Jonestown (9 page)

Horseflesh flanking the Moon and the creek became the shadow of a wall, or a dam, as the procession advanced towards the Courantyne River.

The projected new polder, or diversion, materialized as a gift of passion inherent in his betrothal to Marie, reined-in animal passion, curbed and manifest in engineering, wilderness genius.

It was as if Deacon were intent upon converting the Wheel upon which Marie had fled into a simultaneous asset of culture, into gradients and stages down which he drew the Horses of the Moon.

Celestial mathematics!

He drew the Horses along the lassoing hair –
with
or
in
the lassoing hair – in the Virgin’s body to the wide Courantyne River.
He came upon a box koker or sluice at the point where the tributary entered the main body of the river. The wide estuary was vacant except for a schooner on the bar and the Virgin Ship which Deacon failed to see.

In his child’s mathematical, engineering, mythical eye, infused with wars and baggage trains and advancing, retreating armies, the box koker or Dutch culvert assumed the proportions of a giant coffin. He stood against it and lifted the lid. Then with a tug he propelled each beast and rider into its depths. The colour of new taxes he would propose (if he were prime minster) shone on each flank, money-flesh, political/economic flesh, ballot-box flesh, everything that was pertinent to the betrothal of a hero or a monster to the Virgin of the Wild. They were content to recline in darkness and await the fulfilment of his promise. He inscribed on the lid of the coffin Heracles strangling serpents – unleashing serpents – in his cradle and Hermes herding cattle, outwitting his brother Apollo on the day he was born …

Mr Mageye and I – even as Deacon propelled Horses and riders into a coffin – let our platform with its filming futuristic yet ancient Eye levitate in space. Such verticality, such a sliding scale, was native to blended time, past futures, future pasts. We saw Deacon’s procession along the creek in a new fictional, factual light of peculiar irony and folk indefatigability and deprivation. Conversion of folk deprivation into glorious cradles allied to coffins and taxation in the grave ran hand in hand with mundane, plodding existences. We saw Deacon’s processional wall in the lassoing of space change into apathy yet dogged hope.

The empolderment of the savannahs had been shelved when the War in Europe began in 1939. Money was short in the Colony. Posters advertising the Crabwood Creek Scheme (as it was called) began to loosen into tattered newspaper flags on the walls of buildings and in schools.

Deacon read the scraps and pieces nevertheless in his school. They flapped like wings of a noble scavenger or vulture or eagle that he attempted to draw within and around them into popular graffiti. One day he would come to power. One day his offspring would ensure an indefatigable cradle … Such were his
larger-
than
-life thoughts as he led his plodding, smaller-than-life procession of horses from upriver Courantyne to downriver Crabwood Creek now that the drought was over.

Not giants in cradles to Mr Mageye and me on our platform and ladder in space but processions of hardy, ant-like creatures on the globe beneath us, as ant-like and enigmatic as the moving stars with feet in shadow above us.

Deacon’s dwarf-like substance, the dwarf-like procession that he led – dwarf-like train of giants in the comedy of the wilderness – was nothing unusual in the life of the peasant folk. Peasants as young as Deacon were initiated into the savannahs virtually from the day they began to crawl. Mere lads – in the eyes of the Gods who contested the parentage of wilderness Marie – were skilled herders of cattle. It was a tough, dangerous life. As tough and as dangerous as it had been in ancient Palestine and ancient Greece where hardship was the name of the game.

Where were the new Biblical lands, the new Classical lands, but where exoduses and diasporas, and the threat of drought, of famine, prevailed in variable, unsuspected forms?

Where were the new ships, the new
Aeneid
, but in a web of ancient, conflicting cultures, modern Romes and Jonestowns overshadowing space even before they were built? Such
overshadowing
drove us forwards and backwards simultaneously into celestial mathematics. Deacon and Mr Mageye and Jonah Jones and Bone (myself) and the Prisoner and the Doctor and the Inspector and giants of chaos were witnesses to the diminutive composite epic that drove us into trial and error betrothal to fates and furies and dangerous maids, trial and error gestations in the Womb of space, infinite tragedy yet hope of divergence from absolute plot, absolute doom.

Deacon and his procession below us in the savannahs was a subconscious miniaturization of collective mystery,
miniaturization
of Classical Palestine, Classical Greece, Classical Maya in dwarf-like substance, true, unsuspected intercourse with
complex
, cross-cultural tradition …

Deacon had propelled himself upwards as he led his father’s beaten horses, beaten by sun and drought, ribbed cages on which
weak members of the family sat, from upriver Courantyne to downriver Crabwood Creek.

Propelled himself upwards into a Shadow beside Mr Mageye and me on the Platform of the Camera where we sat.

He was exhausted after the long journey. He seemed naked Shadow as I was naked Bone and Mr Mageye was naked spiritual Jester. We pushed him down again as he had pushed his train into the darkness of a coffin. He was exhausted. He settled in sleep on the lid of the coffin. The sigh of the river against the bank resembled buried souls in the wood of the box koker on which his head lay. Then he arose at last and made his way home.

*

HOME. Home is as elusive as it is real in Memory theatre. I remembered the Cave of the Moon into which I had fled from Jonestown on the Night of the Day of the Dead. It seemed home in a high cliff or bank from which a Waterfall fell beneath me into the Jonestown river. Was that Waterfall beneath me or did it spring from an opposite cliff or bank into which my Shadow reached as if it sought to bridge a chasm in creation? My stomach was hollow and I fed Bone with bread and rice and tinned fruit, tinned vegetables that I had stored in the Cave. Bone ate ravenously. So much so I was tempted to leap down the ladder of the Waterfall onto a rock far below shaped like a loaf of bread. Bone was universal me. I was universal Bone.

The holocaust is a vision of famine, the famine of the Soul imprinted on breath as much as bread that living skeletons bite or choke upon or devour…

I wanted to leap and forget everything that had happened …

But then I saw the faint outline of a body on the rock or loaf of bread. I broke my visionary teeth upon it. My pleasant rice and fruit in the Cave seemed straw for cattle.

Bone is tough, a spirited survivor in the wilderness of civilization.

Was it Deacon lying there far below?

Had he collapsed there and died after shooting Jones? Or was he asleep forever in the wake of the procession that he had led as a child?

His head lay on rock or seeming wood as mine had lain upon a pillow of stone. I resisted the temptation to fling myself down beside him and began instead to contemplate the construction of a Virgin Ship made of wood, of bread, stone, everything, times past and present and future.

Such a Ship begins to create itself upon a land and a sea of Limbo memory, Limbo chameleon memories upon which
diminutive
survivors such as myself feed in order to clothe themselves with the terrors of history that one may still convert into rare however flawed consciousness, indestructible hope. Such was my Limbo initiation into the writing of my Dream-book. I was to wander far and wide – uncertain of the steps I took – before I came to lodgings in Trinity Street, New Amsterdam.

Home is multi-dimensional space. And Limbo is the chameleon of home into which one reaches self-deceptively and endlessly in order to face truth when one comes abreast of the masquerades of the past that one has sustained voluntarily or involuntarily.

I left the Cave of the Moon and adventured into Limbo where I came upon the handsome, beautifully dressed grave-digger who had profited from the burial of the dead in Jonestown which he supervised.

‘Did you bury them all,’ I said, ‘in a mass grave?’

In asking the question I could not help recalling Deacon and his child’s heroic, monstrous incarceration of common-or-garden folk who were nevertheless giants and dwarfs, weak and strong, in the Eye of Mr Mageye’s Camera.
They
would
return
to
judge
me,
to
put
me
on
trial.
Why me? Why not Deacon? Such are the paradoxes of judgement day, dateless day, theatre of Limbo – within the unacknowledged interstices of Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven – when one is recast to answer for another, when the embattled folk are recast into embodiments of self, oneself’s trial is theirs, they are judges arisen from the living and the dead. One may. know then under their terrible hand – considerate and inconsiderate hand – a flicker of the injustices inflicted by others upon their peers and subjects across the ages.

The grave-digger eyed me with a quizzical look: as if he were weighing every stitch I wore. My Nemesis Hat had deposited a
few threads on my mother’s grave, on Mr Mageye’s grave, and on the Moon when Marie danced. The Hat or Bag was lighter now. It could be weighed on the scales of future pasts, past futures, radiating out from an apparitional core of composite self.

‘Lost a few threads, Francisco,’ he confirmed. ‘Each could be auctioned no doubt for a bite of bread. I fancy sweet bread myself. Made from currants and lemon, Demerara sugar, and rich flour. I found quite a store in Jonestown. We split it between ourselves, me and the Inspector and that Doctor-God chap who is popular with the peasants of Port Mourant. They say he cares for the sick who lie on pallets on the floor. All well and good but your shirt and trousers are in tatters. A disgrace! Those would fetch nothing at all in the marketplace. I can see clean through to Bone, Francisco. Ah! but there’s your shoes. I like those. Jolly good leather. I pulled off quite a few like yours from the heels of the dead in Jonestown. Gave me quite a turn. It was as if they were ready to run, to sprint. Well you can do it for them, Francisco. Just as well you got away, Bone. You’re worth but a bite or two of meat and potatoes to me. Imagine my having to cart you into the grave for virtually nothing. I’m glad you got away.’

He laid out at least five hundred watches in the Limbo forest. He tied them to the branches of trees. He laid out earrings, women’s purses, and men’s linen shirts, men’s vests, short pants and long pants and baby clothes.

A curious business, a curious self-addictive satire, a curious mockery and self-mockery rooted in despair, it was that the
grave-digger
conducted in charting his evolution into millionaire Carnival Lord Death.

The robes on his back had been borrowed from the dead and the living. The baby clothes seemed dead baby clothes too small for the giant of Death. Who knows how small or large Death is? He possessed a scarf, on the other hand, around his neck that had been mine. I had wrapped it around my hand when blood oozed from the wound I received and left it on the bushes beside the Clearing. Nothing! I felt nothing at all when I lost two fingers from Deacon’s random bullet … Carnival Lord Death wore the bloodstained scarf now with style that was a wonderful gloss upon numbness.

What was bizarre and charismatic in his style was the strangely lifeless but majestic, ritualistic folds of his dress. He possessed the aplomb of an astronaut on the Moon in Limbo theatre.

This was fascinating stuff. Charismatic aplomb was in fashion. Tradition bouncing on surfaces but bereft of depth, Brain shorn of mind or philosophy, life shorn of unpredictable Spirit or originality.

The array of goods – far beyond the range I have described – confirmed his majestic skills as an entrepreneur
par
excellence
of Limbo Land.

But there were other considerations and moral fables in Carnival Lord Death’s pitiless barter of the numb word, numb lips, numb ears and eyes for treasurers that he pulled from the pockets of the living and the dead, from their running feet, or reluctant hands, from their frames and bodies, to adorn his kingdom.

The quality of Justice! What sort of Justice did Carnival Lord Death administer? He was a just man: as just as any man could be in the Mask of Death. What are the foundations of Justice as the twentieth century draws to a close?

I looked around but there was no help from Mr Mageye in this instance. Carnival Lord Death loomed over me as I uttered a silent prayer, an unorthodox prayer that was more an awkward statement than a request for enlightenment.

‘To feel nothing,’ I dreamt inwardly, ‘except the possession of privileged immunity to famine or to hell, to feel nothing but a licence that is granted in Carnival jump-ups and crusades, in an age of the mechanical death of the soul,
is
justice. Justice is the tautology of the death of the soul. Justice is the prosecution of spare-parts methodologies, spare-parts bodies. Or so it seems everywhere. I know for mechanical ornamentation, buttocks and breasts and all, in pleasure palaces, is the structure of a wound that forgets it is a wound.

‘God forgive me (as I pray awkwardly) but I know. I was shot in Jonestown and lost all feeling in my hand. It became a tool, an insensible tool.

‘Perhaps Lord Death (you are in my prayer, for who knows
what Carnival omens Death employs in an age of the death of the soul in the machine?) were you to permit me to reach up and unloose the scarf around your neck, feeling would invade my absent fingers at last which were blown like cigarette ends in the wind.

‘The scarf or noose is mine. That very rich scarf that you wear. Poor man’s, beggar man’s, thief’s, scarf of kings! It sings of soul’s blood and the genesis of pain all over again. It sings of an apparitional or phantom grasp of reality that may resurrect the elusive lineaments of the Soul.