Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [42]
“Oh.”
K said, “Go on, keep walking. Go back to the house. I’ll catch up with you later.” He held the bone in both hands now, his arms outstretched, as if he were offering it to the paper bark trees.
I turned back to the trail and kept going at a hurried walk. K did not follow me and when I looked back to see where he was, I saw that he had fallen to his knees in the cropped grass and his hands were held skyward, the bone aloft. Dispatch was by his side, anxious and trembling. Sheba was irreverently scratching fleas from her ear. I found my way back to the house alone.
K FOUND ME in the kitchen preparing a fresh pot of tea. “You okay?” he asked.
“Fine.”
K shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I made up my mind,” said K, “last night. I wasn’t going to talk to you anymore. I was going to tell you this morning, ‘If you want to go to Mozambique, then go. Take the pickup, take a map. You can go and see for yourself. Me, there’s nothing for me there.’ But then . . . that bone this morning. The Almighty is talking to me.” K sniffed and sighed. “I should tell you something.”
I said, “Why don’t we go and sit in the garden, then?” suddenly not wanting to be in the cramped confines of the kitchen with him.
K followed me. I poured myself tea and watched the river until K began to speak.
“About a week ago,” said K softly and with great hesitation, “I had a dream that . . . I was digging up a grave. There were two bodies in the grave—two gondies, one man and one woman. And I was trying to get”—K’s voice caught and it was a moment before he could continue—“the woman out of the grave. She was wrapped up in a chitenge, you know, like you were wearing last night, except she was wrapped from head to toe, like a mummy, so I couldn’t see her face—except her arm was exposed, and there was no skin on her arm. Her bone was poking out and she had a big bone, like a cow’s bone, like that bone we just saw . . . and I knew I had to cut through that bone to get her free. To get her out of the grave, I mean.
“So I was hacking at the bone with a panga and hacking and hacking, but I didn’t have the strength to cut her free. I was too weak.” K’s voice tripped and when I looked over I saw that he was crying. “I was too weak,” he repeated. Then K put his face in his hands and breathed deeply.
“What about the man in the grave?” I asked after a minute or so had passed.
K looked up and shook his head. “No, he was okay. It was okay for him to be there. Not the woman though, but I couldn’t”—K gave a great yawn of anguish—“I couldn’t . . . free her. And then I woke up. I got out of bed and I fell on my knees.”
I pictured K on the rough cement floor next to his bed in the little cell of a room, with the chirring insistence of Africa calling to him from outside. I pictured the great loneliness that stretched between him and the watchman who crouched by the gong at the top gate all night, and I pictured the watching islander tending his night’s fire.
“I asked the Almighty, ‘Father, what does this mean?’ ” K shuddered at the memory of it; tears rolled down his cheeks and collected above his lips. “And He told me,” said K, “that I have to go back there and let her go.”
“Let who go? Where?”
K shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hands, but the tears sprung through his fingers and seeped down his neck. I looked away. At last K said, “I have so much inside me that I feel . . . If I could only get it out of me, then . . .” He wiped his eyes again, scraping his hand down from eyes to mouth. “Could you . . . ? I mean . . . if maybe . . . ?”
He looked at me with a mixture of anguish and hope and with such desperation that I folded my hands in my lap and looked at my feet.
K said, “That’s okay. There isn’t anything . . .”
A bird flashed in the bush in front of the veranda—a bright burst of red, yellow, and blue—and scolded, “prrrp,” followed by a sharp wing clap.
K was startled. “Oh look,” he said, forcing a steady voice through his tears, “it’s the Angola pitta. I have a pair nesting here.” He smiled and cleared his throat.