The Polished Hoe (61 page)

“Fair exchange,” Ma grew to tell Mary-girl, her daughter, “is no robbery. Get something for it. You are a pretty girl. With a lovely complexion. Nice hair. If I was the woman o’ means that I wish I was, you would have your own hairdressing place. Or a dressmaking place. Or even be a teacher. But this is our lot. I can’t even buy a second-hand, or a t’ird-hand Singer sewing machine for you!”

Ma had told him what she had wanted to tell him for years, from that time she stopped having her menses. The second time. The first time she found out she was pregnant, her own ma, Gran to Mary-girl, was too scared to try her hand at abortion, for Gran’s mother was poorly; lying on a canvas cot all day, waiting for God to call her home; but in her weak voice, she whispered the “ingreasements” of the portion; for only she, with this knowledge which she said she brought from Africa, knew what to do. Great-Gran had an apothecary’s brilliance with herbs. Great-Gran told them the right herbs and bushes to use. And she knew, from trial and error, the correct portion of engine oil—“. . . jest a drop to a drop and a half, two at the most”—to mix with the thick, bitter, black liquid that the bushes were boiled down to in a tea.

“Eunomia-girl, this going taste like hell, like p’ison,” Great-Gran told her, “but that is exactly what it suppose to be. P’ison-out the infirmities inside your system, girl. So, hold your nose, shut yuh two eyes and swallow
hard.
Good! Now, sit in this bush-bath . . .”; yes, she had gone through that.

But this Friday afternoon, about two, a few hours before she would assemble with the other hands, in the Plantation Yard, to answer to her name—
Eunomia Irene Paul, here?”
—and walk forward, take her brown envelope from the hand of the bookkeeper, and mark a mark that represented her name, her special Mark, her mark of identity and identification, in the large ledger, PLANTATION LABOURERS, that has a black cover, red vertical lines and black horizontal lines, and the names of everyone, man, woman, child, animal, who worked on the Plantation, written in it; with her mind full of the thought that she could reason with him, risky in itself; for her to seem to have a mind, this dangerous disposition, similar to the uppitiness her cousins in Southampton had seen in Nat Turner, this, this “blasted facetiness,” “this circumstance,” this rebelliousness, this talking-back . . ...Well, Ma had hardly got the words with which she wanted to negotiate out of her mouth when she felt the searing, tearing, biting tongue of the riding-crop across her back,
whap!-whap!
It was as if the two lashes were sewn into her flesh, like the two strings of cloth which served as braces that kept her skirt in place.

“You ever whisper
that
one-more-time, and I fecking kill you, like shite!”

“Sir,” Ma said.

“Don’t-fecking-sir-me! Or play with me! You hear me, woman?”

“Sir.”

“You really understand what I fecking.Well telling you, Eunomia Irene Paul?”

This was the first time he had called her by her full name. And hearing her name called by him shocked her into temporary dumbness; and he had to repeat his warning.

“You really understand what I fecking.Well telling you, Eunomia Irene Paul?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Feck-yuh-up! Shoot yuh, like-feck! Point-blank, too!”

“Yes, sir.”

And he flung the riding-crop at her, in a vicious lash. Part of the riding-crop caught her right breast; but the longer part, like a striking snake, ripped into her back.

“You heard me?”

Whapppp!
it cried out again.

“Yes, sir.”

“You understand, now?

“Yessir . . .”

“Be-Christ, how it would look, for people to hear that I fooping my own daughter! You want to send-me-up to Glandairy? Or cause a fecking scandal pon this Plantation? You hate me summuch?”

“No, sir.”

“Good...Well, lemme tell you wha’ I going-do. I putting-in a’ extra piece o’ change in your envelope today.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you, very much, sir.”

And Ma, from that moment, knew that Mary-girl was fixed. Was saved.
Taken-care-of.
Just as—and Ma could not have known this—Mary-Mathilda had taken care of her wishbone; and of her hoe. And Ma knew that she herself would carry this damning, indigestible information within her heart, for who would believe such blasphemy, such, such
wirthless
behaviour; so she would carry it to her grave.

It is this thought, this nagging, raw supposition that comes up now, like the first .Welling on the arm that you watch after rubbing it with your hand, hoping it will disappear, or else stop hurting, but which becomes in three days, always in three days, an open festering sore, which brings pain; and you cannot any longer rub it with your hand, but have to lance it, or cover it with Elastoplast, or use the Village remedy, ordinary dirt that is dry, mixed with ashes from the coal pot or from the fireplace; but whether it is healed in three days after its bursting out, it leaves a scar. A little smooth roundish skin, darker and smoother than your normal skin, and for life, perhaps, or for a long time, but long enough to be a life, you walk about with this mark. This mark.

This is the mark that Mary-Mathilda would see when she walked up the stairs from the front-house, when she had sat in her favourite chair, reading the Bible, or letting her hands guide the bone needles, absent-mindedly, or “just studying”—for she had now mastered most patterns she had taken from
Ladies’ Home Journal
, the English edition—and would, when the light changed, or when Gertrude brought in the acetylene lamps and lit them, before the house was run with electricity, Mary-Mathilda would see, as if for the first time, the smiling countenance of Wilberforce, as a small boy, and then look at the face of Mr. Bellfeels, erect, formal, handsome, in a suit of black, with a high, stiff, white collar that looked as if he has been made breathless by its tightness, and see clearly the obvious fact of patrimony: who had fathered her son, her only living child. And then she would look at the photographs of herself, at age five, and seven, and nine, exactly the three ages of Wilberforce in the triptych in the oval-shaped silver frame, and see the resemblance which struck her always as the resemblance of the son “taking after his mother.” But when she looked at all three together, this is when the thought of a mark, of a silent sin, first entered her mind.

But who in this world, in this Christian world of such small space, but with so many souls living in it, would do a thing like that, and still remain living amongst the other Christians?

She had heard about it, from books and from stories told round the dining table, when Mr. Bellfeels brought his friends on Saturday nights, for relaxation. But these were stories that took place in the back-lands of the Amurcan South; and in the Amurcan Wild West; and in Canada on the Prairies, in the wilds, in the North, in the bitter cold of long winters, on winter farms, where farmers, as Sir G explained it, “needed the superabundance of hands to work the land, before the mechanization of tractors and ploughs, in that unredeeming cold which lasts nine months out of the year, what do you expect, to be reasonable, I put it to you, what do you expect nature to do, to accommodate this phenome-non? Of natural passion?”

Sir G answered his own question.

“The farmer fooped his own daughter, after having exhausted the limited usefulness of his poor loving wife, poor dear,” Sir G said. “I won’t vouch for the farmer’s moral obligation, however, in solving this predicament, but I put it to you.”

All the men roared with laughter, including Mr. Bellfeels.

“And the poor dear, the wife, overworked with the milk pail, the chicken coops, and baling, and at last relieved of her bounden duty, was placed in the position to supervise, to supervise at least, since she could no longer be a participant, the wife had knowledge of (the dark, cold bedroom where the wind howled through the comforters made of cotton) this act of deliberate economic contribution to the theory of employment, within the cemetery of her conscience.”

The men did not laugh at this . . .

Now, in this underground tunnel, where Sargeant and Mary-Mathilda are still walking, these thoughts which are now pressing upon her consciousness and her conscience, slides of her life, make her sad and very angry. But in her mind, now having to think about the act that she “had perpetrated,” as Sir G would say, she knows the reason why . . .

She can feel the difference in the sound of her footsteps, in this section of the underground tunnel; and there is more hollowness in the sound of her footsteps, and this makes her feel that the tunnel is approaching the cellar of her house.

She walks with the hoe, putting it down a few inches ahead of each stride, step after step, just as she had seen the Vicar walk with his umbrella.

Sargeant walks slowly behind her.

At the sound of his sneezing, she emerges from her reverie.

“I have told you things you didn’t know existed before. And these things are things that will remain right here,” she says.

“You told me things, yes,” he says.

“The things I have told you, am about to tell you, I want you to forget, and have them remain here, in this underground passage.”

“You could trust me, Mary-Mathilda.”

“Okay, then. But did I tell you that Ma’s name was Eunomia Irene?”

“Close to one o’ the Bellfeels girls,” he says.

“I asked Ma the origin of Eunomia.

“‘How come you have this name?’

“And she told me that her Mother, my gran, saw it written-down somewhere, and liked it, and gave it to her, when she was christened. In Sin-Davids Anglican Church. And her second name, Irene, I don’t know what that means, either. A hundred women in this Village name Irene. My guess is that the English must-have-bring it here. But don’t you think Eunomia is a very nice name; and then, Irene?”

“Pretty like the Bellfeels daughters.”

“Ma never knew who her father is. In those days, on the Plantation, women didn’t pay much attention to thrildren bearing the names of the father—if the fathers were known, at all—excepting if the father was living under the same roof with the mother, and the child, which was rare.

“No. Ma didn’t know who her father was. Could be anybody. He could be dead, anyhow, before she born. That was Plantation life.

“She knew mine. But she never told me. She never told me who. She just drop hints. Always hints.

“
‘Well, girl, it could be that he is your father!’

“Or
‘What I would be doing with a ugly man like that for?’

“Or yet-again,
‘I haven’t told you a thing, hear? Not one thing. You hear those lawless bitches in Miss Greaves Shop, talking; with nothing more better to do than telling you that the overseer at the Plantation is your father? What right would I be doing with a Plantation overseer, fathering the only child I give-birth to? And if that was the case, why you and me still living in this blasted hovel, whilst your father living in luxuries, in the third-biggest house ’pon the blasted Plantation estate? That mek sense to you, Mary-girl? Not to me!’

“So, Ma never gave a straight answer. I know who he is. And it came to me from the most unusual of sources. After Wilberforce was born, after I had-had the two very painful and tragic childbirths, as a woman herself, Ma must have had pity on me, and made a attempt to tell me. But I wasn’t in the mood to hear that kind of story. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear at that time.

“Sometimes, in my bedroom, looking through the spying glass out to sea, tracking the sailing boats from the Aquatic Club, or inter-island schooners, or straining my eyes to see the exact minute a merchant ship, or a boat-full o’ tourisses come over the horizon, I would take a peep at Flagstaff Macon Castle, your house, to see if I could see you; or I would search the horizon and search the horizon, looking.

“But what am I looking to see?

“Sometimes I see a flying fish jumping in the sea. Sometimes my two eyes would rest on a fish, larger than a flying fish, and from that distance, I would say it is a dolphin. Or a kingfish. And my mind is not on the flying fish or the dolphin, but on the meaning of my life, from Ma refusing to tell me who my father is.

“It was a Saturday afternoon. The men were playing cricket on the Pasture. It was, if I remember rightly, a big game, our fellows against the best team from down in Town. I think it was the Spartans team. Spartans versus Flagstaff. And it was Tea, teatime. The Plantation always provided Tea, and Lunch. Wilberforce was a toddler then. I had Wilberforce holding in my arms, as he was running all over the Pasture going on the field, and humbugging the cricketers. And
she
was in the pavilion, with the other ladies. Mistress Dora Blanche Spence Hyphen Bellfeels, I mean.

“Mr. Bellfeels was Captain of our team, Flagstaff. I hadn’t told Wilberforce who his father was. He wasn’t talking yet. Just muttering a few words, including ‘Da-Da’ and ‘Ma.’ But there is something about thrildren and their parents, when they are small. In time, after he became a doctor of Tropical Medicines, talking about things, Wilberforce explain this same behaviour about thrildren and parents to me, as genealogy. Or progeny. Or could it be that
genes
is the word he used? Anyhow.

“He always argued that from neither progeny nor genes can any father hide from owning-up to fatherhood. No matter how hard he try to hide, he can’t cover-down or deny fatherhood, according to the meaning Wilberforce give to progeny and genes. No man can hide . . .