Free The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea Page A

himself along. Then, as he glided over the tomato and cotton fields, he had come upon a giantess dressed all in white with a red skirt, and he had swum under her hem and up her great white legs. Loreto was upstairs, so he felt free to say such barbarities: barbarities, after all, were a fine art among the witty gentlemen of Sinaloa.
    Huila had answered him with a baffling tale based on disturbing evidence that the flesh was the dream, and that death was the awakening, and then she had demanded to know details even he was not willing to discuss over scrambled eggs: had he actually entered the giant woman’s privates, and if he had, did he find them to be meaty, or a starry void? Huila had not relented. “I didn’t have the dream,” she said, “and I’m not the one who is prancing around with his chile in his hand.” Tomás had nearly spit coffee then, and he cried “Huila!” in his most affronted voice. Seemingly deaf to his outcry, she demanded an accounting of all the places in his life where the numbers four and six had revealed themselves.
    Tomás, forever after, reminded himself to keep his dreams a secret.
    Now, Huila beheld the small one eating her cookies and thought twice about how she should proceed. Ah, Saint Teresa herself. In the Urrea house, many ears were always listening. While this child, she could see right away, had the Hummingbird’s hair—in spite of its strawberry-blond streaks—the rest of her was all Tomás. She glanced around the kitchen. The girls were watching the child as they worked, making eyes at each other. Surely, they were all thinking Teresita should be spanked, and her family charged with an offense for letting her in the main house. Some haciendas right there in Ocoroni would shoot trespassers and even their mothers and fathers.
    Huila herself wondered how the child came to be in the kitchen and not back in the yard. Tomás, she thought, was soft. Perhaps, in some way he did not even suspect, he had recognized the child as his own. If he had been paying attention, he would have seen his own eyes staring right back at him. But the Yoris, they didn’t notice the things right before their faces. They were too busy looking over the horizon.
    “Teresita,” she said.
    “Yes?”
    “How do you like your cookies?”
    “Good.”
    “No,” Huila corrected her. “When an adult asks you a question like that, you must answer politely, and say thank you.” It was a child’s job to learn.
    Teresita watched her lips, watched the small vertical wrinkles that went up to the base of her nose.
    “The cookies are good, thank you,” she said.
    “Very nice.”
    Huila finished her coffee.
    “Give me a bite,” she said. Teresita held her cookie to the old one’s lips. “Gracias,” she said.
    “De nada,” Teresita replied, already having absorbed her first lesson.
    Huila rose.
    “Can I talk to you?” Teresita asked.
    “Let’s take a walk,” said Huila.

    Huila carried a great straw basket.
    “I have a hankering for agua de jamaica,” she said.
    Teresita matched her stride for stride as they walked into the trees.
    “I’ve never had agua de jamaica.”
    “Never?”
    “No.”
    Had these people never taught her anything?
    “What do you drink at Tía’s house?” Huila asked.
    “Water. Nothing.”
    “No wonder you don’t know who you are,” Huila said. “People like that.” She bent through the rails of a fence and pointed. “The hibiscus tree.” They went there and Huila said, “Pick the flowers. We’ll fill the basket, then set the flowers out in the sun to dry.”
    Teresita plucked a red hibiscus from the lowest of the branches. She pinched off the bottom of the flower. She licked the bead of nectar from it. Huila smiled. She had done that when she was a girl.
    “When the flowers are dry,” Huila said, “we boil them with sugar. That’s agua de jamaica.”
    “How much sugar?”
    “How much do you like?”
    “A lot.”
    Huila smiled.
    “Me too,” she said.