Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  "It's time you faced a few facts," Hopeton said. "You and your father, both. Time you opened your eyes to what's going on here." Refolding the page, he returned it to his pocket, then bent over her chair and touched his lips to hers. "Well, I'm gone."

  "What time do you think you'll be home?"

  He shrugged. "You know how these things are. If the crowd gets worked up, it could go on and on."

  She watched him lope down the veranda steps and across the blacktopped parking area at the side of the inn. Beyond the parked cars, four of their guests were using the tennis courts, and she had better put the lights on for them. Others were just returning from an afternoon at Doctors Cave Beach. The yard man was sweeping the driveway clean of red and gold almond leaves that had come down in a brisk little squall a while ago.

  As Hopeton's car disappeared, she tried to analyze her feelings about him. She worried, of course, when he went to these political gatherings. Emotions ran high, and almost every day now the Gleaner's front page told of some new violence. How could a huge country like the United States hold peaceful elections when those in this tiny country so often turned brother against brother?

  But there was nothing she could do about it, was there? Hopeton had been attending meetings for weeks now and would go right on doing so until October thirtieth when, thank God, the election would put an end to this political warfare and she could go back to worrying about more commonplace things.

  Such as . . . well . . . how long could a forty-five year old woman go on hating a dying father and pretending to love an unloved husband without becoming a little crazy? And when, dear God, would she ever stop longing for a return to those wonderful days when she and Roddy Bennett and their University friends had piled into cars every weekend and gone tearing off to explore a cave somewhere?

  As he drove east along the coastal highway Hopeton, too, asked himself some questions, but they had to do with his plans for the evening, not with the problems of his marriage. In fact, he was not aware that he had any marital problems. He had an attractive wife to show off at the various functions he attended, political and otherwise. She ran the Canterbury in such a way that it earned a tidy sum for them while demanding only a pittance of his time and attention. On those rare occasions when he felt like a romp in the hay, she seldom denied him his rights.

  All in all, he had quite a good life. Being a solicitor allowed him to work as long or as little as he wished. When in the mood he could enjoy a round of golf or go to the beach or do a bit of sport-fishing. Or, as he was doing this evening, dabble a bit in politics for the pleasant feeling of importance it gave him. Too much work and too little play had turned some of his colleagues into crashing bores, and who, for God's sake, wanted to be thought boring?

  Darkness came down as he drove, but he knew the road well and felt no need to slow down. His Mercedes was a good car for the island's highways, he reflected: expensive enough to make a point, yet not one of those needlessly long monsters that were so hard to manage on curves. He reached out to turn the radio on, and RJR was playing a record by the mysterious singer all Jamaica was talking about: The Caribbean Solitaire.

  "Judy drown-ded, Judy drown-ded," she sang in that remarkable, bell-clear voice of hers. "Woy-oh, Judy drown-ded."

  It was an old Jamaican lament about a young girl who had been swept away in a flash flood while washing her clothes at a river, and hearing it sung the way Solitaire sang it made one want to cry real tears.

  The Caribbean Solitaire. She was nearly as famous now asreggae-man Bob Marley, who, being a Rastafarian, had somehow managed to give that word a hint of respectability—at least for some people. There were Rastas in shacks crowded roof to roof in MoBay's North Gully, only a short walk from the posh hotels the tourists flocked to. Only a few days ago he had driven in there hoping to find a fellow he needed as a witness. A mistake, that. Any stranger venturing in there to ask questions found himself quickly surrounded by a crowd of unwashed, bearded residents who had found in their Bibles reasons, or what they claimed were reasons, for being unfriendly to people with white faces. Of course, almost anything could be discovered in the Old Testament if one wanted to pluck it from context and give it a personal interpretation . . .

  The song about the drowning ended, and Solitaire began to sing one written by another fine Jamaican singer, Keith Stewart, but Hopeton turned off the radio. Without meaning to, he had reduced speed while listening to it, and now as he neared the country town where the meeting was to take place, headlights of cars behind him appeared in his rear-view mirror and all but blinded him. Easing his foot off the gas pedal even more, and leaning forward over the wheel, he sought a place to park. The crowd was going to be a big one, apparently. He should have left earlier. The Mercedes was less than a year old, and the last thing he wanted was to have some stupid driver crowding in beside it and scratching it.

  In the end he had to drive past the meeting hall and walk back to it after leaving the car—carefully locked, of course—in a space among roadside trees where no other car could be parked close to it. As he trudged along the shoulder he became one of many walking in the same direction, and some spoke to him. One of those was a man who was dressed in a business suit as he was, and who called him Hopeton rather than Mr. Whyte. To that one he handed over the page of photos he had shown Heather on the Canterbury veranda.

  Walking along side by side, the two discussed what might be done with the photos, and when a course of action had been decided on, Hopeton made an added suggestion. "How about reading some of these aloud to the gathering tonight? It might give people something to talk about afterward."

  "Good idea. I'll do it."

  But first the half-dozen speakers on the platform shouted about other things.

  Speaker one called the attention of the crowd to what he called the relentlessly rising cost of everything since the socialists had come into power. "Maybe it doesn't matter to the party big shots that a pound of onions now costs four dollars and potatoes are ninety cents when you can find them and eggs are selling at three dollars a dozen. Maybe they can afford those prices. But most of us certainly can't, and we'd better do something about it on October thirtieth or things will get even worse!"

  Another discussed the number of Cubans presently in the island.

  "When you read your Gleaner, you know which of its writers you can trust. Indeed you do! And the one you trust the most has said that there are more than five thousand Cubans in Jamaica at this moment. Five thousand! Why are there so many? What are they here for? Government says there are only four hundred and forty-nine and they work in Castro's embassy. Ha! But even if that were true, why does the Cuban embassy need four hundred forty-nine people? Why should there be that many in a small country's embassy when there are only ninety all-told in the embassy of the United States and only fifty-five in that of the United Kingdom? And while we're on the subject of embassies, why does the Russian embassy need the forty-two people they admit to having here? Think about it. Russia didn't do a thing to help us when the terrible flood rains hit our island last June. The United States sent planeloads of food and medicines and clothing and even flew supplies by helicopter into parts of the island that were cut off and desperate, and even the far-off Australians sent help, but the Russians, with forty-two people in their embassy, didn't do a thing. So why do they need so many people here? Tell me that, I beg you. In the whole of Russia there probably aren't forty-two people who have even heard of our little Jamaica, but that Communist country has more people representing it here than does Canada, to which we have the closest kind of ties!

  "And let me tell you something else about Russia and Cuba," the same orator went on, his voice booming out through loudspeakers over his head. "Mr. Seaga made a statement in the House a short while ago that every single one of you ought to be thinking about and thinking about and thinking about. He said that young Jamaicans were being sent to Cuba for indoctrination in Communist ideology. That's right, that's what he said.
Our Jamaican youth are being sent to Cuba to be taught how to be Communists!"

  Then came the signs.

  The man to whom Hopeton had given the newspaper page stepped forward and held it up. "You see these pictures? They were taken in Miami, by a Miami Herald photographer, when our Prime Minister went there to address a conference on the Caribbean. These photos appeared first in one of America's most respected newspapers, and then were reprinted in our Gleaner. You see the signs and placards these people are holding up as they picket the conference? Let me read some of them to you, because I know you can't see the words from where you're standing.

  "Look at this one. It says Shame on Our State Department, City of Miami and Dade County for Having a Puppet of Castro as a Speaker at This Caribbean Conference."

  From the crowd arose a humming sound broken by cries of "Yes, him a puppet! Him for Castro!"

  "Now this one. It says Go Home Manley This Is Not Communist Havana."

  Again the humming sound, louder.

  "And this one, friends. Manley Go to Russia, it says."

  "Russia, yes! Mek him live in Russia if that what him like so much!"

  "And see this one. It says, Who Wrote Your Speech, Manley? Castro?"

  The humming had become such a roar that the speaker had to wait two or three minutes now to be heard. But when the roar diminished, he waved the newspaper page again.

  "Look at this. Manley Traitor Resign! it says. How about that, hey?"

  "Yes, yes, mek him resign! Everything him telling we is coming from Fidel!"

  "And hear these: "Michael Manley, America's Enemy! Manley and Khomeni Both Anti-USA Pigs! Go Home Manley This Is Miami Not Communist Havana. Shall I read more of these, or do we already have the message loud and clear?"

  "It clear, it clear!"

  The man on the platform held up the newspaper page one more time. "And remember, most of these people protesting Michael's appearance in Miami were either Jamaicans who have fled from his socialism or Cubans who hate what his friend Fidel Castro has done to their country. People like us! People like you and—"

  The shots came in rapid succession from an automatic weapon of some kind. Ripped from the speaker's hand, the newspaper page fluttered to the platform while the man himself clutched at his chest, staggered backward against the pole holding the loudspeakers aloft, then fell to his knees with the dislodged speakers crashing down on him.

  In the crowd three others screamed in pain and went down, one grabbing at an arm, one at a shoulder, one at his throat in an effort to stop the rush of blood from a gaping hole that suddenly appeared there.

  The one clutching his throat—dead even before his legs went limp and let him sag to the ground—was the man who had brought the photographs to the meeting in the first place.

  2

  At Glencoe, Lyle was having one of what Alison called his good periods, meaning he was well enough to be moderately active. He now managed to get along on only five cigarettes and two drinks of light rum a day. For exercise he sometimes even walked the coffee-field tracks with the plantation's new headman, Leslie Virtue.

  He missed Manny Traill. After holding down the headman's job since that first day when Lyle had interviewed candidates on the Great House veranda, old Manny had died the previous June.

  Age had had nothing to do with Manny's passing, though he had been eighty at the time. Only a week earlier he had guided a group of American tourists to the island's highest point, Blue Mountain Peak, when they stopped at Glencoe to ask if they might begin their climb through the plantation property.

  No, Manny's death had been a simple accident. Taking Leslie along to do the driving that day, he and his Roselda had gone to St. Elizabeth in a plantation car, to visit a cousin of Roselda's who lived there. The plan had been for them to spend a few days with the cousin, but the car had never reached there. Caught in the great rain of June fourteenth, the vehicle had been swept off the road into a water-filled gully. Only the driver had survived.

  Almost always, when rain made a drumhead of the Great House roof, Lyle remembered the big storm and Manny's tragic death. Rain filled the house with sound now as he closed his book in the old schoolroom and walked along the hall to the drawing room to wait for the evening news on television. Alison, already seated on the sofa there, turned her head and said, "Hello, darling. I've just been reading Carita's letter again, about Baby Doc's wedding to our namesake." She fluttered some typewritten pages at him. "You know something? It won't surprise me a bit if our granddaughter turns into the writer she hopes to be. She's very good at it."

  "Well, she's been keeping that 'Haiti Notebook' of hers since she could write her name, more or less, and she's twenty now, isn't she? What do you mean, our namesake?"

  "That's her name, Bennett. Michele Bennett. Lyle, can you imagine those two spending three million dollars on a wedding in a country where more than half the population goes to bed hungry every night?" Alison patted the cushion and reached for his hand. "Come sit here beside me."

  Lyle eased himself onto the sofa and with some difficulty put an arm around her shoulders. The letter in her hand had come at least a week ago and he of course had already read it, but he quite agreed with Alison that it was a colorful piece of prose. He wondered, though, at the wisdom of Carita's having sent such a letter through the mail, at a time when rumors were rife that some of the mail leaving Haiti was being opened by Duvalier's people in the postal service.

  "Three million dollars," Alison said again. And listen to this: "'I've seen her several times when attending various events with Vern. She is light-skinned and attractive, the daughter of a coffee merchant, and went to school in the States for a time. She has been married before—it ended in divorce—and has two sons.

  People say she has had ever so many affairs since the divorce, and Baby Doc must know about them because everyone in Port-au-Prince knows everything about everybody, but apparently she simply wanted him and got him. She has a reputation for being sensational in bed; maybe that's what did it. It is said that Jean-Claude's mother doesn't like her one bit, but can do nothing about it. Anyway—"

  "The news should be on, Al," Lyle interrupted.

  "Oh. Right." Putting the letter aside, she rose to switch the television on, and then returned to him. The screen flickered into an ad for Red Stripe Beer, and the news came on.

  As he listened to the reading—for that was what it amounted to—Lyle recalled the problem they had had with an antenna before they could get an acceptable picture. His beloved Blue Mountains had not been designed for easy TV reception, and the difficulty had been compounded by the steep hillside into which the Great House nestled. Cliff had spent hours on the roof before finding a passable solution.

  The man reading the news talked about pre-election violence. "It began," he said, "soon after the Prime Minister announced in February that his government would not wait the usual five years but would hold an election this year. Then after October fifth, when Mr. Manley set the voting date for the thirtieth, it became little short of open warfare. Never before has so much violence accompanied an election in this country."

  "He's right," Alison said, shaking her head. "It's been awful."

  "Last night," the face on the TV screen continued, "two men were killed and two wounded when gunfire erupted at a rally in Trelawny. The two killed have been identified as a Mr. Hopeton Whyte, who was in the crowd, and a Mr. Arthur Strachan, who was addressing the crowd at the time. Mr. Whyte leaves a wife, the former Heather McKenzie, only daughter of Judge Merrick McKenzie of Constant Spring. Mr. Strachen . . .”

  "Oh my God!" Alison breathed, turning to Lyle so swiftly she lost her balance and had to grab at his shoulder. "That's Roddy's Heather!"

  "Yes. It must be." Neither of them had known of Heather's marriage, or anything else about her since the end of their son's affair with her. They had talked about that relationship more than a few times, though. Once, Lyle remembered, he had remarked that times had changed, and if a fa
ther caught his daughter in a lover's arms today it would not be the end of the world. Alison, disagreeing, had insisted that Judge McKenzie would never change, no matter how liberal the rest of the world became.

  "Roddy's Heather," Alison repeated. "Oh, Lyle, what a terrible thing. Do you suppose she was there and saw it happen?"

  "She probably was." Removing his arm from her shoulders, he struggled to his feet. "Has the paper come yet?" A Gleaner van brought the day's papers as far as Rainy Ridge. A youth from there was paid to bring one up to Glencoe.

  "It's on the table over there," Alison said. "I haven't looked at it."

  Lyle found the paper and discovered the story of Hopeton Whyte's death on its front page. Standing beside the table, he read it aloud to her. Then for a moment both were silent again.

  "Should we send it to Roddy, do you suppose?" Lyle said.

  There was another moment of silence while Alison thought about it. "No," she said.

  "No?"

  "Remember the letter we had from Olive, about Roddy's talking in his sleep so much? Wanting to know what "judge" might mean, and "heather"? And Roddy's telling her—with a laugh—that he must be dreaming of Bobby Burns?"

  Lyle looked across the room at her and waited.

  "Obviously, he hadn't told her about Heather," Alison said.

  "She didn't even spell it with a capital letter. And we always write to both of them, not just to Roddy. If we write to him alone about this and send him what you've just read to me, and he shows it to her . . . No, Lyle, I don't think we should."

  "Well . . . if you say so."

  "Besides, though he's a good husband to Olive, he has never stopped loving Heather. We both know that, don't we? Every time they come here, we end up talking about it after they leave."

  Lyle nodded. The silence returned, or seemed to. It was quite a while before either of them became aware that the face on the television screen was still delivering the day's news.