Conquering Kilmarni

by Cave, Hugh

  CONQUERING KILMARNI

  Hugh B. Cave

  Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 Hugh B. Cave estate

  Copy-edited by

  Cover Design by

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  OTHER BOOKS BY HUGH B. CAVE

  NOVELS:

  Serpents in the Sun

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  This one is for

  MEG, JACKY, and JOAN

  ONE

  "Here it is, Peter," said Mr. Campbell, a little out of breath from the climb. "It's not the only tree that came down in yesterday's blow, but, as I said, it's got the field number on it."

  Peter stood there, looking at the fallen tree. It was a silk oak at least forty feet long—some Jamaicans called them silky oaks—and had damaged a number of coffee bushes when it fell. But most of the coffee would recover, and the coffee cherries grew only on new wood, anyway.

  According to the radio, the storm responsible for the tree's falling had been a hurricane. Born in the eastern Caribbean, it had screamed its way west across the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and the island of Jamaica had seemed to be squarely in its path. Even now Peter could see his father standing in the old Great House living room, a look of despair on his tired face as he listened anxiously to each new bulletin.

  Then, at the last moment, the storm had veered to the north, and except for high winds, the island had been spared.

  He still remembered, though, his father's grim words on turning away from the radio at last. Obviously thinking of Mom and Mark, though both had been dead for more than three years now, Dad had said with a look of wildness in his eyes, "I thought—I thought I was going to lose the plantation, too, Peter. I couldn't believe the good Lord would hand me another such blow, but it seemed as if he was going to. . . ."

  "What do you think, Peter?" the headman was saying.

  Peter snapped out of his reverie. "What, Mr. Campbell?"

  "That other silky oak over there. Wouldn't you say that's the best tree to put the new number on?"

  By asking his advice, the headman was paying him a kind of compliment, Peter knew—probably because he, twelve-year-old Peter Devon, was the one who had persuaded his father to replace the old, rusty field numbers in the first place.

  Since Mark's death, Peter had been attending a private boarding school in Florida and spending holidays and summer vacations here with Dad. He hated being in Florida when Dad was here, but Dad had insisted. This year, on coming for the summer, he had found that the plantation warehouse had been reroofed with aluminum and some sheets were left over.

  "What I ought to do, Dad, is cut up a sheet or two and make some new aluminum numbers for the coffee fields. Those old zinc ones are rusting out around the nail holes."

  "Good. You know, Peter, you're a big help. I'm glad school's over for a while and you can be here with me."

  Dad's saying that had meant a lot because Mark had always been the one he looked to for help on the plantation. Five years older than Peter, Mark had been fourteen when he died.

  Suddenly inspired, Peter had blurted out, "I wish I didn't have to go back to Florida, Dad. I'd rather stay here with you!"

  "Well—"

  "I could go to school at Knox again, like I did with Mark." Knox was a fine old Jamaican establishment that now, in 1989, was as good as any school anywhere. He and his brother had boarded during the week but had been able to spend weekends on the Kilmarnie plantation because Dad or Mr. Campbell would come for them. But when Mark died, Dad had thought it best for Peter to live with his grandmother Devon in Florida.

  "Well, we'll see," Dad had replied after a silence long enough to make Peter feel hopeful. "I'll think about it, son...."

  "You ready?" Mr. Campbell asked, again interrupting Peter's thoughts.

  Peter slid the knapsack from his shoulder and took out the rest of the numbers. He and Mr. Campbell had already replaced the first fourteen. He found the ten-inch square of aluminum on which he had painted the number fifteen in black enamel. Then he and Mr. Campbell went around the fallen tree, which would be removed later by workmen with machetes, and headed for the tree the headman had selected.

  Suddenly the mountain silence was shattered by a loud report, and both of them stopped short. Mr. Campbell turned his head so fast that Peter thought his neck might snap. In his sixties, Winston Campbell usually was slow and deliberate in his movements.

  "Peter, that sounded like a shot!"

  The question, if it was one, was answered by the echoes. It had been a shot, all right, and from a gun not too far away. As the sound rebounded from the surrounding mountainsides, Mr. Campbell's long face took on a scowl.

  "Now, who would be using a gun up here, Peter? Everyone knows your father doesn't allow shooting on the Kilmarnie property."

  That was true. Walter Devon was a lover of wildlife, and there were No Hunting signs posted on all the coffee-field paths, or "tracks." In any case, guns were a danger to the men working in the fields and, in season, to the women who picked the ripe coffee cherries.

  "Your dad won't like this," Mr. Campbell said. "Let's have a look." But after taking a couple of steps toward the nearest track, he glanced back. "Be careful, though. If someone is hunting wild pigs up here, he may shoot at the noise we make without waiting to see what's making it."

  Almost as in answer, a second shot shattered the stillness, and again the echoes played tag along the slopes. But this time the headman was not taken by surprise and raised an arm to point.

  "Up there, Peter. In field seventeen, it sounded like."

  After reaching the track, they went on it slowly with Mr. Campbell in the lead. There were no more shots. There were no sounds at all, except the hum of insects in the noon heat, as they passed field sixteen and reached the start of seventeen. Then—footsteps.

  Toward them, around a bend, trotted a barefoot Jamaican boy about Peter's age. The knees were out of his ragged khaki pants, and his shirt was in shreds. In both dark hands he clutched a shotgun whose rusty barrel and homemade stock were held together with windings of wire. Skidding to a halt, he stood, wide-eyed with sudden fright.

  Mr. Campbell stepped toward him. "Zackie Leonard! What are you doing here with that gun? You know hunting is not allowed on this property!"

  Defiant in spite of his fright, the boy stood his ground. "Me nuh hunting birds, Mr. Campbell."

  "What else could a boy like you be hunting?"

  "Me did see a wild pig up here yesterday."

  "And came after it with this thing?" The headman reached for the weapon, then continued to hold it while shifting his gaze back to the boy's face. "Zackie, I don't believe you."

  Peter stared at the boy, too, trying to recall where he had seen him before. In Rainy Ridge, that was it. One day he had walked into a village shop there and heard the Chinese shopkeeper, Mr. Lee, accusing Zackie Leonard of stealing. Racing out the door, the boy had almost knocked Peter over. Still, the face Peter gazed at now was a good one with bold, bright eyes and a look of—well, determination. Even
if grime did cover it like a mask.

  "Me don't have any better gun," Zackie said with a shrug.

  Mr. Campbell made a snorting sound. "And did you find this marvelous pig?"

  The bold brown eyes grew wary. "Me did see it, yes, and did shoot at it, but this old gun don't shoot true. The pig get away."

  "Which is probably a very good thing," the headman said. "Don't you know a wounded pig is dangerous? I'm sure you've heard what they do to hunters' dogs sometimes."

  Zackie nodded. "Is why me nuh bring Mongoose with me."

  "Why you didn't bring who?"

  "Mongoose. Me dog."

  "Oh. Well, consider yourself lucky you missed. Especially with this worthless shotgun." Mr. Campbell handed the weapon back. "All right, Zackie. Get on home with you now, and don't bring a gun onto this property again, for any reason. You hear?"

  "Yes, suh." Snatching the gun, the boy darted past him and raced on down the track.

  Both Peter and the headman watched him until he disappeared.

  "Do you know that boy, Peter?" Mr. Campbell asked then.

  "Not really. I saw him in Mr. Lee's shop once. Mr. Lee called him 'a wild one' and said he was stealing."

  "He has a right to be wild, I'd say. When he was very young, his mother handed him over to her mother and disappeared." Mr. Campbell shook his head and frowned. "Of course, that isn't unusual among country folk. It's a common thing for young women to leave their children with their mothers and go off to the city to look for work. But now Zackie's grandmother is dead, and he lives alone with a drunken, no-good father and has no friends because the village kids are afraid of his father's temper. Well"—the headman looked at his watch—"let's finish up these numbers, shall we?"

  They returned to field fifteen, where the Jamaican boy's shotgun had interrupted them. With the new aluminum number shining brightly on its chosen tree there, they climbed to the next field and then, Peter in the lead, to the one in which Zackie Leonard had shot at and missed the wild pig.

  A strange buzzing caught Peter's attention, and he stopped. The sound seemed to come from a thicket of the prickly fern Jamaicans called ferrel, a few yards off the track. It was made by a cloud of flies, he discovered when he pushed in to investigate. Hundreds of flies were swarming around layers of fern that had been carefully placed there to hide or protect something.

  Protect something from what? The big black turkey buzzards called John Crows, most likely, because the John Crows could spot anything dead from high in the sky. And the object under the ferrel was dead, Peter saw when he pulled some of the ferns away. It resembled a powerful black dog with short legs, but it was no dog. It was a pig.

  "Mr. Campbell, come look at this!" he called excitedly. He knew about wild pigs, of course. The men of the mountain villages sometimes hunted them for food. And once his brother, Mark, had gone after a pig that was rooting up young coffee trees for sweet potatoes that the workers had secretly planted among them. Mark had hunted it with a rifle and, wounding it, had escaped only by climbing a cedar and yelling for help. But Peter had never seen a wild pig up close before.

  Mr. Campbell strode in from the track and moved more of the ferns, again disturbing the cloud of flies that buzzed over the carcass. There were two wounds, Peter saw—one only slight, the other obviously fatal.

  Crouching, Mr. Campbell examined the animal with care, and then rose to his feet again. "You see what happened here, Peter?"

  Peter looked at him and waited.

  "This wound on the pig's rump is just a scratch, enough to make him good and mad but not enough to kill him or even slow him down. The second shot—this one fair between the eyes—is what killed the brute, and it was fired from not more than a yard away as the pig charged. That Zackie is a brave boy."

  Remembering Mark, Peter looked around. There was no tree here that Zackie Leonard could have climbed. Armed with only that ancient, patched-up shotgun, the boy had had to stand his ground.

  "What do we do now, Mr. Campbell?"

  "Well, I think we'll just cover this up again to protect it"—Mr. Campbell was already doing so—"and then go back down. We can finish the numbers another time."

  "We're going to leave the pig here?" Peter asked.

  "I'll send some men up for it." The headman gave the dead animal one last look before turning away. "You know something else about Zackie Leonard, Peter? He's smart, even if the other kids do shun him. Not every village boy would have thought to cover a dead pig with ferns to keep the John Crows and the flies from cheating him out of it."

  They went down through the coffee fields together, not stopping until they reached the little bridge over the mountain stream that ran through the plantation. Both of them stopped there, Peter because he was again remembering the older brother he missed so much, and Mr. Campbell out of respect for Peter's grief. It was there, before the bridge was built, that Mark had drowned while trying to cross on a log when the stream was a rain-swollen torrent.

  Then, on reaching field one, where some men were chopping weeds, Mr. Campbell walked in among the flashing machetes to the side of a worker and said, "Natty, you know young Zackie Leonard, don't you?"

  "Yes, suh, me do," was the answer.

  "That boy has shot a pig up there in the bush, Natty. You'll find it just off the track in field seventeen, this side of the windbreak. Take some of these men and bring it down to the house, please."

  "That boy did shoot a wild pig with him father's gun, Mr. Campbell?"

  "Fair between the eyes, Natty, from no more than a yard away."

  "My Lord! When the boy's father did use that gun at the shooting match last week, it did fall apart and nearly blow him head off!"

  "I believe you. Get the pig, please, Natty. And when you see the boy, tell him Mr. Devon and I want to talk to him."

  TWO

  The Kilmarnie house never failed to impress Peter. Constructed of fieldstone and juniper from the property, it was nearly two hundred years old and might easily last another two hundred. Because it had been built into a steep hillside, the kitchen and storerooms were on the first floor, the other rooms on the second. A long, wide veranda ran across the front on the second-floor level, with a flight of steps leading up to it.

  His father was in the living room when Peter climbed the steps and walked in. Seated in front of the fireplace, he looked as if his thoughts were far away.

  They probably were, Peter guessed, but not far from Jamaica. Both Mom and Mark were buried in the Morant Bay cemetery, eighteen miles down the road, and more than likely that was what Dad was thinking about, as usual. It had been a terrible blow, losing both of them just when the plantation showed promise of becoming everything he'd dreamed of. It had been shattering to Peter, too.

  Mom and Dad had discovered Kilmarnie when they came to Jamaica on a two-week vacation—Mom from her Florida teaching job and Dad from selling real estate. It was for sale and they fell in love with it, and Dad wanted to own a coffee estate that had once produced some of the world's finest coffee. They'd spent the rest of that two-week vacation getting answers to questions about schools and taxes, whether there'd be any problem finding workers and whether the coffee cooperative down the road would buy their coffee and help them learn about growing it. Then they'd sold their house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and moved there, where they were the only non-Jamaicans owning one of the half-dozen coffee plantations in the famous Blue Mountains.

  At first Mom had worried a little about how they would get along with the country people, most of whom were black, and if Mark and Peter would have any trouble at school. But neither had been a problem. All that the workers had asked was to be treated fairly, and at Knox, where Mark and Peter were enrolled, the color of a boy's skin made no difference to anybody. After all, the motto of the island country was Out of many, one people. And Jamaicans, themselves, ranged in color from white to black through all the in-between shades of brown.

  In the beginning the Devons had had a small problem
understanding the way the country people talked. English was the island's official language—Jamaica had been an English colony before gaining her independence—but such expressions as "Mek I do it" for "Let me do it" or "Mek we go" for "Let's go" took a little getting used to. Not that all the people talked that way. Mr. Campbell never did, for instance. But the workers chose to, even though most had had some schooling.

  As for the old Kilmarnie house, it had been furnished, so Mom and Dad hadn't had to bring a lot of things from the States. And within a few weeks they were coffee farmers.

  No one had known then that Mom was ill with a condition that would soon cause a massive heart attack and kill her. No one.

  At the sound of Peter's footsteps on the hardwood floor, Walter Devon opened his eyes and turned his head. "Well, hello. Did you get the numbering done, son?"

  "We didn't finish, Dad." Peter told him about Zackie Leonard and the pig.

  A flush of red chased the normal pallor from Mr. Devon's face. "You mean Campbell let the boy go?" he said angrily.

  "Well, yes." Peter knew what was causing the anger. The thing Mom had loved most about Kilmarnie was "her" birds, as she called them. She had bought books so she could identify them all, especially the different kinds of doves and wild pigeons. "Zackie promised not to bring a gun on the property again, Dad. He's kind of a loner, I guess. I mean he lives alone with his father, like you and me, but his father's drunk all the time, so Zackie has to look out for himself. That's what Mr. Campbell said, anyhow."

  The flush faded from his father's face just as the housekeeper came into the room with a lunch tray for him. Recommended by the manager of the coffee cooperative, Lorraine Crosdale had been keeping house since the Devons had bought the place, and Peter liked her. She was about thirty years old and liked to sing a lot, mostly Jamaican folk songs. She lived in the little village of Mango Gap, the roofs of which could be seen from the house veranda.