Homeland and Other Stories Page 18

  But in Soufriere there were more varieties of people than had existed in Vieux Fort. There were the brightly dressed foreign women, who moved through town with half-closed eyes and purses hung over their arms like bracelets, buying baskets woven with shells, or egrets carved from goats' horns. White women, whose assured, honey-lazy voices revealed a kinship with the white mistresses of the hilltop villas, who snapped their fingers at servants and held ice in their mouths and watched their children on wide green lawns like cricket fields.

  About the dead one who was her mother, Jericha knew nothing; she saw so many kinds of women. These rich ones and their opposites, the lean-armed brown women who loaded boats in the harbor, their hips swinging in wide arcs as the bananas piled high on their heads moved in a perfect straight line up the gangplank toward the ship's dark, refrigerated hold.

  Jericha lay hidden in croton and poinsettia hedges, absorbing the colors of linen dresses and January flowers, the nervous parrots in cages, the broad stripes of sunset like paint across the harbor. It was too late, long after the Epiphany mass, when she picked up her bicycle from the hedge and pumped her way home to the convent on Jump-up Day.

  She had forgotten the holiday and would have to pay a price for missing the high mass, for even Jericha had to bend to the limited expectations of God, but she wasn't thinking of this until she heard the steel drum and saw the little band of dancers in the road. Their legs and arms were wrapped in tight bands of pink and green paper, and whirling in the center was the Jump-up, painted entirely white, his feet, body, hair, eyelids all cracked and seamed with the thickness of whitewash. His dance was a throbbing of the body, down on the ground and then up, again and again. He contorted his face impressively with cries that made no sound, and he spun from one foot to the other, and the long white strips of cloth tied at his knees and elbows flew in circles like propellers of a frenetic airplane.

  The other dancers chanted in patois: Ka-li-e, ka-quitte, nous ka quitte jusqu'a jour ouvert. The little band had come by the same road from Soufriere to the ancient stone gate of St. Anthony's, to perform for the nuns and children and a goat or two who watched from within the compound. Jericha watched from a distance. She had seen the Jump-up on nearly every Epiphany holiday, but never at this time of evening, and never was it anything more than steel-drum music and black men dressed up for children and a few of their parents' coins. In this light it seemed something else.

  Then it was over. The children applauded with dirt-colored hands and the drummer hammered a livelier song for moving on. The dancers' bare feet rang on the iron bars of the grate, set into the road over a pit, that prevented goats from escaping through the convent gate.

  They moved up the road toward her, and Jericha felt an urgent wish to hide. But the Jump-up had already seen her, and behind the dramatic distortion of his face there was something more genuine: he recognized her.

  The white face with painted turtle eyelids moved forward and back in the darkness, and the breathy voice touched her skin: "The doctor's child. From Vieux Fort." Jericha filled with the water weight that came to her sometimes in dreams.

  "I have a need for you," the Jump-up said. "I'll come, you be here." He spun in the air so close that the white rags touched her face.

  She pedaled fast down the road, her skin burning where the cloth had touched it. The bicycle wheels rang trrrat! over the livestock grate and she was inside the compound, alone in the shadowed outskirts of the yard. Her chest curled over from the pounding against the inside, and she waited for it to stop. She pelted a stone at a jet-black billy named Maximilian grazing under the mango. The pebble shot for the eye but missed, deflected off a horn that gleamed in the shadow. The goat bleated.

  "The sisters are going to cook you, Max. We'll have you in a stew," she said. "You're the next one."

  In her dreams the Jump-up did come back, always appearing in the sky and commanding her to take hold of the white-feathered streamers that trailed from his wings. They flew across the bay toward the Pitons and whatever lay beyond them, toward a feeling of home. So high over the harbor that there were no people below, no dark women loading boats, only columns of ants filing into the split skins of mangos that floated at the shoreline. Not people but ants, a thing you could step on and smash.

  "Not here," the Jump-up said, as their shadows moved over the water and fell on the tin-roofed town, and when they dipped close to the bougainvillaea hilltops and women with ice in their mouths he said again, "Not here," and even when the jungle darkness had swallowed their shadows, he said it. "Not here, somewhere else. Somewhere up ahead."

  And then too much time passed by and her fear hardened into a rock in the back of her mind, a certainty, that the Jump-up would break his promise and not return.

  But he did. It was nine weeks to the day. Jericha was going home from Soufriere again, late again, standing up on the pedals to try to cover the five miles before it went dark. A rising moon hung over the mountains, higher already than the sun settling down like a roosting red hen onto the sea. She sang, to help herself push the pedals.

  Anansi he is a spider,

  Anansi he is a man,

  Anansi he...

  She saw the thing stretched full length across the road, slithering and poisonous, with the cross on its head that every child in the southern islands has been taught to recognize: fer-de-lance. The snake that just bites once. Her breath cut at her throat and passed down to her legs, and she pulled hard to stop. When the front wheel touched it, the snake collapsed into shadow on the dust.

  Planted on the root of the shadow at the edge of the road was a staff, and a man holding it. In the near darkness his face was silver-black and Jericha saw now the two faces at once, white-painted and black. The Jump-up was the same man she had seen once in Vieux Fort, and his name was Benedict Jett. The gardener Sebastian had stood with a rabbit's nape in each hand and pointed out this one standing up straight behind the frangipani, looking at them. Sebastian had called him the Obeah Man.

  "Boy or girl? What are you?"

  Jericha looked at the bicycle's shadow across her foot. The Obeah Man was speaking to her now, not just looking. "Boy," she said.

  "Boy. Ha! What are you called?"

  "Jeri."

  "Jeri. From now on, from this minute, I want you to study what I say. We have a job to do."

  She watched the ground near the bottom of the Obeah Man's staff. The staff was made from knotted black wood, glossy, stripped of its bark.

  "What sort of job?" she asked.

  "I'm not saying that right now. I'll say that when the time comes. Do you know why I'm coming to you?"

  "No."

  "Do you know what obeah is?"

  "No."

  The Obeah Man turned away, speaking in the direction of the trees. "This is what people call working science. You understand?"

  She nodded. She did not understand.

  "When they are sick, or the business is going bad. Or if a man wants some woman to look at him." He laughed deeply, a laugh full of breath. "They come to me."

  Jericha's hands were wet on the rubber handles of her bicycle. "I'm not sick," she said.

  The Obeah Man faced her, and looked at her carefully.

  "I need to get back," she said. "The sisters will send after me if it gets dark."

  "Ha. It will get dark, you don't have to be guessing about that." He smiled, a little more like a man now than a spook. "I am going your same way, and past it," he said. "We can walk along."

  They walked along. Jericha held the handlebars and watched for snakes.

  "Your father was the white doctor in Vieux Fort," he said quietly. "I made no truck with him, but he was humbugging me. Telling the people not to trust in my medicine. He said, Black man's foolishness. Did he tell you that?"

  "No."

  "All right, what I'm saying is true. He went to the doctor's shop in Vieux Fort where I say to people go and get their powders, and he told the shop not to sell my powders anymore. He sai
d he could make the law to stop them. He wants the people to use his medicine and no other kind."

  Jericha thought for the first time in many months of her father, a spectacled man with clean hands.

  "He was a doctor," she said.

  "Listen to me. Some people think a white doctor can make you well every time, but he can't. Like praying to God--sometime He will, sometime He won't. If you are smart, you have a powder to back you up."

  "Is that why he got sick? My father?"

  "He was making cross tracks with me, I said. Saying he was a bigger man than I. You think I am a fool?"

  "No."

  "And did he get sick?"

  "Yes."

  "All right."

  They walked some more. Suddenly he said, "You are a good strong child. This is the job we have to do. Do you know the thing they call a jumby?"

  Jericha shrugged her shoulders.

  "Boy, girl! Don't truck with me. If you know a thing, say it."

  "I don't know what it is."

  "A jumby is a jump-up. Somebody called up from the dead. You call her up to do a job, and then you put her down again. But sometimes she is humbugging you and she won't go down again. You understand?"

  "Yes."

  A thick darkness was growing up in the treetops. Jericha could see birds moving restlessly, without noise, among the branches over their heads. She knew that snakes could also be in trees.

  The man said, "Are you afraid?"

  "Of course I'm not."

  "Then I want you to come on Sunday to Laborie. You know Laborie? Down this road, after the sisters', first is Choiseul, then Laborie, then Vieux Fort. You know the way?" He asked it kindly, and ordinarily, like an invitation to tea. As a friend would ask, she imagined, though she had not had one.

  "I know the way," Jericha said. In truth, she had never explored the road past Choiseul. On her bicycle she always went the other way, toward Soufriere.

  "Study this," the Obeah Man said. "On Sunday, go to Laborie. You can find me on the main road in town, the next past Cato's store, where they sell rum. It's near the church. Ask for Benedict."

  "I'll have to go to mass first. The sisters will know if I don't."

  "All right, that's good. You go to mass first. Take this and wear it inside your shirt." He held out a small bag tied with string. Jericha stopped pushing her bicycle and took the bag carefully in her palms.

  "Should I wear it every day, or just to mass?"

  "Every day; don't lose it. And to the mass also. And another thing. Do you know l'eau benite?"

  "Holy water? Of course."

  "Take that water and put it on your head like so. Then come down to Laborie. Don't forget what I'm telling you." He raised his staff over his head so its shadow no longer touched the road. Jericha waited to see if the Obeah Man would fly away.

  "Go now. Go!" he cried, and Jericha stumbled onto her bike and fled away through the shadows.

  By Friday she could not believe the Obeah Man or a place called Laborie existed. But the pouch filled with sweet-smelling, crumbled leaves was real, and to be safe she wore it around her neck day and night. She was tormented with colored dreams she could not remember. On Saturday, as a test, she asked Sister Armande if she would someday take her to Laborie.

  "What would a little girl want in Laborie? It's only a little town." Sister Armande had finished with Jericha's hair and was tending her "God's small extravagances," her orchids. Ragged boys brought them down from the forest for ten cents apiece, and she grew them on planks wired to the veranda posts.

  "Is it far? Laborie?"

  "Not at all." Sister Armande's hands moved quickly among the leaves. "It's just past Choiseul."

  Jericha made up her mind to go. Before mass ended Sunday noon she anointed herself with holy water, genuflected in a hurry, and tore through the yard to her bicycle. Only Maximilian saw her go.

  The road rose steeply against the shoulder of the Gros Piton, shortening her breath, then led down into Choiseul. She loudly rang her bicycle bell and shouted at some children and brown goats to get out of the road. They let goats run wild here, her father said one time. They eat boiled leaves while a good meal stands by the back door eating the curtains.

  Just beyond the town, broad, banana-planted valleys opened on both sides of the road. It was Sunday, but still there were men and women standing ankle-deep in the ditches between the banana rows, working for someone, hacking with their machetes. Beyond them the ocean glittered, dotted with boats. Sooner than she expected, she was in Laborie.

  She easily found the church, the only building of any importance, and a store that said "CATO. SPIRITS" in front on a painted board. Next door, a woman in a tight, straight dress was hanging out laundry.

  "I'm looking for Benedict," Jericha said.

  The woman waved toward the side street, and took a clothes pin out of her mouth. "He's not too good to lie in another man's shade. You'll find him over that way."

  She walked her bicycle up an alley that smelled of salt fish, and found Benedict sitting against a wall in the shade of the breadfruit across the way. He wore a weathered hat and was smoking a pipe made of carved white bone, or plastic.

  "Hullo," Jericha said. She did not believe now that there was magic in this ordinary man.

  Benedict spoke suddenly. "Why did you come here?"

  "You told me to."

  "Have you been putting it about to people, that you were coming here to see me?"

  She shook her head quickly.

  "Where is your guardian?"

  Jericha hesitated. She felt for the pouch inside her blouse and held it up, her eyebrows questioning.

  "Good. You studied what I told you. Come and sit down here. We have plenty of time." He motioned toward the ground beside him where the dirt was worn as smooth as pavement. Jericha sat down and leaned back against the wall, in exactly the same fashion as the Obeah Man.

  For a long time they said nothing. While Benedict looked inside his pipe, Jericha studied the leafy hands and large dimpled fruits of the breadfruit tree. Small, glossy blackbirds hung upside-down on some of the fruits, pecking holes through the green skin and pulling out white strings of flesh.

  "Are we going to do the thing you said?"

  "What thing is that, child?" Benedict looked at her with a slanted eye.

  "Kill that thing. The jumby."

  Benedict looked up the alley. "You can't kill a thing that's dead."

  "Then what?"

  "You'll see that in time. It takes time to know a thing well, Jericha."

  She glanced quickly away, startled by the sound of her name. This man knew things. They watched a breeze sift through the breadfruit, from bottom to top, scattering the birds.

  "I drove your father away," he said. "Do you know about this?"

  "He got schistosomiasis."

  Benedict looked at her sharply. "What is that?"

  "Don't you know?" she asked in a scornful voice she knew. "You get it from some sort of tiny things in the water. The poor people get it. Sometimes they get it bad the way my father did, but most times it just makes them lazy."

  "Whooo," Benedict said. "Who told you this, lazy and poor? That is the fwedi. You know who gets sick with this? The man that works hardest and gets a day's pay for standing all the time with his feet wet. Go up on the banana plantation, you'll find plenty fwedi. Never did I see so much of this sickness before white man's bananas came to call."

  "Did you ever have it?"

  "Me? I protect myself."

  "And my father?"

  "All right. Did he protect himself?"

  "He took some kind of medicine."

  "Did he have a guardian?"

  "No."

  "So. He was a fool."

  Jericha looked at the Obeah Man's black fingernails.

  "I won't tell you a lie," he said suddenly. "The jumby worked on him. I called her up for this. Now she won't go down again."

  "How do you know?"

  "I know." He fing
ered the thick pouch that hung on a steel watch chain around his neck. The inside of his arm was erupted with constellations of purple sores. Jericha said nothing.

  After a while the Obeah Man pointed down the alley, at the sea. "You smell that? Rain."

  Jericha sniffed the air and shook her head.

  "Close your eyes."

  She squeezed her eyelids shut. Salt and beach mud filled her nostrils. "I can smell it!" She opened her eyes, startled.

  The Obeah Man rubbed her shoulder and laughed. "You keep your nose to the sea, child, you'll never get wet." Then his eyes changed and he asked, "Do you know maweepoui root?"

  "No."

  "You drink it. It takes care of you, if she comes." He extracted from his pocket a bottle of brownish liquid, stoppered with rolled leaves wrapped in string. "Don't lose it, and don't forget. You drink a little every day."

  "Does it taste bad?" Jericha had some experience with medicine.

  The Obeah Man pointed his finger. "This is death and life, not candy. You don't know what can happen. Now go. Do what the sisters say, but keep your guardians close to you. Come back here Sunday. Just like before, do everything the same."

  It was dark before she reached the convent. The stars shone in patches between the clouds rolling up from the ocean. On the deserted banana plantation the long drainage ditches, channels of infected water, shone like an army of luminous snakes marching toward the sea.

  She returned three times to Laborie before the job was done. The sisters knew nothing of it, since by good fortune it was Lent and they were preoccupied with penitence. As Easter approached there was also talk of the pageant and feast, in which Maximilian would play a large role.

  Loolai Therese, a tiny brown girl with a deformed foot, was moribund at the prospect. She couldn't bring herself to confess her anguish to the sisters, but told Jericha many times over.

  "They want to eat him," she said one afternoon in the garden. Jericha sat above her on the lowest branch of the mango, to which the goat was tethered.

  "I know."

  "Maxi-mi." She stroked his nose. Her eyes were as brown and wet as animal eyes. "Don't you feel sorry for him?" she asked, looking up into the branches.