Cross on the Drum

by Cave, Hugh

  The Cross on the Drum

  Hugh B. Cave

  Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 Hugh B. Cave estate

  Copy-edited by Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover Design by Joanna Luna Dillinger: http://daysleeper.joannedillinger.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER BOOKS BY HUGH B. CAVE

  NOVELS:

  Serpents in the Sun

  Conquering Kilmarni

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  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Some readers of an earlier book of mine called HAITI: HIGHROAD TO ADVENTURE may decide that the island of "St. Joseph" in the present story is also Haiti. It is not. THE CROSS ON THE DRUM is a work of fiction against a composite Caribbean background, and its people, all of them, are wholly products of the mind.

  Certain vodun scenes in the present book, however, are similar to material in the earlier volume. This was unavoidable. HAITI: HIGHROAD TO ADVENTURE contains a study of vodun written after a long residence in Haiti, and were I to shun the facts simply because they have been set down before, I should have to invent a vodun that does not exist.

  I might add that HAITI: HIGHROAD TO ADVENTURE has been used as a reference book by other novelists as well—not always with permission.

  1

  ON MAPS OF THE CARIBBEAN the road along the north coast of the island of St. Joseph has no name or number. It is not paved. In the rainy season it is frequently not even passable. The Reverend Arthur Barry Clinton had never been over it before, though he had served for three years at a mission only thirty-odd miles to the south.

  He drove without haste, expertly guiding the mission jeep around holes and boulders, not wanting to shake up too much the white-haired man seated beside him or the dark-skinned youth perched on the mound of cartons in back. He should be desolate this morning, he supposed. In assigning him to Ile du Vent, the Bishop had certainly intended this road to be his private highway to oblivion. But he felt no desolation. He was intensely eager to see his island.

  "This is the place, Barry," the white-haired man said. "Pull off here."

  They had reached the outskirts of a village. Barry steered the dust-coated vehicle to the side of the road and shut off the engine. He looked about him. He had no sensation of being an outcast. He felt like a small boy about to unwrap a Christmas gift.

  On his right the mountains of the St. Joseph "mainland" tumbled like storm waves to the sea, massive and black, leaving only a three-hundred-yard strip of level land between their splayed ridge toes and the beach: room enough for the road, a bit of wind-bent sugar cane, and the village. The village—it was called Anse Ange—walked part way into the sea on stilts, its cluster of rusty roofs gleaming redly in the morning sunlight. Scrawny pigs that resembled dogs foraged on the black-sand shore.

  On his left lay the Channel of the Wind, a calm-looking strip of water seemingly coated with blue and green enamels awaiting a breeze to blend them. It separated the mainland from Ile du Vent, two miles offshore. The Isle of the Wind itself rose seventeen hundred feet out of the sea in a mist of plateaus and ridges, an excitingly mysterious wilderness six miles long, two miles wide at its widest point, and notoriously a hotbed of the native religion called vodun or voodoo.

  Mine, Barry Clinton exulted. A place of my own at last.

  The dark young man in the rear of the jeep dropped to the road and went around to the front, limping. He always limped. Barry wondered if he had to. He wore a clean white shirt and well-pressed khaki trousers, or at any rate the shirt had been clean and the trousers pressed at the start of the journey. Now, like Barry and the Reverend Peter Ambrose, he was layered with limestone dust.

  "I'll go and see about a boat, sir," he said importantly. "You'll want one that won't be too crowded. Monday is the big market day here."

  He hurried down to the beach where a dozen sailboats lay at anchor in the shallow water.

  They were sizeable boats, most of them, but crudely made and cantankerous-looking. They were owned by the men who built them: enterprising islanders who earned a living transporting passengers and goods across the channel. Sometimes their owners overloaded them or attempted a crossing when the channel was living up to its name. Then on Ile du Vent the drums throbbed and there was wailing.

  Barry eyed the boats with misgivings and turned to the man beside him. "It doesn't look two miles off, Peter."

  Peter Ambrose shrugged. He was forty years older than Barry and had been a missionary in St. Joseph for twelve years. Only his bright blue eyes looked young enough to cope with the endless perplexities confronting a man of God in this land of peasant superstitions.

  "It's far enough. You'll know by the time you get there."

  "It's more rugged than I expected."

  "You won't have to climb the whole distance. The mission is about half way up."

  "I can't wait to get there."

  Peter glanced curiously at his companion and saw a well-built man of twenty-eight with an attractively homely face, close-cropped hair that looked a bit like coconut fiber, and unusually large hands and feet. He frowned. He had been Barry Clinton's superior at Fond Marie for the past three years. It was possible to learn a good deal about a man in three years.

  Banished to Siberia was the thought that had been running through Peter's mind as he gazed at the island offshore. But the eagerness in Barry's face did not wholly surprise him.

  A strange young man, Barry Clinton. Unlike most young missionaries, who came to the islands hoping to save souls, this one had come with a belligerent skepticism of accepted missionary methods and a driving determination to battle sickness and starvation. Being master of his own island, a king with four thousand barefoot subjects, undoubtedly appealed to him, even if the island was the last knot at the end of the rope.

  The answer lay in Barry's background, Peter was sure. He was from Massachusetts originally but had grown up in the islands, moving from one to another as his father was shuffled about on various State Department appointments. He had become infected with an obsession to do something about the poverty in these troubled countries. Quite deliberately he had chosen the church as his instrument, but what the church stood for was incidental, really. If his teachers at theological school had insisted he memorize the Bible backward to qualify for the mission field, Barry would have done so.

  He had read a good deal. He knew something of medicine, agriculture, history, philosophy. Perhaps he had read too much. Peter recalled, with a mental grimace, a conversation on the rectory veranda a few evenings back.

  "It's in the Bible, my boy, if you'll look for it," he had said carelessly in reply to some question.

  Barry had turned on him with a gesture of impatience. "Of course it's in the Bible. Everything we're taught to believe is in the Bible, isn't it? That's our rule book. But must we believe it's infallible, or that everything in it means what the learned interpreters say it means? Must we try to befuddle the primitive mind as we do our own, when we ought to be teaching what was and is a simple religion of love?"

 
Peter had been more amused than annoyed. "We teach as we've been trained to. At least I do."

  "I can't believe it's the best way. The faith we teach should be easy to understand, as it was when Christ taught it. And even before that, or at least along with it, these people need desperately to be told how to farm their worn-out land properly and avoid the tropical sicknesses that make them so miserable!"

  "My boy, I try to keep them well with my clinic. I've allowed you to improve their farming."

  "You, yes. But you're the exception, Peter. Most of the others—" "We were sent here, after all, to teach Christianity."

  Barry had subsided at that. He seldom continued his rebellions beyond the point of friendly discussion. Actually it was difficult to be annoyed with him, for despite his theological shortcomings, if one should call them that, he did the work of three ordinary men at the mission.

  I'm going to be lost without him, Peter thought. Why the devil did he have to write those articles?

  The articles in question had appeared in Stateside church publications, and, of course, the publications had found their way back to St. Joseph, and the Bishop had not been pleased. Recalling the Bishop's visit to Fond Marie, Peter made a face.

  "The Episcopal Church has been here in St. Joseph nearly thirty years, Mr. Clinton. Isn't it possible that we old-timers might know a bit more about the nature of our problem than you who have been here only three?"

  You didn't argue with a Bishop, of course. Not even with a hidebound one who in thirty years had accomplished so pathetically little. It didn't matter, either, that some of the points Barry had brought out in his writings were undoubtedly worth consideration. The Bishop was an angry man.

  Ile du Vent was to be Barry's punishment. And Barry was delighted.

  "Look at it, Peter," the young man was saying now. "It's like something straight out of an adventure novel. The most attractive—"

  "Everything in this country seems attractive from a distance," Peter said with a wry smile. "You should know that. It's only when you get close to things that you notice the muck and sickness—how the dog is alive with fleas and the donkey dying from festered sores." He looked at Barry with affection. He was really very fond of this difficult young man. "But cheer up. Ile du Vent is an interesting place. And cool too, especially up there at the top. I'll envy you that in a month or two when I'm gasping for air back at Fond Marie."

  The boy from the jeep had come up the beach with half a dozen barefoot followers. "It is all arranged, sir," he said to Barry. "These men will carry your things to the boat. I said you would pay them fifty centimes each."

  Barry hesitated. Pradon Beliard had been born on Ile du Vent and undoubtedly knew the ropes, but was a little too sure of himself for Barry's taste. He worked at the Plantation Couronne near the Fond Marie mission, a sisal company that owned land on Ile du Vent too and maintained a launch for its man in residence there; but the launch was being repaired just now and Warner Lemke was at Fond Marie with his wife. This efficient young man with the limp had been sent along to help Barry get settled, an arrangement Barry had accepted with reluctance. He didn't want the boy. But he wanted less to hurt the feelings of Jeff Barnett, the Couronne manager.

  Fifty centimes was a fair enough fee, however. "What time does the boat leave, Pradon?"

  "Within an hour. Of course, if you wish to pay extra—"

  "No, thanks. I can wait."

  When the men had lifted the cardboard cartons and single mildewed suitcase from the jeep and carried them to the water's edge, Barry strolled down the black-sand slope with Peter to watch them put the stuff aboard. They did so by lifting it to their heads and striding into the sea with it. By the time they reached the side of the boat only their shoulders and heads were dry. Barry was glad he had sealed his medical supplies in plastic.

  Almost everyone on the beach was watching him. He turned to his superior, saw an unexpected sadness on Peter Ambrose's face, and was sentimentally touched by it. "Do you know who'll be coming to take my place?" he asked gently.

  "No, but it will be someone green as grass, you can be sure. Just as you were three years ago."

  "I'm going to miss you, Peter."

  "You'll miss having someone to talk to when you're certain the next word in Creole will start you screaming. I know. I was five years at Fond Marie before they sent me my first assistant."

  "I'll miss our evening discussions." And that was no lie, Barry told himself. Not that he had ever won Peter over to his way of thinking or ever could, but at least Peter had listened without being indignant. A more hidebound superior might have crucified him. "Well, Peter" —he put out his hand—"I'd better go aboard, so you can start back. I won't say good-by. As the crow flies, we won't be thirty miles apart."

  "The crow has a good many advantages over jeeps and native sailboats," Peter said. "Hadn't you better empty your pockets? That is, unless you plan to go aboard on someone's shoulders, the way old Mitchell does."

  "Thanks. I prefer my feet." Barry put the contents of his pockets into his hat and replaced the hat on his head. "Well—"

  They shook hands. Then with the whole beach watching, the new missionary strode into the sea to show them he could do it as well as they could. When he reached the boat, husky black hands promptly reached down and swung him aboard, amid a chorus of cheers.

  He waved to Peter. The white-haired man waved back, turned, and trudged slowly up to the road.

  How would it end? Peter wondered. Would Barry Clinton do well on his island or would he, like old Leander Mitchell, wind up sick and disillusioned? Would he find something to believe in or go on doubting and questioning? What about his private war with the Bishop? And what about the girl at Plantation Couronne, Jeff Barnett's daughter Edith, who had been waiting so long for him to propose marriage?

  Would Ile du Vent answer some of Barry's problems or simply be another one, more formidable than all the rest put together?

  2

  THERE WAS SCARCELY AN INCH OF SPACE left on the boat when its captain decided he had a full load, an hour and a half later. Barry sat on the stern deck with his back against the low wooden rail, wedged between two barelegged women. One was old and fat and sucked noisily on a mango seed. The other was young and pretty, with dark eyes that kept questing over his face, and a taut young body whose firmness he felt through his clothes. His clothes were still damp from his walk in the sea.

  Another woman leaned on one of his outthrust legs, numbing it, and beyond her were other passengers, men and women, overlapped and intertwined, covering every inch of the deck fore and aft.

  In the yawning waist-well it was worse. There the massed humanity had to contend for space with overflowing market baskets, sharp-pointed garden tools, an ugly roll of barbed wire, and his own collection of cartons. His fragile suitcase, already weakened by three years of tropic damp, was being used as a seat by a young woman with a baby at breast, but he soon became so amused at the infant's voracious appetite that he gave the suitcase no further thought.

  These were his people. He studied them while the crew tugged on frayed ropes, and the clumsy sail, patched with feed bags that still bore the most interesting inscriptions, creaked slowly to the top of the single mast. The mast had been axed from a tree trunk and was not very straight. Nothing in St. Joseph was ever very straight. Even the houses leaned. These people just couldn't see the sense in fussing over things that seemed unimportant to them. Pradon Beliard, he noticed, had found a place in the bow, at the base of the mast, beside an islander who was evidently a friend of his. The two were chatting with their heads together.

  Barry remembered suddenly that he was not a good sailor, and hoped the passage would not be rough.

  It was rough enough. Once the clumsy craft had crept away from the mainland shore and caught the full sweep of the channel breeze in its sail, it began to pitch and sway alarmingly. He found himself lurching first against the woman with the mango seed, then against the girl with the hard young body.
He pressed the palms of his hands against the rough deck to steady himself.

  The girl glanced at him and smiled. She was only a child, eighteen or so, but extremely attractive. Her dress was clean too: made of a gay multicolored print featuring butterflies in flight, whereas most of the other female passengers wore feed bags or faded blue denim. He looked away from her but was aware that she continued to study him.

  The girl saw nothing rude in staring. He was the new missionary, come to take the place of the old one who drank too much; therefore he was a legitimate object of curiosity. A good-looking man, she decided. A man who appeared to have honest blood in his veins, not the ice water that passed for blood in the shriveled body of old Father Mitchell. She thought of all missionaries as "Father." Everyone did in St. Joseph. Now and then one of them might protest, patiently explaining the difference between Protestant and Catholic, but it made no difference. Men of the church were mon Père. How else could they be addressed with the proper respect?

  This new Father, now, was young. He had big hands that looked strong and capable. He had a large, strong mouth and good dark eyes that seemed friendly. It might be exciting, having him on Ile du Vent. The only other white man on the island was M'sieu Lemke at the plantation, a blustering bully who thought he did girls a favor by inviting them to sleep with him.

  The new Father glanced at her and she smiled again, not a childish smile now but a bold one. "Hello, Father," she said. "Comment sa va?"

  "Not too well, thank you. Is it always this tipsy?"

  "Only for a little while." She was amused by his discomfort and glanced about to see if others had noticed it. No one at the moment was much interested, however, and she focused her gaze on his face again. "You're the new missionary, aren't you?"