T. Boyle - Water Music

“Greetings,” Mungo said, the Mandingo dialect thick and leaden on his tongue. There was no response. The explorer buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket, licked his lips and made a stab at conversation. “Enjoying the salt beef?”

A fat woman with stretched and knotted earlobes glanced up at him, her face smeared with grease. Bony children, suspicious-looking dogs and salt-haired old men stared up at him so fixedly he began to feel as if they expected him to start dancing or juggling or something. Damman Jumma said nothing, but looked up at the explorer out of eyes that rolled back on themselves till they looked like hard-cooked eggs.

Mungo cleared his throat. “Uh, Damman, uh the reason I’ve stopped by is to ask if you’ve uh, you know, spread the word about the expedition and the top wages I’m offering.”

The headman inserted a slab of beef in the pocket of his cheek and began masticating noisily. Everyone watched him, silent. It took him three or four minutes to break down the rubbery meat, swallow it and lubricate his throat with a long pull at the calabash. When he looked up at the explorer again he was shaking his head. ‘‘ Baharram wo dodoto ,’’ he said. “No one will go.”

The explorer was incredulous. “What do you mean no one will go? I’m offering half a bolt of red cotton cloth direct from Birmingham and the price of a prime slave. That’s more than you’d make in two years sitting around here hauling crates for Doctor — I mean, Mr. Crump.”

All eyes were on the headman. Using only his teeth and a splinter of wood, he was slowly prizing the cork from a bottle of Chateau Latour that Mungo recognized as having come from his own private stock. Damman Jumma spat out the cork and took a long swig before passing the bottle to his favorite wife. “Listen,” he said finally, speaking in colloquial Mandingo, “you can offer this and that till you’re blue in the face, but nobody is going to go with you. The feeling around here is that you’re kokoro kea , a bad risk. And that’s all she wrote.”

Shaken, the explorer returned to his tent to talk things over with Zander. They decided to offer a bolt and a half of cloth, a case of Whitbread’s beer and the value of two prime slaves to any able-bodied man who would accompany the expedition. The next morning they hired a jilli kea to canvas the countryside, singing out the offer at every village within an eight-mile radius. There was no response. The explorer waited two days more. Finally, on the morning of the third day he called in Zander, Martyn and Scott and told them that the men would just have to shoulder the load. The asses were packed, the troops inspected and provisioned, and the expedition set off on the road to the Niger.

As they marched out of Pisania, the overloaded asses already bucking and complaining, the locals watched wide-eyed, some shaking their heads, others clutching at saphies and scribbling in the dust. They watched with the sort of grim and dumbstruck fascination that might have welcomed the early Christians to the lion pit or assailed the barefooted children of the Middle Ages as they gathered in droves to march across Europe and drive the infidels from the Holy Land. They watched with prayers on their lips and a certain lurking prescience of man’s mortality in their hearts. They watched, solemn as priests, as the crazed and stinking wild-eyed white men drove their asses through the gates and up the long tortuous road to nowhere.

♦ IN SADNESS ♦

Ailie clenches her teeth, her breath torn in gasps. She is thinking, through a trembling pink delirium of pain, about things eschatological and generative, about childhood, adolescence and old age, about budding and parthenogenesis, about trees and sunlight, food for the body, decay. Her mind is suddenly blooming and philosophical, as if she were sitting at her desk reading Locke or Galileo or Saint John the Divine, instead of lying here on the verge of shouting out the filthiest epithets she knows. Meanwhile, the birds have started in again and the windows are beginning to soften with the light of dawn. She bites her finger. There is something inside her, vital and impetuous, crowding her bones, fighting to get out.

This is her fourth, and still the pain is enough to make her jump and writhe like a spider on a burning log. In sadness shalt thou bring forth children , she thinks, and then, more bitterly: Thy desire shall be for thy husband, and he shall have dominion over thee . From somewhere, as if through a haze and at a great distance, the voice of Dr. Dinwoodie, soothing and gentle. And then the answering murmur of Mary Ogilvie, the housemaid, and the clatter of spoon and cup. There is something in this simple domestic music, something that speaks of normalcy and release, something catalytic. Suddenly she finds herself bearing down, the flow and process growing familiar, natural and automatic, the pain on hold, her heart and lungs and muscles clicking along in conjunction, locked now in athletic fervor, pushing to win, break the tape, drive the ball home. There. She can feel the head between her thighs, Dinwoodie’s fingers, the hitch of the shoulders and then the final purgative rush toward release. It comes like an explosion, with a sucking, scouring sound, as if the whole thing were the climax of a stupendous bowel movement. She swells her lungs. It is out.

Drained, she sinks back into the pillow and closes her eyes. There is the snip-snip of the doctor’s scissors, a splash of water, the cry of an infant. From somewhere below she can hear her father berating his apprentice, something about poultices and plasters. Then, close at hand, Dinwoodie’s voice, sussurant and reverential. “It’s a boy, Ailie. A fine strapping laddie, feisty as his father.”

And now it’s in her arms, red and wet, stinking of inner secrets and the must of the womb. She doesn’t care. Boy or girl, child or monster, she doesn’t care. What does it matter? she thinks, something coppery and bitter in her throat. Her husband’s deserted her. Tired and alone, she’s given birth to an orphan.

♦ SOMEBODY TO LEAN ON ♦

She has visitors, people coming and going, grinners and well-wishers. What a darlin’ bairn. Coochie-coo. Hello, goodbye. Through it all, she lies there propped up against the pillow like a suffering saint, feeling odd, odd to be the object of so much pity and admiration, odd to be back in her girlhood room, back in the bed she’d slept in alone for twenty-five long years. Odd to be alone again.

Almost from the beginning it had been clear that things weren’t going to work out at Fowlshiels. Ailie saw the move back to her motherin-law’s as an implied criticism, as Mungo’s way of telling her she’d failed at Peebles. Accustomed to managing her own household and making independent decisions regarding everything from the composition of the kitchen garden to how often the dog needed worming, she inevitably came into conflict with her mother-in-law. Things went from bad to worse when Mungo deserted her. It seemed almost as if the old woman blamed her for Mungo’s rashness and irresponsibility, as if it was glaringly obvious that Ailie had failed as a homemaker and driven her man out into the wilds to face cannibals and ravening beasts. In the kitchen, on the porch, out at the well, Ailie could feel her mother-in-law’s censorious eyes on her, and through each of the hundred little domestic motions of each day, she seethed with a growing resentment of her husband and the intolerable situation he’d forced her into. A month dragged by, then another. Ailie was pregnant, exhausted, the children ran around the cramped cottage like gypsies and red Indians, her mother-in-law retreated behind a wall of glacial and imperious silence. When her father invited her to move in with him at Selkirk, Ailie jumped at the chance.