K.Esquivel-LWFC

opinion about the revolutionaries. What she
never learned was that
this captain was the same Juan Alejandrez
who had carried off her
daughter Gertrudis some months before.
They were even on that score, for the captain
remained ignorant of the
large number of chickens that Mama Elena
had hidden behind the house,
buried in ashes. They had managed to kill
twenty before the troops
arrived. The chickens are filled with ground
wheat or oats and then
placed, feathers and all, into a glazed
earthenware pot. The pot is
covered tightly using a nauow strip of cloth;
that way the meat can be
kept for more than a week.
It had been a common practice on the ranch
since ancient times, when
they had to preserve animals after a hunting
party.
When she came out of hiding, Tita
immediately missed the constant
cooing of the doves, which had been part of
her everyday life ever
since she was born.
This sudden silence made her feel her
loneliness all the more.
It was then that she really felt the loss of
Pedro, Rosaura, and
Roberto.
She hurried up the rungs of the enormous
ladder that went to the
dovecote, but all she found there was the
usual carpet of feathers and
droppings.
The wind stole through the open door and
lifted some feathers that fell
on a carpet of silence. Then she heard a tiny
sound: a little newborn
pigeon had been spared from the massacre.
Tita picked it up and got
ready to go back down, but first she stopped
for a moment to look at
the cloud of dust the soldiers' horses left in
their wake.
She wondered why they hadn't done
anything to hurt her mother.
While she was in her hiding place, she had
prayed that nothing bad
would happen to Mama Elena, but
unconsciously she had hoped that when
she got out she would find her mother dead.
Ashamed of these thoughts, she placed the
pigeon between her breasts to
free her hands for the dangerous ladder, and
climbed down from the
dovecote. From then on, her main interest
lay in feeding that pathetic
baby pigeon. Only then did life seem to
make a little sense.
It didn't compare with the satisfaction derived
from nursing a human
being, but in some way it was similar.
The milk in her breasts had dried up
overnight from the pain of her
separation from her nephew. As she looked
for worms, she kept
wondering who was feeding Roberto and
how he was eating. Those
thoughts tortured her night and day. She
hadn't been able to sleep,
for a whole month. The only thing she
accomplished during this period
was to quintuple the size of her enormous
bedspread. Chencha came to
shake her out of her rueful thoughts; she
gave her a few pushes to get
her into the kitchen. She sat her down in
front of the stone metate