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The grileiros’ methods were simple. They would target an area of small landholders. Smooth agents would go into the area and tell the people that they — the agents — represented the real owners of the land. They would have a paper purporting to prove this. They would tell the farmers that they — the farmers — had no rights, but that the owners, being generous, would pay them an indemnification for the land and would move them into town. In the early days, half the families would fall for this — living on the land was hard, the indemnification looked like a lot of money (they had never had to buy food or pay rent), life in town seemed better. They signed papers, received a handful of cash, and were dumped by the trucks at the edge of town, where a small slum started to grow.

The families who didn’t agree were approached again. They were on the land illegally, they were told. Veiled threats of harm were made. Then crops burned and pigs were slaughtered in the night. More families gave in. Those who did not were increas-ingly isolated. Houses were burned. A farmer was killed, then another. In the end, only the very brave remained.

Within a few years, the Church would establish a network of lawyers and field workers to fight the grileiros. But at this time, nobody quite knew what was going on. Individual bishops and priests spoke out against the grileiros, who retorted that priests were troublemakers, communists, should attend to their prayers and leave the business of land alone.

Padre Raimundo knew almost nothing of these controversies. But, talking to the families slowly starving in the little slum, he was appalled. His first thought was to get them food. But then? He went to a neighboring town to see the state judge. The judge, whom he had known for years, took him quietly into his study and, sweating, told him that he — the judge — couldn’t do anything. He was afraid for himself and for his family. The state policemen Padre Raimundo had known were transferred out of the area — the new police simply looked at him and laughed.

​

This was the situation the day that Zé Severino was arrested.

*

Zé Severino was the leader of a group of small landholders who had resisted. Pascano, a tough, wiry little thug who worked for the grileiros, complained to the police that Zé Severino was threatening his life — Zé Severino had told Pascano to get off his land. Pascano and three policemen went out to Zé Severino’s homestead. He heard the jeep coming, picked up his old hunting musket, and came outside — his wife and five kids behind him. They arrested him for armed resistance, brought him back into town, and threw him in jail. For an hour neighbors heard yelling, groans, and the sound of beating in the jail. Someone ran to tell Padre Raimundo.

Word ran all around town — as it does in small towns — that Padre Raimundo was coming. It was after 11 a.m. — the sun was hot and the dusty street nearly empty, but a shiver seemed to run along it.

The jail stood on a small rise, at the end of the street where it forked into two roads that wandered out into the country. It was a small, squat, insignificant building. Two of the police had left a few minutes before, driving in the ramshackle Volkswagen police car down to the pensão to eat lunch. So there were only three men watching the jail, and they were standing out in front where a big mango tree cast rich shade: Pascano, a tall consumptive police clerk named Elias, and Corporal Oliveira — one of the police who had arrested Zé Severino, and the most active in beating him — a hard-muscled, thick-headed mountain of a man. All three were armed. They had been drinking cachaça — handing the bottle back and forth — or even they might not have done what they did.

“Here comes the word of God,” Pascano remarked wryly, and the other two turned to see Padre Raimundo walking alone up the street. Something in the priest’s manner — the thin, unimpressive figure marching as though he were at the head of an army — struck Pascano funny, and he laughed. “Let’s see how brave he is,” Pascano muttered. He pulled out his revolver, aimed a little above the priest’s head, and fired. Padre Raimundo continued walking without faltering. Pascano’s amusement turned to irritation. “The damn interfering fool,” he said, and fired another bullet close to the priest’s feet. Padre Raimundo came on without a pause. Then Corporal Oliveira raised his pistol, fired, and — through fool luck or destiny — sent a bullet into Padre Raimundo’s heart.

Dona Aparecida, an elderly widow, who was looking out her window near the jail, says that — as he fell — Padre Raimundo raised his arm in a motion like that of a commander waving his troops forward. Old Seu Geraldo, who lives across the street, confirms what she says. These are the only witnesses who admitted seeing anything — their eyesight is good and their sincerity is unquestionable, but of course both are very old.

They say that, as he fell, motioning with his arm, it was as if a great wind swept up the hill toward the jail — though there was no wind, they admit. The leaves on the mango tree remained still. But there was a rush — not a sound, really, nor really a light — but a rush up towards the jail. Pascano began to shout, as if half in anger, half in fear, and fired his revolver twice before being spun around helpless, his arms pinned to his side. Corporal Oliveira yelled and ran forward, as if counterattacking, before falling unconscious to the ground. Elias simply threw up his two arms in a cross to cover his face and fell in terror to his knees. The wind — or whatever it was — rushed past him and into the jailhouse, bursting open the cell room door, and a stunned Zé Severino walked out of jail, free.

*

The official report, prepared by an intelligent, enlightened police major from the state capital, concluded that the people in town had risen up and stormed the prison, releasing the prisoner. No one was located who would admit to having seen anything except for two old people who told an impossible tale of wind and light. The major criticized the close ties between the police in rural areas and grileiros, noting that it undercut the credibility of law enforcement, and urged reform.

No witnesses except two old people. Corporal Oliveira, after he gained consciousness, sat — a huge broken lump of mountain — and looked up into people’s eyes; “I’m sorry,” he would say to them about nothing in particular, “I’m sorry.” This lasted a few months and then he vanished — nobody knows where. Pascano was committed to a hospital in the state capital; in between periods when he seemed normal and remembered nothing of the incident, he would have panic attacks, clinging to the medical assistants and screaming — “Don’t let them — they’re coming.” In one of these attacks he shouted, “Their golden swords!” Elias said nothing at all for six months; resigning from the police, he went to work as a cook for the Franciscans, spending his free hours helping the poor. His consumption had healed.

But these were all psychological ephemera. No doubt the official report was correct — it was very intelligently written.

Yet the bishop, driving home after praying at Padre Raimundo’s funeral, kept remembering: “Saints are for counsel, angels for action.”

First published in The Saint Katherine Review.