The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “The music we have-sing in that Church!” he says. “And almost break-down the walls, and crack the windows, with our voices!

  “‘O, all ye Beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord; praise him, and magnify him forever.’”

  He intones this, imitating Revern Dowd chanting.

  “‘O, all ye Fowls of the Air, bless ye the Lord,’” she says, in response, ‘praise him and magnify him for ever.’”

  “The times we have-sing this Psalm!”

  “This is Morning Prayers,” she says.

  “But we are saying Morning Prayers in the evening.”

  “And a late evening it is.”

  “When I was a choirboy, and my voice didn’t crack yet, I use to spend the whole time, when Revern Dowd standing in the pulpit giving his sermon, counting every one of these verses in this Psalm. They come to thirty-two. All thirty-two begins with the word O.

  “‘O, all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him, and magnify him for ever.’”

  “Yes!” she says. “This is the Benedicte. I used to know all thirty-something verses, by heart, too. And once, my Sunday School teacher made me memorize the first three words in each Benedicte.”

  They stand and look out through the window, humming under their breaths, but not in unison, the verses of the Benedicte, as they come to them. And then Sargeant says, “Lemme see hommany Benedictees you know.”

  “Man-yes!” she says, smiling. “Man-yes, it’s a bet!”

  “What are we betting?”

  “A kiss.”

  “‘O, all ye Works of the Lord,’” he says.

  “‘. . . bless ye the Lord,’” she answers; and adds, “‘O, ye Angels.’”

  “‘O, ye Heavens,’” he says.

  “‘O, ye Waters.’” And they continue like this, down, down to “‘Let the Israelites bless the Lord,’” which is what she says.

  “‘O, ye Priests of the Lord.’”

  “‘O, Ananias, Azards, and Misael . . .’” she says.

  And they both cross themselves, making the sign of the Cross, she correctly; he, moving his hand at the first horizontal position to his right, instead of to his left. Their faces take on a satisfied look, like a glow, like an understanding; as if there is affection between them, like the visage of beneficence that he has seen on the faces of the congregation after Communion; and together, concluding the Benedicte, they recite, “‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.’”

  “‘As it was in the beginning,’” he says.

  “‘. . . is now . . .’”

  “‘. . . and ever shall be . . .’”

  “‘. . . world without end.’”

  “‘Ah-men,’” she says.

  “‘A-men,’” he says.

  She forgets to give him the kiss: and he does not ask for it.

  “Let me show you this,” she says. She takes a red cloth tied with black string, from a chair. Slowly she unties it; slowly, and seductively, and dramatically, looking at him as she does this. He does not know what is contained in the velour folds of the cloth which she peels back like the skin of a banana. Then, he sees it. It is a box. Slowly, for she is performing magic now, she lifts the cover of the box, and shows him a second, smaller velour bag. This contains an instrument. And when she unknots the silk tassel from the bag, she pulls from the cloth a spying glass.

  “No, Mary-G! No!” he says.

  She places the spying glass into his hands, and goes to a large desk below another window, and from a drawer she takes the tripod for the spying glass. She extends the legs of the tripod, takes the spying glass from his hands, and screws it tightly on to the tripod. She swings the long lens in the direction of the valley below, locks it into that position, and motions him to look.

  The spying glass is about one yard long. But when it is extended, to suit focus and distance, it stretches to about four and a half feet. Its body is made of dark brown leather, and marking each joint, or section, there is highly polished brass. The combination of leather and brass reminds him of the smell of the upholstery in the Chief Justice’s Jaguar Mark V. That powerful, smoky smell of a man who is sweating. Almost that smell. This spying glass looks as if it is brand-new.

  “Look,” she says.

  He touches the eyepiece warily; and handles the instrument carefully in appreciation of its price and its owner’s regard of it. He marvels at its beauty and workmanship. He is nervous holding this magnificent and expensive instrument.

  “Look!” she says.

  He looks through the lens, and immediately takes his head away. The lens is so powerful that even with no moon shining he can make out the outlines of things. His imagination does the rest. At first, it is like seeing objects through steam; or mist. But the lens clears up, and he sees some objects the way he sees congo-eels and lobsters when he wears goggles underwater.

  “We used to use ones like this, in the Special Branch, to spot Nazzie submarines!”

  Out of the darkness of the valley, where there are no street lights and only a few kerosene and acetylene lamps burning, the occasional headlights on motor-cars indicating turns, like blinking eyes, comes an object. It looms up at him. With the force of a jab. He is rattled by its magnification. The object occupies the entire lens.

  “You’re seeing your house,” she says. “Or should be. Flagstaff Macon Castle, with the Royal Insurance Company shield on it, made outta tinning.”

  “My God!”

  “The sun blinds you when you look at it during the day. But you can still read the Royal in the sign.”

  “My God!” he says.

  “If it was light outside, and I keep saying this,” she tells him, “you could see the little dent in the Royal shield, beneath the letter y.”

  “I insure the place against all natural disasters,” he says, “with a U.S. Money Order, ten dollars it was, that Ruby send for me. And I remember telling Manny, ‘Ten hard, cold Amurcan smackeroons!’ the afternoon Griffoot the postman deliver the airmail letter. I tell Manny, ‘Manny, Ruby getting rich as hell, fast-fast up in Amurca!’

  “With part of the Money Order, I take out insurance ’pon the property, with Royal Insurance Company of London-Englund. Flagstaff Macon Castle insure with them. Against fire, storm, hurricane, burglars and the unseen. And the unforeseen. Against every-damn thing imaginable.”

  “Tomorrow, in daylight,” she tells him, “you could see the dent beneath the y.”

  “My God, Mary-G! That dent made by a rock-stone three months ago. I pelt it at a wood-dove. The rock smash-against the house, missing the glass panels I had-install in the front door, by a khunh, with the rest of the Money Order.”

  Flagstaff Macon Castle is painted in reddish brown. He cannot see its colour in this light.

  “Spying glasses of a similar mannifacture to this one, is the ones we used to use for spying at night!” he says. “All military people in the Allieds use’ them. I even see them use in war movies at the Olympic Theatre.”

  He uses his imagination more than his actual vision, to see the Royal Insurance shield nailed into the deal board over the front door. He can see the heads of the nails he used, so powerful is his imagination. Why he can see things so clearly as if it was daytime? What kind of science was necessary to manufacture this English-made spying glass that brings objects so close to his face, on so black a night?

  He had nailed the shield on to the house, with a claw hammer, using five rusty nails he had got from Manny; and he drove the nails in, proud in the full view of his neighbours; displaying the sign that testified to the fact that he was now a man of means; that Flagstaff Macon Castle is covered by insurance, “’gainst natural and unnatural disaster,” Manny told him, with equal pride; for although Flagstaff Macon Castle is a one-roofed chattel house, with a door in the middle of the two windows which open outwards, on a hinge, and propped up with a window stick, the naming of the house, its “christening,” had made everyone in the Village see it as a castle. E
veryone gives his house a name, written on a piece of cardboard or tinning or three-ply; or, the name is sometimes written straight onto the house itself. The most dilapidated house in the Village has a name. Manny does not know how this habit started. It is probably a custom in imitation of the Plantation. So, the Villagers go on “christening” their houses, just as the Royal Navy christens warships.

  Sargeant’s mother died twenty-eight years ago; and for the past twenty-five, he has lived without interruption, even before he christened the house, in this house which he “inherited.” His mother owned the house when he was a child. She died suddenly one day, overseas. He assumed ownership. There was no Will and Last Testament. There was nobody to whom the delapidated house could be given. His father had died when he was two years old. From typhoid fever. The house was unpainted; the wood was grey from age; part of the floor had collapsed; and there were holes in the roof, where gaulings and blackbirds squatted. Sargeant painted the house, repaired the roof, replaced the rotten wood with new lumber he bought one length at a time, on paydays; painted the new lumber; and on the Sunday, three days after Griffoot had delivered the U.S. Money Order, gathered all his friends, Manny, his former teacher, Mr. Edwards from Elementary School, Golbourne, Pounce, Mr. Brannford and Gertrude, to “christen” the house with a name. Gertrude cooked boiled chicken for the jovial, loud men; and served them dozens of Fray Bentos corn beef sandwiches with a leaf of fresh lettuce protruding from each; and when the work was done, they all drank a shot of Mount Gay Rum, in a toast to the house.

  “Let we christen the blasted house!” Mr. Edwards, the schoolteacher had said.

  “Man-yes!” Manny had said.

  “Wha’ name we christening this house with?” Mr. Brannford had said. He had drunk three shots of Mount Gay when he asked this question. “Wha’ name you giving to this castle, Perce-boy?”

  “Macon Flagstaff Castle,” Sargeant had said.

  “Jesus Christ!” Golbourne had said.

  “Wha’ shite this is you coming with?” Manny had asked.

  “The blasted house belongst to the man,” the schoolteacher said. “Let the blasted man christen the blasted house Macon Flagstaff Castle, Flagstaff Macon Castle, or Macon Castle of Flagstaff, or whatever blasted name he choose. And every-blasted-body in Flagstaff Village will walk-pass the house, look up at the blasted name, and laugh-like-shite!”

  “Wha’ it name?” Mr. Brannford had asked, four times now.

  “Flagstaff Macon Castle,” Sargeant had said.

  “So be it!” the schoolteacher had said. “So be it blasted.Well be!”

  And they drank the second bottle of Mount Gay empty; and got another twenty-six-ouncer from the Harlem Bar & Grill, which Manny made them pay for; and he drank some of it with them, himself; and they continued into the dusk of that Sunday, drinking rum and repeating the name the house was christened with, and singing Psalms; and then left for Evensong and Service.

  There is a “shed-roof” built onto Flagstaff Macon Castle now, two years after Sargeant got the stripes that made him Corporal. This “shed-roof” is his bedroom and his “den.” He plays dominoes with his friends every Friday night, in his “den,” between “tinklelling” his piano. He can sit in his “den,” so named by Ruby, on his “lazy-boy chair” which she sent for him, and watch his puh-paw tree bloom, and pick his puh-paws green, to boil them with no salt, for his high blood pressure. From his “den” he is able to see the pig growing in its pen; and watch his chickens and check under his cellar for the eggs they lay, before his neighbour and his neighbour’s dog claim ownership . . .

  And occasionally he would glance up the hill, through the valley, to the Great House; and wonder . . .

  “Many’s the night, sometimes,” Mary-Mathilda tells him now, “but more regular in bright daylight, I would come up and sit down here, to study my head, and catch a lil fresh breeze blowing off the sea, and would have a strong urge to see what you are up to. Very-often I would find myself looking down at you, through the trees, wondering where you get the name Macon from? I know the origin of Flagstaff.

  “I even asked Wilberforce the derivation of Macon.

  “Macon is not a name from round-here. Wilberforce, with his knowledge of dialects, languages and the origin of languages, could not figure-out Macon. Is it French? Or a word from a African language? Nobody in my household, in the Village, even Mr. Bellfeels, could come up with a explanation.

  “And now that I have you, where Macon come from?”

  “The South.”

  “South of here?” she says. “South of Flagstaff?”

  “More south than that,” he says. “The real South. The Amurcan South.”

  “You named a house in Bimshire after a place in the Amurcan South? After what I told you about my visit to that country?”

  “I was listening to the radio. A service from a church somewhere in a Southern town I didn’t know the name of, then. It was like a vision, and I was transpose’ there in the flesh. A Friday night, just before the boys come over to play dominoes, and I was listening meanwhile to the service. Manny had-tell me things about the South, though he never tell me exactly what he was doing in the Deep South; but Manny had-tell me sufficient, and by only listening to a fellar preach . . . from a Southern Baptist Church . . . I could visualize everything.

  “Five or six years afterwards—Manny had return-back by then —Manny inform me that it was a man from Georgia, preaching in that Southern accent; and that he was from a place call’ Macon-Georgia. A white man . . .”

  “And you sing in a Anglican Church Choir?”

  “Was the man’s voice, and the music, Mary-G, not his ’nomination!”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Manny had at-first say that the name of the Southern town sounded African to him, because with the first bunch o’ slaves to land in Bimshire, Manny say, Macon was the name of a African slave; and he was speaking a language called Maconese, which the slave masters couldn’t speak, and never learn’ to speak, hence the broken-English version of the proper African name handed down to we, as Macon, Manny say so. Macon. So, therefore in consequence, Macon isn’t merely a word from the Amurcan South, but could-very.Well be a African nomenclature. I don’t rightly know exactly what Manny was telling me, nor the correct pronunciation of the name of my house. But wha’ I going do?

  “I christen it Flagstaff Macon Castle, nevertheless. But Macon of Flagstaff is the name I first-had-in-mind to christen it with, having come across that name in a English story I was reading. But what is done is done. I name it Flagstaff Macon Castle, after listening to a man preach about sin and loving thy n’ighbour as thyself, and putting a end to fornication; and stop serrigating people, because everybody born free. Amurca, the preacher say, is in grave danger of becoming two Amurcas. One, a white Amurca. The other, a black Amurca. I still say, be-Christ, pardon my French, that that white man preach a sermon that make sense to me, regardless to whether he is a Anglican, a Southern Baptist, or a white man!

  “I was impress’ by his voice. When he finish preaching, I remember that I take out my police black notebook, and waited until he axe for donations, and where to send the money and to get the address, when at long last, he said Macon. In Georgia. The Deep South.

  “I join-on Macon to Flagstaff, and add-on Castle, to make it more appropriate,” he says.

  “Thanks for explaining, Percy.”

  “Nobody never asked me this before.”

  “Pass me the spying glass,” she tells him. “Let me show you.”

  “If you can see a little dent in a Royal Insurance shield from this distance,” he says, passing the spying glass, “you sees everything that I do all these years, inside-out . . .”

  “And outside-in,” she says.

  But she says it with a smile in her voice.

  “But it’s such a bad word,” she says.

  “Knowing a person outside-in?”

  “The spying glass. To say that I been looking a
t you with my spying glass is different from saying, I been seeing you through binoculars . . . all these years, your every move, with it at my left eye, with my right closed, trained upon you . . .”

  “Trained on me? But, Mary-G, I don’t have nothing to hide.”

  “One Saturday afternoon, Gertrude went to Manny to get a piece o’ pork, and with my spying glass on Manny, I could see the flies buzzing-round the table with the pig on its back, and its head cut off; and Manny now have the pig in the hot-boiling-water, scrubbing-off the hairs. I could see the colour of the bristles, a white spot near the snout of that boar-pig, that had such a big-long . . . thing, Percy!

  “And the flies. But I was tracking Gertrude. I had just take-heron as cook, promoted from being kitchen help, and I deliberately ask her to make something for me; as a test. I had to know if she was suitable. Pudding-and-souse, or meal-corn cou-cou; and if she pass either, she suitable. And watch to see if she clean.”

  “I would have-make her cook split-pea soup with flour dumplings, mixed with cassava flour!”

  He knows now that she has been spying on other people: Manny cutting up pigs; Gertrude going to Manny’s shop and to Miss Greaves’ Shop; and she has picked out Pounce, Golbourne, the Constable and Naiman. She has spied on all of us, from this window in her bedroom. Just like Mr. Taylor who climbs the fourteen grey cement steps from his green-painted Government house, assigned by the Bimshire Department of Housing, spies on the entire coastline, and deep into the Harbour looking for enemy hostilities; and so long as Mr. Taylor continues to reach the fourteenth step of the Lookout, punctually, four times every day at a fixed hour, in all emergencies and weather, he’ll keep his job. He has to climb fourteen steps—plus one step—to enter the octagonal-shaped Lookout; and spy carefully down into the green sea, Bimshire’s portion of the Carbean Sea, part of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Stream, this vast body of water that is sometimes clouded by the sprays of waves and clouds that hang low. Mr. Taylor will live comfortably in his Government house, so long as he lifts the telephone and rings the bell, and calls out to his superiors down in Town, Crown-Sargeants in charge of Security, and Crown-Sargeants in the Harbour Police in charge of depth-charges, stationed in the Central Police Station, the Special Branch, and at the Harbour Station . . .