The Duppy (8 page)
During that first day of exercising sole management over the shop, I waged war on and off with the ill-mannered public.
I kicked out malingering youths, ran the doorpost leaners off my veranda, and expelled all noisy quarrellers from the premises.
But the big row of the day was over my new policy of cash on the spot, and man and woman customers alike looked stunned when I told them flatly that all purchases must be paid for with real money.
“Money?” one woman gagged as if the word made her stifle. She shifted uncertainly in her tracks and stared at me like her eyes had never before beheld a cash-and-carry shopkeeper. “What dat mean?”
“It mean dat from now on all is discipline and fiscal restraint.”
“No more writing down in de book?”
“Precisely. Book day done.”
A long pause pushed between us while she studied me.
Finally she scowled and said that in that case she’d have to get some money, and she disappeared out of the shop and returned a few minutes later with a handful of crisp twenty-dollar bills.
Customer after customer did the same thing that long first morning, and I remained perplexed as to why the wretches were so determined to trust goods when they all obviously had bands of money.
It was only later that afternoon that I found out what was happening.
A boy had come into the shop to buy a sweetie and after handing me a new twenty-dollar bill, he shambled away nonchalantly.
“Hey, boy!” I called after him. “Take you change!”
He shrugged and said, “Oh,” and came back in with his hand outstretched, looking sullen and uncaring.
“You almost walk off and leave de money!” I scolded. “Money don’t grow on tree, you know.”
His face lit up with a bright grin. “Money grow on tree, sah,” he blurted with an ill-mannered giggle.
“Don’t be impertinent, boy! Not because you in heaven I-can’t box you down.”
“But sah! A money tree right in you backyard!”
He pointed and headed out the front door toward the rear of my shop. I scurried around the counter and followed him— determined to teach the little wretch not to lie—and he led me to the fenced-off backyard behind my shop and pointed to what I had mistaken for a breadfruit tree.
Swaying high up in its leafy crown was a middle-aged woman I had just run out of my shop because she had wanted to trust some goods. She was balancing on a branch and reaching out to pick twenty-dollar bills from a bunch that rustled and twirled in the afternoon breeze.
She clambered down the trunk unsteadily, for she was not dressed for tree climbing, brushed herself off, and disdainfully handed me a bunch of new bills.
“Dis your idea of fiscal restraint?” I bellowed, stupefied at her gall. “To come pay me for my goods with money you pick off my backyard tree?”
She dusted off her skirt and said she didn’t know anything about any fiscal restraint, but she had climbed the tree fair and square and picked the money and now please to give her the goods she wanted so she could go about her business.
“All morning de whole damn lot of you have been climbing my own tree and paying me with my own money!” I raged.
The youth giggled and gloated, “See! Money grow on tree!”
and sauntered away with a triumphant swagger.
I hollered and bawled and raised the dickens and felt like a fool, but then I gave the woman her goods and she walked off in a peevish mood after turning to me and growling spitefully, “One of dese fine days, Baps, I goin’ hold you down and grind you till you headtop drop off.”
Ignoring her threat, I immediately made another sign that blared,
NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC. PRIVATE MONEY
TREE! NO CLIMBING. NO FLYING. NO PICKING. BY
ORDER. TADDEUS BAPS, ESQ.
Tacking it to the money tree, I went back into my shop feeling aggrieved that once again ole negar had made me look like a monkey.
In the villages of heaven, as in earth, what goes down one woman’s ear immediately pops out of another woman’s mouth, with the result that “discipline” and “fiscal restraint” spread quickly among the population like old-time polio. Indeed, that very evening as I was strolling though the peaceful countryside, some urchins playing cricket in a field bawled out as I passed, “Missah Fiscal Restraint!” and, “Busha Discipline!” which gladdened my spirits and made me walk with a brisker step.
Breathing the fresh scents of the countryside, I wandered over a footpath that wormed through the greenery and encountered the white man whom I had met earlier in the bush. He was squatting gloomily against the trunk of a tree, playing in the dirt.
“Mr. Philosopher,” I greeted him, “how you do?”
He shrugged. “To do you must first be.”
“But you do be,” I countered in a mischievous voice, sitting down nearby on a stump and preparing for bracing argument. “As a matter of fact, you
be
in the Jamaican countryside. What you doin’ here anyway?”
He looked puzzled. “I am not in the Jamaican countryside,” he finally said. “If I were, I’d be the first to know it.”
“But you are here! In the parish of St. Ann. Sitting under a Bombay mango tree.”
He thought about what I had said. “Let me see what happened. I was sick. I died. I was quite sure that I died. I even heard the doctor say, ‘He’s dead.’ But that was obviously from the fever, for if I were really dead, I’d be dead. Yet I know I am dead. So I can’t be where you say I am. Where’s that, by the-way?”
“Jamaican bush. St. Ann parish.”
“I must have flown here. I thought I was flying, saw a nice place to land, and landed. But being dead, of course, I couldn’t have done that. As I said, to do you must first be.”
“And as I said, you do be.”
“I do not be. Neither do you. I would be the first to know.”
“So if you don’t do, and I do not be, how come I’m sitting there talking to you and you’re answering?”
He looked briefly puzzled before brightening. “Because you are in my head.”
The brute didn’t know where he was. He didn’t even know how he got where he was but didn’t think he was. Yet he was proposing a line of reasoning that had him, a visitor to my country, philosophically confining me, a Jamaican national, inside his tourist head. This kind of bamboozled thinking made my hackles rise.
I glared at him long and hard. “Please release me from your head, sah, or I’ll have to tie you up.”
“Why?”
“Because you might wander away and carry me off with you. So admit I not in your head or I going to tie you to a tree.”
He rolled his eyes as if he couldn’t understand my logic. Then, with a little gesture, he shrugged and said that every man must follow his own heart.
I grimly tore some creepers and vines off the ground and proceeded to lash him firmly to the trunk of the mango tree. I was prepared to knock the brute down if he resisted and, having thumped down many a hooligan in my day, I expected no trouble in coping with a puny white man. Fortunately for him, he put up no fight.
I strapped him to the tree, stepped back, and admired my handiwork.
“Now, Mr. Philosopher,” I declared smugly, “you are tied to a tree.”
“I am not tied to anything. A man who is not, cannot be tied.”
“We’ll soon see whether shopkeeper ‘knot’ stronger dan philosopher ‘not,’” I laughed, strolling back to my shop in a cool and enjoyable evening breeze, leaving the brute tied to the tree like a rambunctious ramgoat.
Two or three weeks had passed, and no man in heaven was more content than I, Taddeus Baps.
Discipline and fiscal restraint were catching on among the population, and I was even invited by a village parson to come and discuss money management with his congregation that following Sunday. He told me solemnly that just because money grew on trees up here did not mean that fiscal mismanagement must run amok among the baptized community, and he was sick and tired of the everlasting squandering of funds that even decent people carried on with, especially when the five-hundred-dollar trees were in season.
I was very clearly making my mark in the village. People would occasionally stop me on my evening walks and congratulate me for bringing backbone and discipline to heaven, and not an evening passed when one or two good-neighborly sisters didn’t visit the shop to inquire whether I might be in need of a healthful bedtime grind.
So I was definitely earning the respect of the public, even though I was a newcomer to the district, and I took pride in this accomplishment.
One day I decided to go on my evening stroll into that part of the bush where I had tied up the American philosopher, certain that I would not find him still hanging there, for in heaven even a hardened criminal bound with chains can escape by merely wishing freedom. However, if I did find him there, it would only prove that he was the biggest fool in heaven, and I felt in the mood to match wits with a complete idiot.
Whistling with joy, I was walking down the footpath to the clearing where I had left the philosopher when I heard the cracking sound of stones being thrown and glimpsed a rowdy band of American youths standing next to an overgrown gully and pelting a towering tree with rocks. Nearby on the grass a village constable was dozing in spite of their noisy clatter.
Curious, I wandered over and asked one of the youths, who was rummaging the ground for a stone to throw, what they were doing. He panted that they were from a university in America and had come to Jamaica on a field trip.
At this, he let fly a rockstone at the crown of the tree with all his might.
“But who you stoning?” I asked, watching the rock whizz into the tree and ricochet with a loud crack off a fat limb.
“God!”
“Who?”
“God!” he barked gruffly, hurling another stone at the tree with a whoosh of effort. “God’s in that tree.”
After a paralyzing stab of disbelief and shock, I grabbed the youth by the shoulders and pitched him headlong down the gully as he was in the act of throwing.
“Hey!” he screamed.
“What’d you do that for, you old Jamaican fart?” another youth screeched, charging me.
I grabbed the little wretch by the neck, gave it a wring, and tossed him atop the napping constable, who sprang to his feet with an astonished roar, hurling the boy off him.
A free-for-all followed, with six American youths ganging up on me, and some vicious freewheeling thumping was exchanged.
Of course, thumping in heaven being sweet both to thumper and thumped, the scuffle only caused all of us to split our sides with delight before the noisy hubbub brought the boys’ professor crashing through the bush and demanding to know who had started the fight.
“As long as I have strength and breath,” I stormed, “I’ll thump down any man or boy who dare stone my God!”
A scornful hiss swelled from the milling students, and the professor had to shout to quiet them down.
“They are angry with God,” he announced calmly, “for destroying Hypsilophodon, exterminating Brontosaurus, wiping out the entire line of Tyrannosaurus Rex.”
“He didn’t even leave a single Pteranodon behind,” one of the students moaned sorrowfully, as if he was talking about his murdered grandmother.
In the uneasy silence that settled over the bushland, I turned to the constable and asked him if he knew what these demented foreigners were talking about.
He muttered that he was sorry, he didn’t know, but these names sounded to him like the street nicknames of certain vicious Kingston gunmen.
“We’re talking about dinosaurs,” the professor explained in a voice that said he was addressing an idiot. “These were all dinosaur species that God wiped out.”
“Dinosaurs!” I exploded. “You stone God because He clean de earth of a few nasty lizard?”
The students roared indignantly in one voice, surging to flail at me, but the professor bellowed above the tumult at them to shut up.
As the rumble died down, one of the sullen youths muttered, “Ignorant Jamaican,” loud enough for me to hear. I lunged into the crowd and thumped him right on his top lip, causing him to squeal with ecstasy, and the professor had to restrain the others from charging me and inflicting the joys of pummelling on my person.
“Listen, you, whatever your name is,” the professor cried, his eyes afire, “let’s ask God if what I say isn’t true.” He shouted at the tree growing in the gully, “God, didn’t you make Hypsilophodon extinct?”
An ominous pause followed as we all waited expectantly and stared at the thicket of the tree. A breeze riffled through the clearing and a musically polite voice answered, It wasn’t that simple.
For the benefit of those readers who have never conversed with the Almighty, let me add a brief word of explanation about God talk.
In Hollywood movies, God talks in peals of thunder and bolts of lightning. In heaven, however, God talks only in thoughts. All the religious cavorting that goes on at revival meetings where worshippers will shriek and roll on the ground and babble and claim that God is talking in tongues through them, is never God; it’s duppy encyclopedia salesmen from America, who like to hang around revival tent poles for a joke and babble through the so-called possessed.
“What d’you mean, ‘It wasn’t that simple’? Under your stewardship, didn’t Diplodocus, Pteranodon, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and all the other dinosaurs become extinct?” the professor asked while barbing me with an accusing stare.
Again a lofty and breezy pause followed by the same soft voice, I suppose so.
“Murderer!” yelled one of the students, his face turning red with fury.
I reached over to box the boy’s nasty mouth but the constable held me back. “Mr. Baps, don’t be so hot-tempered.”
“We’re anthropology students from Harvard,” the professor explained. “How do you expect us to feel?”
“I don’t care a damn where you come from,” I raged in his face, “and I don’t care what you feel. Dis is God Almighty you dealing with. Show some respect.”
“Respect for someone who wiped out a whole animal species?” muttered one of the students darkly.
The argument raged back and forth in the clearing. I stood my ground and swore that anytime my eye saw a foreigner stoning my God on the soil of Jamaica, all hell would pop, for I would smite jaw and nose and face without mercy, adding that I didn’t understand why Almighty God didn’t just use His everlasting powers and turn the whole lot of them into fish bait.