Eden Burning (54 page)

He was about to reassure her when Clifford came in. His appearance was always a kind of astonishment: he was the palest tan, with kinky hair of the same shade as his skin—a bleached African.

He put the milk down on the table.

“Ready?”

Will got up and they went down a few alleys to the meeting place. Some fifty or sixty youths had already collected in a courtyard, where chairs and a small podium had
been set up behind a dance pavilion, open to the sky. The whole affair was open, there being now no need to hide. You had to give Patrick credit, he had kept his word about free speech.

Candles, flickering in bottles, illuminated the faces of the expectant audience: black faces, working-class faces, except for the presence of several young white women, pallid and earnest. Holdouts from the sixties, Will thought, glancing at their stringy hair; trying to prove something, trying to feel as if they belonged here. His glance swept away. Well, let them. Let them have their great adventure.

The speaker came to the podium to be introduced. Will had heard him before, in other countries, and knew what he was going to say, yet was impressed again by his easy dignity and the music of his Oxford speech.

“Who are you?” He began speaking so softly that a forward movement of the shoulders rippled through the audience. “From where do you come? Why are you here? I’m told that most of you don’t know your own history, though it’s not your fault that you don’t. Listen to me, I have traveled. I’ve been in Africa and seen the forts along the coasts where our great-grandfathers were collected, torn from their forests and their tribes and brought in chains There’s where they started the long voyage to places like this one where we are tonight.

“In the course of the three centuries some fifteen million men and women made that voyage. This you must have heard, how for eight weeks or more they lay manacled in their forests and their tribes and brought in chains. There’s how, maddened and desperate, manacled as they were, so many jumped overboard, dragging each other to death. Surely you have heard that!”

Indeed, they had heard it many times, but they were fascinated nevertheless. Without stirring, with open mouths, they waited for more. The speaker took from the podium a sheet of paper, which he waved in the air.

“Listen! I have here some quotations from a historical document which I found in the Covetown library, I took it from the last will and testament of a planter who lived here when the island belonged to the French. It lists the value of his possessions, among them his slaves. Listen! Pierre, twenty-eight years old, worth four thousand livres. A strong young man, you see. Next, Georgette, seventeen years old, also four thousand livres. A strong young girl, you see. Next, Mamie, aged sixty-eight, an old woman; she was only worth two hundred livres, because she wasn’t fit for much, there weren’t many years’ work left in her. Naturally, you don’t know what that money was worth in that time. Well, I’ll tell you. You couldn’t get a silver dish in Da Cunha’s today for the price of that old woman, and you couldn’t have done so at that time, either.” He held his hand out, as if weighing things on a scale. “A woman. A silver dish.”

Steaming them up, Will knew. All these facts were true, but so far removed in time that they had become irrelevant. The only value in them was shock value, to make these people angry—which had its purpose, to be sure. The real tasks of the movement were done quietly behind the scenes, not by orators like this one, shrewd and eloquent as he was, but by anonymous, cool men doing their assignments in small, tight groups, working in and out of Cuba and throughout the region. And Will had a feeling of proud exhilaration to be trusted, at his age, by men like Cortada, overseer of guerrilla affairs for the Communist party in Latin America and the Caribbean. To be trusted with great things!

No one moved, not a chair squeaked, as the speaker’s voice rose. “But how much better off are you today? Are you not still strangers in this land? Look up onto the hills where the glass-walled houses stand so proudly and the hotels tower, or look at the estates where for centuries the owners have sat in luxury among the cane fields….

“Ah, but now you have your own government, they tell you! Yes, a lot of mealymouthed incompetents who, aping
the European, have merely substituted themselves for your former masters. Nothing at all has changed except the color of the skin, nothing at all.”

At the back of the assemblage two men, who had been standing there, met Will’s eyes and nodded. He looked at his watch. It was time to leave; walking along the beach, he would be taking a different route from theirs and ought to start. Unobtrusively, followed by Clifford, he stepped outside.

“Great man! Great speech!” Clifford whispered.

“Yes,” Will said. Clifford was clinging; it would be hard to shake him. And this night’s business was no business for Clifford.

“Where’re you going now, Will?”

“To my grandfather’s. I promised the old man.”

“You have to? Sure you don’t want to get a girl?”

They were passing the barroom where the girls sat around waiting. The jukebox blared past the swinging doors.

“I can’t, I told you.” He wouldn’t have, anyway. He wasn’t interested in girls right now. There was simply no time. No time.

“Well, guess I’ll go home, then.”

They walked back toward Clifford’s house. The sky held only a curve of moon, narrow as a machete, and clouds were hurrying to cover even that. It was a good night, well chosen.

Clifford mused, “I was just thinking how you told me once you set fire to that place, Eleuthera. You know, I didn’t believe you then, I thought you were boasting. But I believe you now.” There was awe in his voice. “Don’t worry. You know you can trust me.”

It had been a mistake to tell Clifford, even though he really was trustworthy and a friend. It was a mistake to talk at all. You could never regret anything you had kept to yourself.

“A dumb thing to do. Childish. But I was only a kid. What did it accomplish, after all? I’ve learned better now.” He said no more.

When he had left Clifford at his house, Will went as far as
the corner; then, out of sight, he doubled back toward the shore. From a board shack came the sound of hymns. Prayer meeting, he thought scornfully. Waiting for heaven. He passed another bar and a smoky yard where crouching men watched a cockfight. Rotten amusement! Rotten life, he thought, as he came out onto the beach.

He had three miles to go, around the farthest visible curve of shore to the lonely cove where tall cane marched almost to the edge of the sand. There they would meet the boat and unload the rifles and grenades. The beach was deserted now, because the seas between Christmas and March were too rough for all but harbor fishing. This was the resting season for the fishing trade, another point in favor of the night’s work.

The sand reflected the dun sky. Across the inlet he could barely see the strip of beach on which hotel guests baked themselves while beggars hawked straw hats, baskets, and worthless shell trinkets. He almost tripped over a pile of cane trash. Clarence had shown him how this trash, floating, attracts garfish in schools, and for a moment, recollecting this, he had a feeling of nostalgia for the lore and homely wisdom of old Clarence.

A lone man was mending a boat on the sand as Will rounded another curve. The whole side of the boat had been staved in.

Will stopped. “What happened to it?”

The man looked up. “Oh, just grudging.”

“Grudging?” He wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

“You know, like when somebody’s jealous you got a better boat, or some good luck or something, they cuts your nets, you know?”

“Oh,” Will said. “Sorry.”

And he walked on. So the poor destroyed each other. This was what poverty did to people.

The rising tide lapped at his sneakers. He took them off and trudged on. Clams clicked on the flats, making a syncopated
rhythm. Not far out a small yacht floated by, returning to the yacht club after a cruise, no doubt. It was so close that he could see a table set on the deck and people eating; he could hear their voices drifting inshore. Having wine with their lobster, I suppose, Will thought. Ought to be blown up!

Go on, haggle over elections, unions, legislation, and arbitration! Instead of getting out there and grabbing like men. People like Patrick, with their talk, talk, endless talk!

People like Patrick. And he had a flash of memory, with the very taste in his mouth of chocolate and bananas. The kind hands.
No, I don’t beat my children.
The earnest face, bent over a book or explaining and teaching and admonishing. Sad, in a way, to have lost him! For they’d lost whatever there had been between them, as far back as—yes, the day Patrick had asked him about the fire at Eleuthera, and he’d denied having anything to do with it, and known all the time that Patrick never wholly believed him. Sad.

Still, the man was a fool and always had been! A well-meaning fool was what he was. Will kicked the sand. You can’t afford to be sentimental when you’re making a revolution. Not the way things are.

Now, rounding the last turn into the cove he could pick out the shapes of cars and a small truck with headlights off, parked in the shelter of tall beach grape. The boat was already hovering offshore, with only the dimmest lights, just lanterns, probably. Low voices hailed him and he walked toward them.

No, you can’t afford to be sentimental about anything or anybody when you’re making a revolution.

Not the way things are.

Her thin hands plucked and clawed at the blanket. When the pain flowed away Agnes lay back, moving her head so that her gold hoops brushed the pillow.

“Maybe I’ll sleep a little now,” she said.

Patrick got up and went outside to the yard. If he could vomit he might rid himself of the foulness. He wasn’t quite sure she was sane or whether he could possibly accept what she had been telling him in there, in the small dim room where she lay.

The woman whom he paid to care for her sat on a bench, shelling peas into a bowl. As he approached, she stood up. She was in awe of his title, but more in awe of the fine black chauffeured car, although it had only been hired to bring him from the Martinique airport.

“Sit down,” he said.

Trembling, he walked to the end of the yard. A double line of bamboo gave shade to a neat patch of vegetables. A row of yams followed along a strong new fence. He looked back at the house which he had bought for his mother when she refused his request that she return to St. Felice (“It’s fitting to die on the earth where you were born,” she’d told him). It was a good house with a tin roof and running water. In a little while he collected himself and went to sit on the bench with the woman.

“How is she?” he asked.

“She’s dying. It’s the cancer that’s killing her.” The tone reproached him for not seeing what was obvious.

“I don’t mean that. I mean her mind. Does she talk sense? Can you believe what she tells you?”

“Why, of course you can! There’s nothing wrong with her head. Try giving her short change, and you’ll find out.”

“She doesn’t ever rave? Imagine things?”

“Who, she?” The woman was indignant. “Sharp as a tack, I tell you!”

He went back inside and sat down by the bed. “Did I wake you, Maman?”

“No, I was awake. You know, there’s some pleasure in lying here with nothing to do but remember. Everything is so clear, I can even see the colors. Did I ever tell you about the Maurier house? Oh, I must have! They had three thousand acres and such gardens, you can’t imagine. They used to say the gardens were like the ones in France and it was true, when I went to France I saw it was true.” The voice ran on, murmurous and so soft that Patrick had to strain to hear it. “They used to go to Paris every year, with servants, too. I never went along, I was too young. I think they went to visit their money in the bank, people said they had ten million dollars; maybe they did, I know the Francis family had nothing alongside of them.”

“I want to talk about what you told me before,” he insisted. His voice sounded almost harsh in his ears.

“Yes. Well, she said she would come back to St. Felice to die. And she almost did, didn’t she? I heard about the fire, you know. Why didn’t you ever tell me yourself?”

“Why should I have? I don’t like to talk about horrors, especially to you. And I didn’t know it—had anything to do with me, or you.”

The sour smell of sickness made him gag. The gloomy green flicker of sunlight through slatted blinds made him dizzy. And he passed his hand over his sweating forehead.

“Yes, yes, she told me. I remember it well,” Agnes repeated.

“Told you about a fire?”

“No, no”—with exasperation—“no, about not coming
back, I meant. But she did come anyway. I wonder why? Oh yes, yes, a son … I forget so many things these days, Patrick—it’s the pain medicine—but not the old things. I remember them all.”

“And you’re sure you can’t be wrong? Wrong about this, for instance?”

Now came a flare of her quick familiar anger. “What am I, a fool? You think I’m making up a fairy story to amuse a child?”