by Daniel Mason
The villager who had spoken to them left the group and returned minutes later with an older boy, who climbed onto the horse of the first rider. They followed a trail that led out of the village and ran between the rice fields and the uncleared jungle. Behind them, the group of boys ran in gleeful pursuit, their bare feet pattering across the road. At the base of the slope, they turned away from the fields, following a rough clearing which skirted the forest. Soon they passed two men standing at the edge of the jungle. Naked to the waist, one of the men wore a poor imitation of a British helmet and held a rusty old rifle.
“A soldier,” Witherspoon joked. “I hope he didn’t get that from someone he shot.”
Edgar frowned. Fogg chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry. Defects from our factories in Calcutta have an astonishing way of finding their way into places where even our soldiers are afraid to travel.”
Dalton rode up with their guide. “Have they seen the tiger?” Fogg asked.
“Not today, but it was last seen near here. We should load our rifles. Drake, you too.”
“Oh, really, I don’t think …”
“We are going to need all the firepower possible if the beast rushes us. Now, where did all those little children go?”
“I don’t know, I saw them chasing a bird into the forest.”
“Good. Let’s not play Father Christmas here. The last thing we want is an entourage of noisy children.”
“Sorry, I didn’t think—”
Suddenly Witherspoon raised his hand. “Shhh!”
Dalton and Edgar looked at him. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. Something in the bushes at the far end of the clearing.”
“Come on, move carefully.” Dalton kicked at his horse. The party advanced slowly.
“There, now I see it!” This time it came from their guide. He raised his arm and pointed to thick bushes. The horses stopped. They were now less than twenty yards from the edge of the clearing.
Edgar felt his heart pound as he followed the man’s arm toward the forest. There was stillness, a slowing, and he gripped his gun and felt the tension of his finger against the trigger. At his side Witherspoon raised his rifle.
They waited. The bushes trembled.
“Blast it, I can’t see a thing. It could be anywhere in there.”
“Don’t fire unless you know it is the tiger. You took enough chances in the forest with that monkey. We have one chance, and we all need to fire at once.”
“It’s there, Captain.”
“Easy now.”
“Damn it, get your rifles ready. It’s moving again.” Witherspoon cocked his rifle and peered through the sights. There was movement in the bushes, slinking steadily, the shaking growing stronger. “It’s coming. Get your rifles up.”
“All right, rifles up. Mr. Drake, you too. We only have one shot at this. Fogg?”
“Locked and loaded. You call the shot, Captain.”
Edgar felt cold sweat break out over his body. His arms were shaking. He could barely raise the rifle stock to his shoulder.
Above them, a vulture flew, looking down on the scene, a group of eight men, five horses, standing in the dry grass of the clearing, hedged on either side by dense jungle that stretched out over the hills. Behind, in the rice fields, a group of women was advancing toward them, walking faster, now running.
Edgar’s horse stood in the back of the group, and so he saw the women first. They seemed to be shouting. He turned and yelled, “Captain!”
“Quiet, Drake, it’s coming.”
“Captain, wait.”
“Shut up, Drake,” Witherspoon snarled, not dropping his eyes from the sights.
But then they heard the shouts too, and Dalton turned. “What is going on?”
The Burman said something. Edgar turned back to look at the bushes. They were shaking more strongly. He could hear the crash of feet in the underbrush.
The women were screaming.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Someone shut them up. They are going to scare it away.”
“Witherspoon, drop your rifle.”
“Don’t ruin this, Dalton.”
“Witherspoon, I told you, drop the rifle. Something is wrong.”
The women were closer. Their cries rose up above the men’s voices.
“Damn! Someone get them to shut up. Fogg, do something!”
Edgar could see Witherspoon stare down his rifle. Fogg, who had been silent until now, swung around on his horse and faced the women. “Halt!” he yelled. The women kept running, crying, lifting the edge of their hta mains as they came.
“Halt! Damn you!”
All was a blur, the running, the shouts, the incessant sun.
Edgar whirled to look back at the forest.
“There it is!” Fogg yelled.
“Captain! Drop your weapon!” Dalton shouted, and kicked his horse toward Witherspoon, who tightened his grip on his rifle and fired.
The rest remains frozen, a sun-washed memory, a slanting. There are cries and screams, but it is the slanting that will haunt Edgar Drake most, the impossible angle of grief, mother to child, the arms outstretched, reaching, pulling at those who try to restrain. A slanting he has never seen, but still recognizes, from pietàs, Greek urns with tiny figures wailing oi moi.
He stands and watches for a long time, but it will be days before the horror of what happened comes to him, slamming into his chest, entering him as if he is suddenly possessed. It will happen at an officers’ function at the Administrator’s residence, when he will see a servant girl walk by, carrying her child on her hip. Then it will come, he will feel himself drowning, choking, mumbling half excuses to puzzled officers who ask him if he is feeling well, and he, Yes, don’t worry, I am just a little faint, that’s all, and now stumbling, outside and down the steps, into the garden, where he will fall vomiting into the roses, tears welling up behind his eyes, and he will begin to cry, sobbing, shaking, a grief beyond all proportion, so that later he will think back and wonder for what else he mourned.
But in that moment, in the stillness of the day, as he stands before the scene, he doesn’t move. The boy, the mother, the quiet hush of branches, swayed by a sweet wind that swept over the stillness and the screams. They stand, he and the other pale men. They watch the scene below them, the mother shaking the little body, kissing it, running her bloodied hands over his face, over her face, wailing in an unearthly tone which is both so foreign and so familiar. Until at his side there is a rustling, flashes of other women who rush in, falling by the mother, pulling her back from the boy. Her body tenses forward, against gravity, a canceling of forces. A man at his side, his face washed out in the sun, takes a step backward, staggers briefly, balancing himself against the ground with the butt of his rifle.
That night he awakes many times, disoriented. It will be two days before he collapses in the rose garden, but he feels already that a tear has begun, irreparable, like bits of paint lost as dust to the wind in the ripping of a canvas. It has changed everything, he thinks, This is not part of my plan, my contract, my commission. He remembers writing to Katherine when he first reached Burma that he couldn’t believe he had arrived, that he was really away. A letter that now probably sits on a mail train speeding toward home. And I alone in Rangoon.
8
Two days later, Edgar received a message from the War Office. They had secured an extra berth on a teak ship with the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. The boat would depart from the docks at Prome in two days. He would leave for Prome on the train; the trip to Mandalay would take seven days.
In his four days in Rangoon, he had hardly unpacked. Since the hunt, he had stayed in his room, leaving only when called upon by various officials, or occasionally to wander the streets. The bureaucracy of the colonial operation astounded him. Following the shooting, he had been subpoenaed to sign testimonies at the Departments of Civil and Criminal Justice, the Police Office, the Department for Village Administration, the Medical
Department, even the Department of Forests (because, as the subpoena stated, “the accident occurred in the act of wild game control”). At first he was surprised that the event was even reported. He knew that if all the men had agreed, it could easily have been covered up; the villagers would never have found a way to complain, and even if they did, it was unlikely that they would have been believed, and even if they had been, it was unlikely that the officers would be disciplined.
Yet everyone, including Witherspoon, insisted on reporting the incident. Witherspoon accepted a minor fine, to be distributed to the victim’s family, along with army funds set aside for such compensation. It all seems remarkably civil, Edgar wrote to Katherine, Perhaps this is evidence of the positive influence of British institutions, despite the occasional aberrance of hasty British soldiers. Or perhaps, he wrote a day later, after signing his seventh testimony, this is all merely a salve, a tried and effective method of dealing with such terror, to absolve something deeper, The afternoon is already blurring behind the screen of bureaucracy.
Witherspoon and Fogg left for Pegu as soon as the paperwork was completed, arriving on time to relieve a pair of officers who were returning to Calcutta with their regiments. Edgar didn’t say good-bye. Although he had wanted to place the blame for the incident on Witherspoon, he couldn’t. For if Witherspoon had been hasty, he had only been two seconds hastier than the rest of them, all of whom shared the bloodlust of the hunt. Yet each time Edgar saw him after the accident, whether at meals or in government offices, he couldn’t suppress the memory of the rifle raised against the heavy jowl, the beads of sweat running down the back of the sunburnt neck.
As he had avoided Witherspoon, Edgar avoided Captain Dalton as well. On the night before his departure, a messenger brought an invitation from Dalton, once again inviting him to the Pegu Club. He declined politely, excusing himself as too tired. In truth, he wanted to see Dalton, to thank him for his hospitality, to tell him that he held no anger toward him. Yet the thought of reliving the incident terrified him, and he felt that all that he shared with the Captain now was that moment of horror, and to see him would be to relive it. So he refused the invitation, and the Captain didn’t call again, and although Edgar told himself that he could always visit the Captain when he came back through Rangoon, he knew that he wouldn’t.
On the morning of his departure, he was met at his door by a carriage, which took him to the railway station, where he boarded a train for Prome. While the train was being loaded, he stared out over the bustling of the platform. Down below he saw a group of small boys kicking a coconut husk. His fingers reflexively fingered a single coin that he held in his pocket, that he had kept since the hunt: a symbol of responsibility, of misplaced munificence, a reminder of mistakes, and so a talisman.
In the chaos of mourning, when all had left, carrying the boy, Edgar had seen the coin lying on the ground, tipped in the dusty imprint of the boy’s body. He had assumed that it had been overlooked, and he picked it up simply because it was the boy’s and it didn’t seem right for it to be lost at the edge of the forest. He didn’t know that this was a mistake, that it had been neither forgotten nor missed: in the sunlight it glinted like gold, and every child eyed it and wanted it. But what the children knew, and he didn’t understand, he could have learned from any porter who loaded crates onto the train below. The most powerful talismans, they would have told him, are those that are inherited, and with such talismans, the fortune is inherited as well.
In Prome he was met by the staff of a district army officer, who took him to the docks. There he boarded a small steamer of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, whose engines had already begun to turn by the time he boarded. He was shown to his berth, with a view of the left bank of the river. It was small but clean, and his apprehension about the trip was assuaged. As he unpacked, he felt the steamer push away from the shore, and he walked to the window to watch the banks disappear. Still thinking of the tiger hunt, he had noticed little in Prome, only some crumbling ruins and a bustling market by the port. Now, on the river, he felt a lightening, a separation from the hot, crowded streets of Rangoon, of the delta, from the boy’s death. He climbed to the deck. There were several other passengers, some soldiers, an older couple from Italy who told him they had come sightseeing. All new faces, none of whom knew of the accident, and he vowed to put the experience behind him and leave it on the muddy banks.
There was little to the view from the center of the river, so he joined the soldiers in a game of cards. At first he had been hesitant to meet them, remembering the haughtiness of many of the officers he had met on the ship from Marseilles. But these were enlisted men, and when they saw he was alone, they invited him to play, and in exchange, he entertained them with news about the football leagues; even month-old news was fresh in Burma. He knew little about the sport, really, but he had tuned the piano of a London club owner and been given free tickets to some matches. On Katherine’s suggestion, before he had left, he had memorized some scores to, in her words, “facilitate conversation and meeting people.” He reveled in the attention, and in the soldiers’ enthusiasm for the news. They drank gin together and laughed and proclaimed Edgar Drake a fine chap, and he thought how happy these young men were, And yet they too must have seen terror, but here are content with stories of two-month-old football matches. And he drank more gin, laced with tonic water, which the soldiers joked was “prescribed by the doctor,” for the quinine in the tonic fought the ague.
That night he had his first good sleep in days, heavy and dreamless, and he awoke long after the sun had risen with a heavy headache from the gin. The banks were still distant, with little relief from the wooded shore other than scattered pagodas. And so he joined another card game, and treated the soldiers to several more rounds of gin.
They drank and played for three days, and when he had repeated the football scores so many times that even the drunkest soldier could recite them, he sat back and listened to them tell stories of Burma. One of the soldiers had been at the battle for Minhla Fort during the Third War, and he recounted the advance through the mist and the fierce resistance of the Burmese. Another had served on a mission in the Shan States in the territory of the warlord Twet Nga Lu and he told his story, and to this Edgar listened carefully for he had heard the name of the brigand many times. And he asked the soldier, Have you ever seen Twet Nga Lu? He hadn’t, they had marched days through the jungle and everywhere found evidence they were being followed, dead fires, shapes shifting in the trees. But they were never attacked, and returned with neither defeat nor conquest; land claimed without witnesses is never land truly claimed.
Edgar asked the soldier more questions, Had anyone ever seen Twet Nga Lu? How far did his territory extend? Were rumors of his ferocity true? To these the soldier answered that the warlord remained elusive, and sent only messengers, and that few had ever seen him, not even Mr. Scott, the political administrator to the Shan States, whose success at forming friendships with tribes such as the Kachins was legendary. And yes, rumors of his ferocity were true, the soldier had seen with his very own eyes men crucified on mountaintops, nailed side by side to rows of timber X’s. As to the extent of his territory, no one knew. There were reports that he had been driven deep into the hills, beaten back by the sawbwa of Mongnai, whose throne he had usurped. But many felt this loss of territory was insignificant; he was so feared for his supernatural powers, for his tattoos and charms, for the talismans he wore beneath his skin.
Finally, when the bottle of gin drew near empty, the soldier stopped speaking and asked why the good man wanted to know so much about Twet Nga Lu. The heady feeling of camaraderie and acceptance overrode concerns of confidentiality, and Edgar told them that he had come to tune the piano of a certain Surgeon-Major named Carroll.
At the sound of the Doctor’s name, the other men, who had been playing cards, stopped and stared at the piano tuner.
“Carroll?” shouted one in a rough Scottish accent. “Bloody hell, did I jus
t hear the name Carroll?”
“Yes, why?” asked Edgar, surprised by the outburst.
“Why?” the Scotsman laughed, and turned to his comrades. “You hear this, we have been on this boat for three bloody days, begging this chap for football scores, and today he tells us he is friends with the Doctor himself.” They all laughed and exchanged a clinking of glasses.
“Well, not a friend, well, … yet … ,” corrected Edgar. “But I don’t understand. Why all the excitement? Do you know him?”
“Know him?” guffawed the soldier. “The man is as legendary as Twet Nga Lu. Hell, the man’s as legendary as the Queen.” More clinking of glasses, more gin.
“Really?” asked Edgar, leaning forward. “I didn’t think he was so … notorious. Maybe some of the officers knew of him, but I perceive many of them aren’t so fond of him.”
“Because he is so bloody competent compared to them. A true Man of Action. Of course they don’t like him.” Laughter.
“But you like him.”
“Like him? Any soldier who has had to serve in the Shan States loves the bastard. If it wasn’t for Carroll, I would be stuck in some stink of a jungle covered in mud and fighting a bloodthirsty band of Shan. God knows how he does it, but he has saved my pale arse, I’m certain of that. If we have a full-scale war in the Shan States, each one of us will be strung up within days.”
Another soldier raised a glass. “To Carroll. Damn his poetry, damn his stethoscope, but God bless the bloody bastard, because he saved me for my dear mum!” The men roared.
Edgar could hardly believe what he was hearing. “God bless the bastard,” he cried, and raised his glass, and when they had drunk, and then drunk again, the stories began.