A boy ran up shouting, “Fire! Fire! Paciencia
is burning!”
It had been a spark from the train, for sure.
Everybody ran there armed with spades, scythes and clubs. We could see the
smoke on the other side of the river, billowing up into the sky.
“Go get the workers from the fields,” my
grandfather yelled.
The men were there like a shot, on all sides of
the conflagration. The fire was ferocious and soon reached the cane fields. The
cane exploded like burning bamboo. It sounded like there was a gunfight going
on.
“Cut off the fire at the Middle Brook!”
It was the only way of cutting off the fire and
saving the rest of the fields at Paciencia, by using the spades and scythes at
the stream that cut the fields in two, making a clearing on either side.
The Negro Damiao’s house was eaten up in an
instant. There wasn’t any time to get his stuff out. The wind was blowing,
throwing sparks into the distance. A thousand tongues of flame swallowed up the
ripe cane, like a thousand hungry dogs. The wind inflated the fire’s diabolic
appetite, never ceasing to blow for a moment. But the fieldworkers were in
there fighting furiously to contain the blaze, Uncle Juca in the middle of
them. The spades dug into the soil, the scythes cut through the cane, creating
the clearings that would hold back the course of the fire. They beat back the
flame with green branches, yelling all the while as if they were in hand to
hand combat.
We stayed back, watching and listening to the
manoevres and the sound of the fight. My eyes were weeping from the smoke and
the smell of burned sugar that filled the air. People were coming from the
surrounding farms to help. And, as the night fell, the fire burnt bright.
The flames climbed higher now as the wind
slackened. The men would walk over the embers, and singe their hair in the
close combat with an enemy who would not surrender.
“Look! Ze Passarinho’s house is burning!”
Ze Guedes ran through the flames and came out
with old Naninha in his arms, throwing her to the ground like a sack of sugar.
“Attack the fire,” my grandfather shouted, his
stick in his hand, pointing.
My Uncle Juca grew in my estimation that day,
with the courage that he and his friends showed. Uncle Juca stood with them,
sharing in their danger and their exertions. Tenants arrived from Maravalha and
Taipu. And there were more than five hundred men confronting the desperate
enemy. The fire did not cross the stream because the stream was surrounded by
clearings and people were waiting for it with branches, ready to beat it back.
The wind had abandoned its ally on the field of
battle.
People were left with burnt feet, singed
cheeks, red eyes and ragged clothes. Ze Guedes’ chest was covered in burns. The
fields smouldered.
“We’ll have to keep people in the clearings through
the night.”
Back at the mill my grandfather put ironwood
resin in people’s wounds to disinfect them or else the burns would fester.
There would be work to do in the fields the
next morning.
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