The Polished Hoe (13 page)

Sargeant can see and feel the power and magnificence of wealth that is in this room in which he is standing: the cut-glass vases and cups and plates; and the Berbice and tub-chairs, and settees and couches made out of mahogany and cherry wood; and the breeze, a new wind that has risen with his arrival at the Great House, sweeps now through the room, carrying with it the fragrance of roses growing in the gardens, bourgeanvillea, lady-of-the-night, and other flowers whose names he does not know . . . for that one moment, when he spoke to the Constable, Sargeant was transported back to the small patch of unpaved gravel, the Parade Square, at the front of the sub-station. The Parade Square is one-half the size of this front-house parlour in which he now stands, uncomfortable; with his police cap in his hand.

“Good night, then, Constable,” he tells the Constable. The Constable snaps to attention again and salutes.

“Sir!” the Constable shouts.

“Carry on,” Sargeant says. And then he tells the Constable, “At ease! Stand easy!”

The Constable salutes a second time, and rams his peak cap back on to his head.

Sargeant salutes the Constable with a gesture like brushing flies from his face. His own police cap is in his hand. He runs the fingers of his left hand over its sweatband. No one can see his fingers. The sweatband is slippery, and smooth.

“Well, good night, Constable,” Sargeant says.

“Good night, sir!”

“You dismiss,” Sargeant tells him.

“Good night, Mistress.”

“Good night, young man.”

And the Constable leaves.

“Nice young man,” she says.

“Well-train,” he says.

“Young-enough to be my third child, if I had any more boys.”

“My right-hand,” Sargeant says.

“Something to drink, Percy?”

“Should I, Miss Mary? Under the circumstances?”

“What circumstances, Percy? That would make it wrong for me to offer you a drink, Percy DaCosta Benjamin Stuart? Eh?”

He smiles. She smiles, too.

“Last time I hear my name call-out like that, Christian names and surname, in full, was when I was inducted into the Constabulary of this Island!”

“Admitted!”
she says. “The
Herald
said you got the Baton of Honour for passing out at the top of your class. You came first, Percy!”

“When I was admitted in the Constabulary of this Island,” he says.

“So, Percy, are we going to act like strangers the whole night, just-because of the circumstances, as you call it? Or, like two grown-up people?”

“Miss Mary-Mathilda,” he says. In his discomfiture, he has turned his cap around, passing the fingers of his left hand along the sweatband.

She goes up to him and takes the cap from him and places it on the tub-chair the Constable had sat in.

“Still dark rum?”

“Still dark. Please.”

“Private stock? Or ordinary?”

“Six o’ one and half-dozen of the next.”

“You have the choice. A man should always make his choice known! So, private stock? Or ordinary?”

“Well, ma’am . . .”

“Mr. Bellfeels has some private stock he cured himself. Bellfeels Special Stades White Rum, if you please! You want a whites? Your Constable drank milk,” she says; and laughs. “What you say?”

“Private stock, please, if you don’t mind.”

“The times we lived through, Percy!”

“The times.”

“Look at you! Seeing you stanning-up here in my house, for the first time, after all these years, for the first time . . . now, in what you call, under these circumstances, fidgeting with your cap, the same way as when you were a lil boy in Second Standard, fiddling with your school cap . . . look at you! . . . the lil boy who fell in love with me! Didn’t you think I knew; or remember? Yes . . .

“Years-back-when,” she says, “years-back, when we, you and me, Golbourne and Pounce and Courtenay Babb, father to the Constable . . . Naiman and Manny and Charles . . .”

“Charles? Charles Jurdan?”

“Charles Jurdan.”

“What happen to him?”

“Amurca. He disappear to Amurca . . .”

“My God!”

“. . . and Gordon and Randolph . . .”

“Gordon and Randolph! Didn’t Randolph?”

“Leff and went to Panama . . .”

“. . . to help build the Canal Zone?”

“Build the Canal.”

“Yes, he did.”

“The Panama Canal!”

“. . . and Milton and Lionel?”

“Milton Mawn and Lionel Greenwich! What happen to them two brutes?”

“They were close always, like brothers, although they were only third-cousins. But they went to Englund on the same boat. I heard about it, through Mr. Bellfeels, that they dead within the same week. In the same manner, too. By the same means. Lick-down in traffics, by a London-Transport bus!”

“My God!” Sargeant says.

His amazement is not about her knowledge of all these boys and girls they grew up with, it is more to do with the way she speaks, using the Village dialect. Her voice sounds so musical. This is the first time he has had such a long conversation with her, as an adult. Her voice sounds so soft and beautiful. It takes him back, weakened now, in limb and heart, across the miles and years of adolescence.

“Good God!”

“But didn’t they . . . now that you mention it . . . work for the same London-Transport?”

“That’s the
irony
of life! And on their off-day, to-boot. Consecutive. One after the other. The two o’ them was going to some place in London, called Piccadilly Circle . . .”

“You remember names that I forget, Miss Mary-Mathilda.”

“What about Pearl? And Barbara, and Minta? Mignon and Elsie?”

“Pearl. Pearl Hunt! She married a man from one o’ the Small Islands, didn’t she? Sin-Lucia? And Barbara. Barbara Cheltenham! Barbara Cheltenham went to Englund to do nursing. Minta. Minta Whiteacre! Minta Whiteacre, what become of her?”

“Minta died.”

“God rest her soul.”

“May she rest in peace!”

“Mignon. Mignon . . . Mignon, Mignon Osbourne! And Elsie! I’ll never forget Elsie. The prettiest girl . . . after you, of course, Miss Mary-Mathilda . . . who ever lived in Flagstaff.”

“The prettiest, Percy! Elsie Pilgrim was
the
prettiest girl amongst all o’ we!”

“All these boys and girls still living here? Or they emigrade? Except the ones who dead.”

“Most. Most gone. One way, or the other. To the grave. Or Amurca. But this is the full list o’ girls and boys who we used to play with.”

“Most emigrade. I miss them, now that you mention their names. But I can’t say that I did-remember all o’ them, though.”

“And Clotelle . . . remember Clotelle? You can’t forget Clotelle. She went to an early grave. An early death. And a tragic death, to-boot! . . . and Mr. Courtenay Babb, father to the boy, the Constable, who was just here . . .”

“Courtenay Babb-the-first?”

“I wonder if he know that I knew his father?”

“He too young to know things, Miss Mary-Mathilda,” Sargeant says.

“. . . as children, we used to have summuch fun, on moonlight nights . . ..Well, I had better call Gertrude and get something for you to drink . . .”

And she moves to the small heart-shaped, polished table; and she lifts the bell, a heavy, metal bell with a brown handle of dark- ened wood, to clang its tongue against its side; this same bell, the same size as that one, similar in manufacture, and used by the Headmistress of her school, and the Headmaster of his, to summon girls and boys to the platform for floggings, and for rewards; all these bells in Flagstaff Village being rung as if there was such an urgency to be called, to be halted, to be roused from the bed, from the dead, from the cane field, to be always on time. And always “summonsed,” as Miss Mary-Mathilda says to Gertrude.

Mary-Mathilda lifts the bell from the table and rings it, with a quick flick of her wrist, two times. Sargeant sees this bell as a miniature of the bell of Sin-Davids Anglican Church that tolls at six every evening, that sounds the alarms of hurricanes and cane-fires, for ships in danger on the sea; the sea that is everywhere, visible from every corner of the Island, that bell that tolls for the dead, in slow step with the fall of black shoes on the macadam road, polished to a blinding indulgence, slow to match the march of pallbearers and the reduced speed of the dead, always loud and mournful, from the tall steeple of the Anglican Church.

The bell in this Great House has a hollow sound. As if there is a crack in its small girth. But perhaps this kind of a bell, manufactured intentionally to “summonse” servants, may be able to sustain this hollowness in its ring, and still be used, deliberately and daily, to “summonse” Gertrude from the large, dark, smoky kitchen, with its pleasing tingle, much unlike the rebellious, violent, loud and ear-shattering
cuh-lang-cuh-lang-cuh-lang clang-cuh-lang-cuhlang
of the bell in the Plantation Yard. That bell is nailed onto a piece of wood, onto the limb of a strong tree, the tamarind tree, and a thick short length of rope is attached to its tongue and knotted at the end so that any hand, the hand of the Plantation’s children, the hand of Mr. Bellfeels, or his wife, but the hand of someone with privilege, might reach it easily just above the head, and hold the knot of the rope which is like an extended tongue itself, and send the tongue of iron
cuh-lang
ing against the steel of the thick-girded bell. The bell was fired in cast-steel in England.

Sargeant shakes his head, as if indeed there is seawater in his ear; and is once more paying attention to the beautiful things surrounding him: chairs, tables, settees, pictures on the walls; and ornaments of glass and China and clay, all in the shape of animals, leopards, crocodiles and lions and tigers which he has never seen —he knows only horses and jackasses and mules and cows and sheep and goats and dogs, yes dogs, Alsatians and Doberman-Pincers, and stray cats, mongrels and bitches—but all these animals, the leopards and the tigers, in lifelike permanence, are now surrounding him in the front-house of this Great House.

From a room within the large house, noiselessly along a hallway, comes Gertrude walking like a cat; silently; dressed in maid’s uniform of black poplin, without the starched white cap, without the starched white apron that goes with the uniform; but informal in a black dress that is long to her calves, and blacker than its natural blackness against the heavy black complexion of her sturdy smooth skin. And she walks in her bare feet, bold and secure; and after Sargeant sees her enter, he is fascinated how her feet, black on the instep, and pink and thick round the heels, touch the Persian carpets on the brown-stained, shining hardwood floor; and make no noise.

“Evening, sir,” Gertrude says.

“Evening, Gertrude. You getting on, all right, Gertrude?” he asks her.

“Yes, sir.”

“Gertie-dear,” Miss Mary-Mathilda says, “Sargeant Stuart is a bit thirsty. What we have in the house to slacken his thirst?”

“Something soft, Mistress?” Gertrude says; pauses, and adds, “Or something hard?” She manages to send a glance in Sargeant’s direction, quick and furtive. Sargeant gives no indication that he has noticed.

“What you think, Gertie-dear? You be the judge. You think Sargeant Stuart should have something
hard
? Or something
soft
?”

She is not looking at Gertrude as she says this.

“Something hard,” Gertrude says, putting the stress on “hard.” And Sargeant does not, still, give any reaction. “Something hard, Mistress.”

“Do we have it?”

“We have everything, Mistress! We have the twenty-year dark rum Mr. Bellfeels bring back from the Rum Bond. We have some Mount Gay Special. We have something that Master Wilberforce bring back from his last trip, from . . .”

“Israel.”

“Jerusalem, it was, Mistress. The bottle say ‘Made in Jerusalem.’”

“Thanks, Gertie-dear. You know more about this House than me. The mind, Sargeant, the mind . . . not good any more. But, Israel-Jerusalem, or Jerusalem-Israel, that boy o’ mine goes all over the world! What he trying to find in Israel?”

“. . . and we have our usual private stock, Bellfeels Private Stades White Rum. And there’s some brandy, Mistress. We also have the Wincarnis Wine that Master Wilberforce buy for the house, plus the dry Australia sherry that Master Wilberforce bring back from down in Demerara . . . and don’t forget the wine that Master Wilberforce bring us from over in Italy and Europe. We stock-up good, Mistress.”

Mary-Mathilda smiles at Gertrude’s litany of drinks.

“What you would like?” she says.

She is aware that Gertrude is playing a game with Sargeant. But she does not let on she is aware of this. This is the first time this evening that she feels safe.

Gertrude and Sargeant’s game relaxes her. But she feels herself in control knowing the power she has, and has become accustomed to having, which she wields over her servants—excepting Gertrude, who is closest to her in the Great House—she feels this power and authority .Well inside her body, and take over her disposition; and residing once more within her is her characteristically bold, independent and carefree “temperriment,” the frame of mind she said she had when earlier tonight, she walked to the Plantation Main House.