by Mal Peet
It was the fire next time.
Maco smote the scaffolding round the new towers and blew on the flames until they seized the roof. Lead went molten and wept down the walls. He put his signature on his work; that church was a heart of red fire inside black ribs. And like he had said, there was no shilly-shallying after that. No question of pai or not pai. No looking wrongways through mirrors. I had brought my people back to themselves.
Or so I thought.
Fool.
Nothing is ever finished.
OGUN RASA, THE ancestor of health and sickness, is greedy for sacrifice. When the drying disease that the whites call cholera came the first time, I did not know this. The venerations I made were hasty and weak and the offerings I made were poor. So he took Blessing and Achasha from me. The nearest he comes to kindness is quickness; so between my daughter’s first purge and her last breath there was only a day and a night. And after another day and a night, with our dead child still in her arms, Blessing also died. At the end there was nothing I could do but brush the flies off them.
Their deaths seemed to satisfy Ogun Rasa. I came back from the graveyard with soil still on my hands and he made me a healer. I went half ghostly among the cabins and the houses on the river and the sleep shacks in the cane fields; many of those I nursed were spared. I raged inside myself that this was so, that I had not saved my wife and my daughter yet could save others. But my stature among the people grew. It grew like one tree that rises above the roof of the forest. With a thick vine named sorrow wrapped around its trunk.
When the cholera came back seven years later I was better prepared.
From the half-wild boatmen who traded with the feathered Indians far upriver I had bartered medicinal plants and learned their uses. Little by little I had taken from Ma Rosa and Ma Perla the knowledge they jealously guarded. Little by little I learned the ways of Ogun Rasa.
As soon as I could, after the news came of the first deaths among the riverside houses, I began to gather offerings to him. They were difficult to get and I had much trouble. I believe that the colonel heard of what I was doing; but he did nothing to stop me. I took everything to my quiet place along the river beyond the graveyard. By then the cholera had got into the cabins, and the colonel had closed his house up and lit smoke fires to keep away the contagion that drifted in the air. Or so he believed.
Ogun Rasa took a long time to reach me. Perhaps the bitterness I felt towards him flavoured my venerations. By the time he emerged from the trees the moon was low in the sky and I was almost exhausted. He stood tall above me, wearing the woven hat with the wooden brim, the long white veil that covered his face, the bloodstained robe that covered his sad, sore-encrusted body, leaning on the staff with the living snake wrapped around it. The stench that came off him mingled with the smell of burnt meat, and I had to take my breath in through my mouth not to vomit.
I made my submission to him, begging his help, and when I had finished he let out a sigh like a wind that had blown from some cold and desolate place. The snake unwound itself from the staff and slithered, tasting the air with its purple tongue, to where I kneeled. Its coils were warm and dry, but when they wrapped around me they left a coolness that spread peace through my blood. I fell into a dream of Blessing and Achasha in their full health and beauty, and when I awoke the dawn was drowning the stars. I felt strong; and the memory of happiness had returned to me.
I was working on a child in one of the distant cabins when a frightened boy ran in. The colonel had sent for me. The cholera had got into the house and seized his sons.
I went in through the kitchen. The women there were crying. They had covered their mouths and noses with cloths. I asked them which of our people were sick. Two washing girls, they told me, and Benito, the halfwit. And Virginia, the maid who looked after the colonel’s sons. I told them to boil water in covered pots, and when it had boiled they must not uncover it or touch it. I thought of telling them that their masks were foolish, but I did not.
The house was hot and dark, and a sharp reek hung in the air. It stung my eyes. Climbing the stairs I heard cries and groans and they led me to the room where the boys lay. Outside the door the colonel sat with his head in his hands on a small chair made of gold-painted wood.
I stood before him and said, “Señor?”
He looked up. The whites of his eyes were yellowish and threaded with blood. He got to his feet like a man who is a thousand years old.
“I cannot lose them,” he said. “They are why I live.”
I do not think I spoke. The colonel led me into the room. The curtains were drawn and lamps lit. Felipe and Luis lay on two beds close together. There were three housemaids with them, wide-eyed and fearful. A metal dish by the window was the source of the sharp smoke that hurt my eyes and almost covered the stink of sweat and sickness.
The white doctor who had come up from San Juan was standing watching the boys. Everything about him was thin: his hair, his fingers, his face. He wore lenses on his nose that made his eyes big like a bird that hunts at night.
The colonel said to him, “This man has successfully treated many cases of the cholera. I would like you to explain to him what you are doing for my sons.”
The doctor looked up and past me, expecting to see someone else. Then his eyes came to rest on me.
“You mean this nigger?”
“Yes,” the colonel said.
The doctor looked at me like some shit he’d trodden in.
He said, “Don Sebastian, I realize that you are distraught but—”
“Tell him.”
I heard the danger in the colonel’s voice but the doctor did not.
He pulled the lenses off his face and said, “He would not understand.”
“Damn it! Tell him!”
The doctor could not speak to me. He spoke to the ceiling, to the sleeve of his shirt, to his spectacles, to the colonel, to his own foot; but not to me.
“Very well. Cholera is a disturbance of the bodily humours. It excites the hot, or choleric, humour. Which is why it is called cholera. It is spread by an invisible miasma which haunts damp and impure air. The Church believes that this miasma is the result of sinful behaviour, and for this reason it often occurs where there are large numbers of slaves. This may or may not be so; I am a man of science, not religion. What is certain is that the inhalation of the pernicious miasma inflames the lungs, as we can tell by the hot, foul and weakened breath that is characteristic of the infected. The heat in the lungs heats and thickens the blood, and by this means the disease descends to the lower body, resulting in violent purging of the bowels and vomiting. As we have seen, Señor.”
Felipe arched his back and called out, “Papa! Papa!”
The colonel kept his eyes fixed on the doctor.
“The only proven treatments for cholera are those I have undertaken. I am burning oil of eucalyptus and camphor to repel the poisonous atmosphere. Because like attracts like, I have applied poultices of ginger and pepper oil to the lower body to draw away the heat. That your sons’ bodies have become cool and moist is evidence of the effectiveness of this procedure. I have applied leeches to your sons’ temples and feet to reduce the thickening of the blood. To rebalance the humours, I am administering opium, calomel, capsicum and spirits of rum.”
Luis, the younger boy, had agonies in his legs; he thrashed and groaned. I knew from the colour of his skin that he was further down the road to his dying, that he had been the first to start.
The colonel said, “Will they live?”
The doctor pulled his shirt tail free of his breeches and wiped his glasses on it. “If God wills it. Not if I waste time talking to this black.”
I left the room. After a while the colonel came out and closed the door behind him.
He said, “Dr Madureira is highly respected in San Juan. He is the Bishop’s personal physician.”
I stayed silent, and this displeased him.
“Don’t stand there like a black stump,
damn you! Tell me what you are thinking.”
“With respect, Señor, the man is a fool. Everything he is doing is the opposite of what is right. He will kill your sons.”
The colonel made his hands into fists. I thought he was going to strike me. Instead he went suddenly slack, like a sail when the wind dies. He walked unsteadily past me and stopped at the end of the passageway in front of the portrait of his grandfather. It was a picture of a stern man wearing a sword and a great wig like a tumbling fall of white water, standing in front of a pretty wilderness with his foot on the neck of a dead jaguar.
The colonel held his hands together behind his back and straightened himself. He said, “I know that they are calling you Paracleto now. Pai Paracleto. It is not the name I gave you.”
“No, Señor.”
“It is blasphemous.”
“It is only a name, Señor.”
“No,” he said. “It is a title.”
He turned away from his ancestor and came back to me.
“Can you cure my sons?”
“I do not know. I cannot promise it. I treat everyone the same. Some die; most live. I do not have the doctor’s words to explain things.”
The colonel looked at the floor.
“The ones that live. They live because they believe in your … authority, don’t they? I know why they call you pai. I know what it means. But Felipe and Luis, they do not have this … this respect. So I must ask you: without it, will your methods work?”
I did not know. I had no answer. All I could say was, “I believe all bodies are the same.”
The colonel stared at me as if I had told him that stars are the laughter of children or that trees dance at night. Downstairs his tall clock bonged the hour.
Then he said, “We are in hell, so we might as well work with the devil.”
He went into his sons’ room. I waited. He came out with Madureira, whose face was like an angry dog’s.
The doctor said, “Señor, it is widely known in San Juan that you tolerate certain heathenish activities on your estate. That is your affair, and I make no comment on it. But that you should entrust the lives of your children to nigger witchcraft is something on which I cannot remain silent. The insult to my skill is not the least of it. I understand that desperation has brought you to this reckless course of action. But desperation is the enemy of reason. I urge you to reconsider. We are white men, Señor. It is our privilege, and our duty, to be guided by science and reason. Not to be ensnared by the barbarous superstitions of an inferior species.”
The colonel listened to this speech in polite silence. He stayed silent when it was over, and I thought he would change his mind.
“Duty.” The colonel said it quietly, and as if it was a word he had not heard before. As if he was turning it in his hand, studying it.
Then he lifted his eyes to Madureira’s face. If he had looked at me that way I would have felt whipped.
“Your science, your skill, did not save my wife or my newborn daughter. On consideration, I would rather spare you the distress of supervising the deaths of the rest of my family. If you would care to wait downstairs I will pay you your fee and make the necessary arrangements for your return to San Juan.”
The doctor’s mouth opened and closed like a fish drowning. Then he walked to the stairs.
The colonel watched him go. He said, “There goes what is left of my reputation. And a pox on it.”
We went into the room and I set down my satchel of cures on the table between the two beds. One of the three maids met my eyes. I knew her; her given name was Felicia. I asked the colonel to send the other two down to the kitchen to bring the boiled water. Then I pulled back the curtains and opened the window and threw the dish of stinking stuff out. It fell at the feet of Ogun Rasa, whose veiled face was lifted towards me.
I found the courage to ask the colonel to leave me alone with his sons. He looked at me with a thousand words in his head, but none could find his mouth.
When he had gone, I went to Luis and held his face in my hand and asked him if he wanted to die. Because he could not hear me at first I had to ask him three times before I forced the answer out of him.
Then I said, “If you live, your brother will live. If you die, your brother will die. Do you understand?”
His eyes were sunk deep in his face and struggling.
“It depend on you,” I told him.
The girls came back with the water and then I sent them away.
“Papa,” Luis said, “there is a darkie on my bed. A darkie.” His voice was less than the wind in dry grass.
Felicia looked at me with sad rage in her eyes.
I brought out my cures and worked for two days and two nights.
In the middle of the first night the colonel stumbled into the room with a glass in his hand and said, “If my sons die you will wish you had died with them. If they live I will give you anything you want.”
They lived.
I NAMED MY PRICE.
The colonel said, “A house for Worship? You mean a church?”
“No, Señor. An ordinary house. A simple thing. Four walls and a roof. Somewhere I can go to worship in peace.”
He hummed and grunted. The sea in his eyes was full of running shadows. I waited.
“Where?”
“Up along the river, Señor, a way past the graveyard. A piece of nothing between the river and the plantation.”
He sighed and swung his legs out of the hammock.
“Show me,” he said. “Fetch my boots.”
We went alone. He made me walk ahead of him, and he slashed at the undergrowth with his cane and muttered curses at it. When we got there he wiped his face with his neckcloth and looked around. He saw the ashes and bones of my sacrifice fire but said nothing about it.
“I know this place,” he said. “Over there somewhere are good rocks to fish from. I came here sometimes with my father. While I fished, he watched the river with his gun. Once he shot an alligator, but it did not die. He used to say that the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live for ever.”
He looked up at the trees, squinting at the streams of light that fell through them. From not far off a bird called, harsh as stones grinding together.
“I never liked the damned place. Never felt easy here. It suits you, though, does it?”
“It has quietness, Señor.”
“Hmm. Do you know how to build a house? Can you work wood?”
“I worked with my father making boats. When I was a boy.”
“Did you? I didn’t know that. But it’s not the same thing. You’ll need help.”
The colonel lent me three field men and one of the carpenters from the mill, a giant called Baltasar. The work was harder and took much longer than I had pictured. Three weeks just to clear the ground and cut and trim the trees. We had to shape the trunks where they had fallen, turning them on branches laid on the ground. Without a saw pit, we had to work the big two-handled saw flat-ways, pulling the teeth into the wood. Our backs and shoulders hurt us all the time we did this.
At the end of every day I stopped in the graveyard and told Blessing and Achasha how the work was going.
When at last the frame was built we thatched the roof with two coverings of palm leaves, held fast by lines of thin branches pinned down by sharpened twists of green wood. Looking at it, I felt a sorrowful pain that made me dizzy. I was reminded of the house where I was born. The shadow of a memory, of a life, that was lost.
We had nothing for walls. There was little stone in or near the place. Baltasar said it would take months to cut enough planks, and months to dry them. So we made mud bricks and it was a hard and filthy labour.
To give the bricks strength and lightness we mixed the mud with used litter from the floor of the animal pens. Coarse yellow grass, dried cane leaves and the droppings of horses, cattle and pigs. We brought it up to the clearing in great baskets on the backs of two mules; we arrived inside black clouds of
flies. We had to chop it up small with a sharpened spade before mixing it with red soil and river water. When we had stirred all into a foul brown porridge we slopped it into the shaping frames that Baltasar had made and pressed it down with our hands. We did this work naked, to save our poor clothes.
At the end of each cruel day we washed ourselves in the river, but I thought we would never be free of the stink. The field men hated this work. Twice I had to frighten their souls to make them go on. More than once savage rain ruined the bricks, sluicing them from the frames.
When three of the walls were built I washed carefully, put on my house clothes and asked to speak to the colonel. There was something else that I wanted. It had grown in me, this want, like the fingers of plants that force apart little cracks in baked earth, and it had flowered.
In the storehouse on the river there was a high and dusty stack of wooden crates. I knew what was inside them. One after another, layers of straw and some strange hairy cloth, and glass. Glass of the most beautiful colours, so that looking through it you might be looking through blood or the sky or green water or into the sun. The colonel had brought this glass halfway round the world for a window in his church. A window that was a picture. I also knew what this picture was meant to be, because I had seen it painted on paper pinned on the wall of his writing room. It was the ghost of the white man’s god showing his wounds to the half-believer whose name was Tomas. The crates were grey and dusty because the colonel would never have his picture window.
“I hear the work on the hermitage is going well,” the colonel said. That was what he had decided to call it. “I also hear that you are stealing manure from the pens. I imagine that is why you reek like the outhouse.”
“I am sorry, Señor.”
“For the theft, or for the stink?”
“Both, Señor.”