Free A Fool's Knot by Philip Spires Page B

of complications one would only associate with a chemical poison of some sort. If this was true, then the boy had been deliberately poisoned. He had scratches over his thighs. They were not deep, but each one had become red and inflamed with pustules that reminded her of nettle stings. And the effect seemed to be spreading. She tried a number of treatments which seemed to work for a while, but then the inflammation returned.
    And then one of her junior nurses suggested that she knew the problem and knew a cure. Much to Sister’s fascination, the nurse went off into the bush for an hour and came back with a bagful of leaves. These she steeped in milk and then applied the infusion to the affected area, repeating the process every hour or so. In a day the redness had gone. After another day the pustules vanished and by the next the boy was cured. Sister Mary asked the nurse to explain the process. The young girl did not have enough English vocabulary to communicate the details, so she led Sister by the hand out of the hospital and along the road for a few hundred yards where a large patch of succulents grew amongst rocks. This was the plant, the nurse explained. She described its white sap that could be dried and made into a poison. It was used to poison hunter’s arrows, being applied as a sticky resin to the barbs that were shaved back just behind the small head. The pin-like barbs always made a graze on the animal’s skin, even when the arrowhead itself did not pierce the hide. If the hunter waited and followed the animal, the poison would work into the wound and slow it down within a couple of hours, so that he could finish it off. Because the barbs were sharp, the nurse told her, the hunters themselves were always pricking their fingers and so regularly poisoned themselves. But there was an antidote, which was the infusion of leaves and milk she had used on Mwangangi. Sister asked her if the poisoning could have been an accident. She said it might be possible.
    The boy’s health did return. When Father John O’Hara paid his visits, Sister would make sure that he was fully briefed on what had happened, that the boy had been poisoned and that without the contribution of the young nurse his condition might have got much worse. “The only thing that matters is that he’s getting better, thanks be to God,” was O’Hara’s only comment. Privately, however, he was wrestling with what to do when the time came to reunite the boy with his family and his father.
    After two weeks in hospital, Mwangangi was discharged and returned to Migwani on John O’Hara’s motorcycle. The boy himself had only a suspicion that his illness had been deliberately caused by his father, but he knew he had done wrong and he accepted that he deserved to be punished. What he did not understand was how severe that punishment might have been had it not been for the contribution of a young nurse, whose name he would not remember. Father John O’Hara, who made a second trip to the hospital to collect the boy, was apprehensive about what would happen when he took the boy home, so much so that he had already made enquiries and drawn up a plan as to what he should do if Musyoka would not readmit him into the family.
    They stopped on the way at the mission in Migwani, where Father John and Mwangangi sat and talked about the future. First there was his postponed baptism into the Church. John asked him a couple of questions to test his knowledge of the catechism. They were answered perfectly and in full, of course, the boy explaining that he had used his time in hospital to do some extra study from the copy that Father John had given him on his first visit. The boy explained further that he had been very bored in hospital. Having nothing else to do, he had memorised the book. John O’Hara laughed at this, but then began to realise that the boy was serious. He chose two paragraphs at random, prompting Mwangangi