Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  When they saw Elizabeth ride up their relief was apparent. They let down their rifles and waited for her to tell them what to do. She dismounted and stepped between the boys and the red dog.

  “Michael,” she said. “Wake up. Please wake up,” and it was enough for the red dog to let down his guard and for her to go to him.

  Chapter 30

  Help me,” she said to Aubuchon, and they filled the bath and the hot water with Epsom salts. They unbuttoned his shirt and, rolling him over, got it off him. They dragged off his woolen sleep pants and took off his stockings and lifted him into the tub. She knelt beside him and rubbed his hands and feet. She washed his shins and calves, his ankles and heels. She washed his arms and head; his back and torso; his abdomen, groin, and upper thighs. She washed from his skin the sourness and waste and the acrid smell of his sweat and illness.

  As they lifted him out and dried him and dressed him they could hear Mark singing, and then his brothers joined in: “. . . was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay.”

  He tried to talk and his mutterings were insensible and then he began shaking and could not speak for the chatter of his teeth.

  “I am right here with you,” she said.

  “Taking care,” he said.

  “I will take such good care of you,” she told him. “No harm shall come to you.”

  With the next fit he went under again. It was a very bad one. The buffalo were coming in countless numbers from a country under the ground. They poured from the cavelike opening and swarmed the land and he recognized them as the buffalo he’d killed and they were alive and in his dream he was the one who was dead and lost on the plain. Venomous reptiles coiled among the rocks, panicking the horse he rode, and paralyzed, he was falling to the ground into their midst. He was bitten again and again and each bite was a pinch and a shock of lightning-­like electricity. He could see the stream of poison entering the channels of his veins. Their smell was the sulfur of a fiery hell. There were children and the snakes were coiled around their arms and legs and striking with their fangs, and wherever they struck, the children turned black.

  In another, he crossed a broad and turbid river, the sand suspended in the water slowly filling his clothes. He was drowning and he was hunted by the beasts of darkness that lived beneath the water. Each time he made the effort to open his eyes and dissolve these dreams he would slip away into another one.

  He had seven thousand pounds of ivory to transport in tusk and teeth and had contracted with a slave hunter bound east. They were a coffle of slaves chained at the neck and being smuggled to the coast and behind them were their women and children, also shackled. The slaver led the way in a sedan chair carried by six of his captives, followed by those in chains, down a narrow bush path. The land was wet and there was rank jungle and deep black mud. They set to flight great flocks of ibis, dove, and pheasant. Michael and one of the armed guards hung back behind the rear guard and hunted the curious animals, the reedbuck and wildebeest, that stepped onto the path to see what had just passed.

  Suddenly a flock of green pigeons erupted through the loose hanging stems of creepers and into the air and through the treetops and there were so many everybody stopped to look skyward, the iron collars chafing at their necks. When they brought their gaze back to earth, a rhinoceros had emerged from the dripping leafy brush and presented himself beside the path in a profusion of magenta flowers.

  Their faces twisted. There was a sickening moment of fear and inevitability. The world stilled and went silent and then he could hear the bellowing in the grass and everyone understood death had arrived and it was then the rhinoceros charged. When he struck it was the center of the coffle. The man was impaled on the animal’s horns and on both sides of him, and one by one, in rapid order, the men’s necks were broken as the rhinoceros ran on a hundred yards through the chill grass, dragging the men with him by their necks before it finally stopped and shook free of the man impaled. To one side lay eleven dead men and to the other side lay twelve.

  Each day the fever was worse than the day before. Michael’s face burned and his throat was parched. He seemed to lurch from violent fever to delirious fever, his breath short and his chest hollow. He lay for many days burning with the malaria and Elizabeth applied wet cloths to his forehead to cool his brow. His eyes were wild and the surface of his body ran with rivulets of sweat so that his clothes and the bedding were soaked. She washed him and fanned him as he tossed and turned in the bed.

  She thought his heart must be laboring so heavily and wondered could it sustain the torment of such work. There were times she was afraid to touch him and other times she held him as tightly as she could to arrest the violence in his body. Elizabeth prayed over him, offering God whatever he would have: Please take this . . . and please take this . . . and please, God, make this the last fit of fever he must endure.

  When he finally awoke it was with the ache of the long days before. He half-­opened his eyes and sorted out where he was. He was alive and he lay listless and apathetic in her bed, covered with blankets. The embers in their chamber threw a dull red light across the rug. It shined on the even backs of books. She was sitting in a canvas chair beside the bed. He could see her shoulder, neck, and abundant black hair piled high on top of her head. She was stroking his hand. He thought to rise up on his elbows, but his legs and body seemed heavy as lead. He was too weak to move. He raised a hand and wiped a little moisture from his lips.

  “Good morning,” Elizabeth said, turning to him. Her eyes filled with tears. She had been so afraid, but now he was awake and breathing steadily. She touched his cheek and felt his forehead.

  Hers was a faraway voice he knew from his life. He stared as if in a dream. He wasn’t yet ready to break the stillness of his resting body. All was the quietness of early morning. She blew across her lifted teacup and then she spoke again.

  “I am glad to see you,” she said.

  The dogs rallied to their feet and put their forepaws onto the bed. They made whimpering sounds and stretched to nose him. His shirt was dry and open at the neck, his forearms bare. He reached out his hand to pet them and they licked it.

  “I hope you rested well,” she said. She wiped his forehead and upper lip. She wiped his chin and neck and she pulled his sleeves over his hands to keep them warm. His mouth was parched, his muscles cramped, and his stomach had shrunk. She asked to see his tongue.

  “Matthew and Mark found you on the plain,” she said. “The red dog wouldn’t let them get near you. I called to you and you stirred and the red dog relented. We thought we might have to shoot the old boy, but we didn’t.”

  He indicated he needed to go and she helped him to the chamber pot. His limbs ached with muscle pains that made him cry. She helped him back to bed, where he soon fell asleep. The tremor of his body passed into hers as she held him and she feared tonight he would again shiver with fever.

  He slept through the day and night and in the clear, amber light of the next morning he woke again. On a plate by the bed there were biscuits with jam. There was tea and a glass of brandy and water. There was his dose of quinine, fifty measured grains.

  He slipped free a hand and ate a biscuit. He ate a second one and then spoonfuls of jam. When he asked for a cigarette, Elizabeth rolled one and lit it. She held it to his lips until he took it himself and then she sat back in her chair.

  “Are you going to eat that last one?” he said.

  “You have it,” she said.

  She was relieved. He had an appetite. He would be all right.

  “I thought you were gone,” she said, and told him twice his heart stopped and she had to beat on his chest.

  “I must look like hell.”

  She reached out and turned up the lantern wick until it glowed. The oily smell of kerosene smoke drifted over them. She lifted the lantern by its bale and held it close to his face.

  “A picture of health,” she said, replacing the lantern in the center of the table. She brough
t a pail of warm water from the stove and began to sponge his face and neck.

  “Thank you for saving me,” he said, “but it wasn’t necessary.”

  “And why not?”

  “A gypsy told me how I would die.”

  “How?”

  “Not this way.”

  She helped him to a chair close by the fire, where he sat with his elbows on his knees while she changed the bedding and blankets. She then knelt by the stove and held her hands close to the open door. He looked down at her, the curve of her neck.

  “How was your foray?”

  “Very profitable,” he said. “The man named Dimitri lost a finger to a snapping turtle. Every one of them thought it very funny.”

  “How did it happen?”

  She made another cigarette and from the one still burning lit it and handed it to him.

  “One of them found the turtle and would eat it. He chopped off the head and when Dimitri picked it up it nipped off his finger.”

  “Your pain?” she said.

  “Tolerable. I was very ill for several days before coming over. It hides in the blood.”

  “We’ve got to build you up,” she said as she helped him off with his sweat-­stiffened shirt and into one that was clean. From the desktop she took the locket he always wore and draped it about his neck. However much she wanted to ask, she did not.

  “I will tell you,” he said, holding up the locket.

  “You needn’t tell me anything,” she said, and she turned away from him until she thought he was ready to speak.

  “It is my wife,” he said, and it was then he told her the tragedy of his life.

  THE IVORY BAZAAR WAS a market for the hunters from the interior, and there at a tavern, Michael had found men whose company he liked. They were English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish. They were travelers and they were older and thus far had survived their dangerous lives. They’d traveled to the interior in search of ivory and carried with them a certain unmistakable air of violence and self-­reliance. They boxed and gambled. They chewed garlic and smoked cigars to ward off yellow fever, malaria, dengue.

  He sought their advice, a factor who might deal with him fairly, an honest man who’d take possession of his goods and trade them in his own name. A man named Heinrich recommended the mercantile agent De Sousa, who carried on a considerable trade in ivory, gold dust, beeswax, and songbirds and several others affirmed his recommendation.

  The house of De Sousa had a long sloping roof, wide eaves, and a veranda across the front shaded by the joined canopy of fever trees. At some distance, low acacia thorn had been densely planted to provide a wall of security. Whether the man who greeted him was a slave or a servant he did not know. In that land there was little difference between the two. He asked for De Sousa and waited in the dark of the foyer, the slanted green jalousies admitting bars of tempered light. Eventually the man returned and he was shown through to the garden while he waited.

  When he first saw her she wore glasses tinted green, a broad-­brimmed straw hat, a pongee shirt pink in color, loose trousers of brown linen, and dust-­colored canvas shoes. On her hands she wore gloves made of lace. She was sitting in a canvas deck chair reading a book in the shade, her feet propped in the chair across from her. There was not a breath of wind.

  “Do, sir, be seated,” she said, her tone as if his arrival were expected.

  “I stand very well here,” he said.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she cried, standing up. “Please sit down.”

  She shaded her eyes as he crossed the garden and took the chair she offered.

  “Sir, will you be so good as to tell me your business?”

  “I am here to see De Sousa.”

  “I am Luisa, his daughter. Who are you?”

  “I am Michael Coughlin,” he said.

  “An American.”

  “Yes, but my papers are British.”

  “Lysander, the man who answered the door, he is a witch,” she said. “He claims to have killed many people with his art where he came from. He fled for fear of retribution and this is his sanctuary. He never leaves the villa.”

  Michael looked over his shoulder to see the man who answered the door passing in the shadows.

  “He seems a pleasant enough fellow,” he said, turning back to the woman.

  “He has the power to change himself into a crocodile and devour people.”

  “I may have lost some men and dogs to him,” Michael said, taking a second, more scrutinizing look when Lysander appeared with tea and crullers. The man was either handsome or ugly, he could not tell. His features were sharp and his eyes surrounded by scar tissue. One scar seemed to source from his forehead on one side and the other side from his jawline and the effect of his face seemed an illusion. His complexion was coal black and to look at him made one vaguely dizzy.

  “I do not recognize his people,” Michael said.

  “No one does. That is what I am telling you.”

  When she went to see what was keeping her father she left him sitting there with a memory of something rare and beautiful. When she returned it was on the arm of De Sousa, her father.

  He was a man short, slender, and pale, and though his face was soft and melancholy, he was a deliberate and self-­concentrated man. He seemed guarded and distant like many businessmen. He told Michael they’d be leaving in a year.

  “What will you do?” Michael asked.

  “I would rest from business and its cares.”

  “You will stay for dinner,” Luisa said.

  The dining room was long and cool and kept in shadow. It opened onto the garden where the sun was bright. Servants arrived with trays of food. They ate beneath red, white, and pink bougainvillea, the platters of roast chicken and vegetable kabobs. There were glasses of sherbet and lemonade, raisins, prunes, and nuts.

  Michael told De Sousa he’d been granted permission by the king of the Ndebele to shoot game anywhere in his kingdom. Thus far he’d taken 107 elephants and as many hippopotamuses, whose ivory was more dense than both elephant and walrus and highly prized for the making of dentures. He speculated on the number of royals and upper class whose mouths he’d filled with teeth and at this very moment were enjoying their mutton and beef.

  “I like this boy,” De Sousa said to his daughter. “He has something to him.”

  As the sun set an accident of light twinkled on the silver coffee service and the unlit candelabra. He’d been in her company from midday to twilight to setting sun and now full night. The glass of the sideboard glowed in gold and red. De Sousa had fallen asleep in his chair after agreeing to do business with him.

  “Take my hand,” Luisa said.

  “What is it?”

  “Whisper,” she said, touching a finger to her lips.

  “It’s dark.”

  “We will feel our way.”

  They walked through the garden. The vegetables, refreshed by a shower of rain, sprawled from their ordered rows and the several kinds of fruit trees bore an abundance of peaches and apricots. The air was strong perfume, exquisite and balmy. It was cooler, but not by much, and a breeze was coming out of the darkness before them. Fireflies flashed among the slender leaf blades of the bamboo.

  At path’s end, they passed through a silk curtain and were inside the aviary. Sweet songbirds filled the air, moustache birds and long-­tailed whydah finches. They were birds captured with birdlime spread on a branch twig where the bird might land, and these her father exported. This delicate work was done by slaves who’d been gathered on the coast awaiting transport.

  That night they traveled out to the lanes of the plantations on a two-­seated trolley lit with lanterns and running on a narrow track laid through the streets. The trolley was pushed by two boys and in no time they were flying down the rails. Soon they were outside the town and she held his hand as they rode through the dense groves of mangoes, baobab, banana, and palm trees. Through the branches they could see the flashing lig
hts of other couples making the circuit though the plantations.

  Whatever hesitancy there may have been between them melted away. Luisa told him of their life in Portugal, their houses in Lisbon, Sintra, and Nazaré where they raised jet-­black swine, seven hundred or more, and whose meat was flavored by eating the husks of grapes pressed for wine and left to dry in the sun, and there were dozens of bulls one, two, and three years old and still a few years away from being ready for the ring, their coats glossy in the sunlight, their legs thin, and their tails long. And there was a breeding stable where they raised gray Lusitanos whose lineage went back to the time Muslims invaded the peninsula.

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, EACH time he left for the interior, she’d say, I am coming with you, and they would ride to the river where they’d take their farewells. She’d wave to him after he crossed and he’d respond by lifting his hat. They were soon married and these were the brightest and happiest days of his life.

  Then one day he returned from the fly country to the west, bringing with him a nice lot of ivory, when he learned that Lysander in a fit of jealousy had murdered Luisa with an axe. When Lysander was finally coaxed from his hiding place, her father shot him dead with a horse pistol.

  And these were the darkest days of his life. He lived without hope or desire, without want of food or drink. He was as if stark and dead and come to an end.

  He told Elizabeth how after Luisa’s death he began a life of aimless wandering in the company of slavers, missionaries, merchants, hunters, and killers. He was filled with hatred and there was an infinite longing for what would never be again. His soul felt like a place cold and barren.

  He mounted a new hunt into the interior and returned to the bush and there he stayed for three years. All the while, rising inside him was vibrating aggression and a desire for vengeance. In moments he thought, What reality am I passing through? And for that time he was like a lunatic escaped from Bedlam, wounded and wandering and lashing out.