The Laments (11 page)

“Just a minute!” he sputtered.

The little red creatures went about their activity as though he didn’t exist.

A chant was spreading through the group.

“China! China! China!”

China? Something rang a bell.
“Will
?
”
shouted Howard.

“He’s down
ther
e
!” answered a voice, for the earthen faces were unrecognizable; a red hand pointed down into the hole.

Howard peered over, but the depth of the hole, and its darkness, made it impossible for him to see anything.

“Will! Come up here this minute!”

Howard looked at the faces sitting around the hole. Who could these urchins be? Then it occurred to him that they were the children of his colleagues at the company.

“What have you done to my flower bed!” cried Howard.

“What flower bed?” said one child.

“The one that’s been ruined! You’re a menace. The lot of you! Where are your parents?” he asked.

The busy circle of powdery faces offered blank stares. But one little fellow, caked in red clay, offered a shrill reply.

“My daddy said it was all right! He said you worked for him!”

Howard struggled to identify this impudent little savage and finally tagged him as Buck Quinn’s son. Another face appeared at the top of the ladder.

It was smeared with red earth, the hair matted and dusty, but there was something familiar about the downturned eyes. “Hello, Dad!”

“Ah, Will,” said Howard, momentarily relieved at being able to identify one familiar face. “Now look, Will, this has to stop.”

“We’re going to China, Dad!”

“Will, this is Mummy’s flower bed!”

Titters spread through the group. The hole and the flower bed were opposing realities. They couldn’t both exist.

“
YOU’RE JUST LETTING THEM DIG?
” asked Julia as they watched from a distance. The children around the hole were lifting up buckets of soil and chanting: “Chi-na! Chi-na!”

“If they want to go to China,” snapped Howard, who had just opened his second beer, “let them go to bloody China!”

“What about the neighbors?”

“Damn the neighbors. It’s their bloody kids who are responsible for tearing up the company garden.”

“How can you let them?”

“One of those kids belongs to my boss,
that’s
why!”

“What about Will? Where is his common sense?”

“Clearly,” Howard said, “he’s been brainwashed by these children. What an awful neighborhood.” He sighed. “Why did we ever move here?”

A tall African police officer had propped his bicycle up on the garden path and joined the Laments. He removed his khaki pith helmet, dusted it off, and folded his arms to survey the scene.

“Who’s responsible for this?” he asked sternly.

“Certainly not me,” said Howard.

“Who is the occupant of this house?”

“I am,” admitted Howard. “But I—”

“Then you are responsible.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” said Howard, trying a different tack. “You’ve arrived just at the right moment.”

The officer removed his white gloves carefully, slipped them into his belt, and walked to the edge of the hole so that the shiny tips of his shoes reflected the activity around him. The children looked at him with interest, though they kept chanting and passing buckets.

“Chi-na, Chi-na!” they murmured.

The police officer, much impressed, peered down at the bottom of the hole and made a solemn declaration. “China is a long way away.”

“Exactly what I said,” replied Howard. “But they wouldn’t listen to me!”

The policeman frowned, folding his arms again. “This hole is a menace.”

“I know,” Howard said. “I work for the copper mine.”

“Then you of all people should know how dangerous this is!” fumed the officer. “What if someone fell? What if it caved in? What then? Who would be responsible?”

Howard wilted under the policeman’s glare.

“If they dig the hole in the street it is my problem,” the officer declared. “But this is your problem.”

“Chi-na! Chi-na!” cried the children.

The policeman put on his helmet and gloves and mounted the bicycle.

“Isn’t he going to help us?” asked Julia as the officer rode off.

“Bloody civil servants.” Howard walked miserably back to the house.

THE AFTERNOON LIGHT SHIFTED
abruptly as enormous blue storm clouds approached from the east. The sun was low in the west as the first glittering raindrops struck the soil, sending tiny clouds of dust into the air.

Will paused from digging, and peered up at the circle of sky at the top of the hole.

“It’s a monkey’s wedding,” said Ruth.

“A what?” asked Will.

“When the sun shines and it rains too, it’s a monkey’s wedding,” she explained.

Will felt a delicious shiver of delight as Ruth looked at him. She was covered with red dust, too, which made them members of the same tribe. A rumble of thunder shook the ground, and the chanting grew louder.

“Will,” whispered Ruth, “we’ll get to China soon!”

He gazed back at her, elated.

Lightning flashed in the distance, and a violent clap of thunder jolted them. Ruth grabbed Will’s hand and they both giggled with fear and delight.

Against the advancing storm clouds, a line of red silhouettes danced across the garden. The wind picked up, whipping the red dust into tiny twisters, making the banana trees shake and flail like the long manes of wild stallions; then amber raindrops started pelting the dusty ground like diamonds. In another second, a shroud, black and billowing, engulfed the sun, swallowing light and sound until only the voices of parents could be heard, faint and anxious.

“Ruth! Ruth! Out of the lightning!” cried Joseph from the kitchen. Ruth squeezed Will’s hand with a reckless smile and skipped away.

“Hurry, Matthew!” called Buck from the Quinns’ house.

Raindrops pelted down fiercely, streaking the red dust from the children’s faces. A massive flash of lightning ripped a seam through the sky with an instantaneous roar, and the deluge became a swirling torrent. Stripped of anonymity, the tribe was dissolved, and the children raced home to safety while the crimson earth became a molten stream which grew into a river that crested into a whirlpool at each sewer grating.

When the storm had passed, a clear evening sky remained. The stars glittered overhead, and the smell of ozone lingered—the perfume of cataclysm.

WILL COULDN’T WAIT TO SEE
the hole the next day. Julia insisted that Abraham go with him, for fear that it had become a treacherous abyss. What they found, however, was a shallow muddy pit. The storm’s torrent had filled the hole with loose clay and the detritus of its assault. By late afternoon, Abraham had repaired the flower bed, and in a week the roses had been replaced. Meanwhile, when the facts of the tunnel’s origin were revealed, Ruth received a sound spanking from her father. Julia protested, but Joseph insisted that the clear culprit was Ruth’s vanity, and what Sunday school couldn’t cure, the palm of his hand would.

Julia and Howard were not so strict. Julia admired Will’s romantic streak, and Howard, being a Lament, couldn’t blame Will for wanting to go to China.

“After all,” he said, “Laments travel! It’s what we’ve always done,” he told Julia. “Except, of course, for my father.”

WILL KEPT DREAMING ABOUT THE HOLE
long after it had been filled in, as one does after a task unfulfilled. In one dream, he reached the end of the tunnel; when his fingers parted the earth, he discovered a starlit sky. A face peered into the hole—a slightly amused face with a full, Punchinello jaw, wearing black-and-white silk pajamas with a conical hat. His skin was as blue as a robin’s egg, his eyes were small and almond-shaped; embroidered on his silk pajamas were yellow roses. He looked down at Will and laughed, a sound that echoed like a thunderclap.

“What was he?” Ruth asked, when Will explained the dream. “A clown? A ghost?”

“The Midnight Chinaman,” said Will. “Don’t you remember telling me you wanted to see a Midnight Chinaman?”

“Never!” She frowned, passing her hand vaguely down to her bottom; Joseph’s thrashing had apparently adjusted her recollection of the event.

In Will’s dreams, however, the Midnight Chinaman began to take on a more awesome and disturbing proportion. In one dream, he opened his mouth to laugh, and Will was sucked into the man’s paprika-red throat. In another dream, he lurked by the windowsill when Will had been tucked into bed; he leaped into the room, and when Will tried to cry out, the Midnight Chinaman squeezed his throat so tightly that only a high-pitched whistle escaped.

Africa Divided

Rose was furious. Although she was actually the first to be told by letter from Julia, a chance phone conversation with a cousin had brought her the rumor two days before the missive arrived. Nothing stirred Rose’s fury more than being kept in the dark, especially with regard to a matter as important as Julia’s pregnancy.

Apparently I am the last to be told that you are expecting! I must assume that you are attempting to injure me by delivering the news in such a shabby way. Although I have not seen my firstborn grandson in four years, an error I blame on your inability to settle down, I cherish my right as Grandmother to see the boy. How can you deny me this?

Furthermore, your letter failed to fully explain
when
the twins are to be born,
what
their names will be, nor
when
I can expect a visit from my grandchildren. What have I done to deserve such appalling treatment?

Spent a horrid two weeks in London, which is even
filthier than I remember. Oscar and I endured pubs full of cigarette smoke, and streets choked with petrol fumes. I shall never visit England again!

“We could drive down to Johannesburg for a week,” Howard murmured. “And meet Oscar before she divorces him.”

“I suppose,” said Julia. “But I can’t tolerate any of her nasty comments about Will not looking like the family.”

“That’s inevitable, darling. You can’t expect Rose not to be Rose.”

“Well, he’s getting old enough to understand. I won’t see his feelings hurt!”

“Then we should tell her about Will ahead of time.”

“But I don’t
want
to tell her,” Julia protested. “What good will that do? Besides, we don’t even have proof. Dr. Underberg’s dead, and the papers don’t say anything.”

“What are you suggesting, then?” asked Howard.

“That we do nothing.” Julia threw her fingers into her hair and pulled it back, as if her burden rested at the back of her cortex somewhere (which it probably did).

So it was that the rift between Julia and her mother came to separate half of Africa from itself.

THE INITIAL SIGNS OF LABOR
marked Will’s first view of his mother in a vulnerable light. To him she had always seemed unstoppable. Though never a graceful woman—she habitually banged the pots, broke glasses, and slammed cupboards as if she were sealing hatches in a submarine—these sounds, for Will, evoked domesticity and a secure home. The bone-jarring jolt of the oven door promised a fluffy banana cake, and the grating clash of copper on cast iron presaged the soothing delight of a mug of hot chocolate.

But when Julia went into labor she became very quiet. Her strained voice, her limp hair, her eyebrows knitted in concentration, worried the boy. He desperately wanted her to whack the cabinets with a poker just to reassure him that she would survive. She saw him to bed that night, but he settled only when she lowered his blinds with a comforting clatter and dropped his drawing pencils and crayons noisily into the crate under his bed.
That
was the mother he knew.

“G’night, darling!” she said.

“G’night, Mummy.”

The Midnight Chinaman visited him again that night, arms folded, a mirthful grin on his blue face. When Will asked him what he wanted, the phantom put a finger to his lips and broke into a fearsome laugh that to Will’s young ears sounded like wild trumpets.

He awoke to see Howard stubbing his toe on the foot of the bed.

“Ooof!”

“Daddy? You all right?”

“Fine”—Howard groaned—“but your mother has to go to the hospital, so I’m taking you over to the Quinns’ while the babies are born.”

“I want to be with Mummy,” cried Will. But his father ignored these protests, wrapping the boy in a blanket and putting him over his shoulder for the walk across the street.

As Howard noted later, the evening wouldn’t have been such a calamity if Sandy Quinn hadn’t been visiting her sister in Botswana at the time. Though the Quinns’ house seemed like a military surplus graveyard during the day, by night Howard entered a veritable fortress, thanks to the presence of an overweight male Rhodesian Ridgeback named Ajax—a fluke of nature who lacked all a dog’s virtues yet possessed a surfeit of its vices: he was disobedient, hostile, flea-bitten, flatulent, mostly deaf, and absent any sense of smell. He barked all night, slept all day, and, because of his sensitive stomach, threw up repeatedly on Sandy Quinn’s Turkish Hereke in the hall, for which crime he had been cast out of the house forever.

With his son dozing on his shoulder, Howard heard a menacing growl as he ambled across the Quinns’ dark driveway. Pouncing, the hound locked his jaws on Howard’s trouser hem.

“Down, Ajax,” whispered Howard. “I can’t play now.” But the animal let Howard drag him, belly on the ground, claws plowing through the gravel.

“Bugger off, Ajax,” Howard snarled.

Trying to keep his balance with both arms enveloping Will, Howard rapped on the screen door. There was a sharp pain in his tendon.

“Ajax, you . . . Ouch! Naughty dog!”

Perhaps because there was no response from inside the house, the old Ridgeback became more aggressive. Howard felt another nip at his calf.

“Quinn!”
he shouted.

The dog’s growls intensified, and Howard lunged against the door, shoulder against the button.

“Quinn! Wake up,
for Pete’s sake!”

Suddenly a light switched on, and Buck appeared, his .303 service rifle aimed through the mosquito screen. Ajax scampered away with an eighteen-inch swatch of Howard’s left pant leg, shaking the life out of it.