Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [271]
He had long since exhausted his store of cinchona; now, to allay the fever and clear the blood, he relied on the powdered bark of the bitter ash, of which he had discovered isolated specimens growing on the shorewards side of some jungle hummocks, or on a concoction of sassafras.
Libby was grateful enough, in his surly way, and Paris took the opportunity to ask his opinion of the charge against Iboti, due to be heard later that morning. As he had expected from a hanger-on of Kireku – and it was really the purpose of his question – it was the Shantee view that he got.
‘It is clear as daylight,’ Libby said. ‘Iboti is guilty. He tried to kill Hambo just as much as if he had stuck a knife into him. He was seen gatherin’ dust from Hambo’s footprint to make the fetish. Why should Hambo’s woman say she seen him if she never did?’
‘She is Iboti’s woman too. Why she says this or that is what we hope to find out at the Palaver.’
Libby made a gesture of contempt. ‘Palaver’s a shaggin’ waste o’ time,’ he said. ‘The death fetish was found on Hambo’s roof.’
Paris looked curiously at the other man’s face, which was pallid and swollen with the bad night he had passed. Libby borrowed opinions from those he served. Why not beliefs too? ‘I did not know you set so much store by fetishes, Libby,’ he said.
‘Me? A few sticks an’ feathers an’ a bit o’ spit?’ As he got up to go Libby uttered a short laugh, not altogether convincing. ‘When I am sick,’ he said, ‘don’t I come for medicine? I don’t go to Amansa, beggin’ for a charm.’
After he had gone, Paris stood quietly, without moving. There was an ugliness of spirit about Libby, which showed even when he was trying to be amiable – perhaps more then. A period of silence seemed necessary before the place could be healed of his visit. Paris knew this was a superstitious feeling, but superstition of one sort or another, like nostalgia, moved among them all; and this sickroom, though open to everyone, was a very private place for him, it was where he came to commune with himself and with the past.
Everything he possessed was here. His mahogany medicine chest stood on trestles of split palm log, with his small set of instruments, cleaned and polished, laid out in their slots of frayed plush and his glass-stopped bottles set in a row. Barber had made him a cabinet out of mangrove wood and he kept his collection of roots and oils and dried leaves on the shelves and his few books in the drawer.
In a certain way the past was gathered here, as it was in the cemetery. Paris had kept the splints he had used to set a broken leg, the charred cane with which he had vainly tried to cauterize a snake-bite and save a life. In a jar on the shelf of his cabinet he kept the eel-skin – carefully cured – from which in desperate haste he had fashioned a catheter to pass down the throat and into the stomach of a baby of six months that had swallowed some Makings of koonti root – poisonous before pulping and draining. The child had been at the point of death, pulse and respiration had almost ceased. The improvised tube had enabled Paris to use his syringe to inject an emetic – it was a common pewter syringe, still there among his instruments. The effect had been miraculous: within minutes the pulse had become perceptible again at the wrist, the convulsed action of the mouth had ceased and the child had taken a quivering breath.