The Claws of Mercy

by John Harris

  “Now don’t be such a damn’ fool,” he said sharply. “You don’t use guns against black people.”

  “I expect you’ve got a gun hidden away somewhere for yourself,” Gotto yelped, furious with pain and the humiliation of being disarmed. “You want those black devils to get me.”

  “Better have a drink,” Romney said calmly, offering him a glass.

  Without a word of thanks, Gotto swallowed the drink, spluttering and coughing as it burned his throat.

  “It’s all right for you,” he shouted as he got his breath back. “You’ve nothing to live for. You’re a damned old criminal. That’s what. Dodged out here to avoid the police. An abortion case in Birmingham.”

  Romney’s expression didn’t alter and his very indifference made Gotto feel foolish.

  “So you managed to find out,” Romney said. “How?”

  “My girl wrote and told me. You can’t hide things like that, you old crook.” The new imperious Gotto, bolstered up by Zaidee’s encouragement, was eaten away by panic and was crumbling back into the old querulous mean man.

  “And what do you intend to do about it?” Romney asked.

  “I’ll see that everyone knows. I can soon tell Swannack.”

  “My dear boy, Swannack knows. It’s true enough. I’ve never denied it. It was a poor devil of a woman with seven brats already and a lout of a husband who knocked her about. I’d do the same again given the same circumstances. As it happened, I wasn’t responsible but I told her what to do and where to go. But they bungled it and I was implicated. But this is Amama, son, not Birmingham. They don’t care two hoots here why I came.”

  Gotto stared, infuriated and thwarted, aware that Romney was right, and that his news, the well-stored piece of scandal he had intended using as a threat, was worthless.

  Romney glanced through the open door before turning back to Gotto. They could hear the crowd, still in the distance but clearly drawing nearer.

  “And what are you going to do now?” Romney asked.

  “What can we do?”

  “Well, what you ought to do is to go down to the mine office and stay there.”

  “On my own?” Gotto’s words came in a thin shriek.

  “If you’re there, they won’t touch anything.”

  “Don’t be a fool. That’s asking for trouble.”

  “Listen, son,” Romney said in his gentlest voice. “These people are excited and probably will be all night, but they won’t touch you. The penalty’s too high. Just have a bit of courage and stay down there with the lights on. They’ll make a lot of noise but they’ll eventually go away if you don’t do anything foolish.”

  “I’m not going. I’m staying here with you.” Gotto’s words were almost a plea.

  “You’re responsible for that mine.” As he spoke Romney remembered they were even then hoping to remove him from that responsibility but he realised that if they could tell Twigg he had stayed at the mine throughout the uproar it would at least stand in his favour. “It’s your job to look after it,” he ended.

  “Not damn’ likely. Think I care about the mine? Where’s Agnew? Let him go. He should be here.”

  “I’ll find him and send him down at once. I’ll send Earnshaw, too. They won’t attempt anything with Earnshaw there. I’ll get the boy to find them immediately.”

  Romney took a step closer to Gotto.

  “Think, man, what will Twigg say if he hears you just left the place? This is your life. This is your career.” As a sop to his conscience, he was trying to persuade Gotto to redeem all his stupidity with one small fragment of courage and common-sense that might be held to his credit when they were weighing up his record. “And after all,” he ended. “They might not even get as far as that.”

  It was this final point that convinced Gotto.

  “All right,” he said unwillingly. “Are you coming?”

  “I’ve got a maternity case here. Looks like being complications. I can’t leave it.”

  “That’s a good excuse.”

  Romney ignored the comment. “You’d better go. Jimmy and Earnshaw will be along in no time.”

  Gotto was left alone as Romney turned to the back of the house, shouting for his house-boy. He was trembling violently, aware of things out of his control, things he didn’t understand, of the violence of Africa, its darkness, its size, and all the shadowy things that went on that white men didn’t know about. He lit a cigarette jerkily, then his eyes fell on the rifle on the table by his side and he reached out quickly and put it outside the door.

  Romney returned. “I’ve sent my boy to find them. I’ll send them straight along. You’ll be all right. Don’t forget to put all the lights on. Conspirators don’t like the light.”

  As he turned again towards the back of the house, Gotto ran towards the car, picking up the rifle as he passed. He was determined not to be separated from that rifle and its single bullet if he could help it. Its shiny stock with its brass plate gave him a feeling of greater confidence as he felt it in his hand.

  Although there was still a lot of laughter, the mob that moved along the muddy road was getting somewhat unruly round the fringes. One or two people were taking advantage of the confusion to pay off old scores. One or two more grass thatch roofs had gone up in flames en route and there had been several cracked heads.

  As they drew closer to the mine, Clerk Smith found himself in the lead, thrust forward by all those who had no wish to be in front if Sergeant Asimani and his men should appear before them with staves and fists and feet. He was glistening with perspiration and he had now lost his topee and his spectacles, those symbols of his education and respectability. He was quite drunk, not only on his own verbosity and the noise, but on the palm wine that was constantly being thrust on him by laughing well-wishers who were looking forward to the fight with Gotto.

  “Bim bam bom,” he was shouting as he swung his fists in the air. “I fight Joe Louis, dat ole champion man. Bim bam bom. Down go Joe Louis. Clerk Smith de champion of de worl’.”

  At the back of the mob, the city-suited gentlemen were encouraging the passing round of palm wine, shoving forward with cries of encouragement any who looked like growing bored and slipping away into the darkness. Samuel Assissay was lost in a fanatic circle of his own noise, singing hymns, reciting psalms and quoting thunderous prophesies from the Book of Isaiah which was the only part of the Bible he had ever absorbed.

  “Behold, de Lord’s hand is not shortened, dat it cannot save; neither his ear heavy dat it cannot hear. Advance, de slaves and hear de word of de Lord to arise.”

  Sitting in the silent mine office, gnawing his nails, with the rifle across his lap, while the bugaboos of being made to sleep alone in the dark as a child came rioting back to him, Gotto licked his dry lips as he heard the shouts in the distance.

  Following Romney’s advice, he had switched on all the lights about the place, even the arc lights outside, where moths immediately crowded round in fluttering multitudes, but he had felt naked and too visible to his enemies and one by one he had switched them off again, first the ones outside, then the office lights, and finally those in the room in which he sat. He could hear the generator putt-putting in the distance like the ticking of a time bomb, in its chatter a suggestion of power, but nothing would have induced him to switch the lights on again.

  He had no idea what he ought to do and he was praying aloud that Jimmy and Earnshaw, the scruffy, immoral Earnshaw he had always detested, the capable, uncrushable Earnshaw who was never upset by any crisis, would arrive and take the unbearable responsibility off his shoulders. He sat in the shadows of the unlit office, his feet rustling the gritty mud beneath his boots, petrified by fear of the darkness, yet unable to bring himself to move.

  He had parked his car among the trees at the back of the building where it would not be seen and he was still hoping the mob would sweep past him and leave him alone.

  The prospect of being in the middle of two or three hundred black me
n – drunken, noisy, argumentative, probably awkward black men – terrified him and he found himself wondering if anyone would miss him if anything happened to him, and whether Doris would ever even think of him again. His mind still held clearly the emptiness of her last letter.

  His thoughts fixed on the blurred image which was all he found he still carried of her in his mind, he listened again to the sound of the crowd as it approached the opening in the banana plants where the road ran into the mine yard. Outside, he could see the night watchmen slinking away, anxious to avoid being caught up in any trouble. Then, in the faint light of the stars, he saw the first of the mob come sweeping into view, tumbling and rolling between the trees, crushing down the foliage like some vast flood, boiling over the ground, breaking into smaller rivulets as they eddied round obstructions, to end in a seething mass in front of the mine office.

  Trembling from head to foot, Gotto remained seated with the rifle across his knees, wondering what he ought to do, trying desperately with all the courage he possessed to resist the craven desire to dodge silently through the back door of the office and into the bush.

  He knew perfectly well that what Romney had said was right, that while there was a white man at the mine the mob would do no damage, and he knew that what he ought to do was switch on all the lights and stand in the doorway and tell them to go away. But Gotto simply could not bring his will to force his legs to function. They seemed separate entities from his body and the message from his brain was not carried by his numbed nerves to his muscles.

  The mob was still milling up and down the mine yard, shouting and calling, occasionally throwing things, but to his surprise doing no actual damage beyond trampling down the few flower beds Jimmy had planted and smashing the small trees and shrubs. Finally, they halted in front of the office, and he realised that the skinny black figure in front of them, wearing nothing but a pair of linen shorts, was Clerk Smith. It was only the high-pitched voice that gave the figure identification.

  “Dat ole Gotto,” he was shrieking. “He go break de music! Stop de party! I fix ’um! Bim bam bom!”

  His bony arms were flailing but he was incapable of any other action beyond talk. He was too drunk to stand up straight and his monkey-like chattering was an incoherent babble from which Gotto could pick out only the recognisable words like his own name.

  For some time the crowd swarmed round the yard while Samuel Assissay urged them in his strident voice to “Rise against de white man,” and the agitators on the outskirts tried to whip up greater enthusiasm. But the crowd, many of them mine-workers, were too well brought up to the knowledge of law and order and respect for the property which was also their livelihood to do more than make a noise.

  Gotto was not aware of this, however, and as they seethed nearer to the door of the office, he clutched the rifle more tightly, still incapable of standing on his feet.

  Then someone at the back, more drunk than vicious, threw a stone, which crashed through the window of the next office and the sound of broken glass tinkling to the floor in the darkness brought Gotto to his feet at last.

  Smith was standing in front of the crowd, carrying out a violent soliloquy above the catcalls of the others, threatening, demanding, complaining all at once, the only thing in his mind the broken gramophone and the humiliation it had caused. Assissay was driving that magnificent voice of his through the din like a battering ram punching through wood – “Rise de workers of de Lord, and take over de white man’s t’ings” – but he was careful enough to do no more than shout. Gotto, in the dim interior of the office, unheard and unseen by the crowd, clutched the rifle in his sweating palms, holding it out in front of him like a lance as though he were afraid of it, conscious only of hundreds of black faces and hundreds more shouting mouths and wild eyes and waving arms, and the depth and thickness of the darkness.

  At last, Clerk Smith, like the rest of them unable to pluck up courage to do anything more than shout, backed again into the crowd, only to be thrust out once more by two or three laughing men who were enjoying the spectacle he was providing, and he staggered forward, drunk, stupid and half-doped. As he swayed he was given another shove and, still wailing and shrieking and beating his breast, he stumbled towards the office steps.

  Gotto watched him coming, his throat dry with fear.

  “Dat ole Gotto,” Smith was yelling. “I kill him dead. I cut his throat from dis ear to dat ear. I tear him to pieces, de damn’ bloody bad man!”

  While he was still cavorting on the top step, Gotto fired.

  He was not conscious of pressing the trigger. One moment, he was holding the old rifle in front of him vaguely in the direction of Clerk Smith a couple of yards away, outlined in the doorway, and the next the crash and the flash of the flame that leapt from the muzzle burst through his numbed senses. He caught a whiff of the cordite that blew back towards him and he saw Clerk Smith leap into the air as the bullet hit him in the throat, his arms outspread, his fingers clawing like talons at the empty air. He heard the thud as the body clattered on the wooden steps and rolled over, head over heels, heels over head, appearing to spin on its skull, legs kicking wildly in the air, then crash flat on the trampled earth and quiver to a stop, sightless eyes staring at the stars.

  The yelling died at once and a vast sigh rippled through the crowd, then the shouting broke out again as they began to back away and eventually fled howling through the undergrowth and down the road towards Amama Town.

  Gotto stood in the dark office, still holding the now useless rifle, staring at the empty space in front of him where the crowd had been and at the sprawled corpse of Clerk Smith, still quivering in the mud, one foot twitching slightly.

  For a moment he was horrified by what he had done. Then the fact that the crowd had dispersed began to make him feel bold and brave and resourceful. What Zaidee had said came back to him – “Be strong. It’s the only thing they understand” – he began to feel he ought to have acted more boldly before. Then he stared at Smith again and it dawned on him he had killed a man, had committed a murder.

  He had never seen a dead man before, not even a decently dead one, let alone one who had met his end as violently as Clerk Smith had. It seemed impossible to Gotto that anyone who had been as noisily alive as Smith had been a few seconds before could now be so silently dead.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Romney had said, and he had done the most stupid thing of all.

  Even as he caught his breath at the enormity of it, he realised that the mob hadn’t disappeared for good, but had only gone for reinforcements and weapons, and that it would be back in a far uglier mood than the light-hearted spirit with which it had originally invaded the mine.

  He dropped the rifle with a clatter to the floor and ran through the rear door of the office, his only idea to get away before the crowd returned. Vaguely, there was a feeling in him that Zaidee would know what to do.

  He started the car, crashed into gear, and shot out of the mine yard.

  Three

  Labouring by the shattered remains of the jetty, Earnshaw and Jimmy heard the shot which killed Clerk Smith but, preoccupied as they were with the job of getting the boats free before the falling tide left them high and dry, they barely noticed it and put it down at once to Swannack out shooting somewhere nearby.

  It was the glow in the sky which first really caught their attention and halted them in their task.

  Straightening his aching back to mop his face, Jimmy caught sight of the red glimmer over the trees from the direction of Amama Town.

  “Archie,” he said. “What’s that?”

  Earnshaw stopped working long enough to glance over his shoulder. “Nigs celebrating,” he said. “There was fires all over the shop when I first come down here.”

  Jimmy continued to stare over the silhouetted trees. “It’s damn’ big, you know,” he said. “There’s more than a palaver fire or two burning there.”

  Earnshaw looked again. “Come to think of it, old lad
,” he said. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Did you hear a shot a while back?”

  “Swannack.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Jimmy said. “But Swannack was busy when I left. And surely he wouldn’t go shooting as late as this.”

  Earnshaw, too preoccupied with ropes and tackles to be interested in a solitary shot, looked up with an irritated scowl.

  “Romney then. Shooting a rat.”

  Jimmy’s face, picked out in flickering yellow by the glow of the hurricane lamp, was worried. “Archie,” he said. “I don’t like it. When I came down here, I passed quite a crowd charging about the road–”

  “Oh, Christ,” Earnshaw said angrily. “Leave that lark to Gotto – worrying, that’s his job.”

  Jimmy turned back to his work, his mind heavy with the certainty of disaster which had been on him all day. “All the same, I don’t like it. That crowd on the road. The shot. Those flames over there.” He squinted towards the trees again. “Archie, they’re bigger than they were.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do about ’em? Spit on ’em and douse ’em? I got enough on ’ere, ain’t I?”

  “How much longer are you going to be?”

  “Not long. We’ll get one free and have done. If you wanting to be off, scarper. I can manage now and you’re all bloody thumbs, anyway.”

  Jimmy grinned briefly. “OK, Archie,” he said. “I just want to be certain that fool Gotto hasn’t started something.”

  “Started something? What could he start?”

  “He could start lots of things.”

  Earnshaw glanced shrewdly at the glow in the sky. “OK, kid,” he said. “Off you go. I’ll see you back at my place for a drink.”

  His brow puckered, he stared after the tail light of the station wagon as it disappeared. He glanced towards the trees again and the glow in the sky, then he shrugged and turned back to his work.

  He had almost finished when he heard the slap of bare feet on the muddy road and turned round to see Amadu totter down the hill and out of the shadow of the cotton trees.