The Polished Hoe (58 page)

“You changing the subject?”

“Am I?”

“You are changing the subject.”

“But I still-didn’t-know you know the stars.”

“Just something I picked up. Nobody would believe that I was with you, in a cane field, the same cane field, incidentally, I know is where you take Gertrude, to show her the stars.”

“Which Gertrude?”

“My Gertrude.”

“Gertrude isn’t interested in astronomy. She don’t know nothing about the stars.”

“She doesn’t. That’s true. You didn’t teach her good. She asked me about The Three Sisters. I thought she was talking about the Solicitor-General’s three girl-thrildren.”

“Gertrude told you so?”

“You know where we are now?”

“Where?”

“Where we are?”

“In the canes.”

“But
where
in the canes? What is important and ironical about where we are?”

“We are together?”

“What else?”

“I give up.”

“Guess again.”

“In a trash heap?”

“
In the North Field.
”

“The North Field?”

“I took you in the North Field.”

“What so serious about being in the North Field? I pass this field, this North Field, sometimes nighttime, either going to work, or going home; and sometimes, on my days-off. Or to visit friends in the next village, in the daytime. I grow up knowing the North Field. My mother, as you know, worked with your mother, in the North Field, before she went away. I know something about this North Field, too.”

“But not enough.”

“What more to know there is about a ordinary field o’ canes? There is a more deeper meaning that is personal?”

“Good!”

“Tell me?”

“The North Field is where my life began, and caused it to end. And is the motive.”

“You want me to include this in your Statement, as part of your disclosures?”

“I mentioned it only because it is ironical and strange. One beginning is much of a muchness to another beginning. I just wanted you to know.

“You understand that we could have-remained in my bedroom. We went first into my bedroom, didn’t we? But with my mind working in such a strange way, I had to go back in the canes, to be in a cane field; get close again to the trash, and smell trash, sweat; the smell of mould and the soil. Honest and like life. I wanted to go back, as a condemn man, going-through with his last wish.

“For when you spend as many years as me, living so close to cane fields, surrounded by canes, you have a strong pull to go back into cane fields.

“Cane fields can take on a life of their own; and they become a extension of your own existence. That smell. Mould and soil. Of centipees. That smell of death, too.

“When I returned-back from the Main House, earlier tonight, I took the back-way, leading-down directly from the verandah; crossed the circular driveway with the white marl and the loose gravel; down the little incline, and into the gully where the dunks trees and the hog-plum trees grow; through the lane that cuts across in one direction to the girls Elementary School, and in the other direction, to the Church; and it is getting dark now; and the light isn’t too good, because there is no moon; but I know this area like the back of my two hands; and when I realize where I was, for I wasn’t thinking clearly anymore, with all the things on my mind and in my conscience, it was right here, not exactly here, but right here in this same vicinity, where destiny it appears and the fates brought us back to. And I say fates and destiny, because we started-out, you taking my Statement, me giving it to you, in the front-house; and ended-up taking the journey of the Statement, beginning in my bedroom, then in a underground tunnel, in darkness, and ending-up in the open air, but in similar darkness. Yes.

“But I haven’t fail to remember that you arrived as a policeman. And me, I greeted you as the lady of the Great House,” she says; and laughs. “And end up in a cane field. Now, I am more a woman; and less a lady.”

And without saying any more, she removes her hand from resting upon his stomach, as she would take a bookmark from a page, or as she would withdraw a small bone needle from an intricate pattern of flowers she was knitting; and she sits upright, and then gets to her feet, shaking pieces of trash off her white dress, holding the dress at its hem and fluffing it; adjusting her shawl round her shoulders; and then she walks off.

He follows her. As he follows her, he is “fixing himself”: putting his testicles into the same side of his trousers, inside his sliders; putting his penis flat inside his sliders; putting the thick, darkstained ugly baton back into its leather sheath.

The light is far away. It marks the edges of the North Field. It shows them, barely, the colour of grass, and of canes, and of pigeon-peas on trees, in pods that are turning from dark green to spotted brown; and there are beads, jewels, specks of water on the leaves of the puh-paw trees that line part of the North Field.

Against the sky, the large breadfruit trees are like towers, like fortresses, protecting the fields beneath them; and she and Sargeant can see the large green fruits hanging from the breadfruit trees, like huge Christmas balls, only green.

A wind comes up. A dove, far away in another tree, coos,
“Moses speak God’s words, Moses speak God’s words . . .”
This is the translation boys and girls in this Village of Flagstaff have given to the eye-cleansing, mouth-washing early morning “face-and-hands” voice of the brown wood-dove’s cooing.

“Moses speaks God’s words,” she says.

She holds out a hand, and takes his; and softly the trash, being trampled and walked on, hardly reacts, as if it denies it is chastised by their feet; but the trash itself is made less prickly, and cannot tickle the neck anymore, because of the dew formed on it. The trash speaks softly to them, in answer perhaps, to the declarations of the wood-dove.

And she stops. And stoops to the ground. And removes some large stones from a spot in the ground over which she is standing. When the wet trash is cleared away, stones in the shape roughly of a cross are disclosed.

She kicks the stones away with her boots, as if the stones are small footballs. Beneath a thin layer of trash is a hoe. Her hoe.

The handle is shining, but with the dew that has formed on it.

“Here it is!” she says.

“I don’t want it,” Sargeant says, “even as a disclosure. And I not leaving my fingerprints on it, neither. I not touching it.”

“Then, I will put it back under my bed, where it belongs. After I give it a cleansing.” She picks up the hoe, and the two of them walk on in the breaking morning, back to the entrance to the secret underground passage.

Sunlight now pours in from a grate in the ground, which is above their heads, under which they are walking. They come to the portion of the underground tunnel where it gets to a higher level, the height of two steps, and which he remembers having descended hours earlier. Now, as he is about to lift his feet, he can feel the fatigue and the tightness in his legs; and he realizes the number of hours that have passed, and the weariness that has crept into his body, like the formation of dew on the trash and plants and grass and bushes in the field.

They walk on, with no word from her. He watches her body as it moves before him, like someone who is blind and still walking with certainty. He cannot claim that he has contributed to her cer- tainty of gait that is so self-assured; it has nothing to do with him; it was not his body that induced this glow in her posture. It is all hers. The gait of a woman who knows what she wants. And how to get it. He cannot be arrogant and boast, as a man might boast, that he has anything to do with her independence. Her independence seems bigger than when he arrived; and stronger, too.

All this time, from the moment he propped his black Raleigh three-speed bicycle against the side door of the Great House, he knew he could play no significant role even in the taking down of her Statement in longhand, in his careful, tidy,.Well-rounded handwriting. His knowledge of her is second-hand through rumour and gossip, and glimpses of her over the years; and from Gertrude who speaks mainly of her with love, bordering on adoration. All the things Gertrude says are said with deep affection, but are nevertheless things that singled out Miss Mary-Mathilda as a woman of determination, toughness, iron discipline, wilfulness, even bitchiness—“and don’t cross her, if you value your life!”—and yet a loyal, religious woman who kept her word. “But for all that,” Gertrude told Sargeant, “she always strike me as looking a bit crazy-crazy. Tetched a lil, in the head; and frighten like a little girl, yuh-know-what-Uh-mean . . .” And listening to Gertrude sing Mary-Mathilda’s praises, as he looked at the stars, wondering what fate, what future, what luck they held in their distant sway and sparkle for him; it made him uneasy to hear such personal things about a woman he had lusted after since that Easter Monday bank holiday.

He knows he has to make his move soon: take her Statement, get it over with; and then arrange for the Black Maria to take her down the hill, to the police sub-station, and book her, and then, because she is Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda of the Great House, immediately release her upon her own recognizance; “release and without bond on her own recognizances,” words he has been going over and over, aloud to himself, all night; words that take some of the sting out of the duty that insists on being done. And yet, he knows she is a woman loved by all in the Village, this Mary-Mathilda, daughter of a field hand, mother of the most brilliant and.Well-loved doctor in the Island. Who would want to be the man to place the iron handcuffs on her delicate, beautiful wrists, and snap the bolt; and turn the key?

Who in the Village did not know, and wish for, and hope that “the son-of-a-bitch who inhabits the Main House, don’t deserve his throat slit; and the sooner, be-Christ, the better”? And who would raise a hand of censure, or answer a call from the Plantation, or the Solicitor-General, to take an oath and give evidence against Miss Mary-Mathilda, alias Miss Mary Paul, a. k. a. Miss Paul; also known as Miss Bellfeels, and still continue to live in Flagstaff Village? Or remain in the Island of Bimshire? Best to leave; disappear; “drop out o’ sight, for-your-own-good, for-good!”; take a slow boat to China; or to Panama, or Venezuela, or Brazil. Or Brooklyn-New-York.

Sargeant knows there is no one.

Not even the juiciest bribe or inducement could produce one man to arrest Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda; and condemn her.

In many serious and puzzling criminal cases, the authorities easily found a first-hand witness, who at the time of the crime was in another parish of the Island, to come forward, and with a little coaching, and the promise of gain, or the threat of loss, be induced to spill his guts in the rehearsal of precise facts and interpretation that the authorities had taken him through, swear “on false oats”: and always the Defendant was found guilty on this evidence manufactured in a rum shop; and then, presented in Court.

Such a “false-oats taker” would then leave, and never return to the Island, even if he thought, as reason ought to dictate, that the time gone-by, in silence, away from these shores, would have contributed to loss of memory, or the dissipation of the scandal that had followed the sentencing, based upon his “duty as a citizen, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing save the truth,” that his manufactured evidence had caused.

No.

Sargeant had at first thought, when the telephone call came and interrupted the afternoon game of cut-throat dominoes that he and Constable and Naiman were playing in the sub-station, that this kind of a case would guarantee a promotion . . . but a promotion to what? He was already at the highest rank a man of his class, education, social status born in Bimshire, and colour could ever dream of achieving: he had no further round to climb. He was soon to “conclude, as a result, therefore” of these circumstances that the detective who took part in the ’vestigation of this case, to say nothing of solving it, could not be rewarded by a promotion. Perhaps, by a new Watermans fountain pen . . .

Walking through this tunnel now, with its tricky light, Sargeant imagines he is behind the wheel of the Chief Justice’s large, black Jaguar Mark V. He has been sent by the Chief Justice to fetch his dress suit at his home on Belleville Avenue. The Chief Justice liked Sargeant because he was a young and bright policeman, prosecuting simple cases successfully; and Sargeant liked the Chief Justice for his sternness and his classical education, and his sense of humour; and Sargeant tried, whenever possible, to make the Chief Justice his model, imitating his mannerisms, and his love of Shakespeare, and more than once cursed his fate and his family, that he was not born with the necessary background to be rich and able to attend an Inn of Court in London, and become a barrister-at-Law . . . Now, ahead of him, with the light on her body brighter, showing him her thighs as she takes one determined step after another, is this mysterious Mary-Mathilda in better focus, in this strong light . . . and Sargeant remembers fumbling, for no reason, just maliciousness, in the glove compartment of the Chief Justice’s Jaguar Mark V, where he finds an envelope marked IN STRICTEST CONFIDENCE; EYES ONLY. The size of the capital letters, and the colour of the ink, something resembling the squeezed juice from the berries off a spinach vine, mauve or deep red, makes him curious; and makes him want to open the envelope. The envelope is not sealed. So, technically, “and consequently, as a result therefore,” he is not breaking and entering. Breaking and Entering was the topic of the lecture the Commissioner of Police had given that morning to the non-commissioned police officers. The Chief Justice gave a few words, then whispered something to the Commissioner; and left. Immediately after, the Commissioner said a word to Sargeant, in private; and dropped the car keys into his hand.