Seeking heaven in the stubborn earth
Page 7 of 7 -- Beyond the church, near the scorched plot, a farmer's shack held a scattering of tools: a hoe, a hammer, a post-hole digger, and a broom. Scallions grew in pots on a table. Mango, papaya, sweet peppers, and passion fruit rose from nearby soil.
|
ADVERTISEMENT
|  |
A man approached, his sloped shoulders covered in a worn Parmalat soccer jersey, number 9. The man, Luis Nazario Pereira, moved easily, comfortable on the land. Pereira said he had spent many of his 30 years in Manaus, cutting a living from the seething sawmills. Then he married, and, after his wife gave birth to their first child, came here to stake his own claim.
He had cleared the land simply: cut the small trees, then the big. Waited 60 days, then burnt it all. Cut the big ruins into pieces, then burnt it again.
Five years before, drought and runaway slash fires combined to burn millions of acres of savanna and rain forest in Roraima. Posters had since been hung in schoolrooms to warn of fire danger, in hopes that children, at least, would teach their parents not to burn fields.
Pereira fingered the leaves of a plant that would grow pineapples in six months, and a palm, which would bear fruit in six years, and a second man, old and slight, arrived. He carried an empty white sack and offered a wide, gummy smile.
Pereira followed this man, Basilio Almeida, his father-in-law, across the charred field and into the high stand of forest. A flock of birds chattered above. A nut fell to the leaf-covered floor.
The men climbed aboard two wooden canoes and paddled beneath low branches into a still creek. It opened onto a cove, a backwater of the Ro Amajau.
Almeida stopped to check a net and withdrew one silver fish, the size of a hand. Then the two men angled their canoes onto the river, tracing a circular route back to Canauini. A stingray, caught on a trap line, floated on the surface, alive but barely.
Almeida, at 70 a father of 21 children, crouched tight, his paddle knifing into the graying flow. He sought someone to watch over his people, someone to guard this homestead carved from the tangle of jungle.
"Luis is my son-in-law. But I see him as a son. My son," Almeida said. "He is a little short, but he works hard. He has two kids, but they are never sick, because he provides for them."
An hour later, after night had fallen, Almeida donned pressed trousers, a plaid shirt, and loafers and walked alone toward the Assembly of God church.
The huts of the village huddled in weak, shaking light. In one home, a child wailed as a hand rose and fell and, to the cadence of a shouting adult, delivered blows.
Almeida stepped into the one-room chapel, where ceiling fans turned beneath a tin roof and unshuttered windows invited the croaks and calls of night. A crowd of more than 20, some women, most children, took seats on hard pews. A girl in a polka-dot dress drifted to sleep and, guided by the gentle arms of an adult, slumped to the concrete floor.
Arao, a timid 11-year-old boy, rose to lead a song.
Almeida reached into the air and joined others in their shout: "Glory to God!"
The preacher, a stocky man with a tightly-knotted tie, took to the pulpit and talked of fish and fruit and the richness of the earth. God, the preacher said, was a good farmer.
"Glory to God!"
The preacher criticized outsiders, those who lectured against slash-burning, who dared to tell these people how to live in this place. He promised that Armageddon was on its way, that one day all this land would burn.
"Glory to God!" 
