The Eden Hunter (19 page)

He passed Xavier the sling, helping him slide the sennit loop onto the middle finger of his right hand. Kau then reached into a saddlebag and produced another round stone. “Here,” he said.

Xavier grabbed the knotted end of the second sennit and took the stone, seating it in the sling pouch. “What now?”

“You jus twirl and let go.” Kau waved his arm in the air, demonstrating. “Jus twirl and let go.”

Xavier whirled the sling twice and on the third revolution the seated stone clipped his ear. He bent over and put his hands on his knees. His round-hat fell into the river and then floated away before Kau could grab it. “
¡Maldita sea!
” said Xavier. A drop of blood splashed down onto the raft and was absorbed by the dry wood. “
Estúpido
.” He was laughing now, and the sling hung limp from his hand. He rose up and a trickle of blood ran from the split in his ear down across his jaw. Xavier wiped it away with the back of his hand. “
Estúpido
,” he repeated.

Kau stared at him. The raft drifted on and Xavier kept laughing. Kau took the sling from him and thought of the Augusta circus as described by the boy. He realized that to someone watching from the bank as they passed—a negro or an Indian, perhaps even some American spy—their crude vessel might have appeared mastered by some manner of lunatic, a cackling lunatic and his silent little freak.

 

HE SAW THE mouth of a false river entering from the west, a meandering arm of the Apalachicola that had been cut off from the main channel generations before. The old riverbed existed now only as a shallow and silted slough, an expanse of stagnant backwater where heron and egret and ibis gathered for their huntings. He watched them feed and thought once again of Africa. Farther up the false river he could see the monstrous skeletons of water-robbed cypress trees. He heard the booming double-rap of a feeding ivorybill, and then from somewhere distant a beaver alarm-slapped its tail hard against the river.

 

SOMETIMES ALONG THE east bank the shy children of farmers would emerge from the cornfields and watch them like cattle as they drifted by in the raft. At the scratch farm of a widow Xavier put to shore, and they stood in the shade of a big magnolia that was riddled with brittle cicada husks.

“There is no hurry,” said Xavier. “We will go to the island tomorrow instead.”

Xavier then knocked on the door of the woman’s tiny cabin and a child was sent outside, a blind young girl. She sat with Kau under the tree, sang songs to him in Spanish while they waited. He gave her one of his Mississippi arrowheads, and she smiled at the feel of it.

 

IT WAS LATE in the afternoon before Xavier finally emerged grinning from the cabin. Kau saw that he had changed from his uniform and was now wearing loose gray osnaburgs much like his own. They led the blind girl back to the cabin, then crossed the river and broke for the day. At sunset they left their raft tied among west-bank tupelos and hiked inland with the heavy pigeon cage into the pine forest, away from the mosquitoes that collected along the riverbank at dark. Kau started a small fire with the tinderbox and they dined on pickled eggs and cured manatí, brown bread and pepper jelly gifted by the widow. After they ate Xavier pulled a stick from the coals. He dropped his pants, then began to burn a tick from the thatch above his privates.

 

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Xavier said that they needed to release the first of the pigeons. Xavier had been taught to write his numbers, and so to direct him Garçon had penned three notes to himself—thin papers that Xavier said were labeled one, two, and three. Kau listened as Xavier explained their system. How note one was to let the General know they were making progress and doing well; how note two was for when they arrived at the island; how note three was the emergency note, only to be released if they needed saving.

Kau nodded to show that he understood, and then he memorized what the tracks on each note meant—something Benjamin had never got around to schooling him on. Xavier shuffled the rolled bits of paper and quizzed him. “Show me number three,” he said. Kau touched the note marked with a balanced pair of half hoops, and Xavier smiled.

 

THEY STOOD ON the riverbank, and he cupped a pigeon in his hands as Xavier tied the all’s well note to its foot with a fine thread of catgut. Once the paper was secured Kau set the frightened bird loose. It flew north and then disappeared into the dim sky.

 

THEY WERE ONLY a few hours afloat before the river opened into green marsh. He could smell salt in the morning breeze, even taste it in the water.

Xavier put the raft ashore at the very last of the riverbank cypress trees, at the place where the east bank finally yielded to the flooded prairie. Here a small wooden vessel was hidden in the palmettos growing along the bank. Kau helped Xavier right the stashed rowboat, and then they both jumped backwards, wary of moccasins and rattlesnakes and copperheads. Somehow there were none—only a warped pair of oars—and Xavier laughed at their common fear of snakes, serpents.

They dragged the rowboat into the river and waited, checking the hull for leaks. Xavier shared his canteen and then—once he was satisfied that the rowboat was sound—they loaded their belongings and the pigeons on board. When they had finished Xavier fastened
a long rope from the raft to the rowboat. “So,” he said, “we go now.” He removed his shirt and sat down at the oars.

The tide was falling and they went with it. The raft pulled ahead, and the rope connecting it to the rowboat tightened and spun them around. Now and then Xavier dipped an oar to keep centered in the river. Clouds of red-winged blackbirds left the high marsh grass, and on distant mud banks Kau saw sunning alligators—some of them ten, eleven, even twelve feet long and as big around as barrels.

 

THE PIGEONKEEPER’S SMALL green island sat midway across the mouth of the river, at the spot where the salt marsh ended and the true bay began. Xavier had his back to the south and so Kau sat in the stern and shouted directions for him, a little more east, a little more west.

 

HE COULD SEE a figure watching them from the island. The man was standing motionless, and it was a while before Kau realized that he had a spyglass trained on them. The pigeonkeeper. Kau told Xavier to keep them straight, that they were on the right course.

 

THEY BEACHED THE rowboat on the sand shore of the island. The pigeonkeeper Israel was small but wiry, had a bald and shiny head, a full black beard going gray at the temples. Kau guessed him at fifty and was surprised. For some reason he had expected the pigeonkeeper to be much older, and he realized that in his mind he had been picturing a man not so very different from Samuel.

Israel called to them as they approached. “High time you showed,” he said. “I ain’t got but one bird.” He was shirtless and hatless and barefoot, wore only white trousers cut off above the knees.

“You should have five left,” said Xavier. “Is our count wrong at the fort?”

“Goddamn mink.” Israel spit and then closed his eyes. “Forgive me, Lord. I ain’t spoke aloud in over a month.”

Xavier went to him and they embraced. Finally Israel turned his attention to Kau. “Well now,” he said. “Who are you?”

He stepped forward and Xavier said his name.

Israel studied him. “You a real African?”

“Yes.”

“Full grown?”

Xavier spoke: “He might settle somewhere near here.”

“That all right with the General?”

Kau nodded. “What he says.”

Israel reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Then I say suit yourself, son. I don’t own this world, and it sure ain’t mine to give.”

 

XAVIER RELEASED THE success pigeon, and they watched it fly toward the tree line and the fort. Once the pigeon was gone from sight Israel took them to his home. He walked with a limp, dragging his left foot almost as if that leg had a weight fixed to it. Kau saw a branch blocking the trail, and so he ran off ahead to clear up their path.

 

THE ISLAND WAS two or three dry and sand-ringed acres that had been shaped like an egg by the power of the river current. Israel lived in the palmetto-thick core, in a square shack Xavier said had been built from the wood of multiple broken rafts. A cypress cistern stood off to one side, a pigeonhouse off to the other.

Kau listened as Xavier asked after a dog he had brought down with him the month before, a bear-crippled bitch that had belonged to Garçon. Xavier spoke of Caesar and Israel shook his head, told him that the hound had chased a coon into the river and was drowned, that or was taken by an alligator.

 

IT WAS TRUE what Beah had told him—Israel could read. Could read and write just like Benjamin and the innkeeper, the preachers and the officers who had sometimes passed through Yellowhammer. A desk in his shack held a pendulum clock and a calendar; also quills, ink, paper and a single book—a Bible in English. The calendar, Israel told him, was from London, and the clock he thought was French.

Benjamin and Samuel had explained to him well the meaning of white man’s time, but not how to read time. Kau examined the clock. Save the single straight line marking the first hour, the numbers here were different from those Xavier had begun to teach him on the river—but still, by counting the symbols in a circle from one to twelve he was quickly able to place them. Israel then defined each of the metal hands for him and suddenly he had it figured. He could not believe it was so simple.

The pigeons were transferred from their cage into the pigeonhouse, and Israel set a small table surrounded by fiddleback chairs. For supper he served a young coon roasted with the peeled tubers of cattails, and later, after they had eaten, he wound the pendulum clock with a key and read to them the parable of a son who comes home to his father. Kau closed his eyes and listened. This story had been Samuel’s favorite. “But we had to celebrate and be glad,” read Israel, “because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.”

 

THAT EVENING THEY told him that there were barrier islands in the bay to the south. Israel pulled a worn sailing chart from a black sea trunk and spread it out across the table. “Here,” he said, “that to the east is Dog Island. There, centered, the biggest one—St. George.” Israel then slid a finger farther west, letting it settle onto a triangle of land separated from the mainland by a narrow channel. “St. Vincent,” he said. “Follow the coast and in a day you’ll be there. On a calm tide even I might could swim to it.”

Kau grew excited as Israel described an island close enough to the mainland to have deer, wolves, forest, fresh water, everything. A place where he could maybe make himself a home. “Is it empty?” he asked.

“Empty?”

“Anyone else livin there?”

“Was for sure,” said Israel. “But it’s been weeks since I’ve seen sign of an Indian anywhere.”

Kau borrowed Israel’s spyglass and walked to the thin beach on the south shore of the little delta island. He scanned the salt bay but it was too dark now; he saw nothing that he could say for certain was land. He went back to the shack and Israel laughed at him.

“They is there,” he said. “Trust me on that, son.”

 

BEFORE THEY RETIRED for the night Israel asked him if it had been a white man who had cut his teeth like that, and he told him no, that it was the way of his people. Israel laughed, then snarled his upper lip to reveal a single notched canine. “But that,” he said, “is the way of some other people, too.”

 

HE LAY ON his horse blanket in Israel’s shack and imagined coming home himself. His father is waiting at the place where Kau left him so long ago, still neck-chained to the surviving members of the Ota band. They are all sitting in a silent circle in the forest—hungry and thirsty and tired, but also alive. Kau whistles his whistle, the whistle the elders assigned to him as a boy. His father raises his head and stands, lifting the others with him, and when he sees his son his eyes fill with tears and he goes to him, leading the band in a shuffling approach. They touch hands, and his father asks him where it is that he has been all of this time. Kau has no answer. He finds the scattered remains of the Kesa warriors and then the key. He returns. “Father,” he says. “I know now how to release you.” And so he does. He applies his new knowledge of chains and keys and locks and sets his remaining people free. That night they carry the molimo down from a high treetop, then make the trumpet speak
until they are certain that the forest has indeed been awoken. In three generations there is not one left living who was there that day the Kesa came.

 

THE NEXT MORNING he went with Israel to the beach and looked due south. It was light now, and even without the spyglass he could see the pine coast of St. George, the closest of the barrier islands. He asked Israel where was St. Vincent and the pigeonkeeper focused the spyglass on a point west-southwest. “Look,” he said. “You see?”

Kau lifted the spyglass. It was still hazy and so he saw nothing, just smooth green water under a layer of blue sky.

“Stay on it,” said Israel. “It’ll show.”

St. Vincent came as a shimmering on the horizon, a low smudge line of trees. He looked up from the spyglass and could see the island now with his naked eye. All it took was knowing that it was there. Soon he could not look to the southwest and not see St. Vincent. Again he thought of the man hidden in the moon that Benjamin had taught him to conjure. He had been shown that man just once, but thereafter he could never quite look at the moon the same way again, a moon he had known his entire life.

 

THEY TOOK THE rowboat out into the bay during the glass of a slack tide, and he sat at the oars while Israel and then Xavier flung a throw net for schooling mullet. It was midday and very hot, but the fishing went quickly. They caught dozens to a cast, and soon the bottom of the rowboat was covered with dying mullet.