The Clearing

by Dan Newman

  The boys were transfixed. Richard turned and spoke quietly to Tristan; neither Nate nor Pip could hear what was said.

  “I know!” shouted Tristan venomously at Richard. “Do you think I’m stupid?” He shoved Richard hard, and then swore so viciously in Creole that the three women, including Augustine, all inhaled sharply.

  And then, from the perfect darkness of the track toward the plantation house, came a stern voice. “Hey, what’s all this? What the hell happened to it?”

  Tristan’s head dropped and his arms folded tightly around his body.

  It was Vincent.

  20

  Dennery was simple to find. On an island fifteen or twenty kilometers wide, Nate couldn’t go too wrong, and by the afternoon he was standing in a small room at the back of a restaurant called Diana’s. He wasn’t even sure if it was an actual inn, a hotel, or just someone’s quick thinking, entrepreneurial answer to his question: Is there a place to rent a room for the night around here? Still, the room was clean and had a working lock on the door. He didn’t need much more.

  He left his bag unpacked beside the bed and set out into the town. It didn’t take long to find someone who could tell him where Ti Fenwe Estate was, and before the first beer was gone, he was armed with a hastily sketched map. It would take him to a turnoff the main road, a turn into the bush that would lead him to the old plantation. The man who drew the map for him was bent and curled with age, and laughed when Nate asked if he could make the drive in a car or if he’d need a four-wheel drive. Dat place have a bitumen road nowadays. Many touris’ go deh now. And then he put a gnarled hand out and smiled as he waited for Nate to pay him.

  The idea that the road was now paved surprised Nate, although as he thought about it he supposed that in thirty years there was bound to be a few changes. In his mind, the old place was still as it had been, waiting silently in the depths of the rainforest, slowly succumbing to the ravages of climate and time. But if the road had been improved, what of the plantation house itself? Would it even be there? And what about all the secret places they had crawled, jumped and run through as kids…What about the clearing? The thought that it all might be changed—perhaps even gone, like Tristan—left a hollow feeling inside him.

  He ordered dinner at Diana’s—fresh red snapper, sweet potato and plantain chips—but he had no real appetite and just pushed the food around the plate until finally leaving it alone. He returned to his room and checked out the cut beneath his eye. It still looked angry and red around the edges. The antibiotics got him thinking about Rachael, and wondering how she had recognized him after so many years. He must not have changed much, he reasoned. He must still have all the same features he did as a kid. People had told him before that he had a boyish face, or was it a young face? Either way, perhaps he simply still looked like the kid he had once been. Rachael had known it was him, and she was sure of it, too.

  He sat on the bed wearing only his underwear and a white T-shirt. It was hot in the room. There was no air conditioning, not even a ceiling fan, and there was no TV or radio to distract him. Just as well, he thought.

  He collected the envelope Smiley had given him and spread the papers on the bed, searching through them, looking for one in particular—the image of Richard by the sailboat. The aftermath of Richard’s death had been a grim one. That afternoon by the river had torn the De Villiers family apart, and like echoes in an empty canyon it had returned again and again across great spans of distance and time. Those closest paid the highest price, and as he thought it, Nate reached into the pile and picked up the photocopied headline that screamed, I will take a life in payment.

  He looked at the image of Richard’s mother, Collette De Villiers, and he understood the torment that had driven her to take her own life. With her son gone, her life would have simply collapsed.

  In the warm room in Dennery, his mind wandered back to that afternoon, back to what had become mere shards of sharp memories. They were still sharp, still able to cut as keenly as the first time. They came back to him as snatches, bursts of icy cold moments.

  Officers at the door: Mr. Mason?

  Yes…?

  A large, uniformed man with a moustache. I’m Sergeant Cole…I need you to come with me…drunk driver…to the hospital quickly…

  Doctors in blue scrubs with sleeves that seemed too short. Her injuries…too severe…the boy…conscious but critical…

  He remembered the light. It was too bright, too stark and clinical, without comfort. He found his six-year-old son crying but alive, shivering on a gurney, terrified and bloodied in ways no child ever should be. He tried to calm him by stroking his hair and telling him over and over again that he loved him.

  And when Cody died four hours later, Nate became entirely hollow.

  And three months after the accident, after Nate had drifted as far from himself as he could, Sergeant Cole had shown up again like some blue-clad angel of death. It had marked the beginning of the odyssey that had brought him to this little room on this little island.

  He shook his head, trying to physically dislodge the thoughts. The room in Dennery was hot, and he knew sleep would not come easily. Thoughts of Sergeant Cole stayed with him. He could hear the sadness in the man’s voice even now. Ain’t this a goddamn son of a bitch. And he could see the gray slippers, the perfect ‘V’ they made. What was the last thing he had said to his father? Had it been a harsh word? God knew there was enough bullshit between them to stack the odds in favor of that.

  He thought hard but couldn’t bring the conversation to mind, couldn’t place any specifics. It was probably while he was drunk, though, thought Nate. Probably the same old rants. The same old derision.

  In his mind’s eye, he watched his father raise another glass to his lips. And then another. He watched as his father’s face aged and drooped, as his hair fell out and his clothes hung limply off him. The old man’s face took on a red swollen tinge and his skin became papery and dry. His father raised the glass again, and Nate saw that his father’s hand was not alone raising that glass. His own hand was there, too.

  Soon Nate was asleep. His sleep was deep and fitful, and his comatose body flinched and twitched as he lay there. In the archways, there were eyes watching. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there. There were dark rooms and low-slung rafters, blackened roofing joists and airless spaces, and finally that sound that reached through his chest and wrapped tightly about his spine and began gently shaking it, like a loose skeletal hand about a baby rattle. It was the sound of nutmegs.

  They rolled and rolled, their hard dry seeds bouncing along the wooden floor of the loft, rattling and chattering away. It was a sound that held terror for Nate, and the dream always culminated the same way. The footfalls in that dark garret space would get heavier and faster, hammering along as the nutmegs rolled and rolled, until Nate’s whole head filled with their crescendo and he was ejected back to a waking state.

  But tonight the rattling of the nutmeg and the stutter of small feet above him didn’t work their way to a climax. Instead they rapidly fell off, as if the being had stopped suddenly to listen, and the thousands of nutmegs chattered slowly into silence.

  And then, in the seamless and unquestionable way that only dreams can transmogrify, he was in the audience at a play. The cast just stood there, high up on the stage, motionless, watching Nate from behind their makeup and masks. As he looked up at the players on the stage he recognized many of them. He saw Smiley dressed as a colorful parrot, and he saw Ma Joop clad in white robes and heaped with talismans and charms. His father was there, too, drinking of course, and among the many others on the stage was a small wet boy with a tuft of blonde hair. He was standing at center of the group, sopping wet and dripping into a puddle that grew around him. The water crept across the floor, steadily expanding, and eventually included everyone in its cold wet circumference. Nate knew it was Richard.

  Nate jumped up from his seat, and watched as all the people on the stage stare
d back in silence. And then, as if controlled by a single impulse, the entire cast took one step backwards. They were moving away from Nate, that single step seeming to put an unfathomable distance between him and them. One small figure was left standing alone at center stage. He was wearing pajamas, his face was bloodied, and Nate knew it was Cody.

  His own crying woke him, and as he swung his feet onto a floor bathed in the cobalt blue of 4:00 am moonlight, he was startled by what he saw lying there.

  • • •

  How long had Vincent been standing there in the darkness? Had he seen the fight with Tristan? The memory of Vincent pummelling Tristan was still fresh in Nate’s mind, and he was suddenly terrified that he was about to get some of the same. He looked up hesitantly toward Vincent, half expecting to see the man’s weathered face inches from his own, a scowl carved deeply into it and a hand raised and ready for the first blow. But instead he saw Vincent tussling his son’s hair, and then throwing an arm around his shoulder and cinching him in affectionately. It was the picture of a father and the son he adored.

  Nate flicked his eyes to Tristan. Oddly, the boy was not reserved or sulky. No crossed arms, no half turn away, no sullen fixed expression. Instead Tristan was looking up at his father and smiling, if perhaps a little too much, Nate thought. Tristan seemed to be reveling in the attention, and for the moment it seemed there was no one else in Tristan’s world—just his father.

  With an outstretched foot, Vincent pushed the goat’s chin to one side and further exposed the cavern that was once its chest. He grimaced. “Whose animal is this?”

  “Joseph’s,” answered one of the pole-bearers.

  Vincent nodded. “Tell Joseph I’ll buy it from him. We’ll roast it up for everyone tomorrow night.”

  The pole-bearers looked at each other with raised eyebrows, then nodded quickly and hustled the dead animal onto their shoulders again. As they joined the rest of the group moving back down toward the other shacks the boys could hear them talking in excited tones.

  “That should make everyone happy,” said Vincent, watching them go. “Not so, Augustine?”

  Nate looked over and the large, old woman seemed to have shrunk to half her size. She was now meek and obedient, not the towering force that had descended upon him and Tristan in the heat of their earlier brawl. “Yes, Mr. Vincent. Very happy.” But her tone was conciliatory, required. Nate noticed her eyes were cast downward.

  Vincent tussled Tristan’s hair again. “It must be fed, son. And you are the man for the job. Come. Let’s all get back to the house. Tristan has some chores, and the copra oven needs a spark.”

  Richard’s eyes lit up. “Oh, Uncle Vince! Can I light it!? Can I please, please?”

  “What, a lightee like you?” said Vincent, toying with his nephew.

  “Aw, please!”

  “All right. Fine. You can throw the embers.”

  Richard pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!”

  The group marched off with Nate last in line. As they trooped down the path toward the glow of the bedroom window and the growing hum of the generator, Nate looked back toward Augustine. The other two women had already gone back inside and Augustine stood alone, silhouetted in the doorway by the glow of the candles inside.

  “Come on, catch up!” called out Vincent, and Nate trotted back into the group.

  Once inside, the boys gathered in the kitchen. Vincent busied himself in another room, and the boys formed a loose circle around the small wooden table that sat beneath the only bulb in the room. The bulb itself hung at the end of six feet of wire hanging nakedly from the ceiling, and it swayed gently with the breeze that came in through the glassless windows.

  On the table sat a battered tin bowl—probably a large mixing bowl at one point in its life, but now just a battered tin vessel about as wide as a hubcap. In the bowl was a chicken, headless and dead, and swimming in a shallow sea of blood and other fluids.

  “That’s just nasty,” said Pip recoiling, then bobbing his head back in for another look. He was at once horrified and fascinated. “Do they actually run? I mean, when you cut their heads off? Does that really happen?”

  Tristan was delighted to answer and laid it on thick. “They sure do. Wings flapping, running into walls and trees, spattering blood as they go…”

  Again, Nate felt the urge to defend Pip, but the night’s earlier encounter tempered his approach. “No way. That’s crap—they do not.”

  “No, Tristan’s right. They really do,” offered Richard.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “That’s friggin’ gruesome.”

  Richard and Tristan laughed. Pip joined in and then so did Nate. Richard put his hand on Nate’s arm as the group continued giggling. “Nate. You go with Tristan. Go help him leave the food.”

  Nate felt the laughter evaporate. “Why me?”

  “Don’t look so horrified! I’m going to light the copra oven with Uncle Vince, and there’s no way Pip’ll go up into the attic. Plus, Tristan would just torture him.”

  “What if I don’t wanna?”

  “Because you’re too scared?” It was a taunt, for sure, but somehow because it was Richard doing the taunting, it came off as good spirited.

  “Whatever.”

  Richard picked up the bowl and pushed it into Nate’s less than willing hands. Inside, the chicken and its grim basting sloshed sideways, and some of the bloody fluid splashed onto Nate’s shirt.

  “Come on,” said Tristan, already turning away. “I carry the light, you carry the chicken. Let’s go.”

  The stairway to the attic came off the lightless main hall of the house, and consisted of a series of steps that doubled back on themselves halfway up the climb. Tristan and Nate stood before it as Tristan shone the flashlight up toward the first landing. The darkness seemed to gobble the yellow wash of light, and despite the murkiness of the stairs, Nate felt an urge to get moving: rather the relative safety of the light pooling on the stairs than the inky blackness of the main hall.

  He looked over his shoulder and could just make out the glow of the kitchen and the bedroom down a corridor off the opposite side. The safety of those rooms seemed so far away now, and only the bobbing light of Tristan’s flashlight offered any hope at all. “Let’s get going,” he muttered.

  The stairs creaked as they took the boys’ weight, and in Nate’s mind something in the attic—something evil with long teeth and hooked claws—suddenly pricked up its ears at the sound, and turned murderously to see what tasty morsel would emerge at the top of the stairs. They made the first turn, and Tristan angled the light upward, toward the top of the stairs, and the beam disappeared through the door-less frame. It seemed to be devoured by the blackness of the attic proper.

  “Point it back here. I can’t see the steps,” said Nate. The darkness was so complete it seemed to suffocate him.

  Tristan complied, and finally the two boys stepped through the doorway and into the attic. Again Tristan flashed the light upward, and this time the lonely column of light caught the ceiling and the wooden planks that sat atop joists and beams to form the outer roofing. It was more spacious than Nate had imagined, and the two boys were able to stand fully if they kept to the center where the roof was pitched highest. Tristan panned the light around the ceiling, then across the walls and the inside of the gables that gave shape to the many steeples at the roofline’s edge. As his light crossed the small windows in the gables, the boys’ reflections were momentarily cast back at them; two small faces outside in the blackness looking in.

  It was dark and riddled with clichés; cobwebs, looming shadows, and creaky floorboards, but it was the smell that caught Nate off guard the most. The attic air was rich with a distinctive and almost overpowering aroma—something like cinnamon, only softer, and perhaps edged with a sweetness that hinted at candy coated nuts. To Nate it was a new smell, but one that was so close to another that he knew so well. It wouldn’t come to him at first, but he breath
ed deeply and there it was. It was the smell of Christmas back home. “What is that smell?” he asked.

  “Look, here,” said Tristan, flashing the light to the floor.

  The broad boards that made up the attic floor were littered with small orbs the size of misshapen ping-pong balls. They were irregular, mostly oval shaped, and dark brown with raised swirls of red wrapped around them like string. Tristan panned the light slowly along the floor and over to the furthest reaches of the attic, and Nate could see that the entire floor—the ceiling of the house below—was covered with thousands upon thousands of these small brown and red spheres.

  “Nutmeg,” said Tristan simply. “We dry them up here.”

  Nate was awed by the sight, and it felt suddenly as if he were intruding on the peaceful slumber of some vast community of seed creatures. He didn’t want to move, because moving surely meant stepping on them. Would they squish? Or were they hard? Nate’s question was answered as Tristan bent down and picked up one. He took the tin bowl from Nate and offered him the nutmeg. “Here. Check it out.”

  It was harder than Nate had imagined. Its center was solid, like the seed in an avocado, but the red web-like structure that encased it unevenly, the mace, was the consistency of pliable plastic. He put it to his nose and smelled the Christmas in it, then dropped it back to the floor. It landed hard against the wooden floorboards, then rattled awkwardly as the mace casing and the hard inner nut worked to find a resting place.

  “Come on,” said Tristan again. He pointed the light at his feet. “Walk like this. You have to slide your feet or you’ll trip,” he said, showing Nate how to shuffle forward through the field of drying nutmeg. And as he did so the nutmeg began to roll. They bounced and clattered against the hard wooden floor, and with each step they let out a collective grumble, then settled until the next step.