The Luminist (14 page)

Other boys spoke up about what they 'd seen while working the docks and the fields. They recited the keepsakes that next time they would take. The rings and pocketwatches and carriage headposts that gleamed when the light caught them and made them precious.

Eligius thought hard of the Colebrooks' halls, the rheumy study and the space where he'd seen things that could be carried, but what value did they have to anyone else?

He thought of Catherine. She was a stern mistress but she'd paid as promised, and she'd captured some sort of otherness from the secret place in the world where such things hid. That meant something.

He thought of Julia in the gazebo, writing and smiling at nothing he could see. Her face forced the words from him.

“I know a place. Their church. The Galle Face, at the port. I saw inside.”

He listened to their voices, to the scuttle of leaves and dirt beneath his feet, to the glide of animals across the boughs. He waited to see what manner of thing he had just brought into the world.

Chandrak shifted his weight off of his left side. He stared. Then he smiled at Eligius.

It was done.

 

THEY INSTRUCTED HIM to keep his eyes on the port road. Another boy watched the trees for colonials or soldiers. The sound of the church lock crumbling under Chandrak 's brick seemed like thunder. Eligius exchanged terrified looks with the boy.

The church doors opened and the men scurried inside in knots of hunched backs and grasping hands. Some of them emerged immediately, bearing crosses, cups, pillows of blood velvet, and satchels of the colonials' incense.

There are rooms inside, he heard one man say. There must be children because look what I found.

The other boy accepted his father 's gift, courtesy of the now-absent children. A doll with pitch eyes, its shell face cavitied by too much salt air. Take it to Sonia, the man said. They walked into the trees together.

“ Here.”

Chandrak held something out to him. “This is not to sell. It's for you to keep. Your mother told me of your games with light.”

Eligius accepted the square of ornate glass. The size of Gretel's pages, it was framed in silver and laced with rivulets of red and blue. The rest of the glass woman and her baby emerged from the Galle Face in fragments, with broken piping trailing her pieces like roots. In moments she was gone.

He peered inside the church. A wound stood high in the wall where she'd been. Like the pane in his hands, it was lifeless in the dark. “ When they see what we' ve done,” he said, “they'll search every home.”

“We don't have homes,” Chandrak said. “We have mud huts. They'll find nothing. Come.”

 

THEY MADE THEIR way back to Matara's outskirts, at the cliffs overlooking the sea. In the trees they lay what they 'd taken on the ground. Some spoke of their desire to keep what they'd spir - ited away. Others wanted to sell their prizes at bazaar.

Chandrak told them to leave their hoard where it was.

Before dawn a man came. Corpulent and bearded, he conferred with Chandrak while appraising the pieces. They arrived at an accord, then shook hands and walked a short distance to a thicket of tangled tree limbs. In a moment they returned with two long boxes.

Chandrak raised his hands for quiet. “I've heard from Karampakam and Jaffna. All through the peninsula, we're becoming a movement, bandhutva. For this, we'll be blessed. If
you take back what the colonials have taken from us, I promise you they 'll fall.”

He opened the first box and removed a rifle of silver and wood. Slipping a finger around the trigger, he aimed it at Eligius.

Eligius thought,
this is what appa saw
.

Chandrak shouldered the rifle like a soldier. “ Now that you understand how well-placed you are, will you do this? Did Swaran raise a man as these others have?”

His hand came to Eligius' face. It sank deep, as if willing itself through to his heart. “Say yes, meri beta.” There was little confidence in his voice. “ I see it in you.”

The bearded man approached. “You'll take care of this,” he told Chandrak. “I see fear in his face. I think there are no men in your home. I think your good name will be swept out to sea.”

“He's not my father,” Eligius said.

There was more talk of buying powder and bullets, sending boys to other colonials' homes. The bearded man counseled them to steal what sold most readily. The most personal things. His voice was soothing. He laughed easily.

At home, Chandrak removed Eligius' tunic that held, somewhere, the ashen steam of ships. “Take anything you see in the Colebrooks' home,” he said. “Bring it to me and we'll buy a rifle for our brothers. Few men have raised enough money, so we'll be considered important. Tomorrow, when the others see you, they must know I am a man who means to raise a man. They must see.”

Eligius turned so that the banyan strip would lace his back. “Swaran, you are a part of history,” Chandrak said, and wept.

The banyan's serrated edge fell. Soon Eligius' sight left him. His mother and Gita, awake now and cowering in the corner next to Lakshmi; all slipped below the surface of a warm, gathering dark. The beating became less of his flesh and more of sound and light. It slipped clouds beneath him and took him up through the holes in the hut roof. There was no pain. There was
only a shadow of a feather in his hands. Its blackness seeped into him, weaving a stain of him into the walls of the world.

 

CATHERINE HEARD THE first cry well into the night. She was in the cottage, ministering over her latest attempt. A local girl, dark, diamonds for eyes and a boy's muscled shoulders. One of the many urchins who routinely came to the windows of passing carriages offering something forlorn and filthy for sale. A few rupees had purchased the girl's stillness over a long afternoon. Now the sotted paper yielded only a blot of dark space. Failure, again.

Wisps of silversalt had carried her off; she'd fallen asleep to the melody of her own breathing. The moaning infiltrated her dreams, of giving birth to a baby with a voice that twinned her own.

She awoke to the sound. It came from outside, like a whisper through the cottage walls.

Across the yard she spotted Eligius lying against Dimbola's gate. He could not speak to say how he had come through the jungle in his condition. It took her and Julia to carry him to his mat in the house.

He slept through the night and well into the next day, in a fever born of his beating. When he woke, Julia told him that he writhed as if in some kind of flight.

“Wynfield's soldiers are in your village,” she said. “The church was ransacked last night. And your beating…”

He sucked in air, breaking the colors clouding his vision.

“My mother and I heard you in the night. You spoke of your father as if he was alive.”

“Please. I don't want the soldiers to hurt my mother.”

“It's done.” Catherine stood in the doorway. “What happened to you ought have no place. It's savage. It cannot go unanswered.”

He tried to sit up. The effort ignited a fire deep in his chest.
“I have lost yet more time. The roof remains a shambles. Is there wood? I can finish.”

“You'll stay in bed. Let the other colonials drive their ser - vants to the ground. But you'll not lay around idling away time.” She placed a thick book on the mat at his feet. “I expect you to apply your heart to this. Tonight, I'll hear your thoughts on the passage I've marked.”

Her fingers were red, like a maid's. She appeared as if she'd been scaling fish against rock, as his mother did at low tide. But his mother had never returned with her efforts still radiant upon her. She had never been touched by the madness slumbering under his mat.

“Julia, let him be. You too, Ewen.”

Ewen rolled to his feet. He'd been lying still, pressed into the shadows enveloping the sleeping mat. “You never saw me.” He giggled as he ran out of the room.

“Did you know about the Galle Face?” Julia asked. “Is that why you were beaten? For refusing to go?”

“I don't understand.”

She lifted his blanket. The pane of glass lay against his thigh. “It was next to you when we found you. If you were a thief, you would have sold it.”

She left him. He opened the bible the memsa'ab had given him. She'd circled a passage in soft charcoal. Fine black granules filled the separation between pages. Ecclesiastes. The word felt insurmountable. The rest of the passage chilled him.

When Catherine returned that evening, she asked him to read it aloud. Her lean face was near beautiful, with its fine cheekbones and high forehead. Her hair was wrapped demurely. Yet still there was something wild about her.

“I'm afraid,” he said.

“I know you are. Do as I ask.”

He opened the book. “Light is sweet, and it is pleasant to the eyes to see the sun. Even those who live many years should
rejoice in it; yet let them remember that the days of darkness will be many.”

She sat down next to his mat, on the floor like a child. “Its meaning?”

“Are the dark days here now?”

“To believe otherwise is vanity.”

She reached for the book. Now there was silver across her palms, embedded like stars. She had come to love the way it dusted her, like something from a child's wondrous dream. “The question that intrigues is how to hold the light higher, eh?”

Footsteps in the corridor interrupted her. The sa'ab's slow shuffle. “Is he awake?' Charles called. “How is it with him?”

“Better.”

She lowered her voice to a conspirator 's hushed whisper and read from the book. “Before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened, and the clouds return with the rain, and men are bent, and the breath returns to God who gave it.”

This madness engulfed her. It slipped a crooked smile across her face and kept her from rising at her husband's approach.

“Julia tells me of her conviction that you are not a boy who would desecrate a church,” she told him. “I can't say where this conviction comes from, but my daughter does not idly place her faith. Do not make a fool of her, or me.”

“Are you reading to him?” Charles appeared in the doorway.

“No, my husband. I'm done for tonight.”

“Well, he looks better. I'll say goodnight.”

“As will I.”

She had begun an education of his eyes; her shining hands had started it. Already she felt increasingly adrift from her known life, with only an Indian for company.

“Memsa'ab? I'm not afraid of reading. I'm afraid of everything changing.”

“As am I. Perhaps we can find a way around that sad state.”

She left him in a gray growing dark. It deepened with the hour. Gradually, the sounds of ary's evening cleaning fell away. The clatter of dishes, the emptying of filthy water buckets into the yard outside his window, the strangely forlorn whisk of the rug being dragged to its morning spot. When all was still, he rose from his mat. His wounds had dried to taut seams in his skin.

The halls of the Colebrooks' home were quiet. It was as if the family became weightless at night. These people were nothing like the families in Matara. Even at a late, lonely hour, he always felt his village around him, like the stones Matara's mothers placed at the corners of their children's bedding to hold their babies down when the wind came in a flurry of fists against their huts.

He passed the watchful paintings on his way to the front of the house. At the window, he glanced outside and saw a figure at the gate. Chandrak's face shone in the moonlight. It glistened like the starlit trails left in the sand by molting crabs.

Eligius held himself very still. It's dark in here, he thought. The moon doesn't catch me; there are no holes in this roof. He cannot see me.

Chandrak remained at the gate a long time. Once, he picked up a rock as if he might hurl it. But he just held it, while gazing towards the faint light in Holland House.

Eligius glanced around the room for anything he could use as a weapon, should Chandrak come over the gate. It could only be the memsa'ab in the cottage, keeping company with her wood-legged beast.

When Chandrak finally left, Eligius crept outside. To his eyes, Chandrak had left the same black impression as, at that moment, lay under his mat. A mark on the air. But when he reached the gate, there was nothing.

The door to Holland House was ajar. Beyond it, pale light rippled as if disturbed by the breeze. He peered inside, careful to stay silent.

She sat on the floor, muttering to herself. She held a feather in one hand, the paper in the other.

A letter, he thought. From that man. Words, what to do.

She was trying to make it come again. Her hands were stained. In the available light he saw swirls of black atop her fingers.

Somewhere within, he thought, hides the name of this obsession she has betrothed herself to.

He went to the well and returned with a small cistern of water. Entering, he knelt beside her, took the feather from her hand, and began to rinse her skin of its stain. So much of it remained.

She was silent while he ministered to her with patient, careful fingers. “These shadows,” he said. “To hold the fact of one, like the stone it came from. Nothing else matters to you.”

Putting the letter down, she held her other hand out to him. “No,” she said, marveling at the sound of it. Her blood set to words.

He tended to her. As flecks of never-born shade fell from her palm into the cistern, he wondered what became of such things as these, that came to the world broken or not at all, and stayed no longer than a breath.