The Long Song (16 page)

 

 

 

 

R
UN! RUN! GET FAR from here. Trouble! White man’s trouble! Flee! But there was no time. For Caroline Mortimer was already within the doorway—her face pallid, her mouth slack, her breath stopped. Trapped lying beneath the bed, Nimrod’s limbs twitched with phantom running, and a fretful July still needed to piss water.

Seeing her brother lying upon the floor, Caroline decided to believe him drunk; after all it would not have been the first time. The overturned chair, the unmistakable clap of a pistol firing (for she now knew that sound well) would, she thought, have some simple explanation; as would that grey drift of gun-smoke that dimmed the room. ‘John,’ she said, almost gaily, ‘what has happened?’

But then Tam Dewar entered in upon the scene. He pushed roughly past her, then dropped to his knees next to her brother and turned his prone body over. He leaned his ear to her brother’s chest before prising the spent pistol from between his fingers. It was only when the overseer, taking her brother’s head within his hands, stared aghast at the grievous lesion—the gory blood-black crater that was once the back of his head—that Caroline Mortimer’s innocent fancy vanished. Her legs went limp beneath her. She staggered across the room to land with a hefty fall upon the bed. She did not hear the overseer declare her brother dead for she was too busy screaming, ‘Bring the doctor! Someone, someone run for the physic! Marguerite, quickly! Marguerite! Where is Marguerite? She must bring the doctor. Marguerite!’

Molly, arriving, took in the circumstance faster than the missus did with her two good eyes. ‘The massa be shot,’ Molly shouted. While Byron, eyeballs gawping like a whistling frog’s, ran in-and-out, in-and-out the room, proclaiming, ‘Massa dead, massa dead.’ Which brought Florence and Lucy to the doorway. ‘Dead, dead, him is no more,’ they relayed over their shoulder for who knows who to carry it upon the next breath. It was Patience who caught the blare of that fierce chat-chat. She rushed in upon the room, demanding loudly, ‘Massa John? Is Massa John dead? Dead you say, Massa John?’

‘Stop your gawking,’ Caroline exclaimed, ‘and bring the doctor.’

The dog growled wild at the overseer bent fiddling over the massa’s body. And, Molly, smirking unmistakably with the excitement of it all said, ‘Lord, how him head mash up, missus. It mash up.’

‘Shut up! Just hold your tongue, the lot of you,’ Tam Dewar blasted upon the air. He stamped his foot, lunging at the dog until the hound turned tail. He grabbed Molly by the scruff and threw her at the doorway. She landed, stunned, against the frame. Patience, he pushed, punched, and poked, toward the door. She stumbled over Molly and both scrabbled from the room on all fours. He landed his boot upon our little Byron’s backside with so hard a kick that the boy was lifted from the floor by it and cried for several hours after. He showed his fist to Florence and Lucy, for they stood too far for him to reach with a blow. With the room now purged of negroes, he shut the door behind them with an almighty slam.

July, firmly pinned by the droop of her missus’s backside as it squashed the bed down finally had to allow her piss to soak her. While Nimrod, with no sound, nor movement, without taking breath nor making gesture, resolutely commanded July not to reveal herself but to stay . . . stay still . . . stay-oh-so-still.

‘He is dead, Mrs Mortimer.’ Even as the overseer lifted his two thick palms to Caroline, which were marbled with her brother’s blood, she still asked feebly, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Aye. He has shot himself.’

‘He has what?’

‘He has taken his own life, Mrs Mortimer.’

‘His own life, you say?’

‘Aye.’

‘Are you saying he inflicted this upon himself?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Nonsense. My brother would never do such an unchristian thing, Mr Dewar,’ Caroline informed him. The room reeked like a butcher’s shop—there was just not enough air within it. Was it the overseer that stank so? Caroline got up to move toward the window. She had to, or she would faint, she knew it. But his noxiousness trailed her.

‘Look, look, see for yourself,’ the overseer said. It was with his boot that he flipped over the head of her brother so she might have a clearer view of that dreadful wound. ‘The shot went in here,’ he carried on, as if her brother were some freshly slaughtered cattle, ‘and came out here.’

‘Don’t touch him. How dare you touch him? Leave him alone.’ Caroline rushed to stand guard over her brother’s body.

‘He put the pistol to his mouth,’ the overseer said.

‘He would never do such a thing, he would never. It is against God.’

‘It’s the best way to do it, and he’d know it,’ the overseer told her.

Caroline was determined to think carefully upon this situation. Her brother was dead. Shot. Perhaps by his own hand. By his own hand! Oh God! She needed to deliver to that ghastly overseer the action that she required him to take. For it was he that was in her brother’s employ and not the other way about. But first, as his tender, loving, bereaved sister, she would clasp her brother tightly to her sorrowful breast, wipe his pitiful brow, and deliver a kiss of sweet parting upon his cheek. She would prepare his melancholy soul for that everlasting hereafter by washing his face with her grieving tears. But, oh Lord, he was a bloody sight. Caroline Mortimer could not bring herself to gaze upon his gruesome corpse, let alone embrace it.

‘He’s left you with a pretty mess,’ the overseer said. And the bald truth of that assertion buckled her knees until Caroline fell back upon the bed sobbing.

Perhaps if Tam Dewar had been a gentleman—her and her brother’s equal, and not just the son of some lowborn Scots fisherman who, in England, she would not even deign to look upon, let alone solicit an opinion from—Caroline Mortimer may have wished to ask of the overseer why he believed her brother was driven to perform such a profane act as taking his own life. And, perhaps, if Tam Dewar were a person for whom despair and the sorrow of death were still disquieting intruders upon his soul, and not the stuff of his daily bread, then he may have thought it an act of Christian solace to disclose to Caroline Mortimer what he and her brother had witnessed after they had left her table to join their militia.

He may have started by recalling for her the uneasy ride through town that he and John Howarth took as they rode to join their regiment, that was barracked up near Hope Hill. There were no higglers upon the road. No black faces calling boisterous for these white massas to buy their Guinea and Indian corn, their nuts, their sweet cakes, their bundles of firewood, piles of cane, their colourful ribbons or coarse pots, their jack fruits, sweet potatoes, their yams, berries and beans. Not even that curious old woman, who sat with a turkey atop her head upon the corner of Main Street, was to be seen that day, and she was always found wilting beneath her prize bird, no matter what the season.

The negro blacksmith upon the parade near the coopers—him who kept three slaves himself—he was all shut up with ‘gone to visit me sister’ chalked upon his door. That expensive preserve shop, the dry goods store, and every single laundry hut in town were deserted. No food was steaming upon fires along the wharf; no groups of raucous negroes chatting and chewing over those victuals there.

The courthouse saw no restless crowds jostling, anxious, around its doors, nor heard the sharp calls from the buying and selling of the luckless human harvest that was usually being exchanged. There were no ragged children tormenting dogs and chickens about the square. No white people, in their straw hats and bonnets, walked along the road, stepping their fine shoes carefully out of the harm of a puddle of water or dung, while holding their noses away from niggers. Their house slaves were not to be found haggling for them, or being scolded for the dear price as they tripped at their owners’ heels.

Even those three coloured girls who worked in the boarding house along King Street, were not at their open window laughing at the ugly hats that went by them.

All this absence muffled this usually bustling town with a disquieting gloom that the overseer—and perhaps even John Howarth—thought draped around those elegant streets heavy as a black velvet cloak.

They gathered in from all about the district, from plantations, estates, pens, churches and town, the regulars of the Trelawny Interior Militia under the practised command of Captain Shearer. These white men’s pistols were cocked, and their powder was plentiful and dry. Rebel slaves were firing the trash houses up upon Castle Estate. Be warned, they were told, there are a lot of them—forty, fifty, reports were unclear. One or two hundred, someone said, armed with stolen muskets, fowling pieces, carbines, pistols, and shouting, ‘War! War! War!’ Some say these nigger rebels had come from Montego Bay, where they had taken a whole barracks—seized the arms. Nonsense, what piffle, Captain Shearer said, for negroes were never so shrewd.

The militia’s orders were to punish the guilty—all principals and chiefs in these burnings—without mercy. For those who surrender—if they yield themselves up and beg, beg, beg, then, perhaps, they will receive a gracious pardon from his majesty for their crimes. But certain death to all those blacks who foolishly hold out.

The forty white men of the Trelawny Interior Militia rode on to the level land of the Castle Estate in one phalanx. Among them were planters whose families hailed from Canterbury, Bloomsbury and Camden Town; attorneys who talked of home in Bristol, Whitstable and Fife; overseers from Galway, Great Yarmouth, Cardiff and Bow; ministers and curates whose families fretted for them in Exeter and Norwich, St Austell and Sheffield; bookkeepers who had just run from the mills of Lancashire, the mines of Glamorgan and an asylum in Glasgow. All advanced to the vicinity of the plantation works with their jaws jutting with resolve.

Soon they came upon intense flames—a trash house was being devoured with the swiftness of a dragon licking tinder. The bitter smoke from the crackling dry cane leaves blew dense about them, choking at their throats and smarting their eyes blind. Suddenly, from their left and from behind, came bursts of discharging musket fire. Ping, ping. This was not forty negroes, ping, not fifty. Ping, ping, ping. This was a thousand. Maybe ten thousand!

The Trelawny Interior Militia were surrounded—caught stumbling and trapped. These white men, charged to protect property, women, children and loved ones, were men of the land—oh, how the truth of this rumbled through the guts of every man there—they were not soldiers, they were not redcoats. Hold your nerve, Captain Shearer had to order of them. Hold your nerve!

But then the light from that fire spread a golden daylight across that black night, as if the sun had just risen. And there, revealed in their pitiful hiding places, were the few old negroes who had set the fire. Those slaves were suddenly exposed, clear as players in limelight, as they crouched to aim their old cutlasses and fowling pieces.

The noise of the thousand muskets firing was the bamboo burning—the air inside the grass all around them popping with the heat. By gad, it sounded to them like gunfire. But now those revolting niggers were shown to be clutching rusting, squeaking, wood-rotten, useless weapons—last-century stuff that needed an hour to re-arm—that those sneak-thieves had hidden in their roofs or under their huts for years. Oh, what a relief. It was not these ragged rebels that were terrifying the gallant Trelawny Interior Militia—it was popping bamboo!

Bang, bang, bang—and those few old slaves fell dead upon the ground.

Bang, bang, bang, silhouetted against the light, they were as easy to shoot as pots off a fence. Some slaves ran from their hiding places to lose themselves in long grasses, but were chased and felled like squealing wild boars. Others came grovelling to kiss the feet of any militia man who would spare them. Shivering, their eyes wide with fright, stinking of shit, and protesting that they were forced at the point of a nigger’s bayonet to enjoin this fight, they were put to work dousing their fire with pails of dirt.