Limekiller!

“Thank you. I have a drink.” And almost always did have. His tired eyes surveyed Limekiller. Blinked once. Said, “Not afraid to stand beneath the ceiba tree, I see.” Limekiller followed this not.

“Why? Something crap on my head?” Raised one hand to test, gingerly. Caught sight of the black-and-red berries on his left wrist: he hadn’t noticed that some fibre smooth but oddly-spun was wrapped around the more common cotton thread. Ceiba. So that was it: the so-called silkv-tree or silk-cotton tree or wild-cotton tree or kapock — or was it pollack-tree? Damned tree had too damned many names; “devil-tree,” that was another one. It was a damned big tree, too. And there was nothing nasty on his head. He had misunderstood. Oblique Peter Pygore.

Limekiller signalled a drink. Asked, “Why should you call these, ‘jumble beans’?”

“I shouldn’t, I should call them ‘jungle-beads,’” Pygore said. Or had he said something else? People had heard.

People looked; well, some people looked; someone said, “You go jungle side, make sense wear jungle bead.”

Someone else said, “Me not gweyn jungle side,” with an air of emphasis and determination.

Someone else, yet, said, “Suppose jungle come you side? Maybe you sorry you not wear jungle bead, nah true?”

But the first someone else did not respond with “fah true,” or anything like it. What he responded with — and a look of scorn and distaste at Jack’s funny wristlet — was the odd comment (and it had, somehow, the sound of a quote): “‘Who do good fi jungle, is dem jungle does fright.’”

Now there were sounds of disagreement around the tables. “Mon, wear jungle beans not ‘do good fi jungle.” “No, mon, "do good fi jungle,’ mean

But Jack was not to hear what it meant, for at that moment, a voice — and, again, a woman said, in a low tone of deep intensity — said: again: those words which he had heard. and heard and heard. recently, namely, “No tahk aboet eet!'

He had been totally puzzled by almost all the conversation following the original comment on the wristlet; now was moved beyond puzzlement into both irritation and a rather unusual display of temper; he brought his glass down, slam, on the bar. He said, “Damn it, damn it! What the hell are all these jungle things which people keep saying, ‘Don’t talk about it’?”

Deep silence.

And a very' tall, very imposing, very black Black man, who had not turned before, although right next to Jack, turned now, and said, “Well, Mr. Limekiller, sir, if many people or even any people ask not to talk about a certain subject, whatever subject, is it not perhaps the better part tact, sir, not to — “

“Not to talk about it; very well, sir: rebuke taken, silence is golden, pray pardon, ladies and gentlemen,” and, while polite murmurs indicative that he had perhaps apologized more than the offense required were still being murmured, Jack, carried on by momentum, said, but I don’t even understand why all of a sudden people seemed to have started calling it jungle when ever since I’ve been here everybody I would swear calls it bush?”

Some of those who had become so suddenly so deeply silent now continued so; some sounds of scoffing, some of snorting, were heard. A tentative laugh, soon ceased. Odd looks at Limekiller. And Col. Peter Pygore, who had first spoken, said, “Oh, John L., you are sometimes too much,” and gave his head a weary shake. And added, “Verger, you tell him. Whisper it in his shell-like little ear.”

“I could hit you, you know, Pygore.”

Peter Pygore, gaunt and grey, stopped being a cynic, became a stoic. “Limekiller, it does not lie within my power to prevent you.”

The very tall, very imposing, very black Black man, now said, “I suggest, Mr. Limekiller, that we move our glahsses. with Col. Pygore’s leave?… to Col. Pygore’s table;” this was done, and so, of course brawling had become impossible; the rest of the room, like the rest of the world, carried on with its own affairs as busy as before: politics, horse-races, infant baptism, new linoleum, prices, prices, costs, costs, mv turn to buv, vour turn to drink: The Man of Mien now did indeed say, if not in an exact whisper, then in a voice low but clear, into Jack’s ear, “The word in question, Mr. Limekiller, is not jungle. It is jumby.” And added, Jack not having moved, his mind not having yet assimilated the correction, “Of course, as a Christian, sir, and after all, I am verger at St. Alfred;” St. Alfred was the Anglican Church, after of course the Cathedral; “so I can give no credence to such superstition. I merely define the terms…”

Jack now remembered him, and recollected his name. “Mr. Ethelred, you will have to define the terms more clearly,” he said. Jumby beads? Jumby side? — “side” in, the local sense of place or direction? — Do good for jumby? “Because I still don’t