_DROUGHT_[1]
I
The whistle blew for eleven o'clock. Throats parched, grim, sun-crazed
blacks cutting stone on the white burning hillside dropped with a clang
the hot, dust-powdered drills and flew up over the rugged edges of
the horizon to descent into a dry, waterless gut. Hunger--pricks at
stomachs inured to brackish coffee and cassava pone--pressed on folk,
joyful as rabbits in a grassy ravine, wrenching themselves free of the
lure of the white earth. Helter-skelter dark, brilliant, black faces
of West Indian peasants moved along, in pain--the stiff tails of blue
denim coats, the hobble of chigger-cracked heels, the rhythm of a
stride ... dissipating into the sun-stuffed void the radiant forces of
the incline.
The broad road--a boon to constables moping through the dusk or on hot,
bright mornings plowing up the thick, adhesive marl on some seasonal
chore, was distinguished by a black, animate dot upon it.
It was Coggins Rum. On the way down he had stopped for a tot--zigaboo
word for tin cup--of water by the rock engine. The driver, a buckra
johnny--English white--sat on the waste box scooping with a fork handle
the meat out of a young water cocoanut. An old straw hat, black, and
its rim saggy by virtue of the moisture of sweating sun-fingers, served
as a calabash for a ball of "cookoo"--corn meal, okras and butter
stewed--roundly poised in its crown. By the buckra's side, a black
girl stood, her lips pursed in an indifferent frown, paralyzed in the
intense heat.
Passing by them Coggins' bare feet kicked up a cloud of the white
marl dust and the girl shouted, "Mistah Rum, you gwine play de guitah
tee nite, no?" Visions of Coggins--the sky a vivid crimson or blackly
star-gemmed--on the stone step picking the guitar, picking it "with
all his hand...."
Promptly Coggins answered, "Come down and dance de fango fo' Coggins
Rum and he are play for you."
Bajan gal don't wash 'ar skin
Till de rain come down....
Grumblings. Pitch-black, to the "washed-out" buckra she was more than a
bringer of victuals. The buckra's girl. It wasn't Sepia, Georgia, but
a backwoods village in Barbadoes. "Didn't you bring me no molasses to
pour in the rainwater?" the buckra asked, and the girl, sucking in her
mouth, brought an ungovernable eye back to him.
Upon which Coggins, swallowing a hint, kept on his journey--noon-day
pilgrimage--through the hot creeping marl.
Scorching--yet Coggins gayly sang:
O! you come with yo' cakes
Wit' yo' cakes an' yo' drinks
Ev'y collection boy ovah deah!--
An' we go to wah--
We shall carry de name,
Bajan boys for--evah!
"It are funny," mused Coggins, clearing his throat, "Massa Braffit an'
dat chiggah-foot gal...."
He stopped and picked up a fern and pressed the back of it to his shiny
ebon cheek. It left a white ferny imprint. Grown up, according to the
ethics of the gap, Coggins was yet to it a "queer saht o' man," given
to the picking of a guitar, and to cogitations, on the step after
dark--indulging in an avowed juvenility.
Drunk with the fury of the sun Coggins carelessly swinging along
cast an eye behind him--more of the boys from the quarry--overalled,
shoeless, caps whose peaks wiggled on red, sun-red eyes ... the eyes of
the black sunburnt folk.
He always cast an eye behind him before he turned off the broad road
into the gap.
Flaring up in the sun were the bright new shingles on the Dutch-style
cottage of some Antigua folk. Away in a clump of hibiscus was a
mansion, the color of bilgy water, owned by two English dowager
maidens. In the gap rock-stones shot up--obstacles for donkey carts
to wrestle over at dusk. Rain-worms and flies gathered in muddy water
platoons beside them.
"Yo' dam vagabond yo'!"
Coggins cursed his big toe. His big toe was blind. Helpless thing ... a
blind big toe in broad daylight on a West Indian road gap.
He paused, and gathered up the blind member. "Isn't this a hell
of a case fo' yo', sah?" A curve of flesh began to peel from it.
Pree-pree-pree. As if it were frying. Frying flesh. The nail jerked
out of place, hot, bright blood began to stream from it. Around the
spot white marl dust clung in grainy cakes. Now, red, new blood
squirted--spread over the whole toe--and the dust became crimson.
Gently easing the toe back to the ground, Coggins avoided the grass
sticking up in the road and slowly picked his way to the cabin.
"I stump me toe," he announced, "I stump me toe ... woy ... woy."
"Go bring yo' pappy a tot o' water ... Ada ... quick."
Dusky brown Sissie took the gored member in her lap and began to wipe
the blood from it.
"Pappy stump he toe."
"Dem rocks in de gap...."
"Mine ain't got better yet, needer...."
"Hurry up, boy, and bring de lotion."
"Bring me de scissors, an' tek yo' fingers out o' yo' mout' like yo' is
starved out! Hey, yo', sah!"
" ... speakin' to you. Big boy lik' yo' suckin' yo' fingers...."
Zip! Onion-colored slip of skin fluttered to the floor. Rattah Grinah,
the half-dead dog, cold dribbling from his glassy blue eyes on to his
freckled nose, moved inanimately towards it. Fox terrier ... shaggy ...
bony ... scarcely able to walk.
"Where is dat Beryl?" Coggins asked, sitting on the floor with one leg
over the other, and pouring the salt water over the crimsoning wadding.
"Outside, sah."
"Beryl!"
"Wha' yo' dey?"
"Wha' yo' doin' outside?"
"Answer me, girl!"
" ... Hey, yo' miss, answer yo' pappy!"
"Hard-ears girl! She been eatin' any mo' marl, Sissie?"
"She, Ada?"
"Sho', gal eatin' marl all de haftah-noon...."
Pet, sugar--no more terms of endearment for Beryl. Impatient, Coggins,
his big toe stuck up cautiously in the air,--inciting Rattah to
indolent curiosity--moved past Sissie, past Ada, past Rufus, to the
rear of the cabin.