Free Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris Page A

wildly, looking out of the window. “Was a terrible fall. You hear anything?”
    “Impossible,” his mother rebuked him. “You couldn’t haveheard that infant heart beating so small and long ago … three or four months ago….”
    “I hear it,” Carroll insisted and his voice fell and broke into two again.
    His mother smiled as if she had forgotten him. “Maybe is true,” she said, “I hear it too.” She rubbed herself gently on her belly.
    “You‚” Carroll shot at her.
    “Yes‚” she caught herself. His eyes probed hers deep. She spoke like one seeking forgiveness. “I am with child for your stepfather too‚” she expressed herself awkwardly. Her voice broke into two like his. “My first child under his roof after so long and I getting old….”
    Carroll nodded his head dumbly. “Is the child as old as…?” he choked with alarm and fear.
    “Yes‚” she nodded.
    “A boy or a girl?” he asked foolishly.
    “Was a boy‚” she said. “I saw.” They were at cross purposes. “If you go and come back you will find the child,” she sighed.
    “His child borning and mine dead,” he spoke passionately, forgetting to whom he spoke.
    “No,” his mother said sharply. “Is all one in the long run. You can make peace between us….”
    “And go?” he demanded. He was crying. Suddenly he knew he did not want the child in her to live. A heart-rending spasm overwhelmed him, all ancestral hate and fear and jealousy.
    “You are my child always,” his mother spoke softly. Her lips twisted again. “You must live and go. Is your own will if you stay to rot and die since you will start to imagine foolish things. Go I tell you.” She spoke softly again.
    Carroll ran out of the house blindly towards the cabin in the woods where Tiny, the Vigilance sister, lay. She looked old and sad lying there he thought, wrinkled in his imagination. He saw her as an old woman in the future, wrinkled andwise, the memory of her mythical incestuous child come again – living and strong as life. It was as if he came to his spiritual mother at last, and the effect of his child’s death had sealed and saved the maternal pregnancy and womb beyond all jealousy and fear and doubt.
    Carroll’s mother looked up suddenly with a sense of unexplored and inexplicable joy. She was startled when she saw Vigilance. “You here?” she cried. “How long you been listening?”
    Vigilance nodded dumbly. He did not know what to say. He knew that the child she carried for his father would live, and bear the eyes of the living and the dead. He felt drawn towards it as towards a child of his own.
    “You are free to go too, and this time take him with you for ever when you go,” his stepmother addressed him with a curious blessing smile.
     

VIII
    We stood on the frontiers of the known world, and on the selfsame threshold of the unknown.
    Schomburgh was dead. He had died peacefully in his hammock and in his sleep.
    The old crumpled Arawak woman had advised us the evening of the day before where to stop and camp for the night. It was too late she said (Schomburgh interpreting) to venture into the nameless rapids that seethed and boiled before us.
    We buried Schomburgh at the foot of the broken water whose agitation was witness of the forces that lay ahead.
    Carroll was dead. Schomburgh was dead. One death, a cross for father and son. They had been ghosts to each other in the limited way a man grasped reality. Schomburgh often inhabited Carroll’s shoes running from and towards his love the day it was born and had died. Carroll often listened, almost worshipping the hoax of death and age and sin in Schomburgh’s boots, like a child prematurely stricken and old with the passage of mortal conception and thought. It had been an enormous endless growing pain and fantasy – rich with the wealth of unexplored possibilities – all over and done with and secure. They had sown and won a great liberal fortune for the whole world though the full