Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Since Archibol had trained himself to see past the difficulty of any moment to its profits, he felt, by the time he had parked the sedan, gracious enough to open the back door for Isaac, and to walk according to the measure of the young man’s lethargic pace, rather than nudge him forward though the grand fortress doors of the station. He was being conciliatory, he had found a clever way to make his wife a gift—but even this reversal of the minister’s mood couldn’t allay Isaac’s fears. He balked at the threshold to the station, the voices of the dead in his ears, counting off licks: One, fah freeness. Two, fah freshness. Three for all-around chupidness. On the botsy, on the head-side, cross the knackers and over the knees.

  To guide him forward, Archibol touched Isaac’s elbow, and Isaac recoiled.

  “You ain bring me to jail, sah?” he said, planting his feet. “Was de brakes fail, ya know.” Archibol himself spent a rare smile on this comedy and explained to Isaac the reason he must file a report.

  “Is just formality, mahn,” he said. “Relax, eh?”

  The public reception room was not a welcoming sight. Its concrete floor was coarse and cracked. Two framed photographic portraits—one of the Queen, the other of Edison Banks—broke the bare monotony of the limestone walls, disregarded shrines. Two wooden benches, unoccupied, their surface polished by human friction, repeated the corner made by their adjacent walls. A doorway at the back of the room opened into a corridor, lined with austere offices. Against the far wall, facing out, was a metal desk, painted gray, and there sat the duty officer, pencil in hand, doodling on the front page of a copy of the Crier. As he saw the minister approach, he stood, coming to attention, and remained rigid while Archibol ignored him to chat with Isaac as if they had stepped into a pub, two old friends having a drink.

  “I knew Crissy, ya know.”

  “Mm hmm.”

  Isaac had not had much opportunity to know his father except as dead—a murdered and martyred man, too fresh in the grave, too mad with his enemies, who remained among the living.

  “Yes, I knew Crissy,” reminisced Minister Archibol with self-importance. “Mahn, is true, but time fly, eh? Twenty years come and go since Crissy raise me up in de cutters union.” With each word, the minister’s language undressed itself until he was speaking the singsongy patois of his boyhood in the countryside—and of the campaign trail, too. “Me jussa bwoy bahck den, not so old ahs you. Crissy and Kingsley runnin de cane fields in dem days, eh? carryin on hell fah massa. When Crissy die, fust I tell meself, world come to end today. But world juss begin when Crissy tek de bullet from de white fella’s gun, nuh? Crissy cotch de bullet daht set we free.”

  “Mm hmm,” said Isaac, morosely.

  Isaac had never been one to talk much about his father—what was there for him to say on a subject so readily converted into cheap fuel for mouthy politicians. When the first union of cane cutters had formed, illegally, on St. Catherine, Crissy Knowles had been one of the organizers, more inspiring to his mates than inspired by the role of leadership, and Joshua Kingsley had been their first elected union boss. Delwyn Pepper, nascent tyrant, was voted treasurer. Crissy Knowles was in the forefront of the union’s struggle to be recognized, and when it came time to strike against the old families who owned the sugar plantations, Crissy led it. Crissy knew the stakes—he cut in the fields for a living. Kingsley and Pepper had never whacked a stalk of cane in their lives, except to have their pictures taken. When the strike busters mobbed the scene, Crissy’s was the first head bloodied. For men like Kingsley and Pepper, men with no prospects, men who used their mouth the way others used their muscle, the union was a stepping stone to power, leverage against the colonial status quo, and when they were enfranchised into the affairs of the administrated state as unequal partners, it was Crissy who remained behind in the union, a fella who spent the day in the field with the rest of the workers. When England decided it had exhausted its interest in St. Catherine, a withered consort whose time had come to be retired from the payroll, Kingsley and Pepper matched up against the candidates of the old planters in the island’s first elections for self-government, and it was Crissy they easily convinced to execute their most unsavory business, Crissy who talked the laborers into a season-long strike that starved them, Crissy who shepherded gangs of toughs against the Dominicans imported to harvest the cane. And finally it was Crissy, persuaded by God knows what argument, who had taken a thirty-pound crate of dynamite up to Jack Dawes Estate, packed it under the boilers of the island’s only sugar refinery, and lit the fuse. The explosion tore out the last stubborn roots of the island’s planter class, and a night watchman’s bullet was the end of Crissy, and the end of what had since been called the Sugar War. Kingsley and Pepper had conveniently placed themselves in Trinidad for the fiery climax. They came back to bury Crissy Knowles a hero, but until this growing season cane had not been planted on St. Catherine for twenty years, for twenty years St. Catherine had sweetened her tea and cake with outside sugar, the cane cutters sat on their stoops for twenty years, sitting in darkness, and for twenty years Isaac Knowles had heard them curse his father’s legacy of ruination, for twenty years he had listened to the big shots continue to drum his father’s bones on the treasure chests of their venality, using Crissy the way preachers used Jesus, to stay in business.

  Except through two images he had managed to preserve from his childhood, Isaac did not know Crissy Knowles as a man who had existed on the surface of the world. The first was of his mother peeling long green tongues of aloe, the gel glimmering in the lantern light of their wattle hut in the bush near the Jack Dawes Estate, her hands emulsifying it with a dribble of goat’s milk, kneading and massaging the ointment into his father’s forearms, shaped and colored like two legs of smoked mutton, but cratered with old scorpion bites and crosshatched with the paper-thin lines of the cane leaves, where the hard blades had sliced his skin. Nice, nice, Crissy would murmur as his wife worked on him. Then she’d pull off his pants to rub his legs, and he would sit down to his dinner in his sweaty underpants, at peace with himself, for the moment, in his rage against the old families.

  The other image was of his father brought home that night that concluded the Sugar War, carried like a slain panther by four awkward disciples, four co-conspirators less brave and therefore still alive, one man to each arm, one to each leg, Crissy’s rump bouncing on the dirt, his head lolling back impossibly far, scraping the dirt, rolling loosely with the steps of the men, and the worst of it, his father’s tongue, extending horrifically out a gash in the side of his face to the ground, coated with blood and blackened by the soil it had dragged through, as though his father’s dying effort had been to taste the earth. That is what Isaac knew and remembered of his father—an earth-eating animal whose flesh had been butchered by the knifelike slashes of the sweet harvest. As far as Isaac could determine, Crissy in his grave, the one absolute victim of the conflict, was a spirit divided, spending one half of eternity enamored of his own pride, the other half suffocating in a coffin of remorse.

  Isaac leaned wearily on his arm against the edge of the desk in the vestibule of stone and mustiness, indifferent to Archibol’s strange effort to patronize him. He had endured twenty years of his father’s erstwhile mates, now the leaders of an independent nation, making irregular pilgrimage to pay their respects to Crissy Knowles’ widow. In the early years they came knocking at the wattle hut in Jack Dawes and, when Crissy’s pension checks stopped because the government—these same men—decided it would no longer fund a defunct union, they knocked at the clapboard house in the slum of Scuffletown, donated to his mother by a source unknown to Isaac. He and his brothers had grown up with the politicians petting the tops of their heads for good fortune. They would press a warm shilling into Isaac’s hand and tell him, Keep awake in school, bwoy, this poor place going need your brain someday, and then they would saunter out into the yard to stand and speak to the people who had gathered there to see the notable men, native sons who had learned to talk
back to the world. These men would finish their speeches and leave, as they always left, leaving Crissy’s wife and boys to fend for themselves.

  “Is a nation abl disgrace,” Archibol proclaimed, causing his wife to blink, smirking at his pointless oratory, “we fellas in Government House ain ahs yet move to put up a site, eh? like dem statue figure of de mahn Columbus, to honor Crissy properly.” Spurred by his inspiration, he realized that a small relationship with Crissy Knowles’ oldest son would not be a useless thing, even though the martyred union boss was a shopworn symbol for the conservatives and the Banks faction had so far ignored him.

  “Is ahn idea in dis day, in dis time, nuh?” he said, his head nodding to solicit Isaac’s approval. Isaac stared right through him, mimicking the nod, and Archibol assumed he had won his loyalty. Out of habit, he clapped Isaac on the shoulder, shook his unwilling hand, and forgot about him.

  “Come,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the desk to rouse the duty officer, “where de affidavy?”

  The duty officer’s heels popped together, as he had been trained to pop them for all of ministerial rank, and he emerged from his dullness.

  “Sah?”

  “Fah accident report, nuh? Bring it.”

  A ledger was produced from within the desk, its pages blue-ruled, like a composition book. Its used portion bore the painstaking handwritten accounts of yesterday’s cruel involvements between the people of Queenstown, incriminations as old as slavery or as modern as packaged milk, the brawling feuds and larcenies, sexual assaults and drunken rampages that were the community’s malformed and inarticulate self-expressions of justice. The duty officer took his chair, licked the tip of his ballpoint pen and remained poised, head down, waiting for the minister to begin his statement. But Archibol glared at his wristwatch and deferred to his wife, who had stood off to the side throughout, contributing a look of universal disapproval to the proceeding.

  Archibol clucked impatiently at his wife. “Speak to de mahn,” he said. He tapped the glass of his watch, already late for an appointment with the prime minister. “I walkin meself down to Government House to see Eddy.”

  The st. Catherine Crier

  March 29, 1977

  Low & Behold

  by Epictetus

  Eppy: Well, gents, another noisy week at Government House since we last adjourned our curbside choir. The hullabaloo brings to mind an observation offered years ago by a famous lady, to wit: No good deed shall go unpunished.

  Beau of the Bawl: I for one am not surprised a woman said that since they are the ones who ensure its truth.

  Sir Cease-All: The sentiment of a bachelor and card player. As for myself, you’ll never find me lacking in my admiration for the fairer sex.

  Beau: I hear it’s the speed of your admiration that falls short, heh-heh.

  Joe Pittance: As I see it, fellers, the lady’s wisdom points right on target to the politicians, those keen at keeping poor St. Catherine in the bushes.

  Sir C: There you have it. Why, look at this boy Banks trying to fill the shoes of PM. Not to insinuate the worst, but I thought only the communistic philosophy allowed that it was fine and dandy to go around the countryside uprooting families and turning them off the land. First the planters, and now the peasants themselves must go! The people have placed their hopes and dreams in his trust and he has shown them his backside. There’s a fine reward for a good deed, and now perhaps you shall tell me we shouldn’t expect so much from a hot and sweaty youth who borrows his ideas from the academy rather than the workshop of experience.

  Joe: No no no. There are some ministers we would have no trouble naming who have begun to bite the hand that fed them, like they looking to smash up the Coalition, and bring old Pepper back to ruin us.

  Beau: Coalition my foot! That’s what we are calling it now when cats decide they are better off with the rats and divvy the cheese between them. Shenanigans filled up Government House this time, fellers, not votes.

  Eppy: It’s never an easy job to steer our beloved ship but I for one can’t make heads or tails out of this land reform business. Who is doing what, and why, is what I want to know. Surely we each agree that fallow or underused land is of no help to the economic situation. For as anyone will tell you, you can’t call it dancing if all you are moving is your feet.

  Beau: Is dancing all right, Eppy—straight into a potter’s grave. A rat by any other name would smell as bad, but go ahead and put a fancy title to it like Agrarian Reform or PLDP. Mum, come to the window, is Agrarian Reform coming down the street. Well, poor Mum looking left and right but ain’t see a thing but pests. PLDP?—all that is the PM’s push to Kingsley’s shove, eh?

  Sir C: I believe you speak of the practice whereby the political inclination of a parish is physically manipulated. If that were all it was, I would say that is the same old game of dominoes, but the persecution of innocents will not go unheeded if the programme is carried forth.

  Joe: With all due respect for your record of service, Sir C, the masses have had to do the best they can without a Robin Hood of their own. For their sake and for the good of the nation, the old estates which are now in the public domain must be reorganized and made to turn a profit as they did in the old days.

  Beau: I am hoping that our boys have a plan to do this without a return to the old ways.

  Sir C: You know that on all issues I share the view of God, the Queen, and of course the underdog.

  Beau: Make heads or tails of that without getting a headpain and a tailache.

  Joe: More for St. Catherine is more for all.

  Beau: More for government is less for all.

  Eppy: As they say, gents, A Naked Freeman is Nobler than a Gilded Slave. Let our little group set a standard for the rest. Practice patience and withhold judgment until we know more about the scheme. By the way, have you noticed the PM’s anniversary present to the Police?

  Sir C: Well, it makes me very sad to see our men stripped of their smart white jackets and navy trousers with red stripe. How many young boys grew up longing for such distinction? Now they are required to dress as common troopers.

  Beau: Battledress is all the rage now for traffic patrol. Just look at Dominica they playing Marine over there. Straight army fantasy, boy. Barbados the same thing, Jamaica, Trinidad.

  Joe: Modern times is what you’re seeing in the force these days. The old uniforms left over from the colonial bygone had to go. I say cheers and best of luck.

  Eppy: Enough about appearance, as long as the force continues to do a very good job let them wear whatever pleases them. I might add before we part: the Royal Tropic shall call at the island this Wednesday for the first time in two years. Congrats to Mr. Dexter Brisbane of Tourism and Trade for bringing the RT back to us after the unfortunate assault on several of her passengers by scoundrels who weren’t thrown into prison quick enough to suit me. Let’s all be down at the wharves to welcome the ship when she comes in. Once again, it’s time to show the world we are the friendliest folks in the Caribbean. Until next week then, Clarior E Tenebris.

  Chapter 5

  Lloyd Peters stood restlessly to his feet, straightening the square tail of his linen bush jacket, and sat back down, aware that it was his role to lead the men in the room to certain conclusions, his role to make points of views inevitable, to establish clear lines of direction, like a magnetic compass, and then herd his comrades to a common path, thus giving the prime minister the opportunity to make decisions in an atmosphere of consensus, if not factuality. He must do this because Eddy was a bit of a dreamer, a disappointed Utopian for as long as Peters had known him, until now, because throughout the past year he had watched the most subtle of transformations occurring in Eddy Banks: the whole, imposing presence of the prime minister these days was of a disappointment in the process of recovery. Eddy was healing himself, had begun to believe in the gift of his power, yet still his capabilities remained fragile, and in need of orchestration.

  Not all of the men present in the
private quarters of Edison Banks’ office understood this fragility; or, in understanding, appreciated the barrier it implied at this critical juncture in their reinvention of the world. They were the ones who had set the roots in the thin soil of St. Catherine, organizing the study group that had hardened and crystallized into the People’s Evolutionary Party, each of the founding members of PEP now a chief minister or advisor, within the circle, to the government, and they were intent on clarifying the ambiguous nature of what was out there beyond the circle, what mutation might have erupted to deform the dream, what conspiratorial viruses may yet infect it, other than their own. Unlike Grenada, on St. Catherine fate and Eddy Banks had allowed a window for rational change; its own alliance of opposition parties did in fact manage to constitutionally defeat the old regime, and thus embarked on a delicate, factionalized stewardship of the nation which—and Peters did not have to persuade anybody on this point—was the most push-and-shove way to achieve nothing, to achieve less than nothing, like harnessing a donkey at each end of the wagon of reform, each driver lashing the dickens out of his own ass, striving to get down the road. PEAS—the ruling alliance—was a classic coalition of conflicting interests, united in a common hatred but divided by irreconcilable ambition. Yet this did not disturb the young men of PEP, the People’s Evolutionary Party, not at all; they had expected just such a conflict, and had anticipated managing whatever attitudes or selfish aspirations, whatever regressive manipulations, sought to inhibit the forwardness of their programs, especially land reform, the modernization of agriculture on the admittedly backward island. All that Edison Banks required of their efforts was that there be a beauty to them, an inspiring elegance of execution, so that they could say, when the struggle was over and won, that they had done no more than to provide their foes with a rope to hang themselves with, and were blameless in the hearts of the people, and could not be held accountable in the more severe scrutiny of their real and lasting enemies.