Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  "England?"

  "It seem everybody want to go there, squire. Noel Peart is taking some to the airport tomorrow in him truck."

  "Why on earth do they want to go to England?"

  Manny's face and shrug expressed indifference. "Them get letters from friends or family that gone already, and think life must be easier there. It not for me. But Walwin, him want to go, so him will sell you the mule here for only fifty pounds, saddle and all."

  Knowing nothingabout mules, but having ridden horses when a youth in England, Lyle looked the animal over with interest. "Pretty" was the right word, he decided. Except for a splash of white between the ears, Mary was golden brown, with soft brown eyes that appeared to indicate a friendly disposition. Recalling something he had once read about mules, that they would pretend to be docile for days just to get in an unexpected kick, he swung himself into the old, English-style saddle with care and rode her around the Glencoe yard. On returningto where his headman waited, he dismounted with a smile.

  "Fifty pounds it is. But, Manny, we'll need a mule pen, won't we?"

  "One is back of the bump there." Manny indicated a grassy knoll behind the garage. "It only need bushing out. Me can do that right now in an hour."

  Unaware that his seventeen-year-old son had observed the transaction from the Great House veranda, Lyle was startled when Roddy raced down the steps with a whoop of delight. "Can I ride her, Dad? Can I?" Apparently no one had ever told the boy that mules were sometimes ill-tempered and should be approached with caution. In his eagerness he was actually trembling.

  "Have you ever ridden anything before? I don't recall—"

  "I can do it! I know I can!"

  "Well . . . but be careful. Stay here in the yard."

  He and Manny watched in something like amazement as Roddy put a foot to a stirrup, swung a leg over, and took up the reins. It was as though Mary and the boy were lifelong friends. Not once but four times Roddy rode the golden animal around the yard before reluctantly reining her to a halt and dismounting. Then when he patted the mule on her neck, she turned her pretty head and rubbed her face against his breeze-blown mop of coppery hair. It had to be love at first sight, Lyle decided.

  So much for the day's beginning.

  At ten-thirty Alison suggested they drive down to Trinity Ville and pay Kim Tulloch a visit. "I think we ought to find out more about her barrister son, Lyle—whether we can ask him to defend us if the Campbell woman brings charges. I'm not sure what barristers do, exactly. You're English. What do they do?"

  "Barristers are counselors who represent their clients in court. Solicitors do the boning up for them." Lyle smiled. "It's not that simple, actually, but I'm sure Kim's son could represent us."

  "Well . . . shall we go and hear what she has to say? Roddy's going to be talking to that mule all afternoon—just look at him! —and the twins are pestering Ima to tell them all about everything Jamaican."

  "We'll take the station wagon," Lyle said. "Give it a workout."

  Having visited Kim Tulloch at the time of Pam's funeral, they knew where she lived. Her gate was just below Trinity Ville, the house some fifty yards in from the road, in a hollow hidden by trees.

  The gate was closed but not locked. Lyle got out and swung it wide. But instead of following the drive all the way to the veranda steps, he brought the station wagon to a lurching stop as soon as the house came into view. Hands limp on the wheel, he sat staring.

  "How old did this lady say she is, Al?"

  "Eighty. Good heavens."

  The house was of wood, painted gray, with a long veranda running the length of its front. Unlike the veranda at Glencoe, this one was screened, but such a mass of vines covered the screening that anyone sitting there would have been invisible. In any case, Kim Tulloch was not on the veranda. In khaki pants and shirt, with the sun and breeze transforming her white hair into a kind of shimmering halo, she sat astride the highest part of the roof, so hard at work with hammer and nails that she was unaware she had visitors.

  They watched her in silence, Lyle knowing he would have pondered hard and long before climbing to such a height up that mossy slope of cedar shakes, Alison wondering not only how the woman had done it but how she would ever get down. The sound of hammering provided a remarkably steady and businesslike backdrop for their thoughts. At last, with a shake of his head, Lyle stepped from the car and shouted a greeting.

  "Kim! Kim Tulloch!"

  She stopped hammering and gaily waved her free hand. "Hi there! I'll be right down! I'm almost finished up here!"

  "If we're interrupting something, we can come back another—"

  "No, no! Go on in the house and wait! I won't be a minute more."

  They waited on the veranda, which with its vine-covered screening was eerily dark. It was also full of assorted insect sounds and the twittering of busy small birds that appeared to have built nests in the vines. Kim Tulloch might live alone but could hardly be lonely, Alison remarked.

  When the white-haired little woman appeared, she came from inside the house; apparently she had descended from the roof by a ladder in the rear. Accompanying her were two adult cats, one a Siamese Blue Point, the other an all-black Shorthair with orange-yellow eyes. "Well, hi!" Kim said, then picked up the Blue Point and placed it in Alison's lap. "This is Tai-Tai, the mother of your Yum Yum. Isn't she lovely?"

  "What in the world were you doing up there on the roof?" Lyle asked.

  "Oh, just nailing things down. We had a wicked wind here a while back, almost a hurricane, and I could see it had loosened those boards along the top. It lifted some of the shakes, too, but I looked after those last week." The cat was making herself at home in Alison's lap. "You see what I mean about her coloring? Right now her points aren't blue at all; they're sort of lavender gray."

  "She's beautiful," Alison said.

  "She heard that. Look at her."

  The cat had been gazing up at Alison's face. Suddenly in one graceful motion she turned herself over on her back and went limp.

  "You're supposed to rub her tummy," said Kim, seating herself. "Can I get you something? Tea, perhaps? Some of my special cookies? The kids call me the cookie lady."

  "No, no." Lyle held up a hand. "We just want to talk to you for a few minutes."

  "About Venetia Campbell," Alison added. "Is your son likely to be visiting you anytime soon, Kim?"

  "Sunday. He's coming Sunday, he said."

  "Tomorrow, you mean?"

  "Is tomorrow Sunday? Good Lord, how time flies! Yes, he'll be here tomorrow. Do you want to see him?"

  Lyle said carefully, "We need advice, we think, Kim. About this claim by the Campbell woman that her child was fathered by Freeland."

  Kim nodded. "I think you're right. Of course, I'm not sure Eric would be the right man for you. If the law firm decides to represent the woman and gives the case to Ed Shawcross, I'm not sure that Eric would want to . . . But that's nonsense, isn't it? Lawyers who are friends oppose one another in court all the time. One minute they're battling each other tooth and nail in front of a jury; the next thing you know, they're having lunch together and joking about it. What I'll do, when Eric comes tomorrow I'll run him up to Glencoe so you can talk to him." She paused. "But I've some news for you. I dropped in to see Dr. Kirk in the Bay yesterday and told him about your problem. I asked him if a blood test would prove anything."

  The Bennetts gazed at her. In the lacework of vines that kept the veranda dim, birds continued to move about, filling the silence with rustlings and twitterings.

  "He said in Freeland's case it might," little Kim Tulloch went on in her rapid-fire way, using hands and body language as well as her voice. "The way he explained it, if I remember right, is that Free not only had one of the less common blood types—A, I think he said—but was Rh negative, which only some fifteen in a hundred people are. I think he said that if this child of Campbell's doesn't have the same, she isn't likely to be Free's daughter. Does that make any sense to you two?"


  "I wish I knew more about it," Alison said unhappily. "Do you understand it, Lyle?"

  "I'm probably wrong, but I believe if you have type A blood, you're incompatible with B and vice versa. The other type is O, and if you have that you're anti both A and B. But Lord, don't quote me."

  "And this Rh negative thing?"

  "Count me out on that." He shook his head in defeat.

  The birds and insects in the vines continued to make their presence known. Kim Tulloch took over again. "Tom Kirk said—at least, I think he did—that if the father and mother are both negative, the child would be . . . now what did he say, exactly? Damn, I should write things down or stick to repairing roofs, where I know what I'm doing. Anyway, he said that since Free had a blood type that isn't the most common, the case could hang on what type the child has."

  Alison had stopped stroking the upside-down cat on her lap. Now the Siamese turned its head and closed its teeth gently on her wrist while imploring her with pale blue eyes to continue. Kim laughed. "You see what you're going to be in for with Yum Yum?"

  "I wonder if she will," Lyle said, frowning at a point in space.

  Both women looked at him. "You wonder if what? Your cat will bite?" Kim said.

  "No, no. Campbell. Will she let the child be tested?"

  "Who knows? Our country people are great gamblers, most of them. Look at how so many of them spend their hard-earned money on that numbers game the Chinese introduced. If Free did father her child, Campbell will probably jump at a chance to prove it. If she's lying, she just may hope the test will say he could have. Then again, she may think it's only a trick and flatly refuse to have any part of it."

  Lyle stood up. "Kim, thank you. I hope you know how much we appreciate this."

  "Stay for lunch."

  "No, no. We just—"

  "Mavis has made stew peas. Have you ever had stew peas?"

  "I'm afraid not," Alison said.

  "Then you owe it to yourself to stay. She uses trotters and basil and thyme, all sorts of good things, along with what you Yankees call kidney beans. My Mavis Bogle is a direct descendant of Paul Bogle. Have I told you that?"

  Guessing what to expect, the Bennetts shook their heads and waited for it to happen.

  "Paul Bogle." Kim Tulloch settled back on her chair and laced her fingers in her lap. "The Morant Bay Rebellion. A big thing in our history. You've read about it, of course."

  "Well, yes," Alison murmured. "But it happened only thirty years or so before you were born, didn't it? So you must have a feeling for it that one could never get from books."

  "Just let me tell Mavis you're staying for lunch." Jumping up, their hostess disappeared but returned in a few seconds and began talking again even before she reached her chair.

  "The rebellion in the Bay was a terrible thing, so first you have to carefully consider what led up to it." Seating herself, Kim squirmed a bit to get comfortable. "We're talking about the end of slavery in the West Indies, of course. That began in 1804 when the slaves of Haiti won their independence. Three years later England forbade her colonies to import any more slaves. Then in 1833, after all kinds of trouble, slavery here was abolished, but to give both the planters and the slaves time to work things out, the abolition act allowed for a gradual freeing of the Negroes over a six-year period. During that time they would serve as apprentices and be paid for their work."

  She paused to search her callers' faces for evidence of interest, and then hurried on with her story.

  "Well, to put things bluntly, hell broke loose. A quarter of a million slaves here in Jamaica suddenly had to be paid, and the planters were furious. As apprentices, the poor Negroes were treated abominably and made to work harder than they'd ever had to before. Then when the mother country protested, the situation got even worse. Some planters even drove their former slaves out, burning the shacks they'd lived in and leaving them with nowhere to go.

  "Well." The word came out like a small explosion. "When the apprentice period ended and the Negroes were actually free, you can imagine what happened. So many walked away from their jobs that the planters tried to import new people under contract, first from Africa and when that didn't work out, from India. The forebears of your Venetia Campbell probably came here at that time.

  And, of course, importing new workers didn't make the unemployed former slaves too happy, which is probably why to this day many black peasants dislike East Indiansand call them Coolies."

  Leaning forward, Alison started to say something but stopped herself.

  "Yes?" Kim said.

  "It isn't important. I was only going to ask you if white people, too, feel that way about East Indians."

  "I'm sure they don't. They have no reason to." Kim cocked her head to listen to sounds from inside the house. "Let's get closer to home with this before we're called to the table, shall we? To the Morant Bay rebellion, that is."

  The Bennetts did not interrupt again.

  "Edward John Eyre was governor, and the island was desperately poor," Kim went on. "There'd been a free trade act in England that allowed Cuban sugar to compete with ours. Kingston was one big slum. A tenth of Jamaica's people had died of smallpox and cholera. Then a man named Underhill, of the Baptist Missionary Society of Great Britain, came here and saw what was happening.

  "When he got home, Underhill wrote to the Colonial Office about it, and the Colonial Secretary demanded an explanation from the governor. Eyre denied everything; the planters backed him up. But in disavowing the charges, Eyre gave Underhill's letter to the Secretary such wide publicity that it soon became a rallying cry for freed slaves at meetings of protest. 'Underhill Meetings' they were called." Out of breath, Kim had to pause again.

  "But Underhill was in England," she continued, "and the man who took up the torch in his name here was a preacher named George William Gordon, who went from town to town demanding justice. One of the towns he talked in was our Morant Bay. At that meeting a man named Paul Bogle, a deacon in Gordon's church, was chosen to lead a deputation to call on Governor Eyre in Spanish Town, which was the island capital then. But Eyre wouldn't listen, and when Bogle got back to the Bay, his people began secretly training for a show of force."

  Lyle nodded. "The rebellion."

  "The rebellion, yes. It was a two-part thing, but the worst part happened on a Wednesday, the eleventh of October, 1865, when the vestrymen of the parish were holding a meeting in the courthouse Bogle's peasant army came marching up the street and stopped there, armed with machetes and a few stolen guns. The vestrymen came out and ordered it to disperse. There was a lot of shouting, and some soldiers opened fire on Bogle's people. They in turn set fire to the building and slaughtered the town officials as they ran out. Then they went on a rampage through the parish, looting and burning plantations."

  A young black woman had appeared in the doorway and was waiting to interrupt. Kim looked at her.

  "Lunch is ready, mum."

  "All right, Mavis. Thank you. We'll soon come." She turned back to Lyle and Alison. "The rest of this won't take but a minute, so let's finish it here, shall we? It wouldn't go well with stew peas and cherimoyas. So . . . Governor Eyre declared martial law, and troops rushed out here to the Bay. Bogle army was run down. The bodies of the courthouse victims were hardly cold when reprisals were carried out."

  Though she seemed about to cry, Kim settled for a deep breath and a shake of her head. "For the few officials who were killed at the meeting, some six hundred of Bogle's followers were hanged or shot and a thousand homes burned down. Then George Gordon was seized. He wasn't there, mind you. No one knows to this day if he even knew that Bogle was planning a show of force. There was no trial. He wasjust declared guilty under martial law and hanged.”

  She pushed herself to her feet. "England sent a commission to investigate, and Governor Eyre was sacked. That's when we got Sir John Peter Grant, who did so much for us. Let's have lunch, shall we?"

  When Alison rose, the Siamese on her la
p leaped to the veranda floor and gave her a disapproving look that made her laugh. The laugh cleared the air. In Kim's old-fashioned dining room the "stew peas" made with pigs' feet were delicious, and both Bennetts eyed with more than a little interest the young woman who did the serving.

  Was she, Lyle wondered, really a descendant of the Paul Bogle their hostess had been telling them about? It was something to think about.

  More immediately important, however, was what Kim's Dr. Kirk had said about blood tests. And the prospect of discussing the Campbell affair with the lady's barrister son at Glencoe tomorrow.

  8

  "I think you and I ought to pay the woman a visit. Right now.”

  The remark was addressed to Lyle. The speaker was Kim Tulloch's son, Eric Reckford, who with his mother had arrived at Glencoe half an hour before. A man of average height, yet still a foot or so taller than his diminutive mother, he looked, Lyle thought, more like a man of action than a lawyer. Perhaps that came of having such a mother. White slacks and sport shirt, sneakers . . . he might have been dressed for the island's favorite sport, cricket. The windblown blond hair contributed to the effect. But his car, now standing in the Great House yard, was a dignified black four-door, nothing like the little red demon his mother drove.

  Glancing at his watch, Lyle rose from his chair on Glencoe's long veranda and turned to Kim Tulloch. "Have we time, Kim?" It was after three o'clock. Alison had invited their guests to stay for dinner.

  "I'm sure you have. It isn't that far to Wilson Gap."

  "No, but I'm told the Gap road is pretty awful."

  Kim waved a tiny hand in dismissal. "Oh, go on! We won't let dinner spoil, no matter how long it takes you. I'm itching to know what that Campbell child is like!"

  "You've never seen her?" Alison asked.

  "Not that I know of. I've seen the mother, I believe, in Morant Bay on market day, but not the daughter. The mother is a looker, let me tell you. Go on, go on, you two! It will give us something to talk about at dinner!"