The Seamstress (35 page)

The men were not allowed to drink, although the colonel had offered them sugarcane liquor. Still, the unending supply of meat and river water made the cangaceiros giddy. Suddenly, the Hawk left the porch. Luzia believed he would chastise the men for dancing. Instead, he joined them. He led the first row, stomping and shuffling in time with the others. His movements were sharper, more controlled. There was grace in his exactitude, a strange fluidity in his stiff-jointed rhythms.

“My rifle’s the best lawyer.

My bullets are police.

My punhal’s the fairest judge,

And death is my release.”

 

Luzia watched him. She hoped that when he stopped dancing, he would stand near her. She wanted to thank him. Earlier, when she and Ponta Fina had gone to retrieve her sewing machine from the colonel’s back porch, the Hawk had left her a gift. They’d made camp far from Colonel Clóvis’s house, leaving the sewing machine on the porch so it wouldn’t bake in the sun. When Luzia and Ponta went to retrieve it, there was a small bundle on the Singer’s base. It was tied with twine. When Luzia pulled apart the brown butcher paper, silk poured into her hands. It was slippery, like oil. Luzia gasped and scooped it up before it hit the ground. The silk was the color of finely grated corn meal. There was two meters of it. In Taquaritinga she would have thought such a gift silly and useless. But it had been a long time since she’d felt something so soft. For months she’d only felt coarse leather, scratchy woolen blankets, the thorns and burrs of the scrub, and her own calloused skin. Ponta Fina asked to touch the silk. “It must be from the captain,” he’d said. For her birthday, Luzia assumed. Her saint’s day. She’d wanted to thank the Hawk all evening but could not find the words.

Sabiá’s song ended. The men stopped dancing.

“It’s nearly midnight,” the Hawk announced. “Time to say the prayer.”

The farmhands and cangaceiros congregated around a large, flat rock a few meters from the fire. Canjica held a tin of salt and a wooden spoon. He handed the items to Luzia, then guided her toward the rock. The Hawk knelt before her. The others followed. He removed a crumpled paper from his jacket pocket. He looked at Luzia, then bent his head.

“My Santa Luzia,” he said slowly, pronouncing each syllable. “Give me sight. You, who did not lose your faith even after they drained your blood. You, who did not lose your vision even after they cut out your eyes. Defend me against blindness. Conserve the light of my eyes. Give me the strength to keep them always open, so that I may see the good from the wicked, the true from the false. You, who were given four eyes instead of two, look into the heavens and tell us what the months will bring.”

Canjica scooped out a spoonful of salt from the tin in Luzia’s hands. He placed it on the rock.

“January!” the farmhands and cangaceiros yelled.

Canjica placed another spoonful of salt beside the first.

“February!”

Another spoonful.

“March!”

Another scoop was April, another May, and finally June.

It was a prophecy. Luzia had heard of vaqueiros and farmers performing this trick. The mounds would be left out until morning. For each mound that the night’s dew dissolved, there would be a month with rain. If the mounds were intact, there would be drought. Something had to be given to the saint in return for her willingness to predict the future. Luzia knew nothing about prophecy, but she knew about saints. For any request, they needed proof of faith. For any blessing, they always wanted something in return.

The Hawk untied a long leather pouch from his belt. He held it beside the salt mounds, then opened its wide mouth and turned it over. A pile of marble-size orbs fell out. Some were shriveled and raisinlike. Others were warped like bent coins. Some had kept their roundness but were slightly deflated. These had the curdled color of Half-Moon’s bad eye.

Luzia quickly left the center of the prayer circle. She recalled the hollow-eyed capangas from Fidalga, piled on Colonel Machado’s porch. She recalled her aunt Sofia’s rhyme.
The hawk, caracará
,
looks for children who aren’t wise…

Luzia waited for a reaction: a pain in her stomach, a trembling in her fingers. She had none. Over the past months, her fear, her disgust, her pity had evaporated beneath the scrub’s unyielding sun. Just as the skin on her feet and hands had blistered, darkened, grown calloused and thick, something within her had hardened as well. They often found the bodies of baby goats in the scrub. They found the carcasses of cattle and the dried and leathery bodies of frogs. All of them were blinded, their eyes carried away by lines of saúva ants, or snatched up by hungry birds. It was inevitable. In the scrub, one predator was no better or worse than another.

Outside the circle, Luzia knelt. She stared at the dark sky. A scattering of stars lay above the horizon, like spilled salt. Each night she prayed to those heavens. Each day they floated above her, blue and unreachable, home to an unrelenting sun. She looked at the Hawk’s broad shoulders, at his bowed head. When he prayed, he looked not at the sky but at the ground. Luzia straightened her good arm. She pressed her hand to the earth. She was surprised by how cool it felt, how firm.

There was shuffling beside her. Luzia saw the colonel’s leather alpercatas and within them, his withered toes. He leaned on a wooden cane.

“I’m no saint, but I’ll tell you it won’t rain this year,” he said. “When my goats sneeze, it means rain. They haven’t sneezed yet.”

A knife handle protruded crookedly from the waistband of his pajamas. Luzia looked toward the porch. Marcos was gone. Colonel Clóvis shook his head.

“That boy,” he said, jutting his cane toward the Hawk, “takes everything at face value. Thank God there’s no saint who likes hearts. Or bowels.” He chuckled, then looked down at Luzia. “I saw that machine on my porch. You been decorating those boys? They’re starting to look like my wife’s kitchen towels. They like luxury but go too far with it. Is that what you did before you ran off with him? Sew?”

Luzia rose and wiped her hands on her trousers. “I didn’t run off.”

“He do that to your arm?”

“No.”

The colonel pondered this for a moment, shuffling his jaw. “Maybe that’s why he’s fond of you. You’re crippled, like him.” He edged closer. “You ever heard of Colonel Bartolomeu? The one he’s famous for killing?”

“Yes,” Luzia replied. It had been big news, an eighteen-year-old boy killing a colonel and getting away.

“That was his daddy.” Clóvis smiled. “Or so people say. His mother was some poor unfortunate. A young chicken who got herself disgraced. Told people that the colonel had taken advantage of her, that he was the boy’s father. No one listened, but she kept insisting. She wanted money. That’s what all these tenant women want. Bartolomeu got tired of it and sent his capangas. They shut her up and did that service to the boy.” Colonel Clóvis traced a line down the side of his own, withered face. “Isn’t that how the story goes?”

“I suppose,” Luzia said.

“He hasn’t told you?”

“I never asked.”

Colonel Clóvis wobbled his cane back and forth. “You must have done something real nice to make him break his promise.”

“What promise?”

The colonel inspected her face. His jowls were pendulous and fatty, as if all the mass from his face had sunk into them. He shrugged and looked away.

“He’s probably made so many promises it’s hard to keep track. I’d be kissing the saints’ asses, too, if I were him.”

“What promise?” Luzia insisted. The colonel smiled.

“I finally got your attention, uh? Very first time he came here to collect, he said he’d gotten a sign from one of his saints. Said he’d never let a woman in his group. Said women were for marrying. Or for fun.”

“Not me,” Luzia declared.

“Don’t worry about propriety with me, girl. I understand your lot.” Clóvis looked at the Hawk and shook his head. “We all have to make our bargains. We all have to cut deals.”

He tapped his cane several times, as if calling something out of the earth.

“How’d you like that silk I left you? Fine stuff, uh?” Colonel Clóvis asked, pressing against Luzia. “There’s more in my room if you want it. Women like gifts.” He rapped her legs with his cane. “Even when they dress like a man.”

Before them, the crowd of farmhands and cangaceiros lined up in front of the rock where the salt mounds sat. One by one they touched the rock and asked for the saint’s blessing. Luzia excused herself and found a place beside them.

4

Santa Luzia’s predictions were dire. The next morning, only three of the salt mounds were partially dissolved by dew. The rest were intact. For days rain was all the cangaceiros talked about. Luzia did not care. She was preoccupied with the yellow silk. She’d tucked it back into its butcher-paper wrapping and hidden it at the bottom of her bornal but she still felt its presence. She recalled its slipperiness against her hands. She was ashamed by having accepted a gift from the colonel and more ashamed by her joy in thinking it was from the Hawk. Yet she could not return it. Colonel Clóvis was an old goat but he was still their host. Finally, Luzia sneaked into the colonel’s kitchen and left it in his pantry, hoping the cook or a maid would find it and keep it for herself.

Everything in the colonel’s house—the pantry, the lace curtains, the stack of laundered bed linens—had a charred scent. The more cotton the gin processed, the more smoke settled over São Tomé. The black piles Luzia had seen burning outside the gin were cottonseeds. Over the months, their smoke turned the whitewashed town a sooty gray. It made the kids in Clóvis’s corral pant and hack out dry coughs. Each afternoon, mother goats wandered back from pasture with their coats covered in a fine black dust. Brass chocalhos bobbed below their necks, clanging as they ran. Kids crowded the front gate. They bayed wildly as the mass of mother goats stormed their group, sniffing kids and butting them aside until they found their own. The kids looked identical—speckled black and brown with dangling ears and sturdy frames. Luzia marveled at the mothers’ ability to pick their young from the pack.

While his son, Marcos, loped about, rarely speaking and often taking long rides on his prize mare, Colonel Clóvis seemed to enjoy the cangaceiros’ presence. He encouraged them to stay on. Once the cotton was cleaned, baled, and transported, he and Marcos would go to Salvador to bargain for the price. When they returned, they assured the Hawk that he would receive a percentage. Each evening, when the last of the goats returned from pasture, the cangaceiros took turns going into town. There, they sang and played lively music. They bought a ream of silk to make new neck scarves. They watched workers load bales of cotton onto barges headed for Salvador. And they visited the businesses of experienced women, which the cangaceiros later bragged about in camp. Even Colonel Clóvis joined them on those trips. “Men have needs,” the old man said once, cornering Luzia near the goat corral. “Can’t stifle them.”

Luzia grew annoyed with the cangaceiros’ flamboyant behavior. Soon, even the most hopeless troops would find them. The Hawk didn’t seem concerned. He encouraged the men’s trips into town. When a group left, he waited anxiously for their return, pacing back and forth as if his legs missed their daily walks in the scrub. When the men returned, half of them took the long way into camp, avoiding the colonel’s front gate. They carried heavy strings of ammunition, enough to give each man at least five hundred bullets. When they could find one, they brought a newspaper.

Luzia read the papers aloud. There were no articles about the troops. Only once was there a brief mention of a telegram sent by Captain Higino, assuring readers that he was on the cangaceiros’ trail. Outside that, the search had been forgotten in favor of the election. The Hawk bored easily with such news, but Luzia slogged through the articles in hopes of finding a mention of Emília. She read about the new party colors: green for Gomes and blue for the current leader. She studied Gomes’s manifesto, which called for a minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and the relinquishing of power from the São Paulo coffee barons and the colonels. In his reprinted speeches, Gomes called for modernization: new industries, better ports, and most important, a national roadway. A roadway would link the nation to its capital, as arteries linked a body to its heart, giving life to Brazil’s forgotten limbs. His words were poetic and forceful, and they distracted Luzia from the Society Section where, one afternoon, she nearly skipped over a blurb about Carnaval. However, something drew her to a photograph of a brightly lit ballroom at the International Club. She did not recognize any of the costumed revelers but beneath the photograph was a recap of the night’s festivities. Embedded in this chatty summary were the words:

Sadly, on her first appearance at the club, the mysterious Mrs. Emília Coelho left early. Her husband, Mr. Degas Coelho, cited exhaustion for his new bride’s escape. It’s no surprise that a country girl has difficulty acclimating to our cosmopolitan hours! Mr. Degas Coelho, however, had no trouble at all; he remained and enjoyed the festivities with his law school chum Mr. Felipe Pereira.

 

Luzia tore out the blurb.

“Anything important?” the Hawk asked, startling her. He’d been spying.

“No,” Luzia said. “Just an announcement.”

“What kind?”

“About a party,” Luzia replied. She should have said it was an obituary or a cinema ad; only silly girls clipped party announcements. Luzia folded the newspaper roughly. She hated his spying. Each day on the colonel’s property made him more paranoid. He refused to eat anything unless he saw Canjica prepare it. He walked incessantly. He spoke in hushed tones to Baiano. He had circles beneath his eyes from lack of sleep. Each day Luzia wondered why they stayed at the colonel’s if the Hawk did not trust him.