The Polished Hoe (33 page)

The teacher had grabbed the thick tamarind rod from the shelf on the easel of the blackboard where the white chalk is kept.

“
Wunnuh hear?
”

“
Yes, sir!”
they scream.

“
What manners maketh?”

“
Man, sir!”

“
Again!
”

“
Man, sir!”

“
What manners maketh, class?”

“Manners maketh man, sir!”

“Good.”

That same afternoon, at three-thirty, he has to meet Mr. Edwards for his private tuition lessons.

They are going to talk about the things produced in Englund, from Englund’s natural resources. English products. It is on this afternoon that Sargeant learns about the fine biscuits and chocolates and pipe tobacco, and cigarettes and toiletries and soaps and teas that Englund produce. . . .

“
Ten-sixty-six?”

“The Battle of Hastings, Mr. Edwards.”

“Good. The Battle of Bannockburn?”

“Twelve-fifteen? Twelve . . . sixteen?
”

“Signing of the Magna Carta?”

And Sargeant knows this; and screams, “Twelve-fifteen!
”

“When Cro.Well take-over Parliament?”

And he knows this, too
.

“Battle of the Roses?”

He knows this, too
.

“Cranmer? When Cranmer get kill?”

Sargeant hesitates
.

“Executed?”

Sargeant hesitates
.

“Beheaded?”

Sargeant remembers this
.

“You going win a scholarship, boy! You going win a Secondary-to-Second-grade, for-true!”

And Sargeant takes the Secondary-to-Second-Grade Examination, which is held at the Drill Hall, the lecture room of the Bimshire Volunteer Regiment and Brigade; and the examination lasts all morning; and Sargeant is sweating; for the questions on the examination paper are questions Mr. Edwards had rehearsed him in, Friday after Friday, Saturday after Saturday, for one full year; and on Wednesdays, Fridays
and
Saturdays, two weeks before the examination; but the heat in the room, from his own anxiety and that of one hundred other boys, from all over the Island, makes his hands sweaty, his palms sticky, increases his need to pee, to have to ask for a “step-out”—
“Please, sir, may I have a step-out? I have to pass water, bad, sir!”
—to make the Watermans fountain pen leak; and mark his fingers black; and blot the paper on which he writes his answers, many of them incorrect; and then, two months later, the results of the Secondary-to-Second-Grade come back from the examiners and are published Island-wide in the
Bimshire Daily Herald
; and Sargeant, listed officially and formally as STUART,
P
.
D
a
C
.
B.
, comes
twenty-fifth
.

There are twenty-four places.

“Be-Christ!” Mr. Edwards says the Saturday morning, holding the
Bimshire Daily Herald
crushed violently in his right hand, pointing the newspaper and the hand at Sargeant, as if it is a tamarind rod, with the Official Results crushed in his grip, reading them off to Sargeant. “Let we pray that a boy,
any
one of the twenty-four that come before you, dead. Just-drop-down-dead! So you could squeeze-through. Some boy. Any fecking boy . . .”

“
Manners maketh man.
”

. . . Yes, his hands are placed in the exact position, this Sunday evening, in this tranquil Great House, as they had been placed, poised, on his black slate, double-lined by a nail, when he was being coached by Mr. Edwards in the rudiments of Penmanship.

“
Penmanship is next to Godliness!”
Mr. Edwards had shouted many times. “
What is Penmanship next to?”

“
Godliness, sir!
”

This time, there is more affection in the instruction he is being given; or that he is about to receive from Mary-Mathilda.

Her hands are soft. And they smell of perfume. And they are not sweaty. And they do not have the veneer of dust from the chalk on them. And they do not have thick, black hairs. And their nails do not have a line of black dirt underneath them. And they do not smell of tobacco. And they do not have knuckles that make the hands look deformed and swollen at the joints. And her fingers do not have the marks left by the kitchen knife, as Gertrude’s have.

Her hands are soft, and shapely; with long delicate fingers, clean fingernails and nails shaped like the bottom of a heart. And natural. Without the colour of nail polish.

Her nails have half moons on each finger.

A ring with a shield as its design is on her finger. The initials
MGMB
are marked deep into the yellow rich gold, as if the owner, the wearer, wants the world to see her identity clearly. Sargeant looks at the signet ring, sees the initials as a blur of interlocking letters, pays no regard to the initials themselves and is satisfied only to say that it is a pretty ring. To himself. The gold ring is on the third finger of her right hand. The way Europeans wear wedding rings, Wilberforce told her. He had bought it for her in Demerara, and had got the initials cut out by the Indian j.Weller, when he spent one week there, attending a medical conference on Fixing Tropical Diseases with European Facilities.

“This is real gold, Mother,” he had told her. “Them Demerara j.Wellers have the best real gold in the world. Two times as many karats as these Bimshire jewelry-thieves who import semi-gold from Europe . . .”

“Hommany karats in this, son?”

“Forty-eight,” he had told her.

“Many’s these?”

“Forty-eight, Mother.”

She had smiled in her heart when he insisted. She did not believe him. All the gold around her on the fingers of the men who came to her home with Mr. Bellfeels was good gold, pure gold, true-true gold. And none was forty-eight karats.

This gold ring on the finger beside her little finger of her right hand that rests on Sargeant’s hand is the deepest, richest colour of gold that he has ever seen. And the colour of the gold in the ring attracts him now, with deeper interest.

MGMB
. He goes back in his mind, over all those years when he heard her name called out, in Sunday School, and at picnics when the teacher was making sure that everyone was present and accounted for, to go back on the long trip through the hills of Bimshire, Bathsheba, Horse Hill and Mount Zion Hill, to the Village of Flagstaff; in the classes for the Confirmation of young Christians, learning the Catechism and the Nicene Creed; and then years later, on the radio when the name Wilberforce Alexander Darnley Bellfeels—her son’s name—was announced as the winner of the Bimshire Scholarship for that year, for coming first out of every boy attending Harrison College and the Lodge School, in Classics: Latin, Greek, Ancient History of Greece and of Rome and Religious Knowledge—which is what he took—in the Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board Higher School Certificate Examination.

First in the Island in Latin Prose.

First in Greek Prose.

First in Latin Distinction Prose.

First in Greek Distinction Prose.

First in Latin Unseen.

First in Greek Unseen.

First in Distinction Latin Unseen.

First in Distinction Greek Unseen.

First in Latin Translation, both at Pass Level and at Distinction Level.

First in Greek Translation, both at Pass Level and at Distinction Level.

First in Roman Ancient History.

First in Greek Ancient History.

Third
in the Island of Bimshire in Religious Knowledge.

“Jesus Christ, he let-we-down! Jesus Christ, he let-down the entire blasted Parish!” the Reverend Mr. M. R. P. P. Dowd, M.Th
.
—Masters in Theology—(Dunelmn)—Durham University, the Vicar of Sin-Davids Anglican Church, where Wilberforce was a Sunday School teacher, screamed in mock horror. “You mean, he couldn’t come any more blasted higher in a simple subject like Scripture? Religious Knowledge is nothing but Scripture. Reading the blasted Bible! And understanding the Sermon ’pon the Mount. Anybody could understand the Sermon ’pon the Mount! Jesus Christ! Wilberforce is a disgrace to this Christian community of Flagstaff! And to this whole Parish.”

Winning the scholarship was the cause for great rejoicing in the entire Village. Mr. Bellfeels and the other big men of the Island gathered the night previous, in the restricted private rooms of the Aquatic Club, away from wives, away from their servants, away from the Village, where they spent the night drinking champagne; and then eating.Well-done beefsteaks, washed down with turtle soup and Bellfeels Special Stades White Rum. This gathering was the second celebration; and Mr. Bellfeels was smiling, proud as a rum punch; and had invited everyone, regardless of social status or money, to join in the rum-drinking celebrations. Wilberforce was not invited to this second round, either, because, at sixteen, he was too young.

So, Manny and Sargeant and the Solicitor-General and the Headmaster of the Elementary School, and Mr. Edwards who had tutored Wilberforce when he attended Sin-Davids Elementary School, and Mr. Bellfeels, Constable and Naiman and Revern Dowd were drunk and merry and hugging one another, and singing hymns and calypsoes, in the Harlem Bar & Grill.

They were gathered this night in public, in the Selected Clienteles Room; and the curious eyes of the Village were on them.

“One o’ the only things, the few things that this scion of my, of my loins, loins, is that he make me, make me proud of him, tonight, so I tip my glass to Bellfeels, W. A. R., Bimshire Scholar, in
Classics
, be-Christ! Wunnuh know what that mean? Virgil! Caesar! Homer!
The Aeneid,
gorblummuh, Euripperdees and
The Illiad
! Jesus Christ, the Classics, boy!
Amo, amas, amat.
The venerable Classics! My boy. The only son of Darnley Alexander Randall Bellfeels! Gentleman, so I raise my glass. A toast. Down the hatch!” Mr. Bellfeels said. And then he added, “As man!”

“Down the hatch!” Manny said.

“To Wilber . . .Wil . . . berforce Alexander Alex . . . xander . . . Ran . . . Randall Bellfeels,” the Vicar, Wilberforce’s godfather, said.

“Down the hatch!” the Solicitor-General, Wilberforce’s second godfather, said.

“Down the hatch!” the Headmaster of the Elementary School said.

“Down the hatch!” Sargeant, a police Constable of ten years, said.

“
Haec apud Romanos consul,
” the Solicitor-General said, quoting from Livy,
Book XXI,
Hannibal’s decision to let his Gallic captives fight in single combat for the prize of freedom,

Wilberforcus rebus prius quam verbis adhortandos milites ratus, circumdato ad spectaculum exercitu, captivos montanos vinctos in medio statuit, armisque Gallicis ante pedes eorum proiectis, inter-rogare interpretem iussit,
ecquis
, si vinculis levaretur armaque et equum victor acciperet ferro vellet.

“The Classics!” Mr. Bellfeels screamed with admiration, although he did not know the translation. “The fecking Classics, boy!”

And the other men, who, except perhaps the Vicar and the Headmaster, did not know their Latin, screamed their delight at the Solicitor-General’s oratory; and this encouraged the Headmaster to join in the declamations.

“‘Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
‘What thou art promis’d. Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full of the milk of human kindness
‘
To catch the nearest way. . . ,’”
Headmaster said, quoting from
Macbeth.

The men screamed their delight again.

“Words, words!” Naiman said; and got a little carried away, and said, “Jesus Christ, words!” And then he softened it, and said, “Here-here!”

“Here-here!” the Constable, who was not yet a policeman, said.

So, when the announcement was made that Friday night on the radio, for every inhabitant in Bimshire to hear, the name of Wilberforce’s mother was called out first. And then Mr. Bellfeels’ name, with all his Christian names.

Sargeant cannot remember if the announcer had said, “Mary Gertrude Mathilda Bellfeels.” Or if he said, “This year’s Bimshire Scholar is Bellfeels, W. A. R., son of Mr. D. A. R. Bellfeels of Flagstaff Plantation, and a student in the Classical Sixth at Harrison College, also the son of Miss Mary Gertrude Mathilda.”

The four initials,
MGMB
, on the shield of the gold ring intrigue him; but they do not file his memory to the point of sharper recollection.

He moves his attention from her initials on the ring, and places it instead, and with greater concentration, upon the softness of her fingers.

Her fingers are like five boughs taken from the silken arrows that grow out from the tops of the sugar cane; and these silken boughs are touching his hand. Their lightness tickles his hand. It is a sensation he has never suffered through before.

She looks into his eyes. And remains silent. And the force of her gaze, her brown eyes piercing into him, causes him to lower his gaze, to close his eyes, to turn his face away.