There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin . . .
She awakes from her dreaming as Gertrude brings the drinks in on a tray made of mahogany. A tall bottle that once held Gordon’s Dry Gin, with no label, and now containing ice water, is sweating down its sides. There is a soda syphon, and two crystal glasses.
There are two kinds of rum. One, in a tall crystal decanter that is square and thick-skinned, contains special rum, cured in raisins, currants, orange and grapefruit peel, and gooseberries. The other is kept in a jimmy-john for six weeks, and then poured into a round crystal decanter. This is the ordinary rum.
Gertrude pours this ordinary rum religiously only for the postman, and for the sanitary inspector who checks once in a fortnight, for “larvees” in the buckets and tanks of water used for drinking, for bathing and for cooking.
Gertrude pours two drinks of the special rum. She knows the size and strength of her Mistress’s drink. She pours hers first.
She hesitates before she pours Sargeant’s drink. She does not want to ask him, “Heavy on the rum? Or heavy on the water?” And she does not want her Mistress to know that she has previously served drinks to Sargeant. She has done it, in fact, many times in her house, when her children are not home.
Sargeant understands her hesitation, and comes to her rescue.
“Light on the rum,” he says. “And heavy on the water.”
Gertrude smiles, and is about to leave the parlour, when Miss Mary-Mathilda says, “I won’t need you no more, Gertie-dear. We’ll fix ourselves, if need be . . .”
Gertrude moves silently over the thick carpets, and pads the floor in her bare feet, like a cat.
Miss Mary-Mathilda takes the same chair as before, and waits until Sargeant sits before she takes a sip of her drink.
“Normally, I would have brandy, but I already had one brandy for the night, when the Constable was here.”
She shifts in her chair, fidgets a little, touches the cover of a large Bible, moving it two inches to the right, on the heart-shaped tabletop; then, two inches to the left; and then passing her palm over it, she dusts it, although it had been dusted by Gertrude on Saturday morning, when she herself had passed her hands over it, each time she passed beside the table. Her fidgeting settles her nervousness. She touches things she does not even know she has touched: the coconut palm leaf, in the shape of a cross, that she received from the hand of Vicar Dowd last Good Friday; touches the porcelain crocodiles and lions on the mantelpiece; touching all these things that have lived with her, things that give her balance and calm.
“Why we don’t start the Statement, Percy?” she says.
“How you want we to start, Miss Mary-Mathilda?”
“From the beginning, and work towards . . .”
“From the beginning, then.”
“. . . towards the end.”
“That way . . .”
“We’ll hear the whole story.”
“But Miss Mary, you don’t need to tell the full story. You don’t have to tell me. It is my duty to hear it, but I don’t really want to hear it. The powers-that-be don’t. The public don’t. And the Village don’t. I not telling you what anybody down in the Police Commissioner office tell me to say. Nor am I ’sinuating that I got orders to-don’t take a Statement from offa you. But I telling you what I know the situation is, under the circumstances, namely that nobody, not the Plantation, the Vicar, the Solicitor-General, nor the Commissioner o’ Police himself, going-raise a hand against you, for whatever it is that you say you do. Not the Police. Not the Church. Not the Mothers Union. Nor the Church itself, meaning Revern Dowd. Not the School Systems, meaning the Headmaster and the Headmistress of the two Elementary Schools. And not a member of the Board o’ Governances will want to raise a finger and vote ’gainst you, for whatever it is that you do. And I don’t want to know what your act is, neither. You haven’t tell me what is the act, and I don’t want to know.
“And I don’t know if I am in the right frame o’ mind to take a Statement offa you, Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda, to use your full name as I have to do in all official legal circumstances, seeing as how you and me grow up together, though separate. You is a person of great repuke. People follow your lead. People swear by you. People love you. And respect you. In ways that they don’t respect nor follow the Plantation nor the Plantation’s jurisdiction, if you following me.
“So, this is the predicament I see myself inside.”
“But Percy . . .” She takes a sip of her drink. She places the glass daintily upon the doily on the heart-shaped mahogany side table. The light in the crystal glass, and the light from the top of the table, flash; and collide. She cannot decide which of these objects, crystal glass or mahogany polish, gives off the sharper and more pure reflection. “But Percy, I still have to tell the story.
“For as I said to the Constable, I still have to leave the history for Wilberforce, and one to be left back to the people of this Village, and people coming after me so they would know what happened. And I still have to save my soul.”
“Save your soul, Miss Mary? What you mean by that?”
“From the fires of Purgatory. Seek redeeming mercy.”
“Purgatory, Miss Mary? Redeemings?”
“A legacy of words behind me so people will know. Not that it was wrong. Or was right. I don’t want people to see my act in such a simple way. In such black-and-whiteness. But if I don’t leave something behind, anybody, anytime . . . tomorrow, next year, in the future and in the generations to come . . . will only know what happened from word of mouth, and from the Bimshire Daily Herald; and the words from the lips of Village gossip. There won’t be nobody to tell the pure history of my act . . .”
“I sorry to interrupt you, Miss Mary-Mathilda.”
“That is my meaning to ‘save my soul.’ To save my soul from the various interpretations.”
“Nobody in their right mind would put a wrong interpretation to . . .”
“Thank you, Percy, for saying so.”
“. . .your act. That ain’t nothing at all. And if these circumstances wasn’t such as they are, I would say that your position doesn’t take any skin offa my teet’. If you are following me, Miss Mary. You know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean.”
“But you called me and I had to come.”
“Police response. Yes.”
“As hurtful as it is.”
“Duty is duty.”
“I had to respond.”
“You have that duty. And I have a duty to give you the history of my situation.”
“You want to begin now?”
“When you ready.”
“I think this drink going to my head.”
“You was never so light-headed, Percy.”
“This drink working ’pon me already.”
“When you are ready for another one, help yourself, Percy. And before I start my Statement, I want to say how glad it is that it is you I giving it to.”
“Is my honour.”
“It could be worse. Although I am made aware of how I stand in this Village, I do not intend taking any privileges with the Village. Or with you. I giving it to you. The way it happen. Whiching is the way I intended it to happen. Because I am not talking only about one single, isolated night. Or one act. Something that my body, that only my limbs carried out, physically. And that my mind didn’t play a role in that act.
“I am talking, about more than that one act. I am talking about history. About the reason my body took it physically upon itself, with the assistance of my head and my mind . . . my soul . . . I am thinking now about the code that a coloured Amurcan from the South stood by; a code that he invented, and nailed-up above the doorpost of a one-room schoolhouse he was headmaster of; and later displayed and distributed this code on other buildings, workshops and sleeping quarters where the coloured people lived and studied and did practical work, like in apprenticeships, for woodwork, carpentry, joinering and ma
king furnitures; and learning the meaning of drainage, crops, cycles o’ planting and agriculture. That coloured Amurcan man’s code was Head. Heart. Hand.
“It is this code I use to guide the footsteps of my life. I used it to drill common sense inside Wilberforce head; and plant a sense o’ duty . . .
“And Percy, I don’t have to tell you, a man who sings tenor in the Choir, and takes Communion every first Sunday, that there is something to this act of mine being perpetrated on this sacred day. Sunday.
“All these years, people from the surrounding villages would visit our Village, take part in Mothers Union meetings, social gatherings, and play cricket against our team; even attend our church festivals; walk in processions, through every road and alley in this Village, with our choir, in praise and in acknowledgment; and anybody, from here and from elsewhere would envy the life I was leading all these years.
“But they would envy me because they see only the outside of my life. The shell. The husk. The skin and the peel.
“Nobody would believe that the life I lead in this Great House caused the act that put an end to that very life.
“I haven’t explained it too.Well. But what I want to tell you is that my act brought a end to its history. To my history.
“So, Percy, first I have to show you my hoe. There . . . would it be still leaning-up outside, beside the front door?
“After tonight, I may not have any more use for it. After tonight, its sharpness and its shininess won’t be ironical no more!
“All those years, I must have been waiting for a sign. A sign, yes.
“A sign to tell me the correct time had come, counting week, day, daytime or nighttime, hour and down to the minute. Yes.
“Right down to the second. To the fraction of a second! Yes.
“And in all of that time, I really could not understand the meaning of my hoe!
“My hoe, that I used in the North Field; weeding young canes; weeding potato slips; yams; eddoes; just plain weeding; and starting-out as a common field hand, on this Plantation, I was a girl sprouting two bubbies, a spring in my backside, the prey of any bookkeeper, driver, overseer or manager to take advantage of. And they could. And did. Take advantage of this girl. The only body who didn’t stir his spoon in the pot, God bless him, was the Revern. But the rest? I was there. To have, and to discard. To have, at a whim and a will. But, I still had some pleasure to go along with it.
“For there was little acknowledgment of the advantage-taking: but a acknowledgment, nevertheless. By the Plantation, by the bookkeeper, the overseer and the manager, that I was a damn good labourer. Yes.
“Damn good in the fields, and damn good in trash heaps, and damn good in bed. Yes.
“I gave the bastard a son and heir, didn’t I? Yes.
“And damn good in other ways, too!
“But my claim to fame, for what it worth, is, I was a damn good labourer.
“What labourer, though? Field hand!
“I am talking about a time, when any one of them, driver, overseer, bookkeeper, manager, any one of the four o’ them, even the man-leader of a field gang, anybody in the scheme of things, in a more higher position, could grab your hand, and lead you in a cane field; pull down your bloomers, put you to lay-down on a pile o’ cane trash; and after he unbutton his fly, and pull out his dickey, pardon my French, Sarge-boy, he could lay down ’pon top o’ you, bam-bam-bam!, and jerk off. And that was that. Yes.
“That is the history of life on a Plantation. In this Island. On any Plantation in Bimshire! I am not talking fiction, Sargeant.”
“No, you’re not, Miss Mary-Mathilda!” he says. “I have heard such. But not in this abundance.”
“So, my hoe, in its other history, has served me.Well. And still, in those nights, listening to the BBC programme Calling the Wessindies; or playing the Victrola grammaphone; or else tuning-in to the Voice of Bimshire, I would sit here and listen; or I would turn on the ‘private-set,’ and pick-up Latin-Amurca, Caracas, Brazil, Montevideo, Valparaiso, the Argentyne . . . yes.
“Even Trinidad, I would get sometimes. All those foreign countries! With their languages and different ways of behaving. Yes, you could find me here, late-late-late, any night turning into morning, with the music from those foreign countries keeping my company.
“Listening to foreign music is natural to me, because I live in a island. And because the water surrounding we, the Carbean Sea, is the same water flowing here from the oceans of the world, one being the Atlantic, everything that that Atlantic Ocean brings in, with the currents, touches the way we live in this Island; and in any other island in the Wessindies. And I just love to listen to the way foreigners talk, although I don’t understand one damn thing they’re saying.
“But still, their language is so sweet to listen to. Brabba-rabbabrabba-rabba, sennorita—if they’re speaking Spanish. And if it is Eyetalian, ciao-ciao, bonna-days, bonna-days, mangiamo, grazzias and ciao. Yes.
“Foreign talk, foreign language and foreign rhythms and foreign music! And once, by mistake, the ‘private-set’ pick-up Germany. Oh my God! Heine, mine, zee Deutch-zee-Deutch, spraken, racken, nine, nine, nine! And in the midst of the War, to-boot. Whilst the bombs was still falling.
“And all the time that I am listening, I am running my hand over the handle of my hoe, feeling the bumps where the smaller branches were cut from; and I would praise God, that I, Mary Gertrude Mathilda, a simple woman, living so far from what Wilberforce calls the centre of the world, the axis of civilization, is still filled with the spirit of God, to be able to listen to these small wonders.
“I don’t see eye-to-eye with Wilberforce in all things. I think that right-here, rightfully-so in Bimshire, we have things and we do things, that qualify we, that qualifies us, right here in the Wessindies, to be as much important as any country in Europe, or Germany, or Italy or France—not to mention Englund—as being a similar axis, and a similar centre of civilized things, too.
“And it is God. In the lateness of the hour, and in the darkest hour, as Mr. Winston Churchill calls those late-late nights of tragedy, I have to be thankful only to God, for maintaining the handle of my hoe so strong and so long-lasting.
“Things made from the fustic tree are everlasting in their lastingness. Strength and lastingness. I am sure that the handle of my hoe comes from one of the fustic trees growing on this Plantation. But it could equally-be-from a tamarind tree, too.
“And still, with all that polishing and sharpening, I still couldn’t pinpoint what use I was going to put it to. Or, what act destiny and fate had in mind for me to perform, using it.
“But I knew, from the very beginning, yes, that there was an act ordained for me to perform. Yes.
“One Saturday night, late-late, as I was tuned-in to Latin-Amurca, and was listening to Latin-Amurcan mambos and tangos, and parangs, on my ‘private-set,’ I heard a discussion in English, about the hardness of woods. It surprised me to hear English spoken.
“As you know, they have lots of forests in that part of the world. Take British Guiana, or Demerara, for an instant. In those jungles, there’re woods from trees that are famous for their hardness and prettiness; lasting wood that never rots, that we use in furnitures. Look round this room. You will see what I mean. That couch, with the white pillows. And the two matching Berbice chairs. The tea trolley. They are made from Demerara red wood.
“But coming back to the hoe . . .”
“So, Miss Mary-Mathilda,” Sargeant says, “you telling me that you don’t have intent nor intention. Are you stating what we in legal terminology calls ‘no malice aforethought’? In quotation marks. Eh, Mary? I mean, Miss Mary. Miss Mary-Mathilda.”
“Nothing in the way of malice aforethought,” she says.
“That is a big difference.”
“How much of a difference?”
“Well, it is a difference. A big difference. I don’t know how to simplify these legalistical matters in plain English for you to understand, Miss Mary
-Mathilda, but, um, is a big difference.”
“Because if there is such a difference, and a big one at that, after all those nights polishing and sharpening, I did not consciously know, how the hoe would feature. I hope you consider that in your calculation of the differences.”
“I consider that, already, Miss Mary. I already consider that.”
“Because, I don’t really understand what you’re saying. And I don’t mean this with malice aforethought. The Law is a strange thing.”
“The Law is a strange beast, Miss Mary.”
“Malice aforethought! But isn’t it a pretty way to say things! English, boy!”
“English.”
“The English language! No language, under the sun, even those from Latin-Amurca, comes close to English, in beauty. ‘No malice aforethought.’ In quotation marks, as you say. It is a nice way of saying things, as if it comes from the Bible.”
“Is the Law, Miss Mary-Mathilda. The Law. And the Law have a way of talking with words of seriousness.”
“You sure it isn’t from the Old Testament? One of the biblical prophets?”
“Malice aforethought? Is pure Law! Pure jurisprudence, Miss Mary-Mathilda! No connection at-all, at-all, to the Old Testament! None, whatsoever. Far’s I remember, my Torts and my CommaLaw from Police Training School, malice aforethought is nothing but a legal terminology!”
“With this in mind, I going-begin from the beginning, then.”
“As aforementioned.”
“It is always better to begin from the very beginning.
“And my beginning starts, and ends with the hoe that I used to use round this very House where I now living. I was assign, as a lil girl, to weed only the flower beds, beginning from the age o’ eight or nine; and when I reached my teens, I was sent to work in the North Field using the same hoe.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 11