The Polished Hoe (55 page)

Tight. Choking. Violent. Wild.

“Jesus Christ!”

It is her voice.

“I’m going to kill you!”

It is her voice.

And as the words fall out, like the water tumbling over the tall, high, misty precipice, all the passion, controlled successfully for so many years; all the feeling that place and position, and the neglect had caused her to stifle, came pumping out
.

“Jesus Christ!”

This is his voice.

Her grip on his neck is still tight. And she has bent over, collapsed at the second after her scream of climax; and her mouth is at his throat.

She can taste a saltiness in her mouth. And a thickness. And a revulsive sensation.

It is his blood in her mouth.

“Jesus Christ!”

It is his voice.

Her hand, with her own linen handkerchief in it, is passing over his neck. It is not a wound. It is the hotness of blood that has caused the puncture . . .

“Mongoose,” she says, at the sound of feet darting about in the cane field in which they are. She is lying on her back.

“Mangooses, you mean.”

“Or men who are sly like a mongoose?”

“That would be man-gooses? Or men-goose.”

He is lying on his stomach. His arms are propping up the rest of his body. She is flat on her back, as if she is floating, as if she is in the sea at the Crane Beach, floating like a dry beach-grape leaf. He cannot see the expression of relaxed happiness, approaching joy, that is on her face, for it is still too dark. It is not entirely dark though, not like the time of night he roams throughout the Village, on his bicycle, looking for criminals. The light is the light of foreday morning, the light that begins soon after midnight, but hours before dawn, that dreary, dramatic, graveyard type of light. It comes in on their left. And soon, he will be able to see the expression on her face, and gauge her various moods, and see her face, and see if the softness he saw in her face years ago, and knew, when she was young, the softness that came and disappeared in impulses tonight, is still there.

“Do you know anything about astronomy? The stars?” she says.

“No,” he tells her, lying deliberately.

“Not since I was a little girl, have I lay-down on my back, looking up into the skies. Certainly not with a man side-o’-me!

“And it is a long time since I even worried to look up, to see if there are still stars in the skies over Bimshire.

“Orion. The Big Dipper. Jupiter. The Three Sisters. The star that tells you when you are getting rain. And the North Star.

“Do you know anything about the North Star, Percy?”

“I didn’t know you know so much about stars yourself! Did you study astrology? I don’t know much about the North Star. Nothing unusual, except that it shines in the North.”

“Me? A simple, uneducated woman like me, an expert in the stars? No. Everything I been telling you, about paintings and travel, about life, even about how I feel, I picked up from library books. And Wilberforce, to a extent.

“Years and years, when things between me and Mr. Bellfeels was still sweet, and he could get away from his work, and from his wife—he had just got married to her—he would steal away, and me and him would go for moonlight walks sometimes; for at that time I wasn’t in the Great House yet; but we were still thick; so, late at night when nobody was around and walking the road, and we couldn’t be seen, or identified, or picked-out in a motor-car headlights; and bring shame to Mistress Bellfeels, his wife, we had the whole place to ourselves! But on moonlight nights, even though they didn’t last so long, those nights were still . . . Still.

“On those nights, few and far between, always having to dodge people even when it was dark, we never could risk to hold hands while we walked; or nothing so that lovers do; so the walks would take him and me through the fields, where we could hold hands; through the canes, where he would pinch my bottom, and run after me, climbing trash heaps that were like castles and hills, jumping in the trash-heaps as if they were waves in the sea, ’cause I always liked climbing; with not a word passing between us, walking in trash, up to our ankles.

“Now and then, once in a blue moon, along that portion of the front road where few cars pass, he would tell me things about the stars, and what they mean in regards to travel, to science, to witchcraft, and in the foretelling of weather; and fortunes. And naturally, the season for planting; and for reaping. A long time ago.

“The Star of Bethlehem is the most important star. Because it is about Jesus Christ, our Saviour. But the North Star is my favourite star. Do you know why?”

“Isn’t the North Star only another name for the Star of Bethlehem?” he says.

“The thing about it,” she tells him, “is its direction. The North. A compass point, as Wilberforce pointed it out to me. Columbus went East. Or is it West? He certainly end-up West, down here with us in the Wessindies, completely lost in the Carbean Sea, without knowing his arse from his you-know-what. And yet, Columbus get all this credit for discovering all o’ we, including Amurca; but according to Wilberforce, Amurca was already discovered for
donkey years
, by people who Columbus called Red Indians; but peopled by those people, nevertheless. What discovering did Columbus discover, when he didn’t even know his armpit from his arse!— pardon my French, Sarge! What discovery would you call
these
discoveries?

“But Columbus was concern with the East. And ended-up West. In other words, from where he came from, Columbus travelled South. And discovered people that were already discovered, and that had discovered themselves, in one way or the other.

“The South has come to mean freedom, and escape, even today, with all the blasted North-Amurcan tourisses that crowd-up the place, certain months of the year. Coming South means escape and freedom; and other things too, from the coldness of the North.

“But the North. The real North, Percy! And the star that stands for the North, the North Star! To me, and I am not a historian, or a.Well-enough-read person to be pointing you to this point, but from listening to Wilberforce, the North Star is the star that led my ancestors, and Gran, from outta the clutches of men like Mr. Bellfeels, and point them straight-straight as a arrow, out of Canaan Land, cross the Nile River and the Sahara Desert, and up inside the Promised Land, after forty long years perishing in the desert, safe. And free.

“Ma say that her grans on the mother and father side come from a place in Africa call Elmina; was haul-off ship in Amurca; and then was transship here to Bimshire, in transit from crossing the deserts in the forty years that it took to escape bondage.

“And talking about Ma’s grans strikes me as strange. Because we don’t go back too far in lineages; not in this Hemisphere. I never come-across
one
soul in this Village who could say she have a grandmother who born here in Bimshire, to match Mr. Bellfeels bragging that he ‘have family here in Bimshire from the year 1493,
A.D.
’
!
That bastard!

“I don’t know one coloured family, or coloured person in the whole of Bimshire, perhaps in the whole Wessindies, who could match that claim, who could lay-claim to that claim, and trace-back his ancestries to 1493! You?

“And it seem to me, when I think of these things, that we go back, if we go back at all, only just round the blasted corner, to the first chattel house standing on the Plantation land. Rented; and beyond that, to the last slave ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, which my son calls the Middle Passage, and which lay-anchor in the Careenage of Carlisle Bay, down in Town. Or we could go back to the forty years it take us, like the Israelites, to cross the desert, outta bondage.

“Wilberforce argue strong that this time span of forty years isn’t accurate; not when you take into consideration the measurements of the desert; allow for sickness, and death, marriage and even childbirth; for wagons brekking-down, and the horses and mules dropping like flies in the heat of the Sahara Desert, their flight from Pharaoh’s Land should be a journey of one week. Nine days. At the most!

“I wonder where that boy gets his ideas? Learning is a funny thing, Sarge, isn’t it? But Wilberforce allow me to understand that his calculation is based on science; something that proves this argument.

“Yes! The North. Guided by a star pointing to the North. To the land of real, true-true freedom. Namely, Canada!

“And when I went up to Buffalo that time, with Mr. Bellfeels, looking for second-hand machineries for the Factory, as the machineries here was always brekking-down, I happened to look across the lake, the Superior Lake, I think they call it, and I saw the beauty of Canada, the white fields of snow, the white trees covered in white snow, and the houses, and the heads of the people, those who didn’t have-on fur hats,
white
. All that snow symbolize to me the freedom that my ancestors, Ma’s gran-parents, were seeking when they followed that North Star in their journey from out the clutches of Amurcan slaveholders and owners and drivers like Mr. Lawrence Burkhart, into Canaan Land.

“Do you remember that there used to be a passenger bus line in this Island, by the name of the North Star?”

“The
Lone
Star Bus Line, you mean,” he corrects her.

“Yes! My mistake. But much of a muchness. The name is close-enough for you to grasp my meaning. In the eighteen-hundreds, if not centuries before that, the people who were disembarked and put-off on the shores of Amurca, those who had endurance, all of them who could, embarked and got-on on a underground railroad, travelling by foot in whatever weather they slipped out of captivity in, in winter, storm, deluge and summer; and from Pharaoh’s clutches; dodging and escaping and outwitting wolves and hound dogs and guns, state troopers, bounty-hunters and Kloo-Klux-Klans, bloodhounds like the Alsatians the Nazzies employed in the War, that we see in
BBC
newsreels, at the movies; and walking practically barefoot, in the deepness of winter and snow; and not taking the kind of transportation, like a Greyhound Bus Line, that I see in Buffalo! Nor a motor-car! Not even a Model T. To say nothing of a plane! They had planes then?”

“Planes existed in the First Whirl War.”

“Imagine, just imagine a man with a bag, with fried chicken in it, a slice of watermelon, no change of clothes, hardly a penny to raise ransom, or pay a tribute, with a hand-roll cigarette in his mout’, and
walking
from the town of Waycross-Georgia, or Miami-Florida, straight up to Canada, following the North Star, putting all his trust in astronomy, since he couldn’t put his hand on a road map . . . They had road maps in those days?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he tells her.

“Is there any wonder that the black race produce such great runners, and athletes? It must reside in what Wilberforce calls the
genes
. Isn’t that something?”

“Maps didn’t exist, to my knowledge.”

“Isn’t that something, then?”

“They had maps that a person could draw from memory of having travelled that route before. But not maps in the sense that you could go in Cave Shepherd & Sons, and ask for a map o’ Englund, and the clerkess hand you one. Maps didn’t exist in that sense.”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Maps didn’t exist, to my knowledge.”

“But you have given me something very precious, Percy. Precious as having a map to show the escape routes and passages and byways for flight out from under Pharaoh’s hand. You have on this night given-me-back confidence in myself. And some of my dignity. I used to be a woman who could move mountains, not blowing my own horn.

“Mr. Bellfeels knew that. He let me try my hands at certain things in the running of this Plantation. Little things. Things like telling him which labourers was reliable, which was troublemakers. I will never take that from him, bastard that he is still.

“You also gave-me-back my disposition, my disposition to even out things.

“But I want you, Sargeant, to show me no favours. After we get up from layingdown in this trash heap, I want you to tell me
straight
, what I have to do; and what I have to say to the authorities, in the best way, to get this thing over-with.”

“I already gave you a hint.”

“A hint is not advice, or a solution. I am waiting on you to take down my Statement, word for word, in full, showing the motive, the motivation and the intention.

“I wish you had-learn Pitman’s Shorthand, though. That way, what I tell you, and what they report Monday morning in the
Bimshire Daily Herald
, will be my words and nothing but my words. And not like the words the authorities in Northampton put in Nat Turner mouth to say, and then say that his own words condemn him.”

“Who is Nat Turner? He used to live ’bout-here? Was he one of the ‘bastards’?”

“A man from a place in Amurca, called Southampton. You don’t remember hearing or reading about Nat Turner?

“When we were talking about the family ties between Plantation and Plantation, and between owners living in this Island and those living in Amurca, in places like Waycross, Charleston-South-Carolina; and the City of Lynchburg, we end up always talking about Southampton. Not Southampton-England, although they are related, like Trafalgar Square in Bimshire is named after the Trafalgar Square up in Englund, the Mother Country.