The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “The rest is history,” she says.

  “I remember reading this story at Sin-Davids Elementary School, in private tuition from Mr. Edwards who was preparing me for the Secondary-to-Second-Grade. He said that he read the same story in the original Latin, in a book written by Julius Caesar, called Caesar’s Gallic Wars. I remember the story, but I can’t remember the moral Mr. Edwards tell me was in the story, nor whether it was the Greeks versus the Romans. Or the Greeks versus the Trojans. Is a Trojan a Roman?”

  “Or I could tell you the story of Bathsheba.”

  “Bathsheba? The resort area on the East Coast of this Island?” he asks her. “The place where Miss Enid Ma.Well does-cook for a fellar by the name of George Lamming, only ’pon a Sunday, after twelve? That Bathsheba? I didn’t know there was a history to Bathsheba, and Miss Ma..Well, and Mr. Lamming.”

  “Bathsheba the woman! And David, man!”

  “Oh! The Bible.”

  “The Holy Bible says that it was David who was peeping at Bathsheba bathing, spying on the poor woman’s nakedness, without her knowledge. But I have a different version, giving the interpretation that says that it was Bathsheba, knowing her husband was away at the front in the Wars of Ammon and Rabbah, fighting battles and killing other women’s husbands, she, Bathsheba start feeling a lil peckish for the absence of her husband’s warm body side-o’-her, in her bed, got her maid to move the basin with the water she was washing her face-and-hands with, more closer to the window where King David could see her more clearer. Naked as she born.

  “She was invited the night before, as a dignitary, along with other political and military dignitaries and wives of soldiers and of politicians, and the King, David-the-First, gave her a tour of the castle, including his bedroom; and you could imagine that when nobody was looking, the King, being King, pinched Bathsheba on her behind, and she bit her lip in ecstasy and in surprise that powerful King David was feeling-her-up; and that is how she knew which position to put her basin and ewer of water in . . .”

  “It is not only kings who behave like David. The Commissioner is so, too. Manny tell me the Vicar is so; but I don’t believe so. We had, as you.Well-know, a Governor of the Island, who was so, in the worst way. He caused the woman in question to lose her life, he was so much so.

  “I know a lot of men in high society who are so,” she says.

  Her hand is on his baton. She removes it from the holster, and places it on her stomach, between her breasts, and absentmindedly runs her left hand down the smooth object; and when that hand has reached the smaller end, she makes her right hand travel from the smaller end to reach the larger end. And she removes her hands, leaving the baton resting in the middle of her body . . . and she knows that there has been, has always been, a lot of gossip about her, and about some of the powerful men, friends of Mr. Bellfeels’, who played poker for large stakes—some men lost land, some men lost houses, some men lost racehorses, some cars and businesses, and one man lost a woman, on the fall of a card at the Friday night games of Five Card Stud, no limit, that Mr. Bellfeels hosted at her Great House (as his wife detested card games; even bridge); yes, a lot of stories are told about her: how during games, a man, wanting a break, a change of luck, would go into a bedroom, or an adjacent room, and Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda would be sent by Mr. Bellfeels to follow the man; and in fifteen minutes, the man would re-emerge, with a smile on his face.

  Gertrude told this story to Sargeant, who told it to Manny, and from there, it spread throughout the neighbourhood, and then beyond; but there was no truth to the rumour . . . No, she must certainly not appear as if she knows what to do with the baton lying on her belly; and how. When this thought came into her head, like the recollection of an item on a long list of things to do, momentarily her body went limp. Her thighs became dry. Her nipples returned to their unexcited calmness, like a flat land over which many have travelled. For that moment, desire went out of her body. And the smell of the earth came through the thick mattress she had made out of the trash. She could smell the freshness of the canes, and the distant sickening fragrance of crack-liquor, the hot, sweet juice squeezed from the ground canes. She could smell the soil, the land, the ground in which she had worked so hard at the beginning, so hard and with such brutality at the hands of the overseer, the driver, and the male leader of the field gang; and then, at the hand of Mr. Bellfeels; and she remembered the leather riding-crop as it lifted her dress one afternoon, when she was made to follow him to a deserted section of the North Field, while the other hands were eating their flour bakes and drinking molasses water that had pieces of chipped ice in it; her dress was lifted by the riding-crop, and his jodhpurs crushed the trash and the land itself, that vast field that was so large that a woman could not walk it in two hours, the North Field; the land seemed to shake as he unbuttoned two buttons on the fly of his khaki jodhpurs, pulled his “tool” out—he himself called it that—and it assumed a size and brutishness and an ugliness, such an ugly colour, that she thought her bowels, her stomach, her guts, whatever you call that part of her insides, was going to erupt.

  It took him three minutes. He came inside her.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  And he left his semen and the stain of his semen on his jodhpurs. It lasted three minutes.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  And the rest of that afternoon, weeding the six-weeks sweet-potatoes and the young yams, she ached; and had to bend over many times, practising regular breathing, in order to stifle the excruciating pain that crawled through her body.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  She was sixteen years old then. She became pregnant. It was the first of three abortions that Ma and Gran induced with herbs and other bushes recommended and selected by the older women in the neighbourhood, and that grew wild behind the palings of their houses.

  Ma said nothing. No word of pity or of reproof, or of consolation, passed her lips, as she administered the potion. And Mary Gertrude Mathilda cried secretly, and made a promise to herself.

  When she had walked the mile home that evening, at six o’clock, Ma prepared a hot steaming bath for her that had herbs she had picked from the gutter and from the overrun growth behind her house . . . and she soaked Mary-girl in the wooden tub of scalding water; and the water was enervating as seawater first thing in the morning, at the Crane Beach; and Ma gave her the bottle that contained seawater, to drink. No dinner that night; nothing solid; just piping hot Miraculous Bush tea. . . .

  It seems a long time, long enough to tell a story in, that she is lying flat on her back; fumbling in the darkness to touch his hand, and his fingers, to hold his hand, holding it in such a tight but loving manner that it is an exclamation of discovery and of beneficence, also.

  She can feel his body shudder at her touch . . .

  He shudders because his mind is running ahead of him. He cannot extend his hand and touch hers, touch her body: he imagines and paints in dreams the things he wants to do with her . . . He must learn to control his orgasm, and not have his semen spew out too soon, as it happens when he is in this same field, but at another corner, with Gertrude. And he must put aside all his reservations, and his feeling of inferiority, and foop her good, as he would foop or would want to foop any other woman whose presence has caused him to melt, in spirit, in toughness, in masculinity, in man-talk in Manny’s rum shop, amongst his friends, in the Selected Clienteles Room . . . “Help me, God,” he says to himself. He closes his eyes as he says this, and he means it, sincerely as an exhortation for help; for he knows, with the instinct of a detective, that he really is incapable of giving Mary-Mathilda love; the kind of love she deserves; no matter how she should define love.

  On the other hand, she wants to give him her body; but she feels that he feels she has been touched too often, by other men; that she is different; that there is something wrong with her. She wishes that he would be a man, behave brave; mannish; fondle her, take her, go deep inside her and flood her with his sperm; “explo
de inside me, oh-God!”; wish he would behave like the man she imagines. All the men she has known, and she has loved not one of them, are men who knew what they wanted; powerful men; and men who took it.

  She can feel his body beside her shudder; and she lies and hopes he will behave mannish; natural . . . but since she cannot take his hand and guide it over her body, she gives over that desire to her imagination. She is safe and untouched imagining this: she remains whole. She lets her imagination portray her desire, and in this way she can now guide him, at her will, over her body: it seems a long time, long enough to tell a story in, that she is undoing his fly. And it is done now. And she fumbles inside his sliders, and holds his tom-pigeon tight in her hand, holding it in such a tight but loving manner that it is an exclamation of discovery, and of beneficence also.

  She can feel him shudder.

  “No,” he says in a voice soft as a wisp of smoke over a field; soft as the voice of the first wood-dove’s cooing in the morning, “I will get on top.” . . . Mary-Mathilda fumbles in the darkness and finds the baton which has fallen off her belly; and she takes it up and rubs it along her body, beginning at her breasts, down in the middle of her chest; past the raised dead skin of her brooch-wound; down down, slow-slow now, until it reaches the tuft of hair covering her pussy; and she makes the return journey, too full now of passion for words that will let him know how hot she is; and this upward journey, this journey North, is like an expedition, an exploration towards freedom; for the baton is moving slowly round her breasts, massaging the brooch of flesh on her body, that old wound overgrown with flesh that is dead, then over her nipples, which are getting hard as two small peanuts sewn into her breasts; and when this is beyond control, and is controlling her, expressing how uncontrollable it is, she moves the baton in its journey back South, and it stops in the tuft of hair; black, shiny hair that has remained black, and not like the hair on her head; and she is careful now; moving the baton with some determination, but in that determination, with gentleness round and round, as if she is measuring the labia; and she knows she is getting wet; the baton glistening with the fluid from her body, she takes the baton out from her lips, and she places it into his mouth.

  He closes his mouth over the baton. He says nothing. He does not like the taste. Or the stickiness of the baton. But it is a sweet smell. A thick, sweet, mouth-licking smell that has a breath of boiled salt fish on its fragrance, and of a perfume that he does not know the name of, immediately.

  She lifts her dress with her hands. The coolness of the night bathes her buttocks in a tantalizing, relaxing feeling.

  And she gives him the gift she wants to know he has never received before. She passes her left hand over the wetness of her pussy, and then passes the same hand, in a gesture very much like a gesture to be silent, to keep a secret, an indication agreeing to be confidential, over his mouth.

  “My body.” She says it barely audibly. “This is me, for you.”

  “Thanks, Mary-G. Thanks very much, Mary-G.”

  “This. Yessss.”

  “Yes, Mary-Mathilda. Yesssss!”

  She is on top of him. And he is hard, and stiff, and long, and deep inside her, and she feels like a gymnast would, balancing her entire body on a bar that is pointing vertical. And she does behave, in way, precisely as if she is a gymnast, moving in circles, wide and small; small and wide; and feeling his tom-pigeon bend, pliable, in her gyrations, in her circular movements.

  She does not talk.

  No word, no sound escapes his lips . . .

  The smell of the earth is strong. The dampness of the trash makes her feel as if she has awakened from sleep; disoriented; and confused, realizing, perhaps, that she has wet her bed during the night; for she has reverted to childhood . . . or as if she is sick with a fever and the bed is wet from her body heat, and is not her urine . . .

  The smell of the earth is of rotten sugar cane. And she is walking through the trash, in a hurry; and it is night; and it is dark; and she must get to the place she is heading to, in a hurry; but she cannot hurry, because in this rush that is anxious, something always happens to delay the time of arrival and destiny. But the reaching of destination is precisely the cause of her anxiety . . . Even though he does not move, to help her keep the rhythm, she can feel the liveliness in his body . . .

  The sky is dark. He is looking at the stars. They are far away. Music comes into his mind. He cannot say the name of the tune he hears. The music has no name that he can put to it. It is heavy music; martial music; powerful music, the kind of music, he surmises, that would be played at a funeral, at a public hanging, at a ceremony to accompany an execution; or just pure, simple, raw violence, like killing.

  He remembers the name of the music. He heard it earlier tonight. “The Ride of the Valkyries.” He does not understand why this is the music that comes into his head, at this moment. And under these circumstances . . . And a sound comes independently into her head; and it is the sound of water running, water pouring in volumes of magnificence over a precipice that is higher than the rest of the land, and there is a noise from the water which boils in its churning, from the fall of the water, like thick clouds, like mist, which pours everlasting over the Falls; and the name of the place comes to her, far, far from here in this cane field, far in the North of New York State, in Buffalo, across a lake from Canada, the closeness making Amurca and Canada one country.

  The roar is the quickening of her heart; the injection of violent thought, violent action. Her body is out of control. Her eyes are open, wide, wild, staring; and her hair is standing on end, and as she moves, it flares outward; and fearing she will lose her balance, and her perfection of style on the gymnastic bar, the bar that is vertical, she must hold on to something; and she grabs him, in the darkness . . . But the darkness is not so dark that he does not know she is grabbing him, with both her hands, by his neck.

  Tight. Choking. Violent. Wild.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  It is her voice.

  “I’m going to kill you!”

  It is her voice.

  And as the words fall out, like the water tumbling over the tall, high, misty precipice, all the passion, controlled successfully for so many years; all the feeling that place and position, and the neglect had caused her to stifle, came pumping out.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  This is his voice.

  Her grip on his neck is still tight. And she has bent over, collapsed at the second after her scream of climax; and her mouth is at his throat.

  She can taste a saltiness in her mouth. And a thickness. And a revulsive sensation.

  It is his blood in her mouth.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  It is his voice.

  Her hand, with her own linen handkerchief in it, is passing over his neck. It is not a wound. It is the hotness of blood that has caused the puncture . . .

  “Mongoose,” she says, at the sound of feet darting about in the cane field in which they are. She is lying on her back.

  “Mangooses, you mean.”

  “Or men who are sly like a mongoose?”

  “That would be man-gooses? Or men-goose.”

  He is lying on his stomach. His arms are propping up the rest of his body. She is flat on her back, as if she is floating, as if she is in the sea at the Crane Beach, floating like a dry beach-grape leaf. He cannot see the expression of relaxed happiness, approaching joy, that is on her face, for it is still too dark. It is not entirely dark though, not like the time of night he roams throughout the Village, on his bicycle, looking for criminals. The light is the light of foreday morning, the light that begins soon after midnight, but hours before dawn, that dreary, dramatic, graveyard type of light. It comes in on their left. And soon, he will be able to see the expression on her face, and gauge her various moods, and see her face, and see if the softness he saw in her face years ago, and knew, when she was young, the softness that came and disappeared in impulses tonight, is still there.

  �
�Do you know anything about astronomy? The stars?” she says.

  “No,” he tells her, lying deliberately.

  “Not since I was a little girl, have I lay-down on my back, looking up into the skies. Certainly not with a man side-o’-me!

  “And it is a long time since I even worried to look up, to see if there are still stars in the skies over Bimshire.

  “Orion. The Big Dipper. Jupiter. The Three Sisters. The star that tells you when you are getting rain. And the North Star.

  “Do you know anything about the North Star, Percy?”

  “I didn’t know you know so much about stars yourself! Did you study astrology? I don’t know much about the North Star. Nothing unusual, except that it shines in the North.”

  “Me? A simple, uneducated woman like me, an expert in the stars? No. Everything I been telling you, about paintings and travel, about life, even about how I feel, I picked up from library books. And Wilberforce, to a extent.

  “Years and years, when things between me and Mr. Bellfeels was still sweet, and he could get away from his work, and from his wife—he had just got married to her—he would steal away, and me and him would go for moonlight walks sometimes; for at that time I wasn’t in the Great House yet; but we were still thick; so, late at night when nobody was around and walking the road, and we couldn’t be seen, or identified, or picked-out in a motor-car headlights; and bring shame to Mistress Bellfeels, his wife, we had the whole place to ourselves! But on moonlight nights, even though they didn’t last so long, those nights were still . . . Still.