A child cried out. The cart stopped. Hoover came to the rear and asked a question in Tamil. The child responded. Gently Hoover spoke again, smiled, and made a joke. The child laughed and lay down in the blanket.
“Elliot, thank God it’s you.”
A strong hand felt her forehead. “You’re burning up. Try to sleep.”
He went back to the front, slapped the ox with his stick, and the cart rumbled down. Janice watched the clouds overhead, rolling in phantasmagoric shapes in front of the round moon, obscuring it, revealing it, like the eye of a distant god—the god of destruction, satisfied with what he had wrought. The next time she looked they were in a grove of trees, miraculously still tall, still luxuriant. She slept. When she looked again, the cart was pushing its way across a swollen stream, and the moonlight glittered like a million silver fish in the leaping black water.
Then she sensed peace. The cart had stopped, she was in his arms, and he was carrying her across a wet field toward a dark house. She lay against his chest like a child, her arms around his neck. He smelled like wet canvas and like mud and like medicines. The night grew even darker, and it was deathly quiet. She was inside the house. It was dry. Quiet. She lay on a clean bed.
“You’ll be all right here,” he said quietly. “Back there the soldiers might have mutinied.”
She nodded, not comprehending, but wanted to hear the voice go on. She stared at the face. It was Elliot Hoover.
“I’ve pulled the dirt from your wound,” he said. “Cleaned it out well. But I have no antibiotics.”
Janice focused her eyes on the calm face. Her hands traveled over the familiar features. There was no doubt. The pale blue eyes, the sensitive skin, now badly in need of a shave. The compassion that glowed like hot coals from deep inside. His hands covered hers.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered.
He smiled. “I have no choice, Janice. I have to help others. I’ll leave some food for you. Some bread and cheese that won’t spoil.”
“Please, don’t go! I must talk to you.”
“I’ll be back.”
Her fingers tightened around his collar, but he gently uncurled them and laid her hands across her breast. A clean blanket covered her. He stood over her, more shadow than solid form, looking down. For a long time he only breathed there, as though confused, uncertain whether to go or remain. Then he went to the two children sharing a bed next to her. They spoke quietly together. One of the children coughed badly. He showed them a white cheese. He kissed them gently on the forehead, then went outside. The ox cart began rumbling again.
The night passed slowly. Sleep was impossible. It was not the blanket but the fever that kept her warm. Janice was convinced that she would die before dawn. In the next bed two boys, aged about nine or ten, slept fitfully, their arms comically tangled. One of them kept whispering what sounded like a name—probably his mother’s—but the other only wheezed steadily, frighteningly. Through the window she watched the moon go down over the jagged horizon. They were high in the mountains, and here the vegetation was still thick, even dense, like a tropical forest. Black fronds rustled near the window, whispering obscenities, and Janice finally slept.
Dawn showed white sheep foraging peacefully on green slopes. White rocks interrupted the steady green of the slopes. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish the sheep from the rocks until there was a movement. Janice sat on the edge of the bed, shivering. She watched down the road. No sound. The emptiness was as profound as the vista of mud that had flattened the other side of the mountains.
She ate the flat bread, dry and unpleasant, and then encouraged the two boys to eat. Their small faces, round and flushed, dimly focused on her, and their mouths slowly worked at the bread. Then she had them eat some of the white cheese, though it tasted like rancid butter to her. They seemed to relish the cheese. She cooled their foreheads with a damp cloth and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Children, she thought, helpless as newborn fawns. They were also waiting. Perhaps they had more trust than she. If she could speak their language she would ask them who was the man who had driven off in the ox cart, if he was an American, if he had really spoken English to her, or if she had hallucinated the whole thing.
Night came. Janice looked over at the boys and removed the blanket which had slipped over their faces. Once again she dampened a cloth and cooled their foreheads. She ran the cloth over their chests, down their arms, legs and necks. One pair of dark brown eyes fluttered open, gazed at her in misery, and then closed again in slumber. Wearily, Janice went to the window.
It was nearly dawn. Against a hazy purple range of mountains, tinged pink at the crest where the unseen sun hit the upper slopes, came a dot the size of a fly, soundlessly, groping its way forward. As she fed the boys the last of the white cheese and bread, Janice looked again. The dimly perceived dot had separated into an ox, a man, and a cart, silhouetted now as the earth warmed and the road showed brown against the green hills.
For nearly an hour she watched it come closer. A boy came to the window, feebly pointed, and spoke to his brother, who smiled. Then it was no hallucination, Janice realized. Never had she doubted her own senses so completely. The illness, the dislocation from nearly drowning had thrown her system into a shock from which it had not yet recovered. Something deep inside had activated a kind of primal fear, and she felt instinctively the livid hostility of the earth.
Janice went to her bed and sank down. The chills began to emanate from her belly, until they were spasms, and she was shaking uncontrollably under the blankets. In a daze she heard the snorting of the ox. The boys tried to open the door but found the latch too heavy. Then a man came into the stone house with a wooden box on his shoulder. He put the box on the earth floor and took the boys by the hand back to bed. He spoke to them gently in a strange, flutelike language, and began preparing a mixture of powders from pills and capsules that he broke open and mixed with water. He spoon-fed the medicine into their mouths, then kissed them gently on the eyes and bade them sleep.
It was still a dream to Janice. His features, blocked up in a silhouette by the crisp sunlight of early morning, were indecipherable. At times he looked like an avenging angel, stern, the forehead well chiseled over a sensitive, an unmistakably American face. Other times he looked dark, South Indian dark, and his dirty hands were slender and bruised as though by a lifetime of manual labor.
He lifted his bag of medicines, and came to Janice’s bed. Her hands instinctively groped upward at the face, like a blind person trying to read the features. Two strong, calloused hands caught hers and restrained them.
“Elliot. Everything is so strange. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
He bent down, made a paste of medicines, crushed them into a spoonful of water, and forced it into her mouth. She swallowed, still peering at the pale, glittering eyes of the man at the edge of the bed.
“Am I going to die?” she whispered.
His hand pushed her back onto the bed. Two pale blue eyes fixed her, speared her, frightened her with their intensity.
“Listen to me,” he said, examining her face, “you swallowed a lot of contaminated water. Do you understand?”
Astounded that she understood him, astounded that some measure of reality returned with the sound of his voice, she nodded dumbly.
“You’re going to live on boiled water, cheese and antibiotics,” he said, “and you do what I tell you.”
Her hand closed around his. She smiled, but was still confused. The room had begun to swim around her, growing elongated with every pass in front of her eyes.
“I have so much to tell you, Elliot,” she whispered. “I need your help….”
“Later,” he said.
She tried to whisper, but her voice had evaporated. Only her thoughts appeared, and they were inchoate, more like sensations than ideas. It was impossible even to begin to speak about Bill, about Dr. Geddes, about Juanita and the Master—and just as she tried, she began t
o fear that he would float away. He would evaporate like a dream. She clutched at his arm, but felt strong fingers remove her grasp. Then she sank backward into a sensuous river of sleep.
15
When Janice awoke, her body was clean and fragrant, and her hair, soft and recently washed, fanned out blackly against the clean linen of the pillow. A beautiful sunlight slanted in from the mountain clouds, creating strong polygons against the rough stone wall. The two boys sat up, drinking soup out of a tin so hot their eyes winced as they greedily consumed the broth.
Hoover stepped into the house, his tall figure bending under the low-cut wooden doorjamb.
“My hair smells so pretty! I feel so clean,” she said, laughing.
He cleared his throat, and dug a small, sharp knife into the edge of the door.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” he said.
She blushed. She lay against the pillow, happy to be alive, breathing in the fresh odor of green grass, the cool mountain water outside the house, and to know that she had at last found Hoover.
Janice stared at him. He too looked abnormally thin, almost bony around the face, but a sense of strength radiated from him, as though the monsoon flood had burned away everything but the core of his masculinity. He was like a wolf, grown lean but sinewy from hunger.
“You must have wanted very much to see me.”
“I did. I’ve come a long way. I have so much to tell you.”
Disturbed, he walked into the room, and began boiling more soup in the corner for the boys. Their small bodies, sitting up and more animated now, blocked his face. A smell of hot water, vegetables, and fatty meats swirled around the room.
“Do you mind that I’ve come?” she asked hesitantly. “There’s been an emergency. I needed you.”
Hoover rose and rubbed his face with both hands. He deliberately ignored her.
“I went back to the ashram,” he said, leaning against the wall. “They told me an American—a woman—had been looking for me—black hair…”
“Did you know then it was me?”
He nodded. For a long time neither spoke. A strong but indecipherable emotion clouded Hoover’s face. He turned away, as though to examine the clouds breaking up overhead, but in reality to avoid her stare.
“I didn’t want to see you,” he said softly.
She watched him, sitting on the windowsill, feet on the floor, and he looked exhausted, more exhausted than it seemed possible for any man to be. His words came tonelessly.
“But when they told me you had crossed the river,” he said, “I knew I had to get you out of there. The monks don’t understand warfare. To them it’s all a temporal part of life.”
“So you followed my footsteps to the outpost. And all the time I thought I was following you.”
He continued to ignore her, as though he were deaf or trying to obliterate her, to make certain that it was he who dominated the house. He began to look worried, and his voice grew louder but less certain of itself.
“To them your death would have been accepted quite philosophically. Like an insect’s.”
Janice said nothing. India had changed Elliot Hoover from what he had been in Manhattan.
Something had altered him forever.
“Anyway, what does it matter?” he said. “We’re both still alive.”
He slumped further against the sill, looking tired enough to sleep standing up.
“I didn’t want to see you,” he repeated. “But I was afraid of what the soldiers might do. You don’t understand this country. Down in the south, what happens during even a small war…”
“I can only thank you, however feeble that must sound.”
“Forget it. When you feel better you’ll tell me why you came to India. Now you should sleep.”
She drifted into a haze of heat, a reddish cloud of slumber that was draining. Hoover slept on the floor, his soft snores rising and falling rhythmically. Janice thought she saw the two boys remove his muddy coat, push a pillow under his head, but then she fell asleep again. When she awoke, many hours later, the boys were outside, and it was late afternoon, and the ox was stamping its foot into the earth while it munched long yellow stems of grass.
“We have to go down into the valley,” Hoover said quickly.
“What? Why?”
“The soldiers are moving this way. But now they’re only a bunch of bandits.”
Dizzily Janice saw Hoover load the cart, and the boys climb inside; then he came back into the house, took her by the arm, and led her into the warm sunshine. She walked slowly, leaning against his side. She followed his glance and saw, far off on the slope, a cluster of dark dots in a ragged movement coming down the road toward them.
“Once we get into the valley we’ll be safe,” he confided. His eyes shifted to her eyes and discerned the fear in them. “The Tejo Lingam is sacred. They won’t bother us.”
Janice put a foot onto the cart, but stumbled, and Hoover lifted her bodily like a sack of stones and set her onto the dirty wooden back of the wagon. He got quickly into the front, slapped the ox with a thin sapling, and the cart rumbled downhill, away from the mountain house, away from the soldiers five miles behind them.
The cart jostled down toward the south. As they descended the air grew humid again, but not as oppressive and suffocating as it had been before the monsoon struck. This was a delicate moisture, and it brought the fragrance of crushed ferns and palm fronds.
The two boys now watched, their eyes wide, as the new landscape rolled past. They were twins. Orphans, Janice was certain. To them, life had just revealed its most brutal realities, and they were still in a daze. Instinctively they trusted Hoover. To them death was not new. It had just come closer to them this time instead of to their elders or to the animals of the field. Janice toyed with them, tickling their small bellies until laughter came and their happy cries rose like bird melodies over the sad, death-infested forest.
Hoover stopped the cart where two tiny streams buckled into a small rapids. A thatched hut stood in a small muddy clearing, and enormous bougainvilleas stormed upward on vines and branches around the conical roof. Crimson-robed men stopped, amazed, frozen in their tracks.
Hoover approached, put his palms together in greeting, and the men returned his bow. One of the men, overcome, suddenly embraced him. The sound of Hoover’s weeping was extraordinary. A sweet, harmonious sound, like the lifting of a death curse. It seemed to release something deep inside him, unfreeze something horrible, and make him live again. He wiped his eyes, and the monks came with him to the cart.
As the monks carried the twin boys toward a series of smaller conical-roofed huts, Hoover helped Janice down to the ground. She still found it difficult to keep her balance, as she was light-headed. The brilliance of the sunlight dazzled her. The yellow butterflies among the red flowers were like a profusion of sensory impressions too strong to absorb. It was warm, and she made her way slowly toward a small hut.
“These are my friends,” Hoover said.
“Yes, I know. One of the monks here told me where to find you.”
Hoover looked at her, surprised. “Usually they do not speak to strangers.”
“Perhaps I looked desperate.”
“Probably. At any rate, they thought I was dead. We are not indifferent to one another down here.”
They entered a small hut. The earthen floor was hard, swept clean, and a simple white basin and pitcher stood on a flat rock that was worn smooth by a thousand human hands.
“This ashram has functioned for a thousand years,” Hoover said. “It’s for pilgrims going to the big temples on the coast. There are several different sects that use the shrine.” Hoover smiled. “You are the first woman in a long series of pilgrims,” he said kindly.
Her head rolled pleasantly against a wicker mat rolled into a tube and used as a pillow. He still seemed to waver in front of her, as rays of bright sunshine outlined his shoulders and his fair hair.
“Elliot,” she said, no
t wishing him to go, “we must talk.”
“Later.”
“No. It can’t wait. I have to leave soon for New York.”
He laughed. “Do you know how long it would take you to get to Bombay, much less New York? Do you even know where you are? Listen to me, Janice. You have illusions of health. It’s going to take days before you can walk more than twenty yards without help.”
Janice felt the awful fever coming again. It was the helplessness that she dreaded. At bottom, there was the fear that she would wake and Hoover would be gone.
“Elliot, I…”
“Go to sleep, Janice. When you wake, we’ll talk.”
Janice saw his face darken, the jaws lightly clench. She knew he did not want to know why she had come to India. She became afraid that he was going to ride out of the ashram, out of her life forever.
“You won’t leave me?” she begged weakly. “Not before I’ve explained—oh Christ, I feel like such a helpless child. I can’t lift my own arms. I can’t keep my eyes open. Elliot, I need your help.”
“I know,” he said, confused, both angry and yet softening to her obvious desperation. “I know you do. But…”
“But what?”
“Things are different, Janice. They’ve changed.”
“Don’t frighten me. You sound so dead.”
“Reality is not what I thought it was, Janice. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you think I’m talking about?” he said almost angrily.
He suddenly knelt down closer to her. She drew back. His eyes blazed, and his feet kicked up a small cloud of brown dust that caught the shaft of sunlight and drifted toward the door.
“I’m talking about Ivy,” he said, his voice taut with the difficulty of saying the name. “Your daughter, Ivy, and Audrey, my Audrey Rose.”
His voice choked and he retreated to the wall. The small earthen hut had become an arena. It was as though he were fighting her to the death, yet Janice did not understand why. His passion took hold of him, animating his slender arms, blazing out of his steel blue eyes. He crouched in her direction for emphasis, as though he were ready to pounce on her.
For Love of Audrey Rose Page 21