Was it a statistical hoax, or caveat, or illumination of the fraud perpetrated on the Bank of America of which Jonah Jones was accused by the Police?
Eventually Jones’s suspicions were aroused that the huntsman was some kind of underground agent. He sent him packing straightaway. He did not relish such a warning to his flock. I had not understood or perceived the warning myself — executed it seemed now with a curiously dismembered hand — until I followed the huntsman through the door in the Wheel … The dog or the lamb at his heels invoked the invaluable life of the species of genesis. Nobody’s dog, Nobody’s lamb, imbued the huntsman’s pace, the latitude of his grasp, with a watchful eye for all species, care, scrupulous measure of instinct to put numinous flesh in the shape of living masks, plucked from Carnival Lord Death, upon the Bone of wasted lives that survivors of holocaust harbour in themselves.
*
Space was intrinsic to re-visionary narratives of changed time. I followed the huntsman and his dog or lamb in the music of space into the elusive foundations of Jonestown which lay, I knew, in the hidden vistas of modern and pre-Columbian civilizations.
We were walking in two forests, parallel forests, parallel universes. I shook myself at the thought of such trespass.
We were on the margins of Jonestown (or Jonah City) …
I concentrated on the silvery-grey bark of tall, skyscraper greenheart out of which the Port Mourant hospital had been built and which we employed in the construction of Jonestown in the 1970s up to 1978.
A delicate balance needed to be struck, a delicate clock of space, ticking space. The Reverend Jonah Jones was insistent that the treasury of the lofty trees — in which Jonestown was set — must be nurtured even as we made use of it. He had — to give him credit — issued the strictest instructions of which Deacon and I approved. For a Forest is akin to a Bomb. When it blows apart birds cease to sing.
‘It is Spring 1978,’ I said to the huntsman. ‘The prospects look blight for the new town.’
The giant leaf of parallel ages shivered under my feet, whispered.
The shadow of the grave with its rubbled door through which we had come cracked a vein in my mind within the music of the raining, sun-bathed leaves settling on the ground like a pillow resembling stone.
I heard the shivering leaf again and remembered how I had ignored it in the future from which I had come. I had ignored its intervention in seeking to warn me of the poisoned cup against the shattered lips of the woman in the Clearing; in seeking to warn me of the shaking bushes as well in which I hid from Jones.
The Forest opened all at once and we had arrived at the edge of a sawyers’ pit. Stalwart sawyers they seemed in the raining shadow and light of the leaves as they sliced limbs and planks from the fallen living body of trees.
I felt the sawyers’ living breath upon me in the lungs of the trees.
There were three pairs of active sawyers in the long wide pit to which I had come. Each pair operated a formidable saw with rhythmic precision.
A faintly mesmeric and profound shadow of music — sprung from the huntsman’s horn in a tree — enveloped the sawyers and myself.
Mr Mageye whispered that this was a portent of my remarriage to the people of Jonestown.
The sawn timber echoed the sound and dismemberment, the depth of dismemberment, of ancient tree-gods in the service of humanity.
They (those tree-gods) shone with the mysterious, alarming light of aroused flesh-and-blood, trembling flesh-and-blood wood that steamed, it seemed, as it arose from the pit.
The light in the incalculable glow and gloom of the Forest seemed to boil everywhere within the pit, within the noises of bustling Jonestown that one could hear through curtains of leaves, bustling Jonestown arisen from its grave; it floated within and above the implements that the sawyers used like a mist in vein and artery to be traced in trunk or tool or body. It seemed to differentiate inwardly and outwardly — as it flocked within the sawyers’ arms — a range of perverse resurrections within an alchemy of true resurrections in our apprehension of the daily tasks that we perform and the materials that we use …
The timber and limbs and sawn material stacked beside the pit possessed an uncanny patience. Yes, they were the gift of the tree-gods to Jonestown. One legend has it that the Creator created Man from dust.
Dust — when it arises into archetypal bodies and branches and horns and flutes — embraces tree-god wood as much as live, fossil stone or pillow of rock. Beds, chairs, desks, walls, windows are patient receptacles for flesh to lie upon, or move within, in its arousal from dust. Thus the equation between tree-god wood and flesh (animal and human) is shaped upon intangible frontiers between inanimate and animate, legendary worlds and ages …
Those frontiers secrete different pulses, different rhythms, and the pulse of the inanimate (however apparently remote or hidden) is as real as the pulse of animal creatures … One is possessed by shock when one flees from the dead and discovers a measure of disguise they possess in instruments and furniture that one had long ignored as passive features of nothingness. That shock is implicit in the shadow of music upon frontiers of being and non-being that begin to levitate and change places. I remembered the Day of the Dead when I arose from the bushes and fled into the Night of the Forest.
I remembered the bodies piled everywhere from which I fled.
I remembered their effort to dance to shadow music in the leaves of the whispering Forest, shadow orchestra of dust, as they half-crouched, half-lay, half-stood leaning against a wall, half-knelt with their head in the flattened bowl of the sun.
I remembered the black-lit grave yawning at the heart of the Night when I came upon the sawyers’ pit. The sawyers had fled. There was a glowing lantern in the pit or I would have fallen headlong into it. I paused at the edge with beating heart. Tools, garments of all shapes and colours, were scattered helter-skelter in the pit. The bodies that I had seen in the flat bowl of the sun lay here as well in the circling lantern light as the wind blew. Their heels were chiselled, their ankles were bolts and nuts, and their brow of the sun — the windblown, flattened, shadowy, bowl of the sun — addressed them as awakening lantern light, in the pit, anticipating my return to bustling Jonestown in the middle of the day.
I could not however quite rid myself of the memory of the grave into which I had come so close to falling in November 1978.
I could not quite rid myself of ‘middle of the night’ November 1978 — when I came close to falling into the sawyers’ pit — though I knew I had returned to ‘middle of the day’ Tropical Spring in the selfsame year. I stood on the frontier between shapes of time, past future, future present.
I prided myself that I had not fallen in the ‘middle of the night’ and yet on that frontier between ‘middle of the day’ and ‘middle of the night’ I sensed another shape to myself that had fallen.
That shape was a key I felt to unlocking another door into Jonestown, a key that the huntsman provided. He had been there in that ‘middle of the night’ and had caught the other shape of myself that fell.
‘Your skeleton-twin!’ Mr Mageye whispered. ‘You need that twin to orchestrate Bone — the Bone or survivor that you are — into the Carnival news of a further re-entry into Jonestown.
‘On that day of the holocaust you survived, Francisco Bone, but something integral to the fabric of yourself remained behind within the trauma of the grave. A skeleton-twin! You saw it fall though you did not fall! You saw the gleaming net (or perhaps it is visible only now in the “middle of the day”) that held it as it fell. Held it to return it to you as a companion-key to coming events (or past events?) as you tread a frontier between shapes of time.’