The Polished Hoe (29 page)

“In those days, they didn’t give names to hurricanes and storms. But we, those of we who survive the three days and three nights of horror, we christen this one with a man’s name. And pick Darnley, to call it by. Using one of Mr. Bellfeels Christian-names. Darnley the Hurricane. Or Hurricane Darnley. We christen it Darnley the Hurricane, the day after it ended.

“But you should have seen that man, Mr. Bellfeels. Like most of his type, he had-join the Sea Scouts as a boy, the First Bimshire Sea Scouts, despising as his clan does the other scout troops, namely the Land Scouts, as we used to call them. Being a Sea Scout at this hour of need came in handy and saved us.

“The lightning flashed. Like a knife.
Whhhhhhh!
Three seconds later. You could have count-off the time with a watch.
Blam-blam!
Over the North Field.
Whhhhhh! Whhhhh!
The lightning turn-into fork-lightning. The skies light-up. People bawling. Scared.
Blam, blam, blam! Blam!
The drops of rain so thick, coming down like a curtain o’ lead, can’t see two feet in front o’ you.

“‘Come-come! Come!’ I hear the voice, and I couldn’t move. Percy, when I hear the voice, I had to look round to make sure the voice addressing me. I thought it was the heavens talking to me. In times of natural disasters and fear, the very times become supernatural, like in the Bible.

“I look-round. And there is Mr. Bellfeels. On his horse. Holding-down, waiting, to grabble-me-up and put me in front o’ him, on the saddle. ‘Come-come! Come! I tekking you home to your mother. This blasted rain is a night-rain. A hurricane coming.’..Well, when the next thunderclap came after the flash o’ lightning,
whhhhh,
I was on that horse, my two legs straddling the saddle like any man. And through the downpour Mr. Bellfeels take me galloping, splatter-up water in the road, and deposited me at my front door. Ma was already home. I can’t remember why; but she was home when Mr. Bellfeels deposited me, sliding down offa the horse, making my alighting more easier; and he put me down on the coral stone step.

“‘I checking on the people,’ he tell me. ‘I have to see that the blasted labourers, nobody, don’t drown ’pon the Plantation property. Tell your mother, if things go all right, I stopping-off when I pass-back. You hear me, girl?’

“I was either fourteen or fifteen.

“I had-barely step-in the house before the wind slam-back the door, luckily keeping me inside the house, before a limb from the mango tree growing at the side snap; and when I tell you,
brugguh-down
! It slam against the very front door, nailing the door shut, and me inside it, safe. Yes.

“The hurricane raged all night; and there was Ma and me, inside shivering through fright; and Ma holding the Bible in her hand, Gran sitting by the table, with her head in her hands, eyes closed, shaking her head from one side to the next, and mumbling words which I couldn’t understand. Ma it was who told me later that it was her native language Gran was talking in, asking the spirits for mercy; and all the time Gran pleading to her African gods in her African dialect, Ma whispering,
‘By Sin-Peter, and by Sin-Paul . . . by Sin-Peter, and by Sin-Paul, don’t let this storm bury we alive in this house. Don’t let this house be our grave in this Flood, please Lord, and overcome we . . .’;
and holding the Bible in her two hands, shut.

“Ma it was who filled-me-in, after Mr. Bellfeels deposit me on the step. And when he bound-off, I had to say that he reminded me of that coloured man in Amurcan History that Wilberforce tell me about, who had-ride for miles and miles in weather that was not clement, through hurricane and storm, enemy fire, gunpowder and mortal danger to bring a message to the troops fighting in the Amurcan War of Slavery and Independence, to liberate Amurca from having to pay taxes on tea that was mannifactured in Englund and which Englund unfaired them with, making them buy this tea at outrageous prices. Yes! Mr. Bellfeels holding-over the horse-mane with his body synchronize with the body of the horse; rider and horse blended into one piece of machinery, driving through the heavy downpour of rain, now for all intents and purposes a hurricane, Hurricane Darnley; and traversing the Pasture, the fields, every house in Plantation Tenantry, ducking from wallaba shingles falling off roofs; galvanize-roofs sailing through the black night like submarines, fast and just as deadly; even coconut trees falling like pins in a game of bowling. And Mr. Bellfeels, according to Ma, who had a soft spot still for that bastard, inside her heart, giving me, after the third day and the third night, a running commentary of the way he behave brave like a hero. During the performance of Hurricane Darnley, Ma was reduce to silence, like the silence in the Church Yard that Sunday after Church; holding her Bible, praying to God, with the pages shut. Ma. Poor Ma.

“Every house in the Tenantry was brought low-low-low by Darnley the Hurricane. It reminded me, as Ma continued giving me the commentary of Mr. Bellfeels exploits, not because he was acting like a real Sea Scout for three days and three nights only, but she was giving me details more as a means of softening the hardness she knew I carried in my heart for that bastard. Yes.

“But anyhow, every house was lay-waste; brought low; at one with the earth; roofs lick-off; whole sides of houses in the Tenantry blow-way, as they were all built with board, deal board mainly; wood; now reduced to piles o’ matchsticks; the mission-houses that were opened to serve God, stripped bare to nothing, back to the ground, to the land. It reminded me of the words in a Christmas carol we used to sing in school . . . the hurricane hit we in December, when people had-start varnishing and stripping and painting furnitures for the holidays; the ingreasements for the Christmas cake already soaking in jimmy-johns with raisins and rum, yes; that’s why the hurricane remind me of the Christmas carol ‘O Holy Night.’

‘
People on your knees, await your deliverance . . .

’ “And I think another part of the same carol goes something like this:

“‘Long lay the world in sin and error pining . . .
Fall on your knees, oh hear the angel voices.’
Yes!
‘Fall on your knees . . .’

“We certainly did fall on our two knees those three days and three nights of Darnley. The only buildings that was left standing when it was over, were the two elementary schools, the Church, the police sub-station and any wall-house made with cement and coral stone. Everything-else gone! At one stage, it was unsafe for anybody to stay in their house, so Mr. Bellfeels made a human chain with the people holding one another’s hands, and he guided them, with him on the horse, from throughout the Tenantry, going from door to door, and led them to safety in the two Elementary Schools now without roofs; and who couldn’t fit in the schools were guided to the Church, Sin-Davids Anglican Church.

“The other Churches in the Village, the Pilgrim Holiness, the Church of the Nazarene, the First Baptist and the First Congregation of the Shakers of Bimshire that people like the field hands and labourers, and people-so worship at, were all reduced to piles of matchstick. Raze to the ground. All. Gone. Yes.

“God in his wrath spared the .Wellings of the mighty, the rich and the powerful. And reduce-to-rubbles the habitations of the humble, the meek and the poor. I asked God, as young as I was,
‘Why?’
Why this vengeance visited upon the heads of the poor, the same poor which He said could go through a eye of a needle, and will inherit the earth? Why? Why, God? God, why?

“The answer is clear. We had sinned.

“We had sinned in our actions, in our lives, in our dealings with people living amongst us, with the truth.

“But, praise God, not a life was lost. Not a living-soul of this Village lost his life.

“But the slaughter of the stocks, the sheeps, the goats, the cows, horses, mules and donkeys—not to mention the fowls, the ducks and the turkeys—pure carnage. Bodies .Well-up, bloated, eyes staring at you like the visages of mad people, but dead; bare circles, dead eyes that look like glass instead of pupils.

“And the stench that rose over the entire Village when the flood waters drain off, through the gullies, down the hills on their journey to the sea; the trail of destruction and desolation that was disclosed in their wake, my-God-in-heaven, it was as if the entire Flagstaff Village was transform into a huge abattoir of dead and rotting animals. A battlefield of the fallen, at the end of a fight. Something like in the Bible. That was the work of Darnley the Hurricane.

“But that is not all. Mr. Bellfeels. After he shepherd the other Villagers from their houses into the Elementary Schools and the Anglican Church, to safety, he came back for Ma and Gran and me. He take the three of us round to the back of the Main House, which faces the gully that looks out over the North Field, and surrounding fields, from where you could see the back of Guvvament House, where His Excellency Sir Stanley live; and into a shed which I think I told the Constable was built originally as a Dutch oven, to bake bread and cassava-hats in, but now was converted into a cottage. It was one large room, with four windows with shutters, with walls of raw cement, not painted, nor plastered too good; and the floor was the same raw cement as the walls, that wasn’t treated. Two cots against one wall, and separating what look like the space for a bedroom from the rest of the room was a blind made out of a crocus bag, henging on a string made of herringbone twine. A one-burner stove, a wooden table, two upright chairs and nothing more. I felt, over the years, that Mr. Bellfeels had-bring us to the place where the cows that were with calf, and nearing birth, were tied before delivery. Or-else, the place where Watchie, the night watchman, changed. But it was safe. And it was clean. And dry, but with a touch o’ dampness. The four walls were as thick as the walls of a fort or a castle, thick as the walls in a underground tunnel that runs underneat this Great House, thick as the walls of His Majesty’s Glandairy Prison, then. Or Sin-Michaels Lighthouse, at Needhams Point.

“Mr. Bellfeels delivered us there. Safe. But drowning-wet, like three rats. To the skin. Thank God for small mercies! Yes.

“And I being only fourteen or fifteen—I can’t remember which—but in more than a minute’s-time sleep overtake me, and I collapse on one of the cots which Ma moved from the bedroom-area, out into the other space, probably to give herself some privacy. Gran scotch-off, meanwhile, on the same cot, with me . . .

“. . . and drifting off to sleep, with the rumbling of the thunder no longer so close, and in my eardrums, but far off in the distance, over the West Coast, and the lightning flashing just as much as earlier, but no longer like a knife, sleep overtook me. In two-twos, both Gran and me were in another world. Yes.

“I don’t know why. To this day, so many years after Darnley the Hurricane, I don’t know why. I can’t find the answer. And I don’t know if it is my imagination; I don’t know if it is what I saw with my two eyes; I don’t know if it is what I wanted to see and to happen, and that I wished it in my recollection of that terrible Sunday night of the hurricane. But I swear that as the light of the dawning of the new day peeped through the shutters, the Monday—the hurricane had-begin on the Friday evening, and raged through the Friday night, Saturday morning into Saturday night, and was at its worst before it fizzed out, tired and exhausted, on the Sunday night—but with the first rays of the breaking morning, Monday, the start of a new week, the wood-doves didn’t even start to coo yet, stupid-me, thinking that I was still home in our house, opened my two eyes, stretched, break wind and got up, not noticing that it was Gran side-o’-me, in the narrow white canvas cot. I headed in the direction of what I thought was the back door leading to the paling of our house, to wee-wee in the yard . . . I found myself in the next room. Partitioned from me and Gran by the crocus bag blind . . . there, on the cot was Ma. With Mr. Bellfeels on top of her. Yes.

“Transfix by thus seeing my mother, Ma, underneat Mr. Bellfeels, all I heard after this vision was ‘
Huhn, huhn, huhn, huhn, huhn,’
coming from Mr. Bellfeels, muffling his voice, as if he didn’t want who was in the next room, Gran and me, to hear; and Ma shaking her head, as if each
huhn
was a knife driving-in her heart. ‘
Huhn, huhn, huhn, huhn, huhn . . .

’ “You remember that I begin this Statement by telling you that when the hurricane petered-out, Mr. Bellfeels was so exhausted that he sleep-through the Monday morning, the Monday night, the Tuesday morning through the Tuesday night, and didn’t wake up nor come-to until the third day, the Wednesday?

“Well, this is how I know! Yes.”

The room is quiet. From the
BBC
Overseas
programme come the voices of the choirboys of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. Mary-Mathilda holds her hands in her lap, and her eyes are fixed on them, as if she is inspecting them for cleanliness; but she is picturing herself in Church, at Sin-Davids Anglican Church, instead of sitting here, talking about a hurricane. Sargeant looks like a man numbed; overcome by some drug, the effect of the story of Hurricane Darnley on his mind; and he thinks of the mercilessness of the hurricane which brutalized the Village; and he tries to recall his own experience of the three nights and three days of blackness and rain and thunder and lightning which descended upon the land. His mind does not go back over those years to pinpoint his own experience of that tragedy. And this is what causes the expression of numbness upon his countenance. He cannot recall many details of Hurricane Darnley.

The Choir of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields is now singing Hymn 126. They have now reached the fourth verse. Sargeant knows this hymn by heart; and so, silently and to himself, he sings along with the voices coming through the speaker in such beautiful pronunciation and musical perfection. He sings the tenor part, along with the Choir, to this verse