The White Bone Read online

  The White Bone

  Barbara Gowdy

  For Chris Kirkwood

  and

  Rob Kirkwood

  and in memory of my father,

  Robert Gowdy

  Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies the pain and burden of an enormous sadness. For it too feels the presence of what often overwhelms us: a memory, as if

  the element we keep pressing toward was once more intimate, more true, and our communion infinitely tender.

  –from “The Eighth Elegy,”

  Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke,

  translated by Stephen Mitchell

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Maps

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  International Acclaim for The White Bone

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  If they live long enough they forget everything.

  Most of them don’t live that long. Nine out of ten are slaughtered in their prime, decades before their memories have started to drain. I speak of the majority, then, when I say it is true what you’ve heard: they never forget.

  They themselves think this accounts for their size. Some go so far as to claim that under that thunderhead of flesh and those huge rolling bones they are memory. They contain memory, yes, but what may not be so well known is that they are doomed without it. When their memories begin to drain, their bodies go into decline, as if from a slow leakage of blood.

  Before then, every odour they have ever sucked into their trunks, every flicker of sunlight they have ever doused with their tremendous shadows is preserved inside them as a perfect and instantly retrievable moment. They rarely ask, Do you remember? The remembering is taken for granted. It is the noticing they question: Did you smell that? Did you see it?

  They see better than you may imagine. Don’t believe the stories about their being half blind. They gaze at the horizon, make out what’s there, and unlike the carnivores are never dazzled by a herd of moving zebras. If the herd is close enough they can pick out individuals, knowing them by their stripes alone and from a brief look years earlier. The precise tenor of the wind that lowed in the acacias that day, how the sun slammed down through the foliage–these accompany the memory and are re-experienced, and what was scarcely noticed at the time can now be dwelt on.

  Suppose, off to one side, waves of salt dust had swirled up from the pan. In memory, they can turn their gaze on the waves and ponder this phenomenon of a lake bed dreaming its lost lake.

  Which may start them weeping. To a degree that we would call maudlin they are sentimental; even the big bulls are. Any kind of loss or yearning breaks their hearts.

  Chapter One

  All day there are glaring omens that go undetected.

  Never will this failure of perception be admitted to. Into every precisely remembered hour, foreknowledge will be inserted, voices haunted with conviction saying, “I smelled it coming.” Because how is it possible they didn’t?

  Granted, they are absorbed in deciding Mud’s name, but not all of them are, only the five biggest cows. And not completely absorbed either. At intervals they enter the swamp to browse and drink, and the matriarch even dozes and has to be nudged awake late in the afternoon when they summon Mud and announce in a chorus: “From this day forward and forevermore Mud shall be She-Spurns!”

  “No,” Mud says, stricken.

  “She-Spurns!” the cows trumpet. “She-Spurns!”

  Mud slaps her ears against her neck. “No.”

  The cows thud into each other, enraptured by their clamour. They slice their trunks through bolts of sunlight falling between the fever trees and roar, “She-Spurns!” and since nothing happens–no abrupt change in the weather, nobody dropping dead–the sun is deemed to have given consent.

  Mud turns and walks toward the swamp. Halfway down the bank her withered leg gives out as if to demonstrate the aptness of the name she had been braced for. Not this one. “She-Spurns!"–their voices have taken on a surprised quality. They are calling her back, either that or marvelling at how, already, she corroborates their decision. She gets herself upright and walks along the foot of the bank. A baboon runs before her snatching up bones. Countless bones are here, grey and shattered most of them, honeycombed with beetle holes. She picks up a slice of skull and holds it against her throat. It is not worth thinking about, all the names they might have given her. Even She-Stumbles–the name she had so dreaded–would have been better, would have been, at least, appropriate.

  Why did she let Tall Time mount her? She knew that she would eventually lose her birth name if he did. A kind of derangement overtook her, it seems to her now–the same derangement that overtook him, but what was he risking? A bull can mount a hundred cows and still be entitled to keep his birth name forever.

  “That is because bulls are calves forever,” She-Snorts said in her customary deadpan when Mud first started to question the practice of renaming females. This was the day after Mud recovered her senses and Tall Time went back to his hermit’s life.

  “My dear Mud,” said She-Sees, swivelling her enormous head in Mud’s direction, “the reason a bull does not change his name is that a bull is not changed.”

  She-Sees is the She-S family matriarch. She is the biggest cow this side of The Big Water, but she is ancient and showing it. In the middle of her sermons she will fall into a memory of some affront she once suffered, and the sermon then dwindles into huffs of outrage, demands for an apology, the uprooting of shrubs, which she cannot even eat, her molars are so worn. Her senses are worn. Everyone, including the youngest calves, will scan toward a strange noise, and there she’ll be, scenting the wrong way. Out of the blue she trumpets, “Who?” and “Speak up!” addressing nobody. She introduces herself to members of her own family. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” she says. She says, “Your reputation precedes you.”

  “A bull,” she went on now–and for the moment she was lucid and imperious–"is merely the digger. You are the dug. You are the altered one. And do you know how you are altered?”

  “I have a calf tunnel inside me.” This murmured in the formal timbre* but dully. Of course Mud knew, and “altered” was not what she was. Nothing so unmutilated as that.

  “Which makes you–” She-Sees prompted.

  “Hollow.”

  “Hallowed!” the matriarch trumpeted. She looked exultantly at the other big cows as if Mud had fallen for the bait and then, suddenly grave again, said, “On the entire Domain there is nothing more sacred than a calf tunnel.” She eyed Mud over her spectacular tusks. “Declare yourself!” she commanded.

  “Mud,” Mud said, lowering her head. Displays of feeblemindedness made her shy. “I am Mud.”

  * A respectful form of address characterized by exaggerated enunciation.

  Chapter Two

  It is a perfect circle surrounded by bands of water. In the old songs and poems it is called The Place, or The Island. The Domain, everyone says these days and has said for hundreds of years.

  The first or inner band is saline and thousands of miles wide. The second band is wider still, but this water–known as The Et
ernal Shoreless Water–is fresh. Where the two bands meet a luminous margin, fine as a hair, precludes leakage. And then, beyond The Eternal Shoreless Water, comes The Mystery, which might be anything. Land or water or fire.

  Only the dead have any acquaintance with The Eternal Shoreless Water. As for the band of salt water, nobody now alive has ever seen it, but a few ancient cows whose memories have not entirely drained recall heroic bulls returning white from salt spray and forever subdued by what they had beheld. In the last half century none of the bulls who has ventured out to The Domain’s edge has succeeded in getting that far, because, they say, of the profusion of humans and the need tomake constant detours around their habitations. The big cows shake their heads. “There have always been hindleggers,”* they mutter, something to that effect. If the big cows are to be believed, no bull today (with the possible exception of Torrent) can match even the least worthy of bulls from the old times.

  The She-S family lives in the vast bushland of The Domain’s northwest. Here humans are relatively scarce, and why this should be is not known. The grasses are high in the wet seasons, there are streams and underground aquifers. And plenty of creatures for the slaughtering. Perhaps the proximity of The She-Hill is a deterrent (it is big and sacred; humans are small and profane), although no one really believes this, given how humans seem to fear nothing.

  Human dwellings dot the region’s outskirts, however, and consequently the families of the northwest tend to stay within their small ranges, which occasionally overlap, especially if the matriarchs are closely tied by friendship or blood. Otherwise, families meet only when the sweet fruits lureeveryone to the escarpment woodlands, or when the rains revive the grasses on Green Down. In a typical year there are two seasons of rain: the short rains, lasting approximately six weeks, and the long rains, lasting up to three months. During the middle weeks of the long rains, on the paradise that Green Down has become, the Long Rains Massive Gathering takes place. This is the great annual celebration to which upwards of forty families journey to feast together and hear the news and sing the endless songs (those exceeding five hundred verses). Since so many cows go into oestrus during the Long Rains Massive Gatherings, it is also a time of mating and of spectacular confrontations between the big bulls. So much is bound to happen, in fact, that cows arriving at a gathering customarily greet each other by declaring their chief intention (next to eating, of course): “I come to seduce.” “I come to gossip.” “I come to enlighten.”

  All the other reasons why a matriarch would take her family away from its home are unhappy ones. Drought. Fire. Sickness. Humans. It is this last reason, specifically a rumour of humans abducting newborn calves, that accounts for Mud being born on the banks of a river miles from her birth family’s range at Long Water.

  Mud’s birth family is not the She-S’s, it is the She-M’s. And the She-M’s did not know her as Mud but as Tiny. A cow calf who comes into the world at the unusual hour of high noon–the hour when all things have become so diminutive that they fail to throw a shadow–is called either Tiny or Speck. (Bullcalves are given the slightly more consequential-sounding name of Small Time.)

  Back then the She-M matriarch was still She-Measures, and she had already achieved a degree of fame, both for the symmetry of her tusks and ears (each ear bearing a deep notch in precisely the same place) and for her ability to calculate the likelihood of something happening … of rainfall, for instance, or of a lioness bringing down a wildebeest. Mud’s mother, She-Moans-And-Moans, was the matriarch’s youngest sister. She became somewhat famous in her own right but only after, and as a result of, her death and Mud’s birth, events that happened more or less simultaneously. At the outset of her labour she was bitten by a cobra, and yet she managed to stay alive long enough to get Mud born, and not only that but on her feet and even named.

  “Tiny,” she sang. And then she began to careen.

  “You’re going to fall!” She-Measures trumpeted.

  “She shall be Tiny!” Mud’s mother sang.

  “The probability of your falling on the newborn is exceedingly high!” She-Measures trumpeted.

  They were beside a gutted baobab, and there was also a risk of the baobab itself toppling if Mud’s mother leaned against it. She swayed. From Mud’s perspective the world was a low grey sky and grey shifting pillars. And particles of red dirt … even then, in her first hours, her eyesight had the visionary’s exceptional clarity. She felt nothing of fear. When the sky fell, that was simply the next event. Miraculously she wasn’t hurt. Her hind legs were trapped under her mother, but they were nestled, beneath her mother’s belly and breasts, in a mucky depression.

  For some moments the dust continued to rise, accelerated by the force of the death fetor, which had burst out of the body on impact. Now, from the other cows, came an uproar of trumpeting, growling, urinating and defecating, weeping in deep gurgles that jostled the ground.* A cow nudged Mud with one foot until shoved aside by another, larger cow, who lowered herself to her knees, wrapped her trunk around Mud’s neck and pulled.

  “No!” bellowed the nurse cow. “You’ll crack her spine!”

  She-Measures and a cow named She-Meddles tried to lift the corpse. The other cows slapped it as if they could rouse it back to life. “Spare the newborn!” they appealed to the sun. They poked their trunks into Mud’s mouth, and Mud sucked the tips in vicious fits of craving. Boluses of dung tumbled around her, urine rained down, forming pools. She sucked at the pools.

  The hours passed and the distress stayed at a high pitch as She-Measures and She-Meddles kept trying to lift the body. One of them would get down on her knees, slide her tusks under the torso and heave, and the hindquarters or the head would come a few inches off the ground and then thud back down. A little later the other cow would take her turn. She-Measures, who had a young calf of her own, smelled of milk, but whenever Mud squealed to drink, a trunk was thrust into her mouth. Behind her, the heaving and grunting continued. It might have carried on all night had She-Meddles’ left tusk not broken off.

  The snap, like a gunshot, had cows and calves bolting out onto the plain. She-Meddles bellowed and hurled herself around like a wildebeest, and She-Measures’ calf ran in circles bawling. Mud bawled, thinking that she was that calf, its pink ears, its frenzy. A young bull picked up the severed tusk and held it up to his eye. He rotated it and examined it from every angle and then dropped it next to Mud, so close that she could sniff the bloodied root.

  By now She-Meddles’ roars had dwindled to agonized groans. “Make way!” She-Measures trumpeted, and everyone surrounding Mud stepped back. As the other cow had done, She-Measures got down on her knees, wrapped her trunk around Mud’s ears, and tugged.

  Mud would remember her first hours of life second for second, both as the coherent sequence of events into which her older mind would gradually translate them and as the blare of images, sounds and smells they were at the time, when everything outside of herself seemed to be the incarnation of everything she sensed. The pain of She-Measures pulling at her, and a spear of sunlight kicking out from between the bodies of the cows, these were the same, one precipitating the other. Fear was the shape of the big cows’ feet; craving was the odour of dung. Off and on throughout the day the air shuddered with thunder, and this was the sound of her entrapment.

  “Your heart is beating two and a half times as fast as it should be,” She-Measures said. She repositioned herself, and Mud mouthed for the breast, and She-Measures then became the taste of milk and the falling night. The scent of the calf that Mud took to be herself was what spawned the fireflies,which themselves were mysterious pricks of yearning and an apprehension of perfect bliss existing elsewhere.

  The lionesses arrived ahead of the rain. They tore at Mud’s mother quietly. Mud, too, was quiet, warned by their furtiveness. The whole of the night rocked in an urgent silence until She-Measures came roaring from the plain.

  While the other big cows wept, She-Measures studied the damage to the corp
se, muttering how many gashes there were, calculating the trunk-length of them: half a trunk, a third of a trunk. Everybody tossed dirt on the tributaries of blood, and within that barricade of legs Mud had her first vision.* It so exhausted and frightened her that before she fully emerged from it she fell into a sleep not even the thunderstorm disturbed.

  The night was over by the time she awoke. In the vision she had watched the family walk away singing, and yet here they were, somewhere behind her. Before her, planted in the rain-and-blood-filled ponds that had been their footprints, were columns of yellow light. The stench of the corpse she assigned to the flies, which she thought had hatched from the tree’s bark. She thought the vultures were branches, even when they dived down squawking.

  She-Measures was there at once. The vultures hopped backwards but not far. “It would be more merciful to kill younow,” She-Measures murmured, swinging a forefoot close to Mud’s head. She allowed Mud to suckle and then said, “There are hindleggers in the vicinity. We cannot stay.” She wept. There had been so much weeping that it was familiar to Mud, a comfort, and she fell back asleep.

  She awoke to She-Measures groaning, “Mourning order,” and the big cows forming another circle, this one outwardfacing. “Sing,” She-Measures groaned, and each cow passed a hind foot just above the corpse and joined in singing a hymn whose first verse was:

  Let thy blood, here pooled and caking,

  Let thy tusks, thy trunk, thy womb

  Rise to join the She. Her aching

  Love for thee didst will thy doom.

  It was a long hymn, three hundred and ninety verses, and at the second-to-last verse She-Measures turned and walked out onto the plain and the rest of the family followed, none of them looking at Mud, none of them lingering. Having envisioned their retreat, Mud knew that they would disappear within a nebula of red dust. She screamed, and one of the larger bull calves came running back to charge the vultures. At a trumpet from She-Measures, however, he wheeled around and raced off again.