“There are three main things we do in the fields. We call it ditching, seeding and cutting.
“The ditchers dig the trenches that bring water to the cane during the dry season. The original ditches were made by plows pulled by horses, but now your uncle, Mr. Walsh, has a small tractor that makes the ditch. But men with shovels still have to work the trenches, keeping them open.
“The seeders plant the cane. It’s a funny name because we don’t plant seed, it’s just what we call the process. Rather than seed, we plant cuttings about so tall.” He indicated about knee high. “The seeders use a measured stick, about five feet long. They lay the stick on the ground to space where they put each plant. You’ll see in the fields how fast they work when they make the hole and get the stalk deep enough into it.
“We have some growing all the time, new growth coming up, mature plants being harvested. Because we have sun and rain most of the year, it grows almost all year. It takes about a year, sometimes more, for the plants to get tall enough to be harvested.
“The third job is the cutting. You see how tall the stalks grow?”
We walked up to stalks that soared two and three times my height.
“But before we can cut, the men have to burn off the leaf and branches. We don’t burn the stalk which has the sugar, just the heavy growth of leaves surrounding the stalk.”
“Why is that burned away?”
He counted on his fingers. “One, it makes it easier to cut the cane because we can get closer. Two, it drives out the rats. And three, it drives out the snakes.”
“Snakes?”
“Cousin to the cobra. If it bites you, we just bury you where you lie.”
“Leaping viper?”
“That’s his cousin.”
I didn’t ask anymore about snakes. Some things aren’t worth knowing or thinking about. Or worrying about.
“After burning away the leaves, we do the cutting.”
Workers were already in fields. We stopped and watched them cutting. Workers literally attacked the cane, wading in and chopping at it, cutting the tall stalks with a machete-looking tool, a large steel blade about eighteen inches long and four or five inches wide, with a wooden handle and small hook in back. The stalks were cut close to the ground.
“There are still leaves left that we don’t burn off because they’re close to the stalk. They use the hook on the end of the knife to strip it of leaves. They cut the cane at the top joint and then chop it into four- or five-foot lengths. Then they bundle it so it can be hauled to the cane-processing plant.”
The cutter piled the cut stalks on the ground and another worker came along, tied them in bundles and loaded them onto donkey carts for transport to the processing plant.
“Where do I start?” I asked.
“Where do you want to start?”
I was burning with nervous energy. I wanted to hit someone with Jack Walsh’s face, and attacking the cane seemed like a good way to burn off my aggressions.
“Can I cut?”
“That’s not a white man’s job—”
“I don’t care.”
I wanted to learn everything there was about the work and the only way to do it was to get my hands dirty.
Samuel gave me a machete.
As I started for a line of tall stalks, he said, “Remember, my friend, the cane is important, it’s more important than you or me. The money produced in the fields of Corozal and Orange Walk feeds thousands of families. Never disrespect the cane. It’s what the Mexicans call the Flor de Corozal, the Flower of Corozal. You may not love it, you may grow to fear it or hate it, but never show it disrespect.”
I saluted him with my machete and went for the cane.
He called after me. “And watch out for the snakes.”
I waded in, like I’d seen the other workers, bending down, cutting the stalks close to the ground.
It was easy work—for a half-hour. Thirty minutes after I started I was drenched in sweat. The early-morning sun beat down on me. I took off my shirt and tied it around my head and let it drape down the back of my neck. And kept chopping.
The other men chattered in that mix-and-match Creole English they spoke as they chopped the cane. I chopped and sweated. I would have given up by now if I hadn’t pushed my way in. I would have been humiliated if I quit.
The sun got hotter and I felt as if my blood was boiling.
One moment I was swaying dizzily and the next thing I knew I crashed into a pile of cut cane.
A few minutes later I sat in the shade along the river with Sarah. She had arrived just in time to see me take a nosedive.
“You have to learn to live with the heat,” she said. “You wouldn’t go outside in Leningrad during the winter without a coat. By the same token, you don’t walk around the tropics without a hat.”
She had brought me a straw hat, like the other men wore, lemonade, a jug of water, and a piece of stuffed flat bread. She wet her handkerchief with cool water and put it on the back of my neck. She smelled of sweet rose bath oil when she leaned next to me.
“What did Samuel say to you a moment ago?” I asked.
“He blames himself. He said you were so energetic and determined, he forgot you were a backras.”
“A what?”
“I think it’s Creole for ‘raw back.’ It’s what they call a newcomer, a white person who burns in the sun until the skin peels off.” She was silent for a moment. “You left the house without joining us for breakfast.”
“I wanted to get to work.” I changed the subject. “This stuffed flat bread is good.”
“It’s called a burrito. It’s a cornmeal flat bread, a tortilla, stuffed with black beans and peppers, a Mexican specialty. The Corozal area had a big influx of Indians from Mexico during the caste wars about a hundred years ago, so there’s lots of corn and roasted peppers in our diet. From the Creoles, you’ll get food from a West Indies culture, plenty of jerk chicken and rice and peas, but the peas are really kidney beans. And don’t forget we’re British when you’re eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”
She laughed. It was a nice sound, like a small, harmonious bell.
“You’ll have British, Caribbean and Mexican food all on the same day. Things are rather mixed up here. The colony is in Central America, wedged between Mexico and Guatemala, but it’s more Caribbean than Latin American. They have a Creole dish here called a pepperpot, it’s a mix of whatever, and that’s how the colony is. Like that burrito you’re eating, you’ll find much of the Mexican and Creole food is spicy hot from peppers. I guess the theory seems to be that spicy food helps people in hot climates.”
She paused for a moment. “Jack didn’t intend for you to work in the fields. He can use an assistant, and he’d feel more comfortable with you than a Creole. He doesn’t always get along well with the locals, if you know what I mean. But until you get used to the climate, you don’t have to work at all. You caught both of us rather by surprise when Samuel came to the house and told us you insisted upon working in the fields.”
“I like learning new things.”
I avoided looking at her as I spoke. I noticed the bruise mark on her cheek which she had covered with rouge. It made my blood boil almost as bad as the sun had.
She squeezed my arm. “We really are both very happy to have you here. We haven’t had children and have only ourselves for company. You’re not a child, of course, but you are family and Jack is already thinking of you like a younger brother.”
I kept a straight face at that one.
“When you get to know Jack better, you’ll understand why he’s like he is. He had a very hard childhood. His father was a laborer who earned too little and drank too much. Jack worked hard in the army for his sergeant’s stripes but it still wasn’t enough for him because no matter how good he was, some wet-nosed new officer who got his commission through family connections was above him. Jack never got the chance of good schools or being an officer. It’s all rather set at birth, yo
u know.
“Running this plantation has been a godsend, giving him an opportunity to push up the ladder that he never would have gotten back home. But bad luck has plagued us. He convinced the investors to build the sugarcane processing plant, promising them they’d make more money processing cane than growing it. Things were bloody spectacular the first year and then that earthquake shifted the river.”
I smiled and tried to appease her.
“I like Jack. I can see he’s tough, but I’m sure he’s fair. And I’m grateful that you two have let me into your house. But I have a favor to ask.”
“Anything.”
“I notice there are a lot of small houses, huts, that are empty.”
“Those are thatch houses for the seasonal workers we need occasionally when we do major harvesting.”
“I’d like to live in one.”
“You don’t want to be with us?”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’d like to experience living alone for once. In the orphanage—”
“Oh, of course, you must have lived dormitory style.” Her eyes searched my face for the lies. “Well, if that’s what you prefer, but you still must take your meals with us. One thing about the tropics, you don’t need much shelter. You just have to make sure you kill all the scorpions and spiders. And sleep under a net. They can drop off the ceiling and onto your face while you’re sleeping. And check for snakes. The floors are dirt, you know.”
Wonderful.
Sarah and I stared at each other for a moment. Her cheeks flushed and she gathered up her utensils and left.
* * *
After she left, I took my baked aching body back to attack the cane. As I went to war against it, I thought about what had occurred.
For sure, it was no longer possible for me to ever live under the same roof as my aunt.
I had found myself sexually aroused as she sat close to me.
24
Early in the afternoon, Samuel tapped me on the shoulder as I hacked at cane.
“No more.” He jerked his thumb up at the sky. “It’s getting so hot, we’ll melt down. What I tell you?”
“Tek time get dey tiday,” I said.
He led me to a row of empty seasonal worker shacks. One had a roof partly covered with corrugated, galvanized metal. Samuel said it would leak less than a trash house.
“Take this one or take any one you want.”
I figured there would be less poisonous insects in the metal-roofed one.
That evening after dinner, while it was still light, I took my duffle bag and a mosquito net and moved into the shack. On the wall were wilted pictures torn out of a magazine of the wedding nearly two years ago of Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the British throne, to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. A Bull Dog Beer sign was nailed to the front door to cover a big hole.
I lay down but couldn’t sleep, my skin was on fire. Sarah gave me lotion to help with the sunburn. I rubbed more on and tried to lie down again, but it was too hot to sleep. Instead I got up and followed the sounds of music outside, into the thick vegetation beyond the rows of sugarcane. It was cooler in the brush.
I found Samuel and a group of a dozen men and women gathered around a camp fire, with another fire under a rusty oil drum in a clearing. I recognized the drum with the pipes coming out it. It was cruder, but served the same purpose as the vodka still I’d seen at the collective farm in Russia years ago.
Samuel came over grinning with a tin can in his hand. “Bush rum.”
I took a sip of the moonshine. It was molten lava going down my throat. My red face turned fiery.
There was a general laugh among the group. Samuel slapped me on the back.
“You’re okay, boy, you no longer a backras, we make you an honorary Creole.”
We sat around the fire where meat was being roasted. The men and women tapped bottles, cans and sticks, playing an enthusiastic percussion rhythm Sarah had described as “brukdown” earlier at dinner.
More tin cans of rum and pieces of the roasted meat were passed around.
“Meat’s tasty,” I told Samuel.
“Gibnut,” he said.
“Some kind of rabbit?”
“Rat.”
Wonderful.
“Makes me feel like I’m back in Leningrad during the war,” I said.
After a couple cups of the raw rum, I leaned back against the tree and let the booze relax me. I didn’t feel like my skin was on fire anymore. I didn’t feel anything.
Through dimmed lids, I watched a young woman, probably a couple years younger than me, dancing to the percussive sounds. She swayed rhythmically in front of me, giving me a seductive grin. She started slowly at first and moved into a frenzy as the music got faster. Everything shook under the short, tight-fitting cotton dress.
The music suddenly stopped and she collapsed onto her knees in front of me. Her breasts heaved as she caught her breath and her ebony skin glistened from sweat.
She got to her feet and left the clearing.
I started to get up to follow her. Samuel was suddenly in front of me.
“Drink this, Duende.”
He handed me a tin cup of rum. Small dark things were floating in it but I was too far gone to care. I gulped it down and got slowly to my feet, letting the dog running around my head chasing its tail slowly subside. Samuel gave me a grin and nodded in the direction that the girl had gone.
I went into the bush, pushing through the dense vegetation. I was too drunk to question whether I would step on a snake or run into a jaguar—or have a Tommy Goff viper come flying out of a tree. I had something stronger on my mind than danger. Testosterone focused the mind on one thing, an urge that needed to be satisfied.
Following the sounds, I eventually came into a small clearing in front of a green pond. I heard her before I saw her. She came out from behind a tree and was behind me. She gave me a push that sent me flying into the water.
The water was no more than waist high. It was cool and mind-clearing and the first thing that occurred to me was that this was the second time in my life a woman had pushed me into water.
She laughed as she stood on the bank.
“You Englishmen are so easy to trick.”
I smiled at her and said, “Why don’t you come in and see what other tricks we have up our sleeves?”
“I don’t think it’s up your sleeve but in your pants that you’re talking about.”
She pulled her dress off over her head. Her body was young and firm, almost muscular—like Russian farm girls, she worked her whole life in the fields. The back-breaking work under the hot sun would ultimately ruin her skin and break her bones, but right now she was in her physical prime, her black skin taut and smooth.
Her breasts were round and firm, more than enough, with large, brown, oversized areolae and nipples. The mound of pubic hair had the soft sheen of Russian sable. Some females in their teens were immature but this girl was a young woman already, full-bodied, full of love and passion and wonderful promises.
She came into the water slowly, teasing me with the sight of her supple young body. She suddenly went under, coming up next to me, her hand on my firm stalk.
“It wants something,” she said.
I cupped both of her firm breasts gently, savoring each one with my mouth.
She grabbed my head and pulled me hard against her breasts. “Suck harder, they won’t break.”
I sucked harder, then lifted her up with my hands on her buttocks, as she spread her legs apart and wrapped them tightly around my waist. I entered her quickly and easily and brought her against me, rocking her up and down, letting her clit slide back and forth on my cock. She went wild, slamming herself against me as I held her up, squeezing and giggling.
When we were spent and lay on the grass by the bank, she leaned over and nuzzled my ear. “That was amazing. You Englishmen are usually too uptight for good lovemaking.”
I didn’t tell her I wasn’t really an Englishman. “I sa
w you this morning coming out of Samuel’s. You resemble his wife.”
“I’m her sister. I’m also Samuel’s wife. Me and my babies live nearby. He has three wives.”
Jesus. I had a lot to learn about the Creoles.
“You put a spell on me, Duende.”
“What does that mean? Samuel called me that, too.”
She laughed. “A duende is a forest creature, a magic beast that lives in the forest and tricks young girls into making love.”
“I don’t get it, why would he call me that?”
She grabbed my left hand and held it up. “Duendes have only four fingers.”
“I see, that’s logical.”
“I told Samuel you wouldn’t need the wee-wee ants because you were a duende.”
“What wee-wee ants?”
“The ones in the rum he gave you.”
I sat up. “Are you telling me that Samuel put ants in my rum?”
She nodded and grabbed my stalk. “The ants are good, makes your little thing grow big and hard. But I’ll tell Samuel not to do it next time. You don’t need it.”
Ants in my rum.
Wonderful.
25
Garcia’s Widow, Corozal District, 1952
Sarita Garcia stood in front of the full-length mirror and examined her naked body. She was critical of what she saw, but shouldn’t have been. At forty-four, her breasts, thighs and stomach were firmer than most women half her age, the silken sheen of her black ebony skin almost wrinkle free. As she stared at her body, she tried to image what she would look like if her skin was white or yellow or brown.
She slipped on a simple white cotton shift and went downstairs to the kitchen to prepare dinner, going barefooted and wearing no underclothes to take full advantage of a stingy cool breeze.
As she stirred the pepperpot—a concoction of meat and vegetables that varied in its ingredients in every household—Sarita hummed a tune she had learned as a little girl. She was preparing the dinner for Neil Lawrence, a retired English engineer known throughout the Corozal District as “Suez” because he once worked on the canal and talked incessantly about the marvel of engineering to anyone who was trapped into listening.
The Betrayers Page 13
