Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  Standing together on the ladder, with their heads only inches apart in the loft, they collected two more cans in the next few minutes. Lyle shared his son's elation and felt only seventeen years old himself as the cheers came up to them from Alison and the twins. Reaching for the flashlight in his son's hand, he heard himself shouting, "There's one under that tangle of wires in the corner! See it, son? Go get it, man!"

  9

  The hockey games had become less frequent. The weeding was finished. Fertilizer hauled from Kingston by trucker Noel Peart was stored in the garage, to be carried to the fields on donkeys as soon asthe summer dry spell ended.

  The upstairs kitchen was in use now. And with some lengths of pipe and a few hundred feet of black plastic tubing, Lyle and Roddy had created a primitive but effective backyard solar system to provide warm water for the Great House bathrooms.

  Alison, though at first apprehensive about driving on the left, had familiarized herself with the plantation's two English vehicles and then alone, to test herself, had driven the Austin to Morant Bay to do some shopping.

  Eleven days had passed since Lyle's visit to Wilson Gap. Venetia Campbell had not shown up.

  And then one evening . . .

  They had just finished a late dinner produced by Ima and Alison in the upstairs kitchen. Red snapper from a youth who bought fresh-caught fish in the Bay and sold it from an ice-filled wooden box on a bicycle. Vegetables from Manny Traill's garden. Mangoes from Glencoe's own trees, for dessert.

  The twins had their heads bent over the Scrabble board again. Lyle and Alison sat on the veranda, quietly talking. Roddy, claiming to have eaten too much, had walked up the driveway to the road. Night had fallen. The Great House lights were on.

  Suddenly Roddy reappeared, shouting, at the edge of a lane of light from the veranda. "Dad! Mom! There's a big fire! Come up to the road and see it!"

  Lyle felt his heart miss a beat. "A fire on our place?"

  "No, no. But come on!"

  "You go, Lyle," Alison said. "So long as it's not something else for us to worry about."

  Lyle hurried up the driveway and joined his son at the top.

  The fire, he saw at once, was blessedly far away, beyond and to the right of Rainy Ridge. The sky there was an angry red shot through with swirling gray smoke.

  "What do you suppose it is, Dad?"

  "Who knows? Or even where it is. I suppose it could be something at Wilson Gap. The Gap is in that direction and about that far away. But there isn't much up there."

  "Should we sound the alarm?"

  Lyle shook his head. "If we do, men from Mango Gut will come running up here, and they're closer to Wilson Gap now than we are. Anyway, they can probably see that sky from where they live, so they know about it."

  "You mean there's nothing we can do?"

  Lyle was silent. Up there where he and Eric had gone to talk to Venetia Campbell, a house might be burning. But even now the crimson in the sky was fading, so in a short time whatever was ablaze would be only a bed of smoldering rubble. It was a sad business. A fire to such people must mean the end of everything, because there was no way they could fight it. With no water on the premises, one of life's daily chores for most of them was walking to some stream or standpipe for the little they could carry home in a bucket or two.

  The sky there was nearly dark now. With a slow shake of his head, Lyle laid a hand on Roddy's shoulder.

  "Come on, son. Let's go home."

  It was Manny Traill, arriving for work the next morning, who told Lyle what had burned. "It was a house at Wilson Gap, squire, that belong to an old Coolie woman. We did go up there, some of us, to see if we could able to help, but we nuh get there in time. The house gone. The woman and she granddaughter dead. The granddaughter used to work here for Mr. Elliot sometimes, picking coffee. She name Venetia Campbell."

  "Dead? Both of them?" Standingthere at the foot of the veranda steps, Lyle had to steady himself by clutching the railing. "And the child? The little girl?"

  Manny's eyes widened. "You know them people, squire?"

  "Yes. Tell me—is the little girl—"

  "The child all right. It seem she was in the shop down the road when the fire did break out. When me and the others did get there, she and the shopkeeper was in the yard, waiting for things to cool down so them could search for the two women. Some other Wilson Gap folk was standing around too, but the whole place hellish hot and nobody don't able to do nothing."

  "Were they—" Lyle had to get his voice under control and start over. "Did you stay and see the end of it, Manny?"

  "Yes, squire, me did. Them two was burned real bad. You couldn't hardly tell which was which."

  "What was done with them?"

  "The neighbors did wrap them in sheets for a buryin' today sometime. Them will be buried in them own yard, where some other graves already is."

  "And the little girl—Manny, where is she now?"

  "The shopkeeper did take her in."

  "Manny, how did the fire start? Does anyone know?"

  "Nobody know, squire. But the neighbors say the old lady was real careless with matches around the oil stove and did start a fire one time before. That time them was able to out it, but this time it seem them not so lucky."

  After telling Alison what he had learned, Lyle thought about it all through the morning. Should he go to Wilson Gap to see what he could do to help? He ought to, perhaps, even if Free was not the child's father . . . and since the mother had not come to Glencoe to press the paternity matter, that part of it probably could be dismissed now as nothing more than an attempt at extortion. But what could he do if he went there? As a stranger and white, would he even be welcome?

  Then about three in the afternoon, as he was returning his riding mule to her pen after an inspection of the fields, he saw the child herself coming down the Glencoe driveway, with the man Eric and he had spoken to at the shop.

  He hurried to meet them and impulsively reached for the child's hands. "Luari, I'm so sorry. What can I do to help you?"

  Those remarkable blue eyes stared up at him through a film of moisture, but Luari remained silent. Her companion said, "She mother always say this child ought to be living here at Glencoe because she daddy did own this place, Mr. Bennett. So me decide to bring her here to you."

  "To stay here, you mean?"

  "She don't have no other where to go, sir."

  Lyle found it difficult to think and knew this was not the time for him to attempt major decisions. "Please," he said, "come to the house." Alison would have to help him. He could not handle this alone.

  They followed him up the steps and into the drawing room, where he led them to the chairs in front of the fireplace. "I must find my wife," he told them. "Excuse me, please."

  He found Alison in the schoolroom. "Al, I need you. The little girl from Wilson Gap is here."

  She knew about the fire and the deaths, of course. After his talk with Manny in the morning, he had gone straight to her and told her. All she did now was nod, but her face wore a look of compassion as she turned from her books to follow him to the drawing room. Where, he wondered, were Roddy and the twins?

  "This is Mrs. Bennett," he said to the shop-man. "I'm sorry, but I don't know your name."

  The man had risen from his chair and, in that familiar peasant gesture, lifted a hand to a non-existent hat-brim. "Bignall, sir. Calvin Bignall."

  "Please, Mr. Bignall, tell my wife what you told me."

  "Yes, sir. Ma'am, the child say Venetia Campbell did tell she many times that she should be living here in this house because Mr. Elliot was she daddy." He spoke quietly, with his hands at his sides and no particular expression on his face. Then when invited to be seated again, he returned to his chair.

  Evidently he had come here not to make demands, Lyle decided, but only because the child had turned to him for help and he must either take her in himself or find someone else who would. At that moment Clifton came into the room, wide-eyed with
curiosity. A look from his mother stopped him before he could reach the fireplace, but there was a sofa handy so he simply collapsed onto it and sat there to watch and listen. "You have nowhere to go, Luari?" Alison asked. "No, ma'am, me don't."

  The youngster must be very tired, Alison thought. Her blue-denim dress was dark with perspiration stains, and those beautiful eyes had done a lot of crying. Her face was lovely, though, even with its lingering look of terror.

  "No relatives anywhere? Haven't you some aunts or uncles?"

  "Not that me know of."

  "Will there be a funeral, Mr. Bignall?"

  "Well, ma'am, there might be a preacher at the buryin' today. But the family don't never attend no church, so it not likely to be more than that. Me being as close to them as anybody, me expect to look about the nine-night."

  "I see." There was something about nine-nights or ninth-nights in one of the Jamaica books in the schoolroom, Alison recalled. That many days after a death or funeral, family and friends gathered to pay homage to the deceased. She would have to re-read it. Turning, she frowned at her husband. "Well, Lyle, what do you think? Can we let her stay with us until . . .?" Until when?

  Lyle said, "Is that what you would like to do, Luari? Stay with us?"

  "Yes, Mr. Bennett."

  "Well, then, we're happy to have you. Aren't we, Al?"

  Unaware that she was doing exactly what Lyle had done in the driveway, Alison went to the little girl and reached for her hands.

  "She can have the room next to the schoolroom," Lyle said. "The bed's a good one, and we can give her that extra chest-of-drawers in Roddy's room. You agree?"

  "I agree," Alison said.

  "Mr. Bignall, it was good of you to bring Luari here. Would you like something to eat before I drive you back to your shop?" "Me not hungry, sir, but me thank you."

  Again Lyle looked at Alison. "Can you set things up while I take him home, Al? The kids will help you—" He glanced at Cliff, still wide-eyed on the sofa, absorbing every word. “Won’t you, Cliff?"

  "You bet!" Their thirteen-year-old jumped up as if shot from a cannon. "Luari, come on! If you're going to be living here with us, you ought to know about this house. Let me show you around!"

  Two weeks had passed. Things were running smoothly at Glencoe. Lyle and Alison had attended the ninth-night for Venetia Campbell and her grandmother—an affair in shopkeeper Bignall's yard at which their neighbors stepped forward to praise them and hymns were sung before food and drink were served.

  At the Great House it was apparent—no, it was obvious— that the child with the bright blue eyes had become a prime object of the Bennett children's affection. Especially of Cliff's. The time had come, Alison suggested, to find out more about her.

  "Bring her to the hospital Monday morning, why don't you?" The speaker was Kim Tulloch's Dr. Tom Kirk, a large, bearded man with a booming voice, and the suggestion was made in his Morant Bay office on a Friday. Friday being payday, Lyle had driven down to the bank, and then called on the doctor for advice about a blood test.

  Monday morning he and Alison took Luari to the hospital. She had seemed only a little frightened—not enough to protest. "Wait," Tom Kirk boomed after drawing blood from the child's arm. "It won't take long for the lab to run this through."

  When he returned to them in the waiting room, he handed Lyle a slip of paper.

  "Here you are." This time the voice did not boom; it was carefully controlled and full of meaning. "She's Type A negative. Same as Freeland Elliot."

  BOOK TWO

  1954

  Devon.

  Like so many other Jamaican place names, this one was probably English in origin, Roddy decided. But the countryside with its undulating green hills could have been lifted right out of New England. Specifically, Vermont.

  The day was a Sunday in mid December, the road a two-lane blacktop. Now and then on either side appeared weathered wooden farmhouses, many with equally aged tanks for storing rainwater. Cattle roamed some of the gentle slopes. Others were planted to fat crops.

  "Most of our potatoes come from this part of the island," said the young lady seated beside Roddy on the front seat of his English Ford. All four in the car were students at the University College of the West Indies, founded in 1948 in the Kingston suburb of Mona. Roddy was now a senior, Heather McKenzie a sophomore.

  The car had been a gift to Roddy from his father, so that he could return to Glencoe weekends during the school year. And it was fun to go home, sure. Fun to see the plantation running so smoothly and producing some of the best coffee in the Blue Mountains—which meant, of course, some of the very best in the world. Dad was proud as punch of what he was accomplishing. Mom had become a bosom pal of old Kim Tulloch and was all over her misgivings. Young Cliff, now seventeen, was totally gaga over eleven-year-old Luari Campbell. And Lee, coming home weekends from the girls' school she attended, was forever bringing with her a nice-looking Haitian girlfriend who went to the same school. Yeah. It was exciting. But being with Heather McKenzie was more so.

  As the Ford purred through Devon now—and "purred' was the word because it was probably the best-cared-for machine in the island—a second machine followed. In that were three more U.C.W.I. students and a professor. The Underground, the eight called themselves. But not with any connotation of subversion. The name was to be taken literally. Jamaica was a land of caves, and these young people—the professor, too, was young—had formed a caving group.

  The smile Roddy directed at Heather McKenzie came from an inner glow that had begun when she slid onto the seat beside him that Sunday morning. For two years now he had been in love with her, though never sufficiently sure of himself to let her know how deeply. "Potatoes, huh?" he said in response to her remark. "You know something? I think I've always had a yen to be some kind of farmer. Maybe that's why I backed Dad when he decided to give up real estate and grow coffee."

  "And you haven't regretted it?" Heather, at nineteen, was two years younger than he, and at five-seven with soft brown hair, large brown eyes and full, soft lips was one of the prettiest women at the college. Forebears of hers had come to Jamaica from Scotland soon after England's General Robert Venables and Admiral William Penn, father of Pennsylvania's William, had driven the Spanish out in 1655.

  "Nope. I've never regretted it." How could I, Roddy thought, when my coming here to Jamaica brought you into my life?

  The car purred past a country shop and a small post office. "Hey, here's Devon," said one of the two young men in the rear. "Devon, heaven. How about one for the archives, Heather?" Snatching a pencil and a small notebook from his shirt pocket, he held them poised.

  Heather's lovely face took on an expression of deep thought. "What's the matter?" Roddy teased. "Devon got you stumped?"

  "Quiet, please." Then she laughed. "How about this?

  An active young lady from Devon

  Decided she'd not get to heaven,

  Because when in heat

  She became indiscreet

  And bedded not one man but seven."

  They shook the car with their laughter. It was a game they played, creatingnaughtylimericks out of Jamaican place names.

  And what marvelous names some of them were, Roddy thought.

  Maggotty. Harmony Vale. Crooked River. Wait-A-Bit. Harry Watch. The list was endless.

  But they were nearing their destination now. Last week, on a ruinate potato farm on this central Jamaica road so near the untamed Cockpit Country, a youngster named Eddie Jarrett had been hunting birds with a slingshot. One of his targets, a goldfinch, when hit had fluttered from its tree-limb perch into a patch of the thorny scrub called wait-a-bit, and the boy had been hungry enough to brave the thorns in search of it. Presto—another cave to be added to the list.

  Jamaica's caves. How they cried out for a book about them, Roddy thought. Already more than two hundred were known to exist, and that number could easily double. Arawaks had been using caves here when Columbus, in 1494, on
his second voyage to the New World, first set foot on "Xaymaca." The Spanish had taken refuge in them when the English invaded. Runaway slaves had hidden in them. During the Second World War, Geological Survey Department teams had searched some for bat guano to alleviate a shortage of commercial fertilizers. Now the spelunkers from the college . . .

  "That could be the boy's house," said the limerick lady at Roddy's side. "It fits the description."

  The bird hunter had reported his discovery at home to his older brother, and the brother had mentioned it in the Devon shop wherehe worked. The shopkeeper had talked about it when buying goods from a wholesaler in Christiana who had a son at U.C.W.I. Thus had word of the cave's existence reached Professor Fitzroy Dalby, now driving the car behind Roddy's.

  Roddy turned his car into the yard. The other followed. Piling out, the spelunkers exploded into talk like a string of firecrackers touched with a match. With a wave of his hand Professor Dalby, twenty-eight and willow thin, strode through brilliant sunlight to the house door and rapped it with his knuckles.

  A barefoot boy of eleven or so opened it.

  "Good morning. Are you Eddie Jarrett?"

  The lad nodded.

  "It was you who found the cave?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then your father is expecting us. That is, if he got our letter, and I certainly hope he did. We're from the university, to see what your cave looks like."

  "It don't belong to we," the boy said. "It on the old Murchison place."

  "I understand that. But may I speak to your father, please?" The boy shrugged. "Him don't here. Him say me must take you there."

  Dalby looked the lad over and frowned. "Is it far? I mean, do we walk or should we take the cars? Our gear is in the cars."

  "Wecan walk." He pointed. "It only over there, the other side of the field."

  "Fine."

  With the boy and the professor in the lead, the group set out across the field. All but Eddie Jarrett carried caving gear—hard hats, lamps, ropes, rope ladders—some of it recently acquired as war-surplus equipment. When there was money enough, Dalby had promised, the ladders would be replaced with safer ones made of lightweight wire cable, with rungs of aluminum.