Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  There were some other things, too, that Mom wasn't going to be crazy about at Glencoe. The lights, for instance, that seemed to go dim after every rain. And no hot water. And the whole place being so big you could get lost in it. And the way the country people talked, saying things like "Mek we do it" for "Let's do it."

  But, man, the mountains! Those were really great. And maybe he and Dad, when they had some time, could at least do something about the lights and lack of hot water.

  Approaching the Austin from the front, he lifted the hood—the bonnet, here, because Jamaica was English—and looked at the engine. As he had expected, the plugs were miniature lighthouses in little seas of water. Again shaking his head, a habit of his when confronted with a problem, he went into the garage for tools and a rag.

  The plugs removed, dried, and replaced, he got into the car and tried to start it, aware that his father had stepped out onto the veranda and was watching him. The engine would not turn over. With his head under the bonnet again, he used a wrench to remove the battery cables, vigorously applied sandpaper and a dry rag, and put them back.

  The engine responded, and he left it idling while he climbed the veranda steps. "It was the rain, Dad. I'm sorry. I guess in this climate you can't leave a car out like that."

  Lyle looked at his watch. "You don't think it will act up again?"

  "Uh-uh."

  "Not even if we get more rain on the way?"

  "Not if it's running. The heat from the engine . . . It was standing out there all night, remember."

  "All right." He was lucky, Lyle thought, to have a son who could help with some of the problems. A truly lucky man. Tempted to put his hands on the boy's shoulders and tell him so, he refrained for fear of embarrassing him. "Just let me speak to Ima, and we can leave."

  He went back into the house and along a hall to the stairs that led down to the kitchen. There he found Imogene Bailey scrubbing the wooden counters with sudsy water and a brush.

  About forty, she was tall, thin, homely and very black, but greeted him as always with a smile that made everything else unimportant. She was a local woman recommended by Jeff Reid at Osburn Hall, and when hiring her to cook and keep house until Alison arrived he had been careful to tell her that Alison would have the final say about who would finally be employed.

  "We're leaving for the airport, Ima," he told her.

  "All right, sir. Me will look after things here and have a good supper for all of you this evening." Her smile disappeared behind a sudden frown. "Me hope the road don't bad from the rain, sir. Remember Mr. Elliot."

  Lyle had been thinking about Freeland Elliot, too. As the Austin climbed the Glencoe driveway—so steep that some previous owner had thought it wise to pour strips of concrete for a car's tires—he recalled his other trips to Kingston. Driving on the left had been no great problem; with the car's steering wheel on the right, it seemed the natural thing to do. But nothing in Rhode Island had prepared him for driving over an unpaved mountain road barely wide enough for two cars to pass, with long stretches of having a sheer cliff on one side and a heart-stopping drop on the other. His sister's husband had died on that road to Kingston, his car going over the cliff as he tried to get around a mudslide after a heavy rain. What would it be like after the two or three inches that had fallen last night?

  Roddy was less apprehensive. In temperament he stood midway between the twins, Lyle thought with a smile that actually showed on his lips: never as conservative as Cliff, never quite the total rebel that Lee was. Past the once-white wooden buildings of the Osburn Hall coffee works he talked excitedly about how great it would be to have his mother and the twins at Glencoe. Then in Rain Ridge, he eagerly asked Lyle to "hold it for a minute, Dad" so he could run into a shop and buy some cola champagne for Cliff and Lee to try. Roddy had always had a sweet tooth, and nothing in Rhode Island—or anywhere else in America, probably—could be quite as sweet as that particular Jamaican soft drink. "Sickly" was the way Lyle would have described it.

  Lyle stopped at the corner store and relaxed behind the wheel while his almost-a-man son bounded up the shop steps. Suddenly an attractive female face, light brown in color, appeared at the open car window.

  "You is Mr. Bennett?"

  "Why, yes, I am."

  "The Mr. Bennett that think him own Glencoe?"

  The voice was not loud, but something in it, some implied threat or hint of determination instantly put Lyle on his guard. "I don't understand," he replied warily. "Who are you? What do you want from me?"

  "Never mind who me is," she said, again not loudly. "And what me want you will soon find out." Her hands gripped the car door—the window wasrolled down—but she was careful not to put her head inside. A most attractive young woman, Lyle thought: very pretty features, soot-black glossy hair, full but not too full lips, eyes . . . well, the only way to describe those intense brown eyes was to say they were the color of the breakfast drink Imogene Bailey made from the local cacao or cocoa beans or whatever one ought to call them. Deep brown. Deep, deep brown. She was not Jamaican but what some of the country people here called a coolie, here meaning one whose place of origin was India. Many from that country had come here asindentured workers when the slaves were freed.

  "What do you mean, am I the one who thinks he owns Glencoe?" he asked, prepared to be shaken by her reply.

  "It surprise you, don't it, Busha?" she calmly replied, using the country folks' term for a white man or boss. "Well, never mind 'bout me now, but you going to find out. Then you must have to—" Suddenly she was gone, and Roddy, clutching a purchase wrapped in newspaper, was bounding back down the shop steps.

  "Who was that you were talking to, Dad?"

  "She—" No, Lyle thought, leave it alone. "Just someone wanting work. I told her we weren't hiring yet." One of the many books he had read before coming here had said there were oddball characters in almost every country village, and not to be surprised or alarmed if approached by one. It could easily be true, couldn't it? There must be a certain amount of inbreeding in some of these end-of-the-road communities, especially among groups not wholly accepted asequals. According to Desmond Reid, a Mango Gut schoolteacher, when resigning recently, had described that village asa "goat pen." He hoped the teacher was wrong or merely being offensive, for before his sister Pam had let Glencoe go "ruinate" almost all its workers had come from Mango Gut. And now, according to people he had talked to, the place was nearly "ruinate" itself, desperately needing a revitalized Glencoe to provide wages for its survival.

  As Ima had predicted, the road was difficult. Where it snaked along the edge of space, with a branch of the important Yallahs River deep in a gorge below, he was glad to be on the left, farthest away from the drop. It was along here that Freeland had died. The river was too far down to be audible as it rushed over its bed of boulders, but he had a feeling it was higher and swifter than when he and Roddy had last driven this stretch. Then at Ramble, where they rattled over the wooden bridge that was said to be the highest in the island, he looked down and saw that the stream was swollen and swift indeed.

  "I think we'd better bring Mom and the kids back by way of Morant Bay, Rod. What do you say?"

  "Yeah, Dad. The coast road's not soscary. And Mom isn't going to be feeling too great anyway."

  Lyle sent his son a sidelong glance, a little surprised that the boy was so sensitive to Alison's feelings about Glencoe. Not that she hadn't voiced them more than once, but normally Roddy was too preoccupied with the problems and decisions of a teenager growing up to be aware of the feelings of others. It occurred to him that Rod had suddenly become more mature in Jamaica. In the two weeks they had been here he seemed to have put his past life quite out of mind, concerning himself solely with the problems of Glencoe.

  Well. All right.

  In the pretty little village with the Welsh name, Llandewey, he remembered he was out of cigarettes and stopped at a roadside shop for a pack of Albanys, telling himself he ought to quit being a s
lave to such a stupid habit. When the shop's middle-aged proprietress called him by name, he was startled. But then, Glencoe was important to the well-being of the area and almost everyone, by now, seemed to know the name of the man who had come to take it over.

  Then came Cambridge Hill, the road paved now, where Desmond Reid had warned him to be careful when driving back from Kingston at night. It seemed there was a camp of Rastafarians nearby, and having a flat tire after dark might be dangerous. The Rastas were members of a Jamaican cult who believed themselves Ethiopians and revered Haille Selassie as their spiritual leader. At present they were demanding the Jamaican government put up the money to send them back there. In their eyes, whites were hated people who had brought their ancestors here as slaves.

  "We're going to be early, Dad," Roddy forecast. With Cambridge Hill behind them, they had made the turn onto the coast road at the cluster of shops called Eleven Mile. "We can get something to eat at the airport, huh?"

  He was right about their having time to spare. Fully twenty minutes before the plane they were to meet was due to land, they completed their run of the peninsula road and turned in at Palisadoes. And, of course, Roddy ordered Jamaican patties, which cost a shilling each. A patty was a kind of turnover filled with spicy meat—so much better than a hamburger, the boy insisted, that anyone with sense enough to introduce them to the U.S. might make a fortune. Then, still with time to kill, they climbed to the Waving Gallery and watched the plane comein, and when they saw Alison and the twins descend to the tarmac, both of them frantically waved until they were seen and their waves acknowledged. Then they hurried back downstairs to wait outside Immigration and Customs until, at long last, the family Bennett was whole again.

  But what had the young Indian woman in Rainy Ridge meant by "You is the man that think him own Glencoe?"

  3

  Having been to the island before, twice to visit Freeland and Pamela Elliot and then twice more to attend their separate funerals, Alison Bennett was able to guide the twins through the island's landing procedure without becoming flustered.

  "No, we're not just visiting," she told the politely inquiring brown man in Immigration. "I'm afraid we've inherited a coffee plantation here and have come to live on it."

  He stamped their passports and waved them on with a smile that clearly said, "Welcome!" A good omen, she told herself, for no doubt she would be dealing with many locals in the year ahead. Then she stepped into the waiting arms of her husband and was soundly kissed.

  He looked wonderful, she had to admit—more youthful, more alive than when he had said goodbye to her in Rhode Island. Of course, he'd been tired then. Putting a hold on their affairs for a year and finding the right family to rent the house to had been a strain. And in spite of his talk of "a new life" and "a grand adventure," he must have been more than a little apprehensive about what he was doing.

  The two weeks he and Roddy had been alone at Glencoe would have been something of a strain, too, she guessed, though they had been on hiking and fishing trips in Maine together more than once, and both could cook.

  Seated beside Lyle on the front seat of the Austin, with Roddy and the twins excitedly chattering away behind them, Alison talked mostly about the flight as her husband sent the car purring along the peninsula road to the roundabout. About how well the twins had behaved, for a change. How the stewardess on the Jamaica leg had found time to talk about the island. "She didn't like Kingston. Said it was crowded and noisy and not even safe. But she loved Montego Bay and the north coast."

  "Had she ever been to Rainy Ridge?"

  "She said no. But she'd been to some hilltop hotel or guest house in Port Antonio from where you could see that side of the Blue Mountains. They were"—Alison turned her head—"what was the word she used, kids?"

  The three in back stopped chattering. "Who used?" Clifton said.

  "The stewardess on the plane. When she was telling us about the mountains."

  "Oh. She said—"

  "She said they were mysterious," Leora interrupted with a dramatic wave of both hands. "That's what she called them, mysterious."

  "And beautiful, Lyle," Alison added.

  Lyle grinned. "Well, mysterious or not, there they are up ahead, against the sky. And we'll soon be in them, out of this heat. The Great House at Glencoe, let me remind you, is three thousand feet above sea level, and the coffee fields go well past five."

  Alison peered through the windshield at the bluish mist of peaks in the distance. The tallest was over seven thousand feet, she knew—maybe not high for the Rockies, but impressive enough here in the West Indies. The day was clear, the sun almost too bright for comfort, but still there was a haze above the mountains, as though she were looking not at the real thing but at a photograph taken slightly out of focus. Jamaica's famous Blue Mountains, she thought. Her home now for at least a year. The prospect was both exciting and frightening.

  "Lyle, what about the house?" The last time she had seen the Glencoe Great House was when she and Lyle had flown down to be sure that Pamela, Lyle's sister, was properly buried. Mr. Reid at Osburn Hall had phoned them about her death and said they were needed because she had no kin on the island and he knew nothing about any English connectionsshe might have. Actually, there were no close English connections. Pam and Lyle had been their parents' only children. Their father had drowned while salmon fishing in Scotland when Lyle was only sixteen. Their mother had succumbed to influenza when he was twenty-one.

  At the time of Freeland's funeral, Alison recalled, everything at Glencoe had been tidy and shipshape. Not so when she and Lyle had come down for Pam's funeral. The old Great House then had been shabby and neglected, the plantation in big trouble. Poor Pam had always been a bit too fond of her liquor, and according to Desmond Reid she had gone off the deep end with it after the death of her husband.

  Lyle had not responded to her question. She turned her head to frown at him. "Lyle?"

  "The house?" he echoed with obvious reluctance. "Oh, it needs some work, of course. Rod and I have accomplished quite a lot in the time we've been here, but there are still some problems."

  "Such as?"

  "Well, that old shingle roof is about done for. And we could use a new stove and fridge." His shoulders moved a little. "You'll seefor yourself. The place is clean, though."

  "You and Roddy cleaned it?"

  "With the help of a woman Desmond Reid sent. She's sort of a temporary housekeeper, looking after our laundry and doing the cooking. Name's Imogene Bailey. Ima, she's called." Quickly Lyle added, "She understands the job isn't permanent unless you want her to stay."

  "I see."

  A voice from the back seat, Leora's, said, "Does she cook Jamaican food, Dad? I want some of the things we had when we visited Aunt Pam and Uncle Freeland." The children had not come to Jamaica for the two funerals. They had seen Glencoe only when Pam and Freeland were alive and the plantation was prospering.

  "Hey, we had ackee and salt fish for supper last night," Roddy told her. "You remember ackee? The tree-stuff that looks like scrambled eggs?"

  "I want some breadfruit," his sister retorted. "You know—fried in butter?"

  "I want some strawberry guavas with coconut cream on them," Clifton declared. "I'm going to pick the guavas myself, too, the way I did last time."

  "You know"—the children's mother turned again to the man beside her— "there's something I've never fully understood, Lyle. I was thinking about it on the flight down. Glencoe Great House was a disaster when we came for Pam's funeral. The plantation was in terrible shape, too. Yet in the three years she was alone there, Mr. Reid never wrote to tell us shehad become an alcoholic."

  "He never wrote at all, Al. Why on earth should he?"

  "She was your sister. He knew she needed help."

  The Austin had reached the roundabout, where a left turn would take them along the harbor's edge to the island capital, a turn to the right along the coast road to Morant Bay. Lyle made the swing to the rig
ht before answering.

  "In a way, I asked Desmond about that," he said then. "He's been a big help since Roddy and I arrived. A good neighbor, real friend. He said he didn't feel he knew enough about the situation to write to us. You have to understand, Al, that Desmond Reid is a shy man. With that old Stetson of his and the way he walks he may look like an old-time movie cowboy, but he's basically very reserved."

  "And," Roddy interjected from the back seat, "he said there were conflicting stories about what was going on at Glencoe. Didn't he, Dad?"

  "He did. You see, Freeland had changed headmen. He'd let go the local fellow he was using and hired a man from Kingston recommended by some friend of his there. A man named Waldron. Desmond said he heard rumors after Freeland died that Waldron was taking advantage of Pam's drinking and cheating her."

  "Notchecking the work the way he was supposed to," Roddy said, leaning forward from the back seat. "Padding the pay bill. Playing favorites with the workers. Some of the best workers quit."

  Lyle nodded agreement. "Desmond said there were so many tales going around that he didn't know what to believe, and he wasn't close enough to Pam to question her. And anyway, he didn't seewhat good it would do to write to us. How could we help, being so far away and knowing nothingabout growing coffee anyway?"

  "Do you have any workers yet, Lyle?" Alison asked. With Pam's death all work on the plantationhad stopped, she knew.

  "No, not yet."

  "You haven't done anything about the coffee, then?"

  "Mom, we've walked all the fields," said Roddy with his head between theirs. "We know what needs to be done."