Corporal Letchworth gave an explosive laugh. “Tief from tief, God laugh.”
Everyone smiled except Constable Phillips, who looked puzzled.
“When?” Poppa asked.
“A few days ago.”
“You sister went with you?”
Pollyread answered promptly, “No, Poppa, he go by himself. I didn’t even know until today.” She wasn’t sure when the wind might change, and wanted everyone to be clear about her innocence in this matter.
“Gillie.” Corporal Letchworth was looking grimly at Poppa. “This is serious business Jammy get himself involve in. Not like squatting. Or even what him do to your backyard there. This is heavy matters.” The big policeman paused. “Criminal matters.”
Poppa seemed suddenly sad. “Is what that bwoy get himself into now, eh?”
“Him is not bwoy any longer,” said Corporal Letchworth. “The court not going to treat him as no juvenile.”
“Jammy don’t have enough sense to know about coca. Someone put him up to this. I sure of that.” Poppa seemed more to be talking to himself than to those around him. Pollyread was puzzled at Poppa. There was a complete absence of outrage and shock such as Corpie had expressed.
Ignoring Poppa’s musings, Corporal Letchworth took the piece of coca bush from him and handed it to Constable Phillips. “Constable, put this in a plastic bag and seal it.”
“Yes, sir,” said the young constable, relieved to be part of the action again.
“And get it down to the forensics people in Town. Tell them we need an identification right away. Tell them what we think it is, but we need official confirmation. Right, Constable?”
“Right, sir.” His puffed chest of pens told Pollyread how thoroughly pleased he was to be entrusted with such an important task.
Corpie turned back to Poppa and the twins and shrugged. “But them boys at forensics have so much dead people dealing with, they might take them sweet time with a piece of bush. We need a faster certain.” He grinned. “And we certain that he squatting on your ground, Mass Gillie. The court say so.” He waved a long envelope that Pollyread hadn’t noticed him holding. He must have brought it out with him from inside, where he’d been talking with Poppa. “We have him for that. Come.”
Everything and everyone else was forgotten as Corporal Letchworth, reminding Pollyread of Cho-cho when he picked up a scent, marched through the station and down the steps. The three Gilmores, Pollyread and Jackson thoroughly confused, straggled behind him. At the bottom step he stopped abruptly, turned, and nearly knocked the twins over as he barged back inside.
Minutes later, he came back. He seemed to Pollyread to have changed slightly, to have grown even bigger in some way. And then she saw why: a pouch over his shoulder and across his chest from left to right, like a little purse, out of which poked the handle of a revolver.
It was Poppa’s fault, Pollyread told herself.
Poppa had told them to go inside and stay at home, as he and Corporal Letchworth had marched on up the path toward Morgan’s Mount to “fix Jammy’s business,” as Corpie had said outside the station. That business, she knew, and the fixing of it, had to do with the large envelope Poppa had given to Corpie in the station, and which Poppa once more held firmly in his hand.
She had business with Jammy also. His frightening her on the path, whether or not it was for pushing down his sister. And squashing Jackson at Stedman’s Corner. And, worse than all that, worse even than the depredation of the Gilmore backyard, frightening Mama that Sunday morning. Definitely scores to settle.
“No, little one,” Poppa had said, gently but firmly, in response to her plea to go on with them. “Not this time. This is dangerous business. Jackso, bring my stick and the cutlass.”
And he’d dismissed them inside to stay and help Mama, who wasn’t even aware of what had happened that afternoon.
Pollyread had been livid. Jackson too. They had lain in their beds stiff as boards with outrage and disappointment. The world was happening, dramatic events of great moment, without them.
“You want to go to Morgan’s Mount?” Jackson’s voice had been a whispering breeze.
She didn’t twitch; she didn’t even blink.
“You hear me?”
Silence.
“Well, I going,” he said, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed to sit up.
“What you mean?” she whispered, raising herself slowly to sit opposite him.
“I going,” he said, looking at her with eyes as flat and certain as his voice. “You can come if you want, but I going.”
“How?”
“The back way.”
Pollyread didn’t know any “back way” to Morgan’s Mount but didn’t doubt her brother, who wandered all over the place.
They looked at each other.
“What we going tell Mama?”
“We going for water.”
“The barrels full.”
Jackson didn’t answer; he knew that. But it was as though everything was set out already. What they were talking about was something that had to be done. And he had to do it.
“We’ll get into trouble,” Pollyread said, speaking to him in her teacher voice.
“We in trouble already.”
No mention had been made on the walk up from Stedman’s Corner of the earlier act of disobedience, but both twins knew that that was only because Poppa didn’t believe in talking family business in public. When he returned from Morgan’s Mount would be time enough.
“You ’fraid?”
“I ’fraid, of course,” she said sharply. “You ’fraid too.”
Jackson didn’t have to answer. They looked at each other a long moment more. Then, without another word, they got up and turned their backs to each other and changed out of their school uniforms. All the while they were listening to Mama’s movements in the kitchen.
They crept out of their rooms and down the steps. Jackson fetched his baby cutlass and planting stick and, to Pollyread’s annoyance, handed her a water container. He fixed Cho-cho with a glare that made the dog to understand that he was not to move. For once, Cho-cho obeyed.
“Soon come, Mama,” Jackson called out as they ran to the gate.
“Where you going?”
“Standpipe,” cried Pollyread, at the gate by then.
The sound of her voice throwing the lie at Mama rattled still in Pollyread’s head as she thrashed through the unfamiliar bush.
Down the path a little way, out of possible sight of Mama, Jackson had turned off to follow a smooth-worn track that wriggled around the rocks and trees down to Bamboo River.
Pollyread followed without a word, feeling herself sink deeper and deeper into a quagmire of anxiety. She was nervous about the aftermath of this expedition, knowing that the worst part would not be the punishment, which she thought less about the more certain it loomed in her own mind, but the disappointment that would take up residence in Mama’s eyes and voice when the deception was revealed. Mama, Poppa too, would be ashamed for them, and probably angry with themselves as though it was somehow their fault that the children they’d raised so lovingly had turned out to be disobedient, sneaky, lying pickney.
Added to the disobedience of earlier, it was shaping up to be a dramatic and tragical evening of reckoning. Still, nothing except rope tying her to the ackee tree would have kept her at home.
They were beside Bamboo River now, a twist of tumbling water freshened by the recent rains, green-rimmed rocks like turtles’ backs and weedy-looking plants wriggling lazily in the water. Jackson led them a while up their side of the river, his worn rubber sloppies and stick in one hand, cutlass in the other, and then leapt onto a rock, and then another, and another, and was on the other side of the river. He turned to look back at her, still on the other side.
He was waiting on her to say something — or to come across. Their eyes leaned against each other.
“You know where you going?” asked Pollyread.
He grinned conf
idently. “Sure.”
Pollyread took off her sloppies and hopped on the same stones across the river.
They didn’t speak again for a while. The farther they moved away from Bamboo River, the ground under their feet sloping ever more steeply, the more Pollyread felt her guilt and fear fall behind. It was as though the leaves on the branches, as she pushed through them, brushed away her hesitation.
She was aware, the farther they went from home, of the skylight fading toward dusk and eventual darkness. A time when children, especially children away without permission, should be heading toward home.
“Jackso.”
He grunted.
“We soon reach?”
He grunted twice. Yes.
“It soon dark.”
Not even a grunt.
Now they were moving sideways, it seemed to Pollyread, crablike up the hillside. It was like marching in place, with the scene around them moving past. They were going parallel to a little stream, not Bamboo River anymore but one that probably joined Bamboo farther down. They were walking against the flow.
“Sh-h-h,” Jackson suddenly hissed, half turning his head toward her. Pollyread bumped into his bottom as he crouched over; she crouched too.
She didn’t hear anything unusual, but waited, trying to quiet her breathing, listening for whatever had stopped Jackson. And eventually she heard something, sounds that weren’t being made by birds but were coming from the air. Human voices. Men. Not close, but not that far away either.
The voices, when Pollyread focused on them, were coming from below where she and Jackson were crouched. Words and phrases floated past them like mosquitoes, including cuss words, thrown not in anger but in the rhythm of everyday speech between the men — there were at least two voices. Nothing made sense to her. And she couldn’t see anything much. They were surrounded by trees and bush. But there seemed to be a clearing farther down, where the voices were coming from.
Then they heard another voice, from somewhere else, perhaps above them.
“You there!”
There was no mistaking that voice. Corporal Letchworth. Jackson stiffened.
“What you doing there?” Corpie demanded.
“Who want to know?” the challenge came right back.
“Police!”
“R —!” A different voice.
The twins had inched nearer to the edge of the clearing now and peered out from behind a large tree.
The little stream below divided the scene into two halves. On the far side of the trickling water, the slope gray-blue in the fading light, were the two men whose voices Pollyread had first heard. On this side were Corpie and Poppa. The twins were fifty or more meters away from either group. The adults were glaring at one another.
The two men across the stream were shirtless, each with a cutlass in hand, halfway up the slope among the knee-high shrubs that Pollyread now knew to be coca plants. She wondered for a moment whether Jammy, who was nowhere to be seen, had told them what they had planted and been tending so carefully. Probably not. They faced Corpie and Poppa on the other side defiantly, their chests blue with sweat.
“You trespassing,” Corporal Letchworth called to them.
“Says who?” asked one loudly. “This land don’t belong to anyone. I-and-I —”
“It belong to me,” Poppa shouted, slapping his own chest loud enough for Pollyread to hear. “You don’t have no permission to be doing what you doing there. Or to be on my land any at all.”
“You have paper to say is your land?” the man taunted.
From the corner of one eye, Pollyread had noticed the other man, the one above, moving farther away from his partner while the shouting match was going on. He’d picked up a crocus bag and was inching away up the slope.
“He have paper,” said Corporal Letchworth, “to put you in jail if you don’t get your backside off that land right now.” The policeman, followed by Poppa, walked down the slope toward the stream. “What you name?”
“I-man don’t have to tell you.”
“If you don’t tell me now,” said Corpie menacingly, “you can tell me down at the station.”
The man thought for a moment. “Bailey.”
“And what your brethren name?” Corpie gestured to where the smaller man was edging his way toward some thick bush at the top of the field.
Bailey looked hard at his partner. “Josephs,” he said angrily.
Poppa laughed. “Josephs have more sense than you. He looking after himself.”
“Furthermore,” Corporal Letchworth said loudly, “you are growing a forbidden substance.”
The man laughed mockingly. “Cocoa is forbidden substance? In this country?” He kissed his teeth. “You think I-man is idiot.”
Pollyread could see a little smile tilt one corner of Corpie’s mouth. “Whereabouts you come from, bwoy?” His tone was almost conversational all of a sudden.
“I am not no ‘bwoy,’ ” Bailey protested, throwing out his chest.
“I have pickney your age,” said Corpie, stepping across the little stream onto the other side. “You is bwoy to me. And I am asking you where you come from.”
“Not from round these parts,” Poppa said, mocking Bailey, “or him would know which cocoa is really cocoa.”
Pollyread could see some of the stiff defiance leave Bailey’s body.
“Where Jammy?” Corpie demanded suddenly. About twenty meters now separated Corpie and Bailey. Josephs was almost at the line of bush. Poppa, Pollyread noticed, was staring up the slope at a wooden shack that she didn’t remember being there when she had come sometime last year with Jackson and Poppa. There was no sign of life there.
Bailey didn’t answer.
“He sleeping while you out here working?” Corpie mocked.
“Him gone to Town.”
Corporal Letchworth laughed. “If I was you, I would follow him.”
Bailey shrugged.
“I-man is right here!” From the hut that stood farther up the far slope, Jammy appeared, stretching as though he’d just woken up.
“Ah-h-h,” Corpie sighed loudly.
“Babylon, what you come to bother I-man for?” Jammy’s tone, Pollyread thought, was what Poppa would have called insolent.
“Not a bother at all, Jammy,” Corporal Letchworth responded with a cold smile. “It is a pleasure.”
“Not a pleasure for I-man.”
“I don’t really care what it is for you, Jammy. And you can stop this I-man foolishness. You is no more Rasta than I-man.”
“Man free to call himself what he want.”
“Man not free to occupy other people land, though.”
Jammy laughed. The sound chilled Pollyread: It was the laugh that he had thrown at her on the path, just before grabbing her.
“I see you come back behind Babylon skirt, Mass Gillie,” Jammy taunted.
Poppa stepped around Corpie toward Jammy but the policeman held on to Poppa’s arm. “Easy, Gillie. Don’t let this idiot cause you to make trouble for yourself.”
“I did tell you, Jammy —” Poppa began.
“Don’t tell him nothing, Gillie,” said Corpie.
Poppa ignored Corpie as he waved the envelope he was carrying at Jammy. “This is an order from the court,” he shouted, his voice changed, official-sounding. “It say you must get off this land. Now.”
“And on top of that,” Corporal Letchworth intoned, sounding even more official, “you are undertaking illegal activities on said land. Criminal activities. For that, you have to come with me.”
Jammy didn’t answer and didn’t move. Pollyread noticed a bird hovering high above the men. A little prayer escaped her mind that the bird would drop a load on Jammy’s head. Pollyread found herself thinking of Sharon, his half sister, and their recent brief encounter. Jammy’s face, even from the twins’ distance, had that same slatelike emptiness of expression.
Jammy looked at the ground a long time, ignoring the other people on the hillside as though t
hey had suddenly vanished. Then turning, still without saying a word, he walked slowly back into the shack from which he had emerged.
Everyone waited. Corporal Letchworth, after half a minute or so had passed without sign of Jammy, took a couple steps up the slope toward the shack. As if cued by the policeman’s move, Jammy came back out, wearing a tattered shirt and a tam under which his locks were gathered, and carrying his own crocus bag. He looked toward Bailey and Josephs, the latter quite far away by now.
“Come, brethren. Babylon and the system beat down black man again. The birds of the air have nest, but —”
“Don’t say another word!” shouted Corporal Letchworth the churchman. “In your mouth the Bible sound like garbage.”
This time it was Poppa who restrained Corpie, who had taken two more steps toward Jammy before Poppa grabbed his shoulder. Pollyread saw Corpie’s right hand come to rest on the revolver at his waist.
“You a-go shoot I down as well?” Jammy jeered. By now only three or four meters separated him from Corpie and Poppa.
“If I have to,” said the policeman. “Don’t make me have to.” His voice had calmed.
“I don’t ’fraid to dead, you know,” said Jammy, as though debating the policeman. “This vale of tears don’t hold nothing for me except what you see here. I can dead and leave all this without a look behind me.” Then he looked directly at Poppa. “But I not going far,” he said, his voice firm and clear. Pollyread braced herself, grabbing Jackson’s shoulder and digging her fingers into his squirming flesh. “You, Mass Gillie — you not going have no peace from me.”
“Mind who you picking fight with, Jammy.” Corpie laughed mockingly up at Jammy before Poppa had a chance to do or say anything. “I hear say Mass Gillie pickney beat you up and send you running like mongrel dawg. Them Poppa might just finish you off this time.”
Pollyread felt Jackson freeze. She felt exposed, out in the open of a sudden, and wouldn’t have been surprised if Corpie had turned and pointed to them. But no one moved. For a moment.
And then, with a roar of rage that propelled him through the air, Jammy launched himself at Corporal Letchworth and landed on top of him, the two of them tumbling to the ground. After a moment of furious struggle, Jammy was up again and running with something bouncing from his hand. It was not his crocus bag, left beside Corpie on the ground, but the little canvas pouch that had been across the policeman’s shoulder.
Blue Mountain Trouble Page 15