The Polished Hoe (14 page)

Now, as “mistress” of the Great House, it is time to have some refreshments.

She does so every Sunday evening at this hour. By herself. Sometimes, she would invite Gertrude to sit with her; and they would drink their rum in silence, as the
BBC
played hymns from St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. Sometimes, she and Wilberforce would sit together. So, why be different tonight? Even “
under the circumstances
”?

But still, she is a little saddened to see this little game she knows they are playing about the drinks come to an end.

“A lil Mount Gay won’t kill, Miss Mary-Mathilda, please,” Sargeant says.

“Make it two.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Gertrude says.

And when Sargeant hears Gertrude speak these words, in this strange, big, beautiful Great House, and knows that in all the years he has known her, he has never heard her talk like this, if he could put form and construction now to her words, Gertrude, by her own words, would have created some delicate and valuable token, some expression of love, of loyalty, of devotion, some demonstration of her closeness to Miss Mary-Mathilda. And this could be called quite frankly a small, short, beautiful curtsey.

“How you want yours?”

“Lil ice water on the side,” Sargeant answers.

“Soda in mine, Gertie-girl.”

And when Gertrude has served the refreshments, she leaves in the same silence as she had entered. In the same fading silence like the picture in a magic lantern, going out of focus and then completely disappearing. And then is forgotten.

And at this time, on a Sunday night, normally Sargeant would be in the Choir; and she, sitting by the window, where her chair is now, her arms spread on the windowsill, her chin placed on her arms, listening to the broadcast of church service on the Voice of Bimshire Radio Station. And when the local Church service is not broadcast because of “a technical difficulty”—she got to know that this meant the Chief Technician was drunk—she would listen to religious music, hymns and sacred songs from Sin-Martin’s-inthe-Fields, from the Mother Country, from in Englund. Yes, from Englund!

She has never visited Englund. But she knows Englund “by heart,” as she always says. She knows its best radio, the
BBC
; its best magazines; its best education, through Wilberforce’s success; its best music; and its best, proper accents of speech.

She looks through the
London Illustrated News
regularly as they arrive “by surface mail,” into the Island of Bimshire.

Every Sunday, she hears her own Vicar, Reverend Mr. M. R. P. P. Dowd,
M.Th.
(Dunelmn) Third-Class Honours, as he stands in the pulpit, tall like the water tower in the Plantation Yard, talking about sin and the poor.
“‘They shall inherit the kingdom . . .’”
Yes, listening on a Sunday night like tonight, “but under different circumstances”; she is, through her closeness to the singing coming through the radio speaker, and her closeness to the songs and hymns themselves, able to imagine that these songs and hymns were coming from across the knoll, over the green Pasture, and the green fields of sugar canes just a few yards from her Great House. That the music is born out of the burnt grass and old rocks and stones, the walkedover gravel in the Church Yard, beside the graveyard of the Church. She does not have to look farther than this tall structure of coral stone and mortar, of stained-glass windows showing birth and death; defeat and conquest; crucifixion and resurrection in its paints and colours which come to palpable life in the sun, and bleed; yes, thick red blood, red as wine, comes pouring down, as if the tree and the spear and the diadem of thorns, and the voices of abuse and submission that the afternoon sun blazoned forth from the stained windows that give this history is being witnessed by her, and takes place, in its full pageantry and panoply of history, in the yard of the Plantation Main House.

And in addition to this pageantry taken from the Old Testament in her Bible is her own saga, which began in this very Church Yard so many years ago, also on a Sunday.

But tonight, life is under different circumstances. The radio is turned off. She cannot remember having listened to it at all today.

Missing the voices in the radio does not upset her, nor cause her to think long upon it. But in the short space of time, like the tightening of a muscle in the calf, she can hear the words of her favourite hymn. Hymn 332. “There Is a Green Hill Far Away.” But it is the second-last verse she likes:

There was no other good enough,
To pay the price of sin,
He only could unlock the gate
Of Heav’n, and let us in.

It is a hymn written for her moods, to reflect her day when it has been a good one, when the running of this Great House is smooth; when Gertrude is not complaining about “the hard-work you putting on me”; when Master Wilberforce comes home late to luncheon; and in the same day, early to dinner; and brings five friends; when he and his friends eat Gertrude’s “sweet-sweet” food, and smile, pat her on her shoulder and leave in their roaring cars, kicking-up pebbles and dust against the large panes of glass windows—and into the front-house parlour she had just cleaned —when the French doors are open; after her coconut bread comes out..Well, and “cloiding” and delicious, the smell that brings Master Wilberforce and his friends into the kitchen, large as the galley on an ocean liner bringing “them cheap-ass, tight-ass English tourisses” to “feck-up
my
fecking Island!”; when Wilberforce and his friends would break off chunks of the warm coconut bread; and disappear, in clouds of dust.

She never sat at table with Master Wilberforce and his friends. And she did not sit with him when he dined at home alone. She sat always in the kitchen, at a smaller table Gertrude set formally, with silvers, butter knife, main course knife, dessert knife; soup spoon, salad spoon, dessert spoon, two forks, one for the main dish, the other for dessert; and a small spoon placed at right angles to the other implements—even when she was taking only split-pea soup, for luncheon. And a warm, white, damask napkin folded in three, in a long rectangular shape, in the middle of the three white plates bordered in royal blue. Each crystal glass, and each plate and the tips of the handle of each implement bears the coat of arms of the Plantation: two sugar canes with their tops attached, crossed vertical on a shield.
Triumph
is written in gouged-out letters, under the shield.

She and Gertrude prepared meals together, sitting at the unpainted deal-board table, cutting the pork and seasoning it; gutting the chickens, leaving on the head and the “feets”; “leave on the feets, Mistress, the sweetest parts”; kneading the dough for the coconut bread; laughing in spite of the smokiness in the kitchen; eating dunks and ackees and golden apples, in season; and suggesting how the food might have tasted better, if they had added “just a lil more o’ tumbrick,” or “a piece-more salt-beef,” or a “lil-less water in the rice, Gertie-girl!”; talking about everything that went on, over at the Plantation Main House, that week; at Harrison College and the schools; at the Vicarage, and in the Selected Clienteles Room of the Harlem Bar & Grill, down the hill, in the Village.

Gertrude fed Miss Mary-Mathilda with the gossip and scandal of the Village; and Miss Mary-Mathilda regaled Gertrude with the “wirthlessness you behold mongst the rich.” With this information exchanged between the two women, Miss Mary-Mathilda learned a lot about Sargeant from Gertrude’s lips; and she invented the rest; and during the day, alone in her bedroom, Mary-Mathilda trained a powerful spying glass on the front door of Sargeant’s house, focused it on the shield made of tinning that showed the name of the company that insured his house; even picked out his chickens moving round outside his house; yes; and she got to know Sargeant in recent years from this distance, through her telescopic lens; and Gertrude learned “how many nights when you in your warm bed sleeping, and I up here, can’t sleep for the screaming and the shouting coming from the direction of that Main House, girl; like two people fighting . . .”

Miss Mary-Mathilda drank at each meal, except breakfast, a snap of dark rum, with a glass of chipped ice on the side. Sometimes, she drank three snaps. Gertrude drank dark rum with chips of ice in a half-pint crystal glass, drowned in fresh coconut water— with each meal, including breakfast, especially when Miss Mary-Mathilda did not come into the kitchen.

Master Wilberforce had stopped eating a breakfast of two fried pork chops, three strips of fried plantain, two bakes, sliced cucumber with lime juice, fresh parsley, white vinegar, salt and nigger-peppers— he called this cucumber dish, “prickle”—and two large cups of strong Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee. In recent days, he was now eating his breakfast standing up (“I got to fly this morning, Gertzie-love!”): one slice of brown toast spread thick with homemade sweet butter and gooseberry jam, and a small amount of coffee, in a very tiny coffee cup, which Gertrude called a “semi-glass,” holding less than a gill, of very strong coffee from overseas.

“
Expresso!
” Gertrude reported to Miss Mary-Mathilda, the first morning.

“Expresso?” Miss Mary-Mathilda asked.

“
Expresso!”
Gertrude repeated to her mistress. “A Eyetalian habit he say he pick-up in Italy. And him a big man, Miss Mary-Mathilda, and a doctor, to-boot, who should know more better! Forsaking the breakfast that I prepare for him, a real Bimshire breakfast! And telling me he having a Continental breakfast instead!
Expresso
, Mistress? And eating stanning-up! For the food to lodge in his ankles and his two feets? Mistress, you could tell me what so special about this Continental breakfast that consist of only
expresso
coffee?”

“Well, when he get run-down, we will see. He will revert-back to eating real food!”

“I really hope so, Mistress. I like Master Wilberforce too good for this tragedy to befall him.”

“Civilization, Gertie-girl. Civilization . . .”

Gertrude had turned away, hurt; and she left behind her, as an indication of the injury to her status in the kitchen, which Wilberforce had compromised with his European habits, a vexatious stewpsing of her mouth: when she sucked her teeth in disgust, it came out as
stewwwwwpsse
.

Gertrude was off usually at three o’ clock in the afternoon, every Sunday, except when Easter and Christmas fell on a Sunday. On normal Sundays, Miss Mary did the cooking herself.

The meal is served at twelve-thirty, after Church, whether she had attended or not. She feels she is a better cook than Gertrude: but she will never tell her so.

And when she has a bad day; when she would stand alone in her bedroom, and look towards the largest house on the Plantation estate, the Main House, which stands on a hill, a quarter-mile through the fruit trees that seem to guard it, she would think of her life, of her days at school, ended in Standard Seven, too soon; without being able to take up the scholarship to St. Michael’s School, if she had sat the Secondary-to-Second-Grade examination, which she would have passed, and landed her in a secondary school for girls only; paid for by the Social Committee of the Vestry. But she could not, because she had to work in the fields and help the household, consisting of Ma, and Ma’s mother, Gran; and her; and because women were not encouraged to pursue higher learning beyond elementary school (learning to read and write, and the Ten Commandments, was sufficient); so, when she had a bad day, she would stand for hours in her large bedroom in the Great House, and look at the Main House, and at Sargeant’s small chattel house; and see the brightness of day taken over by the sombreness of gold and thickening, rich, heavy colours, the sun touching the sea, the coming on of dusk. The approaching blackness of the end of the day. She would become enveloped in this engulfing sad, veloured house; and her thoughts would wander over the unending fields . . . of the nights, after she had washed her face-and-hands; when the shine on the long handle of the hoe did not satisfy her, did not shine bright enough; when she passed the middle finger of her right hand over the blade of the hoe, to test it, she knew easily that it was razor sharp, because it left a line of red, thin as the thickness of a page, on her finger. Her hoe had to have the same sharpness of any knifeblade in her kitchen.

There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin . . .

She awakes from her dreaming as Gertrude brings the drinks in on a tray made of mahogany. A tall bottle that once held Gordon’s Dry Gin, with no label, and now containing ice water, is sweating down its sides. There is a soda syphon, and two crystal glasses.

There are two kinds of rum. One, in a tall crystal decanter that is square and thick-skinned, contains special rum, cured in raisins, currants, orange and grapefruit peel, and gooseberries. The other is kept in a jimmy-john for six weeks, and then poured into a round crystal decanter. This is the ordinary rum.

Gertrude pours this ordinary rum religiously only for the postman, and for the sanitary inspector who checks once in a fortnight, for “larvees” in the buckets and tanks of water used for drinking, for bathing and for cooking.

Gertrude pours two drinks of the special rum. She knows the size and strength of her Mistress’s drink. She pours hers first.

She hesitates before she pours Sargeant’s drink. She does not want to ask him, “Heavy on the rum? Or heavy on the water?” And she does not want her Mistress to know that she has previously served drinks to Sargeant. She has done it, in fact, many times in her house, when her children are not home.