Nazaré had been climbing since before she could read. Her cousins said she was born with sticky feet. Her father said she was born with no sense, and he said it while watching her go up the mango behind the house like a squirrel with somewhere to be.
At seventeen she could shinny up an açaí* palm with a peconha* looped around her ankles faster than her 19-year-old cousin Jonas, who sulked about it. She could handle a machete, gut a tucunaré (peacock bass), and steer the little rabeta (motor canoe) through the shallows without touching bottom. She hated shelling beans in the kitchen, she did it anyway, because her mother asked her to.
“You carry on like the trees knows who you are,” her mother said one morning. Nazaré had just announced that she was going inland. “A tree doesn’t know. It can drop you the same as anybody else.”
“I know, Mãe.”
“You don’t. You think you do.” Dona Francisca wiped her hands on her skirt. “Where?”
“Past the old rubber trail. Seu Raimundo says there’s a stand of taperebá (hog plum) in the clearing where the Ferreira family used to live. Nobody’s picked them in years.”
“That’s three hours in.”
“Two and a half if I go fast.”
Her mother looked at the river for a while. Francisca had a reason for wanting to say don’t go. But she didn’t and went into the house and came back with a plastic bottle of water and two boiled eggs.
“Back before dark,” she said. “Before dark, Naza.”
“Before dark.”
- açaí: A palm that produces small, dark purple berries, harvested by climbing the tall, thin trunk to cut the fruit bunch. The pulp is pressed into a staple drink and food.
- peconha: A loop of cloth, plant fiber, or cut-up sack that binds a climber’s feet together, so the soles can press against a palm trunk, and the climber can inch upward.
The forest closed around her within ten minutes. The air under the trees was heavy and green, and it smelled of rot and rain. She walked fast with her machete swinging loose, and every fifty steps she nicked a bark mark on a trunk, a habit her father had drilled into her when she was small enough to be carried.
The clearing was where Seu Raimundo had said it would be, and the trees were better than he had promised. Four taperebá, tall and spreading, so heavy with yellow fruit that the ground beneath them was a soft sweet rot and the whole place hummed with flies. She stood in the middle of the joyous bounty.
She filled her sack from the ground first. Then she looked up at the tallest tree, where the best fruit hung in clusters at the crown and she tied her machete to her belt and began to climb.
The trunk was smooth and the first branches thick. She went up easily, twenty feet, then more, her feet finding the forks without any help from her mind. At the top the wind moved the limbs a little and the fruit swung. She stretched out along a branch toward a cluster just past her fingertips.
She heard the crack before she understood it.
For a moment there was nothing under her at all. Then there were branches whipping her face, and the ground rushing up. She hit the roots on her right side, and her leg folded under her in a way that legs are not supposed to.
For a while there was only the sound of her own breathing.
She could not stand. She tried twice and was sick the second time. By noon she had dragged herself to the trunk on her elbows and her good leg, and she lay with her back against the bark, shouting every few minutes until her voice was just a rasp. The forest took the sound and gave nothing back.
She ate one of the eggs. Then the afternoon rain came at four and lasted an hour. She pulled a sack over her head and watched water run off the leaves in strings. When the rain stopped, the light was already turning gold and then gray, and she understood that the before dark that she had promised her mother had come and gone.
Night came all at once. The insects rose in a wall of noise, and under it she could hear things moving in the leaves, small things, she encouraged herself, small things. Her leg throbbed with her heartbeat. She thought of Davi, who would be asking where she was. She thought of her father’s face. Her mind kept going back to the kitchen that morning, and her mother’s expression, and the word careful, which she had heard a thousand times and ignored it.
“Lord,” she said, aloud. “I did what she told me not to do.”
The dark did not answer. After a long time, she found she was saying the twenty-third Psalm, the way she did on Sundays at the IPM church, and when she got to the valley of the shadow she had to stop, because her throat closed. She started again from the beginning, and then again, and somewhere in the third time through she slept.
In the village, Dona Francisca stood at the water’s edge until she could no longer see the river. Her husband Euclides came back from the landing, where he had asked every boatman who passed if they had seen Nazaré. His brother Benedito came behind him with a kerosene lantern.
“We go now,” Euclides said.
“In the dark?” Benedito asked. “Through the igarapé (creek) crossing? Brother. We’d be lost, and then there would be three of us out there.”
Euclides stood with his fists closed. He was a quiet man, and in all their years Francisca had seen him weep twice. She watched his jaw work now as he looked at the black wall of trees.
“First light,” Benedito said. “I’ll be at your door. Rope, hammock, water.”
Nobody in the house slept. Davi, who was nine, crawled into his mother’s lap at midnight and asked if Naza was cold, and Francisca said she did not know. Near morning he whispered, “I’ll give her my blanket,” and she put her face in his hair so he wouldn’t see it.
She did not pray in words. She had no words. She sat on the floor of the kitchen with her back against the wall and thought about the morning, and about what she had nearly said and had not said. Now look at the results.
They left at the first gray light. Benedito carried the machete and the coil of rope; Euclides carried the hammock rolled on his shoulder and a bottle of water in each hand. They followed the old rubber trail until it forked, and then they found Nazaré’s bark marks, neat and regular.
“She remembered,” Benedito said.
“I taught her,” said Euclides, and his voice cracked on it.
They called every hundred steps and stopped to listen. Nothing called back but birds.
At the igarapé, the dark water had risen over the log crossing and ran brown and fast around the trunks. Benedito went first, shuffling his feet through the sand to warn off the stingrays, the way every child on the river learns before they learn to swim. The water came to his waist. Euclides followed with the rope tied between them. On the far bank they sat for a minute, and neither of them mentioned how risky it had been.
A little farther on, Benedito threw out a protective arm. A jararaca lay across the trail in a patch of leaf litter, its pattern so perfectly matched to the ground that Euclides would have stepped on it. They stood perfectly still. Then they went wide around it, cutting a path through the brush with the machete, and Euclides’s heart did not slow for a long time.
Later a wasp nest hung low across the trail, the size of a man’s head. They backed away and took another long detour.
It was past nine when Euclides called her name again, and a thin voice answered.
She had stopped believing anyone would come around the time the sun reached the top of the clearing. Then she heard her name, and thought it was a trick of her own mind. She heard it again and knew it was her father. She screamed back with everything she had left.
He reached her first. He dropped to his knees. He put both hands on either side of her face and held it. She saw that his eyes were red and his hands were shaking.
“Pai,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He took a breath. “I know.”
Benedito looked at the leg and made a small noise in his throat. They cut two straight branches with the machete and padded them with strips of one of her sacks to bind the leg, as gently as they could manage. She bit down on a twig while they did it. They slung the hammock from two poles and lifted her in, and then, because Nazaré insisted, Benedito picked up the second sack full of taperebá.
“You’re bringing the fruit?” her father said.
“I broke my leg for it,” Nazaré said. “Somebody’s going to eat it.” This brought forth a small grin from both men.
They got her home by dusk, crossing the igarapé with the hammock held high over their heads, and the whole village stood at the landing when they came out of the trees. Her mother did not say a word. She just put both hands on her daughter’s face, exactly as her husband had. Then she slapped Nazaré lightly on the shoulder with an open hand, once, and began to cry.
The community health agent, Seu Raimundo, looked at the leg and shook his head and gave her something for the pain. “It looks clean to me,” he said. “The doctors will tell you for sure. The IPM boat’s due Thursday.”
On Wednesday night Euclides sat down beside her hammock on the porch. It was the first time he had said more than a few words to her since the forest. He looked at his hands for a long time.
“I put you up your first tree,” he said. “You were six. I held your ankles. You laughed so hard I nearly dropped you.”
“Pai.”
“I never once thought about the day it would go wrong.” His voice thickened. “Last night I stood there and thought, this is my fault.”
Nazaré reached out and took his hand. His palm was rough as bark. “I climbed the tree, Pai. Nobody pushed me.”
“I know.” He held on to her hand. “I know that. It doesn’t help.”
They sat there while the frogs sang in the dark. Neither of them said anything else, and somehow, it was better than if they had.
The boat came on Thursday, as it did every other Thursday. It was the Boa Nova, white and blue, belonging to the big Presbyterian church in Manaus, with a little steeple painted on the side of the cabin. A volunteer doctor named Henrique, from Goiânia, a thin man with gray in his beard who had given two weeks of his vacation to the route, looked at the leg and then at her and said, “Which tree?”
“A taperebá.”
“How tall?”
“Twelve meters. Maybe fifteen.”
He whistled. “You’re lucky it’s only your leg.”
He and a nurse put her on the deck table and set her leg. It hurt worse than the fall. Nazaré held the nurse’s hand and counted in Portuguese, then in the Nheengatu* her grandmother had taught her. When it was done, the doctor wrapped the leg in plaster and told her that if she kept it clean and stayed off it, she would walk again in six or seven weeks.
“Six weeks?!,” Nazaré protested, as though he had said six years.
- Nheengatu: A Tupi-based trade language that spread across the Amazon during the colonial era and is still spoken in parts of the upper Rio Negro region. Sometimes called the “good language.”
She hated the cast. She hated the chair on the porch and the long afternoons in which Davi climbed the mango in front of her, on purpose, with a look of feigned innocence. Every morning she watched the river and asked her mother if there was anything she could do, and every morning her mother handed her a bowl of beans.
Sometimes she woke in the night with her heart racing and the feeling of the branch going out from under her. Twice she woke to her mother’s hand on her head. Once, in the gray before dawn, she asked, “Are you angry at me?”
“Yes,” Dona Francisca said. She kept stroking her hair. “I’m going to be angry for a long time. Go back to sleep.”
By the third week Nazaré could not bear the porch. When the Boa Nova tied up at the landing again, she hopped down the plank on her crutch, found the coordinator, a stout woman named Dona Lúcia with a clipboard and a pen on a string around her neck, and said, “Do you need anybody?”
Dona Lúcia looked at the cast. “For what?”
“Anything. I know every family here. I can write. I’m going crazy at home.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
The coordinator regarded her a moment longer. Then she took a second clipboard from the shelf. “Sit there,” she said, pointing at a stool by the registration table. “Name, age, what’s wrong. Write it all down. Neatly.”
By noon she had registered forty-one patients, and she had learned that the river writes its story on the people who live beside it.
A man in his fifties, a fisherman, sat down with a dishtowel wrapped around his left hand, the cloth gone brown. “Machete,” he said, a little ashamed. “Four days ago, cleaning fish.” She wrote machete laceration, palm, 4 days and watched the nurse unwrap it and go quiet at the red streaks climbing his wrist. They sent him to the doctor at once.
A girl of three had a burn up one arm from a pot of boiling water that had tipped off a cookfire. Her grandmother would not let go of her for a second. An old man named Seu Anselmo limped in, and she wrote Anselmo, 64, fall from canoe, right hip, and then he lifted his trouser leg, unasked, to show her an old scar, white and puckered, on his calf. “Jararaca, (pit viper)” he said. “Eleven years ago. We took two days getting to Manaus. I almost lost the leg.” He said it with a kind of dry pride, the way old soldiers speak of wars. “A man should look where he steps.”
“Yes, Seu Anselmo,” she said gravely.
A line of children with their shoes off came to have the sores on their feet looked at, tunga (chigoe) fleas, the nurse said, and palm spines.
And then, in the middle of the afternoon, a woman named Dona Odete came up the plank with her son, a boy of eleven, the left arm held against his chest in a sling made from a dish towel.
“What happened?” Nazaré asked, pen ready.
“Açaí,” the boy said. He did not look at her. “I was climbing for the bunch. The peconha slipped.”
She wrote Odete, 11, fall from palm, left forearm.
“I told him,” his mother said. Her voice was thin and tight. “Every day, I tell him. Be careful, be careful. He doesn’t listen.” And then, to Nazaré’s surprise, she began to cry, right there at the table, with her hand pressed against her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just so tired of being afraid.”
Nazaré’s pen stopped moving.
She put down the pen and reached over and took the woman’s hand. “He’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s a clean break. Look.” She tapped her own leg, where the cast had been. “I did this too. Fell twelve meters. But look now.” She turned to the boy. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“It stops,” she said. “I promise it stops.”
When all the wounded had gone, she sat for a while with her hands in her lap. Dona Lúcia, passing by with a stack of charts, paused and looked at her. She did not say anything. She put one hand briefly on Nazaré’s shoulder and went on.
For two months she rode the route on the Boa Nova, the cast came off and was replaced with an elastic wrap. The leg underneath was thin and pale and stiff. She walked with a limp at first and then with a stride. Every stop she knew a little more about the boat, the crew and their mission. She learned to stock the pharmacy shelves in order, to read the doctor’s handwriting, to count out pills, to hold a light steady during a tooth pulling without flinching. She learned to wrap the blood pressure cuff and read the numbers.
And she wanted more. She wanted to be on deck when the lines were thrown. She wanted to be one of the crew who ate at the long table in the evening and slept in the narrow bunks. She wanted a wage. The volunteers rotated, but the crew, the pilot and the deckhands and the cook and the two aides, were paid something by the church, and she had seen the envelopes passed out at the end of the month. She had done the arithmetic in her head. She knew exactly what it would mean to her mother’s jar.
She told no one. She said it only once, to God, on the stern at the end of a long day with the sun going orange over the water. If it’s possible, she prayed. If it isn’t, I’ll keep doing this for free.
Dona Lúcia found her on the deck three days after the wrap had come off for good.
“The auxiliary position is open,” she said. “Registration, pharmacy, the deck when we dock. It pays modestly. You’d live on board during route weeks. The pastor has to approve it, and your parents.” She paused. “I told him you’re the best registrar we’ve had in three years. I also told him how you were with the boy with the broken arm and his mother.”
Nazaré smiled but did not trust her voice. She nodded.
Her mother was harder than the pastor. “A boat,” Dona Francisca said at the kitchen table, with her arms folded. “On the river. You want to work on the river after you nearly died in the forest.”
“I didn’t die, Mãe.”
“You nearly did.”
Euclides had said nothing during the whole conversation. He looked at the worn table. Then he said quietly, “She’s ridden that boat two months and hasn’t fallen off yet.”
Francisca turned and looked at him.
“The doctors treat her like a person,” he said. “The church pays.” He cleared his throat. “She wants it, Francisca.”
For a long moment Francisca looked at her daughter. Then she unfolded her arms and said, “You wear shoes on that deck. You stay off the rails.”
“Yes, Mãe.”
“And you call when there’s a signal.”
“Yes.”
“And you eat.”
“Mãe.”
“I mean it.”
On the first Sunday after she signed on, the family went to the little wooden church at the edge of the village, one of the outreach churches in the Amazon. Afterward, at the table, Euclides asked to say a few words.
He folded his hands and shut his eyes. “Lord,” he said, and stopped, and began again. “We asked you to bring her back, and you brought her back. We thought that was the whole of what we were asking for.” He swallowed. “You gave us the leg, and the boat, and the work. I didn’t see it. I think I’m only starting to see it. You took the worst night we ever had and you made a road out of it. Thank you. Amen.”
“Amen,” said Francisca, softly. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
Davi, who had been quiet all through the prayer, looked at his sister. “Are you going to climb the mango tomorrow?”
Nazaré laughed, and it surprised her how easily it came. “Maybe the little one,” she said.
The night before she left, her mother came and sat on the edge of the hammock, and for a while neither of them said anything. The river made its small lapping sounds below the house.
“When I was your age,” Dona Francisca said, “I wanted to do everything my brothers did.”
Nazaré turned her head.
“My mother said no. Every time. I swore I’d never do that to a daughter of mine.” Her mouth twisted. “So, I said yes. And that day, when you left with the eggs, I almost said no, and I didn’t, because I remembered. And then you didn’t come home.” She looked at her hands. “I sat on the kitchen floor and I thought, I was wrong. I should have been like my mother.”
“Mãe, you weren’t wrong.”
“I don’t know if I was. I still don’t know.” Francisca breathed out. “But I know what I’m going to do now. You’re going on that boat and I’m going to let you go, because the alternative is to live in a box. And I know what a box is like.”
Nazaré sat up and put her arms around her mother’s neck. Dona Francisca held on hard, harder than she needed to, for a long time.
At the end of the first month the envelope came. Nazaré set it on the kitchen table in front of her mother without opening it. Francisca looked at it, then at her daughter, and pushed it back across the table. “Take out what you need. The rest goes in the jar.”
Nazaré took out enough for a pair of boots and pushed the envelope back.
The Boa Nova left at dawn the next day, white and blue in the mist, her little steeple catching the first light. On the foredeck a tall girl in new boots coiled the rope the way she had been shown. On the landing behind her, a woman with her hands folded stood watching until the boat was a distant shape on the brown water. She was still standing there when Davi came down the path to tell her that breakfast was ready.
Author’s Note
The Presbyterian Church in Manaus (Portuguese: Igreja Presbiteriana de Manaus, or IPM) is a major Reformed denomination in the Amazon region of Brazil, also known as the International Presbyterian Church in Manaus. and focuses on extensive outreach to remote Amazonian communities. IPM operates a network of approximately 6,000 members across its main campus in Manaus and 144 additional churches throughout the city and along the Amazon River tributaries. Its mission is distinguished by transport boats which take people to Sunday church services and five medical mission boats that provide doctor, dental, and pharmacy services to isolated villages, alongside church planting and leadership training initiatives.
Relevant Scripture
Humans are described as God’s “workmanship,” created in Christ Jesus specifically for good works prepared in advance. (Ephesians 2:10)
God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea. (Psalm 46:1-2)
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)
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