“Otombe,” Jeremy said, “I’m curious. Could you tell me how you came to learn English?”
Otombe looked at him, no change in his posture or the rhythm of his gait.
Where did this man get such self-possession, wondered Jeremy.
“A British missionary couple raised me as their own until I was six.”
“What happened then?”
“They gave birth to their own child. Returned me to my tribe.” He jogged on, his spear held loosely by his side.
Jeremy considered what that experience must have been like, the shift from a wood house to a wattle-and-daub hovel, from reading the Bible to hunting with a spear, from standing patiently in shoes to running in bare feet, from wearing restrictive clothing to near nudity. Aside from the painful shift in parents, he had to admit a touch of jealousy. After only a week, he found himself strangely at home here in Africa. He wondered if some relative of his could have resided here before, if something in him was meant to stand beneath this wide tropical sky. However, how was that possible when until a few years ago the only foreigners around were the Mohammedans, a few explorers and the Portuguese? Still, in the pre-dawn, he relished stepping out of his tent to hear the nervous cackle of the last of the night’s hyenas and to smell the Indians’ spices beginning to roast over the fires. Gazing out over the twisted thorn trees and the tents dusty with red dirt, he knew not a soul around him had heard a single rumor about his past, and in his chest he felt the rising flutter of love for this colony, this continent.
Most of the adult Africans he had encountered possessed willowy bodies and regal cheekbones. They stood with grace in the bright light of day, wearing only a few wavy lines of paint or some metal bangles, a leather loincloth or woven wraparound skirt.
Each day, the construction of the railroad plowed forward without him spotting a single African village in any direction, but still every morning, no matter what the weather, clusters of scrawny potbellied children would appear, to stare at the Indians and him with the same sober curiosity that he wished to turn on them but, out of propriety, could not. In fairly short order, the children learned to cluck their tongues and hold out their hands, begging. The men tossed bits of bread and rice, and the youths scrambled in the dirt for the scraps, an activity Jeremy believed no American would ever lower himself to.
And then there was the animal life. He had been informed that the drought that had ended five days ago had lasted two solid years and was the worst in living memory, yet to him the wildlife appeared to be flourishing. At night, the hoots and grunts, calls and shrieks were loud enough that on occasion one had to raise one’s voice to be heard, as though this semi-desert were Eden. During the day Jeremy studied with amazement every creature he came upon, never having imagined such crazed coloring, varied sizes, or methods of movement. Red lizards bolted off in a blur of speed, giraffes lazily see-sawed away over the trees, a blue monkey small as a chipmunk plucked food off his table and leapt high into a tree. Before the rains he had seen vultures, awkward as crippled children, hopping toward the bodies of those animals that had died.
In the last few days since the drought had finally broken—with a torrential deluge of eight inches—the season of the monsoon had hit with a vengeance, making up for the years of dryness.
Yesterday, a rhino had clambered across a newly built railroad embankment and, afterward, the downpour had gradually eroded the plate-sized prints into one zigzagging fast-moving river, the erosion spreading until ten feet of railroad tracks had actually decoupled, sliding down with the washed-out mud into the swamped ditch. Surveying the mess, marveling at the destruction possible from something as simple as footprints and rain—something that Jeremy had always considered gentle and innocuous—he thought it was no wonder that modern civilization had developed in Europe instead.
Every day, before he rose, he reminded himself that here he was a complete neophyte, without the comprehension of half of what he needed to know to safely govern all these men he had been assigned. In this new geography he always tried to question his old assumptions, checking here that they sustained their accuracy. He felt he had been born anew in Africa, with the delight of an infant in each unfamiliar sight and with the same inability to recognize danger.
The second day here, he had learned this lesson well when he’d addressed his men for the first time, the Indians whose hands would assemble the geometric perfection of the railroad tracks—his Indians, all seven hundred thirty two of them. He watched the men convene, attired in puffy turbans and oversized white shirts hanging down to their knees. Still carrying the shovels and hoes they had been working with, they jostled closer to hear how he would address them, to see with their own eyes what kind of sahib he might make. So new here, he did not yet comprehend there were over forty different languages in camp, the only shared ones being English and Hindi. He did not understand the difference between the broad groupings of Buddhists, Hindus, and Mohammedans, much less those between Sikhs, Jainists, and Shiites. He had not learned that Mohammedans asked repeatedly not to work Friday afternoons while the Hindus would not touch beef if it were served. He did not know that the Mohammedans would stop work five times a day to bow down toward the North while the Hindus requested that, if they perished here, their remains be cremated. Instead, he mentally lumped all those dark attentive faces together into one homogenous group and labeled it foreign.
Before he could commence his address to the crowd—the Hindi translator waiting at his side—two of the men near the front began to push one other, other, no need for any greater complaint than physical proximity and religious distance. A few of the bystanders were hit by the scuffle and the fisticuffs began to spread. Jeremy froze, no idea of what to do. Five of the jemadars waded in, shoving and yelling, trying to separate the men even as more and more workers pressed forward into the knot of thrashing arms and yelling faces. Then he heard the first real scream and spotted the bloody edge of a hoe raised overhead.
Desperate, Jeremy discharged his firearm into the sky. The crowd froze, all their furious motion abruptly stopped, those brown faces staring up at him and his rifle.
This was not how he had imagined himself ruling. He had visualized his own enlightened kindness, their surprised devotion.
Instead, he found himself looking up at the gun as the rest of them did and noting how forceful it looked up there, against the bright equatorial sky.
Dr. Alan Thornton, the camp physician, was the one to explain to him why no Africans were being used to build the railroad. They refused to dig embankments for a full day in the tropical sun, not for money nor trade items. The only known way to motivate them was how the Belgians were rumored to do it in the Congo: mutilations, hostages, and wholesale slaughtering. Thornton explained that the prevailing view was that the Africans were a lazy lot, a work ethic atrophied by the torrid heat. Jeremy knew Thornton had much more experience with Africa and its natives than he did, but he was unsure how to jibe the man’s statement with the fact that Otombe was continuing to trot on without stopping for what must be at least six miles.
The Indians who built the railroad were also an alien dark-complected lot, but they were much closer to the British in terms of common assumptions about the strictures and hierarchy of society. They knew how to read the details of Jeremy’s clothing to discern his status and how to apply flattery when requesting a favor. From what he had observed so far, however, many of them seemed to get fulfillment, not from laboring hard for the British Empire as the English wished them to, but rather from attempting to outsmart the system.
The other day, he had ridden over the hill into the stone quarry perhaps an hour earlier than he normally did. Instead of hearing the busy ring of iron against stone, the entire quarry was silent, one hundred and seven masons stretched out in the little shade offered by the rocks, several men snoring. The three jemadars in charge were playing cards, their whips looped loosely beside them. As the rustling awareness of his arrival spread, men jumped to the
ir feet and hammered away at the first available rock. In that instant, he could see the big-eyed fear of punishment battling with their pride at all they had gotten away with.
But even at times like this, it was clear they had learned the rules of the white man’s system—were not standing apart, simply watching, like the Africans. Whenever his Indians requested an advance on their wages or a day off their eyes were lowered like women’s.
So far he had continued to pay the railroad’s standard wages out of fear of the men considering him weak, but at night he truly struggled with what fair pay should be for manual labor in this intemperate land where a simple scratch could lead to gangrene. Two days ago, he had examined the accounting books to get a sense of where the railroad’s major expenditures lay. Checking the month’s final totals, he had marveled at how cheaply so much labor could be engaged here on the dark continent. It was only after several minutes of study that he noted, underneath each man’s name, a tidy column of negative numbers. After some inquiry, he learned that their wages were docked for the expenditure of shipping them here and then back to their native land, as well as for what they ate and drank and for any new clothing they acquired while here—all of this clothing purchased through the railroad’s store. Glancing at these negative numbers, it was unclear how much might remain to send home to their families.
This arrangement bothered him. He had been raised to consider the responsibilities of class. He believed that those with affluence and power also inherited the onus to toil harder than anyone else, to be the last one in bed at night and the first one up, to make sure all was done for those who performed the more menial work. Thirty years ago, one of his Grandpapi’s workers had gotten yanked halfway into the thresher by the edge of his sleeve. He had had four children under six. Of his own volition, Grandpapi sold a fifth of his farm to give the money to the widow. This was a tale frequently invoked by the family when discussing current events. Responsible leadership, his mother maintained, this was what the nation needed more of; then there would not be this unstated war between the Carnegies of the world and unionizers like Mother Jones. Responsible leadership—as was seen in her family, his mother believed—was what had made the Turnkeys all that they were.
Jeremy did not remember if she had talked this way, lionizing her family, before his father had disappeared. Of course there was not much he remembered from back then, before he was five, before they had moved in with Grandpapi—her father—on the dairy farm she had grown up on, before she had changed all their surnames back to her maiden name.
Since the start of the rains, more of the Indians’ cuts were getting infected, fist-sized ulcers rising in a matter of hours, purplish and hot. Jungle sores, they were called. Already, the first cases of malaria had been reported. Yesterday, he had decided he would stroll through the hospital tent to visit the ailing men. He had pictured himself calling out words of good cheer to the three or four patients there, raising spirits, breaking the boredom of the sick bed, perhaps even sitting for a moment and chatting about the rapid progress the railroad was making, the service they were providing to this land.
Instead, as he stepped into the tent, he saw there were fifteen, maybe twenty, men. In the heat, the stench of vomit and putrefaction rose to his nose. Some of the men shivered in delirium. The male nurses moved between the beds, able to offer little aside from glasses of water, wet towels for fevers and, in the case of gangrene, speedy amputation.
Since Jeremy was a child, the physical processes of the body had made him light-headed. He could not even bandage his own cuts. The opened flesh and welling blood seemed so disturbing and animal-like, distinct from the human soul he recognized as the very essence of himself. His inability to help Grandpapi during calving season—the bawling bloody cows and mucus-covered newborns—had been a lot of his initial motivation for choosing engineering. Manufactured metal was clean, exact and durable, the apex of civilization, worthy of a lifetime’s devotion.
Standing in the doorway of the hospital tent, he felt his face freeze in horror, an emotion he struggled to erase. These men—who labored hard under this tropical sun, who had traveled thousands of miles away from their families, risking death in a foreign land for the contracted period of three long years—deserved better. He created muscle by muscle the original smile of good cheer he’d had in mind, forced himself forward in a slow amble through the tent. To keep this expression affixed to his face, he made sure not to look directly at any blood-soaked bandages or open wounds, forcing his eyes instead just above the men’s faces, while he nodded and called out words of encouragement. The overriding thought was this was his fault, each fever here, each missing limb, any deaths. He was the one responsible—as much as if he had injected each infection of malaria or inflicted each wound—him and the British, this railroad.
Just in time, he reached the far end of the tent, raising his hand in a casual salute good-bye. Three paces past the door flap, out of sight of the men, his left leg abruptly crumpled under him. He sat down hard, made no motion to get up, strangely content to listen to the rising static in his ears, while his vision tunneled in until all he could see was a single mango peel discarded in the dirt.
“Bwana,” a man’s voice said.
Startled from his memories, Jeremy looked up from his slouch in the saddle, recalling this hunt. Otombe was pointing to a large creature two hundred yards ahead in the midst of the grassy plain. “Eland,” he said.
The animal stood as tall as Jeremy imagined a moose must, only it had spiral horns. It stared at the unfamiliar sight of a man astride a horse. He reined Patsy in hurriedly, although there was little possibility of escape for his prey. Its best hope would be to gallop—dewlaps flapping—for the crest of the hill half a mile away in an attempt to reach shelter on the far side. Wishing to forestall this option, Jeremy grabbed his 450 Express and raised it to his shoulder, ready to squeeze off the shot. For a moment he paused then, for the eland hadn’t begun to run, but was still standing there, its deerlike eyes watching, filled with curiosity at his action. It had never seen a gun, he realized and this understanding spoiled a trifle the thrill of the hunt.
Still he pulled the trigger.
At the report, the huge animal simply disappeared, knocked backward into the grass. A moment later, even from two hundred paces, he heard the dull whump of it hitting the earth. With it standing like that, just waiting, a child could have killed it, but in the instant afterward he felt so much mightier than a child, so much bigger. The thump was as loud as when a ten-foot span of iron rail dropped into place at the head of the train tracks, such a sense of permanent change.
Galloping Patsy forward, he dismounted dangerously close to the twitching eland, amazed by its sheer girth and giant limbs. And yet he had dropped it, all this muscular mass. “Dropped” was the word, as though the only thing that had been holding this beast up before was his lack of desire to shoot it.
The bullet hole was obscured by the fur, so the dark stain spreading across its pelt did not appear to be blood, or even that visually interesting.
He noticed the way its shining eyes stared in single-minded concentration at the grass in front of its nose. Somewhere inside, it must know it would never run again, never stand. The life it had considered normal had ended. Still, it struggled to breathe, willing to settle for so much less than what it wanted in order to survive.
Jeremy knew just what that felt like.
Reaching out one finger, he tentatively stroked the fur on the half-ton of wilderness lying at his feet. At his touch, the animal exhaled and died.
When the rest of his hunting party reached him, he bade the Sikh gun boy to set up the camera and take a photo of him. He sat on the eland’s shoulder, his rifle across his lap, his face impassive with his chin thrust forward, his best imitation of Grandpapi. He would mail the photo home. They could pull it out each time a guest inquired of him. In his correspondence, he would make sure to relate events backing up this image of him: successful h
unts for large animals, observations of native customs, some of the technical difficulties with the railroad’s construction. Every two weeks, he would ship home another envelope filled with a series of foreign and dusky adventures.
In his life, he had striven so earnestly not to disappoint them.
By the time the camera was set up and the exposure taken, the eyes of the eland had glazed over. Within the space of two minutes, the wild animal had turned into a furry mound of undressed meat. He reminded himself he had made this countryside a trifle safer for cattle and horses. The prevailing belief was that killing wild hoofed animals would decrease the speed with which rinderpest could spread. Although no one knew for sure which exact species the disease resided in, the theory was—when in doubt—shoot. The epidemic was so bad and the urge to help so strong, that across the continent, colonists hunted even from trains, resting the rifle in an open windowsill and blasting away at whatever they passed, shooting until the barrel burned with heat, the corpses rotting where they fell.
Perhaps it was partly the fault of the sheer size of the continent, bringing out such excess as this.
All this shooting, as well as the mounting toll from the rinderpest, was creating a scarcity of game that people were already noting. There was some talk of starting an animal preserve, as soon as the epidemic ended, perhaps around Tsavo, where no hunting would be allowed, not even by the tribes that resided there.
“Look,” said the N’derobbo, “a lion.”
Glancing up from the eland, Jeremy searched over the top of the rustling grass. Off his horse, the grass seemed surprisingly tall, the tips waving back and forth in the wind.
Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) Page 4