Henderson the Rain King

  The champion tipped Hummat back on his shoulder, and carried the mountain god twenty feet. Among the rest, he set him down on his base. Winded, the man now turned and looked back at Mummah, alone in the middle of the ring. She was even bigger than Hummat. Amid the applause the champion looked her over. And she awaited him. She was very obese, not to say hideous, this female power. They had made her very ponderous, and the strong man facing her seemed already daunted. Not that she forbade you to try. No, in spite of her hideousness she seemed pretty tolerant, even happy-go-lucky like most of the gods. However, she appeared to express confidence in her immovability. The crowd was egging him on, everyone standing; even Horko and his friends in their own box were on foot. His umbrella now threw a shadow of old rose, and in his tight red robe he held out his stout arm and pointed at Mummah with his thumb—that great, wooden, happy Mummah, whose knees gave a little under the weight of her breasts and belly so that she had to spread her fingers on her thighs for support. And, as gross women sometimes do, she had elegant, graceful hands. She awaited the man who would move her.

  “You can do her, guy,” I too shouted. I asked the king, “What is this fellow’s name?”

  “The strong man? Oh, that is Turombo.”

  “What’s the matter, doesn’t he think he can move her?”

  “Evidently he lacks confidence. Every year he can move Hummat, but not Mummah.”

  “Oh, he must be able to.”

  “Just the contrary, I fear,” said the king, in his curious, singsong, nasal, African English. His large, swelled lips were more red than was the case with others of his tribe. Consequently his mouth was more visible than mouths usually are. “This man, as you see, is powerful, and a good man, as I believe I overheard you to exclaim. But when he has moved Hummat, he is worn out, and this is annual. Do you see, Hummat has to be moved first, as otherwise he would not permit the clouds passage over the mountains.”

  Benevolent Mummah, her fat face shone to the sun with splendor. Her tresses of wood were like a stork’s nest and broadened upward—a homely, happy, stupid, patient figure, she invited Turombo or any other champion to try his strength.

  “You know what it is?” I said to the king.” It’s the memory of past defeats—past defeats, you can ask me about this problem of past defeats. Brother, I could really tell you. But that’s what got him. I just know it.”

  Turombo, a very short man for his girth and strength, really seemed to be bucking a whole lot of trouble. Those eyes of his, which had grown large and humid with strain when he took a grip on Hummat, now wore a duller light. He was prepared for failure and the motion of his eyes, rolling at us and at the crowd, showed it. This, I want to tell you, I hated to see. Anyway, he tipped his fez to the king with a gesture of dedication that already acknowledged defeat. He had no illusions about Mummah. Nevertheless, he was going to try. He gave his short beard a rub with his knuckles, walking toward her slowly and sizing her up with a view to doing business.

  Ambition must have played a very small role in Turombo’s life. Whereas in my breast there was a flow—no, that’s too limited—there opened up an estuary, a huge bay of hope and ambition. For here was my chance. I knew I could do this. Ye gods! I was shivering and cold. I simply knew that I could lift up Mummah, and I flowed, I burned to go out there and do it. Craving to show what was in me, burning like that bush I had set afire with my Austrian lighter for the Arnewi children. Stronger than Turombo I certainly was. And in the process of proving it, should my heart be ruptured, should the old sack split, okay, then let me die. I didn’t care any more. I had longed to do some good to the Arnewi when I arrived and saw their distress. Instead of accomplishing which, I had rashly brought down the full weight of my blind will and ambition upon those frogs. I arrived clothed in light, or thinking so, and I departed draped in shadow and darkness, humiliated, so that perhaps it would have been better to obey my first impulse on arrival, when the young woman burst into tears and I said to myself maybe I should cast away my gun and my fierceness and go into the wilderness until I was fit to meet humankind again. My longing to perform a benefit there, because I was so taken with the Arnewi, and especially old blind-eye Willatale, was sincere and intense, but it was not even a ripple on the desire I felt now in the royal box beside the semibarbarous king in his trousers and purple velvet hat. So inflamed was my wish to do something. For I saw something I could do. Let these Wariri whom so far (with the corpse in the night and all in all) I didn’t care for—let them be worse than the sons of Sodom and Gomorrah combined, I still couldn’t pass up this opportunity to do, and to distinguish myself. To work the right stitch into the design of my destiny before it was too late. So I was glad that Turombo was so meek. I thought he’d better be meek. Even before he had touched Mummah he had implicitly confessed he would never be able to budge her. And that was the way I wanted it. She was mine! And I wanted to say to the king, “I can do it. Let me in there.” However, these words found no utterance, for Turombo had already come upon the goddess from behind. He took a lifting stance, crouching, while he folded his thick arms about her belly. Then beside her hip there appeared his face. It was filled with effort, preparation for strain, fear and suffering, as if Mummah, toppling, might crush him beneath her weight. However, she now began to move in his embrace. The stork’s nest, her wooden tresses, tipped and swayed like a horizon at sea in rough weather when you stand in the bow of the ship. I put it like that as I felt this motion in my stomach. Turombo heaved from the base like a man trying to uproot an old tree. This was how he labored. But though he shook the old girl he couldn’t raise her base from the ground.

  The crowd razzed him as he acknowledged at last that this was beyond his strength. He simply couldn’t do it. And I rejoiced at the guy’s failure. Which is a hell of a thing to admit, but it happens to have been the case. “Good man,” I thought to myself. “You are strong but it so happens I am stronger. It’s not a personal matter at all. It’s only the fates—they willed it. As in the case of Itelo. This is a job for me. Yield, yield! Cede! Because here comes Henderson! Just let me get my hands on that Mummah, and by God … !”

  I said to Dahfu, “I’m real sorry he didn’t make it. It must be tough on him.”

  “Oh, it was foregone he could not,” said King Dahfu. “I was certain.”

  Then I began in deepest, grimmest earnest, as only I can be grim, “Your Majesty—” I was excited to the bursting point. I swelled, I was sick, and my blood circulated peculiarly through my body—it was turbid and ecstatic both. It prickled within my face, especially in the nose, as if it might begin to discharge itself there. And as though a crown of gas were burning from my head, so I was tormented. And I said, “Sir, sire, I mean … let me! I must.”

  If the king made any answer I couldn’t have heard it just then, because I saw only one face in this hot and dry air, off to my left and deaf to the raging cries made by the crowd against Turombo. A face concentrated exclusively upon me, so that it was detached from all the world. This was the face of the examiner, the guy I had dealt with last night, the man Dahfu called the Bunam. That face! A stare of wrinkled and everlasting human experience was formed on it. I could feel myself how charged those veins of his must be. Ah, holy God! The guy was speaking to me, inexorable. By the furrows of his face and the pressure of his brows and the fullness of his veins he was conveying a message to me. And what he was saying I knew. I heard it. The silent speech of the world to which my most secret soul listened continually now came to me with spectacular clarity. Within—within I heard. Oh, what I heard! The first stern word was Dummy! I was greatly shaken by this. And yet there was something there. It was true. And I was obliged, it was my bounden duty to hear. And nevertheless you are a man. Listen! Harken unto me, you shmohawk! You are blind. The footsteps were accidental and yet the destiny could be no other. So now do not soften, oh no, brother, intensify rather what you are. This is the one and only ticket—intensify. Should you be over-come, you slob, should you lie i
n your own fat blood senseless, unconscious of nature whose gift you have betrayed, the world will soon take back what the world unsuccessfully sent forth. Each peculiarity is only one impulse of a series from the very heart of things—that old heart of things. The purpose will appear at last though maybe not to you. The voice did not sink away. It just stopped. Just like that, it finished what it had to say.

  But I understood now why the corpse had been quartered with me. The Bunam was behind it. He sized me up right. He had wanted to see whether I was strong enough to move the idol. And I had met the ordeal. Damn! I had met it at all costs. When I gripped the dead man, his weight had felt to me like the weight of my own limbs fallen asleep and ponderous, but I had fought this revulsion and overcome it, I had lifted up the man. And here was the examiner’s grim, exalted, vein-full, knotted, silent face, announcing the results. I had passed. With highest marks. One hundred per cent.

  And I said, loudly, “This I must try.”

  “What is that?” said Dahfu.

  “Your Highness,” I said, “if it wouldn’t be regarded as interference by a foreigner, I think that I could move the statue—the goddess Mummah. I would genuinely like to be of service, as I have certain capacities which ought to be put to definite use. I want to tell you that I didn’t make out too well with the Arnewi, where I had a similar feeling. King, I had a great desire to do a disinterested and pure thing—to express my belief in something higher. Instead I landed in a lot of trouble. It’s only right that I should make a clean breast.”

  I was not in control of myself, and thus I wasn’t sure how clear my words might be, though my purpose in the comprehensive sense must have been very plain. On the king’s face I saw a very mingled look of curiosity and sympathy.

  “Do you not rush through the world too hard, Mr. Henderson?”

  “Oh, yes, King, I am very restless. But the fact of the matter is I just couldn’t continue as I was, where I was. Something had to be done. If I hadn’t come to Africa my only other choice would have been to stay in bed. Ideally—”

  “Yes, as to the ideal, I have the utmost fascination. What would it have been?”

  “Well, King, I can’t really say. It’s all a puzzle. There is some kind of service motivation which keeps on after me. I have always admired Doctor Wilfred Grenfell. You know I was just crazy for that man. I would have liked to go on errands of mercy. Not necessarily with a dog team. But that’s just a detail.”

  “Oh, I sensed,” he said, “I should rather say, I intuited some such tendency.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to talk about that afterward,” I said. “Right now I am asking what is the situation? Could I try my strength against Mummah? I don’t know what it is, but I just have a feeling that I could move her.”

  He said, “I am obliged to tell you, Mr. Henderson, there may be consequences.”

  I should have taken him up on this and asked him what he meant by that, but I trusted the guy and could not foresee any really bad consequences. But anyway, that burning, that craving, that flowing estuary—you see what I mean?—a powerful ambition had me and I was a goner. Moreover, the king smiled and thus half retracted his warning.

  “Do you really have conviction you can do it?” he said.

  “All I can say to you, King, is just let me at her. All I want to do is get my arms around her.”

  I was in no state to identify the subtleties of the king’s attitude. Now he had satisfied the requirements of his conscience, if any, and caught me, too. No man can do better than that, hey? But I had got caught up in the thing, and it had regard only to the unfinished business of years—I want, I want, and Lily, and the grun-tu-molani and the little colored kid brought home by my daughter from Danbury and the cat I had tried to destroy and the fate of Miss Lenox and the teeth and the fiddle and the frogs in the cistern and all the rest of it.

  However, the king had not yet given his consent.

  In his leopard mantle, walking with tense feet in a narrow-hipped gait, the Bunam came down from the box where he had been sitting with Horko. He was followed by the two wives with their large, shaved, delicate-looking heads and their gay short teeth. They were bigger than their husband and came along sauntering behind him and taking it easy.

  The examiner, or Bunam, stopped before the king and bowed. The women, too, bowed. Small signs passed between them and the king’s wives and concubines, or whatever their classification was, while the examiner addressed Dahfu. He pointed his index finger upward near his ear like a starter’s pistol, bending often and stiffly from the waist. He spoke rapidly but with regularity, and seemed to know his mind very well, and when he had finished he bowed his head again and bent his eyes on me sternly as before, with a world of significance. The veins in his forehead were very heavy.

  Dahfu turned to me in his gaudy hammock. In his fingers he still held the ribbons tied to the skull.

  “The view of the Bunam is that you have been expected. Also you came in time….”

  “Your Highness, as to that … who can say? If you think the omens are good, I’ll go along with you. Listen, Your Highness, I look like a bruiser, and I am gifted in strange ways, mostly physical; but also I am very sensitive. A while back you said something to me about envy and I must admit you kind of hurt my feelings. That’s like a poem I once read called, ‘Written in Prison.’ I can’t remember it all, but part of it goes, ‘I envy e’en the fly its gleams of joy, in the green woods’ and it ends, ‘The fly I envy settling in the sun On the green leaf and wish my goal was won.’ Now, King, you know as well as I do what goal I’m talking about. Now, Your Highness, I really do not wish to live by any law of decay. Just tell me, how long has the world got to be like this? Why should there be no hope for suffering? It so happens that I believe something can be done, and this is why I rushed out into the world as you have noted. All kinds of motives behind this. There’s my wife, Lily, and then there are the children—you must have quite a few of them yourself, so maybe you’ll understand how I feel….”

  I read sympathy in his face, and I wiped myself with my Wool-worth bandanna. My nose, independently, itched within, and seemingly there was nothing I could do for it.

  “Truly I regret if I wounded you,” he said.

  “Well, that’s all right. I’m a pretty good judge of men and you are a fine one. And from you I can take it. Besides, truth is truth. Confidentially, I have envied flies, too. All the more reason to crash out of prison. Right? If I had the mental constitution to live inside the nutshell and think myself the king of infinite space, that would be just fine. But that’s not how I am. King, I am a Becomer. Now you see your situation is different. You are a Be-er. I’ve just got to stop Becoming. Jesus Christ, when am I going to Be? I have waited a hell of a long time. I suppose I should be more patient, but for God’s sake, Your Highness, you’ve got to understand what it’s like with me. So I am asking you. You’ve got to let me out there. Why it is, I can’t say, but I feel called upon to do it, and this may be my main chance.” And I spoke to the examiner, who stood in his leopard mantle and cuffs, holding up the bone rod, and said, “Excuse me, sir.” I held out a few fingers to him and said, “I will be with you soon.” In the heat of my body and fever of mind I couldn’t speak with any restraint whatever and I said, “King, I’m going to give you the straight poop about myself, as straight as I can make it. Every man born has to carry his life to a certain depth—or else! Well, King, I’m beginning to see my depth. You wouldn’t expect me to back away now, would you?”

  He said, “No, Mr. Henderson. In sincerity, I would not.”

  “Well, this is just one of those moments,” I said.

  He lay there, having listened with a kind of soft and even musing appreciation. “Well, whatever may come of it, I do grant the permission. As far as I am concerned I do not see why not.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty. Thank you.”

  “Everybody is expectant.”

  I stood up at once and pulled my shirt over my head an
d hoisted up my chest broadly and passed my hands over it and over my face, and, with my shorts conforming awkwardly to my trunk, and feeling tall and huge, branded by the sun on the top of my head, I went down into the arena. I kneeled in front of the goddess—one knee. And I sized her up while drying my damp hands with dust and wiping them on my suntan pants. The yells of the Wariri, even the deep drums, came very lightly to my hearing. They occurred on a small, infinitely reduced scale, way out on the circumference of a great circle. The savagery and stridency of these Africans who mauled the gods and strung up the dead by their feet had nothing to do with the emotion of my heart. This was distinct and altogether separate, a thing unto itself. My heart desired only one great object. I had to put my arms about this huge Mummah and raise her up.

  As I came closer I saw how huge she was, how overspilling and formless. She had been oiled, and glittered before my eyes. On her surface walked flies. One of these little sphinxes of the air who sat on her lip was washing himself. How fast a threatened fly departs! The decision is instantaneous and there seems to be no inertia to overcome and there is no superfluity in the way flies take off. As I began, all the flies fled with a tearing noise into the heat. Never hesitating, I encircled Mummah with my arms. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I pressed my belly upon her and sank my knees somewhat. She smelled like a living old woman. Indeed, to me she was a living personality, not an idol. We met as challenged and challenger, but also as intimates. And with the close pleasure you experience in a dream or on one of those warm beneficial floating idle days when every desire is satisfied, I laid my cheek against her wooden bosom. I cranked down my knees and said to her, “Up you go, dearest. No use trying to make yourself heavier; if you weighed twice as much I’d lift you anyway.” The wood gave to my pressure and benevolent Mummah with her fixed smile yielded to me; I lifted her from the ground and carried her twenty feet to her new place among the other gods. The Wariri jumped up and down in the white stone of their stands, screaming, singing, raving, hugging themselves and one another and praising me.