She looked up without answering. He stared at her now more than ever. ‘This is a beauty.’ He pointed at the microscope.
‘My father’s.’ She stroked the stand. Vincent had brought it over for her use, now that she was stationed in the hills. She had arrived one night, and now slept in the Doctor’s house.
Jesse remembered this bald nun at La Tinta, in her dress. Her hair had grown. It was not his business to judge.
‘Good evening, Lieutenant.’ She greeted him now without raising her head, keeping some of that composure which went with being a nun, despite her thin muslin dress, her bare arms, her black hair, growing by the minute it seemed, falling over her eyes; her naked feet tied in a knot under her chair. Her veil and habit were in the room upstairs.
‘Hi yuh, there, Doc. Good evening to you, Sir,’ Jesse called to Vincent whom he now noticed out on the verandah.
‘Good night, Lieutenant. You come to entertain us?’
‘Man, you hear those guys, those fishermen, like Jonah with their bottle and spoon, beating out those calypsos? That tune, man. Man, they got me itching to blow. I like their humour and their message. Those fellas are ready for carnival.’
‘If you’re off duty, why don’t you stay and share our supper? Or, maybe, I should check with Theo. He’s the cook tonight.’
‘That’s already checked. The boy was up at the Look Out this afternoon. I’m here on his invitation.’ Jesse eased himself into a Morris chair, positioning the saxophone on his knee.
‘Oh, I see. Well, it’s not for me to interfere, then.’ Vincent stubbed out his cigarette. A silence fell between the two men. Vincent lit another cigarette. Jesse noticed his nervousness. He looked over his shoulder to where Madeleine’s bent back told a story of labour and research.
‘She’s moved in?’ Jesse spoke quietly.
‘She stays.’ Vincent pulled on his cigarette.
Changing the subject, Vincent said, ‘Just heard about the torpedoing of one of the ships on the bauxite run from British Guiana?’
‘Yep. She went down in the seas off Galera Point, the most dangerous, they estimate.’
‘All gone down to the bottom of the sea. No survivors,’ Theo joined in, coming out from the kitchen.
The boy’s stories were often a mixture of tragedy and excitement, as he made these announcements, faintly imitating the news announcer, but mixed with his own sense of ironic absurdity. Then he laughed at his imitative efforts. ‘There were no survivors reported.’ He pursed his lips to mimic a BBC accent. Then, he was gone, out of the room, back to the kitchen.
‘They took her out of the water. The fireball could be seen at quite a distance. Some heard the explosion, even here,’ Jesse said. He played softly on his sax.
Madeleine cleared her things from the dining-room table, making room for Theo to lay for supper.
The men glanced at each other as she passed through the verandah. They watched her descend the steps, reach the boardwalk and sit on the small wooden bench under the jetty house. She pulled her skirt about her legs as it blew up in the sea breeze. She pulled her fringe from her eyes. She scraped her jet black hair up from the nape of her neck. Then she let it fall thickly alongside her face.
Jesse had questions to ask, Vincent did not have the answers, but was looking for his reactions.
Jesse spoke first, calling after Madeleine. ‘Take some fresh air, Sis.’ He tried to break the ice. She did not acknowledge his voice. She was not in a mood for his familiarity.
Vincent had noticed the way she chose the end of the jetty. It had become her spot. She was tasting her freedom, or pretending to explore it, like using her name Madeleine while she was in the house. At dawn, she would be slipping away in her nun’s habit, making sure her long hair was tidied away beneath her skull cap and veil. Then she would become Sister Thérèse again. How long could this secrecy continue?
‘We’ll be eating soon,’ he called down to her. He was trying to understand her isolation, since she had come to stay in his house, to sleep in his room, in his bed. He wanted her to be free. The other spare room was hers. He wanted her to choose again, so that these nights might be spent on her own, or with him. He loved when she did choose him in the night, chose his bed, coming across the landing in her white cotton chemise, her bare feet on the pitch pine floor. She mostly began the night in her own room. That way she felt that she was fooling Theo.
It was like being at her improvised desk at the dining room table, her head bent over her microscope, magnifying the secret life of mycrobacterium leprae. She could pretend that nothing had changed as regards her research. She could feel less lost in the Doctor’s House.
It was not sufficient to be Vincent’s lover. Not that she would call herself that. Most of it was unsaid. There had not been much choice. Then she wondered what the alternatives could be, the ones put to her to threaten her. There was either the choice to live under a cloud in the community, as had started after the incident at La Tinta, or fending for herself in Porta España, while her papers were being processed, and that could take up to a year because of the poor communication in wartime.
The Archbishop had come up with a room in the Magdalen House for the naughty girls, which the sisters ran in the city, in Freetown, she had been told. That could have sealed her fate. Madeleine refused that option also.
Choosing this clandestine life meant that she had not had to make any choices, irrevocably. This of course could jeopardise Vincent’s job. Once they could find a replacement for him, they would both have to choose. In the meantime, they both decided to push ahead with their research here at the Doctor’s House. But Vincent missed her on the wards. The patients took a surprisingly neutral position on the matter. ‘Say howdy to Sister Thérèse, Doctor.’ What did they know? How careful they had to be. He smiled at their innocence. There was always rumour in a small place.
On the jetty, Madeleine could have a view of the convent, and behind her, the house, which was now a kind of new home, a half-way house. It was a place from which to look at where she had come from, and a place to wonder what her future would be.
The tune on Jesse’s saxophone was a mournful tune of loss and abandonment. More than ever now, she felt like a motherless child. Separating herself from her sisters brought back thoughts of her mother, how much she felt her death, finding refuge with the sisters at her school, and then in the novitiate.
There was no moon, and the darkness swallowed her.
Jesse’s playing conjured his story which Vincent had heard of from Theo, and which Jesse himself had begun to speak about at La Tinta. Sitting here on an island in the confines of a bay, a place with distances and horizons opened up. Theo came and stood by the verandah. Madeleine came up and sat on the steps. The music sang of the cotton and tobacco fields, about the crops in the spring and the fall. It was the wind among tobacco leaves in the spring, in the cotton ready for picking in the fall. It was the red of maple trees up north.
The saxophone moaned for the hot trumpet of the trains which travelled north, bawling in the fading distance.
‘You blow that good, Jesse. You want a rum?’
‘I won’t say no, Doc.’ There was a kind of distance that the men kept as they got closer. They felt more than they spoke.
‘Theo, we got time for a rum? Or is that cocoa hot now? Are those bakes ready?’
‘If all you ready, it ready. But, I can bring you a rum first. I still have to swizzle in the vanilla and cinnamon.’ He turned into the house, returned with two glasses and a bottle of brown rum. He put them on the small table between the chairs of the two men. He opened the bottle, pouring a couple of drops to the floor for the spirits, then filling the two glasses.
‘I like the way you do that, boy,’ Jesse said admiringly.
‘What you mean? When I throw it on the floor? Is so we does do it before I reach here. Is I who teach Doctor to pay observance. Mama say…’ Then he stopped himself, looking at both men, from one to the other, as if he had sli
pped up, let the cat out of the bag.
Then he just let himself speak as if the music had loosed his tongue. ‘That is a whole new geography, yes, pappy! I done leave Pepper Hill, Gran Couva, Tortuga up in the Montserrat Hills, beyond Brasso Pedro, with the coco panol music, bottle and spoon, cuatro. I done leave San Jose, La Vega, San Juan, Josefito. I with you Jesse, boy.’ Theo had not shown quite this degree of familiarity before. ‘I with you on them dusty plains with howling coyotes. It like film I see with Mama, and Spanish, in Couva. Them people does live in a big country, yes, man. That is what Spanish tell Mama when we walking home along the road to Pepper Hill.’ Theo stopped. He looked about him, astonished. Jesse, Vincent and Madeleine were staring up at him. ‘Play Jesse, play, nuh, man.’ He sped off to the kitchen.
‘He’s a great one at the repeated tale,’ Vincent explained.
‘Yes, Sir. Repeated journeys.’
‘What’s your repeated journey, Lieutenant?’
‘Mine? Well, I guess, it’s a dream I have.’
‘A recurring dream?’
‘Yeh, I had it as a boy. But it’s coming back now, regular, since I’m in the forces. Since I went North to school, to do my training.’
‘Leaving the familiar, you look back over the past,’ Vincent reflected.
‘Something like that. You’re a philosophical guy, Doc. I’m down by Granma’s homestead. That’s in the Carolinas, and I go round the house to the back porch, where my Grandpa’s chopping wood. That’s my Ma’s Pa. Sometimes it’s just that. And I think, why do I keep dreaming of my Grandma’s homestead, and my Grandpa’s chopping wood outside the back porch?’
‘That’s quite innocent,’ Vincent commented.
‘Right.’
‘So?’ Vincent encouraged the retelling.
‘But then it sometimes continues, and my Grandpa is sitting on the porch steps with a sax. He’s blowing. I never get to hear the tune. Only, he got no fingers. Them keys is pressed invisibly. In another version it’s the same. Only, the sax is bleeding.’
‘Bleeding? What’s behind that dream?’
‘Well, I know that my Grandpa taught me to play the sax. My Grandma, and my Ma before that, told me that he was a great player in his time, jumping tracks and going from town to town. He played in sets with some of the greatest. But, I remember once he told me that the guys used to call him No Fingers. “Hi there, No Fingers,” they would say. He had a way of pressing down those keys with his knuckles. It was painful to watch and painful in truth. No one knew how he did that, and still play the music. Him got his fingers broken when he was a young boy, broken on some ranch he worked on. You know, deliberately. They smashed his fingers.’
‘Who?’ Vincent inquired.
‘Him who owned the ranch. It was a ranch and a cotton mill. They jammed his fingers in some machinery, on purpose.’
‘Who?’
‘My Grandpa was an enslaved man.’
Vincent listened in awe, as the negro Lieutenant told the story of his dream and of his Grandpa’s life, intermittently blowing on his saxophone, his fingers moving invisibly in the dark over the keys.
A silence ticked in the house, disturbed only by the sea, sucking on the rocks, gulping round the pylons of the jetty, where the shadow of Madeleine rustled the darkness, where she had continued to sit on the steps combing out her hair.
‘Madeleine?’ Vincent pulled her away from herself.
‘What stories! I’m so moved by your story and Theo’s story,’ Madeleine looked up.
‘You have a story, I bet.’ Jesse stopped himself remembering their first meeting at La Tinta and wondering about this strange woman.
Vincent smiled and took her hand.
The night was close.
Theo came out of the kitchen, carrying a tray with hot bakes and a blue enamel jug of frothing cocoa. They all turned and saw him and got up off their chairs on the verandah, and went into the dining room.
‘Your fingers are fine?’ Vincent smiled, speaking to Jesse again.
‘Yes, Sir, my fingers are the fingers they took from him. They’re my Grandpa’s fingers. My Mama always say that. “Son, she say, you’ve got them fingers, Mungo picked up from the yard.” Mungo was a lad that worked with my Grandpa. He was there when my Grandpa’s fingers got chopped. He held the bloody fingers in his hand, my Ma say. They hurried, and it was a Dr Du Bois who stitched them back on. But they grow funny. Imagine, them two, Mungo and my Grandpa, hurrying down the dirt road to Dr Du Bois. Them red stumps jumping, Mungo careful they don’t fall in the dirt again. My Ma say, she was a little girl at the time. She have all them stories, and more stories, she hear from my Grandma. It’s so it goes, where I come from, Doc.’ Jesse took a last blow on his sax as they came into the dining room.
‘You play well.’ Vincent did not know what to say about the story, so appalling in Jesse’s matter of fact, comic telling, so awesome with the sax for accompaniment.
‘Oh, I ent play yet.’ Jesse laughed aloud.
Theo hovered, listening to the two men, and pulling out a chair for Madeleine.
‘Those bakes smell good, Theo. Thank you.’ Madeleine looked at the boy appreciatively, enjoying his attention. He stared and moved the jug of cocoa nearer to Vincent to pour for Jesse, Madeleine and himself.
‘And you Theo, you joining us?’ Jesse asked.
Theo hovered round the table making sure they all had what they wanted, and then went back into the kitchen without answering. He had overwhelmed himself talking out on the verandah.
‘Theo, you going to learn sax?’ Vincent called out. But it really was something said for Jesse to pick up on.
‘I done ask him that. I would be pleased to pass on what I know about this instrument to so bright a boy.’ Jesse looked at Vincent and smiled glowingly, speaking loudly, so that Theo was bound to hear from the kitchen.
‘And what did he say?’
Theo re-entered the dining room.
‘You learn what you want to, mon garçon.’ Madeleine smiled at him when he gave her one of the few linen napkins from the Metivier trunk under the stairs.
Theo returned to the kitchen. He had no intention of joining the table this evening. But he was in and out, hovering round the shoulders of the diners. Everything had to be just so for Miss Madeleine, and there was Jesse from the Look Out, whom he was strangely ignoring, letting him speak for himself; something Jesse could do.
Madeleine had a new name now, and Theo was the first to give her that position, Vincent noticed. She was the mistress of the house, conferred by him.
Vincent and Madeleine exchanged glances, as Jesse carried on with his long tales. They could hear Theo clanging about in the kitchen. ‘You not coming to eat, Theo?’ Vincent called. There was a greater banging of pots and pans.
‘I don’t know what to believe when the boy is telling his stories,’ Jesse continued.
Vincent and Madeleine smiled, trying to get a word in. But Jesse was in full flood. They looked embarrassed as the American GI went on and on. Madeleine looked towards the kitchen door, expecting Theo to re-enter the room at any moment.
‘He seems to have infected you, Lieutenant,’ Vincent laughed. They all three laughed together. Jesse realised that he had been going on and on, much like Theo. The boy was still out in the kitchen.
‘Yes. No, I tell you. He talks, at the drop of a hat. Then he starts humming one of those calypso tunes that you hear the fishermen singing. He just makes me want to go to that island of Sancta Trinidad, up in those places that he makes sound so magical.’ He laughed with his mouth full of bake.
Vincent and Madeleine smiled, a little embarrassed, and ate their bakes and drank their cocoa. Theo remained hidden in the gloom of the kitchen, listening to Jesse’s voice.
It was then that they all heard the explosion. Theo ran in from the kitchen. Vincent, Madeleine and Jesse threw back their chairs and went out onto the verandah. The empty night sky over the gulf outside Chac Chac Bay flared up orange and red like
a late sunset. It was as if the whole island shone. No one had seen light like that before, transfiguring the hills and the metallic sea. It was as if the archipelago were throwing up a new island from its volcanic ridge. ‘Boy, what was that?’ Vincent exclaimed. ‘Take care, you fall, Theo, in the darkness.’ Theo had sped out of the house, almost as quickly as he had heard the explosion, as if he had been waiting on his cue. He was on the jetty in a moment, skipping the steps and reaching the boards in no time.
‘That was a fireball!’ Jesse exclaimed. ‘That’s a ship, some ship, somewhere near, hit by a torpedo. Sounds real real close.’ Jesse had climbed onto the banister of the verandah, to see if that could help his vision in any way. But they could not see around Point Girod to where the explosion and the light had come from.
‘Must be out in the gulf, inside the bocas,’ Vincent suggested. ‘Inside the Boca del Drago.’
‘Yep, sure sounds like that. You got a pirogue here?’ Jesse had jumped into complete GI role. He was half figuring whether he should return to his station.
‘Yes. Theo, untie the pirogue.’ Vincent called, going down the steps to the jetty. Madeleine and Jesse followed him. Theo was thrilled with the excitement of being and moving with Vincent and Jesse.
‘God, what was that? Take care, Theo,’ Madeleine called with her caution. The bay lit up the open gulf for a second, like an apparition.
‘It’s the flares to detect the casualties after a bombing. Let’s go out to the entrance of the bay,’ Jesse suggested.
They waited for Theo, by this time in the pirogue, pulling in the anchor. ‘The flares have died down, but we should see some burning wreck, somewhere round that point. There must be men in life rafts in the water. It’s so quiet. You’d expect to hear bombers in the air. Where are those Albacores, those Barracudas?’ Jesse was explaining the routine.
They all got into the pirogue. Madeleine sat in the stern. Theo sat in the bow. Vincent positioned himself at the centre next to Jesse. They both took the oars, fitting them into the rollocks. They needed speed. The sound of the oars grinding in the rollocks, and the dip of the oars in the water, was an added music to the night. There was the plunge and then the grind. There was the heavy breathing of the men.
Night Calypso Page 32