Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “Who?” said Gaby, but Segundo shook his head a little. She was clearly slipping away and starting to drift.

  “I will meet the next visitor, please. And forgive me, because then I will… sleep.”

  She reached out to Anita and took her hand.

  Gaby and Segundo stepped out of the room and wiped their eyes.

  “Damn,” he said. “I hate to see that.”

  They walked to the front of the house, and there they found a tiny white-haired woman waiting on the porch. They just stared at her.

  “I have come,” the woman said. “Take me to her.”

  Segundo shook his head in resignation—Teresita and her strange ways.

  “It’s witchy,” he said.

  They led her to the back of the house and she stepped in the door and stood looking down at the Saint.

  “I am Cayetana,” she said.

  Teresita smiled up at her. Little Cayetana, La Semalú—the Hummingbird herself. She had left shortly after Teresita was born, had not been seen since. Teresita had felt her shadow all these years, had sensed her far away, knew she was not dead. Saw her on some nights, during her most vivid dreams. And here, on the long unlikely mystery road, she had come back. None of those present would ever stop wondering, would ever miss an opportunity to tell the story of the Hummingbird’s return.

  “Oh, Mother,” Teresita said. “I saw you coming.”

  “Will you forgive me?”

  “I will!”

  “I was a bad mother,” she said. “But I am here for you now.”

  “Mamá,” Teresita said.

  Anita backed out of the room as Cayetana Chávez sat on her daughter’s bed, and Segundo and Gaby took her away from the room because they did not know what to make of this last miracle. They sat out in the parlor and listened to the women laugh until night fell.

  Sixty-Five

  WHEN SHE AWOKE, her gathered family was all asleep.

  Dawn was warming her end of the house. Her loved ones were scattered about her in poses of sheer exhaustion. There was dear old Segundo, splayed out in the comfortable chair in the corner of the bedroom, knobby knees spread wide, old beaten cowboy-booted feet fallen open at an angle. He was snoring like a rusty engine, and his knuckly hand lay upon the pistola in his holster. His whiskers had gone white, but his face remained the aged and ageless warrior mask it had always been. She smiled. Segundo had already been a hundred years old when he was born.

  She could see his dream. It wafted all around his head like incense smoke. He was younger—she could tell because his whiskers and hair were all black. He wore a black leather vest, and he had an immense pistola at each hip. They had ivory handles. And his plump little wife had made him raisin tamales, hundreds of raisin tamales. The steam from them filled his dream with the scents of cinnamon and corn dough, and he was eating. Eating and eating. Coffee flowed into his huge cup as if from a waterfall. Segundo grunted once, shifted in his seat, and chuckled in his sleep. She watched him smack his lips.

  She smiled.

  On the bed, her own mother lay across her legs, face turned to one side, sleeping peacefully. Her little face was softened by age, its surface covered with small wrinkles. The corners of her mouth were loose, puckery, like cooked fruit. Teresita could not tell if the shadowy creases there had come from too much laughter or too much sorrow. She reached out and smoothed hair off her mother’s lined brow. Wiry with gray.

  She hooked a stray curl away from the old woman’s cheek and put it behind her ear. Cayetana didn’t stir. Her breathing was steady, oceanic. Teresita could feel it against her knees.

  She did not realize how lonely she’d been until Cayetana came into the room. Teresita almost didn’t mind dying if it brought back her mother. There were no words for it—indeed, there were almost no adequate emotions. She watched her mother’s slumber and thought about God’s strange humor, that the happiest moment of her time on earth was among her last.

  And there, on the floor, poor Gaby sat, reclining the top half of her body against the bed. She was snoring slightly. Her hair was still a great cloud. Full of curls, full of life. No wonder Tomás was so in love with her. Her skin was like coffee with much heavy cream stirred in, and cinnamon, and vanilla. Gaby was still delicious.

  A cat came in and hopped up on the end of the bed and stared into her eyes.

  “Are you the only one still with me?” Teresita asked.

  The cat jumped off the bed, stretched, and went under Segundo’s chair.

  Teresita looked around for Dr. Burtch, but he was gone.

  The girls, her daughters, were in their own rooms. Her little sister Anita was caring for them, sleeping at the foot of their bed. Anita, who would walk through blizzards and wildfires for her. Teresita did not want the girls to sit at a deathwatch. It was better for them to read and play with their dolls. She did not want them to remember her like this—weak, skeletal, spitting blood. Teresita could see them through the floors of the house.

  Bloodied cloths lay in a wad on the bedside table. The terrible porcelain bowl where she spit up clots had mercifully been emptied while she slept. Of all the horrors of this illness, it was that bowl of blood that most filled her with dread. Its ugliness, the fact of it, erased all illusions.

  She stretched. Yawned. She actually felt better. She reached for the brush and attended to her hair. Why, she was refreshed by the sleep she had enjoyed. A sleep free of coughing or fever. No dreams either.

  The windows were open. That was rare. They kept her bundled and safe from drafts. But the scent coming in was so rich. She breathed it in deeply—the curtains billowed in the breeze. It even felt a bit chill. It was as refreshing as a drink of lemonade. Clean. All the mountains sent their aromas to her: pine, hay, honeysuckle, chimney smoke, horses. Were there flowers at this time of year? She could smell them. Sweet peas. Geraniums. Roses.

  She sniffed her arm. No, it wasn’t her. It was from outside. Real roses.

  The sun was bright out there. Birds sang. Oh! She closed her eyes and listened. Jays fussed. Crows joked. Doves murmured. Little songbirds chittered madly into the distance. She heard the kissing sounds of the hummingbirds. A dragonfly whir that suddenly brought to mind the desperate thwap of El Paso’s doomed ornithocopter.

  She heard the door latch click.

  The door swung open, and cottonwood fluff drifted in. It looked like warm snow. The sunlight was blinding as it rushed through the doorway. She was confused for a moment—didn’t that door open to the hallway? She’d thought so. Wasn’t she on the second floor of her father’s house? Had she forgotten that it opened to the outside world? Perhaps she had been moved to a cabin in her illness. She frowned. Perhaps she was in Segundo’s cabin and didn’t even realize it. Her mind was still cloudy. She shook her head slightly. She massaged her eyes with one hand.

  Huila stepped into the room. She wore her old dress, her ancient apron. She had a rebozo over her head, but she took it off and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled at Teresita, put her hands on her hips, and said, “Well, well, well.”

  Teresita smiled back at her.

  “I am so happy to see you again,” she said.

  “Ah, child,” said the old one. “How could you think I would not come to see you at a time like this?”

  She came across the floor and took Teresita’s hand. Teresita put the old one’s knuckles to her lips. Her hand smelled of cilantro and mint.

  “They’re all asleep,” Huila noted.

  “Yes.”

  “It has been hard for them.”

  “Yes, Huila.”

  “Still, I don’t appreciate laziness. There are chores to do.”

  Teresita laughed.

  “¡No seas mala, Huila!” she scolded. “You cannot be mean to them. They have cared for me. They are tired.”

  “Hmm,” said Huila. “Do they think we are not tired? Here I am, dead, and I’m still working!” She shook her head. “Work, work, work. Oh, well. If you were born to be a
grinding stone, you can’t complain when they crush corn on your back!”

  Teresita laughed again.

  “Ay, Huila,” she said.

  “Come,” said Huila, tugging her hand.

  “I cannot,” Teresita replied.

  “Why not?”

  “I am ill.”

  “Are you?”

  “Deathly ill.”

  “How interesting.” She tugged. “Get up.”

  “But I am weak.”

  “Not really. You are not your body. You were never ill. It was ill. It has nothing to do with you.”

  Teresita stirred.

  “It certainly felt like it did,” Teresita complained.

  “Nothing personal,” Huila replied.

  Teresita snorted.

  “That’s what you say.”

  “Come, now—I haven’t got all day.” Huila stopped for a moment and looked around. “Well, actually, I do.”

  They laughed again.

  “Huila, ¡cómo eres!”

  “I am tremendous,” Huila conceded. She tugged Teresita’s hand harder. “Up!”

  Teresita slipped her legs out from under her mother. Cayetana never stirred. She swung her legs over and contorted herself to get around Gaby. She managed to rise without bouncing the bed. Not an eyelid fluttered.

  “I don’t want to wake them,” she said.

  “No. They have to awaken on their own.”

  Huila raised her eyebrows meaningfully as she helped her up.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  Teresita closed her eyes, took a breath.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Better,” she said. “I can breathe.”

  Huila nodded.

  “Come,” she said. “I have something to show you. Outside. Don’t look back. Just come outside with me.”

  They stepped to the door, and Teresita reached over and laid her hand on Segundo’s brow.

  “And my girls?” she asked.

  “They will be fine, child. Let’s go.”

  They walked into a brilliant spring morning. Teresita felt a little weak, but not as weak as she had felt yesterday. Her feet were bare. She always liked that. The ground was covered in damp, thick grass. Teresita’s hem was immediately soaked with dew. The grass felt luxurious against the bottoms of her feet.

  “Feel good?” the old one asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Better than that sickbed.”

  Teresita nodded.

  They were looking all round them at columbines and foxgloves, daisies and cosmos. Sunflowers, morning glories. Wild irises were purple, yellow, and white—butterflies that erupted from the blossoms looked like more blossoms suddenly animated.

  “Strawberries!” Teresita said. “We should pick some.”

  “Later,” Huila said.

  She ushered Teresita through the garden and out under the trees. The shade here was cold, vivid with ferns and mushrooms and gossamer with billowing spiderwebs.

  “I always loved the aspens,” Teresita said.

  Huila said, “They’re a bit precious for my taste.”

  “Look how they tremble in the breeze! They look like coins in the light.”

  “Focus, child,” Huila instructed. “Come.”

  They stepped through the trees and were hit again by glorious sunlight on the edge of a great precipice.

  “Behold,” said Huila.

  Teresita looked up, above the trees, above the peaks, and gasped.

  “Do you remember this?” Huila asked.

  “I do,” Teresita whispered.

  “I have shown you this once before.”

  The sky was full. Every part of it taken up by a shining silver globe. Mirror-bright. All of them spaced exactly the same distance apart. Receding into the infinite distance. Hundreds of pure silver spheres. Thousands. Each globe shimmered with blue from the sky and was lively with bent white accents from the reflected clouds. Tens of thousands.

  “It is my vision,” Teresita said.

  “Yes.”

  “Every possible moment of my life, every choice, every minute.”

  “Yes. But what is different now?”

  Teresita squinted. The eerie beauty of the scene made her eyes water. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  “I see no pictures in the globes,” she said.

  “Look,” Huila said.

  Teresita saw her face in the nearest sphere. And then she saw her face in every sphere. Herself as a child. Herself as a bride. Herself as a mother. Herself.

  “This is the culmination, child,” Huila said. “There are no more paths. There are no more choices. In the end, you are left with this. Yourself.”

  She turned to Teresita and put her hands on her shoulders.

  “You must ask yourself—do you like what you see?”

  “I—” She faltered. “But I have been so wrong so many times.”

  “It happens.”

  “But I have failed so often.”

  “Indeed. That was part of your job.”

  “I tried, Huila, I tried very hard.”

  “Well, then,” Huila said. “What’s your problem? Listen, child—you tried far harder than I did. And look at me. I’m doing all right.”

  Teresita put her hand on Huila’s arm.

  “Huila! Am I…?”

  “Hush, Teresita. See. Don’t speak.”

  Huila pointed—Teresita followed with her eyes. A small sphere from the high left side of the sky trembled and rolled, like a raindrop on a windowpane, down the blue. It wiggled between the other spheres and hit the central sphere and was absorbed. And another. And another.

  They fell gently at first, and then in a steady torrent. Out of the sky and into the globe of quicksilver that floated before her. It was a silent rainstorm. The central globe swelled, grew, wobbled heavily. When all the silver spheres had fallen into it, it burst silently. Its silver tide spread out before them in a vast, shining horizon.

  “Oh!” Teresita cried.

  It was a silver sea.

  Huila took out her pipe and packed it with tobacco.

  She lit it and blew an aromatic puff of smoke into the air.

  “What do we do?” Teresita asked.

  Huila said, “Well, it looks like a good day to go swimming.”

  “Huila! I cannot swim!”

  “In this sea, you can,” said the old one. “Besides, old Huila will be with you. Old Huila won’t let you slip away.”

  They took each other’s hands.

  They stepped into the calm silver tide. It was warm. Teresita shivered once. She could see stars and moons reflected in the infinite water.

  “When you get tired,” Huila said, “float.”

  They waded in deeper, and when they were fully immersed, they swam toward the other shore.

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE STORY is not the history.

  Thomas Wolfe once said you could turn over an entire town’s population of six hundred people to create one character. I think you can also turn over six hundred places to make one place in a novel. Six hundred incidents. Teresita made her way through the American fringe and heartland, setting down sometimes as lightly as a hummingbird, and falling to earth at others like a flaming meteorite. I have tried to make sense of this map and give a taste of the various landings as they happened. This, of course, is a novel as opposed to a textbook. It must be read as an imagining based on long research and a thousand interviews, letters, phone calls, and rituals offered by wise elders of many tribal peoples. Or, People.

  It’s my dream that follows the historical time line. But the duties of the novelist are different from the duties of the historian—six hundred peripheral characters might very well have been squeezed into one or two characters who carry the story without exhausting the reader’s patience or sanity. Several assistants to Teresita, secretaries and bookkeepers, for example, were magically processed into manageable form. There is some argument over the historical Mr. Rosencrans—wa
s he actually called Rosecrans? Spellings vary. Since this is fiction, I went with the more fanciful spelling to give myself room to compose. His son was not named Jamie, though Teresita did heal him. Dr. Weisburd in New York comes not from textbooks or histories. He comes from Teresita’s great-granddaughters. There are family rumors about his relationship with Teresita that were simply too much for me to pursue at this point. Some family members maintain that there was no doctor at all—that the man who supported them in New York was Rosencrans himself. “Weisburd” is a name from my own life and honored here. The Los Angeles episode did happen; I have moved it in time because novels have to make sense, unlike our messy hurtling lives.

  All thanks and acknowledgments from the previous volume in this saga, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, still hold. Family, spread all over the United States, Latin America, and Spain, took part in amassing the story: Urrea, Hubbard, Millán, Duty, Treviño, Kempf, Medlock, Nelson, Valencia, Herreras, Tully, Galicia, Zazueta, Van Order, Mann, Walker, Flores, Salazar—to name a few. Hello, Cousin Jeanne. Thank you for all the letters, talks, tacos, and family photo albums. Thank you for trusting me with your secrets and theories.

  Great-granddaughters rule.

  Geronimo appears in this novel in honor of my own Apache cousins, and of Manny (Manuelito), my Chiricahua medicine man/teacher. Although he was employed by Buffalo Bill, I am wishing for him that he could visit Venado Azul and eat ice cream undiscovered, and for a minute at peace. Also, Ambrose Bierce was working in San Francisco at the same time as Helen Dare; they certainly knew of each other. I hope he had the chance to join the cadres of reporters dogging Teresita. It’s fun to think so.

  Between the two books, I have spent twenty-six years in Teresita’s world. Of all the experts and places, I am most haunted by my days in Clifton long, long before this saga took shape. Al V. Fernandez was the town historian. He told me then, “I am only eighty years old and wasn’t old enough to meet her.” He wore his railroad cap and wished that Clifton had a fine train station he could enjoy. I have offered his spirit both things in the novel.

  Many real-life moments will stay with me forever: finding dear Lauro Aguirre’s grave in El Paso, Texas, with David Romo; or the semi-legendary night when one of the scores of Teresita scholars revealed a carbine rifle at a public event and seemed to suggest he could easily kill me with it at fifty yards; or seeing beloved cousin Jeanne—Teresita’s great-granddaughter, receive overwhelming love and applause from an eight-hundred-strong Pasadena crowd. There are still stories being revealed to me, even after all this time.