Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  "No, Kim."

  "Remind me to tell you about him sometime. It's the best obeah story you'll ever hear. I'd tell you now, but I have to finish what happened to Roger and I've already talked too much. I almost always do when I get started."

  "Kim, you don't have to—"

  "Yes, I do," the tiny woman said again, though less sharply this time. "The day after my fifty-eighth birthday, in 1928, I was in the kitchen cleaning up after a late supper and heard a crash out in the yard. Roger had been sitting in his wheelchair on the veranda, waiting for me to finish and join him." She paused, and then voiced a soft sigh. "I'll never know what happened. Perhaps he heard something in the yard and tried to get to the top of the steps to see what it was. Perhaps he dozed off without setting the brake, and the chair rolled by itself. When I got out there, the chair was at the foot of the steps, bent all out of shape, and he was lying beside it, unconscious. He died before I could get him to a hospital. He was only sixty. And I've lived alone the last twenty-two years in that same house."

  The Siamese was a curled-up bit of soft warmth on Alison'slap. Silence filled the room. There were voices, Lyle's and Roddy's, from somewhere down the hall, and Alison realized the two must have come in from the veranda by way of the master bedroom so they would not disturb her. Where the twins were she had no idea.

  "Kim, thank you for telling me this." Had she been close enough, she would have reached out to touch the woman. "I feel I know you so much better now that—" Aware that Kim Tulloch's almost colorless eyes were staring at her with strange intensity and seemed incapable of blinking, she stopped in confusion.

  "I've something more to tell you," Kim said then. "It's why I came calling on you so much sooner than I should have, and why I've just told you about myself. It's going to upset you, Alison, but I feel you have to know. May I?"

  Those eyes! And now the woman's tiny hands, like bird-feet, were rigidly gripping the upholstered arms of her chair.

  Apprehension caused Alison's heart to begin racing. "I don't—I don't understand."

  "I have a son, Eric Reckford, who is a barrister." The words came slowly, as though the speaker were anxious to be clearly understood without having to repeat or explain anything. "He's fifty-two and has an office on Duke Street in Kingston." She paused while her eyes asked whether Alison grasped what she was saying.

  "Yes?" Alison said.

  "Eric has a friend, Edwin Shawcross, at an important law firm on the same Duke Street. He's a solicitor, younger than Eric, but they have been chums for a number of years." Again Kim paused.

  This time Alison primed the pump by nodding.

  "Last Sunday Eric came out to spend the day with me," Kim went on with the same care in choosing her words. "He does that every now and then. And he told me something about Glencoe that could be a serious problem for you and your husband."

  There were no intruding sounds now. The voices from the hall had ceased. The drawing room seemed to be full of an ominous stillness. The kitten on Alison's lap wriggled over on its back without waking.

  "Have you met a Wilson Gap woman named Venetia Campbell?" Kim continued. "I'm sure you haven't; you've only just got here. But have you heard about her, by any chance?"

  Alison shook her head.

  "According to Ed Shawcross, she's a most attractive East Indian woman, about thirty. By East Indian we Jamaicans mean from India, Gandhi's country. Many such women are exotically pretty, you'll notice when you've been here a while. And one day last week, right out of the blue, this Venetia Campbell walked into the law office where Ed works and asked the firm to represent her in a claim against your husband."

  "What?" Shock reduced the word to a whisper.

  "I'm sorry." The older woman seemed on the verge of tears.

  "She told them Glencoe belonged to her daughter because Freeland Elliot was the child's father."

  Alison shivered so violently that the kitten awoke, looked up at her in fright, and then leaped from her lap to the floor. It ran across the room to crouch under a lamp table. "No,” Alison breathed. ”Oh, no!"

  "She told them she'd had an ongoing affair with Freeland for several years. That he used to come to her house in Wilson Gap at least once a month. The child is seven years old now, and Freeland died less than four years ago, so of course he knew about her. In fact, the mother said he loved the child and had regularly given money for her support."

  Alison's mouth was too dry to form words.

  "Ed said the woman's principle witnesses are Campbell's grandmother, and the child herself. Campbell is twenty-eight years old and has never married. Which doesn't mean she hasn't had other men, you understand. Marriage in rural Jamaica is the exception, not the norm. Anyway, to wind this up, Ed said the firm has taken the case under advisement and is investigating." Kim shook her head in a gesture of compassion. "I'm so sorry, Alison. But I felt you ought to be told."

  Alison had been licking her lips and was able to speak again. "If I—Kim, if I get Lyle, will you tell him about this? So if he has any questions . . ."

  "Of course. I'll do anything I can. And so will the Reids when they hear about it, I'm sure."

  As though in a trance, Alison struggled from her chair and paced slowly out of the room.

  6

  Lyle arose at five the following morning to find both Roddy and Imogene Bailey in the kitchen, Ima preparing breakfast and Roddy seated there at the table talking to her.

  "Don't forget, Dad, we're supposed to pick up the station wagon this afternoon." It was a grown-up Roddy speaking, Lyle suddenly realized. "I know we'll be busy this first day, but if we can do that, we ought to. Having a second car here is good insurance."

  "I agree. And we'll manage somehow. Don't worry." Roddy gave him a look. "Is something wrong?"

  "No, no. I was just thinking."

  "About getting started, you mean?"

  Lyle nodded as he sat and reached for a cup of coffee the housekeeper had placed on the table for him. Yes, he had been thinking about getting the work started. Of course. But he'd been thinking more about the bombshell Kim Tulloch had dropped yesterday. After Kim's departure, he and Alison had discussed the Venetia Campbell matter until both were talked out. The next move, they had decided, was up to the Campbell woman, and they would be foolish to do anything until she made it. She was, of course, the woman who had challenged him when Roddy and he stopped at the shop in Rainy Ridge on their way to the airport. How could he ever forget those flashing black eyes?

  "Would you rather more for you breakfast this morning, Mr. Bennett?" Ima asked. "You is bound to be extra busy today."

  "No, thanks, Ima. Just the usual." Lyle looked at his watch. "Manny Traill said he'd be here before daybreak. I hope he—"

  "Him coming up the path now."

  Were all mountain folk blessed with such hearing? Not for another fifteen seconds or so did Lyle hear anything; then he became aware of a thumping noise not much louder than the beating of his own heart.

  When he stepped to the open door, he saw the new headman trudging up the path through the lane of light from the kitchen. The impact of Manny's heavy work shoes on the hard-packed earth was the source of the thumping.

  "Mornin', squire. Does anyone turn up yet?"

  "Good morning, Manny. No, not yet."

  "Them will come. You not to worry."

  "Manny, tell me something. How are we to measure out the track work? After you left yesterday I looked for a tape but couldn't find one."

  "No problem, squire. Me and a boy me know did measure the tracks-them yesterday after me leave here."

  "But the tape—"

  "Me know a chain is 66 feet, so me did measure off a piece of twine with a ruler the lad use in school." He had marked off the tracks in ten-chain sections, he explained. After the field work was given out, he would walk up with the track men and give them their assignments. "And if you remember, squire, we did agree we must have to pay more for the higher-up places because it will take those men
longer to reach where them is to work."

  Lyle could only shake his head in silent appreciation.

  Soon afterward, singly or in small groups, the men began to arrive in a still misty yard just emerging from darkness. In the plantation office, which was a room some ten feet square attached to the side of the garage, Lyle sat at a scarred old desk of Jamaica cedar facing an open window. MannyTraill stood just outside the window.

  The men advanced and waited, a few nodding or murmuring greetings, most of them silent. All were in work clothes; nearly all wore the same kind of heavy shoes that Mannyhimself did. Some wore caps or hats, but most were bareheaded. Each, without exception, carried a machete—or, as some country people called those long, wicked-looking work knives, a cutlass. That word must have come down from the days when Henry Morgan and other buccaneers had made Jamaica their home base, Lyle mused.

  It went smoothly. Standing by the window, Manny called out names and the men stepped forward. Consulting his pocket notebook only occasionally because he had memorized most of the agreed-on prices, the headman described the jobs to be done and named the amount to be paid. Small fields he gave to individual workers, larger ones to two or more who he must have felt could be trusted to work well together.

  Each time a job was accepted he turned to Lyle, seated inside at the desk with a big new pay book open in front of him, and identified the man or men hired. Lyle wrote the names in the pay book with brief job descriptions and the prices to be paid. The ritual usually ended with the hired workers murmuring some kind of thanks before turning away. By the time the sun appeared over the mountain behind the Great House, all had been hired except a handful who apparently had shown up only out of curiosity. When assured that Lyle no longer needed him, Manny trudged up the driveway with those who were to do the tracks.

  "Dad, is it okay if I go up there for a while?" Roddy, naturally, had watched every phase of the proceedings with keen interest and now was obviously itching to see some of the actual work.

  Relieved that it was over and had gone so well, Lyle laid a hand on his son's shoulder. "Run along. Soon as I've told your mother what happened here, I'll join you."

  After spending half an hour with Alison, who was still visibly upset over what Kim Tulloch had told them, Lyle walked up the driveway and across the flat called Tennis to the first of the fields. Nailed to a silk oak close to the track was a circle of zinc with the number 1 painted on it in black. All the fields were numbered. But the zinc circles would soon have to be replaced, he told himself. They were rusting around the nail holes and the numbers on them were almost illegible.

  The numbers were important, Desmond Reid had pointed out.

  You might, for instance, tell a newly hired woman to pick coffee in a certain field. She must be able to find the field without difficulty or you would be cheating her, for she would be paid not by the hour or day but for the amount of coffee she picked.

  Could he fashion new numbers out of aluminum, cutting the discs out of roofing sheets hammered flat? Were aluminum sheets even available here? It was something to think about and talk over with Roddy. Something different to think about, he mentally amended with a wry smile. A problem other than that horrendous Venetia Campbell business.

  How . . . how . . . could Freeland have cheated on Pam that way? Before buying Glencoe he'd been a respected banker, for God's sake.

  In Field 1, which was large, three men were hard at work and a fourth man cleaned the track. All greeted him. At smaller Field 2, where one man toiled alone, Lyle stopped unnoticed to watch.

  It was not the first time he had seen a machete used.

  Soon after he and Roddy had arrived at Glencoe, Desmond Reid had generously sent some men from the coffee works to bush out the Great House yard. But this was the first time he had seen anyone transforming what looked like an acre or so of jungle into handsome rows of eight-foot-tall coffee trees.

  The man was amazing. Bending from the waist, stiff-kneed, he would grasp a clump of grass or weeds or brush with his free hand then sway forward and slice it off almost as close to the ground as a mower might have done. A twist of the wrist was somehow involved, to flatten the blade as it began the stroke, and at the end of each stroke the hand doing the grasping simply swept backward to deposit the cut trash in the man's wake.

  After a few moments of this the fellow stopped work and straightened up. Turning to a shade tree, he pressed the point of his machete into the bark and reached to a hip pocket for a small triangular file that was fitted with an obviously homemade wooden handle. With long, smooth strokes he ran the file over the machete's cutting edge, first on one side, then the other. When he resumed work, the edge shone like a streak of silver in the sunlight.

  Lyle went on.

  In the next half hour he passed other track workers and saw one or more men working in each field along the route. This winding track up which he trudged was the main one.

  One day soon after their arrival he and Roddy had walked it all the way to the topmost field—a difficult three-hour struggle through wild mountain grasses, brush and fern that had grown up to choke it during his sister's neglect of Glencoe. Partially cleared now, it demanded less effort. When the job was finished, mules and donkeys would again be able to carry up fertilizer and bring the coffee down at harvest time.

  It was good to see things changing for the better! Now if only he could decide what to do about the Campbell woman and her claim to have borne Freeland Elliot a son . . .

  One thing he ought to do about that was talk to a lawyer, he told himself as he sank onto a trackside boulder to rest for a moment. He should have a lawyer in any case, not simply to handle anyclaim made by Campbell. Other problems could easily arise. What if some worker was injured and filed a claim?

  Kim Tulloch had said her sonwas a barrister. Perhaps he should have a talk with the man.

  He went on. At Field 11, where the track stopped its relentless climb and leveled off for a brief but welcome stretch, he met Roddy coming down. The work was well under way everywhere, his son informed him. "That Manny Traill knows what he's doing, Dad. So why don't we go back down and head for Seaforth to get the station wagon?"

  "Why don't we?" Lyle agreed.

  On this first day of Glencoe's rebirth the twelve-year-old twins, too, were eager to see what was going on. Leaving the house together, they raced each other up the driveway. But in Tennis, Lee insisted they take the track to the knoll where their father was thinking of building a house. "Manny told me it goes on to the river, and I want to see that first. I've only been asfar as the house site."

  "But Dad and Roddy are up in the fields."

  "Oh, don't be such a scaredy-cat!"

  "Who's a scaredy-cat? I just don't think we—"

  "You just don't think we ought to do something different." With her hands on her hips, Lee gave him a look of exaggerated disgust. "Don't you realize that if Mother and Dad decide to stay here at Glencoe, everything you and I do will be different?"

  "We won't be staying here. Mom doesn't want to."

  "How do you know?"

  "Just look at her face when she's not trying to pretend."

  "Well, I don't agree with you," Lee said. "I think she's just tired. And if she does want to go back to Rhode Island, I don't agree with that! This could be the biggest adventure of our whole lives!"

  In the end he gave in, of course. He almost always did when his sister cared enough to insist.

  Even when she had explored it before, the path they followed had been only slightly overgrown, Lee recalled. With Osburn Hall drawing its water from the river, men from the coffee works had probablykept it open. It was newly bushed this morning, though, and when she and Cliff were half a mile or so past the knoll, in a stretch of forest gloom, they heard voices ahead, and then came upon two men with machetes.

  Lee brightly introduced herself and her brother—they had not been present at the hiring session—and received friendly greetings in return. When they admitted
they had not yet seen the plantation's river, one of the men stepped forward.

  "It just around the corner here," he said. "A few more steps and you will hear it." He was a young, good-looking brown man, and his blue work shirt was dark with perspiration. His name, he said, was Leslie.

  He was right. As they followed him around the next bend of the track, a muted roar greeted them from somewhere ahead. A few yards farther on they saw the source of it. On their right, at the foot of a sheer rock cliff, white water tumbled wildly down over a mass of huge boulders to form a swift-flowing stream some twenty feet wide and twenty feet below the ledge of black rock on which they stood. The stream then disappeared under a canopy of tangled tree limbs.

  "This river begin way up near Blue Mountain Peak," Leslie said. "All the way down from there it just a string of falls. Below here"—he pointed to where it flowed out of sight—"it drop into a real deep hole, so don't you two go exploring down that way or you likely to disappear out of sight."

  "What's that crazy-looking thing over there?" Lee pointed to a tall structure built against the face of the cliff. It looked, she thought, as though some fairy-tale giant had got loose with a bunch of big jackstraws—in this case, poles cut here in the forest—and put together a sort of railroad trestle. Even as she asked the question, she realized the structure was a support for a wooden gutter that crossed the stream higher up.

  "That how you get you water," Leslie said.

  "What?"

  "That the gutter from the intake above here. To get there you must have to cross the river on that big log you see." He indicated an enormous felled tree that stretched from one bank to the other above the swift white water. "Then you must have to climb a track on the other side for a quarter mile more. Now that him running Glencoe, you daddy will have to send someone up there after every big rain, because leaves and trash come down the river and catch up on the screen."