I went back to work in the fields because I wanted everything to go back to how it used to be. I reckoned that farming was the only way to remember my father without feeling so much pain. I followed my brother down the trails to the fields, and sure enough, plowing the land, planting and harvesting, mending fences, all that hard work began healing me of the pain of my father’s absence, just as it had healed me of my sadness after I moved in with Tobias. The same way it had healed me when I became a widow and lived by myself by the Santo Antônio: work is what kept me alive.
