Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  Gazing at her husband, Lee wondered how he could tell such a story without looking at the person he was talking to. But the road demanded his attention. With the town of Ennery behind them, the Jeep was toiling up the big climb now. With each ascending loop the air grew colder, the view more astounding. It was a feat of engineering, this road, perhaps the finest job of highway building in all Haiti. Constructed of big stone blocks, it was apparently as permanent as the ancient roads of Rome. It led, moreover, to one of the most magnificent views in the entire Caribbean, for when you stopped at last in the thin, chill air on the cap of the mountain, you could see on a clear day for miles. Of course, you might also find yourself shivering in a seaof clouds.

  "Looking dead," Lee said.

  "That's right. And for the next five minutes I thought it was dead. It didn't move, mind you. Not once. Its eyes were open but sort of glassy. I was certain the bocor fellow had poisoned it with his leaves. Meanwhile he was lecturing me, telling me in no uncertain terms that as a doctor I should have an open mind about things I knew nothing about. There were such things as zombies, he insisted, and he was about to prove it to me. Then he took some leaves from the other side pocket of the black coat—smooth, shiny ones this time, like citrus leaves—and rubbed those between his palms the way he'd rubbed the first ones, and again cupped his hands around the chicken's head."

  "And the chicken came to life."

  "That chicken twitched a few times, wobbled up onto its feet, let out a squawk of indignation or whatever, and actually flew out the door. Yes, ma'am. That's what happened."

  "You were there. You saw this with your own eyes."

  "I was there and I saw it. And when the old fellow had finished his demonstration, he gave me a look that said, ‘There, stupid, you see?’ and bought a bottle of aspirin, of all things, and strolled out of there with a smirk on his face."

  "This is where the story ended when you told it before," Lee said. "But I know you better now. Did you examine the chicken?"

  Carey abandoned caution long enough to glance at her briefly in surprise. "I did, you know. There were a dozen or so in the yard, but the pharmacy fellow identified it and we both looked it over."

  "And was it normal?"

  "No. It didn't struggle when we handled it. It seemed to be sort of sleep-walking, if chickens can do that. But it had been dead—at least it looked dead—and now it was alive again."

  They had reached the top of the climb. Far down in the valley, some ten kilometers distant, nestled the town of Plaisance, at the end of the Pilate road Carey had been talking about. The main highway plunged in fantastic curves toward it.

  But the stone pavement had come to an end, and as the Jeep began the big descent Lee realized again the enormous difficulties confronting the makers of roads in this country. Columbus had been right when he described Haiti to Queen Isabella by crumpling a piece of paper in his fist and saying, "It is like that!"

  This stretch, unpaved road was literally hacked out of the mountainside. As they crept down it, green cliffs towered on their left and sheer space yawned beyond the ragged road-edge on their right. Heavy rains had gullied the soft earth. Torrents, plunging onto the highway from the eroded heights above, had eaten away the outer edge of it in their furious rush to reach the jungled valley. Some of these washouts had been filled with gravel, held in place with flimsy fences of bamboo. Others must have happened only yesterday and would be attended to tomorrow—maybe.

  "Haiti's highroad to history," Carey said.

  "Huh?"

  "This road we're on. It leads to the heart of Haiti's past. Port-au-Prince was nothing much in the beginning, you know. The slave uprising, the defeat of Napoleon's troops, Christophe and his Citadelle . . . almost everything of importance happened up here in the north. But I'm forgetting. You were on your way to the Citadelle when I first met you, weren't you? My historic moment."

  "And mine."

  Not daring to look away from the road, Carey reached out to touch her, but his fingers brushed the face of their sleeping daughter instead. Carita sat up and looked around.

  "Where are we, Mommy?"

  "On our way to Uncle Roddy's."

  "Oh. Will we be there soon?"

  "We should be, darling. But in this crazy, wonderful, question-mark country you never know what will happen, do you?"

  You never knew.

  As usual, they had turned off the main road at the village of Limbe. No need to cross the treacherous Limbe River, where the peasant girl had shown Lee and Ginette Beaulieu the fording that day when Carey had first put in an appearance; the seventeen-mile-long dirt road to Bayeux ran off to the left before then. They had covered about half of that stretch when Carey had to slam on the brakes.

  A boy about Carita's age, stark naked, had run from a peasant yard into the Jeep's path.

  Luckily, Lee had time to throw her right arm around Carita and brace herself with her left, or both of them might have been thrown against the windshield. With Carey fighting the wheel, the vehicle skidded to a stop only inches from the boy. He, to their surprise, simply stood there with a puzzled expression on his face, turning his head this way and that as though trying to locate the source of the sounds he was hearing.

  When Carey stepped from the Jeep and spoke to him—sharply, as might be expected of a man who had just nearly killed someone—the boy again seemed to have trouble locating the sound.

  "Carey, I think he's blind!" Lee said.

  "I think you're right."

  Hunkering down in front of the child, Carey reached out and put both hands on him. "Little boy, what's your name?"

  "His name is Lucien Basile, and he is blind!" a voice called from the yard.

  Both Carey and Lee looked in that direction and saw a young woman hurrying toward them from the house there. The house was a one-room, mud-and-wattle structure with a roof of grass. "Lucien, you bad boy!" The woman ran into the road and swept the child into her arms. "How many times have I told you to stay in the yard? M'sie, I am sorry. But I saw what happened. If you had hit him it would not have been your fault, no. In fact, it might have been a good thing. Much as I love him, he is a terrible responsibility and with his affliction, what can he ever expect out of life? Nothing, that's what. Nothing at all, poor child."

  "Wait." Carey stepped forward, looked hard at the child in her arms, then glanced toward the Jeep and called out, "Lee, can you come here a minute?"

  With Carita in her arms, Lee complied.

  "What do you think?" Carey asked her.

  "The school, you mean?"

  He nodded.

  Lee spoke to the youngster. After five years in Haiti, her Creole was every bit as good as Carey's. She asked the child his name. He answered her. She asked if he would like to go to a school where he would be with other blind children, and with

  children who had other problems, like being deaf or having no legs. "It's at a place called Mont Rouis, not far from the hospital where I'm a nurse and this man is a doctor. Your mother could come by camion to visit you as often as she liked. My husband and I would visit you, too."

  "Would I be able to see?" the boy asked from his mother's arms.

  "You would learn to manage without seeing. Lots of children do. Grownups, too. And you'd be with other children, playing games and getting all you wanted to eat and having clothes to wear."

  "Madame, no! We can't afford anything like that!"

  "Yes, you can. Because it won't cost you anything."

  "What?"

  "I'm talking about a school for handicapped children. One part of it is in Port-au-Prince and the other part in Mont Rouis, out in the country. It's not a government thing, if that's what you're thinking. It was founded quite a few years ago by some Episcopal Sisters of Saint Margaret from the United States, when a little blind child just like your Lucien was left on their doorstep. And if you take Lucien there or allow my husband and me to take him, it won't cost you anything."

  The woman's lips quiver
ed. Lines appeared on her forehead. Her eyes all but closed. Then she said, "I don't know what to say, madame. I must think about this."

  "It would be better for your ti-moun to be with other children who have problems," Lee said.

  "I must think about it."

  "But—"

  Carey said quietly, "Lee, we'll be coming back this way on Monday."

  "Yes, of course. I'd forgotten." Lee turned to the woman again. "Madame—did you say your name is Basile? Yes? Madame Basile, do you know Le Refuge? What and where it is?"

  The boy's mother nodded. "The hotel near Bayeux. Yes, I know. I went there to ask for work when the new owner reopened it, but they said I lived too far away and could not walk that far every day."

  "The man who owns Le Refuge is my brother. My husband and I are going there to visit him for the weekend. We'll be coming back this way on Monday, and we'll stop."

  "You will stop?"

  "If by then you've decided to send your little boy to Mont Rouis, we can take him. Remember, he won't have to stay there if he doesn't want to. It's a school, not a prison. You will be able to bring him back any time you wish."

  "I—I will think about it, madame. Thank you." For the first time, the woman smiled. A front tooth was missing, but the smile lit up her face. "Perhaps it is a good thing my gate was open. Perhaps Le Bon Dieu opened it!"

  Carey said, "Does the child have a father, commere?"

  "He did have."

  "What happened?"

  "He and a friend went to Port-au-Prince one day last year to see if they could sell some carvings they had done. The friend told me a Tonton Macoute took a fancy to one of the carvings and demanded it for nothing, and there was an argument, and my Louis ended up in the gutter with a broken head."

  Carey said something under his breath.

  "Sa ou dit, m'sie?"

  "Never mind. We'll stop on Monday. Meanwhile, here—please take this."

  Some paper money changed hands. The woman murmured her thanks. Carey and Lee got back into the Jeep, Lee still holding Carita, who had been silent but wide-eyed throughout the whole interlude.

  The journey continued.

  4

  "Olive."

  "Yes, Roddy?"

  "They should be here soon now. How much should we tell them, do you suppose?"

  The woman to whom Roddy was speaking—the woman he now turned to look at—was two years younger than he and several inches shorter. She was, in fact, only five-three to his six-one. But she was slender and pretty, with glossy dark hair and large, very dark eyes, and a soft, sensuous mouth. A frown troubled her face as she returned Roddy's gaze.

  "How much do you want to tell them, Roddy?"

  "Everything, as far asI'm concerned. I'm for laying it all on the line: how we met, what we mean to each other, the whole bit. But if you'd rather get to know them a little first . . .”

  Olive Frazer walked slowly toward him across the living room of his hotel suite and stopped only when their bodies were almost touching. They had been walking about naked a few minutes before, after taking showers; now they were dressed in expectation of the arrival of Roddy's sister Lee with her husband and daughter. Olive wore a dressof Haiti's sea-island cotton embroidered in brilliant colors. Roddy wore gray slacks and a white sport shirt.

  Olive looked up at him. "Do you love me, Roddy Bennett?"

  "You know I do." Roddy put both arms around her and drew her closer. "With all my heart."

  "And I love you the same way. So why don't we just tell them, and let them take it from there?"

  "All right, let's."

  Holding her against him, Roddy remembered the day she had arrived at Le Refuge in a rented car with her friend Sharon DeCosta: two working women from New York City looking for something different in the way of a vacation. They had planned to spend three weeks at the handsome Ibo Lele, in the hills just above Pétionville, and actually had stayed there nearly three days before hearing about Le Refuge. It had been Olive's idea, the other admitted, to rent the car and drive up here.

  Two young women—rather an oddity for Le Refuge, whose guests were usually mixed couples. He had been slightly suspicious at first, the way they seemed so inseparable. They went to the beach together. They played golf on the resort's little nine-hole course together. One day they had even driven together over the Pilate shortcut to Port-de-Paix and managed to get across the channel to Ile de la Tortue by native sailboat. And though they'd been stranded on that roadless old buccaneer island and forced to stay overnight at Pere Roger Riou's island mission, they'd considered it a grand adventure.

  It was then that he, Roddy, had begun to take an active interest in them. Or rather in Olive, in whose fertile imagination the La Tortue project had originated. But of course the other one, Sharon, had to be included in any invitations. He couldn't ask only one of them to join him at dinner.

  Then one day he'd been lucky. "Hey, I have to drive to Le Cap to pick up some supplies at the airport. Would you two like to come along?" And Sharon had acquired a lovely red sunburn at the beach, very painful, and felt the trip would be too much for her.

  Bayeux to Cap Haitien—how far was it? Only forty miles, give or take a few. But this was back-country Haiti, and something here encouraged people to shed their inhibitions—to say and do things more quickly than they might say or do them in, say, Warwick, Rhode Island or New York City. By the time they returned to the hotel, he and Olive Frazer had learned a good deal about each other. Though no names were mentioned, she knew, for instance, that he had loved and lost a girl in Jamaica. He knew that at twenty-four she had married a man who became an alcoholic and abused her until she regained her freedom a year later.

  That night, when her sunburned roommate retired early, Olive Frazer had come by invitation to Roddy's suite to look at some photos and hear a recording he had made not long before at an important voodoo service in nearby Acul-du-Nord. Seated close together on the sofa, they had first looked at the photos while he told her how, at a brule zin service, those who were merely hounsi bossale—untrained servitors of the houngan or mambo—became hounsi kanzo after putting their hands in the boiling oil. And how, for weeks before such a service, the initiates prepared themselves mentally and physically for what was to happen, even spending the last few days in total seclusion. And then when she knew enough about the background to appreciate what she would be hearing, he had turned on the tape player and together they listened to the prayers and chanting and drumming.

  Things happened fast with this woman. Or was the drumming partly responsible? Toward the end, when the initiates were led one by one from the sacred inner sanctum to the seven pots of boiling oil in the peristyle, the drumming became a seductive whisper, almost hypnotic in its effect. Seated there beside him on the sofa, Olive had reached for his hand.

  It seemed only natural then for him to put an arm over her shoulders and draw her closer to him. And even more natural, when the sounds of the brule zin came to an end, for the two of them to rise silently from the sofa and go into the bedroom. Yet he had no feeling that she was the kind of woman who might take such intimacy for granted. He felt instead that they had known each other much longer than the few days she had been at Le Refuge—that, in fact, her coming had been somehow preordained.

  On the bed he had made love to her very gently at first, afraid that at any moment the magic might end and she would suddenly turn on him. Since that ghastly night when Judge McKenzie had found him making love with Heather, he had never been sure of himself with a woman. Not that he had avoided such moments. In truth he had sought them out, hoping for an answer to what was wrong with him.

  Strange. With Olive the feeling of apprehension passed very quickly. After only a moment or two he found himself touching and kissing her all over with a joy of abandon that was like being suddenly let out of some dark, cold prison into a blaze of sunlight. Free of all inhibitions, lost in a simple joy of loving each other, the two of them might have been two children naked
at the beach, romping in the Caribbean's clean warm waters.

  When she left him that night, he had known without any doubt that he was in love with her. Truly, deeply, lastingly in love. And on returning to the room she shared with her friend, she had told Sharon she was in love with him. When the vacation ended, Sharon had returned to New York alone.

  That had been more than two months ago, but those who were coming today did not know about it. They did not know that he and Olive were living together. More than once, when Lee had phoned to find out how things were going with him, he had been tempted to tell her. Always he had failed to do so. Why? Was it because she always called from the hospital—there were no phones in the little village where she and Carey lived—and he felt he must keep their conversations brief? Or was he afraid of saying something he might have to retract? The latter, probably. He would never forget the torment of having to tell his folks about his breakup with Heather.

  "Leora," Olive was saying now. "That's right, isn't it? Leora?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "The one who's coming. I know you've told me about your family, but I get her mixed up with Luari. Their names are so alike. Luari is the one who's getting married, no?"

  Roddy smiled as he reached for her. "To my brother Cliff. Yes. Just be yourself and the whole Bennett clan will love you, darling. Trust me."

  5

  With the end of their journey in sight, Lee found herself looking forward to the weekend of rest and relaxation ahead. After the tortuous descent from the Massif du Nord, the last part of the seventeen-mile stretch from Limbe north to the sea was a welcome relief.

  The countryside had gentled now to rolling green hills through which the Riviere Port Margot peacefully meandered. Port Margot village slumbered in afternoon heat. Then the valley broadened to permit a view of sea in the distance.