Later, Danny cheered up a bit. They discovered an abandoned canoe in the river. Danny took it and paddled along on his own until he found a suitable creek. He was relieved to be away from Beatrice for a while. She did not seem to be overcome with shame the way he was when they were in company. He wondered if he was a coward.
He set about making a fish-trap. Focusing on the mechanics of constructing the trap relieved him of his unease. By the time he had finished weaving the rushes into a conical trap and set it, building a dam further downstream, he was himself again. He moved up and down the bank setting a couple more spring-traps.
Instead of returning straightaway to Beatrice, he sat on some sand at the edge of the creek and stared at the water.
The sun steamed down. The waters were stained reddish brown from vegetable matter. A ripple the shape of a lifted eyelid in the water rolled towards him. The sweet, sickly smell of grasses, wild eddoes and mangrove bushes hung in the humid air. A film of sweat covered Danny’s body and soaked the roots of his hair as he sat there.
When the insects became too troublesome, he decided to go back and find Beatrice. He could check the traps in the morning. Paddling along the creek, he ducked to avoid low branches and finally emerged into the wide main river. After about fifty yards, the black waters began to slap the side of the boat with an ominous ‘thunk’ and to churn unexpectedly all round the canoe.
At this point the river was some forty feet wide. Trees leaned out from both banks, their exposed twisted roots holding precariously on to the sandy soil. Danny checked to see what was causing the turbulence.
Small bush-hogs go around in groups of five or six. Adult ones herd together in groups of thirty or forty. Wild hogs are fierce. They can kill a tiger. Danny found himself surrounded by one of these large herds as they tried to swim across the river. The boat started to buck and twist as the animals smacked against it.
Suddenly as though by a signal, they attacked en masse. Danny stood up unsteadily in the boat and tried fending them off with his paddle. The boat rocked violently. He was beset by seething mounds of bristling black and grey hog backs. They smashed at the boat in a fury, trying to break it with their yellow teeth and tusks.
His foot skidded as he reached down into the canoe for the axe and the boat nearly overturned. Danny somehow regained his balance and hacked at the hogs, at their writhing backs, their black lips and snapping jaws with desperate, flailing swings of his axe. The water boiled with blood and spray. He was covered in blood. He killed three before the others took heed.
As suddenly as the attack began, it was over. The herd swam leisurely to the other side.
Danny’s chest heaved as he struggled for breath. He watched the carcasses float downriver without even trying to keep one for food. He managed to get the boat to the side of the river and hold on to some branches, retching and waiting for the nausea to pass.
He thought the herd had been acting as if they were under a spell. The whole episode felt like a bad sign.
As soon as Beatrice saw Danny coming towards her, she could see that something was wrong. His shorts were streaked with blood. His gait was stiff and slow. He stared straight ahead without looking to see where he put his feet and he was carrying no fish.
He told her what had happened, then slung his hammock between two giant mora trees and curled up in it, hanging there between the trees like a leaf. She took his shorts down to the river to wash the blood from them, using the lather from black sage leaves for soap. When she came back he was shivering and refused to eat, although the pot was on the fire. She tried to bring back some semblance of normality by chatting in a wifely way.
‘We should get ourselves two Wai-Wai hammocks. They’re smaller and easier to carry. They make theirs with fibre. Our Wapisiana ones are cotton. Ours dry well in the savannah but in the forest they stay wet.’
Danny remained silent.
She climbed into the hammock with him and put her leg over his thigh, trying to comfort him. After a while, he began to make love half-heartedly.
Neither Beatrice nor Danny were aware that an eclipse had begun.
Not much sun penetrated the forest and neither of them noticed that it was growing gradually as dark as night and that the chatter and piercing calls of the birds had stopped altogether. It was pitch black. During the eclipse, the forest became as quiet as death. Then bats began to squeak. A night-hawk, that usually remains immobile on a branch all day, took off and flapped overhead. Somewhere in the far distance, they heard the distressed grunting of a jaguar.
Danny twisted in the hammock to face Beatrice.
‘I’m cold,’ he said.
She thought that it was just the coolness of the creek water which he had dashed over himself to get the blood off. But then something happened to Danny. He was seized with a terrible icy coldness all through his gut, a coldness indistinguishable from sadness. He gave an almighty shudder that rocked the hammock. She held on to him but he could not control the shivering. She rubbed his back vigorously. The shudders rocked him four or five times more, leaving him helpless. She tried to warm him and soothe him by rubbing and stroking him and holding him tightly in her arms.
‘I’m so cold,’ he kept mumbling. He tried to hold on to her in the grip of this chilling nausea and those icy shivers but his arms felt like lead and he was unable to absorb her warmth. He felt as if he would never be warm again. They lay there wrapped in each other’s arms without moving, neglecting to check on the boat or cover the food in the pot which the dog nosed around, waiting for it to cool.
The convulsions left Danny feeling as though all the bones in his body had been taken out and rearranged.
‘I’ll paint you with genipap,’ said Beatrice anxiously, shocked at his condition. She thought he might feel protected by it.
A dismal grey-green light began to filter through the trees once more. And for the next few hours, with the utmost concentration, Beatrice drew patterns all over his face and body with the black dye that she had collected from the Wai-Wai; she painted him with concentric squares like the rotating ones she had once seen when she fainted; she marked him with long stripes and geometric shapes down his bronze back until he looked like a beautifully patterned insect.
He took no interest in the proceedings but lay still while she worked, feeling too sick and exhausted to move. She covered every inch of his face and body with mathematical precision as if the construction of these austere, symmetrical patterns might somehow shore him up and hold him together.
Savannah Eclipse
On the savannahs, the eclipse made it grow dark quickly like someone’s heart sinking. Birds stopped singing. Cattle started to wend their way home. The tamarind tree at the back of Waronawa, which normally at that time of year was one gigantic, flowering buzz, became silent as the bees flew in black swarms through the darkening air for their hives. The first bats started to flit through the sky.
As soon as the moon began to encroach on the sun in the middle of the morning, everybody came out of their thatch houses at Waronawa and began to bang pots and utensils together and started shouting to frighten the two celestial bodies apart. Auntie Bobo’s husband fired two shots into the air with his gun. Some of the men fired off arrows towards the eclipse.
Mamai Maba stood outside the house shouting: ‘No. No. No,’ in a loud voice, as if she was deeply offended by something. Too terrified to look up at the sky, she kept her head averted from the sun while continuing to bang two metal pots together with her powerful arms. Zuna, her hollow black eyes full of anxiety, made a great racket by clashing a metal ladle and a metal bucket together.
As soon as he realised what was going on, McKinnon rushed to the rising ground behind the house and set up his tripod. As the sun was gradually quenched and the savannahs grew dark around him, he snapped at regular intervals in an attempt to catch each phase of the phenomenon. In the distance he could hear people screaming.
When the eclipse was over, he wound up the film and
headed for his dark room to develop it as quickly as possible.
When he got there, his precious dark room was in disarray. Maba was tipping everything upside down. The door was wide open letting in all the light and ruining some film he had already taken. The trough of liquid which he used to develop film had been up-ended and the fluid spilt all over the floor. Angrily, he went through the house to discover that every container, bowl, dish, gourd, pot, monkey-cup and bucket had been emptied of its contents and turned upside down.
‘What’s going on here?’ he asked, furious. Maba and Zuna were struggling to overturn a barrel of rainwater outside.
‘It’s the slime from the eclipse,’ panted Mamai Maba. ‘It will get into everything and poison us.’
McKinnon shook his head in exasperation. Maba had a look in her eyes that he had never seen before, an expression of contempt and malicious defiance. He went upstairs and sat swinging on a hammock to calm himself down. Disappointed and bemused, he looked at the one photograph he had managed to salvage. It belonged to Father Napier and had come out quite well. It showed some thirty or forty alligators sprawled out on the rocks one misty day on the banks of the Ireng River.
By midday when it was quite clear that the monstrous episode was over and the sun had fully recovered, the community at Waronawa came to, rather shamefaced as if they had all been on a temporary drinking spree, and prepared to leave for a manorin at Achimeriwau. People took hoes and cutlasses. They were going to help a young couple clear the land and plant before the rains set in properly. The couple had left it perilously late. Luckily, the rains were delayed that year. There had been a false start with showers and squalls and then the sun had continued grilling the earth as fiercely as ever.
Maba stayed behind. The eclipse had both disturbed her and settled something in her mind. It made her feel better about Danny and Beatrice. What they were doing was more understandable in relation to an eclipse. She went and shaved a piece off the roll of black Rupununi shag tobacco hanging on the wall and made herself a long cigarette. She sucked on it, exhaling the smoke in slow, thoughtful gusts as she looked out of the window.
Everything was dry. It was as if the rains would never come. The road beyond the house was cracked like a turtle back. The sun blazed down, scorching the cashew and sandpaper trees. The dry leaves made a scratching sound as the wind shook them.
She decided then and there to consult her father about the whole business. McKinnon seemed to be completely unaware of what was happening.
Her father had died two years earlier. His bones hung in a gaily beaded and feathered basket from one of the rafters. She took them down. His spirit, she reckoned, must be almost gone from them by now. Still, she took them out carefully and threw them on the dried-earth floor to study the pattern.
Several things happened almost simultaneously. A cloud crossed the sun, throwing the room into darkness and making the bones invisible. The house filled with the oily, bitter-sweet smell of citrus trees and Mamai Maba heard a sort of groan rolling around the room. She grabbed a brush and tried to sweep it out. But the noise grew and got inside her ears. She shook her head and decided it was time to discuss the whole matter with McKinnon.
At first, he did not understand what was being said. Mamai Maba told him so casually and in such a matter-of-fact way that he thought she was just worried because Danny and Beatrice had been away in the bush for so long.
They stood in the upstairs room. The sun came through the windows and buttered the room in slabs with stripes of shadow. Maba looked sad and soft. She was fatalistic about the affair and no longer distraught. Now it was a matter of providence.
‘Looks like the sun and moon repeat their crime,’ she said and shrugged her shoulders as she spoke, her eyebrows lifting up and making the wrinkles stream down on either side of her forehead.
Too startled to reply, McKinnon stared at the woman whose life, with that of her sister, he had shared for so many years. Her hair was still black and tied back in a knot as it had been when he first knew her, but she looked rounder and smoother, like a boulder worn down by the river.
He had felt a wave of nausea at the news. In part it was because he felt foolish for not having guessed. But part of the shock also came in realising that he did not know his own boundaries. He thought he was an open-minded man, a free-thinker, not restricted by conventional morality, but the news shocked and revolted him.
He stood there without moving a muscle. One of the shutters squeaked as it blew back and forth. Mamai Maba, having delivered the news, collected up some clothes to wash and went downstairs.
As soon as she had left, McKinnon felt as if he were suffocating. Driven by an urge to go outside and walk on the savannahs, he left the house.
The sun flashed off the pond behind the house. The air burned all round him. He took one of the trails leading in the direction of the Kanaku Mountains. Here and there rose dead trees stripped of bark. The countryside all round was pure desert, dotted with termite nests. As he walked he could see no living thing, not even a blade of grass, just the charred remains of lifeless trees and withered twigs. Every hundred yards or so he had to stop because a blackness seemed to be gathering inside his head and he could hear the explosive banging of his heart. He stood still on the savannahs.
After a few minutes, he turned to face the house. The ranch and settlement of houses round it lay in the bright sunlight. The Rupununi River glinted behind them. One of the dogs stood halfway along the trail wondering whether to follow him or not. The dog moved off on its own.
And then, quite out of the blue, McKinnon knew that he would leave the savannahs, that he did not belong, however much of his life had been spent there. He was not sure exactly when he would go. There was no rush, but eventually he would leave. He was astounded to think he had been there so long. The whole of the last twenty-five years felt like a dream.
After an hour or so, the palpitations and dizziness both lessened and he began to walk slowly back to the ranch-house. As soon as he was inside, he wrote a note to Father Napier at St Ignatius asking him to come to Waronawa as a matter of urgency.
Although it was getting late, he sent one of the vaqueiros with it. The man set off. Maba and Zuna watched him gallop away in the direction of the Kanakus. The moon on the horizon was bloated and the colour of blood.
The Great Fall
It was June, 1919. Father Napier responded immediately to the summons. The rains had finally started, making his journey to Waronawa a wet and uncomfortable one. Water sloshed around in the bottom of the boat and his boots were soaking wet and heavy. He felt irritable. In the steady drizzle, he scrambled out at the Waronawa landing and started tugging his trunk out of the boat. The lean figure of McKinnon splashed over the muddy ground to meet him.
‘I really have news for you,’ said McKinnon. ‘The war is at an end.’
Despite the damp, McKinnon looked dry and desiccated as if the savannahs had squeezed all the juices out of him. Father Napier noticed that he suddenly seemed to have aged.
News that the First World War had ended finally reached the Rupununi savannahs more than six months after the armistice of November, 1918. When McKinnon had ploughed his way through to the end of his pile of old newspapers he had come across the announcement.
Father Napier hoisted his slippery tin trunk on to his hip and the two men walked up the slope to the house.
‘That’s not why you summoned me here so urgently, surely?’ The priest looked at him sideways with the sly curiosity of a bird. ‘You could have just sent a note.’
‘You don’t seem very pleased at the news,’ said McKinnon, prevaricating, unwilling to divulge immediately the reason for his summons.
‘It depends on the conditions of the peace.’
A flock of cranes flew by. McKinnon could hardly keep his mind on what he was saying. Now that the priest was here, he resented having to tell him about Danny and Beatrice.
‘Apparently the Germans have surrendered uncond
itionally. An armistice has been declared. A peace conference is being held at Versailles.’
‘In that case I am very dissatisfied,’ Father Napier replied, bristling with patriotism under the grey sky. ‘We should have entered Berlin with flags flying and bands playing. I hate half measures. The Germans will be laughing at us up their sleeves.’
The two men entered the cool darkness of the house. McKinnon sent one of the children to bring a glass of lemonade for the visitor.
Upstairs, McKinnon stood by the window looking out towards the ford where four vaqueiros on horseback were taking a small group of cattle across the river in the grey mist.
‘What was the urgent message about?’ enquired the priest.
‘I need to see my son Danny.’
The water swirled where the cattle had crossed.
‘Ah. I saw signs of them on my visit to the Wai-Wai. But I kept missing them. They’ve been away for some time. What are they doing down there?’
McKinnon’s face was half hidden by the wooden shutter but something about the rigidity of the upturned profile made Father Napier stop speaking.
McKinnon prided himself on his rationalism. He looked upon himself as a man of the world. He thought he could discuss any subject with equanimity. But now he hesitated. He found the thought of having to seek help from a priest demeaning. He looked greenish and sick as he spoke.
‘Could you go and find him for me?’ His tone was almost pleading. ‘I’m thinking of selling some cattle. I need his help.’
Father Napier stood stock still in astonishment.
‘What! It has just taken me six weeks to get back from there. Besides, they could be anywhere. It’s impossible. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.’
McKinnon said nothing. He licked his dry lips with little motions like a lizard. Outside they could hear shouts from the children and the thwacks of a lasso as they practised harnessing a wet post.
The Ventriloquist's Tale Page 18
