Omeros (10 page)

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 Grasse

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.