Henderson the Rain King

  “Thank you, Mr. Henderson. I have understood how you feel.” After a quiet hesitation, he said, “Should I guess? Death is on your mind?”

  “It’s on my mind, all right.”

  “Oh yes, very much. You are exceptionally given to it.”

  “Over the years, I’ve gotten involved with it a lot.”

  “Exceptionally. Exceptionally,” he said as if he were discussing one of my problems with me. “Sometimes I think it is helpful to think of burial in a relation to the earth’s crust. What is the radius? Four thousand five hundred miles more or less, to the core of theearth. No, graves are not deep but insignificant, a mere few feet from the surface and not far from fearing and desiring. More or less the same fear, more or less the same desire for thousands of generations. Child, father, father, child doing the same. Fear the same. Desire the same. Upon the crust, beneath the crust, again and again and again. Well, Henderson, what are the generations for, please explain to me? Only to repeat fear and desire without a change? This cannot be what the thing is for, over and over and over. Any good man will try to break the cycle. There is no issue from that cycle for a man who do not take things into his hands.”

  “Oh, King, wait a minute. Once out of the light, it’s enough. Does it have to be four thousand five hundred miles to be the grave? How can you talk like that?” But I understood him all the same. All you hear from guys is desire, desire, desire, knocking its way out of the breast, and fear, striking and striking. Enough already! Time for a word of truth. Time for something notable to be heard. Otherwise, accelerating like a stone, you fall from life to death. Exactly like a stone, straight into deafness, and till the last repeating I want I want I want, then striking the earth and entering it forever! As a matter of fact, I thought, out in the African sun from which the hooked wall of thorn temporarily cooled me: it’s a pleasure when harsh objects like thorns do something for you. Under the black barbs that the bushes had crocheted above us, I thought it out and agreed: the grave was relatively shallow. You couldn’t go many miles inside before you found the molten part of the earth. Mainly nickel, I think—nickel, cobalt, pitchblende, or what they call the magma. Almost as it was torn from the sun.

  “Let us go,” he said. I followed him more willingly after that short talk. He could convince me of almost anything. For his sake I accepted the discipline of being like a lion. Yes, I thought, I believed I could change; I was willing to overcome my old self; yes, to do that a man had to adopt some new standard; he must even force himself into a part; maybe he must deceive himself a while, until it begins to take; his own hand paints again on that much-painted veil. I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt.

  I can’t be sure that I have reported accurately all the things the king said. I may have spoiled some of them a little so that I could assimilate them.

  Anyway, I followed him empty-handed toward the end of the hopo. Probably the lion had already wakened, for the beaters, about three miles away, had begun to make their noise. It sounded very distant, far out in the golden stripes of the bush. An air-blue, sleepy heat wavered in front of us, and while I squinted against the sprays and flashes of sunlight I saw a sudden elevation in the hopo wall. It was a thatched shelter which sat on a platform, twenty-five or thirty feet in the air. A ladder of vines hung down, and the king took hold of it eagerly, this crude, slack-looking thing. He began to climb it sailor fashion, from the side, pulling himself powerfully and steadily up to the platform. From the dry grass and brown fibers of the doorway he said, “Take hold, Mr. Henderson.” He had crouched to hold out the ladder to me and I saw his head, on which was the pleated, tooth-sewn hat, only slightly above his powerful knees. Illness, strangeness, and danger combined and ganged up on me. Instead of an answer, a sob came out of me. It must have been laid down early in my life, for it was stupendous and rose from me like a great sea bubble from the Atlantic floor.

  “What is the matter, Mr. Henderson?” Dahfu said.

  “God knows.”

  “Is something wrong with you?”

  I kept my head lowered as I shook it. The roaring I had done, I believe, had loosened my whole structure and liberated some things which belonged at the bottom. And this was no time to trouble the king, on his great day of joy.

  “I’m coming, Your Highness,” I said.

  “Take a moment’s breath if you need it.”

  He walked about on the platform under the elevated hut, then came back to the edge again. He looked down from that fragile dome of straw. “Now?” he said.

  “Will it bear our weight, up there?”

  “Come on, come on, Henderson,” he said.

  I took hold of the ladder and began climbing, placing both feet on each rung. The spearmen had stood and waited until I (the Sungo) joined the king. Now they passed under the ladder and took up a position around the corner of the hopo. Here, at the end, the construction was primitive but seemed thorough. A barred gate would be dropped to trap the lion after the other game had been driven through, and the men would prod the animal into position with their spears so that the king could effect the capture.

  On the fragile ladder, which wavered under my weight, I reached the platform and sat down on the floor of poles lashed together. It was like a heat-borne raft. I began to size up the situation. The whole setup was no deeper than a thimble when compared to the volume offered by a full-grown lion.

  “This is it?” I said to the king after I had studied the layout.

  “As you see it,” he said.

  Now on the platform stood this shell of straw, and from the opening on the interior side of the hopo I saw suspended a woven cage weighted with rocks at the bottom. It was bell-shaped and made of semi-rigid vines which were, however, as tough as cables. A vine rope passed through a pulley suspended from a pole which was attached at one end to the roof-tree of the hut and at the other was fixed into the side of the cliff, a width of ten or twelve feet. Below it ran another pole from the floor of the hut; it too was set in the rock at the other end. On this pole or catwalk, no wider than my wrist, if that wide, the king would balance himself with the rope and the bell-shaped net, and when the lion was driven in Dahfu would center the net and let it drop. Releasing his rope, he was supposed to capture the lion.

  “This… ?”

  “What do you think?” he said.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say much about it, but, hard as I fought my feelings, I couldn’t submerge them—not on this particular day, I was visibly struggling with them.

  He said, “I captured Atti here.”

  “Yes, with this same rig?”

  “And Gmilo captured Suffo.”

  I said, “Take the advice of a… I know that I’m not much… But I think the world of you, Your Highness. Don’t…”

  “Why, what is the matter with your chin, Mr. Henderson? It is moving up and down.”

  I brought my upper teeth down on my lip. By and by I said, “Your Highness, excuse it. I’d rather cut my throat than demoralize you on a day like this. But does the thing have to be done from up here?”

  “It must.”

  “Can’t there be an innovation? I’d do anything, drug the animal… give him a Mickey…”

  “Thank you, Henderson,” he said. I think his gentleness with me was more than I deserved. He didn’t remind me in so many words that he was king of the Wariri. I soon reminded myself of this fact. He allowed me to be present—his companion. I must not interfere.

  “Oh, Your Majesty,” I said.

  “Yes, Henderson, I know. You are a man of many qualities. I have observed,” he said.

  “I thought maybe I fitted into one of your bad types,” I said.

  At this he laughed somewhat. He was sitting cross-legged at the opening of the hut that faced the hopo and the cliff, and he began to enumerate, half musingly, “The agony, the appetite, the immune, the hollow, and all of that. No, I promise you, Henderson, that I have never classifi
ed you with a bad group. You are a compound. Maybe a large amount of agony. Maybe a small touch of the Lazarus. But I cannot fully subsume you. No rubric will fully hold you. Maybe because we are friends. One sees much more in a friend. Rubrics will not do with friends.”

  “I had a little too much business with a certain type of creature for my own good’ I said. “If I had it to do over again, it would be different.”

  We sat on the shaky platform under the gold straw belfry of thatch. The light was finely grated on the floor. We crouched, waiting under the fibers and straw. The odor of plants came up on the air-blue heat in gusts, and because of my fever I had a feeling that I had found, in midair, a changing point between matter and light. I was watching it being carried from within and thought I saw crying and writhing outside. Not able to stand this sense of things, I got up and stepped on the pole the king was supposed to balance on.

  “What are you doing?”

  I was trying it out for him. I said, “I am checking on the Bunam.”

  “You must not stand there, Henderson.”

  My weight was bowing the wood, but there was no crackling, it was a very hard wood and I was satisfied by the test. I lifted myself back to the platform and we sat together, or crouched, outside the grass wall of the shelter on a narrow projection of the floor, almost within reach of the weighted trap which hung waiting. Opposite us was the cliff of gritty rock, and, following the line of it beyond the end of the hopo, over the heads of the waiting spearmen, I saw a sort of small stone building deep in the ravine. I hadn’t noticed it before because in this ravine, or gorge, there was a small forest of cactuses which produced a red bud, or berry, or flower, and this partly blocked it from view.

  “Does somebody live there, below?”

  “No.”

  “Is it abandoned? Used? In our part of the country, where farming has gone to hell, you come across old houses everywhere. But that’s a crazy place for a residence,” I said.

  The rope by which the cage or net was slung had been tied to the doorpost, and the king’s head was resting against the knot. “It is not for living,” he told me without glancing toward the building.

  A tomb? I thought. Whose tomb?

  “I think they are driving rapidly. Ah! Do you think you can see them? It is getting loud.” He stood, and I did too, and shaded my eyes from the glare while I strained my forehead.

  “No, I don’t see.”

  “I neither, Henderson. This is the most hard part. I have waited all my life, and we are within the last hour.”

  “Well, Your Highness,” I said, “for you it should be easy. You have known these animals all your life. You are bred for this; you are a pro. If there’s anything I love to see, it’s a guy who’s good at his work. Whether it’s a rigger or steeple jack or window-washer or any person who has strong nerves and a skilled body… You had me worried when you started that skull dance, but after a minute of it I would have backed you to my last dime.” And I took out my wallet, which I kept taped to the inside of the helmet, and to make these moments easier for him, within the rising blare of the horns and the constant running of the drums (while we sat as if marooned in the illuminated air), I said, “Your Highness, did I ever show you these pictures of my wife and children?” I started to look for them in the bulky wallet. I had my passport there, and four one-thousand-dollar bills, taking no chances on traveler’s checks in Africa. “Here’s my wife. We spent a lot of money on a portrait and had difficulties all through. I begged her not to hang it and almost had a nervous breakdown over it. But this photograph of her is a beauty.” In it Lily wore a low-necked dress of polka dots. She looked very amused. It was toward me that she was smiling, for I was at the camera. She was saying affectionately that I was a fool; I probably had been clowning around. Owing to the smile her cheeks were high and full; in the picture you couldn’t tell how pure and pale her color was. The king took it from me, and I have to hand it to him that at a moment like this he could contemplate Lily’s picture.

  “She is a serious person,” he said.

  “Do you think she looks like a doctor’s wife?”

  “I think she looks like any serious person’s wife.”

  “But I guess she wouldn’t agree about your species idea, Your Highness, because she decided that I was the only fellow in the world she could marry. One God, one husband, I guess. Well, here are the kids.…”

  Without comment he looked at Ricey and Edward, little Alice in Switzerland, the twins. “They are not identical, Your Majesty, but they both cut their first tooth on the same day.” The next flap of celluloid held a snapshot of myself; I was in the red robe and hunting cap with the violin under my chin and an expression on my face which I had never noticed before. Quickly I turned to my Purple Heart citation.

  “Oh? That is so? You are Captain Henderson?”

  “I didn’t keep the commission. Maybe you’d like to see my scars, Your Highness. The thing happened with a land mine. I didn’t get the worst of it. I was thrown about twenty feet. Now here in the thigh you can’t see it so well, because it’s sunken and the hair has grown over and hidden it. The belly wound was the bad one. My insides started to fall out. I held in my guts and walked bent over to the dressing station.”

  “You are very pleased about your trouble, Henderson?”

  He would always say such things to me and introduce an unforeseen perspective. I have forgotten some of them, but he once asked my opinion about Descartes. “Do you agree with the fellow’s proposition that the animal is a soulless machine?” Or, “Do you think that Jesus Christ is still a source of human types, Henderson, as a model-force? I have often thought about my physical types, as the agony, the appetite, and the rest, to be possibly degenerate forms of great originals, as Socrates, Alexander, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus….” This, and the like, was his unforeseen way of conversation.

  He observed that I was peculiar about trouble and suffering. And, yes, Iknew what he was saying as we sat on those poles beside the lavish bristle of the thatch, this grotesque, dry, hairy, piercing vegetable skeleton. As he waited to achieve his heart’s desire, be was telling me that suffering was the closest thing to worship that I knew anything about. Believe me, I knew my man, and strange as he was I understood him. I was monstrously proud of my suffering. I thought there was nobody in the world that could suffer quite like me.

  But we could not speak quietly to each other any more, for the noise was too near. The sounds of cicadas had been going up in vertical spirals, like columns of thinnest shining wire. Now we could hear none of the minor sounds at all. The spearmen behind the hopo lifted up the barred gate to let through the creatures whom the beaters had flushed. For the grasses of the bush were beginning to quiver, as water will when a fish-filled net approaches the surface.

  “Look there,” said Dahfu. He pointed to the cliff side of the hopo, where deer with twisted horns were running; whether they were gazelles or elands I couldn’t say. A buck was in the lead. He had tall, twisted horns like smoked glass, and he leaped in terror with blasting breath and huge eyes. On one knee, Dahfu was watching the grass for signs, sighting across his forearm so that his nose was almost covered. The small animals were making currents in the grass. Flocks of birds went straight up, like masses of notes; they flew toward the cliffs and down into the ravine. The deer clattered beneath us. I looked below. Those were planks at the bottom. I hadn’t noticed that. They were raised six or eight inches from the ground, and the king said, “Yes. After the capture, Henderson, wheels are put under so the animal can be transported.” He stooped low to call instructions to the spearmen. When he bent, I wanted to hold on to him, but I had never touched his person. I wasn’t sure it would be right.

  After the buck and the three does, which squeezed through the narrow opening of the hopo with heart-bursting terror, came a crowd of small beasts; they rushed the opening like immigrants. More cautious, a hyena showed up, and, unlike the other creatures who didn’t know we were there, this creature sh
ot a look up at us on the platform and gave its shallow, batlike snarl. I looked for something to throw at it. But there was nothing with us on the platform to throw and I spat down instead.

  “Lion is there—lion, lion!” The king stood, pointing, and about a hundred yards away, I saw a slow stirring in the grass, not the throbbing of the smaller animals but a circular, heavy disturbance which a powerful body made.

  “Do you think that would be Gmilo? Hey, hey, hey—is he here? You can take him, King. I know you can.” I had risen on the narrow stand of floor projecting from beneath the grass wall, and I was thrusting and cranking my arm up and down as I spoke.

  “Henderson—do not,” he said.

  Nevertheless I took a step in his direction, and then he cried out at me; his face was angry. So I squatted down and shut my mouth. My blood was full of fever, as if it flowed open to the glare of the sun.

  The king then set foot on the slender pole and took two turns of the cage rope around his arm and began to release the knot against which he had rested his head during our wait. The cage, with its big irregular meshes of vine and the hooflike stone weights, swung from the more rigid part at the bottom. Except for the rocks the thing had almost no substance; it was as near to being air as a Portuguese man-of-war is to being water. The king had thrown off his hat; it would have got in his way; and about his tight-grown hair, which rose barely an eighth of an inch above his scalp, the blue of the atmosphere seemed to condense, as when you light a few sticks in the woods and about these black sticks the blue begins to wrinkle.

  The sunlight deformed my face with strain, for I was exposed to it as I hung over the end of the hopo like a gargoyle. The light was hard enough then to leave bruises. And still, in spite of the blasts of the beaters, the cicadas were drilling away, sending up those spirals of theirs. On the cliff side of the hopo the rock was showing its character. It muttered it would let nothing through. All things must wait for it. The small blossoms of the cactus in the ravine, if they were blossoms and not berries, foamed red, and the spines pierced me. Things seemed to speak to me. I inquired in silence about the safety of the king who had a crazy idea that he must capture lions. But I got no reply. This was not the purpose of their speech. They only declared themselves, each according to its law, declaring what it was; nothing at all referred to the king. So I crouched there, sick with heat and dread. My feeling about him had crowded aside everything else within me, which put some pressure on the neighboring organs.