It is evening now, the brief span of time when sunset paints the sky in bright, hot colors, shades from salmon to crimson in wavering striations, edged a dark and tarnished gold along the bottom and deep, plumy blue-black where the upper limits of the horizon melt into the deepest reaches of interstellar void. There are no clouds tonight and so the stars are showing, one by one, the bright white constellations shining down like holes in space interrupted at their lower extremity by the twisted, full-leafed branches of boab and mangrove interspersed with the occasional small-foliaged oak.
This time, the day’s last phase, is always brief, as though even such atmospheric blooms as this cannot last long in this much heat, wilting away into blackness, complete after only a very few minutes. Things fade fast here, losing whatever beauty they have after lives brutal and brief, but oh, when there is life it is good indeed, flaring up, intensely epigrammatic as an alcohol fire igniting in an airless room.
David is out walking now, in air less boiling than in the heat of day, though never here precisely cool. He is on his way to visit the members of his parish too sick or feeble to come into his office to see him. The sick are mainly women, their illness described by their husbands, depending on the amount of affection remaining in the relationship, if ever there was any, as either ‘a bit punkish’ or ‘she’s malingering again. Could work like a mule if she wanted.’
Though there is a doctor still in town, most of these men would never think to call him for their children or their wives. Sawbones are good for when you get the gangrene infection from a hunting cut wet through by the swamp or when you accidentally trap your leg in one of the small boys’ clamp-down raccoon traps, not for muley little woman’s illnesses.
The symptoms range from sunken-eyed exhaustion to thin cheeks and blood-coughing (accompanied by a peculiar smell) that seems to be contracted purely by luck, drinking bad water or breathing foul air. The first group have a high rate of recovery, after a few days’ rest, provided they can achieve some peace when the men are in the room, ordering them up to wash and cook and fetch. The second never seem to linger very long, they snuff out quickly, like flames without fuel, sweating out blood, thei
