The Pursuit of William Abbey Page 3

  Once a month riders of the Natal Native Horse came through, but they were mostly black men of the amaNgwane, hated by Zulu and Boer alike. The back room of the church could serve as lock-up for any criminals lucky enough to survive capture, and the magistrate could pass sentence from Kimberley on local matters, or order the criminal sent to the Cape for more serious crimes, but by and large Baker policed itself, and it was policed by Baker.

  The town had been built to mine for diamonds, and in fifteen years had found nothing. But men having given up everything to come scrabbled with what little they had left to remain, and Baker had been one of the few places to do well from the recent war, the locals robbing anyone who appeared at the time to be losing and selling their goods to the next most likely victor, with as little respect for national or religious loyalties as a scorpion had to a snake.

  It was, in short, a den of inequity bathed in the chanting of righteous prayers. I loathed it on sight, and seeing no easy way to return at once to England and my beloved, fell head-first into corruption, apathy and damnation.

  Chapter 7

  I was at the brothel when they came to lynch the boy.

  Alas, that night I was not partaking. Like every Englishman raised in the age of Queen Victoria, I had come to Natal with only one idea of African women in my mind – the Hottentot. Be she from Sahara desert or Congo river, from the grassland where the Masai hunted or the long-necked Xhosa of the south, I had condensed every woman in the great sweep of Africa down to a single obscene notion: enormous buttock and gigantic breast, childlike in her mind and savage in her witchcraft. I expected dolts and dullards, and for a little while was convinced that this was what I saw, for the women of Baker were very careful indeed not to catch a white man’s eye, or to be seen to laugh too particularly, or weep where they might be caught showing their weakness. Such flickers of life were dangerous, for the white man’s wrath might ignite at the tiniest spark, from the cheeky smile of a delighted child through to the muttered sedition of an old man too tired to feign ignorance any more.

  And why?

  As I am a truth-speaker, let me proclaim the hearts of men: that every white master knew there were more Bantu than Boers or Englishmen, and that should he ever permit the spark of life to grow in the soul of his black neighbour, it could destroy the privilege that the white man held so dear. So he beat the smiles from the children, and starved the men who grumbled, and lay awake at night with a gun under his bed, knowing retribution would slip through the open window in the form of a black man clothed in blood, and in his terror for crimes committed committed more crimes to keep the terror at bay.

  This was Natal in 1884, where the circle of violence was too deeply burnt to be broken.

  In the midst of this, I grudgingly plied my trade, oblivious to it all. Every girl in the brothel had some disease or another. It was a spawning hellhole for the pox, dysentery and a dozen diseases of the sexual organs, and every time I thought enough bedding had been burnt and enough powder administered, another convoy of travellers would sweep in from the grasslands bringing lice, crabs and plagues to undo all my efforts.

  Worst were the children. Nearly nine offspring ran around the place, the palest nearly as blonde as his long-since-vanished father, scrubbing, stealing and working in the kitchen. At least two had the symptoms of diseases they had inherited from their parents, and that night I was called to tend to one boy, no more than four years old, who had come down with another bout of the fever that would see him buried in a half-sized coffin within a few months of my departure. His teeth were sharp, pointed, not growing flat and even as a normal child’s might; his eyes were shot with red, and he was already remarked to be especially dull. Our science then couldn’t name the congenital syphilis that would damn him, and no one would pay for the mercury to treat him, nor the exorbitant costs of fetching more from Durban; nor was I even sure that mercury could be ingested by one so young, or what the dosage might be.

  All this I said, in so many words, as his anxious mother held him and refused to show weakness, to sob or express any sentiment before a white man; and when I left, I did not linger by her door to hear her cry.

  I had been in Baker for five months, and knew where the boundaries lay.

  There were no street lights in Baker. The town was a splat of materials daubed together by men who weren’t sure if they would remain. Some effort had been made to create what the Americans would have called Main Street, a ridiculously wide avenue of pressed yellow dust around which the general store, church, farrier and brothel lay, along with the four high houses of the four Baker men and their mistresses, thrown down like stakes in the ground to proclaim that here they had come, and here they would remain.

  At first I had been frightened by the size of the sky and the depth of the darkness, a far cry from the green gaslight hues of Whitechapel and spilling yellow lamps of the midnight wards. Now I swaggered through the night towards my little room without second thought for the rustlings of the dark, knowing that Englishmen needed me, Boers had no interest in me and all black men feared me, for the shadow of the gun was at every Englishman’s back.

  Then there was fire.

  Rounding the corner where the Knofius stable sat, lost in my own thoughts, I looked up to see torchlight and hear the braying of voices. A parade of around forty men and women approached, led by some ten initiates to whom the rest had been drawn like iron to a magnet. They barked commands and instructions, yapped noises at each other and their growing audience, as much I think to keep themselves moving as to convey anything of matter, since silence would perhaps have exposed the viciousness of their purpose.

  For there, dragged between the leading men by rope and halter, was a boy. I vaguely recognised him, a Zulu child from the edge of the town whose mother kept house for the Holdstock family and whose father worked the wagons in Kimberley. Now there was blood across his face and bare skinny chest, and one arm was broken so that the white of the bone popped up through his torn and weeping flesh. This obvious rupture to his body did not stop his captors, who had tied a rope to his wrist and hauled him forward despite his groans of pain. Behind him men with sun-bleached beards nodded in wise appreciation at this punishment, and women walked stately with shawls across their shoulders and backs, faces set as though to say they were too kind or Christian to wish this cruelty upon a child, but understood that justice must be done.

  I, too dumb to speak or act, stood mutely on the corner of the street, the perpetual smell of manure pushed back by the smoke of torch and lamp, as the procession marched solemnly by. They moved at the stately pace of a religious parade, as though they bore the image of some saint upon their shoulders, or were lost in confessional thoughts. Only the boy staggered and swayed like a living thing, awake to his surroundings and the world, howling sometimes in pain, and sometimes falling with lip bitten and tears flooding his eyes. As the procession passed, my curiosity overwhelmed the flat stupidity of my soul, and seeing Mrs Smid at the rear of the crowd, who sometimes served as midwife to these parts, I approached.

  “What’s this?” I mumbled, not sure how to classify what I was seeing, not daring to give it a name. To name it made it obscene, and for me to stand by while obscenity happened was clearly impossible, for I knew myself a good man. Better to continue in a state of ignorance than challenge that self-deception.

  “Boy violated the Baker girl. Caught him red-handed. Shouldn’t be done, shouldn’t be done.”

  This is the truth of Mrs Smid’s heart:

  Her father was Boer, her mother was French, and they married in secret when they were seventeen years old. She was born one year later, but her father was often away with the cattle. Her mother taught her that true love conquered all, and told stories of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the old court of the Sun King. But her father slept with another woman, and little by little his absences grew until he never came home. Still her mother wouldn’t speak a bad word against him, would hit her children for repeating the jibes o
f their bullying friends. Love was everything, she said, as they begged for bread at the chapel door. Love will bring us together, when he has found himself again.

  Mrs Smid married Mr Smid when she was eighteen, after he promised her a reliable but unflashy income, good Christian standards and a decent pumpkin patch. They slept in separate beds, were cordial in the morning, closest during prayers, and that was it, thank you kindly.

  Sometimes she recalled that she had a housegirl by the name of Esther, who slept on a pallet by the fire; or that the men who brought in the harvest were all Zulus, who sang until they caught her listening. Sometimes she even found herself staring at the men with black wax around their heads and leopard skin at their groins and wondering what manner of place created men so… she was not sure of the word to use here, but knew it could only be a sin, hot and soft and burning inside – and then she looked away.

  This was the truth of Mrs Smid’s heart. She was one of the first whose souls I knew, when the shadow came.

  So went the crowd, and I followed.

  I followed them to the white boab tree, where they set to tying the boy with ridiculous quantities of rope to the bulging, swollen trunk, his body smothered like a bee in a hive by the sheer weight of cordage. Above the sprout of crooked branches that crowned the tree like greasy hair, the moon was rising, nearly full, and its light beat against the torchlight as the men passed their judgement.

  I saw the eldest Baker, once a Scottish sailor who had taken a liking to the shores of Africa, and two of his sons, their father’s accents eroded down to something respectable in merchants’ halls and bankers’ clubs across the Empire. I saw the pastor exchange a few words with the youngest of this clan, who shook his head in gentle reproach, as if chiding the priest for his foolery. Then the assembled crowd stretched and thinned, forming a wide circle around the tree, and I saw the faces of black men and women, their eyes open and lips sealed, clustered together as if for warmth among the icy pools of white men, watching.

  I watched too.

  It would be comforting to say that I thought of intervening. That fantasies of myself as a hero, leaping between the mob and its victim, crossed my mind.

  They did not.

  It never even occurred to me.

  I was spectator to something that seemed so natural to this place that to intervene would have been as to ask the stars to stop spinning in the sky, or to beg the waters to flow away from the sea. At no moment did it cross my mind that I was a human, watching another – a child – about to be put to death with no recourse to justice, truth or law. No, not even when his mother pushed through her friends and fell to her knees before Baker, begging sometimes in English, sometimes in broken half-Dutch, sometimes in her native tongue for the life of her boy, washing the feet of the old man with her tears – even then, I stood by as one might watch a puppy that needs to be trained, wondering at the strangeness of it all.

  Was I in shock?

  Was I such a good man that my whole soul froze?

  These are pleasant lies that I would tell myself in later months, as I sought to find anything to excuse my complete and utter cowardice, my inhumanity.

  Here is the truth of my soul: that I looked at this black child and saw only the savage, and the rule of law. Perhaps one day all men would be equal; but for now, white men knew best.

  They doused him in paraffin oil.

  I thought at first it was water, until the stench of it and the logic of the situation hit me.

  There were no big speeches, no grand words. Her family pulled his mother back, eyeing the revolver on the hip of one of the Bakers, the rifles held in their men’s arms, and without ceremony the father of the girl who was said to have been violated set the boy on fire.

  In the stories of these things, we always try to make it easier than it was.

  He screamed a while, a stench of burning, popping flesh, bits of him dripping off in bubbles of fat, until he didn’t have lips to scream through, air to inhale. It would have been enough for him to die then, but he lived, for a little while. They cut him down from the tree and let him fall to the ground. For a while people watched, and some whites returned to their houses, and some blacks shuffled in, releasing his mother from their grasp to hold her son’s melted body.

  He breathed.

  He still breathed.

  There was almost no skin left on him, but it wasn’t the fire that was going to kill him. Either the pain would be too much, or the infections would turn what was left of his flesh into liquid, oozing pus. If he was lucky, his heart would go, or his lungs would be too burnt for him to inhale for very much longer. If not, it could take days.

  I knew all of this, and perhaps it was the knowing that kept me standing there, staring at this scene. Perhaps I waited to see if there was anything more, if this lingering demise was also a part of this strange ritual I had witnessed. Or perhaps some part of me was still a doctor, despite myself, and when all his skin was burnt away I at last saw a child, dying.

  To this day, I don’t know. Truth-speakers see the truths of other people’s hearts, never their own.

  His mother held him, and screamed and clawed the earth, seeking with the movement of her arms beneath his shredded back some way to hold him that didn’t hurt him more, something to be done. Some of the men poured cold water over him from flasks or skins; others whispered comfort to the mother, having nothing that could be said to the boy.

  I prayed that he was unconscious, and that the slight fluttering of his eyes came from a mind too far gone in pain to register it any more. I prayed that he would die, and saw his chest move again, and for the very first time, closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again, someone had given his mother a knife.

  She turned her head from him so that the saltiness of her tears wouldn’t hurt him, and in doing so, seemed for the very first time to see me.

  I do not think there was any place in her heart for hate that night. Hate comes after, when the grieving is done.

  She looked at me as one might behold the wolf on the edge of the forest, its muzzle still stained with blood, and in that moment I understood that I was the animal. Civilised man with my civilised ways, had I truly not spoken? Had I not raised my voice, called out in my judicious, cultivated way for the law, for a little thought, a moment of examination? Where was my education, my learning, the gifts of ingenuity and culture that I was meant to have brought with me to the dark continent? Where was my oath to do no harm? Where was that fine young man I believed myself to be? Perhaps he had never lived. Perhaps we were all just savages, in the moonlight through the blackened boab tree.

  Her brother helped her drive the point of the knife through her son’s heart.

  I heard ribcage crack as she twisted the blade.

  She eased his body to the earth as the blood turned dust to crimson mud, and with the scarlet tips of her fingers skimmed his eyelids shut, brushed the white grin of his teeth, exposed beneath dissolved lips, pulled the knife free with a jerk that swung it high up over her head, where it paused as if it might fall again, and then she rose to her feet, and now gave me the full force of her attention.

  Like one caught in the gaze of a lion, I was frozen.

  She spoke isiZulu, or at least I thought she did. She did not move as she spoke, nor do I think she blinked. She did not drop the knife wet with her son’s blood, or point, or howl, or catch the moonlight in her fingers. She did not laugh, or fall down in a fit, or foam at the mouth. She looked me in the eye, and with her gift she put the curse upon me, and I knew it, and could not name it, felt the cold of it crawl up from my feet to my ankles, ankles to my knees, all the way up my body as if the earth had grown fingers of icy bone that now pushed with will alone into knuckle-deep hollows of my flesh.

  Then it was done, and both her stare and the ice let me go, and I realised that my whole life I had known nothing of anything, and that the only truth I had in my heart was ignorance.

  And for a second, something
more.

  For an instant, I thought I knew myself. The limit of my soul, the shape my shadow threw on the earth, the dreams I had not yet dreamt, the fears and the stories that kept me at bay, the path of the lines on my hands and the truth of the questions in my heart I had never dared ask.

  And then it passed. And like a penitent who has seen God for only a second, I was pulled back into darkness.

  Men came and lifted up the boy’s body, carrying it away to some place of their own. I thought, as they lifted it, it seemed like nothing. A burnt carcass of flesh and bone that flopped and jangled loose in their arms.

  Then I thought something else: that as they carried the boy’s body, his shadow remained still upon the earth. And as I watched, the black, half-hollowed-out imprint of darkness that the body had left behind seemed to move.

  Only then, with just me, the darkness and the blood drying in the earth, did some semblance of sense come back to me, and I turned and ran.

  Chapter 8

  At night, alone in my bed, I dreamt the dreams of the sleeping town.

  Of Mr Knofius, the stable master, who when the war broke out wanted to fight for Pretoria, but kept on inventing excuses to stay at home until it was too late and the Boers had won, and he was left without glory or pride, the man who would have, would have, would have, if only he ever had.

  Of Mrs Smid, who permitted her husband to copulate with her once every two weeks until her seventh child was born, at which point she considered her duty done and informed him of this, and who dreams of the men with feathers in their hair and cowtails on their shins, two spears and a shield, marching through the sun. The black man is a terrible, terrible thing, savage in his lusts, brutal in his desires, but once she saw a Xhosa man laughing with a woman with ochre on her hands and they seemed almost human, skin brushing skin, lips sharing in secrets and desires, our father, deliver us from evil, deliver us from temptation…