Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  He heard a movement and a brief muttering from one of the sleeping children on the other side of the partition. Then silence again. “You finish dat now,” he said, pointing towards the cane seed beside her on the trestle. At once she began to sweep the grain into a clay bowl, tilting the board and using the edge of her hand. Paris watched, remembering the first time he had come to her, the desolation of his desire, standing outside in the dark, a cool wind from the sea, his feet kicking in the debris of fallen palmetto leaves, the loneliness of need possessing him and Ruth’s image lost among the rustling fronds at his feet. The same soft light, the same sense of warmth and safety.

  .. He had shared her with several men since those days but nothing had changed the feeling she gave him of having reached a safe haven. Just so had she looked at him then, as he stood dumb before her, with the same steadiness, without subterfuge and yet with a pride and decorum that had survived all the brutalities of the slaveship.

  “Make dead de fire,” she said softly.

  She slept naked but for reasons that seemed cogent to her she would not undress before him nor ever make love except in the dark.

  They lay together on the bed of rush matting and deerskins. Faint light came through where the woven mats joined the eaves. He could make out the line of her cheek, and her eyes in their shadowed hollows.

  Her smell came to him and he nuzzled his face against her neck and kissed the pulse in her throat and then the full mouth, which softened to his kisses; having early discovered his eccentric taste for kissing on the mouth she had practised the way of it that pleased him most. She pressed against him, but softly; her first movements of love were always gentle and slow. She moved her hands over his chest and abdomen and traced the bones of the pelvis. Preliminaries between them never lasted long. For him her touch and nearness in the dark were enough and when he turned to her he found her always ready.

  Tonight as he rode to his peace he muttered that he loved her, loved her, but the only reply that came was in the quickened breath of her excitement.

  Afterwards she was asleep almost at once, almost before his weight was off her. Sleep, however, did not come to Paris despite the torpor of his body—indeed his mind seemed the clearer for this. He lay awake for a long time, his thoughts moving outward in concentric ripples from the solitary phenomenon of himself to the human creatures sleeping around him, then to the spaces of the night that wrapped them all.

  Once again the wonder of their existence on this remote strand came to him. In terms of odds defeated and probabilities defied it verged on the miraculous. Even the first condition of survival, the unity preserved among them after Thurso’s death, in the aftermath of the mutiny, when staying made them all accomplices in murder, even this had been due to accidental factors, the presence of the gold dust on board, the extraordinary fervour of Delblanc.

  No one had known of the gold dust at that time but Barton and Haines and Haines only because Barton needed his help. The knowledge had been enough to make these two throw their weight behind the mutiny. Fear too, of course—both men were hated; but had they not planned to return to the ship they might have opposed the idea of grounding her. Once she was grounded there had been no turning back.

  The presence of the gold, then, had been an accidental blessing. But the man who had done most to keep them together had not been a member of the crew at all. He saw Delblanc’s face before him now, with the starkness on it of a truth belatedly, overwhelmingly, perceived. Delblanc had seen more clearly than anyone that only concerted action could save them, not only from surrounding dangers but from one another. Perhaps there was already present to his mind the marvellous opportunity the mutiny presented to test his theories, vindicate man’s natural goodness in this dream of a community living without constraint of government or corruption of money. A ship blown off course, a scuffle of sick and desperate men, the blood of a madman clumsily and almost casually spilt, he had seen in these a truth of politics, a revolution, the founding of a new order. But it was I, after all, who began it, Paris thought, I who stepped forward under that witnessing sky. For the sake of others or myself? The old question, as far as ever from being answered. Was it to halt a crime or merely to straighten my back at last, face at last those who had set me in the pillory, made a hobbling beast of me? Impossible, now and for ever, to be sure …

  In the landfall itself, where others saw merely a refuge, Delblanc must have seen also a violent birth. Paris thought of that dawn, the unreal calm after the long bufferings of the wind, the listing ship with her decks washed clean by the night’s rain, the sight of the long, sickle-shaped sand bar fretted with waves, and the curving sweep of the inlet. It was afternoon before they could bring the ship into the channel, but the sun was high enough still to cast a band of light across its mouth, making it seem like a glorious threshold.

  In the event, however, more suffering had lain beyond.

  Those early days had been the worst. Weakened by hunger and privation, huddled together on the rim of the limestone pineland, they had lived as they could on beach plum and palm berries and a species of blackberry growing along the shore. These fruits, insufficient as they were, had probably prevented deaths among the crew, several of whom were suffering from scurvy; but more negroes died in those first days and some ran off and were not seen again.

  More would have run and almost certainly died, if the fate of Haines had not come as a fearful warning.

  He and Barton had disappeared on the first night, Barton to return two days later, half raving, bearing still the ripped jute sack that had held the gold dust, as if this evidence of his loss could somehow, as well as proving his words, exonerate him, plead in his favour. The story he came back with, garbled afterwards in pidgin and a variety of African languages, had lived in the minds of them all.

  The two had returned to the ship with what speed they could. In spite of their enfeebled state they had brought the sacks off her. Their first plan, of making off in the longboat, was frustrated because she was fouled and they were too weak to free her, and too much in haste— they were possessed by fear of being surprised at their work. Ever the actor, even in his state of shock, Barton had sought to convey this fearful haste to his listeners. He wanted them to understand, to see that his conduct had been rational, laudable even. “We had to get clear of the vessel,” he said again and again, rapidly and tonelessly. “You can see that, shipmates.” And then, with his inveterate fondness for the polysyllabic flourish, “It was iniquitous dark, lads, we didn’t dare to show no light..

  .”

  Paris found himself smiling involuntarily as he lay there. Barton’s impudence surpassed everything.

  The thin face bloodless with exhaustion, staring with a fear still not overcome, the ripped sack—his gauge of truth—still in his hand. And the incorrigible flourish of the phrase.

  They had blundered with the sacks for some distance and settled down to wait for daylight. This, when it came, brought further problems. Their idea was now to bury the gold, but the ground was too marshy. They had stumbled through thickets of mangrove and swamp willow, carrying the sacks, looking for a place.

  Eventually they had come to the edge of a shore hummock, where a stream ran like a tunnel into thick vegetation. Here, above the stream, there was a deep mould of leaf and soil. But now a difficulty arose, strangely unforeseen in the midst of all their labours: they could not agree on a hiding place because neither man could trust the other not to return to it alone and take all the gold for himself.

  Strange and absurd situation, Paris thought, lying wide-eyed in the darkness, the two exhausted men quarrelling there by the stream as the sun climbed above them, coming to blows at one point, if Barton was to be believed, over two sacks of dust. “It came to me that Haines was not a man to be trusted,”

  Barton said, glancing at the faces round him, restored to the community of honest men.

  The solution they had hit upon was for each man to bury his sack in a place of his
own choosing. And it was then, in the interval between reaching this decision and summoning the energy to carry it out, that an amazing stroke of good fortune occurred to save Barton’s life. “Luckiest shit I ever had in my life, lads,” he said, looking haggardly from face to face, inviting them to share his luck, repeating the fact in that rapid, toneless voice of his nightmare: “Luckiest shit of my whole life…”

  Luckyshit Barton, Blair had begun to call him after that, and so he was known to everyone now, even the toddlers who did not yet know why.

  The diet of beach plums and palm berries had left Barton with violent diarrhoea and he had felt the gripes of it just at that moment. Leaving Haines there by the streamside, he had removed himself into a thicket of bushes. He had taken his musket with him, but he had left the gold with Haines. Because of this he had not gone too far away; and he had chosen a place from which any movement Haines made along the stream would be visible to him.

  As he crouched there in the first easement of his pangs, he had heard a slight sound. He had looked up and seen with heart-stopping shock a party of naked savages, fearsomely tattooed in whorls of red and white on their faces and chests, come drifting down through the trees, moving with a lightness that seemed to have no need of stealth. They had not seen him, but it was immediately clear to him that they had seen Haines.

  They had passed quite close, it seemed—within thirty yards. He had his musket there beside him.

  Haines would have heard him if he had called, would have had at least some warning, some chance to defend himself.

  What sort of hope or calculation had passed through Barton’s mind in those moments could only be conjectured. It was possible of course that he was simply petrified with fear. In any case, he had done nothing. “There was no use,” he said.

  “They was too many. I couldn’t be sure a shot would drive them off and I wouldn’t have had no chance for a second.” In the fever of his veracity he did not attempt to cover his cowardice. His chief thought, he told them, in the babbling of his honesty, was that the Indians might smell his shit and find him. He had tried to cover it, when they had passed below him, with the edge of his shoe.

  But before many seconds the smell of butchery had been in their nostrils. Barton had not seen, from his crouched position there, what was done to Haines. He had heard a sound of surprise, like a cough or a loud grunt, then a wailing cry. Some other broken sounds there had been, more like effort than pain, but these had been made indistinct by some chattering syllables of the Indians and then by their laughter, rather high-pitched.

  He had remained there, not daring to move, crouched over his own excrement, tormented by flies. He did not see or hear the Indians again and supposed they had taken a path below the stream. Long after silence had settled he waited still. When he went finally, moving his cramped limbs with utmost caution, he had found Haines lying there and the sacks ripped and empty. Haines had been scalped. He lay on his back across the slight track above the stream, presenting to the trees and to the sky beyond them a face unrecognizable, obscured by blood from crown to chin. i “He was always proud of hisiiair, Haines was,” Barton said. It was the boatswain’s only epitaph.

  There was not much more to the story. The horror showed in the mate’s eyes, and everyone understood it. The quiet, sunlit path, the glint of flies about the terrible red face of the corpse. He had crawled some way, it seemed—the Indians had left him alive. “Mebbe that was what they was laughin” at,” Barton said. ‘I heard the varmints laughin”dis”

  He had begun to make his way back, halting at nightfall and shivering through till first light—he had not dared to make a fire. Next day he had gone on, staggering with exhaustion, involved in endless detours among the mangroves. He had been at the limits of his strength when he had found them again; but he was still clinging to the vital evidence of the ripped and gutted sack.

  ‘Look what they done, shipmates,” he said, holding it out in witness to an insane universe.

  “Them iggerant beggars… They cut the sacks open an” shook the gold out, down into the creek.”

  On the point of collapse, Barton looked round with a drained, exhausted triumph at this ultimate proof of human folly. ‘How can you unnerstand people like that?”’ he demanded.

  Sullivan was the only one to find anything to say to this, Paris remembered, with a feeling of amused affection. Sullivan always liked to have an answer to everything. He had fastened on the tottering Barton the fleeting speculation of his gaze. “Clear as daylight to a thinkin” man,” he said. ‘They was hopin” to find somethin’ valuable, and they got disappointed like, when they didn’t.”

  It was an old story now, but not forgotten.

  Haines’s face of blood was part of the collective memory of the settlement, though only Barton had seen it. The body was never recovered. The rains came and the grasslands were flooded. By the time the people were able to venture so far there was no trace. But the place where he met his end was called Goldwater by Jimmy in his classroom stories and it became as legendary in its way as Oose Tree or Red Creek, enshrined like them in the imagination of the children. It was said that at certain times, when the water ran clear in the stream bed, glints of gold were still to be seen there.

  It had been Luckyshit Barton’s last attempt at private enterprise. He was Kireku’s lackey now and generally despised, a man without friends and without a regular woman.

  To Haines something was held to be owing, simply for the manner of his death, and this was also true of Wilson.

  It was strange that these two, bad men both and sworn enemies, should have been the martyrs and founding fathers of the community.

  Delblanc had known how to use these deaths, as he had known how to use everything. Not least of the mysteries that touched Paris’s mind as he finally drifted towards sleep was how his dead friend, an itinerant portrait painter of good birth and easy manners, had been able to forge men of such metal into instruments of a higher purpose. But of course it was not a higher purpose at all, he thought, despite the rhetoric of the time. It was our purpose, Delblanc’s and mine; his based on doctrines of liberty, mine on some inveterate hope. Men living free and equal in a state of nature..

  . What gave us the confidence to suppose that a state of nature could only mean what it meant to us, a notion of Eden, a nostalgia of educated, privileged men?

  49.

  Calley woke at dawn, released from a dream in which he had been lost in a desolate place and bitterly weeping. He whimpered on waking and lay for some time without moving, not knowing where he was, still involved in the grief of his dream. Then he knew the feel of the sand on which he was lying and saw the branches overhead of the rough shelter he had made for himself.

  He crawled out, away from his sorrow, into the misty light of morning. He shook himself and urinated and shivered, looking up at the sky above the sea, where trailing clouds were touched with faint pink. Crouched again in his shelter, he ate the koonti bread and scraps of dried fish left from the day before. Then he started back through the jungle of the hummock to make a scratch-hole for water on the landward side. It was several hours” walk to the settlement, but Calley had been combing the beaches and ranging through the pine ridges for years now and he knew there was water here, just below ground, as he knew there were acorn trees and pig nuts and the tunnels of the big red land crabs.

  Now he did things exactly in the way Nadri had taught him years before—Nadri had always been kind to him and protected him and to some extent had taken Deakin’s place in his life. With the long-bladed knife that was his only weapon and practically his only possession, he dug down into the soft, sandy mould until he came upon the water. It was muddy at first, but Calley knew that it would clear if he waited some minutes, because the water below the ground was always flowing, very slowly, towards the ocean. Nadri, who knew a great many things, had told him this and he had always remembered it. When the water was clear he lowered his head towards his moonface reflection: al
one among the crew people, Calley grew no hair on his face, only a soft, whitish down. He drank, careful not to disturb the bed of the pool.

  This done, he put on his harness, which he had carried with him from the shelter. It consisted of a broad back-pad, rather like a saddle, made of matted palm fibres, worn high on the shoulders and secured with rope straps. Calley quite often found logs of pitchwood in the forest and he had learned that this black, heavy wood was in great demand as fuel and could secure him food and shelter and sexual favours sometimes—he had no hut of his own and no settled way of life. He was extremely strong and he would arrive at the settlement with his squat and heavily muscled figure bowed under a great pyramid of logs.

  He began to walk, following a faint track in the direction of the sea. The air was bright and he knew the sun had risen clear, though it was too low in the sky to be seen. Sharp folds of limestone rose here and there above the ground, but Calley’s soles were thickly calloused and he felt little through the deer-hide bags he wore tied to his feet.

  The vegetation thinned as he drew nearer the sea until there was only the saw palmettos and torchwood trees and the smooth writhing forms of the sea-grape. Finally there was nothing but the fringe of tall, dishevelled palms growing above the shore.

  He emerged into the open to see the sun riding clear of the water and a sky that seemed surprised by the brilliance that had come to it, just as he was himself surprised. Calley found echoes for all his feelings in the look of things around him.

  He began to walk southwards, in the direction of the settlement. A breeze from the sea stirred the palms, and the pliant, yellow-green spines of the fronds were touched to gold by this early sunshine.