CHAPTER SIX #2
“Bilong yu et bed! Et bed!” A tiny, but ferocious lady scrambled the rest of the way up a ladder.
She wore a sleeveless tan tunic cut at the knee, with an embroidered beaded belt around her tiny waist. She carried a basket on her hip and the smell of food caused my mouth to water, this time not from nausea, but hunger.
I allowed Granny—because that’s what she must be—to usher me back to the bed, the burlap lumpy with whatever filled the crude mattress.
She pulled the stool over and emptied the contents of her basket—steamed sweet potato, green herbs, and pineapple. She spread it all out on a large green leaf on the bed in front of me.
“Now, you must e’t,” she said, clearly pleased with herself at the feast she had prepared.
“You speak English?” I asked, surprised and delighted.
“Oh, ya, but a story for anudder time,” Granny croaked, waving her hands in dismissal. “How’s yu head?”
I reached for the back of my head, feeling the sticky substance ratted into my hair.
“You…did you bandage me?”
“Yesa, mine own recipe for healing wounds, now e’t!” She gestured wildly at the food.
I ate as Granny stooped over me to examine my head.
“Do you know where I am?” I said with a full mouth of warm sweet potato, “Do you…do you know how I got here?”
“Oh, pikinini, you do not remember?” Granny’s eyes, the color of coal set deep inside a delicate but heavily creased face, gave me a growing sense of comfort. I shook my head.
“You among the tree-dwellers, de Hundi.”
“But…why am I here?”
Granny shook her own head. “Mimbeck said de found you in de jungle, brought you back.”
Back? So I’ve been here before? I pushed my mind to remember, but all I got was a dull headache, and my eyes burned with angry tears.
“Where is this Mimbeck? I think I would like to ask him some questions.”
“Ohh, hesaround, but we first musta get you to wash. Smel u no gut!”
I lifted my arm slightly, sniffing my body odor.
Granny was right, ‘smell you no good.’
Sufficiently fed, I gingerly followed Granny down the bamboo ladder of the tree house and noticed a dozen or so other structures, all built somewhat precariously on stilts, or embedded into the trunks of the trees, at least ten, to twenty feet in the air.
It was a most peculiar sight. A village of tree-dwellers.
Now looking up at my new dwelling from the outside, I wasn’t sure if I’d feel safe enough to climb the homemade ladder again and sleep for the night. Thankfully, it was morning.
A cool breeze swept past us as we walked down a well-trodden dirt path through dense jungle foliage.
There were other houses closer to the ground but still built on stilts that kept them off the soft earth.
Tidy, knee-high hedges seperated the dwellings from each other as well as small gardens neatly fenced with bamboo.
Semi-naked children stopped to stare. Women in dresses printed with elaborate designs, clustered around morning cook fires. All the motion stopped and I felt dozen’s of eyes on me as I passed, and picked up my pace to keep up with Granny.
“They are afraid of me,” I said, swinging around and watch them settle back into their routine.
“They never see waitmeri before,” replied Granny as we passed a group of men, clad only in thongs, a dried vegetable gourd or a small piece of cloth covering their male anatomy.
They were painted from head-to-toe in an ashy gray substance, and I stopped, gaping at them with an odd feeling.
Granny was at my elbow, steering me away, saying something to the men in their native tongue and then speaking to me as we continued walking.
“I’m sorry. What did you say? Those men… ”
“Mimbeck will have been meeting with Jahnu. We go this way, to the river.”
We stopped at Sali’s hut to gather toiletries—a rough bar of soap she called soap weed, “made from the yucca,” she explained, and a narrow bamboo stick smashed and frayed at the top until it looked like bristles. “It’s the chew stick…for teeth,” Sali explained, tapping her old red-tinged teeth.
We threaded our way through more vegetation, winding through treehouses sprinkled among the village and came out to a clearing.
The sight took my breath away. We were on top of the jungle.
I could see miles of lush green, black, and purple rolling mountains and in the distance, the sparkle of aqua that was the ocean.
Fog settled among the trees like ghosts of the jungle that had come to haunt the night and forgot to leave when daylight dawned. I shivered at the breeze.
I felt a strange sense of settledness that left me feeling grounded. This place wasn’t familiar, but it was peaceful. The beauty of the surroundings temporarily distracted me from the fact that I still had no idea where I was, or why. Oddly, the thought left me feeling more curious than scared.
Granny’s cool hand touched my forearm, pulling me back to the present.
“We keep away from all others up here in de highlands,” she said softly.
“But others don’t always keep away from us, so we havta do what we can to stay alive.
” I took in her wizened face. She had been beautiful once—that was clear to see.
Her eyes were still sharp, black, but with a hopeful sparkle.
The crows feet and drooping bags were deeply creased and her ebony color, beautiful.
Granny led me the rest of the way to a large stream gushing quickly down a grass covered hill. The water was cool, but not cold, a refreshing reprieve from the quickly growing heat of the morning. I stood, ankle deep, as Granny tried to help me undress.
“I think I can manage on my own, if you don’t mind?”
The old woman grunted but allowed me to peel away my shirt and pants and bathe in my underwear.
I saw the woman’s veiled curiosity at my semi-naked body.
I’d always been big-busted for my size, and had to have special bras since my waist and back were small and my breasts large.
What I would give now to rip the sweat-soaked thing off and feel the cool water surrounding me completely.
I settled for a quick rinse as Granny took my clothes and rinsed them while I splashed the cool water over my bug-bitten arms and legs.
“Let me take out the bandage,” the old woman said, returning, and I sat in the river bed and allowed her to gently remove the sticky leaves and rinse my hair clean.
I stiffened as the cool water hit the gash at the back of my head, but slowly the pain subsided and the pleasure of rinsing my hair soothed me.
Now properly bathed and drying in the sun, I allowed my mind to broach the subject I’d pushed down since waking in the rickety treehouse.
Why couldn’t I remember anything? A traumatic brain injury could cause post-traumatic amnesia where the brain doesn’t actually store the memories surrounding the incident—but then, how did I know that information?
There was a knowledge supplying itself to my thoughts like the trickle of a small stream in a dry river bed.
I allowed it to flow and rise, hoping it might give me something to orient myself in the vast desert of my brain.
This place. It didn’t surprise me to be here in the obvious jungle, among people who were obviously not like me.
So have I been here before, or at least was I here for a purpose?
I remembered that I did stuff like this.
Flying on a plane to far away places for adventure—no, that’s not the right word.
For a mission my brain supplied the word and flickers of memory flashed through my mind like the slides of a projector.
Sarah and I played with the orphan kids in Mexico, painting, building projects, serving food at the mission outpost when we were in high school. I came to places like this for a mission! I must be here for that reason.
Granny wrung out my clothes and laid them flat on the grass to dry, breaking my frustrated and incomplete thought pattern.
“Am I here on a mission… am I…am I helping you?”
The woman’s cackling laugh surprised me. She rocked back and forth on her knees in her hilarity, obviously privy to a joke that was lost on me.
“That what he said when I meet him! ‘We are here to help you’” she mimicked in a deeper voice.
Granny continued to laugh, wiping spit away from her mouth with the back of her hand, as I stared dumbfounded. “My maritman—my uh…husband. He was a missionary. Come to de island fifty year ago, like you.”
“Your husband? Was a mission man, like me? He…he was an American?”
“Ye, ye, ye,” Granny said, her grin fading. “He died…twelve years ago…” she looked out across the river bed.
“Oh, I’m sorry. So he stayed? He lived here with you?” I ventured.
“He became Hundi…for me.” The silence stretched between us for a long moment.
“Is that how you learned English?” I asked gently. “Did your husband teach you?”
“Robert… he taught many Hundi de English speak, but some do not want to learn,” she added.
I was thoughtful for a moment. The sun felt good on my bare skin and I had briefly forgotten that I was sitting in the sand in only my bra and underwear.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Nem bilong mi—” she stopped herself and started again, finding the English words. My name is Salikon Angara. Robert called me Sali. You call me Sali.”
“Sali, I’m Sidney. Thank you for taking care of me, but I need to find out where I am and who I am with. Can you help me?”
“Mimbeck will know!” she said, rising and shaking out my damp clothes, handing them to me. “Come!”
The sun still lingered in the east, but was making its intentions of heating up the day known by the sweat rolling down my back.
I looked down at my wrist—why did I do that?
I had a pronounced tan-line in the shape of a watch, and absent-mindedly rubbed the area with my other hand as Sali and I traversed through the overgrown paths that led back into the village.
“Jahnu is chief of Hundi. Mimbeck leader of the warriors. There is conflict happening. Fighting. Some don’t come back.”