Claire Holroyde - The Effort

“You won’t find your family,” he said sadly. “I know that’s not what you wanna hear. And it’s not something I’m supposed to say. But it’s the truth.”

Weber lowered his blue-denim eyes.

“Well, I said it,” the other man continued. “But, come morning, when you take leave, you can forget I said it. If need be.”

He got up and fed split logs and tinder into the stove. There was enough water in the large kettle for Weber to soak a washcloth and rub away the dirt and sweat from a fruitless search. As soon as the water turned gray, the other man refilled the kettle from a well pump and set it to warm again.

That night, Weber slept with a full belly under a stranger’s roof. He dreamed of his wife and children. He dreamed of eagles coasting in the breeze. He dreamed of children in the future, born into an unknown age that would be whatever they made of it.

In the morning, Weber remembered his dreams and forgot the truth.

THERE WAS A knock on Zhen’s bedroom door after Sunday prayer. As expected, Gustavo was standing in the second-floor hallway with a canvas bag slung around one shoulder. Many voices echoed below from the townsfolk of Pedra Branca do Amapari as they either chatted by the wooden pews or took their conversations outside the church to stretch their legs.

Gustavo usually attended both the prayer and the townhall that followed shortly after. However, the next rainy season was nearly upon them. Each was announced with a sudden blast of wind, followed by steady downpours that could last as long as a quarter of the solar calendar. Travel was difficult in all the flooding for friends and enemies alike. Gustavo had to return to Wayãpi lands while the dirt road connecting the town was still passable on foot.

“Ned will be ready soon,” Gustavo muttered.

He shared a little smile with Zhen. Ned was a favorite with the townsfolk. The grannies waved for him to bend down so they could kiss his cheeks. The men clapped him on the shoulder. Women blushed and their children reached up to be lifted high in the air. Ned didn’t understand most of what they all said in Portuguese, but he would smile and nod. When it came time to hold hands in group prayer, his large hands were warm and strong.

Gustavo’s gaze wandered over Zhen’s shoulder to the interior of the bedroom, so she stepped aside and invited him in to wait for their local celebrity. Gustavo hesitated at the threshold. Five months ago, he had done the same before deciding to cram into his old bedroom across the hall with Ned so that Zhen could have this larger bedroom with several windows. It once belonged to a Canadian priest, a man who raised Gustavo like a son. Father St. John was traveling abroad when the imminent impact of comet UD3 caused so much panic that major airlines suspended flights. No one knew what became of him, along with so many others stranded far from home.

Zhen opened the top drawer of a wooden dresser, where she had carefully placed the priest’s personal effects for safekeeping, but Gustavo didn’t want to take his things with him, and looking at framed photos “hurt too much.” Instead, Gustavo walked up to the stacked shelves of books against the far wall. His fingertips glanced rows of leather spines and tapped three gaps where books were missing. Gustavo must have memorized the priest’s library, because he named the missing poets.

Zhen pointed to an armchair and a table by the window. Two books rested on the small round table. They were the same collection of poetry, but one was in the poet’s native English and the other was translated to Portuguese. Zhen had been comparing them line by line as the chants of “Ave Maria” floated up from the church below.

“You’ll help Ned with Portuguese?” Gustavo asked.

“We’re helping each other.”

It was true in every sense of the word. Despite a difference in age, gender, race, nationality, personality, and all the rest of it, Ned was Zhen’s closest companion; all the family she had left.

“You’ll give our love to Dewei?” Zhen asked of Gustavo. “And tell him we said goodbye?”

Gustavo nodded with his head hung low. For a time, the four of them were family, living in the Wayãpi village of Aramirã. They borrowed axes from the other villagers and built a house on stilts with wooden plank walls and a thatch roof. Gustavo had immediately swapped his clothes for a loincloth, called a tanga . Dewei and Ned did the same after a week of hauling planks and sweating through their clothes. The humidity is killing me , Ned said to Zhen. And I feel completely overdressed. Like a grizzly bear walking around in a full tuxedo. It took months for Zhen to walk around with only a square of cotton fabric tied around her waist like a sarong, and she regretted all that time spent hot and uncomfortable.

Nearly as soon as their house was fully built, Gustavo married his brother’s widow and moved into his own house. That left the three of them to hang their hammocks in one of four corners and then try to earn their place in the village. Ned and Dewei didn’t hunt with the Wayãpi men. They were too clumsy in the forest and scared away game; they couldn’t shoot an arrow straight and couldn’t keep up with the chase without tripping on the underbrush. Instead, they helped burn, clear, and till small plots for gardens.

As for Zhen, she joined the other women in their endless chores. They bathed before dawn, before the men, so as not to be “lazy women” according to the Wayãpi men. They tended gardens, prepared cassava, and ground it into a flour that was kneaded into flat bread that they dried on their thatched rooves. The women also tended fires, gutted animals and fish, and roasted the flesh. They even brewed caxiri beer with cassava and their saliva for village drinking sprees. Women worked all waking hours while holding and nursing babies or keeping the toddlers safe from scorpions, fire ants, large trees with shamanistic power, and the Amapari River, where the great anaconda, Owner-of-the-Water, lurked.

Dewei soon married a young Wayãpi girl and asked Ned to help him build a house of his own. Both he and Gustavo lived with their new families, but they managed to stay present for Zhen and Ned. The four of them had saved each other from death and witnessed the narrow escape of their planet together; that wasn’t something one should forget.

Zhen and Ned continued to live together. Instead of the linear timeline of the modern world they once knew, nature followed a cycle. There was birth and death, sunrise and sunset. There was the fireside under a night sky pregnant with stars and the glow of the Milky Way. There was the pain of rotting teeth, peeling sunburns on Ned’s freckled back, and wounds on the hardened soles of their feet, but there was also the fullness from warm flat bread and the weightlessness of resting in a netted hammock. There was the dry season, and then the soggy, miserable rainy season, and then the dry again. Three years of this cycle passed in the Wayãpi village before the first raid.

Forty-one Wayãpi were killed, two girls went missing, and a quarter of the village’s gardens were ripped up as a band of invading Brazilians quickly stole all the food they could carry and retreated back on the single road leading out of tribal lands to the frontier town of Pedra Branca do Amapari. One hundred and eight Wayãpi died from an illness that spread like wildfire within days. Wayãpi had no immunity to the diseases of large populations.

The second raid on the village of Aramirã occurred six months later and was even more deadly. Gustavo had stepped into the role of chief, like his father and twin brother before their deaths. He ordered all the dead bodies, Wayãpi and Brazilian, to be burned. Despite these measures, there was another outbreak.