But Teresita was perfectly happy among her leaves and twigs. The clinic did not smell like Burtch’s offices, not of chemicals and camphor, but of dried flowers and sage, of mint and tart berries and cedar smoke, vanilla beans and cinnamon. She coughed and thought that perhaps some rose hips with honey would feel good in her throat.
She caught herself singing.
She had never sung in her memory, except when she played guitar for the buckaroos back in—well, it felt like a century ago. It made her smile. “Ay, Teresita,” she said aloud. “Cómo eres.” She had never talked to herself out loud much either. She sat with herself as if with an old friend. She hugged herself as she pulled a shawl tighter—the mountain could be brisk. “Let’s have that tea,” she announced and urged herself out of the chair. “Come on, old woman,” she told herself. She was thirty-two years old. On the outside.
Gabriela walked up to the clinic and beheld a line of men lounging lugubriously while the women worked inside. John Van Order had appeared from somewhere, and he completed the coalition of louts rocking like great-grandfathers: Aguirre, Segundo, Al Fernandez, and John. She shook her head. Gaby knew that the only real man in the world had died. And look at what was left!
“I will never marry again,” she said, clomping up the steps.
Segundo, swiping Aguirre’s coffee, muttered, “Say what?” but the rest of them were deaf as they stared at the sunlight creeping across the street.
Gaby withdrew a portfolio from under her arm.
“Teresita,” she called. “I have brought something for you.”
Teresita came out with her tea.
Gaby handed the portfolio over, and Teresita placed her cup and saucer on a small table and opened the flap and looked upon a photograph of her dead father laid out on the table in the rancho’s front room.
“That’s him,” Gaby noted. “Lying in state. I thought, since you missed the funeral, you might want this.”
Teresita’s head spun, but she didn’t know if it was from grief or shock or from her cough.
“Thank you,” she said.
“He was tall,” Gaby said.
They stood there.
“Well,” Teresita finally replied. “That he was.”
They went to Teresita’s consultorio and put the sad picture on her desk, turned away from the room so that only Teresita could see it.
Teresita sat down at her desk. “Gaby?” she said. “When all those people came to Cabora, those pilgrims? What was it like?”
Gaby said, “It was horrible.”
“It wasn’t beautiful?”
“No. It was ugly and disturbing. All those dirty hopeless people. That smell. All of them frantic to touch you.”
Teresita rested her chin on her fist.
“I thought it was beautiful,” she said.
“I suppose you would,” Gaby said.
Gaby walked out of the room. Teresita stared at the door. She made it move an inch, then another. It swung shut very slowly and she stared until she heard the latch click. She sat calmly in the shadows.
John had been sulky. He had always had a surly streak, but Arizona had put him in a right state of pique. He knew Teresita didn’t like him to smoke in her clinic, but what the hell. He held his skinny black cheroot in his teeth and hung his thumbs in his dungaree pockets and slouched like a melting candle. He still hadn’t been to their little house up the street from the church. Mostly, he pouted around in Solomonville, telling tall tales to his mother.
“How’s that baby of ours?” he asked.
She sat at her desk watching his ashes drop to the floor.
“She’s fine,” she said. “You should see her.” She smiled. “I believe you have seen her, haven’t you? Once?”
“Jesus, Terry,” he said.
He said it like his bene coves had said it in New York: Jay-zuz.
“You love me, though. Right?” he said.
She breathed out through her nose.
“I will always love you,” she replied. “You know that.”
He sat down, crossed his legs. There was mud on his boot. She hoped it was mud. It was dropping small bits on her carpet.
“Ain’t that a relief,” he said in English.
He ground out his smoke on the sole of his boot. Teresita reached across the desk and took the stub from his hand before he dropped it on the floor along with everything else he was dumping there.
“Hey!” he said, as if he’d just had an idea. “How about that Don Lauro? He’s a real caballero.”
“A fine man,” she agreed.
“A bit of a buggy boss, though,” John confided. “I bet he can’t ride no horse worth beans. It’s a miracle he got all the way up here on his own.”
She drummed her fingers on her desk.
“What are you getting at, mi amor?” she said.
“Why,” said John, all wide eyes and clear features, looking like the pure-hearted boy he never was, “he’s fixing to go back down to Texas. In that wagon. I’m worried.”
“Worried.”
“He don’t even carry a belly gun. Hell—bandidos, Indians, who knows what’s out there.”
“I see.”
She glanced at the picture of her father lying on the table, his boots on and his great whiskers pointing at Heaven.
“And you would go with him, to guard him on his adventure.”
“Can I?”
“You are asking my permission?”
“Well, yes.”
“Are you not a grown man, my love? Can you not just tell me you intend to go on this journey?”
She did not add: The way Tomás Urrea would have done it.
John slapped his knees and smiled.
“Okay then,” he said. “We’re agreed on it.”
He sat staring at her. She sat staring at him. She could not remember what he looked like naked.
“Can I borrow some money?” he asked.
He was startled when she fell back in her chair and laughed.
She cried when they parted. Don Lauro caught many of her tears on his lapels. He patted her on the back and stared at the peaks and ordered himself to remain dry-eyed. Everything was wrong. Everything awry—the revolution should have freed the Mexican people by now, and his dear Tomás Urrea should be sitting in the gubernatorial palace of Sonora watched over by an honor guard of ferocious Yaqui warriors, an unassailable force for good ruling the new north—La Frontera de Oro. Yes! The Golden Border! But now none of it would ever happen. This warrior queen appeared to be happy… puttering, playing nurse to miners and peasants. What had happened to her greater healing? He shook his head. Revolution indeed: a circle back to where you started. He placed a chaste kiss on the crown of her head and climbed aboard his wagon.
“Adios,” he said, holding on to her hand.
“Lios emak weye,” she blessed him.
He nodded, let go of her fingers.
John cried. He cried because he knew he wasn’t coming back. She knew it too. Laura stood on the clinic porch crying, “Papa! Papa, come back!”
“I haven’t left yet,” he said.
But he and Teresita both knew he was already far gone. He was in her arms, yet he had passed beyond the curve of the earth. He was already invisible.
He stepped to the porch and said, “Laura, you take care of your mother and sister. I’ll bring you back some candy.”
“Bye, Papa.”
She stood, stoic as a medicine woman, with heavy tears rolling down her face and falling from the edges of her chin.
He mounted the blue horse. He had Segundo’s massive rifle that he’d liberated so many years before from Mexican assassins. Segundo stood with Laura and put his hand on her head. “Cabrón,” he muttered.
John cocked his hat and looked handsome and led Aguirre’s mule down the cobbled street and out of their lives forever.
And Teresita coughed.
Sixty-Four
EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING that had touched her had been only a t
ide of some unseen ocean. Things rolled up her, over her, and she thought she would drown, but they always receded. The tide always ebbed. And all those many who had come to her, those men and women and children and old ones and spirits and dead bodies and warriors and infants and mothers and widows, washed away. They were mere foam that agitated her until some passing moon drew them back to blend with the great darkness beyond.
She happily emptied her chests. She emptied her boxes. And she emptied her mind. She had her daughters now, and they were the only ones who could still keep out the light. The girls were perfect and small and holy and hers. They were solid in the world that had begun to float away.
Segundo stopped her one morning and asked her, “Can’t you heal no more?”
She shrugged.
“I do not care to try,” she said. “This is a new century. Let doctors do God’s work.”
She put canaries in her own house because she remembered the sound of them with joy. She burned vanilla-scented candles and ate chocolate cake and drank the thickest foamiest teas with the heaviest cream because it made her happy. Bits of quartz and paper wasps’ nests lined her windowsills. A coyote skull brought to her by Al Fernandez sat on her bookshelf. As much as she ate, she slowly thinned out again. The curves John loved melted, and her old bones started to reassert themselves. She coughed and the cough became wet and chronic, and one cool morning she found pink splatters in her handkerchief.
Her work was not through—the clinic did slow but steady duties among the weary and the injured. Those she couldn’t help with poultices or teas or smoke, she sent to Dr. Burtch. She had nothing against pills.
She walked down the hill to the Catholic church in the early mornings and lit candles for her dead. She sat in the silence and locked eyes with Jesus on the cross. “We understand each other,” she told him. “Not all crosses are made of wood.” He seemed to agree.
As her body wore out, she used a cane on achy days.
Anita found her standing in the cobbled street one morning, barefoot, feeling the egg-shaped stones with her feet. Eyes closed. She was pale as her beloved candles. Her lips were red. Anita thought it was from the blood.
Teresita was smiling.
“Sister?” said Anita.
Teresita put her finger to her lips.
“Listen,” she said.
“To what?”
“To silence.”
Teresita smiled and tipped her head back to catch the morning sun full on her face.
“I can hear ten thousand things,” Teresita whispered.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“That is because you never listened, child.”
Teresita opened her eyes.
She raised her hands and blessed the planet.
“Thank you, world,” she said.
That afternoon, it began to rain.
The San Francisco River that charged through town was a moody companion. It was too rocky and precipitous for a good swim, but it gave up fishes in its shallows and respites, and it coughed up rainbows on hot days. Everyone in Clifton knew, though, that it was prone to buck out of its banks in snowmelt season or when the southern monsoon clouds made it up to the peaks to be scraped empty of rain; it liked to flood and seemed to take actual pleasure in carrying off porches and miners, mules and auto cars. People saw it as a character in their history, an outlaw perhaps. It never struck a bargain.
And in that last year, it pitched and swept into the town and splintered walls and drowned dogs. Teresita’s house was up the slope and stayed dry—the girls were upstairs with Segundo and Dolores—but the clinic took a big hit; waves churned up the porch and tossed the waiting room’s chairs against the wall.
And though Dr. Burtch had ordered Teresita to stay inside, warm and dry, she could not. Paisanos were being flooded out of their homes. She went into the storm and the bellowing waters and sandbagged and dug and carried children and saved goats. She fell in the water and was fished out by the Calvillo brothers. Belief in her had waned in some people, but not among them. The elder Calvillo insisted they had found her because she had sent blinding beams of light out of her eyes that led them through the flooded woods to save her.
She spent two miserable nights shivering beside the heroic rescuers and the pick-and-shovel brigades come from the mine trying to build levees in the face of the icy inundation. When the waters slowed and rolled away from some homes, the miners carried her to her house. She was soaked through and burning with fever, and she seemed to be made of little broken sticks and black cloth, her hair falling and dripping and brushing the muddy ground.
There was nothing to do but take her in the wagon to the Urrea rancho outside of town. Segundo laid her in the back amid quilts and pillows. Dolores and Gaby fetched the girls in a little carriage, and they all made their way out of town. Ten or fifteen people stood in the street and raised their hands to Teresita, took off their hats. She smiled at them, waved her hand. They could hear her coughing.
Dr. Burtch had Teresita installed in a back bedroom, away from the family.
“Consumption is a terrible malady,” he told them. “It could contaminate you all. It’s best to keep her comfortable and keep your exposure to a minimum.”
Segundo didn’t care. He sat in a chair off to the side of her bed and kept his pistola at hand, as if he could shoot the Grim Reaper if he showed his bony face. When Teresita needed clean cloths to catch her bloody sputum, he fetched them and tossed her soiled cottons into a fire lest any fanatic appear seeking relics.
“Don’t let them come for my bones,” she said. Her face was white and burning, yet strangely holy. He could not look at her without crying. “Don’t let them dig me up.”
“Ah, cabrón,” he said softly. “That’s crazy talk. You ain’t dying.”
“We are all dying.”
“Not me,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you I’m living forever?”
They smiled at each other.
She closed her eyes.
“But, Segundo,” she mumbled. “Wouldn’t that be terribly lonely?”
She drifted to sleep.
Anita became the little mother to Laura and Magdalena. They had a visitation schedule. It was best in the mornings, after Segundo and Gaby had cleaned Teresita up and put some of her old New York face paint on her to make her look less cadaverous. Dr. Burtch made the girls maintain their distance, perhaps the cruelest part of the entire ordeal. All they wanted was to hold their mother. But they could not. Still, Laura would break loose and jump to her mother’s side and hold her hand and rest her face against her mother’s chest. Dr. Burtch could not bear to force her away too quickly, so he allowed her to dawdle on some mornings. Little Magdalena peered out of her blanket wrap like a ferocious little owl, wondering who all these people were.
A newspaper had run “Saint of Cabora Near Death” on its front page, and incredibly, pilgrims filtered uphill. Several of them confessed to Gaby, “We thought she was already dead.” They brought gifts: serapes, potted lemongrass and cilantro, chickens, holy water, gold coins. One old man from Silver City brought them a chunk of Tomóchic’s charred altar, scavenged after the massacre of her followers. They set glasses of water on the steps of the farmhouse, burned candles. The porch became a small shrine.
“They’re going to burn down my house!” Gaby complained, not at all willing to allow another siege of pilgrims to overwhelm her life.
Occasionally, Teresita accepted visitors—they had to stay as far from her in the room as possible. These visitors made Gaby and Segundo believe Teresita was actually improving. She sometimes showed vigor and sat up in bed and even sipped chicken soup with lemon.
She told a reporter from Guaymas that she had dreamed vividly since becoming ill.
“I have visions,” she said.
“Hallucinations,” he corrected.
“Visions, I said. I am not delirious. I can speak clearly.”
He wrote in his notebook: Hallucinations.
“What did you dream last night?” he asked.
“I dreamed of San Francisco. My favorite city.”
“What did you see?”
“I do not understand it. I saw a great crater, full of fire and smoke. The city was gone.”
He smiled a little.
“And you believe this is—what—prophecy? Are you sure?”
“I may be approaching darkness,” she said, “but I am not yet blind.”
Segundo poked his head in the door and said: “You. Out.”
Teresita made the sign of the cross over the reporter’s head.
She slept. She seldom awoke. She coughed in her sleep. Segundo wiped the blood off her chin. Her breathing was a ghastly, bubbling thing. No one wanted to hear it. Gaby actually found herself praying that God would take her and end her suffering.
And then came the morning. They all thought it was over. She woke and called weakly for her most beloved to join her. But not the little ones—they were not ready for it. So Gaby and Anita and Segundo stood in her room and looked down on her. She seemed to glow. Segundo thought she looked like sunlight breaking through white feathers—her skin looked like a dove’s feathers to him. Her eyes were cradled by purple shadows. She smiled and looked into a corner of the room. Gaby turned her head to look, thinking some spider had settled there, but there was nothing.
“I love you all,” Teresita said. “I know you love me.”
Segundo started sobbing immediately.
“You old lion,” she said.
He blew his nose.
“Hold my hand.”
He stepped forward and cupped her fingers in his big calloused paws.
“It is almost night,” she said. “And I must sleep. Don’t mourn me. And don’t forget me. I will not forget you.” She squeezed Segundo’s hand. “I will wait for you all. We will be together again.”
She closed her eyes and sighed and they thought she had died right before them, but then she opened her eyes and looked at each of them.
“I cannot sleep yet,” she said. “Someone is coming.”