The Seamstress (23 page)

That night, the Hawk instructed Seu Chico to prepare a feast. The old man and his son Tomás killed three goats before dawn. Lia and Luzia spent the morning cleaning out the insides for buchadas, stoking the cook fire, and preparing a vat of beans. Lia was resourceful in the kitchen but Luzia was not. No matter how hard she tried, she ended up making the fire too hot, or forgetting to stir the beans, or cooking the buchada until it was rubbery and tough.

At lunchtime, Luzia stayed with Lia. They watched from the kitchen window as the men took their places beneath the mottled shade of Seu Chico’s juazeiro trees. Seu Chico had brought out a table, stools, and his straight-backed chair. Those who did not have seats sat cross-legged on the ground. There weren’t enough bowls or wooden utensils for all of the men; the newest members would wait until the older members finished their meals.

Before they began, the Hawk called Luzia outside. He produced his crystal rock. One by one, the men knelt. Luzia followed. Seu Chico’s son Tomás bowed his head before the Hawk. Inside his leather vaqueiro jacket, the boy had pinned a lock of Lia’s hair.

“You are small and quick,” the Hawk said. Tomás smiled. “Your name will be Beija-flor.”

“I seal myself,” Tomás repeated after the corpo fechado prayer.

The men clapped. Afterward, a few took their places and began to eat. The rest polished the long, thin barrels of their new rifles. Some of the men also received square, blunt-nosed pistols. The old mule had carried ammunition and weapons, and the cangaceiros were giddy and loud as they examined their new equipment. Those with new guns bragged about their weapons, while those who would not part with their old weapons defended theirs. Luzia lingered near the juazeiro trees. The weapons were made of dull, dark metal, like the Singer sewing machine. Like the machine, she noticed, the guns had many clicking parts. And like her embroidery stitches, each weapon had a distinct quality, and advantages and disadvantages one had to consider before its use.

The men debated. The new German parabellum pistols which, loaded with cartridges in their butts, would be easier to reload than their old Colt “little horse” revolvers with their circular chamber of loose bullets. Some did not like pistols. They preferred to stick with their revolvers because, they said, pistol cartridges would be hard to acquire outside the capital. Then there were the rifles: the old ten-shots had less rounds, but shorter barrels. They wouldn’t heat up in their hands. The newer, twelve-shot rifles had long iron barrels. They had more rounds, but after sixty shots, the men speculated, the barrel would be as hot as fire.

“You’ll burn your hands off,” Sweet Talker warned. He saw Luzia watching and winked at her. “She’ll decide. Which do you think is better? A ten-or a twelve-shot?”

The other men chuckled. The Hawk wiped his mouth and waited for her reply.

“She’s going to give us a lesson?” Little Ear asked, shaking his head.

“It shouldn’t matter,” Luzia said, speaking slowly. “Bad seamstresses—”

“A sewing lesson!” Half-Moon interrupted.

Luzia raised her voice above the laughter. She regretted responding. She hated their smug faces, their self-satisfied chuckling.

“Bad seamstresses always talk about their machines. Or their needles. Good ones just sew. Seems to me it’s the same with shooting. Ten or twelve, that’s talk for people who can’t aim.”

The Hawk let out a long, deep laugh. Slowly, the other men followed suit, chuckling and congratulating Luzia for her cleverness. Except Little Ear. He took a bite of his food, then spit out a clump of beans.

“These are burnt!” he said, wiping his mouth with his jacket sleeve. He paused and stared at Luzia. “Bring me some salt…Victrola.”

She hadn’t heard that name in weeks. She’d believed it was forgotten, buried in the scrub, like her old leather valise. Before she could reply, the Hawk spoke. His voice was low and coaxing. He fixed his eyes on hers.

“Please,” he said. “Bring the salt. Bring the whole tin.”

Little Ear smiled triumphantly. Luzia walked quickly toward the kitchen, relieved to escape the men. Little Ear’s words had startled her, but the Hawk’s request had stung. He was the group’s guide, its ground, its reason for being. The men took their cues from him, and in an instant he’d made her their servant, their errand girl. A person meant to be mocked and ordered about.

Luzia entered the kitchen, startling Lia. She grabbed the salt tin and kept her face down, looking at her feet. They’d grown thick and yellow, like hooves. Aunt Sofia had always said that people were born with a fixed amount of tears. Some were given more than others. Luzia believed that she’d been given few, and that over the last few weeks, she’d used up the tiny amount of tears allotted for her life. But now Luzia’s eyes stung. Her cheeks burned. She walked outside, careful to keep her face down, and set the salt tin roughly on the table. Then she walked away.

“Wait,” the Hawk said. “Stay.”

Luzia kept walking. She would not wait upon him. She would not hold out her hands like a servant and take the salt tin back.

“Luzia,” he called sternly. She stopped.

“Give me your bowl,” the Hawk said to Little Ear. The cangaceiro smiled and obeyed. The Hawk took the salt tin in both hands. He turned it over. A large, white mound fell onto Little Ear’s bowl, covering his beans and manioc flour.

“You asked for salt,” the Hawk said. “Now you’ll eat it. And next time you’ll remember your manners.”

10

After the meal, the men napped peacefully in the scrub. Little Ear, his lips white and chapped, sat beneath a juazeiro and drank cup after cup of water. Slowly, the goats returned from the pasture. Luzia helped Lia milk the mothers, whose udders had grown bloated and sore. Afterward, while Lia fed the animals, Luzia poured the milk through a cheesecloth and into an iron pot. She balanced the bucket in her bent arm and tried to pour with the other. The pail was heavy, its handle slippery with milk. There was movement in the doorway, but Luzia could not look away from her task. She smelled a mixture of sweat and brilliantine paste.

“Need help?”

“No.” Her bent arm wobbled. Milk splattered onto the floor.

The Hawk stepped beside her, anchoring the bucket in his hands. It was hot beside the cookstove. The milk slowly drained. The cheesecloth clogged with hairs, gnats, and specks of blood. When they’d finished, Luzia pulled the cloth away and lifted the iron milk pot onto the stove.

“Lia’s taken with you,” the Hawk said. “She’ll be sad to see you go.”

“She’s sad for her brother,” Luzia replied. “She’s sad to lose her home.”

After lunch, she’d caught Lia crying in the pantry. Tomás would go with the cangaceiros the next day, to extract his revenge in Fidalga. Lia and Seu Chico would have to sell their goats and leave. They would move to Exu, where her other brothers worked.

“They wouldn’t be safe here,” the Hawk said. “Their family was shamed. Her brother will take away that shame.”

“That shame isn’t his,” Luzia said, suddenly angry. “It’s hers. Lia should be able to do with it as she pleases. She wants to stay here. They have a home and animals. They have a calm life. A quiet life.”

“You’re a brejo girl,” the Hawk chuckled. “You would think that.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You grew up on a mountain. And when you look down from a mountain, like the one in Taquaritinga, everything below it is faraway and pretty as a picture—even when it’s brown and dying. When you live down here, in the caatinga, it’s different. You see the world for what it really is. We’re different kinds of people, brejo people and caatinga people.”

Luzia stoked the fire with more kindling. Emília used to categorize people in that way: northerners versus southerners, city people versus inlanders. Luzia didn’t see the value in it.

“You’re a caatinga man then?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“That’s why you’re partial to it. People are always partial to what they know.”

“Not some people. Some people want to run away from what they know.” The Hawk smiled. “You know,” he continued, his hand resting dangerously near the stove’s lit cinders, “your cooking is awful.”

Luzia stared at his rust-colored skin, his white scar, his meaty, lopsided lips. “Why did you eat it then?” she asked. “You weren’t obliged to.”

She grabbed a thatched fan from beside the stove and flicked it up and down with her good arm. He was the most frustrating person she had ever encountered—as moody as a long-eared Zebu cow that followed you one minute and kicked you the next. The cook fire rose and smoked. Luzia coughed and fanned faster.

The Hawk gripped her wrist tightly. Luzia could no longer flick her fan. She looked at him.

“I want them to show you respect. To be loyal,” he said.

“They’re not dogs,” she said. “You can’t force them.”

“No,” he said smiling. “But I can make them eat whatever you cook.”

His fingers relaxed around her wrist, but he did not remove his hand. It was warm, the skin rough. Luzia moved away.

11

They left Seu Chico’s in the middle of the night, before the orange-winged leather jackets emerged from their dangling treetop nests. Before the goats crowded at the corral’s gate and bleated to be released to pasture. Lia stood at the kitchen window with a candle in her hands. The night was cool and moonless. When Luzia looked back, she saw the girl against the dark backdrop of the farmhouse, her face glowing and expressionless, like a saint’s statue.

Luzia hadn’t slept that night, nervous about the raid. The men were animated and focused. They’d coached Tomás, now called Beija-flor, on how to point and shoot. Hours later, when they arrived at the outskirts of Fidalga, the group split.

“Don’t waste bullets,” the Hawk whispered to the men before they parted. “Keep your eyes sharp, your guns aimed. When we’re done, you’ll have time to yourselves. Respect families. Respect decent people. If a girl wants to fool with you,” he said, glancing at Sweet Talker, “make sure she’s not too young. And don’t pay too much for raparigas.”

His instructions startled her. Luzia had expected a mention of bullets and guns. But
rapariga
was an ugly word. Since leaving Taquaritinga, Luzia felt a strange kinship with those women. She’d never met any, but she imagined that beneath the rouge and lip grease, they were simple girls. The Hawk’s mention of them made her question the intentions of the Fidalga raid. The cangaceiros’ excitement took on a different light. Luzia had overheard the men in the evenings, after they’d made camp, bragging about girls offering themselves. Only monkeys or perverts took them by force; the Hawk’s cangaceiros prided themselves on this distinction. Luzia wondered if the raid was truly meant to avenge Lia, or to put on a show for Fildalga’s young women.
Men have needs,
Aunt Sofia used to warn her and Emília.
Urges,
she’d called them. And that was why men should be avoided at all costs, Aunt Sofia declared, because they were like billy goats: fierce, unpredictable creatures that would not calm until those urges were met. Before Luzia could fully register the Hawk’s instructions, Ponta Fina took her arm.

“Come on,” he said sullenly.

He’d been ordered to watch her. Baiano led half of the cangaceiros to the east while the Hawk led the other half to the west. She and Ponta quietly slipped into Fidalga, ducking into a dark shop doorway that faced the town’s square. Luzia hunched so that her head would not hit the thick frame. The shop doors were barred shut. Across the square, a lantern flickered in a window. Luzia smelled the beginnings of a cook fire. Dark lines of smoke emerged from the town’s thatched roofs. Most of the houses were made of clay and sat slumped and crooked around the square, as if resting against one another. In the distance, Luzia heard several loud pops. They sounded in rapid succession, like São João firecrackers. In the window across the square, the lantern quickly went out.

Shadows appeared along Fidalga’s main road. One by one, the cangaceiros emerged, pushing Colonel Machado’s capangas before them. Baiano, Branco, and Caju brought in the first set of men. Two wore rumpled nightclothes; the third had been shot in the shoulder. Blood ran down his shirtfront and streaked his trousers. Little Ear, Sweet Talker, and Half-Moon herded two more of the colonel’s hired men into the square. They wore stained leather vests and their eyes were half closed. Safety Pin, Vanity, and Tatu brought in the last and youngest capanga. His long underwear was crookedly buttoned. Two women with rouged faces and red lips came pleading behind him. A procession of the other capangas’ women—mothers, daughters, wives—huddled at the edges of the square, their shawls thrown hastily across their nightgowns, their hair unevenly stacked upon their heads.

The sun rose. Fidalga’s clay houses glowed orange. In the scrub, Luzia heard birds calling cheerfully to one another, unaware of the events in town. The Hawk and two more cangaceiros appeared, flanking a young man Luzia did not recognize. He wore a linen dressing robe over pin-striped pajamas. His face was as white as the wax of a candle.

“That’s Colonel Machado’s son,” Ponta Fina whispered.

The Hawk ordered the six capangas and his well-dressed captive to kneel beside the stone bust of Dona Fidalga.

“Good morning,” he shouted, addressing the town’s shuttered houses and closed doors and not the kneeling men. His good eye squinted in the morning sunlight. The eye on his scarred side stayed open. He shaded it with his handkerchief.

“I am Captain Antônio Teixeira,” he announced. “We have business with these men. No one else.”

He ordered his captives to stand. Baiano prodded each man with the butt of his Winchester. Tomás stood before them. He aimed his new pistol with both hands. Luzia saw a tremor in his wrists.

“Strip,” the Hawk ordered.

Slowly, the capangas removed their nightshirts, their leather vests, their long underwear. The pale young man shook off his robe and slowly stepped out of his pajamas. The injured man hunched slightly, holding his shoulder. His soaked shirt fell to the ground with a slap. His chest was smeared with pink. Dry rivulets ran down his stomach and traced the insides of his thighs. Colonel Machado’s pale son cupped his hands over himself, but the rest of the men stood proudly, their heads up and legs wide, as if waiting for inspection.