Don Elizar Dueñas got mad when a Hiuchol indian from the Rancheria Nayarit suddenly appeared. He stood several feet from the front door, silently waiting in the sun-rinsed morning mist for Alma Rosa Molinas.
Some time ago, 16-year-old Alma Rosa had come down looking for work in the foothill town of Los Reyes. Her mother and her infant daughter were both sick. Tiquicio Esqueda was there now to collect Alma Rosa’s thin wages – ten pesos a week – for medicine for their Rancheria Nayarit family. Alma Rosa had learned early on not to casually pass around her trust, even to relatives. Many people in the Nayarit mountains lived on thin means. And avoiding tomando atajos (cutting corners) they sought good health and fortune, maintaining well-cared-for crops and slim herds of livestock. Tiquicio encouraged Alma Rosa’s trust simply by never lying, never cheating.
But Don Elizar, a Mestizo, jefe of the local school, and – most important – the one who drew a sacred deer on a blackboard, was offended by Tiquicio’s presence.
“Your mother sends you these.” Tiquicio held out a woolen bolsa filled with reddish tunas – wild prickly pears – and small squashes.
“Do they beat you, your mother wants to know,” Tiquicio asked.
“No,” Alma Rosa said, as Eliazar came toward them. “Not as much as they should. They yell a lot, instead. The talk of these españoles hits the ears like knives.”
“Do you have money for her, your mother asks. There has been no rain since you left.”
“How not? They are paying me more than my Mamá thought they would.” Alma Rosa’s words were swift Hiuchol as she handed him a torn piece of gunny sack bound in with knotted cord. “These centavitos are for my mother and for medicine, Tiqui. Not for liquor or a new knife.” She grinned. “Except for the bus, if needed.”
“Living among these Mestizos is making you too free-spoken,” Tiqui teased her.
“Who are you?” demanded Don Eliazar stepping beside Alma Rosa. Tiqui blinked at the man’s rudeness,
“He’s my uncle,” Alma lied to her patron, looking at the ground. “He brings a message from my mother, and these presents for your house.”
The school director frowned self-consciously at the food Tiquico had brought. “Well, when you finish, the Señora wants to talk to you.”
Alma saw that her employer was embarrassed by his own rudeness. As the school master turned away, she giggled, covering her mouth, staring at Tiquicio with merriment.
Tiquicio ignored the director. “Your mother asks if she should send for money again next month?
“How not? Why am I down here doing crazy things for these strange people?”
“Your husband has not come back,” Tiquicio said. “And your daughter’s cough is better. But she cries because you’re gone.”
“I know.”
Tiquicio stared at her. Alma Rosa understood that expression as a special gaze for he suspected what no one else knew: That she not only had mixed blood – half Huichol, half who-knew-what – but because she also had spent time in a Franciscan school, she could know things other people couldn’t, or at least didn’t. Sometimes, he believed Kuirru, the sparrow-hawk, helped her.
“You would have told me if things were different,” she said. Don Eliazar yelled at her from the brick house.
“Ay, the téiwarisi (the outsider) needs help.” Alma Rosa grinned.
Don Eliazar’s son, Jorge, made sassy by Alma’s brisk attentions, had soon begun defending her against the complaints of the jefe’s cousin, Zanaida Contreras, a woman Jorge and Alma Rosa disliked. Afraid his crowing ways – ”This isn’t a sin,” he bragged. “Because you’re not a Catholic, you’re an Indian” – would arouse the Señora’s suspicions, Alma even climbed the final rungs of the teetering house ladder to clean the highest lamps. Something that demon Zanaida couldn’t do even after a lot of praying. Soon, Alma Rosa was surprised that she was sending her mother more money than any of them had hoped for. Alma told Jorge to stop buying her childish presents, to give her pesos for her family.
After that, her most fretful job was keeping Jorge from grabbing at her when others could see. Once, the cook saw Alma Rosa whip a wide-bladed knife from her waist and scare the boy off. That stifled any snickering about them for a long time.
Alma had begun wearing shoes – men’s huaraches – using lipstick and donning Jorge’s gift of a gold-colored chain with a metal heart showing a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. When Don Eliazar told Alma she should take lessons in writing Spanish, she consented. A month later, when she asked for a raise to 16 pesos and Don Eliazar granted it without argument, she felt something inside her slip. That wasn’t new. She’d had that feeling before. But this time its fierceness made her body jerk. Alma Rosa hurried out past the horse corral and sat in the weeds to speak Huichol to her mother and daughter in the Sierra.
“Mamá, m’ija, I am scared of the strange ways these españoles are acting. They are trying to trap me like possum in this place. They are giving me pesos whenever I ask. I have money to buy those new Mestizo medicines I just sent you, and a new axe, even enameled tazas. I believe they plan to keep me here forever.”
Alma Rosa began to cry. It wasn’t the confusion of screeching voices and español spitefulness that unsettled her. She was afraid of what might happen if she lost track of her Huichol nature.
To save herself, she watched for the protection of vultures, sold the huaraches and the lip paint to the cook, and the locket at a street market, put offerings before the jefe’s drawing of Elder Brother Deer Tail. At Eliazar’s school, she borrowed a blue crayon. With it, she colored the drawing of Tamats Kauyumari, making him into the great blue deer, then sang songs to him.
“It’s not time to come home yet, says your mother,” Tiquicio told Alma the next time he came for money. “In six months, she says, she will have enough for extra planting.” He grinned. “These españoles must be paying you many pesos, no?”
“When you work hard, sometimes the centavos fall.” Alma Rosa bared her teeth and dreamed she would be able to save the right amount to fit her mother’s plan. If the blue deer kept helping her.