Russell Banks - The Darling

“I was there long ago,” I said. “During the war. Some of my friends were killed there. And I need to pray for them.”

He nodded, understanding. From Cape Mount to Maryland County, all over this land, “people’s friends an’ family needs prayin’ for,” he pronounced. “The war not over yet, mebbe never will be over,” he said and held out his hand again for money. I placed a folded twenty-dollar bill into it.

AT BONIFACE ISLAND, the long pirogue, shaped like a plantain, slid onto the dark landing. It was a short, sloped, brown beach with a small clearing surrounded by low bushes a short ways beyond and, on both sides, a mass of tangled, head-high mangroves half in the water and half out. Though it was the largest of the river islands in the broad estuary of the St. John River, it was barely the size of a schoolyard. Standing barefoot in the bow, my sneakers stashed in my backpack, I stepped from the boat and went ashore.

Behind me, squatting in the stern, Curtis held the boat tight to the beach with his single long paddle. He was looking in my direction, but his face was expressionless, as if I weren’t there. Then, without warning, he moved his oar up to the bow, placed the end of it into the mud, and shoved the boat away from shore. It floated past the mangroves, where it caught the river current and slowly spun stern to bow towards the wide, gray waters of the estuary. Standing, he took his long oar in hand and like a Venetian gondolier worked the handle back and forth, driving the boat still farther from the island and into the river.

“Wait a minute! What are you doing?” I cried. “Curtis! Where are you going?”

He was a hundred yards or more from the island now, and he said nothing, did not look back, kept rowing.

I screamed, “Don’t leave me here! Please, Curtis! Don’t leave me here!”

Then he was gone to the far side of the island, heading rapidly on a line towards the city of Monrovia, in the distance downstream. In moments, he was out of my sight altogether, twenty American dollars richer than this morning, when he found me, but with no more money coming to him again for a long, long time — unless he was willing to hit me with a rock and leave me on the island for dead. He must have been too timid a man to do that, I thought, and turned away from the disappearing boat. Afraid that if he’d killed me he’d end up sleepless at night with my spirit haunting his hut, he had done the next Liberian thing, he’d merely taken the twenty dollars and abandoned me.

I looked around at the drooping mangroves, their roots like limp snakes dangling their heads into the water, and stepped away from the shore in search of shade against the glare of the sun. But there was none, unless I were willing to crawl on hands and knees into the tepid water and huddle beneath the mangroves leaves. But the water looked filthy enough to make me sick on contact, and I remembered the crocodiles that Curtis had mentioned and was afraid to leave the clearing in spite of the sun’s beating on my head.

Though I was alone on the tiny island, from the instant I stepped ashore I knew that I was alone with the ghosts of my dreamers. I could almost see them shuffling side to side in the heat-crinkled air. I sensed their presence all around me. There was a rustling from the bushes as if a cool breeze had blown over, but everything was dead and heavy. Then I heard a familiar huffing sound, the low woofs of a pair of adult male chimpanzees, as different from one another as two human voices, and as recognizable, and I knew at once that it was Ginko and Mano. And then came the distinctive pant hoot of the leader of the clan, Doc, the first of the apes that I had dared to name, followed by the chuckling close by of mothers Deena and Wassail and Ellie, nursing their babies and scolding their older children, and the squawks and high-pitched screeches from the adolescents vying for rank and dominance — they were all over this tiny, brush-covered islet! I looked for them in the low, leafless, prickly bushes at the edge of the clearing, tramped from one side of the island to the other, and peered under the mangroves, but could not see them.

But they were here, I knew, still waiting after all these years for me to come back and save them. Or, no, they were waiting for me to step forward, to bow my head, and receive their judgment. Yes, that was it. I suddenly realized that I’d come solely for this. It was the possibility and the necessity of receiving their strict, final judgment that had driven me from my farm and drawn me across the ocean to this tiny island. And I hadn’t known it until now. I hadn’t allowed myself to know it, until, like the dreamers, I myself was trapped on this island, and it was suddenly all too clear why, after years of safe retreat, I’d taken it upon myself to leave my quiet Adirondack valley one autumn afternoon and fly away to Africa.

The dreamers gradually went silent, as if they had seen me standing in the center of the small clearing and knew that I was alone. Emerging slowly from the dense scrub brush, one by one they came forward, all eleven of them, the entire clan, as if they had never been abandoned, slain, eaten. Bent over slightly, looking ready to spring, they hitched themselves cautiously towards me, closer and closer, until they had surrounded me. Their eyes were wide open, with heavy brows lifted in mild surmise, lips sucked tightly together, and when they stared up at me it was in sad puzzlement, not in accusation — which I expected and could have endured and may even have welcomed. After having first made them trust me to provide for their safekeeping, in spite of my weakness and fearful self-interest, and to know what was good for them, in spite of their own best knowledge, I had treated them shamefully. Unforgivably. And now, in consequence, though calm, almost placid, they had been transformed from my charges into furies. Their gaze showed me — as if I needed fresh reminding — that the themes of my life were betrayal and abandonment.

It came to me then that where I now stood in the clearing was the exact spot in which my dreamers had been slain, their corpses butchered and eaten. Their skulls and bones and the charred remains of the fires in which their flesh had been roasted lay like midden deep in the silt beneath my feet. It had been ten rainy seasons since Kuyo and I last stood here, and many flood tides had washed over the island, leaving behind each time a thick carpet of fresh mud floated down from the eastern highlands, sinking the remains of my dreamers deeper and deeper into the body of the island. They were buried far beneath me, and yet it seemed, nonetheless, that I had placed myself in the midst of those old bones as if at the center of a charnel house. The bones were piled up to my knees, a rough pyramid of leg and arm bones, of spines with hooped ribs still attached, skulls large and small, the bones of fingers and toes, yellowed teeth, and thatches of brown and black hair.

The large, yellow, equatorial sun lay pasted against the pale gray sky directly overhead. I knew that my blood and brain were dangerously overheated. I was dizzy and could not see clearly anymore. The faces and shapes of the ghosts of the dreamers had grown fuzzy and indistinct, and they resembled now a cluster of hooded medieval priests at prayer, kneeling in a circle around me. My legs were weak and began to tremble. Everything was spinning. I had not brought water from the mainland — there was no fresh water on the island, none at least that I could have located myself, and the river was brackish and filthy with sewage and rotted corpses — and I had not eaten since the previous night, when Mamoud had stopped briefly at the cook shop outside of Gbanga and the boy had run after us begging for a ride away.

I know now, of course, what was happening to me, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I had thought I was on a secret guilt trip, a return visit to the scene of my crime. One of my crimes. It was sunstroke and dehydration and hunger, but to me it was a vision. And here it came, a huge wave rising in front of me and then breaking and falling over me, shoving me to my knees, bending my body into an A , a wave replaced by a second, still bigger wave, and a third and a fourth, rolling me over, their enormous weight and force pummeling my body to the ground.