Night Calypso (12 page)

The small band of warders were trying to control the crowd. Vincent could hear the crowd even more clearly.

‘Burn him! Burn him! Burn him!’ The fire throwers shouted, circling throwing their tins of gasoline from a distance now. At one point Vincent lost sight of Theo in the flames. He noticed the girl, Christiana, standing near him.

Vincent then caught a difference in the chant. Sister Thérèse joined him, running towards Theo. He ordered people as he ran to bring water. He was surprised that his voice still carried some authority. Where were Jonah and Singh?

‘Theo, what are you doing standing here staring? Don’t you see what’s happening?’ Vincent grabbed hold of the boy, lifting him over the flames.

The body of a man lay on the ground very badly burnt.

When Vincent knelt next to him, beating down the last flames, he realised that he was already dead. He had suffocated from the smoke and the gasoline fumes. His clothes had gone up quickly in the flames. The body was burnt all over.

Theo stood and stared. He seemed unable to react.

The body was charred. What had happened here?

Singh and Jonah were nowhere to be found. In a remnant of clothing, Vincent noticed a piece of a police uniform. One of the three policeman had been burnt to death.

Vincent and Sister Thérèse were now alone in the yard with Theo. She held the boy who now clung to her skirts, burying his head in her lap. Christiana had run off.

The community of nuns had come out onto the verandah of the hospital. Jonah and Singh emerged from the crowd under the almond tree. The dead body still lay where it had been doused with gasoline. Vincent shouted at Singh. ‘Look at what you’ve done. Watch your words!’

Everyone was standing around the edges of the yard silently looking at what had happened. Vincent and Sister Thérèse stood together with the stunned Theo.

A small band of children, led by Ti-Jean, entered the yard with their own music made with tin cans, old galvanise, thumping bamboo on the ground, like in a
tamboo bamboo
band. They had their own calypso. Ti-Jean on his crutches, came to the centre of the yard singing. His young boy’s voice was shrill on the air. He was like a young calypsonian.

‘Everybody rejoicing,

How they burned Charlie King,

Everybody was glad,

Nobody was sad.

When they beat him

And they burn him in Fyzabad.’

Everyone stood still, dazed and shocked, looking at the young boy on his crutches, performing his macabre dance, followed by his small band of other children, beating their biscuit tins, chanting ‘And they beat him and burn him in Fyzabad.’

Very slowly, Ti-Jean’s calypso became hypnotic. From the large ragged circle around the yard, the tune was picked up. Words of protest were uttered. There was a tinkle of sound which then died out. One by one the patients began to drift away. In the end the reality of what had happened took the heart out of the protest. There was the sound of box carts and galvanise grating on the gravel paths.

Two male ward assistants came over to where Vincent and Sister Thérèse stood with Theo, next to the corpse. They removed the body of the policeman, Michael Johnson, on a stretcher.

‘What has happened here?’ Vincent asked, not sure to whom he was addressing the question. Singh and Jonah had walked away. Who would have the answer?

By afternoon, the routine of Saint Damian’s had regained its normality. The event had kept a lot of patients away from the hospital. Some of the regulars discussed the matter under the almond tree.

‘Boy, you wouldn’t think people could do thing so again,’ Mr Lalbeharry reflected, remembering the burning of Corporal Charles King in 1937, in Fyzabad on Sancta Trinidad during the Butler Riots.

But most of the patients stayed in their huts with their own thoughts and their silence. There seemed to be a desire for time to be turned back to before all of this had happened, yet there was a knowledge that things would never be the same again. The two remaining policemen began to make investigations. They made it clear that there would have to be an inquest.

Singh and Jonah stood by the door of the nurses’ common room, listening to the crackling news together. The voice of Mr Chamberlain announced that England and the British Empire were at war with Germany. New Zealand, Australia and France were also at war. Two days before, Theo had run out onto the verandah at the Doctor’s house with the news, ‘Germany invade Poland!’ The impending war had loosened his tongue.

Vincent, Mother Superior and the nursing sisters stood in the common room. He looked across the room at Sister Thérèse. They caught each one looking at the other. Their eyes held all they wanted to say. They had not yet found words for these feelings, nor the opportunity to express them. He saw the terror on her face. Her fear and imaginings were becoming reality.

Later that afternoon, Vincent watched the island steamer depart. There was now ice and new provisions. The water boat also, at last, arrived. It filled the tanks and was now leaving. The daily routines of the day unfolded in their usual way. Vincent and Jonah followed behind the fishing boats as they left Perruquier Bay. Their elegiac calypso, beaten with their bottle and spoon, came across the water:
Chamberlain say he only want peace

Please hold your hands. It is time to cease.
The words of Beginner’s calypso faded as the fishermen entered the gulf.
Chamberlain tell them to realise, these are the days we are civilised.
Vincent smiled at the irony.

But, against these big events, far away, it was the inquest into the murder of the policeman, Michael Johnson, who all now called ‘Charlie King’, which had dominated life on El Caracol over the last six months. The tension between Vincent and Singh over the criminal investigation often erupted into the open. ‘Criminal? Who is criminal? Is a kind of war here, you know,’ Singh argued. ‘This too is a war, if they go keep people so.’ His position was becoming more extreme. He openly accused Vincent of trying to frame him for incitement with his evidence to the inquest.

It had taken the police and the authorities three months to gather their evidence, and the inquest itself, held in Porta España, had taken the other three months. It had involved transporting to Sancta Trinidad a selection of patients who were prepared to give evidence. The newspapers had concentrated on the pathos of children being involved. Their evidence was held
in camera
at the Casa Rosada. Vincent and Jonah went with the patients, and Vincent was present during the
in camera
sessions. This inflamed Singh.

Some of the patients still carried scars of burns they had not felt. The anaesthetic of their condition represented a kind of amnesia. The scars told of something which they had not suffered; could not remember. They all wanted to forget the incident, but it hung over them, brought back by the questioning, representing the fact that, despite all that was learnt from suffering, or not, all were capable of inflicting it. The communality of the act made it difficult to ascribe individual guilt, or guilt to any particular group. Less, of course, all were guilty. Too many of the patients, both children and adults, maintained their silence, claiming that they had not seen anything.

From the talk under the almond tree, Vincent, Jonah and Singh knew, like everyone else, the prime movers, those who had flung the flaying kerosene.

While Father Meyer maintained the secrecy of the confessional for those who were Catholic, it was hoped that he had at least advised the young ones to confess themselves.

Nothing which would hold up as evidence at the inquest came forward. It rested on intention. What had been the intention of those who had fed the fire, dousing the body of the fallen policeman? What had they realised when they were doing so? Vincent could never bring himself to question Ti-Jean. He did not want the boy to lie to him, nor did he want the truth, and have to live with it.

The suspected action of the children, the presumed innocent, the holy innocents, which had caught the imagination of the newspapers, was in the end what prevented further investigation into Mr Krishna Singh, Mr Jonah Leroy and Doctor Vincent Metivier, and the part they might have played in the incitement to violence. It prevented the unearthing of all the evidence there might be, and the bringing of charges. Nevertheless, the judge concluded with a degree of censure for the three men and their political activity, as it was described.

Ironically, despite the tension and accusations during the inquest, Singh and Vincent were brought closer by the common censure. Singh felt vindicated. Vincent, linked now publically with Singh and Jonah, though privately outraged, felt he had achieved an equality. Singh could not now accuse him of privilege, and he now saw Singh’s view differently. At no point did the inquest censure the authorities for the state of poverty and deprivation which it maintained by its policies. This omission from the verdict was a turning point for Vincent.

It seemed to Vincent at this moment, these thoughts running through his mind, this afternoon, in the pirogue with Jonah, that the war was not a part of this world. The truth of these events on El Caracol was greater. That bundle on the ground, the pieces of police uniform he had fingered in the embers of the fire, were a
more staggering fact of what human beings could do to each other, than the war in which his brother was now involved.

The verdict of accidental death had come through yesterday.

‘So, what you think about the verdict, Doc?’ Jonah broke the silence.

‘What you think, Jonah?’ Vincent could see that his friend was eager to have some word about the matter before they parted this evening.

‘Well. Is what I tell Singh. Is not they didn’t have the evidence, but we wouldn’t give it to them.’

‘I think you might be right, Jonah.’

‘What that make you feel, Doc?’

‘It makes me very uneasy, but…’

‘What I say, Doc, is that you can’t divorce what happen from this place, from what happening to people. You can’t divorce that from what happen to the corporal. Look at this place.’ Jonah was pointing at the empty sea, but he really meant the leprosarium and its poverty.

‘A kind of rough justice?’ Vincent asked.

He could not get out of his mind the picture of Ti-Jean with his macabre calypso leading the small band of children into the arena of the yard. He saw Theo staring. Christiana watching.

‘Remember what Pilate ask Jesus. What is truth?’ Jonah quoted the New Testament.

‘Yes, what is truth? What is history?’ Vincent added.

‘History, Doc?’

‘Yes, history.’

He pulled his Panama over his brow and looked into the far distance, the western shore of Sancta Trinidad. The coast was a faint pencil line, a trail of grey smoke. He surveyed its contours, as if tracing his finger along a map. His eye travelled from the mouth of the Caroni River where Walter Raleigh had once entered, and much earlier, the conquistador, Antonio de Berrio, had taken his ships, under the swaying bamboo, to the founding capital at San Jose de Oruñya, the site of the hanging of twelve Caribs in the sixteenth century, a rough justice in retaliation for the crucifixion of twelve Spaniards. Here the caravels of Europe, their charnel
galleons, their slaving ships, arrived on their Middle Passage, from the coasts of ivory and gold, or, later, when that enterprise had foundered, brought those others in bunks upon bunks in the holds from Calcutta and Uttar Pradesh, for the business of Empire, sugar.

The gulf, now that Vincent could see more of it, was stacked with tankers and merchant steamers. These were part of the transatlantic convoys which came up from Brazil and Argentina, along the Guianas through the Bocas, stopping here to refuel. The tankers were here to collect the oil for the war from the refinery at Point-à-Pierre.

‘See, history.’ Vincent stretched his arm wide, pointing into the gulf and beyond. When he turned towards the house, he saw the figure of Theo. Theo was at the end of the jetty, sitting on his own. Vincent’s heart rose with anticipation, with apprehension. Jonah pointed, ‘Watch, the boy, Doc, he waiting for you.’ Then he added, ‘You ent think the boy need a mother?’

I could have a son that age, Vincent thought. Then he smiled to himself ironically. The figure of Odetta fleeing through his mind, he answered Jonah. ‘A boy needs a father. A father needs a son. What about your children, Jonah?’

‘I does look out for them. I does carry their mother things for them in Moruga. But is here I get a work.’ It was Jonah’s common defence.

As the pirogue neared the jetty, Vincent could see Theo more clearly. So slight. He sat resting his chin on his knees, peering over the end of the jetty. From further out, Vincent had thought that he was fishing, remembering that he had said that he would fish with him this afternoon at four. There was a rod by his side.

‘Hi, Theo, catch this.’ Jonah coiled the rope at the bow to throw to the boy to tie up. The motor idled as they neared the jetty. At first, Theo did not show any recognition of their arrival, but when Jonah called again, ‘Boy, what wrong with you, catch the rope,’ he stood up and faced the two men. He was stark naked. He stood facing them directly, then turned and ran, as fast as he could, up to the house.

They saw him climb the steps to the front verandah, two steps
at a time, then disappear; a naked child in the glare of the afternoon sun, running.

The two men looked at each other in astonishment. They did not speak. Vincent raised his eyebrows in alarm. He took the rope from Jonah, who went back to the stern and steered the boat alongside the jetty for Vincent to clamber off and tie up.

‘I better go and see what’s the matter,’ Vincent said to Jonah.

‘You want me to remain, Doc? In case there’s some trouble?’

‘Yes,’ he reflected. ‘Hold on a moment, Jonah, if you don’t mind. I’ll let you know if I need you. If I do, I’ll call from the window upstairs. He’s probably in his room at the back. Not himself since the burning. That’s why he’s not been at the school.’

Vincent was a while. Then Jonah received the signal that it was fine to go. ‘See you in the morning,’ Vincent called. The echo came back from across the bay.

‘Right, Doc.’ Jonah cupped his palms around his mouth like blowing into a conch. The boatman’s voice came back from the hills. He waved from the jetty, undid the rope, got back into the pirogue, started up the motor and set off.

Vincent stood for a moment watching him from the upstairs window. He looked across to the convent. The figure of a nun was standing on the cliff overlooking Embarcadère Corbeau. The skirts of her white cotton habit ballooned in the breeze, her veil fluttered like a white flag of surrender. Thérèse? Vincent asked himself.

He turned back into the house. The stench was overpowering. As soon as he entered the house, he could smell the putrid odour. The wind had died down, so there was not the usual sea breeze to dispel the awful retching smell.

Vincent heard only his own heart beating hard in his chest, as he walked about downstairs, looking into the kitchen, which was spotlessly clean, as was the drawing room and the verandah which he had walked through earlier. Theo had swept, mopped and dusted. He wondered whether he had gone out the back door to his perch on the wall by the water tank. Vincent could see from the kitchen window that he was not there.

Far in the distance, he caught the dying sounds of Jonah’s
put
putting
pirogue arriving at Embarcadère Corbeau. There was the sound of Jonah’s conch and the echo of it in the hills across the bay, as he announced his arrival.

Vincent knew now where to look, having discovered the boy’s hiding place under the stairs in the past.

But no, Theo was not there, not even in the deepest recess. So, then, his first thought that Theo would go to his room must be correct. He climbed the stairs. It was obvious that this was where the smell was coming from. There were more flies than usual, even downstairs. But, on the stairs and on the landing outside Theo’s room, they buzzed and flew off and settled again, particularly near the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door.

His first thought, on entering the house, had been that one of the lavatories had been blocked again, because of the lack of water. The tanks had been running dry until the water boats had eventually arrived earlier today.

The house was still and hot. The heat worsened the pervasive odour of human excrement. The door knob was smeared with dried faeces. Vincent took out his handkerchief and used it to open the door.

Even before he had fully opened it, he heard the low moaning sound coming from inside the room. But with the door fully open now, the full blast of the stench which seeped through the house was unbearable. He had used his handkerchief to protect his hands, so now he had to bury his nose in his shirt sleeve, as he entered and looked around the room, whose floors and walls were smeared with shit. The bed sheets and the mosquito net had been painted with the excrement. There was a strong smell of urine now as well.

Vincent wondered in what place he was. He could not see Theo, but he continued to hear the low moaning sound. There was an old, wooden, varnished Victorian press in the corner of the room, behind the door. The low moaning sound was coming from inside the press. He went over and opened it. Under two shirts, hanging on wooden hangers, one blue, the other a white school uniform shirt, was the naked Theo, curled up like an overgrown foetus. Vincent could now see what he had not seen outside, that his skin was smeared with his own excrement. The body paintings were on 
his face and arms, and in long streaks across his chest and stomach.