The Polished Hoe (21 page)

The gardeners had been given strict instructions by the manager of the hotel.

“I want the blasted beach sweep clean-clean-clean,
so
clean that any son-of-a-bitch could pick up a chicken foot offa the sand and eat it! You hear me?” he had told them.

Mr. Bellfeels, the manager of the Plantation; the Reverend Mr. M. R. P. P. Dowd, Vicar of Sin-Davids Anglican Church; the Commissioner of Police; the Headmaster of Harrison College; and the Headmistress of Queen’s College, “Harsun College sisterschool”; the Solicitor-General of the Island; the two leading barristers-at-Law in the Island, Mr. E.Wharton-Barr,
KC
, and Mr. G. Herbert-Addis,
KC
; and the Member of the Legislative Council of Bimshire would be present. With them would be their wives. And families. And dozens and dozens of the Villagers, bearing chairs with heavy invalids in them; pushing perambulators over the tricky, shifting sand of the beach, near the waves which come in at high tide, during the early afternoon, like small climbing hurricanes, to make the men scream at their maids fearing for the safety of their women and their children, “Oh Jesus Christ! Not suh-close to the blasted waves, girl! You want to commit murder this nice bank holiday? Not so blasted close! You can’t see the tide coming in?”; with toddlers in them; and on this Monday bank holiday years ago, Mary Gertrude Mathilda—Tilda to the Village boys—young and with her.Well-nourished body bursting through her thin, cotton white dress that reached one inch below her knees; thirteen years old; and her hair combed and plaited in long rows that were then woven back into the rest of her hair, giving her hair the overall effect of rows of ploughed sweet-potatoes, or like terraces on an Italian mountainside; and he remembered how her legs looked: sturdy and shiny and soft as velvet from the coconut oil with which they were rubbed and bathed, and greased; and she was smelling sweet, with that smell which he did not know the name of then, not before he had found himself standing in the Perfume and Fragrances Department of Cave Shepherd & Sons, Haberdasheries; and he, a young boy then, having just completed Standard Five, was at the time of this church picnic, apprenticed to the Garrison Savannah Tennis Club, as an Assistant Gardener and Chief Water Boy; and his job which paid him one shilling and sixpence per week, every Friday at two o’clock, with two changes of blue denim suits, short-sleeved shirt, short pants, no cap or hat, no shoes—not even canvas pumps—was the most happy and exciting days of his young adolescence; and he grew accustomed to seeing women’s legs and to witnessing flashes of their “knockie” and pubic hair, dark brown and red, blond and fuzzy; and once, there was no hair there at all; swift like visions, in lightning speed as if these exposures were matching the backhand shots played by the women in doubles; and in this fast time, he would see these private parts that the short white cotton panties could not conceal completely from his wandering eyes that loitered on legs, whenever a backhand shot was smashed against the tape on the net and dribbled “out!”; or when the woman player slipped on the freshly watered grass surface, and her body was slammed against the tall green-painted fence that kept the balls inside the grounds, and out of the hands of the Village boys who watched; eyes and heads moving back and forth, wishing that their eyeballs were magnets; hoping that a ball struck with spin and pace would climb the ten-foot green-painted fence; and they would pocket it in a flash, pocket it in delight and with equal lightning speed “take off” with the tennis ball, for their game of “hopping-ball cricket”; and this very sight and sudden showing of legs within the safety of the club, safe from the wandering, fast, flashing eyes of the young men and boys who pressed their faces against the green fence to see the direction the ball would take when it crashed against racquet, the sound it made announcing that it is hit, the unrhythmic sound, close to that of leather hitting skin, in random accuracy; or to the sound of a broken string:
plop . . . plop . . . plop; plop . . . plop . . . plop . . . plop, plop, plop-plop . . .

“Well-played, I say!”

“Good shot that!”

“Ball! Ball! Boy!
Ball-boy!
”

It is the hysterical, high-pitched voice of the man partnering the woman who has just struck the ball, who has now fallen on the green grass in her white shorts, who has exposed the entire area taken up by her “knockie,” by accident; she had made a commitment before she was ready, had made an unforced error, had hit the ball by chance,
in casu
; an act; a stroke similar to putting too much spin on the backhand shot; this high-pitched feminine voice coming from the man playing with her always shouted orders at Sargeant, as if the voice was asking a question, incapable of giving an order, not knowing how to “be a man,” as it were; as if the man talking was wondering aloud whether the tennis ball was really a ball or a green golden apple.

“Ball?”
he shouts.
“Boy? Boy?”

Sargeant is still taken in by the strange colour of this woman’s pubic hairs and the colour of her panties, and her flesh, turning pink from exhaustion in the tennis game and exposure to the sun which beats down savagely just before three o’clock in the afternoon; taken in by her sadness at being beaten by the two players across the net, as much as by the humidity; and so he does not hear the high-pitched voice of the man ordering him to get the
“bloody ball!”;
Sargeant’s eyes have taken in too much for his ears to function now to hear the warning falsetto cries that leave the woman’s male partner’s mouth in threatening . . .

“Boy?”

. . . and Sargeant is blinded by what his eyes have chanced upon, and is insensitive to orders; cannot obey; is motionless, incapable of seeing danger, and cannot reach for the ball and throw it back into play, in to the woman who still holds service.

“Boy?”

And the voice comes at him again, speaking with a heavy English accent.

“What the dickens, boy? Boy!”

The voice is shrieking now. The voice wants to rouse the staring black eyes from their examination of this young beautiful girl’s private parts. To protect her. To remind the “boy” that this is a closeness, this staring, which is
infra dig
; this is an assault, this is a kind of rape by eyes and staring, that his brothers, yes, his type, those boys standing at the ten-foot fence painted green, with their faces pressed against the fence with its fine mesh, which has left its design imprinted, like embossed fine English stationery, on their concentrating faces; yes, his brothers, the voice seems to say, as it would contain in its anxiety and anger, some knowledge of this kind of staring, by this type, by this kind of boy, similar in his desire to Emmett Till’s, “up in Amerrica where this kind of thing,” these kinds of staring boys are lynched for . . . She puts on a grammaphone record; and in his mind, Sargeant dances with her, and can feel the softness of her body, and can touch her body, clear and as real as that bank holiday afternoon when for the first time, he saw her body through the fabric of her dress. She was dressed in a frilly white sea-island cotton dress . . .

“We didn’t get the answer,” she tells him.

“Which answer?”

“To ‘A Tisket.’” Her body had developed all of a sudden, before his eyes, on one other occasion he had seen her, with her hoe, standing with other women, much older than herself; she was nine then; in the North Field; and he thought the gang of women looked like soldiers, standing erect, with their hands resting on their hoe handles, just as he had seen soldiers and policemen do, when they were ordered by the Drill-Sargeant, to “Stand easy!”; and he had seen her, the other times, in church, at Matins; and now on this Easter Monday, in white dress, with white patent-leather shoes, and white anklets and with a white silk ribbon in her hair, which she always wore the same way: plaited in “cornrows,” and the short end of the plaits bound together with the white silk ribbon tied into a bow; or, instead of the ribbon, an ornament, a heart, made from polished tortoiseshell.

He could see her body as if it had been developing right in front of his eyes, her breasts getting larger, and their nipples standing erect, and her breathing increasing its beat and rhythm, and making her chest rise, and heave in expectation, like the muscles of weightlifters rise when they address the iron bar, preparing for the clean-and-jerk; and her eyes, clear and bright, with dark brown pupils, white eyeballs round the pupils, as white as the clouds overhead are always white on Easter Monday; and her fingers, moving, perhaps against her wish, expressing her nervousness, the pent-up emotion, which cannot at her young age be put into the correct words; and his manhood, his little tom-pigeon in his khaki pants, his “lil pen,” gets harder and harder and just a little larger; and he does not even know, fully, what he is going through. But he had known, nevertheless, that with the female tennis player whom he was being scolded for watching; screamed at for being unable to turn his head, and turn his eyes away from her body, where they remained on the same blond spot with the blond hairs, for exactly three shotgun seconds, three fast bullets of time—in case the woman’s partner, or anyone else, had owned a stopwatch and had been inclined to measure that staring time—he had known deep down, as part of his experience, as the character of his life, circumscribed by myth and ritual, that he could never get close to this fallen, frightened woman; close enough to touch her. And now, seeing her at his feet, bruised against the green-painted fence, he dared not extend a hand to help her up. The reason behind her partner’s high-pitched thin voice was that very hysterial warning about touching.
Do not touch.
Yes, he could not touch her. “Look; but don’t kiss-me-arse touch, hear! Looking is one thing, boy: it harmless; but touching is something-else-altogether-different!”

Time would unroll, and Sargeant would be able to draw a conclusion from the similarity of that afternoon in the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club, about the warning
Do NOT Touch
, along with the notices nailed to huge wooden gates, with wickets cut into the gates, in black capital letters on pieces of tinning painted white, warning DO NOT ENTER. DOGS. Alsatians. Bloodhounds. Doberman-Pincers. Vicious dogs about which Sargeant, years later, joking amongst the “selected clienteles,” would chuckle and say, “They have dogs in this Island, ’specially trained to put a bite in a black-man arse!”

And because it was delivered as a joke, all the men laughed.

The Headmaster of Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys laughed. The Senior Assistant Sanitary Inspector laughed. The civil servant who worked in His Majesty’s Customs and Excise Department laughed. Manny laughed. And Sargeant, who had given the joke, laughed as if it was a joke.

Each one of these men, at some time in their growing up, had suffered from the viciousness of dogs owned by estates and plantations throughout Bimshire. And down in Hastings; in Belleville, and in Strathclyde, which Ma said was as “serrigated” as the South in Amurca, “
’cause in Strathclyde, in the middle o’ the road, a iron-rail keeps black from crossing over into white, I swear to God! Except you is a servant
.”

And still these men laughed; and laughed; and laughed. And then poured themselves another shot of strong, dark Mount Gay Rum, and laughed as they said, in chorus, “
Down the hatch!
”

“As man, man!”

“As man!”

And Sargeant, still reflecting, knew too, on that Easter Monday, that when he saw little Mary Gertrude Mathilda, Tilda, with her developing body, that he could not dance with her, could not ask her for the honour, would not get permission from Ma, to dance to “Evening Shadows Make Me Blue.” No. Not in the presence of the entire outing crowd. In the open air. Sargeant, like all the other boys and growing men in the Village, knew that he dared not ask Mr. Bellfeels for permission to dance with his servant girl, little beautiful Mary Gertrude Mathilda.

Word had just started to travel from that Sunday in the Church Yard, and had gathered strength, like a hurricane, through repetition, throughout the Village, and through the rows of eddoe plants that rolled and rollicked like waves painted green and that stretched for acres and acres in the North Field, that it was Mr. Bellfeels who “
was pushing along Mary’s physical development
”; that it was Mr. Bellfeels who was “
force-ripening her
”; that it was Mr. Bellfeels who was “
tekking the sweets
”; that “
is Bellfeels, that son-of-a-bitch, who licking-cork with that girl
”; that it was Mr. Bellfeels who “
committing statuary rape, by fooping a child!
” Oh, Mary, Mary, Mary!

Yes, but was it really Bellfeels?

Yes, it was Bellfeels!”

“Yes!”

“Is Bellfeels who guiding Mary-Mathilda into this beautiful pulchritudinous ripening pubescence,”
the Headmaster of the boys’ Elementary School said, raising his snap-glass to take a sip. And to propose a toast. And to damn Bellfeels.
“Between me, you, the doorpost, and the wall in this illustrious Harlem social institution of levity and grace, our beloved Harlem Bar & Grill, associated in culture with that other Harlem in Amurca, before that, Haarlem in Holland-Europe . . . between me and you, my friends, and the four walls, in strictest confidence, and amongst Manny selected clienteles, Bellfeels can’t be accused of ever having had a brain-cell in his head. He didn’t get-past Standard Four in my school! Down the hatch! As man!”

Mary Gertrude Mathilda was thirteen that year of the first Easter Monday when Sargeant
saw
her for the first time; noticed her existence; could smell the ram goat in his manishness, as the Villagers say; and for each year that followed, his lust grew with his limbs and with the size of his tom-pigeon, which now began fluttering each time he saw her, from across the street, or passing like the wind, in the front seat of the Plantation’s car, beside the chauffeur clad in stiff khaki, during the day; dressed in black, during the evening. But he remained even farther removed from any closeness . . .