Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (73 page)

‘What is it that you tell her to do?’ This from Cornelis, recovering, shocked, puzzled.

‘It is their damnable “obi”,’ hissed Honoria. ‘I will make her “take it off” you or I’ll kill her.’

‘It is her mother,’ said Cornelis, suddenly inspired. ‘I know about her mother. I asked. Her mother, this girl’s mother, there in the hills – it is the girl’s mother who does this wickedness.’

Honoria suddenly shifted her desperate grip upon the girl’s numb arms. She twisted, and Julietta’s slender body, yielding, collapsed limply to the floor. With a lightning-like motion, back and then forward again, Honoria menaced her with the great carving-knife, snatched from before her husband.

‘Get up!’ Her voice was low now, deadly. ‘Get up, you devil, and lead me to your mother’s house.’

Julietta, trembling, silent, dragged herself to her feet. Honoria pointed to the door with the knife’s great shining blade. In silence the girl slipped out, Honoria following. Cornelis sat, still numb with that fearful reaction after his unbearable pain, slumped forward now in his mahogany armchair at the head of his table. His bones felt like water. His head sank forward on his arms. He remained motionless until Alonzo, the groom, summoned from the village by the frightened, gray-faced cook, who had overheard, roused him, supported him upstairs.

The two women passed around the corner of Fairfield House, skirted the huddled cabins of the estate-village in silence, began to mount the steep hill at the back. Through tangled brush and twining, resistant guinea-grass, a slender trail wound abruptly upward into the deeper hills beyond. Up, and always up they went, the Caucasian lady grim and silent, the great knife held menacingly behind the unseeing back of the brown girl who stepped around turns and avoided roots and small rocks with the ease of custom.

At the head of the second ravine Honoria’s conductress turned sharply to the right and led the way along the hill’s edge toward a small clearing among the mahogany and tibet tree scrub. A dingy cabin, of wood, with the inevitable corrugated-iron roof, hung perilously on the hill’s seaward edge. Straight to its door walked Julietta, paused, tapped, opened the door and, pressed close by Honoria, entered.

A dark brown woman peered at them across a small table. With her thumb, Honoria noted, she was rubbing very carefully the side of a small waxlike thing, which glistened dully in the illumination of a small, smoky oil lamp standing on the table. The woman, her eyes glassy as though from the effects of some narcotic drug, peered dully at the intruders.

Honoria, her left hand clenched tightly on Julietta’s wincing shoulder, confronted her, the knife’s point resting on the table beside the brown hand which held the wax. This was molded, Honoria observed, to the rough simulacrum of a human being.

‘That is my husband!’ announced Honoria without preamble. ‘You will take your “obi” off now. Otherwise I will kill you both.’

A long, blackened needle lay beside the brown woman’s hand on the table. She looked up into Honoria’s face, dully.

‘Yes, me mistress,’ she acquiesced in a singsong voice.

‘You will do that at once!’ Honoria tapped her knife-blade on the table decisively. ‘I am Fru Hansen. I was Honoria Macartney. I mean what I say. Come!’

The brown woman laid the wax image carefully down on the table. She rose, dreamily, fumbled about in the semidarkness of the cabin. She returned carrying a shining, new tin, half filled with water. This, as carefully as she had handled the wax image, she set down beside it. Then, as gingerly, she picked up the image, muttered a string of unintelligible words in the old Crucian Creole, thickly interspersed with Dahomeyan. Honoria recognized several of the words – ‘
caffoón
’,
‘shandràmadan
’ – but the sequence she could not grasp.

The brown woman ended her speech, plunged the image into the water. She washed it carefully, as though it had been an incredibly tiny infant and she fearful of doing it some injury by clumsy handling. She removed it from the tin of water, the drops running down its surface of oily wax. She handed the image, with a suggestion of relaxed care now, to Honoria.

‘Him aff, now, me mistress; I swear-yo’, him aff! I swear yo’ be Gahd, an’ help me de Jesus!’

Honoria took the image into her hand, looked at it curiously in that dim light, made upon it with her thumb the sign of the cross. Then she slowly broke it into pieces, the sweat standing in beads on her face. She turned, without another word, and walked out of the cabin. As she proceeded down the trail, laboriously now, her legs weak in her high-heeled slippers, she cast crumbling bits of the wax right and left into the dense scrub among the bushes at the trail’s sides. Her mouth and throat felt strangely dry. She murmured inarticulate prayers.

She limped into Fairfield House half an hour later and found Cornelis entirely restored. He asked her many questions, and to these she returned somewhat evasive answers. Yes – she had gone to Julietta’s mother’s cabin up the hill. Yes – the ‘stupidness’ of these people needed a lifetime to realize. No – there had been no difficulty. Julietta’s mother was a ‘stupid’ old creature. There would be no more trouble, she was sure. It was extraordinary what effects they could produce. They brought it with them from Africa, of course – stupidness, wickedness – and handed it down from generation to generation . . .

She might have her own thoughts – men were very much alike, as her mother had said – as the days wore into weeks, the weeks into the placid years which lay before her, with her man, here at Fairfield for a while, later, perhaps, in some larger house, in a more important position.

What had caused that devilish little Julietta to contrive such a thing? Those eyes! That mouth! Honoria had seen the hatred in her face.

She would, of course, never ask Cornelis. Best to leave such matters alone. Men! She had fought for this man – her man.

She would give him of her full devotion. There would be children in time. She would have, to replace Julietta, a new housemaid. There was one she remembered, near Christiansted. She would drive over tomorrow. The affairs of a Santa Crucian wife!

Cornelis plainly loved her. He was hers. There would be deviled land-crabs, sprinkled with port wine, dusted with herbs, baked in the stone oven for breakfast . . .

The Tree-Man

My first sight of Fabricius, the tree-man, was within a week of my first arrival on the island of Santa Cruz not long after the United States had purchased the Danish West Indies and officially re-named its new colony the Virgin Islands of the United States.

My ship came into Frederiksted harbor on the west coast of the island just at dusk and I saw for the first time a half-moon of white sand beach with the charming little town in its middle. In the midst of the bustle incident to anchoring in the roadstead, there came over the side an upstanding gentleman in a glistening white drill uniform who came up to me, bowed in a manner to commend itself to kings, and said: ‘I am honored to welcome you to Santa Cruz, Mr Canevin. I am Director Despard of the Police Department. The police boat is at your disposal when you are ready to go ashore. May I see to your luggage?’

This was a welcome indeed. I was nearly knocked off my feet by such an unexpected reception. I thanked Director Despard and before many minutes my trunks were overside, my luggage bestowed in the police boat waiting at the foot of the ladder-gangway, and I was seated beside him in the boat’s sternsheets, he holding the tiller-ropes while four coal-black convicts rowed us ashore with lusty pulls at their long sweeps.

Through the lowering dusk as we approached the landing I observed that the wharf was crowded with black people. Behind these stood half a dozen knots of white people, conversing together. A long row of cars stood against the background of waterfront buildings. I remarked to the Police Director: ‘Isn’t it unusual for so many persons to be on the docks for the arrival of a vessel, Mr Director?’

‘It is not usual,’ replied the dignified gentleman beside me. ‘It is for you, Mr Canevin.’

‘For me?’ said I. ‘Extraordinary! What – for me? Certainly – my dear sir – certainly not for me. Why, it’s  . . . ’

Mr Despard turned about and smiled at me.

‘You are
Captain McMillin’s great-nephew,
you know,
Mr
Canevin.’

So that was it. My great-uncle, one of my Scots kinsfolk, my great-uncle who had died many years before I had seen the light of day, my grandfather’s oldest brother, the one who had been in the British Army and later a planter here on Santa Cruz. He had been the very last person I should have thought of, and now –

The police boat landed smartly at the concrete jetty. Mr Despard and I landed, and in the lowering dusk I could not help noticing the quietly-expressed but very genuine interest of the thousand or more Negroes who thronged the wharf as they courteously parted a way for us while we proceeded toward the groups of white people, thronging forward now with a unanimous and unmistakable greeting shining from dozens of kindly faces.

I will pass over the rest of that first evening ashore. At the end of it and its lavish hospitality I found myself comfortably installed in a small private hotel pending the final preparations to my own hired residence. I found every estate-house on Santa Cruz open to me. Hospitalities were showered upon me to the point of embarrassment, kindnesses galore, considerate and timely bits of information, help of every imaginable kind. I learned in this process much about my late great-uncle, all of which information was new to me, and it was not long after my arrival when it was arranged for me to visit his estate, Great Fountain.

I went with Hans Grumbach, in his Ford car, a bumpy journey of more than three hours up hills and through ravines and along precipitous trails on old roads incredibly roundabout and primitive.

All the way Hans Grumbach talked about this section of the island, now rarely visited. Here, up to ten years before, Grumbach had lived as the last of a long line of estate-managers which the old place had had in residence since the day, in 1879, when my Scottish relatives had sold their Santa Crucian holdings. It was now the property of the largest of the local sugar-growing corporations, known as the Copenhagen Concern. Because of its inaccessibility cultivation on it had finally been abandoned and Hans Grumbach had come to live in Frederiksted, married the daughter of a respectable Creole family, and settled down to keeping store on one of the town’s side streets.

But, it came out, Grumbach had wanted for all those ten years, to go back to the northern hills. This trip to the old place stimulated his loquacity. He sang its praises: the beauty of its configuration, its magnificent views and vistas, the amazing fertility of its soil.

We arrived at last. All about us the vegetation had grown to be ideally tropical, the ‘tropical’ of old-fashioned pictures on calendars! The soil appeared to be rich, blackish ‘bottomland’.

The old estate was in a sad state of rack and ruin. We walked over a good part of it under the convoy of the courteous black caretaker, and looked out over its rolling domain from various angles and coigns of vantage. The Negro village was half tumbled-down. The cabins remaining were all out of repair. The characteristic quick tropical inroads upon land ‘turned out’ of active cultivation were everywhere apparent. The ancient Great House was entirely gone. The farm buildings, though built of sound stone and mortar, were terribly dilapidated.

On that visit to Great Fountain I had my first experience of the ‘grapevine’ method of communication among Africans. I had been perhaps four days on the island, and it is reasonably certain that none of these people had ever so much as heard of me before; these obscure village Negroes cut off here in the hills from others the nearest of whom lived miles away. Yet, we had hardly come within a stone’s throw of the remains of the village before we were surrounded by the total population, of perhaps twenty adults, and at least as many children of all ages.

As one would expect, these blacks were of very crude appearance; not only ‘country Negroes’ but that in an exaggerated form. Negroes in the West Indies have some tendency to live on the land where they originated, and as it happened most of these Negroes had been born up here and several generations of their forebears before them.

We had brought our lunch along, and this Hans Grumbach and I ate sitting in the Ford under the shade of a grove of magnificent old mahogany trees, and afterwards Grumbach took me up along a ravine to see the ‘fountain’ from which the old estate had originally derived its title.

The ‘fountain’ itself was a delicate natural waterfall, streaming thinly over the edge of a high rock. It was when we were coming back, by a slightly different route, for Grumbach wanted me to take in everything possible, that I saw the tree-man.

He stood, a youngish, coal-black Negro, of about twenty-five years, scantily dressed in a tattered shirt and a sketchy pair of trousers, about ten yards away from the field-path we were following and from which a clear view of a portion of the estate was obtained, and beside him, towering over him, was a magnificent coconut-palm. The Negro stood motionless. I thought, in fact, that he had gone asleep standing there, both arms clasped about the tree’s smooth, elegant trunk, the right side of his face pressed against it.

He was not, however, asleep, because I looked back at him and his eyes – rather intelligent eyes, they seemed to me – were wide open, although to my surprise he had not changed his position, nor even the direction of his gaze, to glance at us; and, I was quite sure, he had not been in that village group when we had stood among them just before our lunch.