He had survived on slim pickings before, though this particular assortment of food was a lower mark than he could remember.
In the deep poverty of his childhood, the mainstay of his diet had been pap, a thin, simple porridge of stale bread or cornmeal boiled in water. At breakfast his grandma, who had raised him and his two younger sisters since the death of their mother, would sweeten it with honey, or brown sugar, or the pulp of guava or pawpaw or coconut. When the family came together for their evening meal, the pap would be heartened with turnips and carrots and boiled bits of fish or chicken and their broths, and seasoned with the herbs grown in the tiny plot of a garden beside the single-room shack they all occupied. As he approached his teenage years and took on a variety of jobs for the well-to-do — quick to learn how to bring in a wage, he’d worked as a repairman, groundsman, whatever he could do with his hands — they had been able to improve their housing conditions and expand on the staples of their daily meals. And though Grandma Tressie had passed on long ago, he had continued sharing a portion of his income with his sisters after he went to live and work at Los Rayos, setting aside their money for his regular visits to the village.
Whether or not he had made his final visit… that was the difficult question, right and true.
Now he saw the whistler make a sudden jab at something she must have spotted in the shallows, her bill coming up quickly, a lump sliding down the sinuous tube of her neck. She would stay only a short time, not journeying too far from the nest she had built in the tangle of mangrove roots on the riverbank behind her, ready to defend her newly hatched ducklings against raiders. The best chance to steal up on her would be as she dabbled for food, dividing her attention between the shapes that flitted past her keen eyes below the water’s surface and the sounds that came from the direction of the nest. Should he fail to take her by surprise, the likelihood was that the bird still would not allow herself to be sundered from her young. She would fight to protect them from him, as from any threat, rather than attempt to flee.
This would make his task easier if no less regretful, for Jarvis Lenard hated to kill any living, breathing creature.
He moved toward her, threading a silent path through the eight-foot-tall reed stalks. Jarvis was a Spiritual Baptist by upbringing who, while not a churchgoer, considered himself a man of deep Christian faith. He had, though, sometimes joined friends and relatives at nyabinghis, ceremonies of music, religious philosophy, and politics organized by the mainland’s Rastafarian community — drawn to these at first by the reggae, the lovely girls with whom he would laugh and dance, and, in his younger years, the free and easy abundance of ganja. At these gatherings the Rastas had introduced him to their ideas about livity, a natural way that forbade the eating of flesh, eggs, or dairy in favor of a vegetarian diet, and it had taken hold in his mind and soul. He had come to believe that it was against God’s will, even parasitic, to sustain his own body with the meat of animals the Almighty had brought onto the earth, or with anything that carried their lifeblood inside it.
But Jarvis Lenard was a practical, reasoning man as well as a spiritual one. Already today the helicopters had made three passes of the wetlands and bordering jungle — just an hour ago one of them had flown above the wall of trees outside his shelter, blowing a tempest of foliage through its entrance — and their attempts to close in on him would not end when a heavy curtain of darkness fell over the island and they could put their nightseeker equipment into play. The sky would be patrolled day and night, as would the ground. And the village would be watched, and searched, and watched some more, and searched again with sinister, devious eyes.
Jarvis was unsure how long it would be before he might get to a safe place, or even where such a place might be. In the meantime he would need to hide for what could be days, perhaps weeks, and could not be falling short of food. It would hardly be enough for him to scrounge lichen and berries and the pulp of cattails. However much it troubled him, he would have to resign himself to killing if he meant to keep his strength.
He moved on the fowl with two hurried strides and, as he raised his stick with both hands, saw it snap its head up from the water to look around at him. Its display of aggressive defiance was instantaneous — a shrill cry, a puffing out of feathers, a spreading and flapping of wings. Jarvis took another step forward and brought the stick down on it with a hard swing, trying for the long neck or head. But the whistler partially eluded him with a shrieking, fluttering hop and was instead struck on its right flank at the base of the wing. It fell onto its opposite side and slushed about in the marsh, the one broken wing dangling with shoots of bone sticking up through the skin at its base, the other thrashing like a paddle in the water, flinging up clumps of mud.
Jarvis Lenard clubbed the body again, felt the crack of ribs transmitted to his fingers through his stick, saw bright blood splash from underneath its plumage. The crippled bird dragged on its side with its good wing still paddling and scooping mud, and Jarvis stood over it with his stick up over his head for the deathblow. But then his teeth clenched at its dying cries and he knew he could not take a chance that it would not finish the job. The creature had suffered enough.
He lowered the stick across his chest and, gripping it at either end, bent to press it down against the base if the whistler’s skull. Then he put one knee heavily on the stick to hold it firm, snatched the bird’s legs into his fists, and pulled back with a hard jerk to break the neck apart from the spine as he had seen Grandma Tressie do to the live chickens she would occasionally bring home from market.
The bird quivered as if with a surge of voltage and kept beating its one unbroken wing into the muck for almost a full thirty seconds before its nervous system shut down and the twitches stopped.
Jarvis took his knee off the stick and rose, lifting the warm carcass, standing there a little while as some of the blood and water dripped off. He felt tired, desperate, and sorrowful.
“I beg your forgiveness, little mother, and am deeply obliged for yer sacrifice,” he said. His arm and voice shook. “Doan’t know if yah would care why I done as I ’ave — an’ need yet do — but there are those who must be held accountable fer what’s goin’ on t’ruout this island, and my intention’s ta stick around and see justice done fer a fact.”
Jarvis waited another moment, silent and thoughtful, drops of blood and water spilling from the limp bird in his hand. Then he put it in his makeshift sack and turned toward the mangrove thicket where he had spotted its nest.
Without their mother to feed and protect them, the hatchlings would face either starvation or eventual discovery by predators.
He could do no less in his guilt and gratitude than give them the mercy of a faster end.