The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  “Those hypocrites from the north tell us not to develop our lands because we are hurting the Indians and the animals. Who the hell are they to say this during a recession?”

  He laughed and threw up his hands.

  “I’ll tell you who…they are the ones who sold their forests, skinned all their animals, and slaughtered their natives. That’s who. The North American colonies were built on blood-drenched lands.”

  Father St. John looked at his feet but didn’t budge from his seat. He had told Gustavo that the massacres of his ancestors were more reason to fight against massacres of the present—not less.

  “The rest of the West has grown rich from their lands,” the senator argued. “Now it’s our turn.”

  The chamber resounded with applause from the floor, making him even more bold.

  “If the Amazon is the lungs of the world,” the senator shouted, “then the world must pay us to breathe!”

  One by one, senators stood to cheer and bruise their palms with clapping.

  “We’ve lost,” Father St. John whispered.

  He wasn’t wrong—the code amendments passed with a majority in both legislative houses—but before the ballots were cast, a congressman stepped up to the lectern microphone unexpectedly. The former environment minister looked out at the gallery in a shocked daze.

  “Something terrible has happened,” he said into the microphone.

  Only a respectful stranger, like this man, would refer to them as José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo. To everyone who knew and loved them, they were Zé and Maria. That was how the couple had introduced themselves to church members in the state of Pará after they started receiving death threats in 2008. The land that they rented from the government for sustainable harvesting was under attack from illegal loggers and charcoal burners. Members of the church hired a lawyer to file official complaints to government agencies on their behalf, but police protection was refused.

  Zé wouldn’t run from his home, and he wouldn’t back down. He talked to anyone who would listen about the value of the rainforest and what was being done to it. He took pictures of all the trucks carrying off felled logs from burning forest and emailed them to police and reporters alike. Just last year, he was invited to speak at a TEDx conference and had his speech posted to YouTube. But as media attention spread across Brazil and beyond to the international community, Zé and Maria became bigger targets.

  And so it was Zé and Maria who were sprayed with fifteen bullets. It was Zé and Maria who would be laid out in matching coffins with white polyester silk framing their faces to hide the ragged holes where assassins had cut off their ears as proof for payment.

  “I’d like to call for an investigation into the double homicide—” the senator started to say, but a roar of booing from the floor drowned out the rest of his words.

  Father St. John’s jaw hung open as the rest of the upper gallery audience looked at one another in shock. Gustavo saw a familiar face, the Greenpeace director sitting six seats to the right, shake his head in sadness but not surprise. Amid all the commotion, the Senate called a recess. Several people in the upper gallery filed out and took to the stairs. One journalist making his way to the aisle whispered congratulations for Gustavo’s Nobel award.

  Read one of your poems at my funeral, Zé had said to Gustavo. The one about my beautiful Majesty.

  Father St. John swallowed something of a moan and said humanity should thank God for all the dirt of the earth. Without that dirt, the faces of the dead would be unbearable.

  “There will be more,” he warned. “And the Belo Monte dam proposal will get approved next week.”

  And as collateral damage, a vast amount of rainforest would be submerged underwater, including the traditional homeland of the Kayapo people. Gustavo leaned over the gallery’s metal railing, staring daggers at the eighty-one senators directly below.

  “Fifteen bullets,” he said. “Fifteen. All the fingers on three hands.”

  Of course the number of bullets wasn’t for the newly dead but for the still living. They were for him, Father St. John, and all the others who resisted exploitation by the rich and powerful.

  “Our enemies hire assassins to do their devil’s work,” Father St. John said.

  Gustavo continued to study the men below, stripping himself down to his single, dogged mission of destroying the destroyers.

  “And they will never see the inside of a jail. But you would, Gustavo.”

  Gustavo finally turned to look at the priest. His friend must have seen past his sickened soul, straight to the murderous intent lodged at its core like a pit.

  A plump white man approached Gustavo in the aisle. All of him looked white—his hair, his beard, his linen shirt, and the undersides of his arms and stout legs. Only the red burn on his face and the tops of his arms had color.

  “I’m with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” the man said, extending his hand. “And I’ve read all your poetry collections.”

  Gustavo ignored the other man’s open palm.

  “Today was…one tragedy after another,” the man conceded, putting his hand back at his side. “But isn’t that why we need poets? Tragedy is your trade.”

  Light from the domed silver ceiling flashed in his wireframe glasses.

  “And the Amazon isn’t the only tragedy, the only battleground of climate change,” he said. “There is another for you to write about…”

  Only the environments that were most hostile to human civilization, the Amazon and the Arctic, had been spared from its massive destruction—until now. The white man offered to take Gustavo on an ocean voyage to show him melting icebergs, drowned polar bears, beaches littered with trash and starved murres, abandoned Inuit villages, and rising sea levels. He handed over a business card, which Father St. John accepted as Gustavo remained motionless.

  “Dr. Charles Brodie,” the priest read aloud. “University of California, Berkeley. The Turner Foundation Endowed Chair Professor of—”

  “Just call me Charlie,” the man offered.

  After he left, Father St. John pocketed his card.

  “That kind of voyage would grant you an American visa with no questions asked,” he whispered. “An escape from all this—”

  They were interrupted by a young man walking toward them from the gallery. He stopped in the aisle and bowed in deference as he introduced himself in Portuguese as the Brazilian bureau chief for the New York Times.

  “I’m mainly covering the Petrobras oil scandal and the impeachment proceedings,” he admitted, “but the forest code interests me personally. I’m trying to build a story that will gain enough readership to publish.”

  Gustavo waited silently. He didn’t have any advice on how to make Brazilians care.

  “A statement from you would mean a great deal,” the man explained. “Perhaps enough to make a difference.”

  Gustavo only wished to be left alone to grieve for Zé and Maria and stew in hatred, but he knew these selfish activities achieved nothing. He rose and nodded to the bureau chief. As they headed for the stairs together, another journalist followed them, armed with a pencil and notepad. Yet another pulled out his cellphone and started recording video as they reached the Senate chamber floor.

  A few of the senators had left for the break, but many remained to chat or answer emails on their laptops. Gustavo spotted the rural bloc senator in a large group of cohorts. His face was a caricature of competence and fraternity as they showered him with congratulations on his speech. When the senator locked eyes with Gustavo, his mask fell away in his surprise. Gustavo stepped up to the microphone with a look that said, Now it is my turn. More and more journalists gathered below him.

  Gustavo described the aftertaste of a poisoned river: the bitter metal of mercury and the sour burn of pesticides. The taste, and the floating fish, only came after your children had already drunk their fill. Gustavo described acres of smoking ash that had once been verdant forests nois
y with animals. The death of the forest was also the death of life for hunter-gatherers like the Wayãpi and harvesters like Zé and Maria.

  He lifted the Walking Dead List in one hand and described a pile of bones. If he were to reach in, he might pull out the jawbone of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun who taught sustainable farming to the rural poor renting federal land. She was shot with all six bullets of a revolver from a gunman hired by a rancher. The jawbone was still and silent, no longer giving voice to their cause.

  Reaching in again, Gustavo might pull out a femur from one of the “root collectors” who illegally cut down and burned the forest. These men were rarely the ones who profited. Some were easier to kill and bury in shallow graves. In death, they joined the dead zones of forest they had burned.

  Before reading off the names of his list, Gustavo thought of the senator from the rural bloc.

  “Meus amigos,” he said, slapping the list over his heart.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Escape

  Amapá, Brazil

  April 3, 2019

  THE FIRST THING Gustavo remembered in that small stretch of wretched time was anger—his usual kind, which is to say nothing of the blinding rage that came later. It was the road sign that caused it, the one along the drive from Wayãpi lands to the frontier town of Pedra Branca do Amapari. The sign stated that the lands were protected, but what was stated was not the reality.

  The southern half of the Wayãpi’s designated territory lay within the RENCA reserve, which housed the world’s largest remaining forest as well as deposits of gold, manganese, iron, and copper. In 2017, Brazil’s president tried to abolish the reserve’s protection but was luckily, blessedly, blocked by a federal judge. That same year, an illegal mine was shut down a mile from a Wayãpi village. Several years later, the fight was still the same.

  “Our warriors have guns like the Brazilians,” Gustavo’s twin brother, Tuír, called out.

  He sat in the back seat of Father St. John’s jeep, blinking with the wind and pulling long strands of hair from his eyes.

  “We have bows and poison-tipped arrows. We are brave and will fight to the death!”

  Gustavo sighed. Yes, the Wayãpi men were brave, but the rifles the government had given them were decades old and their bows weren’t real, not like the Grandfather People made them. Father St. John said that the government had many methods to keep Indigenous villages under control. This particular method started with gifts from the modern world: matches that saved a family from the tedious chore of starting a fire with a spark; manufactured cloth that saved them from having to grow cotton, spin it into yarn, dye it with urucu, and weave it into fabric; rifles with bullets—but only in exchange for their bows and arrows.

  Villages grew dependent on these gifts as their traditional ways of survival were forgotten. And then the matches ran out, the fabrics tore, and the rifles needed more bullets. Indians had to obey the government and watch helpless as the boundaries of their lands shrank.

  Gustavo leaned over from the front passenger seat to hand his brother a bundle of clothes. They were almost at the edge of town. Tuír grumbled as he struggled to find the armholes of the shirt. He wasn’t used to white-man clothes, but then he wasn’t used to Father St. John, automobiles, or the town of Pedra Branca do Amapari. He definitely wasn’t used to running for election to the town’s city council.

  “There is more than one way to do battle,” Gustavo told him. “We have no say about what happens to us until we can get an Indian in government.”

  He turned back around as Tuír pulled on khaki shorts and removed his loincloth. Father St. John kept his bespectacled eyes on the rough terrain ahead and let the brothers yell at one another in Wayãpi.

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  Tuír asked this just as Gustavo was checking his cellphone for a regained signal.

  “It needs to be a Wayãpi who lives with our people in the forest,” Gustavo replied.

  What he meant was, it should be a real Wayãpi and not one who had to leave the traditional ways to try to save them. Gustavo barely remembered his true name. Too often, he thought of himself by his Portuguese name, the one a missionary gave him with a shrug, as if to say, Why not?

  “I am the voice of our tribe with poetry,” Gustavo called out. “You need to be the face.”

  Tuír laughed and said they had the same face. He wasn’t one for metaphors.

  “I do my share,” Gustavo insisted. “That’s why I get the death threats. Not you.”

  “You do for the other Indians,” Tuír countered. “You even do for Brazilians more than you have ever done for Wayãpi.”

  There was truth in this. Gustavo had fought for the land rights of Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers alike. Father St. John insisted that allies needed to unite, or it would be hopeless. It had to be all of Brazil’s powerless united against mass destruction and exploitation by loggers, miners, agribusiness, cattle barons, and oil refiners. This battle took Gustavo away from Wayãpi lands. It took him to the trade union leader of the rubber tappers, Chico Mendes, before he was murdered. It took him to Zé and Maria when they were still alive. It had taken him to Paris and to Washington, DC. In the meantime, Gustavo didn’t recognize Tuír’s two sons as they grew unseen.

  Father St. John pointed to a gas station coming up on the side. He needed to refill before they headed into town to his modest parish, where he and Gustavo now lived when they weren’t traveling. All three men got out of the jeep after he parked. The priest disappeared into a small store to pay for gas at the register.

  “Make a real bow,” Gustavo said to his brother.

  Tuír gritted his teeth and shook his head. He said he didn’t want a bow. He could hunt so much more easily with a rifle. He needed to use bullets now that the animals had grown scarce.

  “Make another bow,” Gustavo insisted. “Try.”

  “You don’t remember how hard it is,” Tuír said. “You have to find the perfect wood near the Capoeira headwaters. It needs to be shaved down with the jawbone of a white-lipped peccary. When we lived by the Nipukú River, there were herds of them in the forest. My sons have never seen a single peccary in their lives—”

  “Or a real bow,” Gustavo added.

  You can’t teach your children what you forget.

  “The Wayãpi must remember the ways of the Grandfather People—” Gustavo started, but Tuír barked a laugh, as if to say, These words from you? You who wear khaki shorts with a cellphone in one pocket and a wallet in the other.

  Again, Gustavo felt his anger rising. When they were children, no one in their village could tell the twins apart at first sight. Not until Tuír showed his quick temper, or Gustavo laughed. They said that Gustavo loved to laugh so hard that he fell over backward, but he couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t sad, resigned, or angry.

  “Stay here,” Gustavo said, before he turned and walked away.

  It was one of the little ways the twins hurt one another; their instinct was to remain at each other’s side.

  Gustavo was in the store when it happened. He was trying to read the small print on the packaging of a new phone card. In one second, he realized that his eyes were failing with old age. In the next, bullets shattered the shop’s windows. Gustavo dropped to a crouch and covered his ears until the deafening gunfire stopped. When he lifted his head, Gustavo saw Father St. John slumped against the counter, bloody and dazed. Gustavo scrambled over to him, trying not to skid and fall on shards of glass. He held the old man’s face in one hand while the other patted his body, searching for mortal wounds. The priest groaned in pain, but he wasn’t shot, just cut and bruised all over. Gustavo looked through the shot-out frames of windows.

  My brother!

  As he jumped up, the priest grabbed his leg. Gustavo yanked hard. Twice—three times before he could pull free from the old man’s tight grip. Tires squealed on the road outside. By the time Gustavo raced out the door, a red truck was already peeling off dow
n the road into town. Tuír was lying by the parked jeep with his face up, eyes and mouth open. Blood darkened his orange polo shirt to a wet crimson. The flap of one ear was cut off.

  Gustavo stared down and saw a lifeless body identical to his own. He thought he saw himself with empty eyes looking up at the sky. Those last words thrown at his brother would haunt Gustavo forever. Stay here, he had said to Tuír. And so his twin had died in his place.

  * * *

  Healy in the Gulf of Alaska

  December 28

  T-minus 35 days to launch

  STAY HERE…

  Gustavo had stayed outside that gas station. Time had frozen, trapping him in a small piece of the past with no urge to break through. Numb shock gave way to waves of acute pain as he relived the murder and felt Tuír’s absence. Gustavo had read so many poems about the aftermath of war in which soldiers felt severe burning, itching, and clenching motions in their missing limbs. Gustavo felt these pains for his missing twin, now a phantom self.

  His more lucid moments of grief were tinged with a bitter and hopeless despair over the inevitable extinction of the Wayãpi. For how could he save an entire tribe when he couldn’t even save his own brother? And so Gustavo stayed there, in that time of horror and death. Until now.

  He stuffed a piece of cornbread into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Then he ate a spoonful of beans as he considered his bunkmate’s parting words: For the first time in hundreds of years, the Wayãpi will be left alone in the forest. Until the comet hits or doesn’t. Jack was right. Suddenly the Wayãpi were no more doomed than the rest of humanity. In fact, they were better off in the safety of the forest with their knowledge of how to subsist and survive.

  Gustavo ate more beans as he felt the burden of saving the Wayãpi and their lands lift from his shoulders—thanks to a comet. When his awareness fully returned to the here and now, Gustavo looked down and saw that his plate was scraped clean; he had eaten a full meal. Everyone on Healy had encouraged Gustavo to eat more on the journey: Jack, Ensign Ortiz, the members of something called the Morale Committee, but things had drastically changed. Two Coasties had to search the pockets of his poncho and jeans for smuggled food before Gustavo was allowed to leave the mess hall.