Sacred Hunger

  Calley felt the beauty of the swaying leaves and the radiant sky and the surprised clouds. His soft mouth hung a little open as he settled into the rhythm of his walking and lowered his eyes to the scattering of pebble and shell fragment that marked the tide-line.

  Things could be found here, things of value. Calley had learned and memorized them: sea beans, polished and smooth after their long washing in the sea, odds and ends from wrecked ships, tiny white cone shells to make necklaces and the bigger, cunt-shaped ones that some of the women valued for good luck in childbirth.

  He made little whistling sounds to himself as he walked along, happy to be out here in the open where there was no danger. As the sun rose the sky took on a deeper blue but the marbling of cloud remained and there were bursts of light and falls of shadow across the surface of the water. The low waves broke and milled briefly in splinters of light and the suds frilled out and fizzed and shrank back, leaving gleaming levels of sand that confused Calley’s eyes when he looked along the shore. A company of pelicans, disturbed by his approach, flapped up awkwardly and headed out to sea, one behind the other, gliding on stiff wings. He walked steadily at first, keeping his gaze on the tide-line. But before long the jellyfish began to distract him. Dead and dying jellyfish lay here and there along the shore, stranded by the tide, their iridescent, bladder-like forms sometimes alone on the wet sand, sometimes entangled in seaweed. These lilac-tinted bubbles could deliver a lash-like sting, as Calley knew from painful experience: he had once tried to pick one up and ever since had harboured vindictive feelings towards them. Whenever he came to one now he stopped and pricked it with the point of his knife. As the gas was released the puffed-out sac collapsed with a comical squeak like a fart of farewell. Each time it happened Calley chuckled to himself and mocked the deflated jellyfish with squeaking sounds of his own.

  He looked up gleefully from this sport to see a fretting and worrying of waves round a dark shape at the water-line some distance ahead of him. He thought at first it might be a section of the trimmed hardwood timber sometimes washed up from cargo ships; but it was too short for that and too light—the water was lifting and moving it this way and that. Then he saw that it was the body of a negro, not fully grown. The sex he could not determine yet. As he drew nearer the movements of the body seemed like a sort of languid play. He saw now that it was a boy. Calley stopped and stood looking. It came to his mind that the sea was bringing this body to life.

  Calley knew there were spirits, he saw and heard them everywhere about him, they informed his dreams. In a shaft of awe below any power of words it seemed to him that this negro boy would presently crawl up out of the sea.

  Then he saw the staring eyes and the slight, helpless gestures of the hands and he knew the boy was dead.

  He went forward and drew the body out of the water and laid it higher up on the beach. The boy was perhaps ten or eleven years old and his body was whole—he had escaped sharks in the deep water and crabs in the shallows and the vultures that would have found him soon.

  He was emaciated; his cage of ribs was clearly visible beneath the skin, the collarbone like a halter on him. There was a brandmark on his chest, on the right side, above the nipple. The scar was red, still new.

  Calley fell now into a painful state of anxiety and indecision. He stood looking from the dead boy to the empty shore and sea and sky. He was absolutely alone with the responsibility of this discovery, nothing to guide or help him. He could leave the body where it was and walk on as if nothing had happened. He would never speak about it, no one would know. Would Deakin have done that? Deakin would not just walk away from the dead child. Deakin would take the body and show people…

  He stopped and picked up the boy in his arms. The body was ice-cold and Calley shivered slightly at the contact of this cold flesh against his own. He hoisted the slight form across his shoulders and resumed his way. Soon he became accustomed to his burden.

  He walked on steadily, his mind vacant, aware only of the washing sound of the waves, the growing warmth of the sun.

  Also abroad early was a young man called Sefadu, whom love had made restless. He had risen with the first light and paddled for two hours through the channels on the edge of the flooded saw-grass plain towards the dark line of a jungle island on the horizon. The water levels had begun to sink but he often hunted here for duck and quail and he knew the floodlands well. He had been born in the Bolilands of Sierra Leone, a region not much different, flooded in the rainy season and dry in winter. In the narrow, flat-bottomed canoe, which he had hollowed out himself from a single trunk, he could pass at a level of a few inches.

  The tall grass grew close and the minute teeth on the blades cut his arms and shoulders sometimes. But his purpose was fixed and the fire in his mind steady, so that he hardly noticed these wounds, or the indignant herons and spoonbill birds that flapped up with heavy wingbeats at his approach.

  He tied up the canoe at the edge of the hummock among pads of water-shield plants still cupping their catch of dew, and stepped into the green twilight of the trees. He had been here before and knew there was a wide sink-hole on this side, not far into the trees, a deep hollow in the rockbed which was the hummock’s foundation. Thrusting through the close-growing vegetation, beating before him with a stick to warn snakes, he came upon it. It was deep still, brimming with clear, dark water. A lacework of duckweed floated at the edges, but the centre held nothing save the glinting reflections of the foliage above it.

  Here among the trees there was no sound. Sefadu stood at the edge of the pool, looking across to the sharp outcrop that thrust like wrinkled knuckles through the peat mould on the other side. These creases of rock were what had brought him. He had remembered the dark interior of this hummock, the cracked limestone and the complicated roots of the trees edging the pool. It was a perfect place for ground pearls, the most coveted of all ornaments among the women. He wanted to make a necklace for Dinka, so she would know his love.

  He was three years younger than she, the youngest adult of the settlement, having been not yet ten years old when brought here—he had been a well-grown child and Thurso had thought him older. He was Temne-speaking like Tongman, but that was all they had in common, since Sefadu was not interested in dealing but in making things, and especially decorative things, though he made cutting tools and arrowheads also. He was tall and long-legged, rather narrow in build, with heavy-lidded eyes that gave his face a totally misleading expression of indolence.

  The pause had been for something in the nature of a strong wish addressed to the spirit of his maternal grandmother, who had been a great gleaner and finder. Now he moved carefully round to the far side of the pool and began his search. After he had been there some time a brief but heavy shower descended. He stood patiently where he was, waiting to resume, watching the bark of the trees darken with wet. The rain stopped abruptly and he immediately began searching again, with the drenched leaves dripping down on him and the slow ack-ack of the grateful tree frogs resounding through the hummock.

  It was an hour or so before he found the first pearls, caught among the exposed roots of a pond apple, four small opaque lumps, roseate and waxy, glistening softly among the dark root-hairs. There were two more in the soil below.

  He put them in the skin bag he wore round his neck and searched on without pausing. He felt neither hunger nor fatigue. By mid-afternoon his bag contained thirty-eight pearls, all roughly the same size.

  Enough to make a necklace.

  He set off back immediately, wanting to make the most of the light. Once again in the compound, he started work without pausing to eat or rest. His hut was also his workship and he had everything here that he needed: sailmaker’s needles, steel pins, chisels, all begged at various times from the people of the crew, some when he was still a child—he had always been clever at making things. Now he worked with application to pierce the pearls, the movements of his hands assured and delicate, his face set in a slight frown of concentratio
n, joy and anxiety contending within him.

  Somewhere not far away he could hear the voices of children. They were acting out the story of Wilson—he recognized the dialogue of the quarrel. Sefadu knew this story well; he had witnessed the execution of Wilson as a child and he had never forgotten it, the big man and his white, unbelieving face, the ragged volley of the muskets, fired by black men and white men together, all the men of the settlement. The voices of the unseen children carried to him, rapid, high-pitched, the actors scarcely distinguishable one from another, using words they knew by heart:

  “We here is two man one woman. You ken do matta mattickeayes or no? We got to share dis woman.”

  “I no share wit you, I wan” fuck dis woman for wife.”

  ” We go ask woman den. Womaneay take us share two husban’?”’

  ” Yes, sartin, I take you…”

  No excuse had been found for Wilson’s crime. He had waited in hiding and stabbed a man to death, a negro, over a quarrel about sharing a woman.

  Sefadu had not understood matters fully at the time. Those early days were clouded and confused with the terrors of the voyage and the hardships they had suffered on first landing. As a child, aboard the slaveship, he had seen death come in fearsome ways; he had heard people shrieking around him in the stinking darkness and he had joined in, screaming, not knowing whether it was fear of death or desire for release. But this public death that Wilson had suffered was not like any other he had seen. The white man had been brought out and tied up and slaughtered like an animal. He had not struggled, he had not believed it, he had walked among the people as if in a dream. Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.

  At ten, Sefadu had not been able to understand this because his idea of justice was more personal. It puzzled him still, twelve years later. Killing Wilson had been good for the settlement, it had shown the black people that their lives were valuable to the white people, but he could not see how that could be called justice. Delblanc, dead now himself, had been the great talker for Wilson’s death, just as he was talking for it again now, in piping tones, outside the hut:

  ‘Turn you arse about, I talkin” to you. What you name?”’

  ‘My name Wilsoon.”

  “Wilsooneay kill one man. How ken people live tagedder if dey do dat? How ken dey learn share woman if dey do dat? The worl” fall in pieces if dey do dat. So now we all go kill you, Wilsoon…”

  They had tied Wilson to a tree and discharged their muskets at close range into his body.

  Sefadu remembered how at that sudden explosion of sound great flocks of birds had risen from the marshes. For some moments their wings had filled the sky. Wilson had hung in his ropes all that day and the next for everyone to see…

  Sefadu paused to blow dust from the mouth of the tiny hole he was making. The little pile of pearls on his low bench was diminishing slowly. He sat cross-legged on the floor to work, in the light of the entrance. The image of Dinka came into his mind as he had seen her last, the shapely arms, the proud carriage of the head, the long, narrow eyes both languorous and mocking. On her lower lip, close to the join, there was a tender flush of blood, dark pink, as if at some previous time this lip had been turned a little more inward, into the protective softness of the mouth…

  Sullivan too was busy that afternoon. He was replacing a broken string in his fiddle. He would win Dinka by the power of music, and he desired the instrument of persuasion to be in best possible condition.

  Sullivan’s life from earliest childhood had been too hard for him to maintain much consistency of principle or opinion—that is for more sheltered folk—but he had retained a belief in music as an aid to love.

  He had been alerted to the need for swift action by his talk with Billy and Inchebe and his realization that both of them had a fancy for Dinka, in spite of being settled men with a good wife. He was by no means convinced that his praise for Sallian had done much to make them see the error of their ways. Indeed, he was rather afraid that his words had misfired and roused their suspicions, Inchebe’s particularly. Inchebe was a subtle and a guileful fellow; there was a good deal to fear from this quarter, Sullivan felt.

  Fortune had favoured him in the shape of a fresh-killed deer brought in by Hughes the day before.

  He had selected a length of gut from the carcass and had squeezed and nipped the blood and excrement out of it with utmost care, pulling it repeatedly between finger and thumb until it was as clean and sweet as he could make it. All night it had been soaking in a strong lye of wood ash. Now he had begun to peel away the softened film of skin lining the outside, a task requiring patience and devotion and lightness of touch, all of which qualities Sullivan brought to it and desired also to bring to Dinka. Meanwhile, as he worked his hopes rose, he whistled between his teeth a tune of his boyhood, ‘Katy Brannigan”.

  His plan was formed and he felt that it was a good one.

  He would tune his fiddle to the maximum tenderness it was capable of. He would wait for nightfall. After the evening meal, when things had settled down, he would make his way to Dinka’s hut, which fortunately was one of those on the edge of the settlement. Once there, he would sit outside her door and give her a tune or two. He would serenade her. He had chosen the tunes already: “Oh Hear Me” and “Rose of Ireland”. She would be moved by the beauty of it, she would take him in, he would be home and dry. Perhaps she would offer him, in the way of preliminary courtesy, a drop of grain beer.

  Dinka made an excellent grain beer…

  Of course, there would be something public in it, people round would be certain to hear him, they would come crowding out to see this prodigy of song. But Sullivan had never been averse to an audience. And Dinka would not mind her neighbours knowing she was desired by one of the main music-makers of the place. She would be pleased. It was, he sought for the word in his mind, homage. Sullivan knew women. Women liked homage the world over.

  He made a narrow loop at one end of the gut and passed a short toggle through it. The other end he tied to a corner post of his hut. He began to twist the gut, pausing often to run the twists higher with his fingers, increasing the tension. She was a beauty, taut and supple as any man could wish.

  As soon as he left the shore and began to strike inland, Calley stopped from time to time to gather pieces of pitchwood. These he laid on top of the dead child and then roped the body and the logs together so that the stack rose high above his shoulders. He was almost doubled under this weight when he reached the first huts of the settlement.

  The logs were deposited for safekeeping outside Tabakali’s hut. He knew she would not cheat him and he knew she was charitable with food. On her advice he carried the body to Paris’s sickroom; he was mightily relieved to be told there, by Paris himself, that he had done the right thing.

  The body lay there for the rest of the afternoon under a blanket to keep off the flies. It was quite unmarked and Paris could discover no certain cause of death.

  The boy had not died by drowning, there was no water in the lungs; he had been dead when thrown over the side.

  It seemed likely that a flux or fever had carried him off. Or the shock of captivity, Paris thought, remembering some of the deaths on board the Liverpool Merchant. Fixed melancholy, that had been Thurso’s phrase for it. But no children had died from this cause, none that he could remember, only adults. Children did not die of unhappiness, they were still too close to the dawn of life… The brandmark on the boy’s chest was an S and an L joined in the shape of a loop with one side curving and one straight. It could be the mark of any of a thousand merchants from a dozen nations. The only one that could be definitely excluded was his uncle. K for Kemp. A long way from Liverpool to this wrecked life. There came into his mind an old adage of the Guinea traders which Barton had let fall to him once—Barton could seldom resis
t a quote: Heaven is high and Europe far away…

  For some time he stood there, in the long, open-fronted hut where he kept his jars of herbs and his instruments and his few belongings, looking at the face of the dead boy. The faces of the dead resemble no living face, but Paris judged this boy to be about the age of his own son. Quite unexpectedly he felt the pricking of tears. Only by fortunate accident had Kenka been born to freedom and kind treatment.

  ..

  Several people had seen Calley with his burden and the news of the dead boy passed around. Almost everyone in the compound or the immediate surroundings came at some time during the afternoon to see the body. They stood for a while and discussed with one another where the boy might have come from and what people he belonged to. Most saw some resemblance to their own people. Kireku’s woman, Amansa, came with a funeral mat of palmetto leaf. The children stood in a ring and stared at the face whenever it was uncovered. Paris gave Kenka a task of special responsibility, much envied by the others: he was armed with a fly-whisk in the form of a stick with palm fibres fastened to it, and told to sit at the boy’s head and guard his face from flies. This he did with utmost diligence and gravity, resisting all attempts of other children to relieve him. It was to remain a day of high event in Kenka’s mind through all the years to come, coloured by the pride and importance of this task enjoined on him by his father.

  So the dead boy lay there while his grave was being dug by Calley and Bulum Iboti. Patterns of light and shade moved over him as the sun shifted lower, until finally it sank below the trees and he lay in shadow. They had decided to bury him in the common burial place, which was on a bluff at the edge of the pine ridge, overlooking a sizeable creek. Here were the mounded remains of an ancient settlement of the Indians, long abandoned. The ground had been raised to a dozen feet or more by an accumulation of earth and a heavy dust of shards and shell fragments, making it possible to dig graves deep enough to cheat the animals. Customs vary, and some of the dead were elsewhere. Some lay under the huts they had lived in; two had been exhumed and their bones placed in palm-leaf baskets. But most who had died in the years of the settlement were buried here and their graves marked by posts with an initial or abbreviated name burnt on. Stitched in their palmetto shrouds, Delblanc and Wilson had been laid to rest here, and the man Wilson had killed, and the child that Tabakali had lost. There was a post here too for Deakin; occasionally the wandering Calley came and sat beside it and remembered his friend.