Read Online The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke - Free Book Online

the overhanging branches of the pigeon-pea trees, these two obstacles bite into his face, missing his eyes, and sear his hands. He knows the lay of this land like the keyboard of the piano he plays on Fridays for his friends and for Constable. As he moves in this black night, he feels better, now that the first incident of his patrol was nothing more threatening than two screwing dogs.
    “Blasted dogs. No breeding!”
    And he, a big man, this powerful Crown-Sargeant, felt his life was in danger. He had felt so cowardly, so exposed.
    “Imagine! Me , scared? What could scare me, a big Crown-Sargeant in His Majesty’s Royal Constabulary Force of Bimshire?”
    Sargeant talks to himself all the time, especially on dark nights, patrolling the back lanes, in the black, quiet Village. He talks to himself when he is off duty; when he is at home alone; when he is bathing in the sea at five o’clock every morning; when he is walking up the aisle in the Choir. He talks to himself in the Court of Common Pleas, while he waits to give evidence.
    Instinctively, he passes two fingers of his right hand over the silver embroidery of the three stripes edged in red on his shoulder; and the two fingers linger for a further moment, on the large Imperial Crown that sits above the stripes. He adjusts the bicycle clips on his trousers legs, around the ankles; pushes the heavy brown truncheon back into its leather sheath; and flashes the searchlight in a wide arc, making figures in the black night air, like a child holding a starlight on Guy Fawkes Day.
    He rides on, with the gear of his three-speed bicycle ticking softly and slowly, in low. The sound is like the music of the Police Marching Band, playing a tune of sad death and remembrance, a march composed by Sousa, as he wades through a narrow track, in a dark valley of tall sugar canes cut out between the North Field and the South Field. And he whistles, in a clear, sharp tone, this road-march tune, without knowing whether the tune is by Sousa, or by some other composer of martial music:
    “It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go,
It’s a long way to Tipperary . . .”
    Sargeant cannot put the sight of Clotelle’s body out of his mind. For years after he had taken the Statement that showed the cause of her death; and whenever he rode his three-speed bicycle through the ticking black nights, each sudden noise, each movement, the shaking of a pigeon-pea tree branch, perhaps a footstep from within the vast cane fields, made him see, all over again, the thick clotting blood that covered the gaping wound left by the weapon the murderer had used.
    The crime was not suicide. It was murder. He thought about this crime, its flesh and blood and the savagery a sharp knife could take on, whenever on a Saturday afternoon he went to the rum shop to visit Manny, to shoot the breeze, as he stood within the paling of Manny’s backyard, and saw how Manny butchered-up the huge pig from which he would make black pudding-and-souse, a Village delicacy of boiled pig features: feet, ears, snout, jowls of the head, the tongue, gristle and bones, feet and ears pickled in lime juice with diced cucumber, chopped thyme and hot nigger-peppers, following all this activity, and Manny’s dexterity with a long knife, Sargeant could understand how easy it was for him to see Clotelle all over again.
    And one Saturday morning, he arrived in the backyard and found Manny with his hands deep within the entrails of a slaughtered pig, pulling out the intestines, the heart and the liver and the blood; then cutting the head from the body; and cleaning the head; scrubbing off the black silk hairs with a stone and then with a razor blade and with boiling water. Part of the head, from the neck down, looked like the head of a young woman, bathed in blood. Like Clotelle’s head.
    And now, after a quick drink that he will snap back in the rum shop, without water to kill its sting, without respecting the caution given by