Chapter Eight #2
Realizing that the contest is lost, the watching Indians fall silent, and as Shaw squeezes harder still and the helpless suitor starts to grunt and choke, they murmur unhappily to each other and look concerned.
Shaw won’t kill his opponent, Hearn thinks as he looks on, because that would cause us too much trouble and upset, but he wants them all to understand that if he wished to do it, he could.
That the choice of life and death, even out here, is not theirs but his and his alone.
Shaw smiles and looks about teasingly as if daring the other men to try to stop him.
Then, when the suitor’s desperate plaints have shrunk to almost nothing, he leans down to whisper some final sweetness into his ear, steps aside, releases his grip, and lets the limp and steaming body drop back to earth.
Once the victory is complete and the half-conscious suitor is being helped away by his friends, Datsanthi and Shaw, like two old farmers dickering for a ram, crouch down together by the blazing fire to settle on the nature of his prize.
They talk to each other softly and without rancor, taking turns to speak and listen, and when their bartering is concluded and a satisfactory agreement has been reached, they stand up and shake hands.
Datsanthi, feeling that he has done all he can and that now it is up to Nabayah to understand and accept, walks back to their tent to talk to his son.
“Listen to me, lad,” he says when he finds him there alone, laying his hand on Nabayah’s shoulder and pulling him close.
“There’s no shame in this, none at all, so don’t imagine there is.
It’s a piece of misfortune, nothing more, and when tonight is done, we won’t speak of it again and no one else need know. ”
“What’s Shaw asking for?” he says.
“He wanted two nights with her, but I beat him down to just one.”
Nabayah is still cradling his left arm near the elbow where the muscles are torn. Dry blood is smeared across his neck and his ear. He looks dazed and distracted still, as if his mind is too full of tumbling thoughts to take in what his father is saying.
“I’m a hunter,” he says, “not a wrestler. That’s the only reason I was beaten.”
“Of course you are. No one can argue with that. What happened today means nothing at all.”
“We shouldn’t have stayed here when we saw the others. I knew they couldn’t be trusted.”
“You can blame me for that part,” Datsanthi admits. “That was my mistake, and I regret it now. I thought they were honest and decent folk, but I was wrong.”
Nabayah moves his arm an inch and breathes out slowly.
“I didn’t ask John Shaw to interfere,” he says. “I never asked for help, so why should I give him anything at all?”
Datsanthi lets go of Nabayah’s shoulder and looks at him more carefully.
“Without Shaw, you would have lost her altogether,” he says. “Think of it like that.”
Nabayah’s face changes, and for a moment the air between them seems to chill and thicken.
“Don’t ask me to be grateful,” he says. “Don’t ask me for that.”
“I’m not expecting gratitude, but you have to understand.”
“I’d rather lose that bitch forever than have to take her back besmirched.”
“Besmirched? No, that’s not the right way to think. Don’t be foolish,” Datsanthi says. “It’s like I told you just now: This is something to get past and then forget. When we leave here tomorrow, that will be the end of it.”
“And how can I forget when I see that preening bastard every single day?”
Datsanthi sighs but tries to stay patient.
He is telling his son the simple truth—that it’s a poor piece of luck but can’t be helped, and what can’t be helped must be suffered—but what he gets back from Nabayah, as usual, he thinks, is this stubbornness, this furious desire always to find and bear a grudge.
“Don’t make this any worse than it needs to be,” he says.
“That’s what I mean. I know you have your pride, like any man, and a defeat like this is hard to swallow, but Keasik is a good and loyal wife and what happened here doesn’t change that fact.
You’ve both suffered an injury today, but I can promise you it does no good to cling to your troubles.
If you scratch at a wound like this one, then it will only bleed more, but if you let it be, then in time it will heal. ”
He expects Nabayah to carry on arguing, but instead he goes quiet, eyes lowered to the ground, thinking or brooding, and when he looks up again the expression on his face is altered.
It’s more resigned than angry, Datsanthi thinks, and seeing the change, he wonders if it’s possible that his troublesome son may actually, this once, accept a friendly piece of advice in the spirit in which it is offered and not, as usual, cast it aside in disgust and then go off on his own and do something wild or reckless that rebounds on them all.
“It’s just tonight,” Datsanthi says again as gently as he can manage. “Then it’s over. And what difference does one night really make?”