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father. ‘Says the land out by the zebus is his.’
    Her uncle slowly made his way to her father’s side. ‘We’vehad that land for as far back as my great-grandparents,’ he said. ‘And probably before.’ ‘You mean you’ve worked the land,’ said the man. ‘No,’ said her uncle, ‘I mean the land’s ours.’ ‘Then you’ve got papers, of course,’ said the man, smiling. ‘Not now.’
‘Not now
. What’s that mean, citizen?’ ‘Means just that. Means once we did, but not now, with all the going and the coming because of the droughts.’ ‘That’s the problem,’ said the man. ‘Because I’ve got papers.’ He pushed a stained sheet forward. Her uncle picked it up. He massaged a long keloid that ran from his eye to his ear, a scar from a bottle slash, twice infected, poorly repaired. ‘Says right there that the land’s mine,’ said the man. ‘Right there at the bottom is the date my family bought it.’ Isabel took a step closer. The paper looked old and brittle. Her uncle threw it back onto the table. ‘You’re cricketing,’ he said, angry now. He clenched his jaw. ‘It isn’t yours.’
    The man rose. ‘I came here to tell you, not to ask, citizen. You can leave on foot, or your people can carry your body out in a hammock.’ He turned angrily, and the other men put the guns into their belts and followed him out.
    The man came back, three times, and each time he spoke to a different family. Each time he brought his henchmen. They didn’t clap their hands outside the houses, as was the custom, but banged on the doors with the butts of their pistols. He carried the same faded papers, and he said things like ‘I will let you work it if you give me half, You should thank me, Most landowners are not so generous.’ Word came that he worked for even a bigger man, a general of the Federal Army, who lived in the capital and controlled great swaths of the state.
    In town, the men searched old chests and the backs ofclosets. They shouted at their wives to find the records, although everyone knew there were no records to be found. ‘The man’s papers are fake,’ her uncle told them. ‘Fake’s only fake if people think they’re fake,’ said others. ‘They look real.’ ‘That’s a lie,’ said her uncle. ‘Fake’s fake, I know their tricks, I’m not believing some piece of paper just because he left it in a box with a pair of crickets to piss and shit on it and make it look old.’
    On their walks, Isaias was silent. Once Isabel asked, ‘What’s going to happen?’ He answered quickly, ‘We’re still here, aren’t we? Do you think this is the first time this has happened? Do you think it’s the first time someone has tried to scare us away?’ The words sounded rehearsed, as if he was repeating something someone else had said.
    A week later, two dogs were found at the edge of the town, their heads shattered, sticky and covered with flies. At night, the men ate silently, and the women uneasily eyed the sacks of beans. In the weekend markets, they heard similar stories from other towns. They began to see the three men everywhere, driving into towns with pistols in their belts to pay visits to families who refused to sign the old sheets they couldn’t read. She watched the old people circle them cautiously, an arm’s reach away.
    Later that month, on a small farm on the outskirts of Prince Leopold, someone strung up more dogs in the thorn and cut off the udders of a milk cow. They gouged out the eyes of a herd of goats and left them to tangle themselves in the scrub, hissing at the birds that made swooping dives at sockets clotted with blood. The goatherd was tied to a post and left in the sun, muttering through blistered lips. On the old road to the coast, a man who stayed on his land was found outside hislittle house with a stick stuck in his throat and the crotch of his pants brittle with blood.
    In some towns, they heard, there were those who resisted, gathering at the entrances