Sacred Hunger (68 page)

‘Do I understand you to say that you do not want the money?”’ Campbell said, in the softer voice he used for moments of emotion.

“I did not say that. The negroes were purchased by my father and I will recover some of his investment. I shall expect to reimburse myself for the expense I have been put to. And I shall expect a half share in the proceeds of the sale.

I am aware that these are liberal terms, but my interest is not entirely financial. The people of that ship are murderers and thieves, the black men and women and all their offspring are stolen property. I want the former brought to justice and the latter recovered and sold. I have personal reasons—their nature I won’t discuss, but they are compelling. The years have changed nothing, how could they?”’

His tone had quickened in speaking. He experienced now a faint shuddering in his lower jaw and realized that he had set his teeth too close in the stress of his feeling. “I have money enough,” he continued more calmly. ‘I would be content to sign over to you one half of my rights in the cargo, subject to a deduction for expenses, say three hundred and fifty pounds, in exchange for your official countenance and your help in the matter of the men and guns.

We can see to the papers, it is a simple enough matter.”

Campbell, nodded and glanced aside, compressing his mouth to a thin line. He reflected for some moments then said, “I respect your motives, sir, they show you to be a man of both sense and feeling. But you must realize my position here. There may be loss of life among the troops, if these people make resistance. There may even be damage to the cannon, a serious matter, for which I would be held accountable.

Under the circumstances, will you not reconsider? I would think it more reasonable if you were to deduct expenses after the sale, from your half-share, rather than before.”

‘Sir,” Erasmus said, “any loss or damage would be favourably viewed, since it would have occurred in the course of smoking out a nest of vipers in the heart of His Majesty’s Province. That is the kind of energetic action that brings a man to the notice of his superiors. They will think better of you for it than for saving them a few pounds and shillings on the conference expenses. However, I don’t wish to appear unreasonable. As I say, my interest is not only financial. I will lower my figure for expenses by a hundred pounds, but it must still be deductible before the sale of the negroes. Come now, that is the best offer I can make you.”

Campbell’s face still showed some reserve. With a sense of timing rivalling that of the masterly Watson, Erasmus chose this moment to say, with studied nonchalance, “It would be a private matter between us, of course, I would not ask for any accounting. I would take my half in cash if possible, or in bills of credit, and the other half would be made over to you, together with all receipts and records of the sale. I am content to leave the matter in your hands for the better governance of this new Colony of Florida.”

“Sir,” Campbell said, “here is my hand on it. Give me three days. The Creeks will be drunk for that time on the rum we shall give them and our full force will be needed in case of disturbance. After that they will disperse. Three days, and the men and the guns will be placed at your disposal. You have my word.”

They drank to this, and shook hands again, before parting for the night. Alone in his room, Erasmus lay hot and sleepless, excited by thoughts of lawful profit and just retribution. His plans had knitted together most wonderfully. Somewhere to the south of him Matthew Paris was lying at this moment, asleep or awake, with no knowledge of the nemesis that was drawing near. He had no doubt now that his cousin was there, was alive, was waiting, he too, though unconsciously, for this last act to be played out between them. The nightmare fears that Paris might be dead or somehow beyond his reach had gone now: Paris was necessary to the completeness of things, to the workings of justice, and so he must be there. It was a faith almost childlike, and all the faces that came now to visit him in the darkness confirmed it in one way or another, his father’s faces living and dead, the actor in the shipyard sniffing at the fatal timbers, the flushed and handsome dominator of conversation, the staring creature in the candle-light.

Sarah’s face came too, stately as Miranda, calm with love, then with tears on the cheeks and some ultimate accusation in the eyes. His wife’s grotesque masks floated before him and his mother’s face of recovered health, which he had never been able to forgive. Last, eclipsing the others, the laughing face of the youth who had lifted him away…

Yes, the days were numbered now for cousin Matthew.

You will hang by the neck, as my father did, he promised that laughing face. Lying there in the dark he could feel the noose tightening round his cousin’s throat, feel it so surely that it was like a constriction of his own breathing.

The passage of Erasmus’s ship up the coast towards Still Augustine had been observed by Hughes the climber, who also noticed the unusual length of time she dallied at anchor. He was high in the branches of a gum-resin tree in a jungle cluster surrounding a freshwater pool where white-tail deer came to drink—he had been waiting for the deer since early morning.

He saw the ship in the distance and noted by old habit the set of her sails: two square topsails, fore and aft rig—she was a schooner.

He had grown accustomed over the years to the fleeting sight of sails on the horizon, high-bowed Spanish merchantmen bound for Cuba, an occasional frigate patrolling off the coast, the long, lateen-rigged fishing canoes of the Indians. They showed their shapes to his indifferent gaze, drew away and dissolved like a doubtful memory.

Hughes was fifty-four now and had long ceased wanting to be anywhere else. The purposes of his fellows did not much occupy his speculation. He had noticed that this ship stayed longer than she needed for taking water on. But he soon stopped thinking about her altogether and fell to watching a woodpecker with bright yellow wing-feathers feeding in the branches of a tree some twenty yards away. He watched with close interest the movements of its feet and beak as it swung to get at the clusters of small red berries. Any life before his eyes that was not human could absorb his attention for hours. Inviolate here, high in the branches, his rope ladder drawn up and coiled on the lashed driftwood of the platform, he felt the solitude like an accustomed drug in his veins.

Community life had come too late for Hughes —too late to soften much the savage misanthropy of his nature; but he could escape now, into these empty places, and the impulse of violence had quietened in him. He ranged far and wide, from the pinewood ridges near the shore to the swamps and jungle islands behind them and the great sea of saw grass that stretched far inland from the settlement. He cultivated no ground, living on what he could kill or gather, bringing in skins sometimes to trade for food, going to Lamba, his woman, at irregular intervals.

This last habit had caused trouble in early days, made worse by his demand for Lamba’s immediate and total attention whenever he arrived. It violated established rules of sexual behaviour, which were founded on the woman’s consent, and reflected on the dignity of the man he shared Lamba with, a negro known as Mando Tammy. The three had come to fighting over it, Tammy receiving a knife-gash in his arm which had to be stitched by Matthew Paris, and Hughes lucky to escape permanent damage to an eye from Lamba’s nails. But habit is a skin that can grow over any shape and they had reached a kind of understanding over the years. Hughes could not be brought to any concept of the mutal rights involved in sharing; but he was granted some latitude as a special case. It was never forgotten that he had once, by his vigilance, saved the settlement.

He watched the woodpecker until it disappeared among the lower foliage and then, with the same attention, a honey-coloured bee at the flowers of a smooth-barked tree which grew almost as tall as his own, ending some feet below his platform. He followed the movements of the bee as it clambered among the drooping white spikes of blossom, observing how the insect vibrated its body each time it entered one of the flowers. His mind moved slowly over possible explanation. Could the bee do this to help the flower spread its pollen? From time to time he glanced across the short space of clearing towards the black water below him. In this dry season, when the levels sank below the roots of the saw-grass, the deer came more often to these pools in the jungle islands. He knew they came to this one: he had see their traces in the soft earth at the edge and the nibbled-off tops of the spider-lilies.

The dark water mirrored with absolute fidelity the bushy cabbage palms standing nearby and the spikes of air plants that grew on them and the pale drapes of moss that hung over the surface. No faintest tremor marred these reflections for the moment, all was glassy calm, but Hughes knew that there was always danger in the vicinity of these jungle pools. Not only deer came to drink here: he had seen snake tracks and the pad marks of a panther at the edges.

It was a good place to wait. At forty feet above ground he was not much troubled by mosquitoes.

There was small need for camouflage, deer almost never looked upward; and at that height his smell would be undetectable to them. His bow and cane arrows lay on the platform beside him. The bow was as tall as he was.

He had cut and seasoned the wood himself and strung it with deer-gut. He had to use his full strength to draw it. Most men in the settlement had adopted the Indian habit of pointing their arrows with sharpened fish-bone, but Hughes preferred flint arrowheads, lengthening the shaft to balance the extra weight. He had become expert with the weapon. At this range, if he caught the deer drinking, he could break its neck with a single shot. An instant kill was better, there was more respect in it; and the meat was sweeter when the beast had died without fear.

Sooner or later, perhaps in the early evening, they would come stepping through the trees. Meanwhile he was content to wait. More than content: there was in this exercise of patience the nearest thing to happiness that Hughes had ever known. The feeling lay far below his capacity for words, but it was as if the casual elements of his surroundings, the foliage and the dark water and the bright air and the life of small creatures around him, were freed by his waiting to be truly themselves.

In early afternoon it rained a little. There had been a succession of similar days. The mornings began warm and clear, then towards midday clouds gathered in the east and drew. rapidly across the sky. Out to sea the shafts of rain squalls were visible, shaped like inverted fans and imbued with a smoky radiance. These spread to the land and there were showers of rain, sometimes heavy. By mid-afternoon the skies were clear again, without visible stain, and the sun shone as warmly as ever. At this season clouds formed and dissolved casually. The rain was like a brief smudge of breath on a clear window, bringing no consequence, leaving no trace.

Hughes leaned back against the trunk, drew up his legs and sat still under the rain. Afterwards a faint steam rose from the wet leaves. Before they were properly dry he saw a hunting spider lower itself on an invisible thread and come to rest directly before his face. This type of spider he had seen before: they made no web, but hunted their prey through the foliage and among the litter in the clefts of the branches. He leaned slowly and carefully forward and looked at the creature closely. Its eyes were saucer-shaped, unmoving. When he looked into them, he saw there a pulsing, flashing light. It was as if a shutter were being drawn rapidly back and forth over some brightness at the back of the eye…

Another person who saw the ship pass was Temka Tongman. He was paddling out to his fishnets in the reedy verges of an inlet a mile or so down the coast from the settlement. He paid little attention to the passing vessel. His mind was on the Palaver, due to be held in some days’ time, at which he had agreed to be the speaker for Bulum Iboti, who was accused of practising witchcraft.

Tongman’s abilities as a speaker were widely recognized—he owed his name to them. He was thinking now of the fact that Iboti, a notoriously unlucky man, had agreed to pay him in labour, instead of the acorn flour he had offered at first.

Tongman had no need for acorn flour, but he wanted ground cleared for planting pumpkins and sweet potatoes, both of which grew well in the rich soil at the edges of the freshwater lagoons.

Iboti had agreed to clear fifty paces by ten of roots and vines if he won the case. Naturally, there would be no fee if he lost. Two witnesses had seen them strike hands together…

“Dat ten day work, Iboti,” he said aloud.

“Where you from?”’ Tongman liked the sound of his own voice and in these lonely places he often talked to himself. After twelve years pidgin came more naturally to him than the Temne he had spoken as a child. He had been surprised when his client agreed to complete the work, rather than simply promising a fixed number of days. Iboti could have got away with half of the time. He was not merely unlucky, he was foolish too. Perhaps it was the same thing.

Tongman was a dealer by instinct, a settled, sedentary man, wily of speech. As he paddled out through the narrow channels in the mangroves into the ruffled, gleaming expanse of open water, he wove a golden future for himself. He would exchange the surplus of his vegetables for the salt and flint that more adventurous spirits like Cavana and Tiamoko, working in partnership, brought down from the north. Salt and flint were goods that could be kept indefinitely, until the time came when shortage would increase demand.

His net broke the water. A large, green-mottled lizard fish threshed in the depths of it, its long jaws snapping to show the rows of teeth.

“Dis fish palava too much,” Tongman said. “Look at me bad yai. I got de answer for you, my fren”.” He took up a short club from the floor of the canoe and gave the lizard fish a blow on the head with it, stilling its movements instantly. ‘Where dat bad yai now?”’

He was pleased to find the silver-blue fish with the big fleshy lump on its forehead, which he knew from the rivers of home. “You come a long way. Got a big head, live a long time, finish now. Only one time fish ken die, same as man.”