The Polished Hoe (47 page)

“I think you should draw the line, there, Sarge. These ideas is Manny ideas,” Gertrude said. “These is dangerous ideas. You had-better be careful, ’cause if the Plantation hear you walking this- way, and even you being a police yourself, you don’t know what they would do . . . like in the Riots, when they shoot people . . .”

“What you frighten for, Gertrude?”

“I thought you was starting to tell me about the stars. Orion and the Big Dipper. You have to watch your career, ’cause they thinking of putting Crown-Sargeant rank at your disposal. A couple Friday nights ago, while serving dinner . . . I would hate to know that you throw-that-’way . . .”

“But
Amurca
, Gertrude! Amurca. Notwithstanding with all its colour prejudice and serrigation, with all its black fountains for Negroes and white fountains for whites, nevertheless. Water is water. Jesus Christ, Gertrude, water ain’t got no colour! At least, not the water we does-drink here in Bimshire. So long as it clean, and cool, ’cause in Amurca, the South does be hot as shite, according to Manny . . .

“But Amurca, Gertrude-girl! I argue it is still a more better place to live, and that it more better for a man to know where you stand with white people than to live in a place like here, where every man must know what his rightful place is; like Golbourne, and Pounce, like Clotelle and even Manny, and like me. Miss Mary-Mathilda over there in the Great House is different. Her complexion with the right amount o’ white face powder and cosmetics, could carry-she-cross the Coloured Line. And she could pass. But living in Amurca is different than living in a place like this, where if you was to make a lil mistake in behaviour, and anybody, the Vicar, the Solicitor-General, the managers o’ hotels,
anybody
that white, the Plantation, anybody, feel they have a right to tell you that you are stanning-up in the wrong place. I hear a lil white boy, eight years at the most, one day tell Naiman, a big-big kiss-me-arse man, to move off the sidewalk, so he could pass! Naiman is forty-something, going ’pon fifty.”

“
If you’re white
,” Gertrude said, “
you’re right
.

“
If you’re brown, you can stick around
.

“
But if you black, you gotta stay a waaaaay back!
”

“
Where
you hear that?”

“Mr. Wilberforce. He says it all the time. He says it like if it’s a song he is singing. Says he first heard it up in Amurca. God, I like the way Mr.Wilberforce talk sometimes! If I didn’t know that Bellfeels, a white man, was Mr.Wilberforce father, from some o’ the things that boy says, I would have argue, before I knew the facts, that Mr.Wilberforce is a black man, even-although he look white. Though, after all, he almost white, and could pass,
anytime
.”

“But he is a plain man.”

“When Mr.Wilberforce sings it, I like the way it sounds.

“
If you’re white, you’re right
.”

“Bellfeels, that son-of-a-bitch, is almost pure white. He had a mother who was light-skin like Mr. Wilberforce. Then, you have Miss Mary-Mathilda, your mistress. She is the colour of coffee with a lil milk in it. Light brown to brown-skin. Much more lighter than me. Then there is Wilberforce, light-light-light. And you, two or three shades less lighter, maybe four, than your employer. And me, the blackest of them all. What a group we is!”

“We work-out a way to live together, though. We could teach Amurca a thing or two.”

“Even that son-of-a-bitch, Bellfeels. I wish somebody would teach
him
something! If I wasn’t sure they would want to pop my neck for doing it, I would be the first man, one o’ these dark-nights, with a butcher knife placed to that fucker’s throat! Yes!”

“You scaring me, Sarge, man.”

“Believe me, Gertrude.”

“Is more better, Sarge, to talk about Amurca than Bellfeels . . .”

“Those Amurcans!” And so, after they had fooped on the bed of trash, and Sargeant had remained on his back, looking up into the firmaments, as he called it, this is the way it would be between him and Gertrude.

Now, he inhales the stuffiness of this underground tunnel, and can taste the white dust and the dampness in his mouth, and this makes him remember where he is; and he becomes disoriented again, even though Mary-Mathilda is leading him.

“Follow me,” she tells him.

“Where to?” he says.

“I am leading you, Percy.”

That is all she says. And she takes his hand again.

“Going back to tonight, earlier,” she says. “You are to follow me now. So, follow me.”

“Where to?”

“Where I am leading you.”

She is silent for the next few yards.

“You know, around midday last Sunday I was standing beside Gertrude watching the pot . . . dry-peas and rice, checking to see if the water boil-out, and if it needed more; and I happened to look out the Dutch window, and God bless my eyesight! Such a white cloud! Stretching the whole expanse of the skies, taking up the whole Dutch window!

“You remember Good Fridays, how we would look up at the clouds, and see in those white clouds the interpretations of our future? That was the second thing we used to do as thrildren, on Good Fridays. Midday-noon, sharp. The exact time corresponding to when they nailed Jesus to the Cross?

“And this afternoon, I saw a cloud the shape of a big-big
L
; and I wondered if this
L
was standing for
Luck
, for me? I don’t know. Or standing for
Love?
I didn’t think so, at the time. Cause, Percy, in all my life, in my present state, and in my past state, the state in which you noticed me, as you been dropping hints, all evening, in that time when it appeared to you, as to others, that I was a woman worthy of envy and lust, the truth is that love, and on my part, lust, was absent from my life. Even then.

“Not even when he bred me. Not even when he lay-down on my belly, every other Saturday night, in his usual drunken stupors. So, the
L
shaped in the clouds that I saw this afternoon did
not
stand for
Love
.

“And you know, whether it went out of my mind, as a cloud would do when it vaporates, or whether it was a temporary distraction from watching Gertrude cooking the dry-peas and rice we intended to eat with the joint o’ pork we got from Manny, it never dawn on me to carry that
L
in my mind, as I walked up the road, earlier tonight; travelling as if I was walking through a underground tunnel like this one we’re in now.

“And this brings me to wonder, why I am taking you through this tunnel?

“We could have remained in the front-house. Wilberforce won’t be back till all hours, but that doesn’t matter. And Gertrude gone. Heading to Flagstaff Macon Castle, most likely, or the Pilgrim Holiness.

“Women, Percy! The tragedy with women . . .

“I have not tell you
half
the things that were going through my mind earlier this evening . . .”

She moves beside him, making little noise walking in her boots on the cement steps going down, tightening her grip on his large hand, leading him down, down, down into the darkness of the underground tunnel, in this section with its steps, built like a manhole. Into this dungeon they go.

Not that he is really in a dungeon; not that he is being thrown into the darkness and the cobwebs and the despicable things he himself imagines are crawling over his arms and his face, and up his trousers legs; not that there are snakes and giant scorpions and starving lions awaiting his company in this dungeon, nor tarantulas with bodies the size of his head; things he has read about in adventure stories of the Orient, in
Bible Stories for Children
and Hans Christian Andersen; and library books; it is just that the tunnel and the dim kerosene lamp, blown by a draught that seeps into the tunnel, and clutches him like a close body-lock—he can now smell the smell of dungeons, conjured up in those stories; and smell the taste of old stone, old mortar, old sand and wet dirt; and mould—and choke him to death as if a snake is wrapped round his neck. It becomes difficult for him to breathe.

“The Saturday night that Mr. Brannford, poor fellow, stretched to his limit, had to take his wife’s life, that shameless woman, who gave-way all her business, free, to that man, the Governor; and expose, poor Mr. Brannford, her poppit-husband, to all that embarrassment and ridicule and shame;..Well, the Saturday night when he couldn’t take no more, and he finish-she-off, by putting the butcher knife to her throat,
this
was the first place he run for succour, to. Yes. Right here. We didn’t know
what
to do, at first.

“We had to call in the Solicitor-General, because it was a case that could have expose the fornications of those two sinners, His Excellency and Mistress Rosa Mary Antoinette Brannford—as she liked to have people address her by—the whore; in her pompasetting ways, and damage the reputation of the Governor’s wife.

“Mr. Brannford was brought by car here; and we placed him in this underground tunnel, to hide-him-away; and keep him safe outta the clutches of the Law, until the next move was decided.

“Cause
nobody
in this Village never liked Mistress Brannford.

“Mr. Bellfeels came down from the Main House, and he and the Solicitor-General who had been contacted by now, and the Vicar, and the two leading barsters-at-Law—one for the Defence, the next one for the Prosecutors, it appears; and Wilberforce. In his capacity as a doctor. We sat down in the front-house, planning the next move, whilst Mr. Brannford, poor fellow, is down here, in secret, trembling more from fright, certain that his life was now in the Plantation’s hand, at their mercy; and at stake and in the balance, than from guilt. Gertrude took a piece of yellow Cheddar to him, that we had-got-in from Australia, a fresh salt-bread baked the very day, and a nip-bottle of Mount Gay Rum, in case he felt a lil peckish. All the time, we upstairs over Mr. Brannford head, spraining our brain in a effort to convince the Solicitor-General not to press charges against Mr. Brannford, nor bring poor Mr. Brannford before the Court of Grand Sessions. Because, in the opinion of the Village, even although murder is murder, and we couldn’t argue gainst that, still, a more greater injustice was perpetrated that cause Mr. Brannford to be now having to face the bitter justice of the Court.

“Plus-again, certain old animosities existing betwixt-and-between the local whites and the whites from Away, from Englund and so forth, multiplied by those who claimed they were white. No love lost ’mongst them tribes, boy!

“So, with this knowledge of this history of vengeance and spitefulness amongst Bimshire white people, we poured the Solicitor-General some of the best prune-cured white rum that Mr. Bellfeels had been keeping in secrecy, in a half-gallon jimmy-john, under my bed; and eventually, I think it was after a few shots,..Well, half-dozen such shots, that the Solicitor-General took counsel from all o’ we, and agreed to not bring Mr. Brannford before the next Grand Sessions to face justice in the taking of his wife’s life, by his hand. May she rot in hell!”

“Cuddear!”

“But we had what Wilberforce always refer to as a ’contingency.’ I think it is a word use in Amurca, more frequent than here, ’cause I never heard the Vicar, nor the Solicitor-General, both o’ who studied in Englund, use such a word.
Contingency.
But I love the word. Contingency. It connotes so much that you could do, on the other hand, as a alternative; and as a way of wriggling-out of a tight spot. Like a escape. A secret passage, such as what we are in, this very minute.” . . . Sargeant remembers the Commissioner of Police calling him to his private residence in the Married Women’s Quarters, when the Commissioner placed the bottle of white rum on the mahogany table, and for a time Sargeant who was then a Lance-Corporal watched the rings of water form round the bottle containing the rum, and round the bottle of water just taken out of the icebox, and round the two glasses which found their bottoms touched by the travelling, slow, comforting water from the two bottles which themselves seemed to be melting.

“This is shite,”
the Commissioner had said, finally.

“Sir?”

“You heard what happen? A man killed his fecking wife. Is pure murder, in the first degree. He got to heng for this,”
the Commissioner had said.

The Commissioner was a white man, born in the Island. And he talked, even at formal events, like parades, speech days at Harrison College, and at Combermere School for Boys, his alma mater— he graduated from Combermere in Fifth Form, with the Senior Cambridge School Certificate, with a Distinction in Religious Knowledge, and three Credits, in Geography, Shorthand and Latin; and was the Island’s champion swimmer—and giving evidence in the annual Assizes, the Court of Grand Sessions, and in the Appeal High Court, in the same vernacular that Village men and fishermen used. With a broad, flat, semi-musical brogue that came, so people said, from both Ireland and Scotland.

“And be-Christ, guess what, Lance-Corporal Stuart?”

“Sir?”

“Guess what I call you here for?”

“Sir?”

“You can’t find a next word to use? Why you so monnisyllabical in front o’ me, all of a sudden? You can’t find nothing else to say?”

“Sir? But I don’t know what to say, then.”

“Well, I going tell yuh!”

It was at this point in the interview that the Commissioner of Police lifted the bottle containing the white rum, Bellfeels Special Stades White Rum; unscrewed the cap; and poured four drops, slowly, one at a time, on the hardwood floor that had no carpet,
tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap.
He then filled the first glass up to its sturdy middle, which he handed to Sargeant, did the same thing with the second glass, which he lifted close to his lips, and said,
“Down the hatch!”