Aftermath--green aftermath.
The gap gave up the scurvy ghost. In balloons of steaming froth, the
fog of drought and heat, which had settled over the gap for the entire
summer, bore its way over the craggy tips of Low'rd to the red, brewing
sea beyond.
Splashes of rain--a swift transfusion. The earth murmured under it; lay
tense, groaning, swollen, like a woman in toil, with the burden of its
inheritance. Gold and green and yellow things, near-ripe, sent up tall,
nodding fronds to trumpet the bursting of the dawn.
Dawn cast a greenish gold over the gap. Over the jagged stones donkey
carts slipped, wheels stuck in mud. Men got down to coax their beasts
out of the muddy gutter. Gone the dust. Red mud flowed over the land.
Red mud--good for beans and potatoes--crawled up the legs of dusky West
Indian peasant women, up the hoofs of townbound cattle.
Once more the peewits sang. Strange--the way they found their way back
to the tip-top ends of guava or breadfruit or pine. Gobbling turkeys
and fowls, fond of their new, egg-crusted young, proudly stepped out
of coops, traversing the broad marl highway. Worms swarmed into their
paths to be devoured; plenty to go round. Mixed with the rain the marl
dust made a hard resilient road.
The wind tossed the lanky guava tree. Scudding popcorn--white, yellow,
crimson pink guava buds blew upon the ground. Forwards and backwards
the wind tossed the guava tree. It shook buds and blossoms on the
ground--moist, unforked, ground--on Ella Heath's lap, in her black,
plenteous hair, in the water she was drawing from the well. Guava
buds fell in Ella's bucket, and she liked it. They gave flavor to
the water. All of nature gave flavor to Ella, wrought a magic color
in Ella's life. Green, wavy moss--rhubarb moss--at the bottom of the
frog-harboring well, with fern and broad leaf sprawled along its ribs;
brought color to the water, gave body flavor to it. Gave the water a
tang.
Cast up on a bare half acre of land, Ella came to know the use of
green, virgin things. Ore; green ore--spread over the land. Riotously
nature peopled the earth about her. In front of her cabin door there
was a water course. It was filled with sparrow grass. A wild, mad,
hectic green--the green of young sugar canes. Up and down the gap,
horses, donkeys, ring-horned goats, on the way to Bridgetown to be
raced, tugged at their tethers, crazy to eat up Ella's sparrow grass.
It tempted the oxen carting tremulous loads of salty sugar cane grown
on the swampy seaside of Barbadoes--tempted sheep, oracular, voiceless,
dog-shy sheep bewilderedly on the road to market--tempted hens frizzly
with the pip, and leaping, lap-eared dogs.
Ella had come from Low'rd--the Lower Side--that dinky bar of salty
black earth jutting out to sea on the easternmost tip of Barbadoes.
From Low'rd Ella had brought a donkey cart load of sea crab shells,
horns, conchs, rose and orange and crimson hued, and set them in rows
between the blazing hibiscus and chrysanthemum along the walk.
Inexhaustible stems of green sprang up around Ella's domain. It'd
take five years to mature, but she had planted a cocoanut tree on the
northernmost wing of the cabin. Half an acre of land, but it was no
trifling stake. Inch by inch green overspread it. Corn, okras, gunga
peas, eddoes, _tannias_, tomatoes--in such a world Ella moved.
As if she were on an immemorial lark, Ella experimented with the green
froth of the earth. One day she was grafting a pine and breadfruit.
Standing, "jooking" a foreign stalk in--tamarind, star apple,
almond--and strapping it into the gummy gash dug into the tree's side.
Similarly, with the pigeons and the ground doves. Pigeons at sunrise on
a soap box coop set on top the latrine cooing:
A rooka ta coo
A rooka ta coo
My wife is just as good as you
Good as you
Good as you
to sherbet-winged doves on the cabin roof--in spite of Ella's scissors.
And rabbits; red-eyed ones, white and shy, Ella'd set in the thick
sparrow grass, guarded over by Jit, the dog, to play and frolic.
Sometimes, unmoved by their genetic dissimilarity, Ella'd use drastic,
aggressive methods....
Sows fared prodigiously at the hands of Ella. She filled huge,
fat-stinking troughs of slime for them. Ella's boars grew tusks of
flint-like ivory. Vicious, stiff-haired boars who ate up the sow's
young, frothed at the mouth at Jit's approach, tried to stick their
snouts between Ella's legs whenever she ventured in the pen.
Under Ella's tutelage the one cow she owned streamed milk. From fat
luscious udders filled skillet after skillet....
Gay, lonely girl, her bare arms yellow in the blazing February sun, the
words of a West Indian madrigal issued from her lips:
Do Mistah Bee don't chase me 'way
Fo' de gals nex' do' will laugh at me
Break me han' but let me stan'
Break me han' but let me stan'....
Ella poured the water in a skillet. Guava buds in the water--honey in
guava buds.
* * * * *
All around it was dark. Gravel assailed her feet. A moon worked its
way through a welter of thick black clouds to soar untrammeled in the
phosphorescent sky. Marl dust assailed Ella's unshod feet.
Under the evergreen big barnacled roots stood up like a mass of
sleeping crocodiles--and Ella grew tired, and like blacks on a dark
country road at night, began to sing