Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

She pointed inside and snapped her fingers.

  “Now,” she said. Small cotillion smile. “Please.”

  The maid showed her to the stairs and gestured for her to come. Silent, the Saint followed her upstairs. It was the same story. It was the same illness as the little boy’s. What was his name? She could not recall. Wasn’t that odd? She sat on the bed, took the feverish hand, did the same thing she always did for every child, and felt irritated because she wanted some food.

  Thirty-Nine

  IT WAS ALL SO fast, yet seemed to take years. Everything that happened, happened in less than a year’s time, though later, Teresita would think of it as a decade.

  At night, she dreamed of flames and awoke more tired than when she’d lain down.

  After the healing, the house felt like a jail. There was no subsequent plan. Nobody had really considered what to do with the Saint after her duties were complete. Certainly, they owed her. There was no doubt. But for how long were they expected to care for her? She had no income. It was more embarrassing than troublesome. Mr. Rosencrans certainly didn’t have room for her in his house at the moment—his mother and father had arrived with towers of trunks and bags for a happy visit. Nobody in San Jose had the heart to put Teresita out on the street, but, really, enough was enough.

  Perhaps her father would send funds, but the Saint knew she would not ask. It was awful for her—being tolerated. She left the house early in the morning and walked the streets of San Jose. It was bright, friendly, green. The farmers’ market was vivid with peppers and melons; above were crows, gulls, and pigeons. Soon enough, her hostess’s gardeners recognized her, and word began to spread. The Saint was ushered into many Mexican houses on the side streets of the city, given many cups of coffee, fed many bowls of pozole and plates of eggs and beans. It was a chore for her to return to the big yellow house. She tried to enter silently and sneak upstairs to hide in her room.

  One of her few friends was Mrs. Castro, a neighborhood busybody who regaled Teresita with gossip. But she made gorditas that seemed to melt into butter as they were chewed. And her biscochitos were even better. And Mrs. Castro kept the most aggressive seekers at bay, bustling about Teresita like a terrier off her leash as they strolled. On some Saturdays, Teresita slept in Mrs. Castro’s back room among her sewing projects and her trusty Singer machine.

  “These hills,” Teresita said, “are lonely.” Mrs. Castro did not understand, but like all the mujeres of the barrio, she worked herbs and saw ghosts and revered the Virgin and kept holy water in a small bottle to absorb evil flung her way by brujas. She listened like a good student. This was Indian business. Her grandmother had been an Indian.

  “¿De veras?” she said.

  “No one speaks to the hills in their own language,” Teresita said. “These spirits have been abandoned.”

  “Spirits?” said Mrs. Castro.

  “The scriptures tell us,” Teresita murmured, her eyes closed, as if she were walking in a dream and speaking in some trance, “that there is an angel given to everything in creation.”

  “Guardian angels?” whispered Mrs. Castro, offering her standard sign of the cross.

  “Angels. They do not speak English.” Teresita raised one hand as if in benediction. “Or Spanish. Learn the old Indian language of these hills. Go, then, and sing. The angels will hear you and rejoice. You will see wonders.”

  “Bendito sea Dios.” Mrs. Castro sighed.

  Teresita put her hand to her brow.

  “I feel a little faint. It must be the heat. I will sit.”

  Mrs. Castro led her to a wrought-iron bench and sat her down and guarded her from any pilgrim who might come down the street.

  The trance broke in the morning.

  Teresita awoke to the delirium of a mockingbird, the coos of mourning doves, warm breezes lifting her lace curtains. The great house of her benefactress was otherwise silent. And she suddenly thought: San Jose! Why, she had lived in San José, Arizona, and now she was in San Jose, California. She was caught in circles within circles. How could she break the pattern? Unbroken patterns in life were merely mazes that led fools in circles until they died. She held Huila’s old rebozo in her lap; she burned herbs in her abalone shell; she placed a glass of water upon her small bedroom altar. Gabriel’s feather lay across it, along with a twist of sweetgrass and a bundle of sage, her crucifix, and her small totems. She preferred the Protestants’ bare cross to the anguished Christ writhing on Catholic crosses. She preferred deliverance to pain. Aguirre had sent her a black Bible; its title in gilt shone: SANTA BIBLIA. It lay upon her pillow.

  She dug in the drawers of the small desk in her room and found paper and pencils.

  To:

  Sra. Juana Van Order

  From:

  Your Teresita

  In exile

  Oh! Beloved Juanita!—

  How my heart longs for you and our hours of delightful laughter now that I find myself a prisoner in this lovely place. It is all very comfortable, all full of the most expensive objects and the fattest beds in the world. The señora is friendly, but I am intruding on her. I don’t know what to do.

  I am sick of being told what to do. I am sick of others dictating my actions. I am tired and I am unwilling to be a mere passenger in my life. Yet… Please, tell me, what should I do?

  I laugh at myself….

  Perhaps one of your boys could come—I cannot understand anything anyone says to me.

  No! Weak. Pathetic.

  She stared at her letter through tear-blurred eyes. They weren’t tears of self-pity or sorrow. They were tears of sheer rage. It was useless. She sounded like an idiot. Her bald-faced stratagem was absurd: Perhaps one of your boys could come. Like requesting a mail-order bride.

  Huila whispered in her mind, A woman in trouble does not need a man to save her, child—she will only have to save him in the end.

  Walking that maze.

  She crumpled the page and threw it away.

  What she really wanted to do was write to her father. But she could not. She believed he would not accept any letter from her. And what would she say?

  Perhaps she could send the fugitive Aguirre one of their famous cryptic notes from two years ago:

  Damn it!

  Perhaps, simply, No.

  That would suffice.

  Forty

  CLIFTON HAD BECOME so quiet—or was it only the ranch? Gabriela felt like a nun in an empty church, almost afraid of her own footsteps, as if their resonance on the wooden floors would somehow shatter the mourning silence.

  And poor old Mr. Van Order had died in Solomonville. That didn’t add to the happy times. Tomás was too bereft to even respond, and Gabriela had sent perfumed cards of condolence in his stead. She had also shipped some flowers to Juana, but they had wilted before they ever got to her.

  Tomás voted for McKinley in the presidential election after hearing of the “full dinner pail” doctrine. He had lost money in stock market panics and bad investments, and Republicanism—with its echoes of La República Mexicana—appealed to him. “William Jennings Bryan?” he baffled Gabriela by shouting. “Debs? Please! Por Dios.”

  In spite of the landslide victory of his candidate, doom seemed to dog his steps. He hated the news every day; the American population had swelled to seventy-six million. Soon there wouldn’t be a place for a man to stand. And worse, immigrants poured in by the millions. Why, just that morning, an editorial stated that nine million foreigners would enter the county by 1901. He wrote letters demanding that the borders be closed, that the European trash be stopped from sullying the Americas any further. Germans, Italians, Irish, Chinese, the Hebrews—all taking over his country. It was getting so that a man could not hear good old Spanish anymore.

  Bubonic plague in San Francisco! He rattled the pages. Would it kill Teresita? He consumed the stories of dead Chinese immigrants in hotel basements.

  He turned the page and learned that the life expectancy for an American male was forty-se
ven years.

  “Jesus Christ!” he cried. “I am already dead!”

  Smoking made him cough.

  Even music depressed him. The latest wax cylinder to come was a ghastly thing by some pendejo. It was called “Boola-Boola.” Tomás threw it in the fireplace.

  He asked Gabriela, “Has a letter come from Teresita?”

  She had to say, “No, mi amor.”

  And the next morning: “Any word from Teresita?”

  “No, chiquito. I’m sorry.”

  “A telegram?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think it’s the plague?”

  “No, no. Don’t worry.”

  “The plague,” he said. “It is passed through fleabites. You don’t think she’s in a place with fleas, do you?”

  “Ay, chiquito. No! She went with fine people. Good people. Muy ricos.”

  “I would hate for her to be bitten by fleas.”

  It broke her heart. It made her angry. Damn that Teresita!

  She finally scolded him one morning after hours of his fretfulness.

  “Gordo!” she said—her affectionate term for him. “Why do you not write to her!”

  “Oh, no,” he replied. “No, no. That would not be right. She wronged me. When she asks me for forgiveness, then I will answer her. I will grant it, of course!” After a moment, he said, “She doesn’t want to hear from me.”

  Damn them all. Gaby was sure enough tired of this moping around. There was work to be done. There were chores to do. Even Anita was apparently paralyzed, and lay upon her bed wistfully playing with dolls or reading Teresita’s old books. For hours! Why, when Gaby was a girl, she was up every day before dawn collecting eggs, shoveling cow shit, gathering fruit, or plucking peapods off the vines. And damn that Lauro Aguirre, who had hidden in their house from some nonexistent Texans who were allegedly intending to carry him off to prison.

  Indeed, Aguirre spent his days in the stifling shadows of Tomás’s parlor, sipping tea and staring at the floor with his compadre. They acted like they’d all been shot by bandidos! And the only one who had actually been shot, Segundo, worked like a man of twenty in their absence.

  Then, as if it were nothing, Aguirre left for his stinking Texas, and Tomás grew more hollow, alone in his dark office. Before him, on the table, medical books open to the plague chapters, all of them heavily annotated and underscored, and a collection of colored pencils scattered all around. His reading glasses were atop his head. One red pencil tapping softly.

  The various businessmen in town had not forgotten the Sky Scratcher. All those barons the workers called plutes—by God, they had enjoyed some times at the Urrea spread, and now they sent invites down to the house. But Tomás was uninterested in hilarity, or business, and this appalled them. Just like a Mexican, they said, to be so lazy he can’t even stir his stumps to make a dollar. And so they did forget.

  Except for the great industrialist Twidlatch. El Tweedly-yatch, as Tomás had called him, had a plan. He mounted the train in the morning and chugged away with his sights set on distant San Francisco. Land of opportunity. Gold Coast. Home of piles of glittering gold and pots of coin. Home of the legendary Saint of Cabora. He headed west in great good cheer.

  Tomás awoke, gasping. It wasn’t the first time. It started with the sensation that he had swallowed water and choked on it. He jerked and coughed. His chest felt as though a great stone had been laid upon it. His shoulder felt like he’d been shot. He reached out for Gaby, but she was already downstairs, attending to her duties as wife and mistress of the rancho. Bless her. Bless her heart! Beloved Gabriela! Just as well. Why alarm her? The pain. The pain! He clutched the sheets in his hands. He groaned. He could take it. He was Tomás Urrea. Pain? He laughed at pain. But he did not laugh—he cried out. With great effort, he stifled his cries. Only the weak, Tomás reminded himself, whimpered. He lay there sweating and panting until the pain dulled. He knew he would tell no one. No, he was not weak—he wasn’t going to crawl off to Dr. Burtch asking for help. Indigestion, he told himself. Even though he rarely ate. That was his problem. All this sorrow. All this fasting. By God, he’d eat. He’d eat fried pork and eggs and chorizo. In a minute. As soon as he could get out of bed.

  Forty-One

  MISS HELEN DARE KEPT her auburn hair braided and tightly coiled at the back of her head, held in place by two ivory chopsticks crossed through a tooled bit of leather suggesting a lotus blossom. She had a difficult time working her straw hat around that and pinning it down. There was always hair trouble when she was in a hurry.

  She hustled from the editorial offices of the Examiner. She was almost late, but she’d resigned herself to the fact that reporters were always in that state. And she still had to meet her recalcitrant translator before she rushed to the Saint’s abode. Teresita had arrived in San Jose to some acclaim among the Mexicans of the city. Helen checked her notes. Twenty-eight yrs old—Saint of Cabora—healing—Indian uprisings—Clifton AZ—San Francisco—Medical Consortium promises her she won’t make money here. (?) Provides home, provides vittles, takes money for “upkeep.” (?)

  Miss Helen Dare was tired of all the local-color stories she was assigned. Her editors believed these pieces required “the woman’s touch.” This Saint assignment, though one more in the tiresome series, at least had some real news overtones.

  Hers was a small sorority. Newspapers were still a boys’ game, and women reporters were scarce on the ground. But if any city would allow a woman to succeed in a man’s world, it was San Francisco. She smiled as she tucked in a few loose strands. Not far from Union Square, her friend would be waiting on the corner. She watched for his lanky form in the sidewalk throng. He spoke excellent Spanish from all his cantina-crawling and bandido-chasing. They had to get all the way to San Jose before noon.

  The bustle of Market Street amused her. The rattling cable car moving inexorably toward the bay. The mad scramble of newsboys and pedestrians, and the few comic auto cars. Chaos seemed to reign. She wondered if the Girl Saint had seen this crazy parade yet.

  The house was white. A two-story wooden Victorian-style cottage with deep purple trim. Its shutters, doors, and filigree were all ripe as wine grapes. It was hardly the most lurid house in the San Francisco area, but it was hard to miss. Hard to forget too. This was, of course, part of the design. Atop its roof, a golden rooster weather vane struck an imperious pose.

  The house sat in the middle of North Seventh Street, number 235. A small home with olive trees stood to one side of it, and a business sealed off Teresita’s view of the other end of the street. Tomcats everywhere. Teresita had been amazed by the modernity of the house—it had an electric buzzer on the front door, and a simple button push made the inside of the building buzz like a rattlesnake’s rattle, if the snake had been twenty feet long. And beyond, on the cross street, an electric streetcar passed every fifteen minutes, one of the very cars that would carry Miss Helen Dare to their appointment.

  Among the associates, the house and the scheme within it were known as Twidlatch’s Folly. He could afford to laugh along with them. True, the rent was prohibitive, but the profits were steady and handsome. The other members of the Medical Consortium shared the costs of the Saint’s needs, but as landlord, Mr. Twidlatch was able to take a higher percentage of the overage. If Rosencrans had been involved, he would have overseen a bank account in Clifton, some recompense to her father and the family ranch. But Rosencrans wasn’t involved, and the Urrea clan was far away.

  The contract had been a masterpiece of fake sincerity and bogus piety. She didn’t have a lick of El Inglés. She signed in faith, since Twidlatch had been a friend of her father’s. Sometimes when he was in his cups, he boasted to his comrades, “I own the Saint of Cabora.”

  She believed, at first, that profits were being banked to repay her father. Her own needs were minimal. She wanted her debts—those that could be paid—to be squared. It was only later that she understood that there was no money going back to Clifto
n.

  Today, pilgrims were kept at bay. It was important to have the house relieved from siege for this newspaper story, under control. Teresita was rested and well fed. Sweepers cleared off the steps and swept the sidewalk clean—even horse droppings were taken away from the brick street and deposited around the corner. Poor children carried the dung to their grandmothers’ vegetable gardens off the alleys behind the street. There, chickens scratched still, as if these yards were small portions of Sonora, where people ate cactus and grew their own tomatoes and fried brown eggs fresh from the straw piles beside the outhouses.

  The porch awaiting Miss Dare was plain—wide enough to take believers in single file and to hold two chairs to flank the queue. Teresita’s minders—paid by the Medical Consortium—sat there all day, guarding the door and regulating the clients.

  Two painted Mexican flowerpots rested on the rails. One held white geraniums and the other held red ones. They made the Saint happy, but also set the tone for the Mexicans who shuffled about before the steps, awaiting their conferences. The Consortium had learned quickly that they were the most trusting yet suspicious of all the people. Mexicans needed some suggestion that they were safe or at least on friendly ground. Mexicans never felt at ease until they saw something Mexican.

  The picket fence was close to the front of the house and afforded no real room for a garden—it was mostly yellowing grass and some scraggly ivy, though one rhododendron bush lent a festive air to the sidewalk and porch.

  Teresita had requested canaries, for some reason. Why not? The Consortium put cages of canaries on the locked back porch. It was glassed in and held one small swooning couch, on which she often slept after insomnia had kept her moving like a wraith from window to window, staring out at the silent streets lit pale yellow by the gas lamps.

  Canaries. They sang all day, from before the sun rose and into the afternoon when the sun began to fade. They sang so incessantly that when the Consortium allowed Teresita to go to the farmers’ market, she could still hear the birdsong in her head. She didn’t know if her bodyguards heard these songs too. They did not speak to her.