The Polished Hoe (24 page)

The years she has had this record, and the number of times she has played it and played it for Wilberforce, even when he was a man; and the shorter number of times she played it for William Henry and for Rachelle Sarah Prudence, to their memory; and the times it has been dropped, through carelessness, or too much brandy, by mistake, on the hardwood floor not covered by the thick Persian carpets, in this section of the parlour.

The scratch the needle makes on the disc sounds like a nail moving over glass; and it makes his skin crawl; and it also marks off all those years when he passed near this Great House, and from a distance, heard this music being played on the grammaphone, coming through the open windows and the French doors. That was years ago, when he could only imagine what the inside of this Great House looked like. He and Manny and Golbourne and Pounce knew, in their bones, in their blood, that they dared not go too near to this House. It was an edict, unspoken and unwritten. But an edict, nevertheless. Mr. Bellfeels’ edict. Sargeant knew that before tonight he could not cross this threshold; even on police business.

“Percy would know more better,” Mr. Bellfeels had said. He was not really talking to Mary-Mathilda, or to Wilberforce, when this threat was first uttered, but rather to the entire land; to everyone, even those who did not live on the Plantation. “He and the rest o’ them, Manny and Pounce, those little black bastards, would know more better than to think o’ crossing this blasted threshold. Not if he and them value their kiss-me-arse life!”

Neither Mary-Mathilda nor Wilberforce understood the depth of Mr. Bellfeels’ anger; nor the cause of it. To their knowledge, Sargeant had never visited the Great House. The threat began when Sargeant was a boy, and lasted until he was a man.

“I don’t give one shite if he is a police!” Mr. Bellfeels said, years later. “I would-blow his fecking brains out!”

Mr. Bellfeels continued threatening, snapping his riding crop against the brown, shining, leather riding boot.

The sun hit the boot as sharp as the whip cracked against it; and the rich leather, made redder in the sunlight, gave off blinding flashes.

“He could be a Corporal, a Lance-Corporal, Sargeant, or Crown-Sargeant, be-Jesus-Christ even-if he was the fecking Commissioner o’ Police . . . ’cause I don’t trust no fecking man with my property, with what is mine! Tha’s why I gotting-on so. I protekking my property as
any
man who is a man would do. So let him fecking try!”

In this large front-house parlour, containing so many beautiful objects: the grand piano; the mahogany Victrola grammaphone with His Master’s Voice and the sitting dog printed on the hornshaped speaker; the upright mahogany chairs, sofas, armchairs and settees made by Mr. Waldrond the Joiner; and the walls covered with pictures and paintings and photographs framed in darkstained wood, in the shapes of squares and ovals and circles; and the clean white-knitted cloths, doilies, thrown on to their arms and on their backs, and on the surfaces of the centre tables and the side tables; these objects outside his reach, kept hidden from him, like clues of an unsolved crime; or like ordinary clues that he and his Constable, Manny, Golbourne and Pounce had always felt could give the answer to the differences existing between Mr. Bellfeels, the Vicar and the Solicitor-General—
“them”
; and people like him, Constable, Golbourne and Pounce—
“we.”

“Them” always had: and “we” never got.

“Come,” she is saying to him now. “Come.”

But he is still walking on the beach, with his head down, holding the conch shell, counting pebbles washed smooth as marbles by the waves; and seashells over which he walks, while his footprints crush hers, and bury them beneath his larger feet.

“Come,” she says again.

He is still on the journey back, beside the cluster of beach-grape trees under which the men are sitting and talking. He can hear their laughter, the sound of their guffaws; and see some of them roll over in the sand, holding their bellies as they shake with uncontrollable laughter.

“. . . and, me-too, Jesus Christ! I would take a piece offa she, too!”

“Statuary rape,” Percy hears another man say, and then this man breaks out into raucous laughter.

It is the man who the Village calls the Solicitor-General. Percy does not know the word
statuary
; had never heard it used. But he is wise enough to know that it means something serious. It comes from a serious man. The Solicitor-General of the Island.

“But learned counsel,” the first man says, now howling with laughter and holding his belly, “learned counsel, you-yourself would have to sennhe-up to His Majesty’s Prison at Glandairy, for a few years, nuh!”

“He gone!” the Solicitor-General says.

“All sport aside, now,” another man says. “But the child suh-young! How Bellfeels have the stomach to stomach pussy so young, though?”

“The
soil
,” the Solicitor-General says, no longer laughing.

“What soil?” the first man says.

Percy is now abreast of the group. He doffs his cloth hat to the men. And the men wave to him, in acknowledgment of his good manners.

“What soil?” the man asks again.

“Working with his hands in the soil! Anybody working so close to the soil, with his hands in the soil, day and night, week after week, have to behave so!
Ipso facto
. A man working with his hand in the soil is a different man from a man selling silk handkerchieves down in Cave Shepherd store!”

“All that girl have to do,” another man says, “is call the police.”

“But the kiss-me-arse Commissioner right here!” a man says.

“Oh shite!

“Or call she mother.”

“You mean Ma?”

“Mary-Mathilda’s mother.”

“Bellfeels fooping the mother, too.”

“The man have a big fecking appetite!”

And Percy walks on, kicking the sand, and making small low clouds with each kick, until he reaches the group of women, who are still sitting at the edge of the waves.

At this point, he breaks into tears. And he gallops down the beach; and the sand is shifting under his feet; and spurts around him, in his sadness; and he thinks he will stumble, and fall; and he whispers, to the sea and the waves, and the women who are lolling in the waves,
“I hate Mary, I hate Mary, I hate Mary . . .”

“You haven’ heard me, Percy. I am telling you to come and dance, Percy,” she says.

He looks up, pulled from his daydreaming. He sees Mary-Mathilda before him. Her eyes are fixed upon him. Her arms are extended in welcome, inviting him to her; and her fingers are moving inwards to her palms, beckoning him.

“Come, Percy.”

“Come?”

“Come.”

“Okay, Miss Mary.”

“I have put on ‘A Tisket, a Tasket.’ We’re going to dance, Percy. Me and you. So, let us dance.” And then she says, “May I have the honour of this dance, sir?”

“Of course, Miss Mary-Mathilda,” he says.

He goes to her.

“Let us dance, sir!”

He takes her in his arms. The same feeling of sudden weakness, like a physical incapacity, comes over his body, just as it had done so many years ago on that first Easter Monday.

He can smell the perfume she is wearing. He knows it.Well. He has smelled it before, many times; but from a farther distance: he smells it on Sundays, at Matins, when he passes beside her standing in her pew, with her name on it, on a brass plate; she standing alone in the pew reserved for four for William Henry, for Rachelle Sarah, for Wilberforce and for herself, at the end to the aisle, able to hear the choristers as they walk singing and slow in procession; passing her, close; but out of reach; and he has smelled her fragrance when she leaves her pew, when she leaves the church, and leaves behind her, the rustle of her starched white dress, the soft creaking of her black laced-up boots, and the fragrance of her perfume. Eau de Cologne No. 4711.

He is nervous. His hand in her right hand is sweaty. Her hand on his shoulder is light and loving; and he can still feel the grip of her fingers touching his muscles.

He wonders if his armpits are smelling.

He cannot remember if he patted his armpits with a dab of Limacol just before he left the sub-station when he got dressed. He keeps the bottle of Limacol in the top drawer of his desk.
“The freshness of a breeze in a bottle,”
the advertisement on the Limacol bottle says.

In the same top drawer, with the Limacol, he keeps his bottle of Mount Gay Rum. Twenty-six ounces of it.

He does not remember if he had dabbed his armpits, with the Limacol, as he does before leaving the station on emergencies.

He tries to inhale deeply, trying not to let her know what he is doing, making an over-elaborate move to follow the rhythm of the music, at the same time; and in this exaggerated move, he tries to smell his two armpits.

He cannot smell his armpits.

There is a gold pin on her chest. It is larger than the saftey pin his mother used to secure his handkerchief with, daubed with Chanel No. 5, Paris, in a miniature vial, which she took from her employer’s cabinet.

He is still trembling; and he can hardly follow the beat of the music; he can hardly follow her as she leads him in and out of Miss Ella Fitzgerald’s powerful voice. Ella’s voice is as lyrical and strong as his nightly snap of Mount Gay Rum. If he had his bottle now, he could put it to his lips, in place of her face so beautiful and so suddenly close to his. Now, with this closeness, he is less exultant than his fantasies about this moment had painted and had anticipated.

Her face is touching his. This face, which shows not one wrinkle, as his own face does. The nightly snaps of Mount Gay Rum could help him now to regain his equanimity. His balance. Could help him recover his composure and help him to put his attention on the music.

He must learn to move with her, as he must learn to listen to her. Move in more harmony with her views, her advice and her strong guiding lead.

She is the man. He is the woman, being led.

This is more than a dance.

She closes her eyes. He becomes alarmed, and more nervous.

He takes this opportunity to remove his head from hers, lean over and put his nostrils closer to his armpits. He cannot reach his armpits, to smell them.

He wishes to smell nice for her. And he wants her to feel that he does. He wishes her to like him. To feel that he is worthwhile; and acceptable.

He wishes tonight had come on another night, in different circumstances.

He knows he has to go back to asking her questions; must go back to taking her Statement, and not let her continue giving statements to take him off his track.

He knows what he has to do. But he knows that he does not want to do it. Under the present circumstances.

But it is the perfume, more than the force of duty, that overpowers him. It tingles the nostrils with its tantalizing, sensual fragrance.

Sargeant does not realize that the music has stopped.

“A Tisket, a Tasket” has come to its end.

She is still holding his right arm, a little distance from her breast; and his left hand is resting on her shoulder. Her right hand is on his back, in the middle of his back. She can feel the dampness of perspiration, and imagine the smell of his body. The grammaphone record begins to scratch, and it is at this point that she releases him. It is at this moment, too, that he awakes from the reverie the music and her arms had held him in.

She now guides him to an upright mahogany chair. It has a cane bottom. From this position, he has a better view of the room.

“Thank you for the dance, sir,” she says; and curtseys.

“Thank you, too, Miss Mary-Mathilda,” he says, returning the curtsey, with an exaggerated bow.

In other circumstances, it would have been he who would have escorted her, at the conclusion of the dance, back to her chair.

He takes in the pictures and the paintings—making no distinction in his mind between the two—that hang at the level of his eye.

He knows, as if the words are being whispered into his ear, that he will leave this Great House a different man from how he entered it. The voice in which the words are spoken in a whisper is telling him that in one way, he will never leave this house. Perhaps.

The first picture he passes he recognizes. He has seen it many times. In books. And he has seen it most often in
Bible Stories for Children
when he was a child. Now, here is the same picture, larger and more lifelike than in the children’s book.

Here, on this wall, it is in a dark brown frame of mahogany wood.
St. George and the Dragon.
He guesses that this frame, like the others, is made by Mr. Waldrond, from the same wood.

He inspects the painting of
St. George and the Dragon.
The name is printed at the bottom.

He looks closely at the white horse, and at St. George in black armour, holding a brownish red spear in his right hand; and then at the Dragon, painted in the shape and fierceness of a dog, like the Alsatian dogs in Hastings District where the Solicitor-General and the two leading barristers-at-Law live, near where the Hastings Salon for Modern & Classical Dance, Madame Glorie, Instructoress, is situated.