Night Calypso (9 page)

Jonah walked off the verandah down to the jetty and stood
behind Theo, watching him fish. He knelt next to the boy and leant over and gave a little tug to the line. Singh and Vincent watched from the edge of the verandah. Jonah called up to them, ‘Red fish biting, red fish biting good.’

‘It mean something to me what I hear my father and my grandfather say. The way they tell we coming. The way we tell our arrival.’ Singh drew on his cigarette, inhaled deeply, and then blew the smoke slowly into the air.

‘Sure. I understand that.’ Vincent leaned towards him, lighting another cigarette.

‘Yes, I believe you.’ Singh softened with his own story. ‘You and me here. But our people…’

‘Our people?’

‘White people, East Indian people.’

‘Yes?’

‘We looking at each other. We just looking at each other.’

‘History delivered us here. The British Empire put us here together.’ Vincent was deeply involved.

‘Yes, Jonah people and my people, and we meet your people here. The first ones, they done kill out. You does only hear them in the language the parrots speaking,’ Singh laughed.

‘That’s true,’ Vincent agreed.

‘But, I mean it don’t have to stay so. Take you and me. Why you here, Doctor? Why I here?’

‘Medicine.’

‘Come. We don’t have to practice our respective skills here. You know that.’

‘Leprosy. The challenge, the interest,’ Vincent added.

‘Yes, of course. But I watch you. Is more.’

‘My patients,’ Vincent asserted.

‘People. They part of something bigger than themselves. They’re at the extremity of their own people. Shunned by their own.’

Vincent watched Singh. He saw him in a new light. He began to understand the man.

‘So, you and I here Old Year’s Night talking. An Indian and a French Creole. You not over there and I over here. We here.’ Singh
reached out and put his hand on Vincent’s arm. ‘And Jonah, the black man. He not over there. He here. We three. That have to make a difference to the people, than if we apart, if we continue watching each other from afar.’

Vincent was following intently, pulling on his cigarette.

‘It make a difference for us, but above all it go make a difference for people. If, when we speak, we speak for all people. For the humanity of all people.’

Jonah had climbed the steps from the jetty. ‘That boy can fish,
oui!
Red fish, biting yes. How he coming on, that boy? He talking yet, Doc?’

‘He catching fish? No, not yet. He talks and then he doesn’t talk.’

‘Catching, for so! He already have three red snapper and some carite. We talking, he fishing.’ Jonah walked over to the table with the drinks. ‘Like you need to bring a next bottle, Doc.’

‘You know Doctor, the story Jonah want me to tell you is our history. You have yours, and sure as hell Jonah have his. He go get into that. Them is good stories and we go have to keep on telling them because that is how we reach here. But now, you and me on this jetty, right now, and Jonah there. Our patients with their big big needs, and we have to ask ourselves what we going to do about that. Is not we, is them.’

‘You tell him the story yet, Singh?’

Singh did not pay attention to Jonah.

‘Now that Escalier gone, we have a chance. I see you pressing the Mother Superior.’ Singh was looking intently at Vincent.

‘I’m doing what I can.’

‘Sure.’ Singh lit another cigarette, slipping his fingers into Vincent’s pack on the arm of the Morris chair. He was intense, his white cotton shirt tight on his arms. His thin moustache and a wisp of a beard made him look older than he was, a young man of twenty-five. An earnest man. Vincent now saw his sensitivity, as he had before noticed his fastidiousness. ‘I determine we go see this thing turn out good. But there might be some hard things too.’

‘But Mother Superior catch between what she must see as the devil and the deep blue sea.’

‘Who’s the devil, Doc?’ Jonah laughed.

‘Well, let’s take the devil to be the Colonial Office,’ Vincent argued.

‘We is the deep blue sea, then? That okay with me,’ Jonah boasted.

‘You see, on the medical side, these Chaulmoogra Oil injections have to stop. They not doing any good. Not in the long run, anyway. They have more side effects than people want to admit.’ Singh lectured the two men now.

‘I agree,’ said Vincent. ‘You know the position.’

‘The position is, that they don’t want to spend money on the new Sulfa drugs which they could import.’

‘Escalier love to give people them injection, three hundred a week, yes. Poor people,’ Jonah threw in.

Singh continued, ‘There’s the business of accommodation. Men must be able to visit the women, have relationships. Married men must be able to live with their wives. We’ll have to work out what we do with the children. There are different theories about this infection thing, you know. Different theories about contagion.’

‘Krishna,’ Vincent used Singh’s first name now. ‘Krishna. You know I lectured about these very same things. You were there. Where is the big difference between us?’

‘You see Doc, these things gone from bad to worse before you reach,’ Jonah contributed. ‘They making the people work for nothing, a few cents a day. I mean to say! They sick for one, and then they have to keep the place going for nothing. I don’t blame the nuns them, in a way. They in a fix too because the Colonial Office getting them on the cheap. The Governor say, call on the nuns. It suit them. They capitalising on their good will, their vocation as nursing nuns. But in the end, they does side with the authorities, rather than with the people, when it come to the crunch.’

‘Is so the church is. They’ll go with the government, against the people, when it come to it,’ Singh added.

‘What you mean, come to it?’ Vincent asked tentatively.

Jonah and Singh looked at each other. Then Singh spoke. ‘They
can’t blame the people if they take things into their own hands, you know.’

‘What do you mean, into their own hands? They’re not capable…’

Singh cut Vincent off. ‘They capable alright. Don’t underestimate the spirit in these people. You must know that, Dr Metivier. You must know. Anyway, Jonah, we must get back. We go have to leave you. Happy New Year. And, take care of this boy. How you come to look after this boy?’

Theo was, just at that moment, coming up from the jetty with his catch.

Jonah was as friendly as ever. ‘Boy you catch fish for so. You and Doc, go have a New Year feast.’

Theo remained mute and passed them on his way into the kitchen only with a quick glance at Jonah.

‘Ei, boy, you ent see me?’ Singh tried again. ‘Send him by me, Doctor, I go give him a little training in science.’

Theo turned for an instant at the kitchen door and took in Singh on the verandah, in the dim glow of the kerosene lantern. The men did not understand the look on the boy’s face. They looked at each other when he had passed into the kitchen. They smiled at each other.

‘Like you have your work cut out, Doctor,’ Singh said. He and Jonah looked at each other again. ‘That boy don’t have mother and father?’

‘Mother, yes, the father is a mystery,’ Vincent said.

‘Mystery? There’s never any mystery about fathers. They does just get up so and go.’ Singh watched Jonah.

‘Boy, why you watching me so? I does go and see after my children. Is up here I get a work, but I does carry them things. I does carry their mother things,’ Jonah argued.

‘Come boy, let we go. I only giving you
fatigue
. The doctor want to sleep. Put that child to sleep. You sure you not pulling a fast one on us, Doctor?’ Singh would not leave the subject of Theo alone. ‘You past catching up with you?’

‘Singh boy, what you telling the doctor?’

Vincent laughed. ‘Come, all you need to go.’

‘We go see you, Doc. A happy New Year to you, Doc.’ The three men shook hands, and then Jonah and Singh went down to the jetty and rowed away.

Out in the gulf, the kerosene lamps of the fishermen were a constellation. There was one in particular winking at him, right in line with the Boca Grande, Vincent thought, as he stood and stared and lost himself in what seemed like signals being transmitted to him personally, a kind of Morse. He did not have the code to decipher them.

It reminded him of how, as a young boy, he would sit on the verandah of the Versailles Estate house and stare at the fireflies out on the pasture, wondering at their signals. Matches being struck in the darkness. Candleflies. He did not know then what they meant. Though, he remembered desiring a message, an answer to something. He and Bernard went out and caught the pulsing insects between their fingers and put them in a glass jar. They winked and winked, green light, codes at the nerve end of their fingers. Each pulse had a message.

The Versailles house rose before him now, out of the pasture and above the wide saman trees near the low cocoa houses. It rose to be as high as the palmistes where its turrets and topmost balconies reached the great flowering of the plumes from the heart of the swaying palms. He remembered now that behind the house, where there were always some goats tethered on long chains, was his favourite guava tree. You had to jump from one soft grass patch to another, in this part of the pasture, because of the
Ti-Marie
, soft name for the mauve mimosa which grew close to the ground with her thorns and leaves, which closed to their touch. He could smell the guavas when they burst open on the ground, yellow with ripeness, sticky with their pink flesh and seeds.

It was the green guavas they liked best, Odetta and himself. The ripe ones were collected for his mother to make guava jelly; peeled and boiled with sugar, the pulp squeezed and strained through a thin gauze for the syrup to boil and thicken for her jelly. It became a clear glaze of crimson held in the small globes, which she then let drop into a saucer of water to test with her fingers, rolling the syrup into a ball, her touch testing whether it had formed to the consistency that she wanted. Then the warm syrup was poured into jam jars, stood on the windowsill to cool in tins of water to ward off the ants. The crimson glaze caught the morning light. The stained muslin was rinsed and hung out on the line in the sun.

He counted the ants crawling back and forth along the windowsill.

His father was in the war.

Odetta and himself loved to climb the trees for the green guavas. She was Sybil’s daughter. She climbed the smooth guava trees in a white cotton chemise. He could see her brown legs and more, as she shinnied up the smooth trunk, gripping with her knees. When she was much smaller, she called him to come and peep at the spider between her legs. Then, he was frightened. He was always bare backed out on the estate. Just in his short khaki pants. Running about barefoot. His mother said that he was getting to look like a
coolie
boy. ‘Playing with Odetta again,’ his mother’s voice followed him.

Odetta hammocked the guavas that they had picked in the skirt of her chemise, stretched between her knees. She held them there, securely, in a bundle, between her legs. They climbed the stairs fast to the top turret, bursting into the room, where the breeze whistled and from where they could see the world, or at least the gulf, the Golfo de La Ballena. ‘You see a whale?’ He remembered pointing out of the turret for her to see. She did not believe him. Odetta emptied out the green guavas onto the floor. A balcony ran all the way round the outside of this small room, the walls panelled with jalousies. It was empty except for a hammock. And the floor was bare, plain, scrubbed, white pitch pine.

The fishermen had stopped signalling. Maybe, they were on their way home after their catch, could be even Jonah by now. He used to meet up with some fellas from the Carenage where they went to meet women,
Dorothy went and bathe
… Caresser’s words caressed the night.

Then that thought left him and the others returned. Vincent listened out. The boy was still sleeping.

The white, scrubbed, pitch pine floors, the empty room, the hammock, the afternoons, disappeared when he and Odetta climbed into the turret room with their horde of guavas. ‘Don’t get belly ache,’ was what Sybil her mother used to shout up to them, when she saw the children climbing the stairs furtively. But what he remembered more, now, were his mother’s words: ‘You still playing with that girl, Vincent? You too big now,’ when he was older, after Confirmation Class. But his lips were already sore. They were almost blistered, with his kissing. Odetta’s were red with the blood that rose and pulsed. Blistered lips and bruised knees, from rubbing on the bare floor! He could not stop, once she had let him kneel over her, pulling her cotton chemise over her head and showing him. ‘Let me show you,’ were her words, soft, almost unspoken, peeping from behind the raised hem of her soft cotton chemise. The light through the jalousies sliced her with its lances. What did she show him? Her small breasts, pinky, puckered and brown. He wondered how they appeared to rise out of her, his, small brown sunburnt nipples, flat and tight, hers to fit the palms of his hands, small round sapodillas. He held them. She left the rest to him. There were no words yet, only smells and taste. Later, it surprised him how he needed his handkerchief. She watched him wipe the
break
from his khaki pants. It smelled like the jelly of kimeet fruit, leaving a stain like starch. She watched him wipe himself. In the silence, he watched the woodlice eat away at the floorboards.

They did not talk then, nor afterwards, when they left the turret room. Those ceremonies were left to the turret room, among the scratching palms, up in the indigo sky. Quiet like confession. It was a time when innocence and experience did not jar, when one
fed the other in an idyll, till his mother’s voice, speaking to Sybil, sounded a voice of caution and warning. ‘Sybil, I think that child is too big to be playing with Master Vincent.’