The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “A submarine! A enemy submarine! A Nazzie submarine!”

  Yes!

  Yes, she has picked out the lives of more people than he had imagined.

  “Gertrude left here after twelve that Saturday taking the lane with the dunks trees; and she picked a few, ate some and spit-out some; the dunks are strange, bitter fruits, sometimes; yes; and wipes her mouth with the back of her left hand; holding the basket in her right, the hand she wears two silver bangles on; yes; and I followed her in my spying glass, through the grass-piece to the Pasture, pass cows and a few sheep grazing, where the boys were playing cricket, where she pick a blade o’ Guinea grass, and put the blade in her mouth; and chew it. Growing up, you and me couldn’t walk ten yards without stopping to lick-down some dunks outta somebody dunks tree; break-off a piece o’ grass, and put it between our teeth. Saturday, Gertrude behave no different: break-off a blade o’ Guinea grass and use it as a toothpick; near now to Flagstaff Macon Castle; yes; and it came to me before Gertrude even think about it, that she was heading to your Castle; yes; is something that a woman would know about the behaviour of another woman; my mind racing now, back over the years to see if any hint Gertrude had-drop: in the bus going to Town, at Church on first Sundays; being confirmed together, me, Gertrude and you.

  “The two o’ you always had more freedom than me. But whenever I thought I had a chance to be free, Ma would throw cold-water over it . . .

  “I first-began to regret the life that was mark out for me, when I realize they were keeping me far from people like you and Clotelle, Sis, Gertrude, Pounce and them-so, deliberately. Ma, and even Gran, wanted to bring me up different from you, and closer to the Plantation way, different from the Village. So, I was left half-fashioned as a person; in-between.

  “Not fish and not fowl. Not white and not black. A half woman. Half a person. Or, as the Villagers say behind my back, ‘not knowing my arse from my . . . you know what’!

  “So, there Gertrude was that Saturday afternoon at your front door, and I could hear the knock she gave your door, from this distance, so powerful was I imagining what was in Gertrude head; her knock was too confident; too sure, too brazen for me to stomach and bear; because the way she knocked was the way a woman knocks on a door she is accustomed to entering; who has shared some thing with the man who lives there; she is a woman with a past with that man. I wasn’t angry: just, just . . . just . . .

  “After that afternoon, I stopped counting the times I saw her flounce-up to Flagstaff Macon Castle, and open your door and walk in.

  “The confidence of that woman, though! Soon after this, she stop knocking altogether, and just walk in. Flagstaff Macon Castle was now her briar-patch. As if she living there.”

  “Living in my house?” Sargeant says.

  “. . . as if she and you had something,” she tells him.

  Sargeant is confounded. His speechlessness is more from shame than from shock.

  She stops talking. He remains silent. She continues looking down into the valley; and then she looks up into the heavens; and then she says something barely audible, about no stars out tonight.

  “I am sometimes at a loss,” she goes on to say. “Sometimes I see things but they are not the things that my two eyes are pointing out to me. They are my imagination. But when I saw Gertrude walk-in without knocking, that was not my imagination. Although I did see her walk in, before she actually walked in.

  “And, this evening, when she brought the drinks, you didn’t notice how she used her body to block-me-out . . .

  “But Gertrude don’t know I already caught her at your front door. Months, now. Yes.

  “And still trying to hide. When she brought in the drinks you didn’t notice her nervousness? Because you-yourself were nervous.”

  “What you saying, Miss Mary-G?”

  “Merely that life can play tricks on a person like me in my present position; under the circumstances.

  “But hey, listen to me talking about things that have nothing to do with what brought you into this house, in the first place!

  “You know, and I know, what we should be talking about . . .”

  “And instead we are talking about yesterday.”

  “Yesterday is the best way to face today. Or tonight. You come across this in your detective work, don’t you?

  “It doesn’t seem like I can come to the point, at all. You shift-away from assisting me to come. When I think it is time to come, take blame, admit, confess, and have you warn me that what I say will be taken down and use against me, you veer-away, and postpone my coming.

  “Why I am doing this to myself? Why are you doing this to me? You are here to take a Statement. But a bare Statement can’t convict me. Only God can convict Mary Gertrude Mathilda. Not another soul. Living or dead.

  “They could punish me. And I have faced punishments untold. From the moment the midwife cut my navel string, and I emerge from inside my mother’s womb . . . God bless her soul.”

  “God bless her soul,” Sargeant says; and imitates her as she makes the sign of the Cross, pleased that he does it correctly this time.

  “. . . mercy on the dead,” she says.

  “. . . have mercy on the dead,” Sargeant says.

  From standing at the window, Mary-Mathilda and Sargeant retrace their steps back through the dressing room, and into the ornate bedroom. She stops beside the canopied bed, and passes her hand over the bedspread, as if she is spreading it evenly; erasing the creases. The bedspread has been made smooth by Gertrude, who prepared the bed before she left, a few hours ago.

  Gertrude has gone to wait for Sargeant, at their rendezvous. Tonight is Sunday night. And Sunday night is a night when there is no revival meeting, when Church ends early, at nine o’ clock,early enough to spend in the cane field, in complete freedom and abandon, in complete recklessness and happiness: away from her work, and from Sargeant’s neighbours; and from her two small children. Her house is too small to have carnal knowledge in it, and contain Sargeant’s voice at orgasm. He woke the children one night.

  Something daring and very sexually exciting makes them love to foop in a cane field. It is the caneblades that make their flesh itch, and the trash that bites into their arms and legs . . . and Manny teases him about this predilection: “Sarge, you sure-like to exercise your fecking carnal knowledge in a grass-piece or a cane field, as if you not ’fraid of centipees! Remember Golbourne, boy! Remember Golbourne!” And then he added, “But suppose Bimshire was a cold country like Amurca?” Gertrude expects that Sargeant will join her tonight. Gertrude, just to think of her love and her body of which he is sure, brings a powerful feeling of passion and a need to foop into his entire body: while Mary-Mathilda, whose love is cautious, and more dangerous, places her body teasingly before him, just out of his reach. She holds her love dangling uncertainly, like a stick on which a cord is tied, with a common pin shaped like a fish hook, at the end. He is not sure he will know her love. And he is not sure he wants to. He is not sure if it is safe and wise to be so close to this woman. He has known her from the age of five. Has loved her secretly from the age of ten. He is not sure he should leave the splendour of this room and go right now, back to Gertrude, who waits for him in a cane field, in darkness.

  To locate Gertrude in the North Field is easier than to learn his way walking through all these rooms in this Great House. Through the unbearable heat of carnal knowledge, Sargeant can find Gertrude in the canes with the ease of a dog smelling the path to pussy.

  For many years, he has been riding his bicycle on the perimeter of the Plantation’s lands; and he would see the fields change from black soil, to green grass-like plants sprouting through the black soil, until they became sugar cane, interspersed with yams and potatoes and eddoes; and sometimes, with luck, he would see Mary-Mathilda from a distance, in her garden, stooping to tend her lettuce and tomatoes, the skirt of her long white dress tucked tightly between her legs, showing from that distance only her white-stockinged legs and her
brown laced-up boots; or he would catch her beside the flower beds that run the length of the verandah, along the front of the Great House, and down each side, and almost to the back of the house itself.

  She was dressed always in white, and this colour sharpened his lust after her body, endured silently for years, and disclosed only to Manny from since they were young, bathing in the churning sand, at the edge of the sea, in the green clear water. This lust like white heat has remained smouldering in his body.

  They are in the bedroom. The smell is of lavender. The sheer waves of white cloth surge over the canopy of the bed; and the stout, brown, sturdy mahogany legs scare him; and the magnificence of the bed draped in its white canopy empties his body of desire; and at the same time, this fear excites his lust.

  She takes his hand. She leads him to the bed. The bed is white. The bed is soft. And the mattress is soft and thick, and deep. The canopy comes down into his face, and is like a cloud shutting out the sun. He smells a smell that he cannot define or distinguish from others.

  She is flat on her back, looking away from him; lying crossways; at the head of the bed. The space between them is large. He sits at the foot of the bed, in his black tunic buttoned to the neck, wearing his black policeman’s boots, thick leather belt with the truncheon attached. He has no cap on. It is downstairs, on a chair.

  The urge is there. But he is scared. The fear is like heat, white and searing. And the impetus to rape is there. And this frightens him, to think . . . It is his imagination that saves him: with it, he can do anything. He paints himself into all of the photographs on the wall, that have her in them; dispossessing the man already in the photograph, does so even when there is no man beside her, takes over the space that no man is occupying. In his mad rush to this vengeance no longer lodged only in imagination, he rips the man sitting in her lap in an English deck chair, in the shade, from the frame, and then realizes that the man is Wilberforce, her son, sitting with her on the Pasture, watching cricket. He immediately chastises himself that he can have no moral right to be jealous. And he promptly, but sheepishly, cleanses his mind of this torment, and of this vindictiveness: and goes back to think of rape. He imagines a picture of urgent lust: she is taking off her long, pleated white dress that Gertrude starched and ironed this same morning; beneath the white dress is a white petticoat, the same length as the dress. She is not wearing a brassiere, only a short white cotton garment, like a shirt that has no sleeves; a camisole; a blue flower of cloth is in the middle of the neckline; and he can feel his penis rub against the coarse flannel of his black trousers; right then, she unties a white string made of the same delicate white cloth that is round her waist; and the long white petticoat falls to the floor, just as he has seen a balloon that has lost its air and its agility collapse and fall, in silent wondrous finality; yes, her petticoat is like a cloud that has fallen from the sky.

  And when she steps out of it, and her legs move, and the soft muscles in her thighs shake, he sees how much more beautiful her body is than the speculation of wonder and fantasy; for her legs are shining just like the polished mahogany legs of the four-poster bed that reflects the exquisiteness of taste and gentility; but he does not like this comparison; and he tries to think of what her legs remind him of; when her legs are out of the fallen white cloud, she steps with the lightness of a cloud itself, and stands a short distance from the white collapsed petticoat, as if she had never worn it; as if she is despising it now; and he can see her legs only to her knees. For the undergarment is long, tied with ribbon at the knees, and with another string to protect it from exposing her entire body to him; but he has seen enough; as his penis .Wells, he puts his right hand into his right side pocket, to hold his penis down, and soften his embarrassment; but he cannot control it, so he takes his hand out, and inhales, holding his breath. Manny had told him, one night drinking rum in the Selected Clienteles Room, to do this: “Hold your dickey down with your hand inside your pocket, man! You’s a man, or a boy?” Manny said he learned it “from some Amurcan Nay-groes” in the South, when he worked there illegally for the three months after he had jumped ship at a port in Louisiana. Manny and Sargeant had been talking about a striptease show that an “Amurcan Nay-gro main” had taken Manny to see, in Macon, Georgia . . .

  Now, Mary-G raises her arms, and guides the short vest-like garment over her head; and he sees her arms, and the thick black hair in her armpits, and the form of her neck, and the sculptured prominence of the bone that runs across her shoulders; and more of her neck, long and thin and delicate and strong and with two long strings on either side of her swallow pipe; and then her lips.

  . . . and just as the garment is about to be taken completely off, her breasts in their new posture and position become large; become full; become ripe with the throbbing of his penis, which has not fallen, in spite of Manny’s prescription; while her bubbies become the colour of olives, dark, dark brown, almost purple, and in the middle of each breast, a nipple erect and hard as a marble; and the passion in his body which he wants to have surge through her thighs with the same force, grows unbearable; and when she drops her arms, and has thrown the garment onto the same pile as the cloud that has collapsed on the carpet, her bubbies are transformed; now her breasts are small; he can hold each in one hand; no, her bubbies are not the size he wants; not the same size as Gertrude’s; and they do not have the fullness he had imagined all these years . . . and in the middle of her chest, between her breasts, equidistant from each nipple, is the mark, a spot, a growth of skin, the healed blemish of a wound . . . “Did Bellfeels try to kill her with a kitchen knife?” . . . oblong in shape, raised from the rest of her flesh, and looking like an exquisite brooch, smooth, and.Well-sculptured, a wound cut out clean in anger; or bestowed at birth. And he wants to feel it, to touch it, to fondle it; but he wishes he could rub his tongue on it; and polish it with his hot wet saliva; and he allows his imagination to do that, and the moment his wet tongue touches the cold, soft skin of her brooch, immediately a rush of joy and trembling and passion and peace greet his tongue, which is more wet and sticky and salty from the resilience of her skin. He sucks her brooch hungrily and wildly, with closed eyes . . .

  “Talking ’bout woman,” Manny had said one night, when he and Sargeant were talking about women, “I’s a bubbies-man, personally-speaking myself! I could fall asleep with a woman’s two bubbies inside my mout’, all night! You have to take them bubbies in your hand, and full up your mout’ with a lil saliva, and then you put them two bubbies inside your mout’, and wallow-’bout the nipples inside your mout’, and turn your tongue round and round the nipples, oh-Jesus-Christ, Sarge, have you ever do this? And then, with the palm of your right hand . . . always use your right hand . . . you pass the palm of your right hand over the tip o’ the woman left nipple, light-light-light like the feather from a guinea hen, and oh-Jesus-Christ, Sarge! I could do this all night, till I fall asleep. Now, being as how I naturally different from another man, you for-instance . . . you might be a legs-man, or a neck-man, or a fingers-and-toes man . . . or a plain pussy-man. Some men are like that. ‘Gimme the pussy, now,’ some men does-snarl! . . . and bram-bram-bram! . . .” And Sargeant had told Manny, “Confessing now, and nobody is to know this but you, since it won’t look good if this get out. I is a hairs-man.” Manny screeled out, “A wha’?” And Sargeant fixed his eyes on Manny, with shame in them. And Manny smiled, and dissolved the embarrassment. And it made Sargeant smile, which made Manny break out into uncontrollable laughter, “Ho-ho-ho-oh Jesus Christ!” Manny screamed, “As man!” “As man,” Sargeant said. “The hairs between a woman’s two legs? Or, under the armpits? Sarge, you’s a fecking freak!” And Sargeant said, “But don’t tell nobody.” And Manny screeled for blue-murder, again; and said, “For a police, you weird as shite, Sarge!” But this is in his imagination. And he does not know what he should do.

  Is it her age? Is it her station in life? Is it Mr. Bellfeels? Or is it this house? This Great House, which stand
s for place, for richness, for wealth, for power, and fear . . .

  Real, deep, terrifying, deadly fear. Raw fear. Like the rumours that blow through the Village whispered by the Plantation’s servant-women, about the things that went on in this Great House, before he was a policeman; rumours that continue all these years, in whispers and in hushed awe. And also things that went on over at the Plantation Main House. They say, even to this day, that Clotelle was hidden in a..Well, or a cellar, long enough for the Plantation-people to let the anger of the Village cool off, to let the talk die down; and they say she was taken from this hiding place, because the man who was ordered by the Plantation to transport her to the other place and kill her there got frightened by the deed he was about to commit; and they say she was brought out from the..Well, or the cellar, at an ungodly hour in the dead of night; dead; and strung up in the tamarind tree, to make it look as if she had killed herself.