Jack was caught up in his own needs and had little care about the rest of the world except to strike out when the chip on his shoulder was rattled or it suited his purposes. They were a mismatched pair. Where Sarah was warm and outgoing, Jack was sullen and introspective, and quick to temper. He spoke roughly to his wife, not at all the tone I would expect a good man to use with his wife.
For Sarah’s sake, I would have to watch my step and toe the line when it came to Jack. I was family to her, she was truly happy to see me, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t a disappointment to her, or subject her to lectures for the rest of her life from Jack as to how wrong she had been about “her family.” If I walked out now, she would be hurt.
As to Jack … well, Jack and I were headed for trouble, but I had to keep my mouth shut for Sarah’s sake. But I just didn’t know how many more potshots about my father I could take. Or how unhinged I’d become if he said something about my mother.
21
We were bouncing along in bright sunlight one moment and then the sky suddenly turned black and opened up, hitting us with a downpour so thick I could have cut it with a knife. We couldn’t see fifty feet in front of the Land Rover.
“The rainy season runs from May to February,” Sarah said.
“That only leaves March and April to dry out,” I said.
“Yes, and sometimes May, but you get used to it. As you can see, it’s quite warm rain. You just go on doing whatever you’re doing.”
“Unless there’s a hurricane,” Jack said, grinning. “They come the second half of the year, from July to October, and have winds of over a hundred miles an hour. Sometimes they’re so fierce, they destroy everything. The last big one blew away Belize Town and about everything else standing in the country.”
Wonderful.
“It’s all right,” Sarah said, “the last killer hurricane was nearly twenty years ago.”
“They’re cyclical,” Jack said. “We get the small ones frequently, but the big ones come about once every decade. We’re just waiting for the next big one. If we survive the hurricanes, you still have to deal with the plagues of locust, froghoppers. They come in cycles, too, and attack the sugarcane.”
“They look like tiny frogs,” Sarah said.
“The froghoppers hit in ’41, the last killer hurricane in ’42. We didn’t come to the colony until ’46 and we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since.”
Wonderful.
The rain let up and we passed a cart pulled by a donkey and loaded high with sugarcane. A black man wearing a straw hat guided the donkey. He smiled and waved as we passed. Sarah waved back.
“You’ll find the blackamoors are generally lazy bastards,” Jack said.
“Sweetheart, I wish you wouldn’t use that word. They’re called Creoles, not that ugly old-fashioned word you use.”
“I use it because they’re lazy and stupid. I’ll use a better word when they deserve my respect. I’d hire wetbacks from Mexico, they’re better workers, but the colonial government is against it.”
Sarah looked anxiously back at me. “The locals are neither of those things, Nick. The fact is, it’s difficult for anyone to work hard in the heat and humidity of the tropics. And they certainly aren’t stupid people, they just don’t have the same desire to make money that we British colonists do. They prefer a simpler life. I find the culture charming.”
I didn’t ask Jack what the “locals” thought of him, but I suspected that I could make a good guess.
We passed two pretty young Creole teenage girls who exchanged waves and shouted greetings with Sarah as we rumbled by.
Jack glanced back at them in his rearview mirror and then sniggered to me. “One thing a young buck like you is going to enjoy, these native women are free and easy about spreading their legs.”
“Jack!”
“Jack!” he mocked. “Okay, woman, tell the boy whether I’m lying or exaggerating.”
Sarah hesitated before looking back at me, her cheeks redder than usual. “I’m afraid that he’s not exaggerating. The, uh, moral customs are not exactly what they are in British society. To say the least.”
“Anytime you feel like it, you just grab one of them and take her into the bushes and give her a poke.”
“Jack!”
I had had no interaction with people of color in Leningrad. And while I hated the Soviet system, every school child was taught that all people were entitled to be economically and socially equal—not that it was that way in practice, of course.
My impression of Jack was that besides being uncouth and ignorant, he was the worst kind of economic exploiter, a wannabe British upper-class who had come from the lower classes economically and looked down at others because he was self-conscious about his own circumstances.
“You’re going to hear some things about me,” Jack said.
“Maybe we should go into that later,” Sarah said.
“No, let’s get it out in the open. I stand behind the Union Jack, just as I did when I served under it in the army. This place is the slum of the British Empire, but my ancestors fought to get it and I’m willing to fight anyone who wants to take it back. If they can beat me, they can have it. Me and some of the other Brits who feel the same way have formed a posse comitatus to help keep order.”
“Our own colonial administrators are against it. They say it’s taking the law into our own hands,” Sarah said. “We shouldn’t interfere with the way the colony is administered.”
“We’re not interfering, woman, we’re helping.”
“What’s a posse comitatus?” I asked.
“It’s an old Latin expression. I think it means ‘common-law posse,’” Sarah said. “It dates back to medieval times when the shire of the county had the right to call all able-bodied men to arms if it became necessary to maintain order. Jack and some of his friends want to help keep order even if the commissioner says he doesn’t need the help.”
“When the law can’t keep order,” Jack said, “we do it for them. If it means going out at night to pound on doors and drag out bad people and punish them, that’s what we do.”
Pounding on the door at night. That was how my mother had described the incident in which my father had been taken away.
Jack took on new dimensions in my mind.
22
Sarah was right. The north was paradise compared to Belize Town. But I suspected even Siberia was farther up the rungs of hell than the colony’s capital.
We arrived at the Northern District late in the afternoon, passing through Orange Walk Town and following a waterway Sarah called “New River” toward Corozal, about thirty miles downstream. The river was muddy and sluggish. A small coastal motor freighter carried freight and a few passengers along the river. I also saw dug-out canoes Sarah called “doreys,” flat-bottomed boats with high flaring sides. The big canoes were loaded with goods—fruits, vegetables, even packaged and canned items—and had several rowers manning oars.
“There’s lots of citrus grown around Orange Walk,” Sarah said, “that’s how it got its name. A ‘walk’ is a citrus or coconut grove.”
We passed sugar plantations, row after row of green stalks an inch or two thick, some not more than a couple feet high to full grown ones fifteen to twenty feet tall.
“It’s grass, you know,” Sarah said.
“Grass?”
“Sugarcane. It’s a form of grass, even though it looks like bamboo. Bamboo is grass, too, isn’t it?” she asked Jack.
He grunted affirmatively.
“New River is only about ten miles from Rio Honda, the river that’s our border with Mexico,” Sarah said. “Further down, our plantation runs along both sides of a branch of the river. I call it ours, but you understand, we just manage the plantation and the sugarcane processing plant for a group of investors back home, a group of Scotsmen from Glasgow. That’s what many of the complaints are about, the locals say that all the money from the land ends up in Britain.”
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br /> That comment caused another spiel from Jack about the lazy, stupid natives.
“That’s our Achilles’ heel,” Sarah said, pointing at a bend in the distance after we left the main river and drove along the smaller stream that led to the plantation. “We built the sugarcane processing plant next to the stream so plantations upriver can float their cane to us in barges to be processed. Much cheaper than horse wagons or trucks. An earthquake two years ago lifted the bed of our stream so much, barges can’t make it all the way down to the plant. Instead, the growers haul their cane overland to a processing plant in Orange Walk. We still process for growers who we’re the closest for, but that’s only a fraction of the cane we have the capacity to handle.”
We passed a small village with a mishmash of shacks, some with mud walls and thatched roofs, others with clapboard and tin roofs. Some of the houses looked like they’d been walled with anything handy, from packing crates to a big tin sign advertising tonic water. None of the houses were painted.
The ground was littered with rusting empty cans, bottles, coconut husks, sugarcane debris and other trash. The entire settlement was surrounded by cane fields.
“Many of our full-time workers live here,” Sarah said. “They’re really lovely people, but I’m afraid their culture has a different view on how to deal with rubbish than we do. The mud-walled houses are called abodes; the ones with thatch you’ll hear called ‘trash’ because that’s how the Creoles pronounce thatch.”
A tall, middle-aged Creole came out onto the road and Jack pulled over to speak to him. Jack said Samuel was his foreman.
“This is Sarah’s nephew,” Jack told him. “He’ll be working with us.”
I stepped out of the vehicle and shook hands with Samuel. He grinned at my pale white complexion.
“Better have a hat,” he said. “Or you’ll fry.”
A mile further down, the plantation house sat a hundred feet from the road within sight of the off-shoot river, cane fields at its back and sides, and larger than most of the houses I had seen on the trip, but not as palatial as I imagined it. It was a rectangular white box, two-storied, with screened verandas in front and on the sides of the house on both the ground and second floor. The building was white, with a greenish zinc roof. Several feet off the ground, three steps led up to the entry porch. The kitchen was in back, separated by a breezeway, to keep the hot cooking fires from heating up the house.
“This is home,” Sarah smiled. “It’s not Tara but it’s where we lay our heads at night.”
“Tara?”
“Oh, you probably wouldn’t know about a movie called Gone With the Wind. Tara was the name of the heroine’s plantation house.”
“I think I’ve heard of the movie. A tale of capitalistic exploitation of slaves.” I grinned to take the edge off the remark. Actually, the only thing I knew about the movie was a conversation I overheard during a meal onboard the Queen.
“Well, let’s have something to eat,” Sarah said.
We sat in the kitchen at a table with a red-checkered tablecloth and ate cold beef sandwiches. Jack washed his down with more beer—he’d packed down five or six more during the ride home. His face was flushed and his eyes watery.
“Hope this is all right,” Sarah said, showing me to a room on the first floor. “We’re just above you. We don’t use carpeting because the fleas love the stuff, so you’re sure to hear us walking around.”
“It’s a palace,” I told her truthfully. It was the first “room” I’d had to myself.
“We get to bed early here because we start work at the crack of dawn to beat the midday heat.” She squeezed my hand. “I really am excited you’re with us, Nick. You look so much like Peter, for a moment I thought I was seeing a ghost when you came down the gangplank.” She paused at the door. “Don’t mind Jack,” she said in a low voice. “He’s had a hard life. Under it all, he’s a good man. He’s just had a rough time of it.”
Rough time? Because no one gave him money and status as a birthright? Because he had to work to be somebody? I had no sympathy for him.
Later that night I turned off my light and sat on a rocking chair out on the screened porch. I heard Jack and Sarah’s footsteps above me. Their bedroom door was open to their screened porch and I could heard the murmuring of their voices as I sat in my underwear and took advantage of the cool breeze.
I must have dozed off for a while because Jack’s loud voice awakened me.
“He’s a charity case as far as I’m concerned, he has to earn his keep.” His tone was beer-soaked.
Sarah asked him to lower his voice.
“Bitch!”
I heard the sound of a slap and froze in my chair. I didn’t know what to do. I’d seen plenty of husbands and wives fight, hell, I’d seen a woman go after her husband with a vodka bottle. But they were strangers to me. Sarah was my family.
My first instinct was to run upstairs and beat the hell out of the bastard. My heart started to pound. I got up and went quietly back inside and lay on the bed, ignoring a net that made me claustrophobic. I was sure Sarah would be embarrassed if she knew what I had heard.
It was hard to imagine a man hitting someone like Sarah. These weren’t street people, they were a respectable, middle-class—whatever they called it—couple.
And being called a charity case, I hadn’t heard the expression before, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what it meant. It was an insult. And I came from a street culture where insults were answered with blood. But I had to keep my mouth shut and my fists in my pocket. I didn’t want to hurt Sarah.
I lay in bed and stared up at the dark ceiling. I was a very mature eighteen year old, not only in appearance but as a result of my struggles in life. Hell, I’d survived the 900 Days, the worst single atrocity ever inflicted upon a city and its people. I had experienced more horrors than the most tried combat veterans.
But even if I was mature in terms of some experiences, there was so much about life I still had to learn. I knew almost nothing about women other than the wonders of their anatomy. I knew they could be courageous. To Sarah, my father had been a heroic figure, but to me, my mother was the braver heart although I loved them both. What I lacked was not only how women viewed life but their relationships with men.
How could a woman permit a man to physically abuse her and not fight back—or at least walk out on the bastard?
I didn’t wonder about what made some men strike women. A bully will strike anyone who they can dominate.
One thing had come clear to me: Sarah thought the colony, at least the part where she lived, was paradise. Maybe she was right. But there was a snake in every paradise.
I had found “family” in Sarah, but not a home. I had always looked out for myself and I would have to continue to do so. As much as I liked Sarah and felt her warmth, I could not stay in the house without coming into violent conflict with Jack.
There was another reason why I had to get out.
I felt an immediate affection for Sarah. I had lost everyone I loved. But I wasn’t going to let my feelings for her get so strong that I wouldn’t be able to handle it when I had to move on.
I would have to fend for myself, not rely on anyone.
The people and places of the colony were alien to me, but in most ways, British Honduras was much less a “jungle” than Leningrad. Mosquitoes and jaguars couldn’t compare to the human beasts that had preyed on people during the siege of the city, and were trivial compared to the all-controlling, suffocating and occasionally murderous bureaucracy that kept a tight stranglehold on Soviet life.
Jack’s problems with colonial administrators were, as the banana boat captain would say, “a piece of cake” compared to dealing with the brutal apparatchik system in the Soviet Union. Not to pat my own back, but frankly, it was a lot tougher to be a criminal in a police state than in a free society. Besides the spy-on-spy system that permeated every level of society, the Soviet system had more “police” type personnel and no constitution
al rights to get in the way of super-efficient “justice.” In a country where confession was considered good for the soul, it was not inappropriate to help the tongue loosen with good old-fashioned torture.
I survived on the streets of Leningrad.
I would survive in the jungle of British Honduras.
23
I woke up in a sweat. I had dreamt that I was chased by a huge snake that wrapped itself around my leg and was squeezing the life out of it.
As dawn was breaking, I left the house and walked to the village where we had met Samuel. I was greeted by barking dogs and the smell of food. Smoke curled up from the houses and the smell of food stirred my stomach juices. But I wasn’t going to eat until I had earned my keep.
I hung around until Samuel came out of his house. He did a double take when he saw me.
“I’m ready for work.”
He stared at me in disbelief. “Work?”
“I want to work.”
“What kind of work?”
“The kind you and your men do.”
He shook his head. “We do field work. Englishmen don’t do that sort of job.”
I grinned at him. “I’m not English. I want to learn everything there is to know about sugarcane. And I want to work.”
His expression told me that he considered me slightly touched, but he merely grinned and shrugged and said, “Okay, okay, you want to do Creole work, you’ll do Creole work.”
“Can you teach me about growing sugarcane? Everything about it?”
“There are two people who know everything. God and me. And I am the only one willing to tell you.” He suddenly reverted to Creole. “Too much hur-a get dey tomarra, tek time, get dey tiday. You understand?”
“If you take your time, you’ll get things done faster.”
“Good. Speaking Creole dey firse layson,” he said, grinning.
He talked and I listened as we walked along the rows of cane. He spoke perfect English and only slipped into Creole jargon to give me practice listening.
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