The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  The tires now skid to a stop. The engine dies. The door is slammed. The trunk is banged. Sargeant becomes tense as he hears the door of the car shut. Sargeant can also hear the crickets chirruping. And he takes his hand from her lap. She allows his hands to slip from her grasp.

  The kitchen door is opened. And then slammed.

  Mary-Mathilda gets up, and runs both her hands along the sides of her dress at the same time, passing them from just under her armpits, down her small waist, down along her full hips, until her hands can reach no farther down. And next she passes her hands over the bun in which her hair is tied. And then she passes her right hand, using the third finger of that hand, over her eyes. Her eyes are closed as she does this. Then she opens her eyes, and with the same fingers rubs them.

  The door, down the long hallway from the dining room to the kitchen, is now closed firmly. Wilberforce’s footsteps sound on the darkstained hardwood floor. There is an irregular creak of the floorboards as he comes towards his mother.

  “Wilberforce!” she calls out to him. “We have guests.”

  “Guesses?” he says. His voice rises in laughter; and still laughing, he says, “Guesses? Mother, you celebrating something?”

  “Guesses,” she says, speaking the dialect, imitating her son.

  “What you celebrating?” he says, as his voice grows closer. Wilberforce is at the door of the front-house, where he stops. “Sarge? What the arse you doing here, boy? . . . Mother, don’t lissen to my French . . . but where the guesses? You don’t mean that Sarge is a guess!”

  “‘Evening, Wilberforce,” she says.

  “Good evening, Mr. Wilberforce!” Sargeant says.

  “The Sargeant is here on business,” she says.

  “Somebody thief a fowl-cock?” Wilberforce says; and laughs. They laugh with him. “Somebody kill somebody, then? I know one man I would like somebody to kill!” They do not laugh at this.

  “The Sargeant is here on business . . .”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, welcome then, boy!”

  “On business, Wilberforce,” she says.

  “Here to lock-up somebody?” Wilberforce says; and laughs. “You here to lock-up Mother?” And he laughs some more.

  “No, Mr. Wilberforce,” Sargeant says.

  “Drop this Mister-thing, boy! My name is Wilberforce. Or, if you insiss on being proper, Doc, then. Call me Doc, man.”

  “Evening, then, Doc.”

  “Mother, you looking after Sarge? A good boy.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Doc! Doc, Sarge!”

  “Thank you, Doc.”

  “How the blood pressure? And what you drinking?”

  “A taste of brandy.”

  “Good! I sticking with rum. Bellfeels Special Stades White Rum. The best cured darrou in the whole Wessindies, boy!”

  “What about dinner, Wilberforce?”

  “Gertzie cook, or you?”

  “Gertie cook.”

  “You should cook more often, Mother, ’specially on a Sunday, as you uses to. Uh mean no disrespect to Gertzie. The two o’ wunnuh going-have to eat without me. Patients. Sarge, it seem that the minute I start enjoying myself with a lil bird, somebody be-Christ, tekking-in, getting sick, with bad-feels! Or they having a pain in their leff side, and calling me in to tek-out their ’pendicitis! A next body getting sick, be-Christ, and deading suddenly, and I got to do the attopsy . . . when um ain’ one thing, um is the next, Christ, I don’t have time for—”

  “You would swear, hearing my son talk like this, that Wilberforce was a lighterman, and not a big doctor, who—”

  “Man o’ the people, Sarge-boy! Roots!”

  “So, you’re not eating.”

  “A lil bird waiting for me, at the Club.”

  He pours himself a large rum in a crystal half-pint tumbler, without chipped ice, without water; and he leans back his head, just a little, and with the mouth of the glass not touching his lips, he lets the rich, white liquid pour into his mouth. He keeps the rum in his mouth, making his mouth look puffed; and with his jaws not moving, he places the glass gingerly back onto the table with the diamond-shaped top, screws up his eyes, swallows the rum inside his mouth, and says, “Emmm! Uh-hemmm!”

  He moves and stands beside Sarge; and pats Sarge heavily on his back, and says, “Down the hatch, boy! Down the hatch! Watch that blood pressure. As man!”

  He leaves as noisily as he has entered.

  They can hear his feet climbing the stairs at the back of the dining room; and then they hear his footsteps crossing the ceiling, and they look up, as if expecting to see his footprints reproduced on the ceiling; and then they hear drawers being opened and closed; and water running, travelling noisily through the pipes inside the green-papered wall where they stand, looking at the ceiling.

  They just stand, and listen. And they follow the progress he makes above their heads; and can almost feel they are in his room with him.

  Wilberforce rumbles into the front-house and faces them.

  He has changed from “hot” shirt, cream linen slacks and Clark sandals to a dark grey suit with a fine pinstripe; white shirt, university tie of Jesus College, Oxford; dark brown suede shoes; a freshly pressed and starched handkerchief juts from his left breast pocket, ironed in four points, by Gertrude. These points in his handkerchief are like the sails of a four-mast yacht putting out to sea from the Aquatic Club.

  “You really walk-all-the-way up to the Main House last night, as you say you was doing, Mother?” he says to his mother. “What was so serious you had to tell Bellfeels?”

  The question takes Mary-Mathilda by surprise.

  “Sarge, you know anybody who does-address his father by his surname?”

  Sargeant looks uncomfortable.

  “Calling your father by his surname! Imagine!”

  Wilberforce turns his attention to the decanter of Bellfeels Special Stades White Rum and chooses a fresh crystal glass.

  He pours the drink, the same size almost as the first one; closes his eyes; holds his breath; holds the rum in his mouth; and finally swallows it; and screws up his face. “Emmm! Uh-hemmm!” he says; and then, “Down the hatch!” and then, “As man!”

  He stands about two feet from them.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” his mother says.

  “You not offering the ipso facto Bimshire Constabulary no dinner? Not even a fresh drink?”

  Sargeant is uncomfortable.

  “Of course!” she says.

  “In this old house, Sarge-boy, if yuh don’t brek for yuhself . . .”

  “My manners!” his mother says.

  “Well, down the hatch, then, Sarge-boy!” Wilberforce says. He has poured another drink—for himself—and turns to leave, and says to Sargeant, “I got some pills for you, for the pressure. Down the hatch, Sarge-boy! Pass-round tomorrow by the surgery . . . Good night.” And he leaves, whistling a calypso.

  They stand, not too close to each other, and remain like this, looking through a window, as the gravel kicks up, as some animals in the yard, not sleeping at this hour, shift and resettle their bodies on the dried grass in their pens, reacting to the skidding noise of tires over the white marl and the loose gravel.

  Sargeant imagines the dust rising like smoke from a field of sugar canes on fire, all along the eight-hundred-and-eighty-yard stretch of the white-marled driveway that joins the entrance to this house and that of the Main House, forming a large figure eight; the same road that leads to the corner of Highgates Commons and Reservoir Lane; and he can see the rear lights of Wilberforce’s red Singer sports car getting smaller and smaller, eventually being eaten up in the clouds of marl, in the distance, and in the blackness . . .

  Mary-Mathilda raises the mantle of the acetylene lamp, “a gas lamp,” and strokes the pump attached to the lamp, two times; and this gives the room a white brilliance, greater than the electric light from the two bulbs that hang on long brown wires, like “pah-wee” mangoes, from a branc
h. The mantle bears the flame. The mantle is like a child’s bootie or the cover Wilberforce puts on his golf clubs.

  In the light of the acetylene lamp, the front-house becomes bigger and grander. Sargeant is swallowed-up in its bigness; and at the same time, he becomes part of this bigness and grandness; adjusted and acclimatized: recognizing faces of the men and women in sepia-tinted photographs, all of which are framed in wood and glass; and he is intrigued to see how the glass sends a glare from the frame, and this glare prevents him, temporarily, from seeing the faces clearly behind the glass, unless he changes his position and stands at a different angle to the glass—which he does—to defeat the glare; and study the faces of the men and women—some of whom he sees each day; has seen for years—but who now look dignified and distant as strangers by the formality of the frames; some frames look like silver; some like gold; some like brass; these photographs of the faces of men and women; and the faces of her two dead children, taken in their small, white coffins. In another photograph, little Mary-the-virgin is sitting on the twisted roots of a tree. The tree is the bearded fig tree. It is the tree that is native to Bimshire, picked out by the Portuguese who “discovered” Bimshire, who told the natives of Bimshire to call these trees “barbutos” trees; bearded fig trees; who told the natives they will christen the Island “barbados,” then lost interest in “barbadoses” and “babutos”; and allowed the Island to fall into the hands of pirates, into enemy hands, the paws of the English, who renamed it Bimshire.

  These bearded fig trees grow in uncountable number round the Race Pasture.

  She is about eight when this shot of her is snapped.

  Mary at the annual Church picnic, standing like a buoy in a sea of no current, up to her knees in the warm blue waves, which have a crest of whiteness, like cream on coconut pie, on them; or like the froth on the top of a pail of milk, fresh from the cow.

  Mary in her school uniform. She is eleven years old in this snapshot.

  Mary standing like the proprietoress, in front of a small store in Swan Street, of Cloth Merchants. The background is of people passing and staring.

  Mary, standing in the middle of the East Nave, with the iron gates of Sin-Davids Anglican Church open; framing her body, cutting off her forehead and legs at the knees; and still in this picture, on either side of her are the flowers in bloom, in the garden beds amongst the graves; this natural grotto of life and loveliness. She stands straight, but shy. Her left hand is over her face; a cross attached to a chain is revealed round the neck of a white dress; shielding her face from the sun. A book marked Holy Bible is in her right hand. It is the day of her Confirmation. Sargeant was present in the Church Yard, that Sunday afternoon, around four—but removed from the field of depth and of focus—when the lens was clicked shut.

  Mary holding Wilberforce, in various stages of his growth and development, in many mahogany frames.

  “My Wall of History,” she says. “Or my Wall of Shame. Wilberforce dig-up these photos from in trunks in the cellar, and had Mr. Waldrond frame them.”

  And Mr. Bellfeels on a horse. High, above the level of the photographer, and with no smile, with no softness on his visage, his countenance stern and white. The shirt and the jodhpurs and the helmet he is wearing are all white. The sun is shining in his face. It is shining with such force and brightness that even in this black-and-white photo, Sargeant feels he can still see how the sun has burnt the spiteful ruddiness into Mr. Bellfeels’ face. His riding boots are shining. Sargeant can see the spurs attached to the boots. In his hand is a riding crop.

  Mr. Bellfeels is standing beside a horse. The horse’s hindquarters and Mr. Bellfeels’ head are at the same level. Mr. Bellfeels looks tall and big in this photograph. Sargeant is surprised to see how the Kodak box camera has conspired in the magnification of Mr. Bellfeels’ stature. In real life, contradicting the veracity of this box camera’s lens, Mr. Bellfeels is a short, small man; a “five-foot-three kiss-me-arse, fecking midget—if yuh axe me!—who always trying to terrorize the whole fecking Village! That short-nee-crutch son-uv-a-bitch!”, Manny had called him earlier tonight, talking with Sargeant in the Special Clienteles Room; short as a woman; shorter than Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Mr. Bellfeels standing in a group of men, in front of a cluster of beach-grape trees. Sargeant assumes it is the beach at the Crane Beach Hotel. The Vicar is there. The Solicitor-General is there. The manager of the Aquatic Club is there. The Headmaster of Harrison College is there. And the owner-manager of a haberdashery store, smaller than Cave Shepherd & Sons, Haberdasheries, is there. The six of them. Like a cabinet. Like a government. Or like a committee. Like a clan. Like merchants involved in the sale of something, of somebody, of lots of bodies, chewing on the prospect of profits. Like a secret society. Like their own Bimshire Masonic Temple Lodge. Young, and healthy, and rich, and cocky; arrogant and carefree. And powerful. And drunk. Privileged. White.

  Mr. Bellfeels is sailing a boat in the white sea that looks like glass; off the Aquatic Club.

  Mr. Bellfeels standing over a log, a large branch sawed off from a tree, perhaps a breadfruit tree, perhaps a mango tree, perhaps it is the fallen branch of a tamarind tree; the branch is ripped from the rest of its sturdy body by the winds of Hurricane Darnley that scared the Village and the Plantation into believing that they were facing the end of the world. But it was merely the hurricane season.

  And Mr. Wilberforce, Doc, “Mary’s boy-child,” in most of the other photographs.

  There are shots of Wilberforce snapped to match and chronicle his development: from cradle, into Church Choir, into the First Bimshire Sea Scouts, into Harrison College, in various ascending forms and achievements; standing in front of the large black Humber Hawk, with a chauffeur dressed in livery, grinning behind the steering wheel, parked in the Yard of the College, under the sandbox tree, near the main entrance to the Hall, where Assembly is held every morning, punctually at nine. Wilberforce and Sargeant would sit in the grass-piece, beside the Great House, in the long vacation, eating mangoes, and Wilberforce would tell him about the “funny ways we do things at Harsun College”; and Sargeant would stop sucking a Julie-mango and listen in awe: the Assembly would sing one hymn, from the book of Hymns Ancient and Modern; recite one Psalm; listen to a piece of literature, read by the Headmaster, from the Bible or from The Pilgrim’s Progress, which little Wilberforce, on his first day, in First Form, a “new boy,” did not understand head-nor-tail of this first Assembly, as the Headmaster’s thunderous English accent recited, “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream . . .”

  But he grew to like The Pilgrim’s Progress; and sobbed every morning the Headmaster read from it; and told his mother when he got home how he cried; on the morning of his last day at Harrison College, the Headmaster, now old and with a voice that was weak and distant, and still English, that faded between words, read the final words of The Pilgrim’s Progress, his voice matching the trembling of his hands that held the black, leather-bound, gold-engraved tome,

  As for Christiana’s children, the four boys that Christiana brought, with their wives and children, I did not stay where I was till they were gone over. Also, since I came away, I heard one say that they were yet alive, and so would be for the increase of the Church in that place where they were, for a time.

  “Should it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it an account of what I here am silent about. Meantime I bid my reader

  FAR.Well

  And Wilberforce cried . . . the poems of the English poets Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson or Byron or a devotional section from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” did not have the same impact as John Bunyan “the prince of dreamers” . . . and photographs of Wilberforce, going right into and throughout his days at Oxford University, and then at Cambridge; in gown; and finally in hood, mortar-board and gown; and with the stethosco
pe round his neck making him look serious and important, like an African chief, draped in ceremonial beads: a medical doctor.

  “My God!”

  “What?” she says.

  “So many snapshots! Of every step the three o’ you, Wilberforce, you and Mr. Bellfeels, take! That is the difference. Me-now, I have one photo of me in my whole house. One! And that photo was taken when I get these!” He taps the three silver stripes below the Imperial Crown on his left arm with his right hand. The stripes are edged in red velvet. “That is the only snapshot I have of myself! There is one of my two daughters, Ruby up in Brooklyn, and Wanda who passaway; taken at two different times.”

  “History, Percy. These people . . . and I wonder if they include-me-in with them? . . . these people like to know where they begin, and where they stand, at every minute in their lives.”

  “That is the difference between me and them.”

  “They like things to last a long time. Endure. Wilberforce tell me that the name for this habit is a continuance. These people worships continuances and making things last and endure. The same thing that you would call history.

  “If you look careful, you can map-out Wilberforce life. From cradle, to Christening to Confirmation, to First Communion, to Harrison College, in the Sea Scouts, as you can see from that snapshot where he look like a little coloured sailor-boy in the Royal Navy, to his promotion through all the Forms at Harrison, right up to Six Form, when he won the Scholarship in Classics. And finally, his life through the countries of his trekking-about in, Away. His travels Overseas.

  “Look at him in this one. The clothes he got on. A altered man. A different person, a stranger to me, wearing those damn leather short pants, held-up with those braces, and that shirt, looking more like a woman’s blouse than a man’s shirt! I swear to God . . .

  “In all these variations, in countries, Wilberforce behaving as if he born there. As a European! Not like a real man from Bimshire, at all.

  “But, Percy-boy, that is the young generation for yuh! Eh? Yes!”

  She moves to stand under another row of photographs; looking at them, and having her own thoughts, painting them with her own memories of their history; remembering the pose and the suggestion that the head should be raised, just a little; that Wilberforce, or the subject, one of the Six, should move, just a little bit more to the left, yes; to prevent the sun from hitting the lens so hard . . . yes, a lil touch right . . .