The Darling (5 page)

We wrap each body in plastic and again in paper, and now it is simply meat, food, protein and fat, ready to be delivered to the little Keene Valley Supermarket or picked up later today by our special-order customers—forty-eight organically fed, free-range chickens, a luxury item here in the Northcountry, hundreds of miles from any gourmet restaurant or store, sold at a price that’s competitive with mass-produced, chemically fed, chain-store chickens. I pity those poor sick creatures that, unlike our more fortunate hens, are dosed with antibiotics and spend their entire lives packed in tiny boxes under bright lights in food factories somewhere in Maryland or Arkansas, birds from start to finish raised, fed, watered, killed, plucked, and packaged entirely by shiny machines, never touched by human hands. Our creatures, we believe, have been provided with lives worth living, and they repay us with their healthy, clean bodies.

This, I have convinced myself, is our little battle won. It’s me and Anthea and the girls against Tyson’s and Frank Perdue and the industrialization of the food chain, and for us it justifies the carnage and the stress and high feelings that the bimonthly killing arouses in us. There’s still something of the ideologue inside me, I guess. All these years later. It explains why we find ourselves at the end of the day standing there, bloody and feathered and smelling of gore and guts; it tells us why we are near tears, panting, our chests heaving and our legs weak; and why we look at each other like suddenly estranged lovers. We’re doing it, by God, for a
reason
. It’s
political
.

“I never get used to this,” Anthea said and lighted a cigarette and with a shaking hand passed it to me and lighted another for herself.

I smoked and said nothing. There was still work to do, the cleanup. The dogs, sensing the fun was over, had drifted off, so I swung open the door of the butcher shop and let fresh air and late-afternoon sunlight into the room to dispel the smell of wet rust and motor oil, the odor of spilled blood and opened bodies—the stink of fresh death.

But there was something else, it was the residue of my dream of Africa, a stream of vague, almost erotic feelings that had been released in my sleep and then got left behind when I awoke and the dream dissipated and I could no longer call the generative images and story back to mind—a range of forgotten emotions that the killing of the hens today had summoned and now had suddenly brought forward and that unexpectedly and against my will had taken on the hard focus of a specific desire. I said to Anthea, “If I had to be gone a while, do you think you could run the farm? Could you handle it okay?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. Sure, I could. For how long?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a few weeks, maybe longer. Maybe less. Depends on what I find out there.”

“Where?”

“Liberia. Africa.”

Anthea stared at me in disbelief. “Geez, Hannah, you sure? I mean,
Africa
. How old are they now, your sons? I mean, if they’re…” She stopped herself mid-sentence. “What’re their names? You told me once, but I forget.”

Their names, yes. “Dillon and William and Paul.” When I left Liberia the names of my sons were Fly, Worse-than-Death, and Demonology. I didn’t tell that to Anthea. I added the numbers, the years since I had left Africa, and said, “Twenty-four for William, the twins are twenty-three,” and finished her sentence for her, “… if they’re still alive.” But I did not tell her that when I left our home in Monrovia they were fourteen and thirteen. Little boys. She could work out the numbers if she wanted to, but I knew that she wouldn’t, because she’s a kind woman and loves me.

“All right. Go ahead, and don’t you fret the farm, honey. Me and the girls can keep the place running like clockwork. Stay out there in Africa as long as you need to.”

“Let’s get cleaned up,” I said. “You pack the chickens in the cooler, and I’ll hose this place down. Then let’s take a swim. You up for it?”

“Too damned cold! You got to to belong to one of them whatchacallits, polar bear clubs, to swim this time of year,” she said, and peeled off her bloody apron and cap.

BUT IT WASN’T
too cold after all. Nan and Frieda drove in from the orchard, and a little later Cat joined us on the porch, where by then we were drinking beer and yacking in our usual way—I think Frieda was trying to convince Nan to join her on a climb in the Ecuadorean Andes in November, while Anthea and I teased the two, saying there was no way they could handle altitude with their kind of drug use. I sent Cat for the towels, and when she returned, we tossed our empty beer cans in the trash, and the five of us walked arm in arm across the lawn and cut through the field in front of the house, making our way gaily down to the river.

I felt strangely liberated that afternoon, almost like singing, not faking my comradery, as I normally did on these occasions. Up ahead the dogs bounded through the tall grass, scaring up small flocks of slow-moving, chilled grasshoppers, snapping the insects out of the air as they ran.

On the near bank the grove of tall, spreading, fifty-year-old oak trees cast its long shadow out to midstream. Beyond the shadow, all the way to the far bank, the river was in sunlight, glittering and warm. We stripped off our clothes and entered the cool, shaded water, Frieda and Nan first, plunging ahead, showing off their tanned, athletic bodies and their reckless abandon, followed by Anthea, who shoved her way into the water and hollered as she got waist deep, swearing at the cold and at us for talking her into doing a thing this dumb, and behind her came Cat, slender and childlike, holding her arms over her small, tight breasts, until she was up to her chin, when she finally let go of her fragile protection and swam like the others for the sun-warmed water on the farther side.

Finally I entered the stream, more timidly than they, for I am a little shy, actually, and because I am the old one among these women: my breasts are no longer perked, and my thighs and belly are loose, my pubic hair has thinned and is turning gray. But once I was entirely in the water and swimming—my feet free of the ground, my back arched and arms sweeping ahead of me, my legs scissoring easily, powering me into deeper and deeper waters—none of that mattered. My long white hair, still a point of vanity for me, swirled behind me like a bride’s veil, and my body felt strong and taut and young again, so that there was no perceptible difference between my body and the bodies of the other women. We were, all five of us, a school of porpoises dipping, diving under, surfacing, rolling over on our backs, and swimming out of the fast-running, shaded half of the stream into the sunlit pool beyond. Once there, we floated in place, and when we spoke our voices were softened and low, as if each of us had entered her own mind alone and when she spoke it was only to let the others know that she was still there, still close by, still their friend.

I leaned back in the water, my arms behind my head, and peered up at the cloudless, drum-tight, pale blue sky, and brought my gaze slowly down to the mountain ridges that surround the valley, where the foliage from halfway up the mountains was already glowing with early-autumn reds and yellows. Turning from the bright striations of the higher altitudes, I looked lower and lower, down through the evergreens to the near bank. And there were the dogs, my black-and-white Border collies, Baylor and Winnie, standing on the shore, watching us. They weren’t prancing up and down the bank as they always do, yelping excitedly and after a few moments leaping into the water themselves and paddling out to join us. Instead, today they both stood stock still, tails and ears lowered.

I swam a few yards downstream, separating myself from the others, and when I looked towards shore again, I saw that the dogs’ gazes had followed me. I was the one they were watching. Not the others.

“Really, Hannah, what’s up with the doggies today?” Anthea called.

“I… I don’t know.”

Nan laughed and said it was because they were too smart to swim in water this cold, and Frieda agreed.

Cat said, “This is so awesome,” and disappeared beneath the surface, and when she reappeared a minute later and ten yards downstream from me, the dogs didn’t react. They kept their gaze fixed only on me, and their expression was both accusatory and sorrowful, as if I had committed a crime, and only they and I knew about it. But at that moment I could think of nothing bad that I had done.

I suddenly felt heavy, gravity bound, and old again. “I’m going in,” I said, and started swimming slowly for shore. When my feet felt the smooth rocks on the bottom, I stood, my shoulders and breasts exposed, and stared back at the dogs. They both cocked their wedge-shaped heads and looked as if they were capable of speech but were waiting for me to speak first.

“What?” I said to them. “What do you know?” I asked. “ What do you want to know?”

They turned their heads away, and I nervously laughed and cupping my hands tossed water at them, and they grinned and leapt and yelped. Then, as if suddenly remembering why they were there, the dogs jumped from the bank into the water and, mouths closed, breathing sharply through their nostrils, paddled happily out to join the girls, and I clambered from the river onto the grassy bank and covered my body with a towel and gathered up my blood-stained clothes.

MY STORY IN
all its versions is only a tale of too-late. Maybe at best it’s a cautionary tale. To my sons I used to say, “Be careful what you wish for. Know what you love best. Beware the things that catch your eye.” And this, which I tell to you as well: “Never love someone who can’t love you back.” The truth is, most of the time, even now, I don’t want to tell my story. Not to you, not to anyone. It’s almost as if I’m beyond all stories and have been for years. You want to see me in light, but I’m visible only in darkness. I’m obliterated by light, and can’t cast it, either. I’m like a white shadow. And at night, when I’m visible, wherever I am, even here on the farm in the heat of summer, I lock all the doors and windows and pull down the shades, draw the curtains, and keep the dogs shut inside my bedroom with me and the bedroom door latched and bolted. I’m as afraid of the dark in upstate New York as the bush people are in Liberia, who sleep with their huts closed tight against the thousands of evil spirits that come in the night to steal people’s souls—leopard-devils that bite your throat first and eat you before you die, and two-step snakes that bite you and you take two steps and die, and bad white men and black men from the coast remembered in tales of slave catchers passed down by the elders.

I’m an elder myself now. Fifty-nine this year, in late middle-age, but old enough to have watched other people, my parents, for example, find themselves suddenly elderly and soon dead. Old age is a slow surprise. And at a certain point one’s personal history, one’s
story
, simply stops unfolding. Change just ends, and one’s history is not completed, not ended, but stilled—for a moment, for a month, maybe even for a year. And then it reverses direction and begins spooling backwards. One learns these things at a certain age. It happened to my parents. It happens to everyone who lives long enough. And now it’s happened to me. It’s as if the whole purpose of an organism’s life—of my life, anyhow—were merely for it to reach the farthest extension of its potential with the sole purpose of returning to its single-cell start. As if one’s fate were to drop back into the river of life and dissolve there like a salt. And if anything counts for something, it’s the return, and not the journey out.

When I returned to Liberia from my little farm in upstate New York that last time and saw at once that I had come back too late, I wondered if it had been, from the very beginning, too late. It was my question way back then; it’s my question now. Should I instead have stayed in Liberia a decade ago when the war was still raging and somehow lived there for as long afterwards as possible and shared my husband’s known fate and the unknown fates of my sons? Lord knows, it’s a simple enough question. But the simple questions are the hardest to answer. They always seem to carry with them a hundred prior questions, all unanswered, and probably in the end unanswerable now anyhow. They had to be answered at the moment they were first asked. Intentionality may be all that matters, but who knows a woman’s true intentions? Who knows what she truly wished for? Or what she loved best? Or even what caught her eye? Not Hannah Musgrave Sundiata. Not I. Especially not back then, over a decade ago, when I fled Liberia and left that endless war behind, turned away from the savagery and the madness of it, and abandoned to its flames my home, my husband’s body, my lost boys, and left to be shot and eaten by the soldiers my innocent, frightened, beloved dreamers, the eleven apes that had been placed in my charge.

My poor animals; they were mine to protect, the creatures I loved nearly as much as I loved my husband and sons and whom I tried, vain and proud and deluded, to save by placing them onto an island. Which I suppose was only what I wished someone would do for me. Place me onto an island.

A fantasy, that’s all it was. Just another fantasy of self-sanctification. It was futile then, and probably futile now, all of it. Even here on this little island.

And yet, that day in the midst of the war, when I boarded that final flight out of Monrovia, if I’d known my true motives for leaving, if I’d examined them closely enough at the time, they might have seemed puny to me, puny and unworthy, and I would not have left at all. I wouldn’t have made it to this enchanted isle, my farm—in the good, cheerful company of Anthea and the girls and my faithful collie dogs, all of us caring for sheep and hens and my beautiful gardens—with its inhabitants, me included, sanctified and blessed. And I wouldn’t have been obliged to return to Africa one more time as I did last year.

Mainly, we return to a place in order to learn why we left. Nothing else. That’s what all those nostalgic novels of return are really about. Had I known at the time my true reasons for leaving in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing what women have done for eons: I wouldn’t have become one of those wives and mothers walking mournfully through the wreckage and desolation made by men and boys trying to kill one another. I wouldn’t have become one of those howling widows searching like some ancient Greek woman for her slain husband’s body, so that he can be properly buried, would not have become a doleful mother asking for the whereabouts of her lost sons, so that her sons’ rage can be calmed, their fears assuaged, and their wounds cleansed and dressed. I would not have gone out to the river island where I had so cleverly placed my dreamers, my charges, and when I got to the island found only their hacked, burnt bones and broken skulls.