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Read Ebook: Tropic death by Walrond Eric
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Ebook has 1381 lines and 45702 words, and 28 pages
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TROPIC DEATH
The whistle blew for eleven o'clock. Throats parched, grim, sun-crazed blacks cutting stone on the white burning hillside dropped with a clang the hot, dust-powdered drills and flew up over the rugged edges of the horizon to descent into a dry, waterless gut. Hunger--pricks at stomachs inured to brackish coffee and cassava pone--pressed on folk, joyful as rabbits in a grassy ravine, wrenching themselves free of the lure of the white earth. Helter-skelter dark, brilliant, black faces of West Indian peasants moved along, in pain--the stiff tails of blue denim coats, the hobble of chigger-cracked heels, the rhythm of a stride ... dissipating into the sun-stuffed void the radiant forces of the incline.
The broad road--a boon to constables moping through the dusk or on hot, bright mornings plowing up the thick, adhesive marl on some seasonal chore, was distinguished by a black, animate dot upon it.
Passing by them Coggins' bare feet kicked up a cloud of the white marl dust and the girl shouted, "Mistah Rum, you gwine play de guitah tee nite, no?" Visions of Coggins--the sky a vivid crimson or blackly star-gemmed--on the stone step picking the guitar, picking it "with all his hand...."
Promptly Coggins answered, "Come down and dance de fango fo' Coggins Rum and he are play for you."
Bajan gal don't wash 'ar skin Till de rain come down....
Grumblings. Pitch-black, to the "washed-out" buckra she was more than a bringer of victuals. The buckra's girl. It wasn't Sepia, Georgia, but a backwoods village in Barbadoes. "Didn't you bring me no molasses to pour in the rainwater?" the buckra asked, and the girl, sucking in her mouth, brought an ungovernable eye back to him.
Upon which Coggins, swallowing a hint, kept on his journey--noon-day pilgrimage--through the hot creeping marl.
Scorching--yet Coggins gayly sang:
O! you come with yo' cakes Wit' yo' cakes an' yo' drinks Ev'y collection boy ovah deah!--
An' we go to wah-- We shall carry de name, Bajan boys for--evah!
"It are funny," mused Coggins, clearing his throat, "Massa Braffit an' dat chiggah-foot gal...."
He stopped and picked up a fern and pressed the back of it to his shiny ebon cheek. It left a white ferny imprint. Grown up, according to the ethics of the gap, Coggins was yet to it a "queer saht o' man," given to the picking of a guitar, and to cogitations, on the step after dark--indulging in an avowed juvenility.
Drunk with the fury of the sun Coggins carelessly swinging along cast an eye behind him--more of the boys from the quarry--overalled, shoeless, caps whose peaks wiggled on red, sun-red eyes ... the eyes of the black sunburnt folk.
He always cast an eye behind him before he turned off the broad road into the gap.
Flaring up in the sun were the bright new shingles on the Dutch-style cottage of some Antigua folk. Away in a clump of hibiscus was a mansion, the color of bilgy water, owned by two English dowager maidens. In the gap rock-stones shot up--obstacles for donkey carts to wrestle over at dusk. Rain-worms and flies gathered in muddy water platoons beside them.
"Yo' dam vagabond yo'!"
Coggins cursed his big toe. His big toe was blind. Helpless thing ... a blind big toe in broad daylight on a West Indian road gap.
He paused, and gathered up the blind member. "Isn't this a hell of a case fo' yo', sah?" A curve of flesh began to peel from it. Pree-pree-pree. As if it were frying. Frying flesh. The nail jerked out of place, hot, bright blood began to stream from it. Around the spot white marl dust clung in grainy cakes. Now, red, new blood squirted--spread over the whole toe--and the dust became crimson.
Gently easing the toe back to the ground, Coggins avoided the grass sticking up in the road and slowly picked his way to the cabin.
"I stump me toe," he announced, "I stump me toe ... woy ... woy."
"Go bring yo' pappy a tot o' water ... Ada ... quick."
Dusky brown Sissie took the gored member in her lap and began to wipe the blood from it.
"Pappy stump he toe."
"Dem rocks in de gap...."
"Mine ain't got better yet, needer...."
"Hurry up, boy, and bring de lotion."
"Bring me de scissors, an' tek yo' fingers out o' yo' mout' like yo' is starved out! Hey, yo', sah!"
" ... speakin' to you. Big boy lik' yo' suckin' yo' fingers...."
Zip! Onion-colored slip of skin fluttered to the floor. Rattah Grinah, the half-dead dog, cold dribbling from his glassy blue eyes on to his freckled nose, moved inanimately towards it. Fox terrier ... shaggy ... bony ... scarcely able to walk.
"Where is dat Beryl?" Coggins asked, sitting on the floor with one leg over the other, and pouring the salt water over the crimsoning wadding.
"Outside, sah."
"Beryl!"
"Wha' yo' dey?"
"Wha' yo' doin' outside?"
"Answer me, girl!"
" ... Hey, yo' miss, answer yo' pappy!"
"Hard-ears girl! She been eatin' any mo' marl, Sissie?"
"She, Ada?"
"Sho', gal eatin' marl all de haftah-noon...."
Pet, sugar--no more terms of endearment for Beryl. Impatient, Coggins, his big toe stuck up cautiously in the air,--inciting Rattah to indolent curiosity--moved past Sissie, past Ada, past Rufus, to the rear of the cabin.
It whelmed Coggins. The dry season was at its height. Praying to the Lord to send rain, black peons gathered on the rumps of breadfruit or cherry trees in abject supplication.
Crawling along the road to the gap, Coggins gasped at the consequences of the sun's wretched fury. There, where canes spread over with their dark rich foliage into the dust-laden road, the village dogs, hunting for eggs to suck, fowls to kill, paused amidst the yellow stalks of cork-dry canes to pant, or drop, exhausted, sun-smitten.
His sight impaired by the livid sun, Coggins turned hungry eyes to the soil. Empty corn stalks ... blackbirds at work....
Along the water course, bushy palms shading it, frogs gasped for air, their white breasts like fowls, soft and palpitating. The water in the drains sopped up, they sprang at flies, mosquitoes ... wrangled over a mite.
It was a dizzy spectacle and the black peons were praying to God to send rain. Coggins drew back....
Asking God to send rain ... why? Where was the rain? Barreled up there in the clouds? Odd! Invariably, when the ponds and drains and rivers dried up they sank on their knees asking God to pour the water out of the sky.... Odd ... water in the sky....
The sun! It wrung toll of the earth. It had its effect on Coggins. It made the black stone cutter's face blacker. Strong tropic suns make black skins blacker....
At the quarry it became whiter and the color of dark things generally grew darker. Similarly, with white ones--it gave them a whiter hue. Coggins and the quarry. Coggins and the marl. Coggins and the marl road.
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