A Far Country

by Daniel Mason

  They said that he took after his grandfather Boniface, a thin man who wore a watch on each wrist, donned a stained white suit despite the heat, and spent the market days pining for the return of the New State with two other eccentrics and a set of dominos. Boniface played fiddle, and in his youth he had made a name for himself. At a time when schooling was a whim of the large plantation owners who hired them for seasonal labor, he taught himself to read and knew which plants to take for problems of the liver and which to take for problems of the nerves. He knew how to remove a rotten tooth with the tip of a knife and what to give for a snakebite. He was also very handsome, and the town whispered that he was grandfather to many more of the dusty children than was publicly acknowledged. He wore three wedding bands, one for each wife he had survived. From him Isaias learned to play fiddle, and to smile in a way that made girls cover their teeth and trace their bare toes through the sand.

  Isaias was born in the public hospital in the nearest city of Prince Leopold. Isabel was born in Saint Michael itself, twenty minutes after her mother’s water broke as she crossed the cane fields. It should have been the other way, her mother said, the pensive child born in the yellowed hospital walls, the impetuous little boy clawing his way out into the cane. But they showed their true selves within hours, the boy protesting wildly against the prodding hands of the hospital nurses, the girl uttering a single, startled cry before settling quietly into the arms of her mother, who rose and continued the walk home.

  Her mother would often say: Even then, anyone could see the difference. At that time when babies won’t stop watching your face, that boy stared straight past. Not Isabel—she looked you in the eye and knew what you were thinking, but the boy’s eyes were moving the moment he could keep them open.

  From an early age, Isaias went alone to walk in the hills. When Isabel was old enough to keep up, he took her with him, on excursions in the high heat or at dawn, dragging her grumbling from the house to see the birds before they hid from the sun. He found her wild cactus fruit and polished the dust from it with his shirt. He made her practice the names of plants. He thrust his hands into the thorns to grab beetles, into the hot mud to scoop up toads, into the cacti to pull out vivid pink flowers that he held for her, as she squinted with one eye and then the other through a scratched watch-repairman’s lens he bought at the weekly fair in Prince Leopold. He found fossil fish for her in the eroded sandstone and showed her rock etchings of men and animals. He broke off long leathery pods from the mimosas and rattled them as they walked.

  He brought his fiddle. In the shade of a buckthorn, she sat on a bumpy stone and listened to him play. The fiddle had a threnodial cry, as if one could play the sound of creaking floorboards or an animal’s wail. On the way back, he told her how he would become famous. It was one of the few times he laughed, and his laughter spread until it shook his whole body. Isabel lived for these moments. She lost herself to imagining his successes and boasted of them to everyone.

  When he was older, he borrowed books from a traveling notary. He read to her. Her favorite story was of the Princess of China, whose hair was described as long black sails.

  Once, as she ran dusty and barefoot through the house in a pair of underpants, her grandfather Boniface grabbed her arm.

  ‘Where’s your conspirator?’ he asked. She was four and the word was big and unfamiliar. He brushed dust from her cheek. ‘What is it, little mouse? They don’t teach you anything in school?’

  ‘Conspirator in what?’ asked her mother, cutting a sliver off a rope of tobacco. ‘I don’t think I understand, either.’

  ‘What’s not to understand? The boy makes crazy plans and she believes them. He thinks he is a king, and she thinks this is the center of the world.’ He waved a hand. ‘Yes?’

  Isabel sneezed and didn’t have an answer. She already knew there were certain questions adults asked children only for the sake of other adults. ‘Wipe your nose,’ said her mother, laughing, ‘and if you see your conspirator, tell him the goats chewed down the clothesline.’ Boniface loosed her arm and she sprang off running into the brush.

  At Saint John’s festival, her mother freckled her face with dabs of dark mud. At Carnival she was an angel, then an Indian, then an angel again. Most boys borrowed lipstick and put on their sisters’ dresses. Each year Isaias wore the same oversize coat of ribbons and colored buttons. He brought his fiddle to play along at the edge of the band, where he flirted with the girls who came down from the villages. Isabel trimmed her hair with tinsel, shouted, ‘It’s Carnival!’ and whirled, glinting, as he played.

  When Isaias was thirteen and she was six, her father said it was time for him to leave school and join the men in the sugarcane fields.

  He went on longer walks, alone. At night, she heard him arguing. ‘Let me go to the coast,’ he said. ‘And what are you going to do there?’ her father asked. ‘Play fiddle.’ ‘And be a beggar your entire life?’ ‘Not a beggar. In the cities you can make a living in music.’ ‘That’s a lie.’ ‘It isn’t a lie, I promise. I can play in the markets, or in a band. There are many ways.’

  In the morning, she awoke to Isaias climbing out of his hammock. She rose quietly and stood behind the sheet that hung in the doorway. She watched his hunched back as he ate in silence.

  He worked for the next three years cutting cane with the older men. He walked the half hour to the fields in the darkness and returned to sleep in the early evening. To protect against the sharp leaves, he wore patched leather shoes and three shirts, ash-stained, stiff with dried sweat, buttoned to his neck to keep out the spiders. He wrapped his ankles and torn elbows with rags. Fragments of cane fiber specked his clothes and hair. In the cane fields the men were joined by others brought in by flatbeds. At lunch they sat in the clearings and ate from dented tins.

  Once he cut his hand. The foreman made the driver wait until the end of the day to take him to a clinic. Isabel came along. There they learned the nurse had gone home, and so they slept on a wooden bench until she came back in the morning. The nurse poked at the wound worriedly and stitched it with wide, looping bites. The next night Isaias began to shiver. By the morning, the wound had swollen at the stitches like an overstuffed sausage, and when he made a fist, one of the threads tore through the flesh. He spent the next week at a little hospital in Prince Leopold.

  He asked for Isabel to stay with him. In the next bed was an old woman whose breath rattled like the withered pods they twisted off the trees. Cockroaches fell off the walls under their own weight. Since Isaias was so thin, there was space in the bed, and the nurses let Isabel sleep there. Outside a window, they could see a pair of thrushes dash along a stretch of hot earth. They argued about whether a bird’s feathers were warm or cold. ‘Warm from the sun, cold from the wind,’ said Isaias, and this question occupied Isabel for a long time.

  The hospital had no food; he sent her into the city to buy cornmeal, which he cooked on a stovetop shared by the patients. As he swatted at the flies that gathered on the crusted dressing on his hand, he told her he was afraid he would never play the fiddle again. When he could close his fist, he returned to work.

  During this time Isabel went to school and began to help her mother, taking care of a baby left behind by a cousin who had gone to work in the city. She learned to carry the baby with its legs scissored around her waist and to recognize the meaning of its cries. She helped her aunt sell bananas at a weekly market in the mountains. She grated manioc, pulled the ticks from the ears of the yelping dogs, balanced bags of laundry on her head when she walked to the stream. Her hands became callused. She could break a heavy piece of manioc in two.

  When she was seven, a new teacher came from the coast, a spirited young woman who read poetry about the struggle of farmers and poor working people. Isabel did not understand all of the poems, but the teacher came regularly. Along-side the other children, squirming on the crowded splintery benches, she learned to read.

  One day when the cane was flowering, her mo
ther sent her to find her brother. It was afternoon and still hot. As she followed the empty road along the fields, she thought how she would ask him to cut pieces for her and how only God could have invented a plant that killed both thirst and hunger. The flatbeds had parked a long way down the road. She decided to take a shortcut through the cane. Her bare feet skidded on the gravel as she descended the sharp slope from the road.

  As she threaded her way through the narrow passages, she sang. A rustle startled her. A snake, she thought: last year, a boy had died after being bitten. They found him in the cane fields two days after he had disappeared. They hadn’t let any of the children see him.

  The leaves stirred at her feet and then the rustling moved away. The canebrake was the same in all directions; the sun was almost directly overhead. She picked a faint path along one of the rows. When this was crowded out by the other stalks, she dropped to her knees and crawled. The cane was blue at its base. The air was sweet and, save the rustling, very quiet. It seemed that she was following a path, but when she looked back she saw only an unbroken wall of cane. Her eyes hurt from the shifting of the stalks. Once, she thought she saw a shadow of a person. She stopped and strained her eyes to see and then continued on. Many times, she wanted to shout Isaias, but told herself not to be scared. She entered a burn. Soon she heard someone cutting cane and singing, and walked through the black skeletal stalks and into a small clearing, where she saw her brother. He wore thick gloves and a handkerchief draped beneath his hat, gray with soot. His back was bent and his head was down. She followed the rhythmic motion as he embraced the cane with one arm and swung his knife.

  That night, he said, ‘Isabel, how did you do that?’ ‘Do what?’ ‘Find me like that.’ ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how did you walk straight through the fields and find me?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You don’t know? There are acres and acres of cane.’ She shrugged. He said, ‘You knew where I was?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Do you think you could do it again?’ he asked.

  It was quiet as they walked down the road. At the start of the cane fields, he said, ‘Wait here and sing “Little Sparrow” ten times,’ and he disappeared into the darkness. She stood alone on the road, whispered the words to the song and tore strips from a dry husk. She could hear the sound of his feet on the fallen stalks and see the swaying of the cane plumes. She waited until she could no longer see or hear him, and then she followed. The moon was as thin as a curl of her hair, and the faint light flashed off the long leaves. Above her, the plumes were pale and luminescent, reminding her of costume feathers. Then she thought of the two of them, moving about each other in the darkness, which despite the cane appeared in her mind like a great empty place.

  So it was easier this time, and she found him standing in a dense copse.

  He took her back up to the road. ‘Try again,’ he said, and again she found him. ‘Again,’ he said, and this time had her sing the song ten times, and ten times again. She walked straight through the cane and found him crouching, holding his knees. On the way back to the road he began to laugh. ‘Again,’ he said, and again she found him on a straight line from the road. ‘You are following my tracks,’ he said. ‘No.’ ‘Then you can hear my breathing.’ ‘No.’ ‘Then how?’ ‘I don’t know, Isaias,’ she said, feeling the hair rising on her arms.

  They went out the following night. He blindfolded her, and she found him, feeling her way straight through the rustling stalks, until he tickled her ankle and pulled her down, laughing. He brought a cousin, and told him to hide, but Isabel hunted in circles until the little boy began to cry.

  In the winter of her eighth year, another drought came. There won’t be a cane harvest, said the men, and they began to talk about where they could find work, and later, if they should leave. As summer approached, they were visited by government men who promised help if they stayed. ‘The cities can’t take more of you,’ they said. ‘There is no water and no electricity; there is only disease.’ The men and women were cautious. Hadn’t the government come before, to promise water and food at the time of elections? But this time they returned a week later, with rice and a water truck. They brought a plastic reservoir and posters of the governor. Isabel stood with her brother and watched the dogs gather around the truck to lap at the leaking water as it dripped from the fender.

  Some families left, but most stayed. At home, the men talked incessantly of work, of jobs in far-off places where it rained.

  It was not the first time they had left in search of work. Since her grandfather’s time, rubber plantations had sent representatives into the interior with promises of wealth. Now, again, the rumors tumbled out of megaphones, rattled among the fairground gossips and spread like stains along the roads into the backlands. At first, the men chewed slowly on the news. They were mistrustful of such wet, lush places. In the markets, they huddled around photographs of fruit-laden trees as if they were pornographic postcards.

  At night, when the families gathered, those who had already gone and returned told stories. I walked, I hitched, I took a flatbed to the coast, they began, and the children listened.

  In the stories, the companies took the men to a city by the sea. There they wandered along the docks, stared at the shifting hips of the washerwomen and watched fishermen pole skiffs into the emptiness of the horizon. As they waited, listening to the rumors swell, they saw ships bound for Panama City, Valparaiso and Rio de Janeiro, and others that said Lisbon and Cape Town. On boardwalks glittering with fish scales, they shadowed the stevedores, watching in disbelief at the cargo, the crates of fruit and fish and boxes of grain. They learned the ships had names: Jeanne d’Arc, Rubber Princess, Jungle Queen. What a wealthy place, they thought, and recalled the dogs without names and the horses without names, and the children, left by emigrating families, whose names had been lost.

  On the docks, they spent days at seaside bars, waiting for enough men to fill the company steamers. The companies were generous and advanced them money for liquor and plump, laughing girls. They signed the bottom of ledgers they couldn’t read. The company men licked the nib of the pen for them and said, This just promises that you’ll pay me back, It’s not much, You can work it off in days if you work hard.

  One morning they woke to a procession at sea, where a Christ with real hair swayed like a mast above an altar boy and a seasick priest. Then the company men came around and gathered them into ships. At sea, they watched schools of fish swim beneath the hulls. They nearly cried with awe, whispering, So many fish, and still we don’t stop, Imagine what it will be like when we arrive. After many days, they felt the air change, grow wet and heavy, the seawater go sweet. The banks were so far away that they didn’t believe the crew when they said that it was no longer the ocean but a river. They disembarked on the mildew-stained docks of a cobbled city with a golden cathedral and markets reeking of rotting fruit. In the evening, when the market had closed, they walked barefoot over a boardwalk thick with the slush of papaya. They fought the cats for scraps. They had been fed by the companies, but still they were hungry, as if hunger were an old habit that couldn’t be broken.

  Isabel and Isaias considered the stories quietly. From there we took more boats, said the men who had been and then returned. These boats were smaller, with ribbed railings that reminded some of us of skeletons and some of us of jails. We worked on the plantations, or we fled and tried to mine gold. We fell over each other in massive muddy trenches torn into the earth. We carried everything we owned. On our backs. Like the Indians, who speak strange languages, and keep a distance when they come to trade.

  In the deepest reaches of the jungle, the migrants met men who had never heard of the sea. They looked at the men with incredulity and thought, I spent my life before seeing the sea, but there is no one who hasn’t heard of it. They repeated: sea sea seeee SEA ocean séa sèa sêa Ocean pacific atlantic, sea sea sea and the others shook their heads. A river? they asked. No, not a river, Bigger than a river. With clear water? Clear, yes, but n
ot sweet water, salted water. Salted? Yes. By who? The salt is there already. But who put it there in the first place? Distrustful now, stepping back. In the first place? said the migrants, You could say God, and thought, Or the Other One. The men who had never heard of the sea said, Then people there don’t have to buy salt. No. You don’t have to trade for it? No, there is more salt than you could ever want. That must be good. Yes, said the migrants, thinking it over, That is good. But is it water you can drink? the others asked, and the migrants answered, No, it’s poisonous. The last word soaked with such hatred that it terrified them.

  In the great rubber plantations they cut chevrons into tree trunks, collecting the white latex in rusted cans. They melted it in large kettles and dipped string into the boiling milk, pulling the rubber out to dry. Then they dipped it again, until they held soft swollen spheres that grew slick in the rain, reminding them in their loneliest hours of the breasts and bellies of the girls they once lay with. They stared at the walls of the company shops, decorated with torn magazine photographs of beautiful women whose hair blew behind them. They tried to recall their wives at home, but their memories had withered. In the plantation canteens, they began to pay on credit for the company of Indian girls, who held their hands and followed them through the darkness of the camps.

  Then the rumors of gold came, real gold, not rubber gold, and they fled their debts and the rubber plantations, following barroom whispers up the rivers, where they found cities of rafts. They asked for directions to the mines. You’re here, came the answers. They stared down at the river, with the water black and clear above the rafts and brown below.