Paul Theroux: The Mosquito Coast

"Admit it," Father said, "this is better than school."

THAT NIGHT I opened my eyes in the dark and knew that my father was not in the house. The sense of someone missing is stronger than the sense of someone there. It was not only that I didn't hear his whistling snore (usually he sounded like one of his own original expansion valves), or even that all the lights were out. It was a feeling of lonesome emptiness, as if there was a mummy-shaped hole of air in the house where my father's body should have been. And my fear was that this unpredictable man was dead, or worse than dead — hollowed out and haunting the property. I knew he was gone, and in a worried guilty way — I was thirteen years old — I felt responsible for him.

There was no moon, but even so it was an easy house to search, because there were no locks. Father disapproved of locking doors. I say disapproved, but I mean he'd threaten to hit us for it. Someone behind a locked door was up to no good, he said. He often shouted at the bathroom door, "Don't barricade yourself in!" He had grown up in a small fishing town on the coast of Maine — he called it Dogtown — where door locking was unknown. During the years he had spent in India and Africa he had kept to the same rule, so he said. I never knew for sure if he had been to those places. I grew up with the belief that the world belonged to him and that everything he said was true.

He was big and bold in everything he did. The only ordinary thing about him was that he smoked cigars and wore a baseball cap all day.

I looked first in the bedroom and saw one figure lying there on the brass bed, a humped-up sheet on the far side — Mother. I was sure he was gone, because he always hung his overalls on the bedpost, and they were not there. I went downstairs and through the rooms. The cat was sleeping on the floor like a tipped-over roller skate. I paused in the hallway and listened. It being spring, there was a powerful odor of lilacs and dug-up dirt, and a soft wind. There was a torrent of crickets outside, and one frantic cricket trapped inside making fretful chirps. Except for this cricket, the house was as still as if it lay buried.

My rubber boots were right inside the door. I put them on and, still in my pajamas, I set out along the path to look for my old man.

We were surrounded by plowed fields. The edge of each field was ragged with woods, left as windbreaks. The corn and tobacco had begun to sprout, and though it was easier to tramp between the furrows, I stuck to the path, with my arms in front of my face to keep the branches away. It was not the branches I hated, but the spider webs strung across that snagged on my eyelashes. These woods were full of marshy pools, and the sound that night was the spring peepers, the little slippery frogs, shiny as fish lures, that made such a warbling. The trees were blue and black, like towering witches. Where was he?

I had left the house feeling wrapped in darkness, but the farther I walked the less dark it seemed. Now the land was muddy yellow. Some trees were ash-colored and the upper parts picked out like iron thorns, and the sky was heavy gray. One cloud was the shape of a loaf of bread, and I guessed that the moon was behind it because it had a bright oily look, as if it hid a mill town in the heavens.

After a while I wished that I had not left the house in such a hurry. Was someone behind me? I turned around sharply to confront the smirking skulls on barkless trees or the reaching finger bones from dead branches. That was one fear. My other was that I would step on a skunk and get sprayed with the stink. Then I would have to bury my pajamas in a hole and go back to the house bare naked.

The woods thinned out. I could see single trees against the sky and another row in front of a yellowish field. A pile of boulders told me where I was. This high point had been left because it was impossible to plow. It was narrow and it rose up at the end of the woods, giving the whole thing the look of a ship. From the side, in daytime, it was a schooner with a rocky bow and a cargo on the deck and thirty leafy masts, stranded in the asparagus fields among the windbreaks that looked like islands.

It was mostly asparagus here. The crop was ready, the harvest had begun. It is a funny-looking crop, because it does not grow in furrows. The fields are as flat and smooth as parking lots. From a distance you can't see asparagus plants, but if you go very close you see the spikes — no flowers, no leaves, just fat green candles sticking out of the ground everywhere. From where I was standing I could not see anything but the smooth streamrolled earth, and its dull shine, like a swell in a waveless sea. And beyond those fields the black ribbon of night where I feared my father was.

There were also lightning bugs. They were puny, not bright, less than match flares, dithering on and off and never in the same place twice. They had a light of their own but lighted nothing else and were like dim unreliable stars dying in the darkness.

But a cluster of small lights far off did not die. They fumbled, they were torches, and when I was satisfied that these fires had men beneath them I set off directly for them, across the asparagus fields, kicking over and cracking the spikes, my boots sinking in the dirt crust.

Closer, I could see the high flames wagging all in a row — a procession of people in single file holding torches over their heads, the flames snapping like flags. Their broadbrimmed hats were lit up, but I could not see their bodies. They streamed from a patch of pinewoods where there was an old building we called the Monkey House.

Men with torches marching at midnight across the valley fields — I had never seen anything like it. It was a snake of flame, and I thought I heard a rattling sound, the jacking of beans shaken in a can. But I was more curious than frightened, and I had hidden myself so well and was still so distant that the thing didn't threaten me.

The procession kept to the far side of a stone wall between the crops — young corn there, asparagus here. I had to stay where I was. I imagined that if they saw me they would attack me and set me on fire. This thought, and the knowledge that I was safe here, gave me a thrill. I hunched over and ran to a ditch and got down flat and looked sharp.

Then they changed direction and came toward me. Had they seen me run? My heart almost stopped as the torches tottered through a gate in the stone wall, and I thought: Oh, Gaw, they're going to set me on fire.

I crept backward into the ditch, and as I was in this lying-down position the ditch water started to leak into my boot tops. Pretty soon my boots were full of ditch water. But I didn't open my mouth. One of my father's favorite stories was about the Spartan boy with the fox under his shirt, I forget why, who let the animal chew his belly to shreds because he was too brave to shout for help. Wet feet were no comparison. There were some low vines growing on the ground nearby. I knew my legs were sunk in mud and water, so I yanked at the vines and pulled them over my head and flattened myself against the side of the ditch. I was completely hidden.

The men were close. They were still gabbling — they sounded happy — and I could hear the swishing of their torches, the flames sounding like sheets blowing on a clothesline — no crackle, just the flap of fire. I looked up. I expected to see torch carriers with crazy faces, but what I saw almost made me yell. The man in front was carrying a huge black cross.

The cross was not made out of planks, but rounded — two fat poles lashed together. There were horrible white chopmarks where the branches had been lopped off, like oval wounds on skin. And behind this fellow with the cross, and more scary, was a man carrying a human body, a limp thing, with the head slung down and the feet dangling and the arms swishing back and forth. He carried this corpse the way you heave a seed bag. It was big and soft and heavy, and its parts swung loose in a dreadful way. In the torchlight the carrier's face was yellow. He was smiling.