Jaak

His grief, at its most potent, rose at dusk. It was as unending and as deep as the long rainforest night that skulked dark and ravenousness beyond his crumbling stone wall.

Jaak sat slumped, slowly sipping rum, watching insects swirl around a hanging kerosene lantern. The bugs streamed out of the black void in vast numbers whirling in a dense chaotic circle around the weak yellow light. Many of the more determined creatures flew directly into the flame burning brightly, for a microsecond glowing like shooting stars, exploding into eternity.

Sometimes this nightly spectacle made him sad. Other times he wondered why they flew so boldly and freely towards such a fiery death. Were they fleeing something or purposefully vanishing to a secret place that only a few of their kind knew, a different universe perhaps or a better one? The lantern flamed again as an over-fat moth detonated. Jaak looked away.

He examined the half-empty bottle, sipping at his dirty chipped glass, but still, he felt nothing but the agitation of being alive. It would take most of the bottle before his uneasiness would drift into a brief period of calmness allowing sleep. The morning would come soon enough and with it the work.

His grandson would arrive from the mining camp, whistling with the dawn to rouse him and to bring breakfast from the cantina. The two worked together in his small gold mine, wrestling enough out of the ground to pay their way and to send money and the occasional pouch of gold dust or nugget to the boy’s parents and younger siblings living in Sao Paulo.

The boy was tall now, over six feet, strong as well. Sometimes in a half-sleep or awoken in a dawn stupor or the fog of rum, Jaak would confuse the young man with one of his sons. Fantasizing he was back home waiting for his children to laugh him awake.

How many had there been? He could hardly remember how much time had passed, ten or twelve years, maybe more. He acknowledged it was not enough to forget the Favela, the nightmare of the pandemic, his wife, and children all dead from influenza in the blink of an eye. Like insects flying into the flame, vanished for eternity.

Jaak sipped at the glass while looking out into the blackness of the rainforest and tried to remember their faces. He struggled to remember his own. No grave marked their passing, no monument was raised for his dead. The fire set by accident or deliberately to destroy the disease had swept the Favela off the hillside, roaring behind him as he ran with the few who survived, desperately clutching his one small son and nothing else. The neighborhood when he returned was nothing but a smoking heap of ash for as far as he could see.

With the small boy strapped to his back, he had walked to San Paulo, not remembering any of the days it took to arrive at his sister’s home. There he left the boy and kept moving. Jaak returned a few times, to witness the boy turn from a child to an adolescent than a married man; his son, a reminder of the reality of his life and the fragile fleeting happiness that he once held. As long as he wandered, kept on the move, never settled too long in any place, the memories would not rise.

He knew that to be false. The recollection of the tragedy and fire as sharp and hard as the glass he clutched in his scared hand. Even with the passage of years, it weighted as a heavy stone. He loved all his children and loved them still, yet he could not remember their faces or voices as hard as he tried. Finally, seeing nothing, but the dark abyss of night, he returned his gaze to the glass.

Only the one son had survived, the grandson’s father. Why only one, he thought, the other four boys dead and gone along with the little daughter and his sweet, precious wife. He was gone as well, living a thousand miles deep in the Amazon, mining for gold, and trying hard to forget the unforgettable.

The moonless night drifted on alive with the nocturnal music of legions of creatures singing, croaking, chirping, calling, or growling. The jungle was quicker, nearer, only the weak light of the lantern keeping it at bay, a minuscule oasis of yellow floating in the chasm of his emptiness. Like his glass, he noted, empty again. The bottle was almost empty and still, he felt the harsh sting of living with the dead. A fresh bottle lay under the cot, but he was too weary to retrieve it. If the grandson were still bunking here, he would have fetched it. Jaak sighed, sipped at his glass.

The boy was no longer around spending his nights with that skinny girl who worked behind the counter at the ramshackle general store. What was her name? Maria, Margarita, something with an “M” or was it, Juanita? He knew he should make an effort to know her for his

grandson’s sake, especially now that her belly was swollen with child. He thought, tomorrow, I will try.

He felt exhausted. The rainforest sounds resonating and reverberating, drifting on as music more beautiful somehow than Jaak remembers. The night sky perching high above the tall trees is a blanket of stars, crystalline, sharp, and violet-black. A small wind whispers. The rustle of vegetation. The smell of the forest, wet, deep, and intensely aromatic.  The lamp sputtering. Time suspended, floating, releasing.  He felt a spark of something not felt in decades, a growing joyfulness, and an intimate discovery of a promise of renewal in this unexpected child. Even if this promise was not kept, it was the joy that now rose in him as if the capricious nature of this world was reaching out to lift him with the gift of a new life. A great-grandchild. A long moment, before he spoke.

“Tomorrow, yes, I will find my grandson and this girl.”