And a legend, rooted deep in the tropic earth, passed pell-mell before
him.
* * * * *
It concerned a river, a river red as burning copper and peopled by
barques and brigantines, manned by blacks wedded to the _obeah_.
Once, the master of a vessel, taking a cargo of dry cocoanuts to a
mulatto merchant on the other side of the coast, cheated; a few English
crowns were at stake. But the trader was a high-priest of the _obeah_,
and was silently aware of it. Forthwith he proceeded to invoke the
magic of the _obeah_ against the vessel.
At late dusk the returning vessel hoisted anchor. The festival rites,
incident to her voyage, had drawn to the wharf, selling mango and
grape, the mulatto courtesans of the river town. And the crew rained on
them silver and gold, and bartered till the sun went down.
Upon reaching the vessel's deck the crew--the wine of lust red on their
lips--grew noisy and gay at the sinking of the river sun. From below
they brought a cask of rum, part of the cheated trader's store, and
drank of it. With a calabash they dipped and wallowed in it, finding it
sweeter than falernum.
Stars bedecked the night and a torch was lit. The vessel rocked on,
falling in with the trade winds.
The rum was a siren, it led one on. The cask was deep, immense, but the
liquor shrank till the huskiest of the Islanders had to be pummeled
to lean over into it and dip the liquid out. With a score of itching
throats there was a limit to the cask's largess, and the bottom was
early plumbed. When they got to it, however, it was to find a rum
soaked Negro corpse doubled up in the bottom!
* * * * *
The horse came to a dead, rigid stop. It was death dark and they had
just entered the heart of the marl gully.
He was already fidgety, and grew urgent. "Come on, Rayside," he
shouted, "giddup." But the mare shook, stamped, shuddered.
He stroked her mane, but a strange strong-headedness took hold of her.
She flung her ears forward.
Bellon dismounted, and the mare's inelegant tail switched her bony
flanks. He coaxed and patted her, but all she did was jerk her head the
more.
Resorting to a flashlight, Bellon clicked it at her feet.
As the glare hit the marl, he recoiled, as one struck, at the spectacle
it revealed--a little Negro baby sleeping in the marl!
"God, what's next!"--
Hesitatingly he approached, discerning that it lived, and moved.
For a spell he gazed at it, half-afraid. But for a diaper of green
leaves it was nude. Then it occurred to him to pick it up.
Instantly the child reacted to its contact with human warmth and
snuggled to Bellon's bosom. He smoothed its soft, bronze skin and the
waif, with hands flagrantly like a bird's claws, burrowed closer to him.
With the child held close the buckra started for the horse, but--like a
shot--Rayside bolted!
"Steady, mare!" Bellon growled, quietly reining her back in, "Easy,
horse!"
One ear pasted flat on her mane, she stood impatiently still while he
reached for the chamois blanket and swaddled the Negro baby in it.
Only then was he able to remount her.
Another of the colony's lurking evils, the desertion--often the murder
of illegitimate Negro babes.
O God--another of the island's depraved nigger curses!
All the way up the hill Rayside reared and trotted, kicked and pranced,
keeping to the edge of the marl road.
And the Negro waif's bird-like claws dug deeper into the buckra's shirt
bosom.
He rode up the hill's moon-white crest until the shadow of Waterford
fell upon him. He was tired, his brain fagged, his legs sore, his
nerves on edge.
On the brink of a rocky hill extending beyond the estate stood a buckra
overseer's cabin. Here Bellon's journey ended. He stabled the mare in
the shed, glad to be rid of her. "Why, you don't even give me a chance
to be temperamental--"
He took the Negro child in the cabin, angry at the physical proximity
of it. "If any one had told me three weeks ago that after dodging
Boer-shot I'd next be mothering a deserted nigger ragamuffin at two
o'clock in the morning on a West Indian country road, I'd certainly
have called him a God damned liar!"
He found a spot on the floor and brusquely cushioned the burden in it.
* * * * *
He was edgy, unstrung; he could not sleep. He tossed, half-awake,
tortured by the night's fairy-like happenings.
As a boy at Arise the old man'd tell of fresh-born Negro babes dropped
in eely wells in remote parts of the plantation jungle or wrapped in
crocus bags and left in the canes for some ferocious sow to gnaw or
rout.
Rapacious Negro ghosts--"men in the canes"--ha! ha! preying upon the
fears of the uncivilized blacks.
Fire hags! St. Lucia mulatto sluts--changing their skins--turning to
goats--sheep-prowling--going forth--
And weirdly interchangeable--Black Negro babes and vampire bats!
* * * * *
All night the fussy mare, with glassy eyes glued on the buckra hut,
refused to touch corn or oats--stamping, kicking, growing uneasy.
The glory of the morning sun neared the cane hills. It burned past the
mare's shed, leaving the animal still nervously gazing out it.
Inside the hut there sprawled the dead body of Bellon Prout. With a
perforation pecked in its forehead, it was utterly white and bloodless.
On the ground the chamois blanket was curiously empty.
* * * * *
Coming up the hill the mulatto _obeah_ girl who tidied the overseer's
hut felt deeply exultant. For she was strangely conscious of the
fact--by the crystal glow of the sun, perhaps--that a vampire bat, with
its blood-sucking passion, had passed there in the night.
_TROPIC DEATH_
10
_TROPIC DEATH_
I
The little boy was overwhelmed at being suddenly projected into a world
of such fluid activity. He was standing on the old bale and cask strewn
quay at Bridgetown watching a police launch carry a load of Negro
country folk out to a British packet smoking blackly in the bay.
He was a dainty little boy, about eight years of age. He wore a white
stiff jumper jacket, the starch on it so hard and shiny it was ready to
squeak; shiny blue velvet pants, very tight and very short--a little
above his carefully oiled knees; a brownish green bow tie, bright as a
cluster of dewy crotons; an Eton collar, an English sailor hat, with an
elastic band so tight it threatened to dig a gutter in the lad's bright
brown cheeks.
He was alone and strangely aware of the life bubbling around Nelson's
Square. Under the statue masses of country blacks had come, drinking in
the slow draughts of wind struggling up from the sea. City urchins, who
thrived on pilfering sewers or ridding the streets of cow dung which
they marketed as manure; beggars, black street corner fixtures, their
bodies limp and juicy with the scourge of elephantiasis; cork-legged
wayfarers, straw hats on their bowed crinkly heads; one-legged old
black women vending cane juice and hot sauce.
It was noon and they had come, like camels to an oasis, to guzzle Maube
or rummage the bags of coppers, untie their headkerchiefs, arrange
their toilet and sprawl, snore, till the sun spent its crystal wrath
and dropped behind the dark hulk of the sugar refineries to the western
tip of the sky. Then it was their custom to pack up and sally forth, on
the singing jaunt to the country.
Scores of ragged black boys, Gerald's size and over, filled the Square,
half-covered by the dust, snoring. Old boys, young boys, big boys,
little boys; boys who'd stolen on the wharves at sundown and bored big
holes in the wet sacks of brown sugar; boys who'd defied the cops, and
the sun, and the foaming mules, or the ungodly long whip of the driver,
and skimmed on to tin cups the thick brackish froth the heat had sent
fomenting up through the cracks in the molasses casks; boys who'd
been sent to the Island jail for firing touch bams at birds lost in
the bewildering city or for flipping pea-loaded popguns at the black,
cork-hatted police.
Melting target for the roaring sun, the boy turned and gazed at the
sea. It was angry, tumultuous. To the left of him there rose the
cobwebbed arch of a bridge. Under it the water lay dark and gleaming.
Against its opaque sides there were scows, barges, oil tankers. Zutting
motor boats, water policemen, brought commotion to the sea. Far out,
where the sun kissed it, the sea shone like a sheet of blazing zinc.
Creeping to the edge of the quay, he peeped over and saw a school of
black boys splashing in the water. They were diving for coppers flung
by black tourists on the side lines. They slept on the Congo-slippery
rafts holding up the city, and would, for a ha'penny, dart after
parasols or kites--that is, if the kites happened to be made of hard
glazy "B'bados kite papah"--lost on the rolling bronze sea.
"Come, Gerald, eat this."
He turned and there was his mother. His big bright eyes widened for
her. And a lump rose in his throat. He wanted to hug, kiss her. With
the heat of his mouth he wanted to brush away her tears, abolish her
sorrow. He wanted, too, to breathe the lovely, holy beauty of her.
"Come, son, tek yo' fingah outa yo' mout', quick, de launch will be yah
any minute now."
He took the lozenge, the sun making it soft and sticky.
"Don't yo' want some ginger beer, son?"
"Oh, mama, look!"
The launch had come up, and one of the sailor-cops, a husky, black
fellow, was making it fast.
"Orright lady, yo' is de nex'--come ahlong."
With much agitation she got in the boat. She had to hang on to her bag,
to Gerald, and she was not prepared to get the ends of her slip wet.
The men seized him, and she stepped down, barely escaping a carelessly
dangling oar.
Bewildered, they clung to each other. "All right, son?" she said. But
he was too unspeakingly concerned over the concurrent miracles of sea
and sky.
Leaping through the sea, the boat would drown them in a shower of spray
every time it came up, and Gerald was repeatedly tempted to put his
hand in the water. "Keep yo' hands inside, sah," she cried, "shark will
get you, too."
He remained aware of only foam and water, and the boat's spit and
sputter, and the warmth of Sarah's bosom. Away back, on the brown and
gold of the horizon, he saw speeding into nothingness the scows and
warehouses and the low lofts of Bridgetown. Now, the sea rose--higher,
higher; zooming, zooming; bluer, darker--the sky, dizzier, dizzier; and
in the heavens war was brewing--until the shroud of mist ahead parted
and there rose on the crest of the sky the shining blue packet!