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CHAPTER 1
AURELIA
OSCAR RUíZ, BORN in Mexico, came to Texas when he was fourteen. He had once raised cattle and sheep on a ranch in a fertile valley along the Rio Grande, before Texicans began eating up the land and pushing the Mexicans out. Now he, his wife Luz, their six children, two goats and a donkey lived in Laredito, a squalid, dusty Mexican village on the outskirts of San Antonio. Oscar sold wild birds in the main plaza in San Antonio. Golden canaries and red-breasted cardinals that he caught along the river. When birds were scarce, he sold bits of Mexican lace, dolls with heads fashioned of dried apples, carved saints with wax tears on their cheeks. He moved from spot to spot between the produce wagons and stands of fly-specked beef and pens of wild turkeys, a sack of merchandise slung over his back, twittering birds in homemade wicker cages hanging from his arms.
Oscar's wife was from El Paso, an orphan of mixed Mexican and Anglo blood, abandoned by her father's family when her mother died. Her real name was Cynthia, but Oscar called her Luz — "light" in Spanish — because of her light skin. Luz sold medicine she made from roots and herbs and leaves. She would sit near the low whitewashed wall that surrounded the San Fernando church in the main plaza, not far from the shade of the chinaberry trees, her little pots of colored unguents and bitter syrups arranged on a strip of calico beside her.
Every Mexican family in the barrio had a few jars of Luz's potions, foul-smelling concoctions she boiled up and stored in ollas in her yard. Powdered lobelia seed in apple vinegar made a fine salve for rashes. For constipation she'd mix up a brew of mandrake, buckthorn bark and rhubarb root. Lungwort was good for coughs. And the tonics she made of magnolia bark could reduce fever.
Aurelia at fifteen was the oldest of Oscar and Luz's children. Oscar didn't tell Aurelia that she was his favorite, but he let her bathe his feet and bring him his tobacco, and when he lay in his hammock in the yard he didn't mind if she sang to him or told him stories she made up out of her own head.
She's not like my other children, Oscar told Father Rubio. Her ears hear better and her eyes see farther.
Luz always said that all her children were the same to her, and she treated them that way. When she spoke to her children, she used a firm voice and called each one of them by both their common name and their saint's name. In the mornings the children stood in a line near the porch of the house and Luz gave each of them a spoonful of laxative made of powdered cassia. Then she checked their hair for lice. In the evening after supper she inspected each child's stools for worms. Aurelia Agnes, she would say, take your brothers and sisters to the river and dig for goldenseal. Aurelia Agnes, she would say, help me carry the pots to the marketplace. Aurelia Agnes, she would say, grind the corn for the tortillas. There was no sign that she liked Aurelia better than her other children.
CHOLERA DESCENDED ON the Rio Grande Valley toward the end of summer, when the air was still sticky with heat and the green sweep of hills had not yet turned gold. It hovered in the Texas air like a hungry bird, swooping down and squeezing life away wherever it could. In San Antonio, and even as far away as El Paso, someone milking a cow or tending a baby or loading a wagon would suddenly sicken. The illness killed so swiftly that people rose healthy at dawn and died before supper.
The newspapers in San Antonio printed recipes for keeping cholera away: Fumigate your house with gunpowder smoke. Hang a copper amulet around your neck. Take a daily dose of laudanum. Filter drinking water through burnt bread. Purify your blood with one tablespoon of pepper stirred in a glass of equal parts opium and brandy. The sick died, poisoned and drunk, but they still died.
"I'm not going to sit still and do nothing but wait for the cholera to take me," Oscar told his wife. "We'll go to Chihuahua."
"But no one has died of cholera in Laredito," Luz said. "It's a disease of those gringo Texicans, not Mexicans."
"How can death know the difference?" Aurelia asked. She had never been away from Laredito, except on market day when she accompanied Luz and Oscar to the plaza in San Antonio.
"Death can tell," Oscar answered.
The next morning he loaded the wagon with pots and pans and bedding and foodstuffs.
"I hope the sun in Chihuahua is good for growing herbs," Luz said, and filled a sack with green slips from her garden and placed them next to the bolt of blue cloth she had decided to bring as a gift for her sister-in-law in Chihuahua.
Luz and the younger children sat on sacks of corn Oscar had piled in the middle of the wagon, while Aurelia stood against the wooden rails and looked back at the village. Wildflowers had buried the falling-down fences in drifts of speckled lavender, and clumps of spiny cactus grew out of sod roofs that had been dry over the winter but were now thick with the bitter green blades of spring grass.
The first night they camped in a field. While Luz warmed beans and rice in an iron pot over the fire, Aurelia walked down to the river to get fresh water. It was not yet dark, but she could see other wagons pulling onto the field from the road.
She dipped the jug into the cold black water and thought of how little it pained her to leave Laredito. She had never felt that she belonged there. She had always felt as if she had come from somewhere else, that she was merely passing through, waiting for the moment that would reveal the truth of who she was and where she belonged. Strange thoughts, Luz called them. If you think too many strange thoughts, how will you help take care of your brothers and sisters?
By the time she got back to the wagon, the field was dotted with black plumes of smoke from hundreds of campfires and the air had turned salty with ash.
"The gringo Texicans are running away from the cholera, too," Aurelia told her mother.
"They don't believe the remedies in the newspapers," Luz said.
"The road will be clear tomorrow," Oscar remarked. "Gringos won't travel as far as Mexico even to save their lives."
They set out again the next morning, and as Oscar had predicted, the road was clear, the Texicans still camped in the field behind them.
"The gringos would rather die of cholera than live in Mexico with Mexicans," Oscar said.
The wagon creaked along the road toward Chihuahua, its wooden wheels flinging choking sprays of sand that ground into a fine dust between Oscar's teeth. He had bought two plow horses to pull the long narrow wagon, and they nipped at each other's necks and tried to pull the wagon in two different directions. By the end of the day, with the children now crying at every bump in the road and Luz's pale cheeks flushed in the heat, Aurelia saw an old Mexican woman sprawled out on the side of the road, her legs turned in a strange way beneath her. "Stop the wagon, Papá," Aurelia said.
Oscar wanted to go on, but Aurelia insisted, and so he stopped the wagon and Aurelia climbed down and knelt in the dirt beside the old woman.
"My legs won't work," she said.
"Do they hurt?" Aurelia asked her.
"Yes. Very much."
Aurelia put her hands on the woman's right leg and immediately felt a burst of heat that spread from her fingers up into her arms and didn't stop until it reached the top of her head. She held her hand on the leg until the heat grew too great to bear, and then she pulled her hand away and put it on the woman's left leg, and the same thing happened, except that now Aurelia looked into the woman's eyes and thought she heard the woman's heart beating.
"Aurelia," Oscar called, but Aurelia didn't answer.
"Where are you going?" the woman asked her. She was sitting up now, sipping water from a canteen she took from the package on the ground beside her.
"To Chihuahua to escape the cholera. Can you walk now?" "It's possible."
"You can come to Chihuahua with us. It doesn't matter if you can walk or not, we have room in the wagon."
"Bless you and thank you, but I have errands to do." Then she rose up, gathered her rebozo around her and walked away with surefooted glides and delicate steps that barely left an imprint on the ground. Aurelia looked back at the wagon, at the faces of her brothers and sisters, and strange thoughts began to form in her head. Oscar sometimes said his headaches went away when she spoke to him, and didn't Luz once tell her that her American grandmother could predict the future?
Oscar shouted for her to get back in the wagon, that they had a long way to go, but Aurelia didn't move. Her brothers and sisters had grown thin and sickly in Laredito. They went to bed hungry some nights. There would be no better life in Chihuahua. Life is where you are, she thought, and the thought made her dizzy.
She stood up and walked toward the wagon. "We have to go back to Laredito," she said to Oscar.
"Back?"
"Are you sick?" Luz said.
"No."
"Did you know that woman?" Oscar asked her.
"No. But we have to turn back."
"We can't turn back," Luz said.
"What was wrong with her?" Oscar asked.
"Her legs wouldn't work."
"But she walked away."
"Yes."
"She was just resting," Luz said.
"No. I felt the bones of her legs under my fingers. They were soft and twisted. No one could walk on legs like those. And when I touched her something happened."
"You're not a saint," Luz said. Her lips, usually loose against her teeth, were now puckered, as if she had tasted something sour. "You're blaspheming against God."
"Wait, wait," Oscar said, looking perplexed.
"Maybe people will pay me money to cure them of cholera and then the children won't go to bed hungry," Aurelia said.
And then Oscar smiled. His smile was as broad as his face, his eyes bright and his chin quivering with delight.
"Aurelia is going to make us rich," he told his wife, and he turned the wagon around and headed back to Laredito.
OSCAR STOOD OUT in the main plaza in San Antonio every day and shouted out to every gringo who passed that his daughter, Aurelia Agnes Luisa Ruíz de Sanchez y Lopez, could cure cholera. She has eyes, he told anyone who stopped to listen, that can burn your skin down to where the cholera is hiding and tear it out.
Soon there was a stream of sick gringos clogging the road to Laredito to see if what Oscar said was really true. They camped in front of the small adobe house until it was their turn to pay Oscar two silver coins and come into the parlor where Aurelia sat waiting to cure them. They lay half dead in open wagons or stretched out in the dirt of the road while they waited, too weak to fight for a place in the yard close to the steps that led inside. Some of them died near the gate while they waited, some on their horses, lying crossways across their saddles, legs dangling, the sun burning red crescents into the pale skin of their necks. Some made it as far as the rawhide door of the house, even managed to pay their money before they collapsed and died.
"It's your eyes that heal," Oscar told Aurelia, "so make sure you look deep into theirs." He had her wear black so that she would look older than her fifteen years. And he put a Bible in her hands, and told her not to smile so much, but to keep her little white teeth out of sight and to stare purposefully into the sick person's eyes with her own bright ones.
At first nothing happened. Not one person who stumbled sick and feverish into the Ruíz parlor and let Aurelia stare into their eyes danced, clear-eyed and healthy, out of there. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how much she wanted to cool their hot foreheads, stop their running bowels, remove the glaze from their eyes and the foam from their lips, she couldn't. She tried staring at them with her left eye, with her right, then with both.
"She can't cure anyone," Luz said.
"Maybe you're right," Oscar replied.
"I can," Aurelia said. "I know I can. I just have to try harder."
She didn't know that she could, but coins were accumulating in the olla near the door, and Aurelia felt something when she touched a sick person's hand. It was as if their need to be cured were traveling up her fingers right to her heart.
And then one day, for no reason she could determine, a young girl told her she felt better after Aurelia had stared at her for a while.
After that people began to say peculiar things when she looked in their eyes. I'm cured, they'd say. Bless Jesus, the cholera has left me, they'd say. Those who were agitated and feverish when they came into the parlor grew calm when she held their hands in hers, and those who couldn't stop their moaning would grow as quiet as the desert when she gazed into their eyes.
Oscar would bring the sick into the parlor as though he were ushering them into a church.
"She looks so deep inside of people, she touches their soul," Oscar told his wife.
"Aurelia wants to cure them," Luz said, "and she tries so hard that they believe she can. But she's not a saint, Oscar."
"I see her cure people with my own eyes," Oscar replied. "Who but a saint could do that?"
He ignored the fact that most of the sick that Aurelia cured began to stumble and twitch and groan again when they were down the steps and out on the road. Or that even those who looked like they truly were cured, who got up out of the horsehair chair and walked out into the yard and yelled to the others that it was the truth, the greaser really could do it, usually broke down within a mile of Laredito. Just keeled over and died.
Oscar filled four leather saddlebags with coins that summer. He bought a new black hat and thick leather boots for himself, a new dress for his wife and a silk shawl for Aurelia. The rest he gambled away on the faro tables. He had always gambled, keeping his family on the edge of starvation by stealing money from the metal box Luz kept it in. But now he bet stacks of silver, huge piles of silver, and he felt like a king, as if there would always be money to throw away, as if the cholera would go on and on and Aurelia's powers would bring him riches beyond anything he could imagine.
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Texicans"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Nina Vida.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
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