The Monk's Little Daughter

• Chapter 1 The Stolen Ledger
• Chapter 2 Shadows in the Araucarias
• Chapter 3 The Voice by the Spring
• Chapter 4 Iron Rails and Sacred Ground
• Chapter 5 The Monk's Blessing
• Chapter 6 Ash and Pinyon
• Chapter 7 The Virgin’s Banner
• Chapter 8 A Gathering of the Dispossessed
• Chapter 9 First Blood at Irani
• Chapter 10 Ink on Cold Paper
• Chapter 11 The Holy City of Taquaruçu
• Chapter 12 Miracles in the Mist
• Chapter 13 The Winter of the Besieged
• Chapter 14 Brass Shells and Wooden Crosses
• Chapter 15 Flight into the Redoubt
• Chapter 16 The Birds of War
• Chapter 17 Hunger’s Sermon
• Chapter 18 Children of the Forest
• Chapter 19 The Siege of Santa Maria
• Chapter 20 Thunder from the Sky
• Chapter 21 The Valley of Bones
• Chapter 22 The Burning Shrines
• Chapter 23 The Secret of the Monks
• Chapter 24 The Last Redoubt
• Chapter 25 Scattering the Ashes
• Chapter 26 Words Carried on the Wind

The ledger smelled of damp cellar, cheap rum, and the dried gallnuts they used to make black ink in Rio de Janeiro. It was bound in split sheepskin that had turned the color of stagnant puddle water, and it had three brass studs on the front cover to keep the edges from curling under an overseer’s thumb.

Francisca had eyed it for three weeks through the warped glass window of the Brazil Railway Company’s pay-office in Matos Costa. The pay-office was nothing more than two pine shanties knocked together with green timber that had shrunk in the mountain frosts, leaving finger-wide gaps between the boards where the plateau wind whistled its dry, whistling tune. Inside, Senhor Macedo, a man whose collar was always yellowed with perspiration despite the bitter chill of the highlands, sat behind a railing of sawed pine laths. He had two pistols on the desk, an empty bottle used as a paperweight, and three stacks of paper: lists of men who had cleared brush, lists of men who were sick with the trembling chills, and lists of men who had died of gangrene after their legs were crushed by falling logs or runaway handcars.

The ledger lay just to the left of the pistols. It was thick, nearly three hundred leaves of heavy rag paper imported through the port of Paranaguá, meant to outlast the forest, the rain, and the republic. Most of its pages were entirely blank. Senhor Macedo had only used the first twenty to record the delivery of salt pork, the distribution of pickaxes, and the docking of three milréis from the wage of an Italian laborer who had taken two days to die in his bunk instead of doing it on Sunday.

Francisca did not want the names of the dead Italians, nor did she care what the Company paid for salt pork. What she wanted was the white emptiness that followed page twenty-one. Paper in the highlands was as rare as gold coin; when the lumber bosses finished reading a newspaper brought up on the supply mules from Curitiba, they tore it into squares to light their briar pipes or hung it on a wire hook behind the latrine pit. A pencil was a miracle; a whole notebook was wealth.

She was twelve years old, though she looked nine because her knees were knobby as pine cones and her ankles were thin as wicker. She wore an old cotton shift that had belonged to a washerwoman’s dead boy, dyed brown with the juice of yerba mate to hide the blood from flea bites. Her feet were bare, hard as cattle hooves, with soles that had not felt a piece of leather since her mother coughed her lungs into a tin basin two winters back in the ditch outside União da Vitória.

Her mother had known how to read. That was the singular trouble. She had been the daughter of a village clerk from Paraná who possessed an old edition of the Lendas do Sul and a copy of the Gospels printed in Coimbra before the emperors were chased away. Before she died of the spotted fever that followed the railroad camps like a cur dog behind a butcher’s cart, she had sat Francisca on a pile of cedar shingles and scratched letters in the red dust with a split twig: the round O like an ox’s eye, the sharp A like a surveyor’s tripod, the long-tailed Q that looked like an armadillo dragging its tail into a burrow.

"A word is an iron stake," her mother had whispered on the night her breathing turned to a rattle like dry maize in a gourd. "The big men drive an iron stake into the earth, and they say the valley belongs to them. If you cannot make the mark, you don't exist. You’re just deer meat for their hounds."

Francisca had not forgotten the iron stakes. She had seen the surveyors drive them every hundred meters along the right-of-way: squared lengths of cedar painted white at the tip, topped with a lead seal that bore the initials of the American syndicate. When the surveyors drove a stake through a squatter’s cabbage patch, the squatter had three days to pull down his roof poles and drive his two pigs into the brush before the Company police arrived with kerosene and short carbines.

The sun was dropping behind the ridge of the Serra Geral, turning the crowns of the araucaria pines from dull bottle-green to an ink-black fretwork against a sky the color of bruised lard. It was the hour when the tracklayers dropped their twelve-pound sledges and shuffled toward the cook-tents, their boots caked with four inches of red clay that set as hard as brick once it dried by the campfires. Senhor Macedo was thirsty. Francisca knew his habits because hunger sharpens the sight better than any pair of spectacles sold by the peddlers from Poland. At six in the evening, Macedo always left the lath cage, walked fifty yards through the stump-field to the canteen tent run by an old Spaniard named Don Emilio, and drank three fingers of white cachaça infused with wild ginger to settle his bile.

He never locked the door because the lock had rusted solid during the rains of June, and besides, there was nobody in the camp who dared step inside an office guarded by two brass-framed Smith & Wesson revolvers and the knowledge that the Company hanged thieves from the telegraph poles without bothering to send for the district judge in Canoinhas.

Francisca waited until his broad, rounded back had vanished into the blue smoke of the cook-shacks. A mule train was passing on the upper cart-track, the drivers shouting obscenities at the pack animals whose bellies were raw from the hemp cinches. The bells on the lead mules kept up an irregular, hollow clatter: tonk-tonk, tonk-tonk. It was enough noise to drown the scuffle of bare feet on pine shavings.

She slipped under the rear sill where the rain had hollowed a channel through the red dirt. Her ribs scraped the rough bark of the bottom log, leaving two bright beads of blood on her collarbone, but she made no more sound than a bush-rat slipping into a corn-crib. Inside, the office was dark except for the dull red glow of Macedo’s discarded cigar stump smoldering on the corner of the zinc spittoon.

The ledger was heavier than she had imagined. It weighed nearly five pounds, the corners shod with tin plates that were cold against her palms. On the shelf beneath the desk sat an inkpot of heavy green glass, round and squat as a toad, and two steel nibs stuck into holders of carved bone.

She took the book. She took the inkpot, clamping her thumb over the cork stopper to keep it from weeping into her pocket. She took both pens. Then, because her mother had always said that an empty hand was a confession of laziness, she took three tallow candles that lay beside the ledger and an unopened tin of salt biscuits from the desk drawer.

As she reached the sill to crawl back out, the front door rattled.

Francisca froze with her belly pressed into the shavings. Through the space between the floorboards, she could see a pair of grease-blackened boots. They were not Macedo’s town shoes with their shiny brass eyelets; these were the heavy, iron-shod boots of a capataz—one of the hired mule-drivers or line-guards who did the dirty work the engineers had no stomach for.

"Macedo?" a voice grunted. It was rough, thick with the drawl of the southern pampas, the kind of voice that came from men who had cut throats in the Federalist wars before selling their carbines to the rail bosses.

The man stepped into the room. Francisca could smell him through the planks: stale sweat, horse grease, and the dry, sweet stench of raw tobacco rolled in corn-husk. His spurs jingled with a dry, metallic chirp at every step. He walked to the desk, his heavy knuckles rapping once against the deal tabletop.

"Macedo! The sergeant says the caboclos are gathering at the spring again. Two hundred of them. They’ve got white ribbons on their hats and they’re singing about the old Emperor."

There was no answer, only the wind shaking the zinc roof and the distant singing of some drunken Galician over by the gravel pits.

The man spat. Francisca heard the yellow glob hit the floorboards six inches from her left ear. He turned, his boot-heels grinding the grit into the pine, lingered for a moment by the shelf where the ledger had sat, and then cursed under his breath.

"Bloody clerk’s already at the bottle," he muttered.

The door creaked shut. His spurs clinked down the steps, their rhythm slow and heavy, moving away toward the canteen where Don Emilio was already lighting the kerosene lanterns.

Francisca did not breathe until the bells of the mule train had moved past the water tank. Then she pushed the ledger out through the gap under the log, wedged herself through after it, and pulled the bundle into the crook of her arm.

The town of Matos Costa was not a town at all; it was a scar. Two years before, it had been a high, quiet valley of araucaria trees whose umbrella tops had sheltered the tapir, the wild pig, and a few dozen families of caboclos—brown-skinned descendants of Indians, escaped black slaves, and Portuguese soldiers who had drifted into the contested borderlands between Paraná and Santa Catarina because nobody in the coastal cities remembered they existed. They lived by their plots of black beans, their half-wild cattle that grazed the pajonales, and the harvest of the pinhão, the fat pine nuts that dropped from the araucarias every autumn like hail.

Then had come the Company. The Americans had a piece of paper signed in the capital that gave them fifteen kilometers of virgin forest on either side of the rails. The paper had gold seals on it and words in English that no one between Curitiba and Porto Alegre could translate, but its meaning was simple enough: every pine belonged to the railway; every cedar belonged to the railway; every square yard of red earth that could bear a potato was the property of the Brazil Railway Company, incorporated in the State of Maine.

Behind the railroad came the Southern Brazil Lumber & Colonization Company, its twin sister. The lumber men built the largest sawmill in South America four leagues to the south at Três Barras—a monster with twenty-four gang saws that screamed day and night, devouring thousand-year-old trees in three minutes and spitting out clean, square planks that were loaded onto flatcars and hauled down to the Atlantic to build houses for people in Buenos Aires and Hamburg.

Francisca ran not toward the rail-head, where the campfires were already guttering out in the evening fog, but up the slope toward the timber fringe.

The red clay was slick as hog fat. Twice she fell to her knees, clutching the sheepskin ledger to her chest so its white pages wouldn't touch the mud. The inkpot banged against her ribs inside her shift, cold and hard, the cork threatening to pop with every lurch. If the ink spilled, the paper would be ruined; it would be just another lump of spoiled waste, no better than the dirty bills the track foremen tossed to the girls behind the laundry lines.

She reached the first line of araucarias where the undergrowth of taquara bamboo grew thick and tangled as bird netting. Here the ground rose sharply toward the ridge that separated the river valley from the vast, trackless highlands of the Irani. The trees here were giants, their trunks straight as gun barrels for sixty feet before branching out into the great flat wheels of foliage that caught the night mist and turned it into a constant, gentle rain.

Under the roots of a fallen cedar, where the earth had torn away during the summer storms, Francisca had made her nest three months ago. It was a hole two yards deep, dry as an oven because the huge root-plate hung over it like an eaves-trough. She had lined it with dry ferns and moss that she had beaten with a stick to drive out the scorpions.

She crawled inside and pulled a bundle of dry bamboo branches over the entrance.

For a long time she sat in the dark, her heart hammering against her ribs like a woodpecker on dry cedar. Below her, through the lattice of bamboo, the rail-camp looked like a bed of dying embers scattered along the creek. A locomotive was shunting gravel cars near the siding, its iron wheels screaming against the ungreased curves with a sound that made the dogs on the ridges howl in sympathy.

She fumbled in the pocket of her shift and brought out the stolen biscuits. They were hard as slate, tasting of soda and tin, but she chewed them slowly, letting the saliva soften each crumb until it could be swallowed without tearing her throat. It was the first bread she had eaten since Tuesday, when a cook’s boy had thrown half a loaf of stale wheat-bread to the hogs behind the mess-shack and she had fished it out of the trough before the sow could reach it.

When the last crumb was gone, she struck a match.

The phosphorus flared blue, spitting a tiny shower of sparks that smelled of rotten eggs, then caught the dry wick of one of the stolen tallow candles. The yellow flame guttered in the draft that came through the roots, casting her shadow, huge and distorted, against the red dirt wall behind her.

She laid the ledger across her bare thighs.

The sheepskin was greasy to the touch, and there was a small brand in the lower corner of the back cover—a circle with the letters BRC stamped into the leather with a hot iron. Francisca touched the brass studs. They were cold, perfectly round, like the buttons on an officer’s tunic.

She opened the book.

The first pages were filled with Macedo’s handwriting—thin, spidery marks that marched across the blue-ruled lines like columns of marching ants. She squinted, bringing the flame closer until the tallow dripped onto her thumb, hot and stinging.

14 de Maio. Pago ao turco Miguel por vinte pás de ferro...

She could read the words, though she had to move her lips to make the sounds. "Paid to the Turk Miguel for twenty iron shovels... six milréis... four hundred reis deducted for the broken handle..."

It was all numbers. The whole world of the rail-head was numbers: numbers of sleepers cut, numbers of liters of beans boiled, numbers of yards of ballast moved from the gravel pits by the river. Nowhere did it say that the day the twenty shovels were bought, a boy named Bento had been buried under eight tons of red mud when the cutting collapsed; nowhere did it say that the water in the creek tasted of dead horses because the teamsters had dumped six carcasses into the shallows above the wash-house.

She turned the pages quickly. The lists of salt pork and kerosene ended on page twenty-two.

Page twenty-three was white. It was clean as a linen shroud that had never touched a corpse. It had forty blue lines running across it, parallel and straight, drawn by some great machine in England, and two red lines down the left margin to keep the clerk from straying off the course.

Francisca set the candle on a flat stone. She pulled the stopper from the inkpot with her teeth and dipped the steel nib into the black fluid.

The pen was strange in her hand. Her fingers were stiff with cold, the knuckles swollen and gray with ground-in dirt that no river water could lift. She held the bone holder the way her mother had taught her, not like a knife or an axe handle, but lightly, between the thumb and the first two fingers, the way a priest holds the wafer over the paten.

She did not know what to write first.

She thought of writing her name: Francisca dos Santos. But Francisca dos Santos was nobody. There were forty Franciscas between here and the port of São Francisco, all of them barefoot, all of them with hair full of dust and bellies hollowed out by the hookworm. If she wrote her name, it would just sit there on the blue line, small and lonely, like a dead fly on a tablecloth.

From down the valley came the sound of a shot.

It was not the sharp, whip-crack report of the Company guards' Winchesters. It was the dull, heavy boom of an old muzzle-loading musket—the kind the caboclos kept behind their doors, charged with home-made sulfur powder and bits of lead wire cut from telegraph seals.

A moment later, another shot answered from the ridge across the creek. Then silence, except for the high, thin sound of a wooden horn—a berrante—blowing three long notes that rose and fell like the cry of a crane in the swamp grass.

The people from the woods, she thought.

Every week there were more of them. They came out of the deep pine forests of the interior, from places where the maps had no names other than Sertão desconhecido—families on foot, the women carrying copper kettles on their heads and infants wrapped in homespun shawls, the men with long knives thrust through their belts and rosaries of cedar seeds around their necks. They did not look at the railway men, and they did not look at the soldiers who sat on the verandas of the telegraph stations with their legs dangling over the edge.

They were looking for the Monk.

They said he was the brother of the old Monk João Maria, who had walked the plateau fifty years before, blessing the springs and planting giant cedar crosses on the hilltops to keep the plague away. Some said he was the same man, that he had never died at all, but had only gone to Rome to talk with the saints and had now come back because the Republic had banished God from the schools and the foreigners were cutting down the holy pines to make sleepers for the iron tracks.

His name was José Maria. He wore a robe of coarse blue cotton like a friar, carried a leather bag full of dried herbs, and would not touch silver coin. When he spoke, the people said, his voice was as quiet as water running under leaves, but it could be heard across three valleys.

The men in the rail-camp laughed at him. Senhor Macedo called him an escaped deserter from the cavalry; the engineers called him a charlatan who lived on the sheep the poor people brought him. But last night, two line-guards had deserted their posts, taking their carbines and their cartridge belts with them, and a teamster had sworn on the Virgin of the Pillar that he had seen an army of five hundred men kneeling in the mist by the spring at Irani, their hats adorned with sprigs of rosemary and their faces turned toward the dawn.

Francisca lowered the nib to the first blue line of page twenty-three.

The metal point scratched the paper with a harsh, dry sound. The ink did not take at first; she had to lick the nib to clear the oil from the factory, tasting the sour tang of iron on her tongue.

She dipped it again. The ink formed a fat, gleaming tear at the split.

Carefully, her hand trembling until the blue lines seemed to waver like weeds in the creek, she formed the letters:

O homem do poço tem uma túnica azul.

The man by the spring has a blue tunic.

She looked at it. The ink was very black against the white paper, shining like wet tar in the candlelight. The h was crooked, its leg leaning too far to the left, and the ç looked like an old fishhook, but it was there. It could not be blown away by the wind; it could not be burnt unless someone threw the whole book into the fire; it could not be shouted down by Senhor Macedo or the Italian foremen.

She sat back against the cedar root, her fingers smeared with black to the first knuckle.

From the camp below came the faint sound of the bugle at the barracks. The soldiers were falling in. There were twelve of them, men from the State Security Force of Paraná, dressed in blue tunics that were stiff with lime dust, their brass buttons dull under the fog. They would be cleaning their German Mausers by the light of the stable lanterns, complaining about the damp that rusted the bolt-heads, waiting for the daylight so they could march up toward the springs.

Francisca blew on the ink until the wet shine vanished and the letters turned to a dull, dead charcoal.

She turned the page. The next one was as white as the first.

She dipped the pen again. She did not know what was going to happen when the soldiers reached the spring, but she knew that the men with the white ribbons would not run. Caboclos never ran; they were too slow, too stubborn, too tired of walking. They would stand in the fern-brakes with their scythes and their muzzle-loaders until the lead found them, and then the Company would bring more flatcars and the sawmill at Três Barras would cut more boards, and the big ledger in the office would have twelve more lines of dead men whose names were spelled wrong.

She looked down at the nib. A drop of ink had fallen onto her thumb, right in the crease where the skin was split by the cold.

"I will see it," she said to the roots above her head. The words sounded small in the deep hollow, no louder than the scuttle of a beetle through the dry moss. "I will see it, and I will put it here."

She closed the ledger with a soft thud that sent a puff of tallow smoke into the air, blew out the candle, and pulled the bundle of bamboo tight against the mouth of the hole. In the darkness, the smell of the ink remained, stronger than the pines, stronger than the wet earth, cold and sharp as iron.

The dawn brought no warmth, only a shifting of the dark into the color of dirty river water. When Francisca pushed aside the lattice of dried taquara, the mountain air rushed into her burrow like cold well-water dumped over an open cut. High above, the candelabra boughs of the araucarias dripped steadily onto the sodden fern-brakes, their needles catching the gray mist and knitting it into heavy beads that fell with rhythmic, leaden thuds into the leaf litter.

She wrapped the stolen sheepskin ledger in a greasy square of oiled sacking she had salvaged from an abandoned lard barrel two weeks before, binding it to her torso with a strip of hemp cord so that it rode flat against her ribs. The squat green inkpot went into the pocket of her shift, cushioned by a ball of dried sphagnum moss to keep the glass from rattling against the bone penholders. The pens she tucked behind her ears, nestling them into the thick, tangled knots of her black hair where they looked like strange, smooth hairpins carved by someone who had never seen a woman’s head.

Below her on the valley floor, the railway camp had not yet shaken off its stupor. Smoke from the cookshacks hung low, trapped under the canopy of the forest, smelling of damp cedar chips and burned lard. But the yard was not empty. By the water tower, a squad of state troopers stood in loose formation, their dark blue coats damp with dew. A young lieutenant with a waxed mustache sat astride a sorrel mule, his saber scabbard clinking rhythmically against his stirrup iron as the beast shifted its weight from hoof to hoof. The men did not look like heroes setting out to tame a province; they looked like cold, irritable conscripts whose breakfast had been delayed.

Francisca knew the ways of the forest better than any engineer from Rio. A girl with ribs like an empty basket learns quickly where the wild things walk, because a deer trail does not snap dried twigs underfoot and a tapir’s run avoids the stinging nettles that could blister bare ankles for three days. She climbed toward the upper rim of the gorge, keeping the great rough trunks of the pines between herself and the valley floor.

The araucaria forest was not a silent place, though its noises were subtle. Large blue jays, the gralhas azuis, hopped through the umbrella crowns forty feet above, screaming at each other with harsh, grating voices like rusty hinges as they buried pine nuts in the moss. Legend had it that every araucaria tree in the highlands had been planted by those birds, forgetful gardeners who buried their winter provisions and forgot where they had hidden them. Francisca watched one hammer at a cone with its stout bill, sending a shower of woody scales tumbling into the underbrush. She stopped long enough to gather six fallen pinhões from a mossy log, cracking their thick, leathery hides with her back molars to chew the raw, starchy meat within. It tasted of resin and cold rain, but it stopped the hollow gnawing in her belly.

As she cleared the third ridge, the smell of woodsmoke changed. It was no longer the sharp, chemical stench of green pine soaked in railroad kerosene, but the mellow, ancient perfume of dry sassafras and wild canela burned in open firepits.

She dropped onto her stomach, crawling through a drift of carqueja bushes whose bitter-scented leaves stained her bare elbows a dull yellow. Through the spiked fronds, she peered into the draw of an old cattle trail that had once run between the high pastures of Lages and the mule markets of Sorocaba.

They were there.

They were not an army, not as the schoolbooks her mother read from had described armies, with neat rows of brass buttons and shining muskets held at identical angles. They were a migration of ghosts. An entire village seemed to have untethered itself from the soil and set out across the red mud. Men in tattered ponchos of homespun wool carried long bamboo lances tipped with scythe blades or old bayonets taken from the Argentine wars. Some led pack horses with rib cages showing like inverted wicker baskets, their packs bulging with manioc flour, iron kettles, and small children bundled in sheepskin pelts.

Old women walked barefoot through the mire, their rosaries of dried Job’s tears clicking between fingers gnarled like ginger roots. They did not talk. They walked with the slow, relentless gait of people who had been walking since their grandfathers’ time and expected to keep walking until their knees turned to bone dust.

At the front of the column rode a man on a white mule. He had a great straw hat tied beneath his chin with a string of rawhide, and across his chest he wore a sash of coarse white cotton, crossed like the straps of a soldier's cartridge box, but entirely devoid of cartridges. Instead, sprigs of wild marcela and rosemary were tucked into the cloth, their pale green leaves limp from the morning damp.

Francisca slid lower into the carqueja. Her heart beat against the ledger under her ribs, the sheepskin cold through her shift. She reached behind her ear, pulled one of the bone penholders free, and held it tightly in her fist, as if the sharp steel nib were a weapon against the silence of the woods.

A twig snapped five paces behind her.

"A rabbit would make less noise," a voice said. It was dry and cracked, like the sound of dry grass rubbing together in the winter wind.

Francisca did not scream; screaming in the highlands invited a fist or a blade. She spun on her heels, scuttling backward on hands and knees until her spine struck the massive, fluted buttress of a sapuva tree.

Standing over her was an old man, so bent and withered that his chin seemed almost to rest upon his breastbone. His beard was a dirty yellow-white, tangled with bits of dry moss and dried tobacco leaf, and he leaned on a staff made from a wild guatambu branch taller than himself. Across his shoulders he wore a ragged poncho woven from coarse caraguatá fiber that smelled powerfully of goats and damp ashes.

"What have you got there under your rags, girl?" he asked, pointing the crook of his staff at the stiff square outline beneath her shift. "Stolen salt pork? Or did you take a grease-pot from the foreigners' kitchen?"

"It isn't meat," Francisca whispered, her voice husky from disuse.

"Everything people steal down there is meat or iron," the old man said, spitting a dark stream of chimarrão juice onto a cluster of mushrooms. "The world has grown very hungry for both. Come out of the thorns before you leave your hide behind. The patrol is on the lower track. If they hear you thrashing like a trapped armadillo, they’ll put an ounce of lead through this brush just to see what squeals."

He turned his back on her without waiting to see if she obeyed, shuffling toward the cattle trail with a speed that belied his twisted limbs. Francisca hesitated, touched the cold pot of ink in her pocket to make sure the stopper held, and scrambled out of the scrub after him.

The column was halting by a small clearing where an icy creek cut through the red clay, its water foaming over black slate rocks before disappearing into a tunnel of wild bamboo. The people did not set up tents; they had none. They simply sat where they stopped, resting their backs against their bundles or the trunks of the pines, watching the trees with dull, patient eyes.

A young woman sat on a rotten stump, nursing an infant whose skull looked no larger than a winter turnock. She looked up as the old man passed, her gaze shifting to Francisca. There was no curiosity in her face, only the profound, indifferent exhaustion that comes from living three weeks on boiled fern tops and damp air.

"Who is the stray, Uncle Eusébio?" she asked, her voice barely carrying above the murmur of the creek.

"A rail-crawler," the old man replied, not stopping. "Found her curled under a bush like a hare. She’s got something hard strapped to her belly. Maybe she thinks she can eat it when the frost comes."

They stopped near a great cross that had been planted at the edge of the trail. It was rough-hewn, made from two whole trunks of bracatinga lashed together with strips of raw cowhide that had dried hard and dark as iron. The wood was fresh, the axe-marks still pale against the gray bark, and at its base lay a small heap of offerings: three wild oranges, a bunch of dried rosemary, and a handful of lead pellets tied in a piece of rag.

Francisca stood by the cross, feeling the eyes of the camp upon her. There were perhaps seventy people in this detachment, though the trampled mud of the trail suggested that many more had passed ahead of them. These were caboclos from the high valleys of the Peixe River, people whose fathers had grazed cattle on the common pastures before the provincial governors began selling pieces of paper to the men from the coast.

"Take it off," the old man, Eusébio, commanded, sitting down heavily on a dry boulder by the water.

Francisca set her jaw. "It’s mine."

"Nobody owns anything here, girl," he said, pulling a short knife with a horn handle from his belt and using the point to clean the dirt from under his fingernails. "The Company owns the trees. The government owns the dirt. The Monk owns the soul. What is between the dirt and the sky belongs to whoever can keep it out of the crows' bellies. Show it."

With slow, reluctant fingers, Francisca reached under her shift, untied the hemp knot, and pulled out the package. The smell of sheepskin and rancid lard rose between them. She unwrapped the greasy sacking and laid the ledger on the flat surface of the rock.

The brass studs caught the gray light filtering down through the araucarias, shining like fresh gold coin.

A man who had been sharpening an iron scythe against a river stone stopped his work and stood up. He was tall, with the high cheekbones and yellowish-brown skin of a pure-blooded Kaingang, though he wore the tattered trousers and rawhide boots of a drover. He stepped closer, his heavy thumb tracing the perimeter of the sheepskin cover without touching it, as if it might be hot to the touch.

"The book of wages," the man murmured. He looked at Francisca, his dark eyes flat and unreadable. "You took this from the shanty at the siding?"

"From the desk," she said.

"Did you kill the clerk?"

"He was drinking cachaça at Don Emilio’s."

The man grunted, a short sound that might have been a laugh had there been any joy in it. "He will drink more than cachaça when the inspector comes up from the port. They hang men for losing the lists. The lists are how they know who they have bought and who they have left to starve."

"I didn't take it for the lists," Francisca said. She took the inkpot from her pocket and set it down beside the book, followed by the two bone pens. "The pages in the back are empty. You can put things on them."

Old Eusébio leaned forward, squinting at the squat green bottle with his watery, cataract-filmed eyes. "Put things? What things? Crosses?"

"Words," she said.

A low murmur passed among the few men who had gathered around the rock. One of them, a boy not much older than Francisca whose left arm ended in a withered, fingerless stump—the legacy of an unexploded blast in the railway cuttings—reached out and tentatively poked the paper with his good thumb.

"Only priests have the ink," the boy said softly. "Priests and the judges who sign the eviction papers. When the judge in Curitiba writes on a paper, forty houses burn down. It is an evil thing."

"It is not evil," Francisca retorted, her pride flaring despite her fear. Her mother’s voice rang in her head, clear and distinct above the wind that was beginning to moan through the high pines. If you cannot make the mark, you don't exist. "The paper does not burn the house. The kerosene burns the house. The paper only says whose hand held the match."

Eusébio chuckled, a wet, rattling sound in his throat. He reached out with his guatambu staff and tapped the book's brass corner. "Listen to the sparrow preach. She thinks she has stolen the thunder because she took the gunsmith's hammer." He looked at her closely, his gaze dropping to her ink-stained thumb. "Can you read what the foreigners put in there?"

Francisca opened the heavy cover. The blue lines lay before them, crisp and orderly, alien to the damp chaos of the forest floor. She placed her fingertip beneath the first entry on page twenty-one, where Macedo’s spidery script marched across the page.

"It says here: Seventeen days of work for the black man Benedito." She sounded out the syllables slowly, her tongue thick against her teeth. "Deducted twelve milréis for three axes lost in the river. Balance paid: nothing."

The tall man who had been sharpening the scythe leaned closer. His jaw worked silently for a moment. "Benedito died three weeks ago," he said, his voice flat. "A pine trunk rolled on him in the swamp. They didn't bury him. They threw him into the brush because the ground was too frozen to dig."

"It says here he owes twelve milréis," Francisca repeated, looking straight at him.

The man turned his head and spat into the creek. "They will have to collect it from the jaguars, then."

"Give it to me," Eusébio said, holding out a dirty, trembling palm.

Francisca snatched the book back, holding it against her chest like an infant. "No. I stole it. My ribs bled on the log when I took it through the sill. It’s my paper."

"And what will you do with it, little owl?" the old man asked, not unkindly, though his brow furrowed into deep crevices like dried mud. "Eat it leaf by leaf? The winter is coming down from the south, the true winter that turns the springs to white flint. By June, the mist will have teeth. You can’t build a fire out of three hundred pages; it will burn out before your toes are warm."

"I am going to the spring," she said.

The silence that fell over the clearing was sudden and heavy. Even the woman on the stump stopped the gentle swaying motion with which she had been soothing her suckling child. The men looked away, their eyes shifting back toward the high ridges where the mist was beginning to descend, thick and white as sheep’s wool, blanketing the dark needles of the araucarias.

"Many are going to the spring," Eusébio murmured after a long pause. "Some with their legs whole, some crawling on their knees. But the spring is not a kitchen, child. There is no bread there."

"They say he has bread," the one-armed boy whispered. "They say he touched a basket of pinhões at Taquaruçu and it fed sixty families until the feast of Saint John."

"They say many things," Eusébio snapped, turning on the boy with sudden sharpness. "They say the dead soldiers will rise from the trenches with flowers in their gun barrels. They say the old Emperor Dom Pedro is coming back from over the sea on a white bull with horns of silver. Talk does not fill a belly, Joaquim. Only maize fills a belly, and the Company’s mules ate the maize patches clean from here to Canoinhas."

Yet despite his words, the old man rose to his feet, leaning heavily upon his staff. He looked down the trail, where the gray fog was rolling up like smoke from an underground fire, swallowing the rear of the column tree by tree.

"If you come with us," he said, looking back at Francisca, "you walk at the rear with the pack mares. And if you drop that cursed ledger in the mud, you leave it there. We don't stop for dead paper."

Francisca did not answer. She wrapped the ledger back into the greasy sacking, knotting the hemp cord with tight, fierce jerks of her fingers until the package was once more secure against her ribs. She took the bone pens and pushed them deep into the hair behind her ears, where they nestled against her scalp like small cold bones.

The column began to move again. There was no horn, no command given by the man with the marcela sash. The people simply rose as if an invisible thread had been pulled through all their hearts at once, hauling their bundles back onto their shoulders and turning their faces toward the western gaps.

Francisca fell into step behind a mule whose flanks were covered in white ringworm scars. The animal’s tail swished rhythmically, spattering her knees with flecks of cold red mud at every stride, but she did not drop back.

Above them, the canopy of the araucarias closed like a roof. The great, prehistoric branches, stiff and upturned at their tips like the fingers of praying hands, caught the low clouds and broke them into a persistent drizzle. The light grew dimmer, the deep, undersea green of the deep highlands where no sun ever touched the ground.

As they climbed the slope toward the high divide, Francisca felt the ledger rubbing against her sternum. It was heavy, a burden of dead weight, but beneath the wet sheepskin and the layers of greasy cloth lay the white emptiness of page twenty-four, and page twenty-five, and two hundred more waiting behind them.

Down in the valley they had left behind, a locomotive whistled. The sound was faint now, attenuated by the miles of dense timber, high and shrill and thin, like the scream of an iron needle piercing a thick blanket. None of the people on the trail turned to look. They kept their eyes on the red ruts ahead, their feet making a wet, sucking sound in the earth that had once been theirs, moving slowly toward the high springs where the blue-robed man waited in the mist.