‘Krishna,’ Vincent used Singh’s first name now. ‘Krishna. You know I lectured about these very same things. You were there. Where is the big difference between us?’
‘You see Doc, these things gone from bad to worse before you reach,’ Jonah contributed. ‘They making the people work for nothing, a few cents a day. I mean to say! They sick for one, and then they have to keep the place going for nothing. I don’t blame the nuns them, in a way. They in a fix too because the Colonial Office getting them on the cheap. The Governor say, call on the nuns. It suit them. They capitalising on their good will, their vocation as nursing nuns. But in the end, they does side with the authorities, rather than with the people, when it come to the crunch.’
‘Is so the church is. They’ll go with the government, against the people, when it come to it,’ Singh added.
‘What you mean, come to it?’ Vincent asked tentatively.
Jonah and Singh looked at each other. Then Singh spoke. ‘They can’t blame the people if they take things into their own hands, you know.’
‘What do you mean, into their own hands? They’re not capable…’
Singh cut Vincent off. ‘They capable alright. Don’t underestimate the spirit in these people. You must know that, Dr Metivier. You must know. Anyway, Jonah, we must get back. We go have to leave you. Happy New Year. And, take care of this boy. How you come to look after this boy?’
Theo was, just at that moment, coming up from the jetty with his catch.
Jonah was as friendly as ever. ‘Boy you catch fish for so. You and Doc, go have a New Year feast.’
Theo remained mute and passed them on his way into the kitchen only with a quick glance at Jonah.
‘Ei, boy, you ent see me?’ Singh tried again. ‘Send him by me, Doctor, I go give him a little training in science.’
Theo turned for an instant at the kitchen door and took in Singh on the verandah, in the dim glow of the kerosene lantern. The men did not understand the look on the boy’s face. They looked at each other when he had passed into the kitchen. They smiled at each other.
‘Like you have your work cut out, Doctor,’ Singh said. He and Jonah looked at each other again. ‘That boy don’t have mother and father?’
‘Mother, yes, the father is a mystery,’ Vincent said.
‘Mystery? There’s never any mystery about fathers. They does just get up so and go.’ Singh watched Jonah.
‘Boy, why you watching me so? I does go and see after my children. Is up here I get a work, but I does carry them things. I does carry their mother things,’ Jonah argued.
‘Come boy, let we go. I only giving you fatigue. The doctor want to sleep. Put that child to sleep. You sure you not pulling a fast one on us, Doctor?’ Singh would not leave the subject of Theo alone. ‘You past catching up with you?’
‘Singh boy, what you telling the doctor?’
Vincent laughed. ‘Come, all you need to go.’
‘We go see you, Doc. A happy New Year to you, Doc.’ The three men shook hands, and then Jonah and Singh went down to the jetty and rowed away.
Theo went up to bed. ‘Goodnight, Theo. A happy New Year.’
There was a faint reply. ‘Happy New Year, Doctor Metivier. Thanks for the present.’ The reply startled Vincent.
‘My pleasure, Theo.’ Vincent had one last drink on his own at the end of the verandah.
Out in the gulf, the kerosene lamps of the fishermen were a constellation. There was one in particular winking at him, right in line with the Boca Grande, Vincent thought, as he stood and stared and lost himself in what seemed like signals being transmitted to him personally, a kind of Morse. He did not have the code to decipher them.
It reminded him of how, as a young boy, he would sit on the verandah of the Versailles Estate house and stare at the fireflies out on the pasture, wondering at their signals. Matches being struck in the darkness. Candleflies. He did not know then what they meant. Though, he remembered desiring a message, an answer to something. He and Bernard went out and caught the pulsing insects between their fingers and put them in a glass jar. They winked and winked, green light, codes at the nerve end of their fingers. Each pulse had a message.
The Versailles house rose before him now, out of the pasture and above the wide saman trees near the low cocoa houses. It rose to be as high as the palmistes where its turrets and topmost balconies reached the great flowering of the plumes from the heart of the swaying palms. He remembered now that behind the house, where there were always some goats tethered on long chains, was his favourite guava tree. You had to jump from one soft grass patch to another, in this part of the pasture, because of the Ti-Marie, soft name for the mauve mimosa which grew close to the ground with her thorns and leaves, which closed to their touch. He could smell the guavas when they burst open on the ground, yellow with ripeness, sticky with their pink flesh and seeds.
It was the green guavas they liked best, Odetta and himself. The ripe ones were collected for his mother to make guava jelly; peeled and boiled with sugar, the pulp squeezed and strained through a thin gauze for the syrup to boil and thicken for her jelly. It became a clear glaze of crimson held in the small globes, which she then let drop into a saucer of water to test with her fingers, rolling the syrup into a ball, her touch testing whether it had formed to the consistency that she wanted. Then the warm syrup was poured into jam jars, stood on the windowsill to cool in tins of water to ward off the ants. The crimson glaze caught the morning light. The stained muslin was rinsed and hung out on the line in the sun.
He counted the ants crawling back and forth along the windowsill.
His father was in the war.
Odetta and himself loved to climb the trees for the green guavas. She was Sybil’s daughter. She climbed the smooth guava trees in a white cotton chemise. He could see her brown legs and more, as she shinnied up the smooth trunk, gripping with her knees. When she was much smaller, she called him to come and peep at the spider between her legs. Then, he was frightened. He was always bare backed out on the estate. Just in his short khaki pants. Running about barefoot. His mother said that he was getting to look like a coolie boy. ‘Playing with Odetta again,’ his mother’s voice followed him.
Odetta hammocked the guavas that they had picked in the skirt of her chemise, stretched between her knees. She held them there, securely, in a bundle, between her legs. They climbed the stairs fast to the top turret, bursting into the room, where the breeze whistled and from where they could see the world, or at least the gulf, the Golfo de La Ballena. ‘You see a whale?’ He remembered pointing out of the turret for her to see. She did not believe him. Odetta emptied out the green guavas onto the floor. A balcony ran all the way round the outside of this small room, the walls panelled with jalousies. It was empty except for a hammock. And the floor was bare, plain, scrubbed, white pitch pine.
The fishermen had stopped signalling. Maybe, they were on their way home after their catch, could be even Jonah by now. He used to meet up with some fellas from the Carenage where they went to meet women, Dorothy went and bathe… Caresser’s words caressed the night.
Then that thought left him and the others returned. Vincent listened out. The boy was still sleeping.
The white, scrubbed, pitch pine floors, the empty room, the hammock, the afternoons, disappeared when he and Odetta climbed into the turret room with their horde of guavas. ‘Don’t get belly ache,’ was what Sybil her mother used to shout up to them, when she saw the children climbing the stairs furtively. But what he remembered more, now, were his mother’s words: ‘You still playing with that girl, Vincent? You too big now,’ when he was older, after Confirmation Class. But his lips were already sore. They were almost blistered, with his kissing. Odetta’s were red with the blood that rose and pulsed. Blistered lips and bruised knees, from rubbing on the bare floor! He could not stop, once she had let him kneel over her, pulling her cotton chemise over her head and showing him. ‘Let me show you,’ were her words, soft, almost unspoken, p
eeping from behind the raised hem of her soft cotton chemise. The light through the jalousies sliced her with its lances. What did she show him? Her small breasts, pinky, puckered and brown. He wondered how they appeared to rise out of her, his, small brown sunburnt nipples, flat and tight, hers to fit the palms of his hands, small round sapodillas. He held them. She left the rest to him. There were no words yet, only smells and taste. Later, it surprised him how he needed his handkerchief. She watched him wipe the break from his khaki pants. It smelled like the jelly of kimeet fruit, leaving a stain like starch. She watched him wipe himself. In the silence, he watched the woodlice eat away at the floorboards.
They did not talk then, nor afterwards, when they left the turret room. Those ceremonies were left to the turret room, among the scratching palms, up in the indigo sky. Quiet like confession. It was a time when innocence and experience did not jar, when one fed the other in an idyll, till his mother’s voice, speaking to Sybil, sounded a voice of caution and warning. ‘Sybil, I think that child is too big to be playing with Master Vincent.’
Afternoons! Afternoons and scratching palms! Hot afternoons and the smell of guavas! The pastures rolled away to where the khaki river chuckled under the cocoa. They ran down by the river to bathe and let Sybil catch them in her brown arms in the green light. The great shadows of the saman trees on the pasture moved like great clouds over the grass as the branches swayed in vast undulations in the breeze.
Vincent left the verandah and the sea and went to bed. What thoughts to be having now, at this hour! Odetta? Where was Odetta now? He had not even thought to go and look for her when he came back from England.
The following morning, Jonah arrived in a sombre mood. He was earlier than usual. ‘They need you quick, Doc,’ he shouted up from the jetty.
Vincent did not inquire why immediately. He shouted up to Theo. ‘Tell Beatrice I had to leave in a hurry. Take care of yourself.’
On the journey over, Jonah told him that a body had been washed ashore. ‘Two fishermen coming in early this morning, notice it. Nearly run it over in their pirogue. They think is one of them big gommier logs that does float out and get bring back in by the tide. When they get close they see is a man body. When I leave they still have the body on the beach. Fish start to feed on it. Must’ve be in the water since last night. Lucky them sharks and barracuda didn’t get to it. Tide low at the moment, current not running, so it not get take out into the gulf. Policeman come and ask question.’
‘Any idea who it is? Is it one of the patients?’
‘Must be, Doc. You know them young fellas. Is the same problem we talking about. Nothing go stop them trying to swim the bay at night to get to the women huts.’
‘They’ll be a lot of sadness today.’
‘Yes, Doc. For sure.’
Jonah kept his hand on the tiller, one eye ahead. He listened intently. He slackened his hold on the throttle.
When they pulled into the jetty, they could see a crowd collecting on the beach a little way off. ‘Jonah, I’m going down there right away.’
Already the recriminations had started. ‘See Doctor, see what they do the young fella!’ The body was that of Sonny Lal, a young man who lived up in Indian Valley. His girlfriend lived in the huts along the shore in Sanda’s Bay. The quarantine had kept them apart. But Sonny had found a way, like many of the other men in the past, to swim the length of the bay at night to see Leela.
It was Leela who knelt next to Vincent now, as he inspected the body. She cried quietly, moaning and repeating the name of her lover and the father of her child. ‘Oh God, Sonny, Sonny, Sonny, look what they make you do. Kill your self. For me, Sonny.’
Vincent put his arm around Leela’s shoulder. ‘Come girl. He’s not here anymore.’
‘Oh God, Doctor,’ the young girl cried.
‘Yes, come, we must see that this never happens again.’
Vincent accompanied the men who lifted Sonny Lal’s body to take it to the mortuary room. At the bottom of the steps, he met with Singh and Jonah. Vincent left the procession to talk to the two men.
‘This have to stop, Doctor.’ Singh could hardly suppress his anger.
‘I know the problem, Singh. But not now. Leela needs our comfort at this moment. Let us deal with it later.’
‘Later. When is later?’
‘He right, Doc,’ Jonah argued.
‘I have a job to do now.’
‘We know how he die, Doctor.’
‘There are procedures, Singh.’
‘Fock procedures!’
‘Come, Singh. Come man. We go deal with this later.’ Jonah put his arm around Singh’s shoulder and led him off.
Vincent felt himself torn between his duty as a doctor, as a comforter of Leela, and as one who wanted something done about the reasons this tragedy had happened. As he left Leela, in the arms of other women who had accompanied her from the huts that morning, he went back to a moment at Versailles when he was a boy, when he and Odetta watched a young man taken down from a mango tree, who had hanged himself. ‘He hang himself for tabanca,’ he heard a man from the yard tell his father. ‘He hang himself because of the love of a woman.’ Sonny had not hung himself, had not taken his life in that kind of way, but had risked and lost, and proved to Leela that she meant all that he loved. Vincent had wondered, looking at the hanged man, whether he himself loved Odetta in that way.
As he turned on the steps to tell Leela that he would come and see her later, he saw Sister Thérèse crossing the yard towards the mortuary. She was coming to assist him. He waved. She waved back.
He remembered that they called that place near Versailles, with its avenue of mango trees, Hangman Alley.
At three o’clock that afternoon, a crowd descended from the hills to collect under the almond tree. They began to shuffle on quietly, everyone in their own thoughts, along the paths, down to the beach where the Hindu Pandit and his assistants were performing their pujahs and reciting their mantras, as the body of Sonny Lal was laid on top of the pyre which had been built earlier that day. Then, at the appointed moment, the wood was lit. Leela, the young pregnant girl, whom Sonny Lal had died in his efforts to reach by swimming across the bay, circled the burning body, feeding the flames with ghee butter. All stood quietly and watched the fire consume the pyre with its load.
White egrets settled on the nearby mangrove. Then suddenly, unsettled, they ascended in their flight across the bay. ‘Watch he soul, fly away,’ one of the old women cried quietly, confirming the belief of many.
Pyre
The sun rose raw and burning into a vault of blue emptiness. The dry season had the island in its tight grip this morning. The bush near the house ticked. The cigales’ screaming decibels reached out into the blue nothing. The sea in the bay lay flat and blistered. Vincent shut his eyes against the burning glare. His fear this morning was bush fires, that they might leap the yard’s perimeter and attack the house.
Jonah had not yet arrived. The bay was deserted. There was no Beatrice with breakfast.
The news on the BBC was that Germany had invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. ‘Where this going to end, Theo?’ Vincent asked, trying to engage the boy. There was no answer. Theo pressed his ear close to the radio to receive the news through the crackles and humming. He was getting an education in geography and contemporary history. He had found an old atlas under the stairs and had been busy drawing and tracing maps. This absorbed him more than anything else now.
Without Jonah, Vincent decided that he would get to Saint Damian’s along the track which ran behind the house into the hills. In the dry season it would be clear of bush. ‘Come Theo, hurry boy.’ Vincent had packed some bread and cheese to eat on the way.
The pouis and immortelle ignited the hills, the yellow and orange petals covered the paths with flame.
As they neared Saint Damian’s, they could see the old people on crutches leaning on each others’ shoulders, descending from the huts below them. There were far more people up
and about than usual. Vincent wondered what was afoot.
When his patients saw him, they called out, ‘Good morning, Docta. God bless you, Docta.’
Others put out their hands to touch Theo. ‘The boy nice, eh?’ Theo pulled away and walked ahead.
The warmth of his patients always moved Vincent. He admired their endurance. ‘It’s okay, Theo. They’re just being friendly.’
‘What happening? So many people out so early?’ Vincent inquired of one of the women.
‘Young fellas knock us up, moving about quick, quick. They telling people to come. I myself, not get some green tea to drink this morning.’
‘Thank you, Mistress Maude.’
‘You remember my name, then, Docta?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘The other docta don’t remember my name, you know? I could be anyone. With my face changing so, who could blame people.’
‘We’ll fix that soon. How is the burn on your leg?’
‘I taking good care of it, Docta. This morning self I going by the surgery to get the dressing change.’
‘You do that, Mistress Maude. Excuse me now.’
‘God bless you, Docta.’
Would Sister Thérèse have got the news about the invasion of Czechoslovakia? Probably not, Vincent thought.
He was late for his clinic.
Seeing his patients like this, as they were this morning, in their masses, he almost despaired. There were over two hundred in the leprosarium now. They were always there to meet him, at the opening of the surgery; more in need of a kind word than a remedy. What real remedies were there anyway?
But today, it was different. He could not figure out what had happened to create all of this confusion. ‘Theo, wait for me.’
Night Calypso Page 10