THE RAIN HAS STOPPED, and the sky, suddenly scraped clear, sparkles darkly with stars, and the trees and hills drip in the new silence. Colonel Bowra, his lieutenant Harris, and the white American sit alone on Bowra’s porch around a small table. On the table are a pack of Craven A’s, a quart bottle of white rum, and a smoke-smudged kerosene lantern. The three men are smoking and drinking straight from the bottle and talking in low, intimate voices about the Colonel of the Nyamkopong Maroons, Martin Luther Phelps, a man they believe deserves to die. Or so they say. They agree that the man is a traitor, like Juan Lubolo, who went over to the British and ended his life chopped to bits by his betrayed brethren. They agree that Cudjoe would have killed any of his people who had gone over to the slavemasters’ side, even one of his own brothers. Too many of the old Africans suffered and died for the treaty, they say, to let someone today get away with treating it like a scrap of paper. That’s why the Maroons call it the “Blood Treaty,” that and because it was signed in blood by the Maroons and the Englishmen as well. Let the Englishmen violate the treaty if they will—they are so many that not much can be done to them for it. But when a Maroon Colonel himself violates the treaty, when a Maroon Colonel himself invites the police to breakfast and lets them seize and take off Maroon land any man they wish, when he lets them beat that man in the street and tie him up like an animal and then makes excuses for them—when all that happens, you kill him for it. And there is no way on this island to escape death when the Maroons have decided that you must die. You can smile and beg and bow down and lick boots, but your head will drop off. You can surround your house with police and guns, but in the morning your wife will wake up next to a dead man. You can run into the bush and try to hide out there, but the Maroons will track you down and stick you like a pig and carry you back tied to a pole, with your head banging in a bucket hooked to the front of the pole. You can run into the city and try to hide in a white man’s house, but the white man will go out on business, and when he returns, he will see your blood streaming across his tile floor. You can run to Negril in the west or Morant in the east, and you will come to the sea, and in the morning your head will come bobbing in on the waves.
A boy, shirtless and barefoot and sleepy-looking, comes out of the house carrying a white chicken by its feet. The bird lifts its head like a snake’s and gazes steadily at Bowra. Harris gets up and goes inside the house, returning in seconds with a blue plastic bowl and a kitchen knife and a bronze statuette the size of a human hand, an eagle with its beak open and wings spread. When the boy gets the chicken upside down and in front of Bowra, the man stabs the bird in the throat and bleeds it into the bowl. Bowra speaks in a low, rumbling voice, no longer using patois, and Harris joins in. When the bird has been bled dry, the boy leaves, taking the carcass with him, and Bowra swiftly mixes rum and, from his jacket pocket, seeds and crumpled leaves into the blood, chanting in a low voice while he stirs the mixture, then suddenly drinks off the mixture, emptying the bowl. The eagle that was a bronze statuette flaps its wings, screeches, and flies off its pedestal, flutters for a few seconds in the lamplight near the porch, then soars into the night sky. The three men rise at once off their chairs as if to follow the bird. In a second, the white man has fallen back to his chair—then, a few seconds later, Harris. But Bowra has gone on rising, like a great puff of smoke that hovers over the lamp, dimming it, then moving away from the cluttered tabletop, off the porch to the yard, where he floats in the shadows cast by the lower branches of the breadfruit trees, and, silently, he rises and disappears into darkness.
At the table, Harris and the American stare coldly at each other. In a harsh voice, Harris barks a string of unknown words into the American’s face, and the American bellows back in English, Shut up! I don’t know what the hell you’re saying! A vicious sneer slowly curls over Harris’ mouth, and he picks up the knife and draws the edge of the blade across the underside of his left wrist. The black skin parts and blood bubbles into the cut, swiftly running into the cupped palm of the hand. Then he extends the knife to the American, who with his right hand draws the knife slowly across his left wrist and lets the blood spill over the white skin into his cupped palm, which the black man suddenly clasps in his, mixing and splashing the blood down their arms. Again, Harris shouts at the American, and again, the American tells him to shut up, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s saying!
Harris smiles, stands, and quickly walks from the porch, leaving the American alone in his chair, the lamplight flickering over the empty rum bottle, the blue bowl, the knife, the bloodied arm. Bats dart across the yard beyond, doves huddle and coo at the feet of the trees, and a large tan moth flashes toward the lamp and dives erratically at the glass chimney, as if there could be light without heat and this cone of light were somehow a hole into day.
Slowly, moving his body like a man moving chains, he gets up from his chair, blows out the lamp, and enters the darkness. He walks to the end of the porch, steps down to the muddy ground, and crosses the yard to his car. Opening the side door and closing it behind him, he then locks all the doors, after which he carefully stretches himself out on the middle seat, as if he were handling the body of an invalid, and sleeps.
In the morning, he will be wakened by the sound of children playing on the roof of his car. He will wash himself in the stream below the road and will eat jerked pork and yams with Colonel Bowra on the porch, and then he will drive back along the north coast to Anchovy. When at sunset he arrives at his home on Church’s Hill and has hugged and kissed his children and his wife, he will discover that the Rastaman, his friend Terron Musgrave, has been waiting there for him since midday, waiting to give him the news that Colonel Martin Luther Phelps has been killed.