The Seamstress (21 page)

6

The mandacaru flower had predicted correctly. That night, rain filled the makeshift moats around their toldas. It splattered onto their blankets. The oilcloth tarps above them bulged with water. The ropes that tied the cloth to the scrub trees grew taut. Chico Coffin was the sentry. He hunched near the covered fire pit and watched the simmering buchada pot. His head slowly slumped to his chest.

The other men were quiet, bunched beneath their toldas. They’d dined on goat’s meat and there would be buchada for breakfast. Luzia hoped that their full bellies and the promise of more food had lulled them to sleep. Some might be awake, she thought, and restless. But the rain would protect her; the rain would muffle her movements. It fell loudly, slapping their tarps and hitting the ground in thousands of soft thuds. There was also the racket of frogs, croaking and hooting in the scrub. A celebration, Luzia thought. And in the distance, beneath the rain and the animals, she heard the low rumble of the gulley.

Luzia sat up. Quickly, she pulled her bornal over her head and straightened it across her chest. In one swift motion, she rose from her tolda and stepped into the rain.

In her first few days away from Taquaritinga, she’d prayed for large and weighty things—for rescue, for a miracle. Later, she prayed for water in her canteen instead of cactus juice. She prayed for a hat, a good needle, more embroidery thread. And, mechanically, she prayed for escape. It seemed unnatural not to. She should want to flee, to slip away as quickly and stealthily as a scrub fox. But what would she do if she escaped? Where could she go? People in Taquaritinga would assume the worst. They would say she was worse than ruined—she would be tainted. No one wanted a tainted woman sewing their clothes or measuring their dead. A tainted woman had only one vocation. But that night, after watching the mandacaru flower bloom, Luzia realized that the longer she stayed, the more dependent she became upon the Hawk’s belief in her. With each passing day, Luzia felt a strange gratitude growing toward him. The Hawk’s faith in her purpose kept Luzia safe, even respected. But, if she did not prove useful, how long would his faith last? And if she unwittingly brought bad luck, would there be any faith at all?

She resisted the urge to run. The rain blurred her vision and soaked her clothes, making her movements awkward and uncertain. She had to go slowly, she told herself, recalling Half-Moon’s milky eye. The scrub was dense and dark. She wove her way through it, using her locked elbow to push away branches. Rain clouds dulled the moon’s light. Still, she knew where to walk, following the sound of water until she reached the gully. There was a village beyond it. The cangaceiros had spoken of getting supplies there. Luzia believed that if she crossed the gulley, she could find it. She could hide there. She’d learned enough about survival in the scrub to withstand a few days alone. But if there was no village, she could die of exposure. Or she could drown in that gulley; she did not know how to swim. Luzia shivered and shook her head. It was not a river, she reasoned. It could not be deep. She closed her eyes and pictured it in the summer: nothing but a dry ditch. Soon it would be summer again. The nights would be silent and dry. There would be no more noises to hide her escape. No rain to cover her tracks. No gulley to block the cangaceiros from coming after her.

Luzia waded inside. Water crept into her sandals. It pushed against her legs. Luzia pushed back, taking long, hard strides. The current made the water feel thick, as if she was wading through syrup. She ballooned out farther than she’d intended. Halfway across, the water reached her chest. Something scraped her foot—a tree branch, perhaps, pulled downstream. It caught her sandal. Luzia tried to shake herself free. The weight of the current buckled her knees. Water rushed into her ears, her nose. It had a metallic taste, like clay. Luzia choked it out. She tugged her foot again, harder this time. The branch tore away from her sandal but the current still carried her. Luzia moved her feet to steady herself but she could not find the bottom. Was it deeper than she remembered? Or had the current tricked her, flipping her upside down? Luzia’s chest burned. She craned her neck, kicked and tossed her body. Her bent arm flapped like a useless wing. When she broke through the gully’s surface, she took a breath and swallowed water. Above her was rain. Everywhere, there was water. She could not escape it.

When she had fallen from the mango tree, Luzia had experienced a silence so deep and enveloping it seemed a liquid thing, filling her from the inside out, tamping her ears, her nose, her eyes, her every pore shut. In the gulley, she felt that silence again. She felt the current tugging her under, felt the uselessness of movement. When she was still, the water offered no resistance. It covered her, cloaked her, pulled her inside itself.

Something wrapped around her, pressing beneath her armpits, then tightening across her chest. It lifted her. Rain pelted her face. The roar of water made her dizzy. Luzia took a long, desperate swallow of air.

“Pull!” a voice cried beside her, so loud it hurt her ear. “Pull!”

Luzia saw the outline of Inteligente’s thick frame on the bank. His arm was hooked to Baiano’s, who stood knee deep in the water. Baiano’s other arm was hooked to a third cangaceiro, who was hooked to a fourth, then a fifth, and then the sixth, who held her.

Luzia twisted her body. The arm about her chest tightened, like a clamp around her lungs. His face was centimeters from hers. The good side clenched with effort, the scarred side impassive.

The current tugged them down. The men pulled them toward shore. Luzia’s eyes stung. Her limbs felt weak. Inteligente, the anchor that held them all, might feel his strength buckle under the pull of the water. If so, Luzia would be returned to the silence, with the Hawk at her side. Or the current might give them up, releasing them to the men who would drag them back onto that dark shore. Luzia closed her eyes and waited to see which would win.

7

After the rains, the caatinga bloomed. Orange flowers, their petals as thin and dry as paper, emerged from the quipá’s prickly rounds. The malva bushes grew as tall as men. Bromeliads released red blooms. Bees swarmed the scrub. When Luzia closed her eyes, their buzzing reminded her of rushing water.

After they’d pulled her from the gully, the men regarded her with a quiet respect. They called her Miss Luzia instead of avoiding her name altogether. Ponta Fina gave her honey for her throat, building fires beneath beehives and, when the smoke drove the bees away, tugging the round, potlike combs from the hive walls. Little Ear stayed quiet and wary, but never retaliated for his burn. Luzia wondered if the men’s newfound respect came from her fight with Little Ear, or because she had walked into the gully alone at night, like some kind of witch. Most likely, it came from the fact that the Hawk had deemed her worthy enough to save. He would not speak to her. After the gully, he kept his distance, no longer treating her feet or giving her extra food. She was off the xique-xique juice and her voice had returned, gravelly and hoarse.

Slowly, the scrub changed. The rains ended, but thunder still rolled across the sky in loud, angry rumbles. They walked past tenant farms with blossoming cotton fields and later, when the blossoms fell, the buds broke open with white fibers. The caatinga looked like it was covered in a vast, white sheet.

The tenant farmhouses were clay-and-stick huts inhabited by farmers or vaqueiros. Sometimes the homes were empty, but there were signs of life: lit embers in the cookstove, a skinny dog tied to a tree. The residents had seen the cangaceiros coming and hid in the scrub. If their food supplies were low, the Hawk instructed his men to take what they needed and leave. The cangaceiros tugged hocks of smoked meat off hooks over the cook fire. They grabbed blocks of rapadura and fistfuls of manioc flour and fava beans. Sometimes the absent tenants had small plantings of corn and melons beside their houses. The men ripped the ears and fruits from their stalks. They left no payment. Luzia felt terrible taking the food, but like the cangaceiros, she ate it all the same.

Some tenants stayed in their homes. The women wore stained head scarves and crossed their arms over their bulging bellies. They staggered about, rounding up their many children, who ran naked around their yards. The children had swollen stomachs and sticklike arms. A clear, sticky substance ran from their noses and onto their upper lips, which they wiped clean with their tongues. The fathers were the last to appear. They came from the fields, or from inside the huts. Some were dark skinned and tight lipped. Others had a yellow pallor, their eyes bloodshot from drink. All were hunched from years of planting and reaping.

Luzia was forced to hide nearby, in the scrub along with Ponta Fina, so she would not be seen. Still, she liked watching the women. It seemed like years since she’d heard a woman’s voice. Once, a woman did see her, but she’d simply stared at Luzia’s legs, more startled to see a woman wearing trousers than anything else.

The cangaceiros were kinder to those who stayed. They did not invade their homes or pilfer their crops. Instead, they asked if they had food to sell. They always did. The Hawk paid well, offering thirty mil-réis for a block of cheese that would have cost no more than three. He paid for their loyalty, their discretion. Many of the tenant farmers allowed the cangaceiros to stay the night on their land. They instructed them as to where the nearest town was located, or informed the Hawk if the Military Police or a colonel’s capangas had passed through in recent days. Some farmers refused payment; they asked instead for the Hawk’s blessing and his protection.

In all of their wanderings, Luzia had not seen a church. One of the tenant families admitted to traveling three days in order to attend Christmas services. Luzia did not like how they knelt, quiet and reverent, before the Hawk. They worshipped him, she thought, because they didn’t know better.

They closed their eyes. The Hawk placed his hand on each of their heads. Luzia shuddered. He’d touched her dozens of times—massaging her feet, bolstering her up, forcing her to eat—but in the way one would touch a sick animal, deftly and efficiently, in case it bit. When he blessed these farmers, he did it lovingly. He placed his calloused fingertips on their foreheads, their chins, and on each of their hollow cheeks. Luzia touched her own cheek, then quickly took her hand away.

One morning they neared the outskirts of a farm whose cotton had already been cleared. The cangaceiros hung back, hiding in the scrub. The farm’s wooden gate hung crookedly, leaning out toward the road as if straining against its hinges. A thick rope tied the gate closed. Beyond it was a brick farmhouse with rounded, clay roof tiles.

The Hawk and his men cocked their rifles, holding them level with their thighs. The jolt from their Winchesters could dislocate a shoulder, Ponta had explained to her, so they made sure to shoot from the hip. They did this before entering any house—sitting for hours in the scrub and surveying the area, counting the inhabitants, analyzing the tracks going to and from the property before making contact. “It’s better to be patient, and live,” the Hawk always reminded his men, “than to be avexado and die.” When their observations were complete, Half-Moon placed two fingers in his mouth and let out a high-pitched whistle.

An old man appeared in the doorway and whistled back. He had gray hair and took small, dragging steps, as if his bones ached. Luzia tried to focus on his face but it was blurred. She rubbed her eyes; Aunt Sofia had warned her about embroidering in the dark. When he untied the gate, Luzia was surprised to see that the man was younger than she had imagined—a father instead of a grandfather. Two deep wrinkles ran from his nostrils down the sides of his mouth, like a wooden doll she’d had as a child, whose jaws opened and shut when she pulled a lever attached to its back.

When he saw the Hawk, the man smiled and walked toward him, his steps faster than they had been before. The two men grabbed each other’s shoulders.

“Your gate’s crooked,” the Hawk said.

“Had a lot of rain, praise God,” the man said. There was a raised mound on his forehead, its center scabbed with blood. He messed his hair forward, cringing when his hand met the wound.

“You should get your boys to fix it,” the Hawk replied.

“They’re gone. Left six months back. Found work as vaqueiros, in Exu.”

“Tomás, too?”

“No. He’s out.” The man pointed his chin toward the horizon, to a line of tall, tightly interlaced fences. “Herding the goats.”

“And Lia?” the Hawk asked. “I remember when she used to run and open this gate for us. Now she makes her father do it?”

“She’s grown shy. Not a girl anymore,” the man replied, staring at the rope in his hands. He looked questioningly at Luzia. “Got some new faces?”

The Hawk nodded. The man stepped toward Luzia.

“You’re a big one,” he said, stretching out his hand. “Francisco Louriano. They call me Seu Chico.”

“We’ve come to return your accordion,” the Hawk interrupted. He pointed to the older wooden instrument tied to Half-Moon’s back. “We don’t get an invitation inside?”

“It’s not as you remember it,” Seu Chico sighed, then led them to the house.

The brick facade was cracked and dented, worn away in some places by the rains. There were several holes along the front wall, each small and perfectly round, the width of Luzia’s thumb. Near the back were a series of goat fences, their sticks tall and tightly interlaced. The pens were empty. Luzia heard the distant clang of chocalhos. She looked again at the house. A young girl stared out from one of the windows. Her face was thin and tan. Dark crescents shaded the skin beneath her eyes. They focused on Luzia with a startled intensity, like an animal prepared either to attack or to run, depending on the threat. Without warning, she ducked inside and disappeared.

Before entering, the Hawk kicked his alpercatas clean. The other men did the same. Baiano, Sweet Talker, Ponta Fina, and Safety Pin did not enter. They stood guard along the sides of the house instead. Luzia was the last to duck through the door.