Busha shuddered, awaiting the hoof in the face.
“Might as well begin, eh?” Busha said bravely.
“I already start,” the inspector murmured.
Chapter Ten
Now came riding time. Riding morning, noon, and night for the next week. Riding up mountain and down mountain, riding along the seacoast road, riding on a marl-stone lane that trickled through the bushland.
Riding began in the morning with the first light over the mountaintops and continued through the blazing noon sun when even John Crows knew better than to stay out in the heat, when donkey hood drop and schoolchildren leave the playground and seek the cool of a shade tree, when parsons will bury no dead body and fish will take no bait. But the German woman was oblivious to the sun, heat, hot wind, rough road. All she knew was riding, riding, riding.
And it was the worst kind of riding they did, too—on a hot motorcycle the German had rented. Its exhausts glowed like stovepipes in the heat and fumes swirled up in the hot dry air and burned their noses. Yet the German woman still continued to ride.
On the first day of the riding Aloysius took her up into the mountains, through the villages of Walker’s Wood, Lydford, Beechamville, Trafalgar, and Epworth—places he knew well because he had been hungry in them, or cut and bruised, or hurt.
The land in these places is like a still sea of green pastures and hills. It seeps over hummock and knoll into grasslands, and swirls into gullies, puddles into silent empty clearings where cows and goats graze in the Undertaker’s wind that blows off the mountains every afternoon making the trees tremble.
She took pictures and remarked often that the land was the most beautiful she had seen, to which Aloysius always replied with dour memories: Here was a tree under which he had once huddled against a driving rain, where he had sat drenched and frightened of the lightning and thunder through a long fretful night. There was a pasture where he used to sleep once, a long time ago, before the bushes drove him away with nasty gossip about his personal habits. At the foot of that mountain he had once spent a hungry week, his belly bawling every night for meat when he was only able to feed it wild fruit.
The woman saw none of these things. She saw only trees and green pastures and a mountain framed in a serene pose against the sky. She felt the wind and the sun on her cheek, and she saw none of the misery and pain in the empty land.
“Beautiful,” she cried to a lovely windblown pasture.
Aloysius grunted.
The camera clicked like an insect outside one’s window on a dark, dark night.
But after that first day he was a stranger to the land. She took him to places he had never seen. The motorcycle climbed hills he had never climbed, puttered down roads he had never walked. It drove through the hearts of towns and villages he had never even heard about, and everywhere they rode people stopped and turned to openly stare at the stout white woman and hairy black man on the rented motorcycle.
Aloysius knew his land the way a poor man knows it—the way a dog knows a bone, an infant its mother’s breasts. But Aloysius did not know Jamaica the way the white woman knew her.
She knew the land the way a teacher knows a schoolbook. She knew history, lore, nomenclature—this last being one of the madman’s thousand names, yet it also described how the woman knew Jamaica. The land was not her birthplace, not her homeland, was not a place that she loved—still, she knew it better than Aloysius, to whom the land had given life. It was a way of knowing that galled Aloysius so that he could hardly stand to talk with her and be told about the country, about the names of the mountains and villages and towns, about the names of parishes and places where long ago events of great importance had occurred.
One day she took him to a rugged cliff overlooking the sea and she told him that a long time ago a fierce battle had been fought between the English and the Spaniards here over possession of Jamaica. She showed him where the ships had lain at anchor and where the Spaniards had built fortifications against attack.
Now the ships were gone and the sea was empty in the heat of the sun and the fortifications were nothing more than an overgrown bushy ridge.
They walked over the bare land, and wild macca bushes scratched at their ankles while the woman took photographs. Aloysius poked at the undergrowth with his foot looking for the bones of a dead soldier. But the soldiers who had died here had been dead so long that nothing at all remained of them. The wind soughed through the trees and a bird sang over this graveyard that looked like any other hillside, and there were no bones to be found anywhere.
“In de dark,” Aloysius sobbed aloud, “me mind in de darkness.”
“Vhat? Vhat you go on about now?” she wondered.
“De darkness cover me mind and me eye,” he sobbed, rubbing his eyes as though to erase the darkness inside his mind.
“Dark? Is broad daylight dis. What de madman saying?” asked a bush.
“Maybe him blind,” another whispered.
“Vhat darkness?” the woman grated impatiently.
“De darkness o’ everlasting ignorance,” Aloysius sobbed.
“You should be in German opera,” the woman said without pity.
She lit a Sinsemilla joint.
“Broad rass daylight and negar man complain ’bout darkness,” a bush hissed. “Ole negar never satisfy. God sun no good enough for dem. Now dey want lamppost and floodlight in broad daylight.”
The German took a drag and cast her eyes over the empty landscape: the domination of macca bush and knotted undergrowth; the tangled vegetation so green and lush that it seemed blurry to the naked eye.
“History is shit,” she grunted.
Yet Aloysius became so puffed up with the new knowledge he had gotten from the woman about Jamaica that he began to give lessons in geography to the flame heart tree. Sometimes the lessons lasted late into the night after the moon had already set behind the mountain and only the dim light of the stars fell on the darkened countryside.
“Jamaica,” Aloysius told the tree after another wearying day of riding, “have 4,244 square miles.”
“Eh, eh?” the tree marvelled.
“146 mile long and 51 wide. In de widest part.”
“Of course,” echoed the tree respectfully.
“120 river and stream run over dis island.”
“Bumbo house!”
“30 million years ago dis island come outta de sea.”
“What a long time!”
“Two thirds o’ de island covered with limestone.”
“Me never know stone come from lime.”
Aloysius chuckled.
“No, man,” he corrected. “Limestone is like marl stone.”
“So where dis limestone come from?”
“Dead animal.”
“Dead animal?”
“Dead snail. Dead crab. Dead crustaceans.”
“Say what? Dead what?”
“Dead crustaceans. De little sea animal dem. When dey dead, dey leave behind a little pile o’ bones. Dat what dem call limestone.”
“Why dem don’t call it crustacean stone?”
“Me don’t know. So dey call it.”
“So den all Jamaica is like one rass big graveyard? All day long we walk and talk ’pon top o’ dead animals. No wonder dere so much parson in poor Jamaica.”
“Is true, you know. Parson love a graveyard more dan crow love dead body.”
But even an innocent conversation like this, overheard by bushes, became a dangerous thing. For the next morning Aloysius was awakened by a screeching bush.
“Repent, oh crustaceans,” the bush was raving, “for you soon dead and come to Jamaica. Dey goin’ drive motorcar ’pon you head and school pickney dem goin’ play cricket on you mumma jawbone. Den everybody—government minister and madman put together—goin’ wee-wee ’pon you nose bridge. Dey goin’ wee-wee ’pon you so much dey goin’ make you fart!”
“Hush you rass!” Aloysius screamed.
The flame heart tree stirr
ed.
“Morning, Aloysius,” the tree said.
“Everybody love preach in Jamaica,” Aloysius grumbled, settling back down on the ground. “Dat what wrong wid Jamaica. Too much rass preaching.”
“Bee, you bumbo!” yelled the tree. “Move you rass. Is too early for pollination!”
“Preaching from ignorance,” Aloysius mumbled sleepily. “As if crustacean have nose bridge.”
“Rass negar bee grind me blossom before de sun even rise!” the tree yelped. “Bee, you blood!”
Riding was like reading. Or so it seemed to Aloysius in this week of constant, everlasting, never-ending riding on the pillion seat of the motorcycle clinging to the sweaty back of the thick white woman who had the map and decided on which roads to take. Even though Aloysius could not read, riding through the land was like reading it, was like seeing the story of the land and her people flash past one’s eyes like the words of the book were said to march past the eyes of the comprehending reader.
A new day’s journey was like the new page of a book. You could not say what lay around the next bend, or where the twisting road that slithered down the mountain would lead, whether into the hush of an overgrown valley or the openness of a canepiece with the sun glittering against the distant sea. You could not say how a road would come out or where it would end.
But each parish was like a separate chapter in the book of Jamaica. In Portland you could read stupor and contentment in the land where rain fell morning, noon, and night, where bushes and trees rioted over the banks of mountains and dripped down the sides of hills in lush thickness. The people were poor but the bellies did not hang off the children because the sea was rich with fish and there were many rivers where shrimp and janga lived and could be caught by hand.
In St. Thomas the land became mountainous and sparse, the bushes thinning out and the rocky landscape protruding through the scrub like an old man’s bones. Here was a land where the rain was not plentiful, a dry and arid parish loved by weeds and goats. Here you saw swollen bellies on the bodies of innocent children who stood by the roadside and stared at the passing motorcycle. Here the dry river beds cracked and fissured like old sores and the dust of the parched land billowed in the wake of the motorcycle.
At the end of each day’s journey Aloysius would return to the foot of the flame heart tree and tell what he had read of the book of Jamaica.
“Today, we ride through the parish of Clarendon,” he would tell the tree, settling against its trunk for an evening of quiet talk before sleeping.
“You think negar life hard?” the tree grumbled. “You should be a tree, if you want see hard life.”
“Everybody life hard now and den.”
“Don’t chat no foolishness in me ear, sah! You ride ’round de whole island wid mad white woman. Me sit here all day in the hot sun giving grind to nasty negar bee. What me hear all day long? One donkey braying, dat’s what! Who life harder?”
“Yours, sah. You have de harder life.”
“A-hoa.”
Aloysius understood that the tree was jealous, so he did not dispute with it. It would grumble for a few minutes then it would be eager to hear about Clarendon.
“So what ’bout Clarendon, now?” the tree finally asked.
Aloysius shared what he had seen in the land during a day of riding.
The woman gave him money. Aloysius did not ask her outright for money, but she understood his needs and gave it to him daily. He bought warm meals from roadside ramshackle shops where he was served rice and peas, curry goat, and plantain by a suspicious woman whose husband sat on a barstool against a corner of the wattle-wall shack and stared while Aloysius ate his meals with a tablespoon in a dark corner.
Sometimes the German woman even ate with him. She abandoned the beautiful pink hotel that sat contentedly on the beach with every room gaping an open terrace at the cool breezes from the sea, and she rode with him to one of the food shacks tilting on the roadside and ate sitting beside him on a greasy table in the dark corner. But whenever she went with him the eyes craned to stare at the two of them: Passersby paused to flick glances into the shack at the stout white woman and the hairy madman. The proprietor and his woman peered at them from the dark doorway leading to the kitchen where a wood fire flickered red against a wall.
One night while Aloysius had stepped outside to relieve himself, the proprietor hurried over to the dirty table in the corner where the woman sat alone and whispered urgently to her: “Missus! Missus! You know dat man you wid is a madman?”
She recoiled with mock alarm.
“Mad?”
“Yes, missus. He mad as mad can be. Him is a very dangerous man, missus.”
The woman laughed.
“That’s all right. I mad, too.”
The man stared at her with bewilderment.
Then he chuckled.
“No, missus. Don’t say dat. White people don’t go mad in Jamaica. Only negar go mad here.”
“I say, I mad, too.”
“You make joke ’bout dis, missus. But is no joke. Him is a real madman.”
“I say, I mad, too. Listen to this.”
The shopkeeper stared at her with wonder while she screwed up her face and took a deep breath like a small child struggling to inflate a new balloon.
“BUMBO! BUMBO! BUMBO! BUMBO CLAAT! BUMBO HOLE! BUMBO TOWN! BUMBO HEAD! BUMBO ISLAND! BUMBO WORLD! BUMBO BUMBO! EVERYTHING BUMBO!”
The man’s mouth drooped open. Never in his born days had bumbo flown so freely in his presence. He could not believe his ears. Then he blinked as if he could not believe his eyes either.
Bumbo was a violent patois curse. In the Jamaican consciousness, bumbo lived under a damp rock like a poisonous lizard. Bumbo did not draw clean breath, show itself in the sunlight, or walk on lighted streets. Bumbo wrapped itself like a worm around the stem in the netherland of the brain where it grew fat and slimy on a diet of impiety and taboo.
The shopkeeper gasped like one violently slapped in the face. Bumbo hit him on the side of the head, on the chin; bumbo drove a dirty blade into the solar plexus of his dignity, manhood, conscience. His eyes gaped in astonishment: Here in his establishment, a place of grit and decency, bumbo darted through the room like a rabid bat.
It was true that his shop was poor, that it resembled a weed growing out of the mud rather than a thing made by a human hand. Its floor was filthy. Flies swarmed everywhere in the dark room. Dim light trickled from a few kerosene lamps placed on the crude tables.
But poor might be dirty and poor might be ramshackle and stink like fat Queen Victoria after eight hours in a crinoline, but poor was not nasty. Bumbo was nasty.
The man drew himself up to a terrifying height. His wife flew to his side clutching a stick, ready to battle the benighted influence of bumbo.
Aloysius sauntered back into the room.
“Listen me, Aloysius!” the proprietor told him angrily. “You is a madman because God mek you so. As long as you don’t work you madness in me shop you is welcome. But dis woman not goin’ put her foot cross my doorstep again. Get her out of me shop!”
The white woman laughed and stood up.
“Come, Aloysius,” she cackled, “ve go. He doesn’t like me.”
At the doorway she turned.
“BUMBO!” she spat at the proprietor and his woman, who stood stock-still in the same place over the dirty table.
The force of the bumbo brushed them back like a blast from an engine.
Then Aloysius and the woman were alone on the quiet street, walking toward where they had left the motorcycle under a tree, a knot of people peering out of the shop silently after them.
“You can’t shout bumbo to people in Jamaica, you know, man,” Aloysius whispered to the woman as they mounted the motorcycle.
“Vhat does the vord mean?”
“Bad word. Bad bad word. You can’t just come up to people in Jamaica and say bumbo. It don’t work so.”
“But vhat meaning has this
vord?”
“Is a wicked word. You can’t use dat word to people in Jamaica.”
The woman laughed shrilly. She threw back her head and shrieked.
“BUMBO!”
The spectators in the doorway of the shop winced as one.
“Bumbo!” whispered one bush to another. “You hear dat?”
“Yes, sah. Foreigner come loosen bumbo ’pon poor Jamaica. What is dis trial and tribulation now?”
The motorcycle roared off into the night. With the breeze blowing past his ears, Aloysius tried to think about how to explain bumbo to the white woman. But the words would not come and the explanation that was clear to him he could not impart to a foreigner.
In the week of riding Aloysius gained weight from good eating and began to fart regularly like a rich man. Not only was he eating meat every day and drinking beverage, he was also getting a grind regularly from the woman, and the pum-pum was fattening him up and making him content. Even though he still woke up in the morning on the bare ground under the complaining flame heart tree with bushes babbling foolishness in his ear, he could not help waking up in the good mood of a parson on a Sunday morning. He awoke humming tunes and jumped up off his back like a whore on holiday.
But then something happened and the week of riding was abruptly over.
This was when things changed between them.
Chapter Eleven
A cultivator in a small village in St. Elizabeth went to bed early one night after a hard day of planting yam in the hot sun, and instead of sleeping and resting his weary bones, he waited up for late-night pum-pum. His head was hurting him and his back was stiff from hoeing all day, but when his woman lay down on the bed beside him, he was convinced that he needed a grind. The next thing you know, the tired hood and weary pum-pum had locked and he and the woman were fastened.
They grunted and struggled to get unfastened in the small room which was as black as pitch, this being an un-electrified district of St. Elizabeth, but it was no use. The hood was locked up inside the pum-pum like a rat in the belly of a snake. The woman bawled and cried for her mother and cursed the day she first laid eyes on hood; the farmer swore that if he could get unfastened he’d read Deuteronomy to his hood from now on every time it stood up. But no matter how they ranted and raved the hood was fastened inside the pum-pum and it wouldn’t pop loose for love or money.
The Lunatic Page 7
