‘Oh! I’m so sorry!’ said Peter, instinctively putting his arms around Lover One. He could tell at once that it was the wrong thing to do, like embracing a woman who absolutely doesn’t want to be touched by anyone other than her husband. Lover One’s shoulders cringed, his body stiffened, his arms trembled, his face turned away lest it brush against Peter’s chest. Peter released him and stepped back in embarrassment.
‘Your mother,’ he blurted. ‘What an awful loss.’
Lover One gave this notion some deliberation before responding.
‘Mother made me,’ he said at last. ‘If mother never be, I never be al??o. Mother therefore very impor???an??? man.’
‘Woman.’
‘Woman, ye??.’
A few more seconds passed. ‘When did she die?’ asked Peter.
Again there was a pause. Oasans had difficulty choosing the linguistic boxes into which they felt obliged, by others, to put their conceptions of time. ‘Before you came.’
‘Before I came to . . . Oasis?’
‘Before you came with Word-in-Hand.’
Last few days, then. Maybe even yesterday. ‘Is she . . . Has there been a funeral?’
‘Few . . .?’
‘Have you put her in the ground?’
‘??oon,’ said Jesus Lover One, with a pacifying motion of the glove, as if giving his solemn promise that the procedure would be attended to as soon as it was feasible. ‘Af???er the harve?????.’
‘After the . . .?’
Lover One searched his vocabulary for a pronounceable alternative. ‘The reaping.’
Peter nodded, although he didn’t really understand. He guessed that this reaping must be the harvest of one of the Oasans’ food crops, a job so time-sensitive and labour-intensive that the community simply couldn’t fit a funeral into their schedule. The old lady would have to wait. He imagined a wizened, slightly smaller version of Lover One nestled motionless in her bed, one of those cots that already so closely resembled a coffin. He imagined the fluffy wisps of bedding being wrapped around her like a cocoon, in preparation for her burial.
As it turned out, there was no need to guess or imagine. Lover One, speaking in the same tone he might have used to invite a guest to see a notable monument or tree (if this place had had such things as monuments and trees), invited him to come and see the body of his mother.
Peter tried and failed to think of a suitable reply. ‘Good idea’, ‘Thank you’, and ‘I’d like that’ all felt wrong somehow. Instead, in silence, he put on his yellow boots. It was a brilliant morning, and the shade inside his church ill-prepared him for the dazzling sunshine.
He accompanied Jesus Lover One across the scrubland to the compound, taking two steps for every three or four of the Oasan’s. He was learning many things on this visit, and how to amble was one of them. There was an art to walking slower than your instinct told you to, keeping pace with a much smaller person, yet not appearing exasperated or clumsy. The trick was to pretend you were wading through waist-deep water, watched by a judge who would award you points for poise.
Side by side, they reached Jesus Lover One’s house. It looked identical to all the others, and had not been adorned with any flags, accoutrements or painted messages proclaiming an inhabitant’s death. A few people were walking around nearby, no more than normal, and they were getting on with business as usual, as far as Peter could tell. Lover One led him around the back of the building, to the patch of ground where clothing was washed and hung, and where children often played with ?????, the Oasan equivalent of boules, soft dark balls made of compacted moss.
Today, there were no children or ?????, and the washing line strung between two houses was bare. The yard was given over to Jesus Lover One’s mother.
Peter gazed at the small body lying uncushioned and uncovered on the ground. It had been stripped of its robe. This alone would have made Peter unable to tell whether he’d known this person or not, as he was still dependent, to a shameful degree, on fabric colour. But even if he’d managed to remember some distinctive aspect of this creature’s physiognomy – some variation in skin texture or the shape of facial bulges – it wouldn’t have helped now, as the body was obscured under a shimmering, shivering layer of insects.
He looked aside at Jesus Lover One, to gauge how alarmed he should be at this nightmarish spectacle. Maybe when Lover One had set off earlier this morning, the corpse had been free of parasites and they’d all seized their opportunity in his absence. If so, Lover One didn’t seem perturbed by the swarm. He contemplated the insects as calmly as if they were flowers on a shrub. Admittedly, these bugs were every bit as beautiful as flowers: they had iridescent wings, glossy carapaces of lavender and yellow. Their buzz was musical. They covered almost every inch of flesh, giving the corpse the appearance of a twitching, breathing effigy.
‘Your mother . . . ’ Peter began, lost for further words.
‘My mother gone,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Only her body remain.’
Peter nodded, striving to hide the queasy fascination provoked in him by the insect horde. Lover One’s philosophical attitude to the situation was perfectly sound – it was what Peter himself would have tried to persuade him to feel, had Lover One been terribly distraught. But the fact that Lover One wasn’t terribly distraught, or didn’t appear to be, confused Peter. It was one thing to deliver a funeral address to a bunch of unbelieving USIC workers, urging them to regard the body merely as a vehicle for the immortal soul; it was quite another thing to be standing next to someone who’d taken that principle so deeply to heart that they could watch their own mother’s body being overrun with insects. Peter’s eyes were drawn to one of the woman’s feet: the bugs, in their restless fidgeting, had exposed the toes. There were eight of them, very small and narrow. He’s assumed, because the Oasans were five-fingered, that they’d be five-toed, too. The mistakenness of that assumption made him realise how far he had to go before he truly understood these people.
‘Forgive me for not remembering, Lover One,’ said Peter, ‘but did I ever meet your mother? Before today?’
‘Never,’ Lover One replied. ‘Walk from here ???o our ?ur? . . . ???oo far.’
Peter wondered whether this was an ironic comment, implying that she’d never summoned up sufficient motivation to visit, or whether it literally meant she’d been too weak or ill to walk the distance. Most likely it was literal.
‘My mother begin – only begin – ???o know Je??u??,’ Lover One explained. He made a gesture in the air, gently rotating his hand to indicate slow, stumbling progress. ‘Every day, we carry your word?? away from ?ur? in our hand??, and we bring them ???o her. Every day, word?? go in her like food. Every day, ??he come more near ???o the Lord.’ And he turned his face in the direction of Peter’s church, as if watching his mother walk there after all.
In the days that followed, Peter learned what was really meant by ‘the harvest’. He realised that Jesus Lover One’s reason for fetching him to see the corpse had nothing to do with emotions. It was educative.
The alighting of the bugs on the flesh was just the first step in an industrious husbandry managed by the Oasans in every detail. The body, Peter learned, had been painted with a poison which intoxicated the bugs so that when they’d finished laying eggs, they were semi-conscious, unable to fly. The Oasans then collected them and, with great care, pulled them to bits. The legs and wings, when ground up and dried, made a fearsomely potent seasoning: one pinch could flavour a vat of food. The bodies yielded a rich nectar which was mixed with water and whiteflower to make honey, or processed into a vivid yellow dye. And, while various members of the Oasan community were busy transforming the insects’ remains into useful materials, the insects’ eggs were busy hatching. Peter was fetched at regular intervals to witness how things were getting on.
Like most people he’d ever known, except for one frankly barmy biology teacher at school, Peter was not very keen on maggots. Wise and practical though it might be to accept the naturalness of death and decay, the sight of those opportunistic little larvae always disgusted him. But the maggots on the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother were like nothing he’d ever seen before. They were calm and fat, rice-white, each the size of a large fruit-pip. There were many thousands of them, densely packed and pearlescent, and if you stared at them long enough they didn’t look like maggots at all, but like a cornucopia of albino raspberries.
These, too, the Oasans harvested.