The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  “Has she been feeding you anything that tastes odd?” Meredith inquired. “Any liquids, soups with a bitter aftertaste?”

  Hartley bristled at the suggestion that Phibba had captured his senses with the witchcraft the slaves called obeah. “How can you ask me a question like that?” an indignant Hartley replied.

  “It was just a thought,” Meredith answered gruffly, walking away.

  “I haven’t been obeahed!” Hartley yelled at the retreating backra.

  Without looking back, Meredith gave an absentminded wave before he disappeared around a corner.

  Hartley could not figure out why he was so drawn to Phibba. He simply could not explain it, but she tugged at his heart with a physical force such as gravity or magnetism. He remembered a dialogue of Plato where the philosopher theorized that a man used to be a creature of two parts before the gods separated the halves at birth. Since that calamitous day, the two halves have roamed the world looking for the missing part to whom they crave to be rejoined. It was one explanation the Greeks had for homosexuality, but to Hartley’s mind it was even more applicable to the desires of men and women. Phibba was part of him, and he of Phibba, and only when connected by the isthmus of donkey hood were they once again conjoined into an undivided continent. It was a frivolous carnal geography, but it was the only explanation that made any sense.

  Phibba knew nothing about this bizarre theory that Hartley had constructed to explain their odd relationship, nor did she hold the equivalent in the private chambers of her heart. She lived in a world where capriciousness and unexplainable strands of destiny governed the fate of all, and she had learned to accept anomaly, coincidence, and even miracle as part of the world’s everyday bounty. On the day she was captured, she had taken the right fork of a jungle trail and had stumbled into the ambush of slave traders, a misstep that would prove ruinous to the rest of her life. Now that a backra loved her and she him, she had no reason to ask why. If a brick fell on her head, there was no reason. If a rose petal fluttered into her lap, there was even less. In a world of chance and uncertainty, blessings and blights will come and go like summer rain and should not be questioned.

  That was how Phibba saw her love affair with Hartley.

  CHAPTER 15

  The year 1808, which came and went like any other, had the distinction of being the year after slavery was officially abolished in England by an act of Parliament. This cataclysmic change in the mother country seemed to have no impact on the peculiar institution in Jamaica. The plantation society dug in its heels and deployed its formidable lobby to defend to the death its way of life.

  One evening as a grainy twilight grudgingly gave way to darkness that spilled like bottled ink over the Jamaican countryside, a ragtag group of six men squatted in a rough clearing. Most of the men were barefoot, clad in ill-fitting rags, and armed with machetes or crude clubs. One toted a makeshift assegai or spear made with a knife blade wedged into a shaft of wood. The men did not speak, but only waited as still as stone.

  The terrain around them was clumpy and overgrown with shrubs and bushes covering a countryside of egg-shaped hummocks. The land appeared impenetrable, the bushes were so thick, but here and there dribbling through the vegetation were the faint imprints of footpaths that the men knew by heart and could follow to the glow of starlight and the waxy light of the half-moon.

  The men were all young and black and in the nearly impenetrable darkness they were so still they might have been mistaken for rock formations or tree stumps. One of the men stirred and clambered to his feet. In his right hand he held a spear whose blade had been polished so brightly against a river stone that its cutting edge seemed to be cocked in a sinister grin.

  “Ready?” the man who had just stood murmured.

  The other men got to their feet without a sound and with the spear carrier leading the way, they melted into the dark background of the bushes and disappeared down the throat of the night.

  They padded through the thick underbrush like a pack of wolves. Soon they came to a cut-stone wall some unknown slaves had laboriously erected over the years. At the wall, the spear carrier halted until the men were huddled close enough to hear his whispering.

  “Walk where me walk,” the man urged. “When we reach inside, show no mercy.”

  “No mercy,” the men intoned like priests at a liturgy.

  The leader picked the time well, and on his signal, the six men scampered across the trail, climbed over the cut-stone wall, and darted on the side of the main road to the plantation using as cover the hedges and bushes lining it. Ahead of them loomed an enormous wave of darkness that marked the presence of the great house.

  They slipped inside the house through a door an inside henchman had left unlatched. The house dog, a massive big-chested brute, had been fed some sleeping herbs by another conspirator in the household and was snoring raucously as the men stepped carefully past him. One of the men chopped the dog viciously on the head with a machete, killing it as it slept without drawing even a yelp. Then the men climbed the stairway stealthily, pausing every now and again when the floorboards popped or the stairs squeaked. Soon they were on the second floor, where the backras slept.

  The assassins fanned out down the hallway and, at a signal, slipped inside the dark doorways as noiselessly as the shadows of swooping birds of prey.

  After a breathtaking moment, from the different bedrooms came the splattering sounds of hollow whacks as the sleeping backras were savagely chopped with machetes. Anyone standing in the hallway could hear the distinctive skull-cracking sound made by these murderous blows. The flash and thunderclap of a pistol shot and the sound of shouting erupted from a room. A breathless moment later, Hartley Fudges, still clad in pajamas, was hurled violently out of his room, and dragged down the hallway with a rope tied around his neck. Outside, the night rang with a noisy clamor as dogs and watchmen came running to the great house, their shadows dancing erratically on its masonry walls from blazing torches.

  The killers, with Hartley in tow, raced downstairs to the first floor of the great house and escaped through an open window, barely evading the milling watch. Hartley, the rope around his neck nearly suffocating him, trotted meekly behind his captors and was led toward a dark slab of dense woodland.

  Without hesitating, the assassins plunged into the woods, following a trail only they could see. They did not talk but every now and again the entire party would stop and listen to the night to hear if they were being followed. As he was dragged along and stumbled over roots and bushes, Hartley was thankful that Phibba had been assigned to work the mill for the night by Mahoney, as an act of spite, for the intruders would surely have killed her if they had found her in a white man’s bed.

  They traveled the whole night, slipping through seemingly impenetrable underbrush until they came to a switchback trail that zigzagged across the face of a thickly wooded mountain and emptied into a grassy plateau on which several shacks and huts had been cleverly built in a pocket of trees and bushes so as to be virtually invisible from afar. The layout of the shelters was roughly circular, and in the middle of the compound were the ashes and charred wood that were evidently the remains of a communal bonfire. After their wearying trek from the plantation to their hideout, the band of men settled down on the grassy plateau with exhaustion. One of the men tied the rope around Hartley’s neck to a tree. Some of the men fell into an immediate sleep; others who had been splattered with the blood of their victims tried to clean themselves off with leaves they ripped off bushes.

  Hartley could not imagine why he had been spared and not slaughtered like the others. As the sun beat down on top of the mountain and the day dragged past, he was left sitting by himself tied to the trunk of a tree and mainly ignored except for the occasional grim flicker of a look he got from passing men. When he tried to question any passerby about why he had been brought here, he was warned to shut up if he valued his life.

  As he got used to his surroundings, Hartley began to not
ice that for such a slipshod hideout, which had the disheveled look of a slum, there was a surprising discipline and military preparedness to the camp. He observed a regular changing of the watch that was carried on throughout the day. Without being prompted, someone would collect a weapon and disappear into the bush, and a few minutes after he had gone, the lookout he had relieved would slink out of the thick shrubbery, find a vacant spot in the shade, curl up, and immediately fall asleep. Everything was surprisingly military even though Hartley got the impression that the people were simply sauntering around with little to do. A few hungry dogs, their ribs chiseled on their bellies by starvation, stalked around the campground desperately sniffing the ground for something to eat.

  The sun, meanwhile, was scorching and in spite of the rope around his neck and the discomfort of the heat, Hartley had just dozed off when someone woke him up by kicking him in his rib cage, untied him from the tree, and, leading him to one of the sagging huts, shoved him roughly through the doorway. As his eyes grew used to the interior dimness, Hartley looked around and saw a figure on the ground staring up at him: it was his former slave, Cuffy.

  The boy had grown into a man. He had gotten taller and more muscular, and all the baby fat had melted from his face. Hartley was stunned at first, and he could only stare with bewilderment.

  “Massa, how you do?” Cuffy greeted him sarcastically.

  “What’re you doing here?” Hartley sputtered.

  “Dat’s not what you should ask. You should ask how come you still alive.”

  Hartley was at a loss for words, so he said nothing. Cuffy stood up, approached him, and said in a sinister, taunting tone, “Ask me why you still alive.”

  Hartley scuffed at the dirt floor of the shack with his big toe. He’d left his room so suddenly that he hadn’t had time to put on his shoes and had been barefoot since his abduction. The soles of his feet were sore from a long night of walking. He was miserable from a lack of sleep. To argue with Cuffy seemed futile.

  “All right, then,” Hartley said softly. “Why am I still alive?”

  “Good question! Why you still alive? You still alive because I want it. Dat’s de only reason you still draw breath.” Cuffy moved closer and glared hard at his former owner. “What else you want ask?” he sneered.

  “I have to ask, I suppose,” said Hartley, “why you want me alive.”

  “Very good, Massa. Very, very good,” Cuffy mocked.

  He took an exuberant turn, imparting a shiver to the floor and walls of the wattle-and-daub shack. Before either man could say another word, someone appeared at the doorway and spoke in a strange language to Cuffy, who snapped at him and made an impatient gesture for him to go away.

  Hartley glanced out the window, which had no glass but was merely an opening in the wall, and noticed for the first time that there were one or two women scattered among the men in the rough-and-ready campground. He spotted a bamboo lean-to against an outcropping of rock from which drifted the smell of smoke that identified it as a makeshift kitchen. The slopes of the surrounding hillside were planted in yam and other ground produce, and all the inhabitants of the camp were besmirched with dirt and clad in tattered clothing, giving them the scruffy look that came from outdoor living.

  Cuffy yelled out the window in his African tongue, and two women fanned the fire coming from the kitchen to dissipate the smoke that was coiling off into the sky.

  Turning back to Hartley, Cuffy said abruptly, “Me keep you alive because we have one question to ask you.”

  Hartley blinked rapidly, like a man suddenly dazzled by sunlight.

  “You may ask me any question you like,” he said softly.

  “Why won’t a gentleman fight a duel with anyone but another gentleman?”

  Hartley was stunned. Squirming uneasily, he struggled to regain his composure. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Answer it!”

  After a moment’s thought, Hartley said, “Well, he can’t very well duel with a fishmonger, can he?”

  “What name fishmonger?”

  “Someone who sells fish.”

  “So why won’t a gentleman fight a duel with him? Because de man sell fish?”

  Hartley sighed with exasperation. “Because gentlemen only kill other gentlemen unless there’s war declared. Then they kill anybody who wears the uniform of the enemy—even a fishmonger. That’s just the way gentlemen are raised.”

  Cuffy seemed agitated to hear this pronouncement. He paced to the window and peered out moodily at the slumbering camp. “I want you to learn me how to be a gentleman,” he said abruptly.

  “But why?”

  “So you and me can fight a duel.”

  “Fight a duel? Over what? And why would you want to fight me of all people?”

  “Because you de enemy. And you think you better than me. So, first me become a gentleman. Then you and me fight a duel and prove who is de better man.”

  Hartley pretended to be thinking seriously about this preposterous scenario, while Cuffy stared at him intently.

  “But why?” Hartley asked. “What did I ever do to you?”

  Cuffy’s face suddenly hardened. Standing by the window, he beckoned to Hartley to come over. “You see dat chicken?” he asked, pointing to one scratching near the ashes of the bonfire. “Dat is not de perfect chicken. Dat is de imitation chicken, no so?”

  Hartley was mystified. “Yes,” he said carefully. “At least, according to Plato.”

  “Because of you, I’ll never get de opportunity to be de perfect slave.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you set me free—you and you damn freedom.”

  A thin silence intruded between them. Finally Hartley said, “I thought I was being generous with you.”

  “To cheat me of de chance to be perfect is not doing me favor.”

  Hartley felt suddenly peeved and blurted out, “No matter whom you ask, everyone will tell you that what I did for you was kind and merciful. You can bend and twist that any way you like, but what I did was good.”

  Cuffy was staring at him intensely. “You learn me to be gentleman or me kill you right now.”

  Hartley stared at him with astonishment. “But how do I do that?”

  “You must know,” Cuffy snapped impatiently.

  “This makes no sense,” Hartley said feverishly.

  “Dere’s an old saying in Africa, If you want to understand de lion, become a lion.”

  Hartley’s head was spinning as he tried desperately to think. He could tell from the look on his face that Cuffy was on the verge of exploding. What he needed to do, thought Hartley, was to humor his former slave until he could sway him with reason. There was a madcap logic behind Cuffy’s rage. Obviously, he didn’t grasp Plato but misunderstood him just enough to be befuddled and confused. If Hartley proceeded cautiously and tactfully, he might be able to turn the silly argument on its head and come to an entirely different conclusion.

  Hartley gave a loud sigh as if he were being forced to do something against his better judgment. He sagged visibly as he spoke. “All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll teach you to be a gentleman.”

  Cuffy nodded curtly. “And when me is a gentleman, we fight a duel on de fields of honor to de death.”

  “If you say so,” Hartley mumbled.

  “I say so,” Cuffy snapped. “Begin right now. What me must do?”

  Hartley stared at Cuffy, his mind racing. Cuffy was looking back at him with a murderous intensity.

  “Well,” Hartley said, “to begin with, you don’t stand right.”

  “What wrong wid how me stand?”

  “You slouch. Gentlemen never slouch. Here, look at me.”

  As Cuffy watched him suspiciously, Hartley stood erect like a soldier on parade and did a stiff-legged turn around the small shack. He felt like a fool as he demonstrated the correct posture of a gentleman, drawing on exercises he and his brother Alexander used to perform as children when they played army using wo
oden guns. He was also remembering some lead toy soldiers he’d collected as a child and how they were always molded in a straight-back posture. With limited room inside the shack, Hartley suggested that they move outside for practice.

  As the sun rose higher in the sky and the warm exhale of the tropics blew over them like a damp breath, Hartley and Cuffy stomped around on the occasional level stretch of ground, practicing walking straight without a strut or a braggadocio hop. The camp began to wake up and here and there people watched them as they posed in place or strode from tree to tree. Cuffy, becoming aware of the attention he was drawing, started to ham it up like a bad actor rehearsing his stage movements. But while the people might whisper about the two men, no one laughed openly at them, and the one person who looked like he might break into an uncontrollable guffaw hurried back inside his shack and stayed there until the two men had stopped the practicing.

  Aside from feeling like a fool, Hartley also felt put upon and resentful and several times he was tempted to call off the whole ridiculous game no matter what the consequences. But when he thought that this meant never seeing Phibba again, he quickly changed his mind and fell back into the game.

  Cuffy was dead serious about learning to be an English gentleman and was quite prepared to kill Hartley over it. This point was driven home that morning when Hartley, angry over being part of a humiliating spectacle, muttered sotto voce, “Acting like a bird still won’t make you fly.”

  Cuffy, who had been sitting nearby on the ground, stood up slowly, uncoiling like a poisonous snake until he was upright and within murderous range of his former owner. In his left hand he gripped the assegai, his fingers flexing restlessly around the shaft.

  “What you say?”

  Hartley, looking into Cuffy’s eyes and seeing that death lurked only a heartbeat away, hastily backed down. “I didn’t say anything,” he replied disarmingly.

  “You say something,” Cuffy hissed.

  “No, I didn’t,” Hartley blurted out cravenly. “I was just talking to myself.”