Conquering Kilmarni

by Cave, Hugh

  The Jamaican boy's laughter was soft as a bird cry. "Country people do it to leave them hands free. Mostly women do it, though, not men."

  "Then why do you?"

  "Well, it seem to me women are smarter than us about some things. Look, is you daddy at home?"

  "He should be, unless Mr. Campbell got back early with the young coffee trees. Then they'd both be in field six getting them planted. The holes are already dug."

  But when the boys reached the field that was to be made larger, there was no sign of Mr. Devon or the headman. And at the house they found Walter Devon seated at a card table set up on the veranda, working on the plantation payroll, or "paybill," so he would know how much money to draw from the bank in Morant Bay in the morning. The workers were paid once a week, in cash.

  As they neared the house, Zackie moved the basket of vegetables from his head to his right shoulder. At the foot of the veranda steps he ordered Mongoose, who had romped with them all the way from the garden, to sit and wait. He followed Peter up the steps and set the basket on a veranda chair.

  Mr. Devon had stopped work to watch. "Well, hello," he said. "The two of you together again?"

  "Zackie helped me put up the numbers, Dad."

  "And Peter did help me in the garden," Zackie added.

  "I see."

  "Mr. Devon, me will glad if you take some of these vegetables." Zackie stepped aside to let Peter's father see what was in the basket. "Them is from me own garden, not me daddy's. Him don't have a garden. You will take some, please? For looking about me leg?"

  "Well . . . How is your leg?"

  "It ache a little, is all."

  "May I see it?"

  Zackie bared the wound so carefully that Peter guessed it must be hurting more than just a little. Leaving his chair, Mr. Devon came around the card table to examine it.

  "Let's put on a fresh bandage, shall we?" Mr. Devon said.

  Zackie shook his head.

  "It won't take a minute. And I'll be more than glad to accept some of those scallions as payment. I'm very fond of scallions, and those are beauties. Peter"—Mr. Devon looked up—"would you get some warm water and the first-aid kit, please?"

  Peter went for what was needed, then leaned against the veranda railing and watched while his father dressed Zackie's leg again. The Jamaican boy would not let Mr. Devon take only one bunch of scallions in payment, though. He emptied the whole basket in search of the two largest bunches and some handsome carrots, as well. "I did grow all these meself, Mr. Devon," he said with pride. "Until today, nobody ever did help me."

  "And you sell your vegetables to the higglers?"

  "Yes, suh. But me need more money than me can earn from a garden, Mr. Devon. Would you— You suppose you could have a job for me?"

  "A job?" Mr. Devon was obviously startled. "What kind?"

  Zackie looked thoughtful, and then shrugged. "Me nuh know, suh. Me can do most anything the coffee workers do, like weeding or pruning or spraying. Or me can run errands, or look after the tracks."

  With deep frown lines on his face, Walter Devon seemed for a moment to be waging a silent war with his feelings. "Well," he said at last, "let me talk to Mr. Campbell. Can you come see me in the morning?"

  "Yes, suh! Thank you! Because me truly need more money, Mr. Devon!"

  To go to Kingston, Peter thought as the Jamaican boy said good-bye and, with the basket again balanced on one shoulder, went down the steps. To go to Kingston, where they wouldn't be seeing each other again.

  Peter went downstairs to return the kettle and basin to the kitchen. Miss Lorrie had been there when he went for them, but was gone now. As he turned to go back upstairs, he heard her voice and realized that again she had stepped out to intercept Zackie as he went down the path.

  "You not to go home!" he heard her say. "You daddy is looking all over for you, to make you tell where the pig is. Him is already full of rum but wants the pig money for more."

  Peter could not hear what Zackie said in reply.

  "No, no," the housekeeper insisted. "Him will not let you help him, Zackie. Not drunk and mean like him is now. What?" There was a pause while the Jamaican boy again said something that Peter could not quite hear. Then, "No, no!" Miss Lorrie said again. "You must keep away till him over this. Go to my house instead. You can stay with me for a while."

  Zackie must have come closer. "But me can't go-a your place," Peter heard him say. "Him know me stay with you sometimes. Him might look for me there."

  "Oh, Lord, that is right," the housekeeper said. "So where will you stay?"

  "Don't fret about me, Miss Lorrie," Zackie said. "Me will think of someplace and see you in the morning."

  Peter heard footsteps then, and a single small bark from Mongoose as Zackie and his dog went on down the path. Not sure he should have been listening to such private talk, he turned quickly and went upstairs.

  Later he realized he might have solved Zackie's problem by asking his father to let the boy stay with them, as he had wanted to do after helping Zackie with the pig. But then again, Dad was still so locked up in his own private world, he might have said no.

  FIVE

  When Peter awoke the next morning, he heard talking in the yard. The afternoon before, Mr. Campbell had not returned from the government coffee nursery in Portland early enough for the workers to do any planting. Now they had come to plant the young coffee trees he had brought.

  The potted seedlings were still in the truck, Peter saw on stepping onto the veranda. The men were taking them out and placing them on shallow wooden trays, made at Kilmarnie for just that purpose. Then, as each man filled a tray with eight of the plants, he lifted it to his head the way Zackie had carried the vegetables, and strode off with it.

  At Kilmarnie women did the actual planting. The men still carried the potted seedlings to the fields, though, because even eight of them on a wooden tray could be pretty heavy. That day each man would make quite a few trips from the yard to field six before the workday ended.

  Dressed, Peter found his father eating breakfast and sat down with him. Miss Lorrie brought him a grapefruit from one of Kilmarnie's own trees, then a plate of ackee and breadfruit. Both of those, too, grew on trees. To Peter the ackee tasted for all the world like scrambled eggs, and he was especially fond of breadfruit when Miss Lorrie roasted it first and then fried it in butter. He had learned at Knox that the first ackee seeds had come to the island in a slave ship, and the first breadfruit trees had been brought from the Pacific island of Tahiti by Captain William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, six years after the mutiny.

  Mr. Devon joked about the breadfruit that morning, saying that to him it tasted like an old sponge in disguise. Peter was relieved to see him so lighthearted. Perhaps his thoughts were on the new coffee trees. Or had the coming of Zackie Leonard into their lives begun to make a change in him, even if he didn't want it to? Whatever the answer, Peter fervently hoped the mood would last.

  "You'll be going up to field six, won't you, Dad?" he asked when they had finished breakfast.

  Mr. Devon nodded.

  "You mind if I come along?"

  "I was hoping you'd want to."

  On reaching the field, they walked together through the older coffee trees, now six to eight feet tall and heavy with green cherries, to the new section that was to be planted. Under Mr. Campbell's supervision, women were already at work planting the young trees that had been carried up from the yard.

  Peter stood beside one of the women and watched her. Kneeling in front of a hole dug days earlier with a fork, she first loosened the dark earth in the bottom of it with both hands. Then she stripped the black plastic "pot" off the young tree, placed the tree in the hole, and carefully refilled what was left of the hole with the earth that had been forked out. The last thing she did was stand up and press the replaced earth with her feet, on which she wore sandals with thick leather soles.

  "You want to do one?" she asked Peter.

  "Hey, yes!"
Peter replied eagerly. "Yes, ma'am!"

  She stood by and watched him, correcting him when he would have planted the tree too deep, and he was just finishing the job when he heard a familiar series of shrill yelps. Turning, he saw Zackie Leonard's crazy Mongoose racing along the line of women, barking a happy greeting at each one. Zackie himself, with a machete in one hand, was talking to Dad and Mr. Campbell.

  They were close enough for Peter to hear what they were saying. Mr. Devon, it seemed, had asked the headman if there might be some kind of job for Zackie, and Mr. Campbell was sort of thinking out loud about it. "Well," Mr. Campbell said, "there is one thing he can do for us, maybe. The main track could stand bushing out, especially in those high fields from twenty-six on up. There's a lot of ferrel creeping in there." He turned to scowl at Zackie. "You think you can handle a job that big? We pay by the chain." A chain, Peter knew, was a measure of length.

  "Yes, suh." Zackie solemnly held up his machete. "Nobody is better than me with one of these."

  The headman smiled. "I can think of a couple of grown men who might be a bit better. But all right. Start at twenty-six, and I'll come up later to see how you're getting on."

  Peter stepped forward. "Dad, will it be all right if I go with him?"

  "You?" Mr. Devon said. "Why?"

  "I ought to learn how to use a machete, don't you think?"

  A heavy frown changed the shape of Mr. Devon's face. "You ought to do what?"

  "I mean it, Dad. All the kids here know how."

  "You don't have a machete."

  "I can get one back at the house." Dad didn't actually supply the workers, but did keep a few machetes in the garage in case one got broken. To a Jamaican countryman such a tool was a very personal thing. He bought his own, shaped the wooden handle to suit his own hand, even had his own little pocket file to keep it sharp. In a way, he treated his machete as if it were an extension of his arm.

  "I don't know," Walter Devon said. "Those things are dangerous, Peter. Only yesterday I had to dress a bad cut."

  "I'll be careful, Dad."

  "It isn't always a matter of being careful. The fellow yesterday was chopping out some grass. The blade bounced off a stone he didn't see, and slashed his other wrist."

  "I'll be extra careful. I promise."

  Mr. Devon turned to the headman. "What do you say, Winston?"

  "He will be all right, I think, Mr. Devon. It's mostly when they get careless that they have the accidents. He will pay attention."

  Again Mr. Devon hesitated. But at last, with a small sigh of surrender, he said, "All right, Peter."

  "Here," Mr. Campbell said. "I'll lend you my own cutlass to save you the walk back down. Take this, too." He took a small triangular file from the hip pocket of his khaki pants and handed it over with his machete. "Zackie will show you how to keep the blade sharp."

  Elated, Peter thanked them, and a moment later Zackie and he were walking briskly up the main track with field six out of sight behind them and Zackie's little dog romping on ahead. For a little while the two boys walked along in silence, side by side because the track was wide there. Then Zackie said, "Why you want to work with me when you don't have to?"

  One reason, Peter thought, was that he hoped to find out where the Jamaican boy had slept the night before, and if he needed help. But there was a bigger reason. "I have to learn about everything that goes on here, Zackie," he said. "I want to stay with my dad and not have to go back to the States again."

  "You want to stay in Jamaica?"

  "Yes. And he thinks I shouldn't, so I have to convince him he's wrong. Suppose he got sick or something."

  "If you daddy got sick, Mr. Campbell would keep things going."

  "I know that. But I'd want to be with my dad, wouldn't I?"

  Zackie turned his head and gave Peter a curious look. Then he nodded. "That a good way to feel about you daddy," he said gravely. "Me wish it was the same for me."

  They climbed again without more talk, and the mountain stillness was disturbed only by the shrill cries of birds as Mongoose flushed them out of the undergrowth and tried vainly to catch them. Peter wondered what the dog would do if he caught one. Try to talk to it, most likely. He talked to everything else.

  They came to the place just below field twenty-six where Mr. Campbell had said the ferrel was creeping in. Zackie sharpened his machete by pressing the point of the blade against a tree and rubbing his file over its upturned edge a few times. Peter noticed the file had a handle different from the one on Mr. Campbell's. Both were of wood, but they were not the same shape. He asked about it.

  "Them don't come with handles," Zackie explained. "You have to make you own, so you make the kind you like best." He tested the machete blade with his thumb, and then went to work on the ferrel.

  After watching him awhile, Peter followed suit.

  It was harder than it looked, Peter soon discovered. He had to grasp a clump of waist-high ferrel with his left hand and bend it over, then swing the machete so as to chop it off close to the ground. That meant he had to hold the machete so the blade was almost horizontal and only just above the ground when it hit home. And that meant he had to bend way over from the hips while swinging it, which made his back ache. And in no time at all, the spines on the ferrel made his left hand sore.

  He kept at it, though, until Zackie stopped work and said, "Mek we stop for a while, Peter. It don't always being careless that make you have an accident. Sometimes it only from being tired."

  While they were resting, Peter remembered what he had overheard the day before, when Zackie talked with Miss Lorrie. Should he mention it? Yes, he decided. In fact, he just about had to if he wanted to help.

  "Hey," he said, trying to make it sound casual, "didn't I hear Miss Lorrie telling you not to go home last night?"

  Zackie looked at him. "You did hear that?"

  "I couldn't help it. I was in the kitchen."

  "Yes, that is what she say."

  "And she said you shouldn't go to her house because your father might look for you there. One of you said that, anyway."

  "Me." Zackie nodded. "Miss Lorrie take me in sometimes when things looking bad. But now me daddy know she do it."

  "So where did you sleep last night?"

  The Jamaican boy hesitated so long that Peter thought he was not going to answer the question. But in the end he said, "All right. Prob'ly it better me tell you, because somebody bound to find out and tell you daddy, anyway. Me did sleep in the mule pen."

  "You slept where?"

  "In the small mule pen back of the garage, where Mr. Campbell keep him riding mule. Me feel sure me daddy not going to look for me there."

  "Weren't you cold?"

  "Me did borrow one of Nasty's blankets from the garage." Mr. Campbell called the mule that because of its bad temper, and said if the animal hadn't been so strong and surefooted, he would have sold it and bought a new one long ago.

  "Did you have anything to eat?" Peter asked.

  Zackie shrugged. "Me most always have things like sardines and bammies hid away in case of trouble." All the country shops sold those things, Peter knew. Bammies were a chewy kind of bun made from cassava, and a couple of them would fill you up pretty quickly.

  "Tell me something," Peter said. "Did Miss Lorrie sell the pig for you?"

  Zackie reached into a back pocket of his pants and brought out a small wad of Jamaica's colorful bills, and Peter saw that the wad was quite thick. "She did hand me this when she come to work this morning," Zackie said. "When we quit for lunch, me will be putting it in a secret hiding place me have." He frowned at Peter in silence for a few seconds, as though not sure he ought to say any more. Then he added, "You want to come with me?"

  "Why would you want to show me where you keep your money?"

  Zackie's dog came racing up at that moment and sat down between his feet, gazing up at his face. Staring into space as if he were thinking about other things, Zackie reached out to pat Mongoose's head. The
n he said, "Me have quite a bit of money put away, Peter. If anything was to happen to me and nobody else did know where it is, it would just rot in the ground. Sometimes me think about that."

  "Nothing's going to happen to you, Zackie."

  "You nuh know me daddy." Zackie looked down at his dog again, gave Mongoose a light poke on the nose, and stood up. "You ready for some more work?"

  They worked on the ferrel again until Zackie, looking up at the sky, announced it was time for lunch. Peter was tired again and glad for another chance to rest. He looked at the watch on his left wrist as he, too, straightened up. The time was six minutes past twelve.

  "How did you do that?" Peter demanded.

  "Do what?"

  "How'd you know what time it was?"

  Zackie laughed. "Country kids can't afford fancy watches like that one you have. We must have to tell time by the feel of things."

  "The sun, you mean?"

  "What sun?"

  There was none at the moment, Peter saw. In fact, it had gone behind clouds quite awhile back. "Can you always feel what time it is, Zackie?" It was hard to believe, even though he had just been given a demonstration.

  "Almost always. Look. You don't have any lunch with you, and you did give me some of yours yesterday. How about sharing mine today?"

  "You don't have any lunch."

  "Me do at the garden. Come on."

  At the garden, Zackie went straight toward the bamboo hut where he kept his tools. "Come on," he urged when Peter stopped a few yards short of it.

  Peter went forward again, in time to see Zackie drop to his knees inside the hut and begin to scoop up some dirt from a small section of the floor. That part didn't look any different from the rest, but Zackie hadn't even hesitated before kneeling there. He dug down about a foot, being careful to pile the reddish earth neatly around the opening.