The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  Everyone else in the room, except McKinnon who was just amused, watched with a sort of horror as, before their eyes, the priest turned into a giant, buzzing, savannah grasshopper.

  That night as Beatrice lay in her hammock, the light of the moon punched a hole the size of a fist in the thatch and seemed to spread down the rope until she was suspended in a hammock of light. The foot of the hammock looked like the prow of a canoe. She glanced over to where her sisters slept. Their hammocks too floated like shadow canoes suspended in dark space. Through the door, she could see Danny sitting on a stool pretending to read by the light from a flaming wick in a bowl of beef fat. The flame was unsteady but she could see Danny staring with great intensity at a book, his hair still sticking up. The moon bathed her part of the room in the light of a strong ghost.

  As she dozed off, she wondered why he was doing that – pretending to read when he couldn’t.

  Deer Hunt

  It was night and the deer was hiding somewhere in the tall grasses. Danny lay on the side of the sloping hill. The rough grass under him felt like the pelt of an animal. He almost imagined he could feel it breathing. In the moonlight, he could just see the outline of Uncle Shibi-din’s back. Then Shibi-din signalled him silently to move down-wind of the deer and they set off as quietly as possible in the moonlight, avoiding any twigs that might crack or rustle underfoot. His uncle had rubbed them both down with the scent gland of a deer, and painted the outline of deer bones vertically on their cheeks.

  Shibi-din had seen the deer’s eyes glint green for a second in the light of the moon. Danny had already learned that at night the deer’s eyes shine green, the tiger’s orange and the alligator’s red.

  As they closed in on where he had seen the animal, Shibi-din fired off an arrow. The wounded deer bolted further into the undergrowth. Shibi-din pretended he was too tired to follow it.

  ‘You go and get it,’ he said.

  Danny felt sick with nerves. He knew he was being sent for his first deer and the adrenalin rushed through him. His uncle had trained him how to smell blood. Danny approached the grasses which were taller than he was and let his nostrils open until he scented the slightly metallic smell of blood on the leaves. Then he moved forward in the dark, following the scent, feeling for broken bushes and looking for where the grass was trampled down. His heart was banging. Even wounded, the animal could give a vicious kick. Suddenly, the stench of blood and hair was overwhelming and the deer was panting on the ground in front of him under a bush. He hesitated for a moment because of the way the animal looked at him and then finished it off with another arrow through the eye.

  Danny was exuberant as they dragged it to where they had tethered the horse.

  ‘I felt sad when it looked at me, though,’ Danny said, watching Shibi-din, strong as an ox, sling the dead animal over the horse’s back.

  ‘I know. I shot a monkey in a tree once. It wasn’t a good shot and the monkey was just wounded in the thigh. But I saw him gather bunches of leaves to staunch the wound. I’ve never liked to shoot a monkey since. It was too human. Animals are people in disguise, they say. I can believe that. Some people say we are just the prophetic dreams of animals. Their nightmares. I could believe that too.’

  They began to walk back under the bright stars. Shibi-din went on talking seriously.

  ‘You know, a long time ago we could all speak the language of plants and animals. Animals was people like we. No difference between us. Then one day this man cut a bow and arrow and shot a deer for meat. He dragged it through the bushes and roasted it. Where the blood fell, all the plants shrank back and accused him of murder.

  ‘“You killed a deer. You killed a creature,” they screamed. “Keep away from us.” He cut more plants and they screamed. That day, a bite seemed to be taken from the sun. Everything went dark and the whole savannah turned the colour of rust-coloured blood. When the eclipse was over and the sun became itself again, we Wapisiana people had lost our immortality and we could no longer speak to the plants and animals. Everywhere there was a dreadful stink. That’s why they say the loss of immortality has to do with a bad smell.’

  Danny’s calf muscles were aching so much he could hardly walk another step. He kept getting a stitch in his side and slowing down. All he wanted to do was ride home on horseback. Shibi-din kept pushing him on.

  ‘The horse needs to save its strength,’ he said.

  It took them five hours to cover the fourteen miles home.

  The next morning, Danny was darting around, elated and boasting, while Maba and Zuna skinned the deer and stretched and pinned the hide out on the wall to dry in the sun.

  All the rest of that dry season, Danny hung around after Shibi-din, going everywhere with him.

  Gradually, Shibi-din unravelled for him the complex tangle of stars in the sky until Danny thoroughly understood which stars indicated which season.

  ‘Everything has its master in the stars,’ explained Shibidin. ‘Everything that moves, that is. You don’t find plants and trees in the sky because they have roots and can’t move.’

  He pointed out a certain constellation.

  ‘That’s the Master of Fish. That constellation signals the rains and tells you when it’s fish-breeding time. The little group of stars at the top we call the Tapir – the tapir is also connected to the rainy season. You’ve heard people say: “Shoot a tapir and rain soon come.” They’re numerous around the time of the rains.’

  He pointed out the topmost star of the Southern Cross.

  ‘When that top star reaches its highest point in the sky you’ll hear the powis bird cry – that grunting cough. It cries at a different time every night – but always when that star is at its height.’

  A few minutes later they heard the bird call.

  Danny soaked up all the knowledge. He learned that each constellation was a being who used to live on earth and had gone up to the sky to avoid persecution and to be in charge of a particular creature. Soon he could tell by the stars when labba or bush-hog would be plentiful; when the high grasses of the thunder maize were likely to seed; when the frogs would start to sing and the fish spawn. He could distinguish the scorpion rainfall from the crab rainfall and predict when the black swallows would come twittering from the caves and rivers, darkening the sky as they dived after the swarms of insects.

  Sometimes Shibi-din frightened him. Everyone knew to avoid Shibi-din when he was drinking. Once he had shaken the beams and pulled his own roof down leaving his wife and children looking at the stars.

  The only time the children saw Maba angry enough to raise her voice was when she miscarried and lost twins – for which she was profoundly grateful, twins being a bad sign. One of the men in the village, a skinny, hollow-cheeked trouble-maker, started up the rumour that she had been having sex with a river dolphin and that she had given birth early to two little pink dolphins.

  He said that he had been watching from the other side of the bank when she put them back in the river and had seen them wriggle away downstream.

  ‘They had nice firm flesh like silver balata,’ he said.

  It was rainy season. Maba, furious, waded through the flooded tracts of land and went from house to house tracking down the source of the rumour. Finally, she confronted the man inside his benab.

  ‘We all know how you like to dig in your wife’s bottom and spread it round everywhere,’ she shouted from the doorway. ‘Well, get your wife to sew her bottom up so you can’t find any more shit.’

  The wife threw a log at her but she ducked and walked firmly back through the sheeting rain which plastered her hair all round her head and broad shoulders as she splashed her way back to the house.

  She too had had a fright at the sight of the two foetuses in the sac when she miscarried in a patch of bush near the river. To her the tiny embryos looked as if they had horse’s heads and lizard’s feet.

  Maba was not sure why she did not entirely trust her eldest daughter. Most people praised Beatrice for be
ing a hard-working, happy-natured girl but Maba had her private reservations. She sensed something secretive about Beatrice and Maba did not approve of mystery.

  Although she never mentioned it to anyone, not even Zuna, it had occurred to her that Beatrice might be one of the water people, who live on earth during the day and underwater at night, but who are otherwise indistinguishable from ordinary people. She did not know for the life of her why she felt that way about Beatrice but she did. Maba was practical and this aspect of her daughter offended her in some way. She noticed that Beatrice never paired up with any of the boys although most girls of her age were doing so. She seemed to keep herself apart.

  When Beatrice herself was older and looked back to try and understand what had happened, she remembered that her first sexual experiences had not come about through human agency.

  It was at the blazing height of the dry season. She was about eleven and was leaning against the doorpost of the house, one foot raised and resting against it, watching some of the other children. Two of them were having a wrestling match in the dust. Some others were kicking a balata ball around on the hard ground where the tawny earth had been baked by the sun and tamped down by years of footsteps and horses’ hooves.

  Beatrice’s chest was still flat but her nipples had begun to swell and they pushed against her skimpy dress like two baby turtle heads. Her hair was tied at the neck. The doorpost was hot against her back. Boom. Bang. The ball smacked against the yellow adobe wall beside her head. The heat was making her newly sprouted breasts tingle and the hotter the sun became, the more she became aware of an incandescent darkness at the bottom of her belly, between her legs, in a mysterious place that she had hardly been aware of before.

  She vaguely heard the others shouting as they played but they seemed to be calling from a distance, some faraway place. The sun burned even more fiercely and as the sun grew in intensity, so the darkness inside her turned into a delicious fizzing feeling that just teetered on the edge of an explosion and then died away again. She just stood there. The other children had stopped playing and were collecting their arrows and bows to go fishing.

  They called for her to join them but she turned away and went into the house and swung in her hammock.

  After that, Beatrice often tried to make the feeling come back again. Sometimes she could just be sitting astride the rough poles of a fence and it would start. The heat could trigger it too, when she was standing in the sun leaning against one of the houseposts. Occasionally, she could almost make it happen if she hoisted herself up between two tree branches, clenched her thigh muscles and just wriggled. Her body knew that if she could only keep that feeling going for long enough something wonderful would happen, but her arms always grew tired first and she would drop to the ground. The puzzling thing was that it was unpredictable. Sometimes it happened and sometimes not. Sometimes it just happened when she was walking down to the creek. She preferred it when the sun got into her belly and started it all up.

  By now, the other children were regularly playing sex games which Beatrice did not enjoy. They would all go down to the river and couples would lie down on top of one another in the shelter of the bushes. Beatrice went through it mechanically. She did it because everybody was doing it, this clambering over each other’s bodies. She never associated what they were doing with that nice fizzing feeling she had recently discovered.

  Experimenting more, she found that, if she was patient and lay in her hammock and rubbed herself for long enough, there would first of all come that sensation of warmth spreading through the bottom half of her body and then an increase of intensity that built up to a burst of pleasure followed by deep, pulsing pulls that only gradually subsided. She learned how to control the bursts of pleasure. They reminded her of the spinning, golden catherine-wheel fireworks she had seen when she was staying with the Marinheiro family who had taken her to a fete in Boa Vista. The only worry she had was connected to the fact that her father had recently brought back a torch from Brazil that worked by batteries. Beatrice worried that this newly discovered pleasure might also work on some sort of internal battery and she did not know how many more goes she could have before the batteries ran out. For a while she rationed herself.

  A short while later, something similar happened, this time in the forest where hardly any sun at all penetrated the gigantic trees. Beatrice, Danny and Wifreda had all gone with Shibi-din and some of their cousins to collect mari-mari bark. Shibi-din used the bark to tan his deer- and cowskins. He said that the bark from deep in the forest was better.

  There, Beatrice discovered that the intense colours of certain flowers had the same effect on her as the sun. Branching off on her own to look for bark, taking all the usual precautions to mark her trail, she came across some scarlet flowers under a ceiba tree. The shade from the huge trees prevented much plant life on the ground. But these flowers seemed to burn the air around them. She stared, fascinated. The flowers blazed like sores. She could not take her eyes off them. First came the familiar tingling in her nipples and then the other feeling started up in the bottom of her belly. She lay down on her back under the huge tree and began to play with herself, her hand diving between her legs like a duck’s head.

  Her older cousin Gina followed her trail and came back to look for her, a warishi full of bark slung on her back. She saw Beatrice gasping and panting under the tree and thought for a moment she had been poisoned.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked and then said, matter-of-factly: ‘Oh I see. You’re making love with ghosts.’ And she left Beatrice to find her own way back to the others along the marked trails.

  Later, Beatrice discovered that the vivid, electric blue of jacaranda petals started her nipples tingling in the same way. Certain blossoms with a particular vibrating wavelength of colour affected her sexually like that.

  At home, the tapir had the habit of climbing on to one of the beds and rolling around. Once Beatrice had crept up to the creature and lain down beside it, rubbing her pelvis against its thick skin and breathing in its near-human smell. The creature shook itself and got off the bed as if in protest.

  Her mother was standing in the doorway, a slight frown on her round face.

  ‘Come on, Tapioca-face, I need you to help carry the farine pan.’

  Maba saw the muddied flanks of the tapir as it stood in the middle of the room with its look of blind innocence, sniffing with its prehensile nose.

  ‘You mustn’t let that animal on the bed. It spends all its time in the river. Look. It’s left mud on the mattress.’ Then sensing that there was something odd about the way Beatrice looked, she added: ‘You shouldn’t keep a pet too long, you know. They become able to read your thoughts and they become enemies.’

  Wifreda found Beatrice shocking in a lot of ways although she admired her daring. When they had stayed with the Marinheiros in Brazil, Beatrice had stolen some of the communion wine and shared it out amongst the children. When Wifreda said she did not want to join in Beatrice just lay on the bed and stared at her and giggled.

  She did not only break the rules of the Church. She broke all the rules. When they were back home, Wifreda saw Beatrice bathing in the part of the river where the men usually bathed because she was too lazy to walk further downstream. And Beatrice lied about when she had her period and was not supposed to fish or bathe in the river. She just seemed to follow her own impulses. If Wifreda threatened to tell anybody, Beatrice said she would just leave and go away somewhere else.

  Wifreda thought that life without Beatrice would be unbearable so she kept quiet.

  The Long Wait

  It had been decided that Danny, Beatrice, Wifreda and Alice were all to go to school next year in Georgetown. Beatrice was the only one who was excited. Danny shrugged his shoulders. Wifreda and Alice tried not to think about it. But to Beatrice, that year’s cycle seemed endless.

  First it was time for the round-up. The horses were fed on corn for weeks to give them strength. Because of the po
or-quality grazing on the savannahs, Waronawa’s cattle spread far and wide across the savannahs looking for decent grass. It took months to round them up. The vaqueiros, their bronze, wrinkled faces becoming ever redder in the sun, chased the lowing beasts for miles in a thundering flurry of white dust. The savannahs echoed with drumming hooves and bellowing cattle. Everyone at Waronawa, even the youngest children, could ride. The vaqueiros were all skilled horsemen, mostly bareback and barefoot.

  Danny and Lallo, one of his younger brothers, perched on the corral fence in their shorts and listened for the bellowing of the herds as the cattle were driven towards the river. Danny held on to Lallo by the arm. The previous year Lallo had fallen off and suffered a greenstick fracture. When the men returned with the cattle, the children ran back and forth filling buckets with water for the men to drink somewhere in the shade before they set about branding and castrating the animals.

  That night Shibi-din, his hands badly blistered from the reins, drank heavily. He knocked his wife unconscious after he found no meat in the pepper-pot and in a fit of rage, set fire to his own family house. The unusual, flaring light and screams woke the McKinnon girls. Beatrice, Wifreda and Alice climbed out of their hammocks and stumbled sleepily outside to see what was going on.

  People were running frantically to and from the lake to fetch water. Maba and Zuna were already standing with a crowd, the heat fanning their anxious faces. Everyone had gathered round to try and help but the flames were too fierce and thrust them back. The whole scene was bathed in a strange, pink light. Burning orange flakes of thatch, bordered with black, floated up into the night sky. A keskidee, thinking it was dawn, started to sing.

  Aro, Shibi-din’s wife, had recovered and escaped. She moaned as Zuna gripped on to her arm to prevent her running back inside for her children. When Shibi-din appeared out of the darkness from nowhere, still befuddled, people had to keep them apart.