The Night of the Rambler

by Montague Kobbé

  This was the cue for Desmond O’Farrell, an eighteen-year-old kid, to deliver a speech he had not prepared, to try to talk some sense into a bunch of old men who seemed to have lost perspective. I ain’ wan’ soun’ like no coward, but we come help dem people an’ dere ain’ a soul to be helped. Seem to me we messin’ wit’ a problem that ain’ ours to mess wit’. But before he could finish his metaphor about eating from someoone else’s plate, he was interrupted by Alwyn Cooke, who explained that St. Kitts was a problem that had very much to do with Anguilla’s reality, that Anguilla wouldn’t have a plate at all if Bradshaw had his way, and that whether or not there were any people to welcome their expedition had nothing to do with what they had come to do in St. Kitts, nor with the reasons why they had come to do it.

  Desmond O’Farrell had already been comprehensively shut up when fate produced the trump card Ronnie still had to play, because it transpired that there were only two cars to take ten armed men and four large bags full of guns, ammo, and explosives into Baseterre. But Ronnie owned a small pickup truck, which was precisely what the group needed, so all of a sudden his posture on the dark sand of Half Way Tree became haughtier, and his attitude turned more relaxed—even aloof—and his position became unequivocal: either the kids go along, or there would be no using his truck.

  Alwyn Cooke was growing unnerved by the whole situation, but there was no time to waste, least of all negotiating trivial matters, so he agreed to take one boy, the oldest, so long as he kept quiet, did exactly as he was told, and stayed right next to his father, who would have to take part in the attack. Deal! And as the cars were assembled to set out toward the capital, a dose of sense seeped into Solomon Carter’s mind. He approached Alwyn Cooke and took him aside for a word. There, five yards away from the others, he explained how Dis too dangerous, Al. We ain’ need you here; we need you good an’ healt’y at home.

  Solomon Carter was concerned about the future of the revolution if the present mission proved to be a failure. He recognized in Alwyn Cooke the undisputed leader of the people, the father of the nation, and he worried that, despite the best efforts of the peacekeeping committee, everything would spiral into havoc and ultimate submission, should anything happen to Alwyn that night. Alwyn, flattered as he might have been, was adamant about not staying behind—We already too few, Sol—and before he could say that they needed every man they could get, Sol disarmed his argument with the most powerful of remarks: Dat why you leave six ah we behind?

  Naturally, this had not been the reason. In fact, the only consideration that had played a role in that decision had been the safety of his people. The excitement of the struggle for freedom had infected vast portions of the population in Anguilla—particularly the younger and the poorer on an island where poverty was the rule and infancy prevailed. But there had been too many adolescents too keen to fight a battle that was plagued with uncertainties. Alwyn himself might not have felt so strongly about it had Gaynor not uttered his shattering too-many-people-goin’-dead nonsense, although it had always been part of the plan to leave at least three people looking after The Rambler as a decoy in case the authorities spotted the alien boat. Yet it was true that even if the danger of getting caught or killed had not increased substantially, their awareness of it had certainly grown dramatically since their departure from Island Harbour, eleven hours earlier.

  If you no wan’ sen’ no kid, sen’ Gaynor instead. Sol’s insistence made Alwyn angry, just as much as it made him realize how serious Sol was about the issue.

  You really wan’ a man next to you who get col’ feet already an’ might run away any time? and the Better he dan you came at the exact moment that the three cars pulled up together on the roadside by the beach.

  It was well after two in the morning, and the army of one hundred men had been reduced to a single scared adolescent—but the operation was underway as three crowded vehicles raced out of Half Way Tree and headed in the direction of Baseterre. Sol Carter looked over his shoulder and saw the faint silhouette of a man disappear into the night as they drove off toward the sites where the hits were to be carried out. Once in town, the freedom fighters would be on their own—once there, it would be their task, and their task alone, to succeed, or to find a way back to The Rambler.

  CHAPTER I

  TINTAMARRE AND THE IMPLAUSIBLE TWIST OF ALWYN’S FATE

  Romance is so intrinsic to Tintamarre that the two have been inextricably linked since the island first received its name. A word so typically French it bears no translation, like bougainvillea or papillon (could any language, ever, be so destructive as to turn the charming diction of the latter into the sordid sound of “butterfly”?). A word from the New World, the Wiki(pedia), in its commendable effort to make things simpler, affirms it stems from Acadian French. Itself the paroxysm of romance, Acadia, a linguistic corruption or evolution from the prior Arcadia, seemed so beautiful to the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, so perfect, that it evoked in him the idyllic state of perpetual happiness associated with the pastoral dream. Not that this bore any relevance a few hundred years later when Acadia was ceded to the British together with the rest of the French territories in modern Canada, in exchange for Martinique and Guadeloupe, as part of the peace that put an end to that regrettable chapter of eighteenth-century European history: the Seven-Year War.

  Tintamarre, pure cacophony at its best, has a confused origin (but what doesn’t?). Three syllables that, pronounced (in French) like the first half of “Tintin,” followed by the muted passage of the middle vowel, and the long, vibrating effect of the final sound (something along the lines of mah-rr), allude to the distant mystery of the new territories, to the muddled hierarchies of unknown lands, to the rattling noise of romance in the distance.

  Let’s go back to The Rambler, drifting idly by Flat Island, a.k.a., Tintamarre, and to Glenallen Rawlingson’s tale about a certain Mr. D.C., an eccentric Dutch heir who had come to this far corner of the earth to dissociate himself from the civilized world and who had decided to set up his kingdom in Tintamarre, where he built a luxurious palace and raised cattle and grew cotton and, implausibly, became a major purchaser of Anguilla’s one and only export: labor.

  Fourth-generation Antillean, Degendarus Clement van Ruijtenbeek’s great-grandfather, Degendarus Iustus, had escaped the weather, his parents, the impending war, and the taxman in Amsterdam round about the year 1800, when things in Europe got so heated that the newly elected Pope Pius VII opted against celebrating the traditional Jubilee. Not that Degendarus Iustus cared too much, because he was no papist; he was a disciplined, determined Methodist, and as such he excelled in Dutch Sint Maarten, where he furthered both his cause and that of his church, until the day, twenty years later, when he became governor, and Methodism became the leading cleric force on the island.

  As it turns out, the fruit of young Degendarus Clement remained pretty close to the tree of his immigrant great-grandfather, as he too fled the taxman, this time escaping the remote colony of Sint Maarten to settle in the even remoter island of Tintamarre, in order to avoid having to pay the use tax on “Lover’s Leap,” his large estate on Dutch Cul-de-Sac. At the turn of the twentieth century, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek boarded up the property he had inherited a few years back in his natal Sint Maarten, stored his furniture, emptied his kitchen, dismissed his servants, and headed toward the flat desert island that lay across the channel roughly two nautical miles away, to start a new, secluded life. Maybe he sensed something about the twentieth century. Or maybe he was just particular about his tax, who knows?

  Whatever the case, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek built himself a manor house in Tintamarre—a palace, some called it, mostly because the people engaged in its construction were predominantly Anguillians, and in Anguilla there were no plantations that required manor houses; in fact, in Anguilla there were no plantations at all, there hadn’t been for centuries, nor were there any houses, any buildings, of the size or style of D.C. van Ruijtenbeek’s new home. And the
manor house was surrounded by a vast wall, and both the house and the wall were built in local stone, a beautiful hybrid between limestone and flint. And once the residence was ready, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek had his cattle, all thirty heads of it, imported to Tintamarre, and he tended to the goats, and had the local population replenished with some hundred heads from his farm at Dutch Cul-de-Sac, and he set aside a large piece of ground, around which another wall was built, for the growth of the only produce ever to be profitable in the triangle of islands formed by Anguilla, St. Martin, and St. Barths: sea island cotton.

  D.C. van Ruijtenbeek set up his own little industry, with its own little gin, its own little dairy, its very own self-sustained economy in what wittingly or not became his own little Arcadia. It was not uncommon for him to spend a year or so without coming “ashore”; he would spend ten, fifteen, twenty months at a time away from Sint Maarten; he would distribute his produce around the Caribbean, gaining a reputation for the quality of his milk—and store this in your memory; this is more than just a passing comment, more than just a trivial fact—as well as for the extent of his extravagance.

  But extravagance can sometimes be fashionable, especially in critical times, and at some point during the summer of 1913, when Europe was well on its course to battle it all out in a war to end all wars, somebody finally noticed, and a trendy Parisian publication, not just one of those petite journeaux, included a full-blown feature about “The King of Tintamarre,” a title that D.C. van Ruijtenbeek would always claim, even many years later, when he was long back in his estate in Dutch Cul-de-Sac (and, yes, there is a French Cul-de-Sac in St. Martin—located a few miles away from the Dutch one, ironically, just across the island).

  But back in 1913, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek became a bright, though absent, star in the constellation of celebrities that formed the upper tiers of European society. Out of the blue, he received letters addressed to him in German, in Swedish, in Italian, in French, all from women far, far away who had read about his kingdom, or who had heard about his passion, and who dreamt of becoming his companion in this fairy tale, the queen consort of a distant, romantic, clamorous place called Tintamarre. Meanwhile, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek simply read in silence all these words he could not understand, but guessed, assumed (fantasized about) their meaning.

  And tens, dozens, scores of Anguillians worked in the Kingdom of Tintamarre, which grew to have one hundred heads of cattle and five hundred goats, and a reputation that stretched across the Caribbean for the best milk, the best butter, the best cheese this side of France. But despite his name, the color of his skin, and the nature of his extravagance, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek was as Antillean as anyone could be, and he wanted no Swedish, no Danish, no German queen, because he preferred the figure, the temperament, the disposition of Antillean women, so he read his letters and he fed his ego, but he employed Anguillians and S’matiners, and nationals from a host of other islands, and he feasted himself in the world of curves and dialects that populated his little kingdom on a daily basis.

  You digress, I hear you say. What the hell does this have to do with anything? With The Rambler, with the revolution, with Anguilla? But bear with me, for in the stars are written unfathomable fates, and one of them will prove to be fundamentally linked to the van Ruijtenbeek family saga—one that will reveal itself as pivotal in the development of our story. Just a little patience while D.C. van Ruijtenbeek, in one of his sporadic visits to Sint Maarten, meets a lady from St. Kitts, a British subject whose enslaved grandfather had been liberated in 1834. Yes, a love story—but one so intense, so passionate, so important to this tale that it simply cannot be ignored.

  Elaine Nesbit was one of those Nesbits whose name had come linked to ownership in prior times. Indeed, Master Nesbit might or might not have exercised his rights over Elaine’s grandmother beyond the limits stipulated by decorum. But regardless of her genealogical tree, Elaine Nesbit was cut from a mold that made her infinitely more appropriate to become queen of Tintamarre than any courtesan from Friesland or any pretender from Hanover. At least so it seemed, to go by the reaction of D.C. van Ruijtenbeek when he first saw her, one Sunday morning at church. Clad in her best clothes to pay her respects to the Lord, she looked at the same time elegant and comfortable, demure and experienced. Her long white dress clung to her bust suggestively, only to widen dramatically below her waist. The drapes of her skirt hung loosely from her hips, a fold of cloth catching over her buttocks, revealing the mounting heights of her glutei and the narrow bridge formed by her Achilles tendon, held firmly by the leather straps of her (very) high-heeled boots.

  Sheltered by a tradition that placed him in the top echelon of Sint Maarten’s society, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek should have felt confident enough to stop her as she passed in front of him, once the service was over. However, he found himself muted, paralyzed almost, by the extent of her beauty, as well as somewhat offended by her poise as she walked right past him without so much as a nod of her head. That same day, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek made inquiries as to who this stranger was who had left him with this longing in his heart, and the whereabouts of her lodgings on the island. That same day, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek was standing before the doorway of Elaine Nesbit’s modest little house by the Great Salt Pond on the rear end of Philipsburg, offering his assistance in any aspect whatsoever that she might find wanting during the period of transition while she settled in Sint Maarten. D.C. van Ruijtenbeek was further baffled when Elaine Nesbit thanked him for his interest and indeed his generosity, but explained that she found herself very much at ease on the island, having spent the best part of the past year there. Only then did D.C. van Ruijtenbeek realize that he had been locked away in Tintamarre for the past nine and a half months. Of course, and he began a slow turn away from the untidy veranda of Elaine Nesbit’s home before pausing to take a long, brazen look at the merchandise on display. A tilt of his white hat and yet another Of course put an end to their very first personal exchange. This was in the summer of 1931. Twenty-five years later, on his deathbed, he would still describe it as the happiest day of his life, while she held his hand to ease his negotiation with Death.

  Instead of remaining at Lover’s Leap for a few weeks, like he had during most of his prior visits over the past twenty-five years, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek decided to extend his stay at least another month. He spent this time developing a careful plan for the siege of the wonderful boon he had recently discovered near the marshlands adjoining the Great Salt Pond behind Philipsburg. His tread at the initial stages was delicate and discreet. He would make up pretexts to travel up to town, where in the past he would not have been seen other than for the weekly celebration of Eucharist at the Methodist church. But these days D.C. would spend long afternoons wandering from one end of Front Street to the other, inventing meetings to attend at conveniently disparate times, lingering in his passage from his brother’s import business to his cousin’s ocean liner ticketing agency, waving at unrecognized islanders who called his name first in half-mockery, aware that some serious matter—a woman, no doubt—had to be the reason why, all of a sudden, the king spent so much time in these precincts.

  But Elaine Nesbit was not precisely high class, which was all with which Degendarus Clement had ever been acquainted, and Elaine Nesbit did not spend too much time in the elite end of Front Street, between the bank and the church. She tended to carry out her business toward the opposite end of Back Street, where the shops were messier but the products cheaper. Therefore, despite D.C. van Ruijtenbeek’s best efforts, he never bumped into Elaine Nesbit on the street—not once in three weeks—and he would only get to see her at her very best during service on Sundays. Too proud to be seen in public addressing a common girl who had not shown the slightest interest in him, he took his regular place and sat throughout the Mass waiting only for the moment when the natural flow of the traffic out of the monumental building would land him a privileged view of that involuntary fold which would reveal to him the promising shape of those godly ankles, and
the ecstatic proportions of Elaine Nesbit’s otherworldly rump.

  For three consecutive Sundays, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek would have been incapable of regurgitating even the most obvious points in the preacher’s sermon, because for three consecutive Sundays all his thoughts, his energy, his attention was focused on the exact moment when his imagination would be fueled with new material, the moment when his memory would be refreshed with additional images, which would confirm, enhance, highlight the prowess of a body he had already enshrined. So, before the fourth Sunday arrived, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek devised a plan that gave him hope, that filled him with courage, and that led him through the mudded roads by the Great Salt Pond to the end of Philipsburg where the marshes adjoined the city.

  Elaine Nesbit knew exactly who was calling when she heard the bell by her front door. She was startled by the sound, although she had been expecting her visitor for many days. Elaine knew too much about men and power to be fooled into thinking that a king would allow her to live her life unmolested, once he had set his eyes on her. And the first time Elaine had walked past Degendarus Clement van Ruijtenbeek, on the atrium of the church, below the square bell tower and the cozy façade covered in wooden shingles, she sensed in the rarefied air, scented by his lustful sweat, that she had mesmerized him.

  D.C. van Ruijtenbeek had been memorizing his lines all day, but somehow, just a few yards before reaching Elaine Nesbit’s home, they vanished from his mind. She attended to his call in a long, loose dark gown. He stuttered. But despite the opening false start, D.C. profited from his temporary amnesia, because like this he came across much calmer, more natural than he would have, had his absurd plan been put to action. Except, once the dreaded question had to be answered, D.C. explained that what brought him there was his curiosity as to whether Miss Nesbit drank milk. Milk. Elaine could not hold back the burst of laughter that escaped her teeth. Degendarus Clement desperately tried to save the situation, explaining that he owned the largest dairy on the island—well, not on this island, in Tintamarre, off the northeastern tip of . . . I know who you are, Mr. van Ruijtenbeek, and yes, I do drink milk. She had regained her composure, and looked more beautiful in the evening sun than he had ever imagined her. Good. Because I like to keep a close eye on quality control, and it would be so helpful if I could get your feedback every so often, to make certain all is how it should be.