The Devil in the Bush

by Matthew Head

  “I came back,” I said inanely. “What’s the matter?”

  Miss Collins said, “Jacqueline doesn’t feel well.”

  Jacqueline moaned.

  “Oh, my God,” said Madame Boutegourde. It was “Ah, mon Dieu!” and was more a prayer than profanity. “What can we do? She came here like this, running, she fell right into the room—only a few minutes ago. She says Gérôme—oh, I don’t know what. She can’t talk straight. César!” she called. Papa came running with a glass of brandy. He knelt down and supported Jacqueline with one of his thick little arms, lifting up her shoulders. The way she folded together under the uplifting pressure made me think of the way the bones in her hand had moved when I took it that afternoon. Papa Boutegourde pressed the glass of brandy against her lips, but she moaned and made bubbly and snuffly noises into the glass so that the brandy spilled over.

  Miss Collins said, “If she won’t drink it, throw it on her.” Jacqueline whimpered and downed the brandy in a couple of gulps.

  “You’ve got to find Gérôme,” she said, fairly normally, but still in that strange thick voice. It gave me the feeling you get when the dentist stuffs the little wads of gauze under your lip while he’s working on you. Jacqueline was quiet enough now so that I could see that her mouth didn’t look funny only because the lipstick was smeared. It was bruised and swollen on one side, and the bluish flush spread on up into her cheek.

  “Regardez-ça!” cried Madame Boutegourde suddenly. “Look at that!” She had lifted one of Jacqueline’s hands to chafe the wrist, and the loose sleeve of the pajama coat slid back to the elbow. Her wrist was bruised. You could see the finger marks, and when Madame Boutegourde pushed the sleeve on up to the shoulder, there they were again, on the upper arm.

  “My God!” said Madame Boutegourde again, “she’s not pretending!” She caught her breath then because she had admitted what I suppose we had all been half-feeling. Jacqueline had never done or said one single natural thing in the presence of anybody in that room, and in spite of the way she looked it wasn’t until we began to see that somebody had really been giving her a going-over that we began to take her seriously.

  “They hurt me,” Jacqueline moaned, and even then I couldn’t help suspecting some theatrical self-pity. “Gérôme! Oh, please, they’ve got him, go find him, César!” Now she lay back on the pillow and began crying in a helpless, despairing kind of way that would have been heartrending in anybody else. “You all hate me,” she said, “and you won’t help me. Oh, Gérôme, Gérôme!”

  “What are you talking about?” said Papa Boutegourde roughly. “Pull yourself together and tell us what happened, if you want help. What happened to Gérôme?”

  “I don’t know,” sobbed Jacqueline. “They took him away.”

  Miss Collins said, “Mr. Taliaferro, where’s Mary? We’ve got to get Jacqueline fixed up so she can talk.”

  “She’s down at Henri’s,” I said.

  “Took him away where?” Papa Boutegourde was prodding Jacqueline.

  I thought of something. “Where’s Gabrielle?” I asked.

  Madame Boutegourde said, “Asleep, thank God.”

  “She can’t be,” I said. I felt as if a piece of ice had been clamped against the nape of my neck. “Not in all this racket.” Madame Boutegourde gave me a wild look and went out of the room.

  “Go get Mary,” Miss Collins told me. “She’ll give Jacqueline something.”

  Madame Boutegourde’s shriek came from the other end of the house. She appeared in the doorway looking like the last acts of all the Greek tragedies rolled into one. “She’s gone!” she screamed. “She’s not there! Her bed—her window—” She fell into a chair and began giving a good imitation of what Jacqueline had just been doing.

  I grabbed Miss Collins by the hand.

  “Monsieur Boutegourde,” I said, “I know where Gabrielle is. I’ll go get her. I’ll send Miss Collins back with Miss Finney.” Papa Boutegourde was standing frozen in the middle of the room between the two hysterical women. I yanked Miss Collins out the door with me and I have the impression that I flung her into the truck. I tore down the road toward Henri’s, glad I had the wheel to hang onto. Miss Collins was bouncing around like a dried pea in a cement mixer. Hell had certainly broken loose at the Congo-Ruzi, and if there was a devil in the bush, the way Miss Finney said, he was out settling scores that night.

  Miss Finney was lying on her back with her eyes wide open and her hands under her head. She had a lamp lit on the table, and you’d have thought she didn’t have a care in the world. She looked as calm as if she was just lying down for a few minutes’ rest after sweeping up the room or something, except that her arms were bare and she had a sheet pulled up under her chin. She made quite a large white hillocky mass under the linen, terminating in a sharp bisected peak that was her toes, sticking straight up.

  Miss Collins and I came bursting in and Miss Finney said, “Well, well, it’s the Poppy Girl. What’s the hurry?”

  “There’s plenty of hurry, Mary Finney,” Miss Collins chattered. “You needn’t be lying there that way. Somebody’s been beating Jacqueline.”

  “Lucky him,” said Miss Finney, but a change came over her in spite of herself. She continued to lie there. “Don’t bother me,” she said, “I’m thinking.”

  Miss Collins stamped her foot. “Get up out of there, Mary,” she said. “Jacqueline and Angélique are both about to go crazy. Gabrielle’s disappeared, too.”

  Miss Finney sat up suddenly, clutching the sheet around her.

  “Turn your back, Hoop,” she said. “I’ve got on my slip, but I’m not as pretty as Henri. Turn your back and start talking.” I turned my back and heard her moving around in a hurry, getting into her clothes. I said, “Everybody’s at the Boutegourdes’. Jacqueline’s been knocked around by somebody and she says whoever it was took Gérôme away. Gabrielle’s gone from her room, slipped out the window, and if you’ll get organized here I’ll go find her.”

  Miss Finney said, “Where?”

  “I think I know,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Miss Finney. I heard her grunt slightly, probably pulling on a shoe. “Get the hell out of here, Hoop. We’ll take Henri’s car to the Boutegourdes’.”

  “Henri all right?” I asked.

  “Like a babe,” said Miss Finney. “Take this.” I felt the flashlight pressed into my hand. “Get out.”

  As I left the room I heard her saying to Miss Collins, “You look like Sadie Thompson in that getup, Emily.” When I got to the laboratory I ran the truck across the open ground to the clump of bush where Gabrielle and I had stopped that night and she had asked me not to leave the Congo-Ruzi. I parked the truck where I thought the path came out, and with the flashlight I found it in a few minutes. I was certain I could follow it, and sure enough it was easy. I could hardly have got off it, anyhow, the bush was so thick on each side of it, but I would have fallen around and spent all night feeling my way, if Miss Finney hadn’t been smarter than I was, and sent me off with the light.

  I never doubted for a minute that Gabrielle would be out there on the promontory overlooking the valley. She wasn’t home, she wasn’t at Henri’s, and I took it for granted she wasn’t at Gérôme’s, but I didn’t stop to figure things out, or why she wouldn’t be at the guest house or the laboratory. She had slipped out, the way she had slipped out to see me. I didn’t stop to reason anything, but I suppose I thought all these things in the back of my head. And I was right. I hadn’t gone far before I found her cowering there, as far off the path as she could press herself into the tangled growth. My light picked her out, half crouching and pressing herself backwards, her eyes wide and her lips drawing back from her teeth. She was so still that she looked like one of those night photographs of wild animals, where the animals trip off their own flash.

  Her voice came out in a croak. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Don’t touch me.” She kept saying it.

  “It’s Hoop, Gabrielle,” I said.
She didn’t move or change expression. I turned the light up into my own face, so she could see.

  I heard her cry come out like something giving way under pressure. Before I got the light back onto her she had flung herself on me, both hands clutching the front of my shirt. I put both arms around her to keep her from falling, and she let go of my shirt and flung her arms around me too. We stood there pressed close together and I could feel the current of her fear, like an actual emanation from her body. She tried to talk but I couldn’t get the words, then she began to relax and tremble, and finally she stopped trembling and let her head drop against me and began to cry. I could feel her going limp and I knew she was all right now.

  She told me what I could hardly believe, that he was there; then she led me along the path until we came to the clearing where we had been the night before. Gérôme lay there across the path where the promontory dipped down into the valley toward the native village. I remember how he looked in the beam of the flashlight. I could see the gash in his throat and I saw his shirt ripped half off his back and his back dark with blood, but it wasn’t until I had taken Gabrielle home and Miss Finney had come back and examined him that we saw how the strip of flesh had been peeled off his shoulder. When Papa Boutegourde and I moved him that night we found the circumcision knife lying there. Moving him was a tough job, but not as tough as I had expected, once we got him on Miss Finney’s stretcher and covered him up. We put him in the laboratory and locked it. It was getting light when the three of us, Miss Finney and Papa Boutegourde and I, got back to the Boutegourdes’. Little Emily Collins was sitting straight as a poker in the middle of the living room, with Papa Boutegourde’s rifle in her hands.

  “They’re all quiet,” she said. Miss Finney had half the station under hypodermics that night—first Henri, then Jacqueline and Madame Boutegourde, and then Gabrielle.

  Miss Collins went on, “I can look after this hospital, Mary. You and Mr. Taliaferro had better lie down, you haven’t been to bed at all. You look sick, Mr. Boutegourde.”

  Papa Boutegourde said, in a voice that came dragging out of him, “You must lie down too, Miss Collins.”

  Miss Collins said, “Nobody’s going to get me out of this chair. I went to bed at eight and I slept five hours.”

  “You’re a brick, Emily,” said Miss Finney. “I’ll go down to Henri’s. I’m not easy about him.”

  I told Miss Finney she shouldn’t stay at Henri’s alone. She pooh-poohed the idea but finally she gave in, and we left Miss Collins sitting there guarding everybody else while we went on down to Henri’s. Henri was sprawled all over the bed like something hit by a freight train. I found enough cushions to make a pallet on the floor near by. I lay down, and heard the couch in the next room creak as Miss Finney lowered herself onto it.

  “You all right?” I called.

  “Don’t bother me, Hoopie,” she said. “I’m thinking.” I imagined her lying there on her back, her hands behind her head, her toes pointing up. Then I went to sleep, or passed out, whichever you want to call it, until she came in and shook my shoulder. The sunlight was brilliant. Miss Finney had made coffee.

  Of the three of us, Miss Finney looked the freshest.

  When Henri and I went out to throw a couple of buckets of water over each other in the back yard, we saw that his clothes of the night before had been picked up and hung on the bushes nearby. Miss Finney had taken care of Dodo, too; she showed us the mound of earth at one end of the garden. It was only eight o’clock when she woke us up. She couldn’t have slept at all.

  She didn’t say anything to Henri about what had happened after he had gone to sleep, so I kept quiet too. Henri looked drawn and tense; his eyes would keep wandering unhappily over the room as if he expected to see something bad, but didn’t know what it would be. When we had finished the hot black coffee, he said, “Where’s that damn boy?” “I don’t think you’ll be seeing Albert this morning,” Miss Finney said enigmatically. She gathered up the cups and saucers and went back toward the kitchen.

  “What did she mean by that?” Henri asked me.

  “I don’t know exactly,” I said. “She has something up her sleeve. She’s been acting mysterious ever since she made me turn around and come back yesterday.” I hesitated, then decided to begin telling him. “A lot of things happened last night after you went to sleep, Henri,” I said. “This business of Dodo was just the beginning. It’s bad news and you’ll have to—”

  Miss Finney said quickly from the next room, “Bad news isn’t the half of it. Shut up, Hoop.” She came through the door and knifed me with a look. “I’ll see that Henri is told the way I want him to be and at the right time,” she said. “Come on— we’re all going to the Boutegourdes’.”

  Henri didn’t ask any questions, but followed us in a resigned and unquestioning manner, as if his worries were worse than any news Miss Finney was going to have for him. We stepped out into a staggering sun and started for the truck, but just as Henri was about to get in he said, “Wait a minute,” and crossed back over the yard to the eagle. He pulled away a wooden pin and swung open one side of the cage. The bird dropped awkwardly from his perch to the floor, and waddled tentatively out into the open yard. His black crest rose and fell, and even from the truck I could see his big yellow eye blotted out as the colorless membrane slid back and forth over it. Henri stood still, watching. The bird left the ground with a leap and a heavy flapping of wings. It flew awkwardly into the air, more like a chicken than an eagle, and landed on the low branch of a tree at the edge of the bush, teetering uncertainly.

  Henri threw the wooden peg into the empty cage and came over to the truck. “He’ll get his wings back soon,” he said, and the three of us crowded into the small cab so that after a minute our thighs were sticky and uncomfortable against one another’s.

  The air had the sullen weight of moist heat without breeze. The chirping and squawking of the birds hidden in the bush was subdued; the leaves hung still and the grass stood listlessly in the fields. The truck itself seemed sluggish as it churned along the road, and I became more and more aware of the abnormal quiet which had settled down over the station. Then I realized that the natives were gone.

  Ordinarily they would have been cutting grass or trimming foliage, walking along the paths as they went about their errands, or sitting motionless in the shade. They were as much a part of the place as the hills or the clumps of bush, and without them the station was incomplete, hanging in the hot morning air through which we plowed as if through some viscous substance. None of us spoke, but sat side by side sweating until we drove up in front of the Boutegourdes’ house and I switched off the motor. Its sound died out and the stillness closed against us.

  We found Papa Boutegourde and Miss Collins sitting dumbly in the front room, both dressed now, but Papa’s face looking heavy and puffy, and Miss Collins’ eyes red and grainy from weariness. They said Jacqueline was still in bed, and that Madame Boutegourde and Gabrielle were in their rooms packing. Madame Boutegourde would not stay, and would not let Gabrielle stay on that station an hour longer than could be helped. They were driving to Costermansville as soon as they could pack some clothes and a lunch. “They might as well go,” said Miss Finney. Everybody took it for granted she was in charge. Papa Boutegourde looked too old and bewildered to do anything but follow orders. “Somebody has to go and report this business anyhow. We’ve got a lot to do today, César. I don’t suppose any of your boys showed up this morning, did they?”

  Papa Boutegourde shook his head.

  Miss Finney said, “Henri, sit down please.” She turned to Papa Boutegourde. “César, let Angélique and Gabrielle get away whenever they can. They’ll go to the administrator and he’ll send somebody up here. Have you got a pistol? Give it to Angélique. She won’t need it but she’ll feel safer. I’m taking Hoop and we’re going down to the village. I’m going to bring back some of those natives. They’ve got a grave to dig.” She went on talking to Papa Boutegourde but turned he
r glance on Henri. He looked at her in a quiet, stupefied way. “We’ll have to bury the body. Find me a piece of canvas to wrap it in; if we have to dig it up again it’ll be in better condition than if we let it lie around. We’ll photograph it. I’ve got the laboratory locked and I don’t want anybody poking around there. That leaves you four here—César and Henri and Emily and Jacqueline. Jacqueline can stay in bed as long as she wants to, but I want your word that you won’t separate for a minute, not even in pairs. Do you get all that?”

  “I’ve got it, Mary,” said Miss Collins.

  “I’ll say good-by to Angélique,” said Miss Finney, and went out of the room. We sat there without talking until she came back. “Come on, Hoop,” she said. She turned to Henri. “They’ll tell you about it,” she said, and we started out the door.

  “Mary!” cried Miss Collins, “hadn’t you better take—”

  “I won’t need a gun,” said Miss Finney. “Come on, Hoop.”

  We drove as far as we could in the truck and then began the long walk down the snaking path to the village. Mary Finney was a good walker. We went along steadily and at a sensible pace, single file. It was hard to talk and Miss Finney wasn’t feeling communicative anyway.

  “What are you taking me into?” I asked once.

  “Nothing that’s going to hurt you,” she said. “I think I’ve got this whole thing figured out but I’m not ready to tell you yet.”

  “Tell me now,” I said.

  “Not now,” said Miss Finney, “but you can be the first to know. I won’t tell ’til I’m ready.”

  I said, “It’s not a comfortable feeling, walking into their territory this way.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “You’ll be all right as long as they see you’re with me.” She took a few steps in silence and then said, “It all adds up to an awful total, Hoopie.”

  “You can’t be trying to tie in this M’buku business, last night and all, with what happened in Bafwali!” I said.