by Cave, Hugh
When the doctors told her this, Virgilie looked at Nurse Lee Aldred, who was with them. She was not quite sure she ought to believe the doctors. They might be lying to her because she was crying and they wanted her to stop. But when Nurse Lee Aldred bent over her and kissed her on the cheek, she knew everything would really be all right. Yes. One day she would be able to walk again.
Reaching up, she caught hold of Nurse Lee's hand and clung to it . . . and was able, at last, to stop crying.
8
"Marse Cliff!" Risking a broken neck, one of the plantation workers raced at full speed down Glencoe's steep driveway. "Marse Cliff! You must have to come quick!"
It was a Friday morning. Cliff and his father were in the Great House yard, Lyle about to begin his usual Friday journey to Morant Bay for the pay bill money, Cliff to check the progress of assorted task-work assignments in the coffee fields. Both turned to see what the worker wanted. Milton McCoy would have bowled them over had they not stepped back in time.
A dependable man of sixty or so, McCoy lurched about to face them. "Marse Cliff, you must have to come to Field 4! Ralph Traill him out of him head there! Him gone crazy!"
"What do you mean, out of his head?"
"You must have to see it to believe it!"
"All right, Milton." Cliff turned to his father. "I can handle this, Dad. You go on to the Bay. And remember, you promised Mom and me you'd stop in to see Doc Kirk."
"Cliff, he's probably on ganja." Lyle looked at McCoy. "Is he, Milton? Crazy, you say. Do you mean high?"
The fellow licked his lips, hesitating. They were always reluctant to tell on one another, Lyle reflected. A man on day work who had drunk too much rum the night before might spend half a day sleeping off his hangover, and his fellow workers would say nothing. But this, apparently, was different. McCoy was still frightened by what he had seen. "Me would say so, sir," he managed at last.
"All right, let's go," Cliff said briskly. "Remember, Dad—Doc Kirk?" For a week now his father had had a nasty cough, yet continued to smoke two packs of Albanys a day. Maybe Tom Kirk could persuade him to quit or at least cut back. No one else seemed able to.
Lyle nodded, and Cliff hurried up the driveway after McCoy.
At a trot, the fellow led him through Tennis and up the main coffee-fields track. No work was being done this morning in the first three fields. With clouds low in the sky and no birds to be seen, their footfalls disturbed a total silence. But as they approached Field 4, McCoy turned his head and said, "You hear, Marse Cliff?"
"I hear, but how many men am I hearing? There must be more than one making all that racket."
"No, sir. Only him. Only Ralph."
Only Ralph? Cliff thought. Then you’re right: he must be out of his mind!
What he was hearing was a cacophony of unearthly wails and ear-splitting shrieks, and when he caught a few of the words now and then, they made no sense. "Get away! Don't come no closer or me swear me kill you dead! You hear? Me kill you dead, dead, dead!"
Then Cliff saw him.
Ralph had been wearing a blue denim shirt and khaki pants when he came to the office at seven-thirty to ask for a new piece of task work, saying he had finished the one assigned to him earlier in the week. He was stark naked now and not a pretty sight. Yet the work he'd been doing could not account for the blood that oozed from cuts and gashes all over his body. He'd been told simply to weed a section of the field where the grasshad grown a bit high. There was no macca here. Nothing with thorns. Either he had fallen—and fallen more than once—or he had cut himself with the machete he was now so wildly brandishing.
"Get back, me tell you!" Lurching about as though to surprise someone creeping up on him from behind, he lunged at some invisible attacker and swung the big knife in a half circle that would have beheaded anyone approaching him. "Me kill you dead if you come any closer!" The machete sliced through a two-inch-thick hardwood sapling as though it were made of cheese.
"Marse Cliff, him going kill hisself," McCoy said.
Again and again the headman's brother went lurching and staggering about, lunging at an invisible foe or foes. With McCoy at his side, Cliff watched from behind a big silk oak. Then the man's yelling became mere noise, and they saw blood spurt as he cut himself again, this time on the thigh. Cliff stepped into the open.
"Ralph!"
The man wobbled about, almost losing his balance. With knees bent and arms outflung, the machete held high in his right hand, he apparently had trouble locating the source of the voice.
"Here, Ralph." Cliff took another step forward. "Cliff Bennett. Over here."
The man saw him now—no question of it—but did not know what to do about him.
"I want to talk to you. Put the machete down and come here, please." Cliff took another step toward him.
"Marse C-Cliff, b-be careful!" McCoy stammered behind him. "Him n-nuh know what him d-doing!"
Suddenly, with a roar that shook the shade trees, Ralph charged.
He came like one drunk but determined, staggering from side to side, slashing the air in front of him with the machete. Yes, that glistening blade could take a man's head off. Certainly it would have no trouble lopping off an outthrust hand. Cliff fell back a step, then bent into a crouch and waited, while McCoy, behind him, turned and ran.
As the charging man stumbled, Cliff took a step sideways and felt his foot come down on a fallen tree-limb. Without shifting his gaze from his attacker, he reached down and picked it up.
It was a good five feet long and three inches in diameter. He curled both hands around one end of it and braced himself. "Me kill you dead!" his attacker shrieked.
The machete whistled at Cliff's head.
Ducking it, Cliff jabbed with the branch and took his assailant between the legs.
The big knife flew from Ralph's hand as he went sprawling. Cliff snatched it up and stood there wide-legged, brandishing it, as the naked man struggled to his feet. They faced each other. When it seemed the silence would go on forever, Cliff broke it.
"I'm taking you home, Ralph. Start walking."
Ralph did not move.
"Let's go, Ralph. The job is done here. You need to go home and get some rest."
It must have been his tone of voice. "Rest?" the naked man mumbled.
"Yes. You've worked hard here. Come on now. It's time to quit."
Ralph seemed to think about it. Finally he nodded. "Well, all right, I guess."
It went like that sometimes with a man on ganja. Violent one moment, merely stupid the next. A few weeks ago a man high on the stuff in some Portland village had slashed his woman to death in front of neighbors while screaming how much he hated her; then on seeing her in a pool of blood at his feet, he had suddenly fallen to his knees, weeping, to embrace her. Anyone who claimed ganja was harmless—and there were such people—was a downright idiot.
Ralph Traill trudged slowly out to the track, and down the track to Tennis. Without even looking back at Cliff and McCoy, who followed a few yards behind, he stumbled up the Tennisroad, past the warehouse, to the headman's cottage. What to do about him? Tell him to gather up his belongings and clear out? Report him to the police? Cliff was still asking himself the question when it was answered for him.
He had expected to find only Manny Traill's woman at the cottage. Instead, as Ralph stumbled naked up the walk, Manny himself appeared. Roselda came as far as the doorway and stood there, wide-eyed.
Striding to meet his brother, Manny gripped Ralph by the shoulders and peered into his face. His own rugged face underwent a series of changes, from fear to sudden, fierce anger. He then looked at Cliff.
Cliff stepped forward and held out the brother's machete. "This is his, Manny, but don't let him have it. He's dangerous. He tried to kill me."
Manny took the machete and spoke to its owner in a voice Cliff had never heard him use before—a voice gravelly with rage and barely under control. "Get inside and wash youself! Put on some clothes and pack up
the rest of you things! You leaving!"
For a long thirty seconds the brother simply stood there gazing at him, as though some part of his drugged mind were debating whether to accept the command or repeat the coffee-field performance. Mumbling something incomprehensible, he walked unsteadily toward the door. Roselda quickly got out of his way, and Ralph disappeared inside.
"Where will he go?" Cliff asked.
"Mr. Cliff, you not to worry you head about this. Me will handle it."
"Are you sure you can? How do you know he won't come back and try to make trouble for you?"
"You nuh know the whole story here, Mr. Cliff. Over and over me did warn him what must have to happen if him don't stop using the weed." Manny turned to his woman. "Don't it so, Roselda?"
She nodded.
"So you leave it to we, Mr. Cliff," Manny said, and turned away.
At four that afternoon, when the men came to the office for their pay, Ralph Traill was not among them. To Lyle, handing out the envelopes, Manny said simply, "Me can take me brother money too, squire. Me will see that him get it."
Lyle, of course, had been told. "Am I to take his name off the books, Manny?"
"Yes, squire."
"I'm sorry."
"So me is too. But me did do me best."
9
In the beginning, forester Terry Connor had come to Glencoe to urge the Bennetts to plant pine trees. When Alison showed an interest, he had volunteered to supervise the project. But that had happened six years ago, and he was still at it. Now there were some among Glencoe's workers who wondered—often aloud—about the role he played in the Bennett family's affairs.
"Me did think for a time him was sweet on Miss Lee, but her did go and marry that doctor from Haiti."
"Me did think it was Miss Luari him did have him eye on, but now she married to Marse Cliff."
"Then why him still business with Glencoe?"
Had Terry Connor been aware that such questions were being asked, he might have answered them; he was that sort. "Look, fellows," he might have said. "I was twenty-five when I first turned up at Glencoe about the pine trees. My dad was dead. My mum was remarried—to a guy I didn't care much for at the time and now like even less. The only family I had was my brother Chris, who's a nice guy but so wrapped up in the music business he hasn't proper time for even his wife and kid. So when the Bennetts didn't object to my coming around about the pine trees, I sort of just kept coming, see? And now with them inviting me for holidays and Christmas and weddings and such, I feel like I'm one of the family.
"So was I sweet on Miss Lee? Sure, and why not? What man in his right mind wouldn't be? But I didn't shed any tears when she wed her doctor. I was still one of the family, don't you see? Nor did it break my heart when Luari married Cliff, so long as I was expected to be there with my blessings. Understand, do you?"
They might have, some of them. In any case, they liked him and were eager to work with him, even though the pine planting at Glencoe had outlasted the Forestry Department's interest and any work on the project was now done on weekends.
"Marse Terry, come looka here! You can see the Great House down there, and the coffee works, and Mango Gap. Man, it like being on Blue Mountain Peak. From up here you can see just about everything!" The speaker this Sunday morning was Bertie Logan, a coffee worker.
Followed by two other Glencoe workers—Osterman Jackson and Hubert Walters—Terry Connor struggled through a sea of the prickly fern called ferrel to Logan's side and stood there with him, exclaiming as loudly ashe at the view. At this point in the pine-forest project, most of the available land had been planted. But his eagerness to continue the project had led Terry to assess this high-mountain strip just above the topmost coffee fields.
It wasnot a bad bit of land. Not one of Glencoe's best, of course—those were already planted, with some of the first pines more than ten feet high now—but it would do at this stage of the game. Clearing the land would be a nasty job, though. The whole fifteen acres or so were thickly carpeted with the knee-high ferrel or with a sticky, oily grass the country people called pigeon fat. He would have to warn his three helpers to be extra careful. All of them smoked, and a thoughtlessly tossed-away match or cigarette could easily start a fire which at this distance from the Great House would be out of control before anyone could reach it. Prevailing winds would drive such a blaze into the coffee.
"Well, lads, let's get to work, shall we?" Reluctantly, Terry turned away from the spectacular view below. "We've a lot to do here and—" Suddenly his eyes widened and he gasped. It was as though he had created what he was seeing simply by thinking about it. "My God! Is that smoke over there?"
Smoke it certainly was—suddenly boiling up in a thick gray spiral from the far side of a ridge at which he was pointing. With it came the dreaded crackling sound of flames racing through tinder-dry grass and fern.
"Lord Jesus!" Bertie Logan yelled.
"And look there!" shouted Hubert Walters. "Someone did set it on purpose! See them? Two of them running? Come on, mek we get the bastards!"
TerryConnor also saw the two shapes—mere phantoms racing through the swirl of smoke—but being a forester, knew he had something more vital to do than go tearing after them. He could not stop his three helpers from doing that; they were already gone and too intent on the chase to hear him when he yelled at them to come back. But after a quick, professional assessment of wind direction and fire speed, he threw himself into the job of saving Glencoe's coffee. A fire lane was the only hope, if he could create one in time. Four machetes would be faster than one, but at least he could make a start.
It was savage work. The damned ferrel was like barbed wire, and in only a few minutes his left hand was raw, his hair hung wet in his eyes, his thighs ached, his back felt ready to break. But he had long prided himself on being as deft with a machete asany country fellow, and had fifty feet of lane cleared when his three helpers returned.
Logan and Walters dragged between them, by his arms, one of the two who had been seen running through the smoke. A mango-sized abrasion on one temple eloquently told how they had subdued him; the look on his face said he was terrified. His companion had escaped, the men glumly admitted. "But don't you fret, Marse Terry. This one going tell we who him is,sure as you born."
"Never mind now," Terry ordered. "Tear the shirt off his back and tie him up with it. And make it quick! I need help here!"
Jacksonstepped forward at once while the other two attended to the prisoner. It took them only a moment; the man was too frightened to offer resistance. Then they too sprang into action, and the chopping of the fire lane went faster. Soon all four were out of the ferrel, into pigeon fat.
But now the job was even more difficult. The grass was high. When a man bent forward to chop it, those small, sticky seeds got into eyes, nose, and mouth. When he tried to toss away a clump he had chopped, it stuck to his hands. After awhile they were blind men struggling to swim through a sea of glue.
Behind them, the roar of the approaching fire was deafening and smoke boiled up to hide the sky. Their prisoner, bound hand and foot with strips of his own shirt, lay helpless in the fire lane, bawling at them not to let him die.
It was nightmare time.
At the Great House, Luari was the first to see the smoke. In the garden, picking flowers to enliven the Sunday dinner table, she glanced up at a gliding John Crow whose shadow happened to drift across the ground in front of her. Beyond the turkey buzzard was the mountain top where Terry and his men battled the fire—and a sky now boiling with smoke.
"Cliff! Cliff!" Halfway to the house Luari stopped running, abruptly changed direction, and made for the iron hoop hanging by the garage. Seizing the bar beside it, she began to sound the alarm. By the time the clanging had riven the Sunday quiet half a dozen times, her husband had raced from the house and reached her side.
Later she was to remember—proudly—that Cliff did not ask her what she was doing or why she was doing it. As he to
ok the heavy bar from her trembling hands he said only, "Where is it?"
She pointed.
He looked while swinging the bar. "Beyond Field 28," he said. "Terry and some men went up there awhile ago. It's all ferrel and pigeon fat. One of them may have been careless with a match."
Others came from the house then while Cliff continued to pound the hoop. Alison, Lyle, Beryl Mangan . . . even Ima Bailey came as far as the downstairs kitchen doorway and stood there, grasping the doorframe and staring. Only once before had Glencoe's fire alarm been sounded, and then only to test it, with the workers told in advance. Most of those workers lived in Mango Gut. Would any of them respond on a Sunday?
Manny Trail was the first to come—from the headman's cottage in nearby Tennis. But then a trickle of breathless men began arriving from the village, and soon the trickle swelled to a small army. They came with machetes and hoes and shovels, some in shirtsleeves, others in their Sunday best. Even before they hurried on up to Tennis to begin the long ascent to where the smoke was, they were sweating from the climb to the Great House.
Cliff and Lyle went with them. But Lyle, fifty-four years old now and out of shape—short of breath, too, perhaps from his two packs of Albanys a day—could not keep up. At Field 22, still a long way from their objective, he staggered to a boulder beside the track and sat to rest.
Cliff went to him. "Are you all right, Dad?"
"I—will be. Go on. I'll follow when I can."
"Dad, go on back. The men can handle this."
Lyle only stared at him.
Never before had Cliff seen that face so full of torment, so empty of color. The rum, he thought. The cigarettes. Damn them both. But part of it was undoubtedly his own fault, for insisting on a showdown with Desmond Reid about the price Osburn Hall was paying for coffee.