Weeds in Bloom (14 page)

The first hour isn’t bad.

Beneath me, the smoking land was blackened, charred by Tuesday’s burn. Every twenty yards, I’d discover a dead animal… rat, possum, rabbit, even a dog. A young pig! It had been trapped and roasted alive.

I didn’t eat the pork. The Jamaicans, however, tore it apart, and it disappeared in minutes.

Foolishly, I had brought nothing to drink. As the day heated, my throat was parched with smoke dust coupled with backbreaking work. Movement unscrewed his jug of “petrol” and gave me its virgin swig. The name has no connection with gasoline or any other petroleum product. It is merely a field beverage, brought along in plastic-gallon milk containers … a blend of dark beer, tomato juice or V8, spices (usually cinnamon or nutmeg), and eggnog, plus a can of condensed milk.

It was poison, but I was parched.

“Petrol,” said Movement, “give a mon power for work, and then be stamina for love.”

The local young black ladies adore Jamaican men, Movement bragged, claiming that they are handsome and more generous (because they work harder and longer, and get paid more), and because Jamaicans are lean and muscular. Add to all this
their enchanting accent. They sing instead of talk.

Movement danced through the day.

With grace, ease, and never an awkward motion or a false step, his cane knife arched its silvery half-circle, cutting and slashing, as if the two of them, and their activity, had been choreographed by some Broadway director.

Nonetheless, it was still hard labor. American blacks refuse to do it. Cane chopping is not artistry. It’s a means of survival for Jamaicans and Haitians. And me. Not because I needed to cut sugarcane to exist. I had to do it to learn enough to write not a book, but at least an accurate chapter.

A fight started.

Some cutter trespassed on another man’s petrol and the silver blades of cane knives were crimson with hot blood. Men shouted. Swore. Bosses came in Jeeps and Rovers, guns fired, and a dog barked.

Jamaicans fear a dog. And any snake.

“If you knife-cut a snake, mon,” Movement informed me seriously, “the poison fly up, and it blind you bad. Forever. And it blind you children back home in the islands.”

It would be immoral, I concluded, to tell Movement that his beliefs were false. Rightfully, one can’t rob a man of his inherent philosophy unless able to instantly replace it with a wiser one. Who could say which tenets were correct? Those of a
Jamaican cane chopper or of a Vermont farm boy turned author?

It was the longest day of my entire semi-retired life, but somehow I made it to sundown.

A bus, this one blue, returned us to the cutter camp. A very large Hispanic crew boss locked the gate behind us. Never presume that field hands, regardless of color or nationality, live a great deal more freely than prior to Emancipation.

After work, we sat shirtless, unable to stir or eat or sleep or breathe, or prepare a meal. Pain pounded my spine. I was too exhausted to unwrap from my wrists and ankles the protective bandages that Movement had provided for my safety. Everywhere, eyes were staring at other faces. Somewhere, a cutter was sharpening his cane knife, rasping a file to and fro across the edge of a metal blade. I could smell cookery of some sort, possible red beans and rice, collards, and a mash of supermarket junk that the local merchants sold to all the cutters at a boosted price.

The whores came.

Each woman brought a blanket and a bottle or two of cheap wine. Movement bought himself a jump. He invited me to tag along in order to observe his prowess. Politely, I declined. Listening to the bickering that eventually determined her price was enough of an education. The prostitutes
were all ages. None tempting. Already I had contracted herds of body lice, which were now galloping through the tundra of my southern hemisphere like a panic of lemmings.

In the night, I began to ponder if the people at the Clewiston Inn were wondering of my whereabouts. I was truly wondering myself.

At havens of Okeechobee respectability, such as the Clewiston Inn or the Port LaBelle Inn, I am known as Mr. Peck, a successful author. There, no one calls me Tall Guy or asks me to douse my thirst with a sip from a plastic milk-jug of petrol.

At hotels, no one scratches.

At sugarcane camps, everyone does.

For me, it was a challenge to gain entrance into a labor camp. Now, lying in the dark, afraid, awaiting Movement’s return from his metered romancing, I began to wonder if I could escape from this sewer and return to soap, and sanity. Nearby, there was a toilet bowl. A stagnant puddle of brown smelly filth. No toilet paper. A gray core was hanging uselessly from a triangular wire.

Movement returned.

I expected him to be smiling.

He wasn’t. Instead, he seemed depressed, as if he had sold himself into a lower level of society and fouled his body. Also his wife.

“Tall Guy!” he hollered above the constant
noise of fighting, gambling, and a poorly functioning radio on batteries. “Mon, I hope I don’t catch a misery. Had it a one time. Hurt like a whip to pee.”

He lay quiet.

Near us, two cutters were playing dominoes, banging each little black brick on a plywood square supported by cement blocks, yelling and trying to shave the odds. Each domino was played with such untamed force, as though the players had decided that noise and violence tallied up a win.

Before dawn, I hid and escaped, clawing earth and crawling under a chain fence, through buggy water, to freedom. A schoolteacher stopped his Toyota to offer me a lift. A do-gooder not yet mugged. I was, however, oh so grateful. He never told me his name. I retained mine. We rode by another camp, littered with wastepaper and beer cans and empty wine bottles.

“May I drop you in town?”

I surprised him with ten dollars. “No, thank you. Please cart me as close to the Clewiston Inn as you dare. I’m much too dirty and exhausted to explain in any relevant Aristotelian logic.”

His mouth fell a foot.

I ducked in the back door of the Clewiston Inn, on the north side, and sneaked by the cocktail lounge, which is on the right as one enters. My hall ran to the left.

Following a bath, a shave, and a generous application of paratox (a product used to rid one of head lice, body lice, crab lice, and their countless eggs), I stretched out on a clean and unslept-on bed, hoping that the liquid parasiticide was exterminating my little guests and their progeny. The next day I also tried dog shampoo. It all worked.

I kept thinking of Movement.

One evening more than a month later, I returned to the cutter camp, bribing a gate guard with a twenty and a jug of wine. It took a while to find the cement-block structure where I’d slept. Where he’d slept. Men were inside, cooking, arguing, punching each other, laughing, gambling at dominoes and Blackjack and Casino. They were drinking the cheap wine that a cutter was forced to buy, thirsty or not.

“You seen Movement?” I asked a cutter, then another, and more.

Nobody said a word. No man would admit that he had ever known Move or watched him dance. Movement had simply disappeared, evaporated as milk into the unknown plastic container that is a Sugarland harvest of lives as well as cane.

“Is he dead?”

No answer.

I can only conclude that he is. A cane knife across a throat can snuff a man very quickly. And
everywhere in the Okeechobee area run canals and ditches, a thousand nooks to stash a corpse. You could hide a horse.

Possibly there’s a chance that certain sugarcane choppers go to Heaven, a clean place where there are no long sun-scorching days, no green buses. But there has to be music. Because somewhere a talented Jamaican is dancing and gliding gracefully to some celestial reggae.

Even if there’s no music at all, angels will certainly hear it as soon as they see Movement dance.

I
HAD TO STOP MY TRUCK
.

Pulling off the red-clay road, I jumped down from the cab of my pickup and walked back about thirty or forty feet.

“You deserve saving.”

Picking up the large dark-green turtle, I was surprised how heavy it felt. A big one, dishpan size. Its shell could have served as Goliath’s war helmet. Carrying it to the road’s edge, I hopped a ditch, fixing to release the turtle to a cactus patch, in shade. Beyond the cactus was a stand of low-growing palmetto that the Florida swampers call fan palms. Two main varieties. Smooth-stalked and thorny. This was thorny: little curly barbs (on a brown stem) that can chew at flesh and near eat it.

Setting the turtle down and straightening up, I
made that alarming one-second discovery that I wasn’t alone. Between a pair of palmetto shrubs, there was a human face, staring at me.

Not for long.

Eyes now looked at the turtle. From a distance of ten yards, I could identify a child’s face. Very lean, and very dirty. Long stringy hair that appeared not to have known a comb or a brush. A little girl. Moving a step or two to my right, I saw more of her. Her shabby dress seemed to have no color. Just cloudy. She pointed at the turtle. I guessed that she might have been after it as I’d stopped the truck and that she was concerned I was going to rob the turtle for myself.

“Hello,” I said.

No reply. As expressionless eyes continued to study me, she neither advanced nor fled. Her age was perhaps eight or nine. Thin arms. Circling her unwashed mouth was a black ring of grease.

“My name’s Rob.”

No response.

Until now, the turtle had been as motionless as the little girl. Then a head appeared, a tail, four clawed feet. He crawled forward, unhurried as turtles are. Not interested in the turtle but curious about this child, I followed.

“Where are you going?” I asked him. His flat cream-colored belly shell was drawing a smooth
trail on the loose sand, with a double border of claw swipes. The turtle track reminded me of marks left by an Army tank.

I followed the turtle.

The little girl followed me.

Of the three of us, I was the only one who contributed to the conversation, but no sophisticate could label it inspired chatter.

“Better hurry,” I advised the turtle. “Because this young lady and I are after you and it’ll be a cinch to catch up.”

We all stopped. I stopped because the turtle did. She stopped, I presumed, because I had. Then a guess. Pointing at the turtle, and to her, I made signs that suggested she wanted the turtle for food. If not a turtle, she certain was in need of some other dish, because this child was close to bone-skinny. Too close.

“Are you hungry?”

She nodded.

“Me too,” I said. “What’s your name?” No answer. “My name’s Robert, or Rob, mostly.” I thought for a moment or two. “Maybe you and I ought to capture that big ol’ turtle and eat him for supper.”

She shook her head. Then, to my amazement, spoke.

“I fetch him to home.”

Florida, 1977. Turtle and Dove, pony mare and foal, a filly.

Smiling, I nodded, and told her, “Okay, he’s all yours. Not mine. Because you probable saw him first.” To substantiate my intent, I pointed to myself and shook my head. Then, pointing to the turtle and to her, I nodded.

Running to the turtle, she tried to lift it, but couldn’t. Oh, perhaps a couple of inches, but that was about it. Setting the turtle down, she looked at me helplessly, as though fixing to sob or run away.

I went to her.

“Please don’t cry,” I said. Bending, I picked up the turtle, realizing why such a burden was too much for her to tote. “Which way, and how far?”

Saying nothing, she walked away briskly, looking over a bony shoulder to check if I followed. Again, as I walked, I noticed her dress. A pathetic rag. Suitable, however, for Florida heat, perhaps only in the privacy of a swamp. Earlier, I’d seen no indication that the little girl wore any underwear. Needless to add, she was barefoot, including dirty legs, ankles, and toes. But kids have a right to get dirty.

The turtle was becoming heavier.

I was starting to realize that this whopper was the largest turtle I’d ever lifted. Or carried. Believe this for sure, his tail was to my belt buckle, head forward. At the moment, he was totally withdrawn from society, and I was grateful for his momentary hermitage.

“Brother,” I told my turtle friend, “give up desserts.”

As I glanced at the trusting little girl, now walking ten steps in front of me, it seemed plausible that this child had never eaten even one dessert in her lifetime.

Moving further and further inland, I was wondering if I’d again locate my truck. The landscape changed. Closer to the road, the trees that we had passed beneath had been pines and oaks, a few sycamores in full leafy green. Behind me the earth had been firm, harder and dryer. Here,
however, the dirt was a soft, blacker muck.

More ferns.

Along the road, high ground, I’d heard the musical variety of mockingbirds and the sharp
chit chit chit
of cardinals. No longer. As I walked along, I noticed more wading birds, long-legged white cranes and blue herons. Frogs and cicadas seemed to be tuning up, stilling as we passed, then resuming their constant choir. I saw a white ibis standing silently on one long slender leg, her scimitar beak cocked and ready to become a weapon.