Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  Somewhere in this house, at this very moment, was a booklet called Catechism of a Revolution, published by the government printery, that contained Papa Doc's own ghastly parody of the Lord's Prayer. Carey had brought it home from the hospital one day and silently handed it to her. Though she had read it only once, then put it away for its possible value as a historical document, she still shuddered when she remembered it.

  "Our Doc, who are in the National Palace, hallowed be Thy name in the present and future generations. Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the anti-patriots who spit every day on our country. Let them succumb to temptation, and under the weight of their venom, deliver them not from any evil."

  But the reign of terror had to end sometime, didn't it?

  Even with another Duvalier waiting to step into the National Palace when this one died? Anyway, if they had to give up here and go to the States, Virgilie would be happy there. Of course she would.

  "Carey?"

  Her husband had risen to his feet and stepped to the veranda railing as the two girls approached the house. Preoccupied, he said absently, "Yes, love?"

  "She needs to know she belongs to someone. Her mother abandoned her. Her aunt doesn't want her—not enough, anyway, to leave Malrouge and move to some place where Virgie can have a normal life. What do you say?"

  He turned then. Whenever he looked at her that way, with one eyelid drooping a little, she knew he was trying to get inside her mind. Usually he managed to do so, too. In the eight years they had been man and wife, they had come to think alike about so many things.

  "You really want to adopt her, don’t you?” he said gently.

  "Yes, Carey, I do. Because I love her.”

  He came to her. With his hands on her shoulders he smiled down at her upturned face. "All right, darling. I love her, too, and I'm sure she loves us. So let's do it."

  The two children had reached the house. Lee heard the housekeeper, Tina, talking to them downstairs. A moment later Carita and the girl from Malrouge burst onto the veranda, both chattering at once about their adventures in the market.

  When the babble had died down a bit, Lee reached for the Haitian child and drew her close. "Virgie, I want to ask you something." She spoke in Creole, of course. As yet, Virgilie knew only a few words of English.

  "Yes, Mrs. Aldred?"

  "Doctor and I have been talking about what's to become of you. Wewere planning to find a good home for you, as you know. But how would you like to be our daughter? I mean our real daughter, with Carita your sister."

  Gazing at her in awe, the child replied in a whisper that was barely audible. "Oh, I would like that, Mrs. Aldred! I would like that very much! I have prayed it might happen!"

  "Good." Lee all but smothered her in a hug, and then held her at arm's length. "So from now on, young lady, you may call me Mother or Mama or Mom, whichever strikes your fancy, and"—with a typical Lee Bennett grin she turned the child to face Carey—"you may call this handsome gentleman Daddy or Dad. And at the very first opportunity, he and I will go to Port-au-Prince and make it all nice and legal."

  "You mean Virgie is going to be my sister?" Carita asked, wide-eyed.

  "That's right. Virgie is going to be your sister."

  Their younger daughter voiced a shriek of delight so piercing that people in the street below stopped in their tracks and looked up. It was, Lee later remarked to La Petite Directrice, as though the scene were part of a travel movie and the film froze.

  4

  "You turn off the coastal highway just after Bull Bay," Dr. Kirk had directed. "That's the road that runs by Cane River Falls. You've been to the falls, haven't you?"

  "Once, a few years ago," Alison had said.

  "So just keep on straight ahead, and that road will take you where you want to go. It's up near the university."

  Where they wanted to go was the place to which Imogene Bailey, their beloved Ima, had been moved from Kingston Public Hospital the week before.

  Lyle was driving this morning. As they passed the marked entrance to Cane River Falls, Alison broke a long silence. "That was one of Three-finger Jack's hiding places."

  "Who?"

  "Three-finger Jack Mansong."

  "Tell me about him." Even an old story would be better than more miles of silence, Lyle thought. Both of them knew that Ima's move from the Kingston hospital was ominously significant. He had been able to think of nothing else since leaving Glencoe.

  Alison glanced at him in surprise, knowing he had heard the story of Three-finger Jack before. Why did he want to hear it again? To relieve the heartbreak that was so relentlessly building up in both of them? Well, she could talk, though it mightnot do any good. For fifteen years now, Ima had been like one of the family.

  "Where he came from is open to dispute," she said, aware that she probably sounded a lot like Kim Tulloch. "According to one story, his mother was pregnant when she was sold to a slaver in Africa, and Jack was born here in Maroon Town on the property of a man named Mornton. He was taller than the average African, and enormously strong."

  She glanced at Lyle again. He almost never took his gaze off the road when driving, but his nod told her that he wanted her to continue.

  "At Mornton'splace Jack tried to talk his fellow slaves into revolting, but the plot was exposed and he was seized. The penalty for such plotting was death. He killed his guards and escaped. His first hideout was a cave near Mount Lebanus."

  Lyle nodded again. "Our Mount Lebanus, near Trinity Ville. I remember that. Cliff once urged me to go with him to look for the place."

  And you said you'd go the following day, which was a Sunday, Alison thought, but began drinking that morning and weren't able to. "Anyway," she said, "Jack was a daring and dreaded outlaw who simply would not be captured. He raided plantations. He killed every man who got in his way. Among the island's Negroes the belief grew that he bore a charmed life."

  "Obeah, you mean."

  "Yes. He carried an obeah charm obtained from a powerful sorcerer in the Mount Lebanus region. A Dr. Benjamin Moseley acquired the charm after Jack's death and described it in a book he wrote. He said it contained a piece of goat's horn, some grave dirt, ashes, the blood of a black cat, and human fat, all mixed up into a kind of paste. Also a cat's foot, a dried toad, a pig's tail, and a piece of dried kid's-skin with magic characters marked on it."

  "How could he know the fat was human?"

  The schoolteacher in Alison was in full gallop by now. "That's what Kim said. And how could he have known the blood was from a cat? A black cat, at that? Anyway, Three-finger Jack had this obeah charm, or obeah bag as it was called, and the Negroes were scared to death of it. Despite the governor's offer of a hundred pounds for his capture, only one man really went after him. That was a Maroon named Quashie, evidently a very brave fellow."

  "But if he was a Maroon, he must have been a black man. Maroons themselves were escaped slaves."

  "A governor had made peace with them by then. Too many English soldiers had been ambushed trying to recapture them, and he realized they could hold out indefinitely in the mountains and the Cockpit country. Besides, new slaves were always escaping and joining them. So there was a treaty in effect." Alison could not help smiling. "Can you imagine that? —a treaty between mighty England and a handful of runaway slaves? It should tell you something about the kind of people our Ima is descended from."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, think about it. Those untamed Negroes had come from Africa in slave ships. They had escaped from bondage here, made themselves masters of the wildest parts of a wild island, and resisted every effort by trained soldiers to rout them out. What weapons they had were stolen. They lived like animals. Yet though only two thousand or so strong, they forced a powerful nation to grant them their freedom some fifty years before the slaves of Haiti rose in revolt to win theirs."

  Lyle briefly glanced at her, and t
hen concentrated on the unpaved road again.

  "Under the terms of the treaty, lands in the Cockpit and the Blue and John Crow Mountains—lands the Maroons had defended so tenaciously—were given them for their own," Alison went on. "They were to pay no taxes. They could elect their own leaders. In return, they agreed to harbor no more escaped slaves and to assist the settlers in tracking down any who entered their territories. I don't suppose they're to be admired for that, but even in Africa, remember, the Negroes were selling their own kind into slavery for a price. It was Africans, not white traders, who raided native villages for the human cargo carried in the slave ships."

  "So what about Three-finger Jack and Quashie?"

  "Well, as I said, Quashie was one of the Maroons hired to run Jack to ground. He came upon Jack in the mountains one day and tried to capture him. There was a terrible fight. The Maroon nearly lost his life, and Jack did lose a pair of fingers to Quashie's cutlass."

  "Jack always worked alone?" Lyle asked.

  "Always. Dr. Moseley says he robbed alone, fought his battles alone, and killed everyone who tried to capture him. From his cave near Mount Lebanus he ranged through the whole eastern end of the island, and one of his hideouts was the place we just passed."

  "If his pursuers were reluctant to follow him there, I don't blame them," Lyle said with a grimace.

  Alison nodded, remembering their one-time visit to the place. Cliff and Lee, unmarried then, had accompanied them. Descending from the road by a steep footpath, they had found themselves in a gorge whose walls rose sheer above them for some two hundred feet. Through it the Cane River tumbled over enormous boulders. She had felt, she remembered, that a loud shout in that place might bring the walls tumbling down, because in places they consisted of boulders weighing hundreds of tons, balanced one atop another. At the upper end of the gorge, the river thundered down into it in a glittering zigzag.

  "Anyway," she went on, eager to keep Lyle's mind and her own off what they might find at the end of their journey, "the Cane River Gorge was only one of Three-finger Jack's redoubts, but it was too close to Kingston for comfort. So in January, 1781, the reward for his capture was upped to three hundred pounds—a lot of money on those days—and freedom was promised any slave who might capture or kill him. Quashie, the Maroon responsible for Jack's nickname, wanted that reward and went after him again. He had an unholy dread of Jack's obeah charm, though, so before risking another face-to-face encounter he had himself baptized and changed his name to James Reeder."

  Alison leaned back and shut her eyes, remembering how she had written the Three-finger Jack story in what she called her Jamaica Notebook, thinking she might someday want to use it for something. "Quashie was not alone when he cornered the outlaw the second time. He had two companions: a man named Sam and a youngster who, accordingto Dr. Moseley, was a good shot. They followed Jack's trail to his cave in Mount Lebanus and took him by surprise. A bullet broke his shoulder and he fled down the mountainside with Quashie after him.

  "When Quashie caught up with him, both men were armed only with cutlasses. Quashie had lost his gun or thrown it away because there was no time to reload. They fought as they had fought before, but this time on a ledge part way down a cliff with Sam circling down to lend a hand and the boy trying to get in a shot from above. The shot when fired hit the mark and tumbled Jack to a still lower ledge. Again Quashie dived after him, both men losing their cutlasses in the fall. But even without a weapon—even with a shoulder broken and a bullet in his stomach—the big fellow had Quashie down and was strangling him when Sam came up from behind and finished the affair with a stone."

  Alison opened her eyes. "Well . . . when they had thoroughly beaten out his brains, Quashie and the others lopped off Jack's head and that telltale three-fingered hand and carried their trophies to Morant Bay—probably over the same road we travel at least once a week when we go to the Bay from Glencoe, although it must have been only a carriage road then. Eventually, in a pail of rum to preserve them, the head and hand of Three-finger Jack were delivered to the authorities in Spanish Town."

  "And then there was a folk song," Lyle said. "No fear Jack's obeah bag; Ouashie knock him down, oh! I've heard Luari sing it."

  "Yes. But it didn't end with only a folk song. When Dr. Moseley's account of Jack's career appeared in London, Jack became famous. Moseley's tale was followed by a whole lot of melodramatic stage plays in which fact went right out the window. Before long Jack wasn't a killer run to ground anymore, but a Negro nemesis who had sacrificed his all for vengeance upon wicked whites. Whites who plundered African villages and dragged their occupants off to slavery."

  "Which, of course, never happened," Lyle said. "Because white slavers almost invariably bought their cargoes from equally dark Africans who were greedily eager to sell them."

  "Also, the playwrights who promoted Jack to sainthood conveniently overlooked the fact that the men who finally ran him to ground, and those in the procession that carried his head to Spanish Town, were as black as he." Alison shook her head. "But the melodramas did have some value. They shocked thousandsof Britons into crying out for an end to slavery and—"

  "Al, I think we're here," Lyle interrupted.

  The white, one-story, stuccoed structure on their right seemed a bit out of place on a dirt road, but was not a large one. Lyle turned the car into the driveway and for a moment they sat in silence, neither of them eager to get out. Then Alison reached across to touch Lyle's hand and opened her door.

  A nurse in uniform greeted them. "Imogene Bailey? Yes, you may see her. Please come." She led them across the office or reception room—whatever it was called—into a much larger, white-walled room that was full of beds. On one of the beds Ima lay facing them with her eyes shut as they approached. Not until the nurse touched her on the shoulder did she open her eyes. Then they opened wide.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Bennett!" Obviously it was meant to be a cry of happiness, but it came out a hoarse whisper.

  "Ima, dear." Alison bent over and kissed her on the cheek while Lyle reached for her hand. The nurse brought two chairs for them, and then left. Glancing about the room as she sat down, Alison could have wept. Apparently they lived in a world of their own, these people. Not one seemed to care in the least that Ima Bailey had visitors this morning. Only two or three even had their eyes open. The others, some lying in contorted positions with a leg outside the bedclothes or an arm dangling to the floor—or both—might have been dead. Pervading the room was an odor that was not from food or medicine.

  "How are you feeling, Ima?"

  "Not so good, Mum. My leg hurt all the time."

  "But they give you something for the pain, don't they?"

  "Yes, Mum. But it hurt all the same." Ima's long fingers found Alison's hand and curled around it. "But you is—you are not to talk about me, Mum. You must tell me about Cliff and Luari and Lee and her doctor and"—she seemed to have trouble remembering—"and Roddy and his wife."

  It was always the same. For nearly two months Ima had been in the Kingston Public Hospital, and every two weeks Alison had visited her with either Lyle or Cliff, and on each occasion she had asked the same questions. After living for fifteen years at the Great House, she obviously looked upon the Bennetts as her family. While she and Alison talked this time, Lyle excused himself on the pretext of stretching his legs. He badly wanted a cigarette and vaguely wondered if there might be a smoking room here. There wouldn't be, he decided. As he walked about the ward, what he saw burned itself into his mind and was to live there forever.

  When he returned to the two women and sat again, Ima surprised him.

  "Mr. Bennett—" Those large brown eyes, sadly no longer bright, all but commanded him to pay attention. "Mr. Bennett, as much as four people in this room have cancer in their lungs, and you see how sick everyone is? You must have to—you must stop smoking, Mr. Bennett!"

  Feeling compelled to return her gaze, Lyle slowly moved his head up and down. "I know, Ima."
/>
  "Because this is not a place you want to be, Mr. Bennett. Believe me."

  "I know. And I'll stop, Ima. I promise."

  "Mr. Bennett, can I ask you a favor?" she said then.

  "Of course."

  "If I die, can I be buried next to Medwin, please?"

  Medwin, he thought. The man she had married. She man who had died saving her when their house burned down, soon afterward. The man she had been faithful to ever since. "Of course, Ima. But you're not going to die."

  "Yes, I am." Ima said it calmly, still gazing at him. "That is why they brought me here—because they know I will not get well again. But it all right. I ready. Just if you will have me put next to Medwin. You will see to that, won't you, please? Both of you?" The pleading eyes transferred their gaze to Alison.

  Alison said with a frown, "You told me you buried your husband in Mango Gut, I believe. On the half acre of land where your house was?"

  "Yes, Mum."

  "You planned to rebuild the house but hadn't the money and in the end were forced to sell the property. I think that's what you said."

  "Yes, Mum." Ima's hand was clutching hers again, fiercely. "But Isaac Lowe, who I sold it to, must have.to let me be buried there with Medwin! He must!"

  "Of course, dear. And we'll talk to him about it. But you're not going to die, Ima. You're going to get better."

  "Look," Ima said then, and, with an effort, moved the top sheet enough to let them see her leg.

  Alison felt herself go cold all over. Lyle had to steel himself not to cry out.

  "You see?" Ima said. "But never mind. I will be with Medwin again."

  Yes, Alison thought, you will be with Medwin again. I believe it.

  The nurse had reappeared. Or was it another one? Through her tears, Alison could not be sure. It was time for Ima's medicine, the woman told them. They must leave.

  "Thank you for coming," Ima said, and somehow managed to smile at them as she clutched their hands. It was only a trembling ghost of the old big smile, but it was there.