Eric Walrond, "The Voodoo's Revenge" (1925) (short fiction)
"The Voodoo's Revenge" (1925)
Awarded Third Prize--Short Story Section.
Published in Opportunity, June 1925
AT the edge of Faulke’s River a fleet of cayukas lay at anchor. It was a murky slice of water front. Half Latin, it was a rendezvous for those French creoles who had left the service of the Americans to go into business for themselves as liquor dealers, fishermen, coal burners, black artists, etc. On the side of it facing the muddy rivulet with its coral islets and turtle shoals, were the usual cafes, dance halls and fish markets. Behind these stretched a line of "Silver" quarters—cabins of the black Antillian canal diggers.
One ran across in this part of the Silver City Negroes who spoke patois — black and brunettes from St. Lucia and Trinidad and Martinique. Fronting their quarters a road meandered, dusty on sunny days and a lake of mud and slush on rainy ones, up to Monkey Hill.
Along Faulke’s River folk gathered each morning to buy up the offerings of the fishermen and the pearl divers who had come in the night before. In the group of traders one saw pretty Negresses from the isles of the Caribbean who wore flame-colored skirts and East Indian ear-rings and heavy silver bangles reaching up to their elbows. Some, those of "higher caste," worse in their bosoms cameos and pearls and Birds of Paradise feathers to ornament their already gorgeous head dress. In those days short skirts were foreign to the women of the tropics—and one saw long beautiful silk dresses, a faint echo of Louis Quinze, trailing behind the dusky grand dames as they went from stall to stall and with bamboo baskets bought dolphins and pigeon peas and guinea birds. For hours, as the tropical sun beat down upon them, these lovely angels of Ethiopia would shop and dye their lips with the wine of luscious pomegranates and talk lightly of the things on sale. With them it was a Spring rite. They made a holiday out of it. And far into the morning cayukas full of coral and oranges and yam-pies would come swinging up out of the dark tremulous bowls of the lagoon beyond, to empty themselves upon the wharf while the patois men would stand by and fill their pipes, chin, and ofttimes steal away in soft bits of voodoo melody.
Zoomie maca le
Maca le la
Le ale ale
Zoomie tell me
Pape say kiss
‘Am a’ ready
Tell me mama say wahlo .. .
Zerry wuz a mambe
Zerry.
Wahlo, wahlo, wahlo.
Zamba le a le a le a
Zoke! Zoke! Zoke!
A queer lot these men. Huge, gigantic, black as night, each grew a mustache or a grizzly beard. In them one saw a transplantation of the ancient culture of Europe. In the oil Maiden Islands one saw big hairy black ship chandlers and fishing boat men who walked with the grace and majesty of university professors. And in these silent old witchworshipping seamen on Faulke’s River, unlike the voluble Maches and Spaniards who infested the clumbling wharves along Limon Bay, was a lingering strain of those heroic men who set out at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century to conquer in the name of France the tropic isles of the Caribbean.
Night in the tropics is an erotic affair. As it flung its mantle over the shining form of the lake the fishermen along it would sit on the bottoms of upturned cayukas and for hours dream of far off weird things. Dreaming; dreaming; dreaming. That is all they seemed to do. For it was difficult to penetrate the mind of a patois man. He spoke little. He preferred solitude. He preferred to smoke his cow-dung pipe for days in silence. But he never slept. The fire in his lustreless eyes never went out.
One of these patois men was a robust son of the soil who still went by the name of Nestor Villaine. Certainly it had been a comparatively easy thing for him to get in, jabber a few mouthfuls of broken French, and live as an obeah man. Up in the hills he lived the life of a hermit, ate bobo fish and iguanas and corn cakes and grew up as hardy and as hairy-chested as the oaks and mahogany he tore down to burn his coal. Away from the society of men and the endearments of women Nestor grew to be a stern son of the jungle. Hard, cold, relentless, he hated the sight of human beings.
Villaine plotted revenge!
II
Caught in the maelstrom of local politics Editor Villaine of the Aspinwall Voice drew a breath of righteous indignation as he was jostled into the alcadia. Alongside him was a crouching bit of humanity—a short, brown-skinned stranger whose immaculate duck, white and tan shoes, jippi-jappa hat, branded him an enemy; in all probability in the pay of the reactionary Ex-Governor Tejada. One of his arms was in a sling; a bit of plaster adorned his left temple. His nose was cut. Dark spots, of ink, soiled the caballero’s otherwise white suit.
As if they were made by sharply pointed finger nails, gashes and bruishes covered his coppercoloured face. His eyes threatened to close up. His lips hung unbeautifully. Not only an arm was in a sling, but tied about his head was a red neckerchief. Unlike his fistic antagonist he had on workmen’s clothes. Ink stained his jacket. Dust and dirt disfigured his already ink-stained trousers. Indubitably Nestor was not at his best.
In walked the alcalde. He was a tall, finely built man. Former Deputy Salzedo was one of the handsomest men in the Republic. Friend and foe admitted that. It had an added significance, especially when one is brilliant and fearless and something of a radical. That was what he was. He was the hope of the Liberal Party. He had been swept into office, a few weeks previous, on the crest of a mighty wave of rebellion. In the coastal provinces he was hailed as a Messiah, a man to lead the people out of the chaos brought on by the Tejadistas.
"Orden!"
The tinterillos came to a verbal halt. The alcaldia was full of them. They sat in the best wicker chairs. They buzzed around it like a nest of hungry bees. Out ar the door Pablo, the black porter, who belonged pathologically to the leper asylum as Palo Seco, kept order with an agente’s baton. Leaning up against the newly papered wall was the dean of the ftinterillos, the celebrated Dr. Cecilio Rhodes, a West Indian Negro. As thi alcalde entered, and malleted for order, Rhodes, dragging the tooth pick out of his mouth, yelled to his colleagues engulfed in the soft wicker chairs to "Rise, in respect to His Excellency, el Senor Alcalde!"
The tinterillos rose with one accord out of respect to His Excellency El Senor Alcalde.
Alcalde Salzedo gazed at the prisoners, Fditor Villaine and the truculent extranjero with the white and tan shoes.
"Well, what is the trouble with you two?"
The agente testified. At high noon, as the |abor train had emptied its freight and had started on its way back to the round house, he had been standing in front of the kiosk at the corner of Sixth and Bolivar Streets when a shrill cry attracted his attention. Seizing his baton he raced in the direction whence it had come. In the middle of the block, in the offices of the Aspinwall Voice, he found the prisoners wrestling and throwing rolling pins at each other. After a terrific struggle in which he lost a button off his coat and a bit of skin off the third finger of his left hand, he had succeeded in arresting the scoundrels and there they were. . . .
"Now, what have you got to say for yourself?" asked His Excellency as the agente retired.
Villaine bristled. Ah, to hear his master’s voice? To be able to look into his mentor’s dusky eyes and tell him the story of his love and fidelity to him! To relate, by a striking tale of primordial lust, just how far he was willing to go for the Liberal Party! To do that! For years, as a fly-by-night pamphleteer, he had longed for an opportunity to show these native leaders, like Salzedo, just how loyal a "Chumbo"—that is, a black from the English colonies—could be. For Nestor was a native of Anguilla who had come to the isthmus as a "contract laborer" to dig the canal. But he didn’t want to do that; he had ideas, big, earth-quaking ideas. So when the Magdalena, the ship on which he had arrived, docked, he managed, as the laborers disembarked, to slip out of the line and secrete himself behind a bale of merchandise in front of the wharf. When the car in which the men were sardined began to pull out, he had raced across the railroad tracks and had joined the carnival of folk which swept leisurely up Front Street. Dusk found him safely ensconced in a Chinese lice-ridden rooming house on Bottle Alley.
But that was six years before.
"Nothing to say?" the alcalde inquired impatiently. He was annoyed at the glow in Villaine’s dreamy black eyes.
"Ah," he breathed, "I was—way—this brute came in my office and without provocation at al! began to abuse the Liberal Party, began to swear at Alcalde Salzedo—vilely—criminally! And when he did that I got red in the eyes, and I—well, I went after him, that’s all!"
"And you?" inquired the alcalde, turning to the other.
"Nada!"
All right then, sixty days, botn ot you:
Madre de Dios! Villaine staggered under the weight of the sentence. Sixty days—sixty days—
Naively, very naively, he went up to the desk, put his black ink-stained hands on it, and faced his gaoler.
"Surely," he smiled eagerly, "surely, you do not mean me?"
"Yes, you too. Both of you. Next."
The tinterillos began beseiging the alcalde with their preposterous requests. Pablo with his baton hopped in and escorted the prisoners to the cuartel, which was nearby.
Villaine was in a psychic stupor. It took a long time for it to sink into him. He couldn’t understand it. It was a nightmare, a hideous dream. His head ached.
On a cold, wet slab he sat in the cuartel, staring at the crumbling ceiling. Why, he had been fighting Salzedo’s battles! He fought for him! He was—yet away you—rat! Yes, come to think of it he had been Salzedo’s champion right along. The Aspinwall Voice was willingly and freely his. It boosted him. It came to be known as the Liberal Party's keenest weapon of satire.
Still . . . ah, the fleas in this place! Still Salzedo, on his magisterial throne, had sentenced him to sixty days in jail as if he were a common felon. His body was sore. It was full of cuts and bruises. Cuts and bruises that he had suffered while fighting his jailer’s battles.
Revolution surged through him. And at night when the prisoners conspired to break through the walls of that terrible inquisition Nestor Villaine, the "Chumbo" herido would be plotting, plotting.
At Porto Bello, where he broke rocks, he was gruft and brooding. His fellow prisoners avoided him. The guardias chucked the food at him and had as little dealings with him as possible. Plainly Villaine had something on his mind.
III
One of the show places of the river front was a cafe with a brothel in the rear. Here the patois men drank goblets of anisette and vermouth and met their women. It was the prototype of Sablo’s Baron Bolivar Street. But this nameless rendezvous also served a deadly purpose. It was here that the black artists met "their" cooks and servant girls who worked for the white Americans—folk of the "Golden City"—and gave them for a pittance tips on secret poisoning through vegetable alkaloids, etc. And here it was one dark still night Nestor agreed to meet a young St. Lucian by the name of Sambola.
As the clock struck twelve the boy flung aside the dingy curtain and stepped into the room. Except for Nestor, alone at a table with a glass of green liquor, it was deserted. Squeezing through a network of demijohns the boy came and sat at Nestor’s table. Silently the man pushed the bottle over to him and pretending to take a puff at his pipe threw out a haze of smoke to hide the flames that had leapt into his eyes. Sambola poured out a drink and dashed it down his throat. Nestor lowered his eyes in assurance.
Yes, this boy was just the one for it. He came from a family that wallowed in obeah. His brother, who was a time-keeper on the Zone, which was a big job for a grammar-school boy to hold, had kept his job there all three years by virtue of it. His other brother, the one all of whose front teeth were capped with gold, steered clear of dagger-gemmed combs and senorita’s vials simply because his old witch-stricken mother sat of nights and burned obeah tor the dusky ladies with whom he consorted in El Barrio Rojo.
"Now, look a here," he dashed the pipe. away, "I don’t wan’ no bunglin’, oui?"
"Non," Sambola dared not blink, so potent was the power Nestor exerted over him.
"You must hide it safely in yo’ pocket till the men begin fo’ get sleepy—till it is late. Lissen out fo’ de polise wissle fo’ one o’clock. Pape is likely fo’ go a bit early, you say? But that don’t matter. Be sure you get it in his, though .. ."
Far into the night the older man talked to the boy. He talked to him with the petulance and the nervous gestures of an Oriental. But the thing was Nestor’s life balm. For ten long years he had been cherishing it. And there it was—within his grasp!
"Here, take this, and don’t lose it, oui?"
"Non!"
He took the green vial and tucked it safely in his bosom. Nestor gleamed at him fiendishly. Drink after drink he made the boy swallow. Thru the curtain of the night came the sound of fish splashing in the molten river. From atop the undulating cordilleras in the distance a lion howled.
About four o'clock in the morning Sambola slipped out.
Later in the day, as the dusky folk flocked to the waterfront to gobble up the oysters and cayukas of venison, among the things offered for sale was the big vellow cayuka of the trader Villaine.
IV
"Sambola, don’t forget the Chess Club meets tonight. And I want you to run over to Calavaggio’s and get some of that Jamaica rum he’s got."
Mr. Newbold, the manager of the West Indian Telegraph Company, was a social climber. A mulatto, he was something of a mogul. In a small place like Aspinwall, it was easy to know and talk with the mayor and the governor and the agents of the steamship lines that plied to the city. Born in the Cayman Islands he had been to Liverpool, Calais, Bremen. He was a cosmopolitan. In Aspinwall, where life is more precarious than it is elsewhere, white men found time to cultivate one another. On the native side Mr. Newbold was well liked. Alcalde Munoz and Governor Salzedo were great friends of his. And at the governor's reception he was one of the principal guests. Moreover, his wife, a dark brown woman from one of the islands, passed as a shawl-swept senora. And his idea of a chess club had originated with Mr. Newbold. A few men in the Republic played it and he was bent on popularizing the game. It was too good to limit to a straggling few.
In Sambola, the West Indian office boy, he had a faithful and obedient servant. Sambola was a good boy. Unlike the others‘ Mr. Newbold had had he never smoked or whistled or stayed out late at nights or read "Old Sleuth," "Dick Turpin" or "Dead Wood Dick." He hadn’t any imagination. That, Mr. Newbold felt, was good for him.
He would sit, out there in the front office, and watch Mr. Newbold’s collie lying on the hot sundrenched pavement growl and snap viciously at the flies on his nose. , "You know, Samboia," said Mr. Newbold as the boy returned, "I want you to put on a white apron —like a regular waiter. I was thinking of that the other day. Serving drinks to such a distinguished assemblage in your working clothes looks a bit out of place, don’t you think?" So that night Sambola had on a white apron to serve the liquers.
The chess club met upstairs in Padros’ Bar, facing Slifer’s Park. On Friday nights the park band did not play. In consequence the park was deserted —shrouded in darkness. It was a good night for chess.
Sambola got there first. He opened the door, turned on the gas, and arranged the table. The place was in ship shape for Mr. Newbold always saw to it that Sambola clean and tidy it up the day after each game. In one corner was an ice box. Opening it Sambola examined the array of liquers, and again closed it. A moment later Mr. Newbold arrived. "Well, Sambola, how’s tricks? Are all the bottles there?" He went to the icebox, poked a nose in, and took out a bottle of champagne. He took down a glass.
"Don’t drink, eh Sambola?" he asked as he filled the glass and put it to his lips.
"No, sir." "Not even champagne ?" "No, sir." "That’s a good boy." A few minutes later Herr Pape, the agent of the Hamburg American Line, blond, grey-eyed, a pipe in his mouth, entered. Following him Sir Winfield Baxter, the agent of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, a flippant, youngish old man, a perpetual twinkle in his cat grey eyes; Vincent Childers, the British Vice-Consul, hoarse, hump-backed, anaemic, and dribbling at a brown paper cigarette. Lastly came the Governor and Mayor Munoz.
The years of triumph had heightened the charms of the populist idol. Salzedo wore the usual duck, the same long French shoes with the narrow instep and pointed toes, the same gold and brown peacock charm at his watch, the same fascinating light in his eyes.
"Well, gentlemen," said Mr. Newbold, "this is our club’s first anniversary. Let’s drink to its health." After which, the game began. Herr Pape and Mr. Newbold, Governor Salzedo and Sir Winfield, Alcalde Munoz and Vice-Consul Childers.
Thus it was for hours. Between times the men were served sherry and ice, whiskey and soda, coca cola. Silently Sambola served the drinks, got a check signed, and stole softly back to his stoo! out on the porch to watch the shadows of barques and brigantines and big ocean liners tied to their piers, Below, in the dusky shadows, he saw, too, brown boys and girls spooning. And Sambola grew reminiscent. For down in the Silver City he also had a girl, a yellow beauty from one of the isles, A’Minta, who went with him to the pargue on Sunday evenings. . . .
Hours he sprawled on the balcony, the vial clutched to his bosom. . . . Ah, Pape was going.
He always left early.
"Good luck, gentlemen, I’ve got to run along.
Big day before me tomorrow." Another hour slipped by. The policeman downstairs blew a long owlish wail. Once, twice, thrice.
Twelve o'clock. Somewhere on the roof Sambola heard the unmistakable snarl of a lust-bound boar cat. He dimly glimpsed a yacht in the bay.
One more drink he served. Ensued a long sleeping spell... a sleep in which he dreamt of a shark tugging at his gizzard and of being washed up on the ebony shores of Faulke’s River.
"Sambola!"’ Sir Winfield wanted his glass refilled. He hadn't had anything for an age. The others also wanted theirs refilled. Alert, on the job, a wonderful host, Mr. Newbold also saw it.
"Here, Sambola, fill up the glasses. Why, governor, yours is quite empty." "Oh, let me see, I'll take vermouth." Unemotional as a clam, Sambola went to the ice box and began pouring out the liquers. As if _he had forgotten something he turned to make sure. No, no one was looking at him. They were deeply engrossed in the game. The boy took the vial out of his bosom and uncorked it. Odorless. Colorless. He put three tiny drops in the governor’s anisette. It scarcely created a ripple.
V
The next day the Republic was thrown into a paroxyism of grief over the strange death of Governor Manual Salzedo. The physicians said it was due to heart failure. Others privately attributed it to a vendetta in El Barrio Rojo. Donna Teresa demanded an autopsy. But it did not reveal anything. The newspapers, in dealing with it, threw a cloak of still further mystery over it. They hinted at assault by the ousted Tejadistas. F/ Dario went so far as to dig up or fabricate a parallel in the Republic’s bloody history.
But no one ever got to the bottom of it. Not even the enterprising reporters of the fictional press —not one of them ever thought of linking the governor’s death with the finding a few days later of a Negro’s shark bitten body fished up out of the black lagoon on Faulke’s River.
Soon, like everything else, it died down. And if you asked any of the old residents about it they'd ay, "Ah, that is one of the legends of this legendary country. Like the failure of the French." Yet Sambola, as meek as before, continued to grve liquers on Friday evenings to the members of Mr. Newbold’s Chess Club. Only sometimes a strange, smoky gleam would creep into his eyes.
On nights when he'd go to that brothel on the banks of the river by the Silver City there were those who couldn’t help but compare it with the cat-like light they had often seen in the eyes of the old grouchy trader, Nestor Villaine. As a matter of fact, folk oftimes, for no reason that they could explain, referred to Sambola as Nestor Villaine.