Hunting Midnight

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