Night Calypso

by Lawrence Scott

  And he continued with the songs of the time with broken lines, words from here and there as he came like a moco jumbie on stilts, as he manoeuvred his way over the rock stones and the red dirt paths to come and stand right there under the tall and broad almond tree. ‘Petit Jean, Petit Jean,’ the children cried, and the old women reached out to touch the hem of the Pierrot’s cloak, worn by the wonder child who gave them all hope, as he buzzed about the yards. People joined in with the sweet sweet calypso which the ping pong pan was picking up and accompanying them, as they had never been accompanied before. ‘All you hear the beat of the steel band. You hear the semitone melody, how it have people jumping in the street.’

  Another calypso started up. All day All night Miss Mary Ann down by the seaside sifting sand…’ People were crowded onto the beach below the jetty, the waves breaking and thundering, adding to the music of the ping pong pan and the sweet calypso coming from the mouths of children, old men, old women, and young fellas with their girlfriends, taking the opportunity to grab their sweethearts and chip down the road.

  The Maria Concepción arrived from the convent. At the same time, Vincent and Madeleine, with Theo in the bow, arrived having rowed from the Doctor’s House. Father Meyer had called to them and they had given the priest a ride. ‘Well, this morning we must ride together.’ Even now, Madeleine turned away from what she remembered of his disapproving stares and advice in the confessional. They were all disembarking at the jetty at the same time. In the confusion, Madeleine lost herself in the crowd so as not to have to encounter Mother Superior.

  Suddenly, there was a cry which rose from the crowd, and the music died down. There was the wail of one woman’s voice. ‘Watch! He falling,’ and those nearby surrounded the fallen Ti-Jean. His crutches had collapsed under him, and he had fallen unconscious to the ground. There was the soft movement of the palms and the breaking of the waves on the beach. A high wind caught the trees. One fella still played a gentle ping pong, ping pong until an old lady came and rested her hand on his playing hands, just able to clutch, and folded his ping pong sticks with the rubber tips.

  ‘The child fall,’ she said.

  ‘Call the doctor! Call the doctor!’ Vincent heard the cry and was running in the direction of the voice and people who made way for the doctor to come through the crowd, to where Ti-Jean had fallen on the ground. When they tried to give the boy some air, and took off his cloak of rags, they found that he had strapped the crutches to his body, because he could no longer clutch at them. He had used them like splints to walk and heave his way, make his nimble Anansi spider dance. They began to dismantle him, like he was a doll.

  It was then that Vincent saw the extent of Ti-Jean’s injuries, the state that his sores had become. His inability to feel pain had made him irresponsible. The infection had given the boy a raging temperature.

  Theo crept through the crowd to be near to Vincent. Madeleine kept herself to the edges. Sister Rita had found her for a quick word, but then gone to Vincent’s assistance. Jonah and Krishna were looking after the crowd of Saint Damian’s who were there this morning for VE Day, and for the freedom they wanted for themselves.

  Some fellas helped to take Ti-Jean to the hospital. Some people did not have the heart now for the celebration, while other people stayed under the almond tree, not wanting to leave each other, because of the spirit that had risen among them.

  The news began to spread like cane fire, that the wonder boy, Petit Jean, had passed away, just so, in the arms of Doctor Metivier. Women and children, boys and girls, old fellas and young fellas wept openly for Petit Jean.

  Madeleine returned to the Doctor’s House. She wanted to be with Vincent, but she dared not go the hospital. As she turned onto the back track, she caught sight of him on the verandah of the childrens’ ward and waved. He waved back, reassured.

  Jonah and Krishna went up to the ward to see Vincent. ‘Like you lose your son, Doc.’

  ‘Yes Jonah, he was a remarkable boy. He gave so many others hope, by his spirit.’ Vincent wept openly.

  ‘We’ll bury him good, Doc,’ Krishna joined in. ‘Jonah and I, we’ll see about the wake and the digging of the grave. Don’t take it too hard, Doc.’ Krishna put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder.

  They understood each other now. It was as Jonah had said to each of them, ‘You can’t plan love.’ Theo looked on with Christiana. He too understood more about love, noticing Vincent and Thérèse, Singh and Christiana. As Vincent had thought before, there was a healing magic in his night calypso.

  That night, all the drums beat for the wake of Petit Jean. They beat so hard and long that Madeleine heard them over in their bay. It brought her out again, along the back track to mingle in the crowd and the darkness for the wake. People stayed up outside the hospital and congregated under the almond tree. The sisters brought out jugs of coffee, and they passed around sweet biscuits for everyone. This gave Sister Rita a moment to talk with Madeleine. Theo had gone down to the jetty to be with Jonah.

  ‘What a time!’ Sister Rita took Madeleine’s hand.

  ‘I know. A time of joy and sadness.’

  ‘All that has been going on, and discovered in Germany. What will you do?’

  ‘I can only wait. I don’t know how we’ll get the names.’

  ‘It’s a matter of time. A strange time of waiting. While some rejoice, millions must wonder what now.’

  ‘I read the reports of the camps, and I’m left numb. I look at the pictures. All the faces are faces that I know and do not know.’

  ‘And what will happen here? This can’t continue as it is.’

  ‘Jonah and Krishna will not let this continue. Vincent won’t remain silent, as you know.’

  ‘But there have been some improvements.’

  ‘Yes, Vincent tells me. But they want more for their patients, for the people. They want more and they won’t let go. Nothing will deter Singh. I know now that those patients in the hills must not be left like that.’

  While they talked, patients came up to greet Madeleine, not seeing her like they used to. ‘We not forget you, Sister. You looking well. We does ask the docta for you.’

  She smiled. ‘Thank you, thank you. I’ve not forgotten you.’

  Theo stood with Jonah and the young fellas, Bolo and Elroy. They passed around the rum they had got from the fishermen. ‘Take a nip boy, take a nip for Petit Jean.’ Theo took the bottle to his lips and swigged. He coughed and spat it out. ‘Take a next one.’ They sat on the benches, along the jetty, and on the sea wall.

  No one went to their hut or to their ward. They played All Fours and Dominoes, slapping down their pieces hard on the wooden slats of the benches and on the concrete wall. They gambled away the little they had made. Jonah threw in some cents for Theo. He was a big boy now. The police tried to move them on. They were threatened by the Marines, called in to assist the police, but no one moved from the wake of Petit Jean. They stood their ground and the forces did not want to cause trouble this VE night, and at the wake of the wonder boy, Petit Jean.

  Still, Madeleine had not met with Vincent. Then he suddenly appeared when she had finished talking to Sister Rita and whisked her off to the clinic where they used to work. They held on to each other in the darkness, not wanting to draw attention by lighting a lamp. ‘I’m so sorry about Ti-Jean. What a thing!’ Madeleine exclaimed.

  ‘I’d seen it coming. I didn’t know it would be like this.’

  ‘You did all you could.’

  ‘No. Not all. We don’t do our all. Soldiers have Penicillin. They have the Sulfa drugs they can give us. Money is sloshing around Sancta Trinidad. Some get rich fast, but the poor remain poor. Our patients are the poorest of the poor.’ Vincent was angry, angry in his grief.

  ‘Singh and Jonah will demand more,’ Madeleine reassured him.

  ‘Yes, but I’m not convinced of where their way will lead. I worry about the safety of the patients.’

  ‘What should I do now?’

 
; ‘Stay here. I’ll tell Sister Rita. The wake will go on all night. Theo will be fine with Jonah. I must be among the patients.’

  Only in the very early hours of the morning did the drumming stop.

  At six o’clock, as the Angelus was being rung, Joebell, from Indian Valley, who made all the coffins when they were needed, brought one down on his shoulders the size of the young fella. It was made of good, clean and fresh cedar wood. He put it down on the verandah of the childrens’ ward. Inside, the sisters were cleaning up the children, putting on fresh bandages and then sending them off to the yard.

  Eventually, the coffin was taken in for the laying out of Ti-Jean’s body. Vincent was there to do it himself. They dressed the boy in the best white shirt and pants they could find. The coffin had been lined with the best white cloth they found in the sisters’ sewing room. ‘Give him the satin we were going make the new vestments with for Father Meyer.’ Sister Rita put a First Communion chain around Ti-Jean’s neck with a medal of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

  A small procession of children with the coffin, carried by the most able-bodied boys, made its way down the steps into the yard. The smallest girls and boys stood in front of the coffin. They had collected all the white perfumed frangipani flowers they could get. As they began to walk in front of the coffin, they tore at the flowers, its milk staining their fingers, and sprinkled the petals along the path, tossing them above the open coffin, the petals falling over the face and body of Petit Jean in the open coffin. Sister Marie-Paul started the recitation of the rosary. ‘The Five Glorious Mysteries. The First Mystery, The Resurrection of our Lord.’ The only sound were the mass of feet, bare feet and the pound of crutches, of the people moving, who had collected from all corners of Saint Damian’s, and had now joined the procession to the church, where Father Meyer was to conduct the service.

  Vincent went and stood at the front of the church with Theo, next to Jonah and Singh. Thérèse had crept out of the clinic where she had spent the rest of the night, and entered the church at the side entrance.

  Father Meyer intoned the Introit of the mass ‘Requiem aeternam done eis Domine.’ His short sermon talked about the innocence of children and of how Jesus had asked the children to come close to him. Someone, at the back of the church, mumbled the name of Michael Johnson, the policeman who had been burnt before the war.

  Everyone turned around with, ‘Shhh!’

  The sisters led the singing with, ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine,’ for the receiving of Holy Communion.

  Rain caught people on the way to the cemetery as the sisters, led by Father Meyer, sang the Dies Irae. It continued a steady downpour as the young fellas lowered the coffin into the ground in the small cemetery outside the church. As the chaplain intoned ‘In paradisum,’ asking for the angels to lead Ti-Jean into heaven, where he would be met by Lazarus, all remembered how he, Lazarus, had once had leprosy and had been healed by Jesus. Bolo, Elroy, Jonah and Singh accompanied by Vincent, began to fill in the grave, the priest continuing with, ‘Dust to dust ashes to ashes.’

  When Vincent looked up from his shovelling of the earth, he noticed Theo staring at him. ‘Theo, come, come, boy, fill your first grave. You were a pardner of Ti-Jean’s.’ Theo took the spade and shovelled in the earth.

  The Disappearance

  ‘Theo’s disappeared.’ Madeleine stood in the doorway to the verandah. She had made herself a new dress out of some red curtain material, with an old Singer sewing machine she had found in the cupboard of the spare room. It was a desire for colour after all that white, her cocoon of a nun’s habit. The straps of the red dress allowed her brown arms and back to continue getting the sun. She had emerged from her chrysalis. The breeze lifted her red flared skirt, pushed her black curls off her forehead.

  ‘Oh,’ Vincent continued to read The Gazette.

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’

  ‘No, Madeleine.’

  ‘He’s not in his room, or at the back of the house. I was always so sure to see him on the jetty.’

  Vincent looked up from his newspaper. ‘Where’ve you been these days and weeks? He hardly ever fishes now. Probably up on the back track, or further afield with his butterfly net.’

  Butterflies were Theo’s new obsession; a solitary activity which took him away from the house for long periods into the hills, below the barbed wire fences of the American base, trespassing as far as the lighthouse.

  ‘No. He’s not. I went to look for him,’ Madeleine insisted.

  ‘You’re spying on him? What on earth for?’

  ‘I’m worried. Haven’t you noticed? He’s not been in the house, or anywhere near the house since dawn. He had his breakfast early this morning, sitting out on the tank. Not seen him since then. He’s not been to Saint Damian’s, helping with the Rehabilitation Plan at Singh’s.’

  ‘He’s a big boy now. He can look after himself.’

  ‘A big boy? I see. He may be sixteen going on seventeen, but he is still that little boy we fear for.’

  ‘His nights have been much quieter these last few weeks.’

  ‘The calm before the storm.’

  ‘Come and sit down, read the papers. Look at this.’

  Madeleine read the news over Vincent’s shoulder. There had been so much over the last year, months, weeks and almost everyday the fast unravelling of the most terrible things which had been going on. VE Day had come and gone. There were now the ongoing revelations. Vincent stroked Madeleine’s arm over his shoulder. They both read an account by a European journalist quoted in the local Gazette on the liberation of the camps. In the course of my travels into liberated territory, I have never seen such an abominable sight…where more than half a million European men, women, and children were massacred…this is not a concentration camp; it is a gigantic murder plant.

  ‘I can’t read these accounts.’ Yet she continued to read quietly.

  ‘Maybe there’ll be better news any day now.’

  ‘Better? Why? How? With each revelation it gets worse.’

  ‘What’s happened? What’ve you heard?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s the problem. Nothing. There’s nothing to say. Nothing to do. No news. No headlines: Papa Saved! There are just these big events.’

  ‘I know how you must feel.’ Vincent took her hand.

  ‘I think only of myself.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I haven’t asked you about Bernard for ages. What’s his news? I haven’t allowed myself to imagine what has happened to the world, as we continue to live in this small corner.’

  Vincent put the paper down. ‘Everywhere is a small corner. He’s also disappeared. My mother has not had any more letters from the Admiralty.’

  Suddenly, the bright morning had clouded over. The far southern coast of Sancta Trinidad had disappeared.

  ‘Rain again,’ they both said. It poured down, sweeping in off the gulf making them desert the verandah. They sat on the Morris chairs in the drawing room and looked out at the deluge.

  ‘It’ll fill the tank,’ Vincent said.

  ‘Such an August, for El Caracol!’

  Then the downpour stopped, and the rain water dripped and dripped from the leak in the guttering.

  The lunchtime news told of the relentless bombing of over sixty Japanese cities. The incendiary bombs which fired the cities had killed six hundred thousand people. Instead of calls for peace, the Japanese were displaying increased anger. The US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had one moral misgiving about the campaign, which was that the terror bombing might gain America the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.

  Madeleine and Vincent sipped coffee, and talked about the news. There had been the raid of Tokyo earlier in the year, when one hundred and twenty thousand people had been killed, and one million were fleeing into the countryside. Numbers were beyond comprehension. The American crews in the bombers had to wear oxygen masks because of the stench of burning flesh. One report had told of people jumping into
the river Simida to get away from the flames and being boiled to death.

  Jesse had come over one night and spoke of the talk on the base being of early victory, but he and some of his friends had their doubts about what was seen by them as slaughter. They were unusual.

  Theo had not appeared for lunch and was not there when Madeleine took a tray with tea down to the jetty. No one had seen him. His butterfly net was not in its usual place behind the door of his room. Madeleine had checked, looking for any other telltale evidence of his disappearance. They were like a couple with an only child, thought Vincent. That was his fantasy at the moment. He had told her about Odetta recently, but not about the baby. She was like a worried mother. What would be their future? How much longer could they stay here like this?

  ‘Come, give me a kiss. Don’t be so anxious.’ She got up and stood between his legs and bowed her head towards him, her hair falling over his face, and kissed him wildly on the mouth.

  ‘Vincent? What’re we to do?’

  ‘I’ve got to stay and see this thing through with Singh and Jonah.’

  ‘How will that end?’

  ‘I hope well, safe.’ He held her as she continued to look down at him.

  ‘You’re right. You must stay and stand by Jonah and Singh. I think that with you there, things will work for the better,’ she said supportively.

  ‘Rehabilitation is vital. We’re convinced that peoples’ lives will be immeasurably better with a good rehabilitation programme, rather than living in this quarantine. Spend the money on that. I agree. Jonah and Singh in their own ways are set upon it above everything else.’

  ‘What’s the problem for you?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘It is a matter of education. We’ve made strides here, but out there back on Sancta Trinidad, there will be need for education, so that people will accept our patients back. We need family programmes.’

  ‘Well, you see, that’s what I mean. Each of you has a different contribution to make.’