Cross on the Drum

by Cave, Hugh

  "Barry Clinton, from Fond Marie."

  "Good heavens! At this hour?" The sounds of groping became louder and the grumbling was lost in a spasm of wheezing and throat clearing. Then, "Come in, come in!" the voice croaked. "Just let me find my trousers."

  Barry stepped inside, glad to get out of the sun. This wing of the house consisted of two rooms. The one he stood in was a reception room, apparently. It contained a number of peasant-made chairs and a rude desk. The other was Mr. Mitchell's bedroom.

  Just now the old missionary was evidently struggling into his clothes after getting out of bed. Or, more properly, getting off the bed. In this climate it was the custom to stretch out on top of the bed in one's underwear, or one's shorts at least, for the noon siesta.

  A strip of once-white cloth with green holly leaves and faded poinsettias on it hung in the connecting doorway. It must have been a Christmas tablecloth once. The floor was of pine planks and not very clean, showing the prints of dusty bare feet.

  The tablecloth rustled aside and Leander Mitchell, once of Baltimore, shuffled into view with two limp hands outthrust. His appearance to Barry was a shock. He was a hunched-up little man with fever-bright eyes, dressed in wrinkled dark trousers and an unbuttoned shirt that badly needed laundering. The native-made sisal slippers on his small feet were coming apart.

  "Welcome, welcome! I didn't dream you'd climb from the beach in this heat!"

  "It was a climb," Barry admitted.

  "Sit, sit!" The old man thrust him toward a chair and went past him to the doorway. "I'll get us something to drink. Hot today. Been like an oven since Friday. Lucille!" he shouted, his voice disintegrating with the effort. "Lucy!"

  He turned and hobbled to a chair, mopping the back of his stringy neck with a soiled handkerchief. He looked hard at Barry's face. Young, he thought. Much too young.

  "How old are you, Mr. Clinton?"

  "Twenty-eight."

  "Even worse than I thought. You're too young for this place. You'll be lonely, lonely. Can you stand being alone?"

  Barry smiled. All his life he'd been alone. As a boy with no brothers or sisters, only an eternally preoccupied father and a mother always busy with social affairs, he'd been alone. At college and theological school, among young men who were uninterested in the things he thought important, he'd been alone. What was so terrible about it?

  "It must be difficult," he said. "Especially at night when the work's done."

  "At night? No, no, not at night. You've time to read then, write letters, listen to the radio if it works." The older man shook his head, looked at the moist handkerchief in his fingers, and thrust it back into his pocket. "It's being among them, among people who don't understand you, can't understand you, never will and never want to; that's what gives you the feeling." He sighed. "I've a nice little place here, don't you think?"

  Barry had seen a number of mission rectories in his three years in St. Joseph, even some of the more remote ones back in the mainland hills. This was by all odds the most primitive. "Very nice indeed," he lied.

  "Should have a concrete floor, of course. The dampness, when it rains. But you can't have everything. How's my good friend Peter Ambrose?"

  "Fine. He's looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. He'll be there with the jeep when you get off the boat."

  "The boat. Oh, my Lord." Mr. Mitchell seemed almost to turn green for a second, but shook himself like a large, bony terrier and raised his head again. "I'm always sick, even when the channel's smooth as glass," he said with a sad smile. "Always have been. And since the trouble with my stomach, it's worse."

  Barry was about to say "What trouble?" when a woman appeared in the doorway. He looked at her with a start. She was the least attractive woman he had seen all day. Her face was long and gaunt. She was thin as a stick. She wore a blue denim dress that appeared to be no more than a mass of patches held together with grime.

  "Lucille, this is Mr. Clinton. He has come to take my place."

  The woman looked Barry over from the dusty shoes on his feet to his coconut-fiber hair. "I am pleased to know you, Father."

  "Thank you, Lucille. I'm pleased to know you too."

  "We'd like something to drink," Mr. Mitchell said.

  "Rum, you mean?"

  The old man glanced at Barry, who smiled wryly and said with a shake of his head, "Not for me, thanks. I'm still climbing that trail."

  "Some coconut for Mr. Clinton, I think, Lucy," the old man decided.

  His housekeeper went out without a reply.

  "I don't think she likes me very much," Mr. Mitchell sighed. "I imagine she's disappointed in me."

  "In what way?"

  "Well, you know, she lived for a time in Anse Ange, and our man there has accomplished a good deal. He has a handsome stone church and a school, all quite impressive. He isn't at the end of the trolley track as I am, you see, and doesn't have to contend with vodun. At least, not the same sort."

  "I wanted to ask you about that."

  The island cleric sighed again. "Ask me how to fight it, you mean? If I'd discovered that, I wouldn't be turning my job over to you, would I?"

  "I was told you've been poisoned."

  "Who told you?"

  "Miss Barnett, at Couronne. She heard it from Warner Lemke and a boy named Pradon Beliard. Beliard is a nephew of your Lucille, I believe."

  "It doesn't matter. I suppose I have been poisoned. I really don't know."

  "But surely—"

  "Oh, they don't always use the famous 'three deadly drops.' " The old man waved a limp hand in protest. "When they just want to discourage you, they have milder methods. You wake up one morning with a headache and blame it on the heat. Take aspirin. Headache seems to go away but next morning you have it again, worse, with an upset stomach to boot. You're not really sick, understand. Nothing like dengue, malaria, tick bite, that sort of thing. You just don't feel right. You never quite feel right. Day by day it gets you down a little more—"

  Lucille came in, bearing a rusty metal tray on which were balanced a half-full bottle of St. Joseph rum, an empty glass, and a second glass filled with cloudy coconut water. Reaching for his drink, Barry welcomed the moment of silence.

  The trouble here was age, obviously. The Bishop had blundered in sending a man as old as Leander Mitchell to such a place. Old men did well enough in established missions, but Mr. Mitchell had had to move mountains with no one to help him. He'd had to build the church and this house. Probably he'd lived in a native hut while doing so. He'd had to wrestle with vodun for a congregation. All this when he was tired, discouraged, half sick from the heat, and lonely. He couldn't be blamed for failure.

  Leander Mitchell poured himself a generous measure of rum and drank half of it down at once, leaned back on his chair, and frowned at his successor. It would never work, he told himself. They might have made it work by sending a man of fifty or so, with solid years of experience behind him, but this one was too green, too innocent. Ile du Vent was no place for a man so young. The vodun was only part of the problem. He'd be faced with temptation constantly. Every time he walked about the island there would be girls bathing. Nude girls, in the streams and on the beaches. A man would have to be blind not to see them, and a hundred years old not to notice how attractive they were. He knew what it was like, and he was seventy-two. You thought about it too much. Why, only last week a girl as lovely as Eve, a girl he knew well, had stepped out of a stream as he passed and tried to drag him off the path. "I want a white baby, Father," she had begged. "Give me a white baby!" And when he had been indignant and lectured her, she had spat at him. And he an old man!

  No, young Clinton would never last. Vodun, loneliness, temptation—the odds were too great. He was too young, too good-looking. There'd be no peace for him.

  The old man poured a second rum and sipped it. "Stomach," he muttered apologetically. He waited a moment for his housekeeper to depart, then went on, "It began about five weeks ago. I'm not really sick, you can see t
hat, but I'm not well either. I have to lie down every two or three hours or—"

  A commotion in the yard interrupted him. Finishing his drink, he struggled from his chair.

  Barry Clinton thought him a very sick man indeed.

  AT THE DOOR Mr. Mitchell said, "This is your gear, I imagine. We'll just stow it here in the office for tonight, and after I'm gone tomorrow you can put it where you like."

  Pradon Beliard had come into the yard with five men from the beach, all but Pradon burdened with Barry's belongings. The men looked hot and tired. Motioning them to put down their loads, the boy said to Barry, "I told them you would pay them a gourde apiece."

  "Take the stuff back," Mr. Mitchell rumbled.

  "What?"

  "You know the going rate as well as I do. They get fifty cob. If you promised them more, you'll pay the rest out of your pocket." Barry felt uncomfortable. "I really don't mind—"

  "Don't be a fool," the old cleric cut him off in English. "The lad's just trying you on for size."

  "But is it wise to make an enemy of him?"

  "Wiser than getting off on the wrong foot before the lot of them. Give them fifty cob each. Pay them yourself. Don't let him do it."

  It was not the way Barry would have handled the situation, but he followed instructions. The old man's sudden spurt of efficiency surprised him. It was a mistake to judge a man too quickly. He paid the men from the beach and they departed without comment. He turned to Pradon Beliard and was startled by the malevolence in the boy's eyes, then doubly startled by its abrupt disappearance.

  "Good for you, sir." Pradon was grinning now. "They told me they wouldn't come up here for less than a gourde. No, no," he protested as Barry began to count out money for his own services. "Mr. Barnett instructed me to help you get settled."

  Barry hesitated. He was not sure he wanted help in getting settled, or clear about how he could be helped. He neither liked nor wholly trusted this fellow. But I could be wrong, he thought. Surely Jeff Barnett knows the lad better than I do.

  "Well, there's nothing to be done today," he said.

  "I will be here tomorrow then. A demain, mon Père." Without a glance at old Mr. Mitchell, Pradon swung on his heel and limped away.

  LEANDER MITCHELL LED THE WAY back to the house, pausing only to peer at the word médicaments on the topmost carton of the pile by the door. Inside he took up his empty glass, frowned at it, and put it down with a sigh. "He's a sharp one, that boy," he said. "I'd be careful of him if I were you."

  "But he's your housekeeper's nephew."

  "I know. And a more honest woman than Lucille you won't find on the whole island. But that doesn't make him honest. Lucy herself has precious little use for him."

  "I see."

  The old man smiled. "It's hard, isn't it? They all look so much alike, you're tempted to think they are alike."

  No, Barry thought, recalling the faces on the boat. They're not all alike, even in looks. They're big and little, thin and fat, short and tall, ugly and beautiful. A common blackness of skin doesn't make them similar. It would be as foolish to say that all whites are alike.

  "You asked about the vodun," Leander Mitchell said.

  Barry emptied his mind and leaned forward.

  "It's hard to know what to tell you. I almost think you'd be better off if I went without saying anything at all, let you discover things for yourself and put your own value on them. I've been wrong so many times."

  "Anything you can tell me would be a great help, I'm sure."

  The island missionary looked longingly again at his empty glass, half shoved himself from his chair, then fell back and fumbled for his handkerchief. He drank too much. He knew he drank too much. Before coming to Ile du Vent he had scarcely touched the stuff—only a bottle of cold beer now and then on a hot day—but here it was like medicine; it helped a man to keep going. "There are four thousand people here." His voice had become thick. "They know what the church is, most of 'em—they've been over to Anse Angebut here on the island, before I came, they worshipped their gods of vodun. They still do, I'm afraid." He shook his head in sadness. "I can count on one hand the few I've really won over. But that's beside the point, isn't it? What you want to know is who'll be fighting you."

  Barry nodded, trying to be patient.

  "Number One is a man named Catus Laroche. He's the big fellow here."

  Barry's mind, though an empty bowl extended for filling, nevertheless was active on the perimeter. "I met a girl named Micheline Laroche on the boat. Very pretty girl. Very friendly."

  "His sister."

  "Then I know your Catus, or think I do. There was a fellow on the boat who looked ever so much like her. Fellow about my age and build, with thin lips and a sharp nose. Had a front tooth missing."

  "And wore a ring with a square green stone?"

  "That's right, he did."

  "His wedding ring," Mr. Mitchell said dryly. "He's married to one of the loa."

  "I don't think I understand."

  "Who does, really? It's a queer business. There was a girl in the capital some years back, a popular dancer, married to one of the gods, or at least they said she was. One day every week she disappeared; spent the day communing with him, I suppose. She tired of it finally and became the wife of a young fellow in the dance troupe. Within a month he was dead, laid low by some devilish sickness that wasted him away. The girl went back to the hills where she came from." Mr. Mitchell shrugged. There was so much he could tell this young Clinton about vodun if he got started. He had no intention of getting started. Tell the truth and you were thought queer or accused of drinking too much. But he knew what he knew.

  "The only thing you've got to understand," he said, "and thoroughly, is that Catus Laroche is a devil. I mean that. He'll fight you every step of the way, every move you make, every breath you draw. You'll begin to think after a time that he was put here by the devil for the express purpose of tormenting you."

  "Isn't he young to be so important?" Barry asked. If there was one character in the scriptures he considered a creature of pure superstition, it was the devil. But this was no time to say so.

  "Young but smart. What he knows he learned from old Salmador, who died here about four years ago. I've been told, by people who ought to know, that Salmador was the most powerful houngan in all St. Joseph. You know what a houngan is, don't you?"

  "Yes, of course. A high priest."

  "Catus Laroche was this one's protege. Catus is a big houngan himself now."

  Barry recalled his brief conversation with Laroche on the trail up the mountain, and his shock on discovering how much he and the fellow resembled each other. "He seemed decent enough," he protested mildly.

  "Heaven help you."

  "Oh, I don't mean that I intend to take your advice lightly. It's just that when I talked to him—"

  He fell silent, aware that the island missionary was no longer listening but was gazing past him at the doorway. Barry turned on his chair and rose slowly to his feet. The man they had been talking about stood framed in the entrance.

  "YOU CAME HERE from Fond Marie, did you not, Father?"

  “Yes.”

  "You worked at the clinic there?"

  "I did."

  "Does this mean you are a doctor?"

  Barry returned the gaze and felt himself stiffen against its challenge. He did not answer at once. With the words of Leander Mitchell fresh in his mind, he felt this was the time to size up his adversary and make at least a tentative mental list of his apparent faults and virtues. He should, he supposed, classify the fellow as evil without any qualifications. It was against his nature to do that. He appraised his foe in silence.

  He saw only a little more than he had seen before. The same graceful body garbed only in khaki trousers. The almost handsome face with its intelligent, alert eyes. The gap where a front tooth ought to be. The massive ring with its distinctive green stone on the third finger.

  The one added feature he noticed was not a
feature at all, really. Perhaps it was no more than a product of his imagination. He thought he detected a hint of mockery in Catus Laroche's level gaze.

  "I'm not a doctor," he said at last. "But I do know something about medicine. Why do you ask?"

  "A child of my sister is dying."

  "Dying!”

  "She cut her foot on a machete some days ago. The wound would not heal. Now the sickness has traveled all through her."

  "Where is she?"

  "At my sister's caille. I could not bring her here; she is too sick."

  "And you want me to go there with you? Is that what you're asking?"

  It was the houngan's turn to initiate a silence, and this time Barry was certain of the mockery. But still it was only a phantom turn of the lips, nothing so obvious as a sneer or a shrugged shoulder.

  Laroche did not know his lips had moved. He was embarrassed, uncomfortable. It was a terrible thing, his having had to come here to ask the Father's help. It would lower him in the esteem of every living soul on Ile du Vent. He was a houngan. A houngan held the secrets of life and death. To admit that he could not save the life of his own sister's child was to confess that he was out of touch with the loa.

  He had thought all this over before coming. For a long time, or what seemed a long time, he had knelt beside the mat on which the child lay moaning. With all the force of his mind he willed the mystères to help him; the effort had caused sweat to stream down his face and drip on his knees. What else could he do, short of holding a service? A service would take too long. The child must have help at once.

  He had to say something now; the Father was waiting. He took in a deep breath, hating the man for forcing him to beg. But he did not beg. Not even to save his own life could he have made himself do that. "You are a priest," he said, "and you say you know something of medicine. I ask you nothing. It is a priest's duty to help the sick, is it not?"

  Barry Clinton sighed and lowered his gaze in defeat. So endeth the first battle, he thought. He turned to old Mr. Mitchell. "I don't suppose I'll be long. Why don't you go back to your nap? We can talk again when I return."