The Polished Hoe (6 page)

“You shouldda seen Ma! Ma looked so beautiful. Like a queen! Pretty-pretty. Like a, like a movie-screen star. Like a young Mary Pickford!

“Yes. And, you should have seen the Bimshire ladies and gentlemen that night. It was like a fairyland, like Alice in Wonderland, like starlights burning on a Fiff of November, Guy Fawkes Day, as the King, George-the-Fiff, was in all his regalias and majesty and metals . . . medals, weighing-down his shoulder blade, poor fellow, since, as he was in the flesh, such a diminnative small man to have to bear all those regalias and insignias pin to his chest, Ma say.

“And the King made a big-big point, that night. His Majesty dance with
all
the Bimshire ladies. Every last one. And not only the ones that were white, when they were presented to him, and wasn’t . . . and the King, poor fellow, who couldn’t tell who-from-who, since they all looked white to him, traipsed the light-fantastic with every blasted one o’ those whores! . . . Ma tell me so.

“Ma tell me, also, something that hit me in the pit of my stomach. The strangest utterance. Ma tell me she wished she was
somebodyelse
that night. To be able to take part in that Ball, dress in a long dress sweeping the floor, and dance with
her
King, George-the-Fiff; and take her rightful place in the Receiving Line of that gala; and she wished she was not who she was, a field hand, a harlot, a tool for a man who came into her house, small as it was, humble as it was, after the gala was over, and the Ball had come to its end with the playing of ‘God Save the King,’ and after the kitchen staffs had clean-up . . . And
robbed
her of her maiden. Yes!

“Took her virginity away from her.

“She had the right colour, as you can see from my own complexion, for him to want her. But not light-enough to warrant admission on her own oars, and cross the iron gates of the Aquatic Club, to attend the Ball for her king, His Majesty, George-the-Fiff! She had the looks, as you can see she handed down in me. She had everything. Except the accident of borning in the right bedroom. Ma. My mother. God rest her soul.

“There is a story-and-a-half I could tell you about the doings and the happenings in this small Island of Bimshire! Stories to make your head curl! Stories and skeletons bigger than the square-milearea of this Island.

“It took Ma until she was on her deathbed before she could empty her heart and tell me. And seek her redemption before God called her to her judgment.

“Psalm 51, Constable, in the
Book of Psalms
.

“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness.

“Ma was reading this Psalm in the Bible, for days and days, just before she died. As a warning to me, she eventually confess. But he, Mr. Bellfeels, was already inside my system.

“She was sixteen the night it happened. When he
took
her.

“She went to her grave, at the ripe age of seventy-eight.

“Sixty-one, sixty-two years. Three-score-and-two, she carried that burden like I carried my wishbone, in secrecy, like a skeleton; speechless, and with no utterance. A stain on a white dress, in the wrong place, and that won’t come out, regardless of the bleaching you put it through. A obsession, just like I walked with my wishbone. Not one iota passed her lips. Three-score-and-two years. A whole lifetime. Vouchsafe in the books of the Old Testament.

“Women of her generation knew how to carry burdens. And how to bury them. Inside their hearts. Concealed in their blood. They were strong women, then. Tough women. Women who gave birth in the fields today, and returned to raise their hoe and lift their load two afternoons later; within forty-eight hours. In the same fields. Yes.”

She takes the fat-bellied crystal glass from the mahogany side table, and raises it to her lips. She makes no sound as she takes a sip. She places the snifter back onto the white doily in the middle of the rich, brown, shining table made by the Village joiner and cabinetmaker, from mahogany wood, in the shape of a heart. Three others, scattered through the large front-house, are in the shape of a spade, a diamond and a club. Each has the same white crocheted doily on it. One has her Bible.

“Ma lost the baby conceived in rape, the night His Majesty,
her
King, George-the-Fiff, danced in Bimshire. ‘My God, the blood.’ That is all Ma said. That is all she remember. It was my great-gran, Ma’s gran-mother, with her knowledge of bushes and vines and leaves used for medicines; and cures; plus a lil touch of obeah and witchcraft, that saved Ma. Ma say that Gran brought this knowledge with her from Almina, in Africa. My great-gran. Yes.

“She had a name that sounded African. But I could never pronounce it, the right way. It sounded something like
Agne Beraku
; but in time, it went completely outta my mind, altogether. I do not know my great-gran’s African name. Yes.

“I would see her, my great-gran-mother, just before she passaway, bent almost in half; her face scenting the bushes; picking and picking; putting a leaf or a twig or a stem inside her mouth and chew on it, to test it; and then spitting it out; with her braided-up grey hair slipping out from underneat her white head-tie, and hanging low to the ground, searching-through worthless rocks and stones as if they were precious pearls and corals, picking a twig from this bush, a twig from the next; and putting all of them in her apron. Gran wore a apron, even when she was long-pastworking in people kitchens. She spent most of her life in the kitchen at the Aquatic Club. It’s a wonder to me, knowing what she must-have-went-through in them days, that she didn’t put a lil twig from the wrong bush, or a stem of Poison Ivy, a lil-lil piece of the root, in the tureens of turtle soup those bastards liked her to cook for them! Yes.

“My great-gran. Her apron was like a badge of honour. In her apron, always white and starch-and-ironed, and pleated in straight lines from her waist down to below her two ankles, she would put those bushes—sersey bush, Christmas bush, miraculous bush, lignum-vitae bush, soursop leaves and leaves from the puh-paw trees, tamarind tree leaves and sugar-apple leaves . . . I don’t remember the other bushes! But I know that the sersey bush is what did the trick. Sersey bush that Gran boiled thick-thick until it came like tar; bitter and black; and that poor little girl, my ma, no more than seventeen, or sixteen, was made to drink that tartea every morning at five o’ clock, until Mr. Bellfeels vim was worked out of her system. And at every six o’ clock every evening, Gran put Ma in a bush bath, and soaked her until the sin, and the stain, and the mistake, came out in the form of blood. Yes!

“It take three days and three nights, with Ma’s gran-mother sitting sleepless in a upright chair, for Ma to regain her salvation, and have release from the thing that Mr. Bellfeels sowed inside her, inside Ma.

“But blood was always in our lives. Blood, and more blood . . . and that is why I did what I did.”

Sargeant moves through the blackness of the night, like a brown worm, sluggish and silently; burrowing in the wet, soft mud and soil of the acres and acres of Plantation lands surrounding him. There are no street lights in Flagstaff Village. Sin-Davids Anglican Church, on the northeast edge of the Village, stands like a fortress covered in green crawling ivy, and buried in blackness. Sargeant cannot even make out the church tower; and only because he was born in the Village and has seen the Church in its stationary stoutness, day after day, a witness to the sins of the entire Village, can he tell you, by pointing in this black night, that the Church is still there.

Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys, and Sin-Davids Elementary School for Girls, have no light over their entrances. They never had.

The only lights in this part of the Village are the two naked, powerful bulbs which hang like testicles over the verandah of the Plantation Main House. Everything else is in darkness.

So, on this night, Sargeant, on duty as the Village’s only detective, disconnects the gears in his three-speed Raleigh bicycle, and smiles in the thick dark night as he realizes that the black polished frame of the bicycle contributes to the invisibility which he relishes, as he pedals like a thief throughout the back roads and fields: inspecting and spying, “’vestigating,” looking for suspects, and for women, wherever they may happen to be, before heading for the rum shop, where he will pause, even though he is late in getting to the Great House, and take a snap of overproofed dark Mount Gay Rum, offered free by the owner of the rum shop, Mr. Mandeville White, Manny to Sargeant, as an indication of Sargeant’s office and status in the Village, and as a down payment in exchange against future protection, and the protection of secrets, some mutual, some personal, all serious; and the occasional offer of an item, evidence no longer essential to a case being “’vestigated”: a wristwatch, a bicycle pump, perhaps; and once, a leather wallet dropped by a man fleeing the clutches of the husband of the woman he was fooping. Sargeant kept the money. Four pounds sterling, and seven shillings. He then tore up the identification card, and the photos of the wife and child of the “fornicater,” before he offered the empty wallet to Manny. Manny paid him five shillings, or one hundred and twenty cents, and a snap of Mount Gay, for the brown buckled-back gentleman’swallet, that had
Genuine Leather, English Made
, stamped into its rich Moroccan-red leather, in gold lettering.

Sargeant dislikes what his duty says he has to do tonight. Visit Miss Mary-Mathilda at the Great House. He has to face her before it gets much later. He does not want to take her Statement. If he could avoid it, postpone, forget it, have Vicar Dowd go in his place, ask her to leave the Great House where she lives with her son, the doctor, his doctor; have her leave Bimshire, “emigrade” and just go away . . . Englund, Amurca; live in Brooklyn with the other thousands of illegal people from Bimshire; “escape” to Venezuela, Brazil, even Cuba, Panama, in the Canal Zone, then . . .
anywhere
but here in Bimshire; and he would do anything, but have to face her . . .

He is trained as a detective, to look and to behave brave, even when he is scared. Still, Sargeant does not like this darkness. It frightens him.

Many nights, moving along the narrow track that separates the North Field from the South Field, he would pause often, imagining that he hears the sound of a man moving in the canes, trampling the dried trash; and this would make him grip his truncheon round its thick brown girth, its leather strap wrapped tight round his fingers, as he grips it now; and his body would become tense as steel; and so, stunted by fear, he would listen to the swishing sounds of footsteps deep within the vast, dark bowels of the thick cane fields, swaying in the South Field and the North Field; wondering all the time how he will apprehend this man who intrudes upon his peace, and who delays the pause for refreshment at the rum shop, for the shot glass of Mount Gay Rum whose taste is so enticing.

Sargeant knows about Amurca and Canada from magazines of those countries that carry stories of murders and “’vestigations” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
FBI
; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the
RCMP
ees; in the swallowing swamps of Southern Florida filled with alligators; and in the deep snows of the Canadian North, where, as he read, a man could freeze to death in two minutes flat, if he stands outside on a street in a town named Winnapeg-Manitoba, in November and December and January and February, when the temperature in fifty-three degrees below zero; and he knows that the
FBI
and the
RCMP
ees enforce the Law carrying guns; and he wonders why the authorities, the Commissioner of Police and the Solicitor-General and the Governor of this Island, in charge of his personal safety, balk against arming a man like him; arming him against the violence of all “these blasted criminals” hiding in cane fields, in his Village, in his jurisdiction, trampling the blasted trash a man have to do his business on.

So, Sargeant carries only a truncheon. It is the weapon to protect him from criminals. It is officially issued by the Police Force. It is made out of local wood. Mahogany, perhaps; or lignum vitae. But, in addition, privately, and secretly, Sargeant carries a bull-pistle, a whip made from the cured penis of a Zeebu bull, soaked in water and linseed oil; hidden in a long narrow side pocket custom-made into his trousers.

Tonight, he hears the dried trash swishing in the canes that surround him like the sea; and the crushing sound of the criminal’s footsteps, magnified on the cane trash, at the bottom of the field, like a carpet six inches thick; and on this carpet of cane trash, Sargeant himself, on a slow night, would take a woman, Gertrude, Miss Mary-Mathilda’s maid, more often than others, and would lie; and then lie-down on her belly; and turn over on his back, and dream; and then when he has had his orgasm, which he does not stifle but announces with a “Jesus Christ!” because the field is vast, and he can be loud and still no one would hear his ecstasy; he would then roll over, putting the woman, Gertrude, more often than others, on his belly, and look past her head, right at the skies, and start to count the stars, identify for her the constellations, Orion, the Big Dipper, Neptune, constellations he read in a book his daughter, Ruby, sent to him from Brooklyn, the only ones he memorized; and actually identify the stars he counted, because the sky was dark blue and the stars were like emeralds. But now, tonight, the sky is black and there are no stars. The noise of the criminal’s footsteps on the trash, in the middle of the field, comes closer to him; and makes him grip his truncheon, tighten its leather strap, until he can feel the pain in his fingers. The strap is twisted tight round his right fist, perfect for the delivery of a quick, deadly blow.