Night Calypso (25 page)

The music continued to its conclusion, the needle suddenly grating, suddenly discordant. Vincent got up and took the arm away. He replaced it. He went back to his seat and lit another cigarette.

The noises of the night joined the music of sad love. Fireflies blinked at the window. He got up again and poured himself a measure of rum from one of the decanters on the sideboard. He could hear the clearing up in the kitchen.

He must have dropped off. He woke with a start, nearly falling off the dining room chair. His cigarette had burnt down and fallen as ash to the floor. His finger hurt. At first he thought that he was on his own. The kitchen was quiet.

Then he saw that there was a trail of clothes and shoes from the kitchen. The red satin dress, the green scarf, the high-heeled shoes, the stockings like transparent skin, were left where they had been cast off. Vincent followed where the trail led. Theo was curled up in the old soft Morris chair whose fibre was bursting out from beneath the upholstery. Vincent took another sip of his rum. He dozed.

H
E HOLD ME
close to his face, and she say, Go, go, go to Mister. Mister Coco.

They play with me.

Mama hand smooth and smell of soap, blue soap, slimy soap on the shelf by the scrubbing board under the house.

I smell onion and lime. In bed, under counterpane, sweet and milky, fishy and salty.

Is it one day when I come in the room and hear her, hear my Mama? Is it that way? Did I get to hear it that way?

Mama resting by the Demerara window. Mama speaking like she in confession, soft soft, that I stop by the door and turn and sit on the step outside. First, I wonder who she talking to. Who Mama go talk to like this? Not Ma Procop. This is not how she does talk to Mister. Not so. On a good day that is chirpy and giggly. On a bad day is tears, lash and Mister speaking hard. Then I don’t go near that house. When I peep is nobody there.

Once before, I hear a talk like this and nobody there. That time, Mama on the big bed and she looking at the picture album Ma Dellacourt give her, and she tell me not to touch. I see the picture, but I don’t to go in her press and take that out, where she have it bury under a dress. She say that Ma Dellacourt tell her is her mother dress. Her talk, sad sad. Is so Mama talk to sheself.

Look at where I find myself? And who I go talk to? A mother, I never remember, but who belly I jump in. Jump from the same seed from the same egg with Louis. The Mama who is this face here, in this young girl, take out in this picture. They get rid of he. Is Louis self I must talk to about this business. But the old mister get rid of him. The old Mister can’t take two cock in the same yard. Not when one white and the next one brown.

Look at where I find myself! My brother have to leave the yard since he is a small boy. I abandon in this life by mother and father and dependent on the very thing that trap me. From so long, I trap in this. This is a trap you can’t talk to people about. Is not just that one white and the other black. Is not that one is a Mister and the other is servant in the house. People know well about them things, and they choose to either talk about it, shout it by the stand pipe for people to hear, or laugh about it on the counter when they buy sweet potato and rice, sneer about it over the stall in the market when they choosing tomato and ground provision to take for their
pickney
them.

People can choose to say things. But this is a mix up that have the things that people don’t speak about. This have secret that does live under the floorboard in a family house. That does get whisper, maybe, in a confessional, wanting forgiveness, that does get carry as a secret
never to be whispered in the minds of mothers and daughters.

Fathers never talk about these things. Fathers refuse to let these things enter into their mind. Where the fathers? And that boy of mine? The father? Who I could talk to about this, but you, Mother, my pretty mother. You know about this. You were there. You must’ve be there, Alice.

From what Ma Dellacourt say, is the same thing. All of we in the same thing. You would’ve know what to do. Maybe you would’ve stop this. Maybe we couldn’t stop this. This is how it is. This is how the place make. This is what they does call family in this place. This is what we make, and this is what they make of us.

Ma Dellacourt was the first that was pure, till. But you, you with the old Mister, the young Pierre. You breed half with he, and me now, breed with the next one. That is what gnawing at Mister when he look at my boy. Is what eating him. Is what he have to accept, but is what he want to deny. Is what he want to destroy.

My Theo. What I bind you in, my child? What I bind you in? That is what the Mister see. No more girl child. Then, the little Pierre, watch how he looking sick. He have no girl child to punish. No little half-sister to make baby with. None to take in a bedroom when the train passing in the gully. He have none to take in the cocoa. He have none to desecrate on his mother and father bed with the crucifix knocking on the railing, the very crucified Lord witness the desecration of his parent bed.

This one have none. He have no little girl child to take while she scrubbing floor. No little girl child to wonder where the world is, when she alone under that man. I have no girl children. None to continue with what is going on. When Mister see Theo with Chantal his head does spin. That he not going to allow.

My little Theo, not a thought in his head. Is just friend, he friend with she. He not going to let it happen that way, the reverse way, he not going to let any brown, black child take he long blonde hair princess and make little baby with she.

There was no interruption in the story, no interruption in the roll of the sea, in the gentle caress that the breeze touched the house with as Theo’s mama’s voice inhabited the boy.

He sat there naked and shivering. Then he began to sob.

‘What is it, Theo?’

The boy looked up with his sad face. ‘He jook she. He jook she in the back.’

Vincent, for a moment, thought that he was speaking of his mother and Mister. And, maybe, he was.

But then he blurted out. ‘Singh, he jook she in the back room. I see them and she crying all the time.’

‘Come Theo, let me take you up to bed.’ Vincent lifted Theo up from the chair and took him upstairs and laid him on the bed and pulled down the mosquito net. All around the room, the walls told the story of the world and its terrible, terrible torments.

The boy’s story was going in his mind with the engine of the sea.

What did it look like to a child, this lovemaking? When had he first seen that? In his mama’s bed?

The litter of last night's masquerade still lay strewn upon the floor. There was something, now, utterly ordinary about the red satin dress and the green scarf, the stockings and the high-heeled shoes. They no longer held the allure which they had possessed in the night. They were no longer the macabre. Now was more like Ash Wednesday than the
ole mas
of
J'ouvert
morning, Carnival Monday.

Theo came and stood by the kitchen door and watched Vincent pick up the clothes, and wrap them into a bundle. He handed them to the boy. He took them without any reaction, like a child asked to clear away his toys. He returned to his room to put away the costume. The door of the bedroom banged and he came leaping down the stairs like a happy child.

The smell of fresh coffee percolated through the house from the kitchen. Vincent walked down to the jetty with his tin mug.

Theo leapt down the steps from the house behind him, stopping to pick up stones on the way. He came and sat at the end of the jetty, with his feet dangling over the edge. His reflection curled in the oily water beneath him. He took aim, beginning to play tick tack toe, using the flat stones to skim the surface of the water.

Vincent put down his mug, picked up one of the stones near to Theo and had a go. ‘Tick, tack, toe,' he said, as the flat stone skimmed the water, just hitting the surface three times, before being lost in the deep. The ripples grew wider and wider and then disappeared. Vincent laughed aloud, his laughter echoing across the empty bay.

‘You good, man.' Theo giggled.

He was surprised by the naturalness of Theo's voice, after the masquerade of the night before. He enjoyed the casual, confident,
slightly mocking, but companionable, complimentary tone. It was not the mimicry of the night-time stories, not their incantation, not the
mêlée
of voices, just a plain, ordinary boy's voice.

‘You good too,' Vincent smiled, stooping down near to his shoulder. ‘Give me another chance,' he said. He picked up one of the flat stones, bent his knees slightly, to get down more to the level of the water, and let his stone fly, ‘Tick, tack, toe.'

Then Theo had another go, then Vincent again, till all the flat stones had been thrown. And they both laughed together, aloud, over and over, their laughter coming back to them from across the bay.

There was another silence. ‘You won't have to go by Singh again till you want to.'

Theo did not reply. He kept on pretending to throw stones.

Vincent detected a difference in the sound of the motor, as if Jonah was racing, straining it, so that he could get up more speed. Must be because he is late, he thought. Before he had arrived, Jonah was waving and shouting something excitedly. He could not make out what he was saying. He thought it was their old joke, because he heard the word, whale. Theo turned his head to look in the direction of the gesticulating Jonah. Together they watched the pirogue come alongside the jetty.

‘Catch the rope, boy.' Jonah was chattering away, repeating what he had been shouting out in the bay. ‘A whale man, if you see a whale. It beach. It taking up the whole of La Tinta. You not see the corbeaux? The Marines say they think it must be dead. Maybe get wounded somehow, then it beach. It come in on the tide and it can't get off the beach till high tide, they say. Is a sight to see, boy. Let we go.' Jonah was excited by his story, nearly overbalancing, as he stood astride the pirogue.

Vincent turned to Theo. The boy was absorbed in Jonah's story. His eyes were wide and staring. A whale! This was something that belonged to tales, to myths, to the bible, to the ocean with a big O.

‘So your whale has at last returned, to swallow you up again Jonah?' Vincent joked.

Theo laughed, knowing his Bible stories.

‘Doc, if you see it. You could believe a man could live in there for nights and days.'

Jonah turned to Theo. ‘You coming boy? You never see anything like this before.'

Theo looked at Vincent. He jumped to it and began untying the rope immediately.

‘Steady the boat, Doc,' Jonah leant over to the edge of the jetty, keeping his balance in the pirogue, and lifted Theo off his feet, off the jetty. With one sweeping movement, he put him to sit in the middle of the pirogue. In no time, Vincent was on board and Jonah was at the tiller turning the boat in the direction of Perruquier Bay. Vincent sat next to Theo. The outboard raced. There was the smell of gasoline. Theo clambered into the bow with the rusty anchor.

Just then, the
Maria Concepción,
was crossing from Embarcadère Corbeaux. ‘Like the sisters late this morning too, Jonah?' Vincent wondered about Thérèse.

‘Everybody late. Is the whale. Some fishermen bring the news. They see it even before the Yanks.'

Jonah had trouble navigating the pirogue through the bay, busy with American barges and launches.

As they entered Perruquier Bay, a couple of Marines saw them safely tied up at the jetty. Theo dropped the anchor. Then, they were onto the land. Jonah was hurrying them excitedly along the tracks through the sea grapes and manchineel. They left the hard path, and were wading in deep soft sand. It seemed like the entire population of Saint Damian's had come to La Tinta to see the whale.

Looking onto the beach, with the morning light beginning to break from behind the mildewed clouds, there was a dazzle of figures. The sisters, with their white veils flying, and their cotton skirts billowing, were trying to keep a check on the children. They were standing and staring out to the rocks with their hands shading their eyes. The children, on crutches, were getting up and falling down in the sand. Vincent kept an eye out for Ti-Jean. And where was Thérèse?

As they drew closer onto the black sand making the water look
like ink, they could see the stalking corbeaux flying up, and then resettling on their pincer legs. They were heaping themselves onto what seemed, at first sight, part of the undulation of the beach, a mound of rock, glistening and wet. People were shooing the corbeaux away.

‘The whale!' Jonah pointed, leading the party.

Vincent encouraged Theo to move forward. The boy shook himself out of his amazement, and did not resist.

When they got close up, they could then appreciate the sheer magnitude of the mammoth mammal. They stood silently. Even Jonah was stunned into silence now, staring at the wet oily cliff of flesh which seemed to be written on with prehistoric runes, telling an ancient story of voyaging the deep ocean. The dorsal ridge rose above them. Stuck to it were barnacles, a mosaic of encrustations. The cliff side glistened with purple, pink and jade. It was festooned and draped with seaweed and slime. It freighted the Sargasso Sea, which it had delivered onto the beach at La Tinta. It was a mossed tumulus.

Theo, Jonah and Vincent stood and stared.

What silenced everyone the most was the stillness of this presence of power, its passivity, its helplessness without its element, water. The tide was way out.

A very high tide had brought it right up to the rocks. It was now itself part of the contour of the coast. The danger, lack of water, on this dry island, struck everyone.

A group of Marines were running hoses from their own water boat in Perruquier Bay, and spraying the fast drying out mound. They were being able to just spray the dome of the head and the strangely smiling face.

On each side, there was an eye which seemed uncannily human with its intimate, yet faraway, luminous stare. Even one of the small children noticed and pointed up, crying out, ‘It smiling at me.'

Then, Sister Rita picked up the child to see from a height.

Vincent looked for Thérèse. They had not spoken since after the riot.

On the other side of the whale, some of the children were
touching the flanks of flesh, others were shooing away the corbeaux which were settling on the great bloody gash which had ripped out a huge chasm, a black gorge, revealing a bewildering interior. Already, flies and ants were buzzing and crawling all over. The wound was festering in the heat, giving off an odour of fish oil, blubber, blood and salt.

One marine had organised a line of children to pass buckets of salt water to throw onto the sides of the whale. Someone had got a ladder, and was climbing up to one flank, pouring the salt water which seemed a trickle on a mountainside. Another child had slipped down and scratched herself, trying to climb the cliff of flesh.

No one knew if the whale was dead. The high tide was expected after lunch. They were debating whether a tug should come and drag it off the beach and nose it back into the deep. Marines were coming from their barracks at Perruquier Bay with cotton sheets, and draping the wet sheets over the full extent of the whale, to prevent it from drying out in the increasing hot sun of the morning.

The tail with the tail flukes lay exposed on the small rocks, which were usually covered by the sea except for this unusual tide. Many of the children were looking for crabs and conches in the rock pools. There was a yell. It was Ti-Jean, balancing precariously between rocks and weed and soft sand, helped by one of the other children. Vincent waved. ‘Docta, Docta!' Ti-Jean's voice rose over the wind, and the confusion on the bay, with all the children and Marines.

Theo and Vincent stumbled across the beach towards where Ti-Jean was expertly leaping over rocks and seaweed with his crutches, looking like some strange, spider-like crab on stilts. When he eventually met up with Theo and Vincent, he fell flat on his face in the sand. Then, he looked up, laughing at himself and his antics.

‘Come, boy, let's get you up, Ti-Jean.' Vincent knelt down in the sand next to Ti-Jean. While he lifted Ti-Jean, Theo collected the crutches and stood holding them out for Ti-Jean to take them again.

He paid little attention to his accident, or to the loss of his
crutches. He did not at first seem to notice Theo holding them out. He was obsessed with the whale. He came up spluttering and wiping sand from his mouth and off his face. He pulled himself along on his belly, and then with a huge effort, turned over and sat up with his plaster-of Paris stumps in front of him, like a figure in the stocks. He was immediately in full flow.

‘Is like a mountain, Doc, like an island that come out of the sea. I wish I could climb right to the top of it.'

Vincent, busy brushing him down and adjusting him in his awkward sitting position, asked, ‘And what would you do on the summit of the whale, Ti-Jean?'

‘I go look out over the world.'

Ti-Jean was immediate with his reply. It was as if he had been preparing his response to the extraordinary visitor to El Caracol for some time.

The ocean, from this angle, was mountainous in its green swells, as it came through the
bocas
with a seaplane tender's steep sides seeming closer and higher because of how far out the tide was today.

The sea was above the land.

Ti-Jean's visionary fantasy loosened Theo's tongue. Determined not to be outdone, Theo showed off one of the stories he had heard from Father Angel. Using Ti-Jean's crutches to dramatise width and height, he launched into part of the tale of Moby Dick.

‘He tired, Father Angel say, the writer who write
Moby Dick,
or Ishmael, the character who do the talking, when he come to think about the origin of the Leviathan.'

Theo pointed with one of Ti-Jean's crutches at the steep cliffs of whale behind him, as if he were lecturing on the origin of the species. Then he began to quote from the book of Job. ‘You know, Leviathan, upon the earth there is not his like who is made without fear. Will he speak soft words unto thee?' His tale was a mixture of the Bible and Herman Melville as transmitted through the vocabulary of the parish priest who had educated him, contributing to his fevered imagination.

‘Sometimes, in the book, it say that when you come upon cliffs, in far away land, where rock throw down, you go see the petrified form of the Leviathan. You know that this is the Golfo de La
Ballena, so no surprise to see this whale. Long ago you would've see more.

‘It not unusual to see, when you look up at a cliff, or even higher, look up at a cloud, to see the shape of a whale. At night, when you look up in the sky you go see whale crossing the starry sky, Leviathan swimming through the milky way.'

Vincent could detect the mixture of Theo's sources as he interspersed his own fiction between paraphrases of the Bible and what he remembered of
Moby
Dick
, read to him by Father Angel.

By now, the audience for the boy's tale had grown. There was a tight circle of faces which included Sister Rita's and several of the children who were in her care. This was not like reading from the Royal Reader in school.

He was now working to his climax, his large green eyes getting wider and wider.

‘There is men, with anchor and harpoon, use this as a way to hack and climb to the summit of Leviathan, to reach the top of the sky. These is the very words I hear from Father Angel who teach me them. He want to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond mortal light.' He smiled with his recitation.

He had Ti-Jean in the palm of his hand, Vincent was amused to see. Everyone applauded, and some of the children who knew his storytelling from the school whistled their excitement and approval.

Theo was standing in the middle of a circle. He sank to the sand and laid Ti-Jean's crutches in front of the other boy, and then went silent. When he looked up he stared straight into the faces of Singh and Christiana who had joined the enraptured audience. They were all applauding.

‘You could tell story, boy.' Singh came forward to pat him on the back. Theo shied away. Vincent noticed his unease. He was surprised to see Singh so openly with the girl, now that he knew what was going on, if he believed Theo.

Vincent approached. ‘He gets shy. Let's leave him.'