Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [51]
my soul didn't rise with the water even before it began to spout, following the same motion, and I cried to myself, "Hallelujah! Henderson, you dumb brute, this time you've done it!" Then the water came shooting upward. It might not have been Hiroshima, but it was enough of a gush for me, and it started raining frogs' bodies upward. They leaped for the roof with the blast, and globs of mud and stones and polliwogs struck the thatch. I wouldn't have thought a dozen or so shells from the.375 had such a charge in them, and from the periphery of my intelligence the most irrelevant thoughts, which are fastest and lightest, rushed to the middle as I congratulated myself, the first thought being, "They'd be proud of old Henderson at school." (The infantry school. I didn't get high marks when I was there.) The long legs and white bellies and the thicker shapes of the infant frogs filled the column of water. I myself was spattered with the mud, but I started to yell, "Hey, Itelo--Romilayu! How do you like that? Boom! You wouldn't believe me!" I had gotten more of a result than I could have known in the first instants, and instead of an answering cry I heard shrieks from the natives, and looking to see what was the matter I found that the dead frogs were pouring out of the cistern together with the water. The explosion had blasted out the retaining wall at the front end. The big stone blocks had fallen and the yellow reservoir was emptying fast. "Oh! Hell!" I grabbed my head, immediately dizzy with the nausea of disaster, seeing the water spill like a regular mill race with the remains of those frogs. "Hurry, hurry!" I started to yell. "Romilayu! Itelo! Oh, Judas priest, what's happening! Give a hand. Help, you guys, help!" I threw myself down against the escaping water and tried to breast it back and lift the stones into place. The frogs charged into me like so many prunes and fell into my pants and into the open shoe, the lace gone. The cattle started to riot, pulling at their tethers and straining toward the water. But it was polluted and nobody would allow them to drink. It was a moment of horror, with the cows of course obeying nature and the natives begging them and weeping, and the whole reservoir going into the ground. The sand got it all. Romilayu waded up beside me and did his best, but these blocks of stone were beyond our strength and because of the cistern's being also a dam we were downstream, or however the hell it was. Anyway, the water was lost--lost! In a matter of minutes I saw (sickening!) the yellow mud of the bottom and the dead frogs settling there. For them death was instantaneous by shock and it was all over. But the natives, the cows leaving under protest, moaning for the water! Soon everyone was gone except for Itelo and Mtalba. "Oh, God, what's happened?" I said to them. "This is ruination. I have made a disaster." And I pulled up my wet and stained T-shirt and hid my face in it. Thus exposed, I said through the cloth, "Itelo, kill me! All I've got to offer is my life. So take it. Go ahead, I'm waiting." I listened for his approach but all I could hear, instead of footsteps, were the sounds of heartbreak that escaped from Mtalba. My belly hung forth and I was braced for the blow of the knife. "Mistah Henderson. Sir! What has happened?" "Stab me," I said, "don't ask me. Stab, I say. Use my knife if you haven't got your own. It's all the same," I said, "and don't forgive me. I couldn't stand it. I'd rather be dead." This was nothing but God's own truth, as with the cistern I had blown up everything else, it seemed. And so I held my face in the bagging, sopping shirt with the unbearable complications at heart. I waited for Itelo to cut me open, my naked middle with all its fevers and its suffering prepared for execution. Under me the water of the cistern was turning to hot vapor and the sun was already beginning to corrupt the bodies of the frog dead.
X
I heard Mtalba crying, "Aii, yelli, yelli." "What is she saying?" I asked Romilayu. "She say, goo'by. Fo' evah." And Itelo in a trembling voice said to me,