“Bush, big bush, little bush, fat bush, thin bush, ugly bush, pretty bush, red bush, bushy bush, leafy bush, gorgeous bush, rass bush, bumbo bush, blood bush…”
So it went in the hot afternoon sun with the two of them shrieking names at each other a thousand times over.
Came Inga’s orders about footprints. Neither Aloysius nor Service wore shoes, and Inga said that this was very bad because they would leave a footprint in Busha’s yard that might lead the police to them. She said that they should tear up an old shirt and wrap it around their feet to smear their footprints.
So they did what Inga told them to do, tearing up an old shirt and binding their bare soles with it. When they stepped in the mud their wrapped feet left only fuzzy marks behind which did not match up with the prints of their bare feet.
Inga kneeled and examined their prints closely. Then she stood up with a grin.
“This vill drive the police crazy,” she chuckled.
Aloysius sat down and unwrapped his feet.
“Lawd God,” a bush screeched, “pum-pum make man wrap him foot! Why oh why, oh Lawd, you invent pum-pum to torment man so? Why you put pum-pum in dis world to make honest man turn thief?"
Aloysius leaned gloomily against the tree's trunk.
"Get off me, you rass thief!"
Chapter Twenty
Busha was worried about two things nowadays. He was worried that he would not score even a single run in the cricket match. It would be an unbearable ignominy if the only white man on the side made a duck. The closer the match got the more this worry pressed on Busha’s brain. He went to sleep worrying about being bowled for a duck. The first word that sprang into his head when he woke up in the morning was “duck.” This was usually followed by a gloomy phrase such as “bowled for a duck” or “caught for a duck” or “stumped for a duck.” All week Busha was restless over this worry. Sometimes in the middle of a peaceful country evening with Sarah the word “duck” would pop into his mind and he would jump up and pace about like a man possessed.
The next thing that was worrying Busha was that any day now he might drop dead and end up behind Shubert’s shop in the graveyard he despised so intensely. His day in the hospital had taught him that he could pop off anytime, anywhere, any day, anyhow. Then every goat, cow, and donkey that usually foraged in the graveyard would line up to empty their bowels on his head. He wouldn’t even be cold in his grave before the deluge of doo-doo and wee-wee would begin. He would lie in his dark coffin listening to doo-doo thumping against his graveslab and there wouldn’t be a damn thing he could do about it.
When Busha got an idée fixe in his head, it stayed there for a good while. In fact, it tended to grow and swell against his poor brain until it gave him a splitting headache. And no matter how he thumped the side of his head or jumped up and paced about or tried to think matters through, Busha would usually end up feeling helpless and miserable.
One morning Busha woke up and stared at the gray dawn light seeping through the window and made up his mind so violently and suddenly that he leapt out of bed, landed with a solid thump against the wooden floor, and practically ran to the toilet.
A few hours later he was on his way to Kingston.
To Busha’s mind Kingston was a nasty, dirty, loveless, noisy Sodom and Gomorrah plus a wicked Babylon all wrapped up into one, and he hated the place with such a passion that he stayed away from it as much as he could.
There was more scoundrel in Kingston, more thief, more whore, more gunman than anyplace else on earth. Only the hangman truly loved Kingston because that was where he got most of his business. Without the stream of Kingstonians tramping toward his gallows, he’d have to go out and work for a living in the hot sun like everybody else instead of snapping neck bone at two hundred dollar a head in the shade of Spanish Town prison walls.
Yet it was also a fact that no place on the island was better for a man to dead than Kingston.
Kingston had more graveyard than coop had chicken, had graveyard of every size, quality, and amenity.
In Kingston a man did not have to be stuck in the ground like old turnip: He could preserve his bones in the smooth walls of a palatial mausoleum with angel statue blowing horn on the roof and a solid mahogany door barring donkey, goat, chicken, cow, and dog.
For a long time now Busha had been hungering to buy a mausoleum for his family, but always Sarah had interfered. This time there was no stopping him. He intended to follow his own mind. Moneague graveyard was not going to swallow him up.
As he drove to Kingston, Busha had his checkbook in his back pocket.
The road Busha took to Kingston was an old road cut in the earliest days of the Fallen Empire. It wound over a hard green mountain, lanced through a watery plain, skirted a gorge, and parted the heart of an arid valley.
Busha cornered his way over Mount Diablo where he glimpsed from the heights a vast checkerboard plain with wisps of smoke coiling off burnt fields and scattered settlements clinging to the edge of green fields in the valley below.
He drove past children playing with homemade pushcarts, grown men loitering in front of shops. Fat country women perched on the roadside wall with naked babies wriggling in their laps.
As Busha drove with graveyard on his mind, occasionally he would hear snatches of jabbering voices, the blast of a sound system, the whiplash of domino bone on a backyard table.
Soon Busha was winding his way through a gorge where the sluggish Rio Cobre, bloated with silt and water plants, unwound its old green body down the mountainside like some nightmare serpent caught outdoors in the sunlight.
An hour later the swampy effluvium of Kingston’s slums-blew in through the wing window of the car and made his nose run.
The man Busha was going to see was scamp, scoundrel, and thief all rolled up into one. These were the right words, to Busha’s way of thinking, to sum up the disposition of a man who made his living off death. Yet this man, who was a fat Jamaican of Syrian descent, kept the best graveyard on the island. No goats wandered in and out of the tombstones in this Syrian cemetery. Donkeys were unwelcome, as were cows and chickens. Bad dogs and watchmen patrolled day and night keeping out vandals and intruders.
Mr. Saarem, the proprietor, was born in Jamaica but of strong Syrian consciousness. He often ate raw mince for dinner and cooked his food with peculiar spices that made his breath smell like soup. He was renowned as a glutton and had a fat belly whose hairy rolls bulged through his shirt. He had gotten the idea for a perpetual care graveyard from America. In the years of the Socialist government during which, in the opinion of Mr. Saarem, Jamaica went temporarily mad, he had lived in Miami and gained an appreciation for perpetual care. When he returned to Jamaica he quickly saw that the island needed a new kind of graveyard.
A Jamaican is like a man who lives on a ship: He looks constantly at sea. He pays scant attention to his own quarters, expecting landfall and firmament to loom in his vision at any God-given moment. He neglects, most grievously of all, his graveyards.
A prominent citizen could be dead one day, laid to rest with all due pomp and circumstance, and the next day donkey and goat would be munching on his wreaths. No matter where you go in Jamaica, the dead are uncared for in public cemeteries.
So Mr. Saarem was indignantly explaining to Busha as the two of them sat in the cemetery’s office.
Busha relished this indignation because it matched his own sore feelings about what goats and cows and donkeys were waiting to do to his own appointed grave site behind Mr. Shubert’s shop.
But, of course, there was Sarah, who wanted to be buried near Mummy and Daddy behind the stone church.
“We can move dem, Busha,” Mr. Saarem said as though he couldn’t see at all what the problem was about. “As a matter of fact, I agree wid your wife. Families should be united. You don’t want to bury one here and one there and scattershot everybody all over de place. All should bury in de same spot. Is only right.”
“Move Mummy and Dadd
y!” Busha exclaimed.
“We move grave all de time, Busha,” Mr. Saarem said coolly. “Is part of de service we give. We give full service, Busha. Full service.”
“Too bad you don’t have service dat make a man don’t dead,” Busha muttered.
“What you want to do, Busha,” Mr. Saarem chuckled, “put me out of business?”
Busha thought about moving Sarah’s mummy and daddy. But there was his mummy and daddy, too. Then there was Uncle Herbert and Aunt Mae. Not to mention great uncles and grand aunts and cousins galore. Busha counted them off one by one to Mr. Saarem.
“How so much of you in dat one graveyard?” Mr. Saarem asked with evident astonishment.
“Is two hundred years of McIntosh lying dere,” Busha said boastfully.
Mr. Saarem shook his head with wonder and said the word Busha was waiting eagerly to hear: mausoleum. A family with so much dead needed a private tomb where the deceased could be laid out with dignity in alphabetical, chronological, or geographical order, depending on Busha’s preference. The alternative was to chuck the whole family in the ground higgledypiggledy and leave them there until Judgment Day. But it was obvious that such a makeshift arrangement would not satisfy Busha, who was used to better.
“A mausoleum!” Busha marvelled, as though he had never heard such a word before.
“Let me show you what I mean, Busha,” Mr. Saarem said.
Mr. Saarem bellowed for a boy to bring him some of the display books. The boy returned carting an armload of enormous books crammed with color plates of mausoleums.
Busha was in seventh heaven poring over the books whose cloth covers gave off a faint whiff of mold. He saw more mausoleums than he had ever dreamed existed. Some were squat and flat-roofed and garnished with what struck Busha as fishscale ornamentation on walls. Some had stone columns and rooftop statues, a pediment embossed with the family’s coat of arms, and walls smothered under carvings of acanthus and fleur-de-lys.
Mr. Saarem pointed out specific features of each design.
“You notice, Busha,” he remarked, “dat we don’t have no naked batty angel in dis place. Yet you see it all de time in America. But here we cover de batty. To me it just looks more dignified.”
Mr. Saarem took Busha inside one of the mausoleums and showed where the bones of a prominent family were alphabetically entombed in its walls.
“We do all de genealogical research for the family coat-of-arms, Busha,” Mr. Saarem whispered.
Outside, the sun was broiling hot. But inside the mausoleum, the air was damp and cool, and footfall echoed like hoof on macadamized road.
The opulence, the serenity of it all, took Busha’s breath away.
When they reemerged in the hot sun, Busha had made up his mind. It had been made up years ago anyway. But now it was definitely and firmly decided. He would buy a mausoleum for his family. This was where his own earthly remains would be laid to rest.
They were taking one of the cement footpaths that discreetly wormed past rows of tombstones when Busha saw the only sight in the whole place that put him off. On the roof of a mausoleum was a black stone angel blowing a horn.
“What’s dat negar angel doing up dere?” Busha asked, astonished.
Mr. Saarem glanced at the angel and smiled.
“Black marble, Busha. It come straight from a quarry in Italy. It’s specially treated to bring out the shine.”
“Listen me, Mr. Saarem,” Busha said. “I deal wid negar man every day of my life. When I dead de one thing I don’t want sitting on me head is negar angel.”
Mr. Saarem chuckled.
“Dat’s de way dat family feel too, Busha. Dem nearly carry me to court over dat angel. But I show dem de purchase order dat dem sign: ebony cherub. Dem say dem didn’t think about ebony meaning black. But ebony is black every hour of de day, every day of de week.”
“Is it a white family?”
“Whiter dan you and me, Busha.”
“What a life, eh?” Busha remarked mournfully. “You and your loved ones dead and bury in a nice place and for de rest of eternity negar angel blowing horn over you head. If it was me, I’d paint it rass white.”
At the end of the day, one of Busha’s two worries had been lessened. He had signed a check for ten thousand dollars and authorized the cemetery to draw up plans for a family mausoleum and to do a genealogical search of his family’s coat-of-arms. With one stroke of his pen, he had freed himself of the scabby Moneague graveyard. The only thing that could ruin his plan was if he died between now and when the mausoleum was built. He was therefore driving cautiously, staying well under fifty and keeping his eyes warily on side roads where cars and trucks had a way of popping out in front of you.
But in his heart he knew that he had only transmogrified one trouble to another. There was still Sarah to be faced and her hard-headed opposition to a Kingston burial to be overcome. Busha hadn’t the faintest idea how he would break the news to her, but he was grimly bracing himself for a hard and bitter fight.
Then there was also the prospect of the duck ahead of him. The duck was implacable, merciless, ruled by fate, and immune to checkbook.
If it lay in his future, money was powerless to stop the duck.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was Saturday morning of the big cricket match and Busha was grimly at bat. The first ball bowled to him was a wicked inswinger that bounded toward his unprotected head at some 100 miles per hour. Busha took a desperate slice at it with the bat and missed by a mile. He spun in his tracks, certain that he would see the stumps of his wicket go flying. But the ball zoomed over the bails and plopped harmlessly into the gloves of the wicket keeper, who immediately appealed that Busha had nicked it.
“Hoowwzzhhee?” the wicket keeper roared.
The umpire, a parson from a neutral mountain village, turned up his nose scornfully at the appeal.
Muttering under his breath about thiefing umpiring parsons, the wicket keeper returned the ball to the fast bowler, who began leisurely pacing off his length.
The sun beat down on Busha’s head like a teacher’s switch. He was dressed in the garb of the cricketer: He had on his whites; his legs were ensheathed in thick pads, his testicles baking in a protective metal cup. His fingers sweated under the rubber bristles of the batting gloves. On top of everything else his throat was dry and his belly hung off him like a dead weight.
Twenty-two yards from where Busha stood nervously at the wicket waiting for the fast bowler to reach his mark, Dr. Fox, the other opening batsman, smiled encouragingly at him.
The sidelines of the playing fields were thick with spectators. They spilled out over the boundary lines and dripped from the limbs of surrounding trees; they gawked from thick hillsides and peeped from car tops. Parasols bloomed thick in the air like wild flowers. Women were resplendent in their best dresses. Men had squeezed calloused feet into leather shoes and now pranced on the sidelines like newly shod horses. Everyone smelled of Saturday night baths and Sunday morning scents.
The children had caught the excitement in the air and danced around their mothers, poking their heads through the thick crowd to ogle the cricket pitch. A babble of voices rose and crested and broke, punctuated by occasional laughter and shouts.
The fast bowler, a beefy cultivator from Walker’s Wood who was usually murder on the Moneague batsmen, had reached his mark. He turned, pawed at the ground like an enraged bull, took a deep breath that blew him up to a frightful size, and began cantering toward the crease where he would deliver the ball.
Busha crouched and waited, his breath coming in sharp spurts.
“Duck” popped into his mind just as the bowler hurtled down on him, whipping a vicious bouncer toward the wicket.
Busha closed his eyes and swung the bat like an axe. The seasoned wood clouted the ball and sent it sailing over the boundary lines to carom off the asphalt road.
The umpire’s arms stiffened into the air, signalling that Busha had hit a six.
&
nbsp; The crowd bellowed deafeningly with one enormous mouth.
* * *
Padded and waiting his turn at the wicket, Mr. Shubert was sitting with the other batsmen and talking over his shoulder to $78.59, who stood behind him shielding her head from the hot sun under a gaudy parasol.
In the eyes of the world $78.59 was a good-natured, big-batty widow who had eight grown children, lived in an unelectrified mountain settlement where she minded goats and chickens, and was known to God and her neighbors as Mrs. Sepole. But because of tension Mr. Shubert could not remember the old lady’s name, although he clearly recalled that her balance in his credit book was $78.59.
On all sides Mr. Shubert was hemmed in by other figures from his book. To his right was $130 dressed in a serge suit and putting on airs for a flirtatious young woman. Two rows deep behind Mr. Shubert, standing side by side, were $55.23, $98, and $210, who was in arrears and needed a good dunning. Before becoming aware of Mr. Shubert’s presence, $210 had been blaring out to the whole world his vainglorious opinions about cricket. But one glimpse of the shopkeeper had caused the wretch to lower his voice and skulk away into the thicket of cloying bodies.
It was all in Mr. Shubert’s book—the whole sorry story of the village—and only he knew the truth. Only he knew that the one over there with the big mouth carrying on like a fowl that just lay egg was down in the book for $86.29. Only he knew that a certain sister sweating under crinoline and umbrella on the sidelines and holding her head high like she was bound to go to heaven owed the shop $126.78, mainly for white rum purchases.
No matter where the shopkeeper looked, he could immediately pick out a face in the throng that owed him money. Even the fast bowler, now pacing off his fearful length, was down in the book. It was a comfort to Mr. Shubert to realize that no one, with the exception of Almighty God who had every name down in the Book of Life, kept more complete accounts on this horde of people.
“Mr. Shubert,” a voice from behind sang pleasantly, “we expect a good knock out of you, you know, sah. You mustn’t let us down today.”
The Lunatic Page 16