Working as my father’s apprentice at first, I lined up his tools, making sure they were all in working order for him. I quickly became experienced enough to work alongside him, a full gaucho in my own right. At the end of the day, we cleaned the tools together, talking. My father told me stories about his people, the Azoreans who resided on the lush, exotic islands off the coast of Portugal.

“When I was a child, my parents couldn’t keep me on the ground.” He smiled as he wiped the mud off his prized facón, the knife that he had kept by his side since he first moved here. “There was this one bluff in particular that my friends and I liked to climb. It was so high that you could see for miles over the ocean.” He put the facón away and picked up another tool as I sat on the stool watching him. “When you stand on a bluff like that, you understand just how small you are.”

“What did you do after you reached the top?”

“We jumped.” His eyes got big as he tickled me. “But don’t you go getting any ideas now, little lady. I will not have you jumping off cliffs until you are at least…twenty.”

“Twenty? Why twenty?”

“Because by then you will be your husband’s problem.”

I wrinkled my nose at the thought, but then another question struck me. “Papai, why did you come here?”

He thought for a moment as he closed the toolboxes. After a while, he finally answered, “I understood there was more to the world than my little island.”

Two

January 1833

As ran the course of my life, the omens came, and with them came trouble.

One morning while my father and I were preparing for our day’s labor we heard my mother call out from the house. We dropped the tools that we had been packing and ran to her side. She was standing in the kitchen, staring at a little black bird with a bright red belly, sitting on the back of a chair, his little head rhythmically bobbing up and down.

“This is bad. Very bad.” My mother crossed herself as the color left her face. “There are spirits here.” She crossed herself again. “Something terrible is going to happen.”

I slowly walked up to the bird so that I didn’t startle him, setting one foot cautiously in front of the other. The bird turned his little head toward me. His eyes, as black as his feathers, shone brightly under his white-streaked brows. Gingerly I reached out toward him, stroking his little chest. The bird didn’t move or flinch. Our eyes met and for a moment I felt a kinship with this creature. Moving slowly, I scooped him up in my hands and carried him outside, where I released him back to the wild where he belonged.

It was a hot January day when my father volunteered to figure out where the leak was coming from in the community storeroom, where our small village’s produce and dried meats were stored during the rainy season. Any amount of moisture in that hut and we would all be starving for the rest of the season.