“What a way dis man cry like a woman,” Quashie spat contemptuously.
“Shut up,” Cuffy snarled, deep in thought. To Hartley, he murmured, “Sorry, Massa. Phibba gone to the land of the perfect chicken.”
“Where is dat?” Quashie asked. “What you mean by de perfect chicken?”
Hartley stooped down to rearrange Phibba gently on the ground as if she could still feel discomfort from the rocks under her head. He wobbled to his feet and stood there shakily. “Please shoot me,” he urged Cuffy.
“Why should I? You wouldn’t beat me when I begged you to.”
“Please, please shoot me,” Hartley pleaded again in a small voice.
“You English people expect black man to do everything for you. Pick up after you, give you grind in the canepiece, polish you shoes, cook you dinner, and now shoot you too. Be a man, Hartley Fudges. Shoot youself!”
“Me will shoot him,” Quashie offered.
“No,” Cuffy snapped. “The only one here entitled to a shot is me.”
“Is I,” Hartley mumbled dully.
“Sorry,” Cuffy said, red-faced. “The verb to be takes no object. I knew that too, damnit!”
Cuffy cast a final lingering glance at the dead woman crumpled on the ground and shook his head with what seemed to the small assemblage like a gesture of regret. With a wave of his right hand toward the woodland, he climbed over the stone wall, followed by his men.
“You dirty black brute!” Hartley exploded. “Come back here and shoot me!”
“You hear what dat man just call you?” Quashie gasped.
“I heard what that man called me,” Cuffy corrected. “Let him scream. He must suffer too, like I did.”
“How you suffer?” Quashie scoffed.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Cuffy said airily. “You’re not a gentleman.”
As noiselessly as shadows, the band of renegades slipped after Cuffy into the underbrush, leaving Hartley wailing and hurling insults after them to the empty skies.
CHAPTER 20
After the men had left, Hartley sat on the cut-stone wall and tried to decide what to do. It was a sorry-looking wall that appeared out of nothing and led to nothing. In a more ancient time it might have marked an important boundary of ownership. Now it was a meaningless relic of a forgotten dispute and as enigmatic as the bone of an extinct animal.
Hartley was in an angry and sorrowful frame of mind and every now and again he was racked by a sob. Sometimes he paced down the hillside and then abruptly raced back to touch Phibba all over her face and limbs like he was hoping to coax a flicker of life within her and bring her back. But it was no use; she was stiffening with rigor mortis. Her hands and cheeks were cold; her eyes were cemented shut. Sprawled out near Phibba was the dead driver attended by a buzzing cloud of flies.
Returning to the plantation was out of the realm of possibility. There would be too many questions asked; too many of his fellow workers were dead. No one on the plantation would likely mourn for Phibba—her mother being dead and her father half-crazed from rum drinking. She would be missed no more than a mule or cow or horse. Yet he could not leave her body on this desolate hillside for dogs, rats, and John Crows to eat.
Deciding that he had to bury her, he rummaged through the dray cart for a tool to dig a grave. He found a rusty machete and tried digging with that, but the mountain was stony and the ground unyielding, and he barely made a scratch in the thin layer of topsoil.
Then he had an idea—he would hide her body in a thick grove of trees and cover it with rocks. He found a suitable depression in the ground that was hidden behind a patch of thick bushes, and carrying her there, he laid her out of sight of the metaphorical road and began covering her with rocks.
It took him all afternoon to bury her, and a curtain of darkness began descending on the hillside before he was finished. In building her grave, he was careful not to remove too many stones from the same stretch of wall for fear he would arouse the suspicions of curious passersby. Instead, he walked beside the wall, inconspicuously removing the stones he needed and hauling them back to the grave site. Then as now, a cut-stone wall was built without mortar, each stone carefully facetted by a hammer and hand-fitted. As long as he was careful, no one would notice the missing stones.
When the darkness came, he stood over the crude grave and muttered his last goodbye to Phibba. He wept and moaned in a blubbering way he thought undignified. But he could not help himself and was just thankful that no one was present to overhear his unmanly outbursts.
The moon climbed into the sky, and by its delicate glow he gave the body of the dead driver a push that sent it tumbling down the hill. Climbing into the driver’s seat, he started across the bumpy road, the dray cart rumbling and clattering loudly in the emptiness.
He traveled until the moon had slipped behind a mountain and the terrain became difficult to see. As the road leveled off at the coast, he pulled over, and settling down on a grassy roadside patch, he fell asleep. When he woke up the sun was already clear of the horizon and the moist air was getting sticky from the tropical heat. He started up again and after some few hours he crossed the Martha Brae River and the spires and steeples of Falmouth loomed against the skyline.
Making inquiries at the dockyard, he discovered that three ships were sailing today for England and he was able to buy passage aboard one because of a last-minute cancellation caused by the unexpected death of the passenger. He saw an omen in that—he would be leaving Jamaica in the place of a dead man, and he had many macabre thoughts about this aptness of circumstance.
A few hours later found him standing at the taffrail of a French-built barkentine watching Jamaica sink slowly into the green blue sea as the wind and tide nudged the ship gently toward the horizon. He exchanged no small talk with anyone but was silent and solitary in his grief.
He heard a small child say to its mother, “Mummy, why is that gentleman crying?” and the mother reply, “That is no gentleman. Gentlemen never cry in public.”
* * *
The voyage back to England was plagued by stormy weather and took a little over three months. But the Hartley Fudges who landed in England was not the same as the one who had left three years ago. His heart had a dark and mournful side filled with thoughts and images and glimpses of Phibba. He spent one night in London before hurrying to the family mansion where he was reunited with his father. He passed the next few weeks presiding over the family’s affairs as the heir apparent to the family dukedom. He fired a butler who had once been aloof to him, and he made unmistakably sure that all the staff knew who was destined to be absolute ruler over the family mansion.
Some few months after Hartley’s return to England, his father was considerate enough to drop dead of apoplexy, leaving the dukedom and its riches to Hartley, his only surviving heir, while he was still young enough to enjoy them. A year later, Hartley married a woman of the old school who had many “not” virtues. She was not a fanatical churchgoer, not a conniving spendthrift, not a vain clotheshorse, and not a chatterbox. Altogether, she was not a bad woman, not rich but not poor, and not quarrelsome, being blessed with the contented disposition of a pregnant ewe.
With this woman as his wife, Hartley, now the full-fledged Duke of Fudges, settled down to live the life of an aristocrat and to breed a new generation of Fudges. He fathered five children, two boys and three girls. But the girls all died in childhood and only the two sons survived. His wife made Hartley an agreeable lifelong companion, and together they spent many sociable years burying daughters and raising two sons—one the designated duke, the other a spare. Hartley Fudges felt reasonably confident that his dukedom would survive the ages long after he himself had become a portrait on the wall.
* * *
It was a Friday evening in 1848, and Duke Hartley Fudges, now in his sixties, and his two grown sons were in the library of the family mansion drinking port wine and having a heart-to-heart. The Duchess of Not had retreated into her private cham
ber, for she understood that men gathering in the library around a bottle of port meant that no women were welcome, which was just as well because she had no taste for the braggadocio talk of drinking men.
Hartley had just finished telling a story of his three-year adventure on a plantation in old Jamaica, and although the boys had heard it many times before, they were just as attentive as if it were new. As usual, their father had become nostalgic about the adventures of his youth.
Yet the stories Hartley told were not entirely complete. He said nothing about his capture by the renegade slaves, about his makeshift duel with Cuffy, or his love affair with Phibba; nothing about Phibba rescuing him from Cuffy’s stronghold or giving her life for him. Nothing was told about how he had mourned for Phibba by spontaneously bursting into tears several times on the voyage back to England. But he told his sons enough to lend an exotic appeal to his narrative. Yet he did not want to glamorize black people or hint to his sons that sexual affairs with slack black women were acceptable. Moreover, he would have been mortified if any of his family ever found out about Phibba’s nickname for him. Duke Donkey Hood would never pass muster in Whitehall.
The two sons, George the firstborn and Richard the dispossessed, were facing radically different futures. George, under the grim rule of primogeniture, would get everything upon Hartley’s death; Richard would be at the mercy of fate. The second son had discussed with his father the scant options open to him, but still didn’t know what to do with his life. Richard despised the idea of being a clergyman. A military career was not to his taste. That left him with only one useful option: migration. But, unlike his father, he would not go to Jamaica.
By 1848 the plantation system in Jamaica lay in ruins. With abolition, many of the former slaves had fled to the mountains where they established villages far away from the waving seas of cultivated sugarcane. They disdained working on the plantations as paid hands, and the laws on the books meant to compel them to do so were unenforceable without the driver and his whip. In the eyes of the laborers the plantation was a wretched dungeon of hell where their forefathers had been worked to death. They wanted no part of it, no matter what the inducement. With the plantations shutting down, the great houses were abandoned and the fields of cane came under the domination of weeds. Jamaica’s influence in parliament plummeted and the phrase “as rich as a Jamaican planter” disappeared from polite speech.
* * *
Hartley as a man in his sixties was quite different from the man he had been in his twenties. Aging does harden some men, making them crotchety and more set in their ways, but for the great majority the effect is just the opposite—the heart grows softer, the judgment wiser, the impulse kinder. It was this older, gentler man that Hartley, and men of his age, would have their own sons emulate.
The aristocratic Englishman is an oddity. His heart, soul, and sensibilities are covered by an armor plating of manners that makes it difficult to predict what he will do. He will have dinner with you and be most convivial and entertaining and afterward go to his room and shoot himself as if his suicide was simply late like an overdue bus. He fills his head with the litter and scraps of ancient cultures and knows many words without understanding. His feelings are cocooned behind fortifications and every transaction he has with the world is ritualistic and bristling with hedges and provisos like a promissory note. He is at war with carnality and bodily functions. Form and style are as important to him as outcome and content, and this craving for perfection finds its fulfillment in his meticulous toilet training. Such was the architecture of Hartley Fudges’s soul.
When Hartley first returned to England, he missed Phibba with a benumbing intensity. He thought about her every hour of the waking day; when he slept he dreamt about her. They had shared a ravenous appetite for each other’s body. Sometimes he could smell Phibba, and taste Phibba and hear Phibba and see Phibba in all the vividness of a recurring dream. Over and over he replayed in his mind burying her in the bush.
He never shared this feeling of profound loss with anyone—not his wife, not his sons, not his drinking companions. No one who knew him had the faintest inkling that his mind was a museum in which Phibba and Jamaica and the plantation and Cuffy were stored and kept in a state of suspended animation.
In his old age, Hartley Fudges loved to stroll alone through the ornamental garden with its statuary frozen in the dynamic but motionless acts of hunting or leaping or gamboling behind bushes, every figure forever captured in the lifelessness of stone. In the solitude of his walks, Hartley secretly treasured being the thirty-first Duke of Fudges, one bead in a long necklace of dukes gone and yet to come. And when the new generations of dukes arrived, waiting to receive them like an old faithful nanny would be the family mansion.
To the English world, the family mansion was the ancestral home of an old, respected aristocratic line of men. To the colonial world it was the breeder of claim-jumpers, invaders, and glib usurpers. Under the doctrine of primogeniture, the mansion had hatched many generations of second sons who were blown abroad like airborne spores to infest foreign islands, archipelagoes, and continents. Already Richard was considering going to India, formerly the crown jewel of the far-flung British Empire.
Nearly everyone Richard knew who understood his circumstances urged him to go. If he was lucky, he would return to the mother country with a head full of memories to share with the emerging pupae of English second sons. If he wasn’t, he would fall in battle trying to subdue rampaging natives and be memorialized, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), in an ironic observation like this: Ten thousand pounds falls to ten rupees.
It would be bad enough to be killed. But a fate worse than death would also befall him if he should perish at the hand of a Calcutta coolie.
He would look ridiculous, in a platonic way.
Perfectly ridiculous.
____________________
The following is an excerpt from God Carlos (Akashic Books, 2012) the first novel in Anthony C. Winkler's series about the history of Jamaica. God Carlos follows the Spanish colonization of Jamaica in the sixteenth century. The Family Mansion is the second book in this series.
Chapter 1
He was a short brown man who lived in a world some believed was flat while he himself was adamant that it was round. Standing half naked in the gloomy candlelit room, his pantaloons crumpled on the floor, he was explaining his reasoning as to why the world could not be flat to the plump naked whore awaiting him on the sagging wooden bed.
The whore was not interested in the shape of the world or his opinions about it, but by encouraging him to talk she bought time to massage his short, thick cock with the palm oil coated on her thumb and forefinger, making him easier to take. Wise to the ways of men like him, she knew that they took pleasure in hurting her.
As he ranted on passionately about why the world could not be flat, she pretended to listen while she slowly worked the palm oil into the knobby engorged head. He shuddered once as she did this, and she quickly stopped her massaging, knowing that if he discharged now, he would not want to pay her.
“It can’t be flat!” he exclaimed, as she pulled him firmly by the cock toward the pink vulva gaping obscenely between her legs.
“No?” she mumbled uncaring, her focus on slipping the thick cock inside her without too much discomfort. She spread her legs wide open, placed both hands on his naked butttocks, and with a powerful thrust, stabbed him inside her with a groan.
He stopped talking about the flat earth and began a vigorous thrusting. He had not had a woman in months, and the fluids that were dammed up inside him had begun to vaporize and affect his head with poisonous humors. He believed that if he left any of them inside him he could develop a fever and possibly get sick, even die. What he was doing to the whore, and what the whore was doing to him was, in his mind, a beneficial draining.
He plunged into her as deep as he could go, feeling her wince under him and hearing her groan, which was good, for it meant she w
ould tap deep into the old fluids and draw them completely out of him. He wanted to last long, believing that the more he could delay his discharge, the better for his health, but the palm oil and the massaging had done their work. Moreover, she was squeezing him like an anaconda snake swallowing prey, making a flexing movement over the head of his entrapped cock that was driving him mad. He exploded with a loud grunt like the bark of a wild animal and pumped the whore with a frenzied energy.
In a moment, it was over. He collapsed atop her with a wheeze of exhaustion.
She pushed him off her bosom abruptly, and with a gyrating movement of her hips, expelled him, glistening and drooling, from between her legs. She glanced over at the table, where he had placed the money, and sat up in bed with a sigh of weariness. He was the fifth man she had taken tonight, and she’d had enough.
“I have climbed the crow’s nest of a ship at sea,” he said, feeling suddenly vulnerable and weak, “and seen the curve of the earth.”
She sat down on a chamber pot, spread her legs, and began to openly wash her pussy, which dribbled disgustingly. He shuddered, for she suddenly seemed ugly and loathsome. It was inconceivable that just a minute ago his loins had been afire for her.
He dressed hurriedly while she sat on the chamber pot and wiped herself with a soiled rag and hummed a song she had learned as a child. From the doorway he threw a defiant, parting shot at her: “No matter what anybody tells you, our world is not flat. It is round.”
She did not even look up as he slipped out of the seedy room and closed the door behind him, so engrossed was she in scrubbing between her legs with the absentminded distraction of an artisan cleaning a prized tool.
She only glanced at the table where he’d left the twenty maravedis to be sure he didn’t try to steal her money as many men had done before. Under the flickering lamp light, she could make out the pile of copper coins that cast a wavering shadow, small and cylindrically shaped like a turd.
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