Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [261]
Strange and absurd situation, Paris thought, lying wide-eyed in the darkness, the two exhausted men quarrelling there by the stream as the sun climbed above them, coming to blows at one point, if Barton was to be believed, over two sacks of dust. ‘It came to me that Haines was not a man to be trusted,’ Barton said, glancing at the faces round him, restored to the community of honest men.
The solution they had hit upon was for each man to bury his sack in a place of his own choosing. And it was then, in the interval between reaching this decision and summoning the energy to carry it out, that an amazing stroke of good fortune occurred to save Barton’s life. ‘Luckiest shit I ever had in my life, lads,’ he said, looking haggardly from face to face, inviting them to share his luck, repeating the fact in that rapid, toneless voice of his nightmare: ‘Luckiest shit of my whole life …’ Luckyshit Barton, Blair had begun to call him after that, and so he was known to everyone now, even the toddlers who did not yet know why.
The diet of beach plums and palm berries had left Barton with violent diarrhoea and he had felt the gripes of it just at that moment. Leaving Haines there by the streamside, he had removed himself into a thicket of bushes. He had taken his musket with him, but he had left the gold with Haines. Because of this he had not gone too far away; and he had chosen a place from which any movement Haines made along the stream would be visible to him.
As he crouched there in the first easement of his pangs, he had heard a slight sound. He had looked up and seen with heart-stopping shock a party of naked savages, fearsomely tattooed in whorls of red and white on their faces and chests, come drifting down through the trees, moving with a lightness that seemed to have no need of stealth. They had not seen him, but it was immediately clear to him that they had seen Haines.
They had passed quite close, it seemed – within thirty yards. He had his musket there beside him. Haines would have heard him if he had called, would have had at least some warning, some chance to defend himself. What sort of hope or calculation had passed through Barton’s mind in those moments could only be conjectured. It was possible of course that he was simply petrified with fear. In any case, he had done nothing. ‘There was no use,’ he said. ‘They was too many. I couldn’t be sure a shot would drive them off and I wouldn’t have had no chance for a second.’ In the fever of his veracity he did not attempt to cover his cowardice. His chief thought, he told them, in the babbling of his honesty, was that the Indians might smell his shit and find him. He had tried to cover it, when they had passed below him, with the edge of his shoe.
But before many seconds the smell of butchery had been in their nostrils. Barton had not seen, from his crouched position there, what was done to Haines. He had heard a sound of surprise, like a cough or a loud grunt, then a wailing cry. Some other broken sounds there had been, more like effort than pain, but these had been made indistinct by some chattering syllables of the Indians and then by their laughter, rather high-pitched.
He had remained there, not daring to move, crouched over his own excrement, tormented by flies. He did not see or hear the Indians again and supposed they had taken a path below the stream. Long after silence had settled he waited still. When he went finally, moving his cramped limbs with utmost caution, he had found Haines lying there and the sacks ripped and empty. Haines had been scalped. He lay on his back across the slight track above the stream, presenting to the trees and to the sky beyond them a face unrecognizable, obscured by blood from crown to chin.
‘He was always proud of his hair, Haines was,’ Barton said. It was the boatswain’s only epitaph.
There was not much more to the story. The horror showed in the mate’s eyes, and everyone understood it. The quiet, sunlit path, the glint of flies about the terrible red face of the corpse. He had