Teresa of the New World

by Sharman Apt Russell

  “Giddy-up,” her father crooned, his eyes still closed. “Imagine yourself, Teresa, on a beautiful horse, a horse you would have if you were a boy and not a girl, a beautiful bay mare.”

  Teresa bounced cheerfully. “Papá, Papá, Papá,” she chanted. “Take me with you.”

  Her father left the tribe early the next morning. In the dark round house, he picked Teresa up from the crushed oyster shell bed. “Wrap your legs around my waist,” he whispered, and she did, clinging to him in front while his rabbit skin pack dangled behind. Beside them, her mother stirred. Her father told his wife to sleep. Hmm, hmmm, Teresa’s mother sighed, and the baby sighed, too.

  Teresa didn’t ask why her father had changed his mind. She didn’t think to say good-bye to her mother or sister or grandparents or aunts and uncles, also sleeping in grass houses nearby. A silver mist shrouded the northern hills, the colors of the earth gray and silver, the white water in the bay barely emerging from a pale sky.

  “I must tell you something, Teresa,” her father spoke seriously. “You must understand that this is no ordinary trading trip. By now, on my travels, I have heard of more survivors from the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, good men all, who sailed away in the other barges. They live as slaves with the coastal tribes to the south, and they are treated very badly by these people. My own good friends, the ones who left me to walk to Mexico City—those men are all dead, captured and killed by these same bad tribes. Now I know for certain no ship is coming.”

  Her father paused for breath. He walked slowly, burdened as he was with her and all his goods for trading. Behind them, Teresa saw a peccary emerge from the scrub brush. The animal stood as high as her waist, its body covered with coarse black and white hair, its flat nostrils wet and twitching. Something reached out to Teresa, and she heard the peccary say . . . what? The animal was speaking to her. But the images—pictures like words—wavered, unclear. She didn’t understand.

  “What?” she said out loud.

  “Someone,” her father was saying, “has to walk west again.”

  He murmured a Spanish song, a sailor’s song, as he carried Teresa into the gray breaking light. She could feel the good fortune burning in his chest, in the reed two palms long and one finger thick. She could feel the excitement running through her veins, and she could see crackles of magic shoot from her father’s body into clumps of prickly pear, saltbush, and locust trees. She gripped her father’s waist tightly with her legs. He was the one for whom God would work miracles. He was the one who would walk back to Spain, all the way home.

  2

  Teresa remembered walking beside her father, his steps too big so that she had to hurry, always hurry to keep up. When she felt tired, he sang songs to distract her, and he told stories, the story of their own adventure as they traded north and west while he hunted rumors about poor shipwrecked men like himself. Finally he decided they should go south and bargain with the coastal tribe that held one of these men—a Christian named Andrés Dorantes.

  Unfortunately, instead of letting Dorantes go, the tribe enslaved her father as well. Teresa saw with surprise how easily they grabbed and threw the trader to the ground, how they even took his goods of paste and deer tassels. Now like Dorantes, Cabeza de Vaca was beaten and mocked, made to carry loads of firewood and dig pits for baking cactus. He no longer sang and barely spoke to Teresa.

  On her part, she was treated well by a foster mother who gave her food, boiled roots or the occasional bone and meat from a rabbit or deer. Gently, the foster mother combed Teresa’s hair and cuddled her during the cold nights. She praised Teresa, saying that someday she would be a powerful woman.

  “I can hear the peccary,” Teresa boasted. “I can hear the earth speak.”

  “You are special,” the woman agreed lovingly.

  This foster mother watched and soothed Teresa the day she was tattooed, four blue lines under each eye, four cuts rubbed with ash, making her a member of this tribe. Now Teresa could marry one of the chief’s sons. Now she was valuable as a female who was not a relative and not someone who had to be bought from another group. “Now you are my daughter,” the woman said. “My only child.”

  In the summer, these people went to gather prickly pear in a large field of that cactus, where they were joined by other tribes who all came together peacefully. Everyone was happy to eat so much red ripe fruit. Everyone put aside their grudges—at least for a time—and danced and drank day and night from clay jars of juice they had buried in the ground to ferment. Teresa also danced and drank and watched as her father and Dorantes slipped away to meet with another Christian called Alonso del Castillo and the black Moor Esteban, both slaves in other tribes, both from the Spanish ships. Suddenly her father seemed alert and gay again, quickly doing whatever he was told to do, secretly meeting with his former comrades whenever he had the chance.

  One night, once again, he came for her, this time before dawn, motioning for Teresa to be quiet and taking her from the side of her foster mother, who slept heavily under the glittering stars. Again he lifted her up in his arms.

  At the appointed place outside the cactus fields, the other men protested.

  “You can’t bring a child with you,” the Moor Esteban said. His skin seemed to blend into the night, and his hair curled like the wool on a buffalo.

  “They will follow her,” Andrés Dorantes exclaimed. “They will want her back.”

  But her father insisted. “We will be careful. We won’t leave any trail. She comes with me.”

  “This is your daughter?” The third man, Alonso del Castillo, spoke as though he couldn’t believe such a thing. He was taller than Teresa’s father, with bulging eyes like a frog. “How old is she?”

  “Five years,” her father said proudly.

  “But she is a heathen!”

  “No, listen, Alonso.” Her father nudged Teresa. “Say your catechism.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Dorantes hissed.

  Without effort, knowing the words perfectly, Teresa recited, “In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Famulis tuis Domine subveni, quos pretioso sanguine redemisti. In nomine Patris. Redemisti! Redemisti!”

  The three men stared at her.

  “Now sing in Spanish,” her father commanded.

  Teresa thought of all the songs she had been taught, comedy from the minstrels in the marketplace, love songs and homesick songs, songs of longing for the country of Seville. “Río de Sevilla,” she began obediently, “de barco lleno, ha pasado el alma, no pasa el cuerpo . . .”

  “Enough,” her father said.

  “We should go.” The Moor seemed resigned. “I know of another tribe far enough away who are not friends with any of the groups here. I know their language a little. We are four men. Perhaps they will see us differently if we have a child. We won’t look like warriors.”

  Teresa let her father take her hand. This time, she knew what was happening. This time, she knew she would never see her foster mother again. Her foster mother would wake up reaching for her daughter. Her foster mother would shout and run through camp weeping. Teresa’s sorrow swelled in her throat. She couldn’t breathe or talk. She let her father take her hand and pull her forward.

  They traveled to the next tribe, where they were given some roots and asked to heal a sick woman who complained of headaches. Her father shrugged and made the sign of the Cross over the woman’s head. Immediately, the woman jumped to her feet declaring herself cured! Now other men and women came forward to be cured, and her father made the sign of the Cross over them, too. These people also jumped up, perfectly well, and each gave her father a handful of dried fruit.

  Teresa was impressed by this gift, and so were the three Christians and the Moor, who decided to stay awhile with these friendly and generous people. Although they meant to move on after they had rested, winter came suddenly, and it was a bad season, bitter cold with hardly any rain. No one had the energy to travel now. And soon no one had anything left to share. T
hat was Teresa’s sixth winter, and she was hungry in a way she had never been hungry before. Now when her stomach spoke to the earth, the earth whispered back: well, yes, if you are too empty, too unhappy, then you will die. I will still love you. I will still be with you.

  Should I die then? Teresa asked the earth.

  Wait, the earth suggested, a few more days. A few more days, and then a few more days, and it will be spring, and you will have green shoots and grasshoppers and baby mice to eat. Don’t be in a hurry.

  Soon after that, the Moor came and gave Teresa a bit of dried peccary meat, and she did not die. After that again, they moved to another group of people, who ate the mesquite beans that hung from a thin-leafed tree, the raw beans tasting sweet and crunchy, the dried beans ground into flour that could be carried in a leather bag. In a summer full of mesquite bean gruel and mesquite bean paste, they traveled from group to group, Teresa walking beside her father, always walking toward the setting sun.

  Everywhere they went, they healed people of headaches and illness. Her father was the best healer, with his eloquent voice and face raised to the Heavenly Father. But Andrés Dorantes also cured stomach ache and the disease that made people sleepy, and so did the Moor Esteban. Only the third Christian, frog-eyed Alonso del Castillo, held himself aloof and looked sour whenever his companions made the sign of the Cross.

  “Sacrilege!” he sometimes whispered out loud. “Imagine—if the priests knew!”

  “Look around you,” Dorantes would sneer back, “and tell me what you see. Do you see any priests?”

  In one tribe, Teresa watched her father cut into a man’s chest with a flint knife. Months ago, an arrowhead had lodged near the heart and a scar grown over the injury, which still pained the man and made him weak. Her father reopened the skin so that blood ran into the hollow made by the ribcage. When her father cut deeper and drew the arrowhead out, bright blood flew up and dotted her father’s brown and red beard mixed with gray, his long nose, and his thin lips. He blinked and shook his head. Quickly he used a bone needle and fox hair to draw together the lips of the wound.

  The man watched her father calmly, as though this were happening to someone else. He lay on a grass mat and looked up into her father’s eyes, which shone like bits of blue sky. Teresa shivered when she saw that the air around these men no longer moved as air moves, flowing and shifting. Instead it held perfectly still, while the energy in her father’s body and in the man’s body rose up like another skin above their skins, hovering in a layer of glowing heat that dove suddenly back into the sick man’s heart.

  The man reached for her father’s hand. Her father smiled and covered the fingers with his own. “You will be fine now,” he spoke in Spanish. “You will feel no pain. You will be well. You will rise up from this bed tomorrow. The Lord will bless you and keep you as a symbol of His Mercy and His gifts to us.”

  Now the man’s wife took the arrowhead and showed it to her relatives in the village, and the next morning the man did rise from his bed just as Teresa’s father had said he would, and this healing ran ahead of their journey so that they heard about it at each new place. Each time, the story was a little more extravagant until finally people said the healer could raise the very dead from the ground.

  This upset Alonso del Castillo more than usual.

  “What is wrong, Alonso?” her father asked, winking at Teresa, who sat under a nearby mesquite bush.

  “I will not be part of this blasphemy,” the other man’s voice rose as he paced back and forth. “We are not righteous. We cannot heal the sick or make the lame walk or raise the dead! I am a sinner, like you, like Dorantes, even like the Moor. I have done things in this country . . . There are things I don’t want to talk about.”

  Teresa’s father stood and grabbed his friend by the shoulders. “God has given us this grace and mercy, Alonso. When I bless and cure each man, each woman, I pray to Our Lord, and so does Dorantes. Each healing brings us closer to home. This is God’s will! Everywhere now, the tribes welcome us.”

  Alonso del Castillo began to cry, the tears leaking from his eyes and running down his cheeks spotted with sores and inflammations. “You see this as a way to get to Spain. I see this as a test of my immortal soul.”

  As if moved by these words, suddenly gentle, her father comforted the Christian, and they cried together and then prayed, sobbed, and prayed again. Teresa sat under the shade of the mesquite tree, saying nothing but thinking that Alonso del Castillo’s bulging eyes looked about to pop from his face, his immortal soul spilling out, too. What would it look like? Would the soul be as pop-eyed as the man himself?

  She did not like her father’s friend. And he did not like her.

  “She is disfigured,” he told her father the next day as they lay in a grass house with room only for the three of them, like sticks of wood in a row. Beyond the open door, this tribe celebrated around a fire, dancing and drinking yellow tea, shouting in a language Teresa did not understand. Half their faces were painted blue, the other half white.

  “The tattoos are bad enough,” Alonso del Castillo went on. “But you let them put a board under her head when she was a baby. The back of her head is flat.”

  “It is their custom,” Teresa’s father said. “Her mother insisted.”

  “But how can she be a Christian now? How can she meet the Redeemer?”

  “Because of a flat head?” Her father sighed with exasperation. In the darkness, he stroked Teresa’s hair. “Go to sleep,” he told her.

  “No, I have thought about these things,” Alonso del Castillo continued. “Heaven will not admit men or women or children who are no longer in the image of our Maker. Heaven will not admit a man, for example, who has tattooed himself about the face and chest, or who has altered himself in other ways.”

  “Alonso,” her father said. “We are tired.”

  But Teresa noticed that he touched his own chest, where her uncle had once inserted a reed two palms long and one finger thick. She realized now that the reed was gone. Teresa couldn’t think back to when this had happened, when her father had removed the reed. So much was happening now, a blur of movement, cures, prayer, and dance.

  This time, when they left the large and prosperous village, most of the men and half the women traveled with them, all the way to the next village, where they were given deer meat to eat. When this village came forward to be cured, the people first put on the ground their bows and arrows, sandals and beads, red ochre and seashell jewelry, and the men and women who had come with the Christians took these things for themselves—even before a single person could be healed or blessed.

  From then on, it was a constant exchange. The people from one tribe accompanied the healers to the next and from that tribe took all their goods. The people who were newly rich stayed behind or returned home, while those who had lost their belongings accompanied the Christians and the Moor to the next village and had their turn.

  Her father called it robbery. Dorantes worried that some villagers would become angry and enslave them. But no one did. Each time, the four healers were welcomed with smiles and celebrations. “It is a drama,” the Moor finally decided, “like the processions you have in Spain. Each village plays its part. Each man gets what he has lost. It is a form of trade as well as religion. They call us the Children of the Sun since we only walk in that direction. They call us shamans or medicine men.”

  Alonso del Castillo moaned. “The Inquisition has burned people for less.”

  The three other men ignored him, as usual.

  “But they treat us more like prisoners,” Andrés Dorantes complained.

  Teresa’s father agreed that they had become valuable. No one could speak to the healers without permission from their guides. No one could eat food until the healers had blessed it. Sometimes this meant the four men had to spend a long time making the sign of the Cross over each piece of dried fruit and meat, and even Alonso del Castillo had to help with this job although he worried endlessly that
it was another sacrilege. Teresa’s father only grinned and winked at her. The important thing was that they were walking west, toward New Spain. The important thing was to avoid another winter in the desert.

  Sometimes Teresa thought about her foster mother, whom she could no longer remember very well. More rarely, she thought about her mother, whom she could not remember at all, only a smell of fish and salt and blackberries. She thought about how far they had walked, past mesquite and scrub brush and cactus. They had crossed tumbling streams and one wide river—the Moor had carried Teresa on his shoulders—and she had seen mountains for the first time and had loved them instantly, the way they made so many different shapes, the way they changed and shifted with the light. She could feel their eyes following her as she trotted beside her father, holding his hand. She knew they wondered what she would do next.

  Each day, her father waited for signs of what he called civilization. After one feast at yet another village, a hugely fat woman showed the Moor two painted gourds decorated with feathers. When the woman shook these gourds, the pebbles inside rattled like rain, the sound of water and power, the sound of water returning to the sea. The Moor translated what the woman said. “These gourds have a special magic. They come floating down the river.”

  Teresa no longer understood any language but Spanish, for she spoke only to her father and occasionally to his three friends. But the Moor was good at using sign and at understanding the different dialects of the tribes. He shook the gourds again.

  “They are too big to be wild,” Dorantes declared. “Someone grew these. Do you remember the fields we saw in La Florida?”

  Her father also shook the gourds, and Teresa heard the magic as loud as a clap of thunder. The pebbles rattled. The water rushed to sea. Teresa reached for a gourd, for she wanted to hold that sound. She needed to hold it, and her body lifted, light with desire. She floated up, just a bit, into the air. But her father said no, and the hugely fat woman laughed.

  Only a few days later, in a place where the people dressed in long leather skirts and leather aprons, the leader gave Dorantes a bell of copper decorated with a cat’s face. This bell was brighter than the little copper bells her father had once given Teresa’s grandparents. In fact, her father told Teresa, this copper was of superior quality, surprisingly pure. He and his friends began to whisper about gold, a yellow metal even better than copper.