Omeros (7 page)

that congealed to sepia lagoons, from which some case

of bilharzia would erupt in kids whose livers

caught the hookworm’s sickle. Pretty, dangerous streams.

Their past was flat as a postcard, and their future,

a brighter and flatter postcard, printed the schemes

of charters with their poverty-guaranteed tour.

In the frayed whisks of the vanished storm he felt his

own scalp, freckled, with its skeins of thinning hair,

but sunshine broke through the misty precipices

with a double rainbow that turbanned La Sorcière,

the sorceress mountain with a madras kerchief

and flashing spectacles. They called her Ma Kilman

because the village was darkened by their belief

in her as a
gardeuse,
sybil, obeah-woman

webbed with a spider’s knowledge of an after-life

in her cracked lenses. She took Holy Communion

with Maud sometimes, but there was an old African

doubt that paused before taking the wafer’s white leaf.

The Rover whined up the Morne till they saw, below

a shelf of sunshot asphalt, the expansive plunge

of Cul-de-Sac valley and the soaked indigo

serration of peaks. A sky, loaded like a sponge,

dabbed at, then dried the defiant beads of moisture

on the levelled bananas with their fecal smell

of new mud; but their irrigation ditches were

channels of light and the oval potholes small

mirrors of blueing cloud that the tires shattered,

that almost instantly reglazed their reflection,

until the storm’s green ruin no longer mattered,

and the sparkling road only increased affection

when they watched the sunlight redefining Roseau’s

old sugar-factory roof. The road climbed the bay,

as a cool wind thatched the bamboos like osiers,

urging them with light tongues downward to Anse La Raye,

chattering with expectation at the young sprouts

that would spring from the storm. Their delight was strengthened

by boys racing the Rover with half-naked shouts,

offering them bananas, until the bends straightened

and left them gasping for breath against the wet trees,

till others sprouted from grass around the next bend;

then the sea widened its blue around Canaries,

and the road, coiling with ochre precipices,

was like a rope that bound them, much closer even

than the hurricane, by its azure silences,

the way lianas knot their inseparable vine

around two tree trunks sometimes, or a mast grows leaves

in the heart of a forest, binding every vein,

rooted in the island for the rest of their lives.

The horns of the island were peaks split asunder

by a volcanic massif. Through ferns, Soufrière

waited under springs whose smoke signalled the thunder

of the dead. It was a place where an ancient fear

increased as he neared it. Holes of boiling lava

bubbled in the Malebolge, where the mud-caked skulls

climbed, multiplying in heads over and over,

while the zircon gas from the flues climbed the bald hills.

This was the gate of sulphur through which he must pass,

singeing his memory, though he pinched his nostrils

until the stench faded into verdurous peace,

like registering skulls in the lime-pits of Auschwitz.

The wound closed in smoke, then wind would reopen it,

a geyser would jet its gas through a cracked fissure

the way that steam suddenly hissed from the bonnet

of the uncapped radiator, scalding his face

if he didn’t leap clear. He filled the cooling ring

from a stream in the ferns. Then they went on climbing

around larger and greener ferns, their wide fronds

large as a fan belt’s, passing the old sulphur mine

with its rusted wheel, its hawsers of lianas,

where a Messrs. Bennett & Ward, his countrymen,

in 1836 went home to England as

bush and high taxes foreclosed their wild enterprise.

Wreaths of funereal moss draped their endeavour.

A huge wheel’s teeth locked in rust. What had stopped their scheme?

Quarrels over money? Had one caught a fever,

and, yellow as that leaf, in his delirium

babbled of an alchemy that could turn sulphur

gold, while his partner dabbed the cold sweat of a dream

from his forehead? Had they had another offer

somewhere on the outer boundaries of freedom

and free enterprise that came with an empire?

What was their force? How would they extract the mineral

from the mine and transport it? Transport it to where?

Or had they run out of money and that was all,

until fever grass and bush foreclosed the idea

and their banks were weed? He saw the sprocketed wheel

gritting its teeth at the sulphur that still lay there.

III

In the sharp blue heights beyond them there were orchids

springing from the side-paths. Sometimes, a resinous

woodsman would startle them, his bag full of snake-heads

to flog to Der Guva’ment. He walked without noise,

a shaft of light angling the floor of the forest

without shaking the ferns, his soles quiet as moss.

Through stumps of brown teeth he pointed out the hillcrest

with gaping, precipitous valleys, where smoke rose

from a charcoal pit, and under the smoke, the lines

of a white, amnesiac Atlantic, then with a bow,

and a patois blessing with old African signs,

as soundless as light on the road they watched him go.

England seemed to him merely the place of his birth.

How odd to prefer, over its pastoral sites—

reasonable leaves shading reasonable earth—

these loud-mouthed forests on their illiterate heights,

these springs speaking a dialect that cooled his mind

more than pastures with castles! To prefer the hush

of a hazed Atlantic worried by the salt wind!

Others could read it as “going back to the bush,”

but harbour after crescent harbour closed his wound.

There was a lot in the island that Maud hated:

the moisture rotting their library; that was the worst.

It seeped through the shawled piano and created

havoc with the felt hammers, so the tuner cost

a regular fortune. After that, the cluttered light

on the choked market steps; insects of any kind,

especially rain-flies; a small, riddling termite

that cored houses into shells and left windows blind;

barefoot Americans strolling into the banks—

there was a plague of them now, worse than the insects

who, at least, were natives. Turbanned religious cranks

urging sisters with candles to the joy of sects,

the velocity of passenger transports on

uncurbed highway, comets that hurtled out of sight

and brought a flash to the heart; the darkening monsoon

of merciless July with patches of sunlight

mercurial as Helen, the slanted, almond eyes

of her ebony beauty. And then an elate

sunrise would flood Maud’s garden, pouring relentless

light in angelic lilies, yellow chalices

of morning-glories, and Queen Anne’s seraphic lace.

Just then he saw the butterfly pinned to a blade

like a nervous pennant. She had followed him here.

The dilating panels pulsed to his trembling blood,

the wing-folded palms in their parody of prayer;

then they would widen, like the eyes of Maud’s scissors

following a seam. Was he condemned to see her

every time one twinkled up out of Maud’s garden?

What did she want? For History to exorcise her

theft of the yellow frock? Did she crave his pardon?

After a while the happiness grew oppressive.

Only the dead can endure it in paradise,

and it felt selfish for so long. He felt as if

the still, lemon panels were painted with her eyes.

There’s too much poverty below us. Every leaf

defines its limits. All roots have their histories.

“It’s so still. It’s like Adam and Eve all over,”

Maud whispered. “Before the snake. Without all the sin.”

And their peace was so deep, they sat in the Rover

listening to the bamboos. He switched on the engine

and they bucketed, wobbling over rain-ruts, hurled

on the groaning springs down to the flat, real world.

Chapter XI

I

Pigs were his business. These people were not resigned

to living with garbage, drifting in numbed content

as the filth narrowed the drains. They had not designed

the Attic ideal of the first slave-settlement,

with sea-grapes for olives and black philosophers

with clouds over their elbows. They had not laid out

narrow-gauge pipes for buckets, but none for sewers.

They had not sucked the cane till sugar was played out.

Empires were swinish. These had splendid habits

of cleanliness, compulsively sweeping yards dry

with their palm-brooms. Encouraged to screw like rabbits

by estates who liked labour and, naturally, by

a Church that damned them to hell for contraceptives.

But they waxed their tables, flailed their beaten laundry

on the river-rocks; there were ikons in their lives—

the Virgin, the Virgin Lamp, the steps lined with flowers,

and they learnt quickly, good repairers of engines

and fanatical maids. Helen had kept the house

as if it were her own, and that’s when it all begins:

when the maid turns into the mistress and destroys

her own possibilities. They start to behave

as if they owned you, Maud said. This was the distress

of the pale lemon frock, which Helen claimed Maud gave

her but forgot. He stayed out of it, but that dress

had an empire’s tag on it, mistress to slave.

The price was envy and cunning. The big church, the

middens by cloudy lagoons, kids racing like piglets.

If History saw them as pigs, History was Circe

with her schoolteacher’s wand, with high poles at the fêtes

of saint-day processions past al fresco latrines.

So Plunkett decided that what the place needed

was its true place in history, that he’d spend hours

for Helen’s sake on research, so he proceeded

to the whirr of enormous moths in the still house.

Memory’s engines. The butterfly dress was hers,

at least her namesake’s, in the Battle of the Saints.

II

During this period his life grew increasingly

bookish and slippered, like a don’s. He stayed in. Maud

wondered about his wound. When she took in his tea

he nodded towards the side-table, and this made

her leave him with his ziggurat of books, his charts,

and the balsa fleet he carved with a small scalpel,

while she sipped hers in the arched shade with her orchids.

Dusk darkened the pots, an allamanda’s bell

bronzed in the sky-fire, then melted into night.

Dennis was still at work when she took her tray in.

The desk was dark, except for a green pool of light

cast on its baize by a lamp curved like a heron.

She sat on a chair beside him. He didn’t speak,

and the tea was untouched. One finger traced the line

of some map, and the nose, with its man-o’-war’s beak,

skimmed the white page. She had never felt more alone.

A light rain had washed the stars. They looked very close.

Maud sighed, then went upstairs. She could feel the white sea

losing its white noise slowly, drawing the windows;

she studied the map on one forearm, then briskly

loosened the bridal knot of the mosquito net,

then stretched it to the corners of the tautened pane,

carried the straw basket with the bright spools in it

down to the divan, her needles swift as his pen.

III

She thought: I dreamed of this house with woods around it,

with trees I’d read of, whose flowers I’d never seen.

Part of a barracks, with no noise to surround it

but cicadas chattering like my sewing-machine.

I loved the young teak with bodies clean as birches

in light that freckled the leopard shade of the path,

when martins at dusk with their crisscrossing stitches

would sew the silk sky, or preen around the birdbath.

I saw it when we first came. Unapproachable

cliff on one side, but its ledges a nesting place

for folding herons and gulls, and my teak table

with its lion-claw legs and its varnished surface

spread with fine scalloped linen, white as the sea’s lace,

and ringing crystal, with a fresh wreath of orchids

like Remembrance Day, at my brass candlestick’s base,

in Dennis’s honour mainly, and the place cards

near the bone-china of my huge lily-pad plates.

Have I put on airs, to think of dinner-candles

and flags and lances since we slow-marched down the aisle

under crossed swords? Then, my tureen with thick handles

hefted by Helen, her cap white as my napkins

rolled in their crested holders. She’d set it in place,

and step back in shadow that blent with her fine skin’s.

What a loss, that girl! I ladled the fragrant steam

of my stew in thick portions, the dark full of fireflies

that never catch the leaves. It’s as clear as a dream,

but more real. Well, folks lived for centuries

like this with candles and airs on the piano,

the love-songs fading over a firefly sea,

their mouths round as the moon over a black canoe

like the one I smiled at today:
In God We Troust.