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veil, was dark, the color of ashes or stone. She bit her lip in the picture, making it look as if she was trembling. Their mother had bled to death immediately after giving birth to Luzia, and after the funeral Aunt Sofia removed the bedsheets and the soiled capim grass mattress and burned them both in the yard, near the outhouse.
    Their father was Aunt Sofia’s youngest brother. He was a tall man and made his living as a beekeeper, caring for several hives on the rocky side of the mountain and selling honey, pollen, and propolis. Emília had foggy memories of playing with propolis—rolling the tacky substance in her palms before her father took the gray lump and placed it in a tin boiler. She recalled her father’s makeshift bee suit: brown leather gloves, thick canvas jacket, and a leather hat with mosquito netting stretched tightly from the brim and tied around his neck. There were some beekeepers who could put their bare hands in hives without so much as a sting. Her father was not one of those men.
    When Emília was five and Luzia only three, he left them at Aunt Sofia’s house and never picked them up again. He preferred to sit at the tin shacks along the roadside and consume shots of cane liquor. He grew into a raspy-voiced and unkempt drunk who liked leaning on tree stumps or sitting on street corners, talking to himself and to passersby. On his good days, he visited Aunt Sofia’s house smelling of vomit and cheap cologne. His startlingly green eyes shone from between the wrinkled folds of his face, which had grown as brown and coarse as the leather seat of a saddle.
    Each time Emília asked her aunt about their father’s affliction, Sofia gave the same response. “He has nervous tendencies,” she said. Then she cranked the handle of her sewing machine harder, or stirred a pot of beans on the stove faster to indicate that the conversation was over.
    On his bad days, their father saw his small daughters walking to Padre Otto’s school and confused Emília with his dead wife. Maria! he called to her, tears falling from his glassy eyes. His toenails were cracked and rimmed with blood from tripping on things. He had a penchant for losing his shoes, and once a month Aunt Sofia bought him cheap rope sandals. Maria! he called out, slurring the last letters of her mother’s name, and Emília looked down at her sandals and kept walking, afraid of her father’s gaze.
    When Emília was fourteen and Luzia twelve, he returned to his hives. The mountain path was overgrown with vines. The lids of the hive boxes were thick with propolis. The bees had grown angry and wild. Two farmers had to dress from head to toe in leather vaqueiro uniforms in order to bring their father back down. They carried his bloated body—which looked, to Emília, like a sack of skin filled with water—down the main trail and into town. Emília and Luzia sewed his death suit.
    Each Sunday, she and Luzia put flowers on their parents’ crypt. She placed proper flowers—bunches of dahlias mixed with long stalks of blood red rooster’s crest—next to the wilted and oddly sized bunches of weeds Luzia liked to pick. Once a year, on the Finados holiday, Emília and Luzia brought a pail and brushes to the cemetery and whitewashed the crypt. Each time she passed the chalky liquid over her parents’ grave Emília felt nervous, believing that all of the inert bodies in that yard were watching and yearning for a fresh coat over their own resting places. There were rows of tiny crypts—the size of Emília’s sewing box—for “angels,” as their distraught mothers called them, born too weak to survive. There were larger graves decorated with rosaries and photographs of the dead, men mostly, their leather knife holsters placed beside their portraits. Taquaritinga was like any other town in the countryside; owning a knife was more common than owning shoes. Peixeiras, they called them, their short blades sharpened across flat rocks to a perfect, shining