Russell Banks - The Darling

It was circular and kept coming back to us — to not-us .

I KNEW THAT the truck had come to a stop beside the sea, for I smelled salt in the air, even from beneath the heavy tarp, and heard the waves breaking on the reef and sandbars beyond. I pushed my way out and inhaled the cool, fresh air of dawn. I grabbed my backpack, rolled off the bed of the truck, and swung down to the gravel roadway. The sky was milky in the east. Half hidden in the mists a few kilometers south, beyond the all-but-abandoned Freeport, was the humped back of Cape Mesurado, and sprawled across the cape like a rumpled, drunken sleeper was the city, Monrovia.

Mamoud leaned from the cab and said, “This where you tol’ me to put you, missy. Still got a ways to get to town, y’ know.”

I said no, this was fine, which puzzled him. He slowly rolled a cigarette and lighted it and studied me for a moment. “Don’ make no sense, missy,” he said. He studied me some more, as if for the first time considering my use to him and not his to me, and said, “Gimme some dash, missy.”

“I paid you already. We’re even.”

He shook his head no and licked his thin lips, took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Gimme dash,” he repeated, and when he reached for the handle to open the door and come out of the truck, I bolted — scrambling from the road down the crumbly landfill through the thorn bushes into the dark, gloomy gully below. I shoved my way through the brush down there for half a hundred yards or so, stumbling over garbage and old tires and broken bottles, sea wrack and road tossings, and then stopped, scratched on the face and bare arms by the puckerbushes, and waited there, crouched close to the wet ground, breathing hard, listening. Finally, I heard the door of the truck slam shut, and heard the truck chunk into gear and slowly move on down the road.

A light, cooling breeze drifted through the underbrush from the sea to land. I stood up and heard the waves lap the shore on the farther side of the gully and break on the reef a quarter mile out and smelled the stink of dead fish and wet sand. Then suddenly the yellow African sun was in the glowing sky, and dawn had been here and gone almost without my seeing it. There are no gray shades this close to the equator, no evening’s gloam or dawn’s early light. There’s night, and then there’s day, and night again. The wind shifted slightly, and I smelled wet, charred wood and rotting citrus and fresh human feces. I was alone.

No, I wasn’t alone. A dark brown young man, shirtless, scrawny, and wearing only a pair of pale blue nylon running shorts, stared at me from a few feet away. He backed off, eyes wide open, as if frightened of me — but why, I wondered, frightened of what? It should have been the other way around. But I was not afraid of him; he was exactly whom I should have expected to see there. It must have been my long, white hair, straight and undone — surely peculiar to him — my pale skin, the inexplicable presence of such a strange creature in what was probably his gully, his personal territory. All of that, I supposed. But there was something more than my oddity reflected off his wide-eyed gaze — it was as if he thought I was a jumby, a ghost.

He waggled a finger at me, no-no-no , turned, and scrambled back up the side of the gully to the road, and then away, in the same direction the truck had gone, towards the city.

A madman, I thought. He’ll never return now to this place, which had been his field, his little garden, where, like an insect, a dung beetle, he had learned to scavenge his daily food and safely hide himself at night. I had contaminated his place, put a ghost into it. I slung my pack onto my back and made my careful way along the garbage- and trash-strewn incline out of the gully and over the low ridge to the narrow beach below, away from the road, where I turned toward the city, the harbor, the mouth of the river, and the island in the river where, ten years earlier, I had abandoned my dreamers.

AT THE FARM in Keene Valley and throughout the village, I was thought to have gone out to Liberia as a Peace Corps volunteer and somewhere along the way had married an African man and had borne him three brown children. I had framed photographs of them in the house. “That’s me with my husband, Woodrow. And those are my sons when they were little boys, Dillon and the twins, Paul and William.” And then the photographs of my parents: “That’s my father. Yes, the Doctor Musgrave. And my mother. Both dead.” And no one else.

I volunteered as little as possible. In a partial and carefully reticent way, which people understood once they heard what I had to say, I let on that in the late 1980s, when Liberia erupted in civil war, my husband and sons had been caught up in the violence. “It’s one of those wars that never seem to end.”

I related this in a way that did not invite further questions, told my story in a low, flattened voice that deflected both inquiry and suspicion that I might be lying or had something to hide. “It was a terrible time… People were being brutally murdered… There was chaos everywhere… There still is.” And so on. It’s easy to construct a believable false story from a miscellany of partial truths.

People felt sorry for me and admired my reticence. In my neighbors’ and workers’ minds, even Anthea’s, Africa generally and the Republic of Liberia in particular were places from which any sane American woman would flee anyhow, whatever the cost. Everything I had told them, everything they heard in the post office, at church, at the Noonmark Diner, convinced my fellow citizens that I had suffered enough already. It was as if I had endured and miraculously survived a terrible disease, and no one wished to cause me unnecessary additional pain by asking for details.

THE DAY IN LATE AUGUST when I decided to return to Liberia arrived and passed in a normal enough manner. Frieda and Nan drove the pickup out to the northside orchard and were filling it with late McIntosh apples, and Cat was in the greenhouse seeding the last crop of lettuce for the season. The dogs slumbered in a circle of sunshine on the grass in front of the house. It was warm, in the high fifties by noon, and sunny — a golden day. The leaves of the maple trees, oaks, and birches in the cool spots along the river had begun turning, tinting the air with pale shades of reflected red and yellow and orange light. Occasionally the first Vs of Canada geese crossed the cloudless sky from north to south, their harsh calls and cries rousing the dogs, who looked at the sky and considered for a few seconds the idea of giving chase, if only to keep up appearances, then gave it up, yawned, and went back to sleep.

Soon there was something far more interesting for them. With the dogs’ help, Anthea and I herded the chickens together so we could pack them four to a crate. Though the dogs, Baylor and Winnie, easily kept the hens clustered in one corner of the large, fenced-in pen, the birds were hysterical — there’s no other word for it — making the job absurdly difficult and therefore slightly humiliating. Finally, however, we managed to crate enough to fill our standing orders, four dozen of them, all plump broilers, Rhode Island reds, and lugged the crated chickens to the shed that we call the butcher shop, an old tool shop with a cement floor, a double laundry sink, a hose, and a floor drain.

We waited till after lunch before beginning the nasty work of killing the chickens, which we do the old-fashioned way, with a machete and a wooden chopping block. The chopping usually falls to me, as if it were my responsibility, or perhaps my privilege, though I’m sure Anthea would do it if I asked her. I don’t really mind; Lord knows, I’ve seen worse. But it wouldn’t be nearly as unpleasant if, when you decapitated the chickens, they didn’t bleed the way they do — profusely and in spurts that last longer than you think they should — and their headless bodies didn’t scramble wildly around the shed as if in crazed search of eyes and mouths and tiny brains. It’s strange, I don’t really like poultry or birds generally. They don’t quite register with me as animals. They seem more like complicated plants or higher-order insects, and that’s more or less how I treat them, providing them from the moment they hatch with the same carefully calculated food, water, space, and shelter as I do the vegetables. Until it comes time to kill them, when they seem suddenly to possess all the familiar mammalian emotions — fear and sadness and love of life. Consequently, whenever I have to decapitate thirty or forty or fifty of the squawking, wild-eyed creatures in a row, it’s a stressful, wrenching time for me.