All three aim at the preacher, and all the guards aim at them. The preacher stops a few inches in front of the rifle and eases his chest forward until he comes into contact with the barrel. The young guard steps back and the preacher steps forward to maintain his contact with the young man’s rifle. His mother steps forward and begs her son to put down his weapon. Others appeal to Ryan’s parents to do the same. The preacher holds an arm in the air and puts an index finger over his lips and the crowd falls silent.
—What’s your problem, son?
—I won’t let you hurt her. I love her, Father. You can’t put her in there. Please.
—Don’t beg, son. You have all the cards in your hands. Okay, what should I do with a liar and a cheat in our midst? You be the judge and jury. You tell me what I should do with her.
The young man appears to search for words. He looks at the nurse and at Ryan’s parents. Ryan’s father speaks:
—Forgive her just like you should have forgiven my son. Forgive her and give her a chance to make amends.
—And if I don’t? If I decide, in my limited wisdom, that she needs this lesson, that we all need it to stop another case of insubordination like yours right now, what do you say to that?
—We’ll shoot, Reverend. I swear to God we’ll shoot you and anyone who tries to stop us. We don’t care about our lives anymore.
—You swear to God you’ll shoot me? I plucked you three miserable excuses for humanity from certain oblivion and guide you to the gates of paradise, the very brink of entering eternity, and now you declare that you’ll shoot me? Go right ahead. You three decide the destiny of this community.
The three stand and aim and look at one another and at the preacher and his guards. The congregation begins to edge closer to the three rebels. The nurse walks from the young man slowly at first, and he calls her back, but she ignores him and picks up her pace and strides into the cage and slams the gate behind her. The young guard drops his rifle and tries to run to her, but the preacher holds him, though not in a restraint; it takes a simple laying of hands on the young man for him to stop. Ryan’s parents lower their rifles, and the nearest guards grab and wrestle the two to the ground. The preacher orders Adam to attack the nurse. Adam pauses and looks at the preacher, who repeats the order with a wave of his arm toward the nurse. Adam knows his fate is tied to the preacher, in whose good graces he must remain or perish. Adam runs at the nurse and bats her to one side. She screams and the crowd turns its attention back to the cage. The guards closest to the preacher charge at the young man, and a rifle discharges as they pile on him and throw him to the ground. People scream. Adam pounds the nurse with his fist and she remains motionless on the ground. The preacher instructs the guards to take the young man and Ryan’s parents to his house, and he walks back to the cage and calls Adam’s name several times before the gorilla stops hitting the bundle at his feet and turns to the voice whose commands he obeys always. The preacher steps into the cage and pushes Nora, Dee, and Pat away from him as they try to stop him. He digs into his pocket, retrieves a bar of chocolate, and hands it to Adam, who grabs the bar and retreats to the back of his cage. The preacher gestures to his guards and assistants, and between them they rush into the cage and gather up the nurse and jog with her to the infirmary. The preacher secures Adam’s cage and dismisses the crowd with a sweep of his arm and tells his assistants and the guards around him:
—Make sure everyone gets back to work. Trina, where are you, my child? Trina.
—Here, Father.
—Play your flute for Adam until he calms down.
—Yes, Father.
The preacher strides in the direction of his house as his followers shrink from him and open a tunnel.
Joyce waits with Trina as she plays her flute for Adam. He seems to slow in his movements and rocks to the music of the flute. As she plays, Trina pictures the trees with Adam roaming free beside Ryan. She imagines thick undergrowth, long vines, a waterfall, and Adam and Ryan able to make a bed of leaves at night anywhere under the canopy, rising with the sun to find fruit and leaves with salt and no one to interrupt them. By the time she finishes, Trina sees herself with Rose and Joyce in the company of Adam and Ryan, all together in that forest. Adam dozes off.
Joyce stores Trina’s flute at the library building, and mother and daughter walk to the pig farm. The worst job after cleaning the commune toilets happens to be the most convenient one for Joyce’s plan. She has picked the pig farm for two reasons. It is farthest from the central part of the commune, and, located as it is on the edge of the land, of all the cultivated sites on the property, the pig farm is nearest to the river. People stay away to avoid the stink on their clothing and their skin, which retains a pigskin smell even after washing with carbolic soap. And when the smell disappears, the nostrils invoke a memory of it, leaving pig workers in permanent doubt about the status of their hygiene.
From the pig farm, it is possible to see a boat arrive at the jetty. The crew is not as easy to identify from a distance of four hundred meters, but the boat can be discerned, and with good eyesight, the lettering on the side, while not legible, suggests either a single name or a double-barrel name. By this process of elimination, Joyce hopes to tell whether a boat about to dock is the Coffee and, at four hundred meters, whether the boat’s specious captain dons a distinctive captain’s hat; at least that (specious) was how the preacher described the captain and his many messages to Joyce. The beating Joyce took for messages she did not see and whose contents she can only guess at makes the captain seem like an unlucky talisman for her, but the severity of her punishment and her wholesale condemnation make her believe in the meaningful nature of the captain’s messages, meaningful for her and Trina’s chances away from the commune.
She finds it intriguing that the captain continues his campaign of epistolary worship of her (assuming he did not go through all that trouble just to pour his scorn on her) despite not a syllable of return from her. Could this be love? Can this be what the captain talked about on their river trips, the thing that looks and feels so different from her faith, though just as loyal and blind and persistent? Her gamble: If his love is real and true, this means the captain should interpret her silence not as a rebuttal but as something forced upon her. And if his love is of the fighting kind, as the man himself appears to be—and here her gamble seems biggest—then he will do something to make sure she is not in any danger.
On the walk to the pig farm, Joyce plays a game with Trina where one or the other makes the trip with closed eyes and tries to guess along the way where they are on the trail and how much farther they have to go. This gives each of them an accurate mental picture of the walk. All that remains untested is the trip from the pig farm down to the river. They allow an inquisitive pig to escape under the wooden fence, then take their time retrieving it in order to reconnoiter the area between the farm and the river. Most of the paths are circuitous trails with all manner of hoof and paw prints. Some trails lead to dead ends and make no sense except to a pursuer in a chase.
Kevin, whose guard-duty rotation brings him to the pig farm, tells another guard he will follow the mother and daughter. The other guard watches him as Kevin watches them, so the chain of eyes makes it impossible to do anything but look officious while on duty. He walks along and observes from a little distance as Joyce and Trina slow-chase a squealing piglet, corner it, and drag it, by holding on to one ear each as it screeches blue murder, back in the direction of the pigpen. The guards follow commune workers if they stray for any reason from their designated posts. The official reason given for this close scrutiny—safety—appears legitimate. On two occasions commune workers needed to be rescued by guards from the clutches of a viper and a panther, and once a commune worker became sunblind and walked into the forest and was lucky to bump into a hunting party of Waurá who returned him to the compound late that night.
The guards stop and question anyone who seems to be unattached to a work party. The policy of the
commune is to keep people in groups of four or more and to switch the groups on strict rotation and move people from one task to the next, ensuring that there is no group cohesion that might foster negative schemes of any kind. Even the armed guards work on rotation from night to day, from front-gate duty to the pig farm or another part of the compound perimeter, and the group makeup is never the same on consecutive rotations. Kevin misses what he considers the best job for a guard on the compound, duty at the front gate, because only one other guard works with him and it is easy to persuade one other person to go along with a scheme than two or three others, as he persuades Eric to bend and twist the rules of the commune whenever they happen to be posted together. He asks Joyce over the squeals of the piglet why she and her daughter have picked the worst place to work when they have special dispensation from the preacher to work where they please. Joyce says she prefers to be outside, and pigs may be smelly and sound like poor-imitation banshees, but they are very smart, much smarter than cows or chickens. He says he heard that somewhere, but for him the stink cancels all that wisdom.
Joyce and Trina march the warbling pig back to the sty and leave Kevin standing some distance from them. Trina asks her mother why she was so hostile with this guard, who seems so much more polite than the others. Joyce looks at Trina quizzically and says she did no such thing. Trina said she heard anger and there is no denying it. Joyce shakes her head emphatically. Trina wants to know if a view of the river empty of a boat that shall remain unnamed might be Joyce’s reason for being mad. Joyce casts her daughter a sad expression and says she misses the captain every day, but Trina must never mention his name to anyone or within earshot of anyone. Trina says she misses him, too, and his whistling first mate. She suggests that they come up with a code word for the captain in case they are overheard talking about him. But what? They launch into a list of captains from fiction and history. Trina kicks off:
—Hook. Ahab. Kirk. Scarlett. Drake. Blackbeard. Raleigh. Morgan. Cook. Silver. Bligh. Columbus. Cabral. Vasco da Gama.
—How do you know so many?
—We studied them in school.
Joyce tells Trina she is too smart for her boots. Trina says she does not have any boots. She holds up a foot to show her lace-up canvas shoes, a size too big, then hops on one foot to keep her balance and puts that foot down to keep herself from toppling to the ground and raises the other foot. She keeps switching feet in this dance until her mother laughs and doubles over, holding her midriff and wiping her eyes, and begs Trina to stop before she makes her poor mother split her sides open. Kevin watches them from behind a tree.
The pigs seem to know what happens if men in overalls separate one pig from the rest and pull it into a hut. That pig launches high-pitched screams, hollering, and near-articulate cries for help, that someone who hears must set aside as coincidence based on a belief that a pig does not really understand its fate. How could it? Pigs root in the ground for grubs, roll in mud and eat anything poured into a trough, including their young. Joyce and Trina follow the practice of sticking tissue in the ears to reduce the volume of pigs screaming at the slaughterhouse, nothing like the compliant moos of cows, nothing like the bleat of sheep; pigs cry and beg for mercy. The man who wields the knife must be efficient with a sharp knife and a brisk stroke of the throat for that scream to stop. The pig’s scream ceases in midflow. The legs paddle the air and freeze midstride. The open throat bleeds. The long knives sever the head from the body, slit the stomach, and strip the vitals from the corpse, and the carcass, hung with a hook through it, surrenders its meat to an inquisitive blade. Blood runs down gutters to the river along with the waste of hosed pigpens. Blockage of the drains causes the water to gush back into the sinks and holes in the ground, and the whole operation comes to a standstill as someone traces each drain to find the choke.
Joyce and Trina follow the drain from a sty and find the plug in the drain and move it along until they come to the river and look at each other and know how many steps it will take them from the pig farm to reach the water in the dark. A guard stationed at the dock challenges them, aiming his rifle. He wants to know who gave them permission to come to the river. Joyce begins to explain about unblocking the drain by tracing the blockage from one drain to the next, and she looks for Kevin just as he steps from the trees and calls to the guard, Eric, at the river.
Kevin tells Joyce and Trina to continue their task of unblocking the drain and give him a minute with his friend. Eric apologizes for his stern manner and says he hopes they understand that he has a job to do, and if he appears soft, it will land him in big trouble. Joyce nods. The two men debate whether they should take a dip in the river before the sluices from the pig farm open and mess up the water, as happens twice daily. They look around and appear to assess the risk of such a venture in front of Joyce and Trina. Kevin says he needs a swim to clear his nostrils and hair of the smell of pigs. Eric adds he will swim to keep his friend company. The two men decide to invite Joyce and Trina to join them. Joyce says she does not have a costume, and Trina says the same, but seeing how the guards strip down to their underpants and dive in, they decide to tuck their dresses into the legs of their underwear and wade in up to their thighs and scoop the cool water onto their arms and necks and faces. The guards ask Joyce if with all her influence high up, she might be able to pull a few strings to get them on the same work rotation. Joyce promises to try. They dress and wish each other a good day and swear mother and daughter to secrecy. Joyce and Trina follow the drain up the slope to the pig farm with Kevin a few paces behind. Trina asks: Cook? And her mother says Cook it is.
TWENTY-TWO
At the preacher’s white house, in the spacious meeting room with little furniture, Ryan’s parents and the young guard sit strapped to chairs, blood on their clothes. Dee injects the three captives with a sedative. They look asleep, heads bowed. The guards tell them they have signed their death warrants by their actions. They slap the captives and nudge them hard with rifles. The prisoners cease making the usual sounds of bodies under duress. The guards talk with the assistants about the outrage of someone in their ranks pointing a gun at their leader. As if there were not enough guns aimed at the commune from the many enemies in the surrounding bush, in the capital, in the country they left to get some peace.
The preacher appears and the assistants throw glasses of water over Ryan’s parents and the young guard to wake them. The preacher walks over to the young guard and unties his hands and feet.
—You’re free to go.
The guards and assistants look at one another and at their leader, and a couple of them say no involuntarily. The preacher repeats his announcement. The young guard raises his head, surprised. Ryan’s parents muster a look of vague interest. All three try their best to feign alertness. The young guard tries to stand but cannot. His arms grab at the air and his legs splay from under him. He falls back into the chair and almost topples it backward. He slurs his speech:
—Father, I’m sorry. I love her, wanted to save her. Love you, Father.
The preacher asks the young man if he needs help to walk. He nods. The preacher helps him to his feet and he clutches the preacher and sobs.
—Father, please forgive me. I love her. Didn’t want her to get hurt.
The preacher says he understands. He, too, loved someone a long time ago, before he found Christ and his love became the service of saving souls for the kingdom of heaven. He chastises the youth for putting the life of the nurse in danger by distracting him from his careful orchestration of her punishment.
—She understood the situation better than you. She walked into that cage all by herself. Didn’t she?
The young guard nods and cannot stop his tears.
The preacher asks him what should happen next to maintain order in the community. He wants the youth to put himself in the shoes of a leader and imagine that leader’s responsibility for the lives of so many and make a determination what should be the best course of action to maintain
order. The young guard asks for water. The preacher flicks his fingers and an assistant produces a full glass, which the young man empties in one uninterrupted tilt of his head. His mind seems to clear for a moment. He asks the preacher’s permission to prescribe his own punishment to show everyone in the community the error of his ways. The leader says that will not be necessary, he is free to go. The young guard says the preacher saved his life and his mother’s by taking them in from the streets, and therefore his life is nothing without the preacher’s blessing. He says he lost his mind. The nurse helped him while he lay in a cast. She washed him, took away his bedpans, read the Gospel to him. He loves her and he acted out of fear for her safety and his actions came from that wrong impulse, wrong because it went against his greater love for the preacher and the commune and the chance of everlasting life.
The preacher nods his approval. He kisses the young man on the top of the head. The young guard sobs and collapses, and the preacher holds him and eases him back into the chair.
—Father, tell me what to do to make things better.
The reverend looks at Ryan’s parents and tells the youth that the situation is grave. To have any guard aim a rifle at him in front of everyone, with the help of two adults who should know better despite having a wayward child, puts the preacher in a predicament. If he does nothing about it, even if he forgives the three of them as he did in his heart the moment the incident occurred, despite his forgiveness, if the three of them try to walk out of the commune and the people do not feel the same generous disposition, the people will pounce upon them and tear them from limb to limb. Even he, as their leader, enjoys limited control over the members of the commune.
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