A Spear of Summer Grass

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  It was that moment when I made up my mind to try. I knew the rougarou would come for me. I had always been a naughty child. I left candles burning long into the night to read. I stole pocketfuls of penny candy when Grandfather said I had had enough. And when Mossy’s mother, the bricked-up saint who never left her rooms, summoned me to say the rosary with her, I skipped every third bead because I knew God would never notice. As I grew older, my crimes grew more audacious. I swam naked in the creek, knowing the sharecroppers’ sons would get whipped for watching. I stole Mossy’s favourite pair of earrings and lost them at a masked ball I wasn’t supposed to attend. I strapped a flask under my garters and kissed boys in shadowy gardens. I rolled my own cigarettes and smoked them under the house while I read trashy novels that Granny Miette warned would wreck both my morals and my eyesight.

  The rougarou never came for me. I packed away the story of him like everything else in my childhood. I thought I’d gotten away with it all, but the rougarou keeps careful accounts. He bided his time, waiting for me, always waiting, as patient as a wolf stalking a lamb. He sniffed out not my pain but my happiness, and that was when he lunged, snatching Johnny from me. I sobbed over the pieces of his uniform that came back, and in those sobs I heard the howl of the rougarou. I set off running then, and I hadn’t stopped running since.

  “It doesn’t exist.” I repeated the lie stubbornly.

  The babu shrugged.

  “He says that your belief does not make this thing true or not true. It is what he sees.”

  “I thought he saw a man in a uniform waiting with Death,” I said. “Now he sees a werewolf. I think the babu needs better spectacles.”

  The babu didn’t understand sarcasm, or if he did, he chose to ignore it. He laughed when Gideon translated my words, treating it all as a big joke. I stood up, my face hot.

  “The babu says that you have run all the way to Africa, Bibi, but you do not have to run anymore. The wolf-man cannot hurt you here.”

  “That’s what you think,” I said bitterly.

  I walked off then, but Gideon followed me, and I was glad. Tears blurred my vision and I was so tired I kept stumbling into the pig holes where warthogs ran to ground. Gideon walked patiently beside me, his stride easy and loose, his spear held at the ready.

  I tripped once more, and Gideon put out his hand, one fingertip barely grazing mine. It was the first time Gideon had ever touched me. I twined my fingers in his and we both stared down at the linked hands, so different, and yet were they? Strip away the skin and you would find the same bones, the same blood, the same web of nerves and tendons and everything that made a person human.

  “I am sorry,” I told him again, wiping my eyes with my free hand. “You are my best friend here, Gideon.”

  “You are my friend as well, Bibi.”

  “You know, you might knock off the Bibi business and just call me Delilah.”

  “Such a thing is not correct.”

  “It is correct when people are friends. You could do it when we’re alone if it makes you uncomfortable to say it otherwise.”

  He pondered this. “Very well, Delilah.” The name sounded peculiar in his mouth, but he said it anyway, and for the first time that day I smiled.

  We withdrew our hands then, and I thought of the girl he planned to marry and how simple it all was for them. And I wondered why it had to be so complicated for the rest of us.

  “Gideon, tell me the truth. Is there anything that you’re afraid of? I mean, really afraid, so afraid that if you think of it in the dark of the night your stomach turns to water and your heart beats so fast you can hear your own blood in your ears?”

  “The lion scares me,” he said solemnly. “And when I was a boy, the pinching man scared me.”

  “The pinching man?”

  “He is like your rougarou, but he is a real man. In each village there is this pinching man, and it is his job to punish disobedient children. He takes the skin in between his long fingernails and he twists very hard. Mothers will say to their children, ‘Be good or the pinching man will make you sorry.’ I was very scared of the pinching man when I was a boy. Once I was bad, and I lost my mother’s favourite goat, a perfect goat with hair that looked like new milk. A white goat is a very special thing, and this goat was to be sacrificed for a special feast. And I had let the goat wander away. This is a very bad thing, and the pinching man heard of it. He looked for me all of the day. And I spent all of the day hiding from him. First, up an acacia tree which was very uncomfortable. Then in the home of my best friend, which was unkind to him for the pinching man would have pinched him as well if he had known. Then I hid among the cattle, which was worst of all. The cows knew I was afraid and it made them afraid. They stepped on me and poked me with their sharp horns, and by the time I crawled out from the boma, I was covered in bruises and scratches. I had spent all day wrapped up so tightly in my fear that I could not breathe. And then, when at last I came out of hiding, the pinching man was waiting for me at my house.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He took one look at me with the bloody scratches and the bruises and said, ‘You have pinched yourself harder than I!’”

  “And did he let you go?”

  Gideon smiled. “Oh, no. He pinched me twice, once for losing the goat and once for making him wait. But this is a thing that I know—to live with fear is not to live at all. A man will die every moment he is afraid.”

  “So you mean I should face down the things that scare me? Stare down the rougarou and walk right up to the pinching man?”

  The smile deepened. “I think that Africa is making you wise, Delilah.”

  I sniffled and regretted the loss of my handkerchief. I rubbed my face on my sleeve, wondering what the habitués of the Club d’Enfer would make of me if they could see me.

  “Then let’s go back and see how Moses is. We will wait together.”

  19

  After several hours there was no change in Moses’ condition and Gideon took me back to Fairlight. He left me at the garden gate and I went into the house alone, every bone aching. Dora had left food for me and a note saying the men had disposed of the corpses in the barn and scrubbed it out and that she was spending the night with the Halliwells. I ignored the food and poured a drink and settled on the sofa and that was where Helen found me a few hours later.

  I was halfway through a bottle of gin and she helped me with the rest. She had shown up with an armful of flowers from her garden and an apologetic grin.

  “I suppose you think I’m terrible,” she began.

  I held up the bottle. “No worse than the rest of us. Do you want bitters or tonic?”

  She sighed. “No. Straight-up is good enough for me. Shall I apologise formally, or are we all sorted?”

  “Oh, I think we’re sorted.”

  I had hoped that would be enough, but she went on. “Those parties, there’s nothing malicious in them, you know. They’re just a bit of fun.”

  I didn’t say anything. She sipped at her gin. “Sometimes I wake up and I don’t like what I see in the mirror. And one of my little soirees just makes me feel good again. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  I didn’t like her like this, pleading, looking just a trifle too intently at me. I wanted her to be careless and a little cruel, beautiful and vivacious. That was the Helen I had always known. I didn’t like seeing the cracks in the facade.

  “You probably wouldn’t let me drink if you knew how bad it was for me,” she said with a half laugh.

  “I know how bad it is. I just think a person has a right to do what she wants with her own body.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. She drank deeply of the gin, holding it in her mouth before swallowing it down. “Thank you for that. That’s the worst part of not being entirely well, you know. Ev
eryone thinks they know what’s best for you. But they’re wrong. This is good for me, living is good for me.” She hesitated. “I suppose Rex told you.”

  “He did.”

  She lifted her chin. “He’s fond of you. I don’t mind. You mustn’t think that I mind. I won’t be here forever, you know. And when I’m gone maybe the two of you—”

  “Don’t,” I said. My tone was sharp but she merely smiled.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you like the thought of wearing a dead woman’s shoes? You’d like the pink quartz bathtub. And don’t be so quick to dismiss Rex. He’s a devil in bed.”

  I smiled in spite of myself and she laughed aloud. “Oh, I do love talking to you, Delilah. You’re one of the few people I know who is genuinely incapable of being shocked. I mean it, you know. I don’t mind about Rex. He’s a good man. I like to think that he might not be alone when I’m gone. It’s being replaced while I’m still here that I mind.”

  I leveled my gaze at her. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Kit Parrymore,” she said succinctly. Her smile faltered, but she pasted it firmly in place. Only her eyes pleaded. “I know it’s a bore, but I really am quite fond of him. Don’t take him away from me, will you? I get such a kick out of misbehaving with him, and you know, darling, I’ve so few kicks left.”

  I said nothing. She rose. “That gin went right through me. Point me to the bathroom and then we’ll open another bottle and show these natives how it’s done.”

  I waved her in the direction of my room and she disappeared. She was gone a long while, but I didn’t follow her, and when she returned, I was glad I hadn’t. There was fresh powder on her nose and her eyes were rimmed in pink. It would take a crueler woman than I had ever been to poke that. She poured us each a fresh glass and settled in for a long evening. We talked about Mossy and old friends; we put on the gramophone and danced a wobbly foxtrot. We toasted the moon and when she left, it felt as if the light had gone out of the room. There had always been glamour to Helen, real glamour, and I lifted my glass to her as she fired up her engine and stomped hard on the accelerator. The room was empty and cold without her, without Dodo. I wound up the gramophone and finished the gin. When it was done, I went to work on the whisky. It was almost dawn before I fell asleep on the sofa, and when I woke it was to Ryder putting a hand to my throat.

  “What are you doing?” My voice came out as a hoarse croak.

  “Checking for a pulse. You look like hell.”

  “Feel like it, too.” I sat up. I was still wearing the clothes I had worn when I had found Moses in the barn. They were crusted with blood and stained with dirt. My hair was snarled and my fingernails were packed with earth and dried blood.

  Ryder put out his hand. “Come with me.”

  I didn’t even bother to ask where we were going. He put me gently into the truck and drove away from Fairlight. He could have driven us off a cliff at that moment for all I cared. I had assumed we were going to his little boma, but he took a different road, and after a while he parked the truck behind a cluster of bushes next to a small lake. We walked a little distance away into a lugga and from there into a thicket of trees. Tucked up against one was a narrow ladder, and he motioned for me to climb it. I did, feeling as if my legs and arms didn’t belong to me. They were disjointed as my mind, and I wasn’t sure how I managed to make them work except that Ryder was directly behind me, urging me upwards.

  At the top of the ladder I found a platform with a short railing and a canopy of tightly woven leaves and fronds. A makeshift bed was there as well as a small metal camp trunk of supplies. Ryder told me to sit and rummaged in the trunk, emerging with flatbread and a sharp white cheese. There was biltong as well, a local specialty of meat soaked in vinegar and spices and then dried, and some fruit that was too soft but still sweet. He made me eat, and when I was done, he turned me around.

  The tree house overlooked the lake, the view completely unobscured, and from the short distance we could see every creature that came to drink. A lioness was lapping at the water’s edge while a group of zebra on the opposite side watched her warily. She ignored them and wandered off, her indifference apparent in every step.

  I sat transfixed for hours, watching every little drama that played out there. The warthogs that shepherded their little piglets with their tails held aloft like banners. The hippo that strode firmly to the centre of the lake and submerged only to rise munching contentedly as a cow on her water plants. And the giraffes, stepping with stately intention towards the edge, lowering their heads and splaying their legs. One of them ventured towards us, nibbling at the leaves around the tree house until she was so close I could touch her. I put a finger to her hide, surprised to find it felt like horsehair. She looked like velvet from a distance with her elegant patchwork coat. She looked at me then with her enormous doll’s eyes and blinked slowly. She seemed to nod in greeting, then turned away to make a graceful exit.

  There was nothing that day that I didn’t marvel at. And when the air grew hot and the animals sought shade and rest, I began to talk. I told Ryder things I had never told him, never told anyone. I told him about Johnny, and the fact that I had loved him and how it had surprised me and frightened me to love anyone that much. I told him about burying the pieces they had sent home to me, and what it had meant to be a widow at twenty. I told him about the men since then, those I had loved and those I had not. I told him about the things I was ashamed of, and the things I regretted, and I cried until my eyes were so swollen I couldn’t see him. He held me as he might hold a sick puppy, tenderly, asking nothing. He handed me a handkerchief and said little. His hand stroked my hair, working out the snarls, and when I was finished and could say nothing more, he fed me again and told me to lie down. He covered me with the thin scratchy blanket and lay behind me, holding me against his body. I fell asleep and slept so deeply and so long that when I awoke the stars were out, shimmering as if someone had flung a handful of broken glass across a velvet tablecloth. I counted them until dawn began to streak the eastern sky, pink and gold shot across the horizon.

  Ryder awoke then and pointed to the lake. The animals were stirring, some like the lions just coming in from a night’s hunting. Others, like the gentle giraffe, had never been to bed at all, preferring to stand like sleepy sentinels throughout the night. And still others, like the monkeys, were rising with the dawn, chattering in the trees in conversation with the birds.

  “I don’t even remember what I told you,” I said as he handed me a cup of cold tea. He smiled, and there was something seraphic about that smile. Seraphs were angels, but warriors, I remembered from my catechism classes. They brought absolution and vengeance, an uneasy combination, but a magnificent one.

  “It’s not important. It’s only important that you finally said it.”

  “Possibly. I know my psychoanalyst would say so. Of course, I’ve been seeing him for five years and he’s never managed to fix me.”

  “Why do you need to be fixed?”

  I smothered the urge to laugh. “Weren’t you listening last night?”

  He shrugged. “We’re all broken, Delilah. That’s what Africa does. She either attracts people who were broken in the first place or she does the deed for you. This is no country for softness.”

  “I don’t see that you’re broken. You seem whole enough.”

  “Then you haven’t looked closely.”

  “You mean the women?” He shrugged again.

  “Stop doing that. A shrug isn’t an answer.”

  He looked me in the eye. “Fine. You want an answer? I loved a girl a long time ago. I married her and she was going to have a child. I was the happiest man on earth.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened is that I was a goddamned idiot. She was three months pregnant with my best friend’s child when I marr
ied her and I was stupid enough to believe her when she said she had miscalculated the birth.”

  “My God,” I murmured.

  “It gets better. She was still in love with him. And the only reason she married me was because he left her to marry Jude. I was an afterthought, a fallback plan.”

  “Did Jude know?”

  “Not at first. But when my wife was giving birth it became apparent that this was no premature delivery. There were complications and she confessed everything to Tusker who told Jude and me. Tusker thought it was better the truth came out.”

  “And then she died?”

  He gave a harsh laugh. “Not quite. She gave birth to a healthy ten-pound baby boy with my name and my best friend’s eyes. Last I heard she had fallen on hard times and was running a brothel in Cairo.”

  “She broke your heart,” I said softly.

  “That she did. Put your ear to my chest and you could probably still hear the pieces rattling around.”

  I lifted my cup. “A toast to the broken ones, then.”

  He clinked his cup to mine and we drank. He said nothing for a minute but he was watching me closely.

  “What is it, Ryder? Your silences are loud.”

  “I’m just wondering what your plans are.”

  “I don’t have plans. I’m going home just as soon as I can.”

  “Not if you bring a case against Gates,” he pointed out. “You’ll have to stay for a trial to give evidence. Don’t you want justice done?”

  “That isn’t fair,” I argued, but the fight had gone out of me. “I’m tired, Ryder. I want to go home.”

  I looked out over the watering hole washed with new, pink light. “It seems a little odd for a grown man to have a tree house.”

  “It’s where I sleep when the mosquitoes are bad.” He said it simply, dropping the words like small stones into a pond. But I felt the heft of them. He had to avoid the mosquitoes because they could kill him. It was the closest he had come to telling me about the blackwater fever, and I waited, wondering if he would strip himself bare, throwing confidences like shed garments into my lap.