14 Sticky Burrs

Gone! Free! But alas, not quite. For behind the column there remains that very discombobulated man now running and ballyhooing, his family struggling behind him as he rushes to catch the camel-clod train. It is, in fact, the very same man at whom the chaps had their big laugh. The same gent who, on Tuesday last, Bardey had sacked in his office.

“Hallo! Halloooooo! Monsieur Rimbaud! Monsieur, will you kindly hold up?”

And so it stops, this vast mammalian centipede, the camels looking at the horses and the horses at the men, at this man now bellowing and sprinting.

Fortunately for him, he has help, this queer pilgrim. For after him, walking smartly but with considerably more dignity, comes a stoutly handsome, resolute woman in a dun-colored dress and prim hat, carrying—wisely, against the piercing sun—a battered black umbrella. And after her, scuffing and scowling comes a grumpy, unwilling girl of perhaps ten, pulling an equally unenthusiastic boy of eight or so.

Children, Rimbaud thinks, white children, strangest of all creatures wearing crudely woven straw hats that resemble enormous mushrooms. Their shoes are broken, entirely inadequate. And after them here rumbles their belongings, or what remains of them. Piled in a creaky cart with wheels the size of barn doors, their evicted life groans along, drawn by a dog-sized donkey led, in turn, by an even tinier manservant, an ancient, bent-over, turbaned man with a long switch. Obviously, all they can afford.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, sir,” cries the young Englishman.

Having succeeded in stopping this exodus, he changes step. Look at him striding up, pouring sweat, but now more smartly, as if buoyed by a pumping military band. He is a slim man but strongly built, strung like a bow. About him there is something bumptiously martial, palpably religious, and distinctly ridiculous. For here he comes, thanking one and all. Why, all but thanking the camels and Rimbaud’s scowling band of killers, with their spears and daggers and repeater rifles.

“Thank you! Lovely day. Fan-tas-tic. And thank you, sir …”

His teeth flash. Strong teeth. Two rows of grimacing desperation as he peers up at Rimbaud, already seasick on this rocking trampoline. “Mr. Rimbaud, sir,” he says, swatting his lifeless slouch hat. “Fergus MacDonald! Mr. Bardey sent us, if you will recall, sir. Hem, a little tagalong to Zeila? Surely you remember, sir.” Then, to seal the deal, he proffers a wide, flat hand. Incredible, thinks Rimbaud. As if MacDonald’s pulling him into the lifeboat.

“Do you not remember?” he continues, still more desperate, trying to break Rimbaud’s cold stare. “Mr. Bardey, his grace, kind soul, he was so very kind as to ask you on my behalf. On our behalf, rather.” Pointing behind him. “There, you see my wife, Adelaide. And there are our two children, Lolly and Ralph. Do you not see, sir? The, um, extremity of our situation?”

Rimbaud is still looking at these four—no, five—liabilities, counting the old wretch with the donkey cart.

“Easy, sturdy children, too,” he adds. “Oh, have no care there, sir. All able. All ready. And I know Mr. Bardey,” he labors, “he will appreciate your munificence on our behalf, what with the poor children, you know. Especially since we are, shall I say, at this unfortunate time, well, rather low on resources. But what with your sterling reputation, sir, and your many acts of kindness, well, I know that you worry about the children—I can see that. But sir, if I may say so, without you it might be weeks otherwise. Without your generosity, I mean to say. Upon receipt of which I will bless you, sir. And pray for you. Depend on it, sir. Fergus MacDonald, servant of the Lord, shall forever be in your debt. And Mr. Bardey’s.”

MacDonald is thirty, perhaps. His face is sunburned and wind scraped, and as he pulls off his hat, his balding forehead is shockingly white, embossed with a livid red crease from the rotting sweatband of his hat. He is wearing a white boiled shirt, now dirty. His suspenders are frayed and sagging, his brown trousers are dusty and his pull-on boots have thoroughly stretched-out elastics—hardly the equipage for a long desert trek. But to Rimbaud, the thing most amazing—shocking, in fact—is that, even in his desperation, the man seems happy, serenely so.

And yet, for one who despises helplessness—who finds it horrifying, as his mother does—Rimbaud experiences the man as queasy-making. Embarrassing, as the bearers lower Rimbaud to the ground. Swatting his hat, Mr. MacDonald is like a dog on his back, banjoing his hind leg that you might further scratch his belly.

“Bless you, sir. Do you imagine? Do you think?”

It is then that Rimbaud recalls the fatal promise he made—stupidly, in the haste of leaving, on that same day in which Bardey had saved him by buying him out. Such that Rimbaud feels, for him, a very strange urge, the tug of gratitude.

“How shall I put this, Rimbaud?” the ever-tactful Bardey had explained, laboring to convey Mr. MacDonald’s bizarre saga. “We want him—off the boat. Oh, the chap tried, good heavens he tried. Early on, I counseled him. Strongly, I advised him. And then for a while, and I mean a very little while, I even held out some dim hope for him. Or rather, hope based more on the strength of his wife. Poor woman. As you’ll see, a fine woman. Commanding, even. Can’t see why she stays with him. And so,” he sighed at last, “it did not work out. Utter disaster. A menace, actually. And all, you understand, in his exceedingly nice way. Too nice.”

At this Bardey’s face reddened. “Well, we can’t have some, well, nitwit killing our profits. And all because of God, of course. In this self-deluded friar’s mind, he thinks God frowns on too much profit. And so we have a man, in my employ, virtually giving things away—by the handful.” He sighed again. “His grateful flock, they looted his wagon. Burned his Bibles. Stole his boots. Lord, you should have seen him. Half naked. Job emerging from the desert.”

“And?”

“Well,” ker-hemmed Bardey, “it is most unfortunate—criminal, really—but he brought his whole family with him. Young children, too. Here. Can you imagine? And what I cannot understand, well, that the wife seems quite able, really.”

Bankrolled on the fumes of a modest, now vanished inheritance, Fergus MacDonald was, irredeemably, Fergus the Failed, Friar Fergie, etc. “Well,” Bardey concluded, “finally I sacked him, of course. And this, mind you, after conferring with the local clergy. Who, to a man, agreed most heartily that the lad was ‘done,’ as they say.”

Pity Mrs. MacDonald; pity the children, too. For their father could neither convert nor barter. Nor did he drink, or smoke, or curse, or carry a gun. Or believe in quinine and inoculations. And worst, he was so frighteningly sincere. This is what made him so very dangerous in an already dangerous place. But before Rimbaud can send him packing, here’s the wife, an attractive woman, in fact the first European woman he has seen in several years. The children, though, are another matter. Scowling, they are none too happy to see their father pleading with some sunburned cripple lying in the road.

It must be fever, thinks Rimbaud. Propped up now, shotgun across his lap, weirdly famished, Rimbaud is looking at the children, then at Mrs. MacDonald, at her thick blond hair coiled and pinned beneath a once primly stylish but now chipped straw hat. And yet to him she feels strangely elegant—elegant in a bypassed way—in her long gray dress and starched white shirt, draped in a white shawl of native cotton. But what especially recommends her are her sturdy boots, man’s boots, much worn. Such competence—but with him, poor thing! Indeed, it spurs in Rimbaud an old nursery rhyme from his days in England: “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater had a wife and couldn’t keep her …”

“But, Mr. Rimbaud,” pleads MacDonald, “we’ve no place to go. And as for the children, sir, don’t you worry. Little soldiers, these two. Five months here. Hard months. Believe me, sir, they know the ways here.”

“And you’ll have a trained nurse,” adds Mrs. MacDonald, invisibly but decisively taking over. “Monsieur Rimbaud, you should know that I have worked in a hospital, and you, sir, need attention. The children will be fine, and if you will kindly notice, over there, sir,” she pointed, “over there you can see our cart. We have the food and necessary water. I’ve seen to that …”

Nursed, though. The idea of being nursed strongly appeals to him in his present state. Touched by a woman’s cool hand. And there is something about her—her plump arms, her competence. Fine, he consents.

“Up now. Let’s go,” he tells his grumbling litter bearers. “On your feet.”

So, with a jog, up he goes, our difficult hero. High as an elephant, as behind him, compressing and expanding, here comes the smelly train, an accordion of men and beasts, oozing and undulating at a funereal creep through the slow-slithering heat. The lad, though, Ralph, already he has his doubts about their ailing host. In the boy’s mind, clearly he’s the liability.

“But, Daddy,” he hisses, pulling at his father’s hand. “Well, really, Daddy, look at him. How bad is he?”

“Mind your tongue. He is Mr. Rimbaud to you.”

“Well, I feel sick,” frumps Lolly. “Daddy, what, walking ten days? Daddy, I want to ride in the cart.”

“Come on, Lolly,” he moans. “You can see the poor old beast. Now, please. No more dawdling.”

“And think, children,” chimes in Mrs. MacDonald, her contralto voice rising like the road. “Now you must think,” she says, “now we all must think of how lovely it shall be once we reach the sea. Imagine that, bathing your toes in sloshing warm seawater. And sand, my dears. Not this sand, but beach sand squishing between your toes.” And then with the proffered sweet came the firm push, “Now walk.”