Russell Banks - The Darling

Finally I entered the stream, more timidly than they, for I am a little shy, actually, and because I am the old one among these women: my breasts are no longer perked, and my thighs and belly are loose, my pubic hair has thinned and is turning gray. But once I was entirely in the water and swimming — my feet free of the ground, my back arched and arms sweeping ahead of me, my legs scissoring easily, powering me into deeper and deeper waters — none of that mattered. My long white hair, still a point of vanity for me, swirled behind me like a bride’s veil, and my body felt strong and taut and young again, so that there was no perceptible difference between my body and the bodies of the other women. We were, all five of us, a school of porpoises dipping, diving under, surfacing, rolling over on our backs, and swimming out of the fast-running, shaded half of the stream into the sunlit pool beyond. Once there, we floated in place, and when we spoke our voices were softened and low, as if each of us had entered her own mind alone and when she spoke it was only to let the others know that she was still there, still close by, still their friend.

I leaned back in the water, my arms behind my head, and peered up at the cloudless, drum-tight, pale blue sky, and brought my gaze slowly down to the mountain ridges that surround the valley, where the foliage from halfway up the mountains was already glowing with early-autumn reds and yellows. Turning from the bright striations of the higher altitudes, I looked lower and lower, down through the evergreens to the near bank. And there were the dogs, my black-and-white Border collies, Baylor and Winnie, standing on the shore, watching us. They weren’t prancing up and down the bank as they always do, yelping excitedly and after a few moments leaping into the water themselves and paddling out to join us. Instead, today they both stood stock still, tails and ears lowered.

I swam a few yards downstream, separating myself from the others, and when I looked towards shore again, I saw that the dogs’ gazes had followed me. I was the one they were watching. Not the others.

“Really, Hannah, what’s up with the doggies today?” Anthea called.

“I… I don’t know.”

Nan laughed and said it was because they were too smart to swim in water this cold, and Frieda agreed.

Cat said, “This is so awesome,” and disappeared beneath the surface, and when she reappeared a minute later and ten yards downstream from me, the dogs didn’t react. They kept their gaze fixed only on me, and their expression was both accusatory and sorrowful, as if I had committed a crime, and only they and I knew about it. But at that moment I could think of nothing bad that I had done.

I suddenly felt heavy, gravity bound, and old again. “I’m going in,” I said, and started swimming slowly for shore. When my feet felt the smooth rocks on the bottom, I stood, my shoulders and breasts exposed, and stared back at the dogs. They both cocked their wedge-shaped heads and looked as if they were capable of speech but were waiting for me to speak first.

“What?” I said to them. “What do you know?” I asked. “ What do you want to know?”

They turned their heads away, and I nervously laughed and cupping my hands tossed water at them, and they grinned and leapt and yelped. Then, as if suddenly remembering why they were there, the dogs jumped from the bank into the water and, mouths closed, breathing sharply through their nostrils, paddled happily out to join the girls, and I clambered from the river onto the grassy bank and covered my body with a towel and gathered up my blood-stained clothes.

MY STORY IN all its versions is only a tale of too-late. Maybe at best it’s a cautionary tale. To my sons I used to say, “Be careful what you wish for. Know what you love best. Beware the things that catch your eye.” And this, which I tell to you as well: “Never love someone who can’t love you back.” The truth is, most of the time, even now, I don’t want to tell my story. Not to you, not to anyone. It’s almost as if I’m beyond all stories and have been for years. You want to see me in light, but I’m visible only in darkness. I’m obliterated by light, and can’t cast it, either. I’m like a white shadow. And at night, when I’m visible, wherever I am, even here on the farm in the heat of summer, I lock all the doors and windows and pull down the shades, draw the curtains, and keep the dogs shut inside my bedroom with me and the bedroom door latched and bolted. I’m as afraid of the dark in upstate New York as the bush people are in Liberia, who sleep with their huts closed tight against the thousands of evil spirits that come in the night to steal people’s souls — leopard-devils that bite your throat first and eat you before you die, and two-step snakes that bite you and you take two steps and die, and bad white men and black men from the coast remembered in tales of slave catchers passed down by the elders.

I’m an elder myself now. Fifty-nine this year, in late middle-age, but old enough to have watched other people, my parents, for example, find themselves suddenly elderly and soon dead. Old age is a slow surprise. And at a certain point one’s personal history, one’s story , simply stops unfolding. Change just ends, and one’s history is not completed, not ended, but stilled — for a moment, for a month, maybe even for a year. And then it reverses direction and begins spooling backwards. One learns these things at a certain age. It happened to my parents. It happens to everyone who lives long enough. And now it’s happened to me. It’s as if the whole purpose of an organism’s life — of my life, anyhow — were merely for it to reach the farthest extension of its potential with the sole purpose of returning to its single-cell start. As if one’s fate were to drop back into the river of life and dissolve there like a salt. And if anything counts for something, it’s the return, and not the journey out.

When I returned to Liberia from my little farm in upstate New York that last time and saw at once that I had come back too late, I wondered if it had been, from the very beginning, too late. It was my question way back then; it’s my question now. Should I instead have stayed in Liberia a decade ago when the war was still raging and somehow lived there for as long afterwards as possible and shared my husband’s known fate and the unknown fates of my sons? Lord knows, it’s a simple enough question. But the simple questions are the hardest to answer. They always seem to carry with them a hundred prior questions, all unanswered, and probably in the end unanswerable now anyhow. They had to be answered at the moment they were first asked. Intentionality may be all that matters, but who knows a woman’s true intentions? Who knows what she truly wished for? Or what she loved best? Or even what caught her eye? Not Hannah Musgrave Sundiata. Not I. Especially not back then, over a decade ago, when I fled Liberia and left that endless war behind, turned away from the savagery and the madness of it, and abandoned to its flames my home, my husband’s body, my lost boys, and left to be shot and eaten by the soldiers my innocent, frightened, beloved dreamers, the eleven apes that had been placed in my charge.

My poor animals; they were mine to protect, the creatures I loved nearly as much as I loved my husband and sons and whom I tried, vain and proud and deluded, to save by placing them onto an island. Which I suppose was only what I wished someone would do for me. Place me onto an island.

A fantasy, that’s all it was. Just another fantasy of self-sanctification. It was futile then, and probably futile now, all of it. Even here on this little island.

And yet, that day in the midst of the war, when I boarded that final flight out of Monrovia, if I’d known my true motives for leaving, if I’d examined them closely enough at the time, they might have seemed puny to me, puny and unworthy, and I would not have left at all. I wouldn’t have made it to this enchanted isle, my farm — in the good, cheerful company of Anthea and the girls and my faithful collie dogs, all of us caring for sheep and hens and my beautiful gardens — with its inhabitants, me included, sanctified and blessed. And I wouldn’t have been obliged to return to Africa one more time as I did last year.