Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  When the four from Haiti arrived, she greeted the three she knew with dignified enthusiasm, rubbing herself against their legs, lifting her silky tail to be stroked, softly meowing a welcome. The tone of the meow varied from person to person. "You see," Alison solemnly explained, "she's calling each of us by name. Isn't she wonderful?"

  Roddy's bride-to-be, Olive, was given a different treatment. Being a stranger, she had to be suspiciously appraised. But obviously she passed inspection with flying colors, for within a few moments Yum-Yum had adopted her. When Olive sat, the Siamese leaped into her lap and made herself comfortable with the obvious intention of staying there until the sitting ended. When Olive retired that first night—in, of course, a room of her own because she and Roddy were not yet man and wife and this was Glencoe—the Siamese somehow managed to be in the room when she shut her door. When Olive got into bed, Yum-Yum leaped onto it and curled up at her feet.

  "I wonder if you're supposed to be here," Olive said. "Are you?"

  Yum-Yum almost always responded when directly spoken to. Not always with a "Meow" however. Often with a barely audible little gurgle in her throat. She did so now.

  "Will they be worried and start looking all over for you?" Olive wondered aloud.

  The gurgle again.

  "No . . . I don't suppose they will. It's pretty obvious you're the big boss around here and do whatever you feel like. They must be used to that by now. So all right, come on up here where I can cuddle you, huh? You're not doing me any good down there at my feet."

  As if she had understood every word, Yum-Yum obeyed. Olive put an arm around her and they slept that way, with the face of the Siamese warm and soft against the breast of the future Mrs. Roderick Bennett.

  During the ceremonies Yum-Yum was a silent spectator, but only twice abandoned the role of spectator to make her presence more closely felt. Most of the time, with front feet together and head atilt, she was content to sit quietly beside Alison's chair in the Great House drawing room and watch what was going on. But when her beloved Luari and Cliff stood before the minister in what was obviously the climax of the occasion, she went to stand beside them, gazing at the minister just as they did. And when Olive and Roddy's turn came, she repeated the performance. Not with any thought of attracting attention to herself. Only to be there with those she loved at a time when, obviously, something important was happening and they required her presence as a sign of her approval.

  She must have been somewhat bewildered, perhaps even hurt, when she again presented herself to Roddy's Olive as a bedmate, the night of the weddings. Quietly but firmly Olive's new husband made it clear that her presence was not required. Departing with a pout, but also with dignity, Yum-Yum went down the hall and slept with Kim Tulloch.

  Two days later Mr. and Mrs. Roderick Bennett returned to Le Refuge, and Dr. and Mrs. Aldred returned to their village home near the Kelleher. Except for a few minor happenings—if indeed they were minor—life at Glencoe settled back into its usual groove.

  Terry Connor had had a chance to hear Luari sing that weekend as she went about her bride’s duties. So impressed was he that at the first possible chance, he had grabbed her aside and suggested that she contact his brother, Cliff. Before leaving for Kingston, he managed to be alone with Luari for a few moments in the Great House yard. "Have you thought about what I suggested?" he asked her.

  The way he looked at her while voicing the question told Luari that he would not easily give up. "Yes, I've thought about it, Terry. I just can't give you an answer now."

  "Have you spoken to Cliff?"

  "This isn't the time."

  "Speak to him," Terry Connor urged. "Remember what I said. If he doesn't want you to use your own name, we can invent one. We could call you something like The Caribbean Solitaire. Think about it, Luari! Please! With your voice you could call yourself anything and people would stand in line to buy your records!"

  "Terry, I can't talk to Cliff about such a thing now. We've only just been married, for heaven's sake."

  "Soon, then. Promise me. Jamaica's going to be a big name in music soon; you mark my words. There's a fellow named Bob Marley recording at another studio right now. When you hear him, you'll know I'm right. And in your own way you're even better. Believe me."

  "When the time is right, I'll discuss it with my husband."

  Terry Connor thrust out his hand. "That's a promise?"

  "You have my word."

  The day after the weddings a car driven by Mr. Brian Lindo, owner of the Mt. Charles coffee works, came down the Glencoe driveway. In it with Lindo were Posey Nichol and Matthew Mullen, two old and respected farmers of the Glencoe district who sold their coffee to Osburn Hall. A quiet, attractive man in his fifties, Lindo spoke in the Glencoe office with Lyle and Cliff for nearly an hour, with Nichol and Mullen at his side.

  "The gist of it is," he concluded. "I'll pay you at least fifty shillings a bushel for this year's crop—nine more than the Osburns are paying—and will send my truck weekly to your warehouse for it."

  "And we small farmers will bring we coffee here to Glencoe for him to pick up along with yours, Busha," said Nichol. "What Matthew and I will do is have a meeting with the other small farmers that sell to Osburn Hall, and organize them. At fifty shilling a bushel, it seem likely most all of them will follow we lead."

  "You see," Lindo said quietly, "Glencoe is the key to my doing business over here, Mr. Bennett. The farmers can't carry their coffee to Mt. Charles; it's too far. And I can't send my truck to every farmer's gate; it would be too big an undertaking and take too long. But you have a fine large warehouse here. If the farmers can deliver their coffee to you in crocus bags marked with their names, I can pick up everything here at the one place. Then I would drive over here the following day with the money and they could come to you for it."

  "Let me think it over," Lyle said.

  Cliff looked at him and saw that his face was ashen and taut with strain.

  "I'll need to know your answer soon, Mr. Bennett, in order to put this plan together. Posey and Matthew here will need time to talk to the other farmers, too."

  "Just a little more time, Mr. Lindo. We had a double wedding here yesterday. I'm too tired to think straight."

  "Will you get word to me?"

  'Yes, yes, I'll do that. And to these two men. As soon as—soon as possible."

  Brian Lindo offered his hand, and the three men departed.

  "Cliff," Alison said to her son a few days later, "your father is drinking too much again. And smoking too much, even after Dr. Kirk begged him to quit. Dear God, I wish I knew why."

  Cliff weighed the probable consequences of telling her that a break with Osburn Hall and Desmond Reid appeared to be inevitable if Glencoe hoped to retain the loyalty of the local small farmers. Next to Kim Tulloch, Milly Reid was his mother's best friend.

  If he did tell her why his father was so uptight, the burden of reaching a decision would fall on her. That would not be fair.

  "Mom, don't worry," he said, wrapping his arms around her in a reassuring hug. "It's just that with Ima being ill and his having to plan the weddings, he's had such a lot on his mind. It'll pass."

  One evening, a week after the weddings, Manny Traill and his woman, Roselda, walked down to Rainy Ridge to buy some things at the Chinaman's. In the shop's back room a skittles game was in progress and Manny was challenged to play the winner. He stayed. Roselda walked home alone.

  On entering the cottage she found Manny's younger brother, Ralph, stretched out on the bed she and Manny used. He lay onhis back with his arms outflung, his eyes shut, his mouth open. He stank.

  Roselda dragged him off the bed onto the floor. From the kitchen she brought buckets of water and threw them over him until he stirred. Then with her hands on her hips she stood over him.

  "One more time!" she screamed. "One more time you use that filthy weed in my house and you out for good. You hear me, Ralph Traill? You out! And if you brother Manny don't put
you out, me leaving him."

  He stared blankly up at her.

  "Now get youself up and out of here and don't you come back this night!" she shouted. "Or does you want another bucket of water in you face?"

  7

  Malrouge was not exactly typical of mountain villages in Haiti. Although its "Main Street" was the usual footpath, a Jeep in four-wheel-drive could approach as far as the river that partly encircled it. And though too small to boast an Armee d'Haiti post or a Bureau Postale, Malrouge did have a tax collector and a Chef de Section. It also had a marketplace, a school of sorts, and a voodoo hounfor.

  There were fifty-seven houses in Malrouge, all but one of them constructed of withing plastered with gray mud which the sun had baked to concrete hardness, and capped with roofs of grass or plantain leaves. Their yards were small seas of mud in a rain but when dry were kept surprisingly clean with brooms fashioned of twigs. Chickens, pigs, and goats wandered about at will.

  The one house with straight walls and a galvanized iron roof was the residence of the Chef de Section, whose name was Metellus Deltier. Though a large, pompous man given to wearing black bow ties and a black jacket, Section Chief Deltier was actually married to the woman he lived with —not the usual arrangement in such an isolated village, where the relationship known as placage was more or less taken for granted. He and his wife had a four-year-old son, Marc.

  At the opposite end of the scale, the poorest house in Malrouge was occupied by one Calleste Gautier and her six-year-old niece, Virgilie Valcin. The child's father had died the year before, when he dismounted to pick up a coin in the road—a coin worth one American cent—and was savagely kicked in the head by his mule while reaching for it. Her mother had disappeared soon after with a man from another village.

  One morning Virgilie Valcin went to the river to look for crayfish. There had been a hard rain during the night, but it had stopped. At least it had stopped in Malrouge. In the higher mountains, where the same stream was a series of wild leaps in deep, dark ravines, ominous black clouds suggested that rain might still be doing its best to drown all creation.

  Virgilie Valcin's favorite place to look for crayfish was just below a footbridge over which the village children had to walk when going to school. The school had been built on the other side of the stream because Metellus Deltier said it ought to be there. Over there would be quieter, he said. In the village itself, people were always yelling back and forth to one another and getting into arguments. Especially on market day.

  Parents argued that if the school were built on the other side of the river, the children would have much farther to walk, and market day in Malrouge was Saturday, anyway. No one quite dared to point out that the site the Chef de Section so adamantly espoused belonged to him and would have to be bought from him. He was said to be a friend of the Duvaliers, and when in the capital was even permitted to call at the National Palace to pay his respects.

  So . . . the school was where it was, on the other side of the stream. And this morning, in the pool below the footbridge, six-year-old Virgilie Valcin searched for the crayfish her Tante Calleste wanted for the soup she was cooking.

  Catching crayfish was not an easy thing to do. Even when the stream was low it was not easy, because they hid under stones and when you turned a stone over you had to be quick or they were gone almost before you saw them. When the river was high and dirty, as it was this morning, everything was against you. But Tante Jeanette wanted crayfish, so Virgilie did her best.

  She had caught half a dozen of the little lobster-like creatures and put them into her basket when she heard a splashing sound nearby. Turning her head, she saw Metellus Deltier's four-year-old son, Marc, waist deep in the stream and wobbling toward her with a grin on his face. From twenty feet away he waved and called out to her.

  "No, no, Marc!" she screamed in sudden panic. "It's deep there in front of you! Go back! Go back!"

  But Marc had learned something in his four years of living with Metellus Deltier. He had learned that he was the son of the most important man in the village, and the only person he had to obey was Metellus Deltier himself. All the others he could ignore. Even those he sometimes liked to play with.

  Waving both arms now, he defiantly kept coming.

  All at once a sound like thunder shattered the morning quiet, causing Virgilie to turn quickly from watching Marc and look upstream. A wall of water six feet high was hurtling down on her.

  Such flash floods were not a rare sight in Malrouge. Only the year before, one had drowned a Catholic mission priest and the mule he was riding, and there had been other drownings before that. What six-year-old Virgilie saw did not surprise her, therefore, but it filled her with terror. Yelling again at the son of the Section Chief to go back, she tried her best to reach him but stumbled among the rocks. Before she could scramble to her feet again, the water engulfed her.

  In it, half concealed by foam and debris, swirled a mapou tree she might have recognized had she seen more of it. Mapous were sacred to voodoo, and the village houncian, Papa Lenke, had held ceremonies beneath this one, on the riverbank just above Malrouge. But Virgilie did not see much of it before it smashed into her, crushing her left leg against a boulder.

  As she screamed in pain she saw what happened next, however. On its way downstream the tree swept up little Marc and carried him along with it. She tried to reach him, using both hands and one foot to propel herself through the boulders, but no one could have saved him. Exhausted, she gave up at last and dragged herself ashore, by which time both boy and tree had disappeared downstream. Then Virgilie's one good leg gave up the struggle to support her and she slumped unconscious to the ground.

  When she awoke she heard a sound of drumming that seemed faint and far away. But it was not far away. Had she been able to get to her feet and walk, she could have reached it in three or four steps. It was one of the three rada drums from the hounfor of Papa Lenke, and it was only a few feet from the bed on which she lay—her own bed, in the one-room caille she shared with her aunt. And it was being played very softly, with the fingertips only.

  Papa Lenke himself was not the one doing the playing, of course. He never did that, even at a ceremony. The man playing it was called Ciceron, and he was one of those who regularly played the drums in the hounfor. Papa himself sat on a chair beside the bed on which Virgilie lay. With his eyes closed and his right arm outstretched, he gently shook a sacred rattle over Virgilie's face. He was very old, and the hand holding the asson was not much bigger than Virgilie's. While shaking the rattle he begged the loa to come and help him. At times he even sang the prayers in what Virgilie recognized as a voice filled with despair.

  On another chair, farther from the bed, Tante Calleste sat wringing her hands and biting her lower lip. Teardrops traveled slowly down her cheeks, glistening as she rocked herself from side to side and the light from the doorway touched them.

  Virgilie lost consciousness again after a moment, but when she awoke a second time nothing had changed. Throughout that long, terrible day this kept happening. The last time it happened, she realized that the doorway was dark and the light in the room came from a lamp.

  Papa Lenke and his drummer were gone. Her aunt now sat beside the bed.

  "Does it hurt, little one?" Tante Calleste asked in an empty voice.

  "Yes . . . Oh, yes!"

  "See if you can drink this, then." A hand appeared, holding a glass with two inches of something dark in it. "Papa says it will make you sleep while you are carried to the hospital. He tried his best to make you well again, but he was not able to." Lifting Virgilie's head with one hand, she held the glass to the child's lips with the other.

  The liquid in the glass tasted like a bitter tea brewed from roots or leaves. After she drank it, Virgilie slept again.

  The next time she awoke she was in a much larger room, one that had smooth white walls and a smooth white ceiling and ever so many beds. A woman in white—a very pretty white woman—was bending
over her, gently stroking her face with a warm, damp cloth.

  Suddenly the woman saw that Virgilie was awake, and smiled. "Well, hello there," she said.

  "Where am I?" Virgilie managed in a whisper.

  "Where are you? Now that's good, your being well enough to want to know that. You're at the Kelleher Hospital, that's where."

  "How long have I been here?"

  "Oh, I don't think that's important. Not just now, anyway. The important thing is that you're going to get well."

  "What . . . what's your name?"

  "My name is Lee Aldred," the woman said, "and I'm a nurse here. And right now, little lady, if you'll excuse me a minute, I have to go tell the doctors you're awake."

  "Wait. Please wait! What happened to Marc?"

  "Marc?"

  "He was there, too. The tree that hit me carried him away . . . "Oh." The lady in white looked unhappy. "You mean the other child, the little boy. Well, I—I really don't know what happened to him, Virgilie. I mean no one has told me yet. But I'll try to find out for you."

  "You're lying, aren't you?" Virgilie's voice was all sadness. "He drowned and you don't want to tell me."

  The lady reached out and took hold of her hand. "We don't want to talk about that now, darling," she said. "Later. I'll tell you all about it later."

  Marc was dead. Virgilie knew it.

  A few moments later, while Nurse Lee Aldred was out of the room, she discovered the truth about herself.

  She had only one leg now.

  All the rest of that day Virgilie cried softly to herself, even when the doctors stood beside her bed and talked to her. The doctors were nice men with quiet voices, and they told her that one day she would be able to walk again. "When you're a little stronger, we're going to take you to a place where you'll be with other children who have lost a leg or an arm or are blind or deaf or have other such problems," they told her. "It's a very nice place run by a woman everyone loves, called Sister or La Petite Directrice. What they will do for you there is fit you with a new leg—yes, they will—a new leg that will be every bit as good as the one you've lost. And when they've taught you to walk on it, they'll take you back to your village and everything will be just the way it used to be."