Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [241]
He saw the ship in the distance and noted by old habit the set of her sails: two square topsails, fore and aft rig – she was a schooner. He had grown accustomed over the years to the fleeting sight of sails on the horizon, high-bowed Spanish merchantmen bound for Cuba, an occasional frigate patrolling off the coast, the long, lateen-rigged fishing canoes of the Indians. They showed their shapes to his indifferent gaze, drew away and dissolved like a doubtful memory.
Hughes was fifty-four now and had long ceased wanting to be anywhere else. The purposes of his fellows did not much occupy his speculation. He had noticed that this ship stayed longer than she needed for taking water on. But he soon stopped thinking about her altogether and fell to watching a woodpecker with bright yellow wing-feathers feeding in the branches of a tree some twenty yards away. He watched with close interest the movements of its feet and beak as it swung to get at the clusters of small red berries. Any life before his eyes that was not human could absorb his attention for hours. Inviolate here, high in the branches, his rope ladder drawn up and coiled on the lashed driftwood of the platform, he felt the solitude like an accustomed drug in his veins.
Community life had come too late for Hughes – too late to soften much the savage misanthropy of his nature; but he could escape now, into these empty places, and the impulse of violence had quietened in him. He ranged far and wide, from the pine-wood ridges near the shore to the swamps and jungle islands behind them and the great sea of saw grass that stretched far inland from the settlement. He cultivated no ground, living on what he could kill or gather, bringing in skins sometimes to trade for food, going to Lamba, his woman, at irregular intervals.
This last habit had caused trouble in early days, made worse by his demand for Lamba’s immediate and total attention whenever he arrived. It violated established rules of sexual behaviour, which were founded on the woman’s consent, and reflected on the dignity of the man he shared Lamba with, a negro known as Mando Tammy. The three had come to fighting over it, Tammy receiving a knife-gash in his arm which had to be stitched by Matthew Paris, and Hughes lucky to escape permanent damage to an eye from Lamba’s nails. But habit is a skin that can grow over any shape and they had reached a kind of understanding over the years. Hughes could not be brought to any concept of the mutal rights involved in sharing; but he was granted some latitude as a special case. It was never forgotten that he had once, by his vigilance, saved the settlement.
He watched the woodpecker until it disappeared among the lower foliage and then, with the same attention, a honey-coloured bee at the flowers of a smooth-barked tree which grew almost as tall as his own, ending some feet below his platform. He followed the movements of the bee as it clambered among the drooping white spikes of blossom, observing how the insect vibrated its body each time it entered one of the flowers. His mind moved slowly over possible explanation. Could the bee do this to help the flower spread its pollen? From time to time he glanced across the short space of clearing towards the black water below him. In this dry season, when the levels sank below the roots of the saw-grass, the deer came more often to these pools in the jungle islands. He knew they came to this one: he had see their traces in the soft earth at the edge and the nibbled-off tops of the spider-lilies.
The dark water mirrored with absolute fidelity the bushy cabbage palms standing nearby and the spikes of air plants that grew on them and the pale drapes of moss that hung over the surface. No faintest tremor marred these reflections for the moment, all was glassy calm, but Hughes knew that there was always danger in the vicinity of these jungle pools. Not only deer came to drink here: he had seen snake tracks and the pad marks of a panther at the edges.
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