Night Calypso (28 page)

Madeleine and Vincent had gone back to the end of the beach where they had seen their first turtle. They were stealing time. Jonah would have to get Madeleine back to the Saint Damian’s before six o’clock, before the first stroke of the Angelus.

They had found a fisherman’s shelter of coconut branches. As they lay against each other, they felt as if they were hammocked in the sway of the tide. It thundered beneath them. They heard the rhythmic flip flip of the sand being scooped and pitched by a nearby turtle. The sand fell onto their naked feet. Their own shifting against the sand joined them to this instinctual ceremony. Vincent’s strivings and Madeleine’s cries and sighs were their own belief against the odds.

They listened to the rattle of the shells and the dead corals. The heave and thud of the sea, which passed beneath the ground on which they lay, were voices sighing from within a sea midden. At times it sounded like sobbing, other times, like wailing.

In the far distance was the sound of thunder, the war they heard about, which delivered its dead sailors onto their shores, out of the very sea from which the turtles came to lay their future.

‘I won’t make a baby now,’ Madeleine whispered.

‘Madeleine?’

He wanted to contradict her irrational feeling. His fresh sperm was inside of her. She curled herself into a foetus on the ground which had become a vast womb to incubate the thousands of eggs which had been laid that season. If ever there was a place of fertility this would be it. He curled himself around her. He raked in their discarded clothes, pulling them about their nakedness. Then, he heard her sobbing. He gathered her up into his arms. ‘Madeleine.’

A baby had been their fear after the time in the boathouse. She could not then leave the convent. He was the new doctor. But now he had brought her here. How much longer could they go on with their separation? Could they have another moment? Madeleine’s declaration was the dread that they had missed their chance.

‘Not all the eggs hatch. Not all the baby turtles reach the sea.’ Vincent tried to find the right balancing words to whisper in her ear.

She got up suddenly, pushing him off, and walked out from the fisherman’s
ajoupa
. Vincent watched her, naked in the mist and spray, go towards the sea, tripping over a birthing turtle, falling in the deep soft sand dunes where the eggs were buried, disappearing down the sheer sand cliff to the hard shale where the sea pounded the shore.

He followed, naked too, to the edge of the sand cliff. He watched her enter the sea. He fell down as he followed her to the hard shore. ‘Madeleine, take care! Don’t go in too far! Don’t lose your foothold!’ She continued into the sea. He picked himself up and ran and stumbled into the breaking waves. ‘Madeleine!’

They lay on the beach watching a returning turtle. After washing off the sand, they got back to the fisherman’s
ajoupa
and gathered up their clothes, trying to dry off in the soft breeze which stirred in the palms above.

The moon was a still mask behind the mist and spray.

Back at the fire, Jonah had roasted bake. Everyone was quiet and exhausted after the night of turtle watching. Theo lay on his belly blowing the embers of the fire into a new flame. Bake and black coffee soon gave them the energy they needed to go down to the shore to help Bolo, Elroy and Jai pull in the seine.

Vincent watched with satisfaction the result of his surgery and their care, on the hands of these men, so that they could clutch and pull effectively.

There was a strong wind blowing, the sea was getting rough. The pirogues rose and fell in the swell. The fishermen were in the water with the net. The others, with the excited Theo, waiting to take hold of it on the shore. Soon, everyone was heaving in the net which was jumping with cavalli. ‘A good catch boy!’ Jonah shouted over the crash of the sea onto the steep beach.

That light which is before the dawn, came through the mist and spray, as they all encouraged each other with the heaving of the seine out of the sea onto the beach.
Corbeaux
were landing to guzzle the dead pickings.

Suddenly, on the wind, was a squall blowing off the gulf, swirling
into the bay, causing the sea to swell and crash. The pirogues were heaved up and then let down. The pullers of the seine were slipping in the sand and falling back onto the beach. They managed in time to haul in the seine and transfer the cavalli to the other pirogue which would take the fish back to El Caracol.

Madeleine was worried about the time. Would she get back to the convent before the Angelus?

The men were eager to save the boats from being dashed against the shore. They were heaving them up the steep beach, running them along on logs, winching them up.

Then the rain came in, lashing the coast. Rain and spray. With the dark and pulsing light before the dawn, they were completely cut off.

Bolo, Elroy and Jonah, with Theo in fast attendance, built a shelter of coconut palms raised by bamboo poles they found on the beach. Madeleine and Vincent retreated to the fisherman’s ajoupa, their earlier haven.

Time ceased here, under the coconut palms and the drip of the rain in the bush. They sat huddled together, staring at nothing. They were all ears.

‘Can you hear them growing?’ Madeleine mused.

‘Growing?’ Vincent was astonished.

‘The baby turtles. They grow with the waves pounding onto the beach. This is what they will know most of all, this beach and the sound of the sea. To get to the sea will be their strongest instinct. To return here, to lay their own eggs, will be their strongest instinct too, a generational cycle going on and on. A repeated journey,’ Madeleine spoke amazedly.

Then, words ceased. And time also, as they knew it, stopped.

Madeleine was kneeling in the sand. Vincent came up behind her and cradled her. She leant back into him. Over her shoulder, he could see the task that she was engaged in. She had discovered some hatching turtles burrowing out of the sand in one of the earlier sites. She had decided to help them. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘they’ll never make it.’

Circling overhead, were the corbeaux and the gulls.

‘It’s a cruel outcome,’ she lamented.

‘Nature’s way?’ Vincent said philosophically.

‘You always say that.’

‘What else is there to say.’

‘We could enable them to survive.’

‘We could, but we couldn’t save them all. And would that be the right thing?’ Vincent looked back at the beach. ‘If they were all saved!’

The beach was strewn with debris of birthing.

‘It’s the survival of the fittest,’ Vincent concluded.

‘It’s a matter of luck,’ Madeleine replied.

‘Chance, maybe,’ Vincent qualified.

‘The fittest may die.’

‘Yes, the fittest may die,’ Vincent concluded.

He watched her kneeling in the sand digging, and then with her skirt full of baby turtles, hurrying to where the dunes slid to the hard shore. There she released them to make their own journey, the rest of the way into the water, shooing off the predatory corbeaux, the pecking gulls and inquisitive sandpipers.

‘They know only the sea. Look, at how strong their small fins are.’ He watched her freeing them from her skirts.

It seemed as if at one moment the gulf was empty, and in the next, it was filled with destroyers and mine sweepers. They were transported from a desert island to a theatre of war. A Barracuda reminded them of waking at night to the boom of thunder in the distance.

Thérèse slipped through the palms in her nun’s cloak, up the steps from the jetty at the first toll of the Angelus. She did not turn to wave. She and Vincent had not decided what they would do next. She did not know if any of her sisters had been watching, and seen her naked ankles, as she gathered her nun’s cloak over her cotton frock with the blue forget-me-nots.

Lieutenant Jesse Morrison walked out of the darkness at the back of the Doctor’s House. He had come down the path where the sorrel bushes had grown at Christmas time, but which was now a dry bank of yellowing, scorched grass.

He entered by the back door. ‘Hello, hello,’ he called, carrying his saxophone. Its brass gleam glinted where it picked up the stuttering flame from the kerosene lantern.

The generators had just been turned off. This was part of the new curfew.

Madeleine was sitting at the dining-room table, bent over a microscope in the glow of the humming lantern. ‘Oh, hello, we met on the beach, last August,’ Jesse reminded her.

She looked up without answering. He stared at her now more than ever. ‘This is a beauty.’ He pointed at the microscope.

‘My father’s.’ She stroked the stand. Vincent had brought it over for her use, now that she was stationed in the hills. She had arrived one night, and now slept in the Doctor’s house.

Jesse remembered this bald nun at La Tinta, in her dress. Her hair had grown. It was not his business to judge.

‘Good evening, Lieutenant.’ She greeted him now without raising her head, keeping some of that composure which went with being a nun, despite her thin muslin dress, her bare arms, her black hair, growing by the minute it seemed, falling over her eyes; her naked feet tied in a knot under her chair. Her veil and habit were in the room upstairs.

‘Hi yuh, there, Doc. Good evening to you, Sir,’ Jesse called to Vincent whom he now noticed out on the verandah.

‘Good night, Lieutenant. You come to entertain us?’

‘Man, you hear those guys, those fishermen, like Jonah with their bottle and spoon, beating out those calypsos? That tune, man. Man, they got me itching to blow. I like their humour and their message. Those fellas are ready for carnival.’

‘If you’re off duty, why don’t you stay and share our supper? Or, maybe, I should check with Theo. He’s the cook tonight.’

‘That’s already checked. The boy was up at the Look Out this afternoon. I’m here on his invitation.’ Jesse eased himself into a Morris chair, positioning the saxophone on his knee.

‘Oh, I see. Well, it’s not for me to interfere, then.’ Vincent stubbed out his cigarette. A silence fell between the two men. Vincent lit another cigarette. Jesse noticed his nervousness. He looked over his shoulder to where Madeleine’s bent back told a story of labour and research.

‘She’s moved in?’ Jesse spoke quietly.

‘She stays.’ Vincent pulled on his cigarette.

Changing the subject, Vincent said, ‘Just heard about the torpedoing of one of the ships on the bauxite run from British Guiana?’

‘Yep. She went down in the seas off Galera Point, the most dangerous, they estimate.’

‘All gone down to the bottom of the sea. No survivors,’ Theo joined in, coming out from the kitchen.

The boy’s stories were often a mixture of tragedy and excitement, as he made these announcements, faintly imitating the news announcer, but mixed with his own sense of ironic absurdity. Then he laughed at his imitative efforts. ‘There were no survivors reported.’ He pursed his lips to mimic a BBC accent. Then, he was gone, out of the room, back to the kitchen.

‘They took her out of the water. The fireball could be seen at quite a distance. Some heard the explosion, even here,’ Jesse said. He played softly on his sax.

Madeleine cleared her things from the dining-room table, making room for Theo to lay for supper.

The men glanced at each other as she passed through the verandah. They watched her descend the steps, reach the boardwalk and sit on the small wooden bench under the jetty
house. She pulled her skirt about her legs as it blew up in the sea breeze. She pulled her fringe from her eyes. She scraped her jet black hair up from the nape of her neck. Then she let it fall thickly alongside her face.

Jesse had questions to ask, Vincent did not have the answers, but was looking for his reactions.

Jesse spoke first, calling after Madeleine. ‘Take some fresh air, Sis.’ He tried to break the ice. She did not acknowledge his voice. She was not in a mood for his familiarity.

Vincent had noticed the way she chose the end of the jetty. It had become her spot. She was tasting her freedom, or pretending to explore it, like using her name Madeleine while she was in the house. At dawn, she would be slipping away in her nun’s habit, making sure her long hair was tidied away beneath her skull cap and veil. Then she would become Sister Thérèse again. How long could this secrecy continue?

‘We’ll be eating soon,’ he called down to her. He was trying to understand her isolation, since she had come to stay in his house, to sleep in his room, in his bed. He wanted her to be free. The other spare room was hers. He wanted her to choose again, so that these nights might be spent on her own, or with him. He loved when she did choose him in the night, chose his bed, coming across the landing in her white cotton chemise, her bare feet on the pitch pine floor. She mostly began the night in her own room. That way she felt that she was fooling Theo.

It was like being at her improvised desk at the dining room table, her head bent over her microscope, magnifying the secret life of
mycrobacterium leprae.
She could pretend that nothing had changed as regards her research. She could feel less lost in the Doctor’s House.

It was not sufficient to be Vincent’s lover. Not that she would call herself that. Most of it was unsaid. There had not been much choice. Then she wondered what the alternatives could be, the ones put to her to threaten her. There was either the choice to live under a cloud in the community, as had started after the incident at La Tinta, or fending for herself in Porta España, while her papers were being processed, and that could take up to a year because of the poor communication in wartime.

The Archbishop had come up with a room in the Magdalen House for the naughty girls, which the sisters ran in the city, in Freetown, she had been told. That could have sealed her fate. Madeleine refused that option also.

Choosing this clandestine life meant that she had not had to make any choices, irrevocably. This of course could jeopardise Vincent’s job. Once they could find a replacement for him, they would both have to choose. In the meantime, they both decided to push ahead with their research here at the Doctor’s House. But Vincent missed her on the wards. The patients took a surprisingly neutral position on the matter. ‘Say howdy to Sister Thérèse, Doctor.’ What did they know? How careful they had to be. He smiled at their innocence. There was always rumour in a small place.

On the jetty, Madeleine could have a view of the convent, and behind her, the house, which was now a kind of new home, a
half-way
house. It was a place from which to look at where she had come from, and a place to wonder what her future would be.

The tune on Jesse’s saxophone was a mournful tune of loss and abandonment. More than ever now, she felt like a motherless child. Separating herself from her sisters brought back thoughts of her mother, how much she felt her death, finding refuge with the sisters at her school, and then in the novitiate.

There was no moon, and the darkness swallowed her.

Jesse’s playing conjured his story which Vincent had heard of from Theo, and which Jesse himself had begun to speak about at La Tinta. Sitting here on an island in the confines of a bay, a place with distances and horizons opened up. Theo came and stood by the verandah. Madeleine came up and sat on the steps. The music sang of the cotton and tobacco fields, about the crops in the spring and the fall. It was the wind among tobacco leaves in the spring, in the cotton ready for picking in the fall. It was the red of maple trees up north.

The saxophone moaned for the hot trumpet of the trains which travelled north, bawling in the fading distance.

‘You blow that good, Jesse. You want a rum?’

‘I won’t say no, Doc.’ There was a kind of distance that the men kept as they got closer. They felt more than they spoke.

‘Theo, we got time for a rum? Or is that cocoa hot now? Are those bakes ready?’

‘If all you ready, it ready. But, I can bring you a rum first. I still have to swizzle in the vanilla and cinnamon.’ He turned into the house, returned with two glasses and a bottle of brown rum. He put them on the small table between the chairs of the two men. He opened the bottle, pouring a couple of drops to the floor for the spirits, then filling the two glasses.

‘I like the way you do that, boy,’ Jesse said admiringly.

‘What you mean? When I throw it on the floor? Is so we does do it before I reach here. Is I who teach Doctor to pay observance. Mama say…’ Then he stopped himself, looking at both men, from one to the other, as if he had slipped up, let the cat out of the bag.

Then he just let himself speak as if the music had loosed his tongue. ‘That is a whole new geography, yes, pappy! I done leave Pepper Hill, Gran Couva, Tortuga up in the Montserrat Hills, beyond Brasso Pedro, with the
coco panol
music, bottle and spoon, cuatro. I done leave San Jose, La Vega, San Juan, Josefito. I with you Jesse, boy.’ Theo had not shown quite this degree of familiarity before. ‘I with you on them dusty plains with howling coyotes. It like film I see with Mama, and Spanish, in Couva. Them people does live in a big country, yes, man. That is what Spanish tell Mama when we walking home along the road to Pepper Hill.’ Theo stopped. He looked about him, astonished. Jesse, Vincent and Madeleine were staring up at him. ‘Play Jesse, play, nuh, man.’ He sped off to the kitchen.

‘He’s a great one at the repeated tale,’ Vincent explained.

‘Yes, Sir. Repeated journeys.’

‘What’s your repeated journey, Lieutenant?’

‘Mine? Well, I guess, it’s a dream I have.’

‘A recurring dream?’

‘Yeh, I had it as a boy. But it’s coming back now, regular, since I’m in the forces. Since I went North to school, to do my training.’

‘Leaving the familiar, you look back over the past,’ Vincent reflected.

‘Something like that. You’re a philosophical guy, Doc. I’m down by Granma’s homestead. That’s in the Carolinas, and I go round the house to the back porch, where my Grandpa’s chopping wood. That’s my Ma’s Pa. Sometimes it’s just that. And I think, why do I keep dreaming of my Grandma’s homestead, and my Grandpa’s chopping wood outside the back porch?’

‘That’s quite innocent,’ Vincent commented.

‘Right.’

‘So?’ Vincent encouraged the retelling.

‘But then it sometimes continues, and my Grandpa is sitting on the porch steps with a sax. He’s blowing. I never get to hear the tune. Only, he got no fingers. Them keys is pressed invisibly. In another version it’s the same. Only, the sax is bleeding.’

‘Bleeding? What’s behind that dream?’

‘Well, I know that my Grandpa taught me to play the sax. My Grandma, and my Ma before that, told me that he was a great player in his time, jumping tracks and going from town to town. He played in sets with some of the greatest. But, I remember once he told me that the guys used to call him No Fingers. “Hi there, No Fingers,” they would say. He had a way of pressing down those keys with his knuckles. It was painful to watch and painful in truth. No one knew how he did that, and still play the music. Him got his fingers broken when he was a young boy, broken on some ranch he worked on. You know, deliberately. They smashed his fingers.’

‘Who?’ Vincent inquired.

‘Him who owned the ranch. It was a ranch and a cotton mill. They jammed his fingers in some machinery, on purpose.’

‘Who?’

‘My Grandpa was an enslaved man.’

Vincent listened in awe, as the negro Lieutenant told the story of his dream and of his Grandpa’s life, intermittently blowing on his saxophone, his fingers moving invisibly in the dark over the keys.

A silence ticked in the house, disturbed only by the sea, sucking on the rocks, gulping round the pylons of the jetty, where the
shadow of Madeleine rustled the darkness, where she had continued to sit on the steps combing out her hair.

‘Madeleine?’ Vincent pulled her away from herself.

‘What stories! I’m so moved by your story and Theo’s story,’ Madeleine looked up.

‘You have a story, I bet.’ Jesse stopped himself remembering their first meeting at La Tinta and wondering about this strange woman.

Vincent smiled and took her hand.

The night was close.

Theo came out of the kitchen, carrying a tray with hot bakes and a blue enamel jug of frothing cocoa. They all turned and saw him and got up off their chairs on the verandah, and went into the dining room.

‘Your fingers are fine?’ Vincent smiled, speaking to Jesse again.

‘Yes, Sir, my fingers are the fingers they took from him. They’re my Grandpa’s fingers. My Mama always say that. “Son, she say, you’ve got them fingers, Mungo picked up from the yard.” Mungo was a lad that worked with my Grandpa. He was there when my Grandpa’s fingers got chopped. He held the bloody fingers in his hand, my Ma say. They hurried, and it was a Dr Du Bois who stitched them back on. But they grow funny. Imagine, them two, Mungo and my Grandpa, hurrying down the dirt road to Dr Du Bois. Them red stumps jumping, Mungo careful they don’t fall in the dirt again. My Ma say, she was a little girl at the time. She have all them stories, and more stories, she hear from my Grandma. It’s so it goes, where I come from, Doc.’ Jesse took a last blow on his sax as they came into the dining room.

‘You play well.’ Vincent did not know what to say about the story, so appalling in Jesse’s matter of fact, comic telling, so awesome with the sax for accompaniment.

‘Oh, I ent play yet.’ Jesse laughed aloud.

Theo hovered, listening to the two men, and pulling out a chair for Madeleine.

‘Those bakes smell good, Theo. Thank you.’ Madeleine looked at the boy appreciatively, enjoying his attention. He stared and
moved the jug of cocoa nearer to Vincent to pour for Jesse, Madeleine and himself.

‘And you Theo, you joining us?’ Jesse asked.

Theo hovered round the table making sure they all had what they wanted, and then went back into the kitchen without answering. He had overwhelmed himself talking out on the verandah.