A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 170

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Claudia came to them and went down on one knee beside Sean.

She reached out to touch his shoulder and searched desperately for something to say, but there were no words and she stopped her hand before she touched him. Sean was oblivious of her and everything else around him.

His grief was so terrible that she felt she should not watch it. It was too private, too vulnerable, and yet she could not tear her eyes from his face. Her own feelings were entirely overshadowed by the magnitude of Sean's sorrow. She had developed a deep affection for Job, but it was as nothing compared to the love she now saw laid naked before her.

It was as though that pistol shot had destroyed a part of Sean himself, and she experienced no sense of shock or surprise when he began to weep. Still holding Job in his arms, Sean felt the last involuntary tremors of dying nerves and muscle grow still and the first chill of death sap the heat from this body he hugged so tightly to his chest.

The tears seemed to well up from deep inside of Sean. They came up painfully, burning all the way, scalding his eyelids when at last they forced their way between them and rolled slowly down his darkly weathered cheeks into his beard.

Even Alphonso could. not watch it. He stood up and walked away into the thorn scrhb, but Claudia could not move. She went on kneeling beside Stan, and her own tears rose in sympathy with his. Together they wept for Job.

Matatu had heard the shot from a mile out, where he was guarding their rear, lying up on their back-spoor to watch for a following patrol. He came in quickly and from the bush at the perimeter of the camp watched for only a few seconds before he deduced exactly what had happened. Then he crept in quietly and crouched behind Sean. Like Claudia, he respected Sean's mourning, waiting for him to master its first unbearably bitter pangs.

Sean spoke at last, without looking round, without opening his eyes.

"Matatu," he said.

"N,&,.0w,="Go and find the burial place. We have neither tools nor time to dig a grave, yet he is a Matabele and he must be buried sitting up, facing the direction of the rising sun."

"Ndio, Bwana. " Matatu slipped away into the darkling forest.

At last Sean opened his eyes and laid Job gently back upon the gray wool blanket. His voice was steady, almost conversational.

"Traditionally we should bury him in the center of his own cattle kraal." He wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand and went on quietly, "But we are wanderers, Job and I, he had no kraal nor cattle to call his own."

She was not certain Sean was speaking to her, but she replied, "The wild game were his cattle, and the wilderness his kraal. He will be content here."

Sean nodded, still without looking at her. "I am grateful that you understand."

He reached down and closed Job's eyelids. His face was undamaged except for the chips from his front teeth, and with a fold of the blanket Sean wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

Now he looked peaceful and at rest. Sean rolled him on his side and began to wrap him in the blanket, using the nylon webbing and the rifle slings to bind his body tightly into a sitting position with his knees up under his chin.

Matatu returned before he had finished. "I have found a good place," he said. Sean nodded without looking up from his task.

Claudia broke the silence. "He gave his life for us," she said quietly. "Greater love hath no man." It sounded so trite and unworthy of the moment that she wished she had not said it, but Sean nodded again.

"I was never able to square the account with him," he said.

"And now I never will."

He was finished. Job was trussed securely into the gray blanket, only his head exposed.

Sean stood up and went to his own small personal pack. He took out the only spare shirt it contained and came back to where Job lay. He knelt beside him again. "Good-bye, my brother. It was a good road we traveled. I only wish we could have reached the end of it together," he said softly, and leaned forward and kissed Job's forehead. He did it so unaffectedly that it seemed completely natural and right.

Then with the clean shirt he wrapped Job's head, hiding the ghastly wound, and he picked him up in his arms and walked with him into the forest, cradling Job's head against his shoulder.

Matatu led him to an abandoned ant bear hole in the thorn forest nearby. It was the work of a few minutes to enlarge the entrance just enough to slide Job's body down into it. With Matatu assisting him, Sean turned him until he was facing east, his back to the evening star.

Before they covered the grave, Sean knelt beside it and took the fragmentation grenade from the pocket on his webbing. Matatu and Claudia watched as he cautiously rigged a booby trap with the grenade and a short length of bark twine. As he stood up, Claudia looked at him inquiringly, and he answered her shortly, "Grave robbers."

Matatu helped him pack stones around Job's shoulders to hold him in a sitting position. Then with larger boulders they covered him completely, building a calm over his grave that would keep the hyenas out. When it was done, Sean did not linger. He had said his farewell.

He walked away without looking back, and after a few moments Claudia followed him.

Despite her sorrow, in some strange way she felt privileged and sanctified by what she had witnessed. Her respect and love for Sean had been reinforced a hundredfold by the emotions he had displayed at the loss of his friend. She felt his tears had proved his strength rather than betrayed his weakness, and the rare demonstration of love had only pointed up his manhood. From this terrible tragedy she had learned more about Sean than she might otherwise have done in a lifetime.

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