Jomo fell ill. Unable to eat, hunt, or tolerate the japeries of the children, he tried to remove himself as a burden to the Minids by wandering off alone into a distant thicket on the plain. That same afternoon, missing him, Guinevere conferred anxiously with Helen. Tottering wide-eyed about Shangri-la, singing her distress in eerie bass notes, the old woman raised a small expedition to search for her husband.
Ham and Roosevelt accompanied Guinevere, Helen, and me down the mountain, tracking Jomo by scent and virtually imperceptible trail signs. Within an hour we had found the old man. He was sitting in a beautiful Kaffir boom tree, staring out over the savannah with glassy eyes. He would not come down. His languid intractability on this point so discouraged Roosevelt and Ham that they began foraging their way back across the grasslands. If a crazy old habiline wanted to sit by himself in a tree, who were they to interfere?
Guinevere, Helen, and I waited out the long starry night in the clearing beneath the Kaffir boom. In the absence of any leaves, the tree’s coral-colored flowers waved petals like tiny tentacles. The trunk of the tree bristled with blunt spikes, but Jomo had climbed to his perch without any regard for the hurt they were inflicting upon him.
Once, foolhardily braving these spikes, I tried to climb up to Jomo, but he placed the sole of his foot on my head and levered me to earth with a single forceful thrust. That dampened my enthusiasm for trying to rescue him. Scratches tattooed my belly and thighs, and all that night my right buttock throbbed incessantly. If a crazy old habiline wanted to sit by himself in a tree, who was I to interfere?
Then I remembered Genly’s death and its ritual aftermath, events that seemed as long ago and far away as my childhood in Van Luna, Kansas. Jomo, I realized, had taken his own funeral arrangements in hand.
If the penultimate resting place of a Minid was the fork of a tree (the ultimate, of course, being a leopard’s maw or the gullets of a gang of carrion birds), why, then, he would install himself in the tree of his choice. He had picked a beauty, too. His vertical coffin was a truly awesome coral tree, with wood of resilient softness and durability.
With the three of us alternating watches beneath the old man, he lasted two days in the tree. Vultures began circling overhead on the second day, however, for the odor of Jomo’s mortality hung heavier in the air than did the fragrance of the tree’s scarlet flowers. Finally, his spirit—his soul, if the species known as Homo habilis possessed that intangible commodity—left him, and he toppled out of the Kaffir boom in a heap.
You could not leave a patriarch like Jomo—who had perhaps once occupied the Minids’ chieftaincy—lying crumpled on the ground. We must get him back up his prickly tree. Helen, after indicating by mumbles and signs her intentions, set off to Shangri-la to retrieve another prospective corpse-booster or two. During her absence I used a lava cobble to grind off as many of the Kaffir boom’s spines as I could reach. Guinevere, meanwhile, lay across Jomo’s body, daintily picking vermin from his grizzled beard and mane.
The vultures kept circling.
Ham and Alfie came back with Helen. They touched their dead comrade with the tips of their clubs, wiped the death smell into the dirt, and made threatening noises at the birds. Back and forth beneath the coral tree they strode, as if Jomo’s death were a great personal affront to every Minid, an ill-advised practical joke by a Landlord who did not deserve such forbearing tenants.
Helen was exhausted. I had no idea what due date an Air Force physician would have assigned her, but her time could not be too far off. She did not join Ham and Alfie in their protest, but crouched stiffly beside Guinevere and beckoned me forward to assist her. I saw then that she had brought my Swiss Army knife from our hut. She passed the knife to me, and Guinevere sat up to see what was happening.
Doubtful about the wisdom of humoring Helen, I pulled the knife’s large pen blade free and stropped it several times on my lava cobble. Helen retrieved the knife from me and put its point to Jomo’s right temple.
“Whoa,” I said, thinking of the Homo erectus skulls found once upon a time in a limestone cave at Choukoutien, China. The spinal cords of several of the skulls had been painstakingly enlarged, presumably to permit the removal of the brains. Did Helen wish to dine on Jomo’s gray matter? Did she think such a meal would impart to the old man’s unborn grandchild some of his knowledge, cunning, or wisdom?
My speculations were misplaced. Helen wanted to cut off the old man’s right ear. Hindered by her belly, she leaned over the mop of his hair and tentatively set to work. She was no more adept at this task than she had been at pulling the blade from the handle. Frustrated, she returned the knife to me and held the rubbery brown cauliflower of Jomo’s ear away from his head so that I could slice it off.
Swallowing my objections, I quickly did her bidding. Helen packed a bit of dried grass on the old man’s head to absorb the oozing blood and took possession of the ear. She then extended it on her palm to Guinevere, who looked back and forth between this offering and her daughter’s solemn face.
“It’s a keepsake,” I whispered. “Something to cherish.”
Guinevere finally accepted the melancholy gift.
A moment later Alfie, Ham, Helen, and I were boosting Jomo’s corpse back into the Kaffir boom. That accomplished, we consigned the old boy to the immemorial obsequies of the vultures.
In its own way, it was a lovely funeral.
Several days later Helen awakened me early, if only in my dream. Stick-pin stars held the darkness in place, and Mister Pibb was still on sentry duty in the flame tree beneath whose crepe-hung branches we slept. In an uneasy trance, for I was dreaming, I followed Helen down the mountainside to the moonlit chessboard of the savannah.
Friendly beyond all expectation, a pair of chalicotheres approached. Like camels, they knelt on their forelimbs and lowered their sloping hindquarters to the ground. Helen mounted the female, gripping its silken mane for purchase. With a curt nod she indicated that I should mount the other chalicothere, the male. Although I feared they would not be easy creatures to ride, I obeyed. A moment later both animals were back on their feet, and, swaying from side to side, our fossil steeds trotted out into the grasslands on their enormous talons.
This was the grand tour. We passed herds of dozing zebras, fitfully dreaming dinotheres, asleep-on-their-feet gazelles. Giraffids teetered through the distant thornveldt like antlered sea serpents; and, strangest of all, an albino hippopotamus ran across our path in painful slow motion, its thick neck extended and its legs languidly treading air. It was the color of blancmange, this hippo, with boiled-looking freckles on its broad back, and I remembered that I had seen one like it not very long ago, perhaps in a waking dream.
When it disappeared into the rivercourse toward which it had been loping, our chalicotheres turned aside, carried us past a gang of thuggish hyenas, and stampeded through the low grass toward a destination unknown to Helen and me. Desperately we clutched their manes and dug our knees into their shedding flanks.
A leopard appeared ahead of us. It had flattened its body against the ground, but not quickly enough to go unremarked.
Helen’s mount leapt like an impala, tossing her to the ground. I too was thrown, and as we struggled to our feet, rubbing our bruised buttocks and exchanging glances of wounded commiseration, the chalicotheres fled. I was so afraid that Helen’s heavy fall might result in the miscarriage of our child that the nearness of the crouching leopard did not greatly trouble me. I began running toward Helen, intent on embracing and comforting her.