Such were the messages that Silvio Fabricius, austere, introspective, unnoticing, his mind fully preoccupied with his brotherhood to the tree, brought to his tribe; proceeding, the message delivered, austerely back to his station beside the magnificent palm.
All this, because of my status as the great-nephew of an old Bukra whom he remembered with love and reverence, and because he discovered that I knew about tree-men and many other matters usually sealed books to Bukras, the old fellow who was the village patriarch, who, by right of his seniority, received and passed on from Silvio the messages from Silvio’s brother the tree, amply substantiated. There was nothing secretive about him, once he knew my interest in these things. Such procedure as securing the possession of a tree-man for his tribe seemed to the old man entirely reasonable; there was no necessary secret about it, certainly not from sympathetic me, the ‘yoong marster’ of Great Fountain Estate.
And Hans Grumbach, once he had finished with his road-work, not being aware of all this, but sensing something out of the ordinary and hence to be feared about Silvio Fabricius and his palm tree, decided to end the stupidness out there. Grumbach decided to cut down the tree.
If I had had any inkling of this intention I could have saved Grumbach. It would have been a comparatively simple matter for me to have said enough to Carrington to have him forbid it; or, indeed, as a partner in the control of the estate, to forbid it myself. But I knew nothing about it, and have in my statement of his intention to destroy the tree supplied my own conception of his motives.
Grumback, although virtually Caucasian in appearance, was of mixed blood, and quite without the Caucasian background of superior quality which makes the educated West Indian mestizo the splendid citizen he is in so many notable instances. His white ancestry was derived from a grandfather, a Schleswig-Holsteiner, who had been a sergeant of the Danish troops stationed on Santa Cruz and who, after the term of his enlistment had expired, had married into a respectable colored family, and remained on the island. Grumbach was without the Caucasian aristocrat’s tolerance for the preoccupations of the blacks. To him such affairs were ‘stupidness’, merely. Like others of his kind he held the black people in a kind of contempt; was wholly, I imagine, without sympathy for them, though a worthy fellow enough in his limited way. And, perhaps, he had not enough Negro in him to understand instinctively even so much as what Silvio Fabricius, the tree-man, stood for in his community.
I had, too, you will remember, known something in those six years, of his viewpoints, his reactions to the ‘stupidness’, and, specifically, some knowledge at least of his direct reaction, his pique and resentment, as these arose from his contacts with the tree-man. As I have indicated, the element of fear colored this attitude.
He chose, cannily, one of the periods when Fabricius was away from his tree, reporting to the village. It was early in the afternoon, and Grumbach, having finished his roadwork several days before, was directing a group of laborers who were grubbing ancient ‘bush’ – heavy undergrowth, brush, rank weeds, small trees – from along the winding trail which led from the village to the fountain or waterfall. This was now feeding a tumbling stream which Carrington intended to dam, lower down, for a central reserve reservoir.
The majority, if not all, of these laborers under his eye at the moment were new to the village; members of the increasing group which were coming into the restored stone cabins as fast as these became habitable. They were cutting out the brush with machetes, canebills, and knives; and, for the small trees, a couple of axes were being used from time to time. This work was being done quite near the great tree, and from his position in the roadway overlooking his gang, Grumbach must have seen the tree-man leave his station and start toward the village with one of his ‘messages’.
This opportunity – he had, unquestionably, made up his mind about it all – was too good to be lost. As I learned from the two men whom he detached from his grubbing-gang and took with him, Silvio Fabricius was hardly out of sight over the sweep of the lower portion of the great field near the upper edge of which the coconut-palm towered, when Grumbach called to the two axe-men to follow him, and, with a word to the rest of the gang, led the way across the field’s edge to the tree.
About this time Carrington and I were returning from one of our inspections of the fountain. We had been up there several times of late, since the scheme for the dam had been working in our minds. We were returning toward the village and the construction work progressing there along the same pathway through the big field from which, years before, I had had my first sight of the tree-man.
As we came in sight of the tree, toward which I invariably looked when I was near it, I saw, of course, that Fabricius was not there. Grumbach and his two laborers stood under it, Grumbach talking to the men. One of them as we approached – we were still perhaps a hundred yards distant – shook his head emphatically. He told me later that Grumbach had led them straight to the tree and commanded them to chop it down.
Both men had demurred. They were not of the village, it is true, not, certainly, Dahomeyans. But – they had some idea, even after generations away from ‘Guinea’, that here was something strange; something over which the suitable course was to ‘go stupid’. Both men, therefore, ‘went stupid’ forthwith.
Grumbach, as was usual with him, poor fellow, was vastly annoyed by this process. I could hear him barge out at the laborers; see him gesticulate. Then from the nearest, he seized the axe and attacked the tree himself. He struck a savage blow at it, then, gathering himself together, for he was stout like the middle-aged of all his class, and unused to such work, he struck again, somewhat above the place where the first axe-blow had landed on the tree.
‘You’d better stop him, Carrington,’ said I, ‘and I will explain my reasons to you afterward.’
Carrington cupped his hands and shouted, and both Negroes looked toward us. But Grumbach, apparently, had not heard, or, if he had, supposed that the words were directed to somebody other than himself. Thus, everybody within view was occupied, you will note – Carrington looking at Grumbach; the two laborers looking toward us; Grumbach intent upon making an impression on the tough coconut wood. I alone, for some instinctive reason, thought suddenly of Silvio Fabricius, and directed my gaze toward the point, down the long field, over which horizon he would appear when returning.
Perhaps it was the sound of the axe’s impact against his brother the tree apprehended by a set of senses for seventeen years attuned to the tree’s moods and rustlings, to the ‘messages’ which his brother the tree imparted to him; perhaps some uncanny instinct merely, that arrested him in his course toward the village down there, carrying the current ‘message’ from the tree about tomorrow’s weather.
As I looked, Silvio Fabricius, running lightly, erect, came over the distant horizon of the lower field’s bosomed slope. He stopped there, a distant figure, but clearly within my view. Without taking my eyes off him I spoke again to Carrington.
‘You must stop Grumbach, Carrington – there’s more in this than you know. Stop him – at once!’
And, as Carrington shouted a second time, Grumbach raised the axe for the third blow at the tree, the blow which did not land.
As the axe came up, Silvio Fabricius, a distant figure down there, reached for the small sharp canebill which hung beside him from his trouser-belt, a cutting tool with which he smoothed the bark of his brother the tree on occasion, cut out annually the choking mass of ‘cloth’ from its top, removed fading fronds as soon as their decay reached the stage where they were no longer benefiting the tree, cut his coconuts. I could see the hot sunlight flash against the wide blade of the canebill as though it had been a small heliograph-mirror. Fabricius was about a thousand yards away. He raised the canebill empty in the air, and with it made a sudden, cutting, pulling motion downward; a grave, almost a symbolic movement. Fascinated, I watched him return the canebill to its place, on its hook, fastened to the belt at the left side.
But, a
bruptly, my attention was distracted to what was going on nearer at hand. Carrington’s shout died, half-uttered. Simultaneously I heard the yells of uncontrollable sudden terror from the two laborers at the tree’s foot. My eyes, snatched away from the distant tree-man, turned to Carrington beside me, glimpsing a look of terrified apprehension; then, with the speed of thought, toward the tree where one laborer was in the act of falling face-downward on the ground – I caught the terrified white gleam of his rolled eyes – the other, twisting himself away from the tree toward us, the very personification of crude horror, his hands over his eyes. And my glance was turned just in time to see the great coconut which, detached from its heavy, fibrous cordage up there, sixty feet about the ground, struck Grumbach full and true on the wide pitch helmet which he affected, planterwise, against the sun.
He seemed almost to be driven into the ground by the impact. The axe flew off at an angle past the tree.
He never moved. And when, with the help of the two laborers, Carrington and I, having summoned a cart from the nearby road-gang cutting bushes, lifted the body, the head which had been that poor devil Grumbach’s, was merely a mass of sodden pulp.
We took the body down the road in the cart, toward his newly erected manager’s house. And a few yards along our way Silvio Fabricius passed us, running erectly, his somber face expressionless, his stride a kind of dignified lope, glancing not to right or left, speeding straight to his brother the tree which had been injured in his absence.
Looking back, where the road took a turn, I saw him, leaning now close beside the tree, his long fingers probing the two gashes which Hans Grumbach, who would never swing another axe, had made there, about two feet above the ground; while aloft the glorious fronds of the massive tree burgeoned like great sails in the afternoon Trade.
Later that afternoon we sent the mortal remains of Hans Grumbach down the long hill road to Frederiksted in a cart, decently disposed, after telephoning his wife’s relatives to break the sorrowful news to her. It was Carrington who telephoned, at my suggestion. I told him that they would appreciate it, he being the head of the company. Such nuances have their meaning in the West Indies where the finer shades are of an importance. He explained that it was an accident, gave the particulars as he had seen them with his own eyes – Grumbach had been working under a tall coconut-palm and a heavy coconut, falling, had struck him and killed him instantly. It had been a quite merciful death.
The next morning, I walked up toward the fountain again, alone, after a sleepless night of cogitation. I walked across the section of field between the newly-grubbed roadside and the great tree. I walked straight up to the tree-man, stood beside him. He paid no attention to me whatever. I spoke to him.
‘Fabricius,’ said I, ‘it is necessary that I should speak to you.’
The tree-man turned his gaze upon me gravely. Seen thus, face to face, he was a remarkably handsome fellow, now about thirty years of age, his features regular, his expression calm, inscrutable; wise with a wisdom certainly not Caucasian, such as to put into my mind the phrase: ‘not of this world’. He bowed, gravely, as though assuring me of his attention.
I said: ‘I was looking at you yesterday afternoon when you came back to your tree, over the lower end of the field – down there.’ I indicated where he had stood with a gesture. Again he bowed, without any change of expression.
‘I wish to have you know,’ I continued, ‘that I understand; that no one else besides me saw you, saw what you did – with the canebill, I mean. I wish you to know that what I saw I am keeping to myself. That is all.’
Silvio Fabricius the tree-man continued to look into my face, without any visible change whatever in his expression. For the third time he nodded, presumably to indicate that he understood what I had said, but utterly without any emotion whatever. Then, in a deep, resonant voice, he spoke to me, the first and last time I have ever heard him utter a word.
‘Yo’ loike to know, yoong marster,’ said he, with an impressive gravity, ‘me brudda’ – he placed a hand against the tree’s smooth trunk – ‘t’ink hoighly ’bout yo’, sar. Ahlso ’bout de enterprise fo’ pineopples. Him please’, sar. Ahlso marster; him indicate-me yo’ course be serene an’ ahlso of a profit.’ The tree-man bowed again, and without another word or so much as a glance in my direction, detaching his attention from me as deliberately as he had given it when I first spoke to him, he turned toward his brother the tree, laid his face against its bark, and slowly encircled the massive trunk with his two great muscular black arms.
I arrived on the island in the middle of October 1928, coming down as usual from New York after my summer in the States. Great Fountain had suffered severely in the hurricane of the previous month, and when I arrived there I found Carrington well along with the processes of restoration. Many precautions had been taken beforehand and our property had been damaged because of these much less than the other estates. I had told Carrington, who had a certain respect for my familiarity with ‘native manners and customs’, enough about the tree-man and his functions tribally to cause him to heed the warning, transmitted by the now nearly helpless old patriarch of the village, and brought in by the tree-man four days before the hurricane broke – and two days before the government cable-advice had reached the island.
Silvio Fabricius had stayed beside his tree. On the third day, when it was for the first time possible for the villagers to get as far as the upper end of the great field near the fountain, he had been found, Carrington reported to me, lying in the field, dead, his face composed inscrutably, the great trunk of his brother the tree across his chest which had been crushed by its great weight when it had been uprooted by the wind and fallen.
And until they wore off there had been smears of earth, Carrington said, on the heads and faces of all the original Dahomeyan villagers and upon the heads and faces of several of the newer laborer families as well.
Passing of a God
‘You say that when Carswell came into your hospital over in Port au Prince his fingers looked as though they had been wound with string,’ said I, encouragingly.
‘It is a very ugly story, that, Canevin,’ replied Doctor Pelletier, still reluctant, it appeared.
‘You promised to tell me,’ I threw in.
‘I know it, Canevin,’ admitted Doctor Pelletier of the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, now stationed here in the Virgin Islands. ‘But,’ he proceeded, ‘you couldn’t use this story, anyhow. There are editorial tabus, aren’t there? The thing is too – what shall I say? – too outrageous, too incredible.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted in turn, ‘there are tabus, plenty of them. Still, after hearing about those fingers, as though wound with string – why not give me the story, Pelletier; leave it to me whether or not I “use” it. It’s the story I want, mostly. I’m burning up for it!’
‘I suppose it’s your lookout,’ said my guest. ‘If you find it too gruesome for you, tell me and I’ll quit.’
I plucked up hope once more. I had been trying for this story, after getting little scraps of it which allured and intrigued me, for weeks.
‘Start in,’ I ventured, soothingly, pushing the silver swizzel-jug after the humidor of cigarettes from which Pelletier was even now making a selection. Pelletier helped himself to the swizzel frowningly. Evidently he was torn between the desire to pour out the story of Arthur Carswell and some complication of feelings against doing so. I sat back in my wicker lounge-chair and waited.
Pelletier moved his large bulk about in his chair. Plainly now he was cogitating how to open the tale. He began, meditatively: ‘I don’t know as I ever heard public discussion of the malignant bodily growths except among medical people. Science knows little about them. The fact of such diseases, though, is well known to everybody, through campaigns of prevention, the life insurance companies, appeals for funds –
‘Well, Carswell’s case, primarily, is one of those cases.’
He paused and gazed into the glowing end of his cigarette.
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br /> ‘ “Primarily”?’ I threw in encouragingly.
‘Yes. Speaking as a surgeon, that’s where this thing begins, I suppose.’
I kept still, waiting.
‘Have you read Seabrook’s book, The Magic Island, Canevin?’ asked Pelletier suddenly.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘What about it?’
‘Then I suppose that from your own experience knocking around the West Indies and your study of it all, a good bit of that stuff of Seabrook’s is familiar to you, isn’t it? – the vodu, and the hill customs, and all the rest of it, especially over in Haiti – you could check up on a writer like Seabrook, couldn’t you, more or less?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘practically all of it was an old story to me – a very fine piece of work, however, the thing clicks all the way through – an honest and thorough piece of investigation.’
‘Anything in it new to you?’
‘Yes – Seabrook’s statement that there was an exchange of personalities between the sacrificial goat – at the “baptism” – and the young Black girl, the chapter he calls: Girl-Cry – Goat-Cry. That, at least, was a new one on me, I admit.’
‘You will recall, if you read it carefully, that he attributed that phenomenon to his own personal “slant” on the thing. Isn’t that the case, Canevin?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I think that is the way he put it.’
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 56