The Polished Hoe

by Austin Clarke

  “Mr. Patel looked at me with his eyes, as if his eyes were two knives, all the time that Ma was telling him how bright a young woman I is;.Well-brought-up; won’t give him no trouble; and all the time that Ma is going through my testimonials and recommendation, Mr. Patel’s two eyes penetrating through my body, boring holes in my dress, from my two bubbies down, all over my belly, between my two legs, undressing me, naked, naked, naked, although he never as much as touched my dress with his hairy hand . . .

  “I start to get frighten, and start trembling; and although it was sickening to listen to Ma giving Mr. Patel a ritual of my good points, and good behaviour, I still didn’t want Ma to stop talking, because I knew that the moment Ma turn her back, and left the store, before she reach the corner of Swan Street and Broad Street, leaving me to Mr. Patel’s mercies, Mr. Patel would have his hand down the front of my dress. Mr. Patel would be all over me.

  “I knew this, because Clotelle when I first met her, working in the kitchen here at the Plantation, had-previously worked for a Mr. Boobilal, in the same Swan Street, in a almost identical one-door store, selling dress-lengths and cloth.

  “Clotelle tell me that Mr. Boobilal pass his hand all over her body the first morning she start work. By midday he had begged her two times please for a foop; threatening if she didn’t, he calling the police and saying that she steal money from the till.

  “And every day, punctual at midday, Mr. Boobilal wife coming with his food, curry and curry and curry, with split peas cooked soft-soft, and soft drink; and the moment the wife, Mistress Boobilal, left, Mr. Boobilal trying to get in Clotelle bloomers. And the threats. Because what could poor Clotelle do? Call a police?

  “So I was forewarned through Clotelle’s personal experience; in confidence.

  “And Mr. Patel did come on to me. If I had-scream-out, Ma would-have-hear my plea, Mr. Patel made his move so fast. Ma couldda-heard my cries, if I had open my mouth, in resistance against Mr. Patel’s attempt to take advantage of me, a young woman, not knowing the ways of Town, me, a girl from up in the country.

  “You remember how the soldiers in the Volunteer Regiment and Brigade used to train on the Garrison Savannah Pasture, doing their exercises and other drills they learn from the War, and from being overseas? Things like ju-jitsu? How you could throw a man two times your size in weight and strength flat on his backside and nearly cripple him. Yes!

  “Well, I was always a fast learner. And I would watch, and laugh, and see how those soldiers used to toss-’bout men twice their size in weight, in practice.

  “Mr. Patel seeing me, a girl still in her teens, decide that I was a woman he could subdue. And when he make his first move, rubbing his smelly-self against me, ready now to grab-hold o’ me round my waist, with his left hand, and forcing his hand up my two legs, which I had-squeezed tight,..Well, with Patel trying to separate my two legs, while his hands were occupied thus, Christ! Percy, I remember-just-in-time how I see a soldier-fellow of the Volunteer Regiment and Brigade throw a kick, one kick. Bram! Full between Mr. Patel two legs, smack in his two stones . . .”

  “Oh-Christ, Mary-G! . . . Miss Mary . . . It was you? You? That do that to Patel, causing him to walk with a slight limp and a bend?”

  “I see him, once-in-a-blue-moon, if I am in Town shopping at Cave Shepherd, or at Goddard’s Ice House; and when Patel see me, he would look-off, pass me and not a word leave his lips, as if I am a invisible woman. Yes! Up to this day!”

  “You? You, Mary Gertrude Mathilda, do that to the powerful Patel? As you know, it was never reported. You were lucky.”

  “You call it luck? I call it justice. And guts. To kick Mr. Patel full in his two testicles!

  “Life, Percy-boy, that is life! I wanted you to know what life was like for a woman growing up in this Island, in them days, the nineteens and the early twenties, with all these wolves in the road, in the sea, in the Church, in the school, in Sunday School. In the cane fields. And in the stores in Town. In all stores where men are in positions to hire young girls and women. In jewelry stores, drugstores, the shoe stores. Even the Lumber Yard. And don’t talk ’bout the big food stores. All o’ them wanted a piece.

  “In those days, coloured people didn’t particular own stores like the ones I talking about. A few peddling stores selling salt fish, rice and potatoes, that’s all. And not one coloured-owned haberdashery! But if they had-own one, would it be any different?

  “It was as if we were like lil fish swimming-round inside a big-big oil drum full o’ barracudas.

  “Well, as I heard from fishermen who should know, we wouldda stand a more better chance had we been swimming in the sea surrounded by a school o’ sharks. Sharks, at least, would spare your life, if their belly full, and they had-loss their appetite. A barracuda would eat you, just for spite.”

  “I didn’t realize that a barr’cuda is such a dangerous species, Mary-Mathilda!”

  “A bar’rcuda, as you call it . . . is no different from some men I know in this Village.”

  She no longer is interested in saying more. Her expression changes, and she is like a woman who has seen an object, a ghost that comes upon her without warning; she is a woman who has seen something she does not want revealed at the moment.

  She wonders if she should go right up to him now, this minute, this second, and say, Percy, I don’t have much time. Why are we wasting time, then? Take me in the bedroom, please. My bedroom. It is upstairs. Along the hall, last door on the left. Lead the way. Or let me take you myself, into my bed. Upstairs. Please.

  But he would never do that. Percy does not have the balls. Percy is too much of a believer in right and wrong. Has never used his position in the Village and in the Police Force to put a half bushel of sweet potatoes or a few chickens in a crocus bag and take them home for Sunday dinner. Percy is too decent. Too Christian-minded. “Like church tummuch”; and singing in the Choir even more than that. “Butter won’t melt in Percy mout’.”

  “You were talking about Patel a minute ago,” Sargeant says.

  “Yes! Mr. Patel,” she says. “I was telling you about him . . . All through the day, I would see Mr. Patel wink at a certain customer, a woman. She would come in, look-round, go into the WC, comeback-out and never-once buy a inch o’ cloth. But as the day wore on, and the store got empty, the woman-customer would put in a second appearance, and Mr. Patel would disappear behind a cloth blind henging in front the door leading to the WC, and I would hear the latch scrape against the metal and the door lock. If I listen good, especially when the incense was still burning, I would hear Mr. Patel panting, as if he was climbing a hill or running a race; blowing hard. His breathing rushed. And then, silence. The silence. And for some reason, the incense always seem to burn more stronger during this silence; and smell sweeter. But never a peep outta the woman. And when she left, Mr. Patel always gave her a parcel already wrap-up in nice wrapping paper and tied with ribbon, in a bow.”

  “Did I ever tell you that I went down in Trinidad once, to ’vestigate Patel?” Sargeant says. “It was from Trinidad that Mr. Patel originated from.

  “It was a few years after you must o’ left working for Patel. I was a police cadet, training at the District A Bimshire Constabulary Police Training School, when this big case break. And the Commissioner axe the Training School Sargeant why not send-’long some recruits to get the experience. Our Constabulary was more professional, and with more seasoned police than the Trinidad and Tobago Police Constabulary. So that is how-come I happened to went to Trinidad.

  “In Trinidad you might as.Well be in India. Indians? Everybody look like a Patel.

  “Anyhow, years later we get a call. With a Constable and a Lance-Corporal, they included me on the ’vestigating team. And we gone-cross Swan Street that Friday afternoon, in a police car, with sireens blaring, fast-fast, and flying as if we’re going to a fire, and every damn building in danger of a conflammation, when the call came through.

  “We bound in this cloth store, pushing
-pass women that blocking the door, pushing-pass the reporters and the photographers from the three local newspapers, the Advocate News, the Observer, and our own Bimshire Daily Herald, till we get to the back o’ the store. As I had never went in one o’ these cloth stores before, not being a woman and needing dress-lengths, it amaze me that the place was so blasted dark, as a place of employment. No lights to speak of. And it was midday.

  “We push-pass to the very back. The blind made outta cloth, as you mention. The newspapers on the floor. The water, urine or overflow from the tank on the floor. In there, damp. And dark. And smelling. I holding my nose. A handkerchief close to my nose. And the minute the Lance-Corporal fling-back the blind and pull-open the door, brekking the latch from the outside, Jesus Christ! . . . Can I have that drink now, Miss Mary?”

  “Have a taste-more.”

  “After all these years, the thing still have this effect on me. It must be twenty, twenty-something years now.

  “When the Lance-Corporal fling-back the blind and break-open the door, the body of a woman fall forward and land full in my hands!”

  “Take a more stronger shot.”

  “Thanks. We went in Trinidad after we piece-together certain evidence, but nothing didn’t point to Patel. It was a matter of only what we calls, in Law, circumstantial evidence. Nothing but circumstantial evidence. The premises was owned or occupied by Patel. The woman was trace-back to being a girlfriend of Patel. Patel had went back to Trinidad, staying in a place outside Port-o’-Spain, in Toonapoona, to find a wife; and it was put down, at the conclusion of our ’vestigation, to being a act of jealousy, inflicted by the victim. The woman put a dress-length round her neck and attempted to suffocate herself, but she faint whilst attempting suicide, in the WC, whilst waiting for Patel to give her the regular parcel containing zippers, snaps and dress-lengths. The parcel was there, tied with a bow, wrap in very pretty wrapping paper. The knot was red. But Patel never came back from the Purity Bakery, which had recently open a store round the corner from Patel Cloth Merchants, where he went to purchase six turnovers. The evidence in our ’vestigation brought out this.”

  “The woman in question was a needleworker?”

  “Yes, Trinidad! What a pretty country, though! Meaning the different kinds of religions and religious people, and different dress and looks, and people of all colour-schemes; and my God, the food! The food, Mary-Mathilda! Roti. Curry. Callaloo-and-crab. Chocho. And dasheen.

  “We stayed near the place where we find out that Patel was from. Toonapoona. Up a hill, at its highest elevation, you could see mango trees and the other fruit trees native to Trinidad. And from top that hill, almost a mountain, was a monastery full o’ monks and holy men, chanting prayers in Hindu.”

  “So, that is where Patel and all the other Patels hail from!” she says. “So, that is where he got his habit of burning incense in the store . . . and ringing bells . . .”

  “. . . and our ’vestigation, which covered every inch o’ that mountain in Toonapoona, and all the surrounding land round it, San Juan, Mount Sin-Augustines, Petit Bourg, Arima and places so; the house Patel born in; where he raise-up; the east-coast road where he walk, or ride a bicycle; the school he went to . . . he was a first-class student, liking the arts and paintings and music on Indian instruments . . . and we discovered that right there in Toonapoona, below the Sin-Augustines Mountains, was the sweetest mangoes in Trinidad to be found, in a place name Petit Bourg . . .”

  “You learn summuch about Trinidad in such a short space o’ time, Percy?”

  “Patel had-intend to come back to Trinidad, but business wasn’t good; and then there was the lil thing in regards to a fire in Swan Street, when four buildings to the right of Patel, butting and bounding, and one on his left, burn-down-to-the-ground; reduce to ashes; and as I say, one to the left, and Patel cloth store in the middle, left untouch.

  “Another thing we discover was that Trinidadian women prefers men from Barbados, ’specially professional men, like policemen.

  “The women in Trinidad! Of Trinidad! Indians. Like Patel. Chinee. Syrian. Whiching we don’t have none in Bimshire. Porchageeze people. The locals. The douglahs. People like me and you. And the rest.”

  “You mean the whites?”

  “You-said-it!”

  “Talking about Mr. Patel, and hearing you talk about the different colours of people you meet down in Trinidad, living together in harmony and peace, and not like the tribes ’bout-here, the question came into my head. Who is responsible for the population that we have?”

  “The Colonial Office.”

  “The who!?”

  “A colony! A colony o’ people. The people who run colonies.”

  “Isn’t the three o’ them the same thing?”

  “Colonialism is the way things are done, the means. But if you want to know how we, as inhabitants, are arranged the way we are, black on one side, and white on the next side, with no Chinee, Indian, Porchageeze nor Syrians in-between, not even a douglah, ask the Colonial Office.”

  “I wouldda thought it had to do with slavery and the slave ships and the people who pick we off those slave ships and divide-we-up between the various plantations and cotton fields . . .”

  “Mary-G, where you hear this from? You talking about the history of Bimshire? Or the history of slavery? I don’t know if there ever was slavery here, on the same level as Amurca. You’re telling me so, now. I never would have think that you was the person to know this. But then-again, you is the mother of a very learned man. And you hears things round your dinner table, from the mouths of men with power, and who travels.”

  “I appreciate the compliment, if it is a compliment, Percy. But everything leaving my mouth that makes sense doesn’t come first from Wilberforce mouth. It is true that Wilberforce opened my two eyes to certain things . . . to ‘The Ride of the Valkyries,’ to the English and the Eyetalians; the social things of this Island. But there is certain things that nobody can’t teach you. You pick up those things by yourself. From a library book. Though I never entered the Bimshire Public Library.

  “But when Wilberforce finish reading his library books and leave them on a table, I would turn a page and find myself reading one. The pictures, if it had some, was what first attracted my attention to books.

  “I would sit down, specially at night, alone-by-myself, and look at pictures in Wilberforce library books, to pass the time; and as time pass, I found myself looking more and more at more than the pictures and the photographs. Finally, I was reading the texes, until I started to enjoy the entire book. Over the years, and many years it is, I picked up the things I told you about slavery. From books that happen to be laying-round the house.

  “Wilberforce library books. And the London Illustrated News that Mr. Bellfeels steals from the Aquatic Club.

  “I would read those things. And those things would make me scared. Those things would frighten me with the knowledge that I was gaining knowledge. Those things would tell me first of anything else, how little I already know. And what is worse, there was nobody, until now, to share the knowledge with.

  “A little learning, they say, is a dangerous thing. I can add to that parable, and say, having learning and not having nobody to share that learning with is even more of a dangerous thing. Yes!

  “But you continue. Tell me more about Trinidad and the Trinidadian women.”

  “Well, we went down on a two-mast schooner, captained by a man who later end up in politics.” He settles himself in his chair. She settles herself comfortably in her chair. She pulls her shawl tighter round her shoulders. “I remember the Sunday evening,” he says, “that we sail-out from the Careenage, down by the Sugar Bond and warehouses, smooth as silk round the Pierhead, slowly out to sea. I had a feeling that Columbus and Sir Francis Drake and Lord Nelson, whose statute decorates the Square in the Upper Green, mustta had the same feeling when they was sailing the high seas. A feeling that I was on top, that I was conquering something or somebody. That I wa
s moving along. Just moving along. From one place to a next.

  “So, we turned the end of the Pierhead moving along from the Careenage; and although, as they say, we wasn’t under sails, meaning that the schooner we was travelling in, although it have two masts, no sails was unfurl yet, and it was only a lil schooner without even a inboard motor of the smallest horsepower. But it was the same sensation as sailing over the high seas in this schooner.

  “I am sure that Sir Francis Drake and Lord Nelson, and those other sea dogs, must have had the same feeling of the power of moving along.

  “We wasn’t going to discover Trinidad. Nor any o’ them lil Wessindian islands that we have scatter-’bout in the Carbean Sea. We were only going down there to help their police force work-out the ’vestigation problems they were facing in regards to the sudden disappearance from the Bimshire jurisdiction of Patel, aforementioned; and if there was any ‘corborating’ evidence that we could pick up. Plus, the sudden coincidence of death resulting from attempted strangulation of the needleworker woman, found at the scene.

  “As I tell you, Patel had-went home to Toonapoona-Trinidad, to find a Indian-girl, a doulahin to married, primer-facially speaking.

  “Or, in other words, he couldn’t get enough woman ’bout-here in Bimshire, amongst the local women, like the needleworker, so he went back to his own, to try his luck. Simple as that.

  “Yes. If we were train’ like the FBI in Amurca, or the RCMPees in Canada, or even Interpool, we would have known that taking the religious beliefs that Patel hold, in mind, plus his propensities for his own people, meaning doulahin and Indian culture, a man would do the things that we only find out after the expense of sea transportation, putting up in a guest house, inland travel by pirate taxis, food subsistencies, sport, and . . .”