How had White Feather found them? Were they a gift? A bribe? I wanted to ask Hoopoe but the chieftain laid his hand on my arm and pointed toward the flaps of the tent; he did not want my questions. A moment later the flaps opened and two young women appeared, each holding a bundle of clothes; a third hesitated behind them, carrying a large wooden bowl filled with water.
White Feather grunted, but nothing more.
“For you,” said Hoopoe, glancing at me and Natty, then beckoning two of the women forward; both were very pretty, with short black hair and a somewhat Chinese appearance; they showed White Feather the clothes they carried, and he patted them absent-mindedly.
“He is telling you to put them on,” said Hoopoe.
“Now?” I said, a little wildly.
“Now,” said Hoopoe, and waved the women closer still. They dipped their heads as we took what they offered: a new pair of moccasins each, a dress and red shawl for Natty, a tunic for me.
“So…” I climbed to my feet.
“Where?” Natty mouthed at me.
I nodded sideways to suggest we move behind White Feather, and there we took off our old rags—our tattered white shirts and black breeches—before kicking them away and dressing ourselves in our new clothes. Once we had done this we quickly washed our faces and hands in the bowl of water the third woman now offered to us; the whole business was somewhat awkward, as anyone might imagine, but Hoopoe and the rest politely looked away from us, just as Natty and I looked away from one another.
In the process I also removed the necklace and slipped it back into my satchel, which I continued to keep close with the strap across my chest. As I did so I thought Natty might say I should continue to wear it where it could be seen—but she only mumbled something I could not hear, and we turned to appraise one another. I thought she looked more beautiful than ever, with her smooth bare arms, and her dress shining. My own tunic was rather less flattering because it was shorter than my breeches had been, and so left a part of my legs exposed; they looked as pale as moonlight.
“Very well,” Natty said, and smiled so broadly it seemed to contradict what she was telling me. “You look very well.”
I was about to say the same to her, for in truth her red shawl was very becoming—but Hoopoe interrupted me. “Both good,” he said, twisting round to inspect us. Then he clapped his hands, which showed the women they must go back and help the others with our meal; the next part of our welcome was about to begin.
CHAPTER 14
Paradise
Even before Hoopoe had settled again, and the little tinkling bells around his wrists fell silent, the flaps of the tepee parted once more and a procession of men, women and children started to arrive, all carrying wooden platters piled with different kinds of food. The smells then flooding my head were so delicious, I thought I had never been so hungry since I was a schoolboy.
I restrained myself, waiting for White Feather to take the first mouthful—but when he had done this (so slowly, I thought he might have forgotten that food was for eating) I looked across to Natty on his farther side, saw her nod, and together we set to with both hands. Some things tasted familiar: white chicken, and fish, and bowls of maize ground into a paste. Some I had never eaten before: slippery cuts of alligator; coils of grubby sinew I decided were snake.
I suppose our stomachs must have shrunk during our time in prison. At any rate, after gorging for a few minutes I found I could no longer do justice to everything set before me—at which point yet more plates arrived, all heaped with beans, and potatoes, and slices of meat that had been dried out and then dipped in grease to make them palatable again, and prickly pears, and tree roots and flower roots and goodness knows what other kinds of root—some yellow, some white, some reddish; some tasting very sweet, some woody, and some like soil, and eventually, as a climax to the feast, a large heap of rotten fish in which the larvae of hundreds of flies had incubated, which Hoopoe and White Feather picked out and devoured like epicures.
By this time our hosts had despaired of us having a capacity equal to their kindness, so did not seem insulted by our failure to continue eating. In fact they did not seem very sharply aware of anything at all, thanks to the large quantity of liquor they had drunk, which I later discovered was called mescal, and is made from leaves of the agave plant.
I drank only a little of this, because when I saw its effect I knew it would put me completely at the mercy of our hosts—who were still strangers to us. Hoopoe, however, had no such reason to hold back, and I think may actually have relied on the liquor to boost his skills as a medico.
He certainly reached a different plane of existence as our meal continued, which did not concern White Feather in the least; on the contrary, he seemed to expect it. For as the chieftain browsed with his fingers among the food, collecting titbits here and there and chewing them with a blissful slowness, he repeatedly turned his weather-beaten face toward his doctor and smiled a beatific smile. This, despite the fact that Hoopoe spoke entirely in English, and White Feather did not understand a word.
I will not attempt to remember the whole of Hoopoe’s conversation, which was continually mangled by digressions, and also interrupted very often by his leaning forward to touch the satchel in my lap, as though he meant to draw strength from the necklace concealed inside it. But I do recall that he spoke for the first time about his guiding principle in life, which in England we call God but which Indians know as the Great Spirit; it describes the high-minded feeling of cooperation that ideally exists between people of different sorts, and also between people and the creatures they live among.
The last part of this idea was especially attractive to me, since it combined with many of my natural sympathies. But as Hoopoe warmed to his theme, speaking more and more excitedly, with his eyes bright and the bells jingling at his wrists, and asking me to imagine large communities of animals and men living happily together, which he said could be found in grasslands to the north of his own territory, our conversation was cut short. Not, as I feared might happen, by the arrival of more plates of food, but by a troop of young men, some of whom I recognized as members of the hunting party who had rescued us; their leader was carrying a wooden pipe which had a bowl the size of a clenched fist and a stem three feet long; this stem, I saw, was carved with images of snakes and other creatures.
The interruption returned me briefly to the Hispaniola, where I had seen men live permanently in a haze of tobacco smoke. But this device was meant to be shared by everyone, as I realized when the man in charge of it knelt down in front of White Feather, with his fellows also kneeling on either side, then lifted the stem to place it between the old man’s lips and lit the substance he had already pressed into the bowl.
As White Feather began to suck on the pipe my recent glimpse of familiar life disappeared, and not just because everything around me was suddenly blurred by clouds of white smoke. To my astonishment, which did not feel like astonishment, because there was no accompanying sense of surprise, shadowy animal-shapes began crawling slowly across the walls of the tepee, and then wriggling among the various objects swinging from its scaffolding. In a moment the scaffolding also started to move, sometimes contracting, sometimes expanding, while at the same time I heard faint drumbeats pulsing in the village outside.
At first I thought all this must be a hallucination produced by what I had eaten and drunk. But when White Feather finished with the pipe and passed it to me, and I drew on the moist stem and felt a dagger of light flash through my brain, I realized the smoke was to blame. The effect might have been extremely unpleasant—I was, after all, losing control of my senses. But as I breathed out again and passed the pipe to Hoopoe I found a smile had plastered itself all over my face, while my mind swerved in unexpected and profound directions. I became convinced, for instance, that the most important thing in the world was to know what was real and what was not, and fell into a deep study to consider the idea further. After reaching my conclusion I thought I should
explain it to Hoopoe, but when I tried to speak my tongue tied itself in a knot, and I could not form any words.
By now I had very little clue how much time had passed since we first arrived in the tepee, and therefore no way of knowing how far advanced the night might be. But as the pipe began to circulate a second time, and the women who had brought us our meal reappeared to collect the remains, I caught a glimpse of the heavens before the tent-flaps closed again. The sky was black as a river but sprinkled with so many bright stars it seemed quite wrong to call it dark. And quite reasonable, as well, to think the answer to my question about reality, the answer to every question that men have ever asked about their existence, would be more easily found outside, in a shower of silver, than sheltering here in the fug.
I therefore made an effort to stand up and take myself outside.
My legs, however, refused to obey the orders I gave them. This seemed very puzzling and at the same time entirely satisfactory, so I stayed as I was.
I have no idea whether Hoopoe noticed my confusion, but once he had taken the pipe for a third time, and blown smoke to the four points of the compass, which I thought might be some sort of homage to the Great Spirit, he did not pass it to me as I expected; he laid it across his knees and clapped his hands. At this the young men sitting before us all rose to their feet—with less difficulty than I had experienced myself—waiting in silence as their leader retrieved the pipe, then trooping outside with as much dignity as they could muster.
I squinted at White Feather and had the strong impression he approved of their departure, even though it had not been his decision, for at the same time as his men disappeared he gave one of his most genial smiles and also clambered to his feet. Hoopoe, noticing him stagger as he did this, moved quickly to support him, slipping a long painted arm inside his cloak, and in this manner they too reached the doorway and disappeared.
When I stretched out a hand to Natty and asked whether she would like to follow suit, she shook her head. Her face, which I had not been able to see for a little while, since she had been sitting on the far side of White Feather, was very flushed and her forehead creased in a frown.
“Are you quite well?” I asked in a whisper, as I managed to stand at last and we padded across the dizzy patterns of the floor-rugs.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” she asked, sounding a little put out and swaying gently from side to side.
“No reason.”
“I’m full of food, that’s all. Full as a…Full as full can be.” Then she looked at me more intently, stooping forward a little. “You’re very red in the face. Are you sure it’s not you who are unwell?”
“I’m perfectly well, thank you,” I told her, also a little disconcerted. “Perfectly well.”
She leaned nearer still and I smelled the smoke on her breath, in her hair. The pupils of her eyes had swollen and were glossy-dark; I thought if I could only look at them steadily enough I would see my own face reflected back at me in miniature, as though I had fallen into her head.
“What are you looking at?” she asked slowly; her tongue sounded thick and she was half-smiling—a soft smile like a pout.
“Nothing,” I told her.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing you want to hear.”
“Are you sure?”
“So you say.”
“I do say?”
Such banter was almost meaningless, yet at the same time unbearable because it brought us so close together. Any more of it and I would kiss her, kiss her smile and her opening mouth.
But she put her hand on my chest to steady herself, and at the same time pushed me away. The moment ended, as all such moments ended for us, and I turned my back and bowed through the doorway of the tepee.
When we had first arrived in the village we found everything very straightforward: children playing in the dirt, women grinding maize and making oil, boys fishing in the river. But while we feasted everything had been transformed, so now I was entering a kind of theater, where the stage was lit by torches set on long poles fixed into the ground. In the farthest part of this stage, which was adjacent to the river, other small fires were burning—the barbecues, I thought, where our meal had been prepared; at one end I saw the corpse of the alligator with pieces cut from its flank. In the foreground, and therefore partly obscuring all these things: dancers.
Hitherto I had thought the young men of the village (those not involved in the ceremony of pipe-smoking) must be keeping guard, or perhaps helping to prepare our food. In fact they had been planning a quite different sort of ceremony. While some had brought drums from their tents, a dozen of them had taken off their tunics and moccasins, slathered their bodies in grease, collected their tomahawks and knives and spears, and begun rotating in a slow circle, using the river as their backdrop and the village as their audience.
The moment White Feather and the rest of us appeared from our tepee, these drummers—who were all seated on the ground with their tom-toms gripped between their knees like large flower-pots—began pounding a much louder rhythm. At this, the dancers rotated more quickly and stamped harder on the earth.
I could not help remembering the dance we had seen from our prison, and wondered: have we been lured into a trap? Is all this feasting only a way of fattening us for slaughter? But since White Feather and Hoopoe showed no change in their behavior, and patted the space beside them as they settled onto a strip of matting already spread on the ground, I soon recovered again. A moment later we were lying full stretch as we had seen White Feather do on the floor of his lodge. The chieftain himself, still wearing his seraphic smile, lay on my right; Hoopoe, however—Hoopoe suddenly jumped up and joined in the dance.
“Let him wear it,” Natty whispered, leaning against me so I felt the weight and warmth of her.
“What?” I said, half-asleep and wide awake at the same time.
“The necklace,” said Natty. “Let him wear it while he dances.”
“Why would I do that? He might think it’s a gift and keep it.”
“No, he won’t. He’ll understand. He’ll only think you’re sharing your…” Natty paused and there was her smile again, her wide smile and the gleam of her teeth. “Your power. Besides, it’ll be a way to thank them.”
“Thank them?”
“They’ve given us their food—so yes, we must thank them.” As she spoke she reached forward and opened the flap of my satchel. I helped her, letting our fingers brush against one another as they drew our treasure into the open; the firelight crackled along its surfaces and licked them into life.
“There,” Natty sighed, and lifted the necklace closer, rubbing it briefly against her dress to polish it before handing it back to me. “There it is,” she said again. “There.”
And so it was for a second, lying in my hands like a pool of fire that gave no pain, but only a lightness that entered me through my eyes and flooded my whole body.
Then the necklace vanished, because I lifted my hands toward the dancers, and Hoopoe had reached down and snatched it, and put it on, and continued his dance, whereupon Natty leaned against me again and we lolled back to watch him.
To watch him and to dream. For as the dancers continued round and round in a ring, and their shouts grew wilder, and the women tossed more bunches of sweet sage into the fire, and deeper shadows coiled and uncoiled before us, and the rhythm of the drums grew steadily faster, I felt less and less strongly tethered to the earth, and more and more like a creature of the air—as though I was floating above the village and all our new friends, and the river that rolled alongside us, and the wilderness fading into darkness on every side, and was able to see everything below me, to see and to understand certain things that were essential to me, and for a moment seemed almost within reach.
But what things, what certain things? I tried to focus on Hoopoe, and on the necklace, but his coloring had changed from the rosy pink of his name-bird into flame-red, so I could hardly distinguish him from the fires burning in the b
ackground to his dance. Besides which, I knew from the way he kept his eyes fixed on the ground, then flung back his head to gaze at the stars, then tossed it forward again, that he was not in the slightest bit interested in me, or in Natty, or in what our questions might be, but only in the old stories that always lived in his head, and the new stories that now rushed into him through the necklace sliding across his chest.
The Great Spirit. That is all my brain would allow me to know that night. Those two words, and the idea that every single thing in existence depends on every other single thing, no matter how ordinary and humble. I imagined it like the painting of a peaceable kingdom, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and the other animals are all content with their station and their place, and the fruit of the forbidden tree hangs uneaten on the branches. I saw it, shimmering and real, then it blew away from me and evaporated. I rubbed my eyes. I felt them sting with smoke from the fires. I shook my head.
“Jim?”
Natty’s own eyes were ringed with shadows and her mouth was ajar as if she was panting; in fact she was hardly breathing at all, only taking little sips of air like a fish breaking the surface of a pool.
“I thought so,” I told her. “You’re not well…” As the words came and went, the hard shapes of things lurched, then settled again. The fire and the dancing men. The black triangles of the tepees. The stars overhead.
“Tired,” she said very slowly, as if it took all her energy to speak this one word.
But White Feather roused himself then, and to judge by the proud look he gave us, I knew our entertainment would last for a good deal longer yet. I could not decide if I felt pleased or not; I only knew that if I closed my eyes I would sleep for the rest of my life.
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