2. The Hand That Feeds
The Hand That Feeds
Isabel Canas
This one begins as most stories from my great-grandmother do: with a mother in a kitchen and food on the stove.
But this one also starts with someone shrieking. With a hand pointing an accusing finger.
“Madre de Dios, what is that thing?”
That pitch pierces the delicate flesh of the wolf pup’s ears. It shatters the aromas of human home: comino, bubbling caldo, woodsmoke.
The boy tightens his arms around the pup protectively, even as his mother towers over them, her stance aggressive, her wooden spoon an outstretched weapon.
“But, Mamá, she’s hungry.”
“Get it out of my kitchen!”
Hands seize the pup and toss her into the refuse behind the house, into the dry cold of the night. Doors slam. The sound shudders through her bones.
That is the last the pup will ever see of the boy who dried her rain-soaked fur and moth-delicate ears, who brought her scraps from his pack’s table.
If she had lips, they would tremble, her eyes welling with a weakling’s grief.
But she is fangs and paws and patchy, half-grown gray fur and a snout still speckled with rice that the boy gave her.
That snout smells that the refuse around her has gifts to give.
The boy’s pack is too poor to throw out food, but she catches the scent of bone on the air. A hint of spirit once living. She hauls herself to all fours, ribs aching from where she struck hard-packed earth, and pads in the direction of the smell.
She paws ash aside and finds her quarry: bones. Ribs, to be precise, and from a pig, if the lingering tendrils of scent are to be believed.
Behind her: a flare of light. She shies away, but not quickly enough.
“?Vete!”
A rock hits her shoulder. The breath cracks out of her as she stumbles sideways.
She snatches the pig rib between her teeth, turns tail, and flees.
The pup digs a shallow den under the mesquite grove—out of sight of the house, but close enough to still taste the woodsmoke and the warmth of pack gathering. Her belly aches, its emptiness barely sated by a handful of rice. Her heart’s ache twists deeper.
She turns the rib between her paws with practiced care: thrice to the left, finishing with it pointed toward the east, where the moon rises and drenches the chaparral in sweet silver.
“You never listen to me.”
She looks up, and she is no longer surrounded by mesquite. Instead, she stands before the dying embers of la Huesera’s fire.
La Huesera: creator of monsters, mother of bones.
The pup hangs her head and dips her tail between her legs.
“I made you stronger than this, Lobita.” But la Huesera also made her alone. Packless beneath cold stars. “You know what men say of wolves: they will bite the hand that feeds them. You cannot trust someone who gives nothing himself.”
Lobita paws at her face. Itchiness grows up her snout, as if she were going to sneeze; then her claw catches skin, and she yanks.
Sinew snaps and disconnects from muscle. Gristle stretches and slowly rips. A warm dribble of blood, as always, runs over her teeth as she pulls her skin away.
It collapses before her, a soft pelt in hands that are bare and declawed and red in ember light. She runs her tongue over teeth. They are slick with copper after the kill, but flat. Smooth. Speech-ready.
“But I don’t want to be that strong,” she murmurs. Her throat catches, dry as tumbleweed, old bones splintering in the desert. “I don’t want to be alone.”
La Huesera leans forward. Her braids are swinging steel ropes.
Her skin smells of sun and age, but her eyes crackle with an ageless fire that would bite even the Devil’s heels with heat.
The monsters of the world are her pups; her love for them is both harsh and, with a cruel, swift twist of the wind, achingly tender.
She tucks a lock of black hair behind Lobita’s ear.
“You are never alone if you can call for me.” La Huesera braces a palm on one knee and plucks the pig’s rib between time-gnarled fingers. “What will I make with you?” she coos, admiring its curve.
Bitter wind stings Lobita’s bare skin. Make, make, make. A creator obsessed with creation, but not with caring for them. Not as Lobita aches to be cared for.
For that, she will need a pack. No matter what la Huesera says.
The sun rises and sets over the desert a hundred times, a thousand times more.
Cattle low. Coyotes scuttle through the night.
Lobita becomes la Loba, and la Loba hungers as prey becomes scarce and frost nips the northern slopes of the hills.
But more than an empty belly drives her toward the scents of kept animals—goats, sheep, cattle—and guard dogs.
Jubilant music eggs her on for miles; soon, it is joined by the smells of sweat and the thrum of rhythmic feet.
There is a party on this ranchito.
She once stole a dress for a time like this and hid it deep in the chaparral. Now she carries it in her jaw, fabric draped ever-so-gently over fangs. Once within sight of jumping firelight and dancing, she sheds her skin and replaces it with silk as red as heart meat.
The throngs of humans are so thick that she thinks no one will notice a strange woman enter—black hair pouring down her back, her feet bare and red from the cold.
She was wrong. One notices.
She could never claim that he is the same boy who loved her when they were pups, but he smells enough the same: kitchen, caldo, café. He smells like he has a home. But he does not smell like woman—and that might mean he has a home to share.
He takes her by the hand, dark eyes alight as the bonfire, glinting with a yearning that could be akin to greed. She feels its echo in her breast. She is greedy for touch, for someone to see her.
You know what men say of wolves: they will bite the hand that feeds them.
La Huesera’s words strike a warning note in her bones, a shudder so soft and nameless she nearly misses it.
It is easy to brush away.
“Do you dance?” the man asks. What he means: Will she step into his arms? Will she follow him into his world?
“I can learn,” she says.
And she tries. Oh, she tries. She tries harder than any woman human-born: she braids her hair tight; she forces herself to become accustomed to the weight of skirts to her ankles; she teaches clumsy fingers to grind maíz and café for her new husband.
Their house is a worker’s jacal on the broad sweep of a rich man’s rancho: it is all bright, airy patio with tipichil floors on the outside and dark rooms within.
She sits on the patio in the pale sun and smells the wind.
She remains in the outdoor kitchen long after meals, when the wood settles into slumbering embers, and does not think about the back room.
Her wedding night was calloused palms on bare skin, the rake of teeth over throats and shoulders.
But when that hunger was sated, she had another: she itched for her wolfskin.
Her breath felt thin without it. And so, flush with love and the hubris of having won man and home, she drew her skin from where she had slipped it beneath the bed.
Her husband, propped on elbows between sheets, frowned; then, as she slipped into the change, he leaped to his feet.
She had stared down the barrel of many a gun.
But never that close.
She tore herself bare again, human flesh slick and dripping with the blood of the change and sour with panicked sweat.
The back room is slim, dark, and shallow, barely more than a cupboard.
That is where her husband strode when he seized her wolfskin from the floor, still naked, gun over his forearm. He knelt before a simple wooden chest, wrenched it open, and thrust the wolfskin inside.
Later, la Loba learned that a chicken-footed witch had sold it to him in Tampico. It was spelled so that it would only open with his hand.
He never locked it.
He never had to.
When winter closes its jaws over the land, la Loba knows she should retreat inside, but she longs for the caress of its cold fangs. She slips out of bed. Leaves her boots at the door.
“I am grateful,” she tells her reflection in the moonlit creek.
But the woman’s face is strange to her—she doesn’t recognize the pinched skin at the corners of mouth and eyes.
The reflection shifts, as if it is frowning, as if it means to ask: Do you not lack fangs?
So la Loba adds: “I finally have a home. A pack.”
When she returns to the jacal, she is reunited with her husband’s palms. They leave bruises.
Spring. Her husband drives the cattle to San Antonio. A cold bed suits her. She sleeps easy. She never tosses, never turns, and never, ever thinks about that back room. Nor about her skin thirsting in the dark.
At night, she drowses in the cold bed, listening to the skin claw at the inside of the chest. She imagines gouge marks. She dreams of the give of the wood beneath claw, the splay of her toes against an immovable surface. She hears the crack of splinters.
She wakes in the back room, on her knees, splinters beneath shredded nails. She rests her cheek against the chest and feels the crack of salt drying on her cheeks.
A heartbeat thuds inside the chest.
Her own breast is silent.
White sun fills her head with buzzing. The women of the ranchito notice la Loba’s bones growing prominent.
Lovesick, they cluck knowingly over merienda. They ply her with sweet breads and promise that her husband will return soon and fill her belly with a baby.
La Loba promptly vomits behind the kitchen.
She tries a machete. She tries a butcher knife. She tries stones. The floor before the back room is spotted with dried blood.
She paces. Each step hitches, hobbled by the ever-desperate need for another two legs. Her breath pulls ragged. Her brow burns with fever.
With her tail between her legs, she stumbles to the kitchen refuse.
A bone—a pig’s rib. How fitting, she thinks as she collapses before the small table.
She turns the bone thrice to the left, and when it points east, the jacal around her ripples, but it does not disappear. There is no sign of la Huesera’s fire.
“No.” It’s a dry, broken bark, too exhausted for tears, too parched for anger.
She turns the bone again. Again. Again.
“I raised you stronger than this.”
La Loba whirls, gasping, eyes wide. She sees nothing unusual about the kitchen… but it is la Huesera’s voice that snaps in the embers of the dying fire.
“I’m dying,” la Loba croaks. “Help me.”
“Help you, chamaca?” La Huesera’s voice is drier than the kindling. “You, sinvergüenza, who took my loving advice and tossed it to the wind? I told you this would happen, and yet here you are. Why shouldn’t I sit back, wait until you waste away, and then make something useful out of your bones?”
“You,” la Loba says, and it is so dry, a dry rasp that it is barely speech, “are my mother.” Her breath barely keeps the blackness from the corners of her vision now. “I can call for you still. So I am not alone.”
Warmth ripples off the fire. A murmur; perhaps it is a harrumph, perhaps it is even affectionate.
“Tell me what happened.”
La Loba does.
La Huesera considers these pieces: the gun, the spelled chest, the machetes and stones and blood on the floor.
“Well,” she says at last. “It sounds like only his hand can open the chest.”
The kitchen fire is low when la Loba’s husband returns at last. Boot heels on the patio, a click of spurs. The long creak of the door opening.
The dusk has long since melted into velvet black.
The vaqueros returned triumphant to the ranchito after their long drive north.
The husband’s smell sweeps into the jacal’s central room: sweat, leather, horse, aguardiente.
Roasted red peppers and the burnt spots on tortillas and marinated puerco.
La Loba did not join the other wives preparing the meal to welcome the vaqueros home.
She waited here.
She masks her scent in the cross breeze of the open kitchen. She masks her silhouette in shadow. Darkness has been a ghost haunting her footsteps, hand in hand with hunger and thirst; now she draws it over her shoulders like a cloak and creeps forward.
Her clawless hand curls around the handle of a knife. She runs tongue over teeth: they are flat and slick, but not for long.
A wolf like her doesn’t bite the hand that feeds. She was always too famished for tenderness. So starved that she kissed the offering palm, wrapped though it was in thorns.
Weak, la Huesera would say, and perhaps she would be right. Even la Loba is not so sure.
But she is sure of this: even without wolfskin, her leap will be a silent thing. Even without her good nose, she knows where fragrant blood runs hot and close beneath the skin.
This time, when she limps to the back room, her breath pulls jagged with anticipation. Instead of a machete, or a stone, or a knife, her fingers curl around her husband’s wrist.
She kneels before the spelled chest. Gently—tenderly, even—she places his palm against the latch and splays his fingers wide, not caring how the severed wrist weeps sluggish blood on her skirt.
A long moment passes. Thundering heartbeat. The drip of blood on the floor.
Then the latch clicks.
La Huesera hums to herself as she tallies her latest offering. The dry bones of a man’s hand click against one another in her palm. She pokes them with the tip of her carving knife, squinting in the red light of embers.
“Monstrous in life, monstrous in death,” she murmurs. “What shall I make out of you? A key to the underworld? Dice carved with faces that foretell death? Or perhaps a simple pipe?”
She cackles. She speaks to no one. There are bones and woman and knifeshine, and a long, distant echo of wolfsong on the wind.