The Man Who Invented Love—A Fable of the Old Ones
Rick Sapp
Boy fell and no one knew why, and he fell again and again. Sometimes he fell and flailed about and foamed at the mouth. People wondered, “Is he possessed by evil spirit?” but no one knew and this frightened People.
This time he collapsed into a smoldering fire and for a moment he thrashed and screamed before father seized a leg and pulled him out. Women removed grass plugs from ostrich eggs and gourds and poured their precious water over him, for his agony was terrible to see.
Boy’s skin blistered. Soon, it began to slide away in ugly blotches leaving raw, bleeding flesh that attracted flies and gnats, and boy groaned. His white teeth alternately chattered and then clinched tightly together as his body shook. People gathered around him, eyes brimming with sadness. Mother squatted nearby, chanting mother love, mother magic, but no magic helped.
As sun passed overhead, People knew they must hurry to water before big cats began hunting although lions would drink their fill and roll in cool mud while thirsty animals waited: antelope and oryx, gnu and black buffalo. Even leopard crouched in humility out of sight of the lions. The People would also wait, for although they possessed courage, even a perverse and oddly cheerful instinct to survive in a land that gave little and took much, a land that blessed and destroyed with random satisfaction, they were few and frail.
Boy’s father became stone, fallen log, darkness between stars. He crouched beside his suffering child and would not move except to brush away flies and ants with a jackal’s tail tied to a stick. Then he began to weep and could not stop, for his heart burst with boy’s pain and his own desperation.
Father remembered the day boy crumpled into a thorn bush, thorns as long as fingers and tough as the dried acacia staves People used when walking. Each time he moved one branch of the wicked thorns aside, thorns polished at their tips like the horns of kudu bulls they often hunted though rarely killed, each time they removed one thorn, two sprang into its place.
And the man remembered an afternoon when leopard appeared and boy collapsed. With his twisted leg he could not run or climb, though faced with hungry leopard running and climbing might not save him. Leopard was lightning. Leopard was cunning. When leopard paused to sniff him, boy screamed; his mouth erupting with bubbles of white foam, his back arching and collapsing as he thrashed helplessly in the dust of the arid savanna. People supposed he would die, but leopard backed away. It snarled and snapped its yellow fangs, while boy convulsed. The cat batted at his flailing arms with its awful claws, once, twice and then turned away.
That day People returned and sat beside the boy and fanned his sweating body with their small brown hands as he lay in the sun and later as he slept. Eventually stars whirled above them and boy awoke and they gave him water. Soon, all continued on their way, abandoning boy to follow when he could. And the mother and father were the last to leave, especially the man, who looked back often.
Each member of the band knew where they were going and why, and so the boy limped behind for several days. It was their way, the band moving continuously, silently through the bush,. The People traveled swiftly but without hurry even though they were practically naked and barefoot, their hide sandals saved for the thorniest ground and thus the soles of their feet became as thick and rough as the hide of the elephants they carefully avoided.
The People carried everything they possessed, which was next to nothing, but all they needed – the men their bows and arrows and the women everything else, their mats and digging sticks, food, water, and small children – and they were happy. The boy was also happy because his affliction simply was, and it was no different than heat by day or sweet grubs dug from rotten wood or the song of grasshopper. His affliction was one with spirit and spirit moved inside him and all around in everything, in air and water, in stunted mimosa and steaming piles of dung that warned of elephants.
But this time, boy’s needs signaled a change in the group’s fortune. After his first awful screams, he fell silent. Screams attracted predators and so he moaned in a tiny, undulating voice and his body twitched without ceasing and People spoke of what might be done and their voices were a brook rushing over stones. For a small burn, mother would chew leaf of the sandalwood and spit it on the sore and it would remove the sting, but this … there were not enough mothers in the world.
So now, without water, they must abandon the boy for to be thirsty on the plateau of the desert in this great dry meant all would die. And no death was good or easy, but thirst was wicked.
One by one People walked away. The band usually numbered no more than the fingers of two hands and thus to lose anyone, even this hapless boy, put all at peril, for even he made a contribution to their survival. He laughed at stories and gathered firewood and helped women dig tubers and men skin a carcass.
Boy struggled to keep up with their endless trek and he fought the demons twisting him for many seasons of moon longer than People expected, People whispering that boy’s spirit must be strong, so it was unfortunate that he would now die, but hyena spirit was also strong and it would come or wild dogs or lions or vultures.
This is what they said to boy in speech as eloquent as lizards sunning on rocks or wind rippling through the feathers of eagle’s wings.
“Hyena will come,” the People said, “and pain will be great, but quickly gone and you will travel with the ghosts and you will be free.”
It was harsh, but true and there was no cruelty in their speech or manner as they crouched beside the trembling boy, his eyes wide with anguish, eyes that understood but still clung recklessly to life, for he had often seen hyenas at work.
“Vultures will come,” they also told him, though less willing to say it, knowing the child would soon return to earth and to the world of living dead, and would feed the beasts as surely as they had fed him, had provided for him. If carrion birds came first, they would tear at his eyes and his penis beneath the simple cloth harass which People wore about their groin. He might thrash and would surely fight, but without strength and his will sapped by pain, he would not frighten the hopping vultures or the savage desert eagles and the boy would beg for death, and his death would be slow but sure.
Better the hyenas, thought father, who loved this boy as surely as guinea fowl herded chicks through dry bush or cheetah carried cubs to safety in her mouth. Father had struggled with the boy, carried him, nursed him, knowing that life was not certain but was to be honored – drumming stick on dry gourd until gourd broke and spirit fled to another gourd and then one drummed and sang again.
Either way before sun set, boy would be utterly gone except for fragments of bone or hair. At some future time, unknowable except in its arrival, People would return on their endless circuit and search for remains, and find something and bury it beneath a cairn of rocks while they sang the long song of farewell and the ghost satisfied.
* * *
By ones and twos now People departed, stringing away across the dry veldt after touching him on the face and speaking his name one last time. They would never speak his name again or talk of him or mention his twisted leg or his falling, for soon enough each of them would encounter their own fate and would then join the boy in the world of ghosts and spirits, and a man might die or a woman but the band would live.
Finally the man stood and the woman also. They were thirsty but would not drink for many hours and even then the waterhole might be dangerous, but it was a small thing. The People were accustomed to thirst and occasionally, when no water was to be had, they would suck a stone, their dark, translucent skin tightly stretched over the bones of their face. They often walked for days with little water, finally digging deep into stream beds and licking the amber seep at the bottom of the hole and spitting out the sand, and though they did not know it they were resilient People, unperturbed by hardship which, like boy’s twisted leg and his pitiless falls, was merely a stitch in the fabric of existence, in the fabric of spirit. It is. It was. And tomorrow or the next day all would play with the band’s lone child, tickling and making faces, and would laugh and dance once more, but that did not mean they would forget.
With a last look at their child father and mother walked away. Heat grew and thirst thickened in their throat, but they walked. Occasionally they would notice some sign of the others, a patch of sand disturbed, some mark so insignificant that no one but another member of the band or a lion might understand.
The day was silent. Heat rose in puffs of dust. Overhead a soaring bird, then two, and finally as many as the fingers on father’s hand appeared floating, circling. The man, who like all men was a hunter and who prepared his small arrows carefully and smeared the tips with poison resin of amaryllis mixed with caterpillar called N’gwa or ‘Kaa, knew that hyenas were too late. His mind was distracted with the bittersweet memory of joy at boy’s birth and fright when the withered leg came out of the woman, his mate. He fought to keep the child alive and to understand the water in his eyes and pain in his chest.
The man stopped and looked up and spoke magic to the vultures, but their course did not vary, and woman also watched. It is better, she told him, if you do not look.
When he turned and began to retrace his steps toward the boy, the woman, his mate called to him softly, her voice slipping distinctly through the crackling scrub but not filling or commanding it and no greater than a songbird, pleading with the man to do nothing that might displease spirit, but he went anyway, drawn back to the child by a cord inconceivably strong and knowing that thirst might become so great that his tongue would swell, and his throat would close and he would die. Woman turned away and followed the People.
Sun moved, heat grew, dust rose and at last the man halted where he could see the boy lying in the dirt of the clearing. Hyena spirit was nowhere present, nor leopard. In nearby acacia branches carrion birds gathered waiting on some sign unknown to man, but they were not yet on the ground and the man was satisfied.
Boy lay alone, burned and twisted and surely unimaginably thirsty, but the man had no water to give him. In the lame one’s groans the man thought he heard the names of the band and even his own name, but it might only have been the agony of his child’s ghost summoning others and this, in the band’s supernatural universe, was never a good sign. No man could witness ghosts even though their work lay everywhere about him.
The man shivered in fear. He had protected the boy as well as he was able, but spirit was manifest now. He sensed its heavy presence, knew it was the end. The man might, at the least, have erected shade to protect his child from the blistering desert sun, a simple lean-to of sticks and grass, but the grass was withered. The spirits mocked him.
Finally a black vulture flapped down and hopped toward the boy. Boy kicked and his voice croaked in fear and pain, but the bird avoided the kick, hopping away, and another bird came, and another. The man knew the boy would live even as the birds tore and devoured him, but only for a while, and this seemed cruel to the hunter and his father heart broke.
So the man placed his delicate bow and handful of arrows carefully on the ground and took his knife and walked forward to the boy. He flapped his arms and screamed, defying spirit to stop him. It was courageous and unprecedented and desperate. If his mate had known, she would forever fear to speak to him or share his fire. Birds flew and hopped away, but not far, and they watched him from their trees and bushes.
The man knelt in the dust beside the boy. What he would do was wrong and might bring evil to him and the woman, even to the band, but this was his only child. In a world where joy was fleeting, in a landscape dominated by stubborn suffering, this boy, his man-child had endured without complaint. He had resisted fate day after day, perhaps knowing that it was, eventually, all in vain.
Boy turned his face to the man and seemed to smile through a mask of suffering and terror. As if he said, you are my father. You will save me. When others abandoned me you have always saved me.
Boy’s eyes pleaded for mercy and father, experienced with preparing antelope and snakes and all manner of foods, placed the flaked obsidian blade against boy’s throat and, pressing deeply, drew it toward him one time. Boy’s body jerked violently and then lay still. He was free of pain now, free to join the ghosts that had beckoned to him, whispered to him on every trek, at every campsite. Kneeling beside his child in the dirt of the vast desert, the father felt hot blood spurt onto his hands and prayed that vulture spirit would not be angry, prayed that spirit would forgive him for what else could I do? What else could I give him?
Eventually the man rose. Retrieving his bow and arrows he trotted off to find the woman and the band. He would never speak of this violation, never again speak the boy’s name. Behind him the carrion eaters flocked down from the trees. For many nights the man lay awake listening to owls and watching for shadows against the moon and stars.
Richard 'Rick' Sapp is a freelance writer living in Florida with his beautiful wife and two small Australian Shepherds. Rick's father demanded that he become a teacher and, in the too-long process of rebelling, Rick eventually found himself ... and also came to terms with the ghost of his father.