sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,
proud with despair, we sang how our race
survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril,
and now I was ready for whatever death will.
But if that storm had strength, was in Cap’n face,
beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes,
crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast
to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,
and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us,
and I feeding him white rum, while every crest
with Leviathan-lash make the Flight quail
like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest,
till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail
subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm.
And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come.
11. After the Storm
There’s a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,
a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.
Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,
is clothes enough for my nakedness.
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied
if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.
Open the map. More islands there, man,
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:
The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart—
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow
doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.
Malgrétoute
by Lawrence Scott
Malgrétoute
(Originally published in 1987)
“Boy, when cocoa was king.” That’s what they used to say. Then the estate had begun to die. In his textbook on tropical agriculture, Diseases of Crop-Plants in the Lesser Antilles by W. Nowell, Mr. Wainwright remembered the description. It was a fungus which had come on the winds from Suriname on the South American mainland.
“Look, boss,” Bosoon, the groom, pointed out the young cocoa tree near the verandah of the house at La Mariana. “Look, in the fork of the branch.” It was a bruise on the bark of the tree. By the next day several shoots had appeared and by the end of the week they were a mass of interlacing twigs. Witchbroom. Then the leaves of the young tree had died after becoming soft and flimsy and the other shoots were grossly deformed. “Boy, when cocoa was king.”
“When cocoa was king?” He could hardly remember. The damp morning air made him brace himself and rub his forearms vigorously; rub some warmth into the bones which were already arthritic in the elbows. Forty was not too old, he thought, made him think of death, though. He could start over again. Malgrétoute. This was where they had dumped him. Look at it, he thought. Each morning it was there as he stood at the top of the steps on the gallery, looking out over the sugar-cane estate on the edge of the gulf down by Mosquito Creek into which the stinking Cipero River seeped, clogged with the refuse from the black galvanised barrack-rooms huddled in the gully encircling the junior overseer’s house. A junior overseer, this was what he had become. He surveyed the scene like this each morning, each and every morning since he had arrived at Malgrétoute, in this fraction of the dawn, this half an hour which was his before his wife and children got up and before the servants began to pester his wife. This was it, a junior overseer on a run-down sugar-cane estate. “Boy, when cocoa was king.”
He pushed open the Demerara window by the kitchen sink, filled the kettle with water and lit the wick of the kerosene stove. He couldn’t die now. No. He couldn’t die now. He didn’t believe that. There was more, much more ahead, he thought, in spite of all that had happened, there must be more ahead. And then he thought of the sleeping children, six of them, and his wife. No. He didn’t want them getting up now. This was his time, his half an hour. The flame went out and he had to light the wick again. The black sooty smoke curled off the dirty wick and caught the back of his throat. While the kettle began to boil he went down the rickety back stairs across the back yard to the latrine under the kimeet tree. As he approached the hut he inhaled the heady, strong perfume which came from the white wild lilies which liked to grow in the moist seepage behind the latrine. As he peed he wondered at this apparent contradiction in nature, how the wild lilies with their satiny petals opening out of shiny green stems, already beginning to unfurl to the first light and warmth, amidst the thick fleshy leaves, and reveal their golden centres with their dusty stamens of pollen, had chosen the nastiest place to grow and startle the world. As he buttoned up his crotch he wondered at that. No, he wouldn’t die. “Bosoon, Bosoon, is that you?”
“Yes, boss.”
“It’s cold, boy.”
“Yes, boss, it cold no arse. Excuse, excuse, boss. It cold like hell.”
“No, Bosoon. You’re right, it cold no tail. It damp.” He could talk to Bosoon. The groom came out from under the house muffled up against the damp. Bosoon had come with him from La Mariana. He knew that Bosoon would stand by him. The black man would stand by him. He knew that.
Bosoon had grown up at La Mariana and picked cocoa for his father as a boy. Bosoon was his groom and now at Malgrétoute he was the watchman too, and then he didn’t have anywhere to live, so he lived under the house. Bosoon would always be there. He didn’t like his wife calling Bosoon to take messages in the shop. Bosoon was his man.
“Things still bad, eh, boss?”
“Yes, Bosoon, things still bad.”
“I don’t understand this thing, boss, no promotion except into dead man’s boots. That is what he does say. The big manager man, how he not call you yet? Them is English people, boss, they don’t understand. This thing gone back a long way. Go
ne back a long way, yes. You and me, me and you, me and your father. That is a long time, yes, boss. You going to have to kill somebody.”
“Here, Bosoon, drink it while it’s hot and strong.” Mr. Wainwright laughed. Bosoon lit a cigarette and stood outside at the top of the back steps. Mr. Wainwright stood in the doorway and the two men were wrapped in the smoke and the steam and the aroma of the tea. “Yes, Bosoon, it’s a long time.”
“I go stay, boss. I not moving unless you move.”
When he put the cup of tea on the bedside table, moving the rosary beads with his fingers as he placed the cup and saucer down, Mr. Wainwright decided again that he would go and see Robertson the G.M. He would go to the General Office and he would get Bosoon to ride with him. Bosoon liked to ride. He could ride Hope while Mr. Wainwright rode Prudence. “Tea, dear.” He looked at his wife and saw six children and he couldn’t really remember how it had come to this or for that matter how it had been. He didn’t like to think now about how it had been. He still had a picture of her in his Bible when she was sixteen, long before he knew her. He looked at her now and saw his six children. It made him feel guilty that he didn’t feel like that now as he had then. They didn’t really talk, but they had an understanding. She was feeling it too as she still sat under the mosquito net, dangling her feet onto the damp pitchpine floor, feeling it every single day. She was feeling it too, the change, the disappointment; a disappointment for him though not in him. At least he didn’t think it was in him, though at times he wondered, like last night when her brothers came out for a drink and everyone had drunk a lot of rum.
“You are the junior overseer on a run-down sugar-cane estate. What are we now?” She had got confidence from her brothers to say that and they too were sticking in their oars.
“Come on, man, get into business, man, agriculture is a dead end and cocoa dead, boy.”
“When cocoa was king,” the other brother laughed as he took another swig of rum. “When cocoa was king.”
“Now is the motor-car, boy. No cocoa, no sugar. What you want to stay in this dump for and work for a set of limey people?”
He looked at his wife and saw six children.
“You can sell any blasted thing to the Americans on the base, and there is oil, man, the new El Dorado. You didn’t know that is what they come here for originally, gold. Well, that is the new gold, El Dorado, oil.”
He wasn’t going to sell any blasted motor-cars and he wasn’t going to be a salesman. He was a planter. His overseers knew him as a planter. They knew what he stood for. He stood for fairness, or for a kind of justice, an old justice when everything had its place. He worked hard and his men worked hard. They knew where they stood and he knew what he was, a manager, a planter on his father’s cocoa estate. No, he wasn’t going to go the way of his wife’s brothers, become a businessman and live in a house in town. He wasn’t going to leave the land and he wasn’t going to stop managing and growing on this land. Bosoon, that was all he had left now, Bosoon. Bosoon would stay by him. Yes, he would take Bosoon this afternoon and go to Robertson. He could hear Robertson as he had heard him before. “No promotion, except into the boots of a dead man.” Well he wasn’t going to die and he wasn’t going to wait for anyone else to die. He felt a new confidence as he walked across the drawing-room and began opening up the house. There was just the slightest discernible limp as he crossed the room with the heavy mahogany furniture standing all around him. The children from the barracks used to call him cork foot. He had had polio as a child. He opened up the Demerara windows and let the light, now that the dawn was over, lift the pall off the couch, the sideboard, the oval table with the six chairs, the cabinet and the trolley. They too had come with Bosoon from another place, from La Mariana.
He nearly cut himself shaving. He stirred some more lather into the wooden shaving-bowl and brushed it into his growth. He was afraid of these new hopes. There had been mornings like this before when he had noticed the lilies and gained hope and had had a good smoke with Bosoon and talked of old times. This had lifted him up, especially when Bosoon had made his promise, as he had done many times before, that he would stay and that he would not leave him. There had been times like this before. He could hear his wife fussing over the children and shooing the flies off the food on the breakfast table. Flies. Dysentery. “Sybil, cover the food, girl.” The mesh of the window screens was ripped and the flies came in hordes and alighted on the food and the baby’s bottles and the little boy was down with dysentery. That was all there, just the other side of the door. He could hear his wife pestering the cook that the maid had been late again. He was getting to look old, he thought, as he saw his masked face in the mirror. No, he was the same. There was a way in which you didn’t notice how you were changing and then all of a sudden you could see it. An older man. Well, there could be dignity in that. He had seen his father grow with dignity, tall, silver-haired and a planter gone before him. He wasn’t going to sell any blasted motor-cars. A thought crossed his mind that his sons would leave the land. Maybe it would be oil for them, maybe he was the last. “No promotion except into dead men’s boots.”
When it was after lunch and Sybil was brushing the crumbs off the dining-room table and a silence which was the silence of midday heat and the only sounds were the creaks of the wooden house, Bosoon came up the gravel road from the estate yard with two horses and tethered them under the mango tree at the front of the house.
“I leave it in God’s hands,” Mr. Wainwright’s wife said to herself or her husband as she lay next to him on the big brass bed, resting. “I leave it in God’s hands.” The perfume of the wild lilies rose with the heat from the yard below the bedroom window. “I must pick some lilies for Father Sebastian and ask him to get Mrs. Goveia to put them on Our Lady’s altar.”
This was one of the first thoughts which Mr. Wainwright had as he and Bosoon rode out of the yard on their way to the general manager’s office, imagining his wife with the wild lilies in her arms going into the town to see Father Sebastian. She had her priests. Something was on her mind. He had seen in her eyes the signs of a pilgrimage as she left the house; someone with a purpose to her visit and the lilies were an offering. She was lucky the way she could assail the gates of heaven. She made him feel it was a kind of battle. He remembered standing once outside the bedroom door when she and the children were saying the family rosary and he remembered the prayer which he heard his wife reciting, “armies set in battle array.” For him the lilies were wild and belonged in the dawn where he could see them when he went to pee. For his wife they were an offering to supplicate and adorn the Virgin Mary’s altar for some intention. She had her own intentions this afternoon.
They had their different journeys, he thought. Once, too, she was wild and black-haired with deep brown eyes. Once, too, she had been wild.
The two men didn’t talk and Bosoon rode just behind on Hope; Mr. Wainwright was on his favourite horse, Prudence.
“Wainwright.” He had been asked to wait on the gallery outside the G.M.’s office overlooking the factory. Then he was called. Robertson was a fat man in a brown suit with a collar and tie which didn’t suit the climate and he was red-faced and sweaty. His white skin puckered in the folds of flesh around the collar. “Good to see you, my good man. Come in and have a seat.” He indicated the leather-upholstered chair in front of the general manager’s desk. Above, the ceiling fan whirled and hummed, making the papers flutter on the desk. “Well, what can I do for you? You’ve come all this way from Malgrétoute. What can I do?”
It always took Mr. Wainwright a while to believe that this was true: that these words were in fact what the G.M. actually meant, because they were exactly the same each time, pretending in their insinuation that he, Mr. Wainwright, had never been here before and that Robertson himself was a complete innocent, there, for him, had given up his afternoon entirely to listen to him as if he had never listened to him before, hadn’t an inkling what it was Mr. Wainwright had ridden all the
way from Malgrétoute for. At first he did not know what to say, how to speak the truth in the face of someone who was lying. Wainwright knew that Robertson was a liar. He waited for him to stop lying, which eventually he did, reluctantly.
“Well, Wainwright, you know it has nothing to do with me. You know that, don’t you?’
Mr. Wainwright didn’t reply. He stared at Robertson. He wasn’t going to respond to lies. He wondered whether God, in whose hands this all was, would actually look down, as his wife seemed to indicate, surveying the two men, and would somehow inspire Robertson to tell the truth. Maybe the Holy Ghost, to whom his wife was constantly appealing for wisdom, and who could conveniently take the form of a dove, would perhaps fly in through the open window and alight on Robertson’s desk. Mr. Wainwright smiled ironically. “I leave it in God’s hands.”
“You see, I can see that you know that, old man. It’s those people at the head office in the Strand. When the director comes down in the summer I will put it to him.”
“The summer?” Mr. Wainwright did not intend to speak. “You mean August holidays?” It was a small assertion but Robertson took the point reluctantly as he wiped his brow and then blew his nose into the same handkerchief. Mr. Wainwright was intolerant of people who didn’t take care of personal hygiene. He himself looked fresh in front of Robertson in his Aertex shirt and pressed khaki pants. “We only have two seasons here and this is the dry season, a very dry season.” Mr. Wainwright surprised himself. He didn’t normally speak metaphorically. Maybe it was a way of avoiding, for the moment anyway, the direct confrontation which would eventually have to take place and it surprised him how Robertson could appear to forget the previous confrontations, but then he had not taken them far enough.
“Well, you know what I always say . . .”
“No promotion except into a dead man’s boots,” Mr. Wainwright quickly filled in.
“Quite,” said Robertson.
“Well, who are you going to kill?” asked Mr. Wainwright.
“What?”
“Who are you going to kill?” Mr. Wainwright could hear Bosoon that morning. He could still taste the tea and smell the wild lilies. He knew that Bosoon would be just outside sitting at the bottom of the concrete steps. Uncharacteristically Mr. Wainwright started to laugh out loud over and over again. “No promotion except into a dead man’s boots. Well, you’re going to have to kill somebody, that is what I’m telling you, and if you don’t kill somebody, well, you never know what might happen.” He began to laugh again, got up and walked around Robertson’s office. He didn’t take any notice of Robertson. He opened the office door and shouted, “Bosoon!”
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