“Where the medicine herbs grew?”
“Why, yes, Mr. Limekiller. Where they grew. As I suppose they still do. No one really knows, of course, what still grows down at Cape Mandee, though Nature, I suppose, would not change her ways. It was the hurricanes, you see. The War Year hurricanes. Until then, you know, Government had kept a road open, and once a month a police constable would ride down and, well, at least, take a look around. Not that any of the people there would ever bring any of their troubles to the police. They were. well, how should I put it? Tom, howr would you put it?”
Tom thought a long moment. “Simple. They were always simple.”
What he meant by “simple,” it developed, was simple-minded.
His aunt did not entirely agree with that. They gave that impression, the Mandee people, she said, but that was onlv because their ways were so different. “There is a story,” she said, slowly, and, it seemed to Jack Limekiller, rather reluctantly, “that a British man-of-war took a Spanish slave-ship. I don’t know when this would have been, it was well before we came down and settled here. Well before The War. Our own War, I mean. It was a small Spanish slaver and there weren’t many captives in her. As I understand it, between the time that Britain abolished slaverv and the dreadful Atlantic slave-trade finally disappeared, if slavers were taken anywhere near Africa, the British would bring the captives either to Saint Helena or Sierra Leone, and liberate them there. But this one was taken fairly near the American coast. I suppose she was heading for Cuba so the British ship brought them here. To British Hidalgo. And the people were released down at Cape Mandee, and told they could settle there and no one would ‘vex’ them, as thev sav here.”
Where the slaves had come from, originally, she did not know, but she thought the tradition was that they had come from somewhere well back in the African interior. Over the course of the many subsequent years, some had trickled into the more settled parts of the old colony. “But some of them just stayed down there,” she said. “Keeping up their own ways.”
“Too much intermarrying,” Tom offered.
“So the Bayfolk say. The Bayfolk, were always, I think, rather afraid of them. None of them would ever go there alone. And, after the hurricanes, when the road went out, and the police just couldn’t get there, none of the Bayfolk would go there at all. By sea, I mean. You must remember, Mr. Limekiller, that in the 1940s this little colony was very much as it was in the 1840s. There were no airplanes. There wasn’t one single highway. When I say there used to be a road to Mandee, you mustn’t think it was a road such as we’ve got between Port Cockatoo and Shiloh.”
Limekiller, thinking of the dirt road between Port Cockatoo and Shiloh, tried to think what the one between Port Cockatoo and the region behind Cape Mandee must have been like. Evidently a trail, nothing more, down which an occasional man on a mule might make his way, boiling the potato-like fruit of the breadnut tree for his food and feeding his mule the leaves: a trail that had to be “chopped,” had to be “cleaned” by machete-work, at least twice a year, to keep the all-consuming bush from closing over it the way the flesh closes over a cut. An occasional trader, an occasional buyer or gatherer of chicle or herbs or hides, an occasional missioner or medical officer, at infrequent intervals would pass along this corridor in the eternal jungle.
And then came a hurricane, smashing flat everything in its path. And the trail vanished. And the trail was never re-cut. British Hidalgo had probably never been high on any list of colonial priorities at the best of times. During the War of 1939–1945, they may have forgotten all about it in London. Many of Hidalgo’s ablebodied men were off on distant fronts. An equal number had gone off to cut the remaining forests of the Isle of Britain, to supply anyway a fraction of the wood which was then impossible to import. Nothing could be spared for Mandee and its people; in King Town, Mandee was deemed as distant as King Town was in London. The P.C. never went there again. No missioner ever returned. Neither had a medical officer or nurse. Nor anv trader. No one. Except for Malcolm Stuart.
“He did try. Of course, he had his own concerns. During the War he had his war work. Afterwards, he took up a block of land a few miles back from here, and he had his hands full with that. And then, after, oh, I don’t remember how many years of stories, stories — there is no television here, you know, and few people have time for books — stories about the Mandee people, well, he decided he had to go have a look, see for himself, you know.”
Were the Mandee people really eating raw meat and raw fish? He would bring them matches. Had they actually reverted to the use of stone for tools? He would bring them machetes, axes, knives. And… as for the rest of it. the rest of the rather awful and certainly very odd stories… he would see for himself.
But he had seen nothing. There had been nothing to see. That is, nothing which he could be sure he had seen. Perhaps he had thought that he had seen some few things which he had not cared to mention to Jack, but had spoken of to the Shiloh people.
They, however, were not about to speak of it to Jack.
“Adventure,” said Amelia Lebedee, dismissing the matter of Mandee with a sigh. “Nobody wants the adventure of cutting bush to plant yams. They want the adventure of night clubs and large automobiles. They see it in the moving pictures. And you, Mr. Limekiller, what is it that you want? coming, having come, from the land of night clubs and large automobiles. ”
The truth was simple. “I wanted the adventure of sailing a boat with white sails through tropic seas,” he said. “I saw it in the moving pictures. I never had a night club but I had a large automobile, and I sold it and came down here and bought the boat. And, well, here I am.”
They had talked right through the siesta time. Tom McFee was ready, now, to return for the few more planks which the sawmill might — or might not — have managed to produce since the morning. It was time to stand up now and to make thanks and say goodbye. “Yes,” said Amelia Lebedee, pensively. “Here we are. Here we all are. We are all here. And some of us are more content being here than others.”
Half-past three at the Cupid Club. On Limekiller’s table, the usual single bottle of beer. Also, the three chaparitas of rum which he had bought — but they were in a paper bag, lest the sight of them, plus the fact that he could invite no one to drink of them, give rise to talk that he was “mean.” Behind the bar, Alfonso Key. In the dark, dark back, slowly sipping a lemonade (all soft drinks were “lemonade” — coke was lemonade, strawberry pop was lemonade, ginger stout was lemonade. sometimes, though not often, for reasons inexplicable, there was also lemon-flavored lemonade) — in the dark rear part of the room, resting his perpetually sore eyes, was old Captain Cudgel.
“Well, how you spend the night, Jock?” Alfonso ready for a tale of amour, ready with a quip, a joke.
“Oh, just quietly. Except for the manatees.” Limekiller, saying this, had a sudden feeling that he had said all this before, been all this before, was caught on the Moebius strip which life in picturesque Port Cockatoo had already become, caught, caught, never would be released. Adventure!. Hah!
At this point, however, a slightly different note, a slightly different comment from the old, old man.
“Een Eedalgo,” he said, dolefully, “de monatee hahv no leg, mon. Becahs Eedalgo ees a smahl coun-tree, ahn every-teeng smahl. Every-teeng weak. Now, een Ahfrica, mon, de monatee does hahv leg.”