The Polished Hoe (59 page)

“Don’t drive-’bout the CJ car showing-off,” the Commissioner warned Sargeant. “Return-back prompt. You hear?”

The envelope is the colour of khaki, and has a window through which Sargeant can see part of a pair of legs; and when he shakes the envelope, the legs drop in full view in the window; and the legs are the legs of a woman; and his eyes and his hand now ease the photograph out of its envelope; and more photographs are disclosed; and the woman’s legs become her waist and then her thighs, and finally, her entire body, naked as she was born. He looks up and sees a cyclist in his path; and swerves, too late; and in his rearview mirror, he sees the cyclist on the ground, and his legs caught in the bicycle wheels; and the fallen man is pointing at the Jaguar, with his right index finger.

“Haul your arse!” Sargeant tells the image of the man in the rearview mirror.

He looks at each of the snapshots of the woman and a man, in various sexual positions; and suddenly facing shame for looking at the snapshots, and for “breaking and entering,” he replaces them, using one hand; and worries: “I hope that blasted bicycle didn’t scrape the CJ Jag!” and speeds on.

A .Welling, a lightness, came to Sargeant’s head, making it swim with this new sensation of seeing a man and a woman in the act of lovemaking, with the man doing it in many positions; performing cunnilingus; spanking her buttocks; squeezing her breasts; and from behind—a position Sargeant had
never
contemplated, a position Manny had never suggested; captured on film; and he won- dered how the photographer made the arrangements to take these acts. All the twelve snapshots leave out the head of the man and the head of the woman.”

Sargeant drove like a speed-demon through the streets of Town, from the Law Courts on Coleridge Street, where the High Court is situated; past Cave Shepherd & Sons, Haberdasheries; past the statue of Lord Horatio Nelson, standing in stiff naval erectness, in bronze, at attention, looking out to sea, his line of vision passing over the shallow Careenage, over the Rum Bonds and the Warehouse Bonds, and focusing instead on the wide Carbean Sea and on the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, over which he has himself sailed, years ago; past the Esplanade where the Police Band plays the martial music of Sousa every Wednesday night; past the Aquatic Club, past the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club; past the Hastings Rocks, his heart beating fast, an unsettling feeling in his groin, wondering what Manny would say about these dozen positions, ignoring the accelerated
RPM
s registered on the polished mahogany dashboard, until he comes to a screeching stop in the uneven driveway, in front of the Harlem Bar & Grill. The Chief Justice’s mansion Sargeant deliberately passed on his way to Manny.

“Look at these. Fast, Manny,” he says. “I have to take-them-back. I find them in Sir G’s Jag, out there!”

“The Chief Justice?”

“Look at the things, quick, man!”

“Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” Manny says, as he looks at the first two snapshots, as Sargeant back-backs the large motor-car into the small, rocky, muddy space in front of the rum shop. “Jesus Christ!” Manny says, rolling his eyes, and looking at the third snapshot. “This position is call the Baked Fowl, for your information.”

“What bake-fowl?”

“This next position, I think, the Amurcans call the, the . . . the Missionary Position.”

“How the arse you know these things, Manny?”

“They is both white people. Perhaps from Bimshire. Or they could be English . . . the English like these kinky things,” Manny says. “I know. You is a police; you should know, too. Sometimes I axe myself, ‘Sarge is a police? Sarge is a real police?’”

Sargeant thinks of the Lord Chief Justice who is waiting to be driven to luncheon at the Bimshire Club, whose members are the powerful men in the Island; and he has twenty minutes to pick up the CJ’s suit and get back; and as he speeds through the crowded daytime streets, all he hears in his head are Manny’s exclamations, “Jesus Christ!” as he flipped to another snapshot; and the spewing of mud and the noise of stones run over by the wheels of the powerful Jaguar, as he points it back in the direction of Town, and the CJ’s mansion on Belleville . . . Sargeant passes passenger buses, belonging to Eckstein Bus Company, to the General Bus Lines, Reid’s Buses, and Miss Madame Ifill Bus Company, painted in various colours, like the flags of nations and independent islands, on their way into Town, like a caravan, in droves, early in the morning, as if it is an Easter Monday bank holiday; and men are dressed in white as if they are heading for the cricket fields of villages, of Harrison College, and Spartans and Combermere School, or to Kensington Oval, and now going to the white-marled Yard of the High Court, where they will stand for hours, under the berry trees that give the only shade from the sun which comes down at you, with a vengeance, even as early as ten o’clock in the morning. Everyone lucky-enough to be an early bird already has a seat inside the Court, in the Gallery.

The Court is large and sedate and with large windows covered in jalousies, to keep out the heat and the sun. The jalousies are painted green. Everything that belongs to the Government of the Island of Bimshire is painted green. Thick, deep, shiny green. Everything that is important in this Island is also painted green: the shutters of all the buildings on all the plantations; the eaves and the shutters on the windows of the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club, windows which hang out from the wall like sleepy eyelids; the windows of the pavilions of the First Eleven cricket clubs, and of the Aquatic Club; the windows of the Bimshire Club, whose verandah overlooks Broad Street, the main street in Town; on everything that is English and important is this green, shiny paint.

On the walls of the High Court are portraits of all the preceding Chief Justices.

A portrait of the King is on the wall behind the seat of the Chief Justice. This seat looks like a throne. It is high. It is made of stained wood. It has markings and images, like small sculptures of heads of beasts, ugly, prehistoric monsters that do not live in the Island of Bimshire; and a replica of the Goddess of Justice; and there is the head of a lion that is about to eat some small animal, or the nearest, careless human. The heads of gargoyles.

Below this throne, upholstered in crimson velvet, are seats, on the left and on the right, for the two sides of the Court. Rex versus Accused. Crown versus Defendant. And long tables at which the solicitors and clerks and barristers and juniors of both sides to the argument are seated.

All are dressed in the black of undertakers, white dress shirt stiff at the winged collar, white tie that is two twoinch wide strips of cotton, black silk jacket, black silk waistcoat and dark grey striped trousers, black shoes; wearing wigs which stand out against their natural hair, and their dark skins and white skins, or the reddened complexions, from sun and rum.

They all look very intelligent and very sleepy; and very stern. Some look cruel.

There is a railed, squared-off section, lower than the throne, in which sits the man, or the woman, before the Bar, “the Accused”— the condemned man or the condemned woman—“the Prisoner”; no one escapes lightly from the clutches of Sir Gerald’s encompassing, thorough knowledge of the Laws of Englund applied in classical pronouncement of the English language, straight from his head, to the lawlessness of Bimshire; and without looking into the pages of the huge leather-bound books, whose backs are carved with letters of gold print, and which sit on his desk, piled like cement blocks, to provide protection from the rabblement in his Court, or like huge domino seeds, as if these books of heavy jurisprudence and precedents are placed there to protect Sir G from contamination from the prisoner in the dock; no; no one escapes Sir G’s clutches.

And in the balcony, or the Gallery, the few fortunate local, native historians of murder cases who will tell you, from memory, years afterwards, precisely which argument it was that swayed Sir G to don his black cap, the second the Foreman cries, “Guilty, sir!”; when Sir G will pronounce Judgement: “
You shall be taken from this place, and conveyed to another place, where you shall be held until the day of reckoning come, thence, you shall be taken to the proper place, and hanged by your neck, until you are dead, dead, dead, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul
; these historians, fortunate to be seated within hearing distance of argument and judgement, will stand afterwards in the Yard, under the berry trees and talk, and ignore the yellow sticky berries falling on their heads, will go on talking, reciting the heavy arguments made in Court; and will move from the Yard only when night falls, to the public Standpipe, under a street lamp, in a rum shop, and disclaim, almost word for word, the complicated citing of Law and legal precedents argued by the Solicitor-General, and Torts cited by the Defence, the Island’s leading Barristers-at-Law.

The names, Christian and surname, including initials, of every barrister, law clerk, solicitor who represents Rex or Defendant— there are no women barristers—involved in any aspect of a murder case is known, by the second day, by the onlooking historians in the Gallery. His mother’s name, and his father’s name are already known. It is known on what day he was born; which elementary school he attended in which corner of the Island; and it is known “how he came” in the Secondary-to-Second-Grade examinations; in which year; what marks he got; and in which subjects in those examinations; and similarly, about the Senior-to-First-Grade exami- nations; and when he finishes either at Harrison College or the Lodge School, it will be known by these “members of the Gallery,” mostly men—and some women, too—that in Latin Distinction he reached Scholarship level; that in Greek he got a Distinction; that in Ancient History, likewise; and that “he went up,” afterwards, to Oxford—or Cambridge—and “lick’ all-them English-boys, and
teached
them Law!”; and “came back with a
One-One!”
First amongst all those in the University, and first of all those who got First Class Honours in Jurisprudence.

To the last man, his credentials are known by the entire Gallery. They are known with the same ferocity of retention as cricket scores of batsmen from Englund, Australia, New Zealand and the Wessindies, are held in the memory, and spewed forth at the smallest challenge.

It is a contest. There is no interest in the rightness or wrongness of a murder case. Nobody really cares whether “a woman kill a man; he was a worthless son-of-a-bitch, anyhow”; whether he deserved to have his head chopped off; and his “dickey” jammed into his mouth. No one standing in the Yard under the berries is concerned about the horribleness of a crime. Not really. They are here to hear legal argument. They are here to hear “
talk
.” They are here to hear Sir Gerald interject his wisdom, with humour and quotations from Shakespeare and from the Classics, Livy,
Book XXI,
and Virgil’s
Aeneid,
and Tacitus’
Histories
; and listen to Sir G’s wit, “dry as a cassava-hat.” They are here as they would be in a cinema, watching a cowboy film that has the longest fight in it in the history of cowboy films.

The words they will hear, words from the Latin, and with a generous sprinkling of words from Greek classical literature, and from Shakespeare, are words they would not hear every day in their neighbourhoods, on the beach, in the fish market, or at a cricket game on the Pasture, on a Saturday afternoon; but they will like these words, although they do not know Latin, or Greek; or would not have read too much Shakespeare, they will fall in love with these words; and make them their own, by repeating them, even when their usage is not exactly relevant, or exact. It does not matter. It is the word. And these men have always loved the word. And the sound of the word being spoken. For the word is God. And is like the Law. And like the Law, which is English, the
word,
too, is English. Yes. “Talk-yuh-talk! Yes!”

“
Muh-Lud, humbly I beg leave to proceed in my examination of the person before the Bar . . . Thank you, Muh-Lud.”

It is more than play-play Court. More than Mute Court.

“Now, I put it to you, did you, or did you not, depart your domicile on the night in question, and with malice aforethought, did you not in fact proceed at about thirtyfive minutes after six o’clock in the evening in question, on the thirteenth instant, going into a direction which alone of itself could only have brought you within the boundaries of the private property of the Plantation referred to in the Docket of Evidence before this Honourable Court; and did you not, by that trespass, intend to, and have motive, to carry out the dasterly act of which you are hereby charged? I put it to you, did you, or did you not?”

One man leans closer to the man sitting beside him, and with a hand covering his mouth, whispers, “Words, man! Words.”

“Too-sweet!” the man replies.

. . . and she carries the hoe in her right hand, imitating the Lord Bishop with his Staff of Office, holding the end with the blade, pushing little pieces of paper out of her way, wondering how they got here in this subterranean passage; poking the holes in the masonry of the wall, with the handle of the hoe, and bringing down a small gust of white dust. She is holding the hoe with the care that its meaning would insist upon. She carries her hoe with the aplomb and arrogance and dignity of the Bishop’s Staff. A staff of rank. Or like the polished African stick she saw an African walking with, in the
London Illustrated News;
and this is what it means to her now.

Perhaps she is carrying it with this exaggerated importance and imagined symbolism because it has been with her for the same comparative length of time as the wishbone she had carried pinned into the hem of the tunic of her school uniform, when she was in Primer Standard—and later on, in her navy blue bloomers, when she went into a higher standard in Elementary School—for years, touching it during difficult moments in Geography, when it took her some time to remember the capital of Australia; and once, when the name of the highest mountain in India slipped her memory; once again, when she did not spell in time to suit her teacher, the name of the biggest river in Amurca . . . “M-eye-double-s, eye-double-s, eye-double-pee, eye!
Mississippi
, ma’am”; and that sad, rainy Friday afternoon in Scripture, when she could not remember what the First Commandment warned against doing. But she knew her wishbone was there, to help, in case of some serious problem.