The Gone Rhino, Book Six, conclusion...
If you remember only one ting from Childe Harold, remember this....
The ocean held its breath.
The demon army held its breath.
Natasha and I held our breath.
Childe Harold collapsed on the sand.
The ocean, of a sudden, turned dark, and swirled, and the waves began to stir and chop and bubble like hot broth. A wind picked up and swarms of fish began leaping from the foam. The surface of the sea turned green as a beech forest, then white as fine sand, and finally a blue, blue halcyon blue that joined sea and sky and erased the line of the horizon. And then the waters rose and kept rising, and the waves formed shapes, faces, presences…
Childe Harold, spent, lay at the edge of the roiling ocean. As the sea itself came to life, he called out, “Natasha! Exploradora! If you remember only one ting from Childe Harold, remember this: when life give you rotten toadstools, ‘tink of all you owe to beauty, all you owe to trut’. Den let dem tears fall like rain, and let dat great tru’full sorrow float you ‘way like on a cascade. Never forget: water … is … life…”
When the ocean’s breath let out, the wave crashed on the shore, and the shapes of the wave transformed into an army…An army of Black soldiers…Maroons…hundreds of them, led by Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglas, Aimé Césaire, Toussaint L’Overture, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Jules Nyerere, Malcolm X, Peter Tosh….
Amid the mad melée Harold lay on the sand, too spent to move. As the demon army swarmed and waves of the African diaspora crashed down upon them, I ran to him where he lay, “Harold, get up, move my friend, we’ve got to get you out of here!” I held out my hand for him to pull himself to standing, but he just lay, staring wide-eyed at the sky.
“De time has come for I and I to move on,” he whispered, his breath as thick as the salt sea.
“No, it can’t be!”
With all my strength I lifted him onto my shoulders and ran to the boxcar. As battle swirled at the ocean’s edge, Natasha and I managed to haul him up the ladder to the top of the boxcar where we thought we might lay him down to rest. But just as we reached the top, the white rhino charged and slammed into the side of the boxcar. The impact threw me off balance and I lost hold of him. Harold fell…