The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “But he is a plain man.”

  “When Mr.Wilberforce sings it, I like the way it sounds.

  “If you’re white, you’re right.”

  “Bellfeels, that son-of-a-bitch, is almost pure white. He had a mother who was light-skin like Mr. Wilberforce. Then, you have Miss Mary-Mathilda, your mistress. She is the colour of coffee with a lil milk in it. Light brown to brown-skin. Much more lighter than me. Then there is Wilberforce, light-light-light. And you, two or three shades less lighter, maybe four, than your employer. And me, the blackest of them all. What a group we is!”

  “We work-out a way to live together, though. We could teach Amurca a thing or two.”

  “Even that son-of-a-bitch, Bellfeels. I wish somebody would teach him something! If I wasn’t sure they would want to pop my neck for doing it, I would be the first man, one o’ these dark-nights, with a butcher knife placed to that fucker’s throat! Yes!”

  “You scaring me, Sarge, man.”

  “Believe me, Gertrude.”

  “Is more better, Sarge, to talk about Amurca than Bellfeels . . .”

  “Those Amurcans!” And so, after they had fooped on the bed of trash, and Sargeant had remained on his back, looking up into the firmaments, as he called it, this is the way it would be between him and Gertrude.

  Now, he inhales the stuffiness of this underground tunnel, and can taste the white dust and the dampness in his mouth, and this makes him remember where he is; and he becomes disoriented again, even though Mary-Mathilda is leading him.

  “Follow me,” she tells him.

  “Where to?” he says.

  “I am leading you, Percy.”

  That is all she says. And she takes his hand again.

  “Going back to tonight, earlier,” she says. “You are to follow me now. So, follow me.”

  “Where to?”

  “Where I am leading you.”

  She is silent for the next few yards.

  “You know, around midday last Sunday I was standing beside Gertrude watching the pot . . . dry-peas and rice, checking to see if the water boil-out, and if it needed more; and I happened to look out the Dutch window, and God bless my eyesight! Such a white cloud! Stretching the whole expanse of the skies, taking up the whole Dutch window!

  “You remember Good Fridays, how we would look up at the clouds, and see in those white clouds the interpretations of our future? That was the second thing we used to do as thrildren, on Good Fridays. Midday-noon, sharp. The exact time corresponding to when they nailed Jesus to the Cross?

  “And this afternoon, I saw a cloud the shape of a big-big L; and I wondered if this L was standing for Luck, for me? I don’t know. Or standing for Love? I didn’t think so, at the time. Cause, Percy, in all my life, in my present state, and in my past state, the state in which you noticed me, as you been dropping hints, all evening, in that time when it appeared to you, as to others, that I was a woman worthy of envy and lust, the truth is that love, and on my part, lust, was absent from my life. Even then.

  “Not even when he bred me. Not even when he lay-down on my belly, every other Saturday night, in his usual drunken stupors. So, the L shaped in the clouds that I saw this afternoon did not stand for Love.

  “And you know, whether it went out of my mind, as a cloud would do when it vaporates, or whether it was a temporary distraction from watching Gertrude cooking the dry-peas and rice we intended to eat with the joint o’ pork we got from Manny, it never dawn on me to carry that L in my mind, as I walked up the road, earlier tonight; travelling as if I was walking through a underground tunnel like this one we’re in now.

  “And this brings me to wonder, why I am taking you through this tunnel?

  “We could have remained in the front-house. Wilberforce won’t be back till all hours, but that doesn’t matter. And Gertrude gone. Heading to Flagstaff Macon Castle, most likely, or the Pilgrim Holiness.

  “Women, Percy! The tragedy with women . . .

  “I have not tell you half the things that were going through my mind earlier this evening . . .”

  She moves beside him, making little noise walking in her boots on the cement steps going down, tightening her grip on his large hand, leading him down, down, down into the darkness of the underground tunnel, in this section with its steps, built like a manhole. Into this dungeon they go.

  Not that he is really in a dungeon; not that he is being thrown into the darkness and the cobwebs and the despicable things he himself imagines are crawling over his arms and his face, and up his trousers legs; not that there are snakes and giant scorpions and starving lions awaiting his company in this dungeon, nor tarantulas with bodies the size of his head; things he has read about in adventure stories of the Orient, in Bible Stories for Children and Hans Christian Andersen; and library books; it is just that the tunnel and the dim kerosene lamp, blown by a draught that seeps into the tunnel, and clutches him like a close body-lock—he can now smell the smell of dungeons, conjured up in those stories; and smell the taste of old stone, old mortar, old sand and wet dirt; and mould—and choke him to death as if a snake is wrapped round his neck. It becomes difficult for him to breathe.

  “The Saturday night that Mr. Brannford, poor fellow, stretched to his limit, had to take his wife’s life, that shameless woman, who gave-way all her business, free, to that man, the Governor; and expose, poor Mr. Brannford, her poppit-husband, to all that embarrassment and ridicule and shame;..Well, the Saturday night when he couldn’t take no more, and he finish-she-off, by putting the butcher knife to her throat, this was the first place he run for succour, to. Yes. Right here. We didn’t know what to do, at first.

  “We had to call in the Solicitor-General, because it was a case that could have expose the fornications of those two sinners, His Excellency and Mistress Rosa Mary Antoinette Brannford—as she liked to have people address her by—the whore; in her pompasetting ways, and damage the reputation of the Governor’s wife.

  “Mr. Brannford was brought by car here; and we placed him in this underground tunnel, to hide-him-away; and keep him safe outta the clutches of the Law, until the next move was decided.

  “Cause nobody in this Village never liked Mistress Brannford.

  “Mr. Bellfeels came down from the Main House, and he and the Solicitor-General who had been contacted by now, and the Vicar, and the two leading barsters-at-Law—one for the Defence, the next one for the Prosecutors, it appears; and Wilberforce. In his capacity as a doctor. We sat down in the front-house, planning the next move, whilst Mr. Brannford, poor fellow, is down here, in secret, trembling more from fright, certain that his life was now in the Plantation’s hand, at their mercy; and at stake and in the balance, than from guilt. Gertrude took a piece of yellow Cheddar to him, that we had-got-in from Australia, a fresh salt-bread baked the very day, and a nip-bottle of Mount Gay Rum, in case he felt a lil peckish. All the time, we upstairs over Mr. Brannford head, spraining our brain in a effort to convince the Solicitor-General not to press charges against Mr. Brannford, nor bring poor Mr. Brannford before the Court of Grand Sessions. Because, in the opinion of the Village, even although murder is murder, and we couldn’t argue gainst that, still, a more greater injustice was perpetrated that cause Mr. Brannford to be now having to face the bitter justice of the Court.

  “Plus-again, certain old animosities existing betwixt-and-between the local whites and the whites from Away, from Englund and so forth, multiplied by those who claimed they were white. No love lost ’mongst them tribes, boy!

  “So, with this knowledge of this history of vengeance and spitefulness amongst Bimshire white people, we poured the Solicitor-General some of the best prune-cured white rum that Mr. Bellfeels had been keeping in secrecy, in a half-gallon jimmy-john, under my bed; and eventually, I think it was after a few shots,..Well, half-dozen such shots, that the Solicitor-General took counsel from all o’ we, and agreed to not bring Mr. Brannford before the next Grand Sessions to face justice in the taking of his wife’s life, by
his hand. May she rot in hell!”

  “Cuddear!”

  “But we had what Wilberforce always refer to as a ’contingency.’ I think it is a word use in Amurca, more frequent than here, ’cause I never heard the Vicar, nor the Solicitor-General, both o’ who studied in Englund, use such a word. Contingency. But I love the word. Contingency. It connotes so much that you could do, on the other hand, as a alternative; and as a way of wriggling-out of a tight spot. Like a escape. A secret passage, such as what we are in, this very minute.” . . . Sargeant remembers the Commissioner of Police calling him to his private residence in the Married Women’s Quarters, when the Commissioner placed the bottle of white rum on the mahogany table, and for a time Sargeant who was then a Lance-Corporal watched the rings of water form round the bottle containing the rum, and round the bottle of water just taken out of the icebox, and round the two glasses which found their bottoms touched by the travelling, slow, comforting water from the two bottles which themselves seemed to be melting.

  “This is shite,” the Commissioner had said, finally.

  “Sir?”

  “You heard what happen? A man killed his fecking wife. Is pure murder, in the first degree. He got to heng for this,” the Commissioner had said.

  The Commissioner was a white man, born in the Island. And he talked, even at formal events, like parades, speech days at Harrison College, and at Combermere School for Boys, his alma mater— he graduated from Combermere in Fifth Form, with the Senior Cambridge School Certificate, with a Distinction in Religious Knowledge, and three Credits, in Geography, Shorthand and Latin; and was the Island’s champion swimmer—and giving evidence in the annual Assizes, the Court of Grand Sessions, and in the Appeal High Court, in the same vernacular that Village men and fishermen used. With a broad, flat, semi-musical brogue that came, so people said, from both Ireland and Scotland.

  “And be-Christ, guess what, Lance-Corporal Stuart?”

  “Sir?”

  “Guess what I call you here for?”

  “Sir?”

  “You can’t find a next word to use? Why you so monnisyllabical in front o’ me, all of a sudden? You can’t find nothing else to say?”

  “Sir? But I don’t know what to say, then.”

  “Well, I going tell yuh!”

  It was at this point in the interview that the Commissioner of Police lifted the bottle containing the white rum, Bellfeels Special Stades White Rum; unscrewed the cap; and poured four drops, slowly, one at a time, on the hardwood floor that had no carpet, tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap. He then filled the first glass up to its sturdy middle, which he handed to Sargeant, did the same thing with the second glass, which he lifted close to his lips, and said, “Down the hatch!”

  “Down the hatch, sir.”

  The Commissioner cleared his throat, “Emmm!”

  Sargeant cleared his throat, “Uhh-hemmm!”

  The Commissioner emptied his glass.

  Sargeant emptied his glass.

  “Water?” the Commissioner said, hardly able to talk, unscrewing the bottle containing the water.

  The Commissioner and Sargeant were sitting in a window seat, on its two blue cushions, facing each other; and through the green-painted jalousied windows, that had a view of the Race Pasture and the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club; and they could cast their eyes over the shining, black iron bulk of the two cannons left over from the Boer War, and given to Bimshire by a King of England, as a token of loyalty, and see the green-painted clock tower. It was midday.

  “Water?” the Commissioner said in a clearer voice, now that the sting of the rum had gone.

  “Water, sir,” Sargeant had said, barely able to speak, “thanks, sir.”

  “Good for you. Bowmanston Special good for you.”

  “Sir?”

  “Occasional drink. Plain. Not with any o’ this blasted soft drink, as if you is an Amurcan. Just plain. And straight. English way!”

  “Sir!”

  “So.”

  “Sir?”

  “So.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What we going do? This murder take place inside your jurisdiction. You may even know the man. Good fellow, they say. Wife been horning the blasted man, giving-way the pussy, in front the man nose. Some women, including wives, are like that.”

  “Sir.”

  “And in your jurisdiction, I need your . . . you know what I’m saying . . . no charges.”

  “No charges, sir?”

  “Blind eye. If you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But it’s inside your jurisdiction . . .”

  “I am reading you, sir.”

  “The liss the Assistant Commissioner place’ on my dess, Thursday morning, you know anything ‘bout this, Lance-Corporal? He recommending you to get the next stripe. Full Corporal.”

  “Sir?”

  “Well, drink up. I got to have a shower-a-shit-anna-shave, change-in my cricket-gear, be-Christ, and go and participate as a witness, as them Spartan Club fellows paint our arse in licks, pure licks, in the cricket match, this afternoon! We playing at Spartans, in the Park. You coming, to support the boys?”

  “I going be there, Skipper. Cheering for Police.”

  “Charges dropped, hear? Matter o’ fact, the Police not laying nuh charges. And congratulations.”

  “Sir?”

  “The Assistant Commissioner tell me, early as next Monday, you may be wearing one more stripe over that one pretty stripe you now got ’pon your shoulder, boy! For distinguish service . . . beyond the call o’ duty. Congratulations!”

  “Sir.”

  And Sargeant had stood at attention, and saluted the Commissioner; his right hand hitting the peak of his cork hat, and reverberating like a piece of heavy wire that holds a bell . . .

  “. . . if we had time,” Mary-Mathilda says, “I could tell you the things that take place in this underground dungeon. And this don’t have nothing to do with the times of slavery that Ma used to narrate to me, about when even more stranger things took place on this Plantation.

  “Always blood being shed. And blood flowing. Ma says one time, when the workers rebel and asked for a couple-more pennies-a-week, in wages, the Plantation pick-out who they thought the ring leaders were, namely Golbourne father, Pounce father, Manny grandfather, brought all three of them down here in this tunnel, strapped them by their hands and legs to the wall, in iron chains, handcuffs and leg-irons, built into the wall, the same time the Great House was built . . . Mr.Bellfeels tell me that this Great House originally was the residence of the Englishman who own the slaves and the Plantation. He went back to Englund. He couldn’t stomach the sun and living so close, with his wife, to the slaves. Ma say how she and Gran, my grandmother, the night in question, shelling green pigeon-peas, stood up in the kitchen—the Plantation was having a birthday party that night—and how they could hear the cowskin, the bull-pistle whip—in them days, they called it the balata—tearing-into flesh, plax! plax! plax! in a rhythm as if the man wielding the balata was looking at the hand of a metronome, or a clock, measuring-off time in seconds, tick . . . tock . . . tick; and in the heaviness of each lash. Plax! . . . plax! . . . plax! And the shrieks. The screeling. The cries for mercy. The voices of pain high, high, high, like the fright that comes from a child’s voice when a dog snarls; and then the same voice, low, low, low, in pain, like a moaning, exhausted; no voice at all, now; the loss of strength gone out of the cry for mercy, the murmur of the sting and memory of the pain inflicted by the balata. Plax! . . . plax! . . . plax! And the echo of the lash, like a giant violin with one of its strings brek. Yes.

  “Not knowing, from their distance aboveground, and their place in the kitchen shelling the pigeon-peas, if they could rightly say, or be certain of who the particular recipient of the lashes was, or could they make-out the owner of each pleading cry.

  “One man receive forty lashes.

  “The second man receive thirty.

  “An
d the third man got only twenty-four.

  “Ma and Gran counted all ninety-four.

  “When the last lash, the ninety-fourth plax! landed on that man’s back, Ma and Gran say it had the same sound, the same sting, the same echo, the same savageness as the previous ninety-three. Delivered by one man. That one man, beating three other big men, could have such consistency in his administration o’ violence . . .

  “And afterwards, Ma say, she had to wipe her hands in her apron, and pour Mr. Lawrence Burkhart, the Driver at the time, in charge of disciplines and floggings on the Plantation, a glass of cold Tennent’s Beer that she kept in the icebox, which was all the rage on the Plantation.

  “He drank-it-off in three big, long draughts. And then he said, ‘Ahhh!’ and Ma said a feeling of contentment came-over Mr. Lawrence Burkhart face, that she herself had a hard time understanding: how this Mr. Lawrence Burkhart could remain so cool and calm, after the screels that turn her blood to ice water.

  “Then she had to follow Mr. Lawrence Burkhart down these same steps. And come to the three bodies of the three men, barely held up by the manacles and the leg-irons; the whipping had disfigured their bodies almost beyond recognition; and if she didn’t witness with her own two eyes, that the whipping had-take-place in this underground cellar, Ma say, she couldda swear that she was looking at a tableau-type picture of the three men on the Cross, on Golgotha Hill, in Biblical times, crucified by that wicked governor, His Excellency, the Roman, Sir Pontius Pilate. The three of those men from history. With Jesus Our Saviour, in the middle. And two thieves, robbers, nicodemons, side-b’-side of her precious Saviour . . . one of them being none other than Barrabas who walked by night, Ma said.

  “Their backs was turned to Ma. And Ma knew then who the Plantation labelled the ringleader to be. Cross the whole-entire back of Golbourne father, also named Golbourne, she say she counted forty slashes going in all directions, formed a kind of star, a star that she had come-across somewhere, the Star of Bethlehem . . .