The thunder was not overhead but underfoot.
Like a boiler full of clabbered tapioca, Mount Tharaka was churning inside, its sticky contents threatening to burst, brim, and overflow. The thunderstorm, along with the confusion attending the birth of the Grub, had disguised from us the mountain’s premonitory rumblings—but now, all too plainly, we could hear and feel them. The higher the sun mounted the more pronounced and emphatic these warnings.
We began to make preparations to leave Shangri-la, and our preparations included the manufacture of a travois on which to place my wife’s body. I was hurriedly trying to tie together the frame for this sledge when Mount Tharaka’s highest peak flew apart like a gigantic tooth dealt a shattering hammer blow.
I pitched to the ground. Foliage blocked my view of the summit, but above this line of foliage a billow of smoke and ash climbed into the sky, twisted in the air, and drifted downwind like the fallout from Death’s powder puff.
Another explosion wracked the mountain.
Below our encampment Alfie and Malcolm were hooting frantically. Quite clearly from where I lay, only a few feet from Helen and the Grub, I could hear other habilines calling back and forth across the ridge. I turned on my side and saw Guinevere hurrying out of her windbreak and down a worn footpath toward the men.
Emily, Fred, and Nicole next came scurrying past me, and Nicole was carrying A.P.B., whose eyes were fixed over his mother’s shoulder on the prodigious bonnet of ash cowling Mount Tharaka’s truncated peak. The ground was tilting and heaving even as they fled, and it occurred to me that I had only two possible courses of action: I could die with Helen or I could bid her farewell and perhaps save my life. And the Grub’s.
Kicking aside the struts of the unfinished travois, I threw myself into Guinevere’s shelter. There lay Helen. The Grub squirmed against her breasts, where I had placed the infant to free my hands for work.
About her neck my dead wife still wore the red bandanna that my sister Anna had given me in Cheyenne.
I unknotted it, wiped Helen’s forehead, and, after closing her lackluster eyes, tied the bandanna around my own neck. Another powerful explosion shook the mountain. Time was tightening like a noose.
“Come here, baby. Come to Poppa.”
I picked my daughter off Helen’s chest again and, cradling her in the crook of one arm, mouthed an incoherent goodbye to my lady. Then I darted out of the windbreak in desperate pursuit of the other Minids. The ridge sluiced with yellow mud, but I kept my balance and overtook the habilines in the very meadow where I had first learned that Helen was going to have a child.
Hot ash was showering down. From the vantage of the meadow it was evident that Mount Tharaka had blown away a good four to five hundred feet of its summit. Most of the smoke and soot—or at least the darkest plumes—trailed off to the east, while the sky directly above the mountain had the benighted look of a mirror draped with a black mantilla. Rivers of mud—of scorched tapioca—were oozing down the northwestern flank from the fractured summit, and several of these had already breached the timberline.
Chance and the mountain’s peculiar topography had diverted these floods away from Shangri-la, toward the citadel of Attila Gorilla and his unfortunate people. Unless they had been far more prescient than we, it was hard to imagine that they had escaped their lofty fastness.
Numb, the Minids and I walked away from Mount Tharaka. The men had clubs of one sort or another, but otherwise we had fled the volcano without any worldly goods. The Grub and Helen’s red bandanna were all I had salvaged from the catastrophe still unfolding behind us.
On the savannah elephants trumpeted and guinea fowl paced. The foremost concern of every creature was not to kill a fellow refugee for lunch but to put a healthy distance between itself and the angry mountain. Therefore our evacuation proceeded almost like a parade. We saw baboons abreast of us, unruffled ostriches sprinting into thorn brakes, and giraffids moseying along in self-possessed pairs. As for us, we seemed to be heading toward our old capital cities in the gentle hills east of Lake Kiboko.
The Grub soiled me and began to cry. Her high-pitched mewling alarmed the Minids. I held my daughter at arm’s length, scrutinizing her pallid body and monkeyish features. Her head, too heavy for her scrawny neck, lolled. Her face was a jigsaw puzzle of splotches and lines. Most surprising, her eyes were not the white-rabbit pink of pure albinism but a pair of obsidian dots, hard and penetrating. These dots disappeared when she howled, as she now recommenced to do, and I brought the child back into the cradle of my embrace.
Prolonged exposure to the sun would probably blister an infant so bereft of pigmentation. I tried to shade her with my chest, but the Grub did not stop crying. Shade was not all she wanted.
She was hungry. I was not equipped to satisfy that need and began to fear that I had rescued her from Mount Tharaka only to condemn her to starvation on the veldt. I might just as easily have left her writhing on Helen’s corpse. Milk was what she required.
Guinevere drew alongside me, gesturing for her granddaughter. I handed the Grub to her and watched the baby nudge the depleted reservoirs of her dugs. The futility of this struggle was dismaying—but Guinevere carried her forward to Nicole, who was striding along with A.P.B. sitting jockey-style on her upper back. The child’s dark, downy legs encircled his mother’s waist like sooty pipe cleaners; and when Guinevere tried to transfer the Grub into Nicole’s arms, A.P.B. poked at my daughter with jealous fingers. I hurried forward to deal him a hearty slap.
Nicole beat me to it, knocking A.P.B.’s hand aside. Then Guinevere removed the toddler from his mother’s back and put him on the ground. The Grub—as soon as she was in Nicole’s grasp—began to nurse, and this charity saved her life.
For much of that day Nicole treated the Grub as her foster child. She even took pains to keep my daughter’s body in the shadows cast by her own.
When the Grub was not nursing, I occasionally carried her. The men now seemed to regard me as a kind of habiline transvestite, for if you put on a child in this society, you were automatically dressed as a woman. They stayed clear of me. The Grub, meanwhile, was frustrated by the uselessness of my nipples, which she eventually learned to ignore in order to concentrate on sleeping.
In sleep her translucent eyelids flickered. Sometimes they fell back to reveal the jaundiced whites of her eyes, and I would carefully shut them again, remembering the way Helen had stared at me in death, as if seeing into a future realm of reversed chiaroscuro. The Grub was of Helen’s flesh, but what could the Grub know of either Helen’s suffering or mine? Watching her trembling eyelids, I feared she knew too much.
Late in the afternoon Mount Tharaka boomed so mightily that the aftershocks ran out across the savannah in waves. Debris spewed upward in billows, and several strata of ash layered the southern horizon. Dust quilted the air overhead and drifted down like snow. Our bodies collected the cindery flakes.
Clad in lightweight surcoats of ash, looking like the Clay People in an old Flash Gordon serial I had seen on television in Van Luna, Kansas, we trudged on. The drifting ashfall, I told myself, was a natural sun shield for the Grub. I gave her back to Nicole believing that some power, maybe even my own will, was guaranteeing her survival. I would not lose her. She was Helen’s legacy to me, my wife’s final bequeathment from a past I had dreamed and dreamed again.
Although it thundered that night, it did not rain.
The next day found us still pushing northwestward, through thorn thickets and open grasslands. The gazelles and wildebeest seemed to be grazing on carpets of dusty gray wool, the zebras to be melting into the very air. Our entire world was a negative steeping in the chemicals of a photographer’s developing solution. Nicole fed the Grub, while the rest of us ate whatever we could find, whether ash-dusted fruits or an occasional dull-witted guinea fowl. Everything tasted gray, and the grit in our eyes made every hour the hour before dusk.