The Saint on the Spanish Main (30 page)

Simon drove all the way to the Ch
â
telet des Fleurs,
where the road seems
to end, but she pointed ahead and
said:
“Plus loin.”

He drove on around the inn. Not very far beyond it
the pavement ended, but a navigable trail
meandered on
still further and higher
towards the background peaks. He expected it to become impassable at every
turn, but
it teased him on for
several minutes and still hadn’t petered out when a house suddenly came in
sight, built out
of rock and perched
like a fragment of a medieval castle
on
a promontory a little above them. A rutted driveway
branched off and slanted up to it, and the young
woman
pointed again.

“La maison-l
à
.”

It was not a mansion in size, but on the
other hand it
was certainly no native peasant’s cottage.

“Merci beaucoup,”
she said
in her stilted schoolgirl
French, as the jeep stopped in front of it.

“De rien,”
he
murmured amiably, and went around to
lift out the heavy basket.

A man came out on to the verandah, and she
spoke rapidly in Creole, obviously explaining about her acci
dent and
how she came to be chauffeured to the door.
As Simon looked up,
the man came down to meet him,
holding out his hand.

“Please don’t bother with that,” he
said. “I’ve got a handy man who’ll take care of it. You’ve done enough
for Sibao
already. Won’t you come in and have a drink?
My name’s Theron
Netlord.”

Simon Templar could not help looking a little
sur
prised. For Mr. Netlord was not only a white man, but
he was
unmistakably an American; and Simon had some
vague recollection of
his name.

2

It can be assumed that the birth of the girl
who was later
to be called Sibao took place under the very best auspices,
for her father was the
houngan
of an
houmfort
in
a valley
that could be seen from the house where Simon
had taken her, which
in terms of a more familiar religion
than voodoo would be the equivalent
of the vicar of a
parish church; and her mother was not only a
mambo
in
her own right, but also an occasional communicant of
the church
in P
é
tionville. But after the elaborate
precau
tionary rituals with which her birth was surrounded, the
child grew
up just like any of the other naked children of
the hills, until she
was nearly seven.

At that time, she woke up one morning and
said:
“Mama, I saw Uncle Zande trying to fly, but he dived
into the
ground.”

Her mother thought nothing of this until the
evening,
when word came that Uncle Zande, who was laying tile
on the
roof of a building in Leogane, had stumbled off it and broken his neck. After
that much attention was
paid to her dreams, but the things that they
prophesied
were not always so easy to interpret until after they hap
pened.

Two years later her grandfather fell sick
with a burn
ing fever, and his children and grandchildren gathered
around to
see him die. But the young girl went to him
and caressed his
forehead, and at that moment the
sweating and shivering stopped, and the
fever left him
and he began to mend. After that there were others who
asked for her touch, and many
of them affirmed that
they experienced extraordinary
relief.

At least it was evident that she was entitled
to ad
mission to the
houmfort
without further probation. One
night,
with a red bandanna on her head and gay hand
kerchiefs knotted
around her neck and arms, with a
bouquet in one hand and a crucifix in the
other, she sat
in a chair between her four sponsors and watched the
hounsis-canzo,
the student priests, dance
before her.
Then her father took her by the
hand to the President of
the
congregation, and she recited her first voodoo oath:

“Je jure, je jure,
I swear,
to respect the powers of the
myst
è
res
de Guin
é
e,
to respect the powers
of the
houngan,
of the President of the Society, and
the powers
of all
those on whom these powers are conferred.”

And after she had made all her salutations
and pros
trations, and had herself been raised shoulder high and
applauded,
they withdrew and left her before the alter to
receive whatever
revelation the spirits might vouchsafe
to her.

At thirteen she was a young woman,
long-legged and
comely, with a proud yet supple walk and prematurely
steady
eyes that gazed so gravely at those whom she no
ticed that they
seemed never to rest on a person’s face
but to look through
into the thoughts behind it. She
went faithfully to school and learned what
she was told to, including a smattering of the absurdly involved and
illogical
version of her native tongue which they called
“French”; but when her father
stated that her energy
could be better
devoted to helping to feed the family, she
ended her formal education
without complaint.

There were three young men who watched her one
evening as she picked pigeon peas among the bushes that her father had
planted, and who were more im
pressed by the grace of her body than by any
tales they
may have heard of her supernatural gifts. As the brief
mountain twilight darkened they came to seize her; but
she knew what was in
their minds, and ran. As the one
penitent survivor told it, a cloud suddenly
swallowed
her: they blundered after her in the fog, following the
sounds of her flight: then they saw her shadow almost
within reach, and
leapt to the capture, but the ground vanished from under their feet. The bodies
of two of them were found at the foot of the precipice; and the
third
lived, thought with a broken back, only because a
tree caught him on
the way down.

Her father knew then that she was more than
quali
fied to become an
hounsis-canzo,
and she told him that
she was
ready. He took her to the
houmfort
and set in
motion the elaborate
seven-day ritual of purification
and initiation, instructing her in all the
mysteries him
self. For her
loa,
or personal patron deity, she
had
chosen Erzulie; and in the baptismal ceremony of the
fifth day
she received the name of Sibao, the mystic mountain ridge where Erzulie mates
with the Supreme Gods, the legendary place of eternal love and fertility.
And when
the
houngan
made the invocation, the goddess
showed her favor by
possessing Sibao, who uttered
prophecies and admonitions in a language that
only
houngans
can interpret, and with the hands and mouth
of Sibao
accepted and ate of the sacrificial white pigeons and white rice; and the
houngan
was filled with pride as
he chanted:

“Les
Saints mand
é
s mang
é
s. Genoux-terre!
Parce que gnou loa nan govi pas capab mang
é
,
Ou gaingnin pour mang
é
pour
li”

Thereafter she hoed the patches of vegetables
that her
father cultivated as before, and helped to grate manioc,
and carried water from the spring, and went back and
forth to
market, like all the other young women; but the
tale of her powers
grew slowly and surely, and it would
have been a reckless man who dared to
molest her.

Then Theron Netlord came to Kenscoff, and
present
ly heard of her through the inquiries that he made. He sent word that he
would like her to work in his house;
and because he offered wages that
would much more than pay for a substitute to do her work at home, she
accepted.
She was then seventeen.

“A rather remarkable girl,” said
Netlord, who had
told Simon some of these things. “Believe me, to
some
of the people
around here, she’s almost like a living
saint.”

Simon just managed not to blink at the word.

“Won’t that accident this afternoon
shake her pedes
tal a bit?” he asked.

“Does a bishop lose face if he trips
over something
and breaks a leg?” Netlord retorted. “Besides,
you
hap
pened. Just when she needed help, you drove by, picked
her up,
took her to the doctor, and then brought her
here. What would you
say were the odds against her
being so lucky? And then tell me why it
doesn’t still look
as if
something
was taking special care of
her!”

He was a big thick-shouldered man who looked
as forceful as the way he talked. He had iron-gray hair and
metallic
gray eyes, a blunt nose, a square thrusting jaw,
and the kind of lips
that even look muscular. You had
an inevitable impression of him at the first
glance; and without hesitation you would have guessed him to be a man who had
reached the top ranks of some competitive
business, and who
had bulled his way up there with ruth
less disregard for whatever
obstructions might have to
be trodden down or jostled aside. And trite
as the physi
ognomy must seem, in this instance you would have
been
absolutely right.

Theron Netlord had made a fortune from the
manufacture of bargain-priced lingerie.

The incongruity of this will only amuse those
who
know little about the clothing industry. It would be nat
ural for
the uninitiated to think of the trade in fragile
feminine frotheries as being carried on by
fragile,
feminine, and frothy types; but in
fact, at the wholesale
manufacturing
level, it is as tough and cut-throat a busi
ness as any legitimate operation in the modern world.
And even in a business which has always been
somewhat
notorious for a lack of
tenderness towards its employ
ees,
Mr. Netlord had been a perennial source of am
munition for socialistic agitators. His long-standing ven
detta
against organized labor was an epic of its kind;
and he had been named in one Congressional investiga
tion as the man who, with a combination of
gangster
tactics and an ice-pick eye
for loopholes in union contracts and government regulations, had come closest
in
the last decade to running an
oldfashioned sweatshop. It
was from
casually remembered references to such things
in the newspapers that Simon had identified the name.

“Do you live here permanently?”
Simon asked in a
conversational way.

“I’ve been here for awhile, and I’m
staying awhile,”
Netlord answered equivocally. “I like
the rum. How do
you like it?”

“It’s strictly ambrosial.”

“You can get fine rum in the States,
like that Lemon
Hart from Jamaica, but you have to come here to drink
Barbancourt.
They don’t make enough to export.”

“I can think of worse reasons for
coming here. But I
might want something more to hold me indefinitely.”

Netlord chuckled.

“Of course you would. I was kidding. So
do I. I’ll
never retire. I
like
being in business. It’s my
sport, my
hobby, and my recreation. I’ve spent more than a year
all
around the Caribbean, having what everyone would
say was a nice long
vacation. Nuts. My mind hasn’t been
off business for a single day.”

“They tell me there’s a great future in
the area.”

“And I’m looking for the future. There’s
none left in
America. At the bottom, you’ve got your employees demanding
more wages and pension funds for less work every year. At the top, you’ve got a
damned paternalistic
Government taxing your profits to the bone
to pay for
all its Utopian projects at home and abroad. The man
who’s
trying to literally mind his own business is in the middle, in a squeeze that
wrings all the incentive out of
him. I’m sick of bucking that set-up.”