Tears came to Aloysius’s eyes.
“Vhat’s the matter vith you?” Inga asked.
Aloysius hung his head.
“Him ’fraid,” Service sneered.
“Shut up! Vhat’s wrong, Aloysius?”
He hesitated.
“Yesterday me was de star of de cricket game,” Aloysius said.
“Pickney game!” Service scoffed.
“Me take six wickets.”
“So vhat? Vhat is your point?”
“Nobody say nothing to me! Nobody ask me how de game go. Me take six wickets! Me was de star!”
“Star you neckback!” Service sneered. “Pickney game.”
“Shut up!” Inga snapped. She looked at Aloysius. “How vas the game yesterday, Aloysius?”
Aloysius sniffed. “Me take six wickets,” he mumbled.
“Is that good? To take six?”
“Dere’s only eleven man on de side. Dat’s very good.”
“Then congratulations.”
She patted him on the head and stood up. Her eyes were burning with a fierce light. She shook herself all over like a wet dog. “I feel vunderful!” she crowed. “I feel like I vas just born!”
Busha and Sarah set out that afternoon on their Sunday drive. Busha almost always started out on the road that wound through Walker’s Wood and led to the seacoast. Sometimes he would turn off onto a lane that climbed up the side of a mountain and snaked through sleepy hillside villages whose shops and houses wore the grim rectitude of Sunday. Or they would drive slowly on a ridge road that overlooked a view of placid green fields and big-cheeked mountains bulging against the skyline.
When they had small children these Sunday drives were the cause of much bickering and squabbling in the backseat with frequent stops for wee-weeing and spankings. But now that their children were grown and gone the Sunday drive had become for Busha and Sarah a moment of middle-aged peacefulness. They went where the whim took Busha, talked idly about everything, and roamed the lands as if it were a windless green lake over which they were paddling a rowboat.
This Sunday Busha took the mountain road, climbing the summit in first gear. Sarah especially loved this road because of wild orchids that bloomed on the clay hillside and scented the air.
But any pedestrian who happened to see the car wind slowly past would have quickly spotted that all was not well inside, that the man was gesticulating like one pleading a hopeless case, and the woman’s face cemented with the obduracy of a hardened old wife.
The car screeched to a stop on the summit.
“I not moving Mummy and Daddy!” Sarah cried shrilly, her voice piercing the stillness of the countryside. “You could talk till you blue in de face! I burying in Moneague beside dem!”
“You don’t even give me a chance to explain!” Busha begged.
His face was turning blue.
The white woman and the two black men drifted up from the bushland on different paths toward Busha’s house.
Aloysius went by the road, walking with an exaggerated air of nonchalance. He did not have far to go but still the distance seemed interminable to him. He was sure that eyes were following his every move and he turned frequently and looked about him as though to surprise a hidden observer crouching behind a nearby bush. He tried singing to calm fears, but his voice was nervous and squeaky. Not far behind him on the other side of the road, Service followed, a machete hanging between the fingers of his left hand.
Inga shadowed them on the bush footpath that ran parallel on the road.
Aloysius came to Busha’s driveway and stopped. He looked over his shoulders, peered into the enormous fields that spilled out on either side of the roadway, and hesitated.
Service sat down on the stone wall. Inga slunk behind a bush.
Aloysius took a deep breath and started up the driveway.
“Oyyeaaah, the house!” he sang out, “Busha, please!”
Barking furiously, the dogs bounded down the driveway to meet him.
Busha and Sarah were quarrelling on the top of her favorite hill.
“Whenever I want anything in dis world, you block me!” Busha was raging. “Once you hear dat I want something, you say to yourself, ‘Blocking time now!’ No matter what it is! If I want to go here, you want to go dere. If I want dis for dinner, you must want dat! Blocking your husband! Dat’s all you know how to do!”
“You not burying me in no dirty Kingston!” Sarah snapped. “You not uprooting Mummy and Daddy like is rosebush you transplanting. I don’t care if de coffin lined with gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and de King of England bury beside me, you not doing it! And you can put dat in you pipe and smoke it, for dat is final!”
“God Almighty.” Busha rolled his eyes to heaven for help. “You see dis cross you give me to bear? You see how dis damn woman spend her whole life defeating me? Who wear de pants in dis damn family, anyway? Since when you is boss over me?”
“You could wear a hundred pants, you still not burying me in no Kingston. I burying in Moneague, where I was born, where I was a child, where I live my whole life!”
“I give Mr. Saarem a $10,000 down payment! Because of you stubbornness, we goin’ lose $10,000! Be reasonable, woman!”
“Dat is your business! I never tell you to sign paper to buy a mausoleum! Did I tell you to do dat? If you want to bury in dat place, go right ahead! But I bury where I spend my life—in Moneague!”
Busha started up the car.
“Well, nobody putting me in Shubert’s backyard for goat and cow to do number one and number two on me head! I buying a mausoleum in Kingston and dat’s where dey goin’ bury me. And when I’m dere, for once in me life I won’t have you beside me nagging me head off! Thank God!”
“Buying mausoleum!” Sarah spat with contempt. “All of a sudden de place where him live him whole life is not good enough for him. You’re a joke!”
The car took off with a violent jerk as Busha looked for a place to turn.
“No matter what I say, dis woman is against it!” Busha raged. “Opposition, opposition, opposition! Dat’s all dis woman know! She should be in politics.”
It struck Inga that Busha’s house was like the abandoned lair of an animal. There was the spoor of an alien presence everywhere she turned: A crumbled newspaper was open on a coffee table in the drawing room, a half-drunk cup of tea sat on a sideboard, dishes soaked in the sink. The musty smells of bodies hung warm and stale like dead air in every corner. Pictures and portraits of living and dead McIntoshes stared fixedly at her from the walls.
“Where Busha keep him money?” Service whispered.
“Behind dat picture on de wall,” Aloysius replied.
They shifted the pictures and found a recessed wall safe. Service tried to pry it open with his machete, but the thick wooden door would not give.
“Ve need something stronger,” Inga snapped. “Aloysius, see vhat you can find in the kitchen!”
Aloysius rushed to the rear of the house.
“Look at that fat pig up there!” Inga said, pointing to an ancient oil portrait of a portly, bewigged gentleman caught in a contemplative pose holding a book.
She went to the sideboard, grabbed the half-empty cup of tea, and hurled it at the portrait.
The cup shattered against the ancestor’s ruffled ascot.
Busha drove like a man demented, his eyes fixed on the road, his face creased with anger lines. He tore through Walker’s Wood, careened around corners, and roared past slow-moving buses on the few straight stretches of roadway.
“You kill yourself today in dis car,” Sarah said tartly, “and I goin’ bury you tomorrow behind Shubert shop.”
“Don’t bother talk to me!” Busha roared. “Just don’t bother talk!”
“I talk if I want to!” she snapped. “I don’t pay license on my mouth.”
The scenery flashed past in a smudge of green. Busha stepped on the gas, honked to scatter a flock of browsing goats, and raced down the road leading to Moneague.
He blew through the village, blasting chickens and dogs out of his path with his horn, causing Sunday strollers to turn and peer with astonishment after him.
Then he was skidding past the quiet graveyard and barrelling down the quiet country lane on which they lived.
The car roared up the gravel driveway and ground to a screeching stop under the portico.
Busha bounded out, slammed the door after him, and stalked angrily over the veranda and into the drawing room.
In the middle of the room he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, the hairs on the back of his neck slowly rising.
The wall safe was torn open. Its thick wooden door hung like an idiot’s drooping lip. Money was scattered across the floor.
“Sarah!” Busha flung over his shoulder. “Stay outside! Something goin’ on!”
He was cautiously approaching the safe when murder reared up before him in a blur. Busha caught a glimpse of an upraised machete and instinctively lifted his arm to shield his head.
The machete slashed into his forearm with a hollow whack, and Busha crumbled on the floor with a moan.
Then Service was stooping over him, struggling with the handle of the machete. He gave a grunting wrench; the blade popped out of Busha’s bone with a splattering of blood.
Sarah screamed and rushed into the room as Service took aim at Busha’s unprotected head.
“No kill Busha!” Aloysius howled.
He hurled himself at Service and drove him off his feet.
The two black men wrestled on the floor. They slammed into furniture and tumbled against a wall.
“Let him go, you fool!” Inga yelled. She grabbed Aloysius in a hammerlock, and pulled him off.
Service jumped up, grabbed the machete, and uncoiled a vicious blow at Busha, who was trying to clamber to his feet but had slipped and fallen in his own blood.
A deafening explosion roared through the room. Service was flung against a sofa as though he had been thumped from behind by a fist.
He stood up and turned around slowly, a thread of blood unwinding down the side of his mouth.
From the doorway Sarah took aim at him with a revolver.
“She shot me!” Service bawled.
He put his hand to his chest. Blood oozed through the shirt and seeped between his fingers.
“Lawd Jesus!” he cried, dropping the machete and clutching his chest with both hands. “Lawd God, she shot me!”
Inga made a move as if to attack.
“I’ll kill you stone dead!” Sarah shrieked.
Tears streamed down her face, and she drew breath in sharp gasps. But the barrel of the revolver was levelled steadily at the head of the German.
BOOK III
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bumpkin: That was what barrister Kenneth P. Linstrom was thinking about as he drove toward a court appearance in Ocho Rio. And it was no wonder. He worked with bumpkin, played with bumpkin, got grind from bumpkin, drank rum with bumpkin, and was constantly at loggerheads with bumpkin. As far as the barrister was concerned, bumpkin grew on tree in Jamaica, and any man who lived here was chucked higgledypiggledy into the middle of bumpkin mentality. In his view the motto written under the alligator on the country’s coat-of-arms should be, “Out of Many, One Bumpkin.” Anything else there was a damn lie.
The barrister was a brown-skinned man with graying hair so impeccably distinguished and well-placed on his temples that it looked as if he had painted it there for theatrical effect. The barrister had it all: brawn, brain, good looks, five children, big house, Mercedes-Benz, sailboat, and a successful law practice. On top of everything else, he played a ferocious game of weekend cricket.
During his desultory thinking about bumpkin, Linstrom was driving through the highlands of St. Ann whose lush scenery spoke of constant rain, fog, and morning dew. He was on his way to the small courthouse in Ocho Rios to defend good against evil, mercy against malice, principle against bumpkin. He was appearing at his own cost in the defense of Aloysius, who was being tried along with Inga and Service on the charge of burglary and attempted murder.
This involvement of Barrister Linstrom in this insignificant country case was typical of his quixotic nature. He had merely happened one morning to read about an upcoming trial in which a madman, a butcher, and a German woman were being tried for breaking-and-entering, felonious assault, and attempted murder of a St. Ann landowner. But what had caught his attention was the report that the landowner’s life had been saved by the lunatic. The story was garbled with the usual journalistic porridge, but the barrister was nevertheless struck by its obvious assemblage of good and evil.
He was sitting on the veranda of his Beverly Hills house when he first read the story. Spread out below the terrace on which he had eaten breakfast was a panoramic vista of Kingston complete with morning haze, Palisadoes Peninsula, clogged lines of traffic, and in the distance, the sleek blue of the Caribbean. Affluence, prosperity, and bumpkin mansions surrounded the barrister on all sides but did not seduce him. No matter that a swimming pool lay a few feet from his toes, a Mercedes-Benz was parked a little distance behind his neckback, and four maids were bustling his children off to school inside the house just beyond his right ear, in his heart he was still a devout Socialist.
Of course, bumpkin found the barrister’s Socialism hypocritical and perplexing. Bumpkin thought in black-and-white and always got vexed when a Socialist didn’t live in a hovel and wear rags on his back. But ask bumpkin about heaven and listen to what he said. Ask him if he was praying to go to heaven so he could eat thin gruel and day-old soup and sleep in a stinking hovel with a leaky roof like he expected Socialists to do, and he would laugh in your face. Bumpkin heaven meant fat roast beef, rice and peas, and all the yellow yam you could eat. Ask bumpkin and he would tell you that angels didn’t live in ramshackle house and ride on donkey cart. Angel house was high on a hill with a view and a breeze, had chandeliers, swimming pool, and marble staircase. Maybe even a demon maid or two from the country who would fix you a cup of tea in the morning and scratch you foot bottom at night. If wealth was good enough for heaven and angels, it was good enough for Socialism and Socialists.
That very morning, Barrister Linstrom had rung up the country counsel assigned to defend Aloysius and offered his services. The man was taken aback—he knew of course the name of Linstrom by reputation—and stammered that he had merely intended to advise his client to plead guilty and throw himself at the mercy of the court. Fuzzy thinking, Linstrom had retorted sternly. What about the man’s alleged madness, what about the act of mercy he had shown by preventing a murder? Well, replied the attorney, the man was mad and if he didn’t end up in jail he’d probably wind up in the asylum. As far as he could tell it was a choice between Hee Haw and Haw Hee and wasn’t worth fussing about.
Linstrom let the man have a taste of his temper. He clouted him over the phone with principle until the fellow finally told him in a surly voice that if the barrister wished to take over the case he would be more than happy to relinquish control to him. Linstrom promptly accepted and a week later drove out to Ocho Rios to meet with Aloysius.
He had a philanthropic streak in him, did this barrister. Plus he especially loved cases that gave him a chance to provoke bumpkin and unsettle bumpkin thinking.
Linstrom had two interviews with Aloysius in the dirty dark meeting room of the jailhouse. The first interview went badly because the bar next door was playing reggae music at a blaring volume and the barrister and Aloysius had to practically shout questions and answers back and forth across a soiled wooden table.
The second interview took place on a Sunday when the raucousness of the bar was subdued and the only background noise was a moan of hymns from several village churches. This time the barrister went over Aloysius’s involvement in the robbery, learned some scant details about the German woman who had talked him into taking part in it, and discovered the man named Service who had struck a blow wounding the landowner had since b
ecome a repentant Seventh Day Adventist and intended to throw himself on the mercy of the court.
The barrister summed up his view of the case to Aloysius.
“You have one main problem,” he said. “I’ll give it to you in a word: bumpkin.”
Aloysius blinked.
“Bumpkin, sah?”
“Yes. That is your problem. I could put it another way but basically it boil down to that. You going to have a bumpkin judge, bumpkin jury, and, worst of all, bumpkin mentality to cope with. But the one good thing you have on your side is that you have a barrister who love to fight bumpkin. I going to get you off if it’s the last thing I do.”
“What name ‘bumpkin,’ sah?” Aloysius asked timidly.
“Let me put it this way. Bumpkin is my name for a certain way of thinking we find all over Jamaica from top to bottom. It’s like a gas in de air.”
Aloysius grinned.
“You know, sah, when me was a little boy me auntie used to say dat me have a mind like a barrister.”
“Is dat so?”
The barrister gathered his notes and stuffed them into his briefcase.
“But me auntie dead when me was a little boy and me never learned to read and write.”
“Just as well. Too much damn barrister already in this country.”
“But I wonder, sah. Could you tell me how it feel to be a famous barrister?”
Linstrom peered hard into the loamy eyes of the madman searching his face in the dim room.
“Being a barrister in Jamaica mean you have bumpkin ’round you neck from de time you get up in de morning to de time you go to sleep at night. That’s the God’s truth about being a barrister. Bumpkin make you fart grease and shit fire.”
When Linstrom got to the tiny courthouse in Ocho Rios, many of the players in the morality drama—or so he had described the case to his associates in law and Socialism—were already there. The German woman was sitting at a table with two burly policewomen standing behind her. Her Jamaican barrister and her father sat with her along with another white man identified to the court as the family’s personal lawyer brought over from Germany to observe the proceedings. The three white people wore a thin smile that reminded the barrister of a mouth whose corners had been slit open with a sharp razor.
The Lunatic Page 18
