Weeds in Bloom

by Robert Newton Peck

  “‘Benevolence,’” she said, “because there’s five different shades of blue, and all of ’em’s so kindly.”

  Her third quilt was neither rectangular nor square. Instead, it was octagonal, featuring what appeared to be eight characters, in pairs. Four maroon, all larger and plainer than the four smaller ones, which were frilly, in pink.

  “‘Barn Dance,’” she said, silently clapping her hands, “on account it looks like promenade your partner. Years back, when I was a young girl … oh, how I could square-dance. And clog. My toes flew like wrens.”

  “Did you make all these quilts?”

  She nodded. “Ever single one. You’ll see a down yonder in ever corner. A trademark. My name is Hosannah Holbert.”

  Touching the brim of my cowboy hat, I bent her a grin. “Nice to meet you, Miss Hosannah. I’m Rob.”

  “I’ll turn seventy-seven come May. Been at quilting for over sixty year.” She shook her head. “Young girls today don’t do a lick of it. Leastwise not the bubblegummers I meet up.”

  “What’s this next one called?”

  It was black and white, with eight durable objects; yet the powerful pattern seemed to be more might than music, so I doubted it represented a dance.

  “Them there’s oxen,” she said. “Holsteins. They’s all black-and-white, them cattle, so I named this’n ‘Ox Pull.’ See? I weave two ox in each of the four corners, facing out. All pullin’ like fury. Four yoke. When it’s spread out flat to a bed, why, them ox tug so strong you’d swear the quilt was growing and growing.”

  “It’s beautiful work,” I said.

  “That’s because it’s usual pleasing to chore at something you enjoy. Not once—no, not even a one time—did I ever fashion the same quilt twice. Quilts are my children. Each’ll git a fresh face. Like a sheet of cookies.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “This’n I call ‘Attic Window.’ If you stand still and study on it, you’ll begin to feel you perch away up high, looking out across a meadow of flowers.” She leaned an inch or two closer to me. “I hate selling ‘em. It pains to part with kin.”

  “Yes, I suppose it does,” I said. “I’ve often wondered how a painter can stand to sell a painting. He has it one minute, and poof! It’s clean gone.”

  Hosannah looked at the sky.

  “At night, after I trade away one of my quilts, I look up to the stars and pretend I can still behold it, spread out across God’s bed.” Lowering her gaze, she squinted at me for a moment. Then she so slowly smiled. “That’s a lot like life itself. Having and losing.”

  I agreed. “Living is a gain and then a loss.”

  “What’s so sad,” Hosannah said, “is that I’ll eventual sell all seven of these quilts, and each one’ll leave and wander off in a strange direction. To a different place. They’ll never again be a family like now, all in line, as though sitting to a supper and blessing their food. Or side by side in a church pew.”

  Insanity struck me!

  “Would you be willing,” I asked her, “to allow me to purchase all seven of your quilts? Because I want all of them. Right now, before I change my crazy mind.”

  She blinked a few times.

  “All seven?”

  “Yes. I’ll keep them, give them a good home, and they’ll be together. Our family and our guests, snuggled beneath your family.”

  Hosannah let out a sigh. “That’d be righteous.” As she spoke, her smile was warmer than any coverlet.

  We sealed the deal.

  Happily, I headed for home, wondering how to justify such a spree of impulse buying. As it turned out, no problem. We Pecks are all a tad tilted, so everyone understood. And did so again, a couple of years later, when I collected the quilts, loaded all seven in my car, and drove north to the Panhandle to do research—and to visit Hosannah, of fame.

  She was there. It was a warm homecoming of seven prodigal quilts welcomed by their creator. Eight joyous souls, like a …

  Barn Dance.

  Movement

  THE BAR WAS QUITE DARK.

  And very noisy, a blend of yelling and fighting and canned reggae being played louder than a civilized ear can tolerate. Music declaring war.

  Being an intruder, I was dressed as the other men were. Poorly. Everyone around me was brown or black, either from Jamaica or Haiti. I had dishonestly charred my face with Florida muck and tied a twisted red bandanna around my head as a headband.

  My complexion is naturally dark. Here, it helps.

  On this particular night, I was in Belle Glade, Florida, beneath the belly of Lake Okeechobee. It was winter, but warm. The harvesting season for sugarcane. Straddling a barstool, I ordered beer from a bottle, refusing to put a glass or a fork (or even one of the willing young ladies) near my mouth. Most voices spoke English, others French. I can speak both, or so I always thought; except here, where I couldn’t clearly understand either.

  A cutter on the next barstool fired a joint.

  His first drag was hot and deep and demanding, as though his lungs were desperate for disease. Holding the marijuana smoke inside, he held it as long as possible, then exhaled from one nostril. The other must have been clogged. Looking at me, he offered me a free hit.

  I grinned, touching a finger to my throat as if to explain why I was refusing his generosity.

  “Thank you,” I told him. “I can’t smoke.”

  He smiled imperfect teeth. “Hey, that is okay, mon. No problem.” After his next inhale he said the obvious. “You not Jamaica.”

  I shook my head.

  “Where?”

  “Here, in Florida.” Offering an open right hand, I said, “Roberto.”

  We shook.

  “They call me Movement,” he said, “or sometime Move.” One more pull on the joint. “What you doing in cane-cutter bar?” His eyebrows raised. “Look for young woman, eh?”

  “No,” I said, much too quickly.

  Holding up a finger, he warned, “Hey, don’t put no pansy Yankee hands to my body. Mon, I am straight. You dig?”

  “I dig. Me too.”

  “Movement is not my real name.”

  Tempted to say “Nor am I truthfully Roberto,” I held quiet. In bars such as this one, nobody asks for a name, and few offer identification, formal or informal. Fake green cards, a big business, are kept out of sight.

  “Why do they call you Movement?”

  Wordlessly, he serpentined off the barstool, turned around once, leaped, waved his arms, bent to retrieve a bottle cap from the filthy floor, tossed it up, and caught it. All in one symphonic motion. He wasn’t solid. Instead, he was fluid and breeze, flowing and billowing as a ballet. As he whirled, everyone noticed, watching with the same fascination as I did, even though (from those I had observed) many Jamaicans are graceful. To call Movement a dancer would be unjustly inadequate. He wasn’t merely a dancer.

  He was dance.

  There was nothing effeminate about him. He appeared to be a total male, so confident of his own swaggering masculinity that he was comfortable with grace. Even his hands were delicate. But not all soft or silken. Movement’s handshake had been forcefully firm. Yet a man of lace, a child born of ferns, hemlock, or cypress.

  “Move,” someone said to him, “do some more.”

  So he did.

  Realizing that all eyes were now focusing on him, Movement gracefully performed, to charm us as easily as a cobra slithering from a wicker basket. As he danced, the reggae began to make sense, because Movement added meaning. He swayed to each note as though creating it on a sheet of music with his body as a feathery quill. He was a perfect visual interpretation of sound.

  For a moment, a young black girl danced with Movement as his partner. Yet, despite that she was lithe and pretty, I found myself watching him instead of her. When he danced, or walked, or shifted to another position on a barstool, all eyes followed Movement, mine included.

  “Mon,” he laughed, “I got style.”

  In sequence, half a dozen girls
danced with Movement, each reluctantly releasing him to the next partner. He coaxed them to improve, to leap, to fly.

  People bought and brought Movement drinks, one after another. He thanked everyone, his black eyes flashing as though he deserved the attention in which he was basking. To every lady, he bowed. When he did so, even an adolescent bar harlot imagined, perhaps, that she had become a princess, a king’s daughter, or the beloved sweetheart of a prince. Movement drank. He smoked, danced, shouted to me within an inch of my ear because the music was as loud as the crowd.

  “Where,” I asked Movement, “did you learn to dance the way you do? You really are good, you know. More than good. You’re the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”

  “Want to know who teach me?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No problem.” He giggled boyishly. “Fred Astaire.”

  I laughed too, prompted by the fact that Fred Astaire had retired before this lad was born.

  “Old movies,” Movement told me. “In Jamaica, only rich go to new movies. Us peoples see old gray mares. That where I meet Mr. Fred Astaire.”

  The evening got later, and drunker, and I would have offered a sawbuck for a lungful of fresh air. Yet as long as Movement danced, or even paraded to the men’s room, I had to tarry and watch his return.

  Next morning, however, came very early.

  It was Wednesday.

  On Tuesday, the day before, I’d taken careful notice where the burners were burning the fields of sugarcane. Growers burn on the day before they harvest. No sugar company wants an author (or a reporter) to visit a cutter camp or a cane field. I was officially told that no cane chopper permitted himself to be photographed.

  Cameras, in Clewiston and Moore Haven and LaBelle, were regarded with mistrust. To be photoed was bad luck. A camera was merely one more white man’s demon.

  A devil box.

  For a few bucks, Movement smuggled me into the camp. His temporary domicile, loosely described, was an unpainted cement-block structure of one story, one room, with neither stove nor electricity, and no working toilet. Disguised as I was, I slept unnoticed with about a dozen other men in a room that stunk of sweat and filth and hopelessness.

  To a cane cutter, such is home.

  I had my own cane knife.

  Carrying it, I boarded a dull-green school bus the next morning, before dawn. The darkness protected me from detection, masking my identity, allowing me to chop sugarcane (at almost the age of sixty) with men who were one-third my age.

  Movement was my sponsor.

  First off, he called me Tall, or Tall Guy, a moniker that suited me because I am, after all, a tall guy. Cane, I learned, is not chopped from an erect position. We cutters are only erect from the waist down. The upper body remains horizontal.

  The first hour isn’t bad.

  Beneath me, the smoking land was blackened, charred by Tuesday’s burn. Every twenty yards, I’d discover a dead animal… rat, possum, rabbit, even a dog. A young pig! It had been trapped and roasted alive.

  I didn’t eat the pork. The Jamaicans, however, tore it apart, and it disappeared in minutes.

  Foolishly, I had brought nothing to drink. As the day heated, my throat was parched with smoke dust coupled with backbreaking work. Movement unscrewed his jug of “petrol” and gave me its virgin swig. The name has no connection with gasoline or any other petroleum product. It is merely a field beverage, brought along in plastic-gallon milk containers … a blend of dark beer, tomato juice or V8, spices (usually cinnamon or nutmeg), and eggnog, plus a can of condensed milk.

  It was poison, but I was parched.

  “Petrol,” said Movement, “give a mon power for work, and then be stamina for love.”

  The local young black ladies adore Jamaican men, Movement bragged, claiming that they are handsome and more generous (because they work harder and longer, and get paid more), and because Jamaicans are lean and muscular. Add to all this their enchanting accent. They sing instead of talk.

  Movement danced through the day.

  With grace, ease, and never an awkward motion or a false step, his cane knife arched its silvery half-circle, cutting and slashing, as if the two of them, and their activity, had been choreographed by some Broadway director.

  Nonetheless, it was still hard labor. American blacks refuse to do it. Cane chopping is not artistry. It’s a means of survival for Jamaicans and Haitians. And me. Not because I needed to cut sugarcane to exist. I had to do it to learn enough to write not a book, but at least an accurate chapter.

  A fight started.

  Some cutter trespassed on another man’s petrol and the silver blades of cane knives were crimson with hot blood. Men shouted. Swore. Bosses came in Jeeps and Rovers, guns fired, and a dog barked.

  Jamaicans fear a dog. And any snake.

  “If you knife-cut a snake, mon,” Movement informed me seriously, “the poison fly up, and it blind you bad. Forever. And it blind you children back home in the islands.”

  It would be immoral, I concluded, to tell Movement that his beliefs were false. Rightfully, one can’t rob a man of his inherent philosophy unless able to instantly replace it with a wiser one. Who could say which tenets were correct? Those of a Jamaican cane chopper or of a Vermont farm boy turned author?

  It was the longest day of my entire semi-retired life, but somehow I made it to sundown.

  A bus, this one blue, returned us to the cutter camp. A very large Hispanic crew boss locked the gate behind us. Never presume that field hands, regardless of color or nationality, live a great deal more freely than prior to Emancipation.

  After work, we sat shirtless, unable to stir or eat or sleep or breathe, or prepare a meal. Pain pounded my spine. I was too exhausted to unwrap from my wrists and ankles the protective bandages that Movement had provided for my safety. Everywhere, eyes were staring at other faces. Somewhere, a cutter was sharpening his cane knife, rasping a file to and fro across the edge of a metal blade. I could smell cookery of some sort, possible red beans and rice, collards, and a mash of supermarket junk that the local merchants sold to all the cutters at a boosted price.

  The whores came.

  Each woman brought a blanket and a bottle or two of cheap wine. Movement bought himself a jump. He invited me to tag along in order to observe his prowess. Politely, I declined. Listening to the bickering that eventually determined her price was enough of an education. The prostitutes were all ages. None tempting. Already I had contracted herds of body lice, which were now galloping through the tundra of my southern hemisphere like a panic of lemmings.

  In the night, I began to ponder if the people at the Clewiston Inn were wondering of my whereabouts. I was truly wondering myself.

  At havens of Okeechobee respectability, such as the Clewiston Inn or the Port LaBelle Inn, I am known as Mr. Peck, a successful author. There, no one calls me Tall Guy or asks me to douse my thirst with a sip from a plastic milk-jug of petrol.

  At hotels, no one scratches.

  At sugarcane camps, everyone does.

  For me, it was a challenge to gain entrance into a labor camp. Now, lying in the dark, afraid, awaiting Movement’s return from his metered romancing, I began to wonder if I could escape from this sewer and return to soap, and sanity. Nearby, there was a toilet bowl. A stagnant puddle of brown smelly filth. No toilet paper. A gray core was hanging uselessly from a triangular wire.

  Movement returned.

  I expected him to be smiling.

  He wasn’t. Instead, he seemed depressed, as if he had sold himself into a lower level of society and fouled his body. Also his wife.

  “Tall Guy!” he hollered above the constant noise of fighting, gambling, and a poorly functioning radio on batteries. “Mon, I hope I don’t catch a misery. Had it a one time. Hurt like a whip to pee.”

  He lay quiet.

  Near us, two cutters were playing dominoes, banging each little black brick on a plywood square supported by cement blocks, yelling and trying to shave the od
ds. Each domino was played with such untamed force, as though the players had decided that noise and violence tallied up a win.

  Before dawn, I hid and escaped, clawing earth and crawling under a chain fence, through buggy water, to freedom. A schoolteacher stopped his Toyota to offer me a lift. A do-gooder not yet mugged. I was, however, oh so grateful. He never told me his name. I retained mine. We rode by another camp, littered with wastepaper and beer cans and empty wine bottles.

  “May I drop you in town?”

  I surprised him with ten dollars. “No, thank you. Please cart me as close to the Clewiston Inn as you dare. I’m much too dirty and exhausted to explain in any relevant Aristotelian logic.”

  His mouth fell a foot.

  I ducked in the back door of the Clewiston Inn, on the north side, and sneaked by the cocktail lounge, which is on the right as one enters. My hall ran to the left.

  Following a bath, a shave, and a generous application of paratox (a product used to rid one of head lice, body lice, crab lice, and their countless eggs), I stretched out on a clean and unslept-on bed, hoping that the liquid parasiticide was exterminating my little guests and their progeny. The next day I also tried dog shampoo. It all worked.

  I kept thinking of Movement.

  One evening more than a month later, I returned to the cutter camp, bribing a gate guard with a twenty and a jug of wine. It took a while to find the cement-block structure where I’d slept. Where he’d slept. Men were inside, cooking, arguing, punching each other, laughing, gambling at dominoes and Blackjack and Casino. They were drinking the cheap wine that a cutter was forced to buy, thirsty or not.

  “You seen Movement?” I asked a cutter, then another, and more.

  Nobody said a word. No man would admit that he had ever known Move or watched him dance. Movement had simply disappeared, evaporated as milk into the unknown plastic container that is a Sugarland harvest of lives as well as cane.

  “Is he dead?”

  No answer.

  I can only conclude that he is. A cane knife across a throat can snuff a man very quickly. And everywhere in the Okeechobee area run canals and ditches, a thousand nooks to stash a corpse. You could hide a horse.