The Laboratory of Love, page 13
Bury or boil?
Mitch lowers a test bucket of shells into bubbling water. “Quicker this way,” he hazards, leaning back from an overpowering stench as steam rises from the pot. On the surface black scum gathers, thickens, obscures what’s happening to the shells below. “Maybe we should have done this outside,” my father grimaces, wrinkling his nose. Suddenly he grabs his stomach, lurches out the kitchen door. Lily turns off the stove. We find our father kneeling on the grass, near his portulaca patch. Heaving, gasping, panting. Unable to breathe an alien element.
We allow the house to air out all morning before venturing back inside. Then Lily reaches through a crust of scum. Are the shells she removes the ones Mitch dropped into boiling water? Can inner death alter outer appearance so completely, so quickly? Reduce lustrous beauty into its plain, dull opposite? Effect a change more permanent than, for example, all the fleeting transformations of Gary Cooper, MJ’s chameleon, before his disappearance? The kitchen whispers about forbidden treasure whose tempting glitter tarnishes at the lightest touch. Lily shakes an emptied shell to determine whether it’s lighter without its secret. She holds it to one ear, reveals her crooked teeth. The smile fades. A pearl leaks from some deep chamber of shell, slides down my sister’s neck, hangs there. She touches a finger to the viscous drop, lifts it to her mouth, licks lips.
“Look,” says MJ.
A small crowd has formed at the end of the yard, where it meets the mission road. Village children and church beggars and the cassava women whose baskets appear to brim with large white maggots. They look expectantly at our house, murmur unease across the yard. The crowd gets bigger, louder. As if steam has shaped a lingering signal visible only to African eyes. Approach, it invites. Come and see. At the same time, the perfumed air might be warning: Not too close. “Everything’s a movie in Morogoro,” Mitch says lightly, when our restless audience still hovers outside in the dark.
My father plays the Peggy Lee records in his room that night. Her voice slinks out the window, seduces the crowd beyond to disperse, teasingly instructs Mitch what to do. By morning, he has learned that burying is slower than boiling, but less malodorous. What’s in the earth will devour what’s in the shells without diminishing the latter’s beauty, he hopefully adds.
How deep is deep enough?
Not having all the answers will always throw Mitch off. “What do you think, gang?” he asks, hesitating with the shovel. If the hole is too shallow, it might not allow access to the deep life-forms that can devour the essence of a shell. Worms thick as pythons, I imagine, which with one flick of fangs extricate every meaty morsel from the most withholding mollusc. Maybe wild dogs would detect a subterranean stench, be attracted to something rotting below, want to dig it up at night. Not for eating but to carry off and scatter like fragments of gleaming skull through the brush. Or it would be hyenas that skulked out from the dark and danced atop an aromatic grave that would be laughingly exhumed by dawn. Yet shells buried too deep might be destroyed, crushed by the weight of too much dirt, dissolved by too much darkness. At lunch Mitch slips home from teaching to inspect the patch of earth that holds our secret at the far end of the garden. He stamps already hard-packed ground as though to keep what’s down from forcing itself up; to discourage any unwanted element from breaking surface, bursting through. Maybe my father recalls old country spells shared by his dusky Regina aunts, incantations originally uttered by women in black around smoky village fires. He sprinkles a ring of lime around the spot, sets a stone in the centre, adds ash on top.
At midnight Lily shakes my shoulder, whispers so MJ won’t wake.
“He’s out there again.”
My sister and I kneel before the bedroom window, squint through the screen at a flashlight prowling the darkness beyond the lemon tree. “What is he looking for?” I dreamily wonder, as though the purpose of my father’s investigation of the night were to invoke a question whose answer would illuminate not only this dark moment but also the meaning of the whole obscure search that MJ, Lily, and I have been taken on against our will. I must fall asleep with my head on the window sill. In the morning, the texture of the bedroom floor patterns my stiff knees. A temporary tattoo. Intricate as one decorating the Carnelian cowrie, say.
MJ notices that the sugar man doesn’t come by anymore, though we’re always good for a shilling of his cane. All the Africans who habitually took a shortcut across our yard appear to give it wide berth now. My father’s classes become sparsely attended when they were notably popular before; even the Dutch nuns, whose pink faces poke concern through the doorway while he’s teaching at the mission, prove conspicuously aloof. “I’d almost welcome a couple of damn Brits at the door,” Mitch mentions one quiet evening. Perhaps the atmosphere around us remains subtly fragranced by warning of dangers contained within this sphere. Say we’ve grown too accustomed to the scent to detect it. Maybe it clings to our clothes, skin, hair. Strong soap won’t be able to decontaminate us of longing; no amount of fresh air will eliminate need’s last rank trace. Still one more invisible, permanent brand.
“A week,” my father guesses when we ask how long it will take the earth to clean out the shells. For the first time I am attuned to how desperately the famished globe beneath me starves; it would gobble up the most unappetizing nourishment. Any carcass, carrion, corpse. In sleep, sounds of chewing, slurping, munching rise around me. They’re muffled, almost inaudible; they’re insistent. My dreaming stomach groans with phantom hunger. I salivate with sympathy in sleep.
Lily salvages the shells robbed of beauty by boiling. She strings the smallest of them into a dozen bracelets to adorn her thin wrists all at once. Every swivel makes them click like teeth. A larger, sharp-spiked specimen dangles around my sister’s neck. Her jewellery resembles the ceremonial kind that is assumed after completing a tribal initiation or test of courage or rite of passage. Some shells are carried around like good luck charms in Lily’s pockets, others placed in significant locations. The bowl Ginger ate from before he ran away to join the pack of wild dogs. The nook of the mango tree where we left never-collected letters to Sister Bridget until it became her turn to disappear. At the spot where we found Gary Cooper, at the spot our chameleon was last seen. Five years have been enough to ensure that this geography will always be defined by the associations to loss with which it swarms.
As the date for Ardis to arrive draws near, our father’s eagerness for the event wanes. A flashlight no longer plays through the darkness where shells are buried; he doesn’t dash to the site at noon. “She can take them back as souvenirs,” he offhandedly mentions once, acknowledging that our gift may be insufficient to induce Ardis to stay. More and more, my father looks resigned to failure; inspiration has let him down again. At this point, climbing up into the jungle in search of the rarest butterfly would be too little, too late. To enchant Ardis into sharing the spell in which we are uneasily sunk will require some far more potent totem. A rhinoceros tusk, the claw of an Arusha lion, a shrunken human head.
We unearth the shells a day before Ardis arrives. They need to be cleaned of dirt, then polished. Mitch inches shovel into ground, tosses the tool aside, burrows with bare hands to prevent the metal blade from inflicting damage. The hole reaches the depth at which the shells were buried without revealing them. Mitch digs deeper. MJ, Lily and I look down into yawning darkness. Not one sliver, not a shard of shell. Rising breaths of cold make me shiver in the burning afternoon. My eyes lift from what isn’t below, detect movement beyond the frangipani’s gaudy screen. Dark stirring transforms into a trio of village children. Our witnesses scamper away.
As if it were an open, obscene grave, we turn hastily from the hole. Inside, the house appears all at once derelict for reasons related less to Rogacion’s recent neglect than to long abandonment by the life it once contained. Floors waxed dark red have dulled the colour of dried blood; a company of army ants feeds from dirty dishes; cocoons and webs have sprouted in the corners. Mitch makes a half-hearted stab at marshalling his troops to swing into Operation Clean-Up. It’s hardly worth the effort. Accustomed to an antiseptically clean, painfully neat clinic, Ardis would be unimpressed at being brought even to a spic-and-span house from the Dar airport tomorrow. Mitch swipes his rag at dust like he’s swatting away a persistent ghost. MJ retreats to bed with what he says is another headache. Through the bedroom window, I glimpse Lily slipping toward our father’s overgrown garden. The contents of her arms are indistinct in failing light; then my sister herself is blurred by distance, finally buried beneath black.
“I knew it,” says Lily, when our mother is not among the passengers of what was supposed to be her flight. Without a magic magnet, minus shiny, seductive gifts, we lack the power to pull her to us. Mitch is subdued during most of the drive back home. “We’ll get a letter that explains everything,” he says, without conviction. By the time we near Morogoro, my father has bucked up enough to start laying out a new plan. A sojourn at the Mombasa shore will be just the ticket to make us all A-okay again. When the Peugeot pulls into the driveway, Rogacion is hanging laundry on the line. My father walks past the houseboy and through our cleaned house. His bedroom door doesn’t open when, several minutes later, I knock to announce news. In our absence, the hole at the end of the garden has been filled in, smoothed over, made to vanish.
A letter must have arrived to explain Ardis’s failure to do so; that memory must have seeped from me to linger in the Morogoro air like a signal visible only to some cassava woman’s keen eye. Everything valuable hides. Although the sugar man begins to show up at our door each day again, and the path across the yard becomes redefined by all the feet to cut across it, and Mitch’s classes teem as before with students attracted to his eccentric take on history—even then the air around us remains somehow offended by what we have done: how we tried to fulfill our need at this landscape’s expense. It was wrong to take the shells. Within a decade, some varieties will become rare enough to require protection by law. As valuable as my father wished them to be.
I move in dream through each Morogoro night. A secret path is marked by chips of white whose gleam draws me away from the cinder-block house, invites me deeper into darkness. Past the farthest reaches of Mitch’s gardens, through the frangipani, into brush beyond. Leopard cone, hump-backed cowrie, prickly drupe, spider conch, orange-mouthed olive: now I know their names, what these shells were called when filled with life, when beautiful. The white that guides me across the earth exactly matches the white of stars strewn above. My footsteps could be tracing patterns of Pisces through the sky, following the Milky Way forward. I hear muffled rushing, the echo of a roar. The river appears, a black glint for Lily to kneel beside. My sister looks up at me, looks back to the white object in her lap. She is trying to rub three wishes from what’s hollow, what’s hard. Her prayers are answered or her hope for them dies. Lily holds the shell up as high as her arms can stretch. A scepter, an offering, a symbol.
Ardis’s aborted visit seems to end our Tanzanian experience abruptly, though we linger for three more months. “She’ll join us in Sri Lanka,” Mitch ventures, getting out his maps. “Or in Seville.” As if location were the sole factor in deciding whether Ardis does or does not come back.
I never again see the shells Lily rescued from a dull, plain fate. Where loss occurred is now unmarked; what’s absent may become forgotten. My sister appears vulnerable without her ceremonial baubles, unarmed against an inimical world. A sound of clicking teeth no longer betrays her furtive explorations. I don’t hear Lily slip from the cinder-brick house in the middle of the night or come in later from the dark. Mitch frowns at his maps, mumbles about Seville or Sri Lanka, prays to Peggy Lee for new inspiration. MJ whimpers through another Morogoro afternoon. “I’m burning up,” he says. For a moment I think I smell incineration. I can feel MJ transform into smoke and ash inside. There are ways besides burying and boiling, I might tell Rogacion. “It’s almost over,” I lie to my brother instead. As if we haven’t, MJ and Lily and I, already told each other goodbye.
Chiggers
Sounds of pain reach through the dark. A small animal must be caught in a trap on the other side of the bedroom. To escape, it will have to gnaw through bone that metal teeth already crunch. It will have to leave a limb behind. Survival has its price, every mangled body says. Now I realize the whimpering travels from where my brother’s bed floats on the far side of our sister’s. It’s MJ who moans. “What’s wrong?” I ask the darkness, as if it were responsible for all emotion voiced within its obscure walls, and were aware of the reasons for my brother’s distress. The room falls silent. MJ wants me to suspect he’s asleep. He needs me to wonder if this is just a dream. At eight, I’ve learned some sounds are made only when you’re certain no one listens. Beyond the window screen, another Morogoro midnight swarms with insects that wait until light leaves before they emerge from hiding. Their rustle and stir infiltrates wire-mesh pores to fill the void made by MJ’s quiet; but the world outside the cinder-block house is always too restless to be any kind of balm. I wonder whether in her bed Lily also listens to MJ struggle to remain mute. If my sister hears him try to hide how much it hurts. The effort is deafening. A stifled scream swells.
“You don’t take aspirin in Africa,” chuckles my father when Lily proposes this as a remedy for MJ’s first bad headache. It occurs within a month of our arrival to Morogoro from Brale, BC—via several years of apparently aimless wandering across seemingly random swathes of the globe. According to Mitch, Western medicine has no effect on the Ngondo hills; illness occurs beyond the reach of pharmaceuticals here. Let the damn Brits swallow what the quacks claim prevents malaria, dysentery, typhoid. Mitch’s gang is as tough as any out of his hardy 1930s childhood on the east side of Regina. Able to adapt to anything, to survive anywhere. MJ will buck up before we know it.
The headaches continue. They’re something bad; they need to be kept secret. Once or twice a month, MJ slips away from Lily and me unnoticed. It could be during a butterfly hunt in the misty jungle above the mission. Instead of capturing some winged specimen, our gang of three loses one of its earthbound own. Later, my sister and I trail in with nets from another glinting afternoon, blink in the bedroom doorway until a shrouded shape emerges out of dimness. Lily lifts the sheet to inspect our brother’s peaked face with the same fascination she shows for the boa constrictor for sale in the market in town. You can always tell how much she wants to poke a stick through the mesh, jab at the coiled length, make the snake strike. She feels MJ’s forehead, though its heat could brand. She holds his wrist to count his pulse, then commands me to run to the kitchen for a cool, damp cloth. My brother’s eyes won’t open or tear. He refuses to say where or how much his head hurts; what the pain is like, if it’s better or worse. Our offer to read aloud from Robinson Crusoe is rejected and a glass of water is declined. Lily grows impatient with such an unresponsive patient. “He wants to be alone,” she decides, searching the cupboard for firefly jars. It’s almost dusk. Soon a flickering will decorate the darkness above our reach. In Africa, we’re always trying to catch something.
The Old Country collection of stick huts and smoky fires remembered by Mitch’s quartet of immigrant aunts is never far; here, it’s closer. A path connects the mission to the village. There Mitch squats in the dust with toothless men after his teaching day is over. He practices Swahili slang and soaks up tribal wisdom and consults about MJ’s condition. The old fellows are sure to know a plant that can be ground into powder or distilled into a tincture or concocted into a potion capable of curing his boy. Some jungle root, blossom, leaf. Or it will be a spell that saves MJ from slicing the darkness with screams. The chant of a crone living alone in a hut at the end of a path that twists and winds through elephant fronds, choking vines, clouds of purple moths. A flinty throat releases sparks of sound; ancient hands conjure amid smoke, encourage what hurts MJ’s skull to leave. Invite my brother’s pain to release itself into the charcoal air, where it may be diffused into an ache subtle enough to be borne, and shared, by all who breathe it.
My father shakes his head when the old fellows won’t help his boy from fear that their secret remedy might end up as one more colonial acquisition. The damn Brits have ruined Africa for everyone. MJ isn’t always able to wait until we’re sleeping before he moans anymore. The sound begins earlier in the evening and lasts longer into the night. Mitch has to retreat to his room at the other end of the cinder-block house. He can’t stand to see his children suffer; he can’t bear hearing any of them cry. Once more his record player unwinds Peggy Lee into the dark while Lily presses a fresh cloth against my brother’s forehead. Covers the vein bulging on his left temple. Purple blood beats, purple blood can’t get out. MJ’s lashes flutter with each pulse. They’re dark as his hair remains while Lily’s and mine become bleached white by Tanzania. My brother’s eyes won’t open all the way until what burns inside him has seeped out to soak his sheets. Then the bedroom blooms with a sickly sweetness. Some fruit might have split on the cement floor, what’s beneath the skin become exposed. Ripe meat immediately starts to rot and just as quickly teems with insects drawn by a tantalizing aroma. It will be a full day before they finish feeding. When the too-sweet scent has begun to fade and MJ is almost able to heal and rise, my father might appear in the sickroom doorway to ask how his gang is coming along. “MJ will buck up for good before we know it,” he guarantees again. “Just wait.” Mitch hovers, tentative. Then he knows exactly what to do. He’ll shimmy up a pawpaw right now. He’ll risk his neck to bring an anodyne far more powerful than aspirin down to earth for his oldest boy. Lush orange-red flesh will be just the ticket for whatever ails MJ. An elixir for us all. Africa is not the disease, Africa is the cure.
