Hunting Midnight (15 page)

“Good,” he said, smiling. He took my hand and held it to his heart. “No more crying. It is much more important that you teach me a song. I’ve been meaning to ask you for one.”

Children’s moods change so quickly. “Which?” I asked
eagerly
.

“One of your father’s songs. Any of them. I should very, very much like to learn one.”

Right there on the street, I sang the first verse of “The Foggy, Foggy Dew”:
Oh
,
I
am
a
bachelor
,
I
live
by
myself
,
and
I
work
at
the
weaver
trade
….

That was to be the first of many tunes that I would teach Midnight. In exchange, he helped me learn several songs
belonging
to his people. I even mastered a secret one about rain bringing life to a barren desert. I am still able to sing it. And I believe I am the only European who can.

I discovered my project with Midnight while reading aloud to my parents, a practice in which they both took great delight and which was intended to perfect my diction. In addition to Robert Burns and certain minor Scottish poets whom no one south of Hadrian’s Wall had ever heard of, Papa was a great aficionado of Latin and Greek classics. He read English translations, however, since he was not a scholar, borrowing them from the library at the British club near the riverside. One particular night, I began to read from Xenophon’s “On Hunting,” which Papa had brought home that evening, believing it would entertain our guest. I found it mostly tedious myself, and Mama thought it appalling. She held that “chasing God’s poor little creatures
through a forest and killing them most cruelly” was depraved.

“
The
first
pursuit
that
a
lad
just
emerging from
boyhood
ought
to
take
up
is
hunting
,”
I read. “
And
afterward
he
may
go
on
to
the
other
branches
of
education
,
provided
he
has
the
means.
”

“Rubbish!” Mama scoffed.

“Continue,” Papa prompted sternly.

As a piece of writing it was one extended yawn, but when I glanced at Midnight I discovered his head tilted in eager expectancy, as though this essay were the answer to a riddle over which he’d long puzzled, so I invited him to read from the book himself.

“I cannot,” he replied. When I inquired as to why, he said, “Because … because I cannot read or write.”

“Just try,” I said, holding the leather-bound text out to him. “John, please do not nettle Midnight,” said Mama quickly, laying her embroidery down in her lap. “You were doing splendidly and we should all be pleased to hear more. Is that not right, dear?”

“Aye, your voice has improved greatly of late,” Papa agreed, moving the candlesticks on our tea table nearer to me so I might have more light.

“No, let Midnight,” I replied sulkily.

“But it is impossible,” the Bushman repeated. When he smiled apologetically, my heart tumbled, for I realized it was true; no one had ever taken the time to help him to learn to read and write, which seemed a monstrous injustice. I continued to read aloud, but my thoughts were already searching out where I had left my
Greenwood’s
English
Grammar.
That night, I found it at the bottom of my chest.

In the morning I discovered Midnight standing naked in our Lookout Tower, staring at the rooftops of the city. “I shall teach you to read and write,” I told him, showing him my primer.

He laughed at my forthright statement and then, realizing that I meant it, pressed his fingertips to his temples as though his head were throbbing at the very thought.

“No, it will be easy,” I said. “You’ll see.”

After he’d dressed, I took his hand and brought him to our garden, so that he might learn to design letters in the sunshine.

Progress was slow. During this first lesson, I only got him to draw the letters
A
,
B
,
C
,
D
,
and
E,
and even those rather poorly. He preferred turning his letters into animals, the
A
becoming the legs of a giraffe, for instance, and the
B
the eyes of a crocodile viewed from above.

Over the next few weeks I worked with Midnight every day after breakfast. Soon he was able to sketch each of the twenty-six letters without addition of muzzle, horns, hooves, or tail. I thereafter settled upon a process that guaranteed us slow but steady progress. Standing as though spotlit in a theater,
gesticulating
wildly, I would read aloud a paragraph to Midnight from a classical volume, which always pleased him greatly and
sometimes
provoked him to giggles. Then we would sit next to each other and read over this same excerpt, the Bushman pointing with his finger at the words and sounding them out.

In this way, we read key paragraphs of military drama from Herodotus, Ovid, and Josephus at least a dozen times each. Midnight’s favorite was far and away Strabo’s account of the Roman general Pompey’s defeat at the hands of King
Mithradates
of Pontus. Estimating that we read this one at least once a week for two years, I would say that we relived this unusual battle more than one hundred times, to the point where we could recite it by heart. It never ceased to delight Midnight how Pompey’s superior forces were defeated by nothing more than honey. For while encamped on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, at a place called Trabzon, his troops gorged themselves on combs made by bees that had collected the poisonous pollen of
rhododendron
blossoms. Those who ate only a little were given to the wobbly walk and slurred speech of men who have downed several drams too many. Those who ate their fill were rendered mad or insensible. In their debilitated condition, they were slaughtered by Mithradates’s forces.

Midnight and I referred to it as the Battle of the Mad Honey.

This inspired such mirth in him because, to his people, honey was the single most delightful thing in the world, a harbinger of health, good luck, and joy. As a youth, he would smoke the bees out of their hives to steal their treasure. Honey was also Mantis’s favorite food. It was wisdom – and sunlight – given form. To
imagine that it might be able to change the course of history in a military battle … This was so unexpected that he never ceased to be astonished and delighted by the notion.

My father’s plans for Midnight were responsible for his long journey from Africa to Europe. Papa had made the acquaintance of the Bushman while on an extended visit to a newly established vineyard belonging to a stern Yorkshireman named Reynolds a day’s ride from Cape Town. Midnight was referred to as a servant in the man’s home, but there was not a drop of liberty to his terms of employment.

Just after Papa’s arrival, a terribly ill Dutchman from a nearby property turned up at the vineyard, seeking medical help. Over the next three days, Father watched Midnight cure the man of advanced pleurisy by applying poultices of mashed herbs to his chest and administering sweet-smelling infusions. On the fourth day, the Dutchman was fit enough to return home.

Several days later, through a ritual of smoke and dance,
Midnight
then cured – in Papa’s presence – a youthful Zulu woman who had been possessed by an evil spirit. My father would not have bet a farthing on her recovery, yet recover she did.

With little faith in the merits of European medicine, having recently witnessed its barbarous methods foisted upon me, Papa realized that this was the man to help his ailing son – if he could convince him to return to Portugal. It proved a surprisingly straightforward task; Midnight wished to seek out medical men in Europe who might help him discover which plants might be used to combat the illness of chills and blisters that had already killed thousands of his people, since nothing he or any other local healer had yet tried was of any use. Upon further inquiry, my father learned that this particular affliction was smallpox.

Midnight’s rationale for seeking help in Europe was based on the notion that the disease had been brought to Africa by the Dutch and English. He reasoned that the plant extracts needed to combat it would be found in its place of origin. When and if he found the medicinal plants he was looking for in Portugal, he would return to Africa with them.

Papa proposed to Midnight that he grow in our back garden any specimens that might prove useful to his experiments. He let it be known as well that it would certainly be appreciated by Mama if Midnight could at the same time restore a part of our small rectangle of land to its glory days before my birth. Back then, my Grandfather João had coaxed all manner of colorful blossoms, including some rare Turkish roses, from its soil.

The last part of Papa’s plan, which he had not yet mentioned to Midnight, was that he wished for the African to serve as a companion to my mother and myself during his periods of absence, there still being the necessity of his traveling upriver to survey lands every six to eight weeks.

Only one obstacle to Midnight’s leaving Africa with my father remained: He was a slave belonging to Reynolds, and the Englishman would not let him go for any price. Not only did he treasure the Bushman’s considerable medical skills, but he also greatly valued his talents as an interpreter. Mrs. Reynolds, a frail woman of Swiss extraction from Geneva, who feared all manner of local illnesses, would permit no talk of Midnight’s possible sale. My father and the Bushman were therefore forced to plan an escape.

Having given Reynolds a false date for his return voyage to Europe, Father journeyed alone to Cape Town on horseback at the appointed time: precisely three days before Reynolds and Midnight were to make their monthly visit to the city for supplies.

My father registered under a false name at the Black Horse Tavern, where, growing more anxious and ill-tempered with each passing day, he awaited Midnight.

It was customary for the Bushman to be given one entire night to spend as he wished while his English employer relieved himself of his Calvinist wife’s religious constraints at an infamous brothel. Except that this month – smelling a foul Scottish trap – Reynolds didn’t go to Cape Town and he forbade Midnight from leaving the homestead. And so the night that Papa and the Bushman had agreed upon for their rendezvous came and went. The following evening as well. At which point, my father, gravely disappointed, made plans to leave two days later on a Dutch vessel.

The next evening at sundown, however, while Father sat sipping a gin at the Black Horse, Midnight stepped inside, huffing and puffing, naked from the waist up and barefoot. He carried a small sack containing medicinal herbs, a quiver with arrows, a bow, and an ostrich egg
recently emptied of its last drop of water. A ruckus followed, because no
kaffir
,
as the expatriate Europeans referred to the indigenous peoples, was allowed inside such an establishment. Seeing that he was not about to reverse this absurd ruling, Papa led Midnight outside, where the Bushman promptly imbibed so much water from a civic well that his belly swelled to near bursting. He then explained calmly that he had come directly on foot all the way from his farm, twenty miles by Father’s reckoning. That might have been extraordinary enough, but he had accomplished this feat in little more than three hours, judging by the angle of the sun at departure and arrival, running most of the way.

Papa realized that Reynolds might already be in furious pursuit of Midnight, so they set off immediately on the first available boat, a schooner that took them not to Europe but to a nearby outpost, where supplies of wheat, barley, and cloth were unloaded. They remained in the only inn there under false names, though Midnight, as an African, was obliged to sleep on the floor of the stables. A few days later they were able to book passage on another Dutch ship headed for Holland.

After my father told me all this, I asked if he had indeed found suitable land in Africa, since he had mentioned nothing about it since his return. “I’m afraid not, John,” he replied. “The land is good, but there is no political stability at present, and there won’t be for some time to come. If I were to purchase land there, two years from now those same acres might belong to a Zulu chief or Dutchman. But do not fear, we shall get our vineyard here, sooner or later. That I promise you.”

Then I asked the more troubling question: If Midnight truly was Mr. Reynolds’s property, then was it right for my father to have helped him escape? “Is that not a form of robbery?”

“Aye, I asked myself that more than once, laddie.” He took my hand. “But before I answer, I want to put a question to you. Is it right for one man to own another?”

I wasn’t sure how to reply.

“Does not the bird market of Porto enrage you, laddie?” he continued. “How much more of an infamy is it when men and women are bartered, when such miserable conditions are foisted upon reasoning beings?”

My hatred for the traffic in birds was such that it was unnecessary to say an additional word on the subject. From that moment on, I knew where I stood.

XIV

V
ioleta had not yet vanished from Porto, and one Saturday afternoon Midnight and I hid around a corner to watch her selling her embroidered prayers in New Square. The Bushman was charmed to learn that such a young lass knew nearly all the constellations in the sky. When I told him of the terrible fate that had befallen her, he said, “Likely she is being haunted now by Hyena, just as you were, John.”

I begged him not to try to visit her, explaining she’d be beaten if she was discovered talking to him. Seeing my agitation, he agreed and gazed up into the heavens, speaking for a few moments in the swift clicks of his own language.

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“It will be up to the hunters in the sky to defend Violeta, and I have asked for their help.”

I took him next to the spot at the river where Daniel had drowned. I told him everything that happened on our last day together, confessing that I may have pushed the lad toward his death by telling him that Violeta would leave for America without him. Midnight cupped my chin but said nothing. Instead, he made me stare at my reflection in the water, his strong hands on my shoulders. “John, we are each small beings. And you are not nearly as powerful as you sometimes think you are. Mantis had abandoned Daniel.
That
was what caused him to drown.”

Midnight sensed my doubts and held the back of my neck as we walked away, perhaps hoping to guide me toward certainty. That night he heard me crying and tiptoed to my room. Once again he blew smoke from his pipe into my mouth until my room darkened and I could see nothing. Then, lighting my candle, he closed my door and asked me to hold my palm over the flame for
as long as I could stand it. Petrified, I replied that I did not believe I could do it. He held out his arms and fluttered them amid the swirling smoke, then brought them slowly together over his head, explaining that the burn would attract a very special butterfly to me and that she would apologize to Daniel for me. “It is she who makes amends in the other world,” he said.

He took my right hand and began rubbing it between both of his, so briskly that the friction seemed to create a moist layer of heat inside my palm. I suspect now that he coated my skin with a protective glaze of some sort; at the time I was too scared to notice, but I can recall a sour scent on my fingers.

“You must not shout,” Midnight warned me. “Or you will frighten away Butterfly.”

Taking a last deep breath, I slipped my hand into the center of the flame. The pain was crippling and I stifled a shriek. I held out as long as I could, surely no more than a second, then whipped my scorched hand away. Midnight told me I had done well. “Like a Bushman warrior,” he said, admiration flashing in his eyes. Blowing out the candle, he told me to hold out my hand, with the burn facing up.

When I did, all my breath and life centered on that throbbing pain. My spirit seemed to be opening and closing, like a fist flexing, searching for forgiveness. At length, Midnight crouched next to me and whispered, “There she is!”

“Who?”

“Butterfly. She has alighted on your hand and is healing the burn. She is licking.”

“What color is she?”

“Sssshhh – whisper. She has the pink, blue, and black of her mother, the Desert Wind.” He patted my back. I felt my heartbeat swaying me. “She is almost finished, John. When I tap you again, lift your hand gently-gently and say, ‘I send Butterfly into the forest of night.’”

As I spoke, the flutter of air against my rising hand made me start. “I think I felt her,” I whispered.

Midnight then coated my burn with herbs he fetched from the Lookout Tower and chewed into a paste. “This will seal
Butterfly’s
healing inside you.”

“Does Butterfly always know where to find the dead?” I asked.

“Always.” He touched his nose and sniffed. “She can locate every flower that has ever been born.”

Papa sought to make Midnight familiar with the techniques of topographical mapmaking, a practice for which he believed that the Bushman might have some aptitude. But when he discovered that behind his back his colleagues cackled like magpies at what they referred to as “Stewart’s monkey,” he never again asked Midnight to accompany him to his office. With Scottish stoicism, he got on with the business at hand, purchasing shovels, rakes, hoes, and picks of varying shapes and sizes for the horticultural laboratory and verdant paradise that was to be our garden.

Midnight, Fanny, and I were recruited for this restoration, but nearly all the valuable labor was provided by our sturdy African. To our happy surprise, we soon discovered that the petrified ropes of rosebushes that swirled into a mighty tangle over our property were not all dead. It took weeks of daily toil to clear a good-size area for Midnight’s planting and to prompt the
long-suffering
rosebushes toward health, by which time it was already the end of October. It was a mild autumn, however, and one rosebush gave us three yellow blooms in early January. We presented them to my mother, who threaded their stems into her slender vase of blue and white porcelain. She still has a rough sketch I made of this arrangement to this very day.

Midnight then gathered ideas on what medicinal plants to grow from a visit we made to the Quinta dos Arcos, a botanical garden on the outskirts of the city. Benjamin Seixas, our local apothecary and a family friend, offered the African seeds for hyssop, arnica, foxglove, coltsfoot, and other species of benefit to Europeans, as well as cuttings of lavender, senna, sage, verbena, and other useful herbs.

Our fondness for Midnight did not prevent us from having second thoughts about his staying with us, and I occasionally overheard my parents discussing behind their closed door
whether they ought to subject him to the ridicule of the
townspeople
. Then there were the times when he was churlish and even rude. A sensible reason for such behavior generally came to the fore, however. Sometimes our own misunderstanding of his motives worsened an already unpleasant situation, as when he took ill the first time, developing ticklish pimples all over his body. We worried for a day or two that it might be a grave disease of some sort, but it soon became clear to Mother that it was only chicken pox, which was rather extraordinary, since it was unheard of in adults in Portugal. What proved vexing, however, was that he locked himself in the Lookout Tower and would not emerge.

After a day and night of this behavior, my father had had enough. He stomped up the spiral staircase with my mother and me in tow and banged on the door, finally persuading the Bushman to open it a crack. As Papa entered, Midnight scurried to the back of the room.

“Now, sir, what is all this about?” Father asked.

“Please!” the African cried out. “I would like you to leave very, very immediately!” He waved his hands madly in front of his chest as though keeping a wild animal at bay.

“But you are ill.”

“Do not fight me. Just go. I command you!”

Sensing the nature of Midnight’s fears, Mama said, “Listen to me, Midnight. The three of us have already had chicken pox. We’ll not fall prey to it again.”

“You are too close to me, Mrs. Stewart. I beseech you to leave. Get out!”

“Your behavior is that of a child,” Father snapped, which brought tears to Midnight’s eyes.

None of us knew what to do about this stalemate. Finally, Mama said, “At least leave your door open and allow us to bring you some food.”

When he reluctantly agreed, my mother prepared
caldo
verde
, our local potato and kale soup, and had me bring it to him on a tray. I left the steaming bowl in the doorway, then stepped back so he would approach it, rather like feeding a wounded animal.

That night I tiptoed into Midnight’s room long after he’d
fallen asleep. I sat at the foot of his bed, wondering what to do. I was terribly tired, so when he rolled to his side, I simply crawled under the covers with him.

Awakening near dawn, I found him squatting in the corner, his teeth chattering.

“What are you doing over there?” I asked, sitting up and yawning.

“You disobeyed me,” he said, scandalized. “You are wicked. Go!”

“I’ll not go unless you speak to me about what’s troubling you.” When he refused to speak, I added, “I shall have wrinkles like Grandmother Rosa before I leave this room.”

“You … you cannot be sure it is chicken pox. Your father told me that European physicians are very, very slow-witted.”

I laughed. “Has anything at all we’ve said penetrated that stubborn skull of yours? My mother
knows
what is plaguing you. She makes no errors when it comes to these things, since she worries about them more than anyone else in the world.”

He shook his head as he stood up. “But, John, she might be wrong. I might have something incurable that came with me from Africa. You might catch it by proximity. Mrs. Reynolds was always saying our illnesses would be the death of all Europeans. Mr. Reynolds shot several Bushmen with smallpox at the edge of our property rather than allow me to treat them.” He rubbed his hand over his hair and moaned. “I did not help you frighten away Hyena only to kill you now.”

His explanation was so moving that I considered myself cretinous for not having understood sooner the depth of his fear. “Midnight,” I said gently, “I have been in bed with you much of the night and I am not ill. There is no danger.”

He began to cry. “You must leave me be. Please …”

Looking at him in tears, his head in his hands, I was unable to restrain myself. I rushed headlong into him and hugged myself into his belly. He tried to push me away, but I hung on and breathed in the hot moist scent of him until he kissed the top of my head.

“Listen closely,” I said, “my parents and I have faced this same beast and beaten him dead. He cannot hurt us again.”

Then, on my absolute assurance that Mama and Papa would exercise care and not touch him directly, he allowed me to lead him down the stairs. Papa sat him before the fire and praised his courage. Mama heated some soup, then watched him closely to make sure he ate it all.

Over the next several days, he allowed my mother to dab his itchy pimples every few hours with a solution of zinc oxide, which gave him pinkish spots. When he looked at himself in the glass, he bared his teeth as though he were a leopard, then howled with glee.

Midnight was ill many times that first year. We kept blaming the fog, which mixed with the smoke of fifteen thousand chimneys till one could barely see fifty paces ahead. In truth, however, the poor man took ill even when the sun was in full splendor. He suffered bouts of croup, boils, quinsy, dyspepsia, diarrhea, and a terrible dropsy of the extremities in which his wee feet swelled up to close to twice their natural size. Once, a reddish rash the shape of a three-clawed crab broke out across his right cheek and down his throat and was accompanied by chills. Then he began coughing up blood. It might have been scarlet fever, but as this was also a childhood disease, we could not be sure.

Though we were often desperate with worry, neither Midnight nor my parents were in any way inclined to permit a physician into our house. And so it was Senhor Benjamin, the apothecary who had supplied Midnight with seeds and cuttings, who saved us.

I’d always regarded Senhor Benjamin as mildly threatening and generally undistinguished. This error in judgment was due, I believe, to his shortness of stature – which, before I met
Midnight
, implied insignificance to me – and his knowing brown eyes. Framed by oval spectacles, they were far more vigilant than any lad of my character might like.

Now, however, with Midnight ill with what was probably scarlet fever, he showed himself to be generous, meticulous, and
indefatigable. I believe he would have weighed every grain of sand on the beach if it meant finding the one that might help our guest.

By the time the African’s fever and rash had vanished and he had been declared fit again, Senhor Benjamin had become a trusted family friend. A widower of fifty-seven years of age, he began to sup with us every Friday night, and Father found in him the great friend he had been searching for all these years.

Midnight benefited greatly from this acquaintance; not only did he gain his own personal nursemaid and guardian, but he also earned himself an apprenticeship. Due to his worsening eyesight, Benjamin needed an assistant, so who better than Midnight?

No contract was ever signed; a simple handshake between the two men was considered quite sufficient. The African was to work for the apothecary for three years, four half-days a week, since he was not convinced that he would be able to bear being indoors longer than that. In return, he would be paid a small but fair salary. After three years, if he so desired and if both parties were willing, the Bushman would enter into a full partnership with Benjamin on payment of a sum to be decided later, which Father agreed to pay. If Midnight chose to return to Africa instead, no impediments of any kind would be put in his way.