Refiner's Fire (21 page)

T
HE PHONE
rang as Mr. Brown was drinking his Bloody Mary. The constable wanted him to take the High View truck and evacuate casualties from Jacks River. The Rastas had knocked out the bridge to Oracabessa, but a runner had crossed the river and brought news of two women and a man who were badly off. Marshall and Mr. Brown set out in the four-wheel-drive truck, going over rough paths and streams to get to Jacks River by the back roads. Brown knew the complicated traverses and secret ways, whereas the constable did not. Presumably the constable was preparing for the chase, although everyone was aware that he would arm his frightened deputies, walk a few miles into the jungle, and be unable to find a trace of the Rastas, who moved in back country with the stealth of moonlight.

Marshall and Mr. Brown had their weapons. Having done so well that morning already, Marshall stood in the back of the truck in a near Napoleonic pose, eyes sweeping the jungle for ambush. Of course the noise of the truck and the thick cover made him an easy target, but Brown thought he deserved a reward for his vigilance. Smiling from underneath his nightcap (which he forgot to take off that day) he let Marshall stay, since by that time the Rastas were probably ten miles in the bush, pistols in their waists, their gaits still ferocious because of the cocaine and because they had been up all night.

Though it was early, the sun was murderously hot. Birds the color of red velvet flew through the patterned forest in swooping curves. With not a cloud nearby, a white and silver sun beat down hard as the truck chugged through the brush. Marshall sweated and the water dripped off him. He heard birds and other animals screaming: their chatterings were deafeningly loud. With the rifle in his hands and salt stinging his eyes he understood for a moment why the Rastas did what they did, although he could not justify it. The heat and light, the rhythm of a struggling truck moving on a soft forest floor, his beating heart, made him want to die. He wanted to die. It seemed a perfect thing to do in that hot jungle. And because he wanted to die, he wanted to kill. He wished that they would meet the Rastas, that he would fight them and kill some before they killed him. He wished that his body would be maimed and thrown to the side of the path to be consumed by crows and jackals. But this was dispelled when they sped into a clearing on the outskirts of Jacks River and Brown said, “Maybe they give us a cold beer in Jacks River.” Marshall was put off by the idea of anything as wild and dissolute as drinking beer in the morning, and told Brown just that.

At Jacks River—a settlement on the road, a few houses and a little store outside of which fly-covered lamb carcasses hung for days—one of the women had died. The man who was supposed to have been wounded ran off into the bush when he heard the truck, leading Brown to believe that he had been a former resident of Kingston Jail, who did not need the hospital. The other woman was really a schoolgirl, who had a serious stomach wound. She screamed and writhed, and then would become entirely quiet and look around with a quizzical expression, amazed that she was still alive, not knowing quite how to act when wounded. Then she would buckle up in agony and behave in just the requisite way. They put her on a cot in the back of the truck and sped east to the hospital. There had been much screaming and hysteria, but the strange presence of a white boy as armed escort quieted the girl and her family. They stared at Marshall, not knowing who he was or why he was there.

At the hospital they took the girl into an open operating room and operated. Everyone waited in the courtyard, where relatives of the patients were busy cooking breakfast over open fires. The patients themselves lined the porches of the tropical buildings, looking wretched and sad. Every single one had a white bandage somewhere on his body. In one of the wards a dogfight began, and the mangy dogs were chased out by a man who ran after them gracefully, swatting them with his crutch.

After several hours they wheeled the girl onto the porch. She was sleeping peacefully, and the doctor told her mother that she would soon recover. The mother wept in waves, and the doctor put one of his hands on her shoulder and shook her. He smiled. She became silent as he rattled three lead slugs in his hand. “You should not weep,” he said. “She is a lucky girl. And a strong girl. She helped me find the bullets. A fine girl. You can't keep the young down. You will see. Tomorrow she will eat like five strong men. In a week she will be dancin' again.” The mother, a handsome woman with a light blue kerchief over her hair, wept uncontrollably, and smiled.

Looking at her face, high cheeks, and sweet eyes, Marshall was ashamed for what he had thought on the way to Jacks River. Even at fifteen, having been up since dawn and run himself to exhaustion in a hot, different, black country, he suspected that men without women are subject to the peculiar madness he had felt that morning. Its pressure was as deafening as the overwhelming cries of the animals. Those on the truck hadn't stared at him because he was white. They knew white men, and frequently saw Lucius Pringle, or his brothers, before all the brothers were killed by the Rastas. But when they had seen Marshall, he had had a savage, hard look.

Anyway, that night they celebrated with a big meal, and a jump-up, in which everyone danced, happy to be alive, in a kind of New Orleans funeral for the ones killed at Jacks River. Rifles were stacked in the corner, and Mr. Brown wore his pistol in the house. As always, the stars were as white as rocket flares, and cool winds swayed the large trees, in which birds slept. At about midnight a ship appeared near the horizon, blazing bright. They watched in silence as it moved off the curve of the world, and then everyone went home. Marshall fell asleep laughing, with a tear in his eye. He remembered the blood on the schoolgirl's dark blue uniform, the rush through the trees up to the hospital, the heat, the way she looked sleeping in white sheets, and what the doctor had said in his lilting bittersweet Jamaican dialect—“In a week she will be dancin' again.”

M
ARSHALL BEGAN
to range into the interior. Though young, he had passed the point where Livingston was able simply to tell him what to do. From the day of the raid forward, if Livingston were to direct Marshall he had to do it by internal politics, propaganda, economic pressure, pleading, begging, anything but a command—against which Marshall rebelled dragging in tow a full catalogue of ramlike adolescent insanities, and his own rather eccentric attributes.

One day he had asked Livingston quite nicely if he might hike into the back country. Livingston said no. Marshall asked again. Livingston said no. Marshall asked again. Livingston said no. Marshall disappeared that night. With an old Enfield rifle, some pouches of ammunition, a small sack of food and supplies, and a tarpaulin under which he huddled when the warm morning downpour shot mistily through the high pattering leaves, he stayed away for three days. At first he was terrified, but quickly learned that there were more scorpions in the house than in the jungle, and that if he didn't sing, make fires, or thrash around, he was more or less undetectable. Like darkness, the dense vegetation was the safest place to be, even if it were full of Rastas. In fact, the only danger to Marshall came from within. Because he did not eat or sleep properly for three days, he spent part of the last in contorted agony on the forest floor. An observer would have doubted his own eyes.

At the foot of a tall tree where he had rested his rifle, Marshall writhed as if he were wrestling an invisible boa constrictor. His clothes were black from sweat, and his skin glistened. He knocked over the rifle and it lay beside him. An ammunition pouch had opened; silver-and-brass-colored bullets were littered over the soft floor. His eyes were numb and would not focus. Bolts of light shot in front of him as if a night battle raged, and these tracers enwrapped the clouds of color which had overcome him and fixed him down. When it was over he was dry, exhausted, and pleasantly sleepy. He had contempt for nothing in the world except this allpowerful disease, and enjoyed surviving the murderous attacks. What great relief to come out of them. He thought that most people were fools for their ingratitude. They wanted money, they wanted justice, they wanted recognition, they wanted so much that their days were obliterated. Marshall was grateful just to be alive.

It became usual for him to go for a day or two into the bush. There, he had his favorite places, one of which was an open knoll of volcanic rock. Sitting on its edge, Marshall could see the distant blue strip of the Caribbean ten miles or so beyond a mass of stratified green. Near rapids cold from the feed of high mountain streams, Marshall thought that he was alone. He was not.

While reading C. W. Ceram's
Gods, Graves and Scholars,
he reached out with his right hand to pick up his rifle. It seemed impossibly heavy. He couldn't even move it, and he turned his head enough to see a legged boot standing on the stock. Lucius Pringle stood over six foot six, was armed with a classy automatic, and he said in a deep voice heard clearly over the rushing river as it curled about below, “This is my land.” Marshall made no response and tried to lift his rifle and stand up, but Lucius put his foot down harder on the butt and said again, with a kind of madness, “This is my land.”

Marshall finally said, “Okay, its your land,” at which the giant stepped back.

“I'm Lucius Pringle. I think I know who you are.”

“Is that right?” asked Marshall, who was not so sure that he liked Lucius.

“You're the Livingstons' son, from High View.”

“Yes, I am,” said Marshall, who introduced himself with his customary explanations about why his name was not Livingston. Lucius Pringle then spoke for an hour about his land, his right to it, and how his father and three brothers had died in keeping it. It covered an immense portion of the back country, and part of the seacoast.

“In times gone by,” said Lucius, “my father could ride from Port Maria to Montego Bay and never leave his own property.” Marshall quickly realized that Lucius's obsession with his right to the land was cause for his armament. He was set for war, and in comparison Marshall seemed like a casual country hunter. Lucius carried many clips of automatic rifle ammunition, hand grenades, a heavy killing type of pistol, and a bayonet.

Mr. Brown had once said that Lucius Pringle was mad and would be killed. “He is really lookin' for it, I tell you,” he had clucked. “Some day he gonna get killed. And then his mother and the girl will go back to England and the Rastas will take the land. And then we'll have Rastas right over the hill runnin aroun and shootin' and killin' all night. And then I go back to Egypt, and High View will be full of Rastas. Lucius Pringle is like a dam in the river. Some day the dam break, and the river wash us away. Then I go back to Egypt. High View will get covered with weeds. But it is good that he is a strong man, although only one bullet and he's a dead man like the others.”

“Why don't you ‘come with,' to Rica Vista tea. If we walk fast we can arrive almost on time. I hope you haven't been listening to Brown. He was with my brother when my brother was killed, and now he's afraid of his own shoelaces,” said Lucius.

“No he's not,” said Marshall. “He's brave. The Rastas came and we were ready to meet them.”

“Yes, but not to chase them,” said Lucius, his own designs quite evident. “Brown has stopped chasing them. And so, I am afraid, have I. At least for the present. Come, let's go.” Had Marshall known that tea at Rica Vista meant several score people he would not have accepted, because he was fearfully shy. But he had no way of knowing the enormity of Rica Vista tea, was always hungry for biscuits, and had not been far in the direction to which Lucius had pointed, so he accepted.

They coursed through the jungle like scattering monkeys. Loose-jointed, wet, and hard-breathing, they pounded the paths, crossed slow-veined cocoa-colored streams, ran like horses in open places, brushed past slicing ferns and leaves, went mad with vines, and in a green rapid hour traveled miles across the hills under a light living canopy of plants which, like lace, trammeled the laser lines of quick glowing birds. For different reasons nevertheless allied, both Marshall and Lucius were convinced that humankind was to be eschewed, that real satisfaction was to be had only in the pure natural physics demonstrable in overwhelming volume everywhere at all times. Marshall was lonely, overcome by heat and stars, and in perpetual brush warfare with Livingston. Lucius had seen too many of those he loved die, and at thirty he felt far older than his years.

They broke out onto a red clay road which was hot and straight and led up a high hill. At the top of the hill Marshall was made breathless by what he saw below, and by the beautiful tolling of a bell. Lucius said, “That bell means tea,” but waited for a few proud moments as Marshall surveyed Rica Vista.

It leapt from the throat of fierce jungle in an equally fierce, upright dignity. It was in appearance the essence of Marshall's obsessions about achieving the impossible and defending the indefensible. For there in a wide valley deep in wild swirling green was a prospect of fields, tall trees, sheep grazing as if in heather (but shorn cool), stone walls, dams, weirs, and a village of stone and mahogany houses which, though tropical in architecture and oriented to the Trades, had about them as indisputable a British air as a sergeant major in the Coldstream Guards. A dozen jeeps, tractors, and trucks were symmetrically ordered in a car park. Raw materials were stacked about worksheds as if arranged by the same hand. Four watchtowers made a square around the ten acres of the main compound. It was like a garden, a military camp, an English village, a tropical plantation. And the order was not oppressive because it was so busy. Even from far away Marshall could see so much movement and activity that he assumed it to be a thriving estate. Trains of tractor-drawn wagons wound in and out overburdened with cane and copra; red trucks from the fruit company in Oracabessa loaded up with bananas and drove out on the dusty road. As Marshall got closer he could see scores of people on the long wide porch of the great house. Perhaps seventy or eighty were standing in small groups or sitting with teacups on their laps. As Marshall and Lucius passed the wire a man with a rifle nodded to them. On the lawn in front of the porch were three groups of rifles standing upright like racked lamb, with satchels of bullets hanging over the ground inside the circular constructions.