Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

A minute later I can see flames flaring up at the back of the house and up on the second floor somebody’s smashing the windows and tossing stuff out, books fluttering down and dishes and piss pots and a tailor’s dummy. The drapes on the first floor are on fire now and I can see black people with their machetes and so on coming out of the house and gathering together on the far side. Me and the white kid who’s shivering in my arms back off a few more steps into the bushes as the blacks check each other out and then start running. There’s about twenty or thirty of them waving bloody machetes and hatchets as they cross the great wide lawn in the moonlight headed toward a grove of live oak trees and a long sloping field where the cows are kept. The house is really on fire now, huge sprays of sparks’re flying up and the sky is glowing orange and yellow.

Behind me the long driveway curves away to the road by the sea and I see in the distance the first of the white men on horseback coming with a second batch a short ways behind. The blacks have disappeared into the cow field and beyond the field is the woods and then the hills and beyond the hills is the Cockpit. There’s no one left here now, no one alive but me and the little blond-haired white kid sobbing in my arms. And here come the white men riding up the driveway like.mad with guns and swords glinting in the moonlight ready to slay the first black they see. They’re hungry for killing a black and spattering his blood and no little white kid is going to be strong enough to save him.

Suddenly someone touches me on the shoulder and I turn and it’s I-Man. He says, Comin’, Bone?

What about him? I say and show him the little white kid.

Forget-tee, Bone.

Practically crying I say, Oh Rasta, I-and-I cyan’t do dat! Up to you, Bone, he says and he walks off toward the bush and disappears into the darkness.

I unwrap my arms from the white boy and release him and instantly he takes off running toward the men on horseback who have arrived in front of the house now and are shouting and firing their guns into the air looking crazy and wild until they see the kid. The head white man gets down off his horse real fast and sweeps the boy up in his arms, and right away the kid points straight at where I’m hiding in the bushes. The little bastard betrays me! The head white guy starts jogging toward me with his gun out ready to blow me away and several others come up behind him so I take off running, darting down behind the barns and the sugar factory where I scramble over a stone fence and plunge into the cane field there with bullets flying over my head and zipping through the cane snapping off stalks as I plow ahead like in a green endless head high sea of sugarcane expecting my next breath to be my last.

But it’s not. Way out there in the middle of the cane field with my chest heaving and my legs almost too heavy to run another step I push away a clump of cane and see a hole in the ground. Quick as I can I check it out and observe that it goes a long ways in and is just big enough for a skinny kid like me to squeeze into but no regular white man can. I take one more look back at the greathouse which’s all aflame now and the white guys’re riding around it like they set it on fire themselves shooting their guns off in all directions even in mine still. Then I notice that a bunch of riders are torching the cane field on three sides and a bunch more are galloping their horses around to the fourth side by the road to wait there for me so I drop down on my hands and knees and crawl into the darkness of the hole in the ground.

I’m surprised and a little scared to find that the hole just keeps going, it’s a tunnel and pretty soon it’s pitch dark and I can’t hear the gunfire and the roar of the fires and the white guys yelling anymore, all I can hear is the drumming, the same drumming as before only it’s getting louder now as I crawl along the tunnel feeling my way with my hands out in front of my face. I squirm and crawl like this for hours it seems like and all the time the drums keep getting louder until finally I work my way around a sharp bend in the tunnel and up ahead I catch a glimpse of a flickering light and before I know it I’ve reached the end of the tunnel.

I pull myself forward and up out of it and when I stick my head up and look around I see that I’ve come out in the candlelit Maroon cave. I climb up out of the spinal cord hole at the rear of the skull and there’s I-Man kicking back with a spliff and ol’ Rubber’s working out like a madman on one of those little square goatskin drums and the other Rastas, Terron and Elroy’re rolling joints and everybody looks like even though they’ve been waiting patiently for me to get back they’re relieved to see me and are ready to book. Rubber lays off the drumming and stands and stretches and the other guys do the same. Then I-Man blows out the candles one by one and leads the way back out through the mouth into the darkness.

Things moved pretty fast after that and I didn’t really have time like for weeks, until I left Jamaica actually, for digesting the experience of coming to know I-self so to speak and how coming to see with the lights of I-self’d changed the way I saw everything else like it was supposed to do. And did. But the next few days we just worked all day and even at night harvesting the ganja plants, me and I-Man and the other guys cutting the plants with machetes on both plots, I-Man’s and Rubber’s next door and then hauling them up to my cabin where the drying racks were that they’d built out of bamboo, and then as soon as the plots were cleared we chopped up the dirt again with hoes and fertilized it with this powdery old bat-shit that we had to bag and lug from a cave a long ways into the Cockpit. It was hard work, harder than any I’d done before and you had to concentrate so I didn’t have much time for thinking or remembering, especially because it was so hot all the time. My head was like that kid’s I’d been in slavery days, pretty much a blank except I wasn’t scared or nervous about anything anymore especially white people.

After we had the dirt ready we planted the seeds for the new crop and hauled water and got the rows real soppy and for shading them while the plants were still babies we ran strings from poles and hung these humongous thin camouflage sheets that I-Man said’d been left behind in Grenada after the United States Army finished invading and went home. Dem hiding sheets spread all over de Caribbean now, mon. Dem de bes’ t’ing ‘bout dat invasion so as t’ mek de ganja reach him fulfillment undisturbed ‘neath de Jamaican sun an’ den return to Babylon an’ help create de peaceable kingdom dere. Jah mek de instruments of destruction come forward fe be instruments of instruction.

Then we spent days sorting the dried ganja plants and pressing and packing them into burlap bales, about a hundred of them that we stacked under a lean-to we built and inside my cabin so I had to move out practically and hang my hammock from a couple of trees out behind it. But only for a few days, I-Man explained. De Nighthawk soon come, he said referring I figured to some guy with a big truck because that was what he’d need for hauling this many bales out of here. I never asked much about the higher workings of the ganja trade, how it got financed and all, I just let I-Man tell me what he thought I needed to know which actually wasn’t much since I was like a peon still and just did what I was told by the older heavier dudes in the posse. But I figured there were even heavier dudes in places like Kingston and Mobay or maybe the States who’d put up the money for the operation, for the camouflage sheets for instance and the plastic pails and hoes and all and for walking-around money since the only cash money I-Man or the other guys had came from dealing small load down in Mobay out of the ant farm. What they had going up here in the Cockpit was a major plantation though and that took cash no matter how much free labor we were putting in.