For Love of Audrey Rose (26 page)

The soldiers carried her like a dead log. The mud slopes were visible again: a few clots of grass, but mostly the rivulets of rainwater and mud trickling down the morass of tangled logs, boulders and dead animals far below. Janice had never seen death on such a scale. It was the earth itself that had been mortally wounded. Hills were gouged out, roads dislodged, and whole forests cracked and rubbed away.

They lowered her to the ground next to the rusted canister in which the doctors sterilized their used bandages and knives. The rain came softly, cooling her forehead. Moans rose like the sound of distant barges. A sick cow, the huge rump in the air and the forelegs buckled, lowed pitifully.

“I’m burning… burning up…” Janice heard herself say.

No one turned to look at her. An ox was brought up slowly through the rain, pulling a small cart. A tall man, head lowered, led the ox. Villagers lifted two shivering children into the cart, then Janice, and then the cart jolted, she gasped, and the landscape began to recede.

The cart brought her higher into the hills. The field hospital became smaller, and the soldiers like tiny tin figures. Smoke rose without a waver from the fire. As she watched, another small body was placed onto the fire. The villagers hardly stirred. The entire slope of the hill, the valley floor, even the higher hills where the forest had been, was mud, still slithering occasionally in sudden spurts downhill—a foul landscape, viscous with disease.

So this is death,
came the thought.
It’s like a fever and it looks like mud.

The cart jolted regularly as the ox found its footing in the wet earth. As they went higher, bits of dead root and choked pools of black water went by. With each step four points of pain stabbed into Janice. The cart stopped. The man stepped down, examined the faces of the shivering children, and covered them with a thick blanket.

“Elliot—” she whispered. “Is it you?”

A voice came from the other end of the earth, gentle and kind, but almost broken by the exhaustion of suffering.

“Yes,” he said distinctly.

Astounded, Janice wiped the rain from her eyes. She blinked rapidly, and her hands groped toward the hallucination. But the hallucination took hold of her hands and gently pushed her back down against the children and the blankets.

“I heard from Mehrotra,” came the voice. “I went to the outpost at the river. They said I’d just missed you.”

“Is it really you?”

“Lie down, Janice. We have to get away from the soldiers.”

He went back to the front of the cart. The ox exhaled a steamy breath and pulled. The landscape began juggling again. A child whimpered. Janice pulled herself backward, wondering if she were dreaming. By instinct her arm went around the child; a small boy nestled against her chin, and the eyes began to close in sleep.

Janice craned her neck, staring at the driver. Now he did not look like Hoover. He was squatted down, with the posture of inexhaustible patience that all the farmers showed. Nothing moved except his chest as he breathed. He coughed, sending small puffs into the chill atmosphere.

He did not turn around. Janice sank back and huddled against the children. One of them asked her a question. She could only smile and caress the feverish cheek. It was getting dark, and the landscape was dissolving into a heavy gloom. The cart rumbled up, up to the crest of a hill, then it wound along a path that snaked its way across a green plateau. Night came, and the cart still moved on. Janice kept waking up to different patches of black earth, to different dead trees, and finally the cart began going down the other side. The trees here were still alive. Grass glittered in the moonlight, rain-wet but alive. Water trickled everywhere, a musical, pleasant sound that made sleep easier.

A child cried out. The cart stopped. Hoover came to the rear and asked a question in Tamil. The child responded. Gently Hoover spoke again, smiled, and made a joke. The child laughed and lay down in the blanket.

“Elliot, thank God it’s you.”

A strong hand felt her forehead. “You’re burning up. Try to sleep.”

He went back to the front, slapped the ox with his stick, and the cart rumbled down. Janice watched the clouds overhead, rolling in phantasmagoric shapes in front of the round moon, obscuring it, revealing it, like the eye of a distant god—the god of destruction, satisfied with what he had wrought. The next time she looked they were in a grove of trees, miraculously still tall, still luxuriant. She slept. When she looked again, the cart was pushing its way across a swollen stream, and the moonlight glittered like a million silver fish in the leaping black water.

Then she sensed peace. The cart had stopped, she was in his arms, and he was carrying her across a wet field toward a dark house. She lay against his chest like a child, her arms around his neck. He smelled like wet canvas and like mud and like medicines. The night grew even darker, and it was deathly quiet. She was inside the house. It was dry. Quiet. She lay on a clean bed.

“You’ll be all right here,” he said quietly. “Back there the soldiers might have mutinied.”

She nodded, not comprehending, but wanted to hear the voice go on. She stared at the face. It
was
Elliot Hoover.

“I’ve pulled the dirt from your wound,” he said. “Cleaned it out well. But I have no antibiotics.”

Janice focused her eyes on the calm face. Her hands traveled over the familiar features. There was no doubt. The pale blue eyes, the sensitive skin, now badly in need of a shave. The compassion that glowed like hot coals from deep inside. His hands covered hers.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered.

He smiled. “I have no choice, Janice. I have to help others. I’ll leave some food for you. Some bread and cheese that won’t spoil.”

“Please, don’t go! I must talk to you.”

“I’ll be back.”

Her fingers tightened around his collar, but he gently uncurled them and laid her hands across her breast. A clean blanket covered her. He stood over her, more shadow than solid form, looking down. For a long time he only breathed there, as though confused, uncertain whether to go or remain. Then he went to the two children sharing a bed next to her. They spoke quietly together. One of the children coughed badly. He showed them a white cheese. He kissed them gently on the forehead, then went outside. The ox cart began rumbling again.

The night passed slowly. Sleep was impossible. It was not the blanket but the fever that kept her warm. Janice was convinced that she would die before dawn. In the next bed two boys, aged about nine or ten, slept fitfully, their arms comically tangled. One of them kept whispering what sounded like a name—probably his mother’s—but the other only wheezed steadily, frighteningly. Through the window she watched the moon go down over the jagged horizon. They were high in the mountains, and here the vegetation was still thick, even dense, like a tropical forest. Black fronds rustled near the window, whispering obscenities, and Janice finally slept.

Dawn showed white sheep foraging peacefully on green slopes. White rocks interrupted the steady green of the slopes. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish the sheep from the rocks until there was a movement. Janice sat on the edge of the bed, shivering. She watched down the road. No sound. The emptiness was as profound as the vista of mud that had flattened the other side of the mountains.

She ate the flat bread, dry and unpleasant, and then encouraged the two boys to eat. Their small faces, round and flushed, dimly focused on her, and their mouths slowly worked at the bread. Then she had them eat some of the white cheese, though it tasted like rancid butter to her. They seemed to relish the cheese. She cooled their foreheads with a damp cloth and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Children, she thought, helpless as newborn fawns. They were also waiting. Perhaps they had more trust than she. If she could speak their language she would ask them who was the man who had driven off in the ox cart, if he was an American, if he had really spoken English to her, or if she had hallucinated the whole thing.

Night came. Janice looked over at the boys and removed the blanket which had slipped over their faces. Once again she dampened a cloth and cooled their foreheads. She ran the cloth over their chests, down their arms, legs and necks. One pair of dark brown eyes fluttered open, gazed at her in misery, and then closed again in slumber. Wearily, Janice went to the window.

It was nearly dawn. Against a hazy purple range of mountains, tinged pink at the crest where the unseen sun hit the upper slopes, came a dot the size of a fly, soundlessly, groping its way forward. As she fed the boys the last of the white cheese and bread, Janice looked again. The dimly perceived dot had separated into an ox, a man, and a cart, silhouetted now as the earth warmed and the road showed brown against the green hills.

For nearly an hour she watched it come closer. A boy came to the window, feebly pointed, and spoke to his brother, who smiled. Then it was no hallucination, Janice realized. Never had she doubted her own senses so completely. The illness, the dislocation from nearly drowning had thrown her system into a shock from which it had not yet recovered. Something deep inside had activated a kind of primal fear, and she felt instinctively the livid hostility of the earth.

Janice went to her bed and sank down. The chills began to emanate from her belly, until they were spasms, and she was shaking uncontrollably under the blankets. In a daze she heard the snorting of the ox. The boys tried to open the door but found the latch too heavy. Then a man came into the stone house with a wooden box on his shoulder. He put the box on the earth floor and took the boys by the hand back to bed. He spoke to them gently in a strange, flutelike language, and began preparing a mixture of powders from pills and capsules that he broke open and mixed with water. He spoon-fed the medicine into their mouths, then kissed them gently on the eyes and bade them sleep.

It was still a dream to Janice. His features, blocked up in a silhouette by the crisp sunlight of early morning, were indecipherable. At times he looked like an avenging angel, stern, the forehead well chiseled over a sensitive, an unmistakably American face. Other times he looked dark, South Indian dark, and his dirty hands were slender and bruised as though by a lifetime of manual labor.

He lifted his bag of medicines, and came to Janice’s bed. Her hands instinctively groped upward at the face, like a blind person trying to read the features. Two strong, calloused hands caught hers and restrained them.

“Elliot. Everything is so strange. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

He bent down, made a paste of medicines, crushed them into a spoonful of water, and forced it into her mouth. She swallowed, still peering at the pale, glittering eyes of the man at the edge of the bed.

“Am I going to die?” she whispered.

His hand pushed her back onto the bed. Two pale blue eyes fixed her, speared her, frightened her with their intensity.

“Listen to me,” he said, examining her face, “you swallowed a lot of contaminated water. Do you understand?”

Astounded that she understood him, astounded that some measure of reality returned with the sound of his voice, she nodded dumbly.

“You’re going to live on boiled water, cheese and antibiotics,” he said, “and you do what I tell you.”

Her hand closed around his. She smiled, but was still confused. The room had begun to swim around her, growing elongated with every pass in front of her eyes.

“I have so much to tell you, Elliot,” she whispered. “I need your help….”

“Later,” he said.

She tried to whisper, but her voice had evaporated. Only her thoughts appeared, and they were inchoate, more like sensations than ideas. It was impossible even to begin to speak about Bill, about Dr. Geddes, about Juanita and the Master—and just as she tried, she began to fear that he would float away. He would evaporate like a dream. She clutched at his arm, but felt strong fingers remove her grasp. Then she sank backward into a sensuous river of sleep.

15

W
hen Janice awoke, her body was clean and fragrant, and her hair, soft and recently washed, fanned out blackly against the clean linen of the pillow. A beautiful sunlight slanted in from the mountain clouds, creating strong polygons against the rough stone wall. The two boys sat up, drinking soup out of a tin so hot their eyes winced as they greedily consumed the broth.

Hoover stepped into the house, his tall figure bending under the low-cut wooden doorjamb.

“My hair smells so pretty! I feel so clean,” she said, laughing.

He cleared his throat, and dug a small, sharp knife into the edge of the door.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” he said.

She blushed. She lay against the pillow, happy to be alive, breathing in the fresh odor of green grass, the cool mountain water outside the house, and to know that she had at last found Hoover.

Janice stared at him. He too looked abnormally thin, almost bony around the face, but a sense of strength radiated from him, as though the monsoon flood had burned away everything but the core of his masculinity. He was like a wolf, grown lean but sinewy from hunger.

“You must have wanted very much to see me.”

“I did. I’ve come a long way. I have so much to tell you.”

Disturbed, he walked into the room, and began boiling more soup in the corner for the boys. Their small bodies, sitting up and more animated now, blocked his face. A smell of hot water, vegetables, and fatty meats swirled around the room.

“Do you mind that I’ve come?” she asked hesitantly. “There’s been an emergency. I needed you.”

Hoover rose and rubbed his face with both hands. He deliberately ignored her.

“I went back to the
ashram,
” he said, leaning against the wall. “They told me an American—a woman—had been looking for me—black hair…”

“Did you know then it was me?”

He nodded. For a long time neither spoke. A strong but indecipherable emotion clouded Hoover’s face. He turned away, as though to examine the clouds breaking up overhead, but in reality to avoid her stare.