Page 2 of Girl in the Water
“Best do it, then.” Her mother pushed her heavy braid of hair off her shoulders and gave Daniela a big spoonful of food, a third of what they had.
Later, when the rice was fully cooked, they’d split the rest. Ana always made sure most of the food went to Daniela, always had a few extra bites for her when she came home from school, unless all their pots sat empty.
Daniela chewed the half-crunchy rice to make it last longer, but eventually had to swallow. She drew a deep breath.Now.
I want to be a teacher. Say it.
She opened her mouth. Then she looked at the thin layer of food at the bottom of the pot her mother stirred. Shame tightened her throat. They had no money for her to go away to learn. If she said something, she’d just make her mother sad.
So she tucked her dreams of higher learning away with dreams of a full belly.Maybe someday. Maybe we’ll have more money in the dry season.
She climbed into her hammock with her books, which she was lucky to have, and sank into a story that matched none of Pula’s tales about the Portuguese colonists.
Daniela’s grandmother hadn’t been a slave, but her great-grandmother, Ona, had been, on a rubber plantation.
Ona had told the tales to Pula. And Pula had told them all to Daniela. A few of the tales were happy. Other tales were dark. And some were downright gruesome, the kind of stories that scared her more than the night jungle.
“Bad things happen. Then good things happen,” Pula once said, not long before fever took her. “They take turns like the rainy season and the dry season.”
“What do we do?” Daniela had asked, hoping for a trick to escape the bad things. Pula had many tricks—usually jungle cures—to escape all kinds of unpleasantness, like a bad cough or a case of worms.
But that time, Pula said, “We endure.”
Memories of her grandmother’s toothless smile filled Daniela’s head. The spicy scent of cooking food comforted her, and the sounds of the popping fire and the rain on the roof lulled her to sleep.
The sound of whispers woke her. For a moment, she blinked at the entwined couple in her mother’s larger hammock—the missionary’s broad frame on top. His white skin glowed in the dim light of the hut. As much as he preached about clothes and modesty, with Ana he didn’t mind being naked.
Daniela silently turned the other way and let her thoughts drift.
Her earliest memories were quiet sighs, muffled grunts, and soft laughter from her mother’s hammock. Men always seemed happy when they were shoving their sticker. And they were mellow afterwards. They often had a kind word for Daniela on their way out, sometimes even a piece of candy from their pockets.
For as long as Daniela could remember, men visited the bamboo hut she shared with her mother.
In the dry season, when someone came, Daniela skipped down to the Içana to look for coconuts that sometimes floated down from the jungle. She wished she could do that now, even if sometimes one of the bigger boys took what she found. Of course, at other times, those same boys might give her a fish they caught by hand.
On lazy days when she had nothing else to do, she could sit by the river for hours and watch the boys fish. If they were in a good mood, they might even let her try for eel. Those were the best days, even if the big river eels were too powerful, and she could rarely wrest them from the water.
But this was not the season for eels. Yet when she still couldn’t sleep, she quietly slipped from the hut anyway.
She paddled through the flooded village, each hut a little island. She headed for the largest.
Many people had stands at the market in the dry season and sold straight from their boats in the rainy season, but only Pedro had a store. He also had the biggest boat in the village. And he had the largest hut, larger than the schoolhouse. He had nine children and three grandchildren, and even the missionary said that Pedro had been blessed.
Pula used to say Pedro could sell dry land to fish.
As soon as Daniela scrambled out of her canoe, Pedro popped his head out the open door. “The store needs sweeping.”
So she swept. And then she arranged all the fruit on the shelves in a pretty pattern as Pedro liked, making sure to put hard fruit on the bottom, soft fruit on top.
When she finished, Pedro said, “I need you to fix a hole in the roof in the back. Come stand on my shoulders.”
They went back to where rain dripped down on tin cans of cooking oil. She climbed Pedro’s back, braced her bare feet on his shoulders, and with her small fingers wove the palm fronds back into place as fast as a bird weaving a nest.
When she slipped back down, Pedro caught a closer look at her. “Why is your cheek red?”
Daniela hung her head, glad that in the dimmer light of their hut, her mother hadn’t noticed the mark. She didn’t want to add to Ana’s troubles.
Pedro huffed. “The missionary?”
