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What the World Takes Away During hot, still afternoons, when only wasps disturb the glassy silence, Lily hunts for ticks. On the hard, shaded dirt to the east of the house, beneath the bougainvillea, she holds our dog tight between her legs and combs fingers through secret places of his coat: below the neck, beneath flaps of ears, within the pits of legs. The swollen pests are pinched between a finger and a thumb until the tight skin of their sac bursts and Ginger's blood spurts over my sister's hands. Then she sprinkles white powder where the parasite has nestled; it is supposed to discourage further unwelcome visitors. But a hundred more will fasten to Ginger on his journeys through the brush tomorrow; especially during dry season, there are always too many than can be killed. Our dog squirms beneath Lily's ministrations. Dissatisfied with our company, he is forever slinking from sight, losing us easily when we try to follow. Lily says Ginger hunts for the tail that was chopped off shortly after his birth as a boxer pup. ("It's the custom," our father informs us. "Something people do," Mitch adds weakly, when our puzzled faces request a better explanation.) Only the stump remains, scarcely enough to wag. One day Ginger will return home with his missing tail between his teeth—instead of the usual rats and snakes. Perhaps then he might become our loyal companion, our faithful friend, no longer prone to prolonged disappearances, or battles with other dogs that leave his torn ears permanent attractions for flies. "These ticks will drink all his blood," Lily tells me, not looking up from Ginger's coat. Lips pressed tightly together, she declines my invitation that we venture down the hill to the main road, where the sugar man sells his cane. If we sing something from Mary Poppins, he will give us as much as we can carry; all afternoon, we can chew the sugary, stringy meat his big machete has peeled, spit out a trail of exhausted pulp that shows where we wander through a Tanzanian translation of Hansel and Gretel's haunted forest. Still ignoring me, Lily moves her thin, freckled face nearer our dog's coat. She doesn't look up when a ripe pawpaw falls with a splitting thud from a nearby tree; within ten minutes its sweet flesh will swarm with ants which feed so ravenously you can almost hear the click of small, sharp teeth. Suddenly Lily loosens her legs and claps three times near Ginger's ears. He bounds away. My sister holds blood-stained hands to sky, squints at them with satisfaction. With broad, sweeping strokes, she paints her face with crosses; the marks are nearly the same color as the ochre earth. After the blood dries, Lily must be careful not to smile, or her face will crack.
Our dreamy father has few rules, all laxly enforced. Mitch forgets to check the correspondence lessons we are supposed to do each morning, and he doesn't remember about bedtime and brushing teeth and writing letters to our mother. Also overlooked is his law that we three children must stay close to each other. "There's strength in numbers," Mitch likes to points out. That we do sometimes play together, MJ and Lily and I, is strictly from necessity. There are no other children at the Catholic college—except for black ones who sing taunting rhymes to our backs, or throw bowls of white mush in our faces if we come too near. Mitch encourages us to explore as far and wide as we can, and doesn't express fear for our safety as long as we are home before dark. "Where did you go today?" he asks eagerly in evening, when secrets concealed during day come out to prowl in the darkness beyond the door. "What did you see?" We look at each other cautiously, select what Mitch can be told. Our ability to move as a trio across the disturbing landscape is often impaired because MJ has to lie with tightly closed eyes in bed. His head hurts. You can see veins beneath his brow beat with blood angrily trying to get out. When he comes home from teaching, Mitch will massage MJ's temples, rub his scalp with strong fingers. "It's just the heat," he says again. With MJ waiting to heal and rise, Lily loses what little loyalty she has to our broken group. I turn to see her nearly out of sight already, one of the old, pleated skirts donated by the nuns swishing around swiftly scissoring legs. When I try to follow, my sister walks more quickly; or she pushes me efficiently aside, as you brush away a branch or vine that blocks your path. I never know where Lily goes alone; upon returning, she will not tell me, deflects Mitch's inquiries neatly. I suspect she follows the trail that climbs above the college and twists through jungle to where the Ngondo River roars between the rocks. Up there the air is thin and cool, an element that feels alien to me, unsuitable for human lungs. And there birds cry too loudly, flowers bloom too boldly, the jungle looms too thick and dark. Lily meets Ginger by the river, I think. I never fear she might become lost up in the jungle; two years older than me, eleven, she can surely find her way back down with Ginger. They will arrive home when they are hungry, they will be home before dark. I believe that, like our dog, my sister searches for something severed from her shortly after birth. What exactly is it Lily hunts during dazed afternoons, when at the house below the only sounds are the ancient gardener's machete striking stones in the yard, the houseboy's croon as he wrings dripping clothes behind the kitchen, the whimper of MJ from his dim, painful room? What will Lily bear between her teeth when she returns?
I'm sure Mitch gave us a dog with the best intentions. "I had one when I was a boy," he says; then we hear once more about his tough Regina youth. Probably Mitch holds in his head some clear, focused photograph of three children frolicking with a happy pet. Caring for their dog, the children will learn responsibility; in turn, he acts as comrade and strengthens their number. Mitch doesn't seem to notice that from the start our attention to Ginger goes unreciprocated; we’re neither interesting nor necessary to our dog. We are unable to teach him to fetch or sit up, or to roll over and play dead. "He's getting big," Mitch observes happily, as within the kitchen door Ginger lifts his head at the bark of wild dogs in the distance. They bay at a rough beast who slouches through the night, says the houseboy. Our dog scratches to be let out, insists with claws until we give in and open the door. Returning the next morning, he will smell of something rotten, bad. Lily disregards the stink, picks more ticks from his coat, tries to brush it smooth. Perhaps things might have been different in a blander setting, without the scent of wild blood to lure our dog from us. Mitch's hopeful vision may have unfolded more perfectly against a background of neat lawns and fences, tidy sidewalks and maple trees. It was our father's fatal tendency to disregard the landscape upon which he set his fantasies. And to believe that as long as we reached home before dark, everything would be all right.
During those Morogoro years, Lily stands taller than MJ and myself, with hair hacked by Mitch into the shape of a bowl. (He enjoys playing barber, likes to shave mine and MJ's and his own head right to the scalp, pronounces pleasure in the cool results.) My sister's face is sharp, her new teeth grow in crooked, scabs always decorate her knees. I am not aware that other girls play dolls and house, or dress up in a mother's clothes; Lily doesn't mention such things. She likes to swim and run, and climbs the tops of trees. She enjoys silent activities, such as our visits to Father Joe, the college naturalist, who keeps guinea pigs and snakes. The biggest snake—a sly, old boa—doesn't like to eat when watched by curious children. You must be very still and patient to catch him strike at the guinea pig shivering at the far side of the cage. Lily stares hard as with a gulp the live meal is swallowed whole. Later, I will always envision my sister intently studying what lies right before her eyes, while MJ and I have to turn away. It seems to me that I was usually watching Lily rather than the world; she saw for all of us, I think. When at the prison farm they show us how a cow is slaughtered then skinned, Lily's eyes widen slightly; then they quickly narrow, seal the sight inside herself. Later, attempting to butcher the beef in our kitchen, Mitch scratches his head at a puzzle of sides and quarters, waves the saw through aromatic air, splashes in pools of blood. Lily labors alongside him, advises and suggests. From where I hover with MJ in the doorway, I believe I see her nostrils quiver as they inhale the stench of intestine, the stink of death.
While MJ sometimes tells stories about where we lived before Africa and what happened to us there, Lily refuses to discuss the past, and shows scant interest in what is not visible right now, either. MJ recalls the dancing goat on the island in Greece and the little one-armed girl in Spain; he describes our mother, Ardis, far away in Canada. "She has blond hair and red lips," MJ muses again, while without a word Lily wanders from our secret place beneath the lemon tree. We find her occupied with an army of marching ants. Two by two, in perfect, endless file, they move determinedly toward some distant destination we are only able to fathom. You can stir them with a stick or douse them with pails of water, but this interrupts their progress only for the moment it takes to scramble back into rank. MJ says the ants are returning home. I suggest maybe they are lost. Lily insists they are going to war. We agree that the ants can strip the flesh from a large beast's frame in seconds. Leave bones clean as a whistle in the blink of an eye.
"The nuns," cries MJ, in alarm. Before we can escape, a dozen of the Dutch sisters surround us; they seem always to appear almost out of nowhere, in the most unlikely locations. We see them filing solemnly across the golf course of the Morogoro Country Club in early morning, or clustered in the open back of a pick up whirling down the road. Moving with surprising swiftness, they encircle us again, flap their habits like black wings in our faces. For a long time, we are unable to distinguish one nun from another; their costumes lend them anonymity. Gradually we learn that Sister Bridgit is tall and thin, Sister Ingrid short and plump, Sister Elsa always flushed. They nod and cluck and pat our heads with concern; in guttural Dutch, they discuss us between themselves, seeming to search for a difficult problem's solution. Then they attempt several tentative sentences of severely accented English we can barely understand. "By the sea of Galilee," I think Sister Elsa says. MJ believes they are telling us to prepare for the Second Coming. Lily doesn't like the nuns; she won't look at them. From beneath their robes, like magicians, they pull skirts and blouses sent from Holland to clothe a little native girl. Lily accepts these gifts rudely, glaring at the ground. Finally the nuns sigh, pat our heads once more, turn toward their convent perched at the mission's highest point, where jungle begins its confusing tangle. Sometimes, on our way exploring, we pass the nunnery and hear voices sweetly raised in hymn. Rather than soothe, the song seems to add a jarring note to the setting, as if there is nothing in this air to receive such words of praise and thanks.
When Lily turns twelve, she begins to pick at her blouse, lifts the cloth that chafes her budding breasts. The unconsciously repeated gesture reminds me of the way Ginger violently shakes his head in a vain attempt to banish flies clustered on his bloody ears. The flaps aren't able to heal; his hind foot scratches them constantly raw. The houseboy is left to feed Ginger during our East African safaris, and when we make a longer trip because Mitch decides it’s necessary for us to see the pyramids and Sphinx without delay. During our third year in Tanzania, Ginger isn’t there when we return to the cement-block house, only shows up three days later. The next time, he is gone two weeks. After that, he comes less and less frequently around; between visits, I forget the shape of his nose, the color of his eyes. Sometimes we spy him in the distance, among the pack of wild dogs that makes wide-ranging expeditions through the area. They run in a loose cluster, noses near the ground, direction determined by invisible forces, snarling at each other. Then Ginger refuses ever to come when called; he has forgotten his name, I think. "Leave him alone," says Lily, turning away. "It was a stupid name anyway. He never was the color ginger." Though Mitch seems unaware of our dog's increasing absence, he does appear to sense that things are not the same for us, tries to put a finger on it. "Do you have everything you need?" he asks abruptly once. Our father seems less confident that he holds just the right solution for each of life's hands like a wild card up his sleeve, inquires less brightly at evening about where we have been that day. Perhaps Lily causes him particular unease; his eyes ponder her, glide away. He suggests she spend time with Prima, the stylish young East Indian woman who lives in the house below ours. Lily stares at him. "Why?" she finally asks. Mitch rubs his head, glances at his watch, hums. Suddenly, his fingers snap. "Chess!" he exclaims. "Which of you kids thinks he's smart enough to beat the old man?"
People begin to say the wild dogs are getting out of hand as their pack grows larger. No longer skulking warily at safe distance, they become bolder, more threatening. They circle and howl around a house all night, trapping its sleepless inhabitants inside. They kill chickens in the village by the college. More than actual damage or harm, they cause disturbance, fear. "Rabies," it is muttered. Africans want to get rid of the wild dogs with axes and machetes. Our houseboy says they are evil spirits risen from centuries of tortured sleep. They are demons escaped from nightmare. One night, we listen to the wild dogs tear Prima's pet colobus apart. "Go back to sleep," says Mitch, a black shape in the bedroom door. The monkey's screams die; in his bed between Lily's and mine, MJ moans. His headaches have grown worse, though the Morogoro doctor, a proud graduate of the Bombay Institute of Dental Hygiene, promised he would grow out of them. Lily slips from bed and stands before the window, presses her face against the wire-mesh screen that is supposed to keep out snakes. "What are you doing?" I ask. Lily's nightdress, another gift from the good Dutch nuns, falls too short around her thin, scratched legs. It gleams in the darkness. "Where are you going?" I whisper, as my sister's bare feet pad from the room. I hear the kitchen door click open, then shut. In my safe, hot bed, I fall asleep, while Lily searches for secrets contained within the mutilated carcass of a monkey. I dream her eyes burn yellow in the darkness, her mouth froths white, thick blood smears her nose.
What did I see, what did I dream? Later, I will never know for certain if I glimpsed Lily poised at the edge of the sisal field below the college, a circle of wild dogs dancing around her, leaping up to snap at her face. Back straight and arms folded across her chest, she stands still amid the whirling beasts. Do her lips move? Is she speaking to the dogs? All at once she turns on her heels and runs from the writhing ring. The dogs take after her, barking madly; they are hunting Lily or they are following Lily. The pack enters the sisal that grows taller than my sister. All I can see is dense green field, with no hint what it contains, unfolding still and calm before me. Troubling my eyes.
Finally we return to Canada and to our mother, who manages to stay out of the clinic as long as she takes her Lithium. None of us speaks about Morogoro much. Mitch seems disappointed that we are not grateful for his gift of an exotic experience. My father's efforts to settle down in the small BC town are at best half-hearted; his temper grows uncharacteristically short. In five years, he will go away again. This time alone, this time for good. Lily refuses to remember anything about Africa; she barely admits we lived there. In Brale, BC, my sister says she can't recall our chameleon with the leash of string around its neck or our hunts for frogs in the gutters above the college church. Or seeing the Milky Way creamed above the Serengeti when, in the middle of a night drive home, Mitch stops the car and insists we climb out to view the sky. "The stars are closer when you're in Africa," he tells us. I believe that still, as I continue to believe in many of my father's patent untruths. But Lily denied knowledge of the shape formed by a baobab against Arusha sky and the shriek of a colobus when you pass beneath its jungle perch. In Brale, she wears a disguise of make up and drinks home-made wine with Italian boys down by the Columbia River. Now her hair hangs long, covering her eyes. From beneath bangs, Lily watches Ardis warily, sniffs at our mother from safe distance, tries to determine if this stranger poses danger. "Go back to the loony bin where you belong," she snarls, when told by Ardis to be home before dark. Our mother retreats behind the closed door of her room again; in the basement, MJ watches another hour of TV. Despite a battery of tests and medications, his headaches are never diagnosed or treated with success; in cold Canada, they are clearly due to more than just the heat. MJ is unable to attend high school frequently enough to graduate. At eighteen, he disappears on his way to Montreal, where he was headed to look for work. I think he couldn't stand for us to see the veins still throbbing with angry blood beneath his brow. He needed to lose Africa, to lose us. I continued to believe that a dark continent lay concealed just beneath our skin. A sharp knife could peel away a layer to uncover the rich taste of mango, smells of charcoal and dust and rotting fruit, the mocking laughter of hyenas in the night.
Perhaps Lily was seeking such things when she used the razor on herself. By then—like MJ, like Mitch—I had left the haunted house beneath the reeling crows, below a white sift of icy powder. We went our separate ways, abandoned the possibility that safety lies in numbers. Only Ardis would remain in Brale when Lily entered the regional hospital's psychiatric wing. ("Jesus," Mitch wrote to me in London. "We should have the family name engraved on the place.") During the next three years, while Lily stayed stubbornly silent at the far side of the world, I would sometimes think of Ginger. By the time we left Morogoro, he had become one of the wild dogs entirely, no longer ours at all. He never came to the cement-block house even to snarl over a plate of bones; his teeth would have sunk into our hands if we reached out to pet him. Once we heard disease had swept through the pack of dogs. For a while, their number did seem smaller; then they appeared as populous as before. Several times, in the car, we might have seen Ginger loping along the ditch beside the road. We weren't sure. I said yes; Lily disagreed. "He's dead," she flatly stated. "He died a long time ago." When I finally heard from Lily, she said she had found Jesus. Intermittently, He allowed her to leave the clinic and live with Ardis in the Columbia Avenue house below; then the burden of sin would drive my sister back to her cold white room upon the hill. I couldn't help but imagine Jesus wandering lost amid the bamboo shoots beside the Ngondo River, impractical white robes tangled in vines and roots, waiting for Lily to find Him and to bring Him home before dark. My sister wouldn't see me when I visited Brale in 1986 and 1988, on each occasion retreated into the hospital just before my arrival and remained incommunicado there until I left. On my return to Europe and then North Africa, she sent me poorly printed religious tracts and urged me to save myself before it was too late. Through postcards mailed to me from Thailand and Indonesia and Tibet, I understood that Mitch also received warnings of a Second Coming. Apparently, his strategy to avoid the final judgment involves fleeing ever farther from its reach. And mine? Today, in Morocco, skeletal dogs haunt my step, whine in my ear; the market teems with icons whose obscure shapes tug my mind. The mosque bell clangs hollowly just before dusk; below my balcony, the street suddenly fills with believers scurrying home before dark. Night creeps into the derbs of El Jadida, descends on barren desert beyond. Stars rise in the sky. "They're closer when you're in Africa," I used to write to Lily. With Ardis and Jesus and medication, beside the Columbia River's frigid sweep, she attempts to stitch calm years out of cleaning and dusting and other careful rituals. The last time I heard from Lily, she enclosed a photograph. I couldn't recognize the woman with puffy face devoid of freckles, with hair pinned into a neat bun, with untroubled eyes. Lily looks into the camera without smiling, as if afraid her face will crack. As if parted lips would allow a wild dog's howl to swell the air.
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