The Claws of Mercy

by John Harris

  “Boss Earnshaw! Where dat ole Boss Jimmy?”

  “What’s up? What’s happened?” Earnshaw tossed aside the crow-bar he was using and grabbed hold of Amadu, who almost collapsed into his arms, panting.

  “Boss Jimmy–”

  “He’s gone. Up there somewhere. What’s up? Come on, spit it out!”

  “Boss, plenty trouble. Clerk Smith done get shot.”

  “Well, button my belly button! I expect it serve him right though. He hurt?”

  “Yassah. He plenty hurt. He dead.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Black men go look for Boss Gotto. Dey set houses on fire.”

  Having lived at peace in Amama longer than he cared to recall, Earnshaw couldn’t believe his ears now that the trouble he had been expecting had arrived. “Gawd,” he murmured “A riot.”

  “Yassah,” Amadu panted. “Boss, you come quick.”

  When Jimmy reached the mine yard, the place was deserted. There was no sign of the watchmen but there were obvious indications that a large number of people had recently been there. The foliage at the entrance was crushed and the flower beds he had so laboriously planted had been trampled flat. There were also odd things lying about in the mud – a hat, a few bottles, a stick or two, stones by the dozen – and Jimmy stood by the station wagon in front of the office with the feeling of being in the presence of ghosts.

  The windows of one or two huts were broken and as he entered the office the glass crunched under his feet on the veranda.

  Clerk Smith’s body had long since been dragged away and was at that moment being paraded on a litter through Amama Town, while slogans stamping him a martyr were being shouted by Assissay’s friends.

  Back at the office, however, there was no sign of what had happened beyond the few silent objects lying about the yard. Jimmy switched on the lights and immediately saw the rifle Gotto had dropped lying half under the table.

  He recognised it at once as Earnshaw’s and he found the hair on the back of his neck tingling with the certain knowledge that something evil had happened there. He threw the rifle into the station wagon, closed the office doors, and set off in search of the night watchmen. His headlights throwing a dancing beam before him on the wet zigzag road, he explored the workings and toured round the silent diggers and the deserted Euclids.

  As he reached the mine yard again, he noticed that the glow from Amama was greater than before and that he could actually see sparks flying into the air in the hot up-draught of a big blaze, and he decided to go back towards the river and collect Earnshaw.

  He met him on the muddy slope, toiling up with Amadu and they jumped into the station wagon thankfully.

  “Better get along to your place,” Earnshaw said immediately. “Summat’s up. Amadu says the mob’s out in Amama. It sounds like the mother and father of all riots. Somebody shot Clurk Smith. Amadu says he’s dead. He thinks it must have been Gotto.”

  “Gotto? Oh, God!”

  “That’s what I said,” Earnshaw said laconically. “Or more or less. It’s come at last, old lad, and we’re too late to stop it after all. I only ’ope they tear ’im limb from bloody limb.”

  They halted for a while at the mine bungalow where the litter from Clerk Smith’s party still remained.

  Earnshaw’s bungalow was also empty, but Romney’s seemed to be full of black people, most of them bandaged and frightened.

  Romney came forward to meet them with a worried expression. There was blood on his shirt and his thin grey hair was awry on his head so that he looked frail and elderly as he told them what he knew.

  “They tell me Clerk Smith’s been shot dead by someone – I suspect Gotto–”

  “I found a gun at the mine office,” Jimmy said.

  “My gun,” Earnshaw pointed out.

  Romney stared with narrow eyes at the weapon. “That’s the one. He had it when he came here. I took it off him but he must have got it again.”

  Jimmy looked towards the flames in the sky. “What about the Swannacks?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t like to say, Jimmy,” Romney went on cautiously, oppressed by the thought of his own bad advice. “Amadu tells me the mob have burned down the police station.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Earnshaw said. “Poor old Sargy.”

  “He’s safe,” Romney pointed out. “They took to the bush. Asimani will have sent a runner for help by now if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Is it bad, Doc?”

  “Looks like it, I’m afraid, Jimmy. Amadu says they’re after Indian Joe now. It’ll be Gotto next.”

  Earnshaw looked hard at Romney as he fished for a cigarette in the pocket of his bush jacket.

  “Doc,” he said, unearthing one at last. “You want me to go and get him? I will if you want me to.”

  “I think we’d all be safer here,” Romney said, worried that further deaths might be on his conscience. “If he’s not at the mine, God knows where he is – probably up in Amama Town with Zaidee Soloman.”

  “I’m going up there,” Jimmy said suddenly.

  Earnshaw popped the cigarette into his mouth abruptly. “Don’t be a fool, old lad,” he said. “They class you with Gotto. They might nab you, too, and you can’t tell what might happen if they do. They’re not responsible when they’re like this ’ere. I seen ’em afore.”

  “All the same, I’m going. I’m going to try and find Stella. Doc, can I bring them back here?”

  “Of course you can. I don’t think they’ll touch us here.”

  “Right.” Jimmy set off for the door, but Earnshaw’s hand on his arm swung him round.

  “Hold it, kid,” he said gently. “Don’t take the station wagon. It ain’t all that far. They’d spot you immediate. Use Shanks’ pony.”

  Jimmy grinned nervously. “OK, Archie.”

  “And kid” – Earnshaw’s hand still held his arm as he turned away again – “black your face. That’d make it harder still.”

  “OK. What with?”

  “Plenty of slosh outside.”

  “Right.” Jimmy darted outside and, on his knees in the road, scooped up handfuls of mud and rubbed it on his face and hair and legs and arms. Earnshaw nodded approval.

  “Lovely, kid,” he said. “Now, how about changing clothes with old Amadu ’ere? Them things of yours is a bit too smart!”

  He watched Jimmy soberly as he stripped off his shirt, his body smooth and boyish-looking. “Reckon I’d better come with you,” he commented.

  “You’d be better employed going to Ma-Imi for help.”

  “Perhaps you right at that.” Earnshaw grinned and slapped his shoulder. “So long, kid, and good luck.”

  Dressed in the charcoal-smelling clothes of the house-boy, his face plastered with drying mud, Jimmy set off at a jog trot for Amama Town. The road seemed full of people, mostly in large groups, shouting, gesticulating, arguing, straggling across the highway, clotted in the doorways of huts. They were still noisy and angry but suddenly they were drunk only with excitement. The gaiety had gone.

  Jimmy kept to the shadows and wherever possible used the bush paths off the road. Once he crashed into a staggering man who caught hold of his arm and seemed loath to let go, and Jimmy set him reeling back with the only native oath he knew, a word of considerable obscenity Amadu had spent hours explaining to him.

  Fools rush in, he thought as he set off again. The angels seemed to be scurrying like mad past him in the opposite direction.

  His heart was beating wretchedly in his chest and he was covered in perspiration which carved white marks in the mud on his face, but he was indifferent to his own discomfort in the agony of fear he felt for Stella. His mind was filled with all sorts of horrors and he found himself muttering out loud as he ran.

  “Stella – I’m coming – Look, my darling – I’m going to get you out of this – lark – You’re going to marry me, see?”

  Once, as he drew near to the town, he ran into a crowd which had spilled out of a house. They were arme
d with bottles and sticks and stones and were in an ugly mood. In the fight from the doorway, he saw a man in torn clothes and bleeding from the mouth being dragged hither and thither and beaten by staves and fists. A woman screamed and he saw the thatched roof go up in flames.

  He stopped dead in his stride, panting, suddenly conscious of the night scents about him struggling through the smell of burning foliage. For some reason, they calmed the panic in his heart and his breathing slowed.

  “Steady, The Buffs,” he said out aloud.

  He had a feeling he ought to confront the mob and clear a path for himself simply by the coldness of his eye and the immaculateness of his bearing. Then he realised that his bearing, in Amadu’s stained clothes, was anything but immaculate, and that the mob was a large one and in a nasty mood.

  “Better submerge!” He dived into a clump of banana plants at the side of the road and immediately found his arms round a woman, who squealed and crashed off into the bush.

  Terrified, he sprawled in the tough grass for a moment, then he realised the woman was probably hiding from the crowd as he was, and he crashed off after her in the darkness.

  Amama Town was teeming with people, its rutted roads solid with black figures.

  “Death to the whites,” Jimmy heard again and again as he slunk between the houses. Several times in the shadows, he crashed into someone, and once had to use his fists, shoes, everything he possessed, to drive off a man who tried to grab him.

  The banana plants which marked the entrance to the Mission bungalow were broken down, and littered about were the scraps of clothing and dropped weapons which marked the passage of the crowd. His heart in his mouth, Jimmy stumbled up the lane towards the bungalow and he stopped dead as he saw the schoolroom had been razed to the ground, the charred timbers still glowing in the darkness. The doorway of the bungalow swung open, symbolic of loneliness, of disaster.

  “God, oh, God, no,” he said to himself.

  He moved through the silent building, holding in his hand a stave he had uprooted for a weapon. Cupboards and drawers were flung open and clothing was scattered about the floor. Under the table, he found one of Stella’s cameras and the bush hat her mother sometimes wore.

  As he searched the place, his eyes smarting with tears, odd things, broken and shattered as they were, brought back to him vividly the happy times he had spent there with Stella – a wireless they had tried to dance to, a trampled alarm clock, two or three tattered notebooks, a shoe with its heel torn off.

  There was no sign of a living soul about the place and he laboriously searched all the rooms with a torch he found in a cupboard, holding it shaded with his hand. Then he examined the garden with the seat where he had sat often with Stella drinking coffee, now overturned and broken. Among the still smouldering ruins of the schoolhouse, he found slates with charred edges and crumpled books, and a blackboard, smashed into two pieces down the centre.

  He was in an agony of apprehension as he searched under the bushes, his mind heavy with shock as he found nothing – nothing but a ragged old black man lying by the entrance, smelling strongly of gin. Whether he was alive or dead, Jimmy could not tell.

  He sat down wearily on the steps of the veranda and tried to make his mind function. It seemed reasonable that the Swannacks would have had sufficient warning from the noise to get out and he decided to make for Alf Momo’s house for help.

  Picking up the torch and the stave again, he trotted heavily down the lane towards the main road, his feet like lead now, his clothes sticking to his sweating body.

  Once some hothead had set fire to the police station and Sergeant Asimani and his men, unable to do a thing against the numbers that had now collected, had disappeared into the darkness for their own safety, the crowd seemed to lose all control.

  It had returned to Amama Town from the mine, stirred to rage by the shot which had killed Clerk Smith, to gather reinforcements and fortify itself with more drink. Arriving there, it collided with a large number of fishermen who were on their way from King Tim to join the celebrations which had started the riot and, thinking in the dark they were police reinforcements, had promptly begun to stone them. Fights with fists and staves broke out and spread through Amama, and the Mende in the general confusion began to take it out of the Temne and vice versa. Christians were beaten up by pagans, and the artisans at the mine, mostly decent men sheltering in their homes, were dragged out by groups of labourers incensed by all the false rumours that Gotto’s activities had started, and kicked and punched and threatened. When all the private scores had been settled there were several houses blazing and more than one bleeding figure left for dead, sprawled in the gullies and under the banana plants.

  The flames seemed to incite the crowd even more and, suddenly remembering Indian Joe and the rice shortage, they swept up towards his premises.

  They smashed down the barricaded doors of his bar and helped themselves to liquor, then pushed in the front of the store and, inevitably, found the rice that had been stored there. For a while they milled round outside, sharing it out, carting it away in sackfuls, bucketfuls, pocketfuls, hatfuls, carrying it in anything they could get to hold it, fighting among themselves as they snatched it from one another. Then they started to help themselves to whatever goods they found in the wreckage, and by the light of the torches they carried away buckets, kerosene lamps, toilet powder, alarm clocks, a bicycle, the old-fashioned shoes Indian Joe bought by the crate, the ancient frocks and shirts and hats, wearing them over their normal clothing. The deafening noise was increased by the sound of splintering wood and the clanging of stones raining on the corrugated iron of the roof.

  Indian Joe, horrified by the turn of events, had clung to his house to the last in the hope of saving his store, and there was no chance for him. He could not drive the big Cadillac parked behind the building and he knew Zaidee would not come near the place from her own bungalow on the outskirts of the town. He was discovered under the sofa surrounded by tins of peaches which he had obviously gathered to him in case of seige, and was dragged out, pushed and punched and flung through the crowd, beaten to his knees, his face bleeding, his clothes torn to shreds. His greed had recoiled on his own head and his desperate hope of saving the store was his death sentence.

  He was kicked and hammered with sticks and stones until there was no life left in his fat body, which was then flung into the wreckage of his store. Some madman, egged on by drink, flung kerosene about and tossed a torch on to it and the store went up in smoke. Within a few minutes, the ancient woodwork, tinder-dry in spite of the rainy season, was caught by the flames which the up-draught dragged through the building, so that huge sparks were flung through the air, filtering like fireflies through the palm trees, to drop on the thatched roofs of other huts in the vicinity. Within half an hour, there were a dozen buildings burning round the vaster conflagration of the store.

  Jimmy, edging round the backs of the houses, his face plastered with fresh mud, his clothes grimy and torn, his skin seared by the heat of the flames, was staggered by the violence. The savage mood of the mob, he realised, would not allow much sympathy even for the Swannacks. The hotheads were in control and the more sober spirits were carefully keeping out of the way or preparing to defend their own property. What few had protested had already been beaten up themselves.

  He knew his own safety was precarious. The mob was quite beyond reason now. No one knew how the riot had started, but from being an argument over a broken gramophone, it had developed into a frenzied desire to smash and loot and maim.

  Alf Momo stood in the doorway of his home with a machete in his hands, prepared to defend it if necessary but hoping against hope the mob would sweep past without noticing him. He had seen Indian Joe’s store go up in flames and had stood by helpless while others were beaten up.

  His house was full of people, all huddling there behind the respect that most of the township held for him. And away at the back, farthest from the doorway and the light of the
torches, the Swannacks huddled, Swannack himself bewildered by the events, hurt by the actions of the crowd, with his arms round his wife and daughter.

  Mrs Swannack had been all for staying to fight it out with the crowd. She would doubtless have given a good account of herself and might even have saved their home, but Swannack had wisely advised caution, and they had hidden in the bush behind the bungalow when the mob arrived, wide-eyed and horrified as they saw the schoolroom burned down and the mob storming through their home, flinging their possessions through the windows. They had decided to try and get to Romney’s but, half-way there, had been cut off and had had to make a detour through the ditches and the bush paths to Alf Momo’s. They were all three of them grimy, sticky with perspiration, tired and hungry.

  “Pop,” Stella said in a shaky voice. “Jimmy’s out there somewhere. How long will it last?”

  “I don’t know, child,” Swannack replied in a grieving voice, wounded beyond measure that he had had to shelter for his life, shattered to realise that the word of the Lord, in which he had always had faith, would have been useless against the temper of the mob. “I guess it will die out when daylight comes. Oh, Lord,” he murmured, thinking of Gotto, “we pray that Thou will take the soul of this unhappy man to Thy bosom and forgive him this night.”

  “Do you often have these fun and games?” Peering past Momo’s lean frame in the doorway, Stella interrupted with another nervous question. “It looks as though the Marines have landed out there.”

  “Should have let me talk to them, Father,” Mrs Swannack said loudly. “Now the Mission’s gone.”

  “It was wiser to hide,” Swannack insisted.

  “They’d only have got in over my dead body.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” Swannack said more sharply.

  Momo turned and signed for silence. “Please, Missis. No noise. They must not hear you.”

  Mrs Swannack closed her mouth until it looked like a seam sewn in her face and glared through the open doorway of the dark house at the torches and the lights moving along outside.