Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  Bona was a good-sized town, on a rise, with a small mud-brick mosque. Here and there, less prominently sited, were the mysterious abodes of local fetishes, the palings around them decorated with animal skulls. There seemed an uneasy truce in the war of the One God of the desert against the many spirits of the bush—not to mention my bottled spirits from the misty glens of Scotland, for the Sofas were rigid teetotallers.

  The Prince and his chiefs put on a triumphal reception, arraying themselves and their horses in all their finery. The men played music and fired off guns, while about twenty of the Princes wives began to sing and dance before us, lightly clad. Notwithstanding their Mohammedan faith, the Sofa women go unveiled, and in their ways rather resemble the native African; some indeed, in their free conduct, might pass for local examples of the “new woman,” if one may picture such ladies largely bare except for an exiguous breechclout or a skirt of leather thongs resembling nothing so much as the fringe of a lampshade.

  The Prince seemed astonished that I had no wife, and offered me one on terms much easier than those of the marriage service. Had I accepted, however, it would have been difficult to enjoy the honeymoon, for a constant flow of visitors came to my quarters to stare at me, saying they had never seen a white man.

  On the next day I was sent under guard to Haramonkoro, the Sofa capital. For a week we rode through an unhealthy land, stony and barren, its streams dry. Here and there were great piles of rock, the leopard-haunted homes of the baboon. These primates often sallied out and perched on boulders, shaking their fists at us and making other manlike gestures.

  Monkeys have become rare around our colonies. The great trade in skins has rendered the country all but silent wherever commerce penetrates. A trumpeting elephant is now almost as rare a sound on the “Tooth Coast,” named for his white gold, as it is on the coast of England.

  The gold of most interest to the Sofas was the black kind, still much in demand across the Soudan and Arabia, though it no longer commanded the prices known in the heyday of the Atlantic trade. All work in the Sofas’ domain was done by slaves, and I witnessed a great deal of disgusting cruelty. At Bona I saw a sick slave, whose recovery was hopeless, dragged out of the town to die. On the march, if a woman who was carrying a child as well as a load began to flag, her burden was lightened by throwing the child in a thornbush.

  After a week we reached the Komoe River, where the land improves. Three days later I entered Samory’s seat of government. Haramonkoro resembled Bona in size and architecture, though without obvious fetish houses. Around the outskirts of the town were lyre-horned cattle, all showing their ribs and bawling pitifully as if trying to call down the rain.

  I was brought before Samory without time for a wash, let alone a rest. Weeks had passed since the loss of Dawkita, but I’d had little opportunity to recover from the extreme fatigue we all experienced there. I do not believe I’d slept a night through since hostilities began, for I was woken often by dysentery and even more by the sad procession of events which passed before my mind’s unquiet eye like scenes from a baleful lantern show. My thoughts could not abandon the débâcle at Dawkita, playing day and night over each moment when I might have made a better decision, or given better orders.

  Samory’s army was drawn up around him in an oval formation of about four thousand, with the townsfolk beyond. The spoils were carried round this circus maximus in a kind of Roman triumph, saving the best for last: myself paraded in my hammock. After this I was called before the King.

  He was about fifty years old, a tall man with a rather pleasant face which lacked the weakness of his sons. He was wholly bald, only the muscles of his scalp betraying ripples of emotion and cunning, which he was expert at stifling in his sloe eyes. He had the slender build of the Mandingo, with long fingers in which he clasped a rhinoceros-tail flywhisk. His clothes were of Arab type—white cotton robes over trousers, with a purple silk sash. He had a loose turban embellished with leopardskin, and was augustly seated on an old iron bedstead.

  Signs were made to me to kneel before him. These I disregarded, shaking him by the hand instead. I then sat down on a chair beside him and watched the rest of the review. It was a performance much like the one at Bona, but grander, with the troops attired in booty from a dozen campaigns. Samory had his Household Brigade of five hundred riflemen march past in full uniform, though “uniform” is hardly the word. One was arrayed in a frock coat, a pair of pyjamas, and a fireman’s helmet of French make; the next in top boots, a tail coat, and a tall hat; still another in a soldier’s tunic and a bowler, but with bare legs; and one with a morning coat and tam-o’-shanter.

  Within the oval, four regimental bands were stationed, one having wooden dulcimers, another horns made from elephant tusks, the third a kind of four-stringed harp or lyre, while the fourth consisted of the Kings wives, uttering that eerie African cry called ululation—a trilling of the tongue at the back of the throat, accompanied by bells and cymbals.

  The sun set smartly, as it always does in the tropics, swallowed by the rippling darkness of the hills. The Sofas adjourned their revels to wash and prostrate themselves at prayer, rank after rank of warlike figures meek beneath a violet sky, the Holy City in their wild minds. Then night was upon the town, and straw bonfires were lit beside the bands. Young men, oiled and nearly naked, came forth from the Sofa army to engage in wrestling matches, glistening in the firelight. Each champions name was announced and celebrated by drummers who circled him, beating out his accomplishments with flying hands upon the “speaking” drums. It was like something from the ancient stadium of Olympia, a weird, romantic scene—now dim as the fire died, now bright as grass was cast upon the blaze. I steeled myself to remain alert, keeping in mind that any sign of weakness might prove fatal.

  The climax of the evening could not have been more shocking, or more unexpected after the generally civil treatment Samory had shown towards me until then. I heard a scuffle at the edge of the firelight. Prominent Sofas I’d not seen before came brusquely to their monarch, bearing a bundle in a cloth. They glared and pointed angrily at me, as if demanding to know why I was still alive. When Samory seemed unswayed, one of them unwrapped the cloth, revealing a mans head. It was flourished before the King, held aloft in hideous triumph for the throng, then shaken before my eyes and cast at my feet. They brought a firebrand to illuminate the object, and in this savage manner conveyed to me beyond all hope the fate of poor George Ferguson.

  I will forbear describing the condition of the remains, except to say that his hour of death was clearly many days in the past. I could scarcely recognize his face, but the patterns of hair and beard allowed no doubt that the head was his. I cannot adequately describe my feelings at this abrupt news of the barbaric death of such a brave and loyal friend. Horror, pity, fury—above all, guilt and remorse—surged within me, as they have done ever since when I ponder these events.

  I might easily have said or done something then to bring a similar end upon myself. But exhaustion held my tongue, whilst darkness hid the trembling I experienced throughout my frame. Samory, his face dull red in the light from the embers, regarded me silently for what seemed a long time. Then he began to speak through an interpreter, saying he was sorry for what had happened, claiming his sons men had exceeded their orders. When I recovered enough composure to reply, I attempted to find out the details of Ferguson’s last moments. I also demanded to know what had happened to Gimalah and my other men, and to the rest of our forces at Wa. But he would tell me nothing.

  Next I heard the word brune, “white man,” repeated vehemently by several of Samory’s councillors. They were discussing whether to kill me on the spot. Or perhaps when to kill me. Or how. I have only a smattering of Mandingo and was too tired to parse the grammar, but their gesturing spoke volumes.

  I told the interpreter to convey to them that I knew very well what they were talking about, that I was too worn out to care, and they should wake me when they’d come to a decision.


  I then lay down on the ground and fell asleep.

  Three

  TAHITI

  Arue Women’s Prison. April, 1990

  HENDERSON’S FIRST NOTEBOOK ENDS THERE at the warlord’s feet, as if he meant to leave his reader panting. An odd thing to do for one who hopes he’ll never be read; he wasn’t quite out of pages.

  As I go through these photocopies, typing them up for you, I remember the originals back in Vancouver with my stolen life—their look and feel, their covers of black or green or pinkish marbling, their cellar mustiness and tang of horsehoof glue. New decipherments still leap out, the mind pulling a squiggle into focus, a stranger recognized, so obvious that I smack myself.

  Reading Frank in this way makes me feel that I know him (insofar as you can know anyone by what they write!). Is it fever, or pain, or an articulate madness in his giddy loops and lines? I like him. I like his affection for his wife and friends, his open-mindedness, his freethinking sense of the absurd, his painting—especially that he never claims to be much good at it—and his love of the tropics.

  Years later, when he retired after the Great War, he built a steam-heated conservatory against the Suffolk house, filling it with orchids and hibiscus, bromeliads, strangler figs. As blight and winter claimed the orchard outside, he’d retreat to this tiny jungle, sink in a rattan armchair and talk old times to a scarlet macaw who flew down to eat grapes from his hand.

  Whenever I feel too sorry for myself, I reread his captivity in Africa. I am merely inconvenienced, I have friends nearby, assurances that this will end, and I’ve my health. Henderson had none of these, yet he went on, a man from a hardier time.

  Like you, he’s a comfort to me now.

  I’m locked up in a historic building, a tropical Bastille built by the last king of Tahiti. Picture a stone fortress scrambling up a hill, spacious and old-fashioned, no razor wire or swivelling cameras. Over the main gate, where you half expect to see Abandon hope, are the words POMARE V REX 1879. It used to be the mens jail, the only jail, until things started going wrong in these islands and the French had to build a new one. That’s overflowing, but we female crooks are rare.

  My cell has aquamarine walls and red tile floor. No rug—they worry about people unravelling rugs and hanging themselves with the twine—but they provide a pink curtain in my tiny window, a poster of Bora Bora on the wall, and they allow a few personal things, some photos, a calendar. I even have a small TV, high in a steel cage bolted to the ceiling. This is an extra I pay for. Not much worth watching except the news, but it helps me pick up Tahitian, and my French has improved no end. Above all, they’ve let me keep my papers and my clothes (I had horrid visions of striped pyjama suits).

  My fellow inmates are what you might guess: pickpockets, druggies, hookers, wives who topped their husbands with a breadfruit pounder. Only three or four whites. The rest are Tahitian, Chinese, various mixtures, and homesick girls from outer islands—from Rangiroa, the Australs, the Marquesas. A sad rather than a vicious lot, yet I often hear them laugh.

  No one laughs more than Pua, who knifed a sailor in Quinn’s Bar. She admits it cheerfully (he deserved it). She’s nineteen, slight and graceful, wavy hair to her waist, the very image of a vahine. I never believed her capable of violence until one day I glimpsed a mongoose quickness in her wrist and eye.

  Twice a week she teaches us Tahitian dance, a flowing semaphore of hips and arms: marama the moon, anuanua the rainbow, mata’i, the wind. We do this at the top of the yard, where we can look out over the parapet and rusty roofs and flame-trees to the sea and mountains, our only sight of the world. Down there is Matavai Bay, where the Bounty anchored; Point Venus, where Cook tried to measure the distance of the sun; and a strange tower beside the water containing the pickled bones of the last Pomare, builder of this place, who gave his kingdom to the French and slowly killed himself with Benedictine.

  On Sundays, if the winds onshore, the hymns of Cowper and Wesley waft up above the traffic, faint tunes I half remember sung in old Tahitian at a frumpy royal chapel built by Methodists from Wapping.

  But you don’t want to hear my prison memoirs. When I was free, I hardly had a moment. Now I’m getting long-winded. This will land on your doormat with a thud.

  Your father. I must be careful what I say, and how. I’ve promised you the truth and you shall have it, but there’s no need to make it any bitterer than it is. For me, Victor Lumley is a sour memory in a shallow grave; for you … well, he’s your flesh and blood.

  Until lately, until your note, your father was seldom on my mind. Usually he’s underground, a sort of troll or goblin, which is as close as I come to banishing him altogether. But he gets out and about when my guard is down, as it was on the flight here, a long haul through the night from Los Angeles. In those shiny cocoons of rancid air and rushing noise, where life hangs on a single flaw or stroke of malice, I often think over the inches burned from my candle of unknown length. On the ground, dazzled by the steady flame consuming time, we live as if our light will burn forever. But eight miles high above the world, where humans have no right to be, the flame sinks and I see it as it is, faltering in the gale of chance.

  So Lumley came to visit me in that close darkness, the other passengers asleep (all but a scatter of insomniacs in yellow pools). He appeared, smiled, lowered himself onto me. An incubus.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1966 this letter arrived at Tilehouse Street on Ministry of Defence writing paper:

  Dear Mrs. Wyvern,

  Certain evidence has recently come to our attention which we would be pleased to be able to discuss with you. While we do not wish to raise hopes more than is warranted, it would greatly assist our continuing investigation into the disappearance of your husband and other persons missing in action during the Korean Emergency if you would kindly consent to a visit from the undersigned at your convenience.

  Yours sincerely, V.C. Lumley, Wing Cmdr. (ret.)

  Such an innocuous name, Lumley, Wing Commander, retired. We imagined a moon-faced jovial fellow, maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the owner of a splendid handlebar moustache. And those gallant initials, V.C.—how easily we fell for false suggestions—a brave man, a hero, coming to see us.

  “Oh, Liv! We mustn’t let ourselves. … Of course it’ll be nothing. Just some War Office mistake—the Ministry—whatever they call themselves now. How I wish your sister were here. That silly girl isn’t even on the phone.”

  Lottie was on the phone. Of course she was. You don’t get modelling jobs without one. But I was sworn to secrecy—she’d never forgive me if Mother rang up and heard the row she lived in. I’d already visited my sister at her “flat,” only twice the size of her bed (a mattress on the floor), the smallest inhabited room I’d ever seen. It was in a Clapham terrace with a greasy kitchen and a bathroom shared by eight. Her walls were draped with melting psychedelic posters: Jefferson Airplane, OZ, sundry gigs and clubs. She was barefoot, in a long Indian-cotton skirt and sheer blouse revealing pink rosettes. I didn’t dare—still owned a bra, always wore pullover and jeans. Bursts of music and laughter came from upstairs doors. Hollow-chested men strolled about as if I wasn’t there. There was a smell of joss-sticks and fish on the landing, and another smell I didn’t know until that night, when I smoked a joint for the first time. (Coughed like hell and didn’t get high.)

  At dawn came a clopping of hooves outside, and I thought I must be stoned after all, but it was a real rag-and-bone man with a horse and cart, sleepwalking between the Minis and Vespas parked along the street. London! Half Dickens, half Swinging, and my sister here living it all, and I so impressed, so envious, and I’d have given myself away to any of those young hairies if they’d asked. But none did, and the only one who even gave me an up-and-down look was Lottie’s boyfriend, Art, who shook his locks at me and said, “Lottie’s little sister! You two are so different. Far out.” And Lottie said, “Mitts off, Art. She’s not even legal. You can sod off and dos
s somewhere else tonight. See you.”

  All this I’d kept from Mother, who thought I’d gone up with the school English class for Romeo and Juliet.

  So it was just my mother and myself there to greet V.C. Lumley, Wing Commander (retired), when he turned up on a wet afternoon in the spring of 1966.

  I remember opening the door, dizzy with longing and apprehension, to a tall man, a friendly face, square bone structure like a Scandinavians. He stood there in a damp tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, an open-necked white shirt and spotted burgundy cravat, a gust of March at his back. No moustache. A grey drift at the temples. Dark hair and clear grey eyes that seemed to look into my heart, twinkling, roguish, pleading.

  “Come in.”

  I got the tea things and a plate of biscuits, catching:”—bored stiff since I retired, so I run errands for the Ministry. Enjoy it immensely. Gets me out and about, and I meet charming people like yourself.”

  “A biscuit with your tea, Wing Commander?”

  “Just plain Lumley now, I’m afraid. Victor Lumley. Silly to use ones rank so long after. Korea did it for me, too, Mrs. Wyvern. Though my troubles are trifles compared to … to yours. Health bother. Something in my tum. Still there. Doctors haven’t a clue. Ever had Korean food? Don’t—that’s my advice.” He accepted a jammy dodger. “I regret to say I never met your husband. We were there at slightly different times.”

  “I’m sorry …,” Mother said.

  I was watching him. He looked fit enough to me. A vigorous man in his forties, as Jon would be. What really had forced him to retire? Were some bits and pieces shot away? He was fascinating, though I wasn’t sure I liked him.

  Mother noticed me for the first time. “This is my daughter, Olivia.” We shook hands, his large and muscular, the hand of someone who makes things or plays an instrument.

  “What really happened to you? In Korea?”