Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

What Matilda Jasodhra didn’t tell her daughter was that the police were about to take her into their vehicle to transport her to police headquarters to find out why certain articles of her clothing were drenched in the deathly sweetness of chloroform, and why John Lucknow (ill-luck then, really) Mansing had cotton fibers in his lungs, and markings of chloroform about his nose and mouth, and just as she was lifting a leg into the vehicle — the yardman trying desperately and in vain to insist that his madam was innocent of everything on earth, so desperately that he had to be restrained — the detective in charge received a call on his cell phone, and after speaking for ten seconds with him and ten with the forensic doctor, she was let go. Oswald Jones, now an old man who had long ago divorced his wife and who, after an initiative led by him in Parliament, was appointed President For Life, had himself, himveryself, telephoned — no one questioned how he might have known of certain details of the current situation, but his foresight in many matters had long been recognized and heralded — and the case was post-haste slammed shut.

What she did tell her daughter was that the newspaper headlines the day after her husband’s, her father’s, death read, Butterfly Killer’s Death Ruled, a Case of Nature’s Revenge . Ignoring the typo, she quoted over the telephone, Yesterday morning southern jeweler and amateur lepidopterist John Lucknow Mansing, eighty years of age, fell asleep on a wad of chloroform-soaked cotton intended for live butterflies, and immediately got on with the business of focusing on dangers associated with butterfly keeping in particular and with animal-related hobbies in general.

Meera Meera Johna Mansing flew to Trinidad in time for her father’s funeral, and to clean up the butterfly mess in his study. There was not to be found there a single one of the beautiful Morphos she had been so proud as a child to net her father. Oh well , she thought, how like him .

The funeral service itself, at the Grant Monorail Presbyterian Church, was a gathering of mostly women, all of whom were divorced or had separated from their husbands, three-quarters of whom wore silver necklaces, or earrings, or rings on their fingers, or belts around their waists, and — it was Meera Meera Johna who first noticed — on some part of the surface of every piece of silver at that funeral was embedded bits of blue Morpho wings, in patterns that varied from flower-like shapes and waves of an ocean to scales of a fish or a snake. There at the front, in spitting distance from Matilda Jasodhra Mansing, was Isabella Tatiana, winking and smiling still at Meera Meera Johna, sporting in her old age a slight Cha cha cha tremble, and Meera Meera Johna noticed that even in her wrinkled skin, That Tatiana Woman was as beautiful as forty or so years ago. And there was Lady Oswald, but not, of course, Sir Oswald, from whom she was long ago divorced, stern and upright as ever, a scowl growing on her face as it began to dawn on her that she was not the only silver-and- Morpho wearer.

The dawning was gradual, but soon each woman who thought she had at one time been one of only two women in John Lucknow Mansing’s life — and of those two believed what she had been told, that she was the brighter — realized that she was simply one of many. The acoustics being what they were, the vocals inside Grant Monorail Presbyterian began to sound like the staging of an impromptu experimental piece of choral music, a concerto of staccato sotto voce gasps: arching whimpers, a strumming of tenor realizations crescendoing to full-blown wails, tremolo growls and soprano screams in a multitude of pitches. When the pastor left his podium and ran down to console the confused and enraged ad hoc choir, Matilda Jasodhra soared like a Venus, the Venus of San Fernando, to the pulpit to see better. From there, the casket of her husband — of these women’s lover — not an arm’s length from her, she waved her walking cane as if the choir’s winged conductor, pointing at one woman after the other, and it was to her delight that whichever woman she pointed to complied with her conductor’s command and wailed or hissed or growled appropriately. When the inevitable fight broke out, she banged her cane in glee on the casket, but wigs were already being pulled off, clumps of real hair flung in the air, and shoes, some with dangerously pointed heels, were being hurled. Jewelry was being yanked from necks and ears, and rings torn off fingers. Suddenly, the swarm of women, as if all at once, came to a slow realization. They all together ceased their fighting. There was silence. And then the ominous growl, and seconds before the move occurred — one knew it was coming, it was bound to happen — every woman, save for John Lucknow Mansing’s wife and daughter, charged toward the casket. The pastor, adding a baritone drone to the affair, fled when the lid was torn right off. He didn’t, therefore, lucky for him, see the devastation to John Lucknow (ill-luck now, really) Mansing. It was unpleasant and messy.

Matilda Jasodhra wished she’d had a video camera with her, thinking what a good film this would have made. Meera Meera Johna wondered just how much she had really become like her father, and thought there was indeed more to learn from him, even in his demise, for she mustn’t end up like this. How awful it would be, she thought, for Vishala and Brianni and Carmen, all lovely girls, really, to behave in any way like this. She wondered if the recently dead could hear, and if they could feel.

The yardman too, like the pastor, saw nothing, but not because he had fled. He remained in the church, at the heels of his madam, looking like an ill-fitting lord, smelling disturbingly sweet. He stood behind Matilda Jasodhra Mansing, toying with the tail of her dress, counting for the umpteenth time the fortune that would befall him. He would have to find them a new gardener, someone else to anesthetize the garden snakes. And he would, of course, have to take care of the daughter now, so much like her father in any case, and from that very point of view, who would fault him, he wondered, for his intentions? An intervention here, an intervention there, such as they are, he assured himself again and again as he fingered the fabric of satin and silk, are sometimes necessary, and so a good thing. He nodded in agreement with himself. A very good thing, indeed.

Caroni Swamp

Jerks. Jagabats. Jackasses. I never believed them. Those fools of the Scare-’em Crew, as they called themselves, had me on a merry-go-round. I hate merry-go-rounds, always did as a child and always will. They made me wanna puke. The Scare-’em Crew actually invested in some of the crimes on the crime list themselves. The only thing they did not get into was killing. The leader was a pastor who didn’t want to disobey that commandment.

I shoulda known they were a bunch of jokers. I got a job just doing the small stuff like trafficking weed. It paid well and was not too much of a hassle. But then they tried to get me to pick up some of the heavier stuff. The pastor told me it would only be for two months while his son was away, and when he came back I could stop. Yeah, right. It ended up being six months even after his son came back.

God, I was a damned fool. I shoulda listened to my damned instincts. But as always, I tried to please Mother. Tried to look and be the good son she always wanted. I had to earn money in order for her to feel proud, so she could be just like the rest of the cacophony bitches she limes with. Hell, now she hates me — another dougla gone bad. Damn it, I even saw it in Vish’s eyes.