The Burning Hill

by A. D. Flint

  “That’s a waste of time,” Torquato said. “You won’t get a signal out here.”

  “You don’t have a phone inside?” Eliane asked Vilson’s mother. Goretti shook her head.

  Vilson appeared from the shadows of the trees by the cattle shed and followed them cautiously. The floodlights came on as they passed between the house and cattle shed, illuminating the corner of the field where Torquato had parked his pickup.

  Vilson hung back as Jake dropped the tailgate of the pickup and Eliane and Goretti helped heave Torquato into the back. His jaw was clenched and he was soaked in sweat, his leg blowing up, the trouser leg already too tight to roll up.

  Jake climbed into the back of the pickup, making a pillow for Torquato with a sack of animal feed. “Give me your knife,” he said.

  Torquato tipped up his hip, allowing Jake to pull the knife from the sheath tucked into his waistband. Jake slit his faded jeans to the knee. Torquato’s lower leg was distended, a mottled, purple–black balloon, the skin shiny and tight around the two puncture wounds. It looked like it was about to burst. Watery blood and pus dribbled from the punctures. Torquato looked down at his leg and gasped, his head thumping back on a feed sack. He put Jake’s hand on the belt tourniquet. “You’ve got to keep this tight. If I pass out you have to remember to undo it for a few seconds every ten minutes, but then tighten it again. Understand?”

  “Sure,” Jake said, undoing it and pulling it tighter before retying it. Torquato cursed with the pain, his eyes wild and rolling. But he nodded. “That’s good, it has to be like that.”

  “Okay, let’s get going,” Jake said to Goretti.

  “I can’t drive,” Goretti said.

  “You don’t have to help him now anyway,” Vilson said.

  “You don’t get it,” the farmer gasped. “You don’t understand what’s going on here at all.”

  “I understand plenty,” said Vilson, but his defiance wasn’t cutting it. He could see his mother wrapping her skinny arms about herself, her shoulders hunched, staring at her feet.

  Torquato’s body stiffened, agony wracking him, the air rasping in and out of his chest. He took a moment to gather himself. “If she won’t tell you, I’ll put you out of your misery. Your mother doesn’t want you elbowing your way in to stake a claim here. She already has a kid to do that.”

  Vilson’s eyes widened in disbelief.

  “That’s right, a son. My son. And right now he’s lying in a hospital bed.”

  “What happened?” Goretti cried out. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine, all things considered. He fell in the rodeo and ruined his arm. He will probably never ride again. I came to take you to him.”

  Goretti’s hands went to her face.

  “You had a child with him?” Vilson whispered, horror dragging his jaw down. Jake could see that she wasn’t listening. She looked back at the farmhouse and then at the fields and the cattle shed. She was trying to think. Trying to calculate.

  “For the love of God,” Torquato gasped, the pain squeezing him. “Let’s go. The gringo will have to drive.”

  “Where’s your car key?” Jake asked, clambering from the back of the pickup.

  “Under the passenger mat.”

  Jake searched beneath the dusty rubber mat. It wasn’t there. He searched the driver’s side. He searched the dark recesses that the dim interior light couldn’t reach with Torquato’s torch and with his hands.

  “I can’t find it.”

  “In the ignition?”

  “Not there.”

  “It’s got to be there somewhere.” Torquato’s voice was cracking, panicked. “Meu Deus, my eyes. My sight is going. It’s the venom.”

  “I’ll have to change the tyre on the Polo and we can go in that,” Jake said.

  Goretti was ahead of him, reaching to take Eliane’s car key as Torquato pulled it from his jeans pocket. She backed away as Jake held his hand out for it.

  “Where are the papers?” she asked Torquato.

  His breaths were coming in painful sobs now. “What the hell – are you – talking about?”

  “The papers for the farm. I should know, in case…”

  “Not even a corpse – ah – and the vultures – are already circling.”

  “Tell me where they are.”

  “In my cabinet – third drawer down.”

  “Those are just the old papers.”

  “You went through my stuff?” He gasped. “That cabinet is locked.”

  “Where are the new papers?”

  “With the lawyer, woman – ah – they are doing their stuff.”

  She was a different person now. “Are doing?” she said, her head going still like the snake before it strikes. “You said it was all done. Done a good while back.”

  “It’s lawyers – they hold stuff up with their bullshit – but it will be done. Ah – I swear.”

  Goretti shook her head slowly. “You would cheat your own blood?”

  “He’ll be taken care of.” He was panting now with the pain, his eyes screwed shut.

  “He will? Even though he has no value now that he can’t ride?”

  “Don’t be stupid, woman – he’s my son.”

  She looked at him and then at the car key, holding it out in her open palm. Her fingers closed over it and she flung it off into the darkness of the thick scrub bordering the field.

  “No,” Eliane yelled.

  The insects filled the silence that followed.

  “What’s happening?” Torquato rasped.

  No one answered immediately.

  “She threw away the key,” Jake said after a few moments.

  Torquato sighed and his breathing evened out, his head dropping back, body relaxing. “Then she has killed me.”

  Chapter 34

  Jake

  The floodlights went off on the timer. Vilson’s mother didn’t move.

  “Please can you turn them back on and keep them on?” Jake asked her.

  She didn’t move for a long moment, before shuffling off to the cattle shed and lighting the place up again. She returned and perched on the shiny tiles of the veranda, head in hands. Jake watched as Vilson went to her, but he stopped short. Unsure. He shuffled from foot to foot and paced around in the dusty sand.

  Jake took the shotgun from Eliane, pumped the remaining shells from it and pocketed them. He thought for a moment about the safest place for it, before swinging it by the barrel and flinging it off into the brush.

  “I’m going to change the tyre on your car,” he said to Eliane. He left Vilson standing by his mother as Eliane went off to start searching with Torquato’s torch amongst the thick, tall grass and fireflies out where Goretti had flung the key for the pickup.

  Eliane’s Polo had a jack but Jake had to search around in the cattle shed before he found some planks of wood to support it on the soft sand beneath the car.

  When he got the wheel clear of the sand he undid the bolts and then broke off to check on Torquato. He climbed into the back of the pickup, loosening the tourniquet, counting out the seconds and then retying it. Torquato moaned with the pain, his breathing rapid and laboured. The moan dropped away to become a faint whimper every few breaths, eyes staring blankly.

  Jake got the damaged wheel off and put the spare on. He put a plank of wood beneath the tyre before lowering it, to give it purchase. It wasn’t fully inflated but it would have to do.

  Checking on Torquato again, the sweat had dried up on his skin but his shirt was still soaked and he was beginning to shiver. Jake went to the farmhouse and found a cheap, gaudy blanket on the worn sofa in the TV room.

  Torquato stirred as Jake laid it over him, his face filled with fear, eyes blank and unfocused. He reached out, searching for Jake. When he touched his forearm he gripped it, pulling Jake closer. “My Toninho is a good son,” he said in a whisper. “He really could have made it. The doctors say he might recover but I’ve seen injuries like that before – his shoulder will never be the sam
e again. Life is cruel.”

  He broke off with a series of painful, gasping breaths. Jake tried to quieten him but Torquato shook his head, insistent on continuing. “I have another son, older than Toninho, full of big ideas that his mother stuffed into his empty head before she died.” He told Jake that the son had left home at nineteen, travelling from farm to farm providing a service branding and castrating bulls. The son had said he would show them all, expand his business, become a big shot. “I know that beneath all the boasting, he is just a son trying to impress his father,” Torquato said. “It breaks my heart because it is never too long before he is back with his head down and his hand held out for another loan. And now there is another who is coming with his hand out.”

  “Vilson only wants to know his mother,” Jake said gently. “He wants nothing else. I promise you that.”

  Torquato seemed not to hear. “Anyone who is not a son of mine will get not a scrap. There are no scraps to spare, gringo. Do you understand?”

  Jake felt no desire to add to the farmer’s pain. The man was dying. “Sure,” he said.

  Torquato’s grip relaxed a little and he let out a sigh. Relief.

  “I’ve got to help Eliane search for the car key,” Jake said to him.

  “You’ll come back, yes?”

  “I will.”

  He joined the search with Eliane, breaking off every ten minutes to attend to the tourniquet.

  “This is useless,” he said to Eliane after an hour. “We’re never going to find the key without daylight.”

  When he went back to Torquato the next time, the leg had swelled even more, purple veins streaking away from the blackened flesh, the skin shiny and grotesque. Torquato’s breathing was shallow and rapid. His unseeing eyes opened for a moment. “Is that you, gringo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t go this time,” he said, his hand moving weakly.

  “Okay, I won’t leave you.”

  Jake laid a hand on Torquato’s shoulder and his eyes closed and his breathing evened out. Jake thought about trying to look for the car key again with Eliane, futile as it was. But every time he moved, Torquato stirred and put his hand out, and was only quiet again when Jake laid his hand back on his shoulder.

  Another hour passed, probably more, and Eliane kept on searching the undergrowth. Jake was staring out at the stars in the eastern corner of the sky, trying to decide whether it might be turning a shade lighter than the deep black that was splashed with brilliant constellations. Torquato’s breathing started to catch in his throat.

  His fingers curled and reached out in turns. He no longer seemed to have the strength to move his arms. His shallow breaths were rattling in and out now. Eyes open. Fearful.

  He struggled over several breaths to get words out, choking and gasping. He groped around with a hand, managing to find Jake’s wrist. “Please.”

  Jake held his hand with its thick calluses. Torquato squeezed with surprising strength and then relaxed his grip. The tension went from his face, eyes closing. His breathing was quieter now. But it was becoming shallower and shallower until, finally, it faded away to nothing. His chest was still. His suffering was over.

  Jake let go of his hand, laying it back down, and pulled the blanket over his face.

  Goretti was still perched on the veranda, clutching herself, Vilson still hovering awkwardly nearby. It seemed to Jake that the few metres separating mother and son were impossible to bridge. He got out of the pickup and called out to Goretti, “You can turn those lights off now, he’s gone.”

  She stood and crossed herself and went to the cattle shed. Vilson didn’t move until the floodlights went out. As Jake’s eyes struggled to adjust, he could only just make out the murky shape of Goretti coming back and going into the house. A few moments later he saw Vilson follow her. And then it was just the stars again, the fireflies and the torchlight as Eliane made her way back.

  Jake waited for some emotion to hit. Any emotion. But nothing came. Instead, the space filled with a tiredness that dragged on his limbs.

  Chapter 35

  Vilson

  In all that time while the farmer lay in the pickup, with so much he wanted to ask his mother, Vilson had not managed to ask anything. And his mother hadn’t had the look of someone who wanted to talk.

  This son that the farmer had spoken of, it was like a punch in the stomach. His mother’s son. He could not even make a picture of the boy in his mind. He would not. The boy did not exist.

  The dream that had kept him living and breathing since he was a child was unravelling. He had to put it back together. He had to be the man.

  When he followed her inside the house from the darkness, he found her sitting at the small kitchen table, staring blankly at the cheap plastic tablecloth. A wash of low, white light was coming from a fluorescent tube beneath a kitchen unit. Insects blatted into the light and the walls were mottled with the squished bodies of others, along with the dusty marks from the shoe that had swatted them.

  Vilson pulled out a chair to sit, the metal legs scraping on the tiled floor.

  His mother put her head in her hands. A tear splashed on the plastic tablecloth. He didn’t understand. She had killed the farmer by throwing away the car key. And now she was crying?

  “You are free of him.”

  “Free?” she said, looking at him directly for the first time. “I made this my home. This should be the home for my Toninho.”

  “I am your son too.”

  “And there is another son, Toninho’s half-brother. He will try to throw us off the farm. Others in the family will help him. They will all want to put a hand on this place.”

  “We can go to Toninho. I will help you bring him back here,” Vilson said. He had difficulty even saying the kid’s name. But he would do this thing for his mother. She would see that he was only there to make things right.

  “I cannot leave here,” his mother said. “Not for anything. You ask your lawyer friend – if I am here in the house I at least have some rights.”

  “Then I will go get him and I will bring him back. We can face this thing all together.” He would have to do it. Rework his dream. Make room for this kid. This parasite.

  “Yes, you must get him – you are a good boy. But you cannot stay. It would only make things worse. There is nothing for you here, do you understand?” She was looking away now, her eyes unfocused. Looking into the future, to a place that Vilson was scared he didn’t inhabit.

  “No, Mãe,” Vilson said. “All those letters – you promised me that we would be together one day.” He couldn’t let himself believe that the letters were the last real part of his mother, he couldn’t let himself believe that she had been twisted into the woman in front of him. “You said we would be together on a farm. It has to be this farm.”

  “Letters, letters, I don’t know what you mean when you talk about these letters.”

  “The letters you wrote, Mãe. I kept every single one since you went away.”

  “How could I write you letters? I cannot read or write.”

  “You – you got someone else to write them.” Vilson was reeling. “You told them what to write and they wrote them for you.”

  She shook her head. “There were no letters. Someone has lied to you.”

  Vilson stood. He didn’t hear the legs of the chair scraping this time. The blood was singing in his ears. He felt as if he was about to faint.

  Someone had lied. It was all a lie.

  Chapter 36

  Jake

  The day was coming in quickly. The sun hadn’t yet risen but they could see across the field now to a low, shabby building on the other side. A ragged line of workers was emerging to stand by the stained whitewash of the wall, looking in their direction.

  Jake followed Eliane across the coarse grass, cropped close by cattle. The workers shifted from foot to foot. They would have heard the commotion the previous evening. They would have heard the shots. And yet this place had stayed dark all ni
ght. The faces of the men were drawn, their bodies too lean. They were hungry. And overworked.

  “Senhor Torquato died last night,” Eliane told them. “He was bitten by a snake. If you don’t want to stay here any more you can go.”

  There was no celebration. The men took sideways glances at one another, confused, as if they suspected a trick. They did not look like men just freed.

  “He didn’t pay you any wages, did he?” Eliane asked.

  A couple of them shook their heads.

  “He gave us food and lodging,” one of the others piped up. “He looked after us when we got sick.”

  “He was treating you as little more than slaves,” Jake said. “But he has gone. There is no one to hold you here now.”

  “But this is where we live,” the same one said, “where we work. We have no place else to go.”

  “You can go home,” Eliane said. “Back to your families.”

  “I am from Pará,” said another. “I don’t have the money to get back there.” Pará was a state way up in the north, days away. “I haven’t seen my family for years,” he said. It seemed as though the thought had only just come to him.

  “Just sit tight,” said Eliane. “The ILO will come, and they will get you home.”

  They seemed far from reassured by that, murmuring and whispering to one another, shaking heads.

  “You haven’t done anything wrong,” Eliane said. “The ILO only want to help. They will protect you.”

  There was nothing else she could do. She was flustered as they walked back toward the field by the farmhouse to look for her car key again. “I don’t really know what I was expecting,” she said, “but it definitely wasn’t that.”

  “Looks like they’ve been here so long that it’s all they know. That probably makes even good change scary.”

  “Maybe they’d have been better off if we’d just left them alone.”

  “You don’t mean that?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like we did a good thing right now. It’s such a mess. But I’m so tired I’m maybe not thinking straight.”