The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  He is trained as a detective, to look and to behave brave, even when he is scared. Still, Sargeant does not like this darkness. It frightens him.

  Many nights, moving along the narrow track that separates the North Field from the South Field, he would pause often, imagining that he hears the sound of a man moving in the canes, trampling the dried trash; and this would make him grip his truncheon round its thick brown girth, its leather strap wrapped tight round his fingers, as he grips it now; and his body would become tense as steel; and so, stunted by fear, he would listen to the swishing sounds of footsteps deep within the vast, dark bowels of the thick cane fields, swaying in the South Field and the North Field; wondering all the time how he will apprehend this man who intrudes upon his peace, and who delays the pause for refreshment at the rum shop, for the shot glass of Mount Gay Rum whose taste is so enticing.

  Sargeant knows about Amurca and Canada from magazines of those countries that carry stories of murders and “’vestigations” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMPees; in the swallowing swamps of Southern Florida filled with alligators; and in the deep snows of the Canadian North, where, as he read, a man could freeze to death in two minutes flat, if he stands outside on a street in a town named Winnapeg-Manitoba, in November and December and January and February, when the temperature in fifty-three degrees below zero; and he knows that the FBI and the RCMPees enforce the Law carrying guns; and he wonders why the authorities, the Commissioner of Police and the Solicitor-General and the Governor of this Island, in charge of his personal safety, balk against arming a man like him; arming him against the violence of all “these blasted criminals” hiding in cane fields, in his Village, in his jurisdiction, trampling the blasted trash a man have to do his business on.

  So, Sargeant carries only a truncheon. It is the weapon to protect him from criminals. It is officially issued by the Police Force. It is made out of local wood. Mahogany, perhaps; or lignum vitae. But, in addition, privately, and secretly, Sargeant carries a bull-pistle, a whip made from the cured penis of a Zeebu bull, soaked in water and linseed oil; hidden in a long narrow side pocket custom-made into his trousers.

  Tonight, he hears the dried trash swishing in the canes that surround him like the sea; and the crushing sound of the criminal’s footsteps, magnified on the cane trash, at the bottom of the field, like a carpet six inches thick; and on this carpet of cane trash, Sargeant himself, on a slow night, would take a woman, Gertrude, Miss Mary-Mathilda’s maid, more often than others, and would lie; and then lie-down on her belly; and turn over on his back, and dream; and then when he has had his orgasm, which he does not stifle but announces with a “Jesus Christ!” because the field is vast, and he can be loud and still no one would hear his ecstasy; he would then roll over, putting the woman, Gertrude, more often than others, on his belly, and look past her head, right at the skies, and start to count the stars, identify for her the constellations, Orion, the Big Dipper, Neptune, constellations he read in a book his daughter, Ruby, sent to him from Brooklyn, the only ones he memorized; and actually identify the stars he counted, because the sky was dark blue and the stars were like emeralds. But now, tonight, the sky is black and there are no stars. The noise of the criminal’s footsteps on the trash, in the middle of the field, comes closer to him; and makes him grip his truncheon, tighten its leather strap, until he can feel the pain in his fingers. The strap is twisted tight round his right fist, perfect for the delivery of a quick, deadly blow.

  He grips his searchlight. It is almost two feet long, issued specially to sargeants and detectives tracking criminals. And he waits. He holds his bicycle against his waist, and waits and waits in this thick, voiceless darkness.

  It was so peaceful and satisfying when he was last in this field of canes, near the same spot he is now, about ten o’clock in the night, two Fridays ago, when the trash was thick and soft almost as the mattress of his own bed; and the woman beside him, Gertrude, was silent; and as he lay on her, he smelled the thick richness of the sugar-cane trash, and hoped, in a loose moment that did not last too long for what he was doing, that a centipede from the thick black soil would not crawl from beneath the trash, and ramble up his trousers leg, and put a sting in his testicles.

  Sargeant counted stars again that night. And saw Orion and the Big Dipper.

  He goes over that last night now, as he stands, hardly breathing, ready to pounce upon the criminal in the canes.

  The sounds of feet are moving. Coming towards him. No wind is blowing. He looks up, and he is covered in the same blackness of the skies as the night surrounding him. His mouth is dry. His palate is like sandpaper. He fears that he may not be able to cry out for help. But even if his mouth was not dry, and he could scream for assistance, in the blackness of the night, thick as if it has body to it, like a substance, a thickness you can measure, no one will hear his wail for assistance. No man—or woman—in the Village, will come to Sargeant’s rescue, even if he heard him calling out. Sargeant is a policeman. A Crown-Sargeant. No Villager will come to rescue a policeman.

  The sounds of the feet he hears are louder now. They are like the voice of the Vicar that pounds magnified through the loudspeaker placed on a tripod in the Pasture of Flagstaff Commons, where athletic games are held, when the Vicar announces entrants for the fifty-yard and one-hundred-yard foot races, on the day of the Sin-Davids Anglican Church Annual Picnic; a voice that hits the eardrums.

  The footsteps are waves pounding in Sargeant’s ears, and this sound of water weakens him further, for he cannot swim. He cannot move. He stands with his body against the steel frame of the bicycle.

  Only once before, in his fifteen years in the Police Force, before he was promoted to Crown-Sargeant, has he come this close to the nausea born of deep fear—and from the snapping of rum—that caused him to vomit.

  The quickest sedative now, for his nerves and to appease his high blood pressure, would be a double shot of strong dark Mount Gay Rum, straight-without-ice; and he wishes he was sitting in the dimly lit “Selected Clienteles Room” of the rum shop, on a wooden bench that has no back, cozy amongst his friends. But he must watch this strong dark rum. His doctor, Wilberforce, the son of the woman he has to take the Statement from, has warned him about rum.

  This is the second time in his career that Sargeant must accept that a murder, part and parcel of being a detective, has turned him into pulp.

  There was that first time . . .

  Sargeant had arrived at the scene of that crime, on the wet thick Khus-Khus grass near the entrance to the Plantation Main House; and had pulled back the brown crocus bag that Watchie, the night watchman, had covered the body with; and he saw the young woman, naked; with her throat marked by a red line, tight and as clear as if it was a necklace of red pearls, a choker, eaten into her flesh from ear to ear; and her body striped in blood, with the dark brown soil from the crocus bag that had held sweet potatoes, collected in the folds of the sack, powdering her skin, reddened, in thick clotting marks that followed the direction of the string of red pearls, the direction and the hatred of the butcher knife that the atopsy said she had used, after she had tied herself up to the highest, most convenient limb of the tamarind tree, with a rope ripped from her own clothes; when the rope faltered, she could not hang herself, could not take her own life, could not die clean as she had wanted to do. The butcher knife told the story.

  Sargeant had vomited then. O, Clotelle! Clotelle, Clotelle . . .

  The sight of her body ravaged by this violence took him back to the cane trash in the North Field, months ago . . . He had sat beside her just three Fridays before, in a revival meeting at the Church of the Nazarene. Clotelle. Yes.

  Now, with the same beating fear that is mixed with the courage of fate and destiny, like a man exhaling his last gasp of energy, Sargeant is actually being propped up only by the sturdy steel of his Raleigh bicycle.

  Footsteps in the cane field coming towards him, m
agnified by the dryness of the trash, become louder and more foreboding. He turns his searchlight on. The truncheon in his hand is like an extended right arm. The footsteps become noisier; and his heart is pounding; and just as he is wondering how deadly to make his blow, two dogs locked in sex, and joined like Siamese twins at the genitals, struggle clumsily out of the canes.

  “Jesus Christ!” Sargeant says. And laughs. The dogs retreat into the thickness of the North Field. Sargeant unbuttons the fly of his heavy black serge trousers. His urine splatters on the cane trash. He shivers as he pees. His pee splatters on his policeman’s black boots.

  Sargeant is thirsty now. He wants his snap of rum. Tonight, he will have three. Rum is the blood of the Island.

  The rum shop is a small building, of one gabled roof, made of deal board, and unpainted; and it is built like an afterthought, on to the rest of the main house. Architecturally, it is nothing more than a “shed-roof.” Manny built the rum shop years ago, in one Saturday afternoon and a Sunday morning, with the help of men and boys— and some women—in the Village; their help induced by four tins of Fray Bentos corn beef, Wibix soda biscuits, pork chops fried in lard, and two jimmy-johns of Mount Gay Rum.

  There is one door, reached by climbing two raw blocks of coral stone, cut from the Village Quarry. When the rains come, the two blocks shake, and move from their moorings a little, and cause some customers to lose their balance, and bang their bodies against the door posts.

  The rum shop is lit by acetylene lamps that require pumping, and whose mantles resemble crocheted booties for dolls. They are all white. These acetylene lamps burn with more fierce brilliance than low-watted electric bulbs. They burn throughout the night, like peeping eyes, even when there is no customer in the Selected Clienteles Room.

  Sargeant has to wonder why Manny, Village rum shop proprietor and Village butcher, never got electricity installed in the rum shop, as in the main part of his house, named Labour Bless.

  “I can’t afford ’lectricity offa the blasted lil money these hand-tomout ’ people does-pay me to kill a pig for them!” Manny explains.

  In the verandah of Labour Bless, which runs along three sides of the house, made of coral stone and deal board, Manny has an acetylene lamp, which guides his “selected clienteles” on dark nights when there is no moon.

  Labour Bless is the name Manny christened his house with, after he returned from Cuba where he worked cutting sugar cane.

  “And from the loins of my labour,” Manny told Sargeant, “and blasted hard labour it was, at that! In that Cuban heat? In August? Jesus Christ! Offa that labour, I build this wall-house. It take me five years to complete, but it is mine!” Pride was reflected in the name of the house, even though spelled in English; and in the house itself.

  “If I had-remember enough Spanish, Labour Bless woulda been spell-out in ’Paniol!”

  The acetylene pump-lamp on the verandah is not burning tonight. This to Sargeant is some kind of omen.

  But he rides on, from the vicinity of the North Field, in low gear, in the unending darkness. He continues his patrolling of the Village, taking a dirt track bordered by canes. The canes have sharp leaves like razor blades, and with the overhanging branches of the pigeon-pea trees, these two obstacles bite into his face, missing his eyes, and sear his hands. He knows the lay of this land like the keyboard of the piano he plays on Fridays for his friends and for Constable. As he moves in this black night, he feels better, now that the first incident of his patrol was nothing more threatening than two screwing dogs.

  “Blasted dogs. No breeding!”

  And he, a big man, this powerful Crown-Sargeant, felt his life was in danger. He had felt so cowardly, so exposed.

  “Imagine! Me, scared? What could scare me, a big Crown-Sargeant in His Majesty’s Royal Constabulary Force of Bimshire?”

  Sargeant talks to himself all the time, especially on dark nights, patrolling the back lanes, in the black, quiet Village. He talks to himself when he is off duty; when he is at home alone; when he is bathing in the sea at five o’clock every morning; when he is walking up the aisle in the Choir. He talks to himself in the Court of Common Pleas, while he waits to give evidence.

  Instinctively, he passes two fingers of his right hand over the silver embroidery of the three stripes edged in red on his shoulder; and the two fingers linger for a further moment, on the large Imperial Crown that sits above the stripes. He adjusts the bicycle clips on his trousers legs, around the ankles; pushes the heavy brown truncheon back into its leather sheath; and flashes the searchlight in a wide arc, making figures in the black night air, like a child holding a starlight on Guy Fawkes Day.

  He rides on, with the gear of his three-speed bicycle ticking softly and slowly, in low. The sound is like the music of the Police Marching Band, playing a tune of sad death and remembrance, a march composed by Sousa, as he wades through a narrow track, in a dark valley of tall sugar canes cut out between the North Field and the South Field. And he whistles, in a clear, sharp tone, this road-march tune, without knowing whether the tune is by Sousa, or by some other composer of martial music:

  “It’s a long way to Tipperary,

  It’s a long way to go,

  It’s a long way to Tipperary . . .”

  Sargeant cannot put the sight of Clotelle’s body out of his mind. For years after he had taken the Statement that showed the cause of her death; and whenever he rode his three-speed bicycle through the ticking black nights, each sudden noise, each movement, the shaking of a pigeon-pea tree branch, perhaps a footstep from within the vast cane fields, made him see, all over again, the thick clotting blood that covered the gaping wound left by the weapon the murderer had used.

  The crime was not suicide. It was murder. He thought about this crime, its flesh and blood and the savagery a sharp knife could take on, whenever on a Saturday afternoon he went to the rum shop to visit Manny, to shoot the breeze, as he stood within the paling of Manny’s backyard, and saw how Manny butchered-up the huge pig from which he would make black pudding-and-souse, a Village delicacy of boiled pig features: feet, ears, snout, jowls of the head, the tongue, gristle and bones, feet and ears pickled in lime juice with diced cucumber, chopped thyme and hot nigger-peppers, following all this activity, and Manny’s dexterity with a long knife, Sargeant could understand how easy it was for him to see Clotelle all over again.

  And one Saturday morning, he arrived in the backyard and found Manny with his hands deep within the entrails of a slaughtered pig, pulling out the intestines, the heart and the liver and the blood; then cutting the head from the body; and cleaning the head; scrubbing off the black silk hairs with a stone and then with a razor blade and with boiling water. Part of the head, from the neck down, looked like the head of a young woman, bathed in blood. Like Clotelle’s head.

  And now, after a quick drink that he will snap back in the rum shop, without water to kill its sting, without respecting the caution given by his doctor, Wilberforce; after three quick snaps of rum, he will have the courage and the strength to face another tragedy; but worse than that, because of duty, he will be forced to take a Statement from a woman he has lusted over for years, from Miss Mary-Mathilda at the Great House. She is a woman he has known since childhood. It is a knowledge that was shaped by the distance that controlled status and complexion, and that tested love itself. A woman he still loves, but dare not tell her; a woman who, years before, had caused his small heart to palpitate, and his tom-pigeon to throb in little spasms . . .

  He will need more than three strong snaps of Mount Gay Dark Rum tonight.

  “Any one o’ we have reason to kill that son-of-a-bitch!” Manny says. “We have cause.”

  “For years, now!” Sargeant says.

  Manny and Sargeant are the only persons in the Selected Clienteles Room.

  “Any one o’ we.”

  The BBC Sunday night documentary programme World War Two Round-Up—a documentary on World War Two, already ended— comes on; and they stop
talking, as they listen to the news of battles lost by the Allied forces in Sicily; of Allied ships sunk by German submarines in the North Atlantic, wreaking destruction upon merchant ships which pass through the West Indies, near Bimshire and continue in the ship lanes up North to England; and news of men drowned at sea.

  Manny makes the sign of the Cross.

  “The Axes bursting we arse, Sarge!”

  “Licks leff-and-right.”

  “Licks like peas, we getting up in the European Theatres!”

  “The Axes painting our arse, black-and-blue!” Manny says, when the news, which is now three minutes old, draws near the end.

  “Bull-pistle lashes,” Sargeant says.

  “We lossing this War,” Manny says.

  “But I don’t know if it is a fete-accomplee,” Sargeant says.

  The programme is over, now. Hymn singing follows the BBC Round-Up programme.

  “I merely responding to a call. I don’t know wha’ happen up at the Great House. Perhaps she and Gertrude had a quarrel. Perhaps nothing ain’t happen. Nuh cause, nuh act, nuh motive. I don’t know.”

  There is no wind tonight. The air is heavy and tight; and it clutches the collar of Sargeant’s tunic, as if it is a necktie that a criminal is pinning him down with, like a Boston crab choke-hold he had suffered at the hands of Boysie-Boys, the first murderer to escape from His Majesty’s Glandairy Prison.

  Sargeant’s tunic has five silver buttons that run down his paunchy chest. The heaviness of the air and the fit of the tunic are making it difficult for him to breathe. Beads of perspiration forming on his forehead and under his neck pour from his smooth black skin, like small beads of pearl.

  Still, he does not take his handkerchief from the sleeve of his tunic. He leaves the sweat on his face, as if it is a religious mark, a talisman, a spiritual reminder of faith, and experience.