Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  She had a feeling Carey and she would be going over, too, in the very near future. She would be, certainly, for her father was dying. And with Haiti in intensive care, so to speak, after its massive convulsion, perhaps Carey would feel it was time for him to leave, as well.

  There might even be more trouble ahead, Lee thought.

  Following Jean-Claude's departure, a six-man junta led by the army's Chief-of-Staff had assumed leadership, but some of the sixhad been close to Jean-Claude and might still be loyal to him. The country's future could easily include a struggle for power. Perhaps in anticipation of such a conflict, the junta had already imposed a curfew that allowed only eight hours of free movement in each twenty-four.

  Shouts in the street outside interrupted her thoughts, and she stepped to a window. The curfew, it seemed, was not the measure of control it was meant to be. As she put her face against the glass to see better what was happening, a lone figure threw open the gate used by Carey's patients and slammed it shut behind him. Then, as though something were wrong with his legs, he limped and staggered across the yard to the office.

  Carey had stepped to her side. "Oh-oh," he said. "A patient? I'd better go see what's wrong."

  "There's a crowd after him," Lee said. "A big one. Look!"

  There were fifty in the mob, at least, all of them shouting and waving their arms. But they stopped at the gate. In this neighborhood, no one would dream of storming into Dr. Carey Aldred's yard, even in this time of turmoil. With a quick, "Coming, Virgie?" to his adopted dark-skinned daughter, Carey hurried from the room.

  Virgilie caught up to him as he crossed the yard from the kitchen. The others—Lee, Roddy, Carita, and Vernon Jansen—stopped at the kitchen doorway and watched from there. In the road, the mob was eerily quiet as Carey unlocked his office door and helped its intended victim to enter. Virgilie, following them in, shut the door behind her and switched on the lights.

  "Let me look at you," Carey said.

  It was hard to guessthe man's age with so much blood smearing his face. He could be forty, perhaps fifty. If he had been wearing a shirt, it had been torn off. He wore shoes, though—scuffed and dirty, but still shoes of a quality no peasant would be likely to own—so he was a man of some substance. He had been beaten about the head and chest, and moaned in pain when Carey eased him onto a chair.

  "We'll have to clean him up. I can't see what I'm doing." Anxiously, Carey glanced at the door. "Is that crowd still out there?"

  Virgilie opened the door a few inches and put an eye to the aperture. "Yes, but they're quiet. They seem to be just waiting to find out what's going to happen."

  "It's all right, then, I guess. Let's hope they give up and go away. If they don't, we can put him on a cot in here until they do, I suppose."

  Shaking uncontrollably, the man on the chair watched every move as Carey attended to his injuries. His eyes seemed never to blink. His teeth chattered. Twice Carey had to say sharply, "Be still, will you? You're making me hurt you more than I need to."

  Once, stepping back to take from Virgilie a bandage she was holding out to him, Carey said to her in a whisper, "This one's a coward. But if that mob were after me, I guess I would be too."

  "Aren't they all cowards, though?" she whispered back. "When you take their weapons away, I mean."

  A moment later a sound at the door caught their attention and both turned swiftly to see what had caused it. The door opened and Roddy stepped in, still holding a coffee mug in one hand.

  "Hope I'm not intruding." His voice was heavy with contempt. "I just had to see what one of them looks like when he's not waving a machinegun around." He walked toward the patient. "I mean when he's the one scared to death, for a change."

  He bent down to peer into the man's face.

  The coffee mug clattered to the floor. Roddy's own face went livid with rage and his yell shook the office walls. "You! You bastard!" Stepping back, he snatched a gallon jug of water off a counter—a heavy glass jug, not a plastic one—and lurched toward the patient again. But Carey grappled with him.

  They yelled at each other as they struggled.

  "For God's sake, Roddy, no! He's hurt. Don't do it."

  "Get out of my way!"

  "No. Stop it! It would be murder."

  "This son of a bitch is one of the three who killed Olive! He was the ring-leader! All this time I've been praying I'd find him!"

  "You can't settle the score this way."

  "I can and I will! Damn it, Carey, let go of me!"

  Carey tried to hang on, but found himself unable to cope with such an outpouring of fury. Even with Virgilie tugging at Roddy and adding her pleas to the sounds of the struggle, the man they sought to restrain at last flung them both aside. Still clutching the heavy jug, he hurled himself at the chair again.

  But the chair by then was empty. The terrified Tonton was already out the door and running at full speed across the yard toward the gate.

  There was no way they could stop him. From the office doorway Carey yelled at him to come back, but he already had the gate open.

  The mob was waiting. A single high-pitched scream began at once and ended before Carey finished crossing the grass. When he saw what had happened, he realized there was nothing anyone could do, and simply closed the gate and stood there clutching it. Roddy and Virgilie came across the yard to stand there with him.

  When they again saw the leader of the three Tonton Macoutes who had raped and murdered Roddy's wife, his torso lay in a pool of blood in the gutter with its arms and legs hacked off. His head had become the piece de resistance in a procession. With its eyes gouged out, it was impaled on a bamboo pole held ten feet in the air by singing, chanting marchers.

  As the sound of singing died away down the street, Carey put an arm around Virgilie and together, in silence, they watched Roddy trudge slowly back to the house.

  "Perhaps, for a change, he'll be able to sleep tonight," Carey said. "Let's clean up the office, shall we?"

  6

  There were two cars from Glencoe at Jamaica's Palisadoes Airport when the plane from Port-au-Prince landed and taxied to a stop. Luari had driven one, her daughter Andrea the other. As the two women stood at the rail of the Waving Gallery, waiting for the passengers to appear, many there must have thought them sisters, though one was forty-three and the other twenty-one.

  Both had long, black, shining hair. Both had remarkable blue eyes inherited from Freeland Elliot, and exquisite features they undoubtedly owed to Luari's East Indian mother. In slacks and cotton blouses, both leaned on the railing, talking and laughing, as though indifferent to their beauty. Certainly they were unaware of the many admiring glances sent their way from the gallery crowd.

  "There's Lee!" Andrea suddenly cried. "See her—she's just coming out!"

  Leora first, then Carita, Carey, Vernon Jansen and Roddy descended the steps and disappeared into the airport building. Luari and Andrea hurried downstairs to greet them when they emerged from Immigration and Customs.

  It was a noisy reunion when the five from Haiti finally did so, followed by porters pushing carts piled high with their luggage. Passersby looked and smiled. In the parking lot, Luari led Lee and Carey and Roddy to her car so the three younger people might ride together.

  "Where's that twin brother of mine?" Lee demanded.

  It was a Friday, Luari pointed out. "Any other day but payday, Cliff would have been here."

  "But he's all right?"

  "Fit as a fiddle."

  "And Dad?" The abrupt change of tone was noticeable.

  "He . . . maybe you should talk to Dr. Kirk, Lee. He's coming this afternoon."

  "Does Dad ever leave his room?"

  "Sometimes, to sit on the veranda when the weather's nice. Not often."

  The two cars turned right at the roundabout and in sight of each other continued along the coast road to Eleven Mile, where they turned up Cambridge Hill. As always when traveling Cambridge Hill, Lee thought of Manny Traill and his Ra
sta brother, Ralph—how Ralph had set fire to the plantation's coffee fields and ended up dead in the "tremendous hole" at the river.

  "About Virgilie," Luari said unexpectedly. "In your letter you said she wants to stay in Haiti."

  "Yes, she does," Carey said. "Have you heard about the clean-up?"

  "Clean-up?"

  "With Baby Doc gone, the Haitian people decided they ought to tidy their country up after all the rioting and trashing, And, by God, that's just what they did. Whole armies of them turned out with shovels and brooms. Virgie was in the thick of it."

  "Organizing it, you mean?"

  "Doing it, too," Lee said proudly. "Anyway, when we gave up our house, the Beaulieus asked her to come live with them. Haiti ought to consider itself very, very lucky to have a skilled nurse so determined to stay and help her people."

  "How about Carita and Vernon?" Luari asked as she drove through the pretty village with the Welsh name, Llandewey. "Will they be going back after the wedding?"

  "No. He'll be working in Washington, at least for the time being. What's with the wedding plans, by the way? Is Mother working on them?"

  "Since we got your letter, she's done nothing else." A hint of the old Solitaire song found its way into Luari's laugh. "Do you realize this will be our fourth wedding at Glencoe? First you two, then Cliff and me, then Roddy and Olive, and now Carita and Vernon. And don't be surprised if we have another one. Andrea's found herself a new boyfriend she seems to be really serious about."

  Roddy said, "Oh-oh. Who is he?"

  "He's an Englishman, teaching English at U.W.I. His name is Russell Hazard. Mother, of course, just loves the idea of having another teacher of English in the family."

  "So we may come full circle, eh?" Roddy said.

  "Full circle?"

  "Your father was an Englishman. Now your daughter may marry one."

  "M'm. I hadn't thought of that, but how about it? Anyway, I like him, and you'll soon meet him. He's been coming out every Sunday, regular as clockwork."

  The day matched their light-hearted, glad-to-be-together mood. Birds sang. People walking along the roadsides recognized the two cars and waved and called out friendly greetings. Not yet swollen by spring rains, the streams sang some of their softer songs. The mountains gave off that subtle, mysterious exhalation of color that perhaps had inspired the early settlers to call them Blue. At the Great House, the flower gardens were lakes of brilliant color whose scents filled the sunshine.

  It was good to be home, Lee thought as she stepped out of the car and looked around. She would miss Haiti, and so would Carey, who had devoted even more of his life to that struggling country than she had. But it was time for a change.

  Not a change to Glencoe, however. The estate belonged to Cliff and Luari now. They had run it for years, and the money from Luari's last hit album, the one made from her singing at Ima's Ninth Night, had been a big help in weathering the economic strain of Michael Manley's socialism. Father was dying. Mother—well, mother seemed unable yet to think about a future without him; whether she should stay at Glencoe or return to the States was one of the questions to be discussed in the days ahead. For now, Lee thought, the mountains, the flowers, the champagne air and just being here were enough. Not to mention the joy of hearing the young people's chatter and laughter as the second car rolled down the driveway into the yard and they piled out of it.

  Carey, though, had put a hand on her arm and was leading her toward the veranda steps. "Come on, love," he was saying. "Let's go see your folks."

  Translation: "I'm a doctor, remember? And you're a nurse. So let's have a look at your father and see if there isn't something we can do about him." Carey and Dad had always been good friends.

  But as they hurried toward the veranda steps, Alison appeared in the Great House doorway, and it was she they embraced first. "I was with Lyle and didn't hear the cars," she explained. "My, you look good, both of you. When we heard about the upheaval over there, we didn't know what you'd be like when you got here."

  But you, Lee thought, do not look good, even though you're obviously relieved and happy to have us here. You're only seventy-six, which isn't at all old these days, but you look almost as old as Kim Tulloch was when she died. We'll have to do something about that, Mother dear.

  Moments later, as she stood with Carey and Roddy beside her father's bed, she understood better the reason for all the new lines on her mother's face. The end was already there in Lyle's eyes, and in the weakness of the bony fingers that reached feebly for her hand as she leaned over him. When Lyle tried to speak her name, he began coughing and it obviously hurt him to cough. The pain was clearly written there in the contortions of his face.

  Did he really leave his bed sometimes and sit on the veranda, to exchange the four walls of his bedroom for the magnificent view of the Yallahs Valley he had always loved so much? Or had Luari only been trying to ease their pain in saying that?

  When the coughing spell passed, he was able to talk a little. "You—will you be staying a while this time?" he asked, trying to smile up at her.

  "Yes, Dad, we're going to stay. Aren't we, Carey?"

  "Of course," Carey said without hesitation.

  "Good . . . good. We've a lot to talk about." With an effort, Lyle turned his head to look at Roddy. "And you, son? Have they . . . have they told you about Heather?"

  "Now Lyle, they've only just got here," Alison said. "We haven't talked at all yet."

  "Oh. Well, be sure you tell him. Look." The hand that had been holding Lee's suddenly went limp and let go. "I'm a little tired just now. Have to sleep. But come back later, please? There's so much we have to talk about . . .”

  The eyes closed.

  "He does this," Alison said quietly. "It's brought on by the medication Tom gives him, I suspect. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he'll do it. Usually he sleeps for hours." She looked helplessly at Carey. "What do you think, Carey? Can we—can we hope he will get better?"

  "Is Dr. Kirk coming today?" Carey countered. "Luari said he might, I believe."

  "Yes, for dinner. He'll be here for dinner."

  "Then let me talk with him before I try to answer your question. All right? I mean, he must have had X-rays taken, perhaps looked at the lungs with a bronchoscope . . ." Suddenly Carey put an arm around Alison's shoulders, a thing he had never done before. "We have to think about you, too, Mother Bennett. While Lyle is sleeping, why don't you and I have a quiet little talk in the drawing room?"

  Seemingly puzzled, Alison looked at Lee.

  "Do, Mother. Please," Lee said.

  Her husband and mother left the room together. Her brother Roddy turned to her with a deep frown.

  "What was Dad trying to tell me about Heather?"

  "Roddy, I don't know," Lee said truthfully. "Suppose we find Luari and see if she does."

  They found Luari in the kitchen, talking to Beryl Mangan about dinner. Ima Bailey's old friend had been Glencoe's housekeeper for a long time now, and more hugs were in order before questions could be asked. When asked about Heather McKenzie, Luari nodded.

  "Yes, Roddy, there's something we have to tell you." Gazing at him, Luari asked herself whether it would be better to tell him or to show him the issue of the Gleaner in which the death of Heather McKenzie's husband had been a front-page story. On hearing about the murder of Olive, the family had pondered long and hard whether to write to him about Heather or not, and had decided to wait until he was able to return to Jamaica. The newspaper had been carefully saved in anticipation of this very moment.

  "Come," Luari said.

  Lee and Roddy followed her down the hall to the old schoolroom, Roddy's face revealing an eagerness sadly absent since that ghastly day at Le Refuge. There Luari opened a desk drawer and took out the newspaper. "Here," she said, handing it to Roddy. "Read this."

  Roddy read it standingup. He sank onto a chair and read it a second time. He looked at the date on the paper, then at them. An expression of anger touche
d his face but almost at once disappeared. "This happened six years ago. Why didn't you tell me?"

  "We talked about it a number of times," Luari said quietly. "Roddy, you went through a terrible time when you lost Heather. Our thinking was, you'd gotten over it and were happily married, and weshouldn't reopen old wounds."

  "I see." Gazing into space, Roddy moved his head up and down as though unaware he was doing so. Then he said, "Is she married again, do you know?"

  Luari said, "A man from the Tourist Board was out here a few months ago. You know how people sometimes come here looking for orchids? He and his wife asked if they could look for ferns. We had them to dinner, and Cliff asked about Canterbury Inn."

  "And?"

  "He said it was one of the best guest houses in the MoBay area, and Heather McKenzie owned it. When I asked if she had a husband, he said he didn't know, but she alone was on the books as the owner."

  Roddy looked away.

  "You could write to her," Luari suggested.

  "I suppose."

  "Or go to see her. We know this much: the man who came between you two—her father—is dead now." And after a silence: "Roddy?"

  "I'll have to think about it," Roddy said.

  7

  "There's nothing anyone can do for him," Tom Kirk said sadly.

  The Bennetts' old family doctor had arrived half an hour before and was walking with Carey in the Glencoe gardens. For twenty-nine years—ever since the bearded Jamaican medic had attended Carey's wedding at the Great House, the relationship between the two had been one of deep respect and affection.

  "And he won't go to the cancer home?" Carey said.

  "He won't go to the cancer home. He's never forgotten what he saw when he and Alison went there to visit Ima. Or rather what he felt. It haunts him." Kirk turned to point down the slope at the estate's little cemetery, where a setting sun gilded the headstones. "He'll soon be at peace down there, thank the good Lord. The question is, what will Alison do?"