Swimming in the Volcano (10 page)

“I know you, eh?” Archibol asked in a voice that had traveled off the island, north, and been influenced. “You Crissy Knowles' boy?”

Isaac scuffed the dirt with his good foot. “Me brakes give out, sah. I ain have no control. Me very own auto and livelihood mash up, come to a pile of junk.”

“Get in,” Archibol directed. “Come.” The minister reached behind him to unlock the rear door of the sedan. Full of resignation, Isaac obeyed. There was some comfort to sitting down in the air conditioning, getting the weight off his legs. Before they could even return to the roadway, the woman furiously cranked her window open.

“Smell daht bwoy, Archie,” she complained. “Him ahll drunk-up.”

They drove up and over the crown of Zion Hill and down fast into town, through the blackened stone arch of the gate of the central police station, and parked on its cobbled parade ground. Archibol was committed to relieving himself of the distraction of Isaac as quickly as possible. A man arrives home from overseas where he has been conducting the serious business of his nation and is in no time at all ensnared by the trivial business bogging down the lives of common citizens. A fellow bang into the car and race off, his wife tells him. What does he care, he has more important things on his mind, but still he is only a man and his wife is upset. He's tired from his long journey, he's fretting about the maneuvering between his comrades since he's been gone. He doesn't want to think about such a small thing as an automobile, he wants to forget the whole business, the damage is only superficial and now the automobile looks like any other automobile on the potholed roads and dirt tracks of St. Catherine, so quit making this damn big fuss, woman,
fah Cyrise sake!
There were more compelling and fateful matters to concern himself with—he'd been summoned back from New York by the PM but not for reasons as yet explained. Quit making such a stupid fuss, eh?—but this was part of coming home, pretending sympathy and partnership in the meaningless obsessions of his spoiled wife, entering
within the walls of her domestic kingdom where he was willing to let her reign with only occasional ritual challenges to her petty rule. It was nothing to him, except for such frivolous moments as this, their annoyance a mere tithe, a tax he must of necessity pay for sex, a home, a family. She insisted he stop on the road away from the airport and so he stopped, and now all he wished was for Crissy Knowles' oldest boy Isaac to come along to the police station and file an accident report so that his wife could be assured her vengeance—submitting a proper damage claim to the insurers, an act which would eventually bring about purpose and pleasure for her, given the plodding mishandling of such claims. He felt exactly as though he were providing her with a privileged position of employment—an opportunity to engage in long and fruitful harassment, bullying a chain of clerks and agents who would have no recourse but to listen to her caterwauls, and strive to please her.

Since Archibol had trained himself to see past the difficulty of any moment to its profits, he felt, by the time he had parked the sedan, gracious enough to open the back door for Isaac, and to walk according to the measure of the young man's lethargic pace, rather than nudge him forward though the grand fortress doors of the station. He was being conciliatory, he had found a clever way to make his wife a gift—but even this reversal of the minister's mood couldn't allay Isaac's fears. He balked at the threshold to the station, the voices of the dead in his ears, counting off licks:
One, fah freeness. Two, fah freshness
. Three for all-around
chupidness
. On the botsy, on the head-side, cross the knackers and over the knees.

To guide him forward, Archibol touched Isaac's elbow, and Isaac recoiled.

“You ain bring me to jail, sah?” he said, planting his feet. “Was de brakes fail, ya know.” Archibol himself spent a rare smile on this comedy and explained to Isaac the reason he must file a report.

“Is just formality, mahn,” he said. “Relax, eh?”

The public reception room was not a welcoming sight. Its concrete floor was coarse and cracked. Two framed photographic portraits—one of the Queen, the other of Edison Banks—broke the bare monotony of the limestone walls, disregarded shrines. Two wooden benches, unoccupied, their surface polished by human friction, repeated the corner made by their adjacent walls. A doorway at the back of the room opened into a corridor, lined with austere offices. Against the far wall, facing out, was a metal desk, painted gray, and there sat the duty officer, pencil in hand, doodling on the front page of a copy of the
Crier
. As he saw the minister approach, he stood,
coming to attention, and remained rigid while Archibol ignored him to chat with Isaac as if they had stepped into a pub, two old friends having a drink.

“I knew Crissy, ya know.”

“Mm hmm.”

Isaac had not had much opportunity to know his father except as dead—a murdered and martyred man, too fresh in the grave, too mad with his enemies, who remained among the living.

“Yes, I knew Crissy,” reminisced Minister Archibol with self-importance. “Mahn, is true, but time fly, eh? Twenty years come and go since Crissy raise me up in de cutters union.” With each word, the minister's language undressed itself until he was speaking the singsongy patois of his boyhood in the countryside—and of the campaign trail, too. “Me jussa bwoy bahck den, not so old ahs you. Crissy and Kingsley runnin de cane fields in dem days, eh? carryin on hell fah massa. When Crissy die, fust I tell meself, world come to end today. But world juss begin when Crissy tek de bullet from de white fella's gun, nuh? Crissy cotch de bullet daht set we free.”

“Mm hmm,” said Isaac, morosely.

Isaac had never been one to talk much about his father—what was there for him to say on a subject so readily converted into cheap fuel for mouthy politicians. When the first union of cane cutters had formed, illegally, on St. Catherine, Crissy Knowles had been one of the organizers, more inspiring to his mates than inspired by the role of leadership, and Joshua Kingsley had been their first elected union boss. Delwyn Pepper, nascent tyrant, was voted treasurer. Crissy Knowles was in the forefront of the union's struggle to be recognized, and when it came time to strike against the old families who owned the sugar plantations, Crissy led it. Crissy knew the stakes—he cut in the fields for a living. Kingsley and Pepper had never whacked a stalk of cane in their lives, except to have their pictures taken. When the strike busters mobbed the scene, Crissy's was the first head bloodied. For men like Kingsley and Pepper, men with no prospects, men who used their mouth the way others used their muscle, the union was a stepping stone to power, leverage against the colonial status quo, and when they were enfranchised into the affairs of the administrated state as unequal partners, it was Crissy who remained behind in the union, a fella who spent the day in the field with the rest of the workers. When England decided it had exhausted its interest in St. Catherine, a withered consort whose time had come to be retired from the payroll, Kingsley and Pepper matched up against the candidates of the old planters in the island's first elections
for self-government, and it was Crissy they easily convinced to execute their most unsavory business, Crissy who talked the laborers into a season-long strike that starved them, Crissy who shepherded gangs of toughs against the Dominicans imported to harvest the cane. And finally it was Crissy, persuaded by God knows what argument, who had taken a thirty-pound crate of dynamite up to Jack Dawes Estate, packed it under the boilers of the island's only sugar refinery, and lit the fuse. The explosion tore out the last stubborn roots of the island's planter class, and a night watchman's bullet was the end of Crissy, and the end of what had since been called the Sugar War. Kingsley and Pepper had conveniently placed themselves in Trinidad for the fiery climax. They came back to bury Crissy Knowles a hero, but until this growing season cane had not been planted on St. Catherine for twenty years, for twenty years St. Catherine had sweetened her tea and cake with outside sugar, the cane cutters sat on their stoops for twenty years, sitting in darkness, and for twenty years Isaac Knowles had heard them curse his father's legacy of ruination, for twenty years he had listened to the big shots continue to drum his father's bones on the treasure chests of their venality, using Crissy the way preachers used Jesus, to stay in business.

Except through two images he had managed to preserve from his childhood, Isaac did not know Crissy Knowles as a man who had existed on the surface of the world. The first was of his mother peeling long green tongues of aloe, the gel glimmering in the lantern light of their wattle hut in the bush near the Jack Dawes Estate, her hands emulsifying it with a dribble of goat's milk, kneading and massaging the ointment into his father's forearms, shaped and colored like two legs of smoked mutton, but cratered with old scorpion bites and crosshatched with the paper-thin lines of the cane leaves, where the hard blades had sliced his skin. Nice, nice, Crissy would murmur as his wife worked on him. Then she'd pull off his pants to rub his legs, and he would sit down to his dinner in his sweaty underpants, at peace with himself, for the moment, in his rage against the old families.

The other image was of his father brought home that night that concluded the Sugar War, carried like a slain panther by four awkward disciples, four co-conspirators less brave and therefore still alive, one man to each arm, one to each leg, Crissy's rump bouncing on the dirt, his head lolling back impossibly far, scraping the dirt, rolling loosely with the steps of the men, and the worst of it, his father's tongue, extending horrifically out a gash in the side of his face to the ground, coated with blood and blackened by the soil it had dragged
through, as though his father's dying effort had been to taste the earth. That is what Isaac knew and remembered of his father—an earth-eating animal whose flesh had been butchered by the knifelike slashes of the sweet harvest. As far as Isaac could determine, Crissy in his grave, the one absolute victim of the conflict, was a spirit divided, spending one half of eternity enamored of his own pride, the other half suffocating in a coffin of remorse.

Isaac leaned wearily on his arm against the edge of the desk in the vestibule of stone and mustiness, indifferent to Archibol's strange effort to patronize him. He had endured twenty years of his father's erstwhile mates, now the leaders of an independent nation, making irregular pilgrimage to pay their respects to Crissy Knowles' widow. In the early years they came knocking at the wattle hut in Jack Dawes and, when Crissy's pension checks stopped because the government—these same men—decided it would no longer fund a defunct union, they knocked at the clapboard house in the slum of Scuffletown, donated to his mother by a source unknown to Isaac. He and his brothers had grown up with the politicians petting the tops of their heads for good fortune. They would press a warm shilling into Isaac's hand and tell him, Keep awake in school,
bwoy
, this poor place going need your brain someday, and then they would saunter out into the yard to stand and speak to the people who had gathered there to see the notable men, native sons who had learned to talk back to the world. These men would finish their speeches and leave, as they always left, leaving Crissy's wife and boys to fend for themselves.

“Is a nation
abl disgrace
,” Archibol proclaimed, causing his wife to blink, smirking at his pointless oratory, “we fellas in Government House ain ahs yet move to put up a site, eh? like dem statue figure of de mahn Columbus, to honor Crissy properly.” Spurred by his inspiration, he realized that a small relationship with Crissy Knowles' oldest son would not be a useless thing, even though the martyred union boss was a shopworn symbol for the conservatives and the Banks faction had so far ignored him.

“Is ahn idea in dis day, in dis time, nuh?” he said, his head nodding to solicit Isaac's approval. Isaac stared right through him, mimicking the nod, and Archibol assumed he had won his loyalty. Out of habit, he clapped Isaac on the shoulder, shook his unwilling hand, and forgot about him.

“Come,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the desk to rouse the duty officer, “where de affidavy?”

The duty officer's heels popped together, as he had been trained to
pop them for all of ministerial rank, and he emerged from his dullness.

“Sah?”

“Fah accident report, nuh? Bring it.”

A ledger was produced from within the desk, its pages blue-ruled, like a composition book. Its used portion bore the painstaking handwritten accounts of yesterday's cruel involvements between the people of Queenstown, incriminations as old as slavery or as modern as packaged milk, the brawling feuds and larcenies, sexual assaults and drunken rampages that were the community's malformed and inarticulate self-expressions of justice. The duty officer took his chair, licked the tip of his ballpoint pen and remained poised, head down, waiting for the minister to begin his statement. But Archibol glared at his wristwatch and deferred to his wife, who had stood off to the side throughout, contributing a look of universal disapproval to the proceeding.

Archibol clucked impatiently at his wife. “Speak to de mahn,” he said. He tapped the glass of his watch, already late for an appointment with the prime minister. “I walkin meself down to Government House to see Eddy.”

March 29, 1977

Low & Behold
by Epictetus

Eppy:
Well, gents, another noisy week at Government House since we last adjourned our curbside choir. The hullabaloo brings to mind an observation offered years ago by a famous lady, to wit: No good deed shall go unpunished.

Beau of the Bawl:
I for one am not surprised a woman said that since they are the ones who ensure its truth.