Drink the Sky Read online

  Drink the Sky

  by Lesley Krueger

  Copyright 2015 Lesley Krueger

  The Rev. Adam Sedgwick

  to Charles Darwin,

  on the publication of the

  Origin of Species,

  1859:

  There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature

  as well as a physical. A man who denies this

  is deep in the mire of folly....

  You have ignored this link; and,

  if I do not mistake your meaning,

  you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it.

  Were it possible (which, thank God, it is not) to break it,

  humanity, in my mind,

  would suffer a damage that might brutalize it,

  and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation

  than any into which it has fallen since its written records

  tell us of its history.

  On the other hand, novels, which are works of the imagination,

  though not of a very high order,

  have been for many years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me...

  I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily -

  against which a law ought to be passed.

  — Charles Darwin

  Prologue

  The day was already hot and greasy as Charles Darwin set out from his cottage on Botafogo Bay. Corcovado, the humpbacked mountain, billowed up before him. Leaving the road which skirted its base, Darwin chose a red and rutted path that meandered toward the summit. In his journal that night, he might describe these Brazilian mountains as abrupt domes of French grey arching like mosques from the tropical plain.

  Like illustrations he had seen of mosques. If his work as a scientist were to be of value, he had to be precise in his description, and Darwin had never set eyes on a mosque. His route on this journey around the world, as naturalist on board the ship Beagle, lay to the south of the Holy Land. Already, in crossing the Atlantic, he had dipped far below the Equator to put in on this bay, at Rio de Janeiro, where he had been left to collect his specimens while the Beagle’s crew surveyed the coast.

  A stirring sounded to his left, a rustle in the forest. Darwin pictured game and raised his rifle slowly, tracking not so much the animal as the leaves it displaced, a sly progression parallel to the path as if the game were stalking him. His scalp prickled with expectancy as his finger met the trigger.

  Children! Little children burst out of the forest, boys - four boys - circling him, laughing and pointing, chattering in Portuguese as poor abashed Darwin lowered his gun. Sweating, he pulled out his handkerchief as the boys capered around him, bare-legged, bare of chest, their sheathed knives dancing against their thighs. Not game, he thought. They were playing a game. Prodding him, tweaking the wool of his trousers, feeling its weft and heft before skittering back into the forest.

  Darwin was left to wipe his brow, his heart still pounding. Charley, he admonished himself, you’ve got to look about yourself, see what’s up. This is the New World, not the Old. Do you think you’re up to it?

  Stowing his handkerchief, shaking his head, Darwin headed down the path. Odd how the admonishing voice had been as high as his father’s. A huge man, the old man, to have such a whistling, whispering voice. The largest man in England, they said: towering more than six foot tall, expanding well past twenty stone, a physician, rich as Croesus, solid as the Golden Rule. Darwin should have called these mountains the encircling image of his father. Didn’t they have the same bald pate, and the pater’s broad girth? They loomed over Darwin, casting him in shadow, as advice whistled from their summits like the wind.

  Be precise. See it newly. Avoid fatuous comparison.

  Smiling to himself, and turning a corner, Darwin came across the boys again, playing in a glade. They had cut a stick and dug it upright into the red soil at the far side of the clearing. Now they stood with knives unsheathed, and he watched each take a turn to fling his knife all that wide distance at the narrow stick, hitting it every time. Darwin marveled at their accuracy, one following the other - what? Until one missed? Each knife shrieked across the clearing like chalk on slate, and as he shivered, Darwin grew mindful of the shrieking around him, of birds crying from the branches above and insects sawing, sawing, in the weedy tropical heat.

  A fat boy threw his knife across the glade and hit the stick with a reverberating gulp. Ambling over, the boy retrieved his blade as a toucan flapped loudly above him. Brazilians surely loved their knives - and from an early age. The tiny boy who came up next aimed a blade that was half the length of his tender arm. He drew up straight, then hurled the knife so murderous hard, both stick and steel stood quivering.

  A tall boy followed, then a wide one who reminded Darwin of his younger self, squinting and equable, then the fat one again with his graceful ponderous gait, and the baby, and the tall boy - who missed and threw his knife into the forest.

  Terrible howling tore the air, such bleating and mad screaming. Confused, Darwin stepped forward and back, in and out of the clearing. This was wrong: the wailing was above them, nowhere near the knife’s trajectory. Unnerved by the clamor, Darwin raised his gun and shot. Instantly, the howling ceased, and a coarse body toppled into view. The monkey swung above them, still held to the branch by its prehensile tail - a brown pendulum ticking dully. Gone, gone, it seemed to say, while scattering arcs of blood on the gaping boys below.

  Darwin walked into the clearing, bringing the boys back to life. They swarmed him again, chattering and dancing and picking at his clothes: the jacket, the stifling woollen trousers. Then he saw the glint of callipers half in, half out of his vest pocket. He slapped vainly at the children, trying to knock their fingers away, swearing in protest before it came to him they were putting his possessions back; returning those scientific odds and ends they had sequestered earlier, while repeating their thanks and a word that even with his rudimentary Portuguese he could decipher as dinner.

  “No,” he cried helplessly in English. “Not dinner. A specimen. My specimen.”But the tall boy ran out of the forest with his retrieved knife and began climbing the tree from which the monkey swung; climbing like a monkey himself up its rough bark, its widely-spaced branches, his toes splayed and arms grasping. He climbed up to a sickening height and crawled out on the limber branch, inching along with infinite care until he was close enough to hack at the monkey’s tail - hacking once, twice, a third time before the body finally dropped free.

  The boys ran from Darwin as the monkey landed with a thud, its heartbreaking arms extended. Even from this distance, Darwin could see human creases in the empty curling fingers. They seemed so near to children, these uncouth creatures. When the squat boy picked up the body, he cradled it protectively. The monkey was a little bigger than the smallest boy. A fallen brother, limp and needing Mother’s care.

  Dinner! they cried again, and ran off quickly down the path. Darwin was left to stand alone at the edge of the clearing. As he watched, the remaining tail slipped free of the branch like a length of rope untied. There was a sound like a footfall as it hit the humus, then a rat scurried forth and made off with the ropy length in its teeth.

  Darwin walked across the blood-spattered glade and squatted by the stick the boys had splintered. He reached for the stick to steady himself, a rod and a staff to comfort him. But it was small comfort, when he didn’t know where he was, or what name to call these things. Dizziness took him. He was sweating inside.

  Where was this raw and violent place? What was he doing here? What would it do to him?r />
  “I want to go home,” he said in a reasonable, unheard voice.

  April 1832.

  Sitting in her Rio studio, Holly Austen painted the date in one corner of her canvas. The traffic outside sounded like the ancient mumbling sea. She breathed the same damp leafy air that Darwin must have breathed, heard the unchanged squeal of marmosets and a yelping yellow bird. Everything took her back - to a place she’d never been.

  Define art.

  Creation. Conception. Generation.

  The conception of a new generation.

  In 1832, Charles Darwin was twenty-three years old.

  Part One

  1

  Changes in the weather blow in on big winds in Rio de Janeiro. The faint stirring of leaves in a garden, the dry clattering of palms, the nervous bowing and straightening of the grass on the flanks of the huge bald mountains — these are warning signs, especially in summer. The wind can pick up cruelly and sky cloud over in minutes. Lightning crackles and the day darkens until the clouds erupt with a roar. As thunder booms, the hard rain bounces, spatters, gathers into streams rushing down the steepest roads and gullies. The streams form creeks and the creeks, rivers — reddish rivers boiling with dense Brazilian soil. Storm sewers explode. Manhole covers fly off and pressurized fountains leap high into the air. At the bottom of the hills, canals and rivers surge over the highways. Worried drivers try to rush home, but the water quickly swamps them. Motors stall and cars are abandoned in frightful criss-cross jams.

  The wind will be moaning by then. Somewhere a power line will snap. A driver sprinting for safety will hurl out his arms, claimed by the sizzling, writhing wire. Up in the shanty towns, high on the vertiginous slopes of the hills, heaps of garbage will loosen and start their killing slide. At least one will wash free, burying a frail house with unwatched children inside. Or maybe the lights in the shanty town will fail, and a drug lord on the next hill over will send his troops on a raid against his blacked-out neighbours. Beneath the snap of thunder and the howling of the wind, automatic weapons fire will crackle through the night.

  Drifting restlessly downstairs from her studio, Holly could sense a summer storm approaching. The windows were open on a languid morning, hot and still; hazy under a vague blue sky. But Holly had lived in Rio for eight months, and paused by the window knowing it was too hot, too still. Breathless. Storms could break on days like this. Holly smiled: days on which her husband Todd was returning from his environmental work in the Amazon.

  Yet Holly couldn’t help worrying about this latest trip. Something happened that Todd wouldn’t talk about on the telephone. He’d sounded distracted when he’d called, even agitated, and on the tedious, fractured flight back, landing in one boom town to another, he would have been subjected to another overview of the pillage of the Amazon. Holly hadn’t been there herself, but from Todd’s description she could picture the way agriculture had been imposed on the flat, steamy landscape. In some places, the ragged rectangular farms now butted one against the next to form great sweeps of settlement. In others, the farms were scattered through the forest, red earth openings in the dark green mass that gave the landscape, from the air, the look of poorly cut fabric. Todd said the strangest part was not seeing any houses. The farmers built their houses back in the remaining stands of high canopy forest, sheltered from the sun and hidden from view, so the fields looked abandoned. They looked far emptier than the vital green forest, as deserted as a battlefield from a devastating war where the land had not yet healed.

  After all this, he would have to ferry home their latest celebrity. Jay Larkin was due in from Chicago on an inter-continental flight, arriving at about the same time as Todd. Larkin had called himself a musician on the telephone, although in a magazine piece Todd found later, he was referred to as a performance artist and avant-garde composer. Cutting edge. Noir. Todd was unable to use any of these terms without raising an eyebrow, although he found opportunities to use them often, Todd’s feelings about their celebrity sympathizers being every bit as branched and intricate as the flyways at the airport.

  Holly could only hope that Larkin had got enough rest to be able to fill Todd’s silences. She imagined him on the airplane, his world traveller’s eyeshade in place — black, no doubt, matching his noir clothes. With luck, he’d wake only as they descended over Rio’s bald mountains, banking over Sugarloaf, sliding down over Guanabara Bay, rested, refreshed, and ripe for conversion as Todd’s small plane buzzed in underneath.

  Holly was smiling as the phone rang. It was Todd, calling from the airport.

  “You’re here. You’re alive,” she carolled.

  “I’m here, and I have our guest. The pleasant surprise is, he’s booked himself into a hotel. He’s just coming over for the briefing.”

  “Briefing with breakfast,” Holly said. “I’ve got some ready. But you have to tell me what he’s like.”

  “At the moment he’s preening himself in a shop window,” Todd replied.

  He looked over at Larkin, who had, in fact, walked a few steps away to let Todd call his wife in peace.

  Holly pushed back her hair, freeing herself of its heat. “So you’re okay?” she asked. “When you phoned the other day, I got the impression you couldn’t really talk. What happened? Something bad?”

  “I’m afraid it might be,” Todd said. “I’m probably going to have to go back there, Holly. Something’s going on.”

  “What? When?”

  Todd paused. “I actually called to say we’re on our way home.”

  Of course. She’d forgotten that he sometimes came home. Lately, they had their most intimate conversations on the telephone.

  Holly hung up, unsettled by Todd’s tone, but also amused by his picture of Larkin. Poor man, caught preening. He was probably just brushing himself back into place after the endless, chafing flight. Holly had hardly slept herself on that flight, always alive to the fact she was moving to a new city for the first time in her life — moving countries, moving continents! She’d felt almost deliriously cramped in the narrow, hurtling plane. Her skin prickled, her knees danced with childish, scratchy energy. She’d been both unnerved and elated, and could scarcely contain her exhilaration as they thrashed through the headwinds off the northern coast of South America sometime during the last brown hours before dawn.

  She must have fallen asleep then. The next thing Holly could remember was opening the windowshade at first light and looking out at a rolling ocean of mist, solid and deep beneath her. Yet as she watched, the first rays of the rising sun began burning off the heavy mist, sent it wisping upwards, thinning, flying to reveal kaleidoscopic patches of forest lying underneath. The mist swirled above the trees like silk, brushing the highest branches. Then suddenly the light grew dazzling. The forest seemed to surge toward the airplane, throwing off the last of the white, and all Holly could see below her were the newborn trees, tufted trees in so many shades of green the forest looked like a bed of moss, soft and moist and seductive. Her cramped legs were so weary. All she wanted in the world was to step out on top of the damp, mossy trees, and roam toward the southern horizon.

  The forest unbroken, the forest burned. Holly leaned against her dining room table, picturing the whole vivid continent flaring into fire. Everything she knew had left her with an almost overwhelming sense of the forest’s fragility, its transience. And everything she’d learned had left her with the same breathless feeling about Rio. That was the word for life here: transient. Fruit spoiled in a second, clouds rolled across the sky on wheels, her friends’ moods soared and fell like notes of music. You could see it even in the city’s rich history. Charles Darwin had lived here once, not three miles from where she stood. Was it any wonder that he’d gone on to write the last word on transience, his theory of evolution?

  Holly’s plans were neither so scientific nor so grand, but at least she had a longer time to accomplish — what? Their v
isas gave them two full years in Brazil, and she planned to use every minute. Right from the start, she’d painted the tall square rooms of her house in lustrous tropical colours. Now she could live inside fuschia walls and lemon trim; run her fingertips along the heartbreaking ochre contrast. She loved her house, although it was crumbling from age and humidity. She loved the hill they lived on, adored Rio and yoked all her hopes to the fierce transience of Brazil, feeling that at any moment its intense volatility could sweep away the timid habits of a lifetime. Why not change? Why not dare? Why not fly?

  Holly was smiling and testing a mango for ripeness when she heard the outside gate scrape open. Far earlier than she had expected, male voices came into the yard.

  2

  Todd had time to take just one step inside the living room before their boys were on him, laughing and pulling him onto the floor.

  “Here we are!” Holly cried. She hurried toward them, but was startled off track when Jay Larkin stepped out of the hallway. He seemed just as surprised. “My God,” she could see people thinking. “That can’t possibly be Austen’s wife.”

  “Holly Austen,” she said, holding out her hand.

  What made Larkin look so dubious? Wasn’t it almost a cliché, an alpha male married to a much younger woman? It was true she’d dressed up for the occasion, when Larkin had probably been expecting someone from an environmental flyer. A fading, clean-faced wife. Helpful. Ethical. Wearing hemp.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking her hand. “A dose of brain lag.”

  “Jet lag?” Holly asked.

  Larkin tapped his forehead. “Delayed in transit.” He gave her an appealing smile, but Holly was disappointed. Entertainers were supposed to be small, neat people, while Larkin was tall and lanky, so lean he looked sketched in. The pallor didn’t help, and his black hair was cut in a shank that fell into rather insistent blue eyes. Irish colouring. He had Holly’s colouring, when she was convinced men of her own physical type were moody, evasive and self-indulgent.