The Darling by Russell Banks
I did as instructed, and by the time I’d put together a large string sack of provisions, Woodrow appeared in the kitchen, ready to go, the boys coming along behind him, bewildered and frightened.
“Hurry up,” Woodrow ordered. “You comin’ wit’ us,” he said to me.
“I’m not staying in Fuama,” I said. “What on earth are you running for anyhow? Who are you running from? Look at the boys, you’ve got them terrified. I’m terrified, Woodrow.”
He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me towards the door. “You go where I say you go. Don’t vex me now, woman,” he warned. “Wit’ you in the car, them soldier boys’ll let us pass the checkpoints.”
“No! I’m not leaving this house, I have to be here for my dreamers. And you can’t take the boys until you tell me what’s happening.”
He looked me coldly in the face, as if at that moment he despised me and wished he’d never married me. “Sam Clement seen you at Toby today, didn’ he?”
“Yes, he came out for a few minutes.”
“An’ you think Doe don’t know that?”
“What if he does?”
He shook his head sadly. He no longer despised me; he pitied me. “This man Doe is crazy, but crazy like a fox. Look, he knows the Americans got their hand in this war from the beginnin’. He knows they been secretly backin’ Charles. He knows you an American, missus! An’ ’cause of that old business ’bout me an’ Charles, Doe been puttin’ two an’ two together. He sent two of his soldier boys aroun’ for me this afternoon, but I knew it was a trick, so I sent Satterthwaite across to the Barclay Barracks where Doe and his top boys all holed up, tol’ him to say I be right along, an’ when Satterthwaite didn’ come back, I know what Doe got in his head for me.” He passed me at the door and scooted the boys outside. “Get in the car,” he ordered.
“What about Bruno and Muhammad Ali?” Paul asked.
“Never mind them dogs, they’ll guard the house. Jus’ get in the car. Jeannine or Kuyo or somebody’ll take care of ’em.” He turned and grabbed my wrist again and yanked me outside.
“Let me get the food,” I said, and he released me, and I returned to the kitchen.
“Wait a minute, Papa,” Dillon said. “I forgot something, too.” He followed me into the house and jogged into the living room, and when he returned he carried the camera bag and video camera. Except for the video I made for Samuel Doe, no one but Dillon had ever used it. He had become fairly proficient and had accumulated a small collection of home movies, mostly of his friends and sports events, but a few family events as well, which we usually watched once after they were shot and not again.
“Might be something interesting out there to tape,” he said, as together we passed out of the house. I locked the door and walked to the car, where Woodrow waited impatiently. Dillon got in back with the twins, and I walked to the gate, while Woodrow backed the car down the driveway and out to the street, where he stopped and waited for me to lock the gate. It was our routine.
This is how it happened. As I turned to clip the padlock onto the gate, I saw them waiting for us, Satterthwaite with three men I didn’t know, civilians in sweat-stained sleeveless shirts and caps and sneakers, street kids, the kind of feral young men without jobs or family whom I’d gotten used to seeing hanging out on corners and stalking the alleys in Monrovia over the last few years. Satterthwaite moved on me, his face expressionless; the others, carrying machetes, went for the car. Satterthwaite lifted his shirt and showed me a pistol against his bare belly. “Go back inside,” he said and pushed me through the gate, then quickly closed and locked it. The dogs, sensing my alarm, barked once; then, having recognized Satterthwaite, stopped.
“Woodrow, go!” I screamed. “Drive! Drive, for God’s sake!”
He didn’t move. Several seconds passed as the men walked to the car, two of them on Woodrow’s side, the other on the passenger’s side. Satterthwaite leaned his back against the gate and watched the car. Woodrow, round faced, wide eyed, looked over at me, a prisoner locked in our yard behind the iron-barred gate, and the boys did the same. They stared at me as if I were standing on the deck of a departing ship and were waving goodbye to them.
“Leave, Woodrow! Go!” I yelled.
It seemed they had done this many times. The men moved slowly and methodically to the sides of the car. The one on the far side opened the rear door and pointed his machete at the boys and said something to them. Another opened the driver’s-side door, and the third reached in and grabbed Woodrow by the arm and pulled him from the car to the street. It happened in an instant. While the first man stood by the open rear door and kept the boys inside, the other two forced Woodrow to his hands and knees. One of them pulled Woodrow’s head back, forcing the small of his back down and his narrow shoulders up, and the other flashed his machete on a deadly path parallel to Woodrow’s back and shoulders towards his head, then lifted the machete, and with a single blow separated my husband’s head from his body.
There was no sound, not a word or a cry from any of us, no screams, no weeping. Nothing. The dogs remained silent. There was only the sound of the birds and the cicadas and the frogs and the evening breeze in the trees. Woodrow’s body collapsed onto the street and poured blood into the dirt. The boys, as motionless as a photograph, stared out the car window at their father’s body. The man with the machete looked at the other, who held Woodrow’s head in his hands. He pointed at the head with the tip of his machete and laughed, an odd, high-pitched, silly laugh, and the other tossed the head across the street into the gutter like a rotten melon.
Satterthwaite turned to me and brought his face close to the bars between us. I remember his yellowed eyes, his handsome broad nose, his thin moustache and sharply defined lips. I remember his loathing. In a low, cold voice, he said, “Take your boys now, an’ go home to America wit’ ’em.” Then he joined the others, and the four nonchalantly walked down the street together and were gone.
The boys were still inside the car, peering out cautiously as if at a forbidden movie. I shouted, “Stay there! Don’t leave the car! I’ll be right there for you! I have to fetch another key for the gate!” I cried and ran for the house, cursing myself for not having kept a duplicate on the ring with the house key. I found it in Woodrow’s desk drawer and raced back outside and, fumbling with thick fingers, managed to get the padlock open and off the hasp and pushed the gate back. I stepped quickly past Woodrow’s body without looking at it and flung open the rear door of the car.
The car was empty. My sons were gone.
I REMEMBER DRIVING through the city like a madwoman chasing ghosts. There was very little traffic—a few military vehicles was all, trucks and jeeps carrying soldiers who handed open bottles to one another, laughing and, when they passed by, ignored me as if I were invisible. A pack of teenage boys in looted clothing ran from an electronics store lugging stereos and armloads of CDs, the Indian shopkeeper gazing mournfully from the doorway. A few cars with household possessions lashed to the roof were headed inland to some imagined place of safety. It was not quite dark, and plumes of black smoke rose ominously in the south from the vicinity of the airport, where Charles Taylor’s forces were rumored to be dug in, battling the remnants of Doe’s ragtag army. From Mamba Point the sea was glazed red by the setting sun. Across the harbor there was more smoke rising. Prince Johnson’s bands of marauders were advancing towards the city, looting, burning homes, killing and raping women and girls as they came. A large crowd of people was gathered outside the closed gate of the American embassy, shouting to be let inside. Behind the gate a pair of stone-faced Marines with automatic weapons stood ready to fire if the crowd tried to climb the wall or rush the gate to get inside, where they imagined entry visas to the U.S. were there for the grabbing. People shook their fists, held up their babies, and waved their hands pleadingly as if for alms. I recognized some of the faces of my neighbors and several people we knew from the government agencies and ministries, a judge, a doctor and his wife wi
It was dark now, and I couldn’t get out of the city. I heard the hard clatter of gunfire from the port where the Nigerians were stationed and the boom of artillery and the occasional shriek and explosion of a rocket grenade coming from the direction of the Barclay Barracks. It was useless, driving in circles around the city like this. My sons, wherever they were, did not want me to find them. I drove slowly past the homes of their schoolmates, the few whom I knew. The city was entirely in the dark. No streetlights, no house lights. Even the hotels and restaurants were without electricity. Candlelight and kerosene lanterns danced behind windows, and now and then, crossing ahead of me, the headlights of prowling military vehicles. I drove past the several houses where I knew the families, people whose children at one time or another had played with my children, houses where Dillon or the twins had once stayed overnight, but I could not bring myself to leave the safety of the locked car and walk to the darkened door and knock and ask, Have you seen Dillon, William, and Paul? I looked away for a moment, and suddenly they were gone. They watched their father being murdered, and I had to leave them alone for a few seconds, and when I returned, they had disappeared. I couldn’t imagine saying that to anyone.
Finally, hours later, I found myself parked in an alleyway outside the narrow, wood-frame shack where Jeannine had gone to live with her aunt and uncle and their children. I got out of the car and walked up the rickety steps and knocked quietly on the door. There were no lights inside, not even a candle. After a moment, I heard Jeannine’s voice, little more than a whisper. “Who that?”
“It’s me. Hannah.”
The door opened a crack, then a little wider, and I made out Jeannine’s round, brown face in the gloom. I sensed others behind her, as if the room were crowded and I had interrupted a meeting of conspirators. Jeannine said, “What you want here?”
“I … need you. I need you to help me. I’ve lost the boys. I don’t know where the boys are, Jeannine.”
“No,” she said. “The boys not here.” She started to close the door, and I held it back with my hand.
“Wait. Woodrow … he’s been killed. Woodrow’s dead, Jeannine.”
She looked at me blankly, as if I’d said my telephone wasn’t working. “Plenty-plenty people dead. Go ’way, missus.”
“Please, Jeannine. I need you. I can’t find my sons.”
“You don’ need me for nuthin’. Missus.”
We looked at each other in silence for a moment. We had been servant and mistress, then she the teacher and I the student, then friends. We had shared my husband, and then, at my doing, had become servant and mistress again. Now we were enemies. The truth of our relationship had finally become its reality.
“Will you come back to the house with me, Jeannine?”
She did not answer. She pushed the door closed on me, left me standing on the little porch alone in the darkness.
Slowly I drove down Duport Road towards our house and realized that I would have to pass Woodrow’s body and would somehow have to bring it into the yard and wrap it and bury it. I would have to search in the gutter in the dark for his head and carry it, too, into the yard and bury it with his body. I didn’t know if I was capable of performing this grisly task alone, now, in the middle of the night, but decided that I had no choice, I had to do it for the boys. For Woodrow. For myself. I was not going to leave my husband’s body lying in the street for the rats and wild dogs and the buzzards.
I steeled myself and slowed the car and pulled up before the closed gate. I didn’t remember closing the gate, but must have, to keep the dogs inside the yard. But had I locked it? I wondered, for I saw in the headlights that the padlock had been hooked into the hasp and was snapped shut.
I got out of the car and walked to where Woodrow had been murdered. There was a splash of moonlight through the trees on the ground where he’d been forced to kneel and a pool of blood where he’d fallen. But his body was gone. I crossed to the gutter where his head had been tossed like garbage and grimaced as if I were already looking at it in the muck and refuse. But it was not there. Someone, something, had taken my husband’s decapitated body and his head, his remains. Someone had taken first my children and now the remains of my murdered husband.
I stumbled back to the car, and as I got inside, looked up and saw that the gate was swung wide open, and standing behind it in the driveway was Sam Clement. He waved me forward, and I drove the car in from the street. As I stepped from the car, Sam clanked the gate shut again and locked it.
“You left the key in the lock,” he said. “Not a good idea. It’s lucky I came by before anyone else did, or you wouldn’t have much to come home to.”
My entire body was shaking, and I started to cry. Sam put his arms around me and held me until I could finally speak. “Woodrow … he’s dead, Sam. They killed him. And the boys, my sons, they’re gone. I don’t know where they are! I’ve been driving around all night trying to find them. Can you help me, Sam? I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“C’mon inside,” he said in a low voice. “I know about… Woodrow. I saw his body when I got here.”
“His body! They cut off his head, Sam. It was Satterthwaite, him and three other men. They weren’t soldiers, but I know Doe sent them.”
“Probably, yes. He’s gone all paranoid and wiggy and is sending out all kinds of headhunters. They’re doing their dirty work all over the city. C’mon, I’ll get you a drink. I found some candles inside and Woodrow’s whiskey. Hope you don’t mind,” he added as we crossed the terrace and went inside.
“But the boys, Sam? Doe wouldn’t take my sons, would he?”
“Can’t imagine he’d bother,” he said and in the flickering candlelight stepped quickly to the liquor cabinet and half filled a glass with scotch. “Besides, they’re Americans.”
“What?”
“Well, half and half.” He handed me the drink, took up his own, and sat in Woodrow’s easy chair.
I fell back into the chair opposite, suddenly exhausted. The whiskey burned my throat, but it calmed my shaking limbs and brought my thoughts more or less back into focus. I realized that I hadn’t heard or seen the dogs. “Where are the dogs?”
Sam exhaled heavily. “Yes, well, the dogs. When I got here, with Woodrow’s body out in the street and the car gone and the house dark and silent, I was afraid something equally bad had happened to you and the boys. I had to
“Oh, God, you shot our dogs?” I put down my glass. “Sam, you carry a gun?”
“I do.” He touched the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
“Christ,” I said. After a few seconds of silence, I asked him again about the boys. “I’m terrified. They’re my babies, Sam.” I started to cry again. “Damn it, I hate my fucking crying!” I yelled, and stopped immediately.
Sam asked if the boys had seen Woodrow killed.
“Yes. They watched from the car. Satterthwaite and three others pulled him out of the car and made him get down on his hands and knees. And then one of them cut off Woodrow’s head, Sam. It was … awful. He did it with a machete. And the boys … they watched it happen.”
He stood and refilled his glass at the bar. With his back to me, he asked, “Did they know it was Doe who had Woodrow killed?”
“Dillon, I think Dillon knew. Woodrow came home afraid and crazed and insisted on driving to Fuama with the boys tonight. He said Doe had turned on him. I’m sure that registered with Dillon and very likely with the twins, too. They’re fourteen and thirteen, Sam. They don’t miss much.”
“So they know,” he said, still with his back to me.
“Yes.”
He turned and sat back down in Woodrow’s chair. “That’s too bad, then.”
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do,” he said quietly. “You just don’t want to admit it to yourself. You probably knew it the second you realized they were gone.”
For a long moment neither of us said anything. Distant gunfire rattled the windows. Otherwise, silence. Finally, I said, “You’re right. I’ve been driving all over the city tonight as if I were looking for my sons. But I knew the whole time I wouldn’t find them.”