I looked at the barn doors noisily slapping back and forth with the force of the storm, and I couldn’t help but feel powerless. The twins’ desertion shattered any hope I had left of defeating the malevolent witches. And for the first time on our journey, I wanted to cry.
But there was no time for that. With the twins gone, the remaining lechuzas concentrated on the rest of us. Two of them dived so fast and hard into me that they knocked me over. One of them sat on my chest. Another one had Juanita pinned faceup against the pile of clothes we had used to make ourselves a nest. Pita was pressed against the wall, shivering, while a lechuza pecked gently at her head, as if it were picking nits out of her hair.
“You like eating sweets, don’t you?” The lechuza with Cecilia’s voice pulled Pita in close until their faces were almost touching. “That’s because you’re a piglet! A little piggy with a piggy nose and a piggy mouth and a piggy stomach. You’re a chubby baby, but give me time. I’ll put some real meat on your bones, thicken you up, and get you ready to be eaten. My sisters and I haven’t eaten much lately. Your big brown eyes look delicious. I bet they’d taste sweet slathered with jalapeño marmalade.”
“How do you like your adventure now, you arrogant little twit?” a lechuza with Inés’s voice asked Juanita as she caressed her face with the bristly feathers of her left wing. “What? Do you think you’re smarter than them? Well, you’re not. You dragged them all into this mess with your self-righteousness.” Juanita sniffed and hiccuped as she tried in vain to stop herself from bawling. “Oh, what’s the matter now? Why are you crying? Are you sad? Maybe you should have listened to your older sister. Maybe you should have stayed home and cleaned and cooked like your mother, instead of thinking you’ve got brains.”
“You think you can fool me?” the one with Mamá’s voice asked me. She was sitting on top of me, kneading into my chest with her claws like a cat, laughing when I winced in pain. “Answer me!” she screamed. But instead of talking, I looked straight into her red fiery eyes with what I hoped was disdain.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you afraid? Want to run away?” she asked, and when I didn’t answer she dug her sharp talons deeper into my chest. The pain was horrendous, and I wanted to scream out, but I held my breath instead. “Of course you do . . . I know how much of a coward you really are. I know how irresponsible you can be. Who’s the one who relinquished the piece of thread? Who’s going to protect your sisters now? Who? Who? Who?”
She was shaking me then, grabbing me by my shirt collar and rattling me like she wanted to loosen the last breath out of my chest. I closed my eyes and started to pray, silently at first and then with more courage and conviction, but my prayers were useless against her. Instead of getting off my chest, she started to laugh, a deep cackling laugh that vibrated inside my head and made me lose my place in prayer.
“You, that’s who,” whispered the lechuza, her rotten breath caressing my neck like a dirty rag, penetrating into my every pore. “You! You! You!” she kept screaming in a parody of Mamá’s voice, spitting putrid saliva on my face. “You dressed like me! You took them away! You left me crying! You lost the thread!”
Her words, spoken in Mamá’s voice, pierced through my heart and I screamed in agony. “No! No! It’s not true! It’s not . . .”
Just when I thought all was lost, Velia and Delia burst through the barn doors wielding what could only be described as giant metal baseball bats. I don’t know what kind of tools they were or where they came from, all I know is they looked absolutely dangerous.
“Die!” the twins screamed as they charged in our direction. The lechuzas screeched angrily, let go of us, and scattered themselves around the room. One by one they flapped their wings and took flight, soaring above us, cursing our names and threatening to take their revenge.
“You take the pitchfork. I call the rake,” I told Juanita. I scrambled to my feet and rushed to the other side of the barn where Pita had abandoned the rusty old tools.
“You can’t hurt us. We’re the avengers. The devil’s playmates,” the one with La Llorona’s voice screeched.
“You’ve caused too much heartache and pain. You disrespected Cecilia, humiliated her, and now you have to pay,” the one with Teresita’s voice yelled from the rafters.
“You’ll never get away,” the one with Mamá’s voice screamed, as she descended upon me.
With all my strength, I batted at her with the brittle rake. She flew around me to avoid getting hurt, but she wasn’t completely successful. I’d clipped her right wing and she screamed in rage — or maybe it was pain. I shook the feathers out of the rake and prepared myself for the next attack.
“Just draw her close.” Velia whispered. She and Delia inched themselves toward Juanita and me.
“We can take these bit — I mean, witches,” Delia announced.
“Watch your mouth,” I warned out of habit. Although, this time, I had to agree with her colorful language. These creatures were more than wicked — they were downright malevolent!
“Repent! Repent! Repent!” the lechuzas screeched as they swooped down on us like a squadron of fighter planes. We stood side by side, all four of us, defensively holding up our weapons like ninja warriors, while Pita huddled behind us, defenseless without a weapon to wield.
Claws, feathers, and hair flew everywhere during the first onslaught. But through it all, we never quit. We batted and struck and clubbed and raked, and as we did, one by one the lechuzas flew off our weapons, hit the barn walls, and fell to the ground, squealing like stuck pigs.
When Juanita pierced through one of them with her pitchfork, it screamed out, convulsed, and then lay lifeless. So that’s how we got rid of most of them. The twins and I clubbed and raked them until they were stunned and dazed, and Juanita finished them off by staking them.
By the time we were done, the place was a bloody, feathery, eerie mess. We stood side by side, looking past the settling debris, not daring to talk in case we were dreaming wide awake. I knew I should be shocked, horrified even, that we had just slaughtered a group of beings — not human perhaps, but living, breathing beings in their own right. But my blood was pumping furiously through my body, washing away any remorse I might have felt. Maybe it was the danger they had posed, or maybe I was just becoming psychotic, but I didn’t feel guilty at all. I felt strong and powerful and vindicated as I kicked a blood-splattered feathery lump out of my way and headed for our nest in the corner of the barn.
“You did it!” Pita squealed and jumped for joy beside me. “You saved us!” She shook fuzzy remnants of feathers out of her hair and spat them off her face.
“Wow,” Juanita whispered, still caught in a dreamlike state. “We killed them all. Can you believe it? We won. We defeated them.”
“No, we haven’t,” I said, looking up to the hole in the ceiling above our nest. “The rest of them are back.”
Up in the sky, behind the rest of the perched, cackling lechuzas, there was a tinge of pink on the purple face of night. Dawn was coming soon.
“The sun’s about to rise,” I said. “If we ever want to be able to sleep again without fearing for our lives, we have to finish them.”
I’d lost the silk thread, though. How could we do what Teresita told us would defeat the lechuzas?
I was bemoaning our plight internally again when I saw Pita, disheveled in her best Sunday dress, and realized we’d had the solution all along. “Come here, Pita.” When she came closer, I grabbed the tiny bow at her collar and yanked it off her dress with one hard tug.
“What are you doing?” she wailed. “Give that back!” I’d ripped it off cleanly, without damaging the dress. But that bow was the thing Pita loved most about that dress. She was understandably upset and reached for the bow.
I held it out of her reach until I could untie the bow and smooth it out between my fingertips. “I need it,
Pita. It’s silk,” I explained, ripping it so I could pull out a single piece of thread.
Pita touched her collar and mourned. “This is my favorite dress.”
“Shh! We’ll get you a new one once we’re back home! Watch my back,” I whispered, stepping back to stand between Pita and Velia. Delia and Juanita closed the gap in front of me and stood wielding their farming tools before them, ready for the next attack.
“Padre Nuestro que estás en los cielos . . .” I started to say the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. Only this time, I was smarter about it. This time I held the thread tightly against my chest. Since there was no way of marking it, I would simply make every knot sit tightly against the last. Teresita hadn’t said the knots had to be set apart by any particular amount of space. She only said they had to be evenly spaced. So putting them side by side was, in my opinion, perfectly spaced.
With every word I spoke, it seemed the rain began to wane. Less and less of it fell in through the roof. As the first prayer ended and I closed the first knot, the rain stopped completely and the rest of the lechuzas screeched in pain and flew into the barn. They soared over us, ranting and raving and angrily flapping their wings. They circled and circled, creating a whirlwind, a dirt devil of debris and dark moldy hay that swirled all the way up to the ceiling. The miniature storm swirled and stood before us like a charmed snake, flicking our hair into our faces, wrapping it around our necks, choking us — stealing our breaths. But all the time, I stayed focused and prayed. Knot after knot I tied. Prayer after prayer I prayed, seven Lord’s Prayers and seven Holy Marys, and it seemed that each one of those knots took away just a little bit more of that whirlwind’s strength.
Shorter and shorter it got, and slower and slower the lechuzas flew, until finally, as I tied the last of the seven knots, a whisper of daylight broke through the roof and the whirlwind died away. The seven remaining lechuzas fell to the floor, dead. Their eyes closed, their feathers dulled, and their faces had become clean slates. Then the lechuzas, all thirteen of them, vanished into thin air, leaving only downy feathers floating innocuously in the rays of the morning sun.
EL DIABLITO: “Nomás baila y brinca
el diablito cuando anda alborotadito.”
THE LITTLE DEVIL: “The little devil only
dances and jumps when he’s agitated.”
I’m tired,” Velia said, and she fell into the nest of clothes we had built ourselves the night before. It appeared to be clean despite our tussle with the lechuzas. There was no sign of the struggle or the mud of last night’s rain.
“Me too,” Delia chimed in, joining her in the nest.
“Listen, Odilia, I think we should rest,” Juanita whispered, eyeing the twins, whose eyes were closed in genuine exhaustion.
I stared at them for a moment, debating. “Okay,” I conceded. “But just for a little while.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” Pita whined as she watched me and Juanita making ourselves comfortable on the bed of clothes. “What if the chupacabras comes to get us?”
“There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s daytime,” I said, reaching for Pita. She let me pull her down and lay next to me, burying her face into my side the way she does when we’re at home.
“That’s right,” Juanita said, rubbing Pita’s back for a moment. “We’ll take a short nap and then move on. See, look at the map. We’re here and there’s Hacienda Dorada. We’ll be there before the chupacabras has a chance to get us. Because he only comes out at night, you know.”
I watched as Juanita pointed at the short distance on the map. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that an inch on the map was a lot of miles on foot and we might not make it there before nightfall. I’d been overconfident in our ability to walk so many miles at once in such rough terrain when we left Teresita’s.
After the girls handed it back to me, I looked at the map more closely and I saw once again that there were no houses or farms between us and Hacienda Dorada. Teresita’s husband had drawn many hills and even a creek along the crooked path, but no other signs of human life were depicted on the map. It was both disheartening and worrisome to know we were out here alone with no hope of coming across someone to help us.
“Odilia, are you scared?” Pita asked, lifting her head to look at me.
“Not right now. No,” I said.
Pita rested her face on my arm and let out a long breath. “Me either.”
“I don’t think the chupacabras stands a chance,” Velia said from beside Juanita. “We’re a force to be reckoned with, you know.”
“We are!” Delia chimed in, sitting up on her elbow to make eye contact with us. “¡Cinco hermanitas! Together forever!”
I flipped to my side and wiggled myself into a more comfortable position. “If we’re going to sleep, then we should go to sleep.”
Nobody said anything after that. Even though nobody was admitting it, I knew deep inside we were all still worried about the chupacabras. However, we were so emotionally and physically exhausted that we fell asleep almost instantly and slept for hours without stirring.
When I first opened my eyes, I didn’t have to look at my watch to know it was high noon. The sun was peering down at us from the center of the gaping hole in the roof. However, it wasn’t the sun that had awakened me. There was something else, something inherently evil had drifted into my wakeful consciousness, a bad dream of some kind — a warning, perhaps.
“Juanita,” I whispered, reaching for her.
“El chupacabras?” she asked, jolting up to a sitting position.
I listened to the distant sound. “I don’t know.”
“I hear bleating and singing,” Delia said, sitting up slowly. “It’s a boy for sure, and he has animals with him. A shepherd?”
“Or maybe a goatherd,” I said, shaking the others awake. Velia woke up right away, but Pita stretched out on the nest and groaned with her eyes still closed. “C’mon ladies, get up. Someone’s coming! Get up!”
Juanita and I clung to the wooden slat barring the barn door. She looked too afraid to open it, and after what happened the night before, I didn’t blame her. “Who’s out there?” I called.
“He can’t hear you,” Velia said, shoving Juanita aside and pushing up the wooden slat.
“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed. “We can’t let him in here. He could be dangerous.”
“More dangerous than what we encountered last night? Please. He’s probably a ranch hand from some isolated ranchito out there. He might even be from Hacienda Dorada,” Velia said, and opened the door.
“He has goats!” I said. “It would be like baiting the chupacabras!”
Juanita got up and tucked her shirt into her shorts. “Hello. It’s daylight. The chupacabras only comes out at night. Besides, if he has goats, he has water. Let’s just hope he can spare some.”
“And food!” Delia said, running to help her twin push the other tractor-sized door open.
Pita followed us out into the bright sunlight. “Oh, I do hope he has food! I’m so hungry I could eat a donkey right now!”
“Of course you could, Pita-Chalupita,” Velia said. “Some things never change.”
“Whatever. Make fun of me. I don’t care,” Pita retorted, shoving at Delia’s back.
I took a hold of Pita’s arm and pulled her behind me as Delia and Velia peered out into the sunlight. “I’m not so sure we should be making new friends right now. He could be dangerous.”
“Don’t assume the worst,” Velia said as she poked her head through the doors. “He looks like a very nice boy. See?” I couldn’t see what Velia was talking about at this angle. I needed to get outside now, before the girls rushed headlong into another nightmare brought on by a lack of caution. How many times would Teresita’s warnings have to come true before they believed the see
r?
Once outside the barn, Pita stood behind me, staring at the sorriest sight we’d ever seen. A small, bedraggled boy was coming up the hill toward us with a small herd of goats following behind him. His threadbare clothes were filthy and shredded to the point that I couldn’t tell what his T-shirt used to say. His hair was long and stringy. Whole sections of it were clumpy and clung to his head like matted fur, and the parts of it that hung over his eyes and covered both his ears were wispy. Looking at him, it was hard to believe he was a human being. He reminded me of a mangy dog. But he had been singing, and even though we couldn’t see his eyes for his shaggy hair, his shy smile confirmed it for us: he was human.
“Buenos días, señoritas.” The boy looked up at us from behind a lock of that fuzzy black hair, and then shyly looked down again.
“Hi,” I said from a safe distance.
“Hello.” The girls greeted him the way they would have greeted a stray dog, with trepidation.
“Cresencio Aguilar, at your service,” the boy said shyly, pushing his hair aside to get a better look at us. The one eye we could see under all that matted hair, his right eye, was warm and friendly, and his smile was genuine, so the twins reached out and shook hands with him. I stepped forward to get a better look at him and regretted it almost immediately, because his hands were grubby and he reached over to offer me a handshake. At close proximity, I also noticed he had too much body hair for a boy who couldn’t be more than twelve years old. His forearms were hairy, and he even had tiny hairs on his knuckles. This fascinated me in a repulsive kind of way, and I couldn’t stop looking at his hands.
“We are the Garza girls,” Juanita said, stepping forth and offering him a welcoming hand. “Glad to meet you.”
Summer of the Mariposas Page 17