Читать книгу Condemned to Devil's Island - Mary Blair Rice - Страница 7

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The turnkey handed Michel a bit of paper many times folded. Faintly penciled inside, Michel read:

“Félix died in the night. They will bury him this afternoon.”

It was signed “Pierre.”

Michel crumpled the paper into the pocket of his cotton trousers, joined his work squad, and was marched out through the gates under the words, “Camp de la Transportation.”

The village streets were deserted but for convict corvées filing out of the prison and branching off to the right and left to pass along streets named for Rousseau and Voltaire and Victor Hugo; to pass also the official building which flaunts the familiar “Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité”; and the blue and white Palace of Justice, where four times a year convicts are tried for the various crimes they commit as prisoners.

In this direction and that the squads proceeded to their assigned tasks; to workshops where they produce chairs and tables, wooden spoons and bowls; to shops where it is their duty to keep the supply of coffins equal to the demand; to sawmills and lumberyards, and to the river-front where they land the logs floated downstream on rafts.

Their exodus did not disturb the sleeping houses, quiet behind scraps of gardens and little walls with bricks arranged in geometric pattern like the colored designs on boxes of children’s building-blocks. The citizens of St. Laurent may sleep in the dawn, for the convict corvées are for the most part barefoot, walking humbly like Trappist monks—finding it less painful to accustom themselves to bare feet than to the irritation of the clumsy wooden sandals provided them.

So on silent feet they leave the prison. And on their lips there are few words, for one wakes tired after a night in a Guiana prison.

Michel’s squad moved straight along the Rue Maxime du Camp. It moved toward the rosy flush of sunrise. Yet the air was heavy with possible rain, for it was still the month of May, and the dry season not due until after the middle of June.

Passing St. Laurent’s solitary church, the men heard priests intoning early mass. In the branches of the mangos and the flamboyants, birds twittered, invisible among the leaves. Cocks crowed everywhere, and on the roofs vultures unfurled their wings, showing light buff bands across the black. In spread-eagle position they dried their rain-soaked plumage, occasionally giving a wing-flap to hurry the process, and then soaring off to circle hopefully above the village streets where soft-footed convicts wearily dragged themselves to work.

Behind each squad sauntered ruddy keepers, placidly smoking cigarettes. With big black umbrellas on their arms, sun-helmets on their heads, and heavy revolvers on their hips, they were ready for any emergency—rain, sun, or disobedience.

“What time do they bury the dead?” Michel asked, in a voice so low that he had twice to repeat the question before Eugène replied.

“In the afternoon—about five o’clock.”

The squad turned left to the river where a pair of oxen stood ready to drag the great chain by which a waiting locomotive would haul floating logs. It was a small locomotive, mutilated at Verdun, but since cobbled into sufficient repair for the job of pulling logs up the steep bank of the Maroni.

Standing in the water, Michel, armed with a heavy iron prong, helped steer the logs to the river’s edge. There, others attached the chain and gave the signal that set the engine in motion. Then slowly the logs mounted. The oxen returned the chain to the workers at the river’s brink; it was fastened to other logs, and the signal was again shouted to the locomotive. This process, many times repeated, made up the forced labor of a convict’s day.

Sometimes, with low, moaning thunder, the skies deluged the toiling men. And sometimes the sun swept the sky a brilliant blue and raised great blisters on the bodies of white men sent to Guiana to be cured of the disease which is crime. And always the oxen gazed superciliously upon the scene, their flat corrugated horns pointing back in huge semicircles, the skin of their noses wrinkling above moist round black nostrils, their thick hairy lips quivering as they lifted them to a level with their horns. With this scornful pose of the head they were travelers, contemptuous of life in a country other than their own. They were Indo-Chinese oxen, and Guiana was a mean land where oxen were directed by wretched creatures who perished under the sun.

Michel was often amused by their ponderous arrogance, but today he did not raise his eyes to be diverted by oxen. Today he could think only of Félix. He tried to reason that he hadn’t really loved the boy. He hadn’t seen much in Félix to love. He’d thought his character as pudgy as his body, and Michel detested pudginess. But his argument came always back to the fact that he’d known Félix’s anguish. That was the bond. That was why, through the long hot morning of alternate downpour and blazing sun, he’d not been able to put out of his mind the boy who had turned to him in terrified misery.

At noon in the dormitory Michel lay with closed eyes and heard Félix saying, “I am very afraid.”

“He must have been so dreadfully afraid of dying,” Michel thought. “He would even be afraid of being buried.”

In the afternoon when the long shadows of scornful oxen and toiling men pointed east, Michel found Eugène looking at him. He then saw Eugène go over and enter into some sort of discussion with the keeper. And he knew that Eugène was making his opportunity for him, giving him a chance to slip off unobserved and to make his way back to the Rue Maxime, and a little farther to the bamboos.

He was early. Alone with graves. Here and there comrades had marked a friend’s resting-place with a small black wooden cross. But few of the condemned dead were thus set apart from the great company of unnamed mounds, shut in on three sides by bamboos like a colossal plumed hedge.

Wandering about this pathless field, Michel came upon a newly-dug grave. Standing on its brink, he looked down and saw at the bottom of the excavation a group of bones lying in an inch or so of muddy water. He saw a skull, shoulder-blades and ribs, arms and outstretched fingers, hip and thigh bones and the complicated articulation of feet—a complete skeleton, its anatomical order but slightly disarranged by the removal of earth.

As Paul had looked contemplatively upon the fleshly body of man, Michel gazed now upon the framework which had supported that troubled body. He was conscious of an overpowering sadness, into which walked the memory of Félix, explaining that the patron of the café had had only five days in the hospital, and did Michel think it right that a young fellow should go to the Devil’s Island Penal Colony for so trifling a thing as that?

Michel stood, a motionless little figure with bare feet sunk in the soft newly-upturned earth; a little figure whose loose white cotton trousers and blouse were conspicuously numbered, and whose flat wide-brimmed hat marked him a convict.

It was very still there in what Eugène had called the “prison of the dead.” The great pale polished stems of the bamboos creaked gently as they rubbed one against another, while in their feathery foliage the breeze stirred very softly.

“So they bury us one on top of the other,” Michel heard himself say, speaking aloud as if he would break the stabbing calm. And then, startled at the sound of his own speech, he looked up and saw that barefoot men brought Félix in a wooden box swung between their shoulders. He knew it to be Félix, because he saw that Pierre walked behind the men.

Side by side, Pierre and Michel watched them lower the box until it rested on the skeleton which lay at the bottom of the grave. They watched them shovel back the earth, and all the time there was no more sound than if they’d every one been ghosts. There was only that faint creaking of bamboo stem rubbing against bamboo stem.

Michel wished that he’d brought some flowers to lay on the mound.

Then, leaving Félix there among the bamboos, they turned back to prison. Again Michel and Pierre side by side. But neither knew how to speak to the other.

It was late. The vultures were coming to roost in the palm branches. St. Laurent’s little church was tolling the Angelus.

Three peals of the bell, followed by the interval in which to murmur the salutation:

“Mary, full of grace and blessed among women....”

Again three peals:

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us poor sinners now and at the hour of our death....”

Then chaotic, triumphant clanging of the bells, as though they would proclaim the prayer answered. All at once the clanging stopped, and the dusk seemed suddenly surprised into silence.

The heavy bodies of the dumb roosting vultures weighed down the supple palm fronds. There were no work squads in sight. One of the men who had buried Félix reminded them that if they were late for the roll-call it would mean punishment. But never mind, it didn’t matter.

What was that in the road ahead? A man was lying in the road. Four convicts came pushing a little wooden cart. Had there been an accident, and was the cart brought to carry some one to the hospital?

They hurried forward to see.

Then Michel recognized the man in the road as Antoine—Antoine Godefrey, his neighbor in the dormitory.

He saw that Antoine lay on his back, beating bleeding hands against the gravel of the road. There was sand in his black hair, and tears flooded his closed eyes, leaking out between the lids and forming pools in the deep cavities of his eyes.

Michel heard Antoine saying over and over:

“Oh, my poor mother! How she cried and cried! I was condemned to die ... they would have cut off my head. It was my poor father who saved me!

“Ah, and I was the only son and the oldest.

“Oh, my poor mother! How she cried and cried! And they would have cut off my head....

“But it was self-defense! I shot to defend. Why have I been punished like this! Guiana! But it was my father who saved me, because my mother cried and cried!”

Antoine was drunk and beating his hands until they bled, while with unseeing eyes drowned in tears, his heart mourned without restraint.

How strange that Antoine, so silent and heavy, had all this within him! Michel remembered the emotionless voice in which he’d answered his question with the one word “murder,” and then turned on his side and appeared to sleep. Yet all along, this must have been inside Antoine, waiting to express itself when rum had let down the barriers.

Now the men had tied his feet together and put his struggling body into the cart, where one prevented his throwing himself out while the others trundled the cart off down the Rue Maxime du Camp.

Then, as though Antoine’s unburdening heart had released something in himself, Pierre spoke.

“Do you know,” he said, “what is my advice to every young fellow landed in this hell?

“I’d advise him to take a knife and stick it in the back of some old devil like myself. He’d only have to do it to one.”

Michel took this without comment, for already they were at the prison gates.

They had all arrived together, Michel and Pierre, Félix’s pall-bearers, and the cart where Antoine still lamented that his mother had wept and wept.

The gate opened. All but Antoine lifted their hats; all but Antoine raised both arms above their heads, while the turnkeys passed hands over their bodies.

It was the prison routine. Nothing must be smuggled into the prison. Turnkeys must see that under the crowns of hats, and about the bodies of men, there was nothing. Search was the formality without which no convict was ever admitted through the gates. This gesture of lifted hats and arms became in time so automatic as to be almost subconscious.

They entered. No, the squads stood in formation. The roll had not yet been called. Unless the turnkey told, they might escape detection and punishment.