by Cave, Hugh
"All right. This is a quote, though the article doesn't say what the occasion was. 'The most frequent charge leveled at us is the old bogey that the government is going Communist,' he said. 'The record of this government gives the lie to these unfounded charges. It is a weapon used by those who are bent on spreading fear and paralyzing our nation. We dismiss these charges as cheap attempts to undermine this government's efforts to create a society guided by the principles of democratic socialism, which we publicly enunciated in 1974, and to which we are irrevocably committed.'"
Cliff handed the newspaper page back.
"I wonder how many believe him," Alison said. "What do you think, Lyle?"
"The U.S. Embassy alone has a backlog of some 28,000 people wanting visas," Lyle said with a shake of his head. "They may not be able to take more than fifty dollars of their life savings with them, but they want out. Some are shipping their furniture and jewelry to the States and selling them there for enough to tide them over till they can find work. I'm talking about wealthy people, mind you—about merchants, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, not only the poor. At the same time, inflation is thirty per cent a year here now and the unemployment rate is more than twenty, the hotels are less than half full, and crime is so rampant that our Embassy people have warned their women not to go out alone at night in Kingston."
"And don't forget the income tax," Alison said wearily.
"Earn only $12,500 a year and you're in the top sixty per cent bracket. At the same time, the price of everything is going right through the roof."
"Jamaican things, you mean?" Lyle frowned.
"Yes, Jamaican things. Especially food. Actually, with the country so deep in debt and foreign exchange in such a mess, most of the usual foreign items just aren't being imported anymore."
There was another long silence.
"So, then, what do we do?" Lyle asked. "That's why I called this meeting—to decide what we ought to do."
"I don't see that we have a choice," Alison said.
"Of course we have a choice, Al. We can stay and hope for a change, or we can sell out and go back to the States."
"Go back on what?"
Lyle let his gaze drift from one anxious face to another. Then with a faint smile he said, "We have enough in the States to get by on. I never did close our old account in Rhode Island, you know, and until the government clamped down on foreign exchange here, I sent money to it regularly. But if we give up Glencoe—"
"What will happen to our workers?" Cliff finished for him.
"Exactly. Because with profits being taxed out of existence, who would buy the place to keep it going, even if we sold it for half what it's worth?"
"I vote for staying," Alison said. "Here in the mountains we don't feel the full impact of what's happening. At least we don't have the violence. We can stick it out and hope for a change. Also—" She turned on her chair to look toward the hall.
"Also what?" Lyle asked.
"There's Kim. We couldn't take her with us; even standing in line at the Embassy to apply for a visa would kill her. And she's sold her old place in Trinity Ville. So what would become of her?"
"You want to stay, then. Cliff? Luari? You agree?" In unison the two cried, "Yes!"
"Then it's settled," Lyle said. "We stay and carry on." With an effort he pushed himself to his feet. "Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll take myself back to bed."
The others remained seated. When the shuffling sound of Lyle's slippers had died away in the hall and the door of his room had clicked shut behind him, Alison looked at her son and his wife.
"That's another reason we have to stay, you know," she said, in a voice so soft they had to lean forward to hear her. "He could never stand a move back to the States and starting a new life there.”
Neither answered. They only stared at her, watching the tears build up in her eyes.
"Only sixty-seven," Alison said, "and he's not going to get better. You realize that, don't you? He's not going to get better this time. Oh, God, how I wish cigarettes had never been invented."
Late the following afternoon Luari went alone to her garden. It had been a typical Glencoe day, all aglitter with sunshine, the air clean and crisp, birds singing in the trees and shrubs around the Great House. Lyle was in bed. Cliff had disappeared an hour before, on the third Glencoe mule to be named Mary, to check a weeding job in one of the coffee fields. Alison had driven to the Bay to do some shopping. Beryl was in the kitchen, cleaning some herring sprats she had bought from a man who brought them packed in ice on his motorbike. Kim Tulloch, when last seen, had been in her room, reading.
The garden in which Luari now picked flowers was her own; no yard man touched it. She had forked it up, manured it, selected the seeds, planted them, and carefully tended what came up. Now as she went down the slope below the Great House to the little Glencoe graveyard, she carried in both hands a bouquet of multicolored African Daisies and blue Lilies of the Nile, so big that she had to put it down before she could open the gate in the bamboo fence.
Inside the fence, she went to Imogene Bailey's grave and placed the bouquet in a Roman vase she herself had made, years before, out of clay found near the river. Then she stepped back and sang one of the songs she had sung at Ima's Ninth Night.
And though she sang it softly, intending it to be solely for the woman who had been buried there eleven years now to the day, her voice carried far enough to be heard by Kim Tulloch, who was no longer in her room with a book but was sitting above on the Great House veranda.
The song finished, Luari stood there by the headstone for a few moments, hands clasped and head bowed in silent prayer. Then she turned and went slowly back up the slope. As she did so, the sun sank from sight and darkness flowed down over the house and yard—with somewhat startling abruptness, as it always did here in the mountains—and the power plant began its usual throbbing to provide light. The light at the top of the veranda steps glowed yellow and slowly brightened as Luari climbed them.
At the top of the steps old Kim Tulloch was waiting with outstretched hands and a smile that overrode the many wrinkles on that 108-year-old face.
"So you're the one!" Kim cried. Though the words came out in a whisper, they still vibrated with excitement. "You are the Caribbean Solitaire! My very own Luari!"
Luari clasped the outthrust hands and held them. "Shh!" she said. "Someone might hear you."
"I suspected all along," Kim declared. "Yes, I did. When I heard that very first record, I suspected. But it wasn't until I heard you again just now, singing that particular song, that I could be sure. But good heavens, child, why don't you tell the world who you are? Everyone loves you!"
"Come sit down, and I'll explain."
They went along the veranda together, Luari walking slowly because the old lady had to take very short steps now. They sat, and Luari explained why the identity of the Caribbean Solitaire had been kept a secret. "And then when people cared enough to ask who she was, Terry Connor said we should keep it a secret because the mystery was helping to sell the records."
"Terry Connor?" Kim said. Her memory was not good any more.
"You know. He helped Mother plant the pine trees. His brother owns the company that does my records."
"Ah, yes. And he was in love with you. I remember now."
"Don't be silly. He wasn't in love with me. He was just interested in my singing."
"That's what you think," Kim said. "Where is he now? He hasn't been here in a long time, has he?"
"Oh, he's still with the Forestry people."
"But doesn't come around here anymore, eh? Because he could see how much you and Cliff love each other and finally realized he was wasting his time." Kim Tulloch lifted one of Luari's hands to her lips. "Walk me back to my room, will you, dear? I get tired so quickly now. Must be getting old, eh?" Luari walked her to her room and helped her into bed. Even before the younger woman reached the door, the old lady was asleep. Kim never woke up.
2
There had been a family deliberation in Jamaica. Now there was to be one in Haiti. One November weekend in that year of 1976, Carey and Lee drove to Le Refuge with their two girls to discuss the country's future, and their own, with Roddy and Olive.
The four adults talked Sunday evening in the Bennetts' suite after the children, exhausted by a day of romping at the hotel beach, were asleep in bed.
"How are things in the city?" Roddy asked.
Carey shrugged. "People have a name now for those black limos. Macoutemobiles. That should tell you something."
"We hear some grisly stories from some of our guests," Olive said.
"Such as?"
"How the Tontons bang on doors in the middle of the night and drag people off to Casernes Dessalines or Fort Dimanche. How innocent people are tortured just because they've dared to express an opinion. Can such things really be going on in a country that was once so—so innocent?"
Carey's laugh was sardonic. "This country was never all that innocent, Olive."
"What do you mean?"
"In the beginning slaves were beaten, even killed, for the smallest infraction of the rules. During the war for independence Napoleon's Rochambeau butchered every Black he could get his hands on. Then after the slaves won that war, Haiti's Dessalines retaliated by luring French colonists out of hiding with false promises and having them cold-bloodedly slaughtered down to the last woman and child." Carey paused and shook his head. "Later, Dessalines himself was ambushed and murdered by his own people. In building his mountaintop Citadelle, Christophe caused the deaths of twenty to thirty thousand of his countrymen, and then killed himself. Another Haitian president fled from his people to a foreign embassy only to be dragged out and torn to pieces by them. No, there's never been much innocence here."
"What really happens at Fort Dimanche?" Roddy asked.
"God knows. But if even half the stories are true, the place must be a living hell."
"What is Fort Dimanche?" Olive asked. "People toss the name around as if we're all supposed to know everything about it."
"Fort Sunday is a prison," Carey said.
"You mean the National Penitentiary?"
He shook his head. "If you're locked up in the National Pen, you can hope to get out again. That's for ordinary offenders. Dimanche is more a political Inquisition, a torture house."
"Then why doesn't someone tell the world about it?"
"Well, a patient of mine, an elite who hates everything Baby Doc stands for, told me last week that someone has reported the atrocities here to Amnesty International. I don't know how true it may be."
"It's true," Lee said firmly.
Carey looked at her and shrugged. "How can you be sure?"
"Because the government recently released some political prisoners. Over a hundred, in fact. And you can be sure they did it for only one reason: they're afraid those reports to Amnesty got to the States, and they don't want to lose American aid."
The talk went on. Roddy broke out a bottle of Five Star Barbancourt. Olive made Blue Mountain coffee with beans brought from Glencoe. By midnight everything that had happened in Haiti under the Duvaliers had been discussed, re-discussed, and discussed again.
They had talked about the Duvaliers' private lives, insofar as anyone could separate truth from ugly rumor on that subject. About the influence of voodoo on those lives. About the known beatings and murders and the many mysterious disappearances of those who had dared to speak out against the regime. About the Tonton Macoutes' reign of terror, not all of it politically motivated. Then for hours they struggled to decide on a course of action.
In the end the only thing they could agree on was that it was too soon to make such a decision. "Olive and I feel reasonably safe here at Le Refuge," Roddy said wearily. "Oh, I know we had that trouble with the Macoutes when four of them were drunk here a while back, but nothing of that sort has happened since. And we like it here. We're doing well with the place."
"I suppose Lee and I feel pretty much the same," Carey said. "One of two things seems to happen to you when you stay in this country long enough. Either you come to hate it or you develop an abiding love for the real people of Haiti and feel compelled to beat your brains out trying to help them. Right, Lee?"
Lee had closed her eyes and did not respond.
"Lee?"
She opened them. "What? Oh, yes. Sorry . . . I was thinking about Virgie."
"You were what?" Olive asked with a frown.
"Thinking about our daughter, Virgilie. And that man in her village, that bastard Chef de Section, who believed he was God." She sat up straighter. "You know something? When you really focus on it, that little mountain village was the whole of Haiti in miniature. Yes. It was."
BOOK EIGHT
1980
From the veranda of Montego Bay's Canterbury Inn one could see the sea on a clear day—and, of course, most days in Jamaica's renowned north-coast resort were clear. The guest house itself was now eleven years old. Hopeton Whyte and his wife, the former Heather McKenzie, had owned it for eight of those years. Heather ran it. Her husband was a Montego Bay solicitor more interested in the island's politics than in catering to the whims of tourists.
On the Canterbury's veranda this October afternoon, Roddy's former girlfriend glanced at her watch and said with a frown, "I do wish you weren't going tonight, dear. I've been hearing all week long that it might be dangerous."
Hopeton eased himself out of the chair in which he had been slouched. At forty-seven he was two years older than Heather, but looked younger. During the nineteen years of their marriage Heather had lost the exuberance that had prompted her to make up ribald limericks when on expeditions with the caving club; in fact, she had lost that when she lost Roddy Bennett. Hopeton on the other hand, having been blessed with wealthy parents, and having applied himself to life only hard enough to become a solicitor who felt no urge to work very hard at his calling, looked as though he might still be in college. He and Heather had no children.
"Now, Heather, how can it be dangerous?" he said in response to his wife's plea. "It's a simple pre-election rally, and the only ones on hand to hear Eddie speak will be his own supporters."
"You hope."
"What do you mean, I hope?"
Heather leaned back on her chair and looked at him. She still had good legs and a trim figure. The aging had taken place mostly in her face, which so often betrayed an inner sadness now, and in her large, brown eyes, which had lost some of their life.
"Will it really make such a difference if your beloved JLP comes into power?" she said. For some reason she had not been able to work up much excitement about the forthcoming election. Despite all the oratory—and the increasing violence—she failed to see how it could affect her personal future very much. Perhaps she was just bored with life in general.
"A difference?" Hopeton stood with his hands on his hips, his head thrust forward like that of a turtle. An attractive turtle, of course. He was in fact every bit as handsome as the Michael Manley he so passionately wished to see defeated. "A difference? My God, Heather, how can you ask such a question? The country is in debt to the tune of five hundred million dollars and crawling to Libya's Qaddafi, of all people, for a loan." He plucked a handful of papers from his jacket pocket and waved them at her. "Look. We're just an island in the Caribbean, but all the big U.S. papers are doing stories about us. Here's a piece in the Christian Science Monitor about the food riots. Here's one in the New York Times about the problems we're having because so many professionals have packed up and left. You and I don't need an American paper to tell us about that hassle. If either of us got sick right now, with Doc Bamber one of those gone, we wouldn't know who in hell to call on."
"Why are you carrying those around with you?" Heather asked.
"What?"
"Those clippings."
"I'm giving them to Arthur tonight. Thought he might want to have copies made to hand out at some of our rallies."
He
ather gestured helplessly. "But even if Mr. Seaga wins, will he be able to change anything?"
"If the people get behind him, he will. And they'll do that; don't ever doubt it. Have you forgotten the huge crowd that turned out in Kingston last October when he called a meeting at Busta's statue? It was the biggest in thirty years, by God! A hundred thousand people—the police even admitted there were eighty thousand—and half of them carrying placards attacking Manley, the Cubans, and the Communists."
Heather gazed at him in silence, unwilling to waste her energy in protests. It was frightening, she thought, the way her countrymen so violently took sides in these pre-election political wars. Last week she had visited her parents in Kingston, because Mother had written to say that Daddy might not have much longer to live. Well, perhaps his diabetes might be killing him—for years now he'd been fighting it—but he'd been well enough to sit there like a tin Caesar in his study, where her dream of a life with Roddy Bennett had been shattered, and pontificate on politics for nearly an hour.
It was confusing, having a father on one side and a husband on the other. Not that she respected Daddy's opinions any more. After his calling her a common slut in the confrontation over Roddy, she had never felt anything but bitterness toward him. But how he did go on about his beloved Prime Minister! And how he did revile the Gleaner columnists who dared to disagree with him!
"Look here," Hopeton said.
She had almost forgotten he was leaning there against the railing. When she glanced up at him, he opened a folded newspaper page and thrust it at her.
"Here's something else I think we ought to reproduce and hand out to the voters," he said. "It's from the Miami Herald."
Heather frowned at a page of photos taken some months before when Jamaica's Prime Minister had gone to Miami to address a conference on the Caribbean. Jamaicans and anti-Castro Cubans, it seemed, had walked about in front of the conference hotel, waving signs. She could hardly believe what was on some of the signs. "But this is awful," she said, handing the paper back. "After all, he is our Prime Minister."
