Everfair (7 page)

Mrs. Hunter turned to Wilson. “But our aim is to build a sanctuary for the soul, isn't it? As well as for mere physical victims of the tyrant's cruelty?”

Wilson nodded. “Yes, we must consider all aspects of our peoples' well-being.”

What had Jackie expected? The man was a minister, after all, though he had agreed to the Society's project of colonization as Jackie, their president, had extended it. In the end, the plan was for a series of gatherings up and down the trail. Mrs. Hunter decided she and Wilson would harangue all three parties in turn. Each was centered loosely around one of the traction engines' boiler furnaces.

They began with their “countrymen,” the Negroes grouped together at the procession's rear (Jackie had done his utmost to integrate the expedition's various factions, but to no avail). The Christians' message, from all he could tell, contradicted none of the Fabian Society's ostensible reasons for crossing the Kasai River, only casting them in the light of a mandate from Heaven. He listened a short while to what Mrs. Hunter and Wilson preached. Then he preceded them to the British and Irish workmen clustered around the middle boiler, whose participation in the Society's experiment he'd insisted on—gambling that, in the eyes of the audience he had in mind, the workmen's race would trump white Europeans' objections to their class.

Though for many years an office-holder in the Fabian organization, Jackie Owen was no public speaker. As an author, the written word was what he normally relied on and, he hoped, what would soon attract the attention this project had been set up to generate.

Given the circumstances, he did his best. He made sure the firelight fell on his face. “Practical dreamers,” he said. “That's what we are. Dreamers, but realistic about it. Heads in the clouds, but our feet on the ground.” He saw their eyes glittering, but little else.

“You've come this far. Abandoned your homes, left your wives behind.” Well, most of them had. “Trusting me. Trusting in your own right hands, the work you do. The work that has made the world and will now make it anew.” He paused. What else was there to say? Nothing that could be said.

In the distance behind him he heard music. Church songs. Invoking primal reactions with pitch and rhythm—how could he fight that? He couldn't.

But the men listening: maybe they could. “If I stood here all night, I wouldn't be able to convey to you one half of what I aim for us to accomplish in our new home, liberated from the constraints of capitalism and repressive governments. I know many of you are eager to share your own ambitions for our endeavour, and I invite you to do so—now is the time!” He called on a workman whose name he remembered from a recruitment meeting. “Albert, step up and tell your fellows about that flanging contraption you're wanting to rig up.”

“Me?”

“Yes—yes, you, come here and talk a bit—”

Albert obliged, stepping into the furnace fire's ruddy glow with his jacket and shirt wide open to the heat and insects. Self-educated, of course. Still, he had some highly original ideas on how to revise manufacturing processes for an isolated colony … but as his eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond the boiler's immediate vicinity, Jackie saw the audience's interest was not much more than polite. Music exercised its all-too-potent charms. Heads nodded, hands tapped against thighs, necks and shoulders swayed, and he thought they'd be singing themselves at any moment. The song ended before that happened, though. Albert finished his discourse in silence and stood in the furnace's light without, evidently, any idea of what next to do.

“Thank you, Albert,” said Jackie. This elicited light applause and gave Albert the impetus he needed to find and resume his old place among the onlookers.

Just as Jackie was wondering who next to impose upon for a testimonial, the music began again. No, not again, not the same music from the same source. This came from the other end of their impromptu encampment, from the head of the procession. Where the natives had gathered by the boiler furnace of the first traction engine. Where Mademoiselle Toutournier had insisted on remaining, with Mrs. Albin insisting on remaining with her.

A lyric soprano sang a song he'd never heard that was, somehow, hauntingly familiar from its opening notes:

“Ever fair, ever fair my home;

Ever fair land, so sweet—”

A simple melody, it was winning in its self-assurance, comforting, supportive, like a boat rowed on a smooth, reflective sea. Then it rose higher, plaintive in a way that made one want to satisfy the singer:

“Ever are you calling home your children;

We hear and answer swiftly as thought, as fleet.”

A chorus of lower voices, altos, tenors, and baritones, repeated the whole thing. Then the earlier voice returned in a solo variation on the theme:

“Tyrants and cowards, we fear them no more;

Behold, your power protects us from harm;

We live in freedom by sharing all things equally—”

The same yearning heights, supported by an inevitable foundation. A foundation that was repeated as the resolution necessary for the verse's last line:

“We live in peace within your loving arms.”

He was staring through the darkness at the little light piercing it ahead. So, he felt sure, were all those with him. The chorus repeated, graced this time by—bells? Gongs? Singing swelled around him now and he joined it. A second verse, and a third one, and by then he was on the edge of the circle with Daisy Albin and the lead engine at its center. She sang. She it must be who had penned the words, taught them by rote, composed the music in which the entire expedition now took part. The bells and gongs revealed themselves to be pieces of the traction engine, struck as ornament and accent to the anthem's grave and stately measures.

The anthem.
This was it: their anthem. Before they'd even arrived home, they sang their nation's song. And knew its name: Everfairland. This would be what Leopold endangered, what could rouse all Europe to revenge it if it were lost.

Mrs. Albin had stopped. The chorus continued. Jackie made his way through the happy, singing throng to clasp and kiss her hands.

 

Mbuji-Mayi, Everfair, February 1895

Daisy quite doted on the little hut they'd built her. It had the air almost of a summer cottage. The dirt floor made her feel like a pioneer, uncivilized, but its surface was really very hard—Jackie had tamped it down with a stone weight lifted by one of the traction engines—and clean. And it stood several inches higher than the ground surrounding it, to forestall flooding in the rainy season to come.

Like a ring of clerestory windows, the gap between her house's high, thatched roof cone and the mats of her outer wall let in gentle, indirect light and a refreshing breeze. A red-tailed parrot came sometimes to the trees the builders had left growing by the front entrance. If Lisette lived here she'd want to tame it.

Surely the children would enjoy spending a year or two here, far from the horrors Leopold wrought upon the lowlands. She had written to her husband a month ago. He would bring them by Lily's birthday, before the start of the rainy season.

“I knock on your door.” Lisette had become so formal since they ceased to share quarters. Or had the watershed been her nonsensical “confession”?

“Enter!” Daisy called from her new stool. The door was a bit beyond Lisette's reach, a few feet inside the doorway, leaning against the post from which it would later be hung, well before any danger of storms. For now the frame was filled by a fringe of raffia. Lisette pushed this aside, her down-drawn face expressing—what? Impatience? Frustration?

No table yet. “May I offer you some beer?”

“Water only. I must go back…”

Expressing exhaustion, Daisy decided. “Beer would be better for you.” The Bah-Looba who had emigrated here with them said that fermentation got rid of certain parasites. Or that was one translation.

“Very well, then. Beer. But not so much as to make me drunk.”

Daisy got up to go to the beer jar in the storage room. “Will you sit?”

“I mustn't stay.” But Lisette collapsed onto the stool anyway. When Daisy returned with the beer-filled calabash, Lisette's head rested on cupped hands propped up by the elbows on her knees. Her white kerchief lay spread in her lap, exposing the coiling disarray of her plaits.

Daisy knelt on the mat-covered bed next to the stool, her only seat for her first week in her new home. She lifted the calabash cup. “Here.”

Lisette took a long pull. “Ahh. Thank you.” She offered the calabash back. Daisy accepted it and drank what was left. When she was finished, she set the empty cup on the mat.

Lisette looked around the hut's interior silently for a moment, taking in the carved posts, the prettily woven baskets hanging from them, the bare bench. “You have adjusted yourself quickly.”

Daisy laughed. “Are you saying I've ‘gone native'? I only accepted this place because it seemed easier than arguing.”

“No, but it is beautiful. I don't find any fault.” Not with where Daisy lived, but
how
. Alone.

“Nor I with you, ch
é
rie,” Daisy responded gently. If her cottage—their colony's first private permanent structure—had been built to reward her for composing Everfair's national anthem, the infirmary had been built as a lure for Lisette. Who'd begun sleeping there before Daisy's hut was habitable, deserting their shared tent for its fresh-laid wooden floors.

Another silence. Longer and less comfortable. It stretched and stretched. Only the soft rustling of thatch brushed by the straying wind ruffled its awful smoothness. Then Daisy held out her hand.

Lisette took it. “I can't. Patients are waiting.” But she let Daisy slide her palm up along her brown-skinned arm and tug till she followed the pull downward and fell beside her on the bed. “Ch
é
rie, my dear…” They kissed.

“You don't know—”

“Shush. Of course I do.” Daisy had helped out, bathing and bandaging wounds, boiling water, straining broths. Miles and miles now from the nearest collection points, and still Leopold's victims poured in, half-starved, half-strangled, shot, limping, fevered, slashed with knives …

Those who made it this far generally lived. Generally. And joined the colony.

“There are always more.” Lisette sat up, rebuttoning the light cotton shirt on which Daisy had just begun making headway. “Always. It is wicked to leave them…”

“Yes. But you must sleep”—without hope, she rose to sit herself—“so why not here?” She couldn't help stroking the back of Lisette's neck, the tender, sweat-damp curls hidden beneath her coronet of plaits. She felt the girl softening like honey in the sun.

Then she straightened, crystallized. “No. I belong with the other blacks.”

Stung, Daisy drew back. “It isn't— You
aren't
!”

“Some would say I am.” Lisette retrieved her kerchief and stood, tying it back in place. “And who are you to decide?”

When Lisette had confessed her Negro blood, Daisy had vowed it would make no difference between them. But she must have said or done something wrong: a word misspoken, a glance misunderstood.

She followed Lisette to the doorway. “Is that it? Is that what keeps you away? What can I do?”

“Nothing.” Lisette turned to face her. Disconcertingly, she smiled. “Try not to think it is what you do which will make things better.” This time it was she who reached for Daisy's hand. Daisy gave it. “If you are sure you want—” Lisette stopped. Her face—what did it express now? She cocked her head as if listening. One undecipherable look and she was gone, vanished with a whisk of the raffia fringe.

A second later Daisy stepped after her to see Lisette scurry off along the path to the infirmary. Before she could run and catch her and tell her yes, yes, she was sure, Jackie appeared from the opposite direction, calling her name.

“Daisy! Hello! The best of news—they're almost here! I hurried ahead to tell you!”

“Who? What—” Someone was coming? But why had Lisette left so suddenly?

“‘Who'? Why, your family, woman, the ones you've been
waiting
for.” He had her shoulders in his strong grip. He shook them once for emphasis.

Had Lisette heard his approach somehow from inside Daisy's hut? Still, why depart so dramatically—why not simply—

“Or, some of them, anyway, I'm afraid—look here, it's the most rotten thing imaginable, but Laurie Junior … that is to say, Ellen had to return to Bristol—her health—and naturally Laurie Senior was needed to escort her and they took him, but I kept them from bringing away the other three—”

Think,
she told herself. Logic. She had to think. About what was most important. The children—the “other three”—were coming—soon—now—Jackie had “hurried” to tell her. The children—but not Little Laurie? No, that must be wrong. He needed her. “So when will they be back? With the baby?”

Jackie frowned and bit his lip. Hadn't he understood her questions? “You'll want to be sitting down, Daisy.” He tried to steer her through the raffia-filled doorway.

She resisted. “No. Tell me.”

“He's deserted you.”

Daisy felt calm descend over her like a cold wave. Washing away panic and confusion. Helping her think. “For Ellen.”

“There's to be a divorce.”

“They're gone.” Saying made it so. “They've taken the—” Her voice failed, but not her logic. The “baby,” Laurie Junior, now four and no longer a total infant, was Ellen's son, as the world reckoned these things. Though really they were all Daisy's. All four hers.

“He wanted the other three as well, but I stopped him.”