Omeros (31 page)

does from a kick. It was the last form of self-defence,

it was the scream of gangrene, and the vine round his heel

with its thorns. Waiters in bow-ties on the terrace

laughed at his anger. They too had been simplified.

They were like Lawrence crossing the sand with his trays.

They laughed at simplicities, the laugh of a wounded race.

Chapter LX

I

He had never seen such strange weather; the surprise

of a tempestuous January that churned

the foreshore brown with remarkable, bursting seas

convinced him that “somewhere people interfering

with the course of nature”; the feathery mare’s tails

were more threateningly frequent, and its sunsets

the roaring ovens of the hurricane season,

while the frigates hung closer inland and the nets

starved on their bamboo poles. The rain lost its reason

and behaved with no sense at all. What had angered

the rain and made the sea foam? Seven Seas would talk

bewilderingly that man was an endangered

species now, a spectre, just like the Aruac

or the egret, or parrots screaming in terror

when men approached, and that once men were satisfied

with destroying men they would move on to Nature.

And those were the omens. He must not be afraid

once he kept his respect; the scarves of the sibyl

were those mare’s tails over the island. Their changing

was beyond his strength and he was responsible

only to himself. The wisdom was enraging.

In fury, he sailed south, away from the trawlers

who were dredging the banks the way others had mined

the archipelago for silver. New silver was

the catch threshing the cavernous hold till each mound

was a pyramid; banks robbed by thirty-mile seines,

their refrigerated scales packed tightly as coins,

and no more lobsters on the seabed. All the signs

of a hidden devastation under the cones

of volcanic gorges. Every dawn made his trade

difficult and empty, sending him farther out

than he wanted to go, until he felt betrayed

by his calling, by a greed that had never banned

the voracious, insatiable nets. Fathoms where

he had seen the marlin buckle and leap were sand

clean at the bottom; the steely blue albacore

no longer leapt to his line, questioning dolphins,

yes, but the shrimp were finished, their bodies were curled

like exhausted Caribs in the deep silver mines;

was he the only fisherman left in the world

using the old ways, who believed his work was prayer,

who caught only enough, since the sea had to live,

because it was life? So he sailed down to Soufrière

along and close to the coast. He might have to leave

the village for good, its hotels and marinas,

the ice-packed shrimps of pink tourists, and find someplace,

some cove he could settle like another Aeneas,

founding not Rome but home, to survive in its peace,

far from the discos, the transports, the greed, the noise.

So he and Philoctete loaded the canoe and went

searching down the coastline, Anse La Raye, Canaries,

past cliffs pinned with birds, past beaches still innocent

where he saw a small boy alone, riding a log

and fishing with a twine, and the memory sent

a spear into his chest; he waved from the pirogue

but the small boy ignored him, just as Achille had

other boats long ago. Lean, supple, stark-naked.

But he found no cove he liked as much as his own

village, whatever the future brought, no inlet

spoke to him quietly, no bay parted its mouth

like Helen under him, so he told Philoctete

that until they found it they would keep going south,

as far as the Grenadines, though supplies were tight.

II

They spent the whole night on the beach in Soufrière,

talking to other fishermen under the horned,

holy peaks, where Achille built up a bonfire

to keep off the mosquitoes, where as the dry palms burned

he felt like the phantom of a vanishing race

of heroes, some toothless, some scarred, many of them turned

drunkards in the empty season, but in each face

by the cracking sparks there was that obvious wound

made from loving the sea over their own country.

Then he and Philoctete spoke till a hooked moon waned

and the twin horns sharpened out of a quiet sea.

They slept in the beached canoe till the sunlit wind

woke them and the other pirogues were setting out.

They washed and shat in the depot; they tried to find

a shop with some coffee, but all the doors were shut.

III

They saw what they thought were reefs wet with the morning

level light, seven miles nearer the Grenadines,

till they began passing the sail, and then a warning

cry from Philoctete, who was hauling in the lines

from the bow, showed him that the reefs were travelling

faster than they were, and begged him to shorten sail.

Exultant with terror, Philo kept ravelling

the line round his fist, and then both gasped as one whale—

“Baleine,”
said Achille—lifted its tapering wedge

as a bouquet of spume hissed from its splitting pod,

as it slowly heightened the island of itself,

then sounded, the tail sliding, till it disappeared

into a white hole whose trough, as it came, lifted

In God We Troust
with its two men high off the shelf

of the open sea, then set it back down under

a swell that swamped them, while the indifferent shoal

foamed northward. He has seen the shut face of thunder,

he has known the frightening trough dividing the soul

from this life and the other, he has seen the pod

burst into spray. The bilge was bailed out, the sail

turned home, their wet, salted faces shining with God.

Chapter LXI

I

She was framed forever in the last century,

as was much of Ireland with its lace-draped parlours,

its shawled pianos, her antique maroon settee

(on auction after the Raj); it was not all hers,

this formal affection for candlelight on the

brass buttons of his Regimental mess-jacket,

those of an R.S.M., not a proper major,

since he loved it when she swirled her hair and packed it

in a bun spiked with a silver pin; when she wore

a frock with frothing collar and, like an oval

cameo, posed with one palm nesting the other

on the maroon couch with its parenthetical,

rhyming armrests—a daguerreotype of Mother—

which he studied as he wiggled one polished pump.

And sometimes she sang
a capella,
to the squeak

of his patent leather on the elephant stump

of the Indian hassock. It was so
fin de siècle!

He often wondered if he’d fought the wrong war in

the wrong century. That swan-bowed, Victorian neck,

made whiter by its black-ribboned medallion,

would make him rise from his armchair and sail her hand

around the lances of the candles where Helen

waited in the shadows in that madras head-tie

that whitened her tolerant and enormous eyes.

It was all a lark. Like something out of Etty

or Alma-Tadema, those gold-framed memories,

stroking the tom in the dark with an ageing hand.

All her county shone in her face when the power

was cut, and the wick in the lamp would leap, as live

as the russet glints of her proud hair when she wore

it long and spread it over the wild grass to give

all that a girl could, with the camouflaged troop-ships

below them in the roadstead, with gulls buzzing the cliff

and screeching above us when she parted both lips

and searched for his soul with her tongue, her wild grey eyes

as flecked with light as the sea; then she was urging

me to go in, port of entry, with my fingers,

and I could not. Angry at being a virgin,

she turned her neck and I brushed the soft downy hair

from her ear’s shelled perfection with archaic respect;

she steered my hand through the froth of her underwear,

sobbing, but with a firmness I didn’t expect

from such a small wrist, but I couldn’t. And then she

sat up and stared at the roots of the grass and smiled

faintly back at me. I said it was unlucky,

that I needed something to wait for, and perhaps

that was the nineteenth-century part, Tom. To be

more like an officer, and not one of those chaps

who knocked up beer-headed barmaids, got them with child,

and I told her that, stroking her huddled shoulders.

I wanted to believe in her more than the war;

it was like an old novel, with shawls and soldiers,

that’s how it was, Tom. She said, “I feel like a whore,”

bending her white neck, stabbing her bun with a pin.

“Trying to trap you.” I said, “We’ll have a son, yes.

But this isn’t the way you want this to happen

either.” She took my fist and rubbed it with her tears.

They lay back on the grass, and after a while, her

tears stopped. He told her of an island he had seen

in an advert. An island where he could retire

if he lived through the war. She would give him a son.

Gnats were rising from the grass, and they watched the path

of the bent lances surrendering to the sun,

and the shining drops of the drizzle’s aftermath

glittered like the letters by which she would be known

from that day forth, on that dragonfly afternoon.

The heat was hellish in the back of the rumshop.

The Major leant forward. The cane-bottom chair creaked.

Sweat clammed his khaki shirt. The sibyl closed her eyes

and removed her cracked lenses. The candle peaked

and the flame bent from one of those cavernous sighs

that came from the bowels of the earth. He waited.

She buried the sprig of croton to the brass bell’s

tinkle in the open Bible, and he hated

the smell of fuming incense and everything else—

the lace doilies, the beads, his doubt.

                                                                  “I see flat

water, like silver. I see your wife walking there

in a white dress with frills and pressing her white hat

with one hand in the breeze by a lake.”

                                                                     Glen-da-Lough.

But she could get that from any cheap calendar.

The Major smiled. She didn’t have that far to look.

Close to Maud on the bed’s shambles, he’d imagined

her soul as a small whirring thing that instantly

shot from its crumpled sheath, from its nest of dry vine,

to cross the tin roofs that furrowed into a sea

till, like a curlew lowering in the grey wind,

it saw the knolls and broken castles of Ireland.

Plunkett never thought he would ask the next question.

“Heaven?” He smiled.

                                        “Yes. If heaven is a green place.”

And her shut eyes watered while his own were open.

That moment bound him for good to another race.

Then the Major said, “Tell her something for me, please.”

“She can hear you,” the
gardeuse
said, “Just like in life.”

“Tell her,” said the Major, clearing his throat, “the keys …

that time when I slammed them, I’m sorry that I caused her

all that pain. Tell her”—he stopped—“that no other wife

would have borne so much.” He lifted the small saucer

where the candle had shrunk to a stub, and he edged

a twenty-dollar bill under it, near the Bible.

II

Ma Kilman opened her eyes, took her spectacles

off, and rubbed their cracked lenses. She was no sibyl

without them.

                          “She happy, sir.” Like you oracles,

so would I be, he thought. A twenty-dollar bill

as an extra. He was rising from her table

of sweaty plastic when a white hand divided

the bamboo-bead curtain, and calm as Glen-da-Lough’s

vision, Maud smiled, to let him through. The wound in his

head froze him in the scorched street. Innumerable flocks

of birds screamed from her guidebook over the shacks

of the village, their shadows like enormous fans,

all those she had sewn to the silken quilt, with tags

pinned to their spurs, and he knew her transparent hands

had unstitched them as he watched them flying over

the grooved roofs till they were simply the shadow of …

of a cloud on the hills. He sat in the Rover

and looked back at the No Pain Café. Maud closed the door

and sat next to him with the bread, beaming with love.

There was the same contentment in her demeanour

as when they had seen the old man with his grey bag

carrying the serpents’ heads. He had not seen the

old labourer emerge from the unrolling flag

of smoke from his charcoal pit. The archangel showed

her how far he lived: in a cleft of green mountains

ridged like an iguana’s spine. Under the old road

with its storm-echoing leaves, steady mountain winds

made the valley churn like wake at a liner’s stern

and bent the green bamboos like archers; the old ones

creaking in their yellow joints. The track snaked through

ferns, wriggling up from the hidden river with the sign