Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  "Tell me a little about your family, Manny." Obviously the fellow had a woman, or his clothes would not be so clean and tidy and he would not look so well cared for in other ways. His kinky black hair had been crew-cut lately, if that was the word; he looked well fed and content; there was a nice warmth, even a twinkle, in his dark brown eyes. He had a few teeth missing, of course. Here the only dentists available to country folk were itinerants who passed through occasionally and did little but pull out teeth already half rotten. When a man like Manny Traill had a toothache he simply endured it, perhaps trying to kill the pain with white rum until some such dentist came along or he was able to yank the offending tooth out himself.

  "Me have a good woman, squire," Manny was saying. "She name Roselda. She work in the Osburn Hall fields at picking time."

  "Not that it matters, but tell me—are you and Roselda married?" According to Desmond Reid, few country couples were, because a wedding involved certain expenses few could afford—mostly for windings at which food and rum for all the neighbors and relatives had to be provided. And, said Desmond, the men had a dread of the word "wife" as well, for when a woman acquired that cherished title she almost invariably changed, demanding certain "rights" that even included having a servant in the house. The house might be only a shack, but, by God, a wife was a wife.

  "No, squire," MannyTraill said quietly. "Me and Roselda don't marry as yet."

  "One more question. I'm sure you know how things are here at Glencoe, and the problems I face in putting the place back in shape. If you were I, where would you start and what would you do?"

  The lines that appeared around Manny's half-shut eyes indicated solemn thought. Seconds of silence went by. Then with his chin in one hand and his gaze on Lyle's face he said slowly, "Well, squire, first me would get the tracks bushed out, so the men can able to get around. Then me would bush out the fields, to see better where coffee trees need to be pruned or replaced. This don't be a good time to fertilize, but when the September rains come me would be ready for that, too." He paused. "You don't likely to get much crop this year, squire. But with proper care and good weather you should have a good return in the year to come."

  "Any other suggestions, Manny?"

  Another pause. "Well, yes, squire. If me was you, me would consider building a warehouse in Tennis."

  "Tennis?"

  "The big meadow across the road up there." He aimed a gnarled and almost nailless forefinger in the general direction of the top of the driveway. "It called that because in the old days the Great House folks did play tennis there. In fact, the old court still there. Them did play polo in the meadow, too, me hear. Busha Reid don't did tell you this?"

  Lyle smiled. "Busha has had to tell me so much, Manny, that I'm not surprised he hasn't got around to the meadow yet. I've looked the meadow over, though, and one day I might build a house there. On the knoll at the far end of it."

  "You is thinking right, squire." Manny vigorously nodded.

  "This old Great House don't safe. If someone was to get careless with fire—" He shook his head. "Anyway, as me was saying, me would build a warehouse in Tennis. The garage here, that Mr. Elliot did use, never was big enough to store fertilizer and tools and all the things needed on a place like this."

  "Is there anything else you would do, Manny?"

  "You should have a mule to ride, squire. Mr. Elliot did walk all the time, even to the top fields, but it too far and take too long. Him never did know what was going on up there most of the time when the man from Kingstonwas cheating him. And if me running Glencoe me would build a donkey pen in Tennis, too. Mr. Elliot did keep the animals tied up when them not working, but it better if them free to move around."

  I like you, Manny Traill. I think you're the one.

  He talked to the other two. Both were intelligent and personable, both eager to respond to his questions. In the end, though, telling them he felt he would be more comfortable with someone older but hoped to see them again when the work started, he gave the job to Manny.

  "To start, Manny, it pays two pounds ten a week. Satisfactory?"

  "Yes, squire."

  "And Mr. Reid tells me we should have the work done on a task-work basis whenever possible. Not day-work. You agree?"

  "Me agree. It best to pay a man for what him accomplish, not according to how long it take him. Some men lazy, others them work with a conscience. Mr. Elliot's man from Kingston did give out day work to him special friends and them would just sleep the time away. Or sit under a tree and smoke ganja."

  Ganja, Lyle thought. Marijuana. A problem here in Jamaica where just a week ago, according to The Gleaner, a Portland farmer on the drug had run amok with a machete and hacked to death three members of his family.

  But one problem at a time. He now had a headman, one he felt good with. What next?

  "When can we start work, Manny?"

  "Well, today only Thursday, squire, so we can start tomorrow, no?"

  "The sooner the better."

  Manny nodded. "Me will passthe word this afternoon that you is hiring."

  "And?"

  "Men looking work will come at daybreak, but me will be here first. It better if you up by then to pick who you want to work and take down the names them for you pay bill."

  "You'll be giving out each field as a job? And the tracks by measurement?"

  "The tracks by chain. Right, squire. But you must have to say how much you will pay for the different jobs. We can talk about that now, before me go, maybe? So we both can know what we doing?"

  Lyle stood up. "I have Mr. Elliot's books. Let me get them. While I'm at it, let me get my son, too. He ought to sit in on this, I think."

  The books in question, half a dozen large, thick, hard-covered notebooks, were in the room Alison and the twins would be using later as a schoolroom. Since his and Roddy's arrival at Glencoe he had already spent hours poring over them, fascinated by the vast amount of information they contained. Who back home in Rhode Island, for instance, would ever know that machetes at a hardware store in Morant Bay, Jamaica, cost eleven shillings apiece? Or that mule shoes in the same establishment cost three shillings eleven pence? (The book hadn't said how many mule shoes, but the word had been plural. A touch of carelessness on Freeland Elliot's part, perhaps? And for that matter, what had become of the mule or mules? As Manny had noted a moment ago, there were no such animals here at present. Perhaps Pam had sold anyGlencoe had owned.)

  On his way back with the books he found Roddy with Alison in a small room off the dining room, the purpose of which he had not yet determined. The room's only piece of furniture was a rickety table, and the two stood beside it with their heads together over a sheet of paper on which, with a pencil, Roddy was apparently laying out plans for the upstairs kitchen his mother had talked about. When Lyle explained what he and Manny Traill were doing, Alison took over the sketching while the boy accompanied him to the veranda. There they sat with the headman while Lyle and Manny began the process of deciding how much to pay for weeding each of the twenty-eight Glencoe coffee fields, and how much per chain for the various tracks.

  As each price was decided upon, Lyle entered it in a large new book of his own and also in a pocket notebook the headman would carry. Roddy looked and listened in silence, but with intense interest. They were still hard at it some thirty minutes later when young Clifton Bennett came out of the house.

  Glancing along the veranda at them without interrupting, Cliff went down the steps to the yard. As his sister had done earlier, he was simply getting acquainted with his new home, with nothing special in mind. After wandering about for a while, staring up at a handsome royal Poinciana tree beside the house, rattling a picked-up stick along the stone wall on the high side of the steep driveway, then strolling in and out of the garage, he paused at the side of the garage to examine the plantation fire alarm. This was an iron hoop the size of a bicycle wheel hanging from a wooden crosspiece between two sturdy uprights fashioned from the trunks of
young silk-oak trees, with an iron striker-bar suspended beside it. In case of fire, brother Roddy had told him, you were supposed to grab the bar and bang away at the hoop with it. The sound would carry even to Mango Gut and anyone hearing it would come running to help out. Or so you hoped.

  An engine roar from the top of the driveway caught Cliff's attention at that moment and, puzzled by such an alien racket in this quiet place, he swiftly swung around. Zooming down the driveway was a little red Italian Fiat, behaving like a roller-coaster car doing the big drop. At the foot of the drive it swerved straight toward Cliff and the fire alarm. Cliff leaped aside like a startled mongoose.

  With its tires scattering dirt and gravel, the car miraculously screeched to a stop before doing any damage.

  Out from behind its wheel slid the little old lady Mom and Dad had talked to in Trinity Ville, on the way here from the airport.

  "Hi there!" she cried with a grin and a wave. "Tell your mum Kim Tulloch is here, will you? I promised to call on her today and, golly, here I am!"

  5

  Having heard the Fiat screech down the driveway—who could have failed to hear it? —Alison met her caller at the Great House doorway. Lyle and Roddy left Manny Traill for a moment to come along the veranda and greet her. Lee ran up from the kitchen, where she had been talking with the housekeeper.

  The welcome attended to, Alison dismissed them all and escorted Kim Tulloch into the drawing room, expecting to sit and talk. But the white-rose lady was not ready for that.

  "I've brought you a little present," she announced. "Let me go back to the car and get it, now that I know you're home and all."

  From the veranda Alison watched her trot to the Fiat, open a door, and lift out a cardboard carton. It must have come from some shop, because the lettering on it, visible when she briskly reclimbed the veranda steps, indicated it had once contained canned milk—tinned milk? —from a condensery at Bog Walk. The fridge downstairs contained several cans of that same milk because, Lyle had remarked just this morning at breakfast, fresh milk was not sold in any of the local shops.

  The box was tied with string and there were holes punched in the top of it, she saw when her caller carried it past her into the drawing room and placed it with care on a table almost as large as the one in the dining room. There this amazing little woman took a jackknife from a pocket of her tight-fitting khaki pants, cut the string, and leaned forward to insert both hands very gently into the opened container.

  "Now don't be afraid," she murmured, not to Alison but to something in the box. "I know it was your first car ride, but it's over and everything is going to be all right now. Come!" And she carefully lifted out a kitten which, with a smile, she held out to Alison.

  "When I heard you and the children were coming," she said, "I asked Desmond Reid to find out from Lyle if you're a cat person. Lyle said you are, so I thought what could be a nicer welcome gift than this. She'll be useful, too, even though she's only five and a half months old yet. Have you heard the hockey games? But you've only been here one night, haven't you? So I don't suppose you have."

  Entranced by the beauty of the quivering little creature in her hands, Alison transferred it to the crook of her left arm and stroked it with her right hand. "Hockey games?"

  "Up there." Her caller pointed to the varnished wooden ceiling. "There's a loft up there under the roof, in case you haven't been told yet. And bush rats live there. Now don't be alarmed," she quickly added. "They're not the kind that live in city sewers and carry all sorts of horrible diseases. What they are is rather cute little brown things that live on fruit and berries and such, including—as you'll find out before long—the ripest, plumpest cherries on the coffee trees." She paused to gaze at the kitten. "Oh, look, she likes you already. She's not afraid at all!" Then with a glance at the ceiling again: "What I'm trying to tell you, but not very well, I guess, is that Freeland Elliot got tired of hearing the rats scampering around up there and one day he reached up through one of the trap doors and put some poison there. You can't actually walk around up there; there's too big a risk that these old ceilings might give way. Freeland just climbed on a stepladder and stuck his head and arms through the opening." Her giggle was a pixie sound full of little bells tinkling. "His mistake, mind you, was in putting the poison in empty condensed milk tins, a whole bunch of them. And do you know what those clever little rascals did? Instead of eating the poison, they tipped it out and organized a perpetual hockey game with the tins."

  "But Freeland died more than three years ago, Kim," Alison protested.

  "Of course. But as I say, you can't walk around up there, or even crawl, so the tins are still up there, scattered all over now, and nobody has figured out a way to recover them. So the games go on."

  Alison made a face. "Well, as you say, I've been here only one night. But this—" She gazed fondly at the kitten, which now was responding to her stroking with a loud purr of contentment. "How old did you say he is?"

  "About five and a half months, and it's a she."

  "Have you named her?"

  "Of course not! She's yours now. You name her."

  "She's Siamese, isn't she?"

  "Indeed she is, every inch of her. A Blue Point, though I don't know why they're called blue. Half the time she and her mother are sort of creamy gray; other times they're almost lavender Anyway, her mother, Tai-Tai, belongs to me and her father to Dr. Kirk, in the Bay."

  "A doctor?"

  "Oh, I've been chumming around with medics all my life," Kim said. "This one's too young for me—only thirty or so—but I married a Kingston doctor when I—" She caught herself and frowned. "Do you want to hear this? Really?"

  "Please," Alison said. "I do."

  "Let's go into the drawing room and sit down, then. I like those big chairs by the fireplace."

  "Should I get the kitty something to eat first?"

  "Uh-uh. She was fed this morning." Kim Tulloch reached into the carton on the table and produced a bulging paper bag. "I've brought you all of her food, tinned and dry, that I had left. It'll hold you for a couple of weeks, and by that time you'll have been to Kingston for a good many other things you need." Again the giggle with the bells in it. "You can't get cat food locally, you know. The country people can't afford it, so the shops don't carry it. Country people mostly have dogs, anyway, not cats; but the shops don't have dog food either. Country dogs are fed table scraps and cornmeal porridge."

  By this time Kim Tulloch was half way to the fireplace in the drawing room, with Alison hurrying to catch up. Kim dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs there, all but disappearing in the process. When Alison was seated too, she said with a frown, "Do you really want to hear about me? Why should you?"

  "I'm hoping we'll be good friends."

  "Well, so am I. I mean I liked you when you came for the funerals." Kim leaned forward to wag a finger. "One thing you're going to find out, Alison Bennett, is that there aren't too many people around here for people like us to talk to. I don't mean because most country folk are colored; I mean they just don't get much beyond talk of how to survive. And, of course, you simply never get used to the patois unless you were born to it."

  Alison stopped stroking the kitten, which was now asleep on her lap. "I suppose you're right. I have trouble understanding our housekeeper."

  "Who's she?"

  "Her name is Imogene Bailey. Mr. Reid recommended her."

  "Imogene Bailey from Mango Gut?"

  Alison nodded.

  "Good Lord, that one speaks English! I know her; she even worked for me once, when I was sick a couple of years ago and needed extra help." Kim waved her arms. "She's had some schooling. Just wait till you have to talk to some who haven't had any at all.”

  Hearing a sound from the veranda, Alison looked in that direction. The kitten awoke and did so too. The newly hired headman who had been working there with her husband and Roddy was departing. Politely he walked past the open doorway without looking in. The kitten put her hea
d down and closed her eyes again.

  “. . . ought to start at the beginning, I suppose," Kim Tulloch was saying. "I'm eighty years old, I think you know. Was born Kimberly Sutherland in 1870 in Spanish Town when that was the island capital and Sir John Peter Grant was governor. Sir John was a good man who did wonders for Jamaica, moving the capital to Kingston when I was two. Kingston had streetcars then. They ran on rails and were pulled by mules. I used to love riding on them when my parents took me there."

  "You're eighty and you drive a sports car!" Alison said in awe.

  "I had to drive when my late husband was hurt, but that's getting ahead of my story. When I was twenty-two I married a Kingston doctor, John Reckford. He was twenty-nine. Perhaps you've read about the 1907 earthquake that destroyed Kingston?"

  "1907? I've read about the big quake that caused the pirate town of Port Royal to disappear into the sea. But that was in 16-something, wasn't it?"

  "1692. The later one was nearly as awful, though. Hundreds of people were buried alive, hundreds more died in the fires that were out of control for four or five days. I was taken to the hospital unconscious, and then stayed there helping out after I found I wasn't seriously hurt. I didn't know where John was. He'd gone out on a house call, and I assumed he wasjust being a doctor somewhere. Lord knows, doctors were needed all over the city. Then—oh God—I was told he'd been found crushed to death in the home of the patient he'd been attending."

  "Kim"—Alison's voice was barely audible—"you don't have to go on with this. Not now."

  "Yes, I do. So let me." Kim took in a big breath and squared her tiny shoulders. "When I was forty-three and had been a widow for four years, I met and married Dr. Roger Tulloch, who practiced in Trinity Ville. He was a widower of forty-five, handsome and full of fun; everyone loved him. When the war came along in 1914, he volunteered to serve—as a medic, of course—but was turned down because he limped from an old leg injury, of all the crazy things. Then in 1918 he hurt the same leg again exploring Three-finger Jack's cave in Mount Lebanus, not far from where we lived, and for the rest of his life had to use a wheelchair. That's when I learned to drive. I had to take him on his house calls, over some of the worst roads in the parish." She paused, and Alison saw her lower lip quiver. "Do you know about Three-finger Jack?"