Chapter XVI
I
Plunkett’s ances-tree (his pun) fountained in blossoms
and pods from a genealogical willow
above his blotter’s green field. One pod was the Somme’s.
It burst with his father’s lungs. Then a pale yellow
asterisk for a great-uncle marked Bloemfontein.
At the War Office he’d paid some waxworks fellow
to draw flowers for battles, buds for a campaign.
The cold-handed bugger’d done it for a fortune.
Undertaker’s collar, bald as a snooker-ball,
as hunched as a raven, he plucked titles in turn
from their cliffs of gilt ledgers, picking with his bill
from Agincourt to Zouave, returning to where
he found blue blood in the Plunketts. The Major
voiced no objection. But why Scots? Why a claymore
with a draped tartan? And, when the willow faded
into a dubious cloud, he smiled. To pay more,
naturally, and he did. A carved, scrolled shield waited
at the willow’s base, his name and hyphen
for a closing date, then a space for son and heir.
“No heir,” he told the mummy from Madame Tussaud,
who believed he had dropped an aitch. “I mean ‘No. Here,’”
snapped the Major, pointing to where the blank place showed
on the waiting shield. “No heir: the end of the line.
No more Plunketts.”
The crow wrote it on the design.
II
An evening with the Plunketts: he marking cannons
by their Type, Trunions, Bore, Condition, Size, Weight,
in a marbled ledger, by order of Ordnance,
Cipher—GR. III, GR>IV, Site, Silhouette, Date,
nib scratching the page, beaking the well for a word,
Maud with her needle, embroidering a silhouette
from Bond’s Ornithology, their quiet mirrored
in an antique frame. Needlepoint constellations
on a clear night had prompted this intricate thing,
this immense quilt, which, with her typical patience,
she’d started years ago, making its blind birds sing,
beaks parted like nibs from their brown branch and cover
on the silken shroud. Mockingbirds, finches, and wrens,
nightjars and kingfishers, hawks, hummingbirds, plover,
ospreys and falcons, with beaks like his scratching pen’s,
terns, royal and bridled, wild ducks, migrating teal,
pipers (their fledgling beaks), wild waterfowl, widgeon,
Cypseloides Niger, l’hirondelle des Antilles
(their name for the sea-swift). They flew from their region,
their bright spurs braceleted with Greek or Latin tags,
to pin themselves to the silk, and, crying their names,
pecked at her fingers. They fluttered like little flags
from the branched island, budding in accurate flames.
The Major pinched his eyes and turned from the blotter—
green as a felt field in Ireland—and saw her mind
with each dip of her hand skim the pleated water
like a homesick curlew. Frogs machine-gunned the wind.
Dun surf cannonaded. A star furled its orchid,
faded and fell. The hours drowsed like centuries
mesmerized by the clock’s metronome. Maud lifted
and shook the silk from her lap, smoothing her knees.
She did not look up. He watched as the beaked scissors made
another paper cutout. A scratch in his throat
made him cough, softly. Softly the pendulum swayed
in its ornate mahogany case; he was tired,
but her hair in the aureole cast by the shade
never shifted. How often had he admired
her hands in the half-dark out of the lamplit ring
in the deep floral divan, diving like a swift
to the drum’s hoop, as quick as a curlew drinking
salt, with its hover, skim, dip, then vertical lift.
Tonight he shuddered like the swift, thinking,
This is her shroud, not her silver jubilee gift.
His vision was swimming with fathom-depths, degrees
bubbling with zeroes on the old nautical charts;
he pinched his eyesockets. Cannons flashed from his eyes.
He dropped the dividers, tired of fits and starts;
the exact line of engagement was hard to find,
whimsical cartographers aligned the islands
as differently as dead leaves in a subtle wind.
He bent to the map, rubbing his scalp with his hands.
III
Once, after the war, he’d made plans to embark on
a masochistic odyssey through the Empire,
to watch it go in the dusk, his “I” a column
with no roof but a pediment, from Singapore
to the Seychelles in his old Eighth Army outfit,
calculating that the enterprise would take him
years, with most of the journey being done on foot,
before it was all gone, a secular pilgrim
to the battles of his boyhood, where they were fought,
from the first musket-shot that divided Concord,
cracking its echo to some hill-station of Sind,
after which they would settle down somewhere, but Maud
was an adamant Eve: “It’ll eat up your pension.”
But that was his daydream, his pious pilgrimage.
And he would have done it, if he had had a son,
but he was an armchair admiral in old age,
with cold tea and biscuits, his skin wrinkled like milk,
a gawky egret she stitched in her sea-green silk.
Chapter XVII
I
Now, whenever his mind drifted in detachment
like catatonic noon on the Caribbean Sea,
Plunkett recited every billet, regiment,
of the battle’s numerological poetry;
he learnt eighty ships of the line, he knew the drift
of the channel that day, and when the trade wind caught
the British topsails, and a deep-draught sigh would lift
his memory clear. At noon, he climbed to the fort
as his self-imposed Calvary; from it, the cross
of the man-o’-war bird rose. He heard the thunder
in the cannonading caves, and checked the pamphlet
from the museum, ticking off every blunder
with a winged V, for the errors in either fleet.
In his flapping shorts he measured every distance
with a squared, revolving stride in the khaki grass.
One day, at high noon, he felt under observance
from very old eyes. He spun the binoculars
slowly, and saw the lizard, elbows akimbo,
belling its throat on the hot noon cannon, eyes slit,
orange dewlap dilating on its pinned shadow.
He climbed and crouched near the lizard. “Come to claim it?”
the Major asked. “Every spear of grass on this ground
is yours. Read the bloody pamphlet. Did they name it
Iounalo for you?”
The lizard spun around
to the inane Caribbean. Plunkett also.
“Iounalo, twit! Where the iguana is found.”
He brought it for the slit eye to read by the glow
of the throat’s furious wick.
“Is that how it’s spelt?”
The tongue leered. The Major stood, brushed off his khaki
shorts, and rammed the pamphlet into his leather belt.
“Iounalo, eh? It’s all folk-malarkey!”
The grass was as long as his shorts. History was fact,
History was a cannon, not a lizard; De Gr
asse
leaving Martinique, and Rodney crouching to act
in the right wind. Iounalo, my royal arse!
Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle
in naval history, which put the French to rout,
fought for a creature with a disposable tail
and elbows like a goalie? For this a redoubt
was built? And his countrymen died? For a lizard
with an Aruac name? It will be rewritten
by black pamphleteers, History will be revised,
and we’ll be its villians, fading from the map
(he said “villians” for “villains”). And when it’s over
we’ll be the bastards! Somehow the flaring dewlap
had enraged him. He slammed the door of the Rover,
but, driving down the cool aisle of casuarinas
like poplars, was soothed by the breakwater. In a while
he was himself again. He was himself or as
much as was left. Innumerable iguanas
ran down the vines of his skin, like Helen’s cold smile.
II
He kept up research in Ordnance. The crusted wrecks
cast in the armourer’s foundry, the embossed crown
of the cannon’s iron asterisk: Georgius Rex,
or Gorgeous Wrecks, Maud punned. In that innocence
with which History fevers its lovers, a black wall
became its charred chapel, and a mortar-seized fence
of green stones near the Military Hospital
bent his raw knees for a sign; when he came outside
from a pissed tunnel, his face had the radiance
of a convert. How many young Redcoats had died
for her? How many leaves had caught yellow fever
from that lemon dress? He heard the dry bandolier
of the immortelle rattling its pods. “Forever”
was the flame tree’s name, without any reason,
since it marched like Redcoats preceding the monsoon.
How was the flower immortal when it would flare
only in drought, a flag of the rainy season,
of gathering thunderheads, each with its scrolled hair
wigged like an admiral’s? Then he found the entry
in pale lilac ink. Plunkett. One for the lacy trough.
Plunkett? His veins went cold. From what shire was he?
III
On what hill did he pause to watch gulls follow a plough,
seabag on one shoulder, with his apple-cheeked sheen?
This was his search’s end. He had come far enough
to find a namesake and a son. Aetat xix.
Nineteen. Midshipman. From the horned sea, at sunrise
in the first breeze of landfall, drowned! And so, close
his young eyes and the ledger. Pray for his repose
under the wreath of the lilac ink, and the wreath
of the foam with white orchids. Bless my unbelief,
Plunkett prayed. He would keep the namesake from Maud.
He thought of the warm hand resting on the warm loaf
of the cannon. And the crown for which it was made.
Chapter XVIII
I
The battle fanned north, out of sight of the island,
out of range of the claim by native historians
that Helen was its one cause. An iguana scanned
the line of a sea that settled down to silence
except for one last wash over the breakwater
as the French fleet worked its way up to Guadeloupe
with Rodney heeling them hard. What he was after
was such destruction it would be heard in Europe—
masts splintering like twigs and fed to the fire
in George the Third’s hearth—in which the sun’s gold sovereign
would henceforth be struck in the name of one Empire
only in the Caribbean, gilding the coast
of the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to Maine.
The Dutch islands were in Rodney’s pocket and the cost
to the New England colonies was the French fleet
racing like mare’s tails, each ship a dissolving ghost
of canvas turned cloud, until that immense defeat
would block their mutinous harbours from arms and men.
The Major made his own flock of V’s, winged comments
in the margin when he found parallels. If she
hid in their net of myths, knotted entanglements
of figures and dates, she was not a fantasy
but a webbed connection, like that stupid pretense
that they did not fight for her face on a burning sea.
He had no idea how time could be reworded,
which is the historian’s task. The factual fiction
of textbooks, pamphlets, brochures, which he had loaded
in a ziggurat from the library, had the affliction
of impartiality; skirting emotion
as a ship avoids a reef, they followed one chart
dryly with pen and compass, flattening an ocean
to paper diagrams, but his book-burdened heart
found no joy in them except their love of events,
and none noticed the Homeric repetition
of details, their prophecy. That was the difference.
He saw coincidence, they saw superstition.
And he himself had believed them. Except, once,
when he came into the bedroom from the pig-farm
to pick up his chequebook, he was fixed by her glance
in the armoire’s full-length mirror, where, one long arm,
its fist closed like a snake’s head, slipped through a bracelet
from Maud’s jewel-box, and, with eyes calm as Circe,
simply continued, and her smile said, “You will let
me try this,” which he did. He stood at the mercy
of that beaked, black arm, which with serpentine leisure
replaced the bangle. When she passed him at the door
he had closed his eyes at her closeness, a pleasure
in that passing scent which was both natural odour
and pharmacy perfume. That victory was hers,
and so was his passion; but the passionless books
did not contain smell, eyes, the long black arm, or his
knowledge that the island’s beauty was in her looks,
the wild heights of its splendour and arrogance.
He moved to the coiled bracelet, rubbing his dry hands.
II
The bracelet coiled like a snake. He heard it hissing:
Her housebound slavery could be your salvation.
You can pervert God’s grace and adapt His blessing
to your advantage and dare His indignation
at a second Eden with its golden apple,
henceforth her shadow will glide on every mirror
in this house, and however that fear may appall,
go to the glass and see original error
in the lust you deny, all History’s appeal
lies in this Judith from a different people,
whose long arm is a sword, who has turned your head
back to her past, her tribe; you live in the terror
of age before beauty, the way that an elder
longed for Helen on the parapets, or that bed.
Like an elder trembling for Susanna, naked.
He murmured to the mirror: No. My thoughts are pure.
They’re meant to help her people, ignorant and poor.
But these, smiled the bracelet, are the vows of empire.
Black maid or blackmail, her presence in the stone house
was oblique but magnetic. Every hour of the day,
even poking around the pigs, he knew where she was;
he could see her shadow through the sheets of laundry,
and since she and her shadow were the same, the sun
/>
behind her often made their blent silhouette seem
naked, or sometimes, carrying a clean basin
of water to the bleaching stones, she wore the same
smile that made a drama out of every passing.
III
The village was bounded by a scabrous pasture
where boys played cricket. On its Caribbean side
was a cemetery of streaked stones and the tower
of a Norman church where the old river died.
Like reeds in the old lagoon the French in their power
had lifted a forest of masts with Trojan pride.
When the pages of sea-grapes in their restlessness
lifted a sudden gust, through asterisks of rain,
he climbed the small hill of garbage, and on its mess
he stood there, measuring out the site with his cane
and a small map he had found that was falling apart
from its weathered spine in the back of the library.
From this he had made his own diagram, a chart
that he measured as two thousand steps from the sea,
which concluded in the mound’s elegiac rampart.
In the rain-blotted dusk, what was he raking for,
poking with his cane there among the ruined shoes,
a question on a seething heap, raking some more
when something shone, metallic? What thing did he lose?
The midden was a boredom of domestic trash
whose artifacts showed nothing but their simple sins,
as clearly as rainwater in a calabash,
cracked as the crescent moons of enamel basins.
Boys watched the white man’s inexhaustible patience
chasing the curious piglets away from his work,
which was to prove that the farthest exclamations
of History are written by a flag of smoke,
from Carthage, from Pompeii, from the burial mound
of antipodal Troy. Midden built on midden;
by nature men always chose the same dumping ground
or an ancestral grove, and what lay hidden
under the heap of waste was the French cemetery
when the place was an outpost, facing Gros Îlet.
But this was also her village, this was where she
walked and swam on its beach, this was her parapet.
The midden proved to have been the capital port.
But then she had been the glory of nations once,
the shoes and basins of Troy. Imperial France
lay in his palm: two brass regimental buttons.
Chapter XIX
I