Beggar's Feast (9 page)

Taking him by a tuft of hair warmed by her skin, oh by her own hair, Sam turned Malcolm's head and yanked him off her body, brought him to his feet and chopped down at his cowardly hands struggling with hers for the sheet. Sam pushed him hard and Malcolm's splotchy pinkness collapsed into itself as he staggered backward against his uncle's desk, his arms and hands scissoring into a V at his privates. Sam rammed an open palm into his nose and when he raised his hands to his blooming bloody face Sam kicked him down. Malcolm fell to the floor, sucking and gurgling. Sam walked over to the desk. He found the scrolled menu card half tucked beneath the blotter and turned to leave. But he had to look again at his cot, at her face, also splotchy. She seemed to be wriggling away, or trying to get herself onto her elbows without the sheet falling. She was cursing as she moved—her cousin, her brother, her father. She leaned and spat in the wastebasket beside his cot. His bed! Suddenly she was staring at him, her eyes diamond bright with confusion and rage and shame, could it be, and thanksgiving? But the creased bed-sheet looked like ten thousand crows' feet. He felt like a paddy field on fire. He felt charred, used up, scoured of past life and all possibility save one. Sam ran.

As promised: from high upon the verandah of the silent walauwa, and from within the dark doorways of Sudugama's silent village huts, a strange new noise was heard coming down the Kurunegala Road. It sounded like distant bees, or ten thousand dragonflies, forty thousand wings, a vibrant hum that became a growl and then a rumble and whine as it neared the village whose people, always ready for omens, checked the time and reminded themselves of the date and squinted over the treetops to consider, in its early-morning fade, how much and malevolent was the moon left in the sky. Malaria, drought, and now this, in 1929, some boxy monster bringing with it dogs barking; birds cawing; boys clapping and calling on friends to come see; older men slack-jawed with shock, women peering from behind husband and brother shoulders, failing to hold on to their own children, who ran to join the mad parade that had gathered around him town after town since Colombo. Sam Kandy was seated in the back of the first motorcar ever to come to the village of Sudugama, a 1928 Morris Minor, black as deep water; his driver, a boy with blue eyes.

The car turned off the main road into a dry dirt laneway cut between the paddy fields. On the left was the reedy pond, now more a brown puddle. Sam remembered how once, before the temple, when he was just another boy in the village, he had been told that this pond was filled with baby turtles, told by a boy who was soaked through and smiling as he described the crawling surface of the water. His wet finder's feet were filmed in dust from running up the laneway. Sam never thought to ask him where his turtle was. He ran down straight away, crouched and squinted across the reed-bent water, waiting for the shimmering surface to tremor with life born to be caught. He was pitched forward by the very boy who had called him down. The leafy surrounds shook with laughter as the other boys, ranging from long dry to still damp, stood to see the latest conned. The boy who had pushed him in pulled him out with rough ceremony and said that now it was his turn to find his own boy to tell about the baby turtles. Sam understood and played the game and played it well. He had been so happy not to be the last boy found, happier still that the boy he ran and called down was Bopea, whom he had once fought and lost to on the great green clearing.

The Morris was moving very slowly now, the surface of lane that led through the village undulant like the bony backs of the men and beasts born to walk it. At Sam's word the car paused at the barren junction that marked the centre of the village. He glanced to the right, toward the now gaping astrologer's hut. He glanced to the left, down the lane past the carpenter's stall, at what, until so very lately, had been his family's own place. And now, twenty years later, always, he looked forward, upward, to the great twin boulders that marked the entranceway to the walauwa itself. Boulders that, in years past, had always barred the way forward, upward, for men like his father and his father and his father too, the men of his family back unto the very first of his line who emerged from untold, unknown history, who appeared on the scene from unnamed and long forgotten geography one morning to spend the rest of his days and his son's and his son's forever more working the mud lands of men born to better horoscopes. Until now and himself, Sam thought, wondered, promised; no, vowed. He had stopped the car so he could ask himself one last time if what was next was in fact what was wanted. And it was, it had to be, it was what everything before this day compelled him now to seek, impelled him, at last un-fathered, to make his own.

“What are you? A politics? A temperance bugger?” the old man had asked him, days before, when he had stepped into the hut. He'd come by train and then cart, dressed in a simple clerk's outfit, unannounced, unknown, to see what was left of a forgotten family he was certain and outraged and grateful had forgotten him.

“You don't know me?” Sam asked. Yes, he did, he wanted it that way, wanted no ceremony as he returned to the low little room lit only by bottle lamp and any early moonlight and starshine washing in through the side window beneath which he had lain as a little boy. Those jurying stars. While his father studied him, Sam looked around and found nothing of the Christmas crate he had sent from Sydney, four years earlier. He breathed deeply the odour of ages, finding again nothing of himself in it save the earthly sweet smell of ripe plantains, combs as profuse as they and they alone always were, piled on the table. The rest was old dirt and oil, burnt rice, rinds, pot arrack; old man smells.

“I don't owe you any money, I know that! Ask anyone if I owe anyone.”

“Are you alone here?” Sam asked. His mother must have died.
Soo sa
he had tried to protect her from muddy snakes when he was a boy and she was pregnant too long and they had gone walking on the great green clearing.
Soo sa
she had taken him to the astrologer and let his father take him to chase the crow and then to the temple.
Soo sa

“Mokatha
?
” his father shot back, less with puzzlement than worry.

“You really don't know who I am?”
Appachchi
he hadn't said; the word had curled and disappeared upon his tongue like a singed leaf.

“Justgowillyou” the old man muttered, bagging up his sarong between his legs as he always did. Only now the legs looked thin as cigarettes. Only now the sarong was from an old bed-sheet, bought years earlier by Mrs. James Astrobe at David Jones in Sydney and long since faded and betel- and tea-stained beyond all recognition. “I owe nothing in this village. Just ask any fellow if I owe him still! I have nothing for you.”

“Uncle,” Sam said, swallowing the rest of it. He would use the first of his two plans, the greener one, to get his father out of Sudugama before he arrived a few days later in the motorcar. “I am here on behalf of someone else, to see your wife about an inheritance matter.”

The bunched-up fabric dropped and the old man hooked forward, his eyebrows crumpling. “Aiyo malli-sir, it's like this. I am a poor widower, my beloved wife has passed only recently, and just see all my ungrateful children have left me.”

“And where are all your children?”

“They are all ungrateful, all gone and left me.”

He was alone. Sam felt nothing.

“There are none remaining in this village? None from your relations? No blood?” Sam asked carefully, his words heavy as links. But he felt nothing. He could not.

“They are all gone and left me!” He would be alone, undiscovered. He could do it.

“And your wife's family?”

The old man waited a beat and bagged himself about the legs again. “No one I can think of, malli-sir.”

“Only you?” Sam confirmed, pretending to write something in a ledger, knowing the old man was lying but not worried. He could not remember any of his mother's family save the old one, his grandmother. She was long since gone. None of the rest would remember him. He could do it.

“I have come on behalf of one of your wife's distant relations, from down south, near Matara. Did you know she had family there?”

The old man bobbled his head, knowing it was not true, that no one in his wife's family or his own had ever been, save Kandy town, farther than a dog's trot from Sudugama.

“Right,” Sam said. He had lately gone down to Galle to secure a shipping agreement with a family of Muslim traders. Afterwards, he went farther south, as far as he could, and then inland a ways from Matara. He told anyone he met what he wanted and with funny looks was sent to Ankuressa and there he looked until he found what it needed to be, a certain kind of house for sale. No one had lived in it for a long time, no one could chase them away, and it was a bad omen to cut down a Mara tree. Sam had waited past dusk to make sure that what he had been told was true. And yes, oh vengeful symmetry, this great flamboyance of leaves and branches was in fact a roosting tree, where every night the crows beat its branches black.

“What have you come to say from them?” his father asked.

“Not come to say, Uncle, but to give. This relation has died and I have come to show you the deed for the property, a good property, down south with a good strong Mara tree and here is your rail ticket from Kandy—”

“I AM GOING IN THE MORNING!”

When the Morris jumped back to life, something fired out the back. Three boys took off down the lane, racing to see who would first find whatever bullet cannon or fireball this thing just shot out. An older man tripped backward over a dog, one of the many milling about sniffing and barking and considering what part of this thing looked softest to bite. There were yells and screams, laughter terror outrage from the rest of the crowd, which, like some palpitating organ, had surrounded the car when, moments before, it had stopped at the village crossroads. The crowd gave way as the car resumed its course, straight ahead and slower still, moving into a steady incline, deliverance from and deliverance forward, the angle-bodied mutts still nipping at its back wheels in vain and so nipping at each other instead. The crowd reformed as one in Sam's wake, not following but instead watching the black beast drive on to the big house near empty and silent with its own waiting.