Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Nobody knew what to think. Gaby locked the door, as if the lock could keep his voice out. The children hid. Mrs. Smith had stayed after work, and she sat in the parlor with a double-barreled 12-gauge in her lap.

  Teresita was bruised. Her eye was black already, and the blood from her nose was crusted on her lips. Her eyes were almost silver with shock. She lay in bed shaking. Gaby cleaned her face with a moist cloth.

  “What have I done? What have I done?”

  Gaby blew out the lamp and left her alone.

  Lupe’s yowls were frightening. He was far down the prisoner’s mine shaft, locked in the cell in the belly of the cliff. He ranted and gibbered and sent up noises like a trapped wolf’s. People near the train station could hear him. They pulled closed their shutters. They kept their houses dark lest whatever was loose in their town find them.

  Tomás stood in the street staring down into the black hole that was Lupe’s chimney and window.

  “Can you hear me, pendejo?” he called.

  The howls never stopped.

  “I have something for you.”

  He opened his trousers and pissed down the hole.

  Noon.

  Clifton was utterly silent.

  Not even crows made noise.

  It was all wind and rattling weeds beside the tracks.

  A lone dog clicked across the cobbles and vanished behind the Fernandez house.

  Teresita stood in the street, sniffing the air. Not even cooking smells. It was as if the entire population had fled. No doors opened, no shades rose in the windows.

  She looked at the cliff. The dark prisoner’s hole stared at her like a blind eye. He was there—she could feel him. His heat seemed to pulse out of the hole. Tendrils of black and deep purple and sick red curled and evaporated in the sun.

  “It was my eye that was blind,” she said.

  She walked toward it. He must have known, must have sensed her, because he began to yell again. His voice, now that the sun had risen, was small. Sorry and flat.

  She stopped three feet from the hole and looked down it. Bars, rusted and stark. Beyond that, only darkness.

  “Why?” she said softly.

  “Because I hate you,” he called.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “Because it was easy.”

  He laughed.

  “Because it was my duty.”

  He howled.

  “Because! Because! Because! Do you want to pull up your dress now? Do you want to let me look? Let me look! I want to see it again! Back up to the window!”

  She turned and took a step.

  “Saint! Saint!” he challenged her. “Forgive me! You must forgive me now, right? Because you’re a saint! Right?”

  She walked away.

  “Answer me! Right? Right? Answer me!”

  She walked out of town.

  Clouds burned like fire in the azure sky.

  They were peach-, orange-, grape-colored far below.

  It was like a garden.

  Flowers in the sky.

  Perhaps this was Sea Ania after all.

  Perhaps she was dead.

  Even God had turned His face away.

  She deserved it.

  She’d betrayed them all.

  With nowhere to go, she just kept walking.

  Thirty-Six

  TOMAS MOVED SEGUNDO INTO his house. There, the wounded caballeros recuperated in the parlor, smoking and sadly sipping rum. They repeatedly played the new cylinder from Chauncey Olcott, “My Wild Irish Rose.” Tomás was covered in bruises, but he didn’t remember how he’d gotten them. His feet were swollen, and his left foot would never work right again. In the kitchen, Dolores and Gaby fretted while Mrs. Smith fattened them with biscuits and gravy.

  Sheriffs had come and pried Lupe Rodriguez out of his hole. He was quite mad. He fought like a demon, cried that he could not be torn from his mother’s womb, not by mortal men. They cuffed him and chained his hands to his waist and grew tired of his resisting, so they looped a rope around his waist and hauled him out with the help of a mule. He bounced and slithered up the chute like a bale of timothy.

  They lifted him onto the mule’s back and tied his feet together under its belly and led him shouting curses down the mountain.

  Tomás saw in the papers that he had been found insane. The judge in Solomonville signed the declaration. The same sheriffs, not softened in any way toward their prisoner, transported him by iron prison wagon to the asylum in far Safford, where he was tied to a bed and kept down for hours at a time lest he tear open his own veins with his teeth.

  The newspapers reported that Aguirre had been imprisoned for fomenting revolution or that he had fled, depending on the publication. Whatever his fate, Tomás thought, it served him right. All this ruination could be laid at Aguirre’s feet.

  And the newspapers said Teresita had been shot, perhaps killed. Bad enough the paper that gloated “Sainted Girl Beat by Hubby”—he threw that one in the fire.

  People in Clifton were mostly circumspect. Many of them felt sympathy for Teresita and her family. But there were those few who had always said she was a witch. And there were others who, feeling now that she was not—from what they could tell—pure, turned against her, saw her as sullied and divorced from God entire. Talk circulated. It was a small town, after all. Sooner or later, the talk made its way around, and then started around again, changing and turning, darkening and building mockery in its heart. Those who loved her became silent, and in their silence, they felt shame.

  It was not long until there appeared on the side of the barn, in red paint, an epithet that had been loose on tongues for days:

  WHORE OF CABORA.

  Tomás didn’t see it. He never stepped outside. He barely ate, barely rose, did not bathe. He just played the maudlin cylinder and poured poor old Segundo small copas to drink.

  She sat in the cabin. After all, she owned it now. Mrs. Rodriguez. That was rich.

  She spent so much time on her knees, asking God to explain how she had gone astray, that her knees were bruised from the rough floor. But there was no answer.

  The nights were long and terrifying. Every rustle of branches, every owl hoot or coyote yelp, convinced her that killers were coming for her. Or demons offering a darker sort of massacre. She pushed the door shut and braced the lone chair against it, tried to block it with boards. She did not eat—there was no food. Small deer bones behind the cabin, nothing more.

  On the third day, Gabriela came to her with a bundle of her clothes and a covered pot of beans with potatoes and a stack of tortillas. She maneuvered her small wagon right up to the door and handed the goods to Teresita.

  Teresita tried her old joke on Gaby: “Thank you, Mother dear.”

  But Gaby merely looked down on her with cold eyes.

  Teresita grabbed her hands and cried, “I have sinned.”

  Gaby shrugged.

  “I don’t understand such things,” she said.

  “My father?” Teresita asked.

  “Not well.”

  “Segundo?”

  “Better than your father.”

  Gaby pulled her hands away.

  Teresita asked, “Can I come home now?”

  Gaby looked at her a long time.

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Not now.”

  She shook the leads, and the horse trundled off.

  The next day, Teresita heard the wagon again, she thought. She heard the snort of the horse, the crack of the wooden wheels crushing pinecones. She hurried outside and held her hand above her eyes—since she’d been hiding inside all these days, her eyes were hurt by the sun.

  But it was not Gaby at all. It was Mr. and Mrs. Rosencrans. And between them, small and thin and still pale, sat Jamie.

  He struggled over his father’s lap and dropped clumsily to the ground. He smiled at her, his skinny face luminescent as a candle in a clouded glass. He limped
forward. She stepped to him and put out her arms.

  He fell into her embrace and squeezed her waist.

  “I can walk,” he said.

  “Bendito seas,” she blessed him. She laid her hand on his head. “Handsome boy,” she said. “Little man.”

  Mr. Rosencrans hopped down. He turned and offered his wife his hand and helped her to descend. The gesture was not lost on Teresita. They came to her, holding hands like young lovers.

  “Thank you,” Rosencrans said.

  His wife kissed her cheek.

  They stood like this for a moment, almost comfortable in one another’s presence.

  “You can’t stay here,” Rosencrans said.

  “My father does not want me back,” Teresita said, almost exhausting her English.

  “Yes. So I hear. But I mean here, on the mountain. In Clifton. It’s not healthy for you to remain.”

  “Where would I go?” she asked.

  He looked at his wife.

  “Well,” she said. “We are leaving tomorrow. We return to the coast.”

  “Coast?”

  “San Francisco,” she said.

  Oh! Teresita put her hands over her mouth. San Francisco!

  “If I may,” said Rosencrans. He withdrew a folded sheet of vellum from his coat pocket. He unfolded it. “I have a letter here from our friend Mrs. Fessler.”

  “A dear woman,” said Mrs. Rosencrans.

  “Yes.” He read. “It seems her daughter, ah, Sally, is quite ill. Mrs. Fessler asks if we know you. She asks, in fact, if we might convince you to come to San Francisco—well, San Jose—and heal poor Sally.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful?” said Mrs. Rosencrans.

  Jamie hugged her tighter.

  “No comprendo,” Teresita said.

  “You,” said Rosencrans, “come with us. Tomorrow. On the train.”

  She dropped her head.

  “No puedo,” she said. “I have no money.”

  “Oh, Teresita,” said Jamie. “We have money. Don’t we, Daddy? Shoot—we have all the money in the world!”

  The Rosencranses laid hands on her.

  “It would be an honor,” the wife said, “to take you home.”

  “Say yes,” said Jamie. “Say yes.”

  Teresita smiled.

  That night, the dream awoke her. She heard puttering in the dark. She thought mice had gotten in again. Well, after the next morning, they could have the house. They could gnaw holes in the walls, and the skunks and foxes and squirrels and porcupines could come inside and destroy it. She would be gone.

  A pot clanged. What a funny dream. She sat in the dark, listening. She fumbled and found a match and struck it on the rough wall and lit her last candle. She squinted.

  An old woman stood in the corner with her back to Teresita. It wasn’t frightening. Given all the monsters and fiends she expected in the dark, an old woman held no terror. Teresita had experienced these dreams before.

  “Hello?” she said.

  Huila, her old teacher, turned around and stared at her.

  “Huila!” she cried. “You are dead!”

  “Hmm,” said Huila. “Tell me something I do not know.”

  She dragged the chair away from the door and sat on it.

  “You have my pipe?” she said.

  “Yes. In your apron.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Teresita rushed to the mound of clothing in the corner and withdrew Huila’s pipe from her apron pocket. What a very odd little dream.

  Huila lit her pipe and took a mouthful.

  “Savory,” she noted.

  Teresita stared at her. Huila! Her heart was bursting with joy.

  “Don’t stare,” Huila said. “Sit.”

  Teresita sat on the cot.

  “You’ve had a bit of bad luck,” Huila observed.

  “I have failed.”

  “Failed at what?”

  “Failed at my calling. My work.”

  “Really? One mistake is failure? Damn. It’s a good thing I didn’t know that.”

  Huila made smoke and watched it happily.

  “Looks like sheep,” she said. “Little puffs.” She used the word in the mother tongue: bwala.

  “I am so ashamed,” Teresita said.

  Huila shrugged.

  “Ashamed of what?”

  Teresita laughed.

  “You are joking with me, Huila.”

  “Huila,” the old one stated imperiously, “does not joke.” She smoked and stared at Teresita. “When someone does something bad to another person, it is his own shame. Not his victim’s.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Stop whining.”

  “Unfair!”

  “Look,” Huila said. “The American child was cured.”

  “Yes.”

  “The woman was cured who came with the poisoned womb.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Quiet. And you fell in love.”

  “I did.”

  “Women are stupid in love. Now you know.”

  Dios mío. Teresita rubbed her face. This was becoming a bad dream.

  “Was he a good kisser?”

  “Huila!”

  “Was his little flute pleasing?”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Perhaps,” the old woman said, “your job was also to remind everybody that men can be bastards.”

  “Huila!”

  “Could be.”

  Teresita shook her head.

  “I am going back to sleep.”

  “No,” Huila said. “No, you aren’t.”

  She leaned forward and put her icy hand on Teresita’s brow.

  “Now is the time for you to awaken. For the great work has begun. The world is calling you. You have learned you are not perfect. You are no different from any other person. But God still pours His power into you. No one can know why. Frankly, I am irritated with you. But God believes. He’s strange that way. God believes in you. So wake the hell up and go forward. There is no time left for lazy moping. Not now. Child! If you were born to be a flood, you cannot insult Heaven by insisting you are a drought.”

  “What great work?” Teresita said, but it was morning, and she was lying on the cot, tangled in the rough gray sheet. The door was open. It had started to rain.

  Five hundred people gathered at the station to watch the little family and Teresita board the train. They raised their collars against the cold rain. Al Fernandez sniffled as he watched the Saint disappear into the train car.

  They called and cried and clapped and waved their hats as the train pulled out. The whistle echoed all across the mountains as the engine’s cloud of steam caused the people to vanish.

  On his porch, Tomás listened to the whistle blow. His heart fluttered—it felt cold in his chest. He leaned on the post and listened. The sound of the train came faintly to him. Everybody that was left to him—his beloved, his children, poor Segundo and his Dolores—waited for him inside. Anita was inconsolable. Aside from her, Tomás had demanded, they were not to cry—not a single tear.

  Farther down the slope, Lauro Aguirre paused to watch the train cut down and turn a long slow curve and then seem to be swallowed by the vermilion cliffs and the ragged trees. He rode into town and was baffled by the listless people wandering sadly in the rain. Aguirre pulled his hat over his eyes to keep the rain from his face and turned down the road to Cabora Norte.

  When he reined in before Tomás’s porch, the Sky Scratcher beheld him with no expression whatsoever on his face.

  “You are too late,” he said. “Our lives are over.”

  “Teresita?” Aguirre asked.

  Tomás spit off the porch and glanced up at the rain clouds. He took the drops on his cheeks. He shook his head.

  “Who?” he said.

  He went inside.

  He closed the door in his old friend’s face.

  Book II

  TO THE SILVER SEA

  Part IV

  FAR AMERICA<
br />
  That self-same Santa Teresa who has been worshiped as a guide from heaven by the Indians of Mexico on our southern border; who has been credited with miraculous healing powers; who was thrown into prison in Mexico charged with causing an uprising of the Yaqui Indians; who was banished from Mexico for the same reason; who has been the cause of uprising and bloodshed wherever she has appeared in Mexican towns or villages, and excited the fears of the authorities by the enthusiastic following her presence provided; who has gone about healing by the laying on of hands—as believers claim—until her fame has so spread that her presence in any place turns that place into a camp of sufferers flocked to see her; who was, it is claimed, the real cause of a bloody attack on the customs-house of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico some four years ago…; who only last month was the occasion of another sensation in Arizona, when she was married on one day to a Mexican there, who on the next day attempted to shoot her—that self-same Santa Teresa is in California.

  —HELEN DARE,

  San Francisco Examiner,

  Friday, July 27, 1900

  Thirty-Seven

  THE TRAIN ROCKED AND growled to a clanging stop. She smelled a change in the air. The conductor walked down the car calling, “Yuma! Yuma, Arizona!” She peered ahead, past the water tower and the bursts of steam billowing from the engine. Trees. White birds. Reeds. Mexicans. Arizona would always belong to the Mexicans.

  She rose from her seat and rushed down the aisle and pushed out through the door. She could smell wetness. Mud. It smelled green after the relentlessly yellow scent of the desert. It was so hot, so brutally hot. There were no echoes—the heat had crushed all sound.

  “¿Qué es?” she asked the conductor, pointing ahead.

  He was standing out there on the platform of the train car enjoying a smoke.

  “That’s the Colorado River,” he said.

  His words came out in small gray puffs, as if he were on fire.

  She jumped from the car and ran toward the river.

  “Miss!” he called. “Miss!”

  Her companions joined him on the small platform and watched her run.