The Seamstress (22 page)

There were several stools with ripped leather seat covers. A few had been hastily sewn back together. On the rest, the leather dangled in slashed pieces. There was a brown stain smeared across the wall. Several wooden caritós were snugly built into the room’s corners. One held a singed portrait of São Jorge. The others held fragments of clay saints: a shrouded head, an arm with birds at its fingertips, a pair of chipped feet. Each broken piece had a candle beside it. There was an odor Luzia could not define—on the surface it smelled of smoke from the cookstove, but underneath was something sharp and heady, like the scent that came from the cauldrons Dona Chaves’s husband used to cure animal hides back in Taquaritinga.

“Who was here?” the Hawk asked.

Seu Chico bowed his head. A clicking sound erupted from his throat. He covered his eyes.

“Sit down, friend,” the Hawk said, dragging a stool toward Seu Chico.

The man waved his hands as if shooing away a bug. He walked down a dark corridor and brought out a chair, a real chair, with a wooden back. He put the chair before the Hawk.

“You sit first,” Seu Chico said. “Please.”

The curtain that shrouded the kitchen door moved open. The girl peeked out from behind the fabric. She was no older than Ponta Fina. A shaft of sunlight fell through a gap in the roof tiles, making her hair glow.

“It happened fifteen days back,” Seu Chico said. “A group of Colonel Machado’s men—his capangas—came here from Fidalga. I have to sell my cotton to him. Except…” Seu Chico coughed. He threaded his crooked fingers. “What he pays isn’t just. Part of my harvest I sold to a man from Campina. The colonel found out. Those colonels, they think a man’s back is just a place to wipe their knives clean.”

“How many were here?” the Hawk asked.

“Six.”

“What time?”

“Near dusk. Tomás was out, bringing home the goats. It was only me and Lia here.”

Seu Chico looked nervously toward the kitchen. The curtain was closed, the girl gone. He growled out mucus, then spat. When it hit the floor he raised his eyebrows, alarmed. He quickly rubbed it into the dirt with the tip of his sandal.

“They took my old papo-amarelo,” he continued. “My father gave me that rifle. They burned the beds. Broke our saints. Shat in the water tank. It took me and Tomás a week to clean it out. Praise God we had rain this winter. If they’d done that in the summer, we would’ve died of thirst.”

“And Lia?” the Hawk asked, his voice a whisper.

The man touched the wound on his head.

“One hit me with the butt of his rifle. Knocked me out cold. I still feel like I drank too much branquinha. When I came to, I thought they’d left. I looked for Lia, couldn’t find her. Then I heard them. Heard those capangas laughing in the back bedroom. They held the door shut. I heard Lia in there, with them. She was calling for me and I couldn’t get in. I hit it as hard as I could, that door, but it wouldn’t move.” Seu Chico stared at the Hawk for a long time. “Lia’s in back,” he finally said. “Won’t come out. Not with men here. She can’t be in a room with her own father now. I wish they’d killed us both.” Seu Chico put his head in his hands. The cangaceiros were quiet. The Hawk’s left brow furrowed. The corner of his mouth twitched. His scarred side stayed placid, expressionless except for his watery eye, which he gently dabbed with his handkerchief.

8

The town of Fidalga was half a day’s walk from Seu Chico’s farm and it belonged to Colonel Floriano Machado. He’d named the town in honor of his deceased mother, a Portuguese, and in the town’s square he’d placed a stone bust of the woman, her jaw set in a stern underbite, her eyes staring steadily to the east, as if looking toward her country. Luzia studied the bust each time she and Ponta Fina went to Fidalga.

Before their trips, Ponta tied his hair back and removed all of his knife holsters but one. He wore trousers and a sackcloth shirt that belonged to one of Seu Chico’s sons. Luzia wore a dress. It was baggy and short. Seu Chico had kept all of his deceased wife’s frocks, but the woman was small and squat compared to Luzia, who had to sew another layer of cloth around the hem of the borrowed dress so that it would cover her calves. When she wore it for the first time, Luzia missed her trousers. The dress felt too airy, too vulnerable.

“You will be our eyes,” the Hawk said before her first trip into town with Ponta.

Ponta Fina hadn’t yet grown the telltale cangaceiro calluses on his shoulders, but his hair was long and his back was hunched. The townspeople would mistrust a strange, long-haired boy, but they would not suspect a woman. Not a brother and sister. They visited Fidalga three times, posing as orphan travelers in need of supplies. Ponta always held her arm tightly. The first time she walked on Fidalga’s narrow dirt paths, Luzia felt the townspeople’s eyes on her. They stared at her bent arm, her baggy dress, her calloused feet. On their second visit, she and Ponta purchased dried beef and blocks of rapadura. By the third visit, she and Ponta had become familiar faces, and their humble looks and prompt payment loosened merchants’ lips.

Colonel Machado’s property extended as far as the horizon on all sides. Even on horseback, a man could not cross all of his land in one day. Fidalga’s first houses had been built by tenant farmers. Later, the colonel built a small chapel and allowed stores, bars, a dance hall, a Saturday fair. Like other colonels, Machado’s contract was simple: people did not pay a single tostão to live on his land, but in return they owed him their obedience, and a sizable percentage of whatever they harvested or sold. If Colonel Machado did not like a house’s color, he ordered it repainted. If he did not like the looks of someone, he asked them to leave. And if they refused or broke his contract in any way, they no longer dealt with the colonel himself, but with his hired men, his capangas.

After each visit, Luzia and Ponta took a convoluted route back to Seu Chico’s farm. When they arrived, they sat with the Hawk and described Fidalga: the location of its grain shop, its makeshift prison, and the colonel’s powder blue mansion at the far edge of town. Like the colonel’s house, his capangas were easy to locate. During their second visit, Luzia saw a group of men sitting on wooden stools outside the town’s largest shop. They wore short-brimmed, round vaqueiro hats whose leather was warped from sweat and rain. There were six of them.

“As big as a horse,” the oldest capanga, a broad-chested man in his forties, said and nodded at Luzia.

“As good looking, too!” another snickered. He was no older than Ponta Fina.

During this visit they also learned that Colonel Machado had traveled to Pará to buy cattle and would be gone for another two months.

“No matter,” the Hawk said. “We don’t need his permission.”

After that, the Hawk put an end to their trips. He took several rolls of mil-réis notes from his bornal—enough to buy a dozen pedal-operated Singers—and left with four of his men. They headed toward the São Francisco River, to visit a rancher friend he called “a man of character.”

Baiano took charge of the group. The remaining men camped in the scrub beside Seu Chico’s house, hidden from sight. They rationed their coffee and rapadura. Once a week, Seu Chico butchered a goat and each Saturday he and his son, Tomás, made a trip into Fidalga for manioc flour and sun-dried beef. They could buy only small quantities so as not to attract suspicion. Luzia and Lia made cheese from the goats’ milk and dug macaxeira root from the ground, but it was not enough to feed all of the men. Luzia felt a constant, dull ache in her stomach. The cangaceiros did not complain. They were accustomed to living with little food, but they grew restless with inactivity. Each night, Luzia heard their arguments over games of dominoes.

She slept inside the house, on the floor beside Lia. She often thought of Emília and their shared bed, but Lia was nothing like her sister. She was more like one of Seu Chico’s goats: thin necked, with a large oval face and bulging eyes. Like the goats, Lia was sweet natured and skittish, jumping at any odd noise, ducking in the storage pantry whenever Ponta Fina or Baiano came near the house. Despite their delicate appearance, Seu Chico’s goats were hardy and resourceful creatures. Determined to survive in the scrub, they consumed the toughest plants, peeling away bark with their teeth and uncovering the soft, pulpy centers of trees. Luzia saw this same determination in Lia. Each morning, the girl held palma cactus in her bare hands, chopping it into cubes and dumping the sticky chunks into the goats’ feeding bins. She grabbed newborn kids by their back legs and squirted mercurochrome into their bloody bellybuttons so efficiently and mercilessly that the kids didn’t have time to squirm or be frightened.

Some nights, Lia cried out in her sleep. The first time this happened, Luzia tried to comfort her. The girl slapped her away and then curled into a ball, trembling in the early morning air. Luzia had heard people in Fidalga gossiping about Lia. It was a shame, they said, that she had been ruined; Lia would have made a good wife. But after the capangas’ visit, she could never marry. She would have to take care of her father, and when Seu Chico died, she would be at the mercy of Colonel Machado.

Luzia could have escaped a dozen times. She could have lifted herself from their makeshift bed and walked out of the front gate without the men noticing. The cangaceiros were listless and, out of respect to Seu Chico and Lia, they rarely came near the house. But each time Luzia contemplated leaving, she felt Lia’s wide, startled eyes on her. They rarely spoke, but each afternoon they sat in the shade and shucked beans from their shells. Each evening they sewed together, and Lia peered over Luzia’s shoulder to copy her stitches. There was something else holding her as well, an anticipation Luzia would not acknowledge until she caught herself listening for clapping at the front gate, or for a whistle, or for the Hawk’s deep voice signaling his return. Once, she heard the men hooting outside and nearly tripped over the milk basin as she ran to the window. It was only a celebration for catching three fat mocó rats. Luzia silently wiped up the splattered goat’s milk and cursed herself for such foolishness. Still, each evening she leaned against the goat pens with Ponta Fina and questioned the boy.

“You’d be surprised who our friends are,” Ponta said, smiling. He answered her questions coyly, which annoyed Luzia.

“He took money with him,” Luzia said. “What does he mean to buy?”

“Just because he took it doesn’t mean he’ll use it. Our protection is worth more than money.”

“Protection?”

“The captain’s a man of his word.” Ponta sighed, irritated by her ignorance. “No one wants to be at the end of his knife.”

He spoke slowly, as if the speed of his words would help her understanding. There were ranchers, colonels, even police captains who traded with the Hawk, burying munitions or food or other gifts at predetermined locations where the cangaceiros would eventually dig them up. In exchange, the Hawk paid them with money or with the promise of protection from rival colonels and their capangas. In the case of the police, there were some captains who paid them to stage fights. Their feats appeared in the papers but no one was actually harmed.

“We’ve got buried treasure all over the state,” Ponta said. His voice cracked. A stiff layer of fuzz now covered his face.

Behind the corral fence, the goats bleated and settled in for the night. Two billy goats reared up on their hindquarters and rammed each other. Their horns clacked together.

“When will he be back?” Luzia asked.

“Why?” Ponta smiled. “Do you miss him?”

“You shouldn’t talk to a girl that way. It’s disrespectful. Didn’t anyone teach you that?”

“No,” Ponta said quietly. He stared at his feet.

“What about your father,” Luzia said, softening her voice. “Didn’t he teach you?”

“He’s dead,” Ponta muttered. “Killed.” Ponta kicked the bottom edge of the corral fence. “Another butcher, a no-good son of a bitch, told everyone my father weighed his meat wrong; said he tricked the scale. But he didn’t. I was there. You can’t let a man say those kinds of things. Papai did what he had to do, to protect his name. He just didn’t win.” Ponta looked at Luzia, then kicked the fence harder. “You ever seen somebody stabbed?”

Luzia nodded. She’d never witnessed the act itself, but she’d seen the results. Once, on her way to school with Emília, a boy had run up to them. “Seu Zé the carpenter’s dying,” he shouted. “Come see!” When they turned the corner, they saw Seu Zé’s body, covered with a sheet, slumped on the ground.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Ponta Fina said. “After he killed Papai, I killed him right back. I stole his knives and left. The captain didn’t want me at first. Said I was too small. He said, ‘This is a dead end. Once you’re in, you can’t go back.’ But I didn’t want to go back. I showed him those knives. I told him what I’d done. He let me join. He said a man who doesn’t revenge himself has no morals. I liked that. He called me a man straight away.”

“So all your knives belonged to—”

“The cabra who killed Papai,” Ponta interrupted. “And this”—he unbuttoned his jacket and showed her a wooden crucifix on a leather cord—“this belonged to Papai.”

Behind the fence, the billy goats’ horns had stuck together. The two animals pulled back wildly, trying to pry apart. Ponta ran into the corral.

“We’ve got to separate these two!” he shouted.

But Luzia was already in the corral. She knew that goats, like men, were stubborn creatures. If left alone, they would stay locked together and starve. Or they would pull until their horns were pried from their heads and one, or both, bled to death. Either way, Luzia knew, there could be no winner.

9

The goats were the first to sense the Hawk’s return. In reaction to a stranger’s presence, the animals walked in circles and let out low-pitched, warbling cries that woke Lia and Luzia. The Hawk and his four men—Chico Coffin, Sweet Talker, Jurema, and Vanity—arrived with a mule. The animal’s legs and belly were badly lacerated from the thorny scrub. Several cloth-covered bundles were fastened to its back.