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

“So we’ll put in a lot of sugar! It needs sugar. It’s like this pinche life, you see—so tart. It stings your mouth. You have to feel around inside it with your tongue to find the sweetness.”
    This was Teresita’s second lesson.

    Late in the day, Teresita made her way back to Tía’s shack. She had saved one pig cookie for her auntie, and it was crumbly but still whole in Teresita’s one pocket. The tired cotton pickers were hauling their heavy sacks of bolls out of the dusty fields, their prickled hands bloody and scabbed. The chile pickers had red eyes and runny noses, their eyelids puffy from the burning juice. Butchers lay together in the shade of a cottonwood, stinking of blood and fat, passing a cigarette and a clay jug of pulque. “Adios!” they called, and Teresita called back, “Adios!” Nobody but those Sinaloans said good-bye instead of hello when they saw each other.
    Don Teófano, the handyman and occasional mule skinner, carried three planks over his old shoulder and walked along the track, bouncing as the ends of the wood bounced, making a rhythm that made his whole body bob as he walked. “Adios,” she told him. He raised a hand off the boards, then slapped it back down when they started to tip off his shoulder. His sharp sweat smelled almost exactly like the leaky pine boards, and Don Teófano made his way into the distance in a cloud of turpentine and pitch.
    Teresita watched the girls older than she was: girls with jugs of water balanced atop their heads; weary laundry girls, smelling of soaps and salts, their boiled hands and feet white as mushrooms, and their hair escaping from under their tightly bound scarves; the evening cook on her way to the main house, her best church clothes on her back, and frazzled huaraches on her feet—her only good shoes hung off her fingers as she rushed to work. “Adios!” Teresita knew that the cook’s boyfriend, one of Segundo’s buckaroos, would be there at ten at night to greet her and walk her back to her house seven doors down from Tía’s.
    “Adios!”
    The ones with sick children and dying old ones brought them out into the gentle sunset. They’d been locked inside their stifling houses all day, and it was their first chance to feel a cool breeze. A curled old woman lay huddled in a wheelbarrow, wrapped in her rebozo and looking like a puppy. Writhing young men tied to chairs with hemp rope raised their palsied hands and pointed at the birds with their knuckles. Great cascades of drool fell from their chins, and they shrieked and laughed at the crows, the donkeys, the scampering children, the astonishment of the reddening sun. Mothers smoothed their unruly hair with old stiff-bristled brushes. “Adios!” Teresita called to them, and they called back, “Os!” and “Dos!” and “Awoss!” and reached for her as she went by.
    And there was Segundo, slouched on his mount, and watching it all with a small smile on his lips. “Adios!” she called to the big vaquero. His dark hat turned toward her, and one finger rose and touched the brim.
    Teresita had told Huila that Tía called her mother a whore. “That is not correct,” Huila told her. And Tía also called Teresita a whore. “That is a sin,” Huila said.
    Teresita pushed through the crooked door of the shack. Tía was sitting in the one chair at her small table. Teresita’s bedding was wadded up against the wall. Tía’s children were still outside.
    “I wish I had a cigarette,” Tía said. “Did you see any cigarette butts lying around out there?”
    Teresita shook her head.
    “No, Tía. But I brought you something else.”
    She pulled the cookie out of her pocket, brushed off some lint, and handed it to her auntie.
    “Oh?”
    Tía actually smiled for a moment. She grabbed the cookie and bit off its head and closed her eyes. She knew she should save the rest for her children. Any mother would save it. She took another bite. The children were small—they’d need less of