It was as though a trumpet had sounded over the scene of a great battle, signaling all the soldiers to lay down their arms. None of us spoke. I believe each of us had a different reason for retreating into silence. To me, Midnight made no sense at all, but his words seemed magical — like those of a sorcerer. Mother had plainly concluded that this African was beyond salvation, a heathen who ought to have remained in his loathsome homeland.
As for my father, his eyes were gleaming with pride, as though he had welcomed Robert Burns himself into his home.
After a dessert of pears poached in wine and ginger, Father’s favorite sweet, he built a fire in our hearth and invited us all to sit with him.
Midnight declined and begged permission to climb the stairs to our Lookout Tower in order to view the city. Not to be rude, Papa withdrew with our guest for a few minutes. When he returned, he told us that the African was gazing through the yellow and red glass panels of the skylight as though they were a threshold to a future world. Earlier that day, on a tour of our house, he had been fascinated by their translucency and had said that we had managed to steal a piece of Mantis’s son, who was Rainbow, and place him within our reach. Mantis, as we were to learn, was the chief god in the Bushmen pantheon.
Midnight’s words had elicited a murmur of delight from Father and a
He then assembled his tobacco pouch, flint, and pipe, and reclined in his armchair. I fought to stay awake but was yawning shamefully. I smiled whenever Mama or Papa looked at me, as I did not wish to play Old Gooseberry and ruin their reunion by confessing how bad I was feeling.
And yet I soon succumbed to a paroxysm of sobbing, simultaneously bringing up my supper all over our Persian rug.
“It is all the excitement of having you home,” Mama said to Papa, fetching me a glass of water.
Papa felt my pulse. It was weak and dangerously quick. “You have been ill all day,” he said irritably. “You are brave, but foolish not to have told us.” He led me straight up to my room.
While I lay in bed, Mama grabbed Papa’s arm and turned her back to me. My hearing has always been first class, and I overheard her whisper, “God help me, I know he may be leaving us. It may even be what he wishes.”
Midnight then joined them in the corridor. After receiving permission from Papa, he sat on my bed and placed a moistened towel over my forehead. Mama stood behind him, her hands clutching at her handkerchief, ready to pounce on him if he in any way tried to hurt me.
For the next three days, I was delirious with fever. While drifting over waves of light and dark, I once glimpsed a burning horse galloping up our street. I tasted opium on my tongue at times. It tasted of the moon, but I cannot say why.
It seemed to me as though Midnight stayed with me the entire time. During periods of lucidity, I reasoned that I must have been hallucinating. Yet I later found out that he did indeed spend three straight days by my side, sleeping on the settee that he and my father positioned at the foot of my bed. He spoke to me in a mixture of English and his own language, full of clicking noises not unlike bird calls, until I almost believed I could understand what he was saying.
On four separate occasions, according to Papa, when I was given to chills, Midnight curled up behind me to warm me with his body heat. I remember one of these times clearly, and I am firmly of the opinion that he gave me something of his own self, although I don’t know how. I only know that something not easily explained was exchanged between us, because even now, decades later, there is a part of him that resides in me. If it had not been for his gift, I believe I would have succumbed then to the cold death wishing to claim me.
Several times I awoke from dreams of being buried alive to discover him placing his warm mouth directly over my nose. My mother later confessed that she was horrified to witness this the first time, but she realized that Midnight was simply sucking the noxious fluids out of me to clear my blocked breathing passages. Each time he completed such a treatment, she reported, I stopped wheezing and fell back to sleep.
Once, when I was still greatly congested, the Bushman puffed mightily at his tiny clay pipe and aimed the smoke into my ears, making them crackle like melting ice.
So impressed was Mother by his loyalty and care that she once brought his hand to her lips and kissed it, whereupon he smiled and said, “Hyena will not steal your son, Mrs. Stewart.”
Mother was too panicked to ponder what he meant. She only cared that his intention to see me well was firm.
To know how iron-strong gratitude can be, ask any mother whose child has been saved by another person. Over the course of these three days of precious care, Mama was won to Midnight’s favor forever.
On the third night Midnight sat me down on my bed, lit his small clay pipe, and blew sweet-scented smoke in my ears again. This made me feel as though iron gates were opening at my temples. Then he had me open my mouth. Puckering his lips, he directed a stream of smoke in there as well, then several more, each time instructing me to breathe in deeply.
This time the smoke was not tobacco — or not only tobacco. I do not know what weed, leaf, flower, resin, or combination thereof was in his glowing bowl. Years later, I spoke to a man in London who had lived for a decade in southern Africa and who told me that hashish is used in some of the Bushman rituals. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this information, but I am certain that Midnight’s smoke had the effect of deepening the beating of my heart at first, then lulling me into a soft slumber. As the bells of the St. Bento Church were tolling two in the morning, I woke to see an animal face peering at me from the darkness of the corridor. At first I thought it was Fanny, but when I took a step toward her, I realized it was Daniel, wearing one of his horned masks.
My heart swelled with fright. Daniel receded swiftly into the shadows, but the tips of his horns were visible as two glowing points of violet light.
“Is it Hyena?” Midnight whispered from his settee. He must have been watching me for some time. He approached me, naked. I could feel his heat radiating toward me.
“You there!” he called to Daniel. “We know who you are. We know your name and you are Hyena!”
The masked apparition ran away from us down the corridor and scurried up the stairs.
“Where is he now?” asked Midnight.
“I think he’s gone up to the Lookout Tower.”
The African took my hand and helped me to my feet. My body felt heavy and alien. Despite his having cared for me over the last few days, I wasn’t sure if I ought to trust him. In the unsettling darkness, he seemed a creature of shadows.
“The Time of the Hyena is on you,” he said. “He is a clever and powerful animal we have in Africa. He is fooling you. For Daniel is gone and you cannot win him back, no matter what you do. But Hyena is as good a mimic as you are. You are being tricked.”
I made no reply; I was confused.
Patting my shoulder, Midnight said, “Mantis will help us.” At that, he lifted the child’s rattle he had been carrying with him and shook it.
“Who is Mantis?”
“Mantis is an insect, and he is very, very small, but with big-big power. I shall need his help to frighten Hyena away and make him never return.”
Midnight went to the window and opened the shutters and mosquito screens. The moon was nearly full. Crescents of light fell across his back and legs. It was unsettling to see him naked, for the only man I had seen in this way was my father.
I noticed four lines of scars on Midnight’s back. When I asked him about them, he told me he had once been attacked by a wild beast but had escaped with his life. “Do you know what a lion is?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Lions kill hyenas. They are very, very strong. Now, will
I offered him my hand. His grip was powerful; I could not have escaped him even if I’d wanted to. He lit his wee clay pipe again and blew his sweet smoke in my ears and my mouth, just as he had done earlier. It warmed
