Oh, but they reminded themselves, each in his own way, that they were blessed by the Saint. Them. They bore her holy image inside their tunics and shirts. Her holy face would stop all bullets—this, Ochoa and Arvisu and González had promised.
“Tell us about the Saint,” a voice requested. “You saw her at Caborca.” They had already mistaken the name of the ranch for the name of the town in the west.
“She was like a figure made of light,” González told them. “She made us all laugh. She blessed Cruz and his fighters.”
They nodded and murmured and smoked and stared into the fire.
“She smelled like flowers.”
“You got that close?”
“I did. She laid her hand on me. I smelled her with my own nose.”
Benigno nudged him.
“You couldn’t have smelled her with anybody else’s nose,” he said. They snickered. They elbowed each other.
“Can I touch you?”
“You can.”
The warrior touched the hem of González’s serape.
“Bendita,” he said.
They touched their angel pictures now.
Manuel carried pages of the ¡Redención! articles folded in a cotton pouch that dangled from his neck. He tucked it away against his heart.
Those articles! Teresita had busied herself in her writings with messages about fate, destiny, and God’s bounty. These pieces clearly galled Don Lauro, and he had steered her to more political bits—pensées on the fate of the Mexican dictatorship, for example. “How do you feel about the deaths of so many of your innocent tribesmen?” he’d offer over coffee and pig cookies.
“It tears out my heart. I am consumed with horror. I pray for justice to come, of course.”
The next day, a headline: “The Girl Saint Cries for Revenge!” Subhead: “Justice Will Come in the Form of God’s Wrath, She Avers.” Aguirre had taken her sentiments and transformed them into ferocious proclamations.
“Teresita will protect us,” Manuel said. “Teresita will watch over us.”
“They say she can fly,” one warrior said. “Is it true?”
“Yes.” Manuel González pointed to the sky. It was flat black, a painted ceiling. Stars were smeared across the vault of the sky like flour. “She can see us all.”
“She’s asleep,” Benigno said.
“In her dreams! She sees!” Manuel hissed.
Ah; the warriors nodded. They were Yaquis and Mayos and two mestizos. They knew about the Dreaming.
“She is always with us,” Manuel promised. “Always. Always. She will bless our bullets to fly true. Her holy face will stop the enemy’s rounds from killing us.”
“Yes, we know.”
“Claro que sí.”
“Amen.”
“Yes.”
This was good. They felt happy. They would attack the border. They would incite a new shooting war in Mexico, and the killers of the People, the dictators and the soldiers, would fall. They smoked more mapuche cigarettes wrapped in corn sheaves.
“May God guide us,” Manuel said.
“Let us,” added Benigno, rising and dusting off his pants, “kill them all.”
The forty men dropped out of the Sonoran hills and silently moved along the line. They could walk right up the main street from the American border shack. The only American border guard was a young cavalry rider in a small booth. He was lit by an oil lamp, and he was mostly asleep, and when he looked up and saw an Indian peering at him, he said “What?” before the stock of a rifle slammed into the bridge of his nose and dropped him, snorting blood and snot, to the sand. The warriors were gone before he even moaned.
They fanned out in the dark, heading south like a flood after a night rain—each of them with a directive, each with an ambush point to man in the slumbering town. Ochoa had trained Benigno well, and they had fought many battles back when the Yaqui wars were hot on the land, when they thought the revolution was about to ignite. Well, things seemed to find their own time. Men could not dictate the will of God.
Dawn was coming, but they were already in place. Six riflemen crouched in the little park. Ten men took up their positions across from the barracks of the guards and the soldiers. Men lurked behind corners at the mercantile, the post office, the little Hotel Nogales. Manuel González cut the telegraph lines and shimmied back down the pole and picked splinters out of his thighs as he crouched behind a barrel across from the customhouse.
Ochoa had told them, “Disrupt trade first. Business is their religion! Kill their profits, and you kill them.”
As soon as roosters started crowing across the border in Arizona, he rose and shouted.
“¡Viva la Santa de Cabora!”
They jumped to their feet all around him and took up the shout.
And they fired.
Soldiers poured out of the barracks to a rain of bullets. Two Federales died immediately. Church bells rang. The fire station’s bell on the American side clanged along with them. The Mexican sheriff jumped from his bed in the hotel and tumbled downstairs in his long johns, racking rounds into his Winchester. The thunder of massed guns overwhelmed the day. Dust. Running. Screams.
American cavalrymen leapt from their beds and were on their horses in minutes. They charged up and down the line, unsure of what to do. They waved handguns, tried to point their rifles into the melee. They were the only defense against invasion.
Dogs fled. Horses panicked and charged, whinnying and kicking. Barrels, windows, bottles in the saloon, jars and flowerpots on porches exploded. Dirt, shards flying everywhere. Men falling. Hollering. Cats scrambling. Chickens, in a hysterical burst, left feathers swirling in the street.
A speeding wagon was peppered with shots and overturned, throwing its pilot in a hideous rolling tumble across the cobbles.
Manuel González danced like a drunkard at a party as fifteen rounds from three directions slammed into his chest and belly. Benigno watched him dance and die from behind a water trough at the mercantile. Manuel shook, his shoulders shrugged rhythmically, and he lifted and moved backward through the air, his rifle loose in one hand and his red bandana the same flashing color as his blood gouting in jets all around as he spun, spun, one foot on the ground, one raised, his hand in the blizzard of rounds going to his heart, to his pictures of Teresita, the look on his face one of bewilderment as he soared. Teresita could not fly. He was flying. And the bullets tattered her to rip through his heart.
“¡Cabrones!” Benigno shouted, and stood up into the whirlwind.
It might have been due to the bells or the shouting of the federal troops on the Mexican side or the endless roar of gunfire, but the cavalrymen in Arizona could not contain themselves and jumped their horses over the gates and low barbwire fences and invaded Mexico. The young lieutenant at the head of the column shouted, “Boys, they’re coming our way!” which made no sense, since it was the Americans heading toward the Mexicans. But nobody noticed in the din of rifles and bells and screaming horses.
Benigno and his boys shot their way into the customhouse and barricaded the doors and then shot at everything that moved. Bullets blew bright holes in the walls, as if a hundred eyes of angels had opened in the dark and cast beams of light into the gloom. But if their gaze fell on you, you would bleed and die.
Teresita’s face did not stop a single round that day.
Hours later, the dead raiders were set out on the street. During the battle, they’d seemed twenty feet tall. Now, emptied of life, they looked small and pathetic. They weren’t even gruesome. As citizens came down the sidewalks and stared, leading their children by the hands, there were few rivers of blood or piles of viscera. These warriors looked asleep. One who had been shot through the jaw had a comical rag tied around his face and looked as if he were waiting for a barber to pull an aching tooth. People pointed at him and laughed. The dead men’s heads were propped against the wall of the customhouse. The angle would have hurt if they’d been alive.
Manuel Gonz?
?lez, their leader, lay a bit apart, set out perpendicularly to them, across their feet, with his ankles crossed. People walking by kicked him. He seemed to nod when they kicked him, sometimes turned his head as if checking to see who was bothering him. His blood had ruined Aguirre’s newspaper inside his shirt. He was half staring into the sky. Dust turned his black eyes gray.
Twenty-Three
THAT SAME MORNING, REBELS attacked customhouses across the sweep of northern Mexico. They attacked Ojinaga, and they all died. They raided Juárez—in El Paso, Aguirre and Ochoa had assembled on the roof of the ice cream parlor to watch—and were destroyed by the garrison of Mexican federal troops stationed there. The expatriate revolutionaries smoked cigars on the roof and mourned. They could hear every shot, and the cries of the fallen drifted across the river with the clouds of dust and the bracing smell of gunpowder. Ochoa gestured toward the south and stated, “All this because your saint will not fight like a man.” Aguirre knew this was unfair, but he also knew this was a good line, and he made it—in gentler, more reverential tones—the subject of editorials and broadsides. For a time, Tomás banned him from their boardinghouse, declaring him a traitor, but only until the next boot dropped. Díaz in Mexico declared the revolt a plot by Teresita herself, laying the blame for the violence on her, thundering that she be extradited immediately to face her belated fate in the motherland. The Mexican ambassador to the United States made his case in Washington for the festering indigenous danger of Teresita and her agitators—she had brought terror across the border and threatened to unleash new waves of scalpings and uprisings among the savages in the great southwestern territories if she wasn’t exiled in reverse! Really, he pointed out, the great Abraham Lincoln himself had once hung a score of recalcitrant Indians when the security of the country called for it. Teresita had, the ambassador insisted, earned her place beside her Yaqui rabble, dangling from a tree.
It took all of Ochoa’s vast network of influence, debts, favors, and operatives to stay the hand of the U.S. government. When Aguirre and Tomás were speaking again, Tomás—who now had gray hairs in his sideburns and mustache—jeered at Aguirre. “Nice work, you son of a whore! You had a one-day revolution!” His laughter was cruel.
When she stepped out to see how the morning would look, Teresita found a letter from the archangel Gabriel on her front stoop.
At first, she thought it was an editorial response to one of her articles for Don Lauro or, worse, another insult after he had suggested she was the reason for the revolution’s failure. How could she both inspire the revolt and destroy the revolt? Herbs and spirits were so much simpler than this.
If she were more like her father, she would work up a good long curse. She never knew what new irritation or panic would hit on any morning. She certainly didn’t expect a letter from Heaven.
Gabriel had lovely penmanship. His words lifted into curlicues, inspired no doubt by the trajectory of his wings as he flew. Those who do not follow me, he wrote, shall be slain by my sword. I am a general in the army of the Lord. Believers shall forever march under the shadow of my wings. It is mankind’s choice—glory or death.
He signed it The Angel Gabriel. It didn’t say Sincerely. There was no PS.
Attached to the heavy cream paper was one large, white feather.
It wasn’t the strangest thing that had ever happened to her.
She awoke before dawn and washed herself and made ready her clothes. As she did each morning, she prayed, she honored her ancestors, she prepared a clear glass of water to put on the altar with her sacred objects and her cross. There was no way, in Segundo Barrio, for her to walk out to the fields of Itom Achai and greet the sun. What fields? And how would she maneuver through the crowd? No way to find power spots under trees to consult with coyote or semalulukut or the sly libélula—old dragonfly, her friend. What trees? But God could come to her room as she had once gone to His. Oh, death. She had been dead—it was hard to believe now that she was alive again and it meant being so hot and tired and bored.
Tomás had asked her what death was like, and she’d said, “Cooler than Texas.”
Indeed, Heaven was breezy. God’s hair, locks full of stars and waterfalls, had blown slowly around Him, she recalled. But she could not remember His face. Still, she’d know Him again when she saw Him.
Getting up from bed was so hard. Her body ached because she could not sleep well feeling the tidal swell of all those souls outside her windows dreaming about her. Huila used to say, “The hills are ancient, but they still are covered in flowers.” She smiled. She was feeling the age, but the beauty was fading.
How easy, she remembered, it was to die. Why did we fight it when it came? It was like lying in a feather bed, after the pain and fear had passed.
As she washed herself with her soaps and tepid water, staring in the mirror as she bent to the basin, she could see the small wrinkles beside her eyes and mouth. Her eyebrows were growing back together. No wrinkles in Heaven, she thought. Lots of deer, though.
She hadn’t seen Gabriel in God’s valley. She had seen old Yaquis there, walking in the small hills where the sunflowers grew. She was curious about what moved him to write to her now. And if he could write her letters, would her dear Cruz Chávez or Huila ever write? How she would love a letter from Huila! Her eyes welled with tears. She splashed water on her face. No time for that. People were waiting. But she wondered, as she went back down the stairs, why Gabriel was in such a bad mood.
Once the reporters started to arrive, she found out.
Lately, she knew, they had been saying she was a mesmerist, that she somehow put her followers in a trance. Before, she would have laughed at them. She would have been fierce about it. But now… She had been away from her home, her land, her teachers for so long. She didn’t think she was putting anyone in a trance. She was almost sure she was passing the power of God through her body. Don Lauro told her that her power was political, not holy. Of course he would. She sniffed her arm. She still smelled like roses, but she could barely smell it anymore. That was what holiness was like. Holiness coming down on her every day, she was ashamed to admit, was a crashing bore. It started out bright gold, vivid red, delicious purple. Over time, though, with no respite, it faded to gray.
It was harder in the rooming house. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to meet the seekers, nowhere to escape them. A wine-sotted borrachito on the ground floor had one of the empty-lot-facing doors up three stone steps from the street. He let Teresita sit in his dark room and wandered the streets drinking red wine and bumming smokes while she did her work. The old paisano’s room smelled vaguely of dirty clothes and urine. She burned her incense and candles and hoped for the occasional breeze to stir the stink. No wonder the Bible promised golden mansions and great feasts in Heaven. This was a life of dust and ordure.
Her first clients were elderly Chinese, hiding in the city’s shadows from the anti-Chinese expeditionary forces that rode into barrios and rounded up the illegal “celestials” who had come north from Mexico to work the rail lines and slaughterhouses. The old ones were awake before the Mexicans, and they smiled at her or stood stoically, sometimes unable to tell her what ailed them but pointing at body parts. They talked to her about chi, which made Tomás smirk when he overheard it, because in Spanish chi meant “urine.” Sometimes, the old ones would take her hands in theirs, dry and soft and hot as little birds, and they would position them near spots on their bodies, nodding, whispering in their language that she somehow understood. One Dr. Chai sometimes spoke poems to her as he tried to show her where the cardinal spots for healing could be found.
After the Chinese came the banged-up buckaroos and the dented cantina boys and the feverish doves from the alleys. Teresita took them all. She knew whom Jesus knew. She helped whom Jesus helped.
And then the citizens of El Paso. And the citizens of Ciudad Juárez. And the travelers from New Mexico and Colorado, and then California and Missouri. They came from Chicago and New York. How she
longed to see New York! And they came from Scotland and Ireland. They came from Mexico City and Havana. She greeted them all equally, the fine businessman, the prostitute, the Indian guerrilla, and the nun. It was her calling to accept them and offer them God’s gift. Day after day. Sometimes they just wanted to see her and touch her hand. Sometimes they cried out when she raised her hands, and swooned at her feet. Sometimes they knew they were dying and merely wanted a kind send-off and an assurance or two. Nothing startled her. There was no malady, stench, wound that shocked her. She preferred the cures she could offer with herbs. Herbs relied on her expertise, her training. They could be measured. She knew what tea eased pain in the womb; she knew what ointment drew pus from a cut; she knew what leaves chased worms from the gut. Beyond the herbs was all faith. Yet, like the smell of roses, faith sometimes waned. Sometimes it also turned gray.
“Who am I but a woman?” she asked a deaf old man from Bavispe.
He smiled at her. He bent in a deep bow. He kissed her hand.
Tomás watched as he always watched, with one hand near his pistola. “All beggars,” he said. “You have a ministry of whores and orphans and beggars.”
“These are the blessed poor whom Jesus loved,” she replied.
“You’re not Him.”
At night, she knelt on the painful wooden floor and prayed. Tomás was down on the stoop, unwilling to be exposed to any more sanctity. It felt like typhus, some holy miasma in the air that choked him. Malaria.
“Father!” she cried to her Lord. “It is not what I thought it would be. I don’t know where to turn. Where is my refuge? Or am I greedy to ask?” Tears rolled down her face. “I am so tired, Lord. I am afraid. Those around me have used me. Those who follow me do evil. Those who are against me seek to silence me. Please, Father. A sign. Won’t You offer one small miracle for Your poorest daughter?”