by Cave, Hugh
"Both of us."
"He hasn't been himself. There's something wrong."
"Another time, Victor. I can't think now."
"Of course. We'll talk in the morning."
"Before you're up in the morning, I'll be on my way back to the hospital. I never should have left there. Forget it, Victor. He's leaving tomorrow, anyway."
When she went downstairs at six in the morning, Victor did not appear. Perhaps he didn't want to. Marie served her a breakfast at the table under the almond tree in the paved garden. Noticing a lump on the girl's cheekbone, Kay said with a frown, "What happened? Did your boyfriend rough you up?"
"Yes, Miss Kay."
"You hit him back?"
"No, M'selle."
"Well, next time slug him," she said bitterly. "Don't let any man push you around. They're no damned good, any of them."
As the afternoon neared its end, the trail ascended to a high plateau and leveled off. It began to widen. Wattle and mud cailles appeared on either side, and people stood behind bamboo fences gazing curiously at the strangers.
When, Kay wondered, had they seen a white woman before?
But she was not the main object of their attention, she presently realized. They were staring mostly at the child who sat in front of her.
Tina Sam stared back at them. This was her village.
24
The road divided, and Kay reined the gray mule to a halt. "Which way, Tina?"
"That way!" Pointing left, the child was shrill with excitement.
Kay clucked the mule on again, looked back, and saw the trailing crowd turn with her.
What did they want? And if they recognized the child, why weren't they calling her name and waving to her?
This was not the main road, only a downhill path, a yard or two wide, through a lush but unkempt jungle of broad-leafed plantains and wild mangoes. More wattle and mud cailles lined its sides, roofed with thick layers of brown grass. More people stared from yards and doorways, then trooped out to join the procession.
Oh God, don't tell me things are going to go wrong now that I've finally got here! What's the matter with these people?
"There it is! There's my house!" Bouncing up and down on the mule, Tina raised a trembling right arm to point.
Standing by itself near a curve of the path, behind a respectable fence of hand-hewn pickets, it was a little larger than most of the others, with a roof of bright new zinc. "There it is!" the child kept screaming, all but out of her mind with excitement.
"Hey, now. Calm down, baby."
End of the line, Kay thought with relief. In spite of the flash flood, the dragon lizard, the Devil's Leap, here we are. Made it. Be proud, gal.
She turned to look at the crowd behind them and was not proud. Only apprehensive. Worse than apprehensive. Downright scared.
At a gate in the fence she reined in the mule, slid wearily from the saddle and reached up for Tina. A woman came out of the house, a slender, good-looking woman of thirty or so, wearing a dress made of feed bags. RED something. Something MILLS, INC. QUALITY FEED. A walking billboard, she came part way to the gate, staring at Kay. How long since a white woman had stopped at this gate in Bois Sauvage?
Then, her gaze shifted from Kay to Tina, and she stopped as if she had walked into an invisible wall.
The woman began screaming. The sound tore the stillness to shreds and brought a man from the house, stumbling as he ran. He reached the woman in time to catch her under the arms as she sank to her knees, still screaming. Standing there holding her, he too looked at the strangers and began to make noises. Not screaming noises but a guttural "huh huh huh huh" that seemed to burble, not from his mouth alone, but from his whole convulsed face.
A woman on her knees shrieking. A man holding her from falling, going, "Huh huh huh huh." And from the crowd came a response like a storm noise, with words flashing in and out like jabs of lightning.
"Mort! Mort! Li mort!"
Kay clasped the youngster's hand and pushed the gate open. Walked to the kneeling woman. There was nothing she could do to stop the nightmare sounds.
Don't listen to it, Gilbert. Just do what you have to do.
"Is this your mother, Tina?"
The child did not answer. Only hurled herself forward and threw her arms around the kneeling woman's neck and began sobbing, "Maman! Maman!"
The woman wrenched herself free and staggered to her feet, looked at her daughter in horror, and ran. Ran like a blinded, wild animal across the bare-earth yard, past a cluster of graves at its edge, into a field where tall stalks of piti mi swallowed her from sight.
Empty handed, the man stood there gazing at Tina as though his eyes would explode like overinflated balloons.
The child looked up at him. "Papa. . ."
"Huh huh huh. . ."
"It's me, Papa. Tina!"
He lurched backward, throwing up his arm. "You're dead!"
"No, Papa!"
"Yes you are! You're dead!"
"Papa, please. . ."
Reaching for him with her arms, the child began to cry. And Kay's reliable temper surged up to take over.
She strode to the man and confronted him, hands on hips and eyes blazing. "This is nonsense. Just because the child has been missing for a while doesn't mean she's dead. You can see she isn't!"
He stared back at her and his heavy-lipped mouth kept working, though soundlessly now. His contorted face oozed sweat.
"Do you hear what I'm saying, M'sieu Sam? Your daughter is all right. I'm a nurse, and I know."
"You . . . don't. . . understand. . ."
"What don't I understand? What are you talking about?"
He turned himself slowly to the right, as though his feet were deep in the red-brown earth and he could move them only with difficulty. Facing in the direction the child's mother had fled, he brought his right arm up as though it weighed a ton. With it he pointed.
"What do you mean?" Kay demanded, then looked at the weeping child, and said, "Don't cry, baby. I'll get to the bottom of this."
Metellus Sam reached out and touched her on the arm. "Come." He began walking very slowly across the yard, his bare feet, scraping the earth and leaving drag marks. Beyond the cluster of graves toward which he walked was the field of kaffir corn. What could there be in such a field that would make him afraid of his own daughter?
Kay began following him, and then looked back. Tina gazed after them with her hands at her face, obviously all but destroyed by what had happened. The crowd in the road was silent again. The whole length of the fence was lined with starers, the road packed solid, but no one had come into the yard, even though the gate hung open. She had neglected to tie the mule, she realized. Should she go back and do it, to make sure the crowd wouldn't spook the animal? To hell with it.
Metellus Sam reached the edge of the yard and trudged on through the gravestones—not stones, really, but crudely crafted concrete shapes resembling small houses resting on coffin-shaped slabs of the same material. Nothing special. You saw the same kind of thing all over Haiti. Kay looked beyond to the corn field.
Where was the woman?
Suddenly, the leaden feet of her guide stopped and, preoccupied as she was, Kay bumped into him. He caught her by the arm to steady her. With his other hand he pointed to the last of the graves, one that was either new or had been newly whitewashed.
"Look."
The name was not properly carved. Like those on the others, it had merely been scratched in with a sharpened stick before the concrete hardened. It was big and bold, though. She had no difficulty reading it:
TINA LOUISE CHRISTINE SAM. 1971-1979.
Fists on her hips again, she studied the inscription, scowling up a storm while her temper boiled to the surface. She turned on the man.
"You shouldn't have done this! Graves are for people you've buried, not for someone you only think might be dead!"
He looked at her now without flinching, and she saw how much he resembled Tin
a. About thirty, he was taller than most mountain peasants and had good, clean features. "M'selle, you don't understand. My daughter is buried here."
"What?"
"She died. I myself made the coffin. Her own mother prepared her for burial. I put her into the coffin and nailed it shut, and when we put it into this grave and shoveled the earth over her, this yard was full of people. All those people you see standing in the road, they were here. They saw it. The whole village!"
Kay got a grip on herself. Watch it here, Gilbert. Don't, for God's sake, say the wrong thing. "M'sieu, I can only say you must have made a mistake."
With dignity, he moved his head slowly from side to side. "There was no mistake, M'selle. From the time she was placed in the coffin until the earth covered her, the coffin was never unguarded. Either my wife or I was with her every moment."
We can't stand here talking, Kay thought desperately. Not with that mob in the road watching us. "M'sieu, can we go into the house?"
He nodded.
"And Tina? She is not dead, I assure you. All that happened was that she lost her memory for a time and could not recall who she was."
He hesitated, but nodded again.
They walked back across the yard, to the waiting Tina. Kay put a hand on the child's shoulder. "Come, baby. It's going to be all right." Metellus Sam led the way to the house. She and Tina followed. As she turned to close the door, she saw that the villagers in the road and by the fence were still staring.
If they actually think they buried this child, I don't blame them. I'd probably do the same.
The house was larger than the one Tina and she had slept in last night. Seemed to be, anyway. 'But before attempting an appraisal, or even sitting down, she said, "M'sieu Sam, will you please see about my mule? He should be unsaddled and given some water, and tied where he can eat something."
He did not seem eager to comply.
"You'll have to put me up for the night or find someone nearby who will," she went on firmly. "So please bring in the saddlebags too."
"You wish to stay the night here?"
Kay made a production of peering at her watch, though she knew the time well enough. "I can't be expected to start back to Trou at this hour, can I? That's where my jeep is. I've brought your daughter all the way from the Schweitzer Hospital, M'sieu Sam. Do you know how far that is?"
"All that way?" He peered at her with new respect, and then looked again at Tina. What was he thinking? That if the child had been at the Schweitzer, she must be real, after all? No ghost?
"The mule, please," Kay prodded. "Tina and I will just sit here until you return. Believe me, we're tired." As he turned to the door, she spoke again. "And try to find her mother, will you? I want to talk to you both."
While he was gone, she asked Tina to show her around the house. In addition to the big front room, which was crowded with crude but highly varnished homemade furniture, there were three bedrooms. Despite the zinc roof, which indicated a measure of wealth in such a village, the floors were of earth, hard-packed and shiny from years of being rubbed by bare feet. At least there would be no lizards dropping from overhead thatch.
They sat to wait for the return of Metellus, and Tina began to cry again. Kay said quietly, "Come here, baby."
The child came to her and stepped into the waiting circle of her arm.
"Listen to me, love. We don't know what's going on here, but we're not going to be afraid of it. You hear?"
"Y-yes, Miss Kay."
"You just concentrate on being brave and let me do the talking. For a while, at least. Okay?"
Tina nodded.
Kay patted her on the bottom. "Good girl. Now go sit down and try to relax. The big thing is, we're here. You're home."
It took Metellus Sam a long time to attend to the mule. Or perhaps he spent much of the time trying to locate his woman. Daylight was about finished when at last he came through the door, lugging the saddlebags and followed by Tina's mother.
Having already decided how to handle the situation, Kay promptly rose and offered her hand. "Hello, Fifine Bonhomme, how are you? I'm Nurse Gilbert from the Schweitzer Hospital." Her memory for names was not all that good. She had had to ask Tina again what the mother's name was.
Pretty, like you? Well, maybe. But at close study, it was only a surface prettiness without character. With that baby-doll face, she had probably been pampered from birth. It was usually so in this country, Kay thought with a mental sigh. Give these affectionate people a living doll to play with and you could nearly always be sure of an empty-headed adult who still expected coddling.
Well, the only way to treat such a creature was with firmness. "Sit down, Fifine. I want to talk to you."
The woman looked fearfully at Tina. She had not even approached the girl to speak to her, obviously had no intention of embracing her and speaking words of welcome.
Bitch, Kay thought. But no. The woman actually thought she was staring at the daughter she had buried in that grave outside. . . didn't she?
The door burst open, and three children stormed into the room: a girl who resembled Tina but was a little older; two peas-in-a-pod boys a year or two younger. Rosemarie and the twins, Kay thought. All three were out of breath but remarkably clean for country kids. Barefoot, of course, but decently dressed. And handsome.
At sight of Tina, they stopped as though they had been clubbed. Stared at her with eyes that grew bigger and bigger. The girl backed up a step. The twins, as if they were one person, took two steps forward and whispered their sister's name in unison. "Tina!"
Tina lurched from her chair and stumbled to her knees in front of them, wrapping her arms around their legs, crying so hard she must have been blinded by her own tears.
Reassured (when the twins were not destroyed, Kay supposed), Rosemarie dared to advance again. Dared to sink to her knees and press her face against her sister's.
"Let the children go into another room," Kay said to their mother. "I want to talk to you and Metellus."
Fifine Bonhomme only gazed at her brood in a silence of apprehension. It was their father who spoke up, telling them what to do.
"Now, listen, both of you," Kay said. "I'm going to tell you what I know about your daughter, how she was found by Father Turnier. " She paused. "Do you know Father Turnier?"
"The priest who used to be in Vallière," Metellus said. "We know of him."
"All right. I'm going to tell you how he found her and what happened afterward. Then you are going to tell me why her name is on that grave out there. You understand?"
They nodded their heads in unison.
"After that," Kay said, "we'll decide what's to be done here."
25
"That's how it happened," Kay said.
She had taken her time. Had been forced to take her time because her Creole was not that good. About the only way to be sure she was understood most often was to keep saying the same thing but in a slightly different way each time until it became clear that she was getting it across. But it required patience.
She had repeated the story told to her by the nuns in Cap Haitien: How Tina was discovered by Father Louis Turnier in a remote caille to which, apparently, she had wandered alter becoming lost and losing her memory. How the priest had taken her to his residence in Vallière, then to Cap Haitien. How the sisters there had sent her to the Schweitzer.
The whole story. Because it was terribly important for them to understand that the youngster was perfectly normal. She had even included a brief lecture on amnesia.
In telling of her journey with Tina from the hospital to Bois Sauvage she had been very, very careful not to mention the flash flood, the dragon lizard, or the strange occurrence at Devil's Leap. Oh, very.
"Now then," she said firmly, "you do the talking, please. Explain that grave to me." Expecting little from the child's baby-faced mother, she directed her request at Metellus.
"Tina took sick and died," he said.
"What made her sick?"
"How do you mean, not well?"
"Her stomach hurt and she had la fièv. A really high fever. I went at once for the houngan."
"And?"
"He came and did things. Brewed a tea for her and used his hands on her, things like that. He is a good man. He stayed the whole night trying to make her well. But in the morning she died."
"Who said she was dead? This houngan?"
"All of us." Metellus returned her gaze without flinching; "It is not in dispute that she was dead when we buried her, M'selle. When someone dies, the people we call in may not be as learned as your doctors at the hospital, but they know how to determine if life has ended. Tina was dead."
"And you think this mango that was given her by—by whom?—"
"Luc Etienne."
"—might have caused her death? Poisoned her, you mean?"
"Perhaps. Something made her ill. She had not been sick before."
"There were two mangoes, you said."
"Yes."
"Did anyone eat the other?"
He shook his head.
"What became of it?"
"After the funeral, we opened it up, I and some others, to see if it had been tampered with. It seemed to be all right, but, of course, you can't always be sure. Some people are wickedly clever with poisons. Anyway, we buried it."
"Did you talk to this Luc Etienne?"
"Yes, M'selle."
"What did he say?"
"Only that the mangoes were from a tree in his yard, perfectly innocent, and he gave them to Tina for herself and the twins because he was fond of children. Especially of them."
Speaking for the first time, Tina's mother said, "Our children liked him, too. He was a nice young man."
"What do you mean, was?"
