The Hummingbird's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

slow the bleeding. Vervain would open the black nipples. And now, as the baby’s mouth sought her mother’s breast, Huila wiped the new mother with a soothing yerba mansa.
    Huila fished a banana out of her mochila and peeled it, sitting in the dirt. “Ah,” she said, “a banana.” She took a huge bite and chewed it happily. Later, she would offer up thanksgiving prayers to God and to her patron saints. But right now, she needed her breakfast.
    “Are you happy, child?” Huila asked.
    The two girls had closed in on Cayetana, and were fussing over the infant.
    “Happy?” said Cayetana. She had never thought of the word as it related to her. Happy? What would happiness feel like?
    “I think so,” she replied, finally. “I think I am . . . happy.”
    Huila wondered if Tomás had remembered to have chocolates shipped to the ranch. Cómo me encantan los pinches chocolates! she thought. When women ran the world, the palaces would be made of chocolate!
    She said nothing of the red triangle.

Four
    TIME! AY, DIOS. Cayetana kept asking herself where the time went. This year, that year, almost two years gone. Now she couldn’t even remember giving birth, though she did remember deciding to never do it again. She was careful to take the dark potions Huila brewed from roots that served to keep her womb hollow.
    At sixteen years old, she was old enough to be married and to be facing the appalling ancientness of her twenties. And yet her own fate seemed almost secondary. The old ones warned that the new century was coming, and with it, the end of the entire world. 1900! Cayetana could not imagine such a frightening date—all those empty zeros. Lutheran missionaries had said Jesus Himself was riding out of Heaven on a fiery horse, and, apparently, all the dead would leap out of the ground and kill everybody. A wandering Lipan held a short council with the People and told them that the end would be different: the white men would all die and the dead Indios and the buffalo would return. He had given Huila three buffalo teeth and promised that these awesome beasts would be back. The People had never heard of buffalo. “We didn’t know they’d left,” noted Don Teófano.
    “What of the mestizos, like us?” asked Don Nacho Gómez-Palacio. The Lipan had pondered it and said, “Half of you will probably die.” The question of the day, after that, was: will half of all of us die, or will half of each of us die? The men were comforted by the thought of their bottom halves living.
    Cayetana didn’t think she would live long enough to see the century turn—how long was it? She counted on her fingers, lost count, said, “It’s a long time.” Her daughter, crawling on her dirt floor, heard her voice and said her favorite word: “Cat!”
    “Be quiet,” Cayetana said.
    “Cat!”
    The child spoke early, and when she did speak, it was often that word. She called Cayetana a cat, she called pigs cats and trees cats, and the mockingbird was also a cat.
    “Cat! Cat!” the baby shouted.
    At four months, she had wanted to explore, but could only manage to crawl backward. With a deep red face, the triangle on her forehead turning a ruddy carmine with her exertions, she would roll onto her belly and back out of the ramada and find herself outside, and she would start to wail. Cayetana could not help herself. This was funny. She had finally found something to laugh about.
    But the pissing, the caca—first black, then green, then yellow—and the vomit. Por Dios! Fúchi! The child sucked at her teat for long slurpy gulping sessions, then turned her head and puked burning hot whey all over Cayetana’s front. She did not appreciate that. And the nursing! Ay, ay, ay! Qué barbaridad! Her nipples were chafed, cracked. Her hardened breasts were constantly aching. And the blasted child popped out little teeth almost immediately, and she bit Cayetana hard. And the disgrace of the milk, sometimes running down her front in two long stains