Let Them Eat Tea

by Coleman Maskell

  Chapter 12 - Night in the Village

  Baldwin isn't sure how long he's been watching the dancers when he feels the presence of Jomo, their friend from the afternoon. "Here to save me from the dancers now?" he jokes, not sure whether Jomo understands. Jomo smiles and gestures for him to follow.

  They walk a few yards to where the shaman sits. The old man looks up and gestures to a place by his side. Baldwin sits. For a few minutes they remain sitting together in silence, continuing to watch the dance.

  "Your girlfriend's a good dancer," the shaman finally observes, opening a conversation. "Was she raised in the islands?"

  "She was born on St. Lucy, in Soufriere," he answers. To himself he thinks: She spoke to him in Creole, everything about the way she moves is Caribbean; He's supposed to be a wise man, he has to realize she's native to the islands. Of course he has to realize, he answers himself. The man is just making friendly conversation. Great, he thinks. Even among primitives I'm a social primitive by comparison. He shakes off the internal dialog and adds, "I'm the luckiest man alive to have found her."

  The shaman nods. Is he nodding in agreement with the analysis, Baldwin wonders, or is he blessing the pairing? It doesn't matter. The down side of genius is that an active mind doesn't stop thinking and analyzing even when it isn't needed. "I love her," he hears himself add. He's surprised that he tells this to the shaman when he hasn't said it to her.

  The shaman nods again. "I can see all that," he tells Baldwin reassuringly. "Perhaps she also counts herself lucky to have found you."

  It is Baldwin's turn to nod, conceding the bizarre possibility. It had not occurred to him before. Even faced with the suggestion he can hardly credit it as likely. She's so perfect. Surely she could have anybody she might want. Why would she pick him, of all people? He can't dance. He can't shoot a gun. There is no end to the list of things he can't do, when he thinks about it.

  "And yet she does want you," the shaman answers Baldwin's thoughts. Seeing the surprise in the younger man's eyes, the old man chuckles. "I had a young wife once, too, you know," he adds. "Like you, I didn't see why she would want me, out of all the young men in the village. Still, she did. It doesn't matter why. My advice to you is to give the young lady what she wants."

  Baldwin nods again and says nothing for a while. Internally he tallies the nodding score, two nods for each man. Does that make it his turn to talk? If it is, he doesn't know what to say. He changes the subject to refrigeration. "I wish I had some way to put those specimens on ice for a few days," he says. "I was thinking maybe we should send Snake or Jack to take Zeph and Zoe back to St. Lucy with the samples. Zeph would know what to do with them. Or maybe they should all go back and I could just stay here with you for a while by myself."

  The shaman grunts out a "hunh," then shakes his head. "Not necessary," he adds. "I can refrigerate your specimens here, if you don't mind riding a bicycle."

  "Bicycle?" he asks. His own mind answers him with an instant dream picture of an exercise bike hooked up to an electrical generator. In his mental picture he pedals furiously, like a cartoon character being chased, pedaling wildly to a Keystone Cops silent movie soundtrack. "You have a generator here?" he asks, excited at the possibility.

  The shaman nods again. "Too bad I can't use the dancing to power it," he says aloud, still nodding. "It's like this almost every night," he adds, gesturing toward the dancers.

  "I could do bicycling," Baldwin agrees to the proposal.

  "Maybe tomorrow," the shaman assents to the arrangement. "It's already powered up now. Tomorrow afternoon you can take a turn on the stationary bike to keep it going. In the morning we go out together looking for plants."

  "Fantastic," the younger man blurts out. He feels suddenly energized by shedding the mental weight of the refrigeration problem.

  The shaman continues, "I've taken the liberty of having Jomo put your specimen bag into the refrigeration unit already. It's more secure from animals there."

  More good news there. "I'm curious," Baldwin asks after a few seconds.

  "Why I have a refrigerator?" the Shaman completes the thought for him.

  "Yeah. I don't suppose it's for cold drinks," he answers. "Not that I know much about the shaman business. I don't. But it never occurred to me that you might use modern equipment like that."

  "I even have a microscope," the older man informs him congenially.

  Baldwin just stares. Okay, traditional medicine is subject to progress like everything else. Why wouldn't it be?

  Another minute of silence. "Well, thank you for that," Baldwin finally adds. "For taking care of the specimens. Maybe I can find you some additional equipment, if you need anything. As part of our collaboration on this Cordyceps problem. I mean, this antler ant problem."

  "No need to correct yourself," the shaman responds immediately. "You're quite right. It's Cordyceps, or rather a variation on Cordyceps, a cross maybe, or a mutation."

  Baldwin looks at him. "Cordyceps and T. gondii," he finally replies, and looks for a reaction.

  "What do I know from Cordyceps? Is that what you're thinking?" the shaman speculates on Baldwin's unspoken questions.

  Baldwin nods.

  "I studied chemistry and biology at the university. Even went to the medical school for a while on Grenada, before I dropped out and came back home. My son is attending there now. Maybe he'll even finish the course," he ends with a laugh.

  "Why would you do that?" Baldwin wants to know.

  The old man gives him a look, as if he doesn't see a specific question.

  "What prompted you to go after a modern scientific education? You know, I expected you'd be a traditional shaman, living here like this. I assumed your father had been a shaman before you, that kind of thing. You look like you totally belong here. So I'm thinking, were you really born here, are you actually indigenous? and if so, then I'm curious why you'd go after something so different from all this, and then come back. Did you have any trouble getting admitted? How did you pay for it, a scholarship or something? That's really interesting, that you would do that, and that you could. Forgive my curiosity."

  The shaman laughs a little, and finishes the pineapple drink he's been working on. Then he answers Baldwin's questions. "I managed it. Some scholarship money, some part-time work. It wasn't easy, but I had help, and in the end I learned a lot. As far as why I did it, that's easier to explain. I was a young man. My father was still the village shaman then, and he was in good health. Sometimes the boys from here go to other islands, some to find work, some for girlfriends, and some just for adventure. Some came back with stories of modern doctors in the cities. How can there be a doctor in a city, I wondered. I had studied under my father, learning about all the plants that grow in the jungle. There are no medicinal plants growing in the city, I think. What does a city doctor do? How does he heal? And I listen to the stories told by those who return from the cities." He pauses to accept another pineapple drink from a woman who smiles at him lovingly. He smiles back at her, and she disappears again into the night.

  "After I hear enough I decide to go see for myself," the older man continues. "One thing leads to another. I was gone for years, studying and learning. Sometimes I came back to visit my father in the village. He approved of my learning as much as I could, whatever the source. A good man, my father." Again Azacca pauses and sips the pineapple drink while he thinks about his father for a minute or two.

  "When I saw he was getting older, I became afraid of losing him." Azacca continues. "So I returned to the island. And he lasted another forty years after that!" the old man says, laughing and shaking his head. "He continued to teach me as long as he lived. Now I am the shaman," Azacca concludes, "and it is my son who has gone away to learn what he can from the schools."

  Baldwin thinks over what the old man has said before asking for more information.

  "This C
ordyceps hybrid we're seeing," he finally asks, "Is it something new? Or was it here on the island in your father's time?"

  Baldwin waits while the old man considers his answer.

  "I first saw this variation about seven years ago," the old medicine man recalls. "We don't get a lot of tourists here, but we do get some. There was a particular cruise ship that anchored in the bay for about a week. The tourists would come ashore and lie on the beaches, reading, napping, and drinking pineapple mixed with alcohol."

  He pauses to drink some pineapple juice himself while gathering his thoughts. "One woman brought a lot of pets with her," he finally says. "We tried to talk to the boatmen, to warn them not to bring foreign animals ashore. She seemed to have money; She must have paid them to look the other way."

  "She always had some animal with her," Azacca continues with a head shake and a sigh. "Sometimes a monkey or a cat. There were some others I didn't recognize. She'd always carry one on her shoulder or in a handbag. Take it with her everywhere. When she took a nap, or just looked the other way, sometimes the animal would wander off. Usually she found them again. Sometimes she didn't. The men told me a Spectral bat got one of her little rodents. I don't know what species it was, maybe a chinchilla or a hamster. She lost a little monkey to a margay. None of it seemed to bother her much until one day her pet cat skipped off into the jungle while she was napping on the beach. I ask you, who but an American tourist would take a cat to the beach?"

  He pauses for an answer, but Baldwin has none to offer.

  "So she insisted on a big search," the old man recounts, with a peevish tone in his voice. "Hired some of the local people to hunt for the cat. Offered a reward. The cat was never found of course. Probably something ate it. She left with the cruise ship a few days after that."

  At this point he pauses again, thinking about the situation. He drinks more juice from another pineapple that a woman hands him. He looks at Baldwin, wondering if the biochemist is ready to take a chance on the local cuisine. Baldwin nods. The shaman smiles and gestures to the woman to bring a drink for his guest. From the way they look at each other, Baldwin wonders if she might be a younger wife, or maybe a grown daughter.

  After sipping the pineapple juice for a minute the shaman continues. "Now, I have no evidence that it was connected, but bringing in alien animals like that presents a strong chance of introducing new diseases and new parasites. About six months after the woman was here, I saw the first signs. Small animals began to lose all fear of the margay. You know the margay, those small spotted cats that hunt in the trees? Tree ocelots they're sometimes called. The little hutias and agouti would run right up to them and get eaten. That made me think, this could be T. gondii. I didn't find any other T. gondii evidence at the time, though."

  He pauses again to take another sip from the pineapple, then continues. "Those same margay eat the anteaters too, of course. If the anteaters have been dining on Cordyceps-infected ants, then of course the two parasites end up together in the cat's digestive system. It makes sense what you suggest, that there could have been a crossover eventually, a merging." Again he pauses when the woman brings Baldwin's drink, another hollowed out pineapple filled with pineapple juice. It feels warm. The straw is a hollow reed.

  Baldwin sips the drink, then nods and smiles approval. He hadn't realized how thirsty he was.

  Again the shaman continues the story, coming to the end. "Within a few months we saw the more extreme symptoms. The small animals were not simply fearless, they were insane. Bats the same way. Even small monkeys. I got samples and analyzed them of course. Compared them with the Cordyceps that infects the ants. Very similar."

  He pauses again reflectively, then continues the story. "So I thought that perhaps I had been wrong, and the tourist woman's menagerie had nothing to do with it. Maybe it was just some mutated form of Cordyceps. Ants infected with Cordyceps of course become fearless, so a mutated form attacking mammals seemed plausible. I experimented with different formulas based on what I knew about the ants. Fortunately I was able to cure a few monkeys before the first human cases occurred. So we've managed to get along. I haven't found any way to eradicate it, though." With that he ends the story.

  Baldwin tells the shaman about his own history, then tells him that reports of the new disease have been coming in from all over the Caribbean and all along the southern coast of America.

  The two men talk far into the night while the music and dance continue in the flickering orange and black darkness. Sometimes Annetka comes and sits by him quietly, listening, leaning on him. He holds her close for a while, until the call of the dance draws her back.

  People are eating, but no one insists that the guests eat. Baldwin sees Annetka trying some cooked bits of pineapple and decides it's probably safe. The shaman sees that he notices, but says nothing to reassure him. All food entails some risk, Baldwin imagines. Roasted pineapple must be fairly safe as food goes. He's glad she isn't sampling the meat. Then again, the shaman knows about the problem; surely he wouldn't be permitting the villagers to consume anything unsafe.

  The night gets late, and couples begin to disappear from the dance floor without returning. Annetka comes back and sits by Baldwin, closing her eyes, leaning on him and not leaving to return to the dance. The shaman makes a gesture and Jomo reappears.