Homeland and Other Stories (19 page)

“Is that why he got sick? My father?”

“He was making cross tracks with me, I said. Saying he was a bigger man than I. You think I am a fool?”

“No.”

“And did he get sick?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

They walked some more. Suddenly he said, “You are a good strong child. This is the job we have to do. Do you know the thing they call a jumby?”

Jericha shrugged her shoulders.

“Boy, girl! Don't truck with me. If you know a thing, say it.”

“I don't know what it is.”

“A jumby is a jump-up. Somebody called up from the dead. You call her up to do a job, and then you put her down again. But sometimes she is humbugging you and she won't go down again. You understand?”

“Yes.”

A thick darkness was growing up in the treetops. Jericha could see birds moving restlessly, without noise, among the branches over their heads. She knew that snakes could also be in trees.

The man said, “Are you afraid?”

“Of course I'm not.”

“Then I want you to come on Sunday to Laborie. You know Laborie? Down this road, after the sisters', first is Choiseul, then Laborie, then Vieux Fort. You know the way?” He asked it kindly, and ordinarily, like an invitation to tea. As a friend would ask, she imagined, though she had not had one.

“I know the way,” Jericha said. In truth, she had never explored the road past Choiseul. On her bicycle she always went the other way, toward Soufrière.

“Study this,” the Obeah Man said. “On Sunday, go to Laborie. You can find me on the main road in town, the next past Cato's store, where they sell rum. It's near the church. Ask for Benedict.”

“I'll have to go to mass first. The sisters will know if I don't.”

“All right, that's good. You go to mass first. Take this and wear it inside your shirt.” He held out a small bag tied with string. Jericha stopped pushing her bicycle and took the bag carefully in her palms.

“Should I wear it every day, or just to mass?”

“Every day; don't lose it. And to the mass also. And another thing. Do you know
l'eau bénite
?”

“Holy water? Of course.”

“Take that water and put it on your head like so. Then come down to Laborie. Don't forget what I'm telling you.” He raised his staff over his head so its shadow no longer touched the road. Jericha waited to see if the Obeah Man would fly away.

“Go now. Go!” he cried, and Jericha stumbled onto her bike and fled away through the shadows.

 

By Friday she could not believe the Obeah Man or a place called Laborie existed. But the pouch filled with sweet-smelling, crumbled leaves was real, and to be safe she wore it around her
neck day and night. She was tormented with colored dreams she could not remember. On Saturday, as a test, she asked Sister Armande if she would someday take her to Laborie.

“What would a little girl want in Laborie? It's only a little town.” Sister Armande had finished with Jericha's hair and was tending her “God's small extravagances,” her orchids. Ragged boys brought them down from the forest for ten cents apiece, and she grew them on planks wired to the veranda posts.

“Is it far? Laborie?”

“Not at all.” Sister Armande's hands moved quickly among the leaves. “It's just past Choiseul.”

Jericha made up her mind to go. Before mass ended Sunday noon she anointed herself with holy water, genuflected in a hurry, and tore through the yard to her bicycle. Only Maximilian saw her go.

The road rose steeply against the shoulder of the Gros Piton, shortening her breath, then led down into Choiseul. She loudly rang her bicycle bell and shouted at some children and brown goats to get out of the road. They let goats run wild here, her father said one time. They eat boiled leaves while a good meal stands by the back door eating the curtains.

Just beyond the town, broad, banana-planted valleys opened on both sides of the road. It was Sunday, but still there were men and women standing ankle-deep in the ditches between the banana rows, working for someone, hacking with their machetes. Beyond them the ocean glittered, dotted with boats. Sooner than she expected, she was in Laborie.

She easily found the church, the only building of any importance, and a store that said “
CATO. SPIRITS
” in front on a painted board. Next door, a woman in a tight, straight dress was hanging out laundry.

“I'm looking for Benedict,” Jericha said.

The woman waved toward the side street, and took a clothes
pin out of her mouth. “He's not too good to lie in another man's shade. You'll find him over that way.”

She walked her bicycle up an alley that smelled of salt fish, and found Benedict sitting against a wall in the shade of the breadfruit across the way. He wore a weathered hat and was smoking a pipe made of carved white bone, or plastic.

“Hullo,” Jericha said. She did not believe now that there was magic in this ordinary man.

Benedict spoke suddenly. “Why did you come here?”

“You told me to.”

“Have you been putting it about to people, that you were coming here to see me?”

She shook her head quickly.

“Where is your guardian?”

Jericha hesitated. She felt for the pouch inside her blouse and held it up, her eyebrows questioning.

“Good. You studied what I told you. Come and sit down here. We have plenty of time.” He motioned toward the ground beside him where the dirt was worn as smooth as pavement. Jericha sat down and leaned back against the wall, in exactly the same fashion as the Obeah Man.

For a long time they said nothing. While Benedict looked inside his pipe, Jericha studied the leafy hands and large dimpled fruits of the breadfruit tree. Small, glossy blackbirds hung upside-down on some of the fruits, pecking holes through the green skin and pulling out white strings of flesh.

“Are we going to do the thing you said?”

“What thing is that, child?” Benedict looked at her with a slanted eye.

“Kill that thing. The jumby.”

Benedict looked up the alley. “You can't kill a thing that's dead.”

“Then what?”

“You'll see that in time. It takes time to know a thing well, Jericha.”

She glanced quickly away, startled by the sound of her name. This man knew things. They watched a breeze sift through the breadfruit, from bottom to top, scattering the birds.

“I drove your father away,” he said. “Do you know about this?”

“He got schistosomiasis.”

Benedict looked at her sharply. “What is that?”

“Don't you know?” she asked in a scornful voice she knew. “You get it from some sort of tiny things in the water. The poor people get it. Sometimes they get it bad the way my father did, but most times it just makes them lazy.”

“Whooo,” Benedict said. “Who told you this, lazy and poor? That is the
fwedi
. You know who gets sick with this? The man that works hardest and gets a day's pay for standing all the time with his feet wet. Go up on the banana plantation, you'll find plenty
fwedi
. Never did I see so much of this sickness before white man's bananas came to call.”

“Did you ever have it?”

“Me? I protect myself.”

“And my father?”

“All right. Did he protect himself?”

“He took some kind of medicine.”

“Did he have a guardian?”

“No.”

“So. He was a fool.”

Jericha looked at the Obeah Man's black fingernails.

“I won't tell you a lie,” he said suddenly. “The jumby worked on him. I called her up for this. Now she won't go down again.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.” He fingered the thick pouch that hung on a steel
watch chain around his neck. The inside of his arm was erupted with constellations of purple sores. Jericha said nothing.

After a while the Obeah Man pointed down the alley, at the sea. “You smell that? Rain.”

Jericha sniffed the air and shook her head.

“Close your eyes.”

She squeezed her eyelids shut. Salt and beach mud filled her nostrils. “I can smell it!” She opened her eyes, startled.

The Obeah Man rubbed her shoulder and laughed. “You keep your nose to the sea, child, you'll never get wet.” Then his eyes changed and he asked, “Do you know maweepoui root?”

“No.”

“You drink it. It takes care of you, if she comes.” He extracted from his pocket a bottle of brownish liquid, stoppered with rolled leaves wrapped in string. “Don't lose it, and don't forget. You drink a little every day.”

“Does it taste bad?” Jericha had some experience with medicine.

The Obeah Man pointed his finger. “This is death and life, not candy. You don't know what can happen. Now go. Do what the sisters say, but keep your guardians close to you. Come back here Sunday. Just like before, do everything the same.”

It was dark before she reached the convent. The stars shone in patches between the clouds rolling up from the ocean. On the deserted banana plantation the long drainage ditches, channels of infected water, shone like an army of luminous snakes marching toward the sea.

 

She returned three times to Laborie before the job was done. The sisters knew nothing of it, since by good fortune it was Lent and they were preoccupied with penitence. As Easter approached
there was also talk of the pageant and feast, in which Maximilian would play a large role.

Loolai Thérèse, a tiny brown girl with a deformed foot, was moribund at the prospect. She couldn't bring herself to confess her anguish to the sisters, but told Jericha many times over.

“They want to eat him,” she said one afternoon in the garden. Jericha sat above her on the lowest branch of the mango, to which the goat was tethered.

“I know.”

“Maxi-mi.” She stroked his nose. Her eyes were as brown and wet as animal eyes. “Don't you feel sorry for him?” she asked, looking up into the branches.

“No.” Jericha attempted to drop a ripe mango on the goat's hindquarters. “He's just an old black billy.”

“But he'll die. If the sisters kept him he could make milk.”

“Only a girl goat makes milk,” Jericha informed her. “I'm quite sure of it.”

Loolai Thérèse thought about this. “Well, he could be put to some use,” she said finally, “besides eating. He could pull a cart.”

“That's stupid. That's how you think. In England people eat goats and whatever else they want, whenever they feel like it.” She aimed another mango and let it fall.

 

The final trip to Laborie was on Good Friday. Following instructions, she went straight from the evening service. It was not an actual mass, she'd learned from Sister Armande, since Jesus was in Limbo until the resurrection on Sunday and therefore could not be called upon. But Benedict said it would serve.

Benedict was waiting where he told her, in a truck, a sawed-off thing, just a cab with wheels behind it and no truckbed. But it functioned. They drove on a mud road into the jungle, passing
through dark thickets of greenheart and calabash. Small eyes shone from the branches.

While he drove, Benedict leaned forward and pulled another container from his pocket, a tin flask, and unscrewed the cap with his hand on the steering wheel. It smelled like Sister Mary Matthew's cherry brandy. He drank, and then offered the flask to Jericha. The liquid was fiery and tore at her lungs, but she tipped the metal bottle and drank it again.

“Will that protect me too?” She felt dizzy.

He laughed. “The sisters don't give you that, uh?”

She took deep breaths. “No.”

He laid the flask down on the seat. There was a good-sized basket there too, riding on the seat between them. It was covered with a cloth and smelled, Jericha thought, like church.

Benedict turned on the headlamps of the truck and darkness drew in around them, covering all but the two mud tracks ahead.

“How did you make her jump up?” she asked. Over the weeks, Benedict had grown more talkative about the jumby.

“This is the easiest thing, to make her come up. She was a troubled soul. She wanted to do harm to a white man.”

“Why?”

“She was used by a white soldier boy down at Vieux Fort. He used her and went his way, and she was left with it. She tried to get rid of the baby with St. John's bush. Do you know this bush?”

“No.”

“You boil the leaves and the water turns to blood, and then you drink it. But she waited too long. She bled, bled, until she died. So she's troubled, not peaceful dead.”

“Do you think she wants to hurt me too?”

“Do you have your guardian? Did you drink the maweepoui, like I told you?”

“Yes.”

The floor of the truck was pocked with rust and holes, and
Jericha could see the dark road beneath her feet as they passed over it. “That kind of medicine is bad, if it made the lady bleed so much and killed her,” she said.

“She waited too long, I told you. And it wasn't obeah that killed her. It was the soldier boy. Don't you know that?”

Jericha shook her head. “That medicine is bad.”

“I want you to study something.” The Obeah Man looked at her. “Nothing is all good or all bad. Maybe the sisters tell you that, and the doctor, but it isn't so.”

They stopped. Ahead of them a small clearing was lit by the headlamps. When he turned them off, the distant trees jumped close and crowded around the truck like beggars.

“I want to go back now, please.”

The Obeah Man offered her the flask again, but she shook her head. He put his hand on her many-braided head. “Listen, don't fear. She doesn't want to hurt you. We worked on the doctor, but then we felt sorry for what we did to him.”

She looked at the dark holes in the floor.

“She is sorry, don't you see this?”