Limekiller, glad to be free of that freezing gaze, bent over the bottles. “Whiskey, Major?” he asked, solicitously. “Water? Soda?” There was no ice.
For the first time Deak gave him the benefit of his attention. “Whiskey?” he demanded. “ Whiskey? Before the sunset gun? Certainly not. Gin and tonic, Stickney.” Limekiller, fairly crushed, yielded his place at the bar.
Squatting peacefully in the shade as she smoked her pipe, a middle-aged Arawack woman had given Jack a brief nod; he supposed she was the housekeeper. The floor here must have certainly been swept, for the Arawack were notoriously vigorous sweepers; but sand had been tracked inside, and the breeze, that same breeze which had been so reluctant to waft the Saccharissa along with any speed at all, now blew the sand in little swirls and eddies. “I’d thought to retire here,” Major Deak, perhaps none the better for his deep sip of Mother’s Ruin (and perhaps none the worse: he did not, somehow, have the look of a drinkard), continued his plaint. “Thought to put up a house and several cottages, take in a few congenial paying guests. The only solid place on the caye is under this house, this half-built house. Got to pave the rest of the place, in effect, clear off the mangrove, which I can’t even sell, market for tanbark is sated, not to say cloyed; clear off the mangrove, box in the bog and fill it with sand like a kiddies’ sand box. half the time when we've dumped I don’t know how many boatloads of sand, I find that the plot wasn’t boxed in at all, and the sand just slips away. ‘Cottages’? Can’t even seem to get this house finished, let alone cottages. Can’t hire proper workmen, they don’t want to work out on the caye, don’t want to stay overnight, they come late and leave early, collect their wages and are gone till they’re spent, demand advances, don’t return to earn them back, steal tools,” the drone went on. Limekiller had little doubt that there was much to complain. Bayfolk would work hard, would work very hard indeed. but they much preferred to work their hard work in King Town, the ancient capital which was London, Paris, Rome, and Jerusalem to them. Away from King Town and its incessant cheerful noise, away from the dram-shops with their convivial tencent glasses of low-proof local rum and local water, away from the chance to lime the passing women and girls, away from the continuous opportunity to break the monotony of labor with a purchase from passing vendors of fried conch-flitter or a handful of peanuts or a cluster of fibrous pocono-boy nuts; away from all this and from the very bumboats gliding along the Foreshore or the canals, the Bavman tended to wilt and to lose interest. All this was nothing new to Jack. Nor did Deak seem at all the type to toil alongside his workmen and cheer them up with a jest or a quip.
And he certainly did not look as though a jest or a quip would cheer him up. At all. And as for his very evident bad health, Jack, in the words of the song, was not a qualified physician and did not want to give the decision. Perhaps the man had picked up one of the multitude of little-known bugs which added to the White Man’s Burden… or for that matter, the Black and Brown. Whoever. Or, if a psychosomatic illness, well, a perforated ulcer, for example, caused by worry, was a hole in the stomach just as much as a hole in the stomach not caused by worry. Or, putting it another way, three and three equals six and so does four plus two equals six and so five and -
“Oh, I works fih Whitemon fih money,” sang someone in the cheerful yard, „ahn I geeves eet to my honey,” and at once Nora or was it Gwendolyn or Eva, cried out in a cheerful shriek, “You naw geeve eet to me!” Much laughter. The singer shouted “What I does geeve you, gyel? Eef you no like eet, senn eet bock!” Much, much laughter.
“Did you have much trouble getting here today?” was Jack’s question to Stickney Forster.
“No. None. We’ve a good little engine in the boat. One of yours, you know, Johnson.”
Perhaps not every boat motor in the waters of “the Colony” was a Johnson-Evinrude, but Johnson, in Hidalgo-English — or anyway, in Bavtalk — was the word for an outboard engine. “Ah, you came by motorboat,” said Jack, nodding.
“Yes. You not? No, I see not. I well remember, on my old boat, sometimes trying to avoid this cave, yet it keeps coming back into sight. And sometimes, try as one will, it seems that one can hardly get here at alclass="underline" the winds require one to tack back and forth. Well, on certain days. And the old people, de w’old people,”he slipped into Baytalk, not at all in mockery but as though to reinforce his own statement; ""they used to say, those days are the anniversaries of hangings.” Having said this, in a tone slightly that of saying something in confidence, Stickney Forster seemed rather resentful at having said it. He gave a covert look at Major (‘Judge”) Deak. Who had not seemed to hear it, was studying his gin. It was, after all, his gin; was he perhaps recollecting the sign over the cellar in Hogarth’s Gin Lane engraving. Drunk for a penny. Dead drunk for two pence. Clean Straw for nothing.? George IV brand gin cost a deal more than a penny.
But someone else had heard it. Felix removed her water-overmangrove-bark-dark gaze from Limekiller’s eyes (but what have I done? he cried in his heart; she did not seem to have heard it), and turned to — almost on — Stickney Forster. “You still hang people here, then?” she asked.
Stickney Forster seemed, suddenly, or once again, a very model of a model English gentleman. With no trace of the old colonial or modern North American tones which had overlaid his accent previously, he said, “Yes. I’m afraid we do. you know. ”
“Yes. I’m afraid I do know'. But isn’t that a very terrible thing to do?”
As an attorney, either for the Crown or in private practice, he was usually capable of speaking crisply and succinctly. Now? Not. “Hm, well, still, hm, you know, I don’t know,” he said, brushing back the tip of his auburn moustache with the tip of his auburn finger, and sounding almost as if he had determined to burlesque himself. “I don’t know, you know. About that. Not so sure. About that. You know.”
“No,” said Felix, suddenly as calm as the eye of a hurricane. “I don’t know. Explain it to me.”
Stickney concentrated. Cleared his throat. “ Well. You are from The States, I take it.” “You may.” “Well, you see. Now you must be familiar with at least one large city in The States. Hmm. Ah, Chicago. You’ve been in Chicago?” Felix had been in Chicago. “Well. There you are.”
“I am where?”
Clearly she was going to give him no help at all. He made a long, slow motion with his long, slow hand, tawny from the tropic sun. Made up his mind to make his point. “Well. In which place do you feel safer? At night, I mean?”
Felix was hostile. But, whether poor or not, she was honest. “Here,” she said.
He nodded. “Exactly so. And do you know why? Because of Murderers. Beg pardon. But you do let them get away with murder there. Perhaps what you call ‘a good lawyer’ gets them off. If not, what then? Found guilty? Appeal. Appeals. Chap wears the courts out, often. Evidence grows stale. New trial? Witnesses have died. Or grown forgetful. Or reluctant. Chap often walks away free. Or. Guilty? No new trial? ‘Life imprisonment’? Out on the streets in six years. Perhaps does it again.