A zombie is a dead adult that walks, and the one I followed down the terraces above Ouro Fundo covered 340 yards in an hour without once speeding up or slowing. Its right heel drags. I measured the furrow it leaves in wet silt by laying a yard of cut cane beside each print, and the prints fall thirty inches apart. It eats nothing, though it mouths roots and loose soil as it goes. Three people who live below those terraces describe it three ways, and I give them in the order I met them.
Lourdes Amaral cuts cane on the lower slope and says it listens. After dusk her crew hums with their mouths shut, because a spoken word turns its head, and nobody on that road greets anyone aloud once the light goes. They touch a hat brim and pass. She has watched one stand at the end of a cane row through an entire shift because a boy called out the name of his dog, and she has never let the boy forget it.
Leandro Cortês, a cooper in Cascalheira, says it wants water and has no use for sound. He builds cistern lids now, oak two inches thick and banded in iron, and it takes two men to lift one. The dead walk into open cisterns and stand upright beneath the surface, and a household learns of it by the taste. Half his orders come from families that lost one well and will not lose a second. Before the walking began, he says, he made only barrels.
Lucinda Prado buried her brother in spring and found him on the third night at the foot of the family plot, in the black wool coat he was buried in, the left sleeve torn to the shoulder. His eyes were not alike. The left was clouded white. The right was black and open, and it did not blink. His right hand was shut around a fistful of roots and would not open. He stood eleven minutes while she talked, then went on downhill. She says it follows only the slope. Fine gray silt sheds from its clothes along the route, and families track a missing relative by it. On my own night the zombie turned toward the cutters' humming, went on, and at the Cortês yard climbed the rim of the one cistern still without a lid as though the stones were a stair. The ring of silt it left on the inside wall stood forty-one inches above the floor.
- Classification
- Reanimated human corpse
- Habitat
- Cane terraces, ditches, open cisterns
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5 ft 9 in, human height
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Lowland cane country
- Binomial
- Corpus errans
- Diet
- None; mouths roots and soil
- Temperament
- Patient, blank, drawn downhill