Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  7

  MARSHALL BEGAN to range into the interior. Though young, he had passed the point where Livingston was able simply to tell him what to do. From the day of the raid forward, if Livingston were to direct Marshall he had to do it by internal politics, propaganda, economic pressure, pleading, begging, anything but a command—against which Marshall rebelled dragging in tow a full catalogue of ramlike adolescent insanities, and his own rather eccentric attributes.

  One day he had asked Livingston quite nicely if he might hike into the back country. Livingston said no. Marshall asked again. Livingston said no. Marshall asked again. Livingston said no. Marshall disappeared that night. With an old Enfield rifle, some pouches of ammunition, a small sack of food and supplies, and a tarpaulin under which he huddled when the warm morning downpour shot mistily through the high pattering leaves, he stayed away for three days. At first he was terrified, but quickly learned that there were more scorpions in the house than in the jungle, and that if he didn’t sing, make fires, or thrash around, he was more or less undetectable. Like darkness, the dense vegetation was the safest place to be, even if it were full of Rastas. In fact, the only danger to Marshall came from within. Because he did not eat or sleep properly for three days, he spent part of the last in contorted agony on the forest floor. An observer would have doubted his own eyes.

  At the foot of a tall tree where he had rested his rifle, Marshall writhed as if he were wrestling an invisible boa constrictor. His clothes were black from sweat, and his skin glistened. He knocked over the rifle and it lay beside him. An ammunition pouch had opened; silver-and-brass-colored bullets were littered over the soft floor. His eyes were numb and would not focus. Bolts of light shot in front of him as if a night battle raged, and these tracers enwrapped the clouds of color which had overcome him and fixed him down. When it was over he was dry, exhausted, and pleasantly sleepy. He had contempt for nothing in the world except this allpowerful disease, and enjoyed surviving the murderous attacks. What great relief to come out of them. He thought that most people were fools for their ingratitude. They wanted money, they wanted justice, they wanted recognition, they wanted so much that their days were obliterated. Marshall was grateful just to be alive.

  It became usual for him to go for a day or two into the bush. There, he had his favorite places, one of which was an open knoll of volcanic rock. Sitting on its edge, Marshall could see the distant blue strip of the Caribbean ten miles or so beyond a mass of stratified green. Near rapids cold from the feed of high mountain streams, Marshall thought that he was alone. He was not.

  While reading C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars, he reached out with his right hand to pick up his rifle. It seemed impossibly heavy. He couldn’t even move it, and he turned his head enough to see a legged boot standing on the stock. Lucius Pringle stood over six foot six, was armed with a classy automatic, and he said in a deep voice heard clearly over the rushing river as it curled about below, “This is my land.” Marshall made no response and tried to lift his rifle and stand up, but Lucius put his foot down harder on the butt and said again, with a kind of madness, “This is my land.”

  Marshall finally said, “Okay, its your land,” at which the giant stepped back.

  “I’m Lucius Pringle. I think I know who you are.”

  “Is that right?” asked Marshall, who was not so sure that he liked Lucius.

  “You’re the Livingstons’ son, from High View.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Marshall, who introduced himself with his customary explanations about why his name was not Livingston. Lucius Pringle then spoke for an hour about his land, his right to it, and how his father and three brothers had died in keeping it. It covered an immense portion of the back country, and part of the seacoast.

  “In times gone by,” said Lucius, “my father could ride from Port Maria to Montego Bay and never leave his own property.” Marshall quickly realized that Lucius’s obsession with his right to the land was cause for his armament. He was set for war, and in comparison Marshall seemed like a casual country hunter. Lucius carried many clips of automatic rifle ammunition, hand grenades, a heavy killing type of pistol, and a bayonet.

  Mr. Brown had once said that Lucius Pringle was mad and would be killed. “He is really lookin’ for it, I tell you,” he had clucked. “Some day he gonna get killed. And then his mother and the girl will go back to England and the Rastas will take the land. And then we’ll have Rastas right over the hill runnin aroun and shootin’ and killin’ all night. And then I go back to Egypt, and High View will be full of Rastas. Lucius Pringle is like a dam in the river. Some day the dam break, and the river wash us away. Then I go back to Egypt. High View will get covered with weeds. But it is good that he is a strong man, although only one bullet and he’s a dead man like the others.”

  “Why don’t you ‘come with,’ to Rica Vista tea. If we walk fast we can arrive almost on time. I hope you haven’t been listening to Brown. He was with my brother when my brother was killed, and now he’s afraid of his own shoelaces,” said Lucius.

  “No he’s not,” said Marshall. “He’s brave. The Rastas came and we were ready to meet them.”

  “Yes, but not to chase them,” said Lucius, his own designs quite evident. “Brown has stopped chasing them. And so, I am afraid, have I. At least for the present. Come, let’s go.” Had Marshall known that tea at Rica Vista meant several score people he would not have accepted, because he was fearfully shy. But he had no way of knowing the enormity of Rica Vista tea, was always hungry for biscuits, and had not been far in the direction to which Lucius had pointed, so he accepted.

  They coursed through the jungle like scattering monkeys. Loose-jointed, wet, and hard-breathing, they pounded the paths, crossed slow-veined cocoa-colored streams, ran like horses in open places, brushed past slicing ferns and leaves, went mad with vines, and in a green rapid hour traveled miles across the hills under a light living canopy of plants which, like lace, trammeled the laser lines of quick glowing birds. For different reasons nevertheless allied, both Marshall and Lucius were convinced that humankind was to be eschewed, that real satisfaction was to be had only in the pure natural physics demonstrable in overwhelming volume everywhere at all times. Marshall was lonely, overcome by heat and stars, and in perpetual brush warfare with Livingston. Lucius had seen too many of those he loved die, and at thirty he felt far older than his years.

  They broke out onto a red clay road which was hot and straight and led up a high hill. At the top of the hill Marshall was made breathless by what he saw below, and by the beautiful tolling of a bell. Lucius said, “That bell means tea,” but waited for a few proud moments as Marshall surveyed Rica Vista.

  It leapt from the throat of fierce jungle in an equally fierce, upright dignity. It was in appearance the essence of Marshall’s obsessions about achieving the impossible and defending the indefensible. For there in a wide valley deep in wild swirling green was a prospect of fields, tall trees, sheep grazing as if in heather (but shorn cool), stone walls, dams, weirs, and a village of stone and mahogany houses which, though tropical in architecture and oriented to the Trades, had about them as indisputable a British air as a sergeant major in the Coldstream Guards. A dozen jeeps, tractors, and trucks were symmetrically ordered in a car park. Raw materials were stacked about worksheds as if arranged by the same hand. Four watchtowers made a square around the ten acres of the main compound. It was like a garden, a military camp, an English village, a tropical plantation. And the order was not oppressive because it was so busy. Even from far away Marshall could see so much movement and activity that he assumed it to be a thriving estate. Trains of tractor-drawn wagons wound in and out overburdened with cane and copra; red trucks from the fruit company in Oracabessa loaded up with bananas and drove out on the dusty road. As Marshall got closer he could see scores of people on the long wide porch of the great house. Perhaps seventy or eighty were standing in small groups or sitting with teacups on their laps. As Marshall and Luci
us passed the wire a man with a rifle nodded to them. On the lawn in front of the porch were three groups of rifles standing upright like racked lamb, with satchels of bullets hanging over the ground inside the circular constructions.

  The first thing Marshall sensed was that they would not keep their land. Especially when they were gathered, theirs seemed to be a losing cause, even though they had apparently seen some victories. With only one man of the family left and the rest workers or hired administrators, mercenaries, mechanics, and farmers, there was little opportunity to cultivate political power. Lucius had to watch the land—which receded gradually in satisfaction of economy, security, justice, necessity, or whatever, but was surely falling away. The bandits made it impossible for Rica Vista to harvest its cocoa, since the cocoa trees were on thousands of acres of leased land in the jungle of the interior, and the small farmers whose intensive labor had brought in the crop had fled to Shantytown in Kingston rather than be harvested themselves by Rastas and Rudie Boys mad on drugs in an inaccessible camp so far inland that they had to plan their raids a week in advance. Without the cocoa, and without the traditional lands, Rica Vista (already pieced up and falling) was in danger. Somehow Marshall knew that they would not last, and because of that, everything he saw there, all their actions, impressed him, moved him. They seemed to be artful in everything they did. He felt as if he had happened on a surviving court, a grouping of the Enlightenment, the anachronistic grace of another time set to be crushed by rolling justice, self-assured executioner of the old and the indefensible. Marshall always believed that people who wanted justice had the souls of killers. Despite these reveries he was beguiled to drink much Shandy Gaff, a mixture of beer and ginger beer, and he happily met the eclectic garrison at Rica Vista.

  According to the trend of dissolution Marshall felt in his life, he stayed there—for an evening, a week, a month, a year, and more. The Livingstons left High View, and Marshall moved to Rica Vista. Swept away by relentless pressing climate, he forgot the river bay country and it seemed as if he would be trapped forever in the slow amber of eventless days on the land and over the reefs. He stayed because he knew that Lucius would have to go after the Rastas, because he did not want to return to school in Eagle Bay, because he was not genuinely the Livingstons’ son, and because he wanted to find that which he had lost.

  And then, Lucius had a younger sister who was rather extraordinarily beautiful. In fact, she was excessively beautiful.

  8

  HE LEARNED of Africa from a white girl. She was older than Marshall, though young herself. She had been graduated from Oxford with a first in history. Brown-eyed, blond, strong, Dash Pringle loved the rivers and the Caribbean, and could with Marshall stay in the water from morning until night, lost in the time of the sea. Though she loved England, she was to Jamaica as a prelate is to his own cathedral. She was open and warm, and could make you feel at ease and happy. She moved like a dancer. When Marshall met her at tea he fell in love with her so hard that he almost choked.

  One night in September there was a wedding. Lucius had two friends who had become almost like brothers—Peter and Stanhope. They were black Jamaicans who had attended Oxford with him, where the three had come together as Jamaicans—the key link being their sweet disabled speech. Peter and Stanhope helped Lucius run Rica Vista, and together owned forty percent of it. Peter was married one night to a girl from Jacks River, and after the wedding they went to a house there to dance.

  Marshall was shy, so Dash took him and led him to the floor. Once in a while they glanced at Peter and his bride, but most of the night they danced to the enlivening red music, holding close together through Dash’s light silk dress. Marshall was astonished by the fact of her magnificent body moving against his for several hours at a time. It left him in a devilish trance. They grew very thirsty and quenched their thirst with cola wine and Red Stripe. Soon they lost track of exactly where they were and became oblivious of the other couples enough to kiss a little. Then the kisses grew hotter, deeper, and longer, until sometimes five minutes would pass and they would wonder who exactly was who, and where, precisely, each one was.

  They ate the wedding cake like bulldozers clearing soft earth. They ploughed through it and polished it off in a frenzy. They drank more cola wine and Red Stripe. They huddled in the corner and laughed over jokes and stories while surrounded by a collection of jostling brown boards and red tin, and tables of coconut and cake and wine, and a hot rain outside. They went to the covered porch, where down among the splatterings of a thick night shower he kissed her lips and her neck and her shoulders and her breasts through the hot silk dress and she took him and lay back. She grasped some wide leaves which came over the porch, and as Marshall went mad in rhythmic kissing she said, “Africa, Africa, Africa,” in Jamaican speech almost a miracle from her English face. They both nonsensically tolled the words, “Africa, Africa, Africa,” with the long Jamaican A, while outside the heavy green leaves bent in the storm. A continent rushed through their imaginations as Marshall kissed her again and again. Then Lucius staggered onto the porch. They looked with their drunken faces. He lifted one eyebrow impossibly high, and then staggered back in. “You’re too young,” said Dash.

  “Is this a joke?” asked Marshall heatedly. “I am not too young. I was, way before you were born, as a little child, in the Hudson Valley, quite old.”

  “Indeed,” said Dash.

  “Indeed,” answered Marshall.

  Oddly enough, this night wildness presaged days of exquisite discipline in which Lucius taught Marshall physics and mathematics, Dash taught him history, Peter taught him biology and agronomy, and Stanhope tried to teach him German. He learned history with kisses. “I’m going to tell you about Oliver Cromwell,” Dash said, “and the Puritans, and the English Revolution,” and as if hypnotized they placed their lips together and tongued and sucked for an hour or more during which Cromwell jumped up and down in his pewter helmet. But overall (and goodness knows it was much) he managed to learn, reading two or more books a day. Mrs. Pringle taught him literature.

  She had come half a century before as the speechless Sheffield bride of a Scotsman made good in the tropics. She had seen many lives pass, including those of her husband and sons, and she had emptied the libraries and then sent to England for books. The first words she said to Marshall were from the poem of his name, of which he had never heard: “Pearl, the precious prize of a king,/ In all the East none equalling.” To Marshall, it was suspiciously ambiguous.

  At Rica Vista the farmers planned, the workers worked, the mercenaries practiced war, Marshall learned, Mrs. Pringle read, Dash dreamed of England, Lucius broke at the bit. It was confusing and would have driven them mad throughout the months except for the perfect sleep they had as arc lights played restively along the wire and sentries took their turns. It was because they worked and tried to do their best against the odds and the terrible heat. They knew that they would be defeated, but they were brilliant in their defense. Marshall was taken up with this and dreamed a dream; that he might sleep not alone but by Dash, and love her completely, as she had not allowed him to do in those dark nights thick with crickets. The atmosphere isolated them from themselves, creating exemplary portraits, shocking them with the stroke of love and time.

  Lucius had learned his disregard for the things of man not from having father and brothers shot down like birds, but from his mother. She was a fiercely strong woman, though equally compassionate, and she knew that the beams of hard judgments allowed the soft things of the heart to thrive. Her speech was hard. She wanted peace, and would fight for it. She nearly capsized Marshall when she turned to him and said: “I don’t like people who make waves. My sympathy is for those who stand against waves, who refuse to be overcome, to whom troubles flock, and who are brave in resistance. But I detest those who would destroy. That is why I will not allow Lucius to raid the bandits. We will stand here and fight them.”

  She believed in other than the primacy of man,
saying to Marshall in her library as the sun flooded through the louvers and, by its intensity and beating, ticked off time like an escapement, “Some people see only the roots of trees, the base.” She coughed and momentarily shut her old eyes. “They are moles, and belong tunneling in the seething earth. Others see just the shafts and trunks. They are the practicáis—good for sawing and cutting and working the design. Others see only a fine canopy of leaves. They are the effete, and drop down in hard or cold times to beg.”

  “What can be done?” asked Marshall. “The parts of the tree are all faulted. If you see it from afar it is balanced, but close in, if you become part of it, you—”

  “Exactly! If you become part of it you become lost to it. Go to the mountains. Take the high view. Then you will have the power, in looking beyond yourself, your race, your kind, to see the bold arrangement in things.” She pursed her lips and took a breath. “Marshall,” she said, “when I am in church I do not look at peoples’ feet, nor even at their faces, though they are beautiful. I look at the pure light which floods through the white dove and which makes those faces what they are.” She could see in Marshall’s eyes that he understood, and then she asked him an impossibly difficult question about what they were reading, to make him forget for the moment what she had said, and thus see to it that her hook was barbed.

  Lucius was going crazy. He wanted to mount a raid and capture the leader of the bandit camp, a man wanted on many warrants for murder. If he could bring him out alive, so much the better. If not, he would kill him on the spot. He felt little sympathy for him, since (with one shot through the window) the man had murdered Lucius’s father when Lucius was only Marshalls age. The brothers had risen to place, and both had been killed. But his mother made him swear against his planned and daring mobilization.

  Nonetheless, he had assembled the forces. They were necessary to protect the compound, and had daily to escort workers in the fields. Lucius, Peter, and Stanhope had served in the British Army in the same company, attached to the Royal Marines. However, there were two professional soldiers at Rica Vista, and they were the sinew of the play. Nielson was a Swede of fifty, as fit as a boxer, painfully experienced for having fought voluntarily throughout the Second World War, and continually ever after all around the world as it dissolved and flared at itself like sunspots. He was used to being in the thick of it, and though it is difficult to describe a mercenary as gentle, he was quiet and of a serene nature. On the other hand, his partner, a Northern Irish Protestant called Farrell, was a self-proclaimed son of a bitch whose overwhelming compulsion was to get things done. Farrell shared Dash with Marshall, unequally as befitted their ages and experience. He was repelled by any talk of goodness and morality, the notion of which sent him into a rage. It was his belief that people did more or less what they had to do, and that as a soldier his job was to absorb the hatred and contempt of those for whom he did the dirty work which allowed them ofttimes to live. He cared little for his life, cared little for anything except pure action and daring in itself and of itself. He had never killed anyone who was defenseless, or harmed anyone not armed against him. That was his code. He hated the constraints of those who would ponder and judge. He had left Ireland at sixteen on a ship bound for Malaya and fought for his living in a vast number of places. At times he grew sentimental for Belfast, but had never returned. He was not interested in money, in politics, in protecting the weak (though that is what he often did, and even though he would not admit to it, had consistently refused to fight for “bastard cutthroats”), but only in his job—which he did elegantly well even though he was rather small. Lucius had planned that Farrell would be the first to penetrate the bandit camp, knowing that he would love to do it.