Conquering Kilmarni (6 page)

Mr. Devon joked about the breadfruit that morning, saying that to him it tasted like an old sponge in disguise. Peter was relieved to see him so lighthearted. Perhaps his thoughts were on the new coffee trees. Or had the coming of Zackie Leonard into their lives begun to make a change in him, even if he didn't want it to? Whatever the answer, Peter fervently hoped the mood would last.

"You'll be going up to field six, won't you, Dad?" he asked when they had finished breakfast.

Mr. Devon nodded.

"You mind if I come along?"

"I was hoping you'd want to."

On reaching the field, they walked together through the older coffee trees, now six to eight feet tall and heavy with green cherries, to the new section that was to be planted. Under Mr. Campbell's supervision, women were already at work planting the young trees that had been carried up from the yard.

Peter stood beside one of the women and watched her. Kneeling in front of a hole dug days earlier with a fork, she first loosened the dark earth in the bottom of it with both hands. Then she stripped the black plastic "pot" off the young tree, placed the tree in the hole, and carefully refilled what was left of the hole with the earth that had been forked out. The last thing she did was stand up and press the replaced earth with her feet, on which she wore sandals with thick leather soles.

"You want to do one?" she asked Peter.

"Hey, yes!" Peter replied eagerly. "Yes, ma'am!"

She stood by and watched him, correcting him when he would have planted the tree too deep, and he was just finishing the job when he heard a familiar series of shrill yelps. Turning, he saw Zackie Leonard's crazy Mongoose racing along the line of women, barking a happy greeting at each one. Zackie himself, with a machete in one hand, was talking to Dad and Mr. Campbell.

They were close enough for Peter to hear what they were saying. Mr. Devon, it seemed, had asked the headman if there might be some kind of job for Zackie, and Mr. Campbell was sort of thinking out loud about it. "Well," Mr. Campbell said, "there is one thing he can do for us, maybe. The main track could stand bushing out, especially in those high fields from twenty-six on up. There's a lot of ferrel creeping in there." He turned to scowl at Zackie. "You think you can handle a job that big? We pay by the chain." A chain, Peter knew, was a measure of length.

"Yes, suh." Zackie solemnly held up his machete. "Nobody is better than me with one of these."

The headman smiled. "I can think of a couple of grown men who might be a bit better. But all right. Start at twenty-six, and I'll come up later to see how you're getting on."

Peter stepped forward. "Dad, will it be all right if I go with him?"

"You?" Mr. Devon said. "Why?"

"I ought to learn how to use a machete, don't you think?"

A heavy frown changed the shape of Mr. Devon's face. "You ought to do what?"

"I mean it, Dad. All the kids here know how."

"You don't have a machete."

"I can get one back at the house." Dad didn't actually supply the workers, but did keep a few machetes in the garage in case one got broken. To a Jamaican countryman such a tool was a very personal thing. He bought his own, shaped the wooden handle to suit his own hand, even had his own little pocket file to keep it sharp. In a way, he treated his machete as if it were an extension of his arm.

"I don't know," Walter Devon said. "Those things are dangerous, Peter. Only yesterday I had to dress a bad cut."

"I'll be careful, Dad."

"It isn't always a matter of being careful. The fellow yesterday was chopping out some grass. The blade
bounced off a stone he didn't see, and slashed his other wrist."

"I'll be extra careful. I promise."

Mr. Devon turned to the headman. "What do you say, Winston?"

"He will be all right, I think, Mr. Devon. It's mostly when they get careless that they have the accidents. He will pay attention."

Again Mr. Devon hesitated. But at last, with a small sigh of surrender, he said, "All right, Peter."

"Here," Mr. Campbell said. "I'll lend you my own cutlass to save you the walk back down. Take this, too." He took a small triangular file from the hip pocket of his khaki pants and handed it over with his machete. "Zackie will show you how to keep the blade sharp."

Elated, Peter thanked them, and a moment later Zackie and he were walking briskly up the main track with field six out of sight behind them and Zackie's little dog romping on ahead. For a little while the two boys walked along in silence, side by side because the track was wide there. Then Zackie said, "Why you want to work with me when you don't have to?"

One reason, Peter thought, was that he hoped to find out where the Jamaican boy had slept the night before, and if he needed help. But there was a bigger reason. "I have to learn about everything that goes on here, Zackie," he said. "I want to stay with my dad and not have to go back to the States again."

"You want to stay in Jamaica?"

"Yes. And he thinks I shouldn't, so I have to convince him he's wrong. Suppose he got sick or something."

"If you daddy got sick, Mr. Campbell would keep things going."

"I know that. But I'd want to be with my dad, wouldn't I?"

Zackie turned his head and gave Peter a curious look. Then he nodded. "That a good way to feel about you daddy," he said gravely. "Me wish it was the same for me."

They climbed again without more talk, and the mountain stillness was disturbed only by the shrill cries of birds as Mongoose flushed them out of the undergrowth and tried vainly to catch them. Peter wondered what the dog would do if he caught one. Try to talk to it, most likely. He talked to everything else.

They came to the place just below field twenty-six where Mr. Campbell had said the ferrel was creeping in. Zackie sharpened his machete by pressing the point of the blade against a tree and rubbing his file over its upturned edge a few times. Peter noticed the file had a handle different from the one on Mr. Campbell's. Both were of wood, but they were not the same shape. He asked about it.

"Them don't come with handles," Zackie explained. "You have to make you own, so you make the kind you like best." He tested the machete blade with his thumb, and then went to work on the ferrel.

After watching him awhile, Peter followed suit.

It was harder than it looked, Peter soon discovered. He had to grasp a clump of waist-high ferrel with his left hand and bend it over, then swing the machete so as to chop it off close to the ground. That meant he had to hold the machete so the blade was almost horizontal and only just above the ground when it hit home. And that meant he had to bend way over from the hips while swinging it, which made his back ache. And in no time at all, the spines on the ferrel made his left hand sore.

He kept at it, though, until Zackie stopped work and said, "Mek we stop for a while, Peter. It don't always being careless that make you have an accident. Sometimes it only from being tired."

While they were resting, Peter remembered what he had overheard the day before, when Zackie talked with Miss Lorrie. Should he mention it? Yes, he decided. In fact, he just about had to if he wanted to help.

"Hey," he said, trying to make it sound casual, "didn't I hear Miss Lorrie telling you not to go home last night?"

Zackie looked at him. "You did hear that?"

"I couldn't help it. I was in the kitchen."

"Yes, that is what she say."

"And she said you shouldn't go to her house because your father might look for you there. One of you said that, anyway."

"Me." Zackie nodded. "Miss Lorrie take me in sometimes when things looking bad. But now me daddy know she do it."

"So where did you sleep last night?"

The Jamaican boy hesitated so long that Peter thought he was not going to answer the question. But in the end he said, "All right. Prob'ly it better me tell you, because somebody bound to find out and tell you daddy, anyway. Me did sleep in the mule pen."

"You slept where?"

"In the small mule pen back of the garage, where Mr. Campbell keep him riding mule. Me feel sure me daddy not going to look for me there."

"Weren't you cold?"

"Me did borrow one of Nasty's blankets from the garage." Mr. Campbell called the mule that because of its bad temper, and said if the animal hadn't been so strong and surefooted, he would have sold it and bought a new one long ago.

"Did you have anything to eat?" Peter asked.

Zackie shrugged. "Me most always have things like sardines and bammies hid away in case of trouble." All the country shops sold those things, Peter knew. Bammies were a chewy kind of bun made from cassava, and a couple of them would fill you up pretty quickly.

"Tell me something," Peter said. "Did Miss Lorrie sell the pig for you?"

Zackie reached into a back pocket of his pants and brought out a small wad of Jamaica's colorful bills, and Peter saw that the wad was quite thick. "She did hand me this when she come to work this morning," Zackie said. "When we quit for lunch, me will be putting it in
a secret hiding place me have." He frowned at Peter in silence for a few seconds, as though not sure he ought to say any more. Then he added, "You want to come with me?"

"Why would you want to show me where you keep your money?"

Zackie's dog came racing up at that moment and sat down between his feet, gazing up at his face. Staring into space as if he were thinking about other things, Zackie reached out to pat Mongoose's head. Then he said, "Me have quite a bit of money put away, Peter. If anything was to happen to me and nobody else did know where it is, it would just rot in the ground. Sometimes me think about that."

"Nothing's going to happen to you, Zackie."

"You nuh know me daddy." Zackie looked down at his dog again, gave Mongoose a light poke on the nose, and stood up. "You ready for some more work?"

They worked on the ferrel again until Zackie, looking up at the sky, announced it was time for lunch. Peter was tired again and glad for another chance to rest. He looked at the watch on his left wrist as he, too, straightened up. The time was six minutes past twelve.

"How did you do that?" Peter demanded.

"Do what?"

"How'd you know what time it was?"

Zackie laughed. "Country kids can't afford fancy watches like that one you have. We must have to tell time by the feel of things."

"The sun, you mean?"

"What sun?"

There was none at the moment, Peter saw. In fact, it had gone behind clouds quite awhile back. "Can you always feel what time it is, Zackie?" It was hard to believe, even though he had just been given a demonstration.

"Almost always. Look. You don't have any lunch with you, and you did give me some of yours yesterday. How about sharing mine today?"

"You don't have any lunch."

"Me do at the garden. Come on."

At the garden, Zackie went straight toward the bamboo hut where he kept his tools. "Come on," he urged when Peter stopped a few yards short of it.

Peter went forward again, in time to see Zackie drop to his knees inside the hut and begin to scoop up some dirt from a small section of the floor. That part didn't look any different from the rest, but Zackie hadn't even hesitated before kneeling there. He dug down about a foot, being careful to pile the reddish earth neatly around the opening.

Reaching into the hole then, he lifted out a metal box about the size of a chocolate box. On his knees Zackie opened it, and then turned so Peter could look down and see what was in it. What was in it was paper money—enough of it, Peter realized, to be really important. "For Kingston," Zackie said, looking up so his gaze met Peter's. "Now you know where me keep it. Just in case."

Peter nodded.

Zackie added his wild-pig money to the bills in the tin and returned the container to its hiding place. He carefully refilled the hole with the dirt he had scooped out, and then smoothed the floor so no one would ever suspect anything was buried there. "Okay?" he said, rising to his feet.

Peter knew he had just been shown something that Zackie Leonard had never shown to anyone else. It scared him a little, but made him feel proud. "Okay," he said, solemnly nodding.

"Good. Now mek we have some lunch."

Zackie went to a corner of the little shed and reached up to where the bamboo walls met the roof of old zinc. From a hidden niche there he took two tins of sardines and a plastic bag of bammies. Then to Peter's surprise he reached up again and produced two bottles of the Jamaican soda pop called Kola Champagne.

By this time Mongoose was jumping up and down, as if his back legs were pogo sticks, and making noise enough to shake the walls.