Night Calypso

by Lawrence Scott

  They listened to Germany’s attacks. Poland was caught between the Russians and the Germans. Theo had his atlas out. He had retrieved a globe from under the stairs which had been Vincent’s and Bernard’s as children. He spun it, searching and tracing with his finger the movement of troops.

  Earlier today, they had stood and watched the last shipload of Jewish refugees come through the boca, to be quarantined on Nelson island. The fishermen sang the calypso of the day, describing the Making of a New Jerusalem, as they put out for the fishing banks.

  Since dirtying himself, Theo’s night calypso had subsided. But Vincent was always waiting for it to begin again. He dreaded its resumption. What more did the boy have to go through? What more had he been through?

  The afternoon light slanted, yellow as the lances of the palms. Theo had moved to the jetty. The wake of a British destroyer swamped the sunbaked boards as it turned in the bay. He stared at the sleek, silver strip, HMS Liverpool, slipping out of the bay into the gulf, fluttering the Union Jack, as if it were a toy he himself had pushed out onto the waves, a carved cedar pod on the stream.

  After the news, he was checking his log of barges and tugs of the British navy doing their exercises. This had been the first visible sign of the war. He kept a note of what he spotted. The low flying aircraft had joined the frigates, cormorants and diving pelicans.

  Vincent watched the boy from the verandah. He was in another world altogether, different from the one at Pepper Hill or Father Dominic’s friary, as he threw his line from the jetty, in the hope of a catch.

  Darkness came suddenly after a green flash on the horizon as far as Guira on the eastern coast of Venezuela, bringing its gloom into the lamp-lit house. The generator had broken down again. Fireflies pulsed in the bushes.

  Theo had earlier kneaded the dough for a bake which was now ready. He fried a supper of his red snapper catch for Vincent and himself which they ate with the bake in silence. Vincent thought he seemed as if he had sunstroke. He had caught the sun on his face and arms and bare back. He had noticed him bathing his head with water from the tap at the tank, outside the kitchen. The water darkened his Demerara-sugar-coloured hair. ‘You must respect the sun on the island, Theo. Wear a cap. There’s one under the stairs.’

  Theo looked up for an instant. There was a flicker of recognition, then his eyelashes were lowered, shutting down the light of his green eyes.

  Vincent followed him up the creaking stairs to bed. He let himself into his room, barely opening the door, sidling in, furtively. What secrets now? Vincent thought.

  ‘Sleep tight, don’t let mosquitoes bite.’ Vincent retired, without receiving a response.

  It must have been just after midnight when Vincent woke to one of the island’s owls. The jumbie bird, as people called it, kept the night watch. It was between a hoot and a trill. It had its own Morse Code, transmitting its own messages. Then, there was the usual static and hum of the night.

  The voice which had haunted him was barely audible as it began its story. It ran like a river. Vincent listened, dreading the long night. Theo sat stunned at the foot of his bed.

  COCO MAMA, Emelda, know more than Mister. She have history lesson too. She give it to her boy. What she know was from where she come from, down in the gully, in the barrack yard, below the big house on top of Pepper Hill. What she know was from the dolly house in which she and Coco live.

  Coco? Hmm! That’s not my name.

  What she know was from the yard of she grandmother, Ma, who come out at specified hours of the morning and evening to rock back and forth on her teak rocker, make for her by Mr Cardinez in Guapo, and who rise only to water her anthurium lilies, growing in cut-down kerosene tins on the ledge of the verandah, with a calabash dip in the bucket of water, and which have to always be on the verandah steps for this purpose. She carry in herself a long memory which take her, herself, back to herself, back to the young girl, Christina Dellacourt of the Dellacourts of Corinth, that fair estate in the soft undulations of sugar cane, which lie between Petit Morne and Golconda.

  She come on the request of the then Madame de Marineaux, if not enslave, at least indenture still, or, at very least, feeling that the trip by buggy from Corinth to Pepper Hill, near Gran Couva, must be the longest trip she ever make in this life.

  Is here, Ma Dellacourt say, that her daughter Alice leave and go to work as a servant in the big house on top of Pepper Hill, when the present Mister Pierre was a little boy. All called Pierre, like they don’t have other name to call their children. Pierre de Marineaux!

  Coco Mama, Emelda, was a little girl then, and the secret that the whole world know run through she vein and blossom on the red skin cheek of the little girl that Ma Dellacourt daughter, Alice, leave with she.

  Child, what trouble you bring me? But leave the children them, Emelda and Louis, the twins, and go and do your work. Watch yourself, Alice.

  Alice continue to please her Mistress and serve she Mister, a Mister that come from a line of misters since they start to come in 1820. That shameful time!

  De Marineaux and then de Marineaux and more de Marineaux, the name they give the children born to the Mistress inside the house, the wife, the one who is bride since she is a child sheself, dress up in yards and yards of Chantilly lace and broderie anglaise. You does see that in them pretty pretty picture, yellow yellow, stun by the camera, wrap in torpor. That is Father Angel word. I get it in vocabulary lesson. TOR POR.

  But, as time pass, de Marineaux is the name take by the outside children in the barrack yard. De Marineaux bloom like orange blossom on the slope of Pepper Hill. De Marineaux, ripe like purple governor plum, like jolie mango. Like rose, like mango vert. De Marineaux like red sorrel in the breeze Christmas time.

  Child, what you telling people, Emelda say.

  Is so, I hear my great-grandmammy say.

  Vincent was transfixed. Theo threw back his head and laughed. Vincent listened to the tongues in which the boy spoke, not the tongues of Father Dominic’s devil, those wild, priestly superstitions, but the troubled tongues of a troubled child. A great-grandmother’s story. He must listen to the boy. He must keep awake. Theo looked straight at him, but did not seem to see him.

  The entranced child sometimes lay across the end of his bed. Sometimes, he was at the window in the shadow of the blackout, sometimes walking about the room, gesticulating, or sitting in a chair, imitating an older person, a voice in the story. He was a mimic, sometimes standing close to the mosquito net and peering down at the doctor’s face, or kneeling by the bedside to confess the story into his ear, as if to a priest in a confessional, or an accomplice in a crime, pouring his history into his ear.

  Theo strode across the room delivering his history lesson in the learnt voice of an adult.

  MA DELLACOURT daughter, Alice, not the first to get take, on a quiet afternoon, to the tune of the catechism class downstairs, under the house, teach by the mistress of the house, Ma Dellacourt tell me.

  What must you take most care of, your body or your soul, children?

  I must take most care of my soul because it is immortal and will never die.

  The fine, high voices sing and repeat, they learn by heart. Ma Dellacourt daughter, Alice upstairs, think, never die? What a tribulation! Sometimes, more easy, just to die. And she say, she say to she self, let me die. Die, die, die.

  Vincent listened to the boy telling this astonishing tale, as he unfolded the history of his grandmother, as told by his great-grandmother. The story possessed him, so that he told it as he had heard it, rendering the tones of the voices which possessed him. It was as if he had a fever. Vincent let him tell the story. No matter how painful, he had to listen to the boy he cared for. It frightened him how much he cared.

  IS TO THESE catechism voices that the young girl, Alice, who know no better or, even if she do, unable to do anything about it, let the attention of her Mister, in those days still Master, seduce her into giving up her body. She let him take her body, hearing
the sing-song children, with their young faith, repeat time and time again, that it was her soul she must take most care of. What of the body?

  Before that, the Monsieur de Marineaux of the time make his way into the body of Christina Dellacourt, Ma Dellacourt as she become. It begin an ancestry of such interference! All she think of was how far Corinth Estate is, and whether it better to stay there, to scrub floor.

  What a danger in such simple work! To kneel on the ground and let the soapy water swamp her dress. She tell how a young son of the Corinth house take her, there, on the floor, in the soapy water flooding her dress, a twelve year old girl. He take her like she was a dog. He call her puppy, and come up behind, to lift her skirt. Puppy, Puppy, and before she can fight, she feel the pain of it, the push of his swelling into her.

  And all the time, Christina, my great-grandmammy, say she hear the keskidee in the zaboca tree. But the one sound that she never forget is the sound of the blacksmith pounding iron far down in the estate yard. Clang, clang, clang.

  That dry season, that crop time, trash blow in from them burning fields on a hot afternoon. The clanging sound fill the blue sky. It toll and toil like a bell at church. She cross sheself for the Angelus. The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceive of the Holy Ghost.

  Hmm? This was no Holy Ghost, my great-grandmammy say, but it make Christina think even then, that this taking of young girls in these houses, always have to have the music of the church accompanying each push of the mister swelling. The tolling of bells, the repetition of the catechism, telling them that if they have to lose their bodies, is their souls that the church want to save. Ka-ka, Kif-kif.

  Even now, Christina, my great-grandmammy, say she hear the laughter from the barrack rooms.

  Vincent listened to the laughter in the voice of the boy, mimicking the laughter of his great-grandmother, and under that laughter, the sadness of the story of herself and her daughter Alice, the boy’s grandmother.

  The fever was rising. Vincent was sitting bolt upright, his eyes wide open, listening to Theo who sat on a rocker, poised like the Ma Dellacourt of his story. He had taken the counterpane and draped it about him, and held his head sideways, his hand on his chin, a little tilted up in a manner both superior and spurning of the time that he was describing. He topped off his costume with a turban made from a white towel, so that he looked like one of those Martiniquaise women who strolled on the quay in Fort-de-France.

  Theo continued. The voice changed to something more sorrowful.

  EACH WEEK, when she go up to the little cemetery, and through the gate to the ground outside, to put flowers on the grave of her daughter, Alice, Ma Dellacourt have the twins with her, Alice little ones, Emelda and Louis. She read the name, Alice, with a cross on a stone with writing she know she pay for already with she own body, what she give the cemetery man. Well pay for, Ma Dellacourt say, as she turn from the grave, as she tell me the story, no matter my Mama, Emelda, who tell me. Tell me when she not even know she telling me.

  My Mama have story, oui!

  But, great-grandmammy say, as she look out onto the soft rolling hills between the high ridges, hump like the back of an iguana, rich with the cocoa, that she see, on their wild savannahs, a cemetery nobody know is there. Big with ditches.

  In the dead of night, the pilgrimage from the little board house is by one desperate girl, no more than a child herself, anxious to make her life more simple, to undo her life and start again, to smother that last one she called, Mercy, who she fear get damage between the sheets of the de Marineaux.

  Vincent felt to restrain the boy from his painful story of his mother’s younger sister, Mercy. But Theo, possessed, delirious, sped on, leading here and there, and then coming back to the main road with his family’s secret.

  ALICE, take by the pain of guilt, remorse and despair, go down the dark canal of trace, to the shady patch with a mango tree at the centre of the brilliant light. It low enough to sling a rope over a branch and swing, and high enough that she can’t drag she foot on the ground, but allow for her dead weight to drop. Once that young girl, Alice, who learn from her brother at games to swing, hice sheself up, she let the rope take the full strain, once she have the noose tight around that little neck of hers, upon which a mother once hang a cheap silver chain for First Communion. The neck crack and she swing, till the odour of death and the buzzing of flies, till high in the blue air the soaring and circling of the corbeaux, bring some cocoa picker to look, and run and call people. Look, who child it is, hanging in the clear light of the afternoon, down by the dou douce mango tree? Maybe she try to climb the rope to save sheself in one last moment of hope, but reach up too late, so slip back, jerk, snap, and let her grazed and bloody fingers lose their hold, as she cry, Mercy.

  Theo did not let up. The voice carried him.

  WHAT PEOPLE remember out in the open, then, was not the reason for this death, the one responsible. They don’t pick up sticks and stones and pieces of iron to march up to the big house on the hill, for retribution and reparation.

  Instead, they wail all night at a wake, and take her down, such a sweet sweet child, and lay she out in the same white of her Confirmation dress, as white as sweet frangipani flowers; a girl as delicate as a butterfly on a hibiscus hedge, as fragile as those flowers which are the frills on their mothers’ broderie anglaise.

  They lay she out and crown her with sweet-lime flowers, and take her to the ground outside the cemetery, after the Shango people blessing, because the church, with its Abbe, betray her as the Judas, because of the hanging and the life-taking despair, casting her out from the sacred and consecrated ground, so that the women and the grave diggers had to heap up the grave in the dark of the night with the fireflies, one flambeaux on the ground, just beyond the cemetery the next side of the fence, with all the flower they could find to make wreath.

  But the grave that that young girl make in a ditch far beyond the shade of the mango tree, which she choose for her secret, before she kill sheself, will go unattend, unmark and trampled by the cattle. Except that in the night, when people passing, they only hearing somebody calling, Mercy. And a next voice crying, Mammy.

  Teacher Theo rose up to deliver the conclusion of his history lesson. It was as if the voice could not stop. It was the rhetoric of the rocker going back and forth on the verandah. Theo was his great-grandmother.

  AFTER ALL THEM STORY, Ma Dellacourt give praise and thanks that she have the strength to endure and survive, so that others go do the same, though she know, too, that those who take to swinging on mango trees on splendid afternoons, is witness to survival and martyrdom of this same endurance.

  Sweet Alice she say, she was a sweet child, oui. And Mercy, mercy.

  Then there was a silence, and then only the sea. Its sigh, exhaled, as it dragged the shale up the beach, and let it go again to meet the next wave. Vincent opened his eyes and saw Theo leave the room with his history and a music which sounded like ‘Sweet Chariot, coming to take me home, swing low sweet chariot, coming to take me home,’ sung by a child umbilically tied to a great-grandmother’s story, a grandmother’s story, a mother’s story.

  Was he aware of himself telling these stories? Was he sleepwalking, dreaming the past? He was drenched with his fever.

  Vincent had listened to the tale of the Dellacourts, the generations of servants in the de Marineaux household, a name he knew well.

  His own past began to creep close. He thought of Sybil in his own house on the estate at Versailles with its Le Petit Trianon, the little pavilion, at the bottom of the garden. Folies de grandeurs.

  Did he know the full story of that time, in the house where he had grown up?

  The boy’s history lesson was teaching him something, reminding him of something he did not like to remember. Odetta came to rest in his arms, to lie beneath his body.

  Vincent lay back, infected by the boy’s fever.

  Again, it came back to him. Always there was the turret room and the tall pa
lmistes. He always thought that it must have been the palmistes that he must have first seen when he was born. Outside, in the gravelled yard, there were six tall, tall palmiste palms. Palms! The island winds tore at their crowns. It seemed that the sun had a green light which filtered through those lances. Green light, like green water.

  Then a young girl’s cry, and the sigh of the wind in an indigo sky.

  Lying there in the darkness and stillness, left by Theo’s departure, Vincent entered that past as if it were yesterday. The pitch pine floorboards of his parents’ bedroom creaked. The jalousied window banged. Sybil’s fingers smelt of onions. His mother smelt of vertivert; cool colognes for the heat. His father’s pith hat had a band of sweat on the inside rim. It was wet and it smelt of him. The sun had made his arms the colour of a mule or the red tobacco which he smoked on the verandah in the evening.

  At the end of the pasture, the barrack rooms laughed in the day when children had the run of the yard; elders in the hot fields, or under the shade of the cocoa and the immortelle. At night, he heard what sounded like murder.

  Vincent found his memories tumbling out an ancestry, a shared legacy, grounded in the source of the wealth of the creoles, much like Theo had described on the same hillsides. Was this why he had taken the boy from Father Dominic’s convent? Did he sense that some crime had been committed, and this boy carried in himself testimony to that? Struck dumb!

  These voices from the past paraded themselves in the night. Were these the stories that Father Dominic could no longer listen to? Was this the reason why the boy had to be put somewhere else? What else was there to be said? What else did he have to tell? Tonight, he told more of others rather than of himself – what did Theo have to tell?