“But wait! It is coming back, in a whiff of its first reading by Revern Dowd: ‘. . . and that through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our everlasting resurrection . . .’”
Sargeant closes his notebook.
“Please stay, Percy,” Mary-Mathilda says. “Stay with me till you get the end of my Statement. Please.”
“I will stay to the end.”
“The Collect for that Sunday . . . I will remember it better now, like The Lord’s Prayer. It will be my prayer for forgiveness, and I hope you will understand.”
The Plantation bell has just banged two times, to herald the start of a new, long day of toil, and labour in the broiling fields, just as the short-lived storm has come to its end. They can hear the bell over the fading roar of the thunder which roams throughout the tenantries of the Plantation.
“Clean and pure,” she says.
“What?” he says.
“The morning . . . I am ready, now, Percy. Take me, please.”
They hear Gertrude moving about in the large house; and they pick up the sound of her bare feet going down the steps; and Mary-Mathilda Paul opens the bedroom door and leads Percy down the stairs to the kitchen.
Going down, he counts thirteen soft, carpeted safe steps, watches the way her body descends, and he smells the fragrance of her perfume that lingers.
Austin Clarke is the winner of the 2002 Giller Prize, the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the 16th Annual Trillium Prize for The Polished Hoe. He is also the winner of the 1999 W.O. Mitchell Prize, awarded each year to a Canadian writer who has produced an outstanding body of work and served as a mentor for other writers. Clarke, who lives in Toronto, is the author of nine novels and six short-story collections, including Choosing His Coffin: The Best Stories of Austin Clarke.
The Polished Hoe Page 49