I think of where I am. Mister there, standing, staring at me, and he have his switch. He have his switch out, hanging down in his right hand along the length of his khaki, along the length of his breeches. He hitting his tall boot with his switch. He swiping at them, and there is the crack of the switch against the leather. There is the reek of leather. It is the sign of a master for his dog to kneel.
I hear the cigale singing. Sand fly and mosquito playing their tune, the afternoon heat high in the blue sky, where is one corbeaux circling high high. We alone, I see. This is how he does chose to do things, when he have me trap.
I can’t run.
I think to run. I think to hide. But I stand still, until he tell me to come. He know that I know what I have to do, as he walk off the trace into the bush.
He take me by the neck and pull me down, so that I must try to touch the ground. I must touch my toes. Touch your toes. And while I bend I must wait for the switch. I must listen to his voice.
Who say you can play with Chantal? Who say you can come up in the house and go downstairs and play with Chantal? I tell you now you must leave her alone. She is not for you to play with. And the words come with the switch. Do what you have to do. And what I have to do is to drop my pants there in the light of the cocoa.
I stare at a cocoa pod. I stare at the purple of a cocoa pod. I enter the cocoa pod. But that don’t take away the sting. I take the sting and I enter the cocoa pod. I enter behind the purple skin, and I open the pod and take out the bean in their fleshy cocoon. I must get close to softness. I must tear something soft to place between my fingers. I forget how long I there.
Only now I know is Chantal’s soft hair in my face, Catechism class, that comfort me as I bend low to the ground and I smell the dead leaves and the fresh crushed grass and the little pink flowers that grow under the cocoa.
Who tell you to talk with her? Who tell you to play with her? She is nothing to do with you. You are nothing to do with her.
And now I near his leg. I staring at his boot. I near where he like to have me by his crotch. I am nothing to do with she. She is nothing to do with me. I must repeat. My repetition smell like his sweat. The sweat which drip from his forehead. The reek of the leather. The salt of the sweat. The stench of his crotch. I forget how long it take. The smell is the sweat of his crotch where he have me. And that is a kind of softness to be lying my head on his leg. That is something. I think he do not know what he want to do. Whether to hurt me, or to make me the gift of something soft.
Soft and hard. I pull my khaki pants up.
I catch myself and I alone. My back hurt me for so. The sound of the river in my ear. The hoot of an owl in the darkness of the cocoa. Jumbie bird! And in the sunlight on the trace a keskidee with his question. Each sound in itself shrill and loud in this moment, when I open my eyes, and I alone, and Mister have his way with me once more. My back hurting for so, must have burst open. I reach so, to feel where I feel it bleeding. I must go home and wash myself by the pipe near the house, or if water shut off I must use a calabash to dip in the barrel and splash some water on my skin, to clean and soothe. I must dip from the big oil drum which collect water from the spouting.
And the next day when I bring message for Mama, is the Mistress self who say, We not see you in the yard for a day or two, Coco. I hear her say, Coco. She must’ve get this name from Mister. And I lower my head. I shy. So one invite me and the other shoo me off. But I feel that it not so simple.
And where is Mama? Where is my Mama?
‘Theo, let’s leave these stories. Theo, it’s time to leave all of that behind. Come with me.’
It was like a code buried in some far off moment, part of some part of the story, a trigger which immediately had Theo turning around, and bending over.
RIDE A COCK HORSE. Ride me, ride me to Banbury Cross.
Vincent now saw what had really frightened Father Dominic. This was where he had got to, and rather than deliver him to another bout of exorcism, he had decided to try the doctor whom he sensed had a gift of healing.
Vincent immediately, by some instinct for survival spoke authoritatively. Coco, get up, at once, and go to your room.’
There was a moment when nothing took place, and then Theo rose from his bending position and went up the stairs to his room. Vincent slumped against the door. Maybe, if the boy could sleep he might wake into a normal state, it would have been like a dream. Then he could assume his own self, Vincent, the Doctor.
‘Vincent.’ It was Madeleine. ‘It’s morning. Come, I’ve coffee out on the verandah. The boy is sleeping.’
‘Is morning, already?’
‘Yes, after a long night.’
‘You still here?’
‘Yes, I’m late. I’ll risk it.’
Pierrot
Vincent was glued to the stories in The Gazette when he got home that afternoon. So much was going on since the D-Day Landings last June. There was high expectation in the air.
The development of the war had come to a halt on the walls of Theo’s room, since the allies had landed at Anzio. The cutouts had yellowed, and were curling away from the dried-up flour paste. One last one stuck without much commitment: De Gaulle Heads Parade from Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame, was old news now, as was Sister Rita’s last message about the Maquis and the Milice.
The papers had been full of the Ardennes and the Meuse at the time of the Battle of the Bulge. The Soviet troops had entered the camp at Auschwitz. They remembered when they first had heard that name with the trainloads from Drancy.
One of the last letters from Montreal, enclosing Sister Rita’s cousin’s news, which was coming less and less, had told of a hurried last trainload from Drancy last August, a couple of days after the French and Allied troops had landed in Provence.
Just when Vincent thought Theo would be recording the victories, he had lost interest. Today’s Allies Cross the Rhine and Allies Liberate Buchenwald and Belsen did not get cut out or stuck up.
The U-Boats had quietened down almost completely. Bits and pieces of ships still floated up onto the beach. Quite recently, parts of the corpse of a German sailor were found, caught in a fisherman’s seine, a macabre reminder of their proximity to the war, and of the night Achilles entered the harbour of Porta España and torpedoed the Mokihana.
Headlines continued to tell the story of the end: Allies Liberate Dachau. Madeleine read the news and looked at the grainy photographs with horror and without words to say what she was feeling. The letters from Montreal had old news. Things had moved on. Petain had been arrested. Mussolini had been executed. The news from France was all about what to do with the collaborators.
Madeleine and Vincent sat on the verandah. She had learnt to make rum punch and was trying it out. ‘One of bitter, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.’ She mimicked Vincent, telling her his mother’s recipe. ‘Would your Maman approve?’
‘Of you? Or the rum punch?’ They laughed. No, she had not been presented to Madame Metivier.
They heard Theo at the back of the house. ‘What’s he up to?’ Madeleine asked.
‘Let him be,’ Vincent pleaded.
Earlier, Theo had gone straight up to his room on returning from one of his island hikes, and then out to the back of the house with his butterfly net. He had not returned till now, sundown, and then went straight to his room without supper. ‘I must check on him,’ Madeleine said to Vincent.
She knocked at his door. She could hardly enter the room for the weight against the door. ‘Theo.’ There was a faint murmur indicating for her to push the door harder.
In the faint light, she noticed that the walls were bare. The maps, newspaper reports, headlines, the advance of armies with their flags, the torpedoing of U-Boats, the sea lines, the myths, the facts, and the scraps of letters, had all been torn down and piled high in the middle of the room and behind the door. There was the faint smell of sulphur, the scent of a lit match. Theo was in the process of dampening down a small flam
e under the heap of paper at the centre of the room when Madeleine entered. There was a trail of smoke, rifling through the singed newspaper. The streets of Dresden and Hamburg smouldered.
‘Theo!’
Theo looked up.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘What you see me doing?’ He was immediate and unusually aggressive.
‘Theo.’ Madeleine knelt next to him among the pile of newspaper cuttings. ‘We can take these outside and burn them in the backyard, if you don’t want them in here anymore.’ She began collecting up the newspaper cuttings in her arms. ‘I’ll help you. We’ll get some kerosene. You bring the matches.’ Theo followed reluctantly with a pile of paper.
Vincent came to the back door and looked on with concern while Madeleine and Theo coaxed the bonfire of paper cuttings in the middle of the sorrel patch.
‘Don’t let the flames get too near the bush,’ Vincent cautioned.
Madeleine looked over to Vincent with restraint in her eyes. She knew his concern. But she wanted the boy to take care of the fire responsibly. She went over to the back door and stood with him, taking his hand in hers. Together they looked at Theo bringing the last of the cuttings down and put them on the flames. The World War, as told by the boy, roared, then fizzled out. Ash floated up in the still evening air. They had the fire doused before the curfew.
Madeleine and Vincent followed Theo up to bed that night. In the early hours of the morning, Madeleine woke with a start. ‘Vincent.’ She shook him violently. ‘Vincent, do you smell fire?’ They both sat up, startled.
They saw him crouching on the floor at the foot of their bed. Theo was kneeling over a small heap of papers striking matches, trying to light them. They both leapt out of bed. Vincent quickly lit the kerosene lamp. Madeleine knelt next to Theo. ‘Theo.’ She restrained his hands.
FIRST THE big house, then the dolly house down in the gully.
‘Theo?’ Vincent knelt on the other side of the boy. ‘Come, Theo, you don’t want to do this here.’
FIRST THE big house, then the dolly house down in the gully.
Madeleine sat back on her legs. Vincent put his arms around Theo’s shoulders.
‘Do you want to tell us this story, Theo?’
Then there was that inimitable voice they had grown to know.
I TELL CHANTAL to go and sleep by her cousin that night. I alone. I have my plan. First is the big house, then the dolly house down in the gully.
I have two pan of kerosene. The flame only following me like a fiery snake, where I run right upstairs and through the bedroom. I throw the match. Mosquito net disappear just so.
And down in the gully I gone. Is there I go catch them.
All them little dolly furnitures. Like the house light up for a party. I see the light through the windows. I watch till the flame take the whole dolly house. I ent wait to see. I leave the whole place to burn
It burn, pretty, pretty pretty…
Theo sat staring at the floor silently.
‘Come Theo, let me get you to bed. All that’s over now.’ Vincent led Theo to his room and sat by him while he fell back to sleep.
When he returned to his room, Madeleine was sitting on the side of the bed reading the cuttings that Theo had been trying to burn. The headline read: Young Boy in Pepper Hill Responsible for Mother’s Death by Fire. Vincent took the singed cuttings and read the article. This was what Father Dominic could never bring himself to tell.
‘Will telling the story be sufficient to free him from this trauma? Is this what was attempted in the cloister? Father Dominic had been explicit about the flying, but not about the fire. We need to watch the boy, Madeleine. I’ll sleep next to him tonight.’
They each went to bed with heavy hearts, and minds stretched beyond their believing.
The news had caught like a fire in a cane piece crop time in the dry season. People way up in Indian Valley, the men and women in the huts along the coast, had heard the news before it even reached the quiet slumber of Father Meyer’s presbytery on the point. He was late this morning for the nuns’ morning mass. Not even the sisters, just coming out of Matins, over at the convent, were aware of the news.
Vincent, Madeleine and Theo were dead to the world, following Theo’s revelation of his crime in the early hours of the morning.
Parrots, with their agitated green screams, caught the news and flung it loud across Chac Chac Bay.
No sooner had that British Bulldog’s voice crackled and growled over the radio early this morning, than the tassa drums, like at Hosay, had begun to use the opportunity for a kind of Jour Ouvert morning ole mas. People came out of their huts in nighties and pyjamas to see what had happened in the night, and was now being celebrated at dawn.
‘Germany surrender!’ One fella shouted to another, one woman knocked on the door of her neighbour to announce. It was the phrase on every lip. ‘Germany surrender! Watch Mr Hitler moustache.’ It was like every carnival which had been banned by the Governor because of the war, every calypso which had been censored for insurrection, got now an opportunity to come out onto the road, onto the mud tracks, the gravel paths, where the barefoot people of El Caracol had tread these weary years, to shake themself, sing themself, loud, loud!
Yes, it was the end of the war. In one sense, people sung about that, but it was a release for so much more that had been borne and suffered here, that they wanted to use the permission of the time to dissent.
The Angelus at Saint Damian’s was never so joyously and wildly rung, school children taking turns at the tolling. Young fellas began to buss bamboo like it was the sweet Christmas season; the bamboo young and exploding in the hills.
It was Jonah who came down the road taking over from the chantwell and the old tambour bamboo band some fellas had collected: the bass bamboo, the cutters, chandlers and the foule, beating the music the people had to make when the skin music and the Shango drum get ban. People say the tamboo bamboo band as sweet as the John John tamboo bamboo, as sweet as the Belmont, Cadiz Road tamboo bamboo. Jonah had the voice of the Shango from down in Moruga. He raised his arms and then poured libations on the road, and called upon the Orishas: “Ogun. Ye Manja!” Plenty people beat their bottle and spoon.
But, suddenly, men, women and children were making their way along the mud paths, the gravel tracks and the red dirt ground, for a new sound; a kind of iron sound, the sound of iron beating on iron.
Olga Cardinez came out of one of the huts beating her soap box, while her neighbour, Marjorie Rojas, beat her bucket. One fella, John Mendes, came out beating a sweet-oil pan. People pick up pitch-oil pan, biscuit tin, and milk can. But the sound everyone was moving towards was a kind of ping pong, a sound that those who were lucky had heard once, or twice, when the young fella who had come from Laventille, that bad John place in Porta España, behind the bridge, over the Dry River; the one who came with the illness and was forging cut-down oil drums in his back yard.
In the heat of his fire he was ponging out an instrument of music, sounding light and trembling: a little shy this music this first morning, as if all creation right here bow down and stop to listen to this new kind of ping, this new kind of pong which make the very palm trees pick up the music.
And, suddenly, it was as if people sensed that this belong to them, and they gathered behind the young fella from Laventille and some few fellas he had persuaded to join him. They followed behind him with pan that does make the du dup sound, a bass pan from a big oil drum. And one fella who they call Mauby, because of how he like the drink, beat a big Bermudez biscuit tin, slap bass. They replace the big bamboo bass, the one that does make the bass sound in the tambour bamboo band because too many people foot get hurt. Doctor Metivier would’ve be glad to see that as his patients dance their music.
They made their way down to the meeting place beneath the big almond tree where Krishna Singh greeted them with speeches of freedom, and where a set of Hindu people were chanting mantra like it Pagwa or Ramleela.
&
nbsp; ‘Come people, come!’ Krishna Singh shouted.
The whole place come out.
All the politics talk, all the cries for Justice, for Bread, for Rights and Wages, for Humanity, get turned into the music which was now filling the whole island of El Caracol, and waking those sleeping in the priest’s house and the Doctor’s House with the tintabulation of the iron. People catch the rhythm, the semitone melody, jumping wild on the ground. The whole place was catching fire. People sense the beauty in the music in the ping pong, but they sense too, they feel too, a kind of violence which was the violence of the fire out of which this music was made, a kind of violence that was needed to burn that music out. They felt the hot iron in the fire, and with that they pick up sticks, to walk with sticks like fighters to the gayelle. With the iron and the trembling noise of the pan was the old time lavway that people sang, to make their life sweet and to take away the violence.
Suddenly, a child’s voice drew attention to a figure coming down from right on top of the hill above the hospital. Those who knew this Anansi figure on crutches, who knew the trickster, Ti-Jean, the exuberant boy of the yard, laughed and pointed, ‘Watch Ti-Jean, watch Petit Jean! Watch my boy!’ Crutches going like the legs of a spider, Ti-Jean had decked himself out in rags, all kind of pieces of coloured cloth, to give himself the cloak of Pierrot, storyteller extraordinaire. He was descending to people with a long tamarind stick in his hand which was the wand that Pierrot does carry, and he was bowing and receiving the applause of the crowd who parted for the favourite of the yard to make his Pierrot dance. As he descended, Ti-Jean was singing a melée of calypsos: ‘I heard an ex-soldier exclaim never me go fight again.’
‘Sing Ti-Jean, give us the melody!’ people cried out.
Night Calypso Page 40