The Hummingbird's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

before she even noticed it, everybody, she was sure, looking at her and snickering. The baby, the baby, the baby—it was always the baby. Uy, la niña! She’s so cute. She’s so strong. Look how she stares in my face! Look at her little red triangle on her little head! Not a word to Semalú—not a good morning, a how are you, a how are you feeling.
    Cayetana peeked out the blanket door and looked at the rancho. The corn and maguey were green as far as she could see. The distant cotton and squash and bean fields were emerald, egrets and ibis walked among the rows like little blots of snow. Of course, she had never seen snow, but she had heard someone mention it, so she made a point of repeating the word often so she would seem wise and knowledgeable.
    How she wished she could be out there picking some chiles and feeling the sting of the juices making her hands swell. The nightmare of the sun and the burning in your eyes were not as bad as the slavery of motherhood. She looked back at her daughter and relented. The child was lying there kicking happily, holding a ball of cloth and babbling at it.
    Sometimes, a feeling came over her, a feeling like wanting to weep, but not for sadness. This happened when she nursed, after she winced from the pain and the child closed her eyes and made small fists and suckled. But like happiness, love was a thing Cayetana guessed at.
    She had named the baby Rebecca. Names, everyone agreed, were important—look at Segundo. Like prayers, Cayetana imagined names built spirit ladders that led to the heavenly realms, that with enough names, you could simply rise, like Segundo, to a position of power. She made an excellent long name for her daughter, but since she had not yet baptized her, and because she couldn’t write, she had to repeat the name to herself to keep it straight.
    Niña García Nona María Rebecca Chávez.
    “Afuera?” said the child. “Sí?”
    “You are not going outside.”
    “Afuera? Afuera!”
    “Quiet.”
    “Cat?”
    “No,” Cayetana said.
    To her horror, her daughter’s hair was showing light streaks—almost blond.
    Cayetana had tried, at first, to pluck all the light hairs, but they spread, a weed, an incrimination, a combination of her mother’s obsidian curls and the golden and auburn straight hair of Tomás. Cayetana could not imagine what might happen to her if Tomás took note of this poor bastard girl. Even worse, what if Doña Loreto, his elegant wife, noticed?
    Chela, also known as the Little Cactus Fruit, La Tunita, was hanging wet clothes on the bushes in the sun.
    “Tunita,” Cayetana called.
    “Qué hubo, Semalú?” Tunita said. She had three girls of her own.
    “I’ll take down your laundry for you if you’ll watch the child,” Cayetana said.
    Tunita wiped sweat from her brow with the back of one wrist and said, “All right.” She sent her girls running up to Cayetana’s hut, and they pushed past Cayetana like little geese, squealing.
    “Gracias,” Cayetana called as she stepped down the drybank and crossed the creek. She crept up on a big apricot tree outside the corrals and watched Tomás and the vaqueros work a pinto in the ring. She often spied on the men of the ranch, watching them talk and smoke and laugh. She crouched in the dusty berry bushes and pushed away from her face a drooping branch with nasty little rocky apricots, dangling like earrings.
    Segundo came forth, leading an old man with no hat.
    “Jefe,” he called.
    Tomás sat on the top rail and laughed as the pinto bucked off another vaquero. His kind of horse.
    Loreto had given Tomás a smart pair of tight black trousers with silver conchas arrayed down the outsides of his legs. He wore a short leather vest and white shirt, his black boots with silver and gold spurs, and a big Montana-style gringo cowboy hat he’d bought off a buckaroo riding through the country with a posse in a futile hunt for the horse-thieving bandit Heraclio Bernal, the Sinaloan