BEYOND THE PALE
4th instalment
III
Richard died three months after we arrived at Bulongo Station, just before Christmas. There’s no other way of saying it, is there? Not when it comes to death. One moment he was here, the next moment he was gone. It happened just as quick as that. Perhaps the biggest irony was that his death had nothing to do with his asthma, although in the end I suspect his asthma may have done something to restrict his breathing. He was in the classroom when he reached into a closet and was bitten three times in quick succession by a black mamba that slithered away as the children screamed.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with this particular breed of snake, but there was little that we could do. By the time Livingstone arrived, I was beyond hysterical. I was crying, and howling, even as I wiped the sweat from Richard’s face, kissing the tears forming at the corners of his eyes. There were hot tears coursing down my cheeks as well, as I rocked him back and forth on my lap. His final breaths came in huge grating gasps, but he seemed to be looking beyond me—as if he could see something, or perhaps someone—standing behind me, beckoning him.
“Tell Annie I’ve always loved her,” he managed to say, clutching my arm tightly and looking at me as if he didn’t know who I was. The children watched in horror as Reverend Hoegeveen tried to corral them outside as Richard slipped away from me. His body went rigid, every muscle as taut as a wet, corded rope, the veins in his neck twisting tight as his bladder burst and he sank to the floor.
It was a moment before I thought to pull his hand off my arm, peeling his fingers back carefully, afraid I might somehow hurt him. I stared down at him, dumbfounded, my tears lost in the echo of his last words. The memory of a woman I’d never known haunted me still, even as the man I loved lay dying in my arms. It wasn’t me he was thinking of as he died, was it, but a ghost. Hers was a memory I’d known all along I could never compete with, except that given time, I might have.
But even that she took away from me.
“Vanessa?” Livingstone asked awkwardly as he sank down on his knees beside me. “Do you know who Annie is?”
“Yes,” I said softly, laying Richard’s head on the floor and stroking the hair out of his eyes. I’d always enjoyed brushing his hair out of his eyes; I loved any reason to touch him.
She was his first wife, I wanted to say—actually, I wanted to shout it—but a part of me told me to keep it locked within me. Still, I kept asking myself why he hadn’t called out my name?
We buried Richard in the Mission cemetery on a low rise overlooking the Lopori River. It was a beautiful sight. The sun came spilling through the trees, dappling the ground with tiny teardrops of light, as the wind came rustling through the leaves with a sigh—like an angel’s sigh, I heard one of the children say. My mind was a million miles away as I stood on the hill transfixed, watching the river flow in the distance, too afraid to cry, but somehow, more afraid that I wouldn’t.
After the service, I stayed by the graveside in spite of Reverend Hoegeveen’s determined efforts to lead me back to my cabin. I shook my head, letting myself sink to the ground, forcing myself to smile as I told him I needed to see it through to the end.
I sat and watched Livingstone fill in Richard’s grave. Somehow, it felt like he was filling a deep hole in my heart. When he finished, he stood leaning on his shovel, looking down at me.
“Are we done here?” he asked.
I lifted my head, not realizing that I’d been staring at the ground, sifting the dry earth through my fingers. I looked at a dozen little crosses bleached bone white by the sun, some of them cracked with age, all of them weathered, and wondered how long they’d been there. How long before Richard’s cross became just as weathered?
“Yes,” I said softly. “We’re done.”
Livingstone helped me to my feet and walked me down the path to my cabin. He stood in the open door as I sat on the edge of the bed. His figure was a dark shadow in the light of the open door. I looked up at him, speechless, and he closed the door, leaving me to my grief.
The following weeks went by in something of a daze. Reverend Hoegeveen had dismissed the children from school two weeks earlier, for Christmas, and Livingstone drove each of them home in the lorry, where they sat in the back laughing, delighted at the prospect of an early Christmas. I sat in silence wishing I was leaving with them.
I spent my days grieving, coming across everyday reminders of Richard as I began packing his clothes and books, even his shaving gear. Every morning, I woke up breathing in the fading scent of his pillow. When I could stand it no longer, I told myself I had to get away from this horrible place and back to England where I belonged. That’s where Gerald was, and I told myself I needed him as much as he needed me. That’s when the Reverend Hoegeveen stepped in and offered to comfort me.
Reverend Hoegeveen was tall, and thin; an emaciated looking man who had more in common with a lonely spectre, than a man of God. He’d spent more than half of his life in Africa, he told me, burying three children and two wives in the Mission cemetery. What remained of his balding hair was snow white, and there were deep lines carved along both sides of his thin lips, as well as crow’s feet that looked as if they’d been scratched into the soft flesh of his face. The back of his hands were peppered with liver spots; the thin, blue veins of his hands standing up like tiny ridges. He wore thick, black framed glasses that magnified the intensity of his blue eyes.
He sat with me every night after that first week, hoping to comfort me through prayer. But his prayers left me feeling hollow inside. It felt to me, as if there was a pitiable emptiness where my soul should have been. Even as I fell to my knees with him, clutching my hands until my knuckles turned white—the wedding band digging into the flesh of my fingers serving as a sombre reminder of the pain in my heart—I still couldn’t make myself repeat the words he muttered, or find the strength of character to believe in them. I had loved Richard with everything that was mine to give; I loved him body and soul, and yet, as he lay dying, his last words—his last thoughts—were for a different woman.
It made me question Richard’s love for me. Was I simply there to fill the empty space left in his heart? As much as I might have loved Everett, I’d managed to put that love behind me and start my life anew. I began to fret over the idea that Richard had still been in love with the memory of his dead wife. And when the Reverend left I would find myself weeping into my pillow, realizing I wasn’t grieving for the love I’d lost, but for a love I never had.
Several weeks later, I stepped out onto the stoop of my small cabin to see Livingstone walking across the compound carrying a dead animal on his shoulders. I watched as the sun set behind the low rise of the cemetery, looking at the tiny white crosses in the fast falling light as the sky slowly bled into a fiery red. The jungle stood in stark contrast against the twilight, almost as if it were a child’s cut out made of heavy construction paper.
I made my way up to the cemetery, and though a part of me wanted to run back down the hillside, I knew it was something I had to face. I stood looking down at Richard’s grave. The flowers the children had laid on it were dead now, withering along with the passing weeks. My first thoughts were that I should replace them. But then I thought of the irony of it all; how my first concern had been for Richard’s cough and that he would probably die because of his asthma. It was this thinking and how my concerns had all been for naught, that had caused me to laugh. It wasn’t a big laugh, more of a chuckle, something that told me I’d somehow manage to get through this on my own.
I watched the shadows creeping over the graveside with the darkness overrunning everything as if the world were plunging into an abyss. I looked up at the evening twilight bleeding into itself, the colours streaking across the sky and the river below me gurgling like a gloomy, moving shadow, and told myself there was a beauty here I’d failed to see earlier.
I turned as I heard a noise behind me.
Livingstone appeared with a rifle in the crook of his arm.
“It’s not safe out here at night,” he said slowly, watching the river flow in the distance.
“Do you think it matters to me that much?” I asked him after a moment.
“It might not matter now, and it might not matter in a week from now, but it will,” he said softly.
“How would you know?” I asked, instantly regretting the bitterness in my voice.
“Because this is Congo,” he said, turning to look at me. “We live to die here.”
And oh, how prophetic those words would come to be.
Wonderful!