Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  “One moment, Mrs. Stewart,” the African replied. He went to my window and peered out, then closed the shutters. “I may have been followed here,” he explained.

  I saw that his hair was matted with wee twigs and that there were soil stains on the back of his breeches. “Who would want to follow you?” I asked.

  “The men who were with Lourenço Reis.”

  XVIII

  Midnight remembered musket and cannon fire exploding around him the first time he was captured by Europeans. But most of all he remembered the horses. “Swiftness and power given life,” he told me. “Even Mantis watched them with awe.”

  Dark heavy balls of metal launched from cannons exploded in storms of fire. Blood spilled from his wounded tribesmen; all save three young children were left to rot in the African sun. Midnight never knew what happened to his two surviving kin.

  The howls of hyenas gorging themselves could be heard from his new home, a farm owned by a round-faced Dutchman, whose servant he became for a few short months. But although he could carry water, feed the chickens and cattle, and kill snakes with only a stick, Midnight had an enormous appetite and ate more than he could earn.

  Rather than slit his throat, as the Dutchman ordered, a Zulu servant, under cover of darkness, walked Midnight an hour into the countryside, offering him to the will of the desert. The land and sky proved generous that night; he found his way by moonlight to a family of Bushmen following the rains to the Shaggy Hills, thirty miles east. They offered him water from a hollowed ostrich shell and some dried meat. They became his new kin.

  Fourteen years later by Papa’s estimation, Boer soldiers returned, different ones to a different place but mounted on horses just the same. By now they knew that even Bushmen adults could be “domesticated” with a regime of punishment and reward. So when Midnight was wounded by a bullet in the arm, he was allowed to be seen by a physician. His life was spared and he was sold by a soldier to Reynolds, the Yorkshireman from whom my father would later steal him.

  When asked his name, he replied that it was Midnight, for this was the name Mantis had instructed him to assume when among Europeans. “It will help you to remain at your own center,” the insect-god had told him.

  It was an itinerant Welsh minister named Dee, with burning coals for eyes, who informed Midnight that his parents had been killed not by men but by God. Furthermore, he said, the Lord was no longer willing to permit heathens in the civilized Africa that Europe was forging out of the primitive, pestilent, and dark chaos that it had once been. Having had the misfortune to be born a Bushman, Midnight, too, would be barred from heaven unless – here the minister withdrew a New Testament from his small leather satchel – he received Christ into his heart.

  Dee visited all the English farms on the Cape. Clad in a hat lined with purple velvet and a mantle of rabbit pelts, he told all the servants that their dancing and – in the case of the Bushmen – their nomadic way of life were affronts to God. The sole cure for both illness and ignorance was Baptism.

  Unlike the other African servants on the farm, Midnight refused the minister’s cure. Whipped until his skin was shredded, he was carried to the servants’ quarters. There, Jackal appeared to him in a dream, peeing on Mantis. But the insect remained unperturbed. In fact, he was laughing.

  The next day, Mrs. Reynolds took her carriage to town for some cordage that her husband needed. The next candidate for Baptism was a Xhosa lad called John, who was generally regarded as lazy and expendable. He was not as fortunate as Midnight. Though he had agreed to the ceremony, he was to be made an example.

  With all the slaves in attendance, John was tied to the porch rail and whipped until the skin on his back had peeled off and he would never cry again. With his bright eyes still wide open, but with his life gone, Minister Dee untied him and pronounced him saved.

  This was why Midnight allowed water to be sprinkled on his head. But the Time of the Hyena was on him, and he was unable to laugh like Mantis. In fact, he did not talk for many months.

  *

  Father, Mother, and I listened in rapt silence while Midnight told us of these times in Africa. At first we didn’t understand the connection of his past to what he might or might not have done to Lourenço Reis – until he said that after seeing the preacher on St. John’s Eve he had remembered Minister Dee and the Xhosa young man named John who had been lashed to death. Midnight believed that the correspondence of names was not accidental. “I understood that Mantis was telling me that our John would die if Reis were to live.”

  “Just because he has the same name as that Xhosa lad?” Papa asked.

  “I believe that such coincidences point to connections between destinies that we cannot always see. But Mantis can see them.” Midnight told us that over the previous nights he had tracked Reis from one city square to another, where growing crowds welcomed his words with great cheers.

  “Just after eleven o’clock last night,” the African said, “Reis walked very, very briskly to the wharf. As he conversed with a ferryman, I ran up the hill and hid in the bushes.”

  “What happened after that?” Papa asked.

  “Then … then I shot him … I shot Reis.”

  “Your arrow reached him from the hillside?” Papa asked.

  “Yes, I could see him distinctly in the lantern light. My first arrow pierced his shoulder blade. It had a tip of strong-strong poison. There was no need for another. He is dead by now.”

  Before he could say any more, Mama rushed to Midnight, weeping.

  “I care not for myself, but you have delivered my John from Pharaoh,” she said solemnly. “You have saved him again. Thank you for your sacrifice. I shall always be grateful.”

  Kissing the African’s hands, she rested her head against his chest. I was dumbfounded, and so, too, was my father. Neither of us had realized the extent of her fear these past days and the supreme effort she had made to conceal her emotions.

  Mama later told me that she knew in her heart that the Inquisition would have started afresh had not the Bushman murdered Lourenço Reis. “There was no question in my mind. One man would have turned us all to smoke and ash. Do you understand? It takes only one.”

  “He was mad,” I replied.

  “No, no. He was quite sane. He knew precisely what he was doing. They always do.”

  *

  I must confess the story Midnight told us may not have been entirely true. I learned from the Olive Tree Sisters that Reis had been seen entering Senhor Benjamin’s home on the night of his death – a fact later confirmed by the apothecary. Benjamin would also admit that a note from him requesting a meeting with the necromancer had been delivered to Reis, though he would never divulge the identity of the messenger.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that Reis was lured to Benjamin’s home by Midnight, who had been following him and who would have had ample opportunity to hand him a note. Once there, the preacher might have been given a clever poison in a glass of wine or water, one that would only take effect several hours later. Or the poison might even have been placed secretly in his snuff.

  The ferryman who rowed Reis back to land told me that the preacher had not been wounded by any arrow. Instead, after placing two pinches of snuff in his nose and inhaling, he complained of deep chest pains and then fell almost immediately into a rigid paralysis. He was dead within minutes.

  I did not discern the discrepancies in the African’s story at the time because we did not discuss the situation with anyone outside our family – for obvious reasons.

  I have come to believe that Reis’s death was planned by Benjamin, who prevailed upon Midnight to lie to us so that we might only reveal a false version of events if ever questioned by ecclesiastical or civil authorities. In this way, we could neither implicate the apothecary nor be regarded as coconspirators. I have often wondered if Papa, too, might have been one of the originators of the plan.

  I am quite sure that Midnight could have been convinced to lie to us,
if he was sure that it would protect my family.

  It might be considered that Benjamin endangered Midnight by compelling him to lie to us about having murdered Reis. But the Bushman would not have been in any true peril, since his story, even if recounted to representatives of the Crown or the Church, could easily have been refuted. Reis’s body bore no arrow wound, as the ferryman and others could testify.

  *

  In the twenty years that have elapsed, I have read what I could find about Reis, who is mentioned twice in Artur Moura Carneiro’s chronicle of Porto in the years prior to the Napoleonic Wars. It is written there that he had returned to Porto from Goa, where he had endeavored to reestablish the stranglehold of the Inquisition on Portuguese India. Why he chose our city for the revivification of his career in continental Portugal remains a mystery, but he probably thought that the greater part of commerce in our city was controlled by the British and the Christianized Jews. This was hardly true, but his hatred of us blinded him to the reality of our situation.

  Another very intriguing possibility is that his true target may not have been the Marranos at all, but rather the Freemasons, a nearly invisible clan I knew nothing about at the time, but who were apparently well-placed in the city’s hierarchy. Perhaps he wanted to take advantage of the traditional Christian distrust of the Jews as a way of reestablishing the Inquisition, intending to turn its persecutory power against these Masons at a later date.

  *

  Whatever the truth of this episode, we thought it prudent that Midnight leave Porto for a time. My father, who was due to travel upriver to survey lands, decided to take all of us with him.

  We spent a peaceful fortnight in a stone manor house on the north bank of the Douro River. Papa, who had visited it often, dubbed it Macbeth’s Castle, where dark night strangles the traveling lamp. But as we were all together as a family, we could not have been happier.

  XIX

  As the present danger to our secret community had passed, my father, mother, and I never talked again of boarding school in England, and Midnight and I began our weekly discussions of the Torah with Senhor Benjamin. The Bushman was enthralled from the very beginning, greatly pleased that the Lord of the Hebrews could be wrathful and even scheming, as well as occasionally indecisive.

  And so our lives again returned to a happy routine, and we continued along this path largely without incident till October of 1806.

  *

  I was now fifteen and a half, and to my great joy, my upper lip bristled with a faint mustache. I was also nearly a hand taller than Midnight and Mama, fully five feet four inches, though I was still a year away from the growth spurt that would elevate me to nearly six feet in height. Unsurprisingly, young women figured most prominently in my thoughts at this time.

  Midnight was more preoccupied than ever with his work and studies with Benjamin. Indeed, the apothecary’s basement had been turned into an alchemical laboratory of sorts, home to a dizzying combination of odd smells that often filtered out into the street.

  Father had acquired seven more acres of land upriver, giving us a grand total of fourteen. He estimated that in just two more years he could begin planting vines for our very own vintage. Although my father had taken me upriver several times for lessons on wine growing and I had proved totally useless, we all agreed that the name Stewart & Son had a certain ring to it.

  Mother had forsworn her allegiance to Mozart for the time being and been captured body and soul by Beethoven. She learned everything by him that she could order from London. New manuscripts were slow in arriving, however, due to disruptions in the postal service caused by Napoleon’s war, currently raging across most of Europe, though not yet in Portugal.

  As for Fanny, she had given birth to four unplanned chubby puppies. While she was in heat, she had escaped from under my vigilant eye by launching herself like Pegasus out of the parlor window. Dashing up our street, she surrendered her maidenhood to the first passing suitor – a fawn-colored mutt raised in the sewers of Porto, judging from his matted hair and foul smell.

  Of the four puppies, we succeeded in finding proper owners for three of them and kept the runt of the litter for ourselves. Midnight named her Zebra, owing to the white stripe that started at her nose and stretched across her black and brown back. She was the puppy my dearest Fanny loved the most. So much so that I feared her heart would break if we were to give her away.

  *

  In the world beyond the confines of our home, Napoleon had won his greatest victory at Austerlitz, leaving fifteen thousand Russians and Austrians to rot in the Moravian sun. On land he had proved himself supreme, and there were many who believed that he would soon be the master of all Europe. Except for the British. And not if the Emperor were foolish enough to attack at sea again: Off the coast of Cape Trafalgar, in southwest Spain, Lord Nelson and his fleet had won a decisive victory precisely one year earlier, on October the Twenty-First, 1805. British forces had multiplied in strength since, and Napoleon hadn’t dared to send his navy off again to battle.

  Although we were nervous about Portugal getting involved in the war, we weren’t lacking in optimism. It was firmly believed that the British – our main trading partners – would never allow Porto to fall to the French.

  *

  In matters of the heart, I had become absolutely fascinated by a lass living on the Rua das Taipas. Maria Angelica was her name, and she was seventeen. I tend to hold Violeta responsible for instilling in me a liking for older girls with knowing eyes, and this young lady had the most stunning green eyes I had ever seen.

  She was fair of complexion, and yet her hair was so thick and black that in one of my secret love poems I rhapsodized that it was made of starless night. Her breasts were also of great interest to me, and I simply could not drag my covetous eyes away from them.

  In those days, we were expected to behave as proper gentlemen and ladies, so I dared not even speak to Maria Angelica, although I watched her from afar, utterly charmed by her delicate movements. To catch glimpses of her, I walked by her sitting-room window up to a dozen times a day. I would invent endless excuses for pausing a moment, such as fastening the buckles on my shoes or doing up the buttons on my breeches, until her neighbors, giggling with mirth, began to make loud kissing noises every time I approached.

  One afternoon I had the good fortune to pass beneath her window just as she was opening it. “Good day, sir,” she said, leaning out.

  Before we could expand upon this promising start to our relationship, however, her mother yanked her inside and slammed the shutters closed. Yet I remained undaunted in my passion. Which was why, when I first learned of my father’s impending trip with Midnight to London, on the night of our commemoration of Lord Nelson’s victory, I failed to insist on being invited along. They were to be gone for six weeks.

  “Am I to come?” I asked my father, desperately hoping that he would say no.

  “No, son, I am afraid not.”

  “Why are you going?”

  “Well, John, you may recall that one of Midnight’s reasons for coming with me to Europe was to try to find a cure for smallpox. A few years ago, I learned of a physician named Jenner, who has been working in London, and of his theories on the inoculative effect of cowpox. And so …”

  I must have looked confused, because he went on to explain, “John, all I know is that thousands of people have now been successfully inoculated against the disease. The good man provides this service to the poor free of charge – up to three hundred patients per day. So I wrote to the Royal Jennerian Society, requesting permission to witness the procedure, and they have graciously agreed.”

  “If this cure is a good one, then will Midnight return to Africa?”

  “Aye, he may, son. We shall only know after England.”

  The possibility of him leaving us filled me with dread. “In that case,” I said, “I should like to come with you.”

  “No, not this time, lad. You and I shall go to London one day soon,
but not now.”

  “But it would be good for me to – ”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I’m sorry, but it’s completely impossible.”

  *

  I didn’t bring up the subject again until the following afternoon, when I was walking with Midnight by the dry docks along the river.

  “Papa says that you will soon leave for England to find a cure for smallpox.”

  He patted my back. “Yes, John, I am very, very pleased. You cannot know what this means to me. So many of my people have died. So many Zulu and Xhosa too.”

  “If you find a proper medicine, will you leave for your homeland immediately?”

  “No, I shall return to carry out experiments with Benjamin. I must be able to repeat the procedure or it will be of no help at all. If all goes well, then I shall indeed return to Africa.”

  Seeing my sadness, he added, “I have an interesting proposition for you, however.”

  I frowned at him, because I wished him to feel terrible about leaving me alone.

  “Will you not even ask me what my proposition might be?” He winked. “I shall be cross with you if you don’t.”

  “No,” I barked, which made him laugh.

  “May you always ride between the toes of Eland,” he said.

  “And just what does that mean?”

  “May you always be you. And may you always go slowly.”

  “Why slowly?”

  “Because in the African desert one must always proceed with caution or risk stepping on something that might bite or sting.”

  He linked his arm in mine, which he had started to do ever since I had grown taller than him. “John, when I return to Africa, I should like you to come with me. That is my proposition.”

  “Me – in Africa?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes. I’d very much like you to stay with me for a time. We have birds there that are beautiful-beautiful, and they have been waiting for you to imitate them for many years. I should not like them to wait forever.”