Chico Mendes and the Rubber Tappers
Chico Mendes and the Rubber Tappers — a biography. 10 illustrated pages, narrated, free to read on Wonder People.
Page 1
The clay bank was slick as soap under their feet, and the rubber ball was heavier than any of them wanted to admit. Chico braced his shoulder against the curve of it, barrel chest straining, while Raimunda dug her long bare toes into the mud and shoved from behind. Zé scrambled lower down, arms wrapped around the ball's bottom, pushing upward with his whole skinny body. They heaved it a man's height up the bank, then two, the sixty kilos of smoked latex groaning against the clay. Then it slipped. The ball rolled backward, gathering speed, and all three let go and leapt clear as it thundered past them and crashed into the shallows with a brown splash that soaked Zé to the waist. Cursing, they waded in after it through knee-deep water, grabbing for the slick black surface. As they struggled, a raft of freshly felled mahogany logs slid past downriver, lashed together, riding low and silent toward the sawmills, and all three straightened to watch it go.
Page 2
They moved tree to tree along the spiral cuts, the trail barely wider than a goat path, roots humped underfoot. Zé swung his cup-arm too wide and clipped a brimming latex cup off its spout, knocking it sideways; the white sap sheeted down the bark and poured over his bare right foot, cool and thick as paint. He jumped back cursing, scraping at his toes with a leaf, and Raimunda grabbed his elbow to keep him from stepping backward into the next cut. Chico crouched to salvage what latex he could into his own enamel cup, scooping it off the bark with two fingers, when his hand stopped on something hard nailed to the trunk — a strip of pink survey ribbon, stapled flush to the wood. He straightened and looked down the line: every rubber tree on the trail wore one, pink flags fluttering tree after tree into the gloom like a wound marked out for counting.
Page 3
Smoke curled thick through the palm-thatch hut, stinging the eyes, as Chico turned the long wooden paddle over the smouldering palm nuts, layering milky latex into a growing grey ball waist-high on its spit. Raimunda fed the fire with cracked nutshells while Zé poured a fresh cupful down the paddle's curve, watching it skin over in the heat. Then came a crash against the doorway — a sapling, freshly chainsawed, its branches still green, dragged across the entrance by unseen hands outside. Voices shouted, boots stamped away through the brush. Raimunda spun, drew her machete from its cracked sheath in one motion and hacked at the trunk, splinters flying, until the blocked light broke through again. The sudden lurch of the hut's post, struck as she swung, jolted the spit — the half-built rubber ball toppled, rolling off into the ash pit with a soft thud, half its shape crumbling apart in the embers. Chico lunged for it too late, hands coming up empty, smoke stinging fresh tears from his eyes.
Page 4
The union hall was hot as an oven, sunlight knifing through plank gaps onto the crowded floor below. Zé scrambled up the wobbling ladder, rung by rung, the painted banner clamped under one arm, a hammer and nail between his teeth. He reached the rafter, hip-height crossbeam above his head, and stretched to nail the cloth up — but the ladder shuddered under his bare foot and the banner's fabric caught, tearing straight down the middle with a ripping hiss. He grabbed the splitting halves, cursing through the nail in his mouth, and clung on as the ladder swayed. Below, Chico steadied the ladder's feet with both hands, bracing his shoulder against a rung, shouting up instructions. Along the wall, tapper families shuffled past a rusted oil drum taller than a child's waist, each one dropping in a machete or a battered shotgun with a hollow clang. Raimunda went first, drawing her blade from its cracked sheath and letting it fall into the drum, the sound ringing through the hot room like a bell calling the meeting to order.
Page 5
The line of tappers stretched across the cut like a living fence, elbows locked, bare feet planted in the churned red mud among the stumps. Chico ran down the row shouting for calm, waving his arms to hold the families steady as sawyers revved their chainsaws in warning. Raimunda strode straight at the nearest man, seized his saw with both hands and wrenched it free before he could brace, tossing it onto the growing pile with a clang. Zé darted between two women to catch a dropped saw before it hit a child's foot, hauling it clear and dumping it on the stack. The bulldozer driver gunned his engine but a dozen hands slammed flat against the hot metal hood, and the machine shuddered and died. Through the drifting smoke came hoofbeats — Darly rode up slow, gunmen fanned out behind him, his scarred mouth twisting as he reined in before the unbroken wall of arms.
Page 6
The pasture roared, waist-high flame walking the grass faster than any of them could beat it. Chico slammed a soaked burlap sack down on a tongue of fire creeping toward the treeline, stamping the smoking edges flat with his sandals. Zé swung the water barrel off the cart, but it tipped on a root and burst open across the ash, soaking only mud. He cursed and grabbed a sack instead, choking on smoke. Raimunda, half-bent, waded into a smouldering thicket where something squealed, and hauled out a scorched young peccary by its hind legs, its fur blackened and smoking. She dumped the shuddering animal straight into Zé's arms. "Hold him, don't let him run back in," she rasped, her blind eye white as bone in the firelight. Zé clutched the peccary against his chest, feeling it kick. Up on the unburnt ridge, beyond the reach of the flames, Darly sat his horse motionless, hat brim low, watching the three of them fight the fire he'd lit, saying nothing, making no move to help.
Page 7
The castanheira rose fifty metres clear above the canopy, a trunk wider than three men standing shoulder to shoulder, and the skinny boy climbed it like a stick insect, rope looping tree to waist as he went. At the crown he lashed the union flag to a branch and looked out over the green sea to where yellow machines crawled on the red cut line. Then the old rope, frayed where it had scraped bark all morning, gave with a crack, and he dropped, swinging wild over nothing, boots kicking air fifty metres up. Below, a chainsaw bit into the trunk's base, blade screaming into wood. Chico seized the slack end and hauled, Raimunda's long arms closing over his, both of them dragging hand over hand, rope burning their palms, until the boy's bare foot found a branch and he scrambled flat against the bark, chest heaving. On the ground Darly raised one ringed hand and his foreman cut the saw dead, the engine choking into silence beneath the swaying flag.
Page 8
The headlight behind them swells in the mirror, a single white eye bouncing through sheeting rain. The jeep's tyres scream onto the planks of the Igarapé Judia bridge, each board wide as a door and slick as glass, and halfway across the rear wheel punches straight through rotten wood with a crack like a gunshot. The axle slams down onto the broken plank and the jeep lurches sideways, engine screaming uselessly. Chico wrenches the door open and scrambles out into the downpour, boots skidding on wet timber. Zé is already running, dragging a long bamboo pole from the roof rack twice his own height. Raimunda plants her bare feet wide on the planks, grabs the pole's other end, and together they jam it under the sunk axle, heaving down with all their weight. The wheel groans, lifts an inch, then another. Behind them, across the black water, the motorbike's headlight stops dead and holds steady, pinning them in its beam, engine idling like a held breath.
Page 9
The kitchen door swings open, a plain plank door only a little taller than a man's head, and the short stocky figure steps through it with a towel slung over his shoulder, heading for the bath shed across the muddy yard. The papaya trees at the fence line rustle. A shotgun roars out of the dark leaves and the short man is thrown backward across the threshold, his legs still inside the doorway, the enamel cup clattering against the step. The hurricane lamp hanging by the door shatters, glass spraying, its flame gutters and dies in the puddle spreading black around him. The tall barefoot woman comes running from the cooking fire, bare feet slapping mud, and throws her whole long body down over him, her white braid falling across his chest, shielding him with her own back. The lanky boy in the red shirt skids into the yard rope still looped on his shoulder, and freezes, staring past the fence where a pale wide hat is already moving away low along the posts, unhurried, into the dark.
Page 10
The post is taller than either of them, a whole trunk of carved hardwood thick as a barrel, and they wrestle it upright into the waiting hole with their arms locked around it, heaving until it stands. Zé braces it with his shoulder while Raimunda shovels red earth in with a flat board, stamping it down hard with her bare heel, packing the soil tight around the base. Zé grabs handfuls of loose clay and rock, dropping them into the gaps, kicking them flush, testing the post with both hands to see if it shifts. It does not. Behind them a long line of tappers climbs the ridge path, sacks of rubber and Brazil-nut pods roped across their backs, bent double under the weight, passing the two of them without stopping, feet finding the old worn grooves in the clay. Raimunda straightens, pressing a fist into the small of her back, and looks out over the canopy rolling unbroken to the shine of the river.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
- Format: 10 illustrated pages, narrated, free to read on Wonder People
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