Night Calypso

by Lawrence Scott

This night was a busy night in the doctor’s house. The drama moved from room to room. The boy moved quickly. Madeleine and Vincent moved fast to keep up. Now they were in his bedroom and then across the landing, then back to his perch on Vincent’s bed.

  BENEDICAMOUS DOMINO, is the knock on the door.

  Deo Gratias. I is a good boy. I get up.

  Is another day. The man-horse don’t come every night. Sometime, only once a month. I don’t know. I lose time when I dead. I don’t mark it on the calender.

  I don’t know when the horse go neigh. And I can’t stop myself. I must go to the window and throw down the key.

  When this start?

  All the time the sea was breathing just near the windowsill. And, in the distance, a thunder. Vincent was alert. Madeleine perched at the top of the bed, got down. She could not listen to any more. She went to sleep on the couch downstairs.

  I COME INTO MY ROOM after Compline one night, and I feel this big key on the table by the window with the wash basin and the jug. I see the key and I wonder about it. But I sleepy. I say I go find out in the morning.

  I clean my teeth. I pick nice hibiscus twig to make a good brush. I pass the wash rag over my face. Sleep come heavy after the hot day.

  But it cross my mind, someone come in my room, when I not there, and leave this key. There is nothing to come in my room for. There is nothing in my room. This room more empty than Popo mother house up Pepper Hill. This room have nothing. The crucifix with the crucified one. The five wounds. The crown of thorns. The ill-used head from the hymn. My conversation is only a prayer I don’t understand.

  Carry your cross, Father Dominic say.

  Father Dominic must’ve come to see if I hiding matches under my mattress. He have fire on the brain. Leave the key by mistake.

  In the dark there is nothing at all, my naked body standing in the middle of the room. There is the naked man on the cross.

  He don’t come for anything. He come for me. And I am nothing.

  I hang my cassock and scapular on a rusty nail behind the door. I crawl into my flour bag nightie. It still smell of flour. Like flour bag at the back of Chen shop up Pepper Hill. I lie on the coconut fibre mattress and I look at the stars, peeping through the jalousies.

  If is moonlight it flow onto the floor and I can see the table and chair. I can see the wash stand. I can see my white cassock and black scapular and leather belt and beads hanging on the rusty nail. And the whip, the discipline, I en’t use yet. I hear the friars Friday night lashing their back. I can see in the moonlight.

  But tonight is dark. No moonlight. I creep to the wash stand and touch the iron key. I lift it, heavy, cold in my hand. Smell it. It smell of cold iron. Rust. It smell of lock and keyhole. It smell of oil someone rub on it, long ago to make it turn in the keyhole. It smell of mortice and latch. Clackityclack. It turn and squeak. It jam. Is a key to open some door. Heavy and cold. It belong in a hole in a door somewhere. My door to my cell don’t lock. There is no key in my door. I don’t have the key.

  Father Dominic keep the matches and the keys.

  I smell it, and then I don’t know why, I lick it. In the dark I kneel by the wash stand and I hold the heavy cold key in my hand, and I lick it. It taste of rust and oil, and the taste of the metal stay on the tip of my tongue.

  I heavy with sleep and I crawl back in my wooden bed. I hold the heavy cold key under my pillow. I wait for sleep with my eyes open and my heart beating.

  Is worse than before.

  Then, that night, I must’ve close my eyes and fall into a dream. The horse at the window neighing and jangling it reins. I not hear a horse in the friary before. I sleep walk to the window. I find myself there. I lift the latch and throw open the shutter them. The horse chestnut and sweating in the hot night under the stars.

  I see the horse. It all one figure, the horse and the man on top of it. He come like borokeet carnival time.

  It go back on its hind leg and start to climb to the window from the courtyard.

  Is the body of the man, and is the man who say, Give me the key. Give me the key.

  Then I understand. I run by my bed for the heavy, cold key under my pillow. I lean over the windowsill and let down the key.

  It worse than ever.

  Them divide them self and the man leave the horse, so that the horse alone as a horse. The chestnut horse, Mister tether near the mango tree in the backyard. We call him Prince.

  He is the devil. Pay de devil.

  Not the carnival passing with jab molassi and red devil and moco jumbie.

  He is the devil. He get over the wall.

  Pay de devil.

  Spanish say, give the devil a baby for dinner.

  Mama say, cheups!

  He have the key for the door. The horse stamping on the courtyard. I crawl back in my bed. I curl up like a cashew nut.

  I don’t sleep. I dream. I call it that, or else I dead. Mama say, die, die. Be dead.

  She say once, that she fear that she might have carry me dead in she belly. Curl there like a dead leaf. Then I trans-pa-rent, like light on a muslin curtain.

  No branch from she body go get cut out.

  Cut it out, child. Go by Ma Sidone at the bottom of the track, cut it out.

  She hear them voices tell her that. She say no, she not cutting out the child.

  And Abraham take a knife to slaughter his son Isaac. And I look around for an angel. No angel in that room that night. Unless this devil was an angel in masquerade.

  No angel in that room that night. No angel in battle array. No guardian angel with their hand on your shoulder, looking over your shoulder to take you down the path of darkness to goodness. Like the holy picture Mrs Goveia give me for my First Communion. No angel with fiery sword. No angel to cast Lucifer, carrier of light, from the height of heaven to the depth of hell. No Michael with a flaming sword. No Gabriel with annunciation. No seraphim, no cherubim. I find no one in that room that night. Not one of all the host of angel.

  I wait, curl up like before I born. No match to light candle to see my way. I must wait in the dark. Above me on the bare wall he hang naked, crucified, the crucified one.

  I taste rust in my mouth, the rust of the cold key, the metal of the bit in the chestnut horse mouth. The key is a bit in my mouth. Suck it, I tell myself.

  Suck it, he say.

  Don’t hear no door open, no latch click, Clackityclack!

  Must be a beetle. A black backed beetle which drop from the ceiling. Or a cold mabouyan lizard drop on the floor from it hiding place behind the crucifix. That was the only sound. My eye squeeze up as I try to die.

  Pretend you dead, Mama say. If you dead nothing can’t happen to you. You can’t do nothing. Nothing go do you. Is not you. You not there.

  Suck it.

  I can’t breathe. I can’t bawl.

  No one can hear. No one go know. And no one go believe.

  But then, no one know when I say no. No one know what happen then, no one know when I force his hand, and there and then I must go and get the switch.

  Not now, because of the silence of God’s place.

  Out in the yard to find a nice smooth one on the guava tree, or a sweet wiry one on the tamarind tree, like it use to be on Pepper Hill, out into the silence of the Thursday afternoon, all the windows and doors of the little house in the yard shut up and peeping at me as I go down the silent trace to pick a switch for Mister in the bush.

  Here, he bring them, their length lying against the length of his leg in his breeches, and now a clutter with all the heap of khaki on the floor behind the door where he kick them. Khaki. Stains of sweat in the armpits of his shirt, in the crotch of his pants, in the seat of his pants, where his bottom sweat. Where I must put my face. He kick them here where I kneel to find their treasure, treasure he call it.

  Bring my treasure, in the bundle of clothes whose smell I know so well, so well, so long I find on the floor of his bedroom, but much longer find against my young skin in my Mama’s bed.


  Here they is, as I turn to find a glimmer on his face, a glint in his eye to tell me which one he prefer.

  One tonight, the smooth one, marbled green and brown, the length of the guava bois, or the flexible sting of the tamarind snake.

  Each one I hold up, each I test for him with my finger pull along the length, bend and test against my knee, or swish in the air to hear it sing, to show that I concern that he get the best, that he get the one he need, he think I need, he know I need, and I know them, for he train me so.

  Then I kneel to offer the switch. I must kneel and I must bow with my bare bottom, my flour bag nightie curl round my ankle like a pool of moonlight, bow straight against the slat of the board bed with my face in the slat watching the cockroaches crawl on the floor.

  I must wait. Wait and not know when it will hit, when it will hurt, when it will sting, when it will go on. If there is a pause, and I lose count and start again, so always it seem it is one, two, three till I reach ten. But I don’t know how many decade I have whispered here, bow and bend over the wooden bed with my face in the slat in the dark with the cockroach which tickle my toe and creep up my leg to nest. A rat chew at my toe.

  That is to get him start before the ride, and the gallop through the cane piece. I must turn this way or that way, depend on how he pull his rein, pull the bridle.

  Some brother think that is my virtue, my fervour for beating. Is not Friday night.

  He knock on the door and say, Sufficient.

  Is this Father Dominic?

  He sing a song to cheer me up. Frère Jacques, dormez vous… sonnez les Matinas, ding dong dong…

  Not a sin to tell in confession. Is not my sin.

  No one go believe, no one go know, except the one who put the key in my room. So I is the one who let him in? I is the one who say, yes, to this.

  After that tale, Theo lay in the corner of his bedroom. Vincent did not stop the drama as it unfolded. He watched the re-enactment. He was relieved that he had not been invited to participate in this one, as he had done with previous re-enactments. He watched to the very end after all the newspaper cuttings were torn off the wall to make a bed of newspaper in the corner for the boy to lie down, curled like a cashew nut, like a foetus. Like a baby to be born, like a baby in a ditch.

  When it was perfectly quiet, when it showed absolutely no signs of starting up again, Vincent went over to Theo heaped upon the newspaper cuttings, sweating, in a fever of his story. His warm body was clammy with the sweat and the exertion of his memory.

  The story was what it was, and it had to be told. The burden was the awful secret of it. That was the pain, the secret of it. Tell it to the world, and a kind of healing would come, retribution and forgiveness. Was that it?

  This was the world that had been given to the boy: this doctor who must have reminded him of Mister, the Mister of his tale. When Vincent realised that, he felt so ashamed, so sorry, for what had been done to this son of Mister.

  He wanted to go then and there find his own boy, his own son, in the arms of others, hold him and tell him that he was loved by him. He wanted to tell himself that he was loved by him. But why should he be? Why would he want to come to him now? Why would Odetta want him to come to her?

  ‘Theo, come boy. Come let me hold you. Theo, you are a good boy, none of this is your fault.’

  That morning, there was an unusual low tide, the kind of low tide that preceded a spring tide. It was as if all the sea had been sucked out of the bay. There was a dramatic sense of exposure in the naked seabed from where Vincent looked from the bedroom window.

  ‘Come Theo, let’s go and walk on the sands and see the low tide.’ They walked out of the house hand in hand, passing Madeleine still asleep on the couch.

  They came down the steps at the side of the jetty straight onto the sea floor. Vincent had not experienced this tide before.

  Theo was amazed. ‘The sea get take away!’ They walked as far as they could, to where the waves were breaking in the warm shallows, alarming the sandpipers in a frenzy at the edge of the ocean.

  They talked of tides and the power of the moon.

  It was as if the world had changed to what it must have been like when Noah’s flood had subsided. Vincent had not remembered a tide quite like this. The air busy with gulls, skimming over the sandbanks and mudflats. Egrets in flight from the mangroves around Salt Pond alighted on barnacled rocks, stalking and pecking, inquisitive, pedantic in their search.

  The dawn had not yet broken.

  They let the silence in the wind and the waves wash over them. It soothed the turmoil of the night. They stooped and collected shells. They found starfish and chip chips, snails and oyster shells. Blue and rust. White and pink. The snails were like white coral, like the bones Theo remembered in the midden.

  When they returned to the house, Madeleine had already changed into Sister Thérèse, and left the house.

  El Caracol

  1945

  News From Abroad

  With the mail boat that morning came a letter from Vincent’s mother in town. Ti-Jean brought the mail to the door of the pharmacy, where Vincent was working that morning on his own. He had seen him struggling up from the jetty on his crutches. He took the mail, noticing that Ti-Jean’s condition had regressed. It seemed like they were not winning that battle. Oh Alexander Fleming! If he only had the stuff, Vincent sighed. Ti-Jean hung back at the door. ‘I can’t see you now, Ti-Jean. Maybe this afternoon. Find Sister Rita, if you need attention.’

  ‘Where Sister Thérèse?’ The boy pestered like a child, though now, suddenly, he seemed older. Made old by sickness. Vincent thought how he had not noticed his growing up, like he had noticed Theo’s.

  ‘Ti-Jean, you know Sister Thérèse is working up in Indian Valley now.’

  ‘Magdalen!’

  ‘What did you say, Ti-Jean?’

  ‘Magdalen. Is so the fellas by the almond tree calling she.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Ti-Jean hung his head. Vincent watched him and realised that he could not feel the pain that he should be feeling with his wounds and sores in that state. This fact always amazed him as he looked at his patients struggling. Half the battle was lost before they had started, because they were not receiving the signals. There was no pain like this body without pain.

  ‘Come, Ti-Jean. I know you miss her. We’ll talk later. Okay? I wouldn’t bother with what the fellas under the almond tree say.’

  ‘They say she get cocobay. She come like we.’

  ‘What you mean, Ti-Jean? Come like we?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘What I know Ti-Jean is that we’re all the same, but some of us are ill. You have an illness.’

  Ti-Jean lowered his head.

  ‘We’ll talk later.’

  Vincent sat back at his desk by the window. Inserted with the letter was a telegram. He toyed with the letter and the telegram. The letter fluttered in the breeze. Magdalen, he heard Ti-Jean’s voice again. He saw her black hair, falling over her naked shoulders. They would have to make a choice, make a choice and live with it. Cocobay, what was Ti-Jean talking about? An irrational fear gripped Vincent. The boy was talking nonsense. He must talk to Madeleine about it. What an idea!

  He unfolded the already cut open telegram.

  WE DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON 129620 FLYING OFFICER METIVIER B M FAILED TO RETURN FROM AN OPERATIONAL FLIGHT THIS MORNING LETTER TO FOLLOW.

  Vincent placed his mother’s unread letter down on the desk, on his left side, with the telegram on his right. He rested his head in his hands for a moment, and then looked up and stared out over Chac Chac Bay. He watched Ti-Jean, the messenger of bad news, retracing his steps to the jetty.

  Bernard was not dead. He was missing. ‘Come on, come on.’ Bernard was running away from him in the pasture at Versailles. Bernard was running fast, holding aloft a World War One plane, hurling his model aircraft into the air; the one his father and Bernard had made of balsa wo
od on the dining room table. What he always remembered was the sound emitted from his lungs, the terrible roar of the plane, and its eventual crash into the hibiscus hedge at the bottom of the pasture. What danger had Bernard gone into? He had been driven by a father who had returned from a previous war with shrapnel in his hip, his mind shattered, but transfigured sufficiently to be his son’s hero, his model; the Empire’s soldier.

  Then the thought overwhelmed him. Bernard was missing and he had not got to know him. He had not got to really talk and share a life with his brother.

  While he had followed his passion for Odetta, Bernard had dreamt of being an airman. He had sat for hours, it seemed, listening to stories of the front, to stories of Verdun and the Somme. The very words sounded like the distant thunder of the guns. Foreign fields.

  All these thoughts and feelings flooded Vincent’s mind as he played with the pages of his mother’s letter, and the stern impersonality of the telegram, telling him that his brother was missing somewhere in Europe.

  As he sat there and watched the mail boat, George the Vth, leave the bay to return to town, he felt himself shaking uncontrollably. There was a terrible croak coming from his throat. There was a stifled sob wanting to break from his chest. His eyes filled with tears, flooded his cheeks, falling onto his mother’s letter. Smudged Quink ink ran along the lined writing paper.

  The telegram, with news of Bernard missing in action, fell from the desk in the breeze.

  The bay was hot and bright. The coconut palms scratched the air. Cocks crowed and Vincent could hear the end of Singh’s speech under the almond tree. ‘Vote for your rights and your freedom. Tell them Yankees where to go.’ The vote was unanimous. Singh would never give up. The banging of crutches confirmed their intent. ‘Vote for Rehabilitation!’ They would hold Mother Superior to her undertaking to get their wages increased, to get the huts repaired for the married quarters. She would have to get the money from the Colonial Office or from the Americans.