Marshlands (8 page)

The long afternoon is over. The weed-strewn water has lost its oppressive glare. The sky is thick with fowl. There's a kind of relief in simply enjoying their flight, appreciating the noisy formations without worrying about sight lines or losing downed birds in impenetrable grass.
We are safe from you
, their eager honking seems to say. To which I feel like answering,
And we from you!

The water has receded since the beginning of the hunt. Chigger tries mightily to avoid leaping in the shallow brine to free us when we run aground. It's a point of pride with him.

But the water is so low, and the towering reeds so thick, that at times we're both forced out of the canoe.

Progress along the waterway, which in places is hardly more than a brackish tongue of mud, is hard-won. It becomes clear, as evening lowers its shroud over the swaying grasses, that we will not reach home before dark.

Chigger wants to push on. His determination gives me pause. Perhaps he has taken a lover. And why not? He's young and handsome, and there's prestige in his long association with me. I wouldn't mind sleeping in my own bed, either. The comforts of camp have softened me. But it's unsafe to move in the marshes at night. This is unrelated to the occupation. Night in the marshes has been dangerous for thousands of years.

Where should we sleep?
I ask.

Chigger protests in his gentle way, but I insist. Finally, he suggests a reed island in a nearby lagoon.
There will be shelter
, he says,
whether or not the villagers have carried
.

The marshmen are nomadic, moving from island to island as their buffalo exhaust the local fodder. Their mobility has always amazed me. They're capable of loading their households onto improvised rafts and vanishing into the reeds within minutes, if need be.

He doesn't wait for my assent. He knows I trust him implicitly in these matters. If he says there will be shelter, it will be there.

The reeds shudder as we part them. A purple gloom presses down their tips. Mallards call out overhead, inspiring Chigger to song, too, something about a girl with a gauze dress, and the tattoo on her thigh that can be seen through it.

Or perhaps it's a song of bride-stealing. The dialect is unfamiliar to me. In the gurgling near-darkness, the meaning of a monotonous song like this has a tendency to bend itself to one's mood.

Suddenly he squats. His bright palm flashes behind his back. This is our signal. There may yet be enough light to take another pig. Killing them is not mere sport. These wild pigs cause great hardship for the marshmen, rooting up their crops, trampling their goods, and causing a surprising number of fatal wounds with their filthy tusks.

I take up my cape gun and disengage the safety, which causes a new tension in the boat. Chigger's back glistens with exertion. It's a moment of great intimacy between us, although he'd surely never describe it that way. Hunting accidents are second only to the resolution of blood feuds as a cause of death among the young men of the marshes.

The channel widens. He maneuvers the canoe to one side, then beaches it on ground that remains invisible to my eye even after the keel has bitten deeply into sand.

I follow him, staying close in the last of the light.

Pig?
I whisper.

He nods, then spreads his arms wide. A large one.

And then we're on it. No sooner do we make out the hulking head, like an entire bristling beast itself, than the breeze shifts. The pig turns on us, shattering the peace of the evening with its roaring.

It charges, but the attack is merely a feint. By the time there's a clear line of fire, the pig is crashing away through the high grass.

We've missed a kill, but it's no great tragedy. The hunt was already complete. The violent atmosphere quickly dissipates. A cool breeze fluffs the grasses, restoring the calm.

But something's out of place. Chigger senses it, too. He touches my elbow and points to a shape on the ground where the pig was feeding, something dark and long laid out on the wet stubble. I ready the gun. It could be another pig, a juvenile.

As we approach, the breeze carries a familiar stench. It's not another pig after all, but the corpse of a young marshman, perhaps a few years older than Chigger.

The pig has been at the face. The forehead is split, and the scalp torn away. The cheeks are mostly gone. One ear remains, and just a bit of dark flesh where the nose was. The eyes have been eaten by something smaller. A crab, perhaps.

He was a sturdy young man, a rice farmer, by the look of his legs, which are scabbed up to the calf, the mark of a parasite common to rice paddies. Remarkably, the pig has spared the genitals, which exhibit a clean circumcision, the work of a surgeon, not an itinerant barber. I've done countless circumcisions over the years, enough to put most of those butchers out of business. This young man was almost surely one of mine.

His belly is bloated, which suggests drowning, but drownings are exceedingly rare among the marshmen, who learn to swim practically before they can walk. A drowning is often a sign of a drunken binge, but he seems too young and too poor for that.

Chigger has retreated to the canoe. He wants no truck with corpses. It's left to me to roll him over.

The wound across the forehead continues all the way around the head, a ring of deep incisions like bird tracks. I haven't seen anything like it since my early days here, when the use of razor wire during interrogations was fairly common, a barbaric practice that has been banned for years.

Everything else points to an unlucky young rice farmer who startled a wild animal. Perhaps the pig knocked him unconscious with the first charge. I've seen it before. It has nearly happened to me.

I'd like to be more definitive, but autopsies fall outside the brief of our field hospital. Besides, the marshmen would never warrant such a thing. They're pragmatic about death. As long as there's a proper burial, they grieve fiercely, pounding their breasts and wailing until one of them says,
Enough.
Then, as quickly as it began, the keening ends. The grieving is set aside, erased with the swiftness of the grass that closes behind a passing canoe.

Of all the marshmen's ways, it's the one I envy most.

*   *   *

We're in luck. The island Chigger mentioned is not far, and, as he predicted, the villagers haven't decamped. We're welcomed by a naked boy hanging like a monkey from a brace of bent reeds. The boy asks us, in a lovely pure treble, whether we've eaten. This is the age-old greeting of the marshmen, a token of their deep hospitality, but in the child's mouth it takes on the aggressive tone of a challenge.

Chigger berates him, telling him to hurry up and gather the elders.

The whole village receives us at the landing, arranged, like everything in these parts, by status. The man we need to see stands impassively by the guesthouse, which in this place is a modest hut that ordinarily stables buffalo.

We must make a bewildering sight: a paunchy foreigner dressed as a marshman, and a canoe boy with borrowed dog tags slapping his naked chest. Chigger parts the crowd, warning of what will happen if our welcome is not sufficiently warm.

But our purpose tonight is serious. I motion for him to be quiet, a gesture not lost on the villagers, who cross their arms with satisfaction to see the boy put in his place.

We have found a body
, I say.
I would like to speak with the headman
.

This is a perversion of the normal order of things, which calls for a coffee ceremony before anything serious can be broached, but I don't mind trading on my status as an outsider. The rice farmer's family needs to be notified. Judging from the level of putrefaction, he's been missing for a while.

My announcement causes a general rush to the canoe. I'm left alone with the headman, who leads me into the guesthouse, where a young girl is seated in a place of honor by the hearth. Her cheeks are red from scrubbing. A brass chain has been hurriedly woven into her hair. I recognize the coin that dangles on her high forehead. It's military scrip, a copper blank stamped with the number five.

My host averts his milky eyes while I drink coffee and partake of some gritty rice. Then he takes the coffeepot from the girl and pours me another cup himself. The business with the corpse can wait. He imagines we're entering a bridal negotiation.

This is a very useful girl
, he says.

I'm not looking for a wife
, I say. The girl can't be more than eight years old.

He shrugs. The shrug is universal among the marshmen, a gesture with infinite subtle inflections. Here, it means,
Often a man doesn't know what he's looking for
.

A virgin
, he says.
See for yourself.

Father
, I say,
I'm troubled about the rice farmer. Surely his people miss him
.

He frowns. I'm being difficult. The matter of the dead farmer will not be advanced by a foreigner's impatience. His grimace exposes a mouth empty of teeth except for one monstrous yellow canine.
Her mother is very fertile. She has five brothers
. He holds up three fingers, all that remain on the right hand, and supplements them with two fingers from his left. His withered arms tremble from the effort of holding up his hands.

Instead of marveling at the size of the girl's family, I thank him for the meal.

But he's not done. With the sour expression of a man who has been forced to play a valuable card prematurely, he leans in and confides,
Naturally, you want to know about the dowry
.

There's a commotion outside the guesthouse. Chigger appears, beckoning me with exaggerated gestures, so the villagers outside will have a clear idea of his influence.

A relative has been found
, he says.
A cousin. The cousin has requested you
.

Requested me for what?

A consultation
, he says.

I want to ask what there could possibly be to discuss, but I suppose I already know.

I apologize to the headman, then follow Chigger to the landing, where they've laid out the body in the sand. The cousin squats by the corpse, smoking nervously, shifting his weight from foot to foot like an inexperienced merchant rehearsing the price of his goods.

Here he is!
Chigger announces.

On cue, the cousin pulls back the green army blanket, revealing the young man's ruined face. A nearby charcoal fire mercifully suppresses the odor.

The cousin rocks back and forth, puffing away with a disturbing air of detachment. Unless I'm mistaken, he's waiting for a pronouncement that will help set the blood price—not that one is warranted. This was an ordinary death, not a military one. No payment is due; nevertheless, here is the corpse, and here am I.

This is a side of life in the marshes that I understand, but despair of. What's really needed is to clean the young man and make him as presentable as possible before wrapping him in a winding sheet. All of this would have been automatic if it weren't for my presence.

The general hush is broken by a splash in the darkness, followed by an indignant snort. A child has thrown a stone at one of the wading buffalo. The animal churns the shallows in outrage, its broad back slick with moonlight. The boy laughs. Several of the elders scold him. There's even a halfhearted chase, but the boy is too nimble, and the men are confused by a foreigner in their midst.

Suddenly I feel the exertions of the hunt. My body aches. My face burns from long days of exposure. Without asking permission, I pick up the corpse and stagger with the stinking burden to the doorway of the guesthouse. If need be, I will clean him myself. But before I can enter, my way is barred.

Chigger explains the situation. Apparently, a single drop of the boy's blood has the power to render the reed structure ritually impure, and, with the recent conscriptions for levee work, there's simply not enough manpower to rebuild a guesthouse.

The corpse is leaden and incredibly rank. It takes all of my concentration to keep from gagging. I can feel body fluids seeping through to my skin. The faces here are all hostile. Even Chigger shakes his head with disapproval.

In the end, there's nothing to do but return the boy to his cousin, who hasn't budged from his place by the fire. He tilts his chin, indicating where he wants the body.

Everyone seems relieved that I've reestablished myself as an outsider. And not just an outsider. Let's not mince words.

An occupier.

2

We arrive back at camp at dusk the next day—that is, a day late. We haven't been missed. What is a day, or even a week, here in the marshes, where time is reckoned in terms of length-of-tour, often years?

Field hospitals are temporary by definition, but a more or less permanent village has formed around the perimeter of the camp, the way the great briny lakes here will precipitate a ring of salt along their shores. The marshmen come to camp for the wages. We hire them to avoid the more unpleasant of our daily duties. It's an age-old symbiosis, neither good nor bad, merely the vanguard of contact between two civilizations unequal in power. There hasn't yet been intermarriage, but it can't be far behind.

No marriage, but plenty of night sport, ever since the first heady weeks of conquest. I've been administrator here long enough to see lanky native children with the piercing green eyes of empire.

By my colleagues' suggestive smiles, I know that my tent girl is waiting for me. The adolescent smirking is hardly necessary. Of course she's waiting. That's what I pay her to do.

The tent is stifling. Our military tents don't breathe like the woven reed structures in the marshes. I've tried again and again to commission a guesthouse, but the marshmen will not build me one. Only a headman may commission a guesthouse. I'm a potentate, to be sure, but also a foreigner. I've offered an obscene sum of money, but the only takers have been good-for-nothings, drunkards who haven't the faintest idea how to work with reeds.