Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (75 page)

Africans, supposedly static in cultural matters, have solved all these problems. And, very prominent among these, especially as it concerns the agricultural peoples – for there are, perhaps, as many black nations, kindreds, peoples, tongues, as there are Caucasian – is, of course, the question of weather.

Hence, the ‘tree-man’.

Set apart with ceremonies which were ancient when Hammurabi sat on his throne in Babylon, a young boy is dedicated to a forest tree. Thereafter he spends his life beside that tree, cares for it, tends it, listens to it; becomes ‘the-brother-of-the-tree’ in time. He is truly ‘set apart’. To the tree he devotes his entire life, dying at last beside it, in its shade. And – this is African ‘culture’ if you will; a culture of which we Caucasians get, perhaps, the faint reactions in the (to us) meaningless jumble of Negro superstition which we sense all about us; the ‘stupidness’ of the West Indies; faint, incomprehensible reflections of a system as practical, as dogmatic, as utilitarian, as the now well-nigh universal system of synthetic exercise for the tired businessman which goes by the name of golf!

These Negroes at Great Fountain were, primarily, agriculturists. They had the use of the soil bred deeply in their blood and bones. That, indeed, is why the canny French brought their Hispaniola slaves from Dahomey. Left to themselves at the old estate in the north central hills of Santa Cruz the little community rapidly reverted to their African ways. They tilled the soil, sporadically, it is true, yet they tilled it. They needed a weather prognosticator. There are sudden storms in summer throughout the vast sweep of the West India Islands, devastating storms, hurricanes indeed; long, wasting periods of drought. They needed a tree-man up there. They set apart Silvio Fabricius.

That fact made the young fellow what a white man would call ‘sacred’. Not for nothing had they danced and performed their ‘stupid’ rites those three long days and nights to the detriment of Hans Grumbach’s deliveries. No. Silvio Fabricius, from the moment he had clasped his arms about that growing coconut-palm, was as much a person ‘set apart’, dedicated, as any white man’s pundit, priest, or yogi. Hence the various
tabus
which, like the case of the green coconuts, had puzzled Hans Grumbach. He must never take his attention away from the tree. There, beside it, he was consecrated to live and to die. When he departed from his ‘brother’ the tree, it was only for the purpose of reporting something which the tribe should know; something, that is, which his brother the tree had told him! There would be drenching rain the second day following. A plague of small green flies would, the third day later, come to annoy the animals. The banana grove must be propped forthwith. Otherwise, a high wind, two days hence, would nullify all the work of its planting and care.

Such were the messages that Silvio Fabricius, austere, introspective, unnoticing, his mind fully preoccupied with his brotherhood to the tree, brought to his tribe; proceeding, the message delivered, austerely back to his station beside the magnificent palm.

All this, because of my status as the great-nephew of an old Bukra whom he remembered with love and reverence, and because he discovered that I knew about tree-men and many other matters usually sealed books to Bukras, the old fellow who was the village patriarch, who, by right of his seniority, received and passed on from Silvio the messages from Silvio’s brother the tree, amply substantiated. There was nothing secretive about him, once he knew my interest in these things. Such procedure as securing the possession of a tree-man for his tribe seemed to the old man entirely reasonable; there was no necessary secret about it, certainly not from sympathetic me, the ‘yoong marster’ of Great Fountain Estate.

And Hans Grumbach, once he had finished with his road-work, not being aware of all this, but sensing something out of the ordinary and hence to be feared about Silvio Fabricius and his palm tree, decided to end the stupidness out there. Grumbach decided to cut down the tree.

If I had had any inkling of this intention I could have saved Grumbach. It would have been a comparatively simple matter for me to have said enough to Carrington to have him forbid it; or, indeed, as a partner in the control of the estate, to forbid it myself. But I knew nothing about it, and have in my statement of his intention to destroy the tree supplied my own conception of his motives.

Grumback, although virtually Caucasian in appearance, was of mixed blood, and quite without the Caucasian background of superior quality which makes the educated West Indian
mestizo
the splendid citizen he is in so many notable instances. His white ancestry was derived from a grandfather, a Schleswig-Holsteiner, who had been a sergeant of the Danish troops stationed on Santa Cruz and who, after the term of his enlistment had expired, had married into a respectable colored family, and remained on the island. Grumbach was without the Caucasian aristocrat’s tolerance for the preoccupations of the blacks. To him such affairs were ‘stupidness’, merely. Like others of his kind he held the black people in a kind of contempt; was wholly, I imagine, without sympathy for them, though a worthy fellow enough in his limited way. And, perhaps, he had not enough Negro in him to understand instinctively even so much as what Silvio Fabricius, the tree-man, stood for in his community.

I had, too, you will remember, known something in those six years, of his viewpoints, his reactions to the ‘stupidness’, and, specifically, some knowledge at least of his direct reaction, his pique and resentment, as these arose from his contacts with the tree-man. As I have indicated, the element of fear colored this attitude.

He chose, cannily, one of the periods when Fabricius was away from his tree, reporting to the village. It was early in the afternoon, and Grumbach, having finished his roadwork several days before, was directing a group of laborers who were grubbing ancient ‘bush’ – heavy undergrowth, brush, rank weeds, small trees – from along the winding trail which led from the village to the fountain or waterfall. This was now feeding a tumbling stream which Carrington intended to dam, lower down, for a central reserve reservoir.

The majority, if not all, of these laborers under his eye at the moment were new to the village; members of the increasing group which were coming into the restored stone cabins as fast as these became habitable. They were cutting out the brush with machetes, canebills, and knives; and, for the small trees, a couple of axes were being used from time to time. This work was being done quite near the great tree, and from his position in the roadway overlooking his gang, Grumbach must have seen the tree-man leave his station and start toward the village with one of his ‘messages’.

This opportunity – he had, unquestionably, made up his mind about it all – was too good to be lost. As I learned from the two men whom he detached from his grubbing-gang and took with him, Silvio Fabricius was hardly out of sight over the sweep of the lower portion of the great field near the upper edge of which the coconut-palm towered, when Grumbach called to the two axe-men to follow him, and, with a word to the rest of the gang, led the way across the field’s edge to the tree.

About this time Carrington and I were returning from one of our inspections of the fountain. We had been up there several times of late, since the scheme for the dam had been working in our minds. We were returning toward the village and the construction work progressing there along the same pathway through the big field from which, years before, I had had my first sight of the tree-man.

As we came in sight of the tree, toward which I invariably looked when I was near it, I saw, of course, that Fabricius was not there. Grumbach and his two laborers stood under it, Grumbach talking to the men. One of them as we approached – we were still perhaps a hundred yards distant – shook his head emphatically. He told me later that Grumbach had led them straight to the tree and commanded them to chop it down.

Both men had demurred. They were not of the village, it is true, not, certainly, Dahomeyans. But – they had some idea, even after generations away from ‘Guinea’, that here was something strange; something over which the suitable course was to ‘go stupid’. Both men, therefore, ‘went stupid’ forthwith.

Grumbach, as was usual with him, poor fellow, was vastly annoyed by this process. I could hear him barge out at the laborers; see him gesticulate. Then from the nearest, he seized the axe and attacked the tree himself. He struck a savage blow at it, then, gathering himself together, for he was stout like the middle-aged of all his class, and unused to such work, he struck again, somewhat above the place where the first axe-blow had landed on the tree.

‘You’d better stop him, Carrington,’ said I, ‘and I will explain my reasons to you afterward.’

Carrington cupped his hands and shouted, and both Negroes looked toward us. But Grumbach, apparently, had not heard, or, if he had, supposed that the words were directed to somebody other than himself. Thus, everybody within view was occupied, you will note – Carrington looking at Grumbach; the two laborers looking toward us; Grumbach intent upon making an impression on the tough coconut wood. I alone, for some instinctive reason, thought suddenly of Silvio Fabricius, and directed my gaze toward the point, down the long field, over which horizon he would appear when returning.

Perhaps it was the sound of the axe’s impact against his brother the tree apprehended by a set of senses for seventeen years attuned to the tree’s moods and rustlings, to the ‘messages’ which his brother the tree imparted to him; perhaps some uncanny instinct merely, that arrested him in his course toward the village down there, carrying the current ‘message’ from the tree about tomorrow’s weather.

As I looked, Silvio Fabricius, running lightly, erect, came over the distant horizon of the lower field’s bosomed slope. He stopped there, a distant figure, but clearly within my view. Without taking my eyes off him I spoke again to Carrington.

‘You must stop Grumbach, Carrington – there’s more in this than you know. Stop him – at once!’

And, as Carrington shouted a second time, Grumbach raised the axe for the third blow at the tree, the blow which did not land.

As the axe came up, Silvio Fabricius, a distant figure down there, reached for the small sharp canebill which hung beside him from his trouser-belt, a cutting tool with which he smoothed the bark of his brother the tree on occasion, cut out annually the choking mass of ‘cloth’ from its top, removed fading fronds as soon as their decay reached the stage where they were no longer benefiting the tree, cut his coconuts. I could see the hot sunlight flash against the wide blade of the canebill as though it had been a small heliograph-mirror. Fabricius was about a thousand yards away. He raised the canebill empty in the air, and with it made a sudden, cutting, pulling motion downward; a grave, almost a symbolic movement. Fascinated, I watched him return the canebill to its place, on its hook, fastened to the belt at the left side.

But, abruptly, my attention was distracted to what was going on nearer at hand. Carrington’s shout died, half-uttered. Simultaneously I heard the yells of uncontrollable sudden terror from the two laborers at the tree’s foot. My eyes, snatched away from the distant tree-man, turned to Carrington beside me, glimpsing a look of terrified apprehension; then, with the speed of thought, toward the tree where one laborer was in the act of falling face-downward on the ground – I caught the terrified white gleam of his rolled eyes – the other, twisting himself away from the tree toward us, the very personification of crude horror, his hands over his eyes. And my glance was turned just in time to see the great coconut which, detached from its heavy, fibrous cordage up there, sixty feet about the ground, struck Grumbach full and true on the wide pitch helmet which he affected, planterwise, against the sun.

He seemed almost to be driven into the ground by the impact. The axe flew off at an angle past the tree.

He never moved. And when, with the help of the two laborers, Carrington and I, having summoned a cart from the nearby road-gang cutting bushes, lifted the body, the head which had been that poor devil Grumbach’s, was merely a mass of sodden pulp.

We took the body down the road in the cart, toward his newly erected manager’s house. And a few yards along our way Silvio Fabricius passed us, running erectly, his somber face expressionless, his stride a kind of dignified lope, glancing not to right or left, speeding straight to his brother the tree which had been injured in his absence.

Looking back, where the road took a turn, I saw him, leaning now close beside the tree, his long fingers probing the two gashes which Hans Grumbach, who would never swing another axe, had made there, about two feet above the ground; while aloft the glorious fronds of the massive tree burgeoned like great sails in the afternoon Trade.

Later that afternoon we sent the mortal remains of Hans Grumbach down the long hill road to Frederiksted in a cart, decently disposed, after telephoning his wife’s relatives to break the sorrowful news to her. It was Carrington who telephoned, at my suggestion. I told him that they would appreciate it, he being the head of the company. Such
nuances
have their meaning in the West Indies where the finer shades are of an importance. He explained that it was an accident, gave the particulars as he had seen them with his own eyes – Grumbach had been working under a tall coconut-palm and a heavy coconut, falling, had struck him and killed him instantly. It had been a quite merciful death.

The next morning, I walked up toward the fountain again, alone, after a sleepless night of cogitation. I walked across the section of field between the newly-grubbed roadside and the great tree. I walked straight up to the tree-man, stood beside him. He paid no attention to me whatever. I spoke to him.