so good…so stupid. He was like a golden retriever, fetching things, sloppy-tongued, panting, falling over himself to please. He used two days of fresh water giving the Kikuyu boys showers. He spent seventy shillings on a sisal basket that should have cost him seven. He insisted on sending visitors off with care packages, plantains or House of Mangi tea biscuits, wrapped in paper and tied off with yarn.
“You’re doing fine, Pop,” he announced, one evening at the table. He had been there a week. Every night he invited strangers, diseased people, to the dinner table. Tonight it was a paraplegic girl and her mother. Josh spooned chunks of curried potato onto their plates. “You can afford it.” The shell collector said nothing. What could he say? Josh shared his blood; this thirty-year-old dogooder had somehow grown out of him, out of the spirals of his own DNA.
Because he could only take so much of Josh, and because he could not shell for fear of being followed, he began to slip away with Tumaini to walk the shady groves, the sandy plains, the hot, leafless thickets of the island. It was strange moving away from the shore rather than toward it, climbing thin trails, moving inside the ceaseless cicada hum. His shirt was torn by thorns, his skin chewed by insects; his cane struck unidentifiable objects: Was that a fencepost? A tree? Soon these walks became shorter: he would hear rustles in the thickets, snakes or wild dogs, perhaps—who knew what awful things bustled in the thickets of that island?—and he’d wave his cane in the air and Tumaini would yelp and they would hurry home.
One day he came across a cone shell in his path, toiling through dust half a kilometer from the sea. Conus textile, a common enough danger on the reef, but to find it so far from water was impossible. How would a cone get all the way up here? And why? He picked the shell from the path and pitched it into the high grass. On subsequent walks he began coming across cones more frequently: his outstretched hand would come across the trunk of an acacia and on it would be a wandering cone; he’d pick up a hermit crab wandering in the mango grove and find a freeloading cone on its back. Sometimes a stone worked itself into his sandal and he jumped and backpedaled, terrified, thinking it would sting him. He mistook a pine cone for Conus gloriamaris, a tree snail for Conus spectrum. He began to doubt his previous identifications: maybe the cone he had found in the path was not a cone at all, but a miter shell, or a rounded stone. Maybe it was an empty shell dropped by a villager. Maybe there was no strangely blooming population of cone shells; maybe he had imagined it all. It was terrible not to know.
Everything was changing: the reef, his home, poor frightened Tumaini. Outside the entire island had become sinister, viperous, paralyzing. Inside his son was giving away everything—the rice, the toilet paper, the Vitamin B capsules. Perhaps it would be safest to just sit, hands folded, in a chair, and move as little as possible.
Josh had been there three weeks before he brought it up.
“Before I left the States I did some reading,” he said, “about cone shells.” It was dawn. The shell collector was at the table waiting for Josh to make him toast. He said nothing.
“They think the venom may have real medical benefits.”
“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,
