The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James Read Free Book Online Page B

toddy and two smacks of the tongue. (Toddy was the only spirit he would touch, as it came straight from the coconut.) He was careful with his money and his land, having inherited seven acres to my father’s six. At the end of each harvest he was rewarded with mountains of fragrant, golden, unmilled rice, which he stored in the shed. As children, Raghu and I would scramble up the mounds and slide down the sides until our legs itched from the husks. Itchy or not, this was the best time of my life.
    But mine was a flimsy happiness, not the kind of happy that lasts.
    The trouble began when my mother found a pouch of bullets in Jayan’s cabinet—thick and crude as if sawed from a steering rod—and thrust the pouch at my father. She felt it a father’s duty to straighten out a wayward son even if the father himself was wayward past hope.
    That evening Jayan found my father waiting on the sit-out, sober for once. My mother and I hovered in the doorway.
    “What are these for?” my father said, tossing the pouch of bullets at Jayan’s feet.
    Jayan took his time adjusting the new watch around his wrist before bending to pocket the bullets. The watch was a Solex, poor cousin to the Rolex, but gold and fine all the same. “For making money.”
    “Black money.”
    “Least it’s mine.”
    My mother gripped the doorway, all the heat gone from her voice. “Not here. Inside.”
    But my father was already sailing down the steps on a wave of interrogation: Was it Jayan who had brought the gun into the house and was it Jayan who had been butchering elephants and God knew what else and was it Jayan who had so shamed his mother and father by becoming the one thing they had never dreamed he would be, a lowlife poacher, and in doing so, made them lowlives as well? Was it? Did Jayan have nothing to say for himself? Did he have a banana in his mouth?
    Never before had my father spent so much breath on my brother. They had always been two lone wolves content to prowl their own sides of the mountain. Now Jayan’s lips trembled as if in fear or remorse, I could not tell.
    Then he broke out laughing.
    “Shamed you?” said Jayan. “Shamed
you
?”
    “Stop laughing.”
    “I used to think you were unlucky. Now I know you’re just stupid.”
    In one swipe my father had him on the ground.
    My mother ran to Jayan’s side, but he blocked her with his arm. His watch face caught a glimpse of moonlight. It looked suddenly huge to me, so wrong on his slim wrist.
    For a terrible second, I thought Jayan would charge at my father. Instead my brother dealt a blow much worse: he looked at my father and said we all wished him dead.
    The thought had crossed my own mind once or twice. IndeedI had imagined a fatherless life. Wouldn’t you, if you watched your father day by day destroy your mother and drink away your land, wouldn’t you once or twice imagine him resting in peace so you could honor what good memory of him remained and preserve what land and love were left?
    Still Jayan should not have said it. To hear that truth out loud—it was a whipcrack to my heart.
    My father tried to hide his hurt by spitting off to the side. But for a narrow moment his eyes met mine, and I saw the depths behind them, I saw how tired he was. Some men cannot master their many selves. My father was such a man, and he knew this just as he knew where his life would end.
    One month later his body was pulled from a river. Bruises round the throat, a clump of his woolly beard torn out. My mother forbade us from speaking to the police for fear of reprisal, yet I could not rid the image from my mind—my father floating facedown on the water, all his hopes for me somewhere at the bottom.
    Later I asked my brother, “You don’t miss him at all?”
    Jayan considered the question for less than a second. “Do you miss having a car?”
    “We never had a car.”
    “That we did not.”
    Jayan worked in the field till the sun striped his arms, till dirt gummed his nails and