The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke Page B

not die clean as she had wanted to do. The butcher knife told the story.
    Sargeant had vomited then. O, Clotelle! Clotelle, Clotelle . . .
    The sight of her body ravaged by this violence took him back to the cane trash in the North Field, months ago . . . He had sat beside her just three Fridays before, in a revival meeting at the Church of the Nazarene. Clotelle. Yes.
    Now, with the same beating fear that is mixed with the courage of fate and destiny, like a man exhaling his last gasp of energy, Sargeant is actually being propped up only by the sturdy steel of his Raleigh bicycle.
    Footsteps in the cane field coming towards him, magnified by the dryness of the trash, become louder and more foreboding. He turns his searchlight on. The truncheon in his hand is like an extended right arm. The footsteps become noisier; and his heart is pounding; and just as he is wondering how deadly to make his blow, two dogs locked in sex, and joined like Siamese twins at the genitals, struggle clumsily out of the canes.
    “Jesus Christ!” Sargeant says. And laughs. The dogs retreat into the thickness of the North Field. Sargeant unbuttons the fly of his heavy black serge trousers. His urine splatters on the cane trash. He shivers as he pees. His pee splatters on his policeman’s black boots.
    Sargeant is thirsty now. He wants his snap of rum. Tonight, he will have three. Rum is the blood of the Island.
    The rum shop is a small building, of one gabled roof, made of deal board, and unpainted; and it is built like an afterthought, on to the rest of the main house. Architecturally, it is nothing more than a “shed-roof.” Manny built the rum shop years ago, in one Saturday afternoon and a Sunday morning, with the help of men and boys— and some women—in the Village; their help induced by four tins of Fray Bentos corn beef, Wibix soda biscuits, pork chops fried in lard, and two jimmy-johns of Mount Gay Rum.
    There is one door, reached by climbing two raw blocks of coral stone, cut from the Village Quarry. When the rains come, the two blocks shake, and move from their moorings a little, and cause some customers to lose their balance, and bang their bodies against the door posts.
    The rum shop is lit by acetylene lamps that require pumping, and whose mantles resemble crocheted booties for dolls. They are all white. These acetylene lamps burn with more fierce brilliance than low-watted electric bulbs. They burn throughout the night, like peeping eyes, even when there is no customer in the Selected Clienteles Room.
    Sargeant has to wonder why Manny, Village rum shop proprietor and Village butcher, never got electricity installed in the rum shop, as in the main part of his house, named Labour Bless.
    “I can’t afford ’lectricity offa the blasted lil money these hand-tomout ’ people does-pay me to kill a pig for them!” Manny explains.
    In the verandah of Labour Bless, which runs along three sides of the house, made of coral stone and deal board, Manny has an acetylene lamp, which guides his “selected clienteles” on dark nights when there is no moon.
    Labour Bless is the name Manny christened his house with, after he returned from Cuba where he worked cutting sugar cane.
    “And from the loins of my labour,” Manny told Sargeant, “and blasted hard labour it was, at that! In that Cuban heat? In August? Jesus Christ! Offa that labour, I build this wall-house. It take me five years to complete, but it is mine!” Pride was reflected in the name of the house, even though spelled in English; and in the house itself.
    “If I had-remember enough Spanish, Labour Bless woulda been spell-out in ’Paniol! ”
    The acetylene pump-lamp on the verandah is not burning tonight. This to Sargeant is some kind of omen.
    But he rides on, from the vicinity of the North Field, in low gear, in the unending darkness. He continues his patrolling of the Village, taking a dirt track bordered by canes. The canes have sharp leaves like razor blades, and with