by Peter Bowen
I backed away two paces.
“Whatever it is you want ain’t for you, Dunn,” I says. “Now spit it out and maybe I’ll join you. Maybe not.”
“Oh, nothing foul, Adendorff, nothing foul. Word of honour”—he actually made it have three syllables.
Dunn leaned out and looked up and down the street. “Miss Colenso wanted you to come.”
“Well, I’ll just wander on over to their log pile and knock on the door then,” says I, “since it is on the way back to my hotel. I’ll go there now.”
“No!” Dunn hissed. “She’s not there. For god’s sake, man, please come. No harm was meant or is.” He had been drinking a lot of brandy and the gusts from his talking hit me like bay rum from a barbershop door.
I shrugged and got in. There couldn’t be anybody in Zululand who could possibly want to do me any violence, and I was fresh out of secret maps to lost mines or where the damn elephants go to lay their tusks on the pile that’s just waiting for some lucky fool out there somewhere in ten million square miles of jungle.
Dunn whistled up the carriage as soon as I was in and we went through the last of town and out a bit into the country, and then turned off at a kraal next to a building that they store blasting powder in, away from everything except the poor niggers, who wouldn’t be missed.
Dunn led me to a hut and motioned me inside. A stench hit me the moment that I went in, and I knew that there was someone in there who had a bad wound, one that had gone gangrenous; it smelled like syrup on rotten fish. Dunn scrambled through behind me and I blinked for a moment. There was one small oil lamp, and I could see the tiny, tight face of Harriet Colenso in the feeble light. She was putting a cloth on someone’s head.
She whispered something to the form on the pallet. A low bass growl answered. Dabulamanzi. I’d know that voice anywhere.
Harriet slid past me and went on out into the evening. Dabulamanzi motioned me closer. His face was sunk, and his black eyes glittered feverishly in their yellow whites. The stink was coming from him.
Dunn come up, too. Dabulamanzi rumbled at him in Zulu.
“He says to ask you if you liked this war,” said Dunn.
“No, not a lot,” I says, still wondering why I was here.
“Good,” says Dabulamanzi. “We had a shaman who said that the ruin of Zululand would begin with a single missionary. Unfortunately, he was an epileptic and a cattle thief and not a Zulu, so we didn’t listen. But that does not matter now. My brother is in chains and I am soon dead and Zululand can ask for the return of our bones.”
“They ain’t going to kill Cetshwayo.”
“True, but with him gone another King cannot be elected until the return of his bones, so for the People of the Sky—Zulus—it would have been better had he died in Zululand.”
He began to shudder, from pain, I thought, but caught himself.
“I remember that you shot at me from far off, and I thought it a gift, that you would be so afraid of me that you would not wait until I got closer,” said Dabulamanzi, “and so I have brought you a gift, too. I will give it to you when you go.”
I waited. Dabulamanzi blinked up into the darkness, though whether that in the hut or one of his own I couldn’t tell.
“Now the Boers will pour in and they will take our pastures and our cattle and we shall be their slaves. Here, look at this.” He threw back the light blanket over his leg. It had been cut off, but not soon enough. Black gangrene, and it was in his blood, and if he hadn’t been the color of obsidian I’d have seen the poison in his skin.
“One of your Martini-Henrys,” said Dabulamanzi. “I was never wounded in any battles. A son of mine dropped one when it was loaded and you see what it left. The missionary woman wants to write a true history of the war.”
“Meaning she sets down everybody’s lies and lets the reader take choice,” I says. Dabulamanzi laughed. He was still a long ways from dead.
“Dunn tells me that you went through our land and we never knew it, and that you were at Hlobane and Ulundi. You know, some of your shots came pretty close. So you remember what happened here. That is all. And as for your gift, it is here.”
He motioned to a large calabash. I picked it up and hefted it. Not too heavy.
“Now go.”
Outside, by the carriage, I took the top of the gourd off. It was Dik Uys’s head. His face had been painted with cedar oil, but I could still make out the features.
“Curious,” says Dunn. He’d seen so much that I suppose that amounted to a scream of horror.
I put the lid back on.
“When we get to a good spot let’s toss this in the bushes,” I says. “I need a drink.”
“I have a bottle in the carriage,” says Dunn.
“Good,” I says, pitching the gourd into a tangle of thorns.
I was sure lookin’ forward to Australia. Cheerful place, so I’d heard. This part of Africa was not going to do well.
The next day I watched Africa slide away until it was gone. I thought of Marieke for a long time. It hurt some, but she’d be all right, and so would I.
A sailor on lookout was playing a harmonica. I didn’t know the tune, but it was a sad one, and therefore Irish. When the sun sank into the sea, the reedy music stopped, and after a while, even the gulls quit squalling.
Epilogue
OLLIE’S PLACE WASN’T TOO peaceful to practice the writing trade in, so I come up here to a little place I have on Lake George and spent the summer and fall and winter and spring and the summer again scribbling away.
This is how I remember it, anyway, but I’m fifty and those two years was over twenty years ago. When I go down to the drugstore for a seegar and shaving soap, I forget one thing or the other and have to go back, or maybe I just want to walk.
I cut this book off as I was leaving Durban—I could have gone on, as I really did, to China and Australia and Europe and Arabia and Alaska and South America. But about midway through the damn thing I went down to the bookstore and bought a book—not too fat and not too skinny—and I counted the pages about what I figure I’ve got. So I quit here. I’m tired of it. I got calluses on the first two fingers of my right hand.
The Indians is all dead now, or in jail, even if the jail is a big patch of ground, and they’ve been there a long time.
The Zulus and the Shanganes are fighting either each other or once in a while the British, but they are small tribes. As wars, they don’t amount to much. Hell, they’re barely good riots.
The Boers are kicking hell out of the Brits now.
Well, good luck to them all. This new century stinks of blood. I got a nose, and I don’t like the wind.
Some one of them Boston ladies what wears blue stockings and commonsensical shoes run me down about July—she’s one of them women throws herself in front of horses to get the vote. Well, fine, says I to her, why don’t you take the damn vote for a while and us men will just look on. You couldn’t possibly do worse than we have. She blinked. Then she got real frosty and said I shouldn’t take such an important subject so lightly. I told her I was serious.
“Mr. Kelly,” she says, deciding that changing the subject was her best bet—which it was—she meant well and warn’t too bright, you know the kind, got one idea and looking for throats to jam it down—“you were involved in the brutal and unjust destruction of the American Indian. Why did you do it? Did you forget the words of our Lord and Savior?”
“While I was single-handedly slaughtering all them damn Indians—and I killed them all, Mrs. Pettigrew,” I says, “the Army just carried the bodies away and held my coat—I never once forgot this—that it was wrong. The kind of wrong happens when one big bunch of mean folks needs land for farms and homes. So they kill the weaker folks that was already there. And at least all the Indians I killed died clean and quick, and didn’t perish of misery and boredom listening to the kind of pinch-faced godwallopers descended on them later. I was a killer, but I warn’t cruel.”
Mrs. Pettigr
ew got a look says there is this bad smell in the room. She had been escorted to my digs by a godwalloper looked like he lived on snails and twigs. He began to make little choking sounds. This encouraged me greatly. Maybe he’d die of the conniptions right there on my porch.
A bird hopped up on the feeder I keep filled with seeds out near the little stone birdbath I brung back from China.
“That bird out there is a starling, Mrs. Pettigrew,” I says. “Now that starling was brought here by some ass who wanted all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to be found in America. Them starlings is doing pretty well. But you never see a bluebird around here any more.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” she says.
“I mean that if we hadn’t broken the tribes, we’d be in deep trouble. See, our country would right now be a worse place if we hadn’t rushed to fill it up. If we hadn’t got the Russians out of North America, we’d have to fight them. So we had to take the land and fill it up with farmers. They don’t move a round much. Actually, they ain’t no fun at all, but there you have it.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Can’t have two roosters on one perch, Mrs. Pettigrew. Two nations on the same patch. I had a teacher when I was to school, a lady name of Soames, who taught me Greek and Latin and history. She used to say that nations have interests, period, and those interests will lead them to cruel places. She had lost her husband at Shiloh. We didn’t fight the Civil War to free the slaves, we fought the Civil War to keep the British and the Russians and the French out of our spot. I was just along for the fun.”
“You enjoyed killing Indians?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, “I didn’t. That’s why I was so good at it.”
“Our noble Civil War?”
“Was a bloody incompetent business fought by amateurs. War always is. And I can’t explain it to some fool like you who thinks them stupid paintings of glorious charges or last stands is a right way of seeing it. It isn’t.”
“You shock me, Mr. Kelly.”
“Go to hell, ma’am. Take your damn bookend with you.”
The godwalloper arose to give me a good lecture on proper manners and I arose to see if maybe I could knock his pointed little head into the middle of Lake George. Well, I am a killer, damn it, and he saw whatever it was that my eyes said and he run like a striped-ass ape off toward their carriage.
“Noble feller,” I snorts. “I hope he didn’t leave his smelling salts.”
“You, sir, are a beast,” said Mrs. Pettigrew.
“Couldn’t agree with you more, Mrs. Pettigrew. Why don’t you go talk to Pawnee Bill Lillie? He’s Temperance and Born-Again Christian and he never fought an Indian in his life but he’ll tell you that he did and how bad he feels about it now. He’s been suffering for years for things he didn’t do. I’m sure you’ve heard him speak, and been greatly moved.”
Mrs. Pettigrew was flouncing down the steps. I recognized the flounce. Time she got down to the train station, she’d be cussing herself (in modulated tones) for not having said a lot of things back, but right now she couldn’t think straight. Well, she meant well, damn her.
But she had bothered me, though I hated to admit it. I thought of Joseph and White Bird and Yellow Wolf and the Nez Perces. They should have been left alone. They was farmers and horse-breeders and good people. But that don’t seem to matter much. I have seen whole tribes destroyed by whiskey and common measles. I chased them down, and I didn’t like it much. It wasn’t like I was there to save anything or make anything better. Hell, I liked the excitement and I liked the country, and I got to be a scout because I knew more about it than anyone else available. When I began, I was eighteen, same age as most of the boys in the Gettysburg Cemetery, if you go and look.
I pleaded with Red Hand and I pleaded with a lot of others to demand U.S. citizenship and just go to court like every other American. They wouldn’t listen, and I can’t blame them. When your introduction to the white man is goldminers and trappers, it don’t give you real confidence in what’s coming along behind. The Indians’ life was dead but not stiff yet the moment Columbus stepped off the boat. Same thing happened to the Zulus. And the bluebirds.
I began humming a song, one I heard a lot in Africa and later in Australia. It says all that there is to say about any of it in one little verse.
Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.
Then I decided to go and get me a real good attack of gout.
The next day, the mailman came with another letter from Miles. It said, “Africa soonest.”
Again? Damn him.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1987 by Peter Bowen
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-9548-9
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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