An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  Redhead, looking downcast, went on with his story, which the prosecution hoped would speak to motive. That evening he’d waited until Joseph had left, then warned Penny that she’d “have to stop doing these things because your husband will eventually start blamin’ me.” Enraged, Penny screamed at him and accused him of trying to rape her. Jim was drunk and asleep, Redhead told his rapt audience, but she woke him and reported the supposed rape. Jim called her a liar, Redhead said, adding that he never mentioned the embrace again, “’cause I was scared I might be shot by any of ’em.” He’d seen Penny flash her pistol many times, so he leaped into the dinghy and slept under an almond tree on shore for safety’s sake. When he returned the next day, Jim fired him.

  Then came the defense attorneys’ chance to question the deckhand. The scenario, the defense suggested, was at odds with his account and cast Redhead himself as the villain. Ralph Gonsalves, his grand voice savoring every syllable, implied that Redhead had actually been pub-crawling in town all evening and was drunk when he got back to the yacht—or “sweet,” as Vincies say.

  “You were sweet, weren’t you?” Gonsalves asked.

  “I was not sweet,” Redhead said hotly.

  In Richard Cheltenham’s version, Redhead stripped down to his underwear on his return from Port Elizabeth and drunkenly accosted Penny, who was sitting up reading after Jim had passed out. She resisted his advances, and they grappled around and made such a racket that Jim woke up and came to the rescue. Jolly Joseph was nowhere around, according to Cheltenham.

  “James Fletcher slapped you in your face!” the barrister bellowed. “He sent you back to your room and told you he would deal with the matter in the morning.”

  “No, your honor!” Redhead snapped. He denied every charge thrown at him, clearly offended, before he stepped down. Had he been believable? I thought so. But I thought as well that the real truth lay somewhere between the two different stories.

  The prosecution produced one final witness, Inspector Ernest James, a top-ranking police official on Bequia. He had supervised the murder investigation and stated for the record that the Fletchers had been cooperative and had asserted their innocence throughout. He had only one new item to contribute. The stains on the Carefree’s fiberglass storage chest had proved to be blood—type O, identical to the victim’s. When questioned, Jim Fletcher had claimed that the blood was his. He’d smacked his nose on the lid of the chest while removing a quart of oil from it, he’d claimed. Inspector James had noticed a bruise on Fletcher’s nose, but when he’d requested a blood sample for the sake of comparison, Jim had refused to provide it.

  And with that, the prosecution’s parade of witnesses ended. Opinions in the gallery were evenly divided as to the ultimate worth of their narrative. The defense team responded to it as they might to a merry little fairy tale. Gonsalves argued that the case was too weak to go to the jury, and that the judge should exercise his right to dismiss it. Richard Cheltenham joined his colleague in the push for a “no-case” submission.

  “What we have are fragments or scraps of evidence posing—posing, milord!—as circumstantial evidence,” he said. Hudson-Phillips, the lone (and predictable) dissenter, reminded the court that circumstantial evidence is by definition composed of fragments and scraps, and he offered a professorial discourse in support of its validity.

  Judge Cenac—pen in hand, writing away—listened to the arguments from both sides and advised the court that he would sleep on the matter and render a decision in the morning.

  It was a long night in Kingstown for all the principals in the Fletcher case. When morning came at last, the courtyard was mobbed with Vincies awaiting Judge Cenac’s verdict. As Bob Fletcher made his gentle way through the crowd, a few locals approached him to offer their support or merely shake his hand—he had become an island celebrity, like it or not—while others kept their distance and grumbled about the special way Americans were treated. Army troops in camouflage uniforms were posted around the courthouse in case of a riot.

  Inside the building, Cenac gave a long legal explanation for his decision, going over it point-by-point. It was so quiet during those 45 minutes of discourse that you could hear the blades of the ceiling fans turning.

  “The question remains, ‘Who shot Jolly Joseph?’” Cenac asked. “There is no evidence before me, direct or indirect, that the accused committed this act.” And with that, he instructed the bailiff to release the Fletchers from the dock. They were free.

  The courtroom fell to bedlam. Penny Fletcher burst into tears and let her head rest on her husband’s chest, while their equally tearful family members rushed forward to embrace them both. Mary Joseph, Jolly’s mother, was visibly upset, and there were shouts and hoots of derision everywhere. Jim and Penny Fletcher were soon to board a flight to San Juan, but before they left they paused to make a brief statement. “Justice has been served,” Jim said from the courthouse steps. “We bear no ill will toward the people of St. Vincent.”

  So the affair was over, at least for some of the parties involved. Prime Minister Mitchell rode the ferry back to Bequia with the Josephs and afforded them what comfort he could. Arguably, his situation was somewhat improved—it had been shown that American tourists could get justice in SVG, if that is how you chose to look at it—but the fact remained that Mitchell still had two unsolved murders on his hands and the cries of injustice continued, this time from some of his citizens.

  In Key Largo, Jim and Penny gave their only extended print interview, to Mark Truby of the Huntington Herald-Dispatch. They described the horror of being in prison and confessed that they’d planned to commit suicide if they were convicted. They blamed Prime Minister James Mitchell for all their trouble. Mitchell was the mastermind out to get them, they believed, because they had embarrassed him by intending to buy books for the children of Bequia. As for the true murderer of Jolly Joseph, Jim hinted that it might have been someone in the courtroom. His love for sailing was undiminished, he stated, and he and Penny might well board the Carefree again and continue their interrupted trip.

  In late August, when the dust settled, I called Bob Fletcher and asked him if his son might be willing to talk with me. I wanted to offer Jim and Penny a chance to correct the unflattering portrait of them that had been painted in Kingstown. But Bob doubted that they’d consent to a talk—they wished that the business would simply disappear. He agreed to pass my number along to them, at least, but they never called. I spoke with Sally Erdle of the Caribbean Compass right after that, hoping to reach the Josephs, but she informed me that the family members were still grieving and in seclusion.

  Erdle did have a bit of news, however. In trying to track down Rudy Hanson for a story for her paper, she had discovered that he’d put the Fletchers’ yacht in dry dock at a boatyard in Trinidad and had done some repair work while he lived aboard it. Now Hanson had the yacht back in the water and had set sail—possibly for Venezuela, though the boatyard owner wasn’t certain—perhaps to meet Jim and Penny at some agreed-upon anchorage in the Caribbean. And one other thing, Erdle said: Rumor had it that the boat’s name, Carefree, had been rubbed off. I found it difficult to imagine the boat in operation again, its larder stocked and its destination unknown.

  Outside, 1997

  Ulster Spring: Belfast

  In Belfast last spring, I stayed at the Wellington Park Hotel, near Queen’s University. It isn’t a fancy place by American standards, but the staff is friendly and polite, and if you take advantage of the free breakfasts, you can go straight through until evening on the eggs, streaky bacon, and doughy pancakes that make up an Ulster Fry. My windows looked out on a back parking lot, where empty beer kegs were stored; a front parking lot was protected by a guard, closed-circuit cameras, and a ten- foot-high fence. All the security measures put me off at first, but I soon learned that they had to do less with terrorist attacks than with keeping rowdies out of the lobby bar on weekend nights. Like so many things in the city, they were deceptive, double-edg
ed, not at all what they seemed to be.

  In my room at the Wellington Park, I always watched the evening news. Almost everyone in Northern Ireland is addicted to the news, and events of importance are constantly reinterpreted, so that sometimes it’s impossible to be sure what really happened. Although the newspapers are expensive—about seventy-five cents on the average—you have to read at least three of them daily, each offering a different viewpoint, to get any sense of the actual. I started clipping stories when I arrived in May, and before long I had such a pile of print that the maids were afraid to disturb it, as if it had a totemic significance.

  Quite early in my stay, I saw that it would be impertinent to take a judgmental, overly sympathetic, tongue-clucking attitude toward the Troubles. Local people become agitated when outsiders carry on about the sadness of Ulster, and they are doubly offended when an American does it, since our own history is so violent, racist, and imperialist. It’s fair to say that journalists, even some of those in town, are regarded as a lower form of life. The easiest way to start a pub fight is to mention Beirut in reference to Northern Ireland. The reporting in English papers is roundly despised, because it often treats the Irish as if they were unwashed children in need of moral instruction.

  Only foreign TV crews are heaped with more abuse—they disseminate the sensational images that give Belfast its bad reputation. There is a much-talked-about tragedy involving a French crew that, facing a deadline and unable to find anything dramatic to film, hired a few punks to drink too much, knock each other about, and toss a petrol bomb over a wall. The bomb supposedly killed a milkman and his teen-age son.

  The hotel where most journalists bunk is the Europa. It’s an ugly concrete slab near the city center, bombed so often it has a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. When I first walked by, I wondered how it had ever passed architectural muster; nobody had told me yet that you can put up anything in Belfast as long as you pay off the Ulster Defence Association or the Irish Republican Army. These paramilitary organizations, especially the I.R.A., like to be thought of as pure in heart, but both thrive on graft and corruption, and they control the building trades in most of Northern Ireland. Sometimes they work hand in hand to shake down developers and contractors, plowing their profits into Swiss bank accounts, dummy corporations, and arms shipments from Libya.

  The best aspect of the Europa is its location, right across from two of Belfast’s oldest and finest pubs, the Crown Liquor Saloon and Robinson’s Bar. The National Trust owns the Crown, and it has a Victorian atmosphere, with stained-glass windows, elaborate woodwork, and a series of cozy booths called snugs, which have curtains for privacy. If you sit in a snug with some oysters and a glass of stout, it’s easy to imagine liaisons between men with handlebar mustaches and women in rose-colored garters. Robinson’s, where the barmen wear blue-and-white striped shirts and long aprons, has a Gay Nineties feel. The clientele in both pubs is a mixture of Protestants and Catholics, and religion, as a topic of conversation, gets about as much play as trigonometry, baseball, or the breeding habits of newts.

  In Belfast, the nineteenth century isn’t a distant memory. The city is still a monument to the Industrial Revolution, all brick and iron and grit, and its style remains resolutely working class, long on muscle and short on frills. Around 1900, it had a population of about four hundred and fifty thousand, the largest in Ireland, and almost everybody was employed by the shipyards or the linen mills. (Today, the population is about three hundred and fifty thousand, and is rising again after two decades of decline.) Its industries didn’t collapse until the nineteen-fifties, so you meet lots of middle-aged people who were sent off in their youth to work in factories.

  Often they had harsh childhoods, sleeping two or three to a bed, using a backyard privy, and doing their homework by candlelight because electricity was too dear. Alcohol ruined many fathers, and mothers made some extra cash by taking in laundry and boarders, or scrubbing floors. Families were big (bigger on the Catholic side), and they occupied the sooty row houses you see in most districts even now. The houses fan out in every direction before giving way to farms, hills, and open fields.

  The phone book for Northern Ireland lists twenty-six pages of farmers. They still drive into town on Saturdays to visit their relatives, do some shopping, and have a few pints of beer. The ones I met were not unsophisticated, but they all wanted to know how Belfast, so physically compact, had become so prominent in the eyes of the world—as if geographical size were a measure of notoriety. They would insist that the city is just “a wee small place,” and it’s true that you can walk from one end of town to the other in a couple of hours. If you take a central route, you notice hardly any signs of a conflict, only some broken windows or a vacant lot gone to rubble.

  The full weight of the Troubles can be felt only in the Catholic ghettos, where the British presence is most evident. When you consider that the I.R.A. has fewer than two hundred activists in Greater Belfast, it’s astonishing how much money is being spent to keep an uneasy peace. About sixteen thousand troops are scattered from Antrim to Armagh, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary has an armed force of about thirteen thousand police.

  Coming out of Robinson’s one afternoon, I nearly bumped into four British soldiers on foot patrol. They held rifles against their chests, crept forward in a semi-crouch, and craned their necks to check the roofs of surrounding buildings, probably in response to a rumor of a sniper. They wore regimental berets and jungle camouflage, and all four had pimples and wispy mustaches. I was struck by how jittery and inexperienced they looked. Their assignment was difficult and a bit embarrassing, since they had to track an invisible enemy through an obstacle course of cyclists, elderly matrons, schoolchildren, and women pushing prams.

  I could tell that they wanted to appear noble and brave but it wasn’t going well for them—and yet at every moment their lives were in danger. The Army is composed of just such young men thrust into just such hopeless, confusing predicaments. The soldiers are often recruited from England’s depressed industrial areas, and it must shock them to travel north on their military adventure only to arrive in a city that looks, smells, and tastes exactly like home.

  * * *

  If there was one thing I didn’t expect in Belfast, it was lovely weather, but the spring storms that blow in from the Irish Sea stayed away, allowing the chestnut and elder trees to blossom. The temperature rose into the seventies, and the Botanic Gardens, adjacent to the university, were filled with picnickers, lovers, and sunbathers. They stretched out on blankets or on the grass and listened to radios—U2, Van Morrison, Hank Williams singing “Jambalaya.” Everywhere, men strutted around bare-chested to show off their tattoos, which ran the gamut from snarling tigers to hearts melting in rings of fire. A few amateur jobs were also on display—inscriptions such as “MUM,” “UDA,” and “PIRA” which had been done with safety pins and ink on nights when the beer got mixed with strong cider and then with whiskey.

  Along the Lagan River, which flows down from the hills, a handful of men sat on campstools holding long poles and offering a bait of maggots to fish that seemed to have no interest in biting. The Lagan is a murky, slow-moving stream in a state of decay, polluted with chemicals and other waste. When children go for a swim, they head for one of many leisure centers around town, where for about a quarter they can splash and paddle in a big indoor pool. The centers are part of a government plan to combat violence by promoting exercise—the theory being that adolescents who have exhausted themselves in athletics will be less likely to join in the ritual rock and bottle throwing that occurs on every Peace Line, especially in summer.

  Peace Lines crisscross working-class Belfast, separating Protestant and Catholic turf and creating a sectarian map that bears little relation to the city as it appears in official atlases. The map gets drummed into every child as soon as he or she can walk, and it colors the way everyone thinks about space and property. For boys and girls who live in Ballymurphy, a tough Cath
olic slum where poverty is endemic, Belfast is no larger than a few square blocks. This causes a mental as well as a physical diminishment: children are deprived of the right to dream of a future that might be any different from the past. The pressure to conform, to abide by the myths and traditions of an inbred group, is enormous, and it comes at them from all sides—from parents, siblings, and priests.

  It is often said that the Troubles have left a scar on entire generations in Northern Ireland, and to some extent this seems to be so. Children who have been exposed to the horrors of terrorism do sometimes suffer from nightmares and other problems associated with post-traumatic stress, but most of them survive intact and begin to develop a resilient personality that may be peculiar to Ulster. It’s a personality built upon rock—quiet but defiant, with an inner strength that anchors one in reality. The inducements to paranoia are so constant that people become ultra-sane; they turn into no-nonsense types who seldom indulge in flights of fancy.

  Words are mistrusted in Belfast, because they can be fickle, twisted around, put to a variety of purposes. The best poets in the North still write formal verse, with much of the tension buried under a surface of restraint. If you scratch the surface, you’re likely to touch a frustrated naturalist, somebody who longs for the exactness of taxonomy. It’s considered bad manners to put on airs. At a literary gathering one night, I heard a fine poet in excellent health announce that he would read a poem about his funeral—it was really a loving catalogue of what he’d miss when he did die—and, before he could begin, a dishevelled man in a mud-spattered shirt rebelled against the conceit, shouting, “Is the funeral to be soon then, Michael?” The entire program lasted just fifteen minutes, and copious wine and beer were served throughout, free of charge.