stories

 

A goat, a duppy and a walnut tree the more you beat them the better they be

 

Only it’s difficult now to find a walnut tree. But I know where there is one. The walnuts stain your hands ochre and grime your fingernails, and the odour of iodine accompanies you as you cup them home. Beating a goat is just silly. The billy at the end of our road, his testy, randy, tang comes to meet you before you see him. He puts his feet high up on the wall and snickers his lips in a grin. His eyes are yellow opal sliced by the line of his pupils, his beard tremors with his desire to come over, over to your side. Look what big horns he’s got – all the better to poke you with, my dear.

And you can’t beat a duppy though you can call one up with beer and money thrown down on its grave ground and send it out to haunt your enemy until your enemy goes away.

Once was a woman arrive in this old island. She going to live her life here. With her man who work the plantation, with her two babies and ones to come, the born islanders. Adventure. In paradise, she say. But it was three year after the big war, the world war two. The sugar, it hadn’t recover, it never recover. Wasn’t money ’nough for ’nother manager. That was one wrong ting. And a bad man mash the dog Bellady down, what the little girl and boy say. That was two wrong ting. But the nice doctor come. He make Bellady better. And the woman is heavy with baby. That is two good ting, the daddy say.

Also there was the maid-girl for the children, late afternoons spent by copper green seas sifting white sand for tiny pink cowries, fresh nut milk to sweeten the harsh rum. Life was not too horrid.

The woman got pains. The doctor come and haul her feet in air and pull with his tongs and take the baby away. There be no more babies he say.

After, the woman smelt the duppy. Between sun down and cock crow it lingered in the porch. Left its whiff – oily nut,rancid, nostril-whickering goat, iodine from the seaweed it trailed. Every night, she said. It came every night.

The woman and her husband and the two children left the island. They set sail on a top-heavy lake boat, because all the ships been taken to the navy or sunk in world war two. They steamed across the deep sea back from where they had come. And the woman threw their last beer bottle into the long, dark swell of the waves. Stoppered inside was a note. Please send money.

A joke, she said, happy to escape.

But you don’t beat a duppy, a goat or a walnut tree.

Published 2011 Spilling Ink Unbound Press

The man who told a lie

 

Like the others he went over the border when he received his call-up papers. Most of them aimed for the cities, sharing rooms, picking up jobs in restaurants, floating around the colleges camouflaged from the authorities as students, but he wanted to go elsewhere. He wanted to be somewhere remote, live a real life, not just run away to wait like them, for the war to end, so he could go home.

He took the twenty-four hour ferry ride from the mainland then started hitching. On the Saturday evening, when he was about halfway across the island, he was dropped off at a motel where one of the infrequent roads to the coast joined the highway. He ate a hamburger and fries in the dining room noting a couple of guys a little older than him fooling around with two girls, mock-courting them with ice-cream sodas, singing along with the country-n-western love songs on the juke-box.

The next day he stuck out his thumb for three hours. Each driver stopped, to smile at him and say, ‘Sorry, boy, I’m only going to the next turn off,’ before letting in the clutch and carrying on. At last the guys from the night before came by, said they were taking the route, the one opposite where he was standing, into the town, a little harbour town like all the rest, but he’d find a cheaper room there, if he wanted to grab a ride with them.

They dropped him on the main street, outside the hotel. It faced the bay, like the grocery store, the bakery, the clothing and haberdashery store. And the pool room.  A few days later he saw some adolescent boys go in there at noon. When the bell for the afternoon session rang, the sound clear on the dry wind, they didn’t reappear. Then a small dark girl walked down. Their teacher he assumed.  It wasn’t proper for her to go in, and she stood outside calling to them, to come out. Now. He grinned at them as they emerged and her gaze was curious as she tried to hurry them back towards the sprawling school building.

Every day of that first month he walked past the three stores along Main Street. He ignored the unpaved lanes which ran off at right angle, telephone wires looping from house to house, but continued right out, to the hospital, where the road ended. Beyond there was a tiny strip of shingle beach coated in seaweed, dotted with the remains of fires, the illicit beer cans, tossed in to them at the end of the kids’ summers’ parties, blackened and rusty. He couldn’t go any further, the scrub was too dense, and he sat there plopping stones into the sea. In the evenings he left his room for a corner of the bar, listening to the talk. They were tough, the men here, with stocky muscles on their arms, but quiet faces. Once there was a fight and he watched as they picked up chairs and threw them with slow deliberate force. They had a genial contempt for the government which couldn't provide them with jobs, but whose handouts they pocketed, buying pickups to carry the wood they cut to enlarge their houses and accommodate their increasing families. Sometimes they glanced at him as they discussed the merits of their vehicles, the fishing and hunting which fed them, but they never addressed him or asked if he wanted a beer.

At the start of October he saw that the larches’ needles were yellow, the maples incandescent in a cold sun. Snow would come soon. His money wouldn’t last much longer, he ought to move on, down the highway to the city but he didn’t want to.  He wanted to stay. He wanted the people here, content with where they came from, sure of who they were, he wanted to know them. He wanted them to know him, but they were indifferent to his existence. If he could get something to do, to earn enough to help him get through the winter, find somewhere cheaper to live, then next year there might be some work up in the woods, the mines might be hiring again. Maybe he could do some substituting in school. He wasn’t trained to teach, but he had his Master’s.

Next morning he walked over to the one storey Junior High. Stepping through the metal-framed doors he heard the low buzz of classes that were on task coming from the rooms that opened off the wide corridor. Its green walls displayed some fine pictures, and he was disconcerted. They didn’t seem appropriate here.

He found the main office. The secretaries were surprised, but his request to see the principal was granted. But the principal with dispassionate eyes, had nothing to offer him, despite his qualifications. They had little need of substitutes, he said, and when they did they had a pool of trusted ones, women who’d left to have families, who already knew the students, had no trouble with them. All he could suggest was teaching elementary school in one of the outports. It was always difficult to fill those posts, there were vacancies even part way through the year.

 He thought of the tiny clusters of families living by the green seas. Places where there was no one he could talk to, and said that he would think about it.

  The interview came to an end as a clanging announced the mid-morning break. The principal took him past the pictures – a travelling exhibition, a good way to bring art to the children of this remote province - to the staff homeroom where in consolation he had him given coffee and a slice of cake lavish with frosting. As he ate he was aware of the male teachers observing him, of their reserve. They looked like the men in the bar, as if they would be, were, as at ease with a chainsaw as with a book, and he was jealous of their confidence. They were just a bunch of hicks who didn’t have the brains to leave.

The girl he’d seen outside the pool room came in. The men teased her, calling her Fanny, joked about her accent, asked her, how she managed to teach the seventeen and eighteen year-olds repeating the lower grades when she was so posh. She shook her head in mock exasperation, and said, ‘Come on guys, the names Franny.’ Then he joined in, reminded her of her vigil, her insistence that the boys go back to class with her. His description of her doggedness raised laughter, but she didn’t seem to resent it and to his amazement invited him over that evening.  She said that although her room-mates would be out she’d cook what she called a proper meal, and as they left to resume class she told him where she lived. Overhearing, the men grinned at him, complicit, but he felt they were contemptuous.

That evening he took a bottle of rum which he’d managed to get from the bar keeper. She welcomed the gift. It was so difficult, she said, to get anything other than beer if you didn’t have a car to get to a liquor store, the nearest was fifty miles away. She sprinkled a little over the rabbit layered with onion and carrot that she was preparing, put the dish in the oven, then poured a couple of inches into two glasses and added ice and coke.

 Pinned to the kitchen wall was a photo from the newspaper, of her reading to the students in the gym at the Senior High. She was wearing knee length boots and a short skirt, her long hair falling forward disguised the slight pudginess of her face. He asked what it was she had read. She said it was the poetry of the First World War, they’d asked her to do it because of her English voice, it would give the poems more meaning – and they were relevant because of what was going on in Vietnam.

Knowing she would be sympathetic to him, to someone who had taken a stand against the war, he told her about coming over from the States like the other draft dodgers. About his decision to be different and come here. The rum and the confession relaxed him and he realised how lonely the last few weeks had been.

   They ate. It didn’t taste like rabbit, and she said it was a kind of hare, trapped by the kids she taught, who brought them and hung them up outside on the porch for her. She didn’t mind gutting them and peeling off their fur, though she said would have trouble snaring them, and she wished she knew how to cure the skin, because she’d like to try to make a pair of mitts though she knew she’d never manage it. She said that she had to pay for them at school because the boys didn’t want to be seen knocking on her door and asking for money.

  After they’d finished eating, they drank some more rum, this time with ice only. He felt very much at ease, even more so when she got up and started washing the dishes. He looked at her, intent on the task, so intent it made her sexy. Maybe she was a bit lonely too, all the teachers at the school, men and women, seemed to be married, wore rings to prove it. He wondered if she’d go to bed with him. Whether, the thought came to him, he could move in. It would eke out his money. He could be useful. She was doing O.K, she seemed to get on well with her colleagues, even if they ribbed her. She could be a way into this town. Through her he might get to know some of the guys, get into the woods with them. He leant back in his chair and stretched his legs under the table.

   She wiped her hands on the dish cloth and sat down again. He reached out and poured them two more drinks, straight. He was beginning to feel a little drunk but he answered her questions about his university career, that he’d majored in Literature, done his Master’s on Hemingway. He asked her who her favourite writer was. She said she liked Lawrence. He said wasn’t he a punk who spent all his time cleaning and running around after his lady friend? Had some kind of world vision. Not like Hemingway. He really was an author, one who could shoot as well as write. She said she wasn’t convinced that Hemingway was that good. He said this was because she hadn’t understood what she was reading and was taken aback by when she said, with the impersonal decision of a college professor, which she wasn’t, she wasn’t as qualified as he was for Chrissake, that Hemingway undermined his work by being a liar. That he lied about himself.

‘How did he lie about himself?’ he asked.

‘He lies about himself because he thinks he’s a hero,’ she said.

‘That’s not a lie, Hemingway went to war, he was a real man.’

She looked stubborn, unrepentant.

‘He was a narcissist,’ she said.

‘Being narcissistic doesn’t stop you being the greatest writer of the twentieth century – anyway he wasn’t.’

‘Yes it does,’ she said, ‘you can’t be a good writer and think you’re the only lover and soldier and hunter in the world.’

That was such crap he didn’t bother to answer – she was English, what the hell did she know about an American writer, and she was a teacher, a woman, what did she know about what men were like?

 They were still facing each other across the table, but the warmth from the oven was thinning. The comfort was slipping away.

‘Why don’t we go next door?’ he said, and poured the last of the rum into their glasses.

She got up and took him through to the living room. It had a work table, a lamp with an orange shade, a thin carpet covering a floor heaped with students’ books, a couch that looked uncomfortable. They sat on it and he put his arm around her. She stayed still. She wasn’t pliant but she didn’t resist, and he kept it there, hoping she would soften again.

 They finished the rum and she talked about how barren the island was, how the people were bound to one another by centuries of bare survival. Then she said she was thinking of returning to England at the end of the year to study, she realised she needed to train further because she wanted to know how to teach kids who were failing, and asked him what his plans were.

 ‘Stick around, get some work next spring - but I’m running out of money, I need to find somewhere to crash.’

‘You could stay here for a bit.’ Her remark was casual but his hope increased.

‘I could pay for my food.’

‘You could clean the windows – they need it.’

Her tone made him laugh and the remnants of his anger at her wrong-headedness dissolved.

‘I’ll ask the others when they come in.’

Then she moved away to put on some music, but sat back down, this time at an angle to him, her feet up on the couch, her moccasins not quite touching his thighs, and he didn’t push it. They listened, not quite as intimate as before, but no longer antagonistic. She chatted about her room-mates the one from Vancouver, the other from out around the bay.

A bit later the other two girls returned, and she introduced him, explained where he was from, how he came to be here. They looked at him coolly. The one from out around the bay wore unflattering trousers and her eyes passed over him as if it was unimportant whether he was here or not. She opened the fridge and rummaged in it for a drink, finding the remains of the coke. Then she read the newspaper, ignoring him. The one from Vancouver was prettier, had dangling earrings made from tiny glass beads. When he told her of his desire to become part of this community she asked him what made him want to live in such intellectual isolation as she gathered books from the piles on the floor, and put them in a striped bag ready for work next day. Her scepticism needled him, but he remained calm and said that there were qualities among the people here that made up for that. She looked quizzical but didn’t reply.

‘He needs somewhere to stay,’ the English girl said.

The one from around the bay said there wasn’t enough room.

‘I could sleep on this couch, be your housekeeper,’ he joked.

The one from Vancouver raised her eyebrows and said, ‘If there’s not enough room, then we don’t need a housekeeper.’

Her dismissal annoyed him. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘why’re you so hostile?’

The girl from the bay, sitting with her legs apart like a man, lifted her head from the paper, studied him as she finished her coke. The English girl swung her feet off the couch.

The girl from Vancouver said, ‘I’m not the one who’s hostile.’

Her prissiness infuriated him.

‘What are you then, a couple of lesbos?’

The two considered him. Then they turned on the neon strip in the ceiling, so he had to screw up his eyes, and switched off the lamp. They made themselves cups of tea. They flicked through their work, and talked about what they were might do over the weekend. The girl sat next to him and said nothing, her feet side by side on the floor, as if she was ready for flight.

 They turned off the heating and went to bed, saying to her, ‘You need to get some sleep.’

When they’d gone he squinted at her in the harsh light. She didn’t look so appealing now, her skin pasty from the late hour and the rum, but he said, ‘What did I do?’

‘You don’t know?’

 ‘All I need is a space to stay.’

‘You were insulting.’

 ‘Jesus, I didn’t mean it, its just they were so unwelcoming, like a couple of maiden aunts who think your hair’s too long.’ He knew the cliché was an affront.

She didn’t respond. He could feel her disapproval in her immobility.

He changed tack, pleaded, ‘Look, it’s late, can I stay just for to night?’

She stood up and went and called into the basement, ‘Can he stay tonight?’

There was a discussion for a few moments at the bottom of the stairs. The two girls appeared in the doorway, with blankets in their hands.

‘O.K, but leave the prick to bed himself,’ the girl from Vancouver said. And all three faces shared an instant’s glee as they tossed the blankets towards him. Together they descended to their rooms.

 For a moment he thought of smashing the place up, but there was nothing worth damaging, they’d just clean up and borrow some more stuff, call him a jerk.

In fury he lay on the couch and pulled the blankets up. The guys in the bar ignored him, the covert grins of the male teachers derided him, the girls, the girl, had cold shouldered him. None of them had done anything in their lives that wasn’t ordinary. He didn’t need to woo their respect.

His eyes, gritty with liquor, prickled as he stared into the darkness and waited for morning.

At first light he left the house and made his way across town to the hotel where he crammed his stuff into his rucksack. He put ten dollars on the bar and came down the steps to Main Street. Turning his back on the bay he started walking the five miles to the highway, where he could hitch to the city.

Published Transmission 2005 Revised 2008