Boozy alone believes that Elphie has spoken to a ghost Monkey. “Is it only ghosts who can talk?” Elphie asks her.
“Usually ghosts don’t bother, they’re fed up with talking,” says Boozy. “But of course some Monkeys can talk. You father never tell you this?”
The green girl never admits that she saw Melena leaving before dawn. The others would just complain that Elphie should have stopped her somehow. Still, the jungle river would have had to drain down to dry gravel before Elphie could have considered crossing it.
They bury the body in a graveyard used by the locals, thereby consecrating it in a new way. Weeping great ugly tears viscous as wax, Nanny ties some of Melena’s jewelry, baubles and a few of the rings, to strings. She hangs them from a bough that stretches over the grave. The jungle grows so fast, thwarts itself and revives endlessly, that without some marker they’d never identify the spot again.
There’s little else to disperse. Nanny’s already light-fingered an item or two—that ivory brooch, a bottle of green medicine. What else is left? Some gorgeous gowns from Melena’s girlhood, probably long out of style. Also an ornate mirror in an oval frame. Nanny crushes the dresses back into the trunk, cushioning the mirror, for dealing with another day. Maybe Frex can auction them for funds to build a shrine to Melena.
But Frex won’t stick around to establish a mission church. No one can posit why not. Arguably there’s just as much reason to memorialize this spot as to abandon it. But never question the visions of the wannabe mystic; you can’t get a grip. Enlightenment seems to be selective. It rarely occurs to more than one deserving soul at a time.
So they pack up the foodstuff and dismantle the tents. Bundle the newborn in his swaddles. He is a dropped rose petal, an angry squawling snail in a cotton wrap. Nanny carries him, fussing over him until he screams for peace. Frex has named him Sheltergod, perhaps with the hope that the baby might be a homestead for the Unnamed God in this wicked place, or that the Unnamed God might provide the baby shelter that will not be supplied by a mother. They will come to call him Shell.