Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

He didn’t thank me. He was a man, after all, why should he be grateful?

perhaps because I was always challenging them, never bowing to the authority they believed they enjoyed. That’s how I used to be. But living with that man, between the crumbling walls of his hovel, I felt like an outsider, unsure of myself.

My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.

If there’s one thing I’d learned by then, it’s that you never accept someone else’s protection. If I didn’t take care of myself, no one else would.

Her anger revealed, too, the wounds in her soul—of which she did not speak. Wounds slow to heal, those which, when they come to mind, we wave away so we can move on.

They returned older in the flesh, granted, with aches and pains that would persist for weeks or years, perhaps for the rest of their lives, but their eyes shone as though lit by candles, and that was enough to tell us that they did what must be done.

They sold Água Negra to a couple with two children; they sold the entire property, including our mud houses, including our very bodies as furniture.

That’s how it used to be; but fear travels across time. It has always been part of our story.

The fear of leaving your house, the fear of displeasing those people, the fear of simply being. The fear that they don’t like you, they don’t like what you do, they don’t like your smell, your hair, the color of your skin. The fear that they don’t like your children, your songs, your sense of brotherhood.