The Polished Hoe (64 page)

“Why?

“Why I had to do it?

“I will tell you why. This is the truth. The God’s truth. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth.”

“So help you, God?”

“So-help-me-God!”

“Let me hear the truth, then, Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda Bell—” Sargeant says.

She cuts him off before he can complete the name.

“
Don’t!”
she says.

Her tone is high, raised beyond her normal speaking voice; and her manner is without softness and emotion; and is threatening.

“Don’t you
ever
address me to my face by that name! Not even behind my back. It is not a name I want to have!”

“Well, you could tell the truth by using
any
surname, Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda,” Sargeant says.

And he smiles: he knows this is the surname she is called by openly, in the Selected Clienteles Room, in the sub-station and throughout the Village, by Manny and his friends; and just as openly by the Constable and Naiman.

When the telephone call came that afternoon, disturbing them from their game of dominoes, Naiman had announced, “The Great House, Sargeant. Miss Bellfeels want to speak to you.”

“Bellfeels deputy-wife? I wonder what Miss Bellfeels want?”

And she knows that his wife is called Mistress Badfeels.

“Don’t ever use that name for me!” Mary-Mathilda says again.

And this makes Sargeant stiffen, and become formal like a policeman on duty.

He opens his small black book with the elastic band round its back, to keep its contents safe and secret; and he begins at last to take down his notes, already headed
Evidence pertaining to the Case of Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda BELLFEELS, at the Great House, Sunday the 13th Instance.
He puts the pencil into his mouth, and wets the lead in the pencil, and he screws up his face, making his large eyes into slits, concentrating; and looking like a man with bad eyesight.

He is poised now. To take down her Statement.

“I ready now, Miss Mary,” he says.

“A word or two, before you go from here,” she tells Sargeant. “I did some good things about here, in all this time you know me. And I talking to you in this Statement, as if I am addressing the Court of Grand Sessions. All I ask you, Sargeant, when people, including the Commissioner of Police, ask you to repeat what my evidence is, tell him what you know about me. Just as I am. Without one plea. You would know what to leave-in, and what to leave-out. Let your conscience be your guide. Tell him about me, not out of malice, but as a woman who did what she do, did, to save her soul.”

The formality of her words, and the ponderousness of the thoughts inside her head, seduce her; and she assumes the posture and rhetoric and “silks” of a King’s Counsel, whom fantasy has chosen as the barrister for her defence; and easily, she slips back into this role, giving evidence, in defending herself . . .

“It is not as a murderer that she stands before you. Even if on the night in question, murder was the only occupant of her mind.

“If it was in her mind when she set out, it had vanished from her mind when she entered the Plantation grounds, and approached the Main House.

“Not in stealth, even although it was a dark night. The Plantation’s three German Alasatian dogs and the two Doberman-Pincers ran up to her, to greet her, licking her feet and fingers, and jumping up to kiss her.

“Standing in the midst of the five dogs kissing her, she had a strange sensation dealing with sacrifice. I can only identify that sensation as a kind of sacrifice.

“She was sacrificing him. She has lived under circumstances for the past thirty-eight years that was unworthwhile.

“She is a woman with a past of strangulation
.
Her future ended with each setting of the sun every evening.

“She could not continue to live in that situation, as she could not breathe in it; so, she had to change it. And she changed it in the only way that she knew how.

“Her act is the act of self-defence.

“Mixed-in with the act of sacrifice.

“She wanted to sacrifice herself along with the other-mentioned sacrifice she has made.

“She is a very ordinary woman, possessing education not beyond Standard Seven, at Sin-Davids Elementary School for Girls. But that education served her..Well, and proved to be good-enough.

“Good-enough to lead a Christian life.

“Good-enough to understand what’s going on round her.

“Good-enough to read the
Bimshire Daily Herald
, every morning.

“Good-enough to follow what people of a better station in life than she are saying to her.

“Good-enough to understand the meaning of Church.

“Good-enough to raise a son.

“Good-enough not to bear malice, nor vengeance for the stillbirths of another son and a daughter.

“Good-enough not to cross the paths of, nor show disrespect to, the other lady.

“Good-enough to respect those lower than her in state, estate, and station.

“And good-enough to know her place on this powerful estate.

“So, she stands before you, naked; as a woman; not jealous in spite of cause; but when pushed, she becomes real mad. A straightforward woman. Plain. Simple. Not highly educated, as she has stated. But deeply religious. And consequently, not a fool, as a result.”

She changes her stride, and walks with the hoe in her right hand. The alteration in her stride matches the rising of her voice. Her words flow behind her, and hit him like the pelting of dust in the wind, armed with fine specks of gravel.

He wonders if this is the working of his imagination, or if the dust, the white specks, the accidental rubbing of his shoulders on the coral stone wall, as he follows her in this subterranean tunnel, is the reason his mind might be inventing all this. Whatever it is, his attention is cemented to her words. He has put the notebook away.

He will omit as much as possible of the evidence from the Statement he has to write. He intends to begin writing it from memory and from his notes, on official foolscap-sized paper provided by the Police Department, at the sub-station; and the moment he leans up his bicycle, and has his cup of strong loose-leafed green tea, with a thick, three-inch slice of coconut bread (which Naiman prepares for him, every morning, at six o’clock), he will begin. He can taste the tea, whitened by fresh cow’s milk. Perhaps, if she is in a better mood, when she reaches the door that leads up into her kitchen, and if she has the time, and if there is time before Gertrude arrives, and if Wilberforce is not awake and ready for his own breakfast, she might prepare him a cup of strong green tea. And a slice of Gertrude’s coconut bread.

In the bedroom, the light of morning comes in like spray through the white voile curtains. The smell of fresh cow dung comes in with the light. And the wind sweeps in from over the hills, passing the Plantation Main House, through the fruit trees of mango, pear, ackee, breadfruit, puh-paw and tamarind, down the incline that leads into the fields, the North Field and the South Field, through the gully, and finally again up the slight incline to her house, and her bedroom in the Great House.

The voile curtains fly like kites, crash against the glass in the half-opened windows, collapse like burst balloons, and they billow out from the glass, like the sails on yachts leaving the Aquatic Club.

The morning light makes the fields give off a haze that looks like smoke rising from a starting fire. And the morning has in it, at this hour, the signalling small fires from the labourers’ chattel houses that mark and dot the green land.

In her bedroom, once again, and with the full light of the morning sun sprinkled over the bed, Sargeant paints a picture in his mind of a man’s body on the white bedspread; and the form left by the body identifies itself in his mind as Mr. Bellfeels’ body. All desire that had ridden his comfort during the long night has left his body. All he can see in her bed, with its seductive smell, the dainty pillowcases, the feminine touch of colour and the softness of cloth, sheets, nightgown and pillowcase, soften his heart, but point out the discomfiture that the richness of this room brings with it. But the image of another man’s body in the bed he himself had wished he could occupy with her beneath him is too strong. Sargeant cannot think of love, or lust, in this bedroom any longer.

Sargeant’s mouth is like sandpaper; and he does not wish to think of the fragrance of his breath. Nor the smell of his armpits. Small grits of dust seem to move round his eyeballs. The weight of the night descends upon him, as he watches her take a towel from the stand that contains a wash basin and a ewer, and pass it up and down the handle of the hoe, and make the shine return to the wood. He watches as she passes the same towel across the blade.

The sun streams through the window upon her, and rests on the blade, and makes it easy for Sargeant to read the name of the English manufacturer.

“This was made in Englund,” he says.

“What isn’t,” she says. “What isn’t?”

“The blade,” he tells her. “The blade of this hoe!”

He writes a note in his small black notebook, after flipping back the rubber band that keeps the pages in place.
Make in Englund
, he writes. And then, he adds, after wetting the lead pencil in his mouth,
Note bene. Reference: the hoe blade! Important
.

“Made in Englund,” she says, noticing the concentration in his face as he writes. She cannot see what he has written.

“Mannifactured up in Englund!” he says. He says it as if it is an earth-shattering conclusion he has come to, the solution of a long, nagging problem to do with this case.

Mary-Mathilda puts the thoughts about the manufacture of the hoe out of her mind. And looks instead at the clouds falling thick and dark over the blueness of the morning skies, like a slow curtain at the end of a play.

The storm is coming, she knows. Living so close to the land, she can feel it in her bones. Ma said that, too. “
I can feel a storm coming, in my bones.
”

She hears a roll of thunder in the distance, which she gets a scent of, a warning of, like the sound of a whistle from a train still coming round a bend; and then, in full sight, at full speed, bursts through thick, short bush, and a field of almost ripe Indian corn. It is the first report of thunder; and the windows in the bedroom shudder.

The thunder gives no warning of its third explosion. It bursts in a glorious reverberation, like shattering glass, retaining its sharpest sound for the last moment, and this suddenness increases its sound and puts a trembling fear into Mary-Mathilda’s body.

The fourth crack of thunder is not so sudden as the third, as the lightning flashes one or two seconds before, as if it is warning her and Sargeant to prepare for the coming explosion.

She is waiting for the next explosion; and she waits for it standing before the window that looks directly through the grove of fruit trees to the Main House. In the gathering storm, she cannot see the trees, nor the Main House. Sargeant is sitting on the bed, near the foot, looking into his notebook, waiting in case she continues with her Statement.

He hopes her memory will bring the words in easy flow, so that he does not have to urge them on by asking any questions.

She seems to be reading his mind, and she begins to talk. She moves a little away from the expanse of glass in the window just as a flash of lightning illuminates the fields and the trees, in a dramatic green setting; and a portion of the Main House.

“Before the storm comes-on more,” she says, “I should go on with my Statement. Before the morning gets too old.”

“Before.”

“And as I was saying, with the lovely smell of the lady-of-the-night, there was me, turning off the Front Road, going along a track between the North Field and the South Field, flat for the most part now, now that most of the canes cut. All that those fields have in them now is young plants, yams and eddoes, and a few holes of eight-weeks sweet potatoes . . . and the Plantation Main House, with its lights on, facing me. The bright lights reflected-back on to me, was like a big wave coming towards me, rolling over my head; and the feeling that came over me tonight, was the same feeling I had that first Sunday in the Church Yard, when the sun and the height of the man looking down at me from the saddle of a horse knocked me to one side, as if indeed it was a wave. The bright lights in the Plantation Main House earlier this evening was like lights on a steamer sailing over the waves on a dark night. Like the brightness of the sun that Sunday morning in the Church Yard.

“This big powerful House, which have such an effect on me, and which to enter the driveway, and walk up the white marl and loose gravel path, and approach the verandah, I trembled to do.

“The dogs were barking, at first; and the horses shaking their heads; the donkeys making noise, and the chickens and the fowls scattering like leaves in a high wind; and the land covered in the darkness of night.

“And then, everything changed. Time itself changed.

“And I found myself in new and different circumstances, with a change of heart, kind of; as if I was becoming . . ...Well, as if I was falling in love with the Plantation Main House and the Plantation itself all over again; and wanting to visit it, and walk up the same circular path of the entrance of white marl and loose gravel, admire the chickens and the fowls, and the donkeys and mules and horses which are still swaying their heads with a mouthful of grass in their teeth; and behind the Plantation Main House, and behind the garage and the sheds and pens and Servants Quarters, on the left side and the right side, fields and fields and fields in a expanse of wideness which at this time of year would be cane arrows like plumes, like silver garlands and diadems that I had read about in books Wilberforce subscribe to, swaying in the breeze. And the smell of freshness. Fresh cane blades cut as fodder for the animals. Eddoes dug fresh from the ground, and smelling strong and musty, like with the smell of the earth, ready to be cooked in mutton soup. Fresh Guinea-grass and Khus-Khus grass cut and dried in the sun, then to be stuff into mattresses and pillowcases, for the bedrooms. Fresh, big-big tomatoes for slicing and putting in sangwiches. And the smell of fresh bread coming from the oven. The penny loaf. White bread with a crispy outside, and a strip of leaf from the palm tree on the outside. Or from a cane blade, four by a half inch; and baked into the dough. And the white insides of the loaf warm; so warm that with a daub of yellow butter that loaf of bread becomes a meal fit for a king! Yes!