The Codex

54

They were awakened by Borabay’s cheerful voice. Night had fallen, and the air was cooler, the smell of roasting meat drifting through the hut.

“Dinner!”

Tom and Sally dressed and emerged from the hut, feeling embarrassed. The sky was resplendent with stars, the great Milky Way arcing like a river of light over their heads. Tom had never seen the night so black or the Milky Way so bright.

Borabay was sitting by the fire, turning shish kebabs while he worked on a dry gourd, drilling holes in it and slicing a groove in one end. When he was finished he lifted it to his lips and blew. A sweet, low note came out, and then another and another. He stopped and grinned.

“Who want to hear music?”

He began to play, the wandering notes gathering into a haunting melody. The jungle fell silent as the pure, clean sounds spilled from the gourd, faster now, rising and falling, with runs of notes as clear and hurried as a mountain stream. There were moments of quiet while the melody remained suspended in the air around them, and then the song resumed. It ended with a series of low notes as ghostly as the moan of wind in a cave.

When he stopped, the silence lasted for minutes. Gradually the jungle noises began to enter the space vacated by the melody.

“Beautiful,” said Sally.

“You must’ve inherited that ability from your mother,” said Vernon. “Father had a tin ear.”

“Yes. My mother sing very beautiful.”

“You’re lucky,” said Vernon. “We hardly knew our mothers.”

“You not have same mother?”

“No. They were all different. Father pretty much raised us himself.”

Borabay’s eyes widened. “I not understand.”

“When there’s a divorce…” Tom stopped. “Well, sometimes one parent gets the children and the other one disappears.”

Borabay shook his head. “This very strange. I wish I had father.” He turned the shish kebabs. “Tell me what growing up with Father like.”

Philip laughed harshly. “My God, where to begin? When I was a kid I thought he was terrifying.”

Vernon broke in. “He loved beauty. So much so that he sometimes wept in front of a beautiful painting or statue.”

Philip gave another sarcastic snort. “Yeah, weeping because he couldn’t have it. He wanted to own beauty. He wanted it for himself. Women, paintings, whatever. If it was beautiful he wanted it.”

“That’s putting it rather crudely,” said Tom. “There’s nothing wrong with loving beauty. The world can be such an ugly place. He loved art for itself, not because it was fashionable or made him money.”

“He didn’t live his life by other people’s rules,” Vernon said. “He was a skeptic. He marched to a different drummer.”

Philip waved his hand. “Marched to a different drummer? No, Vernon, he whacked the different drummer upside the head, took his drum, and led the parade himself. That was his approach to life.”

“What you do with him?”

Vernon said, “He loved taking us camping.”

Philip leaned back and barked a laugh. “Appalling camping trips with rain and mosquitoes, during which he brutalized us with camp chores.”

“I caught my first fish on one of those trips,” Vernon said.

“So did I,” said Tom.

“Camping? What is camping?”

But the discussion had outrun Borabay. “Father needed to get away from civilization, to simplify his existence. Because he was so complicated himself he needed to create simplicity around him, and he did that by going fishing. He loved fly-fishing.”

Philip scoffed. “Fishing, next to Holy Communion, is perhaps the most asinine activity known to man.”

“That remark is offensive,” said Tom, “even for you.”

“Come now, Tom! Don’t tell me in your old age you’ve taken up that flapdoodle? That and Vernon’s eightfold way. Where did all this religiosity come from? At least Father was an atheist. There’s one good thing for you, Borabay: Father was born a Catholic, but he became a sensible, levelheaded, rock-ribbed atheist.”

Vernon said, “There’s a lot more to the world than your Armani suits, Philip.”

“True,” said Philip, “there’s always Ralph Lauren.”

“Wait!” cried Borabay, “you all talk at same time. I no understand.”

“You really got us going with that question,” said Philip, still laughing. “Got any more?”

“Yes. What you like as sons?” Borabay asked.

Philip’s laugh died away. The jungle rustled beyond the light of the fire.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” said Tom.

Borabay said, “You tell me what kind of father he is to you. Now I ask what kind of sons you are to him.”

“We were good sons,” said Vernon. “We tried to get with the program. We did everything he wanted. We followed his rules, we gave him damn musical concerts every Sunday, we went to all our lessons and tried to win the games we played, not very successfully, perhaps, but we tried.”

“You do what he ask, but what you do that he not ask? You help him hunt? You help him put roof back on house after storm? You make dugout with him? You help him when he sick?”

Tom suddenly had the sensation of being set up by Borabay. This was what he had been getting at all along. He wondered what Maxwell Broadbent had talked about with his eldest son in the last month of his life.

Philip said, “Father hired people to do all those things for him. Father had a gardener, a cook, a lady who cleaned the house, people to fix the roof. And he had a nurse. In America you buy what you need.”

“That’s not what he means,” said Vernon. “He wants to know what we did for Father when he was sick.”

Tom felt his face flushing.

“When he sick with the cancer, what you do? You go to his house? Stay with him?”

“Borabay,” Philip said, his voice shrill, “it would have been utterly useless to impose ourselves on the old man. He wouldn’t have wanted us.”

“You let stranger take care of Father when he sick?”

“I’m not going to stand a lecture from you, or anyone, on my duties as a son,” cried Philip.

“I not lecture. I ask simple question.”

“The answer is yes. We let a stranger take care of Father. He made our lives miserable growing up, and we couldn’t wait to escape from him. That’s what happens when you’re a bad father — your sons leave you. They run, they flee. They can’t wait to get away from you!”

Borabay rose to his feet. “He your father, good or bad. He feed you, he protect you, he raise you. He make you.”

Philip stood up in a fury himself. “Is that what you call that vile eruption of bodily fluid? Making us? We were accidents, each one of us. What kind of father is it who takes children away from their mothers? What kind of father is it who raises us like we’re some kind of experiment in creating genius? Who drags us out into the jungle to die?”

Borabay took a swing at Philip, and it happened so fast that it seemed Philip just disappeared backward into the darkness. Borabay stood, five feet of painted fury, his fists clenching and unclenching. Philip sat up in the dust beyond the fire and coughed. “Ugh.” He spat. His lip was bloody and swelling rapidly.

Borabay stared at him, breathing hard.

Philip wiped his face, and then a smile spread across it. “Well, well. The eldest brother finally asserts his place in the family.”

“You no speak about Father like that.”

“I’ll speak about him any way I want, and no illiterate savage is going to make me change my mind.”

Borabay clenched his fists but did not make a further move toward Philip.

Vernon helped Philip stand up. Philip dabbed at his lip, but the look on his face was triumphant. Borabay stood with uncertainty, seeming to realize that he had made a mistake, that by striking his brother he had somehow lost the argument.

“Okay,” said Sally. “Enough talk about Maxwell Broadbent. We can’t afford to fight at a time like this, and you all know it.”

She looked at Borabay. “Looks like dinner’s burned.”

Borabay silently removed the blackened shish kebabs and began parceling them out on leaves.

Philip’s harsh phrase rang in Tom’s mind: That’s what happens when you’re a bad father — your sons leave you. And he wondered: Was that what they had done?