Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (76 page)

‘Fabricius,’ said I, ‘it is necessary that I should speak to you.’

The tree-man turned his gaze upon me gravely. Seen thus, face to face, he was a remarkably handsome fellow, now about thirty years of age, his features regular, his expression calm, inscrutable; wise with a wisdom certainly not Caucasian, such as to put into my mind the phrase: ‘not of this world’. He bowed, gravely, as though assuring me of his attention.

I said: ‘I was looking at you yesterday afternoon when you came back to your tree, over the lower end of the field – down there.’ I indicated where he had stood with a gesture. Again he bowed, without any change of expression.

‘I wish to have you know,’ I continued, ‘that I understand; that no one else besides me saw you, saw what you did – with the canebill, I mean. I wish you to know that what I saw I am keeping to myself. That is all.’

Silvio Fabricius the tree-man continued to look into my face, without any visible change whatever in his expression. For the third time he nodded, presumably to indicate that he understood what I had said, but utterly without any emotion whatever. Then, in a deep, resonant voice, he spoke to me, the first and last time I have ever heard him utter a word.

‘Yo’ loike to know, yoong marster,’ said he, with an impressive gravity, ‘me brudda’ – he placed a hand against the tree’s smooth trunk – ‘t’ink hoighly ’bout yo’, sar. Ahlso ’bout de enterprise fo’ pineopples. Him please’, sar. Ahlso marster; him indicate-me yo’ course be serene an’ ahlso of a profit.’ The tree-man bowed again, and without another word or so much as a glance in my direction, detaching his attention from me as deliberately as he had given it when I first spoke to him, he turned toward his brother the tree, laid his face against its bark, and slowly encircled the massive trunk with his two great muscular black arms.

I arrived on the island in the middle of October 1928, coming down as usual from New York after my summer in the States. Great Fountain had suffered severely in the hurricane of the previous month, and when I arrived there I found Carrington well along with the processes of restoration. Many precautions had been taken beforehand and our property had been damaged because of these much less than the other estates. I had told Carrington, who had a certain respect for my familiarity with ‘native manners and customs’, enough about the tree-man and his functions tribally to cause him to heed the warning, transmitted by the now nearly helpless old patriarch of the village, and brought in by the tree-man four days before the hurricane broke – and two days before the government cable-advice had reached the island.

Silvio Fabricius had stayed beside his tree. On the third day, when it was for the first time possible for the villagers to get as far as the upper end of the great field near the fountain, he had been found, Carrington reported to me, lying in the field, dead, his face composed inscrutably, the great trunk of his brother the tree across his chest which had been crushed by its great weight when it had been uprooted by the wind and fallen.

And until they wore off there had been smears of earth, Carrington said, on the heads and faces of all the original Dahomeyan villagers and upon the heads and faces of several of the newer laborer families as well.

Passing of a God

‘You say that when Carswell came into your hospital over in Port au Prince his fingers looked as though they had been wound with string,’ said I, encouragingly.

‘It is a very ugly story, that, Canevin,’ replied Doctor Pelletier, still reluctant, it appeared.

‘You promised to tell me,’ I threw in.

‘I know it, Canevin,’ admitted Doctor Pelletier of the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, now stationed here in the Virgin Islands. ‘But,’ he proceeded, ‘you couldn’t use this story, anyhow. There are editorial
tabus
, aren’t there? The thing is too – what shall I say? – too outrageous, too incredible.’

‘Yes,’ I admitted in turn, ‘there are
tabus
, plenty of them. Still, after hearing about those fingers, as though wound with string – why not give me the story, Pelletier; leave it to me whether or not I “use” it. It’s the story I want, mostly. I’m burning up for it!’

‘I suppose it’s your lookout,’ said my guest. ‘If you find it too gruesome for you, tell me and I’ll quit.’

I plucked up hope once more. I had been trying for this story, after getting little scraps of it which allured and intrigued me, for weeks.

‘Start in,’ I ventured, soothingly, pushing the silver swizzel-jug after the humidor of cigarettes from which Pelletier was even now making a selection. Pelletier helped himself to the swizzel frowningly. Evidently he was torn between the desire to pour out the story of Arthur Carswell and some complication of feelings against doing so. I sat back in my wicker lounge-chair and waited.

Pelletier moved his large bulk about in his chair. Plainly now he was cogitating how to open the tale. He began, meditatively: ‘I don’t know as I ever heard public discussion of the malignant bodily growths except among medical people. Science knows little about them. The fact of such diseases, though, is well known to everybody, through campaigns of prevention, the life insurance companies, appeals for funds –

‘Well, Carswell’s case, primarily, is one of those cases.’

He paused and gazed into the glowing end of his cigarette.

‘ “Primarily”?’ I threw in encouragingly.

‘Yes. Speaking as a surgeon, that’s where this thing begins, I suppose.’

I kept still, waiting.

‘Have you read Seabrook’s book,
The Magic Island
, Canevin?’ asked Pelletier suddenly.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘What about it?’

‘Then I suppose that from your own experience knocking around the West Indies and your study of it all, a good bit of that stuff of Seabrook’s is familiar to you, isn’t it? – the
vodu
, and the hill customs, and all the rest of it, especially over in Haiti – you could check up on a writer like Seabrook, couldn’t you, more or less?’

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘practically all of it was an old story to me – a very fine piece of work, however, the thing clicks all the way through – an honest and thorough piece of investigation.’

‘Anything in it new to you?’

‘Yes – Seabrook’s statement that there was an exchange of personalities between the sacrificial goat – at the “baptism” – and the young Black girl, the chapter he calls:
Girl-Cry – Goat-Cry
. That, at least, was a new one on me, I admit.’

‘You will recall, if you read it carefully, that he attributed that phenomenon to his own personal “slant” on the thing. Isn’t that the case, Canevin?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I think that is the way he put it.’

‘Then,’ resumed Doctor Pelletier, ‘I take it that all that material of his – I notice that there have been a lot of story-writers using his terms lately! – is sufficiently familiar to you so that you have some clear idea of the Haitian-African demigods, like Ogoun Badagris, Damballa, and the others, taking up their residence for a short time in some devotee?’

‘The idea is very well understood,’ said I. ‘Mr Seabrook mentions it among a number of other local phenomena. It was an old Negro who came up to him while he was eating, thrust his soiled hands into the dishes of food, surprised him considerably – then was surrounded by worshippers who took him to the nearest
houmfort
or
vodu
-house, let him sit on the altar, brought him food, hung all their jewelry on him, worshipped him for the time being; then, characteristically, quite utterly ignored the original old fellow after the “possession” on the part of the “deity” ceased and reduced him to an unimportant old pantaloon as he was before.’

‘That summarizes it exactly,’ agreed Doctor Pelletier. ‘That, Canevin, that kind of thing, I mean, is the real starting-place of this dreadful matter of Arthur Carswell.’

‘You mean – ?’ I barged out at Pelletier, vastly intrigued. I had had no idea that there was
vodu
mixed in with the case.

‘I mean that Arthur Carswell’s first intimation that there was anything pressingly wrong with him was just such a “possession” as the one you have recounted.’

‘But – but,’ I protested, ‘I had supposed – I had every reason to believe, that it was a surgical matter! Why, you just objected to telling about it on the ground that – ’

‘Precisely,’ said Doctor Pelletier, calmly. ‘It was such a surgical case, but, as I say, it
began
in much the same way as the “occupation” of that old Negro’s body by Ogoun Badagris or whichever one of their devilish deities that happened to be, just as, you say, is well known to fellows like yourself who go in for such things, and just as Seabrook recorded it.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘you go ahead in your own way, Pelletier. I’ll do my best to listen. Do you mind an occasional question?’

‘Not in the least,’ said Doctor Pelletier considerately, shifted himself to a still more pronouncedly recumbent position in my Chinese rattan lounge-chair, lit a fresh cigarette, and proceeded: ‘Carswell had worked up a considerable intimacy with the snake-worship of interior Haiti, all the sort of thing familiar to you; the sort of thing set out, probably for the first time, in English at least, in Seabrook’s book; at the gatherings, and the “baptism”, and the sacrifices of the fowls and the bull, and the goats; the orgies of the worshippers, the boom and thrill of the
rata
drums – all that strange, incomprehensible, rather silly-surfaced, deadly-underneathed worship of “the Snake” which the Dahomeyans brought with them to old Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

‘He had been there, as you may have heard, for a number of years; went there in the first place because everybody thought he was a kind of failure at home; made a good living, too; in a way nobody but an original-minded fellow like him would have thought of – shot ducks on the Léogane marshes, dried them, and exported them to New York and San Francisco to the United States’s two largest Chinatowns!

‘For a “failure”, too, Carswell was a particularly smart-looking chap, in the English sense of that word. He was one of those fellows who was always shaved, clean, freshly groomed, even under the rather adverse conditions of his living, there in Léogane by the salt marshes; and of his trade, which was to kill and dry ducks. A fellow can get pretty careless and let himself go at that sort of thing, away from “home”; away, too, from such niceties as there are in a place like Port au Prince.

‘He looked, in fact, like a fellow just off somebody’s yacht the first time I saw him, there in the hospital in Port au Prince, and that, too, was right after a rather singular experience which would have unnerved or unsettled pretty nearly anybody.

‘But not so old Carswell. No, indeed. I speak of him as “Old Carswell”, Canevin. That, though, is a kind of affectionate term. He was somewhere about forty-five then; it was two years ago, you see, and, in addition to his being very spick and span, well groomed, you know, he looked surprisingly young, somehow. One of those faces which showed experience, but, along with the experience, a philosophy. The lines in his face were
good
lines, if you get what I mean – lines of humor and courage; no dissipation, no let down kind of lines, nothing of slackness such as you would see in the face of even a comparatively young beach-comber. No, as he strode into my office, almost jauntily, there in the hospital, there was nothing, nothing whatever, about him, to suggest anything else but a prosperous fellow American, a professional chap, for choice, who might, as I say, have just come ashore from somebody’s yacht.

‘And yet – good God, Canevin, the story that came out – ’

Naval surgeon though he was, with service in Haiti, at sea, in Nicaragua, the China Station to his credit, Doctor Pelletier rose at this point, and, almost agitatedly, walked up and down my gallery. Then he sat down and lit a fresh cigarette.

‘There is,’ he said, reflectively, and as though weighing his words carefully, ‘there is, Canevin, among various others, a somewhat “wild” theory that somebody put forward several years ago, about the origin of malignant tumors. It never gained very much approval among the medical profession, but it has, at least, the merit of originality, and – it was new. Because of those facts, it had a certain amount of currency, and there are those, in and out of medicine, who still believe in it. It is that there are certain
nuclei
, certain masses, so to speak, of the bodily material which have persisted – not generally, you understand, but in certain cases – among certain persons, the kind who are “susceptible” to this horrible disease, which, in the prenatal state, did not develop fully or normally – little places in the bodily structure, that is – if I make myself clear – which remain undeveloped.

‘Something, according to this hypothesis, something like a sudden jar, or a bruise, a kick, a blow with the fist, the result of a fall, or what not, causes traumatism – physical injury, that is, you know – to one of the focus-places, and the undeveloped little mass of material
starts in to grow
, and so displaces the normal tissue which surrounds it.

‘One objection to the theory is that there are at least two varieties, well-known and recognized scientifically; the carcinoma, which is itself subdivided into two kinds, the hard and the soft carcinomae, and the sarcoma, which is a soft thing, like what is popularly understood by a “tumor”. Of course they are all “tumors”, particular kinds of tumors, malignant tumors. What lends a certain credibility to the theory I have just mentioned is the malignancy, the growing element. For, whatever the underlying reason, they grow, Canevin, as is well recognized, and this explanation I have been talking about gives a reason for the growth. The “malignancy” is, really, that one of the things seems to have, as it were, its own life. All this, probably, you know?’