Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  —You stand in terrible heat below, he says, and there on the peak of that mountain is a crown of snow.

  —Sometimes the bloody thing’s covered with clouds, Deerforth says.

  Captain Murray scowls at him. The others, fixing him in their gaze, offer their own version of opprobrium.

  —I only said you can’t see the top for the clouds.

  They all go back to eating in silence. Mary understands that this strangeness has something to do with her presence, and is too tired to worry much about it. She eats her dinner and retires to her cabin to read.

  The evening is quiet, calm, cool. In the late night she wanders the deck again, gazing out at the moonlit swells. She has her old trouble sleeping.

  The following morning, Captain Murray calls everyone on deck for Sunday service. Withers is too seasick to lead them, so one of the ship’s mates, a young man named Quilby, begins to read from the Bible. He keeps stumbling over the words. Everyone stands quietly while he makes this faltering effort, and intermittently they keep sending furtive looks Mary’s way.

  At last, Captain Murray says:

  —Would you care to lead us?

  —Excuse me? says Mary.

  —Would you care to lead us, mum?

  —No, thank you.

  They stare at her. The crew, the other passengers. It is as if she has been abruptly set down here among them from the very top of the sky. They are not even bothering to hide their curiosity now.

  She returns to her cabin, deciding to keep out of view for the day. In a little while, Captain Murray knocks on her door. She opens it a crack and peers at him.

  —I assume I have upset everyone somehow, she says.

  —I neglected to mention to anyone that you had booked for the coast. They all assumed you were getting off in Las Palmas.

  —Well, I don’t understand what I should do now to reassure them.

  —They assumed, and—well, I assumed—you were on a missionary journey. That you were a missionary.

  She says nothing.

  —A religious, he tells her.

  —I am not, Mary says, looking directly back into his eyes.

  He smiles, and then laughs softly, shaking his head.

  —We must have looked amusing to you this morning.

  —I was perplexed, she says.

  —So were we, mum. So were we.

  They are both laughing as he moves along the deck and she reenters her cabin and shuts the door.

  4

  THE REST OF HER JOURNEY down the world is mostly pleasant, the weather very calm, the sky a pageant of towering cloud shapes. For hours she and two of the older children of the missionary’s family imagine animals and the faces of people in the changing convolutions of cumulus. Mary finds one rather large shape that resembles her brother in profile. She watches, bemused, without mentioning it to the children, as it slowly dissolves in its progress across the western edge of the sky.

  They pass Almadia Reef, and the wreckage of what Conklin calls the doomed ship. He uses the phrase almost as though wanting to be ironical about it. There is a gleam in his eyes as he tells poor Withers about it, and about the hundred lost passengers. It is the Port Douglas, which foundered and broke up a year ago. Mary stands port side and watches it recede, two spars, and the jagged end of a mast, which juts from the moving water like a black stick.

  They sail on, down to Cape Verde, off the coast of Senegal. Here, the weather changes for the worse: it is the wet season in West Africa, and everything is enveloped in mist and rain. For days they proceed with extreme caution in the blinding fog. Now and then another ship emerges from the obscurity, is visible for a few moments, and then is gone again, as if it had all been imagined, or was the product of some supernatural vision, a ghost ship.

  The hours pass in a strange, languid fashion, as if this shroud of mist were permanent, the time onboard all that will ever be any more of life. She takes lessons from Captain Murray’s men—in navigation and seamanship and sailing and Kru English. At night she walks the deck alone, amazed by the thickness of the fog. She cannot even see the other side of the deck, and, looking up, there is nothing but blackness obscured by heavy, misting rain. When she manages to sleep, she sleeps deeply, without dreams. And when she wakes, in spite of everything, she feels refreshed and happy. The steady, slow rocking of the ship is like a narcotic to her, and she witnesses its bad effects on the others with some measure of pride and amusement. She tends to the sick in their cabins—there are two cases of malaria and several of seasickness. She sees to them with the practiced hand of having cared all those years for her mother. It seems to her that, though sleep doesn’t come easily, when it does come she sleeps so well that the sleep itself is an indulgence she can choose or ignore—many nights she’s up until the fog begins to pale, and the gray hues begin to appear in the blankness of it.

  One morning toward the end of August, the sky clears. She stays awake to watch it happen, the heavy continent of clouds sliding away from the moon, like a vision of the epochal changes of history, a magnificent unveiling of silvery light and sparkle, the stars again, as though reborn, or washed new. The sunrise is spectacular, light blazing over a low, blue escarpment of clouds and retreating haze, burning through on its way to noon.

  She goes to sleep that dawn, only to awaken to a foul smell so pervasive and strong that it forms a clot at the base of her throat. She rises and dresses, drawing in air through her open mouth, and makes her way out on the deck, where the air is even heavier with it. The second mate, a Scotsman named Corliss, who has helped her with Kru English, says:

  —Hello, Miss Kingsley.

  —Hello, Mary says, and her vexed look seems to amuse him.

  —Do ye know what ye smell? he says. Ye smell Africa.

  She gazes out at the eastern horizon, and sees nothing but the line of blue ocean and the softer blue sky, with its scattering of hoary clouds.

  —I don’t understand, she says.

  He doesn’t answer, smoking the stub end of his cigar, which is something he seems always to have with him, as if it were one cigar that he is perpetually refurbishing by some mysterious means. There’s something secretive and foreboding about him, though he has been friendly enough to her.

  —It’s close, he says.

  As she watches with him, the ocean gives up two rounded promontorylike islands that turn out to be connected—it is the coast. And the odor is so strong now that it stings her lungs.

  —What is it? she says. My God.

  Corliss blows smoke into the malodorous wind, and coughs, then turns to her:

  —Death.

  —You won’t frighten me, says Mary. You can’t. I’ve seen death.

  —I wasn’t trying to frighten ye, mum. There’s large areas of this coastline that carry rottenness on the wind. Swamps, stagnant water, dead masses of fish, and fowl, and every other thing that can die and leave the stink of itself behind. Bogs made of nothing but the slime of dead animals decaying with such speed that the only thing they do leave is their stench, because there ain’t enough time for the scavengers to eat it. And it all travels on the air. Mal-aria. Bad air, ye see? That’s where the word comes from.

  Conklin and Deerforth walk by, holding handkerchiefs to their faces. Conklin removes his rag and smiles at her:

  —Home, he says.

  Mary faces into the wind and manages to keep herself in that stance, looking off to the expanse of brown and sick green that is the coast. They are tacking south at a fast pace now, helped along by trade winds. She watches the land change from rounded hilltops and low mountains to rocky cliffs, and back to soft hills again. She can see trees now, or at least a color that suggests them. Conklin and Deerforth are talking with Corliss about the rapids of the Ogowe.

  —Nothing could be more beautiful and nothing could be more deadly, says Deerforth.

  —I would say the swamps at the mouth of the Gabon are deadlier, Conklin says. Those marshes. God knows how many poor souls, blac
k and white, have slipped down in that mud and disappeared. It grabs you—the damn stuff is alive.

  He leans over so that Mary can see him seeking her gaze. With a broad smile, he continues:

  —A woman in a dress now. That would provide the marsh with quite a hold. Quite an advantage.

  —I’ll be careful not to give it the chance, Mary says, smiling at him.

  Corliss, throwing his cigar overboard in a gesture of exasperation, suddenly breaks forth:

  —Ye’re a damn fool to try this place. It kills. It will almost certainly kill you.

  For a long while, no one says anything.

  —I almost got taken by the marsh mud once, says Conklin. Gentlest tug, you know, and then, very fast, mind you, it became rather insistent. If I hadn’t had a good purchase on my boat and a pair of kindly hearted Fulani tribesmen, I might not be here.

  —I would like to know what ye think you’ll accomplish down here, Corliss says to Mary.

  —Leave her be, says Conklin.

  Corliss ignores him, and doesn’t take his eyes from Mary:

  —I’m waiting for your answer.

  —I’m in search of specimens, she says. I’m in possession of the means to support myself in this. Your job is to provide me with transport. I appreciate your working with me about the language, but that doesn’t mean I’m obliged to follow your advice.

  —Yeh’re a fool, he says, chomping down on a fresh cigar, which is bitten half off, and looks like the old one. And Murray is as much a fool for taking you up on this. And we’ll be transporting a box with you in it on a return trip.

  He lights the stubby cigar, and blows the smoke, staring through it at her.

  —Bugger, Mary says, and moves away. She hears Conklin laugh appreciatively as she enters her cabin. He shouts after her:

  —After me own heart, dear lady.

  She closes the door and in that narrow space with its hard bed and its battened lamp she feels suffocated, near collapse. It surprises her. The fumes from land have settled in the little cabin, a thick, invisible mantle through which she moves, gagging. She sits on the bed and finds herself thinking of death. Before her are the twin shapes of her knees under the black dress she wears, and she realizes that her knees are trembling. Her whole body quakes, and perhaps this is fever.

  She’s here. She’s come all this way. Africa is out there in the sinking sun, sweating and pouring its damps and fetid humors into the air. How could a country emit such an odor? And is it possible that this is nothing but Corliss and the others trying to frighten her? Is it something emitted from the hold of the ship?

  She stands. It’s quite clear that they have great affection for her, these men, and that Corliss is truly concerned for her welfare. The thought causes her to experience something like a wave of mingled rage and gratitude: in spite of their affection, they still do not see her as an equal.

  This, she realizes—and she phrases it to herself—would be scanned: she has always felt that her duty lay in service to her mother, father, and brother, and that her place in the scheme of things is dictated by her sex. Yet the short history of her life includes this journey, this exotic flight from home, from the little flat above Addison Road with its doorway letting out onto the street in front and its tall, leaded windows, its boxes of unopened correspondence and books. It occurs to her in the stinking gloom of the cabin that she must remember to express quite openly her beliefs about the place of women in society; that she must claim, for herself—in order to gain the cooperation she will need from all sides, from missionaries as well as coasters and traders—that she is only a woman. She believes this; it is available to her as an article of faith, though some hard little corner of her soul understands its use to her, too.

  She goes back out on deck in time to see a soaring wall of dark clouds approaching from the east. These clouds reach up into the top of the sky. At the base of them is a greenish light, and a ghostly calm. The sea is mirror-flat. The rank air has gone utterly still. Conklin, Deerforth, Withers, Corliss, and Captain Murray, too, are all at the gunwale, gazing at the spectacle. Mary sees lightning forking down from the base of the cloud wall.

  —A tornado, Conklin says to her. Watch.

  She does. The sky appears momentarily stationary, a towering, solid mass. But then she sees that it’s moving. It is all ferocious motion. The whole black expanse of it seems to stride toward them. An enormous, churning finger comes dreadfully down out of the bottom of it, exactly as a green rush of ocean water rises to meet its bottom-most edge. The whole thing becomes a spiral, and then there are several giant spirals staggering together across the ocean, coiling and bending and trailing strands of lightning. One funnel towers over them, sending sheets of rain in a terrible horizontal blast. They wait it out, watch it lurch on to the west, the funnel itself disappearing in a crashing of waves and lightning and hail. And when it is gone, a steamy calm settles on the sea. Another thick haze forms, still smelling of the fetid marshes in the distance. The Lagos must slow down, for there is not twelve feet of water visible in front of them, and there is always the danger that they’ll founder on the rocks that lie offshore. Mary’s wet through to the skin, and so is everyone else. The ship has taken on a lot of water. Some sailors are bailing, and she moves along the deck to help. No one stops her. It’s as though she’s one of them, so much a part of their daily life that they scarcely notice her anymore.

  Captain Murray steps out of the mist and they stop working to gaze at him, at the shape of him coming forward, as if materializing. He claps his hands together and says:

  —We’ll drop anchor here, mates. Sierra Leone is out there, but so is Carpenter Rock. I don’t want us to suffer the fate of the Port Douglas, to name only one of the unfortunate multitude. There’s a lighthouse on Carpenter Rock, but it has rather irregular habits, if you know what I mean. We’ll put to shore as soon as the fog lifts. Miss Kingsley, you must be exhausted. You were out on deck all night last night, were you not?

  —I was, she says.

  —You should be ready for the rigors that face you, he says. And I’ll have nothing else to say on the matter. My second mate is worried.

  —Tell Corliss I thank ’im for the concern.

  —Oh? That is not what Corliss tells me you do.

  —I ask for indulgence from Corliss, then.

  Captain Murray nods, smiling, then turns and disappears back into the fog. The others are staring at her.

  —Well? she says. Is there something else?

  They all go back to work. They continue for another hour or so, and after a few minutes’ talk and storytelling, everyone, except Mary, returns to his cabin. Mary is alone, walking the clouded, damp boards of the ship. Corliss comes out of his cabin and walks over to her. She waits for him to speak. And the will to do so is apparently something he has to struggle for.

  —Forgive me, he gets out at last.

  —There is nothing to forgive, sir.

  —Well, then, I shall forgive you, since yeh asked for it.

  —Thank you, she says.

  He turns on his heels and walks away from her. The sound of his cabin door closing makes her feel oddly abandoned, and she makes her way to her own cabin, where she closes herself in with the knowledge that in the morning she will set foot on the African coast.

  It’s a long night. If she sleeps, it’s no longer restful, is so fitful as to seem mere hallucination—a falling off into some zone of disconnected images that bring her jolting back to consciousness, aware only of her wish for sleep, and of its refusal to come. She is too excited to sleep. At dawn, she dresses and goes out on deck, to see that the fog has lifted. There is a startling clarity to the air now, a vividness it could not have possessed before the fog. Landward are the green mountains of Sierra Leone, with the sun rising behind them. Here is Freetown Harbor, just as she had imagined it all those years ago, as a girl, reading Charles Johnson’s century-old book: A General History of Robberies and Murders of the Notorious Pirates.
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br />   Captain Murray comes from the other end of the deck, smoking his long pipe and wearing a jaunty straw hat.

  —This used to be a refuge, you know, for freed slaves. They came from the West Indies and from Canada, and from American ships we intercepted. A lot of their children still live here.

  —Creoles, Mary says. I know.

  Murray nods, puffing on the pipe, which gives no smoke, his eyes narrow with amusement.

  —Is that so precocious? Mary asks him.

  —Young woman, you make me proud of the English.

  This sort of expression is not characteristic of him, and she senses his momentary unease at having spoken. She turns to practical matters:

  —When can we go ashore?

  —Almost immediately, he says, hitting the pipe bowl on the palm of his hand.

  5

  THEY GO ASHORE together in a small rowboat, propelled by two of the sailors. The sea is quiet and calm, and the sky looks bluer than it could ever have been before. Her heart is beating fast, and she has to draw breath in small gasps.

  —I must tell you, Captain Murray says, that I looked forward with no small degree of horror to the prospect of having a single passenger lady to take down the coast.

  She nods at him as if to say that it is unnecessary for him to go on. But he gathers himself and continues:

  —I haven’t minded at all. And I will not soon forget you, either.

  —Nor I you, Mary tells him.

  Freetown looks like a confused collection of shambled ruins amid vines and flowers and unbelievably lush vegetation. The houses, whose walls are bleached by rain and sun, are jammed together under what looks like one pieced-together expanse of corrugated tin roof. There are doors off their hinges, and windows with sagging frames, sagging porches, and falling-down wooden stoops, all of it so close together as to make an impossible screen of dilapidation to the eye: she can’t distinguish one building from another along the main thoroughfare, which is full of potholes and dung. It is hard to imagine anything but the most crushing deprivation here, and yet the street is festive-seeming, crowded with people, blacks and whites, wearing all the colors of the rainbow. Beyond the tangle of roofs are the mountains, green and fading at their heights to a soft blue. The air here, for all the ramshackle disorder around her, is surprisingly pleasant; it smells of flowers and fruits and, delectably, of meat. She discovers, to her delight, that it is market day. The whole city is bustling with commerce—there are open markets out on the side streets, and wall-less ones, white-stone pavilions, in the main street itself. She gazes upon the abundance all around, every conceivable kind of vegetable, dozens of exotic forms she can’t even recognize—wild lettuces, yellow oranges, several different kinds of tomato; a profusion of many different sea foods and game, vibrant fruits, chains of beads, and an uncountable number of other commodities: kola nuts, vivid Berlin wools, pumpkins, alligator pears, pineapples, monkey skins, snails, and antelope horns, old iron. The midnight-black women behind the tables on which all these riches lie are dressed in bright colors, silk-print cloth, and they have lovely braids in their tight hair. The noise is deafening, human voices, thousands of them. People walk by her, men and women, larger than she can believe, some of them without much clothing, some of them with elaborate scars and marks on their faces and along their arms. Captain Murray tells her that the ones in the long Muslim gowns are Fulani. There are also some Creoles to be seen—one of them dressed in the clothes of a Cheapside banker, with top hat and cane, and spats. A young bare-breasted woman with a brilliant cloth wrapped around her middle strolls by with a tray of smoked fish on her head. Mary gazes at the sculpted flesh of the girl’s shoulders and the perfect shape of her breasts, the astonishing smoothness of the skin. Following this woman comes another, with a small woven basket, her thin, shapely arm languidly holding it in place atop a long-faced, thickly braided head. And here is still another, with more smoked fish, her stride almost dancelike, strolling by. They are all equally beautiful and carved-looking in the heat, their dark flesh gleaming as though polished. The street is also home to a lot of stray chickens, goats, and sheep, who wander in and out of the clutches of people, avoiding being tripped over or walked on. Now and then a cur dog snaps at them, or jumps at something one of the passersby might hold out, a morsel of meat or a scrap of bread. The dogs look starved and dirty and half wild. There is a constant undercurrent of their barking and whining.