Welcome to Fordlandia
Matthew Hooton
On the morning my mother bled to death on the banks of the Tapajós, I was nearly a mile away scrubbing stains from a blue cotton pillow case in Henry Ford’s one hundred bed sanatorium—that bright white building of glass and mortar jutting like a new tooth from the green gums of the jungle. Even now the sight of a pig-bristle scrub-brush or the sharp whiff of Dial tightens the knot of my heart strings and takes me back to those final moments I missed: my mother rising from the shaded water, skin pale despite the Amazonian sun, golden hair pulled back, and that red-frilled two piece the dock workers pretended not to notice each time she let her robe slip from her shoulders before a swim. Only this time, when she emerged from the water, she was missing her left arm from the elbow down, and by the time the men who were still not watching had clocked this horror and leapt into the river to pull her out, the water had turned red and she was so deep in shock she couldn’t even form sentences.
My father told me her final words were: Tell Jack I love him. Untrue, though I loved him for the lie. What she really said was: Tell Jack—. I know this because I overheard the dockworkers who pulled her out retelling their story outside the mess hall that evening. And again the day after. Twelve years old and I knew without a doubt which story was true, and why.
Now that I’ve been back in Michigan for so many decades, it’s difficult to explain how such a thing could have happened, never mind what the place was like. I know my grandson, Nicholas, thinks of my personal history as a story or folktale. And why shouldn’t he? He cannot smell the leaf rot after each seasonal flooding, the fish-tank reek of each tributary as they dried and islands formed, nor the utter cacophony of parrot and monkey chatter from the palm and rubber trees. So how could he picture his great grandmother dying on the sand and grass beneath that giant sign, blue paint on white, that read, without any intended irony or foreboding: Welcome To Fordlandia.
Last week Nicholas took me to see the latest Star Wars picture. Flick, my daughter, his mother, would say. Movie, he says. I say my grandson “took me” as a parroting of my daughter, even though I paid for us both. But I’m of an age where, I’m told, I cannot be trusted not to wander off into the jungles of Muskinaw to die and be consumed by carpenter ants and crows. These, it seems, are what pass for wildlife along the still-frozen crusts of Lake Michigan.
Nicholas is a college student, though I cannot fathom what he actually studies. He reads widely enough, which is probably good. Walking home from the cinema, he told me about a narrative theory to do with journeys and heroes, which he insists applies to everything.
“Movies and books,” he said. “Probably real life.”
I let the second comment pass. “Don’t writers get tired of rehashing the same things over and over?”
“Never,” he said. “Too archetypal. They probably don’t even know they’re doing it. Plus it sells well, obviously.”
Obviously. I wanted to tell him that this was nearly too sad to bear, but a tiny green tree frog had climbed from my gut into my esophagus, and I was worried that if I opened my mouth too wide it would leap out to invade our cold, grey streets. Such a thing, even an imaginary one, is too bright and fast for this half-dead city of concrete and brick. And too fragile. Where would it hide amongst the rusting hulks of old cars and machinery? How long until its tiny veins froze solid?
Nicholas didn’t seem to clock my discomfort. But that’s the way of the young and strong: they still believe all of their words are useful. I changed the subject to the amount of gel he uses to make his hair look like it hasn’t been combed.
For this I earned a roll of his eyes. “It’s wax, pops. No one uses gel anymore.”
And Brill Cream? I chose not to tell him that his wax was probably made from the pulverized remains of countless thousands of Amazonian carrion beetles, and that I once saw an army of them carry away the entire carcass of a fawn.
Let’s be clear about one thing: I’m not a hero, and if I am on a journey it has probably been a full-out retreat since 1928. At best, I’m a witness, though, as you now know, sometimes not even that. Still, I’ve seen creatures and places that would give my grandson nightmares, and others that would restore faith to a leper. All of this seven decades ago when my family and I still worshiped Henry Ford. Before we knew how he treated his poor boy Edsel, or that he’d arranged the deaths of those union leaders in Flint, or that he was best pals with Adolf in Berlin. And we certainly didn’t know how all of that was going to turn out. Well, this is what we all tell ourselves, isn’t it? Perhaps we did know, but chose not to see. Yes, he’s a terrible man, but just look at his paintings. Well, sure, he’s got a mean streak, but his inventions have changed the world. Of course he’s not perfect, but he’s promised to revitalize the dying automobile industry. I now believe we weigh these things subconsciously and instantaneously, and nothing we see or hear afterwards seems to change our minds, at least not all that much.
Still, I will say this: that town, Fordlandia, it was a miracle.
So picture this: asphalt streets cutting through swaths of overhanging palms and vine-wreathed orange trees, glossy red fire hydrants at intervals, and row after row of white-picket fenced bungalows with red-tiled roofs and garden plots bearing orchids, lime trees, and the largest Lima beans you’ve ever seen. After a few weeks you stop hearing the thudding of coconuts on the streets, stop smelling the kerosene fires from the cleared hills, stop mistaking each twisted branch or tendril for a pit viper like the one that turned Sully Abraham the cook’s ankle black and swollen around two, tiny puncture wounds. In the mornings, mist drifts off the river and mingles with smoke from breakfast fires, and the tree tops along the river disappear in grey, wispy fingers. Above it all looms the giant, white water tower, stamped with the company logo in blue: our very own protectorate, brother to Christ over Rio a thousand miles north in the same country, constructed and blessed during those same years.
It’s difficult now not to see the tower as a symbol of the opposite: a colossal portent out of place in the depths of Amazonia. Maybe if we’d read the signs correctly my mother would still be alive, and my father wouldn’t have set out after the black caiman that took her arm, and with it his mother’s silver wedding band. Half the town’s men went with him on that first day, rifles over shoulders and sticks of dynamite to raise the hiding monster from the safety of the riverbed. But each time they shot a scaled, sharp-toothed reptile of the right size, hauled it onto the riverbank and sliced it open from gullet to tail, they found the same intestinal mess of fish and tiny mammals. No arm. No ring.
I last retold this story to my grandson after his mother let her own wedding ring slip from her soapy finger into the kitchen sink drain, and called me to help her retrieve it. Nick just shook his head and frowned as I spoke, and it took me a moment to realize he was upset about the slaughtered caimans. He was right to be, of course, for they are at least as real to him as his great grandmother—probably more real, since he can call up images of matching creatures with a few clicks of a computer mouse, and I haven’t so much as a faded photograph of my mother to show him.
When I imagine my mother’s arm in the belly of the caiman, I picture it wrong way around: elbow joint towards the stomach, hand facing the teeth, as if the arm has not been consumed, but controls the creature like a puppet.
My father and I received a letter from Henry Ford himself, signed in thick ink, thanking us for our dedication to a cause greater than any one life and destined for the annals of history. This seems in incredibly poor taste now, but at the time we were proud of the commendation and hung it over our mantelpiece, where the humidity immediately began curling and discoloring the paper’s edges—terra incognito taking back that which was once mapped.
I try to tell myself it was the quinine tablets I swallowed every night to ward off malaria, but I saw her once in the dead of night, standing beneath that letter, Lucky Strike smoldering in her right hand, left arm gone or lost in shadow. She did not look at me or speak, only stared at the letter on the wall until a bat trying to wedge itself beneath a window screen shifted my attention.
The letter, I believe, is still in the archives of the Smithsonian. A wonderful place, that. I have it on good authority that it was first called the National Cabinet of Curiosities, which is how I choose to think of it still. A shame we felt the need to change such a glorious and true name. But names are peculiar things: they have power.
In part because of what happened to my mother, but also because my father was the sanatorium janitor and well liked for excelling at a job no one else wanted, everyone in Fordlandia knew my name. I spent long mornings beneath the insect nets over rubber tree saplings making contrasting lists of reasons to celebrate and loathe my parents’ decision to call me Jack. The pros: Jack the Giant Slayer, Jack Sparrow, Jack O’Lantern. The cons: Jack in the box (a horrifying toy), Jack the Ripper, and Jack my uncle who died at the Somme after his boots flooded in a muddy field and he fell and was trampled to death during a retreat. My father watched this happen, but the tide of men prevented him from saving his brother from drowning. Couldn’t even go back for the body, he confessed once. Couldn’t have found him in that mess anyhow.
The Amazon taught me that there are many ways for a man to drown, and none of them glorious or heroic. My father drowned in grief—sunk into the cannibal jungle around him so that even his thoughts, in the end, seemed to come to him on pollen and spores through the overhanging canopy of leaf and vine, floating and taking root, rather than springing forth from his own snapping neural pathways.
It is thoughts like these that draw me to the frozen edges of Lake Michigan now, where the effort of the spring thaw is a marvel, and where I wonder how this place might affect my own thought patterns—part of my personality, I think, has become migratory, and goes missing for parts of the year. My daughter tells me I suffer from the winter blues, my grandson says it’s seasonal affective disorder. But I know it is neither: this place is just too cold for my imagination, and so my mind casts itself back to those days in Fordlandia, to the stunning spectrum of green on even a single papaya tree, to the heaviness of that fruit and its black, peppercorn seeds. To my mother chopping it lengthwise for us to scoop its musky-sweet orange flesh from the bowls of its skin. The fruit is too expensive in Muskinaw, too easily bruised to ship well, and so I make do with oranges from Florida and the occasional Mexican avocado. Strange to live in a nation of plenty and yet find oneself constantly seeking sub-par substitutes for that which brought the senses alive as a child.
There was much talk at the time of the disappearance of the explorer Percy Fawcett, and of his fabled lost city of gold, but, perhaps because I was still wrestling with grief, still in awe of the jungle and the great steamship adventure that had brought us to a place so unfamiliar and seemingly hostile, I didn’t pay much attention. Fordlandia was a lost city already, impossibly isolated and at odds with the environment. When I considered the jungle, I thought only of my father and of going after him. Fawcett, as my father once said, was probably dead, a wraith haunting some patch of green like my mother haunted our home.
The talk of Fawcett did have one clear effect on me though, which was to solidify my fears for my father’s seemingly endless wandering through the jungle surrounding Fordlandia. Most nights he would arrive home long past dark, and I would hear him rummaging through the kitchen or scraping mud from his boots at the door. I didn’t ask him where he’d been or if he’d found the caiman, for I knew he did not properly remember his own path, and that it was already weeks too late to find the instrument of my mother’s demise. I say instrument out of habit, though I have long since given up hoping for a clear sense of divine order—the world is a jungle, and we are all swallowed eventually. My father must have known this too, on some deep level at least, but he couldn’t stop searching. Now I believe that he was averting his own gaze from the days ahead, that he couldn’t bear the thought of a life without the woman who had so willingly followed him to this sweltering Utopian dream beneath the Southern Cross.
So I followed him too. Skipped work in the sanatorium’s laundry, left the lemon-scent of cleaning detergent and Dial’s All-New Miraculous One-Touch Stain Remover, boiled water for a skin on a shoulder strap, dressed in long sleeves and pants, a hat, and set out after my father at dawn, following just out of sight as he strode through the bone-lit camp, passed the white-picket fences and red fire hydrants, to the rows of rubber tree saplings wrapped in netting. And from there into the cautiously waking jungle.
I thought it odd that he did not begin on the river in a boat, though I soon saw why. He was following the Tapajos, our river of doubt, along a tapper’s trail, one of a vast network of paths cut through the jungle by the men who, for centuries, had gathered the sap of rubber trees for the barons of Belém to the south. It was a painstaking way to a make a living, as mature rubber trees grew a great distance apart in the wild, and Ford’s engineers and botanists insisted the practice would soon be made obsolete by our rows of farmed trees. But until such a time, these men continued their nomadic tapping, treating the sap in open flames and rolling giant balls of rubber into open canoes to trade for what little funds the corrupt barons deemed fitting.
This trail was seasonal, already starting to flood as the Tapajos swelled with the rain, the path muddy and sinking, my boots soaked by the time my father branched off towards a smaller tributary of the river and the sun crested the canopy and cast rays onto the pallet of greens around me. Lone bird cries became a chorus, and the jungle rustled and hummed with insects and lizards and mammals unseen. I paused just off the trail as my father stopped on the riverbank before a row of wooden canoes, flat bottomed like the ones tappers and natives in the region used. He placed a rucksack and rifle inside one and pushed it into the water. I did not know to whom these boats belonged, but my father didn’t hesitate, and so once he had paddled around a bend upstream I hauled a second canoe into the water and took up a paddle of my own.
The wooden handle was worn smooth by use and the water calm, the work easy enough in such a light vessel. I had not ventured north of the tree saplings before, and I recall a sense of wonder at the vines and canopy hanging over this small finger of the Tapajos, which was itself only an arm of the sweeping Amazon. Monkeys leapt overhead, crossing the water with ease, and giant spiders’ webs shattered rays of sunlight into sparkling shards on the water’s surface, which rippled with the movement of fish and reptile.
Even floating amidst such beauty, it did not take long for me to realize my mistake: my father was hardened and strong from work, and he paddled far too quickly for me to match his pace. A pack of capybaras watched my struggle from between the feet of mangroves, the giant rodents braving the water’s edge despite the teeth that lurked just out of sight, and this gave me courage, through had I known more, I would have seen these creatures as an omen of the precarious nature of my place within the world I had so naively entered.
Around another bend, my father out of sight, and then before me a small island of tangled root and fern, and one clean trunk stretching to the canopy. And high up that grey tree, above the flood line, a wooden shelf, its sharp lines and corners utterly foreign to the jungle, and upon it a row of porcelain dolls, tiny eyes staring down at me as I drifted, mouth agape. It was as if a child’s toy shelf had fallen from the sky and come to rest in tact, the dolls condemned to watch the passing of the river and those upon it through glass eyes, even as their fabric dresses rotted and mildewed, and their gleaming bodies caught arrows of the morning sun.
Decades later, after my daughter was born, I refused to buy her dolls—could not bear to look at those tiny black eyes, lidless and lifeless and yet watching. My wife understood, for I had told her many of these same stories, but I believe her family and our neighbors considered me an eccentric, or, worse in their eyes, a progressive of some kind. In fact, I would like to claim that I was progressive, that I didn’t want my daughter to grow up encumbered by the pink-frilled constraints of expectation. But, like so much of parenting, I was only acting on my own fears.
You know, I remember my father-in-law telling me as we took apart a rusted shower head in his home, for a plumber, you sure think on things a lot. Offensive on any number of levels, but perhaps forgivable in 1951. We all compartmentalize what we see into packages that we can process and understand. This labeling gives us a sense that we’re in control of our lives and our world, and it’s only in the presence of that which is utterly and obviously beyond our influence that we drop our delusions of power and come to terms with the darker truths of our mortality and smallness in the world. For some this is a near-death experience, for others the fingertips of God. For me, it was seeing the jungle of my childhood for a split second through the eyes of those porcelain dolls as I sat rocking in a drifting canoe: the vastness of the place and all that moved through it, the place as habitual provider and unfeeling murderer, a many-handed god that touched everything within its realm, was everything within its realm, and never ceased moving and growing. This is what those dolls taught me: everything moves, even that which desires to remain still.
I paddled onward, though even then I didn’t think of it as going deeper into the jungle, for Fordlandia was already deep within its borders. Rather, I felt as if I were turning the pages of a giant book, one that was beyond finishing in my lifetime, and yet so compelling I could not stop reading. Soon, there were decisions to make, tributaries to ignore or follow, and though I tried to chart each twist and turn of the river, I realized I had lost my father and could not possibly hope to track him over water.
Still, I slowed but did not stop yet, and the canopy over the river became a tunnel, dim and rounded, and from its ceiling hung droves of vampire bats, asleep save for an occasional flexing, leathery wing. I stroked as quietly as I could past those nocturnal legions, until the green roof thinned again and the many-colored wings of the day-shift flitted noisily above, and I sat in the canoe wondering if this was as far as my journey would lead that day, if I had already come too far to find my way back, if anyone had clocked the missing canoe and set out after me.
An echoing gunshot snapped me from my thoughts and sent the tunnel of bats awake and whipping past me upstream in a funnel of black hooked wings that brushed my ears and hat as I ducked and covered. I followed the bats to another bend, expecting to see my father taking aim at a black caiman sulking on the muddy banks, but instead found an American Confederate flag hanging from a tree at the water’s edge. The red and the cross of stars had faded, but the edges were not ragged, and the flag was creased from folding, as if the marker had been placed there with care only moments earlier. The river twisted nearly back on itself here, and around another corner I stopped paddling, gaped at a girl in leather boots and a pale blue dress standing upon a wooden dock holding a shotgun, the barrels hooked over her arm as she reloaded, blonde locks falling over her forehead and eyes despite the bun. And behind her in a rocking chair the perfect image of a Southern Gentleman: corncob pipe, brimmed hat, suit and bow tie. Both figures faced a row of green glass bottles lined across a fallen branch on the bank opposite, and both started when I fumbled my paddle into the edge of the canoe.
I didn’t know what to say, and so many questions flooded the soft well between my ears that I just waved slowly, as if I were passing on a train and not drifting inch by inch towards their floating dock.
The girl finished pushing shells into place and snapped the gun closed, raised an eyebrow. The man didn’t rise, but took off his hat and nodded.
“Well,” he said. “You look like you might just be from our part of the world, son. That so?”
I nodded, then added yes sir because it seemed like it would sound right despite the strangeness of the situation.
“Hear that, Clara? A young man with manners.”
The girl rolled her eyes, though the man did not see this or care. She looked older than I, though not by much. It was hard to judge such things in the moment, the place so foreign, the encounter so unexpected.
“I suppose you’ll have seen our flag. But I don’t reckon you are looking for us.” He pronounced are as ah.
“No sir. I….” A moment of hesitation while I decided on the truth. “I’m looking for my father. Did, did a man in a canoe pass earlier?”
Both figures shook heads.
The man tapped his pipe on the dark wooden arm of the chair. “Here since dawn, so unless he passed in the night, he’s taken another route.”
I tried not to return the girl’s stare, tried not to think of the black eyes of the dolls as my canoe nudged the dock at her feet. Neither figure moved, nor invited me to join them, so I apologized for the interruption and turned my canoe.
“All right then,” said the man. “We wish you all the best in your endeavors.”
I nodded and paddled back the way I had come, around the bend and beneath the hanging flag.
The ancestors of these Confederates had arrived, I learned later, after the Civil War ended. Left America by the hundreds and journeyed south and south, as far as they could from the armies of the north, for fear of retribution or because they had lost too much, in their eyes, to war. They bought or took land and traded rubber, stayed and birthed offspring, and I wonder now if the two I’d met knew I was part of Ford’s crew, a northerner in their eyes who was pushing south yet again. They must have, though they gave no signs to betray any thoughts or opinions.
After a time another two shots rang out, and I imagined the glass bottles shattering into the mud and mangrove roots. I still think of the girl when I come across broken glass scattered in a parking lot or sidewalk, which is often in Muskinaw. Unless you experienced the intense noise and unceasing motion of this place in its prime of automotive production, the men and women hired in their thousands to work tiny stations on conveyor belts, sweep floors, build and design the chrome and steel bones of the new world, the dereliction and silence of our now empty warehouses and factories cannot possibly resonate the same sense of change and sadness. It’s not that I have any love for industry of that scale—it turned our lakes and rivers green, destroyed our lungs, caused workers on the conveyors grave injuries and often lifetimes of chronic pain—bur rather that such vibrancy and brash human endeavor feels so permanent when it is active, and so very absent once it has passed.
Occasionally when I wander through the old warehouse district, walls sprayed in shockingly bright neon colors with symbols and half-words that have no meaning to me, I come across squatters, those who have lost jobs and camp in corners or tiny offices within buildings covered in leprous rust. These are not “hobos” warming hands around a burning barrel like those scenes from so many films, but campsites outfitted with sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses, laundry lines, kerosene stoves and battery-run lanterns. Men and women not unlike me who have been unlucky enough to share the fate of the dying automotive industry in America, those who have lost homes and the comforts we so quickly learn to take for granted.
Sometimes we’ll share a nod or a quick hello, but mostly these men and women keep to themselves and eye me as if I might be an informer, a journalist, a documentary film maker attempting to render this experience into something relatable. When I see these industry cast-offs, treated as if they are sub-human, as if it is a simple thing to move from a thirty-year automotive career to shelving dolls at Walmart, to easily recover from the loss of a family home, I think of the tappers in the Amazon, of those isolated campsites and labyrinthine paths, of the rendering of rubber from sap over an open fire, the burnt-carpet acridity of the smoke, the rolling of the sap into basketball-sized ovals for sale in Belém. And I think of how the rubber barons of the Amazon had for centuries treated the very tappers who supplied them as utterly expendable.
It is true that I am fortunate not to share these ill-treated souls’ fates, and that I have my grandfather, my father’s father, to thank for this, since it was he who insisted I apprentice as a plumber when I returned from what he called foreign shores, and whose tutelage led to years of work, despite the state of affairs in Muskinaw. But it’s also true that resettling was difficult at thirteen years of age, that school did not quite stick, that the sight of children scared of their own bed sheets each Halloween seemed utterly absurd after having seen my own mother’s one-armed corpse wrapped in similar linens.
And school felt almost dreamlike at times, a series of histories that could not compare to the lush tropical vividness of my own history, the other children suspicious of my darkly tanned skin at first, then of my reluctance to build go-karts in shop class, or play baseball at lunch hour. It began on the first day, my homeroom teacher announcing my mid-year arrival to a class of 8th graders and asking me to tell them all about myself. I told those children that my family worked for Ford, just like so many of theirs, but that I’d lived in Brazil, where we’d tried desperately to grow rubber trees we could harvest for the car factories here. Whether or not they’d heard rumors of what had happened in the depths of Amazonia, or whether they could sense that I wasn’t being as forthcoming as I might have, I can’t be sure, but I remember panicking as I stood before the class, anxious that I might speak the truth and then never be able to take it back, that I would open my mouth and reveal secret histories, of my mother’s ghost smoking her Lucky Strikes to the sound of bats’ hooked wings against window meshing, of my father’s madness as he hunted her reptilian murderer, of the Confederates’ secret lives.
I now believe that children can sense these things, these hidden chambers of our vine-wreathed souls, and that they know intuitively when one of their own is attempting to conceal the true story of their life. Fordlandia wasn’t just a couple years of my childhood, as my grandfather liked to say. It was the place where my imagination was baptized in the piranha-frothed waters of the Tapajos, where my mother was buried on a manicured grass-covered hillside overlooking the river, where I first came face to face with the jungle that is also the world.
What is the capital of Michigan? Fordlandia.
What is the largest sea port in the Americas? Fordlandia.
What city is destined to become the economic heart of America? Fordlandia.
Rows of tiny desks, names of past students carved into their undersides, ink stains and lorikeet-colored chewing gum. The nurses and staff at Fordlandia’s sanatorium would never have approved, never allowed their pristine ward to fall into such disgrace. When we left America for the jungle, my parents agreed to put my official schooling on hold in favor of experience, a word they presented to me as sacred, and, despite the many other words I might use to describe my time in Brazil, they were not wrong: the experience lives inside me still, where it grows and wraps around my organs, tendrils creeping beneath my wrinkled skin—a physical religious conversion that has never properly faded as one might expect over so many decades.
Fordlandia had a one-room schoolhouse, but I rarely attended, as most of the other children were much younger, and those older than me were expected to work. This left me in a sort of limbo, a space where the adults of the place might accept me in either realm. I chose the hospital because it kept me close to my father, who cleaned with such vigor and skill, be it dust, gecko droppings, or blood. Is there a guide for such a range of stains and mess? Mrs. Pristine’s Pamphlet Guide to the Rigors of Cleaning and Maintaining an Amazonian Sanatorium. Parrot droppings on a plaster cast? No problem! Just mix a dash of….
Steering that borrowed canoe back from the Confederates and their shotgun, past those shiny eyed dolls, I thought not of whether the girl was the man’s daughter or child bride, but of how badly I would need an ointment to soothe my hands, which were blistering on the wooden paddles, and I wished I had thought to bring a jar of the mashed papaya and honey the nurses at the sanatorium applied to minor wounds. Perhaps this was why I didn’t notice the caiman until I struck its body with my paddle, and why I lurched so violently with surprise that I sent the canoe rocking. The caiman thrashed as well, slamming into the side of the tiny vessel and sending me into a wild panic, so that I placed all of my weight on the dipping side of the canoe and capsized it. I plunged beneath the surface of the water, terrified of the creature thrashing next to me and the overturned canoe. For a few seconds, choking on dark water, I couldn’t find the surface, and feared I was struggling towards the bottom of the muddy river. And when something grabbed the top of my shirt and pulled, I assumed it was the reptile’s jaws closing around my neck, that I was about to suffer a nearly identical fate to my mother. There was nothing to do but scream and suck in more water, and yet there was no pain, only a mixed sense of levity and confusion as my father dragged me from the water into his own canoe. I had always known he was a strong man, performing hours of physical labor day after day, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how powerful he was, and even as I sat retching and coughing into the belly of the canoe, I felt a sense of shock at his solidity, and just how opposite his form was to the memory-turned-phantom of my mother. How he managed to keep his vessel from capsizing while pulling me aboard, I still cannot fathom.
“That’s it,” he said. “Get it all out.” He did not smile or frown, just watched my ragged gasping until I had calmed and was breathing properly again. “Nasty little thing.”
For a moment I thought he was referring to me, until he flicked his chin at the retreating ripples on the river that marked the caiman’s path. My father later told me it had been a juvenile, less than four feet long, hardly large enough to cause me any serious damage, and altogether too intelligent to pick a fight it might not win. But how could I have known this in my panic beneath the surface of the same water that had surrounded my mother’s final moments?
My father didn’t ask me why I’d set out alone through the wilderness of the wet jungle, nor did he scold me for my foolishness, perhaps because such actions were not unlike his own. Instead he towed my canoe to the muddy river bank and righted it, retrieved my floating paddle and left both on the shore.
“Let’s dry you out,” he said. “You smell that? Tapper’s smoke.”
I sniffed the air but could only smell the lost-penny tang of river water. We stole through the late morning along a well-worn path away from the river beneath the ancient canopy, and I remember dizzying myself staring upwards at the filtered, insect-full beams of light, the flutter-hush of a thousand pairs of brightly colored wings, the ferns growing on outstretched branches, roots and vines hanging from such a seemingly source-less height they looked as if they had fallen straight down but frozen mid-air. There was a world far above the earth at my feet, I saw, a strata I had never properly considered, its population levitated by the giant bones of the old growth: walking palms, rubber trees, ungurahui. And now that the jungle was properly awake, it sounded oddly less loud, perhaps because individual sounds were dulled by the constant buzzing of insects and the clicking of beak-encased tongues. To this day, when I close my eyes and remember, I can feel the air vibrating, the Heliconius butterflies, orange and yellow, brushing my ears and alighting on the bridge of my nose and in the corners of my eyes, drawn to the moisture.
The smoke my father had detected earlier filled the air now, and we broke from our path into a small clearing housing an adobe and thatch hut. A lone hen clucked laps around a small wooden pen beside the hut, and the still smoldering fire pit and cleared jungle gave the abode a desolate appearance, as if the area had been shelled by mortars rather than cleared by machete-calloused hands. I remember that my father removed his hat. It was made from tightly woven toquilla straw that was coming loose from damage and wear around the brim. The act of removing it, of manners or politeness or habit, was so strange in this already strange place that I nearly laughed for want of an appropriate response.
A woman pulled open the bundled sticks that composed her door then, her belly enormously swollen, her belly button tenting the fabric of her thin brown smock. She was dark skinned and her black hair was pulled back from her face and tied, and her high cheekbones and forehead beaded sweat. All at once she bent double and let out a moan, and retreated into the darkness of her home, where the moan became a cry that lasted for several moments before fading into a whimper. I looked to my father, who stood holding his hat before him, rifle on his back. He opened his mouth as if to speak, half forming words, then licked his sun-baked lips. We waited like this for what felt like hours, though it was no doubt much less time, before my father cleared his throat.
“She’s going to need our help, I think.” He handed me his hat and the rifle, a canteen and a small rucksack, then nodded at the canteen. “Pour some of that over my hands.” I did and he cleaned his fingers and palms as best he could with a blue handkerchief. “The father is a tapper. He could be miles away, or back any moment. If he arrives, smile and do not pick up the rifle. No telling what he’ll think of us invading his home.”
He stepped into the darkness of the hut then, leaving me on the threshold. I remember thinking how surreal it was that what was happening inside the hut seemed more wild and frightening than the jungle surrounding it, and that the woman’s moaning seemed to come from a place that was not wholly human. The smell from the hut was feral too, musky and sharp with urine, scents I was familiar with from the hospital but could never quite reconcile with my own experience of humanness, as if such fragrance were not part of the body’s natural cycles, but a marker of regression to an animal state.
The woman cried out sharply, and my father murmured softly somewhere in the darkness beside her. He was not present at my own birth, I knew this from the stories my mother told me. But he’d wanted to be, had been restrained by security and nearly expelled from the tiny Michigan hospital for arguing with the nursing staff. I hoped that if the father did arrive, he would understand that we meant only to help, that we were not here with any predatory intention, but I knew how it would look and could not help but eye my father’s rifle where I’d leaned it against a tree stump.
I passed a long afternoon, first drying myself by the embers of the tapper’s fire, then in the shade of walking palms and a giant rubber tree at the edge of the canopy, listening to the woman’s cries echo off trunks and down the many-fingered tributaries of our river. With each cry, the jungle would trip into silence for a few beats, before resuming its cacophony of bird call and answer. Even the insects seemed to pause their humming momentarily, and leaves, in my memory, did not rustle or snap above us. The woman’s wailing intensified as darkness fell, and I gathered windfall and stoked the fire into a small blaze and sat before it, trying not to imagine the myriad eyes upon my frame, small and silhouetted against those tongues of flame.
The moon rose bright and full, and though the clearing was small, I counted stars until my neck stiffened. I couldn’t accustom myself to the night sky of the southern hemisphere, despite marking the Southern Cross and its fellow constellations, and there was something deeply unsettling about staring up at an unfamiliar sky: it made the earth at my feet feel less steady somehow, less permanent, the strangeness making it all too clear that our earth was not stable, was in fact hurtling and spinning through a vast, dark galaxy. I did not need to be reminded of my smallness, of the insignificance of my existence and suffering in the face of the jungle, and the loss of my mother. I began to lose my bearings next to that fire and the cries from the hut, and I felt my spirit walk out from my bones and moil through the soggy riverland—unanchored, haunted and haunting, until, as if in response to my dizzy hunger, exhaustion and anxiety, another cry emanated from the hut, small and cracked, toylike: a doll’s voice squawking for its mother.
My father emerged then, holding a wrapped bundle, and I thought for a moment that he was bringing the crying child to show me, until I clocked his ashen face in the firelight, and the sticky blood up to his elbows. Another tiny cry from the hut, and my father stopped, staring at me as though he had forgotten I was still there, had been waiting all day for this very moment.
“Twins,” he murmured softly. “The girl’s fine.” He paused and cast his eyes around the site, as if trying to decide what to do with the bundle in his arms. I stood and approached, saw that the bundle was unwrapped on one side, revealing half of an infant’s closed face, blue even in the flickering light, and missing an opening where its mouth should have been, the skin sealed over both the nostrils and lips, giving the newborn the appearance of an aquatic creature of some nature, not unlike the Amazonian descriptions of river nymphs and gods, though my father did not let me gaze upon the poor creature for long enough to discern whether or not its fingers and toes were webbed.
Did this child’s deformities mark the workings of some ancient curse that ran through our river of doubt, and, if so, in what ways had this family transgressed? I thought of Fordlandia, of our insistence that we belonged there, and of the deep workings of this place upon us. Perhaps we were all cursed, had all sinned and fallen short of some unspoken set of commandments, rules forged not by the flame-wreathed hands of God upon Sinai for Moses, but in the watery crucible of Amazonia. Thou shalt not submerge thy hands in, nor bathe beside the banks of the Tapajos at dusk. Thou shalt honor the sharp-toothed reptilian custodians of silt and mangrove root. Thou shalt make blood sacrifices to the green vines, dripping palm ferns, and cannibal flora.
My father wrapped the dead infant tightly in the blood stained cloth, covering the deformed face, but he did not speak again or move to further action, and even then I realized he was utterly lost, that he could not recall or invent an appropriate protocol for such a moment. I do not know if he meant to, but he hummed quietly, a hymn of Calvary, and rocked the stillborn boy gently in his blood-covered arms, and I found myself wondering if I had had a twin also, a brother or sister that did not survive the savagery of childbirth. In my imagination my sibling arrived not without a mouth, but without eyes to see, a blindness that protected them from even the smallest glimpse of what could have been their home and family. I still worry about my brother or sister, that tiny specter crying out in the darkness of Michigan winter nights, unable to see me awake also, my wrinkled frame wrapped in sheets and curled fetally, murmuring spells into the frost-covered window panes in the hopes that the lonely child will find my mother’s spirit and be comforted by her one-armed touch, despite the all-encompassing blues and blacks of their un-sight.
I thought my own vision was blurring when my father’s shadow began to move independently of his outline against the fire that night. It has come unstuck, I thought, torn at the seam by his grief and the curse of this place. The shadow moved around the periphery of the fire, until the newborn cried out again from the hut, and a man stepped into the light, his face dark like the woman’s, his eyes wide, as though he could not quite believe we were flesh and blood in the same way I had yet to realize this of him. He held a machete in his right hand, his fingers pianoing through invisible keys along its wooden handle, as if unsettled on the correct grip for this confrontation. My father followed my gaze, but did not react to the man’s apparitioning from the jungle, nor did he move towards the rifle. Instead, he held out the stillborn bundle. The man did not move, and so my father laid the un-breathing infant at the man’s feet and stepped back beside me.
The man called out to the woman, who answered in a flood of Portuguese that neither my father nor I could fully grasp. She must have reassured him that we had only helped with the birth, for he fell to his knees and dropped his blade. He unwrapped the child’s body slowly, but with trembling hands, and I thought of children I’d watched at birthday parties during my other life in Michigan unwrapping gifts slowly out of respect for a grandparent, or aunt. He raised the still child to his chest, and let out a moan, and my father knelt at the man’s side and pointed to the infant, then to the jungle, gesturing that we would take the child and bury it, if they so wished. I cannot be certain if the man understood, but he shook his head and spoke again in Portuguese, clutching the blue-skinned infant more tightly, and carrying it finally into the dark hut, where the two adults wept together and spoke quietly, these sounds and the sounds of their one cooing child filling the campsite in such a way that my father and I agreed without words that we must not interrupt these noises of mourning and joy, and we sat without speaking, dozing next to the fire until pre-dawn, when the jungle was safe enough to navigate, and we could walk side by side along tapper trails back to Fordlandia’s fire hydrants and paved streets, its tended gardens with their latticed vines of green beans and snow peas, its otherness made more so by the smell of blood and afterbirth emanating from my father’s hands and arms, which he dared not clean in the river.
I often wonder what it was the tapper said to us when we offered to bury his dead child, and I have reconstructed his words endlessly over seven decades. The only bit of vocabulary I believe I caught was the word despidida: farewell, or goodbye, though even this is likely a figment, and whether or not it was directed at us or the infant, I’ll never know. But I love the idea that this man recognized the need for his family to properly ritualize and verbalize their parting with the twin that could have been. That the tiny ghost might pass easily to a place of rest and soft light. That its lips might be unsealed at the hands of some true creator, far from the hardships of rubber tapping in the Amazon basin. That the short memory of this goodbye would be a haunting enough to satisfy the hunger of the lost one whose sealed mouth could not latch upon his mother’s breast, and enough to release this tiny family from a life of restless apparitions and shadows torn at the seams.
Matthew Hooton is the author of the novels Deloume Road and Typhoon Kingdom, and has written fiction and non-fiction for a number of venues internationally. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where his research and writing range topically from Korean history through Jim Henson's Muppets and the stunts of Evel Knievel.