Limekiller!

For lunch there was heart-of-palm, something not often had, for a palm had to die to provide it, and palms were not idly cut down: there was the vegetable pear, or chayote, here called cho-cho; venison chops, tomato wdth okra; there was cashew wine, made from the fruit of which the Northern Lands know only the seed, which the)- ignorantly call “nut.” And, even, there was coffee, not powdered ick, not grown-in-Brazil-shipped-to-the-LTnited States- roasted-ground-canned-shipped-to-Hidalgo-coffee, but actual local coffee. Here, where coffee grew with no more care than weeds, hardly anyone except the Indians bothered to grow it, and what they grew, they used.

“Yes,” Miss Amelia said, “it can be a very good life here. It is necessary to work, of course, but the work is well-rewarded, oh, not in terms of large sums of money, but in so many other ways. But it’s coming to an end. There is just no way that working this good land can bring you all the riches you see in the moving pictures. And that is what they all want, and dream of, all the young people. And there is just no way they are going to get it.”

Tom McFee made one of his rare comments, “I don’t dream of any white Christmas,” he said. “I am staying here, where it is always green. I told Malcolm Stuart that.”

Limekiller said, “I was just talking to him this morning, myself. But I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. something about trying to trade with the manatees. ”

The Shiloh people, clearly, had no trouble understanding what Stuart had been talking about; they did not even think it was particularly bizarre. “Ah, those poor folks down at Mandee,” said Amelia Lebedee; “— now, mind you, I mean Mandee, Cape Mandee, I am not referring to the people up on Manatee River and the Lagoons, who are just as civilized as you and I: I mean Cape Mandee, which is its correct name, you know —”

“Where the medicine herbs grew?”

“Why, yes, Mr. Limekiller. Where they grew. As I suppose they still do. No one really knows, of course, what still grows down at Cape Mandee, though Nature, I suppose, would not change her ways. It was the hurricanes, you see. The War Year hurricanes. Until then, you know, Government had kept a road open, and once a month a police constable would ride down and, well, at least, take a look around. Not that any of the people there would ever bring any of their troubles to the police. They were. well, how should I put it? Tom, howr would you put it?”

Tom thought a long moment. “Simple. They were always simple.”

What he meant by “simple,” it developed, was simple-minded.

His aunt did not entirely agree with that. They gave that impression, the Mandee people, she said, but that was onlv because their ways were so different. “There is a story,” she said, slowly, and, it seemed to Jack Limekiller, rather reluctantly, “that a British man-of-war took a Spanish slave-ship. I don’t know when this would have been, it was well before we came down and settled here. Well before The War. Our own War, I mean. It was a small Spanish slaver and there weren’t many captives in her. As I understand it, between the time that Britain abolished slaverv and the dreadful Atlantic slave-trade finally disappeared, if slavers were taken anywhere near Africa, the British would bring the captives either to Saint Helena or Sierra Leone, and liberate them there. But this one was taken fairly near the American coast. I suppose she was heading for Cuba so the British ship brought them here. To British Hidalgo. And the people were released down at Cape Mandee, and told they could settle there and no one would ‘vex’ them, as thev sav here.”

Where the slaves had come from, originally, she did not know, but she thought the tradition was that they had come from somewhere well back in the African interior. Over the course of the many subsequent years, some had trickled into the more settled parts of the old colony. “But some of them just stayed down there,” she said. “Keeping up their own ways.”

“Too much intermarrying,” Tom offered.

“So the Bayfolk say. The Bayfolk, were always, I think, rather afraid of them. None of them would ever go there alone. And, after the hurricanes, when the road went out, and the police just couldn’t get there, none of the Bayfolk would go there at all. By sea, I mean. You must remember, Mr. Limekiller, that in the 1940s this little colony was very much as it was in the 1840s. There were no airplanes. There wasn’t one single highway. When I say there used to be a road to Mandee, you mustn’t think it was a road such as we’ve got between Port Cockatoo and Shiloh.”