‘Look,’ protested Father Napier, ‘I have only just got back. The whole journey took me four months. Apart from the fact that I’m extremely tired, as far as my mission work is concerned, I have a great deal to do here in the savannahs. I don’t plan to return to that area for a year or more when it will be time for confirmations. I’m sorry but it’s out of the question.’
The priest found himself enjoying that particular exercise of petty power which comes with being righteously justified in refusing a request.
‘I believe they have left Wai-Wai country now,’ continued McKinnon as if Father Napier had just agreed to go and look for them. ‘There have been sightings and reports that they are headed for the Great Fall on the Essequibo.’
Father Napier tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle his annoyance.
‘For goodness sake. I’m not a messenger,’ he burst out irritably. ‘Send one of the vaqueiros or some men from the settlement. I have the Lord’s work to attend to.’
McKinnon turned to look at the priest who had swung round away from him in exasperation and stood, one hand on his hip, fidgeting with his straggly beard. Something in the other man’s manner infuriated him. His self-assured cockiness. McKinnon wanted to dent that assurance. He did not take his eyes off the priest as he spoke.
‘I think as a Christian minister it is your duty to go. They have run away together.’ He spoke slowly and deliberately, emphasising the last sentence.
Father Napier still failed to understand fully what he was being told.
‘Well, they’re old enough to do what they want. You can’t hang on to your children for ever. They’ll come back eventually, I’m sure.’
McKinnon hammered it home.
‘Father Napier. They are full-blooded brother and sister. In your terms, I believe they are committing what you would call a mortal sin.’
His own distress abated somewhat in his pleasure at the priest’s shock.
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I will go straightaway. Can you find men and provisions for me?’
‘Yes.’
Father Napier caught the relief in McKinnon’s face.
‘I hope that, in return, you will consider letting me build a church here for the people of Waronawa.’
‘Most certainly,’ replied McKinnon, concealing his dislike of the man. He knew that the church would never be built. He had already decided to sell his cattle and get out of Waronawa.
Later that evening after McKinnon had told Maba that Father Napier was going to look for the couple, Maba said shrewdly to Zuna: ‘It’s because they are part white that he is going. If they were full Indians he would never make all this fuss. And we would never ask him. We should look after our own affairs. Besides, I know it’s not good, what Danny and Beatrice are doing, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s happened before. It’s just fate. He shouldn’t interfere.’
McKinnon provided the priest with what he could for the journey. He sent four of the vaqueiros with him. There was a cassava shortage so he could only offer some rice and Bovril. Father Napier and the men would have to subsist on what they could catch.
The party set off on June 21st, 1919. The rainy season had now begun in earnest.
Where previously, the sun burned down on the clear outline of trails and village settlements, now everything on the savannahs seemed to be dissolving in the teeming rains. This dissolution of contours, the blotting out of differences, the melting of edges made Father Napier feel that the distinction between everything was being blurred. He thrust his chin up in defiance against the rain as they made their slow way to the Kudiuwini River by bullock cart. The water ran down his face. Every so often, they had to stop and push the cart out of a rain-filled rut. Sometimes the track disappeared altogether in a flooded part of the terrain.
He kept looking towards the horizon to try and find his bearings but the rains obliterated the rim of the earth and stirred the land into the sky. He had no idea where he was and relied entirely on his Indian escorts. Roads turned into rivers and plains into lakes. The Indians told him that the rains heralded invisibility and change.
It took them fifteen days to reach the Kudiuwini River which was running high and allowed Father Napier to travel straight down to Barakako without having to go via the Kassikaitiu as he had done previously. When they reached Barakako, the weather broke and a pale sun gleamed through the clouds. The ground had dried out and the villagers were sitting in a circle outside the touchau’s hut.
Father Napier pulled at his beard impatiently. It was the same in every village they passed through. One of his escorts would spend two hours reciting to the chief every single event, however trivial, that had occurred on the journey.
He looked round. The women stood in a line outside the house. All of them were dressed in seed aprons and bead ornaments except one who stood proudly in front. She wore what Father Napier recognised immediately as Beatrice McKinnon’s blue skirt. Several of the men too were decked out in what must have been some of Danny’s clothing. One had on a vest, another a cotton jacket and someone else a battered grey felt hat.
Father Napier enquired if anyone had seen Danny and Beatrice lately.
‘Yes. They are asleep in one of the houses at the back,’ replied a beaming old man, trying to be helpful.
It had started to rain again and they were standing in the open on sodden ground. Father Napier asked to be taken there immediately.
‘They will soon wake up. Wait a little,’ said the man.
After a few hours, Father Napier realised that Beatrice and Danny were not there at all. The old man had been indulging in the customary Indian habit of trying to please him by telling him what he would like to hear. He had been taken in by it over and over again in his years as a missionary and had never become used to it.
But he discovered that Beatrice and Danny had passed through there recently. The evidence was in the bartered clothes. They had been given a canoe in exchange. The delay meant that the search party had to stay the night at Barakako. The next day, Father Napier’s party continued along the Essequibo, over some small rapids, heading towards the Great Fall.
Danny was dabbling his fingers in some tepid waters, trying to give the fish the impression that other fish were eating there. A few scrawny bushes leant into the water which was translucent, the colour of tea without milk.
A malaise, halfway between boredom and depression, had wrapped itself around Danny ever since the incident with the wild hogs. Beatrice tried to tease him out of it by saying that he must have swapped spirits with a sloth and left his own spirit hanging in a tree somewhere. When they were small and had bad diarrhoea, Koko Lupi used to blow on them and call on the sloth to make their shit hard like its own pellets. Danny smiled wanly.
‘That’s all stupidness,’ he said.
Part of his melancholy came from the death of his dog. The dog had been running ahead of him, following the scent of an agouti, when a labaria snake leapt ten feet and struck it. Danny watched, powerless, as the snake struck over and over again until its venom was exhausted. The dog whimpered, screeched, convulsed and was dead within minutes. To Danny, it seemed that this was just another one of the endless signs that things were going wrong.
He lay face down, moving his fingers gently in the water, next to the stream that flowed into an inlet of the Essequibo where they had left their boat. The painted marks of the genipap were fading but still visible over his face and body. His legs were dotted with the black dots from kaboura-fly bites.
Beatrice was a few hundred yards inside the forest, following an old deserted trail amongst the towering mora and greenheart trees. She was looking for any fruit trees, particularly the yellow ishura fruit that Danny preferred or the tiny kum fruit that was not much more than purple skin and stone but made a welcome change to their diet.
As always in the forest, Beatrice had the feeling she was being watched. When she heard a long, low, choral
moan, she assumed for a minute that it must be a band of howler monkeys swinging through the forest. But almost immediately, it was followed by a rustling and she realised that it was the wind sighing in the upper branches of the trees.
It was a storm. Lightning lit up the topmost arches of the trees and a massive crash of thunder burst overhead. A distant clattering in the canopy of leaves hundreds of feet above signalled rain. After a few minutes, dead leaves and twigs began to float and drop to the forest floor. Beatrice stood still, alerted by movement in a nearby bush. Movement usually meant an animal. But all at once, everything started moving. Bushes swayed. Leaves upturned and shivered, showing their pale sides. Everything shook. Little rivulets and streams began to run down the tree trunks. Soon pools occupied every hollow.
Unnerved as the thunder crashed again, Beatrice sheltered between the giant roots of a silk cotton tree. The huge triangular buttress was large enough for a hut to be built between the fin-shaped roots. She wore only a lap, having left behind the last of her clothes in Barakako. After a while the grey rain began to penetrate that far down. Some dainty white flowers at her feet gave off a nauseating stench. Beatrice decided to make a run for it, the half-full basket of fruits bumping against her shoulder.
Danny was securing the boat. Heavy spears of rain lacerated the surface of the water. She helped him wedge the canoe in the undergrowth and tie it to a bush and then they both ran towards the shelter which Danny had erected on the bank of the inlet, where they had been staying for the last few days.
Within minutes, the downpour turned the bank into a slippery shelf of mud. The pair of them clambered up the slope, slithering back every few steps. Ropes of water twisted around them, transparent lassos ensnaring their arms, legs and necks, tugging them back towards the river.
They made it to the top. Beatrice stood in the shed panting, wiping water from her lashes and wringing out her hair. Danny took off his shorts and wrung them out. Still breathless, she pointed to one of the struts in the roof of the hut. A large toucan perched there, its brilliantly coloured, top-heavy head glistening with raindrops. It looked sideways at them from its painted eye with that pale blue rim that is said to come from too much weeping. Beatrice and Danny laughed simultaneously.
‘Those birds are stupid bad,’ said Danny. ‘You can chase them across the savannah and they’ll fall down before they reach the next tree. The head is too heavy for them to keep airborne for long.’
He crouched on the ground but it was impossible to light a fire. The damp wood refused to catch. There was nothing else to do but lie curled up together in the miserably cold and damp hammock and listen to the roaring of the nearby river until the storm passed.
Father Napier leaned back in the boat, tired and disappointed. The day was dull and the sight of the vast Essequibo River with its sullen indifference to human affairs somehow depressed him. Thousands of inlets and tiny tributaries and creeks notched the banks of the river. It was a hopeless task to search for anybody in this giant wilderness.
They had arrived at the Great Fall on the Essequibo and could see no trace of the missing couple. Initially, he had set off feeling that he was undertaking yet another heroic mission – the salvation of two souls. Now, it seemed, his mission would fail. No one they had spoken to for the last few days had any news of Danny and Beatrice.
A storm sent them scurrying for the tarpaulins in the back of the boat. They pulled the boat into a swamp of enmeshed roots at the river’s edge and crouched under the tarpaulins as the rain drummed down over their heads. Cold rain ran down Father Napier’s neck. Two men held on to the branches against the pull of the great river.
The men were already disgruntled and discussing how they could get back. Someone suggested a route down the Kubanawau from the mouth of the Sidawau to the Rupununi. Heavy rains meant that cataracts and rapids were gushing at full strength. So far they had managed to shoot the rapids, remaining in the boat, or streak them, attaching a rope and guiding the craft, stern first, between rocks and ledges. They were all exhausted.
As soon as they saw the Great Fall, they knew that Danny and Beatrice could not have taken their boat over by themselves. It was roaring and thundering in full spate. They decided to turn back. The captain thought they would be able to reach the shed above the next falls where they had left two baskets of cassava bread.
Father Napier nodded his glum approval. When the storm abated, they turned round. Progress against the current was slow. Although the rain had become no more than a drizzle, mists hampered visibility. The sun was going down. Continuing was too risky. They decided to camp out and get into their hammocks without eating that night. At first light they would make for the shed where they had left their food.
‘Let’s go in there.’ Father Napier pointed to one of the numerous channels leading from the river, a small opening between the trees. Two of the crew got out and went ahead.
‘A canoe,’ one called out.
‘Danny’s canoe,’ called out the other as he spotted the bows, arrows and the gun.
I have found the needle in the haystack, thought Father Napier. Praise be to God.
Shouting penetrated the gloom. Beatrice opened her eyes. It was a man’s voice calling.
‘Danny. Danny. Danny.’
The voice sounded like a bird of ill omen flapping and screeching round her ears. Half asleep, they scrambled out of the hammock. It was not quite dark. Both of them recognised the voice. Danny, panic-stricken, fumbled around for his wet shorts. He turned to Beatrice aghast.
‘It is Father Napier,’ he said, trembling. ‘God has sent him here.’
Within minutes, the priest had found them. Before she could see him clearly, Beatrice could smell him. The soaking-wet cloth of his black soutane exuded a damp, gaseous aura like the smell of rotting cassava or a secreted compost heap. To Beatrice the stench was overwhelming.
For hours Beatrice stayed in the darkness listening to them speaking just outside the shelter. Alert and straining every sinew to catch what they were saying, over the noise of the river, she knew by his tone of voice that Danny was agreeing to return to Waronawa. She heard them laugh briefly over a shared joke and then she heard Father Napier’s voice turn serious. She slid out of the hammock in order to eavesdrop more easily. The ground underfoot was wet and cold. The rains had stopped. Father Napier and Danny stood a few yards away, faceless in the black night.
Danny was promising to build a church for Father Napier at Wanawanatuk. That will never work, thought Beatrice scornfully, remembering the mosquitoes there. Danny’s voice sounded weak and insincere. Beatrice listened for a while longer, then the night mists made her shiver with cold. She climbed back into the damp hammock, sick with misery.
Danny did not return to their hammock that night. He stayed with the other men in an adjoining shelter they had erected. Beatrice lay awake all night long. The rains started again. The thatch leaked. Splodges of cold rain fell on her, scurrying down her neck, and water trickled down her hammock rope. She made no attempt to avoid any of it. She wished that the rain would fall until the waters rose and drowned them all in a muddy burial. She lay in the darkness, dreading the dawn.
The next morning, in grey opal light under an overcast sky, Father Napier tried to light a fire. Everything was still sodden and he gave up. Apart from a ‘Good morning’ which barely concealed his disapproval, he had not spoken to Beatrice. The sight of her in a seeded apron disgusted him.
‘I would have thought you had learned better than that at St Joseph’s,’ he remarked tartly.
Beatrice felt herself burn. She could not tell whether it was with shame or fury. With Danny, however, Father Napier was different, full of anxious bonhomie and conciliation, almost sycophantic.
It was decided that the priest’s party would start off straightaway because Danny had to do some work on his canoe, caulking it with resin against the flood waters. He and Beatrice would follow on behind.
Beatrice and Danny watched the bla
ck-robed figure climbing into his boat from where they stood on the bank. Mists and drizzle hung in a cloud over the water. Jubilant at his success, Father Napier started to sing. He turned to wave and shouted something but the roar of the river drowned him out.
On the journey back, Father Napier was overjoyed. He thought it could only have been the hand of God which guided him to that one inlet of the thousands of criss-crossing waterways leading into the Essequibo.
As soon as they reached Wanawanatuk, he marked out roughly the spot where Danny should build the church. One clearing, he thought, was particularly suitable. They decided to overnight there.
That night, a monstrous battalion of mosquitoes stung Father Napier through his hammock, pyjamas and blanket. He tried wrapping himself in a tarpaulin but they crawled in there too. The place was less than two degrees from the Equator. The heat was appalling. He got out of his hammock and fought his way through what felt like a wall of mosquitoes. He breathed them in. He did not dare open his mouth. Finally, he took his hammock into the forest and slept under a tree.
In the morning, he was woken by piercing whistles. He dressed quickly, picked up his gun and went to see what was happening.
‘Bush-cow. Tapir,’ said one of the men, gesturing for the priest to stay still.
A whistle came from the other side of the creek. One of the men imitated it. The tapir whistled again in response. Every time the man whistled, the tapir became increasingly excited. Father Napier could see movements behind the bushes across the strip of water. Unable to move closer, he aimed at where he guessed the tapir’s shoulder might be and fired. The men waded over the creek and gave chase but despite the trail of blood, they never caught it.
Three weeks later, Father Napier arrived triumphantly back in the savannahs.
Silence
Neither Danny nor Beatrice spoke while Danny worked methodically and silently on their canoe. Beatrice felt her heart beating in a stone body. From the way he consistently avoided her eyes when she looked at him, she knew there was no point in trying to persuade him not to go back. Rather than risk a real rupture, she said nothing.
The Ventriloquist's Tale Page 19