The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke Page A

criminals. And he waits. He holds his bicycle against his waist, and waits and waits in this thick, voiceless darkness.
    It was so peaceful and satisfying when he was last in this field of canes, near the same spot he is now, about ten o’clock in the night, two Fridays ago, when the trash was thick and soft almost as the mattress of his own bed; and the woman beside him, Gertrude, was silent; and as he lay on her, he smelled the thick richness of the sugar-cane trash, and hoped, in a loose moment that did not last too long for what he was doing, that a centipede from the thick black soil would not crawl from beneath the trash, and ramble up his trousers leg, and put a sting in his testicles.
    Sargeant counted stars again that night. And saw Orion and the Big Dipper.
    He goes over that last night now, as he stands, hardly breathing, ready to pounce upon the criminal in the canes.
    The sounds of feet are moving. Coming towards him. No wind is blowing. He looks up, and he is covered in the same blackness of the skies as the night surrounding him. His mouth is dry. His palate is like sandpaper. He fears that he may not be able to cry out for help. But even if his mouth was not dry, and he could scream for assistance, in the blackness of the night, thick as if it has body to it, like a substance, a thickness you can measure, no one will hear his wail for assistance. No man—or woman—in the Village, will come to Sargeant’s rescue, even if he heard him calling out. Sargeant is a policeman. A Crown-Sargeant. No Villager will come to rescue a policeman.
    The sounds of the feet he hears are louder now. They are like the voice of the Vicar that pounds magnified through the loudspeaker placed on a tripod in the Pasture of Flagstaff Commons, where athletic games are held, when the Vicar announces entrants for the fifty-yard and one-hundred-yard foot races, on the day of the Sin-Davids Anglican Church Annual Picnic; a voice that hits the eardrums.
    The footsteps are waves pounding in Sargeant’s ears, and this sound of water weakens him further, for he cannot swim. He cannot move. He stands with his body against the steel frame of the bicycle.
    Only once before, in his fifteen years in the Police Force, before he was promoted to Crown-Sargeant, has he come this close to the nausea born of deep fear—and from the snapping of rum—that caused him to vomit.
    The quickest sedative now, for his nerves and to appease his high blood pressure, would be a double shot of strong dark Mount Gay Rum, straight-without-ice; and he wishes he was sitting in the dimly lit “Selected Clienteles Room” of the rum shop, on a wooden bench that has no back, cozy amongst his friends. But he must watch this strong dark rum. His doctor, Wilberforce, the son of the woman he has to take the Statement from, has warned him about rum.
    This is the second time in his career that Sargeant must accept that a murder, part and parcel of being a detective, has turned him into pulp.
    There was that first time . . .
    Sargeant had arrived at the scene of that crime, on the wet thick Khus-Khus grass near the entrance to the Plantation Main House; and had pulled back the brown crocus bag that Watchie, the night watchman, had covered the body with; and he saw the young woman, naked; with her throat marked by a red line, tight and as clear as if it was a necklace of red pearls, a choker, eaten into her flesh from ear to ear; and her body striped in blood, with the dark brown soil from the crocus bag that had held sweet potatoes, collected in the folds of the sack, powdering her skin, reddened, in thick clotting marks that followed the direction of the string of red pearls, the direction and the hatred of the butcher knife that the atopsy said she had used, after she had tied herself up to the highest, most convenient limb of the tamarind tree, with a rope ripped from her own clothes; when the rope faltered, she could not hang herself, could not take her own life, could