Cross on the Drum

by Cave, Hugh

  Dufour rose, scowling.

  "Well, I'll be running along." Barry held out his hand. "I'm sure you won't hold this against me. Just trying to do my job, you know."

  Dufour shook hands, went to the door, and opened it. Barry saw that he was seething.

  When Barry had gone, the little magistrate began to shake. He shook uncontrollably. The hair shimmered on his head and his teeth made a clicking noise. For almost a minute he simply stood there by the door, shaking. Then he flung the door open and spat, aiming his spittle at the back of the man now riding up the village street.

  Barry, of course, was unaware of the insult.

  Dufour let the door slam and returned to his chair. But he could not sit still. He shot to his feet and paced the floor, clenching and unclenching his hands. He knew why the Father had come this morning. It wasn't to help the marchandes. All that talk about the poor suffering marchandes was simply pig defecation. The Father was out to settle the score for the mule. Why had he mentioned the mule, if not to make that clear? Why had he been so free with his smiles?

  Damn!

  The worst of it was, he couldn't fight back. That was a clever man, that Father. He had sat up there in his miserable mission like a patient spider, waiting for the web to entangle his victim before he struck. The tax would have to be dropped. If it wasn't, all the Father had to do was file a complaint with the right people and Ile du Vent would have a new magistrate. The stupid marchandes wouldn't register an official complaint, but the Father would. He probably had a letter already written and was just hoping for the excuse to send it.

  As for an appeal to the legislature, what a stream of horse urine that was. As if those Cadillac-rich politicians in the capital would listen to a plea from the magistrate of Ile du Vent! Why, they didn't know there was such a place as Ile du Vent. And even if they did, he would have to guarantee that crooked deputy, Beauvoir, nine tenths of the profits before he would agree to bring the request up.

  Damn the Father! Dufour spat again, forgetting where he was. The blob of spittle struck the Swiss calendar on the wall and dribbled like a fat white snail down the side of a snow-covered mountain. He beat his clenched hands against his forehead, squealing with rage.

  Then he remembered the letter.

  It had come yesterday, a letter from the hospital in the capital, very official, explaining the circumstances of young Toto Anestor's death and instructing him to make the facts known to the populace of Ile du Vent in his capacity of magistrate. It was going to mean a great deal to the Father, that letter. True, the work on the church was proceeding in spite of the people's attitude, but he still hadn't nearly enough workers. And according to Pradon Beliard, the old church had been practically empty at last Sunday's service.

  Dufour yanked open a table drawer and read the letter again. His lips curled. He turned and marched through his ornate little dining room into the kitchen. There he crumpled the letter in his fist, dropped it into one of the iron charcoal braziers, and set fire to it.

  ON HIS RETURN TO THE MISSION Barry found Alma Lemke waiting with a patient. The man's name was Julio Everaste. He was a fisherman. He had been carried from the plantation end of the island on a stretcher of poles and woven palm fronds by some of his neighbors.

  "My cook told me about him," Alma said. "I found him lying on a mat in his caille, waiting to die. Can you do anything for him?"

  Everaste lay now on the cot in the office. His left foot was a great bloated balloon and he was obviously in pain.

  Barry made an examination, then called for hot water and laid out some instruments. Removing his shirt, he said, "Are you sure you want to watch this?"

  "You may need help, don't you think?"

  "It won't be very pretty."

  "It isn't pretty now."

  He had no operating table; there wasn't room in the office for one. He would have to do this on his knees, he saw. Having washed the awful-looking foot and put a folded towel under it, he leaned forward to peer into the fellow's face.

  "This is going to hurt for a minute, compère."

  "Oui."

  "After it's over, you'll be all right."

  "Merci, mon Père."

  With his left arm around the leg to hold it, he cut into the side of the foot where the infection seemed to be centered. Everaste made a gasping sound and arched his back convulsively. But the blade had not pierced the skin. The skin was like leather.

  Barry tightened the pressure of his arm and cut again in the same place. It was like going through the hard rind of a watermelon into the pulp. There was a great spurt of fluid from the incision. He felt a sticky wetness on his face and saw that the front of his undershirt was yellow. The stench was horrible. Behind him Alma gasped.

  The man on the cot was writhing.

  Barry dropped the foot and groped to his feet, sickened by the stench, aware that his eyes were smarting. It was a frightful moment. He must wash at once or run the risk of some ghastly infection, but the patient was tossing about in agony, banging his bad foot against the frame of the cot, and the fluid spurting from the wound was getting all over everything.

  "Alma!" he said frantically. "Can you hold him?"

  "Of course." She stepped past him and went to her knees, pressing her hands down on Everaste's shoulders. "Julio!" she said sharply. "Stop it!"

  Barry groped for a basin of water.

  He was still scrubbing himself when Alma said from her position beside the cot, "It seems to have stopped spurting now. Is there something I should do?" She seemed completely calm.

  "No, I can attend to it. I'm all right now."

  She rose to make room for him and, after watching for a moment, opened the door and went out. He didn't blame her. He was on the verge of being ill himself. It was all he could do to hold down the contents of his stomach while he cleaned the open foot and put a dressing on it.

  The door opened. Alma came in again with a bucket of steaming hot water and a handful of cloths. At once she began to clean up the mess on the floor. For a moment Barry was too astonished to speak.

  "You don't have to do that," he said.

  "It isn't the first floor I've scrubbed," she replied with a shrug. "Take care of your patient."

  He gave his patient an injection of penicillin and leaned over him. "Does it hurt very much, Julio?"

  "A little, mon Père."

  "Do you want something to make you sleep for a while, or would you rather have a shot of rum?"

  The sick man grinned. "What do you think, mon Père?"

  "Rum it is." Barry put some into a glass and supported the fellow's shoulders while he drank it. "As a matter of fact, I could use a little of this myself."

  He poured two small drinks and handed one to Alma. She touched her glass to his.

  "To the doctor," she said.

  "And to his nurse."

  "Shall I go home now, mon Père?" Julio asked.

  "No. I'll want another look at you when you feel better. You'd better plan on staying here tonight."

  "Here in your house?"

  "Right where you are. Now, though, I think we'll have your friends put you in the church so we can clean this place up. No one will bother you there." Barry opened the door and told the men outside what he wanted. As they followed instructions and carried the cot from the room, they gazed at the man lying on it as though he had been returned to them from the dead.

  With Alma's help Barry put the room to rights. When the job was done, they collapsed onto chairs and looked at each other. "You should have been a nurse," he said.

  She frowned. She was wondering what had happened to her. If anyone had told her an hour ago that she could be useful in a doctor's office, she would have laughed. The thought of handling a sick person would have made her sick herself. Especially a black one.

  She tried to recall what had passed through her mind when Barry looked up from the spurting foot and asked if she could help. Nothing had passed through it; that was the strangest part of the who
le business. She hadn't thought at all. She had simply stepped forward and done what she knew had to be done. She was like a person who had lived a lifetime in fear of water, then suddenly was forced to swim and discovered it was a natural, easy thing to do. There on her knees beside the cot she hadn't been conscious of anything except that Julio might hurt himself unless she helped him. She was glad she had helped him. She felt a little proud of herself. She looked at Barry with new understanding. He too must feel something when he helped these people. There was a reward.

  "I said," he was repeating, "you should have been a nurse."

  "You could use a nurse here if this sort of thing happens often."

  "All sorts of things happen. What's the story on Julio, do you know? What happened to him?"

  "He isn't sure. He was wading in shallow water off the beach one day and something stung him."

  It was all Barry ever learned about the cause of Julio's illness.

  HE HAD TWO MORE PATIENTS THAT MORNING. Alma stayed to help, and he was astonished at her instinctive understanding of how best to help him. It was a joy to have her at his side.

  She remained for lunch, and her presence magically transformed the occasion into a session of fun. St. Juste told some hilarious stories of Pradon Beliard's attempts to avoid work on the ridge. Barry recalled some of the amusing things that had happened at the clinic. Before the meal ended, there was even a smile on the usually hangdog face of Lucille as the old housekeeper served them.

  "That Mrs. Lemke is a wonderful woman," St. Juste said when Alma had gone. "I didn't know she was like that."

  "I didn't either," Barry said. "She must have enjoyed being a nurse this morning."

  Soon afterward, Edith arrived. Barry found her complaints about the heat and the long ride hard to take, then suffered pangs of guilt for his attitude and put himself out to make her visit pleasant. When she left at five, though, he was glad to see her go and wondered what on earth was the matter with him.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY Edith told him she was returning to Couronne. The atmosphere at the Lemkes' house, she said, was just too much for her.

  "Perhaps I can come again when the church is finished and you're not so busy," she said.

  15

  ST. JUSTE SAID ONE DAY AT BREAKFAST, "We'll be starting on the rectory this morning, Mr. Clinton. You'll be up to swing the first shovel, won't you?" With Edith's departure Barry had returned to his original schedule, holding clinic in the mornings and working on the ridge in the afternoons. Alma found it more convenient to come in the mornings.

  "You couldn't keep me away."

  He waited for Alma to arrive, left her in charge, and hurried to the ridge. St. Juste and his handful of workers were putting the finishing touches on the church roof, but stopped and led him to the lines laid out for the rectory near by. St. Juste put a shovel in his hands.

  "Just break the ground for us, Mr. Clinton. Then you can run along back to your patients."

  They cheered when he swung the shovel.

  He turned to admire the church. It was nearly finished. The job had taken longer than St. Juste had predicted, of course—everything in St. Joseph took longer than it ought to—but the result was a structure to make a man proud.

  It was large. It had a broad, high entrance and spacious window openings to let in the breeze. Its corrugated iron roof gleaming in the sun could be seen from Anse Ange, across the channel, and probably from many a mountainside far back in the interior of the mainland. Barry had to smile. A lot of people in the mainland mountains, including a number of his fellow missionaries, must be wondering about the strange new glitter atop Ile du Vent.

  A few items were lacking. The bell for the handsome little bell-tower had not arrived yet from the capital. For that matter, it probably hadn't arrived in the capital yet from the States. The benches, though cut and sanded, couldn't be assembled until the brackets came. The altar wasn't finished. But he was not impatient.

  Things had gone well, he told himself. They might have gone better, of course. If Felix Dufour in his fury over the market-tax business had not denied having received the letter from the hospital—a letter he must have received because Barry had been sent a copy of it—there would have been more workers. It hadn't done much good to produce his own copy and insist that Dufour was lying. The peasants were quite sure that the magistrate, even though they hated him, just wouldn't have the nerve to lie about such a serious matter. Still, St. Juste had never been entirely without help, even if much of it was unwilling and incompetent.

  The garden was flourishing. Some of the quick-growing vegetables —radishes, bush beans, leaf lettuce, mustard greens—were ready for harvest, and scarcely a day went by when some of the peasants didn't come for seeds and advice on how to plant them. There would be more and better food for the islanders soon; no question of it.

  At the clinic he was always busy and always facing new problems, but there was a difference now. Since helping him that day with Julio Everaste, Alma had come nearly every day. It was a pity she had never studied nursing. She had an amazing knack for it and, surprisingly, just the right temperament; at least it was just right for Ile du Vent. Cheerful no matter what happened, able to scold without being angry and joke without being ridiculous, she could win the co-operation of the most difficult patients. The stubborn ones gave in to her, the stupid ones obeyed her, the frightened ones gained courage from her, the demanding ones trembled before her. She took her work seriously too; it was no mere fad. At home she studied the medical books he had lent her. They were more interesting, she said —"a damned sight more interesting"—than the romances she had used as an antidote for boredom before.

  He still did not know why she should be bored at home. She rarely mentioned her husband, and Barry had asked no questions. Warner had ridden up from the plantation once or twice to ask if there was anything he could do to help with the work on the church. On being told there wasn't, he had said politely "Well, let me know if I'm needed" and ridden off again.

  There was one real problem. Too few people came to church on Sundays.

  He never had more than a dozen in his congregation. Lucy always attended, of course. Alma came when she could. Louis and Daure were amazingly faithful, and even on the Sunday following the birth of Daure's second child—it was another girl, born on a Friday—Louis had turned up. Of course he could count on St. Juste, and sometimes on Catus. But Micheline had stopped coming, and so had Pradon Beliard, who was in a perpetual sulk these days.

  He rarely saw any of the others. There hadn't been a new face since the first Sunday, or, to put the blame where it belonged, since the spread of that fantastic story that he had paid Louis to smuggle a dead boy off the island so he would not be blamed for the boy's death.

  It would not be correct, though, to say that he had accomplished nothing religionwise. He had accomplished a great deal, he felt. Catus and he, since their curious discussion of Christianity prompted by the lurid illustrations in the old Bible, had found much to talk about. He would not soon forget, for example, the evening Catus had called on him with a copy of old Mitchell's Creole book.

  "I have been reading this again," Catus had said. "As you instructed, I paid small attention to those tales of how the world was made and the great flood came, and so forth. But I did read about those two in the garden, and it puzzles me."

  "You find the story of Adam and Eve hard to believe?"

  "The book says that two people made by God to populate the earth were given a wonderful garden to live in but were ordered not to touch a certain fruit. They ate the fruit and were driven from the garden as punishment. The story seems to me just silly. If God made these people and wished them to be blameless, why did he put a temptation in the garden to trap them? You are building a new church on the ridge. Are you going to build a crack in it so the church will have a chance to fall down and prove itself bad? Or do I offend you by questioning this?"

  "You don't offend me. Go on."

  "Well, t
hen comes the really incredible part of this silly story. Because the first man and woman sinned, all men are sinners. How can that be? Is Daure's new baby wicked because her great-great-grand-mama did a wrong thing one time?" Catus shook his head. "If you expect me to believe this kind of thing, you must think me a fool. If you believe it, you must be a fool."

  "I don't think we're fools, Catus. And if you remember, I asked you to believe only one thing."

  "What is that?"

  "The truth of the teachings of Jesus."

  Catus thought for a moment. "This Jesus of yours was a good man, I believe, though I think he was not a god and probably not the son of one. He may have believed he was, of course. That he had no earthly father I don't believe either, though I may be wrong. The big thing that troubles me is that since his return to heaven he has never shown himself to you who believe in him. If the loa can come to a vodun service, why can't Jesus come to yours?"

  "We believe he does, Catus, though of course not in the same way. He possesses our minds, so to speak, instead of our bodies."

  "Well, if you choose to believe that, without ever seeing him . . . On the whole, as I say, I admire him very much. He said many good things and lived the kind of life he asked others to live. It pleases me that he showed such an interest in the peasants and had no wish to be rich or a politician. Probably the rich would not have accepted him, of course, he being poor himself. How long did he live, this Jesus?"

  "A little more than thirty years. But he was a teacher only three."

  "Only three?" Catus was astonished. "From only three years' teaching has come a faith so strong? Why, I have heard it said that your religion covers the whole world!"