Carol had wondered if they should keep the kids at bay. But Gabe urged her otherwise. Bearing witness to death, he said, should be part of, was perhaps finally the beginning of, their education. It might help Heather to come to terms with her father’s fate instead of torturously repeating the theme song to a television ad for his obnoxious employer and stockpiling pain au chocolat at breakfast. It might further discourage Flicka from making abusively cavalier references to her own death, and as for Zach—Glynis was his mother. So they involved the children, who took turns sponging her forehead with a cool damp cloth, fanning her with copies of Africa Geographic, and plumping her pillows.
Yet there were lulls after a generous dose of morphine during which Glynis sank into a shallow sleep, and two days and two sleepless nights was a long vigil. Too long to remain stricken, to maintain a pitch of grief. So when Carol first scolded her children for giggling, Shep told them, no, it was all right; in fact, it was fine to laugh. In truth, for portions of their deathwatch they had a wonderful time. Carol, Shep, and his father shared a bottle of bourbon the first night, and from then on they kept up a steady stream of cabernet, Kilimanjaro lagers, and more champagne. Fundu’s kitchen delivered a groaning board to the tent at every meal—mounds of mangos, pineapple, and papaya; grilled lobster tails, prawn curries, and boiled cassava; whole buffets of chocolate rolls, cream éclairs, and coconut cakes. He encouraged the kids to go swimming, or to join Flicka in the plunge pool during the heat of the afternoon. He admired their beach-combed booty, unusual shells that they arranged as offerings around the bed.
His own offerings were of Glynis herself. Once the sun had set the second day, he lit the dozen tapers that lined the tent. He unrolled the flatware that he’d bundled into his bag on Crescent Drive. He arranged the pieces along the shelves, propping the salad servers with Heather’s shells until their inset crimson glass caught the candlelight. He inserted the series of sterling chopsticks in coral from the shore, until they rose in the dynamic attitudes they might have assumed if encased under lock and key in the Cooper-Hewitt. He balanced her forged ice tongs against the champagne bucket, beaded from chilling yet another bottle; he oriented the tongs so that the copper-and-titanium inlay shone from the perspective of the middle pillow. He angled the fish slice so that it writhed in the flicker of a nearby flame, flashing silver like the schools that leapt from the water around Fundu’s pier.
He had assured Glynis that her sedulous production of metalwork in middle life was of no consequence, but on his own account he wished there were more of it. She had cannily reincarnated herself in a material far more durable than flesh, and not as fickle. The flatware would outlive her by generations.
Yellowed by candlelight, the gauze of the mosquito netting draped in mellow folds about the bed. The lapping sea lulled not a hundred yards from the tent, and the evening had mercifully cooled. Cicadas surged in and out of the same frequency as the ceiling fan. Appraising the scene, he thought, I’ve done the best I can. Though he was doubtful that Fundu would banner as much on their website, it was a beautiful place to die.
Yet the night was long, a second with no sleep. Carol and his father spelled him holding Glynis’s hand while she twisted, but he was fearful of missing the moment, and didn’t let them take the helm for more than a few minutes at a time.
Around 2:00 a.m., she slurred drunkenly, “I can’t take it anymore,” and began to cry. “I can’t …”
“You don’t have to take it anymore, Gnu,” he said, turning her head to administer more morphine to her tongue.
Shep couldn’t take it anymore, either, though of course he would. To his own embarrassment, he sometimes grew bored, and impatient to get this over. For their lives together as they had understood them had really been over the instant that Glynis announced she had cancer.
Previously convinced that the declaration should be rationed, he had repeated “I love you, Gnu” so many times these last two days that the refrain was in danger of melting into more mumble about cloves. But he was reminded of that cigar box full of foreign currency on his bedside table in Elmsford, in which he’d stashed about a hundred dollars’ worth of Portuguese notes. Now that the European Union had converted to the euro, that scrip was no longer legal tender, but a mere souvenir. So just as he should have used up those leftover escudos at Lisbon’s duty-free, he spent his passion with abandon while he still had the chance.
“Why is Glynis snoring?” asked Heather at around 5:00 a.m., having crawled from her bed in the adjacent tent.
“Because she’s very, very tired,” Carol whispered. “Now, go back to sleep.”
It would have been difficult for the children to do so. The rattle racked the encampment, and menaced the bush babies away. Shep held his wife and crooned once more about there being nothing to be afraid of, though of course he had no idea. As the sun’s first red rim shone over the sea, she seemed to be trying to speak.
“Shuh … shuh …”
He put his ear to her lips. She exhaled a warmth into the drum that she did not suck back.
There was no final message, no parting avowal, no earth-moving revelation before her head went limp. That seemed fair. Likely most mourners were obliged to forgo a last thing said. You had to make do with the years of their lives that the dead left you instead.
A knacker in Old England purchased worn-out and ailing farm animals or their carcasses for manufacture into feed or fertilizer. It may have seemed a morbid moniker, though in its day the trade was respectable, and the surname derived from the medieval tradition of calling a man by his occupation: Baker, Carpenter, Smith. With the caretaking nature of his Christian name, there had always been about Shepherd Armstrong Knacker a great arc: the tending, toiling, and interment that at each stage of life any good man undertook for his brethren, and they for him.
In the years that followed, Shep was true to his christening. It would come as no surprise to those who knew him that the lifelong handyman did not retire to an African island to sip endless tropical cocktails under a beach umbrella. His skills with a wrench and hacksaw were much in demand in Pemba, especially once locals learned that he paid house calls for free. With the assistance of an Arabic charity, he took on the more ambitious project of digging a new community well; the island had a shortage of fresh water. Lending a hand was a good investment, of course. In turn, the Wapemba taught him surefire techniques for catching kingfish, the rules of bao, the complications of land purchase in Tanzania, and the optimal bribe for getting another box of Artificial Tears successfully through customs. (Jackson would be pleased to learn that his Mooch-Mug paradigm translated readily to other continents. Toa kitu kidogo was so frequently wheedled in Tanzania that it was commonly abbreviated as TKK: “give me a little something.”)
Though his relations with the locals were amicable, Shep hailed from a different world, and he would never quite replicate in Pemba the same easy banter and playful jousting of ritual ambles with Jackson around the circuit of Prospect Park. Still, interchanges with their neighbors were good for his struggling Swahili, and being simply different prevented neither party from being warm. Amazingly, Pemba was the only place he’d been to in Africa where everyone wasn’t on the hustle—where children and mzees alike spotted this conspicuous mzungu in the street and cried jubilantly, “Jambo! Habari yako!” because they were glad to see him, and not because they wanted his watch.
Hard physical work soon melted away all the cream-laden mashed potatoes that Glynis had left untouched. Yet however busy he kept, Shep always got enough sleep, near the top of the list of pleasures that the ravages of mesothelioma had taught him daily and wittingly to savor. Sleeping joined talking, thinking, seeing, being—as to the last, once in a while doing absolutely nothing and not feeling in the least bit bored—unconscionably long showers, and not-idling-in-rush-hour-traffic-on-the-West-Side-Highway.
After mastering the byzantine socialist property charade—the bureaucrats in Dar bought the land for you, and you bought i
t from the government, with plenty of TKK to smooth the way—Shep purchased a sizeable coastal plot just outside Mkoani that cost a trifling ten thousand dollars. Securing residency for himself and the five other refugees in his trust may have been a larcenous undertaking, but only in Tanzanian terms; fortunately, the thieves in Dar had no idea how much he would have paid to stay here. Thus even after he sprang for a pickup and small outboard, the wires from Zurich to the People’s Bank of Zanzibar in Chake Chake wouldn’t significantly deplete his financial reserves for decades. (To his banker’s dismay, the monies were conservatively invested in a dumpy savings account that earned a derisory rate of interest. Shep had resisted exhortations that there was a “fortune” to be made in “somewhat” riskier instruments, for he couldn’t care less about getting rich when in his adoptive country’s frame of reference he was already wealthy beyond measure. Thus he hued to what he called the principal principle: above all, keep what you’ve got.) For that matter, locals were so grateful for rides into town, repairs of their plumbing in the unusual instance that they had plumbing, resolderings of their rickety cookstoves, and his whole family’s cheerful assistance picking stems off the clove harvest that they rarely allowed him to pay for anything at the market, and he could go for weeks at a time only out of pocket from volunteering to cover a neighboring child’s school fees.
There was some question, of course, about whether Forge Craft’s award for compensatory damages was taxable income. According to Mystic, it all came down to whether the settlement “made you whole”—a surprisingly spiritual concern for civil servants, meaning: none of their fucking business. The notion that any amount of money could “make him whole”—could fill the void left by a splendid woman—was every bit as insulting as those Forge Craft lawyers having assessed his wife’s value in accordance with how often she did the laundry. In any event, he found himself rather hoping that it was taxable income. If the feds wanted to submit to four flights, three layovers, and a minivan ride, they could come and get him.
With Zach’s increasingly capable assistance, Shep built a house modest by their own standards, extravagant by Pemba’s. Framed with cinderblock for strength, it was coated on the outside with traditional red mud, because he loved the look—baked in the sun, a more casual version of Spain’s terra-cotta. The floors were polished mangrove—dark, moody, and kind to bare feet. He roofed the place with proper tarpaper, but topped it becomingly with makuti, the dried leaves of coconut palm of local tradition. The very first room he completed was Flicka’s, so that she could move from the hotel in Mkoani that, while a vertiginous comedown from Fundu Lagoon, at least had air-conditioning. The island’s electrical provision was sporadic, so he imported a generator from Zanzibar, and soon had the little AC unit chugging to cool her bolt-hole. After his frigid summers at Handy Randy, personally he would have skipped it, but for Flicka air-conditioning wasn’t a luxury but a lifesaver.
Shep had never considered his son dexterous or mechanically gifted. Yet once the boy relinquished his surly resistance to Pemba as a losing battle, he threw himself into a level of technology that at last he could understand. It turned out that father and son were constitutionally akin, and Zach thrived with the materials of his father’s own young adulthood: timber, stone, cement. Soon a proficient carpenter and mason, he also became a skilled furniture maker with the local mangrove wood. With another burst of height, the boy filled out in the shoulders, at last coming to resemble his father—although Shep was sorry to see the narrower lines of his mother fade. By the time the house was completed, Zach had little taste for idleness. After learning scuba from Fundu’s crew, he started working for the resort as a diving instructor. Sadly, the job took the boy a speedboat ride away to the lagoon. Still, Shep was well pleased: his once pale, inward hikikomori had left his room.
Meantime, Carol took over the landscaping, a calling she had sacrificed when she switched to IBM for its health insurance. Frangipani, magnolia, eucalyptus, acacia, jasmine, and jacaranda grew rapidly in the equatorial climate. Of course, she had to work around Shep’s cockamamie fountains; kooky constructs of coconut shells, mangrove roots, conchs, diving flippers, and Africa’s ubiquitous plastic shoes, the fountains were an indulgence with the water shortage, but he had dug his own well. She planted fruit trees out front; mangos, bananas, and papayas for the picking facilitated Shep’s fiendish experiments in brewing gongo, or “lion’s tears,” the archipelago’s lethal moonshine. She tilled a vegetable plot at the back, growing plantains, cassava, and carrots, and grew adept at weaving coir, the fibers of coconut husks, into mats and baskets. She returned from marketing trips to Chake Chake with fantastical canvases of hippos, gazelles, and hornbills in the naïve style called tinga-tinga. Draped with kangas, always full of flowers, and glinting with Glynis’s freshly polished flatware, the interior of their little home grew bright.
Carol gave up on homeschooling Flicka, whose protestations that learning to factor equations was a complete waste of time carried more weight on an agricultural island off the east coast of Africa. Flicka made up for her boycott of lessons by inhaling the books that Shep brought back from secondhand shops on ferry trips to Stone Town for provisions. (Shep’s own literary ambitions had proven stillborn: he ended his days so wonderfully weary that a page or so put him to sleep. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for novels. He’d rather live a good story than read one.) Heather didn’t escape her tutoring sessions so easily, but in her free time developed into a remarkable swimmer. They weaned her from the antidepressants. On a diet of fish and fruit, she grew tall and lean, promising to become as beautiful—out of Glynis’s earshot, Shep would concede the adjective—as her mother.
No longer repeatedly re-infected by staff carriers in an institution where the bacteria had become endemic, his father defeated clostridium difficile and, to both parties’ relief, no longer required his son’s assistance ten times a day to go to the toilet. With diligent application to the physical therapy exercises he had learned at Twilight Glens, the old man not only regained his original strength but surpassed it, taking brisk daily walks of several miles along the beach. Once he’d run through that stack of detective novels, he started to handwrite a whodunnit himself. He didn’t have expectations of publication, he claimed, but if they were now building their own house and catching their own fish and weaving their own baskets, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t catch the bug of self-sufficiency and write his own books.
The manuscript was never finished. Nevertheless, Shep was relieved that his dignified, formidable father did not meet his end by shitting himself to death in nursing-home diapers. Instead, perhaps overestimating his newfound vigor, he’d been reaching for an enticingly ripe mango and died respectably from the leading cause of traumatic injury in Pemba, according to the local Chinese doctors a far more pernicious medical problem than malaria or AIDS: falling out of trees.
They buried Gabriel Knacker in the back clearing beside Glynis. Shep owed his father for Africa, and the grave site seemed apt. Once the last shovelful was hefted, he said a few words of affection, glad to be spared reading scripture. Gabe Knacker had never regained his faith in God, but he had regained faith in his son, which was probably more important.
It was well he’d left space in the clearing. Like Shep himself, Flicka had fallen in love with Pemba on sight, and never waxed nostalgic about Brooklyn. She’d become a popular local fixture, having learned to make her signature wisecracks in Swahili. Among the Wapemba disabilities, crippling diseases, and genetic abnormalities were common, and they seemed at ease with a girl with a funny hooked nose and protruding chin who crabbed close to the ground while covered head to toe in kangas to escape the sun. Yet a sweltering African island was the worst place in the world for a kid with FD, and whenever Flicka reeled into a retching “crisis,” Shep cursed himself for his irresponsibility in bringing her here. Still, who was to say that the same thing wouldn’t have happened the very same night back in New York? After brushing her teeth, squeezing
in her Artificial Tears, smearing her eyes with petroleum jelly, and then swaddling them in plastic wrap, one ordinary night Flicka went to bed to the purr of her private AC and never woke up.
Which reprieved her from following through on her old vow to eventually end a life that was, she often swore, more aggravation than it was worth. Neither Shep nor Carol had ever taken her seriously on this point, until they were dolorously packing up the young woman’s things. Hidden away in a little backpack that—come to think of it—Flicka kept with her at all times, they discovered a trove of pills. The rucksack was a grab bag of all the medications that—come to think of it—had mysteriously disappeared: the antidepressants from Twilight Glens that his father had stopped taking, Heather’s leftover Zoloft, Glynis’s remaining stock of “marzipan,” and, most unnervingly, the remains of the liquid morphine. Now they would never know if she’d ever truly planned to call it quits, or if she’d simply kept the backpack at ready hand like a talisman, a magic lantern with one remaining wish. In any event, Flicka had surely relished ongoing access to her own private nuclear option, making the conduct of yet one more day of meds and infections and swallowing lessons not a sentence but a choice.
Thus with three gifts to the soil in the clearing, Shep had knackered the whole trio.
That their party of seven would contract to a party of four had been inevitable, of course. With Zach spending more and more time at Fundu Lagoon, in practice they were a family of three. Screamed through Shep’s cell phone, Beryl’s outrage at the “depraved” and “abusive” kidnapping of their father probably precluded his sister’s swelling their ranks any further. (Beryl was livid that she’d been outclassed. Her dull, conformist businessman brother “the philistine” suddenly goes loopy and runs off to an obscure tropical island. Meanwhile, the real artist, the real adventurer of the family, is stuck in the house where she grew up, swaddling down its chill hallways in two sweaters and a secondhand fur coat, trying to design a documentary about “fuel poverty.”) By contrast, due to Zach’s frequent emails detailing the diving, the dolphins, and the diaphanous dawns, Amelia had grown envious. Forced to take a proper job selling “derivatives”—whatever they were—now that her father didn’t subsidize her keep, she had vowed to come out for a visit, if not to abscond herself. Shep was uneasy; his daughter’s penchant for bare midriffs and jeans slung to the pubic hair wouldn’t go down well on a predominantly Muslim island. But so long as Amelia covered her shoulders and wore skirts to the knee, he could see how a pilgrimage to Glynis’s grave might help to assuage her sorrow over having missed out on that uncannily celebratory vigil at her mother’s bedside.