The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke Read Free Book Online Page B

thick-thick until it came like tar; bitter and black; and that poor little girl, my ma, no more than seventeen, or sixteen, was made to drink that tartea every morning at five o’ clock, until Mr. Bellfeels vim was worked out of her system. And at every six o’ clock every evening, Gran put Ma in a bush bath, and soaked her until the sin, and the stain, and the mistake, came out in the form of blood. Yes!
    “It take three days and three nights, with Ma’s gran-mother sitting sleepless in a upright chair, for Ma to regain her salvation, and have release from the thing that Mr. Bellfeels sowed inside her, inside Ma.
    “But blood was always in our lives. Blood, and more blood . . . and that is why I did what I did.”
    Sargeant moves through the blackness of the night, like a brown worm, sluggish and silently; burrowing in the wet, soft mud and soil of the acres and acres of Plantation lands surrounding him. There are no street lights in Flagstaff Village. Sin-Davids Anglican Church, on the northeast edge of the Village, stands like a fortress covered in green crawling ivy, and buried in blackness. Sargeant cannot even make out the church tower; and only because he was born in the Village and has seen the Church in its stationary stoutness, day after day, a witness to the sins of the entire Village, can he tell you, by pointing in this black night, that the Church is still there.
    Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys, and Sin-Davids Elementary School for Girls, have no light over their entrances. They never had.
    The only lights in this part of the Village are the two naked, powerful bulbs which hang like testicles over the verandah of the Plantation Main House. Everything else is in darkness.
    So, on this night, Sargeant, on duty as the Village’s only detective, disconnects the gears in his three-speed Raleigh bicycle, and smiles in the thick dark night as he realizes that the black polished frame of the bicycle contributes to the invisibility which he relishes, as he pedals like a thief throughout the back roads and fields: inspecting and spying, “’vestigating,” looking for suspects, and for women, wherever they may happen to be, before heading for the rum shop, where he will pause, even though he is late in getting to the Great House, and take a snap of overproofed dark Mount Gay Rum, offered free by the owner of the rum shop, Mr. Mandeville White, Manny to Sargeant, as an indication of Sargeant’s office and status in the Village, and as a down payment in exchange against future protection, and the protection of secrets, some mutual, some personal, all serious; and the occasional offer of an item, evidence no longer essential to a case being “’vestigated”: a wristwatch, a bicycle pump, perhaps; and once, a leather wallet dropped by a man fleeing the clutches of the husband of the woman he was fooping. Sargeant kept the money. Four pounds sterling, and seven shillings. He then tore up the identification card, and the photos of the wife and child of the “fornicater,” before he offered the empty wallet to Manny. Manny paid him five shillings, or one hundred and twenty cents, and a snap of Mount Gay, for the brown buckled-back gentleman’swallet, that had Genuine Leather, English Made , stamped into its rich Moroccan-red leather, in gold lettering.
    Sargeant dislikes what his duty says he has to do tonight. Visit Miss Mary-Mathilda at the Great House. He has to face her before it gets much later. He does not want to take her Statement. If he could avoid it, postpone, forget it, have Vicar Dowd go in his place, ask her to leave the Great House where she lives with her son, the doctor, his doctor; have her leave Bimshire, “emigrade” and just go away . . . Englund, Amurca; live in Brooklyn with the other thousands of illegal people from Bimshire; “escape” to Venezuela, Brazil, even Cuba, Panama, in the Canal Zone, then . . . anywhere but here in Bimshire; and he would do anything, but have to face