“Who are they?”
“Scientists. They say they’re trying to isolate some of the toxins and give them to stroke victims. To combat paralysis.”
The shell collector wasn’t sure what to say. He felt like saying that injecting cone venom into someone already half paralyzed sounded miraculously stupid.
“Wouldn’t that be something, Pop? If what you’ve done winds up helping thousands of people?”
The shell collector fidgeted, tried to smile.
“I never feel so alive,” Josh continued, “as when I’m helping people.”
“I can smell the toast burning, Josh.”
“There are so many people in the world, Pop, who we can help. Do you know how lucky we are? How amazing it is just to be healthy? To be able to reach out?”
“The toast, Son.”
“Screw the toast! Jesus! Look at you! People are dying on your doorstep and you care about toast!”
He slammed the door on his way out. The shell collector sat and smelled the toast as it burned.
Josh started reading shell books. He’d learned Braille as a Little Leaguer, sitting in his uniform in his father’s lab, waiting for his mother to drive him to a game. Now he took books and magazines from the kibanda’s one shelf and hauled them out under the palms where the three Kikuyu orphan boys had made their camp. He read aloud to them, stumbling through articles in journals like Indo-Pacific Mollusca or American Conchologist. “The blotchy ancilla,” he’d read, “is a slender shell with a deep suture. Its columella is mostly straight.” The boys stared at him as he read, hummed senseless, joyful songs.
The shell collector heard Josh, one afternoon, reading to them about cones. “The admirable cone is thick and relatively heavy, with a pointed spire. One of the rarest cone shells, it is white, with brown spiral bands.”
Gradually, amazingly, after a week of afternoon readings, the boys grew interested. The shell collector would hear them sifting through the banks of shell fragments left by the spring tide. “Bubble shell!” one would shout. “Kafuna found a bubble shell!” They plunged their hands between rocks and squealed and shouted and dragged shirtfuls of clams up to the kibanda, identifying them with made-up names: “Blue Pretty! Mbaba Chicken Shell!”
One evening the three boys were eating with them at the table, and he listened to them as they shifted and bobbed in their chairs and clacked their silverware against the table edge like drummers. “You boys have been shelling,” the shell collector said.
“Kafuna swallowed a butterfly shell!” one of the boys yelled.
The shell collector pressed forward: “Do you know that some of the shells are dangerous, that dangerous things—bad things—live in the water?”
“Bad shells!” one squealed.
“Bad sheellllls!” the others chimed.
Then they were eating, quietly. The shell collector sat, and wondered.
He tried again, the next morning. Josh was hacking coconuts on the front step. “What if those boys get bored with the beach and go out to the reef? What if they fall into fire coral? What if they step on an urchin?”
“Are you saying I’m not keeping an eye on them?” Josh said.
“I’m saying that they might be looking to get bitten. Those boys came here because they thought I could find some magic shell that will cure people. They’re here to get stung by a cone shell.”
“You don’t have the slightest idea,” Josh said, “why those boys are here.”
“But you do? You think you’ve read enough about shells to teach them how to look for cones. You want them to find one. You hope they’ll find a big cone, get stung, and be cured. Cured of whatever ailment they have. I don’t even see anything wrong with them.”
“Pop,” Josh groaned, “those boys are mentally handicapped. I do not think some sea-snail is going to cure them.”
So, feeling very old, and very blind, the shell collector decided to take the boys shelling. He took them out into the lagoon, where the water was flat and warm, wading almost to their chests, and worked alongside them, and did his best to show them which animals were dangerous. “Bad sheellllls!” the boys would scream, and cheered as the shell collector tossed a testy blue crab out, over the reef, into deeper water. Tumaini barked too, and seemed her old self, out there with the boys, in the ocean she loved so dearly.
Finally it was not one of the young boys or some other visitor who was bitten, but Josh. He came dashing along the beach, calling for his father, his face bloodless.
“Josh? Josh is that you?” the shell collector hollered. “I was just showing the boys here this girdled triton. A graceful shell, isn’t it, boys?”
In his fist, his fingers already going stiff, the back of his hand reddening, the skin distended, Josh held the cone that had bitten him, a snail he’d plucked from the wet sand, thinking it was pretty.
The shell collector hauled Josh across the beach and into some shade under the palms. He wrapped him in a blanket and sent the boys for the radio. Josh’s pulse was already weak and rapid and his breath was short. Within an hour his breathing stopped, then his heart, and he was dead.
The shell collector knelt, dumbfounded, in the sand, and Tumaini lay on her paws in the shade watching him with the boys crouched behind her, their hands on their knees, terrified.
The doctor boated in twenty minutes too late, wheezing, and behind him were police, in small canoes with huge motors. The police took the shell collector into his kitchen and quizzed him about his divorce, about Josh, about the boys.
Through the window he heard more boats coming and going. A damp breeze came over the sill. It was going to rain, he wanted to tell these men, these half-aggressive, half-lazy voices in his kitchen. It will rain in five minutes, he wanted to say, but they were asking him to clarify Josh’s relationship with the boys. Again (was it the third time? the fifth?) they asked why his wife had divorced him. He could not find the words. He felt as if thick clouds were being shoved between him and the world; his fingers, his senses, the ocean—all this was slipping away. My dog, he wanted to say, my dog doesn’t understand this. I need my dog.
“I am blind,” he told the police finally, turning up his hands. “I have nothing.”
Then the rain came, a monsoon assaulting the thatched roof. Frogs, singing somewhere under the floorboards, hurried their tremolo, screamed into the storm.
When the rain let up he heard the water dripping from the roof and a cricket under the refrigerator started singing. There was a new voice in the kitchen, a familiar voice, the mwadhini’s. He said, “You will be left alone now. As I promised.”
“My son—” the shell collector began.
“This blindness,” the mwadhini said, taking an auger shell from the kitchen table and rolling it over the wood, “it is not unlike a shell, is it? The way a shell protects the animal inside? The way an animal can retreat inside it, tucked safely away? Of course the sick came, of course they came to seek out a cure. Well, you will have your peace now. No one will come looking for miracles now.”
“The boys—”
“They will be taken away. They require care. Perhaps an orphanage in Nairobi. Malindi, maybe.”
A month later and these Jims were in his kibanda, pouring bourbon into their evening chai. He had answered their questions, told them about Nancy and Seema and