The Penalty

by Mal Peet

  When he’d got the door to his room open, Faustino’s foot skidded on something that lay on the polished veneer floor. Cursing, he reached out to steady himself and by chance his hand landed on the main light switch.

  The thing that had almost put him on his back was an envelope. Both it and the single sheet of paper inside were printed with the name of the hotel. The note read:

  Meet me in the cathedral 10 a.m.

  E. Bakula.

  Three: Blessing

  I DIDN’T GO to the cane fields. I was put to work in the sugar mill, in the crushing yard. Unloading the cane from the ox wagons, feeding it to the presses, cleaning the runnels the juice ran down, fetching the mush over to the rum house. I kept quiet. I watched, I learned. I didn’t let myself die inside, like some of the others. The ones who had gone ghost. I built a shrine in my head. My father was in there, making a cup of his hands for his own blood. The faces from the death ship were in there, and the bodies rolling in the sea like logs. Abela was in there. And the walls and the roof of the shrine were the teachings of the pai.

  The boss of the mill was an old man with one eye that was blind and milky. He liked me for my steadiness. He had been born on the plantation, and knew the white man’s language, which he taught me. He also told me about the white men’s Worship, about their god who was murdered. He thought that was why they loved death so much and took it with them everywhere.

  In the three years I was in the mill, I saw Colonel d’Oliviera no more than six times. The first was the morning after we got off the boat. I stood with the other four men he had bought and he came and looked at us. He was not young and not old. He was the first person I had seen who had eyes the colour of the sea. He spoke harshly to Morro, about Abela, I think, and also about the damage to my lip. Morro kept quiet, staring at the ground, but I could smell his rage. Always after that, when Morro saw me, he would watch me with his hot eyes, looking for some reason to whip me. I never gave him a reason, and that fed his hatred.

  One day at the beginning of my fourth year, the colonel came to the mill. He came with a tall black woman, a very proud-looking one wearing a blue turban and a white dress that she hitched up off the ground to keep clean. I didn’t know it then, but it was Ma Rosa, who was in charge of the colonel’s house. I watched from the corner of my eye while they talked with the boss. Then the boss brought them over to where I was. Ma Rosa stood in front of me, looking me up and down. She asked me some questions, but she was also asking other questions with her eyes. She looked into me. After some silence she nodded and spoke to the colonel. Then they went away.

  The boss said to me, “You save now, or in shit. I don’t know which.”

  Next day, I started work up at the house.

  Time passed, years unfolded, full of things and the names of things. Saw, wedge, hatchet. Spade, rake, hoe. Charcoal, bellows, anvil, saddle, stirrup; whip I already knew. Griddle, kettle, saucepan, jug, flour, pepper. Carpet, chandelier. Goblet, spoon, plate, napkin, tureen.

  One day, there was a big fuss. Ma Rosa roamed among us like a fierce animal. In the afternoon three boats arrived, and more white people than I had seen since San Juan were carried up the hill. Women as well as men. Meat was roasted in a pit behind the house. I hoped the smell of it wouldn’t be unkind enough to drift over to the cabins where we lived.

  When the sun was falling I had to take the slops down to the pigs. When I returned, there was a girl leaning against the wall of the back kitchen looking at the sky and fanning her face with a big leaf. I’d never seen her before, even though she was dressed in house clothes. She had eyes that could smile, and they smiled at me.

  Later, when the colonel’s guests had eaten and we’d had the leavings, which were good, there was a revel. There were candles in glass bowls all along the veranda where the whites sat, flapping their hands at the yellow moths that filled the air. A slave band played, the drummers and a kora player and an old man who played a fiddle holding it against his hip. Behind them all the slaves sat in a big half-circle, and there were tall torches stuck in the ground. Round the edge of the light, Morro and the white gang bosses stood with their guns in their arms and whips in their belts, watching, scratching their crotches.

  I was one who brought drinks and fruit and manioc cakes to the white people, and the girl was another. One time I went to the kitchen with a tray and she was there, ladling punch into cups. She stopped when she saw me and stood straight and still. Half her face was gold in the candlelight.

  Yes, I remember this.

  I asked her name.

  She said, “White name Dolores.”

  I said, “True name?”

  She said, “Asuntula.”

  It was not a name among my people. I had trouble saying it, and she made a little laugh, hiding her mouth behind her hand.

  Then she said, “It mean Blessing.”

  A magic thing happened next. She reached out and ran her finger softly along my lip, pausing where the kink in it was. The first time, in that life, anyone touched me gently. Inside I felt like trees move in the wind.

  She said, “I know your name. Ma Rosa tell me.”

  “Why she tell you?”

  “Because I ask her,” she said.

  Then she took up the tray of cups and carried them to the door.

  I said, “I’ll call you Blessing.”

  She stopped and half turned and dipped her head just a little; then she was gone.

  When the band rested, two kegs of watered-down rum were brought round to the front of the house. All the slaves lined up and had one drink, all using the same two cups, drinking and passing the cup on to the next. Then the colonel stood up and said to his guests, “Now the Negroes will entertain us with their African dances.”

  And they were Worship dances. The women and girls dipped and swayed themselves in a big circle then in smaller circles while the men stood tall, stepping then bending. But there was confusion because we were not all one people, and sometimes the drumming stumbled, and the calls were different languages. Most of all, there was no power in the dancing because our ancestors were far, far away. And because the whites were watching, and because Morro and his men were a circle of death around us.

  I saw how big my task would be.

  A YEAR AND a half later, me and Blessing were married at the end of the dry season, when the cane-cutting was almost finished. It was the afternoon of the half-day rest, and the air was heavy under the hot white sky. We were one of four couples married that day. A white priest came upriver and did us as a job lot. We stood in the colonel’s part-built church, where the roof timbers cast prison-house shadows. The priest was a short fat man who wore a little black hat and a black robe with a white one over it. His face was melting. His slave stood next to him, holding up a wooden cross with their dead god nailed to it. We were married in a language none of us understood. It did not take long.

  When the whites had gone into the house we held our true ceremonies in the shadowy grove behind the cabins. Ma Rosa had woven eight strong cords of cotton. Each couple held cords in their right hands, and because we had no pai, Ma Rosa tied the knots herself. Then Blessing’s mother and another mother held a long stick and we stepped over it, two by two. This was not a custom among my people and I felt foolish doing it; Blessing laughed at the look on my face. We ate corn roasted on the fire and a dish of meat that was the colonel’s gift. We drank a fruit and rum drink the mill boss had brewed for us. The musicians played, and we danced our different wedding dances as best we could. The children ran wild, and I saw Blessing’s eyes following them.

  The sun slid behind the trees, a thin disc white as bone. With the darkness came a light rain, hardly more than a mist, that drifted across the grove like thin curtains.

  There was a small cabin that was now ours. When we were inside, I saw that Blessing’s family had prepared it for us. Two wicks burned in dishes of oil, and the yellow light showed me that our rough bed was covered with a sheet of many colours and
patterns that the house girls had sewn. A small bunch of flowers with petals like creamy flesh speckled with blood lay on the sheet. And on the floor around the bed was a line of white pebbles. I looked down at them and then looked at Blessing with a question in my eyes. She smiled and stood with her back to the bed. Her white dress was damp from the rain, and where it stuck to her I could see the beautiful shapeliness of her body. Then sideways with her foot she made a gap in the line of pebbles and said, “Wall is broke, my husband. Come through.”

  So I reached out and touched her.

  Then the door smashed open and evil came in.

  The instant I was seized I smelled Morro’s stink. One of the lamps died. Blessing tried to get through the door but Morro pushed her back. Two men had me by the arms and throat and a filthy hand covered my mouth. My legs were kicked from under me and then I was outside in the rain and the darkness that had been a world away. I fought and tried to bite, then something like lightning struck my head. A dark hole opened in front of me and slowly I fell into it, and as I fell I heard Blessing scream.

  Then the scream and everything else was far above me and then gone.

  When I came back to life I tried to get onto my knees but one of the overseers pushed me down again with his foot. I curled up in the wet dust close to the dying fire and sickness filled my body and my mind.

  Some time passed and then I heard Morro call. The overseers went away, leaving their laughter and their pipe smoke hanging in the air.

  The cabin door was leaning broken. I held on to the doorpost to keep from falling. Inside, Blessing was huddled in a corner, covering her nakedness with the white dress. Her face was turned away from me, her eyes tight shut, and when I spoke her name she did not move. The flowers were crushed in the twists of the wedding sheet.

  THE BIG RAINS did not fall for three more weeks. The sky pressed down on us, making the air thick, but did not break. One morning, I went out through the kitchen and saw Morro sitting on a chair in the yard. A house girl called Madelena was cutting his hair. He had his back to me, and did not see me. I stood under the lean-to roof for a minute, watching. Then I went inside to the mending room next to Ma Rosa’s parlour and took a piece of red thread and a piece of black. I went back out and watched from the shadows till Madelena had finished and showed Morro himself in a mirror. When he went away Madelena started to sweep up, and I went to her and stopped her. I picked up a lock of Morro’s hair and twisted it into a thin greasy cord, doubled it over and tied it with the red and the black thread. I put it in my pocket.

  Madelena watched me with big eyes but I didn’t speak. She didn’t speak either, but I knew her, knew she was a mouth and that by the end of the day news of what I had done would be spread among our people in the house and beyond.

  Next day, Colonel d’Oliviera and his family set off down the river to San Juan. The colonel’s wife was big with their second child and he wanted her to be near doctors. Truth was, Ma Rosa and her main help, old Ma Perla, knew more about birthing babies than any fool white doctor. Which the colonel got taught cruelly three years later when his wife died giving birth to a girl child. The child died too.

  Still, they went, and a fear and quietness spread through the house and the cabins and the village down on the river. Because now Morro was in charge, and whenever the colonel wasn’t there to mind him, his drunkenness and fierceness grew.

  When the dark began to fill the forest I took a gourd cup to the butchering shed and filled it with pig blood that was thickening for sausage. I took it to the kitchen and set it down on the big cooking table. Blessing was there, cleaning up with two other women and two boys, the ones who carried out the slops. They all watched me as I went to the kitchen store and filled a dish with salt and took one of the thin black cheroots that Ma Rosa liked to smoke. I stood the cup of blood on the dish of salt and put the cheroot in my pocket. Then I went to the cooking grills and collected hot charcoals on a little iron shovel. I took all these things outside and walked slow and steady through the cabins, knowing I was watched but not looking at those who watched me. It was near dark now.

  At the edge of the grove where the long arms of the trees stretched out I collected dry stuff and heaped it on the coals and blew till flame licked up. I swept a little patch of earth clean with the edge of my hand. I dribbled the blood in a square shape; and inside that square I made another of salt. I took out the fetish I had made of Morro’s hair and put it, careful and exact, in the centre. Then with an unburnt coal I drew a long mark down my left cheek, and with the last of the blood from the bowl I drew a long mark down my right cheek. I sat and lit the cheroot from the fire and blew smoke in all the ten directions and began my chant, soft, rocking my body.

  Did Maco come to me? I still cannot say. I had no strong trust in myself, felt I had little strength, little wisdom. I was very young, and so far away. Maybe the pai had poured his teaching into a leaky cup. I was steering my soul on strange waters with no stars to guide me. What I can say is this: that first time, Maco did not grow in me the way he did later. He did not spread inside me like a skin spreading under my own skin, making me a shape he could live in. No. If I saw him, his face half red and half black, watching through his closed eyes, it was like seeing him as a shadow on glass. And I was where I was: I sensed people gathering in the darkness beyond the small light of the fire, as I knew they would. But I chanted on, and I smoked on, the taste of the tobacco making sickness rise in my throat. And when I thought it was right, I threw Morro’s hair onto the fire.

  It burned stench, like the smell from sores, like something left dead to rot in the swamp. Groans and soft cries then came from the darkness around me. I made one last veneration, strong as I could, then I stood and rubbed away the blood and salt with my foot. I walked to my cabin, not looking at the people parting to let me pass.

  After a while Blessing came in and stood with her back against the door.

  “Husband,” she said, “what you done? Who you think you are?”

  NEXT DAY AND the next, I saw that people looked at Morro in a different way. Not scared of him, but scared for him. It gave me a quiet joy.

  On the third day the sun did not rise. Instead, the rain finally came, at first slow fat splashes, then so fast and thick you thought you could not walk through it.

  About noontime, Ma Rosa came out back and said, “Morro is here. On the veranda in his damn dirty boots like he own the place.”

  She looked at me stern. “And you stay away from him,” she said, in a voice that was both hard and soft.

  But when she wasn’t looking I slipped into the big room at front and watched him through the glass doors. He was sprawled sideways in the colonel’s hammock, pulling the flesh from fried chicken and drinking rum and coconut milk, staring into the rain.

  The rain stopped halfway through the afternoon and the clouds slid away like a sheet pulled from a bed. I went and stood on the back steps down into the yard to breathe the fresh-washed air. Light in splinters came off the trees and the air was riot with birdsong and frog call. One of the young yard boys came splashing through the red mud, leading Morro’s horse round to the front of the house. I went to the glass doors and watched Morro ride off, watched him turn the horse down the hill towards the river.

  I knew where he was going. Alongside of the big jetty, there was a big stone house with bars on all the windows. One half was boat repair, one half the store. Morro and the white overseers liked to spend nights in there with the store boss, drinking and gambling. Usually they kept themselves pretty quiet. But when the colonel was away they sometimes got worked up loud and wild, and dragged our women in there, and fired their guns out of the windows to make a scare.

  That night I waited till I knew Blessing was asleep then I stole out. The moon was fat and everywhere was black and silver-blue. I moved from shadow to shadow through the cabins, then on down the hill. I cut left through the trees and came out on the track that went from the buildings on the river along to the bar
rack house where Morro and the other overseers lived. Near where I came out, the track crossed a little creek on a bridge made of thick planks. In the dry season there was just a trickle in the creek, but now it was already full, the water up to the underbelly of the planks and spread out over the track and into the bushes.

  I got the knotted wedding cord out of my pocket. I took off my light-colour clothes and hid them in a mostly dry place under some big wide leaves. Then I melted naked into the darkness under the trees.

  It was a long wait but I was not restless. My blood ran cool and peaceful and my heart went steady like the slow tick of the colonel’s big stand-up clock.

  I heard the horse first, going brrr-brrr with its lips, then Morro mumbling a song mixed with curses. I looked down to the bridge and the horse came into the moonlight there with Morro swaying on its back. When it got to the flood it stopped and would not go on, even though Morro kicked it in the belly with his heels. In the end he slid off the horse and stood crooked, cursing some more. I could see now he had a brown clay bottle in one hand. He splashed and staggered onto the bridge, hauling on the reins, and after much trouble he got the horse to walk onto it and across.