All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

by John Farris

  Dawn was shrilly alive with birds in the derelict trees behind them. The sky, like fine bone china, showed a rim of gold on the horizon.

  "Let's walk," Nhora suggested, keeping her arm around him. He was lulled by the pleasant suspense of wondering just when he would kiss her, and what would follow. "There's something I want to show you, and it's almost light enough."

  They went slowly along the glistening river toward the narrow south end of the sandbar, where saplings had taken hold, and the deadwood was laced with vines.

  "It was a common practice," Jackson said, "for the Ajimba and other tribes to feed puppies minute rations of a deadly poison every day. By the time they matured and were trained as hunters, their tissues were permanently saturated with enough of the poison to paralyze an elephant. Just a scratch from a fang or a claw was enough to kill a small animal in a matter of seconds. But the dogs themselves were immune."

  Nhora shuddered. "You know a lot about the Ajimba, Jackson."

  "They carried my father off after one of their raids. He was a doctor. He'd spent eleven years In Tuleborné, which realistically can only be described as a hellhole, often working twenty hours a day to keep up with the demand for his services. He doubled the size of the hospital and trained many Negro assistants. The meager professional help he received was from the Sisters of Radiant Hope, a tiny Catholic nursing order—and he had my help. What ability I have today I owe to my father."

  "How old were you?"

  "Seventeen, when our luck turned bad. That was in 1920."

  "Your father was killed?"

  "No. By his account, they took good care of him. He was missing for three months but when he returned his memory was clouded, he thought at best he'd been away three weeks. He was confused in other ways, disoriented, and, I believe, severely frightened by his experiences in captivity. He claimed he was taken for the purpose of treating an ancient hag, a white woman, who convinced him that she was the legendary Gen Loussaint."

  "You mentioned her."

  "Stories about Gen Loussaint were always fantastic and frequently chilling. One met old-timers, traders who were on the river long before the turn of the century, and some insisted they had dealt with her. In her prime she was said to be very beautiful—what else?—but inhumanly cruel, unequaled in wickedness, a priestess of butchery among savages infamous for their bloody dealings with other tribes. Her cruelty so pleased the evil spirits of the forest that she was given the power to change her shape, to vanish in a twinkling and reappear miles away. Familiar rubbish. She became—reptilian, after the fashion of the Ajimba gods, but not less beautiful. Her otherworldly self was a kind of succubus, common in African folklore."

  Jackson smiled. "When I was a boy, alone at night in my bed, I could work up a case of shivers in no time just thinking about such creatures swooping down on me. Symptomatic of the buried terrors of puberty, I suppose. At the hospital we were accustomed to seeing patients who seemed to have nothing organically wrong with them, yet inevitably drifted into comas and died. Sometimes the cause may have been untraceable poison administered by an enemy—Africans poisoned each other at a prodigious rate. Other victims were frightened into believing a succubus was having intercourse with them while they slept, draining the life force from their bodies. It's not difficult to look back with objectivity, but I grew up among primitives besotted with superstition, and the fantastic seemed commonplace then. Like the Shadow, the primeval forest clouds the minds of men. Insignificant spiritual wounds became gaping sores infested with the bacteria of unreason. My father was an educated, disciplined, God-fearing man. But eventually he succumbed."

  "He was convinced that he'd actually met Gen Loussaint. But she was dying, and not very beautiful. Did she fall out of favor with the gods?"

  "Oh, she didn't exist. I am sure my father imagined her. He most have fallen quite ill after he was captured. He may have been delirious for long periods of time, lying in a hut surrounded by talismans, relics of the Ajimba's beastly religion, dreaming the legends with which he was already familiar."

  "You're shaking; are you cold?"

  "A little." Jackson produced the bottle of whiskey and opened it.

  "You first," Nhora said.

  He drank. Then she had a swallow, watching him, her green eyes coming clear against the sunburst of a perfect morning. Jackson clamped his teeth to stop the chill that plagued him. He took the offered bottle and finished off the whiskey, pitched it to the current.

  "Well, he s-seemed all right when he returned to us, but shortly thereafter he began to break down emotionally. Nothing but overwork: father s-should have been persuaded to take a long holiday. And the rainy season that year was the worst in memory, intolerable. The river was out of its banks. Brutal storms swept over us, collapsing buildings. At the same time there was an epidemic, a mysterious sickness that struck nearly everyone at the station. If that wasn't enough, a crackpot feticheur began to announce the end of the world, and blamed the white man. Negroes deserted us in droves. The damned rain just wouldn't stop. My sister became critically ill, and my mother was ill too, from incessant worry. Father asked me to accompany them to Zenkitu on the steamer. I begged him to go with us; by then we all had the feeling that s-something disastrous was overtaking Tuleborné. But I suppose you'd have to say the real tragedy, for the Holleys, took place in Zenkitu harbor."

  There was a crisp breeze off the river; Nhora brushed hair from her eyes and said earnestly, "Jackson, this is upsetting you. Don't tell me any more, you don't have to."

  "It's important. Because I have an explanation to make, an apology to offer. And if you're going to accept my apology, you must first understand what—who—"

  "Apology?"

  "Just listen," he said, eager to get on with his divestiture, "The steamer was near Zenkitu, jammed with refugees from the flood and very low in the water, when a surge of giant logs from a tributary stream battered and capsized it. It happened in less than a minute. I couldn't save my mother, she was swept away before I could get a hand on her. I swam to a bar with my sister in tow. She was unconscious then, and never came to."

  "Jackson, I'm so sorry."

  "I went back upriver after my father. By then I had a fever. I don't remember much of the journey, which I made alone in a small boat. A miracle I didn't drown. Eventually I reached Tuleborné. The rains had ceased. I found my father. At least I had a glimpse of him. In less than a week his hair had turned snow white. He was totally mad, mad, mad. He—attacked me, then nearly killed me during some impromptu surgery."

  "Surgery?"

  Jackson pushed his hair aside to show her the scars. "Yes." He was trembling, from indignation, pain and disgust. "It seems father removed pieces of my skull, quite without permission, to make a fetish strong enough to protect him from his—his dismal obsession."

  "Gen Loussaint?"

  Jackson nodded tautly.

  "I don't understand what you mean by a fetish."

  "In the simplest terms it's a good-luck charm: a rabbit's foot, a silver dollar, a four-leaf clover. Civilized men pay lip service to superstition. But an African's life is circumscribed by his religion, his belief that he is powerless to survive without magic. He is surrounded by human enemies and at the mercy of swarms of hostile spirits eager to snatch his soul away from him, to possess his body. When dealing with these spirits there are rules to follow, daily appeasement is a necessity. The faithful are rewarded by being left alone, because the spirits also must obey the occult laws of creation set forth by Legba, god of the sun."

  "But why did your father risk killing you? Why was it so important to have a piece of your skull?"

  "He thought he had killed me—and so much the better; there's no more powerful magic than to sacrifice a member of your own family to complete a fetish. He succeeded in banishing his nemesis, I'm sure. Unfortunately he never recovered his sanity."

  "What happened to you, Jackson?"

  "I spent nearly a year in hospital. Complications. My
father was returned to England, to a rest home for burned-out or deranged missionaries called Hawkspurn House, in Yorkshire. I caught up to him the autumn of 1921."

  "He must have been happy to—"

  "He refused to see me, insisting that I had died the night he trephined my skull in Tuleborné. It was thought that the shock of an unexpected confrontation might prove beneficial. But he looked right through me. I didn't exist for him."

  "He was faking! Wasn't he?"

  "How will I ever know? I was profoundly shocked by his implausible treachery. I still don't recall very much of the year that followed, the psychic storms I weathered, the desolation. Because I had worshiped my father. I was inspired by his knowledge and art; the brilliant improvisations he wrought with limited equipment, under frequently desperate conditions; his energy and spirit. I devoted my life to his work, his service. I was diligent, responsible, obedient—and always fearful that I would never be good enough to fulfill his expectations. I had to become a man before my time. In return for this abiding loyalty he nearly succeeded in killing me."

  "He was mentally ill. He couldn't have known what he was doing."

  "That's why I was unable to admit to myself how angry I was. He had no right to do this to me—to become a tired, broken, prematurely old man. I didn't give up hope easily. I made many trips back to Hawkspurn. But it was like stirring a dead fire until I was shrouded in ash. Slowly my rage began to have an effect. I belatedly caught up with my adolescence. I had a rather wounded, romantic, Rupert Brooke-ish air about me that was not yet out of style, the war having so recently ended. Also I had a certain amount of mother's money to spend. I discovered I was attractive to women. I was sullen, rebellious and frequently drunk. I abused the hospitality of those relatives who kindly took me in.

  "Before the money came to an end I was persuaded to take up my medical studies in London. Of course, what else was I to do with the rest of my life? I had no natural talent for pub-crawling and roistering, it was all a bit thin and unsatisfying once the first good shock of perversity wore off, and there was no one girl I was particularly attached to. I was talented, my father had said so, and I knew that in due course I would become a great surgeon. But I no longer had his faith to sustain me, and by the time I reached London, not knowing a soul there, my cloak of self-assurance was ragged with terror. I now had to accept the fact that I was virtually alone in the world, I would never again see him look upon me with love and approval."

  They had come to the end of the sandbar: the jumping-off place. There was a golden sheen on the roiled surface of the water. A small whirlpool was spinning fifty feet from shore. Jackson stared at it and recalled, for the first time in many years, his K'buru baptism, by Fullerite tradition a rite of the ninth year. Going down dazzled in song and heat, embraced by the love of the multitude, bent over backward from the waist, suspended in the river, his head held under by the weight of his father's hand, nostrils pinched together, mouth sealed against the thrilled outcry in Jesus' name amen. . . . Where had his faith gone? It had all drained into the austerity, the sucking dryness of a drab, dotty, unresponsive stranger, a man who had never sung, laughed, prayed, cradled him in tenderness. A cipher, a long-lived cripple, a failure.

  The breeze changed direction. Nhora was standing close behind him and her hair whipped fetchingly against his cheek. He turned and took her face in his hands, to calm himself. She looked patiently at him, waiting, not smiling but radiant.

  "Medical school was a disaster. I already had experience and skill which my fellow students would be years in acquiring. After my training in the bush, having learned in hazard highly unorthodox technique, I was not adaptable to the grinding routine of classroom and laboratory. I knew already what I felt I had to know, and disdained the fine points I was expected to learn. I refused to assimilate mountains of information that would be useless in practice. I was not reluctant to feel superior, even to my instructors. This attitude fast discouraged friendships.

  "To relieve my boredom and win acceptance I became the class hell-raiser. Because of my father's considerable reputation I was granted a certain amount of immunity from official reprisals. But when I openly conducted an affair with the wife of the chief of surgery at Saint Bartholomew's, they were forced to expel me. Thus I achieved two aims: My feelings of superiority were reinforced, and I was relieved of the necessity of ever having to prove how good I could be if I wanted to."

  "But you are a doctor. A good one."

  "I possess certificates from the most distinguished faculties of medicine in Great Britain. I am acknowledged to be a member of the Royal College of Physicians. All of my degrees and certificates are among the best that money can buy. What I mean to say is, they're forgeries."

  Nhora's eyes widened.

  "I'm an imposter, Nhora. A charlatan. I spent less than a year in medical school. All I have by way of qualification for my adopted profession is the knowledge that my father gave me, plus what I've observed and read during the past twenty years. I've knocked about two continents, often working on the fringes of society where no questions are asked, somehow just missing serious difficulty with the law. Making abrupt changes of residence out of fear that I'll be investigated, and exposed. I have no right to be looking after the health of Champ. If he died, I'd be open to criminal prosecution. Men go to prison for such quackery,"

  He let go of her then, because he saw that she wanted him to.

  Nhora walked a few feet away, head down, leaving sharp footprints in the muddy sand. She looked sideways at him, her lips compressed, and banged a fist against one hip. She appeared to be seething.

  "Could another doctor have saved that child tonight?"

  "I don't think so. I used all the accepted resuscitation techniques. I've been successful before in such emergencies—cases of electrocution, drowning and so forth. This time I failed."

  "Then you have nothing to apologize for. Do you know what killed her?"

  "I've been over every possibility in my mind. She was poisoned, I think. I don't know how."

  "Jackson, how many lives did your father save?"

  "Thousands, I'm sure."

  "You worked alongside him for years. Would you be willing to take some of the credit? That is, if you were inclined to be halfway generous with yourself?"

  "I suppose so."

  "And in all the years you've been practicing medicine without a license—how many saved, Jackson?"

  "I don't know."

  "One life, Jackson? Just one?"

  He forced a smile. "At least that."

  "And how many have you killed from simple bungling, because you didn't know what you were doing?"

  "I always know what I'm doing. Or I don't do it."

  "Then clearly you're not a quack. You're a trained physician, by any reasonable standard. Years ago it was legitimate to learn medicine the way you've learned, through apprenticeship."

  "This is the twentieth century. The laws have changed."

  "I'm sure they have. And how many unqualified, splendidly incompetent doctors are turned out by our medical schools each year?"

  "Who knows? I've met general practitioners I wouldn't trust to swab a septic throat, surgeons who gave me cold chills whenever they picked up a scalpel."

  "Champ's going to live, isn't he? But he might not have, if you hadn't given him that new drug." She walked back to him. "No more apologies from you, Jackson. Not now or ever. If you've been looking for a place where you don't have to worry about the past catching up, then I think you may have found it." She smiled strangely. "You looked so woebegone up in that tree last night. Tears in your eyes. My heart fell out of place. Not right away, about two hours later, I was just lying in bed thinking about you, the way you turned up in my life. What do you want to do, Jackson?"

  "I still don't know. For now, all I care about is being with you."

  Nhora's face was pleasantly reddened by the rising sun; she shielded her eyes with one hand to see him. She smiled again, with more
confidence, and beckoned with her other hand.

  "Let me show you the Stephen Mulrooney."

  "The—?"

  "It's an old stern-wheeler, dating from the great age of steamboats on the river. Most of them went out of service or were destroyed before the turn of the century—they were particularly susceptible to fire—but the Stephen Mulrooney was rescued from dry rot by a millionaire cotton planter in Helena. Until a few years ago he used it as a kind of floating clubhouse for his cronies and his women. The big flood of thirty-nine swept the Mulrooney from its dock and downstream. Somehow it wasn't destroyed by the floodwater or the weight of all those trees. You can still see one of the stacks from here—" She leaned companionably against him, pointing to the vast thicket which stood half in sunlight, half in darkness.

  "It's in there?"

  "Battered, but well preserved. The backwater is shallow and acid, and that's saved most of the hull. Some of the staterooms on the portside boiler deck silted up during recent floods, but the forecastle and the Texas deck have stayed high and dry. Children don't go near the boat. It's not easy to find your way through the thicket, and there are a lot of—you know. A boy was fatally bitten two years ago. Then there are rumors of haunts, phantasms floating around at night. But the decks are in sunlight nearly all day. It's cozy and almost dry and not too buggy. Bugs don't bother me anyway. The Stephen Mulrooney has been my getaway place, when I'm fed up with people and circumstances. But I haven't been aboard for a few months. Come on."