Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  “He ought to be caged!” another shouted.

  This latter judgment brought out the Highlander in me, and I let loose a flurry of epithets that Daniel had taught me, the choicest of which was that the woman in question plainly had the mind of a camel, since even a simpleton knew that monkeys had hands and not paws. I elaborated on this by stating that it was obvious that she had crashed headlong into my friend like a driverless carriage and caused him to stain his waistcoat, as anyone who was not blinded by stupidity could see, since her offending forearm – the size of a stuffed capon – was smeared with telling yellow stains.

  Comparing the sobbing woman to either a camel or a carriage or a capon might have been acceptable, but saying all three so forthrightly in one sentence served not to win me admiration as a child of advanced vocabulary, as it might have, but rather condemnation as a rude and impudent cur. A man wearing a shearer’s apron stained black with grease even dared to grab my arm and shake me. “You little sod,” he said. “I ought to beat your bottom here in the street!”

  This affront roused Midnight from his anxious confusion. Advancing toward the man, he said, “Please, sir, let the lad go.”

  Blood shone in the moon-whiteness of the African’s eyes. It was lucky for our shearer that the Bushman carried no knife; he might have killed the man that day as quickly as he would have a jackal coveting his child.

  Midnight’s few words quieted the crowd, probably because he spoke them in English, which tends to intimidate the Portuguese. Or possibly it was because no one expected him to be able to speak any language at all – or to dare to defy a Portuguese man.

  The shearer let me go, but only so he might confront Midnight. Yet as he strode forward, the African – to my great surprise – hoisted me over his shoulder. I do not know if he intended this as the brilliant coup it was. Likely, he simply wished to protect me. Whatever the case, the shearer was not about to fight a man carrying a young lad.

  Midnight walked with me through the parting crowd without saying a word. After he turned the corner, he put me down. “The gemsbok is not bothered by ants, tortoises, and hedgehogs,” he told me.

  “What’s a gemsbok?”

  “A noble animal, a kind of deer. He has a crescent horn on his head.” He held my chin in his hand. “John, this may come as a surprise to you, but you are not a crocodile.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You must not let yourself be provoked so very, very easily.”

  Midnight spread his hands like a fan atop his head and crouched into a posture of expectancy, as though he were an animal listening for a far-off call. His nostrils flared and his fingers wiggled. He sniffed at the air, scenting something upwind.

  This, then, was a gemsbok. He was imitating it. Or, as he would tell me later, inhabiting it.

  “This is how you must act,” he said. “No more shouting at strangers.”

  His criticism shamed me. “But that woman was rude to you! She said horrible things.”

  He made no effort to answer or comfort me, which struck me as heartless. Frustration cast tears down my cheek. Still he would not move. Finally, I gave in and imitated him, placing my own fanned hands atop my head and making believe that I, too, was a gemsbok.

  “Good,” he said, smiling. He took my hand and held it to his heart. “No more crying. It is much more important that you teach me a song. I’ve been meaning to ask you for one.”

  Children’s moods change so quickly. “Which?” I asked eagerly.

  “One of your father’s songs. Any of them. I should very, very much like to learn one.”

  Right there on the street, I sang the first verse of “The Foggy, Foggy Dew”: Oh, I am a bachelor, I live by myself, and I work at the weaver trade….

  That was to be the first of many tunes that I would teach Midnight. In exchange, he helped me learn several songs belonging to his people. I even mastered a secret one about rain bringing life to a barren desert. I am still able to sing it. And I believe I am the only European who can.

  *

  I discovered my project with Midnight while reading aloud to my parents, a practice in which they both took great delight and which was intended to perfect my diction. In addition to Robert Burns and certain minor Scottish poets whom no one south of Hadrian’s Wall had ever heard of, Papa was a great aficionado of Latin and Greek classics. He read English translations, however, since he was not a scholar, borrowing them from the library at the British club near the riverside. One particular night, I began to read from Xenophon’s “On Hunting,” which Papa had brought home that evening, believing it would entertain our guest. I found it mostly tedious myself, and Mama thought it appalling. She held that “chasing God’s poor little creatures through a forest and killing them most cruelly” was depraved.

  “ The first pursuit that a lad just emerging from boyhood ought to take up is hunting,” I read. “And afterward he may go on to the other branches of education, provided he has the means.”

  “Rubbish!” Mama scoffed.

  “Continue,” Papa prompted sternly.

  As a piece of writing it was one extended yawn, but when I glanced at Midnight I discovered his head tilted in eager expectancy, as though this essay were the answer to a riddle over which he’d long puzzled, so I invited him to read from the book himself.

  “I cannot,” he replied. When I inquired as to why, he said, “Because … because I cannot read or write.”

  “Just try,” I said, holding the leather-bound text out to him. “John, please do not nettle Midnight,” said Mama quickly, laying her embroidery down in her lap. “You were doing splendidly and we should all be pleased to hear more. Is that not right, dear?”

  “Aye, your voice has improved greatly of late,” Papa agreed, moving the candlesticks on our tea table nearer to me so I might have more light.

  “No, let Midnight,” I replied sulkily.

  “But it is impossible,” the Bushman repeated. When he smiled apologetically, my heart tumbled, for I realized it was true; no one had ever taken the time to help him to learn to read and write, which seemed a monstrous injustice. I continued to read aloud, but my thoughts were already searching out where I had left my Greenwood’s English Grammar. That night, I found it at the bottom of my chest.

  In the morning I discovered Midnight standing naked in our Lookout Tower, staring at the rooftops of the city. “I shall teach you to read and write,” I told him, showing him my primer.

  He laughed at my forthright statement and then, realizing that I meant it, pressed his fingertips to his temples as though his head were throbbing at the very thought.

  “No, it will be easy,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  After he’d dressed, I took his hand and brought him to our garden, so that he might learn to design letters in the sunshine.

  Progress was slow. During this first lesson, I only got him to draw the letters A, B, C, D, and E, and even those rather poorly. He preferred turning his letters into animals, the A becoming the legs of a giraffe, for instance, and the B the eyes of a crocodile viewed from above.

  Over the next few weeks I worked with Midnight every day after breakfast. Soon he was able to sketch each of the twenty-six letters without addition of muzzle, horns, hooves, or tail. I thereafter settled upon a process that guaranteed us slow but steady progress. Standing as though spotlit in a theater, gesticulating wildly, I would read aloud a paragraph to Midnight from a classical volume, which always pleased him greatly and sometimes provoked him to giggles. Then we would sit next to each other and read over this same excerpt, the Bushman pointing with his finger at the words and sounding them out.

  In this way, we read key paragraphs of military drama from Herodotus, Ovid, and Josephus at least a dozen times each. Midnight’s favorite was far and away Strabo’s account of the Roman general Pompey’s defeat at the hands of King Mithradates of Pontus. Estimating that we read this one at least once a week for two years, I would say that we relived this unusual battle more than on
e hundred times, to the point where we could recite it by heart. It never ceased to delight Midnight how Pompey’s superior forces were defeated by nothing more than honey. For while encamped on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, at a place called Trabzon, his troops gorged themselves on combs made by bees that had collected the poisonous pollen of rhododendron blossoms. Those who ate only a little were given to the wobbly walk and slurred speech of men who have downed several drams too many. Those who ate their fill were rendered mad or insensible. In their debilitated condition, they were slaughtered by Mithradates’s forces.

  Midnight and I referred to it as the Battle of the Mad Honey.

  This inspired such mirth in him because, to his people, honey was the single most delightful thing in the world, a harbinger of health, good luck, and joy. As a youth, he would smoke the bees out of their hives to steal their treasure. Honey was also Mantis’s favorite food. It was wisdom – and sunlight – given form. To imagine that it might be able to change the course of history in a military battle … This was so unexpected that he never ceased to be astonished and delighted by the notion.

  *

  My father’s plans for Midnight were responsible for his long journey from Africa to Europe. Papa had made the acquaintance of the Bushman while on an extended visit to a newly established vineyard belonging to a stern Yorkshireman named Reynolds a day’s ride from Cape Town. Midnight was referred to as a servant in the man’s home, but there was not a drop of liberty to his terms of employment.

  Just after Papa’s arrival, a terribly ill Dutchman from a nearby property turned up at the vineyard, seeking medical help. Over the next three days, Father watched Midnight cure the man of advanced pleurisy by applying poultices of mashed herbs to his chest and administering sweet-smelling infusions. On the fourth day, the Dutchman was fit enough to return home.

  Several days later, through a ritual of smoke and dance, Midnight then cured – in Papa’s presence – a youthful Zulu woman who had been possessed by an evil spirit. My father would not have bet a farthing on her recovery, yet recover she did.

  With little faith in the merits of European medicine, having recently witnessed its barbarous methods foisted upon me, Papa realized that this was the man to help his ailing son – if he could convince him to return to Portugal. It proved a surprisingly straightforward task; Midnight wished to seek out medical men in Europe who might help him discover which plants might be used to combat the illness of chills and blisters that had already killed thousands of his people, since nothing he or any other local healer had yet tried was of any use. Upon further inquiry, my father learned that this particular affliction was smallpox.

  Midnight’s rationale for seeking help in Europe was based on the notion that the disease had been brought to Africa by the Dutch and English. He reasoned that the plant extracts needed to combat it would be found in its place of origin. When and if he found the medicinal plants he was looking for in Portugal, he would return to Africa with them.

  Papa proposed to Midnight that he grow in our back garden any specimens that might prove useful to his experiments. He let it be known as well that it would certainly be appreciated by Mama if Midnight could at the same time restore a part of our small rectangle of land to its glory days before my birth. Back then, my Grandfather João had coaxed all manner of colorful blossoms, including some rare Turkish roses, from its soil.

  The last part of Papa’s plan, which he had not yet mentioned to Midnight, was that he wished for the African to serve as a companion to my mother and myself during his periods of absence, there still being the necessity of his traveling upriver to survey lands every six to eight weeks.

  Only one obstacle to Midnight’s leaving Africa with my father remained: He was a slave belonging to Reynolds, and the Englishman would not let him go for any price. Not only did he treasure the Bushman’s considerable medical skills, but he also greatly valued his talents as an interpreter. Mrs. Reynolds, a frail woman of Swiss extraction from Geneva, who feared all manner of local illnesses, would permit no talk of Midnight’s possible sale. My father and the Bushman were therefore forced to plan an escape.

  Having given Reynolds a false date for his return voyage to Europe, Father journeyed alone to Cape Town on horseback at the appointed time: precisely three days before Reynolds and Midnight were to make their monthly visit to the city for supplies.

  My father registered under a false name at the Black Horse Tavern, where, growing more anxious and ill-tempered with each passing day, he awaited Midnight.

  It was customary for the Bushman to be given one entire night to spend as he wished while his English employer relieved himself of his Calvinist wife’s religious constraints at an infamous brothel. Except that this month – smelling a foul Scottish trap – Reynolds didn’t go to Cape Town and he forbade Midnight from leaving the homestead. And so the night that Papa and the Bushman had agreed upon for their rendezvous came and went. The following evening as well. At which point, my father, gravely disappointed, made plans to leave two days later on a Dutch vessel.

  The next evening at sundown, however, while Father sat sipping a gin at the Black Horse, Midnight stepped inside, huffing and puffing, naked from the waist up and barefoot. He carried a small sack containing medicinal herbs, a quiver with arrows, a bow, and an ostrich egg recently emptied of its last drop of water. A ruckus followed, because no kaffir, as the expatriate Europeans referred to the indigenous peoples, was allowed inside such an establishment. Seeing that he was not about to reverse this absurd ruling, Papa led Midnight outside, where the Bushman promptly imbibed so much water from a civic well that his belly swelled to near bursting. He then explained calmly that he had come directly on foot all the way from his farm, twenty miles by Father’s reckoning. That might have been extraordinary enough, but he had accomplished this feat in little more than three hours, judging by the angle of the sun at departure and arrival, running most of the way.

  Papa realized that Reynolds might already be in furious pursuit of Midnight, so they set off immediately on the first available boat, a schooner that took them not to Europe but to a nearby outpost, where supplies of wheat, barley, and cloth were unloaded. They remained in the only inn there under false names, though Midnight, as an African, was obliged to sleep on the floor of the stables. A few days later they were able to book passage on another Dutch ship headed for Holland.

  After my father told me all this, I asked if he had indeed found suitable land in Africa, since he had mentioned nothing about it since his return. “I’m afraid not, John,” he replied. “The land is good, but there is no political stability at present, and there won’t be for some time to come. If I were to purchase land there, two years from now those same acres might belong to a Zulu chief or Dutchman. But do not fear, we shall get our vineyard here, sooner or later. That I promise you.”

  Then I asked the more troubling question: If Midnight truly was Mr. Reynolds’s property, then was it right for my father to have helped him escape? “Is that not a form of robbery?”

  “Aye, I asked myself that more than once, laddie.” He took my hand. “But before I answer, I want to put a question to you. Is it right for one man to own another?”

  I wasn’t sure how to reply.

  “Does not the bird market of Porto enrage you, laddie?” he continued. “How much more of an infamy is it when men and women are bartered, when such miserable conditions are foisted upon reasoning beings?”

  My hatred for the traffic in birds was such that it was unnecessary to say an additional word on the subject. From that moment on, I knew where I stood.

  XIV

  Violeta had not yet vanished from Porto, and one Saturday afternoon Midnight and I hid around a corner to watch her selling her embroidered prayers in New Square. The Bushman was charmed to learn that such a young lass knew nearly all the constellations in the sky. When I told him of the terrible fate that had befallen her, he said, “Likely she is being haunted now by Hyena, just as you were, Joh
n.”

  I begged him not to try to visit her, explaining she’d be beaten if she was discovered talking to him. Seeing my agitation, he agreed and gazed up into the heavens, speaking for a few moments in the swift clicks of his own language.

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “It will be up to the hunters in the sky to defend Violeta, and I have asked for their help.”

  I took him next to the spot at the river where Daniel had drowned. I told him everything that happened on our last day together, confessing that I may have pushed the lad toward his death by telling him that Violeta would leave for America without him. Midnight cupped my chin but said nothing. Instead, he made me stare at my reflection in the water, his strong hands on my shoulders. “John, we are each small beings. And you are not nearly as powerful as you sometimes think you are. Mantis had abandoned Daniel. That was what caused him to drown.”

  Midnight sensed my doubts and held the back of my neck as we walked away, perhaps hoping to guide me toward certainty. That night he heard me crying and tiptoed to my room. Once again he blew smoke from his pipe into my mouth until my room darkened and I could see nothing. Then, lighting my candle, he closed my door and asked me to hold my palm over the flame for as long as I could stand it. Petrified, I replied that I did not believe I could do it. He held out his arms and fluttered them amid the swirling smoke, then brought them slowly together over his head, explaining that the burn would attract a very special butterfly to me and that she would apologize to Daniel for me. “It is she who makes amends in the other world,” he said.

  He took my right hand and began rubbing it between both of his, so briskly that the friction seemed to create a moist layer of heat inside my palm. I suspect now that he coated my skin with a protective glaze of some sort; at the time I was too scared to notice, but I can recall a sour scent on my fingers.

  “You must not shout,” Midnight warned me. “Or you will frighten away Butterfly.”