The Polished Hoe (48 page)

“Down the hatch, sir.”

The Commissioner cleared his throat,
“Emmm!”

Sargeant cleared his throat,
“Uhh-hemmm!”

The Commissioner emptied his glass.

Sargeant emptied his glass.

“Water?”
the Commissioner said, hardly able to talk, unscrewing the bottle containing the water.

The Commissioner and Sargeant were sitting in a window seat, on its two blue cushions, facing each other; and through the green-painted jalousied windows, that had a view of the Race Pasture and the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club; and they could cast their eyes over the shining, black iron bulk of the two cannons left over from the Boer War, and given to Bimshire by a King of England, as a token of loyalty, and see the green-painted clock tower. It was midday.

“Water?”
the Commissioner said in a clearer voice, now that the sting of the rum had gone.

“Water, sir,”
Sargeant had said, barely able to speak,
“thanks, sir.”

“Good for you. Bowmanston Special good for you.”

“Sir?”

“Occasional drink. Plain. Not with any o’ this blasted soft drink, as if you is an Amurcan. Just plain. And straight. English way!”

“Sir!”

“So.”

“Sir?”

“So.”

“Yes, sir?”

“What we going do? This murder take place inside your jurisdiction. You may even know the man. Good fellow, they say. Wife been horning the blasted man, giving-way the pussy, in front the man nose. Some women, including wives, are like that.”

“Sir.”

“And in your jurisdiction, I need your . . . you know what I’m saying . . . no charges.”

“No charges, sir?”

“Blind eye. If you know what I mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But it’s inside your jurisdiction . . .”

“I am reading you, sir.”

“The liss the Assistant Commissioner place’ on my dess, Thursday morning, you know anything ‘bout this, Lance-Corporal? He recommending you to get the next stripe. Full Corporal.”

“Sir?”

“Well, drink up. I got to have a shower-a-shit-anna-shave, change-in my cricket-gear, be-Christ, and go and participate as a witness, as them Spartan Club fellows paint our arse in licks, pure licks, in the cricket match, this afternoon! We playing at Spartans, in the Park. You coming, to support the boys?”

“I going be there, Skipper. Cheering for Police.”

“Charges dropped, hear? Matter o’ fact, the Police not laying nuh charges. And congratulations.”

“Sir?”

“The Assistant Commissioner tell me, early as next Monday, you may be wearing one more stripe over that one pretty stripe you now got ’pon your shoulder, boy! For distinguish service . . . beyond the call o’ duty. Congratulations!”

“Sir.”

And Sargeant had stood at attention, and saluted the Commissioner; his right hand hitting the peak of his cork hat, and reverberating like a piece of heavy wire that holds a bell . . .

“. . . if we had time,” Mary-Mathilda says, “I could tell you the things that take place in this underground dungeon. And this don’t have nothing to do with the times of slavery that Ma used to narrate to me, about when even more stranger things took place on this Plantation.

“Always blood being shed. And blood flowing. Ma says one time, when the workers rebel and asked for a couple-more pennies-a-week, in wages, the Plantation pick-out who they thought the ring leaders were, namely Golbourne father, Pounce father, Manny grandfather, brought all three of them down here in this tunnel, strapped them by their hands and legs to the wall, in iron chains, handcuffs and leg-irons, built into the wall, the same time the Great House was built . . . Mr.Bellfeels tell me that this Great House originally was the residence of the Englishman who own the slaves and the Plantation. He went back to Englund. He couldn’t stomach the sun and living so close, with his wife, to the slaves. Ma say how she and Gran, my grandmother, the night in question, shelling green pigeon-peas, stood up in the kitchen—the Plantation was having a birthday party that night—and how they could hear the cowskin, the bull-pistle whip—in them days, they called it the balata—tearing-into flesh,
plax! plax! plax!
in a rhythm as if the man wielding the balata was looking at the hand of a metronome, or a clock, measuring-off time in seconds,
tick . . . tock . . . tick
; and in the heaviness of each lash.
Plax! . . . plax! . . . plax!
And the shrieks. The screeling. The cries for mercy. The voices of pain high, high, high, like the fright that comes from a child’s voice when a dog snarls; and then the same voice, low, low, low, in pain, like a moaning, exhausted; no voice at all, now; the loss of strength gone out of the cry for mercy, the murmur of the sting and memory of the pain inflicted by the balata.
Plax! . . . plax! . . . plax!
And the echo of the lash, like a giant violin with one of its strings brek. Yes.

“Not knowing, from their distance aboveground, and their place in the kitchen shelling the pigeon-peas, if they could rightly say, or be certain of who the particular recipient of the lashes was, or could they make-out the owner of each pleading cry.

“One man receive forty lashes.

“The second man receive thirty.

“And the third man got only twenty-four.

“Ma and Gran counted all ninety-four.

“When the last lash, the ninety-fourth
plax!
landed on that man’s back, Ma and Gran say it had the same sound, the same sting, the same echo, the same savageness as the previous
ninety-three.
Delivered by one man. That one man, beating three other big men, could have
such
consistency in his administration o’ violence . . .

“And afterwards, Ma say, she had to wipe her hands in her apron, and pour Mr. Lawrence Burkhart, the Driver at the time, in charge of disciplines and floggings on the Plantation, a glass of cold Tennent’s Beer that she kept in the icebox, which was all the rage on the Plantation.

“He drank-it-off in three big, long draughts. And then he said, ‘Ahhh!’ and Ma said a feeling of contentment came-over Mr. Lawrence Burkhart face, that she herself had a hard time understanding: how this Mr. Lawrence Burkhart could remain so cool and calm, after the screels that turn her blood to ice water.

“Then she had to follow Mr. Lawrence Burkhart down these same steps. And come to the three bodies of the three men, barely held up by the manacles and the leg-irons; the whipping had disfigured their bodies almost beyond recognition; and if she didn’t witness with her own two eyes, that the whipping had-take-place in this underground cellar, Ma say, she couldda
swear
that she was looking at a tableau-type picture of the three men on the Cross, on Golgotha Hill, in Biblical times, crucified by that wicked governor, His Excellency, the Roman, Sir Pontius Pilate. The three of those men from history. With Jesus Our Saviour, in the middle. And two thieves, robbers, nicodemons, side-b’-side of her precious Saviour . . . one of them being none other than Barrabas who walked by night, Ma said.

“Their backs was turned to Ma. And Ma knew then who the Plantation labelled the ringleader to be. Cross the whole-entire back of Golbourne father, also named Golbourne, she say she counted forty slashes going in all directions, formed a kind of star, a star that she had come-across somewhere, the Star of Bethlehem . . .

“Ma say she had to throw a bucket of saltwater on Golbourne father, on Manny grandfather and on Pounce father, each; the same way, Ma say, she used to throw water on the hogs in the pigpen, to cleanse-them-off. With a few drops of Jays Fluid in it, to bind the wounds and clot the blood.

“Not a peep came from
one
of those three men, crucified by the flogging Mr. Lawrence Burkhart gave them.”

“
‘Get a second bucket,’
” Mr. Lawrence Burkhart tell Ma.
‘And when you up there in the kitchen, call the gardener and Watchie. I can’t lift these three heavy sons-o’-bitches, by my-one. These three bastards too blasted big!’

“The blood was all over this underground tunnel. Flowing like rainwater running to reach a gutter, and pour-down. And only after buckets of fresh water, the yard broom and some crocus bags that Watchie bring, did Ma and Gran bring back that section of this underground tunnel to former appearances.

“
‘This for you, May,’
Ma say that Mr. Lawrence Burkhart said to her, using her Christian name, and handing her a bright, half-Crown, as if he himself had just minted it.
‘For your services. And keep your mouth shut. Nobody will-ever know about this, right?’

“But he didn’t have to seal Ma mouth to that secret confidence. Ma would be a blasted fool to ever utter a word to anybody. Mr. Lawrence Burkhart give Gran one shilling.

“I heard this, not from Ma. But from Mr. Bellfeels, after he got me pregnant the first time, with William Henry. Since then, pieces of this history, this pageantry of blood, have leaked-out through various cracks and crevices in conversations at the dinner table, back-there, back then in the times when times were sweet between me and him . . .”

The story that duplicates this strange underground journey Sargeant is being made to take causes him to feel he is a foreigner, a stranger in a land in which he thought he had a straight course, but which he now knows is winding, if not circuitous; something like the alienation, the hopelessness and the invisibility Manny told him he felt, when he lived in Georgia and in Florida and in Philadelphia, working illegally, until that morning when a Trinidadian worker, himself illegal, bearing a grudge against another Trinidadian, went to the place of work, late the Friday; payday; and waited until it was five minutes to five, knocking-off time was five, and then he screamed, “Immigration!” One time. Just once. “Immigration!” he screamed. A second time. In one minute flat, the place was empty! Only the shocked, angry manager-owner of the factory that made bottle caps remained at the unattended machines, which whirred and ground and rattled to a halt. Manny spent that winter freezing in doorways, after he was chased out of the boiler room of a hospital; and it was after this, that he sought refuge in the sewer until he resigned his fate to the clutches of the U.S. Immigration . . .

But another aspect of her story, the part about men dragged underground, comes in his recollecting it, from
Nelson’s West Indian Reader, Book Three
, his textbook in Standard Three. In this book, an animal whose name escapes him now, was burrowing in the mud, making a channel, from which it could not afterwards extricate itself. It was a channel of journey and of death. And he wonders if death underground, below the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and from the stars which he likes to point out to Gertrude, is to be his fate.

But it cannot be. She is Mary-G. Mary of his dreams, a virgin woman, before tonight. Now, tonight, she is a woman with whom he has made love, in his imagination, making her no longer a virgin.

But it is still imagination, and no matter
what
, she will never be able to know the carnal extremes he has performed over her body, over her.

Sargeant is thinking also of reading exercises in
Nelson’s West Indian Reader, Book Three
, about a spider who bores a hole in the ground and covers it with a lid made of pieces of straw and mud, as a protection and as a guillotine. As a weapon. He remembers another exercise in the
Reader
, about an animal, a very small animal, who bores a hole underground and lives in it, with traps laid for intruders; and he remembers another animal, but not by name . . . why can’t he call-to-mind these important little animals at a time like this, when he thinks of himself as one of them? Understanding how vulnerable he is crawling through this tunnel, not on his hands and knees, but crawling nevertheless, being led in this slow passage? . . . this animal whose name he can’t remember is a worm that bores its home under the surface of soft mud, in tunnels which any intruder would get lost in, tire himself out in, and give up the ghost of spirit and of strength; drop dead from frustration, unable to extricate itself; then to be devoured by the worm. He is this animal. This bug. This fragile spider. “Come into my parlour, said the Spider to the Fly.” He cannot remember where he first heard this line; but he had to learn the entire tale by heart, in English Literature classes that were heard orally. Perhaps, it was Mr. Edwards, his private lessons tutor, who told him about it at Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys. Perhaps in Sunday School. Perhaps on the Pasture playing cricket “firms”; and football with the big boys, who kicked the football made of a pig’s bladder, or a green breadfruit; kicking each other, anything; all day long, in the hot steaming sun, during the long vacation.

“Come into my parlour,
“Said the Spider to the Fly.”

He does not remember who wrote these words. But he feels he is a fly in her hands.

“. . . and, years ago, when Ma worked in the Great House, and she sent me to the Plantation Main House, in the long vacation, to buy large tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots; and walking by myself, it would take me twenty-five minutes to get there, from the Great House.

“Earlier this evening, it took me
ten.
To travel the same distance. Perhaps because I am a big woman. And can walk faster. Perhaps I had a reason for getting there quick. But I was telling you about the three men . . .