A Jungle Full of White Roses

FIVE YEARS LATER…

Five years has passed and our little village has undergone many changes. Shuka has passed away two wet seasons ago at the ripe age of a hundred and three summers. She had gathered the herbs for that day, just telling me, just saying, she wanted to do it just to remember what it was like. When I went to her home, she appeared asleep, a somewhat lightened expression on her face, she appeared younger, the flowering herbs were still in her fist, clutched to her chest. They were her favorite herbs, her favorite of all flowers. She would never admit to that, but we all knew that. We never told her that we knew, and I supposed Shuka enjoyed our last laugh as we cremated her with bouquets of the herbs.

Kip left the day when we began to move our belongings and produce to the mines, the day we buried the Man in White’s body near the spire and tossed the bloody clumps of the sand in the ocean to be cleansed. He just packed a backpack and left, walking down the beach to one of the great cities like Shuka told him to. He never looked back. I believe this was the first time he ever thought something through. Stark left the day Shuka passed away. I do not know what made him leave; his skin was still as dark as a child’s. He said nothing offensive when he left, but hugged me goodbye as brothers would do. He told me he would return, but when he did not know. Unlike Kip, Stark did look back at the village when he walked off into the jungle. Now I am the shaman of the village.

We had moved to the abandoned village in jungle, up top the lands of our ancestors, the holy lands. The land we once lived in, once considered simply land, was “unholy”. In many years time, like the lands of our ancestors, it would change and be like holy lands, only remnants, scraps, would remain and the Goddess would reclaim it. Children who sneak down to the “unholy lands” claim to see a white orb on the spire…white and looming, dignified almost, at a distance, and red up close, shaking like a balled fist, clattering like nutshells and howling like a night bird. No adults have ever seen the orb, then again, only children find it frightening.

Humans did come to our lands, a few days after we emptied the village and began to clean up the abandoned village. It was the same men who brought Amber and the Man in White to our village. We watched them from the banana shoots kick around our gardens. They look down the mine shoots, perhaps had they looked deeper they may have seen the bundles of belongings and produce stored away, but they did not. They stumbled around in our fields, dug up the unripe peanuts and carried off a handful of green pumpkins. Then left without shouting a word, as if they had forgotten why they came. Amber gripped my hand. I remembered quite well. Her hand was stiff and arm was sore. She held it too tightly when Shuka marked her flesh with the tattooing needle. Shuka marked Amber with her family symbol, since Amber had no family symbol of her own and Shuka had no family of her own. It was the flowing symbol of the flowered herb Shuka loved so much. Three summers later I pricked at Amber’s other shoulder, marking the symbol of little white flower of the jungle we loved so much. It was the first tattoo I had done. Shuka did the symbol on my shoulder as well. It was the last tattoo she had done.

Amber has taken to the village quite well and the village to her. Her hands are small and adapt, and I had taught her some minor medical techniques to help me along. She sews and embroiders our clothing with designs we have never seen before but quite like very much. She has learned to weave baskets and mats and many other useful tools as well. Her cooking is not the best, and is subject to many jokes around the village, but it has…improved to a degree. But most of the time, Amber performs a more useful service to the villagers. She teaches the young human language, for a few hours every day in the morning the children gather in village center. Their grasp is much better than mine, and they speak smoothly, speak as if balancing baskets on their heads. We knew the inevitable. The move was just to prepare ourselves, to delay immediate occupation of the humans.

It is the wet season, Amber is teaching in the old temple. She should be back in a few minutes time. I boil bark to extract a pain medicine. I’ll mix it with honey later to give to a child with a sore tooth and dry the rest to make somewhat bitter pellets to give to adults. Flume cries behind me, kicking about in his basket. I move him over to me, he still sobs, but does not scream like a bird anymore. Amber takes him with her when she teaches, but it is the wet season and Amber and I are both fearful he may get an upper chest infection if he is taken out into the cold, so he stays inside with me, something he does not enjoy, I guess he finds me boring to be with, and I do not let him chew or gum anything, taking away anyting he manages to snatch. There is no sugar cane to give him, so he will have to manage without it. I tickle his fat belly and he squeals loudly.

Flume is not my fruit, and he is not Amber’s fruit, but he is our child. His skin is dark like a child’s should be, but his stripes are lighter than his skin, which is an oddity as stripes should always be darker. They make him even more beautiful. I named him Flume, it means Umber in human language, and it sounds like Amber as Amber pointed out. It was purely unintentional. Amber has yet to tell me what Amber means in human language, if it means anything at all. Amber named him Willoughby, or Will for short; the former means nothing but the latter means motivation and determination. A fisherman had brought Flume up from a village down south. He was half the size a child his age should be, he looked like a one month babe more than a three month old. Amber and I had suffered through many false pregnancies and two miscarriages. Physically she cried from the pain in her stomach and breasts, mentally, she cried from the pain in her heart. I held her many nights and listened to her sob. I cried myself, knowing there was little for me…a shaman…to do. The fisherman brought me the child, Flume. There was no history where Flume came from and what put him in such a sad state. The fisherman was simply handed him by the elders of the village. The poor child had stomach parasites that I cleansed away with a battery of herbs. It was Amber, however, who brought Flume to health.

She was a bit startled when she came home to find the little baby sitting on our bed, kicking and but not crying, just staring up at the ceiling, mechanically, like a beetle flung on its back. She held him in her arms, pressing him against her skin, and for many hours it was like this until he finally cried out, cried for, like a baby should.

Soon he was just a bit smaller than a child his age, no longer listless. He is quite fat…perhaps Amber was doing too good of a job, but maybe Flume was making up for the neglect he had suffered prior to becoming our child.

Amber appears on cue, only the tips of her hair are wet, the latex coated cloak has kept her dry for the most part. She scoops up little Flume and takes him to the bed to be nursed. He is hungry. He is always hungry, for attention, love, food, and we were heavy with all.

The bark has given all it could. I remove the strips of bark and set the syrup on a clay tablet to cool.

I lay down on the bed beside Amber, my face resting on her shoulder. Her skin is tan now, a beautiful shade, but still as soft as ever, and it smells of white flowers. I watch her and Flume, standing vigil over the two. My arm snuggles under her head then cushion’s Flume’s. Her hand touches mine.

“Do you love this world, this life?” I ask her in notadrach. She answers me in human. This is how we talk in the house.

“Yes, why do you ask such foolish things?” she says.

“Because I like to hear you say it,” I answer.

“There’s no such thing as my and your world, Debaun,” she whispers to me and draws close. “It is our world, all of our world, your, his, mine, hers, and theirs.”

It thunders outside loudly. Flume began to bawl loudly. He hates thunder more than anything, and I believe bad storms were not common where he came from. Children here, no matter how young, seem very indifferent to storms, as they were prepared in the womb for them. Flume will have to learn to overcome his fear on his own.

Amber draws him close; I draw them close to me. An even more earsplitting clap strikes outside our window. He sucks softly on Amber’s fingertip, it calms him. Rain cascades outside to the point it is a curtain, a sheet, of opaqueness. Rain will soon leave, the land will dry and flowers will bloom. We will take Flume to see the white flowers the first of the dry season. There will be many of them, since coming to the village in the jungle, there always has been plenty of them. So many, that the air still carries the faint scent of them still despite the flowers blooming months ago, like a promise or hope, threatening to break through turmoil.