Plowing season on the Malvaredo terraces runs from the first thaw to the last pruning, and it is the season the skeletons come up. Frost lifts the old slope graves a hand's width each year, and what lay under the slate stands and walks. The one I follow is a tall adult, bone the color of weak tea, with a hairline split across the left cheekbone and a splint of twisted copper wire binding the left forearm. It does not eat, speak or tire. It walks downhill toward the river road in a line so straight that the vintners set new rows by its track.
Three people who live beside it give three accounts, and they do not agree. Pilar Ordóñez, who prunes the lowest terrace, says it moves only while the soil is wet and stands stock-still on dry afternoons, jaw hanging, until rain returns. She finds it by the trail: two pale scuffs on the slate where the toe bones drag, each with a pinch of white grit, still damp at noon. Paulo Vaz digs graves at Karrasqueira, across the gorge, and says weather has nothing to do with it. It turns toward any name spoken aloud. Nobody in Karrasqueira says a dead person's name on the terrace road between thaw and harvest, and Paulo will not say his own father's within a mile of the wall.
Perpétua Lobo teaches the six children of Malvaredo and holds a different view. It is not walking toward anything, she says. It is walking away from the churchyard, which filled in the flood years and had no room for it, and the river road is simply the first flat ground. She has watched it step around a sleeping dog and over a dropped hoe, never through either. I have watched the same. The skull stays level the whole way down the slope, as though carrying a full cup.
Two springs ago the forearm break showed bare and clean, the ends of the bone a finger apart. This spring the wire is there, wound tight, the cut ends tucked under so they will not snag. Nobody admits to the work. Pilar says the wire matches the spool she uses on her vines, and says so flatly, looking at the slate instead of uphill. When I asked Perpétua whether the skeleton ought to be stopped, she pointed to the gate on the bottom terrace, propped open with a stone. "Leave it open on the river side," she said. "It only wants to get through."
- Classification
- Animated human skeleton
- Habitat
- Old graveyards and thaw-heaved hill slopes
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft tall, about 40 lb
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Terraced hill country and churchyard walls
- Binomial
- Costa errans
- Diet
- None; needs no food
- Temperament
- Single-minded, careful, unresponsive