The Polished Hoe (32 page)

“Yes. But he also gave we ‘Moonlight Sonata’ . . . I mean, ‘Serenade.’ It was in 1940 that again Artie Shaw gave we ‘Stardust.’”

“‘Frenesi’
?”

“Nineteen forty.”

“‘I Can’t Get Started’?”

“Thirty-seven!”

“Who by?”

“Bunny Berigan and His Orchestra.”

“‘Dipsy Doodle’?”

“Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.”

“Year?”

“I can’t remember the year.”

“Yuh slipping.”

“The mind, Miss Mary, the mind.”

“And ‘Moonlight Sonata’ . . . ‘Moonlight Serenade,’ as you said?”

“Nineteen thirty-nine!”

“And Glenn Miller and His Orchestra?”

“We covered everything, far’s the big bands. With one exception.”

“Who?”

“Duke Ellington!”

“No! Don’t let we forget Count Basie! And Billy Eckstine! And Cab Calloway! And the one-and-only Louis Jourdan! And Fat Swaller!”

“And Les Brown?”

“Yes. Les Brown. And his Band of Renown! A funny name for a big band.”

“‘Stardust’! Still my favourite. ’Specially when I hear Nat King Cole sing it. Is a hard tune to learn how to play. All them changes, and the flats and the minor keys. But I pick and pick till I mastered it, though.”

“We’ll turn off the grammaphone, and listen to you play ‘Stardust.’ I can do even better than that. I can give you the sheet-music . . .”

She chooses the chair with the high back, a kind of rocking chair made from mahogany, with its back covered in a piece of brocade cloth, with flowers in its pattern. This brocade is draped over the back, covering it like a man’s jacket, tight-fitting, following the outline of the back of the chair, which is as strong and defined as a man’s chest. The chair is close to the window. Sargeant follows her with his eyes, as she chooses her place. And behind her head, through the opened window, he can imagine the canes, now clothed in a dark, dark green hue. The light that this Sunday evening gives them unwillingly, and sparingly, is not good to see in; but he can still imagine that he can see the sugar-cane fields around him, wide as the sea; and the waves of the canes; and although there is no wind and no breeze at this moment, he imagines them moving, as they do in the daytime; and their white silk arrows, silk even in the night light, but white only in the light of a hot sunny day, touching the tops of the canes that surround him in their cruel, skin-cutting fierceness, just like the sea, on that afternoon years ago: around four o’clock when the sun is fiercest, when he slipped from the side, when he was sitting on the gunwale of the fishing boat
HMS
Barracuda
that belonged to Manny’s father, too far out in the sea, fishing for kingfish, when he dropped fast and definite into the churning waves, and disappeared, in the twinkling of an eye, before Manny’s eyes, and before Manny’s father’s unbelieving eyes.
“Jesus Christ, the boy gone! Percy? Percy, you gone? Man-overboard! Jesus Christ! Man overboard! Quick, Manny! Quick-quick!”
And they tossed the anchor overboard after him because they had no inner tube which served as a lifesaver; and Sargeant’s weight, heavy for his age, was making him sink faster than the makeshift anchor Manny’s father had fashioned out of the rim of the wheel of the tire of a motorcar, could sink; down-down like the anchor of
HMS
Barracuda
itself into the green slimy sea . . . Looking at this thick dark greenness now, he feels safer, more comfortable; at ease now, as if he is used to the tranquility of this house, as if he is a regular visitor to this Great House, and the big houses on the Plantation estate, and the Plantation Main House, as if he is, at last, getting even with Mr. Bellfeels; dispossessing him.

The smell from the bushes, and from the thick, prickly, studded trees round the House, under the windows, comes up full into his nostrils. Although he cannot memorize the names of the smells, does not know the names of bush, tree, vine or stalk, he knows there is beauty in the night, on this black, moonless Sunday evening; and love; and that there can be love making.

If he ever had the good fortune to sit in this House, on an ordinary day, earlier, just after the huge, fiery sun was touching the skim of wave and water far out where the German submarine had met the
HMS
Cornwallis
, he would have been able to see the riot of colours, the drama of trees pushing against one another, the arrogant, supercilious disregarding casuarina trees that border the limit, boundary and ownership of the Plantation. He would have been able to see colour and colours. But the Plantation is limitless.

Now, all he can see, and he is not even certain that he is not imagining these tints and hues, as he had earlier imagined the violence and had fantasized the desperate criminal coming through the North Field, towards him; all he can see now, is the unending sweep of dark green, like a sheet of water, big as the sea, big and dark as the sea that night, when he fell from the gunwale of
HMS
Barracuda
. . . There was something beautiful, something inexplainable, something almost religious about the thickness of his fear and fantasy, earlier, as he had stood foolishly with his Raleigh bicycle leaned against his body; and he, a Crown-Sargeant, useless beside it . . . But he is not useless now. He is inside. Inside the front-house of this Great House. And the size, and the grandeur, and the smell, of furniture and of cleanliness, of flowers cut from the gardens that are below the huge windows, all this, this quiet, this silence, this tranquility, makes him brave and confident . . . She finds the sheet-music, just before he reaches the piano bench; and she takes it out, passes it over the skirt of her dress, cleaning the dust off, and then she places it on the music stand that comes up over the keys. The built-in music stand conceals the name of the manufacturer of the piano, printed in Italic Script.

He flings the lid of the grand piano back with a flourish he had never been capable of imitating before.

He is surprised that the lid does not cry out when it touches its acquainting rich, expensive wood from which it is made. The ivories do not sigh, even.

He has never before sat at a piano of such beauty and magnificence. He can see his face in its polish. He can see his eyes in the sheen of the black keys. And his hands begin to shake.

He is incapable of going further, of imagining his life further from this first touch of gentility and graciousness; this is like a journey into the unknown; through a cave; a challenge to embark upon this journey that he somehow knows he cannot take on. It is more than an ordinary moving of fingers over keys, of touching pedals, of travelling through notes over a landscape of such great, tragic foreignness, for any great distance . . . The pages of the sheet-music do not remain flat. She holds her hand on the pages, and then thinking better of it, takes from the pocket of her dress a long wooden clothespin. She affixes this clothespin onto the pages. The pages sit obediently, open, in the full reflection of the light in the room. She closes the book of sheet-music, just for one moment, to check that the cover bears the name of the song. The name is printed on the cover. There is a design. The design is a circle, with the name of the song inside it. The design shows something, specks of something rising. Of dust? Of stardust? Of sand that is like dust on the beach at the Crane Beach Hotel? But she has never seen any other dust but the white, fine powder that rises from the roads whenever a bus or a lorry or a motor-car speeds along the Front Road, the highway where it meets at Highgates Commons and Reservoir Lane.

“You ready?” she asks him.

“I am ready.”

“‘Stardust,’” she says.

“‘Stardust,’
”
he says.

But he cannot play it. The surroundings are too overwhelming.

The window is open, and he suddenly becomes afraid, frightened that he is on
HMS
Barracuda
; and he is drowning.

His earlier confidence slips away from him. Leaves his power, just as the cane juice slips out of his mouth when he sucks a piece of Juice-nine-tray-five sugar cane.

She rises from her rocking chair, and she goes and sits on the piano bench, beside him.

She places her hands over his. And as if she is a kindergarten teacher guiding him in the first curves of learning Penmanship, controlling his handwriting; she guides his hand over the keys; and he looks up at her; into her eyes; and she gives him back the look; and he closes his eyes because he knows the music by heart; and she locks her eyes onto his closed eyes, and continues to guide his hands over the keys.

His hands look blacker as they touch the white keys. Her hands, lighter by three or four shades, stand out against his. She removes her hands. He allows his hands to rest on the keys they were covering.

No sound rises from the keyboard.

The white ivories and the black ivories are like the conch shell which is discarded on the beach, without the benefit of a pair of lips placed to it to force a tune from it. No noise. No music. No sound.

He leaves his hands on the keys.

He remembers how another hand touched his hands, shaking and exploring, frightened and daring; and regarded them as ignorant hands, stupid hands; hands that bore the anxiety and the drama of defeat in learning Penmanship years ago in Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys . . . It was about two in the afternoon; and the room was hot. Humid. Sweat—which the Headmaster called “spirsperration”—was running irrepressible and unrestrained, down his face in two small, slow streams; and he could feel their stickiness and their warmth as they dropped upon his sea-island cotton shirt; and this white shirt he had worn to Church the day before, for his regular school shirt, made of thick, cheap, raw khaki, was still wet from the rain that had fallen all Sunday afternoon, Sunday night and right into early Monday morning.

The blackboard was lined; and they were double lines; and the lines were drawn into the thick blackboard with a nail; and the slate in his hand was black like the blackboard; and lined; and it had a wooden frame; and someone had drawn those double lines even before he was born. Generations before.

The slate in his hand had been scratched on and disfigured in the calculation of the nine-times table; the three-times table; and simple arithmetic, by his own father.

“Manners maketh man,” his teacher, Mr. Edwards, is saying. “What manners maketh?” he asks his class. There are fifteen boys in his class. His class is Standard Five.

“What manners maketh?”

“Manners maketh man, sir!” they shout, rivalling one another for loudness . . .

“Louder!” Mr. Edwards yells at them.

And they scream, even louder, that the entire school can hear them, “Manners maketh . . .”

The school is one large room, divided by the placing of blackboards which spin around on a pin, in certain positions, to form walls; to form classes or “standards.”

There are seven “standards,” excluding Low-Primer and High-Primer, in the one-roomed school.

Boys “graddiated” from elementary school, in Standard Seven. Some went on to Combermere School for Boys, a secondary Government school. Others entered various apprenticeships. Or they fielded tennis balls in the afternoons, at the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club, as Sargeant got to do. Or watered the flower gardens of the rich who lived in Belleville Avenue, in Hastings, in the Married Women’s Quarters in the Garrison. Or they joined the gangs of labourers in the North Field of the Plantation. Some became fishermen. Some became carpenters. Some became thieves. Some became gamblers throwing dice. “Dice don’t nick five! Dice don’t nick five, man! Six cents the dice don’t nick five! Mek it seven!”; playing rummy and jacks, all day on the Pasture. Many never worked. Some died without ever having worked one day in their lives. All were black. Black boys with beautiful physiques and erect posture, all “graddiates” or “school-leavers” of Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys. Three from Sargeant’s days went to Englund to fight in the Second World War; some before that, in the First World War. In Sargeant’s time, two were killed by a mine, somewhere in France. One returned as a Private, First Class; with no medals. And ten went to Amurca. Four got their letters addressed “in care of Ancon Post Office” in the Canal Zone, in Panama, in Central Amurca, before they disappeared. Some swept the large front yards and grounds of those rich people who lived in Hastings. Like Sargeant, a few qualified for admission to the Bimshire Constabulary as recruits. And more than that number became grooms, and bathed racehorses in the strong currents of the sea, at Gravesend Beach, near the Aquatic Club, near the Garrison Race Course, which the Villagers called the Race Pasture, every morning of the week, at five o’clock, just before most of the regular population arrived at the beach to take a dip. Manny went into his father’s business. Selling rum and killing pigs. Yes, of the hundreds of boys who “graddiated” from Standard Seven,
not one
, over the years, ever ended up sitting in a front-house like this one, unless he was a servant. Not even as a visitor. And certainly not, as Sargeant is allowing his imagination to roam, as a suitor.

He is aware of where he is. Yes . . . And her hands are no longer touching his. They are placed in her lap. In the rich, white folds of her muslin dress.

Her hands are not moving. In his mind, he goes back to that humid afternoon, when Mr. Edwards, his teacher, screamed the instruction, “
Wunnuh going write out ‘Manners maketh man’ fifty times! Wunnuh hear? Wunnuh hear?”