was time for the siesta.

  The children, who were Americans and didn’t appreciate the great Mexican traditions, scattered to their games and their sports and their chores while Tomás and Gabriela retired to their upstairs boudoir. Teresita found it wise to exit before the inevitable sounds of creaking and thumping headboards resonated through the parlor and caused the cook and the house girl to blush and frown and secretly laugh.

  “Them Urreas,” Mrs. Smith confided to Mr. Smith, “is rutters.”

  Suppers came late, Sinaloa style. After so much gluttony in daylight, the nine o’clock meal was light. Cooked pumpkin or squash, served cool. Puddings. Breads. Melon and strawberries in cream. Milk all around.

  And to bed.

  When school started, Teresita helped Gaby get everyone in order and watched them head off like a meandering line of sad goslings up the hill to Segundo’s wagon. The old pistolero didn’t seem to mind delivering children to school at all. Segundo didn’t seem to mind anything anymore.

  Everyone was extremely happy.

  Except Teresita.

  Twenty-Six

  YOUNG AL FERNANDEZ WAS a skinny kid who skipped school to go to the station and watch trains. He lived in the house with big flowerpots on either side of the door farther up Segundo’s street. He loved trains so much that the engineer of the passenger line gave him a striped trainman’s cap. He wore it every day, and even when his father hid it from him, he’d find it and get out the back door so he could catch the afternoon ore hauler as it pulled like a giant rattling curtain across the drama that was slumbering Clifton. Al knew everybody, and he knew everything. He was a historian by nature. Lacking a jailhouse, the miners had dug a deep, narrow shaft and closed it off with bars, and that’s where bad men and drunks were locked to wait for their trials. When it was empty, he sometimes snuck down there to hide from patrolling schoolmarms hunting him down.

  Al sat near Segundo while the old man smoked and basked like an ancient lizard as he waited for the train to come. Al stretched out his legs in emulation of the pistolero and they silently took the sun together. After a time, Segundo wordlessly donated a bottle of strawberry soda to the kid. The closest they got to talking was Segundo’s laughter when the truant officer came for Al and hauled him away.

  Al led Teresita up the slopes to a hidden cave. They squeezed in and found a tarnished Spanish helmet inside. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “I think it’s cursed.”

  Teresita felt curses flying all around them. She believed the earth was angry because of the mines. She felt the restless spirits of the dead wandering the hills. The anger of the conquistadores. It was frightening. Her father would never go to Mass, but the rest of them did and sat there knowing perfectly well that they were all living in sin. Worse, her father was lying to the American government—he was trying to register Gaby as a U.S. citizen and claimed all the children in the house were theirs! That they had been married for years! Everyone knew perfectly well that he was married to Loreto in Mexico. But nobody seemed to care. “All the Mexicans do it,” he said in one of their rare chats. “You always lie to the government.” Yet they called her bad names behind her back? It wasn’t hard to see devils in the air.

  Through Segundo, Al met the Santa de Cabora. He was shy. You didn’t just walk up to a witch and say hey. But he knew she was historic.

  One day, Al showed her down the narrow prisoner shaft on the west side of town. It was empty for the moment, and she slipped down, feeling choked by the stone tunnel. At the bottom, it opened up into a small cell with a bench carved in the raw cliff rock. She could see up a long borehole to the barred round window at the top. An eye of blue sky looked down at her; in its center, a dark pupil formed by a hawk. The stones were unhappy; she could smell it.

  Teresita had to bless this mountain range.

  She had Al lead her on a climb up the two highest of the San Francisco peaks. Each climb took an entire day. Al was all too happy to miss school.

  At the top of each peak, she placed a wooden cross she had fashioned from her father’s fence slats and painted white. She placed the first cross so it faced east, and the second so it faced west, the happy town resting between them, blessed at sunrise and sunset. She prayed and murmured and wept at each cross while Al Fernandez sat on stones and watched her, eating rock candy and wondering if she was crazy or holy.

  They came down the second peak in time for the evening train. Segundo was there with his wagon. Teresita saw Al off with a pat on the head and a handful of coins.

  The boy doffed his engineer’s hat once and nodded to Segundo, who merely lifted one corner of his mouth in response. They watched the kid trudge uphill to lie about another day at school. Teresita turned back and looked at Segundo.

  Don Lauro stood beside the wagon, beaming.

  “My child!” he cried.

  She flung herself into his arms.

  She had never been so happy to see anyone.

  He patted her on the back.

  “I am so happy you have come,” she said.

  “Are you crying, my child?”

  “Only with joy, Uncle Lauro.”

  Segundo pursed his lips. He felt wise. Women were like that. He had learned this from his Chatita. These emotions they had. He nodded sagely at Aguirre.

  “Teresa,” Aguirre said, “I have a surprise for you.”

  She pulled back. She seemed as nervous as a sparrow to him. He gripped her arms and felt bones. Did nobody feed her up here?

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Me,” said a voice behind her.

  She turned around. A terrible fellow in a hideous red silk cowboy shirt festooned with gaudy roses and piping stood smirking at her. He wore absurd violet boots made from some sort of alligator skin. He wore a yellow cavalry bandana at his neck, and his pants had thin red stripes. He was a one-man parade. He held a toothpick in his mouth, and his hat was black with a white feather in its band. He smiled. Gold teeth under a pencil-thin black mustache.

  “¿Qué pasa, flaca?” he drawled.

  Flaca! How dare he call her skinny! She turned to Aguirre.

  “That’s Johnny Urrea,” he said. “He joined me in El Paso.”

  “That’s what I call myself,” said the dandy.<
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  “He wanted to come see you all.”

  “Is he a reporter?” Teresita asked.

  “I’m right here,” Johnny Urrea said. “You people. Still talking about cabrones like they wasn’t even there. That ain’t holy, is it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, face flushing.

  “I’m a card player,” Johnny offered. “Pistolero. A powerful rancher too.” He laughed.

  She stared at him.

  “Give me a hug,” he said. “Just don’t paralyze me this time with your little ‘powers.’ ”

  “Ay, Dios mío,” she said. “Buenaventura.”

  “Who else?” he confessed. “Really, sister, are you stupid or what?”

  She went to him and gave him a tentative hug.

  He smelled like cologne.

  “Our father,” he noted, “is going to be impressed when he sees me.”

  She thought: I doubt it.

  When she was small, still undiscovered by Tomás and still unwanted, Buenaventura had appeared on the rancho looking for his father. He was a terrible child, but he was her only protector when things were bad—and things were always bad. He had never gotten over his resentment when Tomás took her in but refused him any measure of love or acceptance. He secretly thought of himself as the Bastard Son. And he had used that rage to fuel himself. Frankly, Segundo was more of an influence on the boy than his own father, since Segundo was the only one who had ever taken him in.

  Years later, his jealousy pushed him to mock his bastard sister at every turn. Unlike his great father, he did not love Indians. Her Indian ways appalled him and seemed affected and stupid. Little Miss Has Her Own Bedroom wearing her rebozo, talking Yaqui. Little Miss Father Buys Me New Shoes. While his mother coughed out her lungs alone, and he slept under bushes until Segundo took him in and fed him beef.

  He loved her. He loved Tomás. Why did they not love him? What had he done? He had been a hero to her! If he hadn’t saved her when she was lying beaten and snotty in a pigpen, if he hadn’t carried her, smelling like pee and mud, through the night and to that damned witch’s door, to that nasty Huila, then Teresita wouldn’t even be the Saint. He had fought for the ranch. He had fought for his father. But there was never anything left for him.