Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

“You are scaring my daughter.”

  “Shut yer yap and give us the money or we’ll take care of your daughter too.”

  Laura craned her neck around and stared at him.

  “You’re bad,” she said.

  Elias moved toward them, and Teresita held up one hand.

  “I am warning you,” she said.

  The two men looked at each other and laughed.

  “Shit,” said Elias, and came for her.

  Teresita felt it from her feet. It was a tickle and a burning. It was a thump that rolled all the way up her skeleton. It was a wave that came from some invisible sea and crashed into her hands and eyes. She felt her hair fly as it burst from her.

  “¡No!” she said.

  She didn’t shout. She was firm. Not loud at all.

  Both men were caught in midstep and became wooden. Their hands up. Their eyes wide. They squeaked and made horrible spastic faces, and drool flew from their lips and they fell to the floor and twitched and gargled and quivered at her feet.

  “You,” she said, “do not threaten my daughter!”

  Laura looked down from Teresita’s grip and pointed. She laughed.

  The men hammered the floor with their heels. They frothed and mewled. It was horrible to see.

  Teresita grabbed a heavy coat and a blanket for Laura and rushed past them.

  Suits stood in the doorway, blocking it with both arms.

  She didn’t even give him a chance to speak.

  The wave hit him so hard that dust burst from his clothes and he was shot backward down the stairs and crashed to the floor.

  Bill Somers, in his nightshirt, rushed out of his apartment and shouted, “What the hell is going on here?”

  Teresita ran downstairs, feeling light as a deer.

  Laura was whooping.

  They ran into the street.

  Laura shouted, “How’s she do that?”

  And Teresita started her journey home.

  Sixty-Two

  MAGDALENA VAN ORDER URREA was born in Juana Van Order’s ranch house in Solomonville, Arizona. In attendance were Dr. Burtch from Clifton, Juana herself, and a reluctant Gaby, who had not yet forgiven Teresita for destroying everything she held dear. Love prevailed, however—Tomás would not have forgiven her for ignoring Teresita at such a moment.

  Outside, ancient Segundo sat in the wagon with his rifle across his aching knees and wept slow tears. He wept easily now—the death of Tomás had rendered him melancholy and regretful, and his hands shook with tenderness and his eyes sprang tears at any sign of beauty, sorrow, or impermanence. He cried when trees were felled by great winds. He cried at first snows. He cried at births and weddings and Christmas Eve. Why, Dolores had caught him holding yellow baby ducks and weeping. He had become gentle in his old age, and he’d kill any son of a bitch that mocked him.

  John sat inside the house, dizzy. New York was still filtering out of his veins, and he was powerful sick from it—his head ached and his feet twitched. At night, he still heard klaxons and screaming El brakes instead of crickets and coyotes. Mama Juana fed him and he ate every bite. She brought him olive and chicken tamales, and he jumped on them like a barn cat on a mouse. Eggs fried with nopal cactus; he ate them with six tortillas. Beans and charred beefsteak and onions? He sopped up the grease with rough chunks of bread. He drank bottle after bottle of Mexican beer, and he didn’t care if it was warm.

  Teresita lay in the back room with the new babe, bleeding and weak. Gaby sat with her and they kept the door shut. When the letter came from the Consortium, John knocked and stepped in sheepishly and read her their apologies: The Consortium members in no way condoned nor had any foreknowledge of the dastardly actions independently undertaken by Mr. Suits et al., and they extended their sincerest wishes for a speedy recovery from such trauma, etc., etc., and looking forward to the day when she could see her way clear to reinstating their mutually beneficial arrangement, the terms of which—but of course!—were absolutely negotiable.

  She held up her hand to stop him.

  “Please,” Teresita said, “take that fine letter and place it in the stove and light some kindling with it.”

  He stood there, not knowing what to say.

  He decided on: “Right. Okay.”

  He went to his mother and changed the subject.

  “Mother,” he said. “All these fellows around here wear guns.”

  She laughed.

  “Why, don’t they wear pistolas in New York?” she said.

  She sat in a gray wooden rocker on the porch. He joined her and squeaked along beside her in his own chair. The loose boards of the porch sounded escalating and receding notes like the slats of a marimba as the rockers agitated them.

  “You can’t be carrying guns around in the city,” he said.

  From the wagon, Segundo’s primordial raven’s voice squawked, “This ain’t no city.”

  “Where’s your gun?” Juana asked.

  John watched a roadrunner strut from east to west as if he owned the ranch. It took a couple of minutes for him to appear, waggle his tail, stroll along casually, and then disappear in the Spanish bayonets growing in the distance. All he needed was a big cigar.

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  “You never married John,” Gabriela Cantúa said.

  Teresita lay back against the pillows, weak and feverish.

  “No.”

  “The people here know that.”

  Teresita shrugged.

  “We are married in God’s eyes.”

  “How do you know?” Gaby asked.

  Teresita was stumped.

  “One just… knows.”

  Gaby raised her eyebrows and let them drop—they would have made a thump if it were possible.

  “They say your daughters are bastards.”

  Teresita shook her head.

  “Not all of them say such things.”

  “Enough of them do.”

  Magdalena slept against her mother’s chest.

  “They said the same of me,” Teresita said. “There are no bastards. We are all God’s daughters. Our parents only borrow us for a season.”

  Gaby resented that—she had definitely not borrowed her children!

  Teresita was serene. She was letting go of the tangled branches of her days, letting their fruits drop to the ground. She was not apathetic, but she had become detached. She could have floated out of the bed on a slight breeze. She didn’t like to look at Gaby because the light was showing through her. It leaked through all the gaps in her body.

  Everybody was becoming clear. It was very strange, yet did not alarm Teresita. If they passed between her and the sun, she could see thin light threads burning through them. She could see the shadows of their bones. Everybody glowed pink. She supposed they would continue to clarify before her eyes until they were like soap bubbles, almost invisible and revealed only by the swirls of color cascading across their surfaces.

  “We are mostly empty space,” Teresita said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We are only made of light.”

  “I see.”

  Gaby did not see, but she was used to Teresita’s half-mad proclamations.

  “How interesting,” she said blandly.

  The room was quiet. Laura was out in the parlor, endlessly rearranging Juana’s many buttons from her sewing boxes. The baby’s body between the two women made infernal noises, as if she were some overheated little machine. Some of these noises were so rude and so startling that the women forgot their sorrows and laughed out loud.

  “My God,” said Gaby.

  “I think this one will grow up to play the trumpet,” Teresita said.

  After a time, Gaby said, “Ay.”

  Teresita listened to the clock ticking.

  “Ay, sí,” she replied.

  “Pues,” said Gaby. “Mira nomás.”

  “Qué cosas,” Teresita agreed.

  What else could they say? Such things, indeed. How many million
women had gathered in the rubble of how many histories and sighed, Oh, well. How about that?

  “They say that coming home was a retreat,” Teresita said. She reached out and grabbed Gaby’s arm. “But I will tell you the truth. I failed when I found fame. The higher I climbed, the farther I strayed. Wait. Just listen. Don’t speak. Not yet.

  “I failed. I failed, Gaby! I made a hundred, a thousand mistakes! I thought I was doing the right thing. But I lost my way. Huila warned me that we wander off the path, and I thought I would never do such a thing.

  “Everyone is gone! Everything is gone! Because of me!”

  She cried. She rubbed the tears from her eyes angrily, with the butt of her palm.

  “Coming home is not my failure. Leaving New York is not my retreat. Coming home is my triumph.” She paused for breath. “Do you see? I am a mother now. I am not anybody’s daughter. I am nobody’s saint. I am walking back to the road, and all the illusions of that life are gone. I despise them and I despise her.”

  Gaby stared at her. It wasn’t the first time she didn’t understand Teresita. She had always been on some other level from the rest of them. Gaby was still not certain that Teresita wasn’t simply insane.

  “Who?” Gaby asked. “Who do you despise?”

  “Her,” said Teresita. “The Saint of Cabora.”

  Gaby gasped. She made the sign of the cross.

  “That’s a blasphemy,” she whispered.

  Teresita laughed. It was the best laugh she had had in months. She laughed until her eyes were wet again, and she laid Magdalena down and wiped her eyes with the edge of the sheet.

  Gabriela, confused, patted her on the shoulder and got up and let herself out of the room. “Bendita sea Dios,” she muttered, crossing herself again, just in case.

  All the fancy Manhattan clothes went to Juana and Gaby. Teresita saved the parasols for Anita, because she knew her little sister would love such frilly things. Laura sat with Gabriela in the back of the wagon on Mama Juana’s quilts and pillows. It wasn’t much, but it would be a start. Teresita sat atop the wagon beside Segundo. She cradled Magdalena in her arms and covered her with a rebozo. They looked like a peasant family searching for farmwork on the haciendas of the desert.

  John had refused to leave his mother’s house.

  “I don’t wanna,” he said.

  “But, John,” Teresita said. “We’re going back to Clifton.”

  “Not me.”

  “We’re starting a new life.”

  “Don’t make me.”

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Ain’t gonna.”

  What was he, a child?

  “But you will join me later,” she said. “Join us.”

  “Sure, yeah. I reckon I’ll mosey on up in a day or two… you know.”

  They looked in each other’s eyes.

  She touched his cheek and turned away. Ah, John. Almost entirely clear. With her back to him, she could remember only his eyes.

  Juana showered her and the girls with kisses and tears.

  Segundo kissed none of them, but he did cry. He shook the traces and the mules hove to and groaned onto the dirt track that cut across the llano and bent to the hills that cut into canyons and creaked slowly into ridges that followed the old Spanish trail up and up, trailing Coronado’s conquistadores and the shadows of Apache riders and the endless etching of hawk-wing shadows and darting ephemeral glitterings of dragonfly flight, up out of cactus to scrub oak to pines and spires and waterfall trickles and patches of breeze-drunk yellow flowers. Wanderers coming down the trail stood aside and watched her pass, silent. Some of them took off their hats and stared. Others spit or looked away and patted their burros and waited for the damned wagon to get out of the way. No trumpets. No heralds. No honor guard. “Bye!” Laura called to them as they rumbled past. “Bye-bye!” None of them waved.

  Segundo had used part of Teresita’s inheritance to secure her a snug little house across the street from her old co-adventurer Al Fernandez. Al was tall now. He no longer wore his railroad engineer cap, but he did carry chests and quilts into the house for her. Laura walked beside him, matching her footsteps to his as best she could.

  Teresita wanted to do one thing, and one thing only. She wanted to kneel at Tomás’s grave and confess to him, tell him all the things in her heart, say to him those things no other person alive or dead could ever hear or know. The most secret things a daughter can confess to her father, hoping he could somehow hear and understand them.

  But first things first: she had to go to the Urrea house and see her familia. Segundo waited for her to brace herself and change the baby and fuss for a moment before she was ready. She remounted the wagon and they set out. She carried the parasols like rifles. When the wagon pulled up to the house, many small faces peered out from the doorway and the windows and Teresita descended and stepped up on the porch she had left a hundred years ago.

  “I am home,” she said. “Forgive me for being gone.”

  And the door swung open.

  The next morning, as they all slept, she crept out of the house and found a blue horse in the barn and saddled it and rode through the dew grass and out the gate and up through town and onto the Morenci road and up past the mine roads to Shannon Hill. She tied the blue horse to the fence and walked past the spot where she and Anita had first spoken to Rodriguez. She knew Tomás was at the far edge of the cemetery, in a double plot that had been laid out for him and Gabriela. There was not yet a headstone, but there was a plaque with a plot number and the rusting letters U*R*R*E*A and a low iron fence around the grave and the flat space beside it. No one in sight. Dead paper kites rattled in the electrical lines like crashed fruit bats. The wind made forlorn noises as it topped the hill and sped toward the canyons beyond.

  Teresita stepped over the fence and swept weeds and bits of paper off his grave with her foot. She knelt at his head and whispered, “Hello, Father. I have come home.” She stretched out on the sun-warmed soil beside him. She laid her hand on the ground above where his heart would be and stroked his chest through his five feet of cover. “Father,” she said, “it is a beautiful morning here. You would like it. Did you know you have a blue horse?” She laughed a little, as if she’d heard him exclaim in his usual fashion, Seriously! Blue! She closed her eyes and laid her head on the dirt as if it were his shoulder.

  “Ay, Papá.” She sighed. “Please forgive me.”

  And she related her story to him as the sun rolled along and the day turned on its axis into cool blue afternoon.

  Sixty-Three

  “MAMA USED TO SMELL like roses,” Teresita told Laura. Anita knelt behind the child, braiding her hair. Teresita was down on her knees in the middle of the oval carpet, and Laura had her hands on Teresita’s face, rubbing her cheeks. “And Mama healed the sick like that.”

  Laura laughed.

  Dolores bustled around carrying bundles of herbs and sweetgrass braids from the parlor to the kitchen. They had rented the building next door to the Greenlee Printing company. Its wide porch was crowded with comfortable chairs and hanging baskets of geraniums and nasturtiums. Don Lauro Aguirre had made his last journey to Clifton to bring Teresita supplies from the curandera store in El Paso. He’d brought her a mysterious hanging flower called a fuchsia, and it immediately drew hummingbirds to its exquisite meteor showers of blossoms.

  He sat outside with a pot of coffee and was still watery eyed over his compadre Tomás Urrea’s passing. It seemed that the world was dying all around him. Mexico was bleeding. His comrades grew old and weak or were imprisoned or shot. And the legendary Sky Scratcher was gone from the earth. It was one thing to know the news and deal with it from a distance, and quite another to be here in the great man’s shadow. It was… visceral was what it was. He was disconsolate and couldn’t even face a quick visit to Shannon Hill to pay his respects.

  “What anhedonia!” he proclaimed, imagining Tomás scolding him for his absurd vernacular. He stifled a small sob.
r />   “Mama had thousands of people come to see her when she lived in Mexico,” Teresita explained to Laura.

  “What did they want?” Laura asked.

  “Me.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Silly people,” Laura said.

  Teresita smiled. She shrugged.

  “Not so silly,” she said. “Maybe Mama was silly.” She sat back. “I forget.”

  Inside, where they were, it was all comfy little couches and chairs and potted plants and children’s art on the walls. Teresita had hired Dolores and the famous Mrs. Smith to help her. Upstairs, three bedrooms had beds for clients. She rose from the carpet and watched Segundo and Al Fernandez hang the sign by the front door so it faced the street but did not impede access: CLINICA TERESITA, it read. Segundo had painted crude but fetching roses and hummingbirds on the wood in an elegant French style. Teresita was sure the morning glories she’d planted by the front steps would swarm up the posts of the porch and make a fine frame for the sign.

  Cedar incense burned in covered dishes designed to look like little adobe houses. Laura loved to peer in their small glowing windows and imagine the tiny people living inside, having warm little lives. Teresita touched her daughter’s head and went to her office back beside the kitchen. This would be her consultorio, where she could examine her clients and apply her potions. She had a slight cough that didn’t want to go away. She smiled—perhaps she should prescribe a tea for herself.

  None of them knew how far word of her return had traveled down the mountain. There had been no press interest, at any rate. No reporters following the river up the steep road to see her. No photographers. And no pilgrims to speak of. Some down below felt that she had been revealed as anything but a saint. What saint cohabited with gringos and had babies? Others had heard that her powers had faded along with her scent. The Americans posited dense psychological theories to explain her saintly affliction. Delusional, they said. Both the miraculous period and the fading of the miracles. The Mexicans argued that her soul itself was used up and gone. No one asked the Indians, but they would have said, She’s tired and bored and doesn’t want to do it anymore.