The Headhunter's Daughter (13 page)

“
Muambi
,” the houseboy said, suddenly quite solemn, “do you not agree that our waterfalls here at Belle Vue are the most splendid in all of the Kasai?”

Pierre was astounded at the man’s cheek. “
Pardon?
”

“Of course I have not had the opportunity to see as many waterfalls as you, given that I lack your means of transportation. Nonetheless, based on all the comments I’ve heard throughout the years of my employment, I stand by my conclusion.”

Captain Pierre Jardin was a young man of twenty-eight, but unfortunately, he was no longer naïve. It may have taken him a moment, but now he had caught up with the sly houseboy, Protruding Navel, son of a minor Lulua chief. Somewhere, somehow, Protruding Navel had learned to speak English, and had been so amused by the preceding conversation that he had been unable to contain himself.

“Where did you learn to speak English?” Pierre asked. It was no surprise that the second he opened his mouth to speak English, the houseboy turned his head away from him.

No matter, Pierre thought; there were ways. “I will pay you a week’s salary if you tell me,” he said.

The arrogant man snorted, but wouldn’t take the bait.

“Very well. I’m sure that I will find another Lulua monkey in the village who knows how to speak English. How about your wife? Is she a monkey too?”

“
Nkima?
You call us
monkeys
?” It was the worst insult in the book; it was the worst thing Pierre could have called an African, because the word had a history.
Macaque!
Monkeys. That’s what Belgian housewives said—sometimes to their faces—of the Africans they encountered on the streets of Leopoldville, Luluaburg, and even Belle Vue. It was the Belgian equivalent of “nigger.” It was worse than “shit.” It was a fighting word—except that you weren’t allowed to fight if you were a black.

But Protruding Navel was on fire now. The veins along his temples twitched. His dark eyes flashed, and yes, he was looking at Pierre now, looking at him as if he wished to throw him over the cliff, throw him to his death on the rocks below, so that ultimately Pierre would become crocodile food along with the table scraps.

“Ah,” said Pierre, “a thousand apologies. But I did not call you, or your wife, a monkey. I asked if she was one. Clearly the answer is no, because in order to be a monkey, she would have to be Flemish,
n’est-ce pas
?”

The two men stared at each other, as if they were engaged in a contest, and then suddenly it was over and they were laughing and shaking hands. But no more, of course. No backslapping—after all, Protruding Navel was still a black.

“Yes, Captain, I do speak a little English,” he said in a very heavy African accent.

“So then, one more time please, where did you learn?”

“Monsieur, I learn this from just my ear,
comprenez-vous
?”

“No teacher?”

“Just listen to missionaries. They very funny sometimes. Like now.”

“Yes. But
excusez-mois
, Protruding Navel. How was
Muambi
Gorman very funny just now?”

“Because, monsieur, he thinks progress is to be made by investigating the little Muluba woman, Cripple. Yes, progress—if one is a stick of dynamite.” He paused, and both men laughed. “Can you not see it now, monsieur? Cripple and Muambi Gorman matching watts?”

“Uh? Do you mean ‘wits’?”

“Perhaps. But this English is not the speech of your peoples. Am I correct?”

“Touché.”

“So maybe for now, we are both right.”

Pierre nodded and extended his hand again, but Protruding Navel was no longer in the mood for pleasantries. He took off like a virgin from a French monastery, or, perhaps because he was sure now that he was no longer wanted on official police business. Oh well, Pierre could understand that as well; if he were in the houseboy’s shredded cloth shoes, he would do the same thing. He wouldn’t fraternize with the enemy one more second than he had to, that was for sure.

Alone at last, Pierre stole a few precious moments of solitude. The arrogant man was right; there was no finer setting for a city in all of the Congo, except perhaps up in the mountainous Kivu Province. A horseshoe-shaped falls could not compare with the Mountains of the Moon, with their fabled gorilla bands. But then again, those mountains probably couldn’t compare with Everest. It was all relative, wasn’t it?

And wasn’t
relative
just another word for perspective? So what if Cripple and the headhunter’s daughter were really communicating somehow. Ultimately, that was a good thing. In the meantime it was merely a puzzle that needed to be worked out. More worrisome was discovering Protruding Navel’s propensity for acquiring languages. This was just the kind of thing that had probably never occurred to the stuffed shirts in Brussels; quite possibly there could be other secret geniuses like Protruding Navel. Who knew what that might mean as the days dwindled, and independence for the Congo loomed closer?

Taking hold of a jacaranda sapling that clung to the very edge of the precipice, whether by design or by nature, yet not quite trusting it, Pierre edged as close to the drop-off as his stomach would allow. From his vantage point, the cliff plunged straight down—even undercutting him somewhat—for at least sixty meters. What was that in feet? About two hundred, maybe slightly less? Then below that the land continued to fall steeply in a jumble of rocks and debris for another fifty meters. At the very bottom was a wide, seasonal sand bar, one that would be under water in another month if the rains continued on schedule.

C’est incroyable! Ce crocodile est deux fois grand comme il etait la derniere fois.
Captain Pierre Jardin gazed respectfully down at the largest reptile he had ever seen. All right, so it couldn’t be the
same
crocodile, since it was twice as large as the last one he’d seen there, but
mon Dieu
, where were these monsters coming from? Usually only man-eaters got this large. The Missionary Rest House was going to have to stop throwing its rubbish over the side of the cliff; Pierre had been trying to get them to compost it for years. Maybe now that Amanda was in charge, things would change.

He made a mental note to check with some of the villages along the river to see if there had been an unusual number of fatalities amongst women laundering clothes in recent years. In the meantime, he would remember to be thankful that Amanda lived high above the canyon walls.

Chapter Thirteen

W
hen Amanda returned to the sitting room, she was greeted by a gang of demanding eyes. Yes, that’s what they were: a gang. They were all trained on her, and they all wanted to know the same thing: Were Cripple and the white Mushilele girl communicating together in Tshiluba? What was going on? Were they somehow being duped?

“I’m afraid I didn’t learn very much,” Amanda said.

“But she’s your—what
is
this crippled woman to you?” Mr. Gorman asked.

Amanda felt her cheeks redden. “She’s my maid, I guess.”

“You
guess
?”

“He’s only asking this because most houseboys are men,” Mrs. Gorman said. “And if they’re young, you can spank them.”

“Why, I never!” Amanda said. “It wouldn’t occur to me to spank an African. Aren’t we called here to shine a light in this, the heart of darkness?”

“The child is right,” Dorcas said, “although I haven’t heard it put so quaintly for quite some years.”

“Humph,” said Mr. Gorman, as he gave the old woman a look of moderated sourness.

For some reason his expression reminded Amanda of putting sugar on grapefruit. She’d never much cared for this fruit before coming to the Congo, but now she adored it. Maybe if she dumped enough Christian love on crusty old Mr. Gorman she could at least learn to tolerate him.

“What are they doing now?” Mrs. Gorman asked.

“Cripple is giving the girl a bath,” Amanda said.

Mrs. Gorman recoiled in shock. “A
bath
? That’s impossible; it’s utterly unchristian.”

“I don’t understand.”

Young Peaches rolled her eyes dramatically. “You can’t have an African looking at a white girl’s baby-maker.”

Her
baby-maker
? What century were these people living in? This was almost the nineteen-sixties, for crying out loud. Had they even heard of Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis? If Amanda were to use the scientific word for that part of a girl’s anatomy, every other female in the room would faint dead away, and as for Mr. Gorman, he’d probably have a heart attack.

Nonetheless, Pierre had put her in charge of the girl’s rehabilitation and she would do the sensible thing. “Black or white, a woman is a woman. Y’all have
babas
here in the Congo, just like we have mammies in the South, and my mammy saw me without my clothes on plenty of times.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Gorman said, her face as white as froth on the falls, “but you were a little girl. Am I right?”

“She is trying to be delicate,” Dorcas said. “She is afraid to reference pubic hair.”

“Dorcas!” Mr. Gorman exploded.

“Oh Mama,” Peaches whined, “and I’m just an innocent child.”

“Bother you are,” Amanda said, using a Briticism she had learned in the movies and of which she was rather fond. She was suddenly fed up to the gills with her guests. She would have thrown them all out, except that of course that she couldn’t, because strictly speaking they weren’t her guests; they were the guests of the Missionary Rest House. They were hardworking servants of the Lord, and her job was to give them a place to rest and refresh themselves; not to judge the narrowness of their minds.

“Why, I never!” Mrs. Gorman said crossly, or was that a sly smile playing around the corners of her lips?

“Oh come on, everyone,” Dorcas said. “The girl is right again; this foundling—for that’s really what she is, is not our business. By the way, I have decided to go across the river this morning, instead of after dinner. Would anyone like to ride along? I’ll be going to the general store and then to the garage to have some work done on the car. One can walk from there to the company club grounds and have a soda by the pool while one waits.”

“Will there be any boys my age there?” said Peaches.

“Yes, I’m sure there will be,” Amanda said, and then she caught herself. “Well, there usually are. The Gaston twins are fourteen and their parents are keeping them home this semester.”

“Isn’t that highly unusual?” Mrs. Gorman said. She sounded genuinely alarmed. “Shouldn’t they be off at a boarding school?”

“What did they do?” Mr. Gorman boomed. “Get thrown out?”

“No—I mean, yes,” Amanda said. “It really isn’t my place to talk about it.”

How ironic was that? Back home, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Amanda had loved nothing better than to gossip with her friends. It was a skill she had learned at her mother’s knee. As one grew older, one perfected one’s craft until, as a fully integrated adult woman in the community, it was possible to gossip with impunity just as long as one spiced it with wit, and then sugarcoated it with charm. But Amanda had come to Africa to atone for her sins, not to revel in the sins of others.

“Hmm,” said Mr. Gorman, sounding not at all convinced.

“Mama, can I please go with Auntie Dorcas? Daddy, please? Pretty, please, with sugar on top?” Peaches was a ball of energy. No doubt she could have run all the way across the bridge if given permission.

“Well, I—” Mrs. Gorman started to say, speaking slowly.

“You ladies go ahead and enjoy yourselves,” Mr. Gorman said, giving Amanda quite the shock. “I never did see much sense in dabbling about in a shared bath and then cooking in the sun like a wiener on a stick.”

The three ladies looked at Amanda, but of course she had to refuse the offer to accompany them. Not that she would have seriously entertained the offer for a second, anyway. How often did one get the chance to study a real-life Tarzan—make that Jane? In this movie, however, there would be no need to hire men in chimpanzee suits to play the part of the apes; those parts went to the white community of Belle Vue.

Harry Gorman thrived on being a contradiction. After all, he hailed from a town named North, South Carolina. Having been the victim of an armed robbery when he was just six years old—his parents were shot in a home invasion, right in front of his eyes—Harry grew up as an ardent pacifist. However, his was a hunting culture, and Harry was able to delineate quite clearly between the killing of animals for sport and the taking of human life.

Similarly, he was brusque in his manner—a bit of a loudmouth, when it came down to it—but at the same time, he was a humble follower of the man from Galilee. And just because Harry yelled at Mrs. Gorman and Peaches, that didn’t mean that he didn’t love them;
au contraire
, a more passionate family man you’d be hard-pressed to find out on the mission field.

So when Harry went hunting for the Headhunter, it wasn’t so hard to convince himself that he did so in his capacity as a father. There was at least a part of him that wished to communicate with the man heart to heart. But since the other so-called father was a Mushilele, one of the tribe known to be headhunters, Harry did not have much hope. Only Satan could convince a man that it was all right to kill another man as a right of passage. Only Satan could convince a man that it was okay to drink one’s palm wine from a human skull. Satan and his helpers on earth: the village witch doctors.

Oftentimes the natives were spiritual slaves to these witch doctors. They lived their lives in abject fear of the witch doctor and the power of his curses. Harry also knew that these curses weren’t just a bunch of mumbo jumbo, either. They were very real. In his twenty-one years in the Belgian Congo, Harry had witnessed perfectly healthy people fall deathly ill overnight because of a witch doctor’s curse. He had seen a man’s arm shrivel practically before his eyes. He was there when a woman, cursed to her back, fell on the ground, foaming at the mouth, and died twenty minutes later.

If the Headhunter was under a protective spell, it might even be dangerous to talk to him. Yet what worried Harry more was the possibility that the girl was similarly protected. What else could explain the fact that she, with her skin the color of yellowed ivory, could live undetected for thirteen years in a Bashilele village?

Harry slipped out the back kitchen door, the one facing the woodshed, and took stock of his surroundings. To his left was the lawn; that narrow, level bit of land that led to the precipice and the falls. To his right the land rose steeply, save for a half acre or so, tightly planted with mango and citrus trees. The Missionary Rest House had been built at the base of a great
tshisuku
-covered hill, atop of which perched the workers’ village.

The Headhunter had found quail in the
tshisuku
—the elephant grass—and Harry thought of the antelope it must contain. There would be time to hunt on the morrow, and in a safer place, because the hillside was too close to the village, and undoubtedly the
tshisuku
here was crisscrossed with native trails. So focus, Harry told himself,
focus
. He was always talking to himself. Wasn’t everybody his age? And look, it paid off. There, sticking out behind the green-and-white blotched trunk of that mango tree. That is the tip of a bow.

Harry could creep up on a grasshopper and grab it. That was a skill he’d perfected as a child, just in case he had to run away and live in the woods. You never really knew when the home you lived in would be invaded again, or if the people Foster Care stuck you with would treat you mean. After all, adoption was out. Nobody wanted to adopt a harelip, even after the surgery.

Cripple could work wonders, not miracles. She had engaged Protruding Navel in many conversations regarding the
mamu
’s clothes, but neither of them had been able to figure out the workings of the garment-of-shameful-breasts. This was to be expected, as neither of them had actually seen it worn. However, Protruding Navel, having been employed by several white women of varying breast sizes and shapes, proclaimed himself to be the more informed of the two on the subject.

In Protruding Navel’s considerable opinion, the band was worn up, along the top side, to help flatten the breasts. The cups then hung down like the mud flaps of a truck, but essentially to protect them from being bumped. Any suggestion that the breasts might be hoisted and enhanced by an article of clothing struck the man as lewd—unchristian to the extreme; certainly something no Protestant would ever do.

“Come,” Cripple said to Ugly Eyes, when she had dried her off with the softest of cloths, “come and I will show you the most amazing sight.” She led the girl, who by then was truly almost white, to the
mamu
’s closet and flung open the door.

“Behold! A forest of dresses hanging from sticks! Have you ever seen such a thing in your life? Of course you have not; you are a savage from the
tshisuku
-dwelling Bashilele. Nonetheless, are they not beautiful?”

“
Aiyee
,” said Ugly Eyes, and then she did the oddest thing; she backed away, as if she were afraid of all that brightly colored cloth.

“They will not bite you,” Cripple said, repeating a joke she’d heard the
mamu
say. “Except for one!”

“
Baba wani!
” Ugly Eyes cried and flung her arm over her eyes.

Cripple thought she would burst a gut laughing. Perhaps she would have, had not the
mamu
pounded on the door and demanded that she account for the racket.

“Cripple!
Nudi nenza
tshinyi?
” What are you doing?

“Nothing,
Mamu
. We will be out shortly. In the meantime, please attend to your guests, for they are
bakalenge
, lords, and as such are far more important than I am.”

“Stop that,” Mamu Ugly Eyes said, and then Cripple could hear her walk away from the door.

“Cripple,” whispered the new Ugly Eyes in astonishment, “you dare to speak to a white woman like that?”

“
Tch
,” Cripple said. “I said nothing that was untrue. And when I am through with you today, you too will be a
mukelenge
—a lady. I shall have to call you
mamu
and show you the respect one normally reserves for one’s parents. I will have to say yes, when I mean no, and no when I mean yes. I will have to stand when I can no longer feel my feet, and then I will have to walk home, only to sleep on a thin mat woven from the fronds of the
malala
palm. I will have to serve you and the other lords sumptuous feasts—with meat—three times a day, but I will eat but twice, and perhaps twice a week there will be meat—if we have been fortunate.”

Ugly Eyes had big feet and she stamped one now, just like a white woman. “Then I will
not
be a white woman. Believe me, Cripple, I will never treat you as you have just described. Give me back my
didiba
—my loincloth—and I will return to my village.”

“
Aiyee!
Such a sensitive one you are. Perhaps it is because of the pasty color of your skin. Do you not recognize a joke when you hear one? Of course not! Well, never mind; that will all come in due time. For now let us return to the matter of the dresses on sticks. You must choose one to wear.”

“
Kah!
They are not mine!”

“And the sky is not yours, yet you breathe the air. Now choose. Hurry, we do not have much time if we are to surprise the
mamu
with a good impression.”