Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [262]
He had begun to make his way back, halting at nightfall and shivering through till first light – he had not dared to make a fire. Next day he had gone on, staggering with exhaustion, involved in endless detours among the mangroves. He had been at the limits of his strength when he had found them again; but he was still clinging to the vital evidence of the ripped and gutted sack.
‘Look what they done, shipmates,’ he said, holding it out in witness to an insane universe. ‘Them iggerant beggars … They cut the sacks open an’ shook the gold out, down into the creek.’ On the point of collapse, Barton looked round with a drained, exhausted triumph at this ultimate proof of human folly. ‘How can you unnerstand people like that?’ he demanded.
Sullivan was the only one to find anything to say to this, Paris remembered, with a feeling of amused affection. Sullivan always liked to have an answer to everything. He had fastened on the tottering Barton the fleeting speculation of his gaze. ‘Clear as daylight to a thinkin’ man,’ he said. ‘They was hopin’ to find somethin’ valuable, and they got disappointed like, when they didn’t.’
It was an old story now, but not forgotten. Haines’s face of blood was part of the collective memory of the settlement, though only Barton had seen it. The body was never recovered. The rains came and the grasslands were flooded. By the time the people were able to venture so far there was no trace. But the place where he met his end was called Goldwater by Jimmy in his classroom stories and it became as legendary in its way as Oose Tree or Red Creek, enshrined like them in the imagination of the children. It was said that at certain times, when the water ran clear in the stream bed, glints of gold were still to be seen there.
It had been Luckyshit Barton’s last attempt at private enterprise. He was Kireku’s lackey now and generally despised, a man without friends and without a regular woman. To Haines something was held to be owing, simply for the manner of his death, and this was also true of Wilson. It was strange that these two, bad men both and sworn enemies, should have been the martyrs and founding fathers of the community.
Delblanc had known how to use these deaths, as he had known how to use everything. Not least of the mysteries that touched Paris’s mind as he finally drifted towards sleep was how his dead friend, an itinerant portrait painter of good birth and easy manners, had been able to forge men of such metal into instruments of a higher purpose. But of course it was not a higher purpose at all, he thought, despite the rhetoric of the time. It was our purpose, Delblanc’s and mine; his based on doctrines of liberty, mine on some inveterate hope. Men living free and equal in a state of nature … What gave us the confidence to suppose that a state of nature could only mean what it meant to us, a notion of Eden, a nostalgia of educated, privileged men?
FORTY-NINE
Calley woke at dawn, released from a dream in which he had been lost in a desolate place and bitterly weeping. He whimpered on waking and lay for some time without moving, not knowing where he was, still involved in the grief of his dream. Then he knew the feel of the sand on which he was lying and saw the branches overhead of the rough shelter he had made for himself.
He crawled out, away from his sorrow, into the misty light of morning. He shook himself and urinated and shivered, looking up at the sky above the sea, where trailing clouds were touched with faint pink. Crouched again in his shelter, he ate the koonti bread and scraps of dried fish left from the day before. Then he started back through the jungle of the hummock to make a scratch-hole for water on the landward side. It was several hours’ walk to the settlement, but Calley had been combing the beaches and ranging through the pine ridges for years now and he knew there was water here, just below ground, as he knew