Africa All Alone

The Serengeti is a terrible place to raise your kids. Something, lying underneath its yellow surface, drifts like a phantom across the wild land and whoever happens to be in its path becomes surrounded by it, hypnotized by its seething charisma. Charmed, as if by a snake, they lose themselves in it.

This is what happened to my daughter, Clara.

“Clara, what are you doing!?” I had screamed this, cried this while my heart was falling into my stomach.

“He told me to,” she said, standing in the wooden doorway of our missionary’s hut.

I walked over in a rush. Leaning down I grabbed the old machete out of her hand and tossed it to the corner. Blood trailed behind it in streaks along the uneven, wooden planks that made up the floor.

Drenched in blood, her hair stuck to her cheeks in crusty tendrils that wrapped up under her chin. No area of her skin had been left clean- she was completely red. Even her white dress, given to her by her mother before her death, was stained red. Only her shining blue eyes were the same- well, the retinas anyway. Red veins bulged around the blue circles. They looked up at me with playful curiosity.

“What happened!? Tell me right now, what HAPPENED!?” I searched her fragile body for wounds. Her legs, arms, neck, scalp, chest, back- all of it. I found no wounds.

“Whose blood is this!?” I screamed. But I soon realized the absurdity of asking her this, as she was only six years old.

Suddenly, I could hear a scream emanate from somewhere in the encampment around us. Panic was spreading at some spot away from us. A woman’s voice, yelling the word no over and over again, as if she could not believe what she had found, rang out.

I scooped Clara up into my arms and ran towards the door, avoiding the puddle of blood where she had been standing.

The hot sun burned my forehead as I walked out into the dusty yard. I carried Clara out into the street and noticed, a few yards down, a crowd of people. Down on the ground a woman kneeled, still screaming “No! No! Who has done this!?”

I could not quite make it out, but I could see a pile of something lying in the road beside her. A couple people were vomiting off to the side, and a stone-faced man, another missionary from the church, covered the thing with a white sheet. Instantly, the white began changing shades, turning into a dark red hue. I realized suddenly that the thing was a human body, badly mutilated.

A few minutes passed before the shock of the whole thing subsided, and I realized what had happened. I turned in despair to Clara, covered in blood, and found that she was staring off to the side. She was pointing at something, a small droplet of blood forming on the tip of her precious little finger. I looked up at what she was pointing at, but found only a vast landscape of dry desert. Small dots, probably gazelle or antelope, were bouncing across the plain.

“He told me to do it,” she whimpered. I looked at the spot she was gazing at intently and decided to start praying. It was just a whisper, a shadow of a breathe, but it was the most sincere prayer I’ve ever muttered.

I discovered later that the man my daughter murdered was the head honcho of our little game, Reverend Mitchell. Apparently he found Clara chewing on the leg or thigh of some small animal and, when he tried to take it from her, she pulled the machete from his belt loop and and hacked him to death.

 

Clara and I left the evangelical encampment and took the road up and into the jungle. Those bastards wanted to send her to some hospital in Tanzania, but I wouldn’t allow it. So I packed up what little things we had into a pack and set off. Clara, with that same look in her eyes, held my hand and kept quiet for the next few weeks.

I have always been a god-fearing man and I believe I have lived a good life. These were my thoughts when I lost my wife to a strange case of Typhoid fever, and these were my thoughts now- wondering why something like this had to happen to me. What God would allow something like this to happen to me?

I cried every day for three weeks, surrounded by the dense green jungle, moving from settlement to settlement, unsure of how to proceed. This lasted for a while, and then five weeks and five days later it happened.

We had reached a village and, having stopped for food, I was exchanging some clothing with an African woman for some meat when Clara began running herself into the wall of nearby hut. She slammed up against the wall, fell to the ground without a cry, picked herself up, and then did it again.

The African children reached Clara before I could and began carrying her to the center of the village. She convulsed, a ribbon of foam bubbling from her pink lips and her little blue eyes rolling into the back of her head. The little black hands around her gripped with a gentleness that chipped away a bit of my worry. I began praying again.

But my pathetic mumbling was drowned by the flood of screaming that poured from Clara’s weak lungs. The children carried her into a tall hut decorated with bones and feathers and rock that dangled from rotting vines. Black smoke wafted from a hole in the top of the hut. We became enveloped in its dim light. I was surprised to find a blue fire burning in the center of the hut, shooting green sparks into the air. It smelled of some strange incense, like cinnamon and rosemary. The African children laid Clara down on a skin that covered the earthy floor and filed out of the hut one by one. I bent down near my daughter and again, began praying. I was halfway though my address when something stirred in the corner. A figure, draped in skins and other colorful jewelry, turned to face us. He had sharpened his teeth, painted his face and dirtied his hair, so that he resembled an animal. He held a small pot in his hand and stared at Clara through black eyes.

The witch-doctor walked over to Clara and held out his hand, moving it up and down slightly. I believed then that he was just signaling to me not to worry. Of course I still was, but I allowed him to work on my daughter. The man kneeled before her and whispered something in his native dialect, his face glowing blue from the fire.

The pot was raised to Clara’s lips, where it was tilted, letting a clear liquid trickle down her throat. Her eyes slowly opened and before I could tell what was happening, the shallow veins under her skin all pulsed for an instant, like an invisible blue web fading into view, then disappearing.

Clara began to scream. She writhed about on the floor, twisting and pulling at her blonde, sweaty hair. Clawing at herself, Clara drew blood on her arms and legs and started shaking violently. Her yelps were interrupted by spasms so that she sounded like a broken record.

As if it had never happened, she laid still, not breathing. I pleaded for the witch-doctor to do something but he sat and stared at her, nodding with a gaunt look on his face.

There were bags under my daughter’s eyes, and yellow fluid was leaking out of her ears. I let all my weight fall on her tiny little chest, and every breathe I forced into lungs with my own seemed to disappear before it did any good. Twenty minutes went by before I came to it.

Without control, I killed the witch-doctor silently and placed him on another map in the back of the hut and positioned him as if her were sleeping. Though it would not take the natives take long to find that his neck was broken.

The sunlight burned my forehead again as I carried Clara out of the hut, totally numb. The jungle swept by us in an intangible blur. A few hours later I buried my daughter beneath an Umbrella tree near the river.

What darkness had wrought its tentacles through my life? What treacherous mistakes had I made to deserve such a suffering? It slithers through the jungle and the rivers and the station owed to God until it finds something it can unhinge its jaws around. The prey is slowly swallowed into the tunnel-stomach of this snake.

The wind swayed the yellow grass around me, no doubt crawling with life. Off in the distance I heard the wild beat of war drums in the direction of the village.

The witch-doctor must have been discovered.

It did not matter. I had reached a point where I could feel the roots underneath the ground sucking what they needed from the earth. Osmosis of the damned! There beauty and resilience were emblems of all that was truly real. But I, without my golden leash to yank me by the throat anymore, betrayed by the hand at the other end, had discovered that these trees, so tall and and wondrous, were but a prison. Like the walls of the witch-doctors hut, the streets of London, the pure air above Mt. Everest... it was, all of it, a prison.

Wild screams echoed throughout the plain...and I knelt beside the grave to pray. It was when my knee touched the ground that I began to laugh- so hard that tears streamed from eyes. I laughed until the sun sank below the horizon, and the sounds of the dark jungle swirled around me. Lights from there torches bobbed up and down in the grass, but I felt nothing.

I just laid there and sunk my fingertips into the little lump of soil I used to cover my little girl. Sudden wind rushed down from the skies and scattered some of the soil from the grave across the ground. A loud crack sounded overhead, and I thought had I heard a booming voice above me. But I was wrong. It was just the heavy thunder of a coming storm. I noticed, finally, that I was all alone. I had always been.

 

-- Nathan Noyes