The Texicans Read online

  And then the epidemic was over, and the stream of sick became a trickle. Oscar couldn’t believe it. Hadn’t he heard that people were talking about Aurelia as far away as El Paso? Didn’t they tell stories about how the dead rose when she looked at them, how the sick became well at her touch? He knew the stories had sprung out of mad desperation and had spread, like the cholera itself, without reason, but all he had gained was gone on the gambling tables, and he had no heart for catching wild birds, and he thought it beneath him to sell trinkets in the plaza, and when he looked at Aurelia he was consumed with bitterness.

  As for Aurelia, she had begun to have a dream in which she could see the future. She dreamed that her brothers and sisters were in Chihuahua growing up without her, that she heard them calling to her to hurry up and come to them, that they forgave her, that they loved her, that she belonged with them, but their faces became so dim in this dream that she couldn’t see their features, and finally she couldn’t even hear their voices, and then she would wake up, her heart pounding as if she had been running all night. She tried to tell Luz about her dream, but Luz wouldn’t listen. She said it was Aurelia’s fault that Oscar had lost all their money. You’re not a Mexican, you’re not an American, you’re not a saint, Luz said. No one in Texas wants you. You don’t belong here with your strange thoughts and crazy dreams. It was all a trick. You didn’t cure anyone.

  Aurelia understood that Luz spoke to her the way she did because she was in pain. And it didn’t matter to Aurelia whether Texas wanted her or not, or whether she was a saint or not, or whether the money she made from cholera had been procured by trickery. If she had thought about herself that way, she would have been angry, and she couldn’t think when she was angry. She had once thrashed a boy who called her a half-breed, and then brought him home so Luz could clean his wounds. It hadn’t solved anything. She was still who she was after the thrashing. The only thing that had changed was that she was sorry she had done it, and she resolved to think more carefully before she acted. Dreams were for her a way of thinking. She spun out problems at night that couldn’t be seen in daylight. But the same dream every night presented a special problem. It was as if a message were being sent that she couldn’t read. So every night she dreamed the same dream, and during the day she struggled to understand it. She stayed alert for signs, looked carefully at people in the marketplace, tried to anticipate what words meant when they were spoken hurriedly or cautiously or carelessly, as if in that way the meaning of her dream would be revealed. She was a half-breed, a girl with strange thoughts, who dreamed of running away, but instead of running she made herself stop and listen, forced herself to wait and see. Everything happens in moments, she told herself. I will move from moment to moment. I will listen carefully, then make beautiful turns and say wonderful things and everyone will be caught off guard.

  2

  April, 1844

  “I’VE HEARD SAY this girl of yours can cure people just by looking at them,” the man said.

  “Aurelia cure you just by the blink of her eye,” Oscar replied. “All you got do is stand in her way and there it is, whatever hurt you stop right that second.”

  Aurelia could see the Texan through the door, talking to her father on the wooden porch. He said he was a Ranger, said he was camped with fifty-six other Rangers down by the Nueces River.

  “We were watching for Comanches, and chasing a few, too, and just about every time I got off my horse and went to eating, I got a cramping in my stomach, and Captain Hays, he said there was a greaser girl from a family name of Ruíz curing people of all sorts of illness just by looking in their eye. He said he heard she cured some people of the cholera last summer.”

  The man’s homespun trousers and shirt looked clean, cleaner than they ought to be for someone who spent his time chasing Comanches, even if he was camped beside a river and could have washed his clothes in between times.

  “Sí, my daughter Aurelia can cure you,” Oscar said. His English words were soft and slurry, the way he would have pronounced them if he were speaking Spanish. “You got spots on you, she look at you one time and they’re gone. Your boils is gone and your fever. Open sores, too.”

  The red-and-blue bandanna wrapped around the man’s neck was clean, too, and the silver spurs on his boots gleamed as bright as sun on water, as if he spent all his spare time, when his stomach wasn’t cramping, pulling a cloth across them to get them that way. He had tied his horse to the gate, and even from the house Aurelia could see that the leather saddlebags weren’t dirt-spattered.

  “Is that the girl I see standing inside, the one with the long black hair?”

  “Ten silver pieces and you can see her up close. She can fix your stomach real fast. I saw her first time cure an old lady in Laredo. We were going to Chihuahua, and an old lady, she said what kind of look is in that girl’s eye, she just cure me of the pain in my aching bones, got no more pain in my body. And you ask anybody about the cholera, no one got it here, no one. Laredito, not one person died. Aurelia did that. God makes a big space around Aurelia so nothing can happen to her. Business isn’t too good now, but you can go in. Five silver pieces and she’ll cure your stomach.”

  Aurelia moved back from the open door until she was nearly out of the man’s sight, until all she could see were snatches of red-and-blue bandanna and an occasional glimpse of blond beard. She would let her father take the man’s money first. It wasn’t too good to let him stare at her before he paid or he’d think she could cure him from inside the house, that he didn’t even have to come in. Then he might just ride off on his horse and take his silver coins with him. Her sisters and brothers were playing cuartillos in the yard, little skinny faces intent on the game, but she could hear their stomachs growling with hunger all the way across the yard and into the house.

  “I just have a cramping in my stomach,” the man said.

  “That won’t take no more than half a look from Aurelia,” Oscar said, “so half the price.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” The man kept glancing behind him at the dirt road that had led him into this part of San Antonio, the Mexican part, the part they called Laredito. He appeared to be confused, as if he hadn’t expected to see windowless adobe houses with sod roofs, or rows of jacales made of mud and sticks and thatched with dried cornstalks, or broken-down horses grazing on dry grass right at the doors of the jacales, or so many dirty, ragged children and bony-looking dogs chasing each other beneath the shade of the liveoaks, was surprised to see grown men sitting with their backs up against pieces of sagging fence, shoulders wrapped in colored cloth, heads resting so far forward on their knees that the brims of their black hats skimmed the dirt.

  “I’m willing to pay the full price. I don’t want a cheap job. I want what anyone gets who pays his money. I want to be able to eat meat and potatoes and have it settle in where it belongs and not pain me afterwards.”

  “Listen to me.” Oscar lowered his voice and put the edge of his palm up close to his face, as though to keep his words boxed into the small bit of space it made between him and the man, as if to show him he was his equal, could get as close as he wanted, wasn’t afraid the man would shove him away, call him a greaser or tell him he wasn’t any better than a nigger or an Indian.

  “I’m going to tell you something I never tell anyone, never, ever in my life, just to show I’m honest and you don’t have to worry that I try to take your money for nothing. Dumb Mexicans don’t know this, what I going to tell you. They too dumb to understand when you tell them things, anyway.”

  It pained Aurelia to hear Oscar talk about Mexicans that way, as though he didn’t belong to them, didn’t want any part of them. And she would have walked out onto the porch and told him so, but there was something about the man with the blond beard and polished boots that made her think of plates of beans and stacks of tortillas. She would let Oscar say what he wanted, no matter how sad it made her feel, because she knew he could hear the children’s stomachs rumbling as well a
s she could.

  “My wife Luz is descended from Cortés,” Oscar said. “Not too many dumb Mexicans can say that. I bet you never heard one lousy Mexican say that in all your life, did you?”

  “I can’t believe I rode up here from the river,” the man said, as if he had just that second realized he was standing there talking to a Mexican with skin as dark as mud. “I don’t know what I was thinking of.”

  “You know who Cortés was, don’t you?”

  “I heard.”

  “Aurelia, she no dumb Mexican girl, no greaser, not with Cortés’ blood in her. You think someone with blood like that cheat you, lie to you about how she can heal the sick? Look at her yourself. Go on, look, but you better look quick. Aurelia don’t like it when she has to wait like that, standing and waiting, and it’s so hot.”

  The man hesitated a moment and then walked closer to the door.

  “Go on, go inside. Go see for yourself what Aurelia can do.”

  Aurelia turned her face slightly, so her eyes looked past him to the left, to the crucifix on the wall.

  “I might take one look,” the man said and stepped inside.

  Aurelia could tell by the way he survyed the rough log floor and the bare windows, stared at the homemade table and chairs, at the beds against the spotted walls, then let his eyes linger on the strings of chili peppers hanging in the open door, even the way he sniffed the air, that he had never been inside a Mexican house before or stood this close to a Mexican girl.

  “People say you’re a saint, Jesus in a woman’s body,” the man said to her and put five silver pieces down on the table beside the door.

  “The priest says I’m not anything but a poor Mexican girl,” Aurelia replied, and she told him he could sit down in a chair next to the table and she would just kneel on the floor, if he didn’t mind.

  “You cure people, don’t you?” He was squinting, adjusting his eyes to the dull shadows of the room.

  “Sometimes.” Some people got up and left when she told them that. Some just didn’t care. They’d say things like, Well, I’ll be the lucky one, or Maybe you weren’t trying very hard before. She couldn’t tell which kind the man was.

  “My stomach cramps up on me when I eat. Do you cure people or not?”

  “I’m not sure. If people say I cure them, if they believe it, maybe I do.”

  “I paid money for you to cure my stomach.”

  “And I will.”

  “You said you weren’t sure.”

  “My brothers and sisters are hungry, and we need the silver. Can you hear their stomachs making all that noise outside?”

  “It’s my stomach I came about. I have pains in it when I eat. I heard you aren’t a girl at all, but something made up out of clay and brown flour and dropped down out of the sky.”

  “I don’t think so. But I don’t know everything.”

  “You’re the strangest girl I’ve ever seen.”

  “Is the pain in the top of your stomach or the bottom?”

  “In the middle, I think.”

  He was staring at her the way some men in the marketplace did, his eyes wavering, the lids fluttering just the slightest bit. You have a look that men like, Luz said.

  “Your blood is too rich,” she said. “Your skin looks pink to me, like your blood is too hot. You can hear my brothers’ and sisters’ stomachs right now, can’t you?”

  “I don’t hear a thing.”

  “The noise is so loud, I feel like it’s inside my chest. Are you sure you can’t hear it?”

  “Just do what you do and I’ll be going.”

  He was staring at Aurelia’s neck now, at the hollow of skin that the shawl didn’t cover. She pulled it tighter around her shoulders, felt the silk’s fine pull beneath her jaw. He reminded her of the men in the marketplace who grabbed at her and acted as if she didn’t know that they thought Mexican girls were to be used once or twice and then tossed away, men who pretended to like Mexican girls, but who would never walk in the street with one or take one for a ride in a carriage, or marry one.

  “I paid my money,” the man said. “Is it true or not that you can cure me?”

  Maybe this man was like the men who took their time before they began to grab, who started out by asking if she knew of a good lodging house or if she could tell them where to find a cobbler to fix their wornout boots, and ended by telling her there was a pretty place along the river they wanted to show her, men who spoke to her in short sentences the way this man did, men who didn’t ask her name or bother to remove their hats, men with open-faced lust and barely hidden lies.

  But it didn’t matter what kind of man this was. She had feet for running and a mouth for telling stories. I have Negro blood, she would say, and as she spooled out the made-up details of her birth on a plantation in Georgia, their eyes would darken. I have three children and no husband, she would say and they would back away. I put a spell on the last man who spoke to me, and he turned into a horse, she would say and they would run for their lives.

  “Well, can you cure me or not?”

  Like all the other men there was something about this one that felt dark and hungry.

  “Only God knows that. Who am I to say I can’t?”

  The man’s name was Willie Barnett, and he came to the mud house in Laredito every day after that. Not to see Aurelia. He didn’t even speak to her, never even told her whether her look had cured his stomach cramps, just tied his horse to the gate, touched the brim of his hat to show he saw her in the doorway, then came up the steps slowly, as if in no particular hurry, and walked around the porch that circled the house, down the back steps and past Aurelia’s younger brothers and sisters playing in the dirt alongside the weedy garden where Luz’s herbs grew. He trampled the same morning glories and honeysuckles he had trampled the day before, and then kicked open the rickety gate and walked out to where Oscar was swinging in his hammock beneath the liveoak trees.

  Aurelia would stand at the rear window and watch the way Willie talked to Oscar and the way Oscar answered him back. She had watched Oscar in the marketplace when he had taken goods to sell. Trading things. That was the way Oscar talked to Willie.

  On Willie Barnett’s last visit to the house Oscar asked him if he’d like to sit on the porch where it was cooler. Luz brought two chairs out for Oscar and Willie to sit on. One of the babies, the one who had just been weaned, crawled across Willie’s feet. Aurelia watched from inside the house as he nudged the baby away with the toe of his boot—a gentle nudge, not a kick like you’d give a dog—and then bent down and wiped his boot with his handkerchief. Oscar offered him some tobacco, and Willie said he had his own and didn’t want to smoke right then anyway, and if he had wanted to he wouldn’t have smoked Oscar’s, that he didn’t like the tobacco Mexicans used, it was too full of dirt and weeds to suit him.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking about Aurelia,” Willie said to Oscar after Luz picked the baby up and took it inside. “I don’t want to marry her, you see, but I’d like to buy her.” Aurelia was sewing near the open door, bending over the material, taking tiny stitches in the quilt she was making for the baby Luz was going to have in the fall. She looked up, waiting for Oscar to turn toward her.

  “She can keep my clothes washed, and do some sewing,” Willie said. “What about the wedding?” Oscar said. “We talked about a wedding.”

  “I changed my mind. I’d like to buy her. Keep her a while.”

  Aurelia’s heart began to beat in quick spurts against her chest. She put down her sewing and came out onto the porch. It wasn’t yet evening, but the sun was almost gone, just a thin arc of orange remaining. She had the power to stop Oscar. She had done it before. She had followed him to the gambling hall and stopped him from selling their wagon for a few pieces of silver.

  “A wedding with a priest,” Oscar said.

  Willie was looking at her now. It was a casual look, with no more feeling than if she had been one of the carved santos with wax tears that Oscar sold
in the plaza.

  “I don’t sell Aurelia,” Oscar said.

  Aurelia went down the steps into the yard and sat on the ground beneath the trees. Luz had come out into the yard with the two babies and she sat down on the ground beside Aurelia. Aurelia waited for her to say something that would save her. It needn’t have been much. You don’t have to do it, would have been enough. Or she could have put her arms around Aurelia and told her that she saw her goodness, that she knew her dreams. But she merely wiped one baby’s mouth with the hem of her apron and dandled the other baby on her lap.

  Willie and Oscar began to argue. Oscar, who always lost his English when he was angry, was spitting long Spanish sentences into the evening air, letting all his hatred of Texicans out on Willie, shouting at him that he owned Texas, he was here first, it was his country. It made Aurelia want to shout for joy. Oscar would save her. He would take Willie by the knot end of his red-and-blue bandanna and drag him out the gate and tell him that Aurelia wasn’t for sale.

  “Aurelia Agnes, go grind corn for the tortillas,” Luz said.

  “No,” Aurelia replied.

  Willie’s words were now getting all mixed up with Oscar’s Spanish ones. He kept saying he didn’t know how Oscar could think he meant to marry Aurelia, it wasn’t what he meant, wasn’t what he was after. “Marry her?” he exclaimed. How could he marry her?

  “Marry her is the only way you can have her,” Oscar said.

  “I didn’t plan on it.”

  “Then you can’t have her.”

  Willie was quiet now, but he didn’t fool Aurelia. He was playing with Oscar, dangling money in front of him, waiting to see whether Oscar would bend, biding his time before he stood up and walked out the gate.