Sugar Cane Field of Dreams

In a time long past, my family and I lived in a modestly appointed three bedroom house, one of twenty-six in a linear array of houses called the 26-Line. In another world, the 26-Line might have been called a housing development. In mine, it was no more than a relic of a bygone past yet alive, a mere segment of a larger estate that also housed a sugar factory and a rum distillery, and at its heart, a Great House, all monuments now to a time when their relationship with sugar cane was bound to a less liberating incarnation of capitalism.

This house held many a memory: the spoils of fine-skin mango and plum season, morning races to catch the school bus, Sunday afternoon post-dinner people watching on the stoop, complete with a powdered neck and some spare change for the ice cream truck. At night, our backyard took on a life of its own. The mango tree leaves often splashed the shadows of their moonlit revelry onto the kitchen windows, in constellations both eerie and ethereal. Stalks of corn in our vegetable garden animated by an after-hours breeze whipped their green headdresses in call and response to their sisters further afield, a boundless expanse of sugar cane plants that had made a home for themselves just beyond the irrigation canal that separated the people of the Line from the saccharine fields that kept them fed.

In a child’s mind, there is no end to the terrors that inhabit those fields. Jamaican spirit lore is riddled with all manner of foul beings with malevolent intentions, all passed down in the old as time tradition of sharing ghost stories at bedtime. My mother would forbid them told in our home, for though she refused to invest any stock into fanciful tales of creatures from the beyond, she had personal experience contending with a demon or two. Storytelling for her was nothing more than the spreading of a banquet table for the spirits, who according to her, relished the fear they inspired.

Stories would find their way to us anyway. Either from my older siblings indulging us in a delectable dollop of disobedience or through whispered accounts at after-school lessons, by the time I was 9, I knew enough duppy stories to last me a lifetime of sleepless nights.

A violent thunderstorm raged outdoors. Thunderstorms have always been unpleasant experiences for me, less so now than before, but still. Where many find magic and wonder as fronds of light thread their way across a moody sky, I for a long time found nothing more than an electric death and its raucous herald. The rain poured onto the tin roof of our home in a full and steady stream, its symphony punctuated with much frequency by the cymbals of thunder that shook the house for good measure.

I was on my way back from the bathroom to join my family in the living room to watch some tv show. There was one tv in the house, which I suppose made for good family bonding if we could all agree on what to watch. We loved this one South African soap opera called Generations, so it was easy enough on the nights when that aired. Don’t ask me about the other nights, unless of course you want to hear about my father falling asleep with the remote in hand, snoring for good effect, and holding the TV hostage, only to wake up as soon as the channel was changed, just to say “I was watching that.”

Normally I would take the long way to the living room. That involved taking the hallway from the bathroom to the dining room, on either side of which hallway were the entrances to my mother’s room on the right and my father’s room on the left, where I slept. Sleeping arrangements are a story for another time. Once at the dining room, I’d make a right into the living room. On days when I would dare risk it, I would shortcut that trip by passing through my mother’s room, which had its own entrance to the living room. She hated unnecessary traffic through her room, but if she was in a good enough mood, it generally would not matter. I figured she would probably be too consumed with the tv to notice, so I went for it.

Two steps away from exiting her room, a deep and desperate fear burrowed its way into the lowermost cavern of my stomach. As it took root, goosebumps dotted every pore in my body, binding every strand of hair and arching them skyward to signal that the fear had breached not only my mind but my skin, all of this a response to the presence of an unseen entity: foreign, malefic, vengeful.

A prayer had not escaped my lips in some time, yet with all the desperation of a child separated from his parent, I began. “Goddess Celestial, Queen of the Heavens, I beseech you. Grant me approach to your throne of undeserved kindness.” The words were soft at first. Head bowed, eyes closed. As I sensed the presence of the entity closing in around me, I lifted my eyes heavenward, and screamed in a fervor unbecoming of me: “You have not heard my voice for an age, but please. HEAR ME NOW!”

A searing flash of lightning enveloped the house, and as the sound of my voice rumbled through all the rooms within, a clap of thunder sent shivers through the woodwork without. My hands, which had reflexively risen to my eyes to dampen the effects of the light were now floating to the ground. I opened my eyes, frantically looking for signs that I had been heard. I was greeted only with darkness, thick and viscous, highlighted only by the periodic flashes of lightning as the storm continued undimmed. The power had gone out.

I found comfort in a barrage of footsteps shuffling hurriedly ahead of me. My family, summoned from the living room by my prayer, were barreling into the northernmost room of the house. My mother beckoned me in, and we barricaded the door.

Someone lit a candle. As the outline of their faces came into view by the candle's flickering light, I took attendance. Mother sat on one of the two beds in this front room, and clockwise from her my brother, Dean, also on the bed. Then me, seated on the floor in the space between the two beds, then my sister, Lara, seated on a chair followed by my other sister, Ariel, also seated on a chair, and the loop closing with my niece, who was seated on the floor, wedged between the bed and the dresser in front of it.

My mother continued the praying. This incensed me at first. In our spiritual tradition, it did not belong to women to pray while a man was present. It was a silly rule that had no merit other than to stroke the male ego, but you would be hard pressed to catch me complaining about any rule that permitted so much as an inch of authority over my mother. Yet, I could not find the words to challenge her, the reason coming to me in a distant whisper loosed from its prison in my mind, bearing with it the words: Your Connection to The Divine Has Been Severed.

My mind drifted away from her, as my eyes flitted to each link in our chain of interconnected hands. When they reached Ariel, I traced the outline of her hand up her forearm and eventually her shoulder, upon which I found her head fixed straight, her eyes locked on a patch of empty space on the bed just beside Dean. Her face was illegible, and in its stillness, I searched her eyes for some clue of what held her gaze.

As the candle flames danced on her pupils, I began to make out in her eyes, the silhouette of a man seated directly in front of her, just on the bed beside my brother. He wore a linen shirt, the three topmost buttons undone, revealing the same heavy tan that also characterized his neck and face. The shirt may have been beige, but more likely white shirt tainted by its fair share of soil. His eyes were veiled by the brim of the straw hat he wore, tilted down only to expose the tip of his nose and below. His thin lips were pursed together in a menacing smile, made even more fearsome by two massive creases in his skin between which this smile was set, emanating presumably from just below his eyes. I could not tell whether they were scars or just the wrinkles of old age.

Beads of sweat condensed on the plateau of my forehead. I looked away from my sister’s eyes to behold this man with my own, but there was nothing . I pivoted to meet her gaze once more. The rain was now trying to tear holes into the roof. Every drop carried the sound of a thousand firecrackers. Something glinted in Ariel’s eyes. I leaned in to focus. A draught from a half open window was cavorting with the candle, making it difficult to get a clear read of his figure. Lightning struck again, and in the fading brightness, I inhaled all the tension in the room with an audible gasp as I recoiled in fear at what I had seen. The man had unsheathed a knife and was positioning himself to attack my brother.

“Dean, MOVE!” I yelled, to the soundtrack of another burst of thunder. My mother looked up from her prayer, and Dean stared at me, frozen in fear and oblivious to the imminent danger. I jumped to my feet with all the haste my weak legs could muster, but before I could move any further, a violent gust of wind tore through the room, sealing the half-opened louvered windows shut, knocking me down and flinging the bedroom door open. My sister looked at me, and in the corner of her eyes, I could see the man swept up in the wind, which was now caught up in the sails of his loose khaki trousers and his unbuttoned linen shirt, his eyes still invisible under his hat. I breathed a short-lived sigh of relief as the wind ripped him from his perch on the bed, only a split second later to find a stillborn scream lodged in my throat as I watched him grab my brother by his hand and drag him along the draught out of the room.

“Stay here!” I barked at the rest of the room, as I swiped the candle off the bed and bounded for the kitchen. Once the light had consumed the room, it marked the body of my brother, his back to me and his arms outstretched, hands straddling a swath of open space, the fingers of both hands inching closer and closer to each other in a tightening choking motion. He was grunting under the effort of the struggle to keep the demon contained. The black hilt of the unsheathed knife circled his head above in earnest anticipation of a strike. Fearing what might happen and helpless to do anything else, I conjured the lingering remnants of authority my voice possessed, and in a firm yet dispassionate rebuke managed the words: “Stop this!”

Dean’s eyes caught mine, laden with fear and embossed with the knowledge of his impending fate. I had taken my eyes off the knife for but a moment, but when it re-engaged my gaze it was descending furiously, plunging again and again into my brother’s neck. And his shoulders. And his back. I watched in horror, waiting for his screams and flinching in anticipation of the squirts of blood that would inevitably find my face. There were none. The knife could not pierce the mortal plane. Fearing that the damage might be to his spirit, I ran to his side, wrapping my free hand around his chest and telling him to let go, as we both retreated back to the room, locking the door behind us.

Silence reentered the room with the light we brought. My mother examined my brother for signs of injury, but aside from being a little shaken up, he was fine. I set the candle down again, and no sooner had it hit the stand, it went out. “Relight the candle,” Dean whispered as he motioned my mother to unhand him. As light filled the room again, I looked at Ariel. She acknowledged my gaze and shook her head no to confirm she saw nothing.

Dean, not satisfied with that response, motioned for me to grab the bottle of baby powder sitting on the dresser. I immediately understood what he meant. He watched me as a I poured half the bottle into my hand and with a sweeping motion, blew the powder away from us and towards the door. Powder particles swirled all around the room, their candlelit travel being watched closely for any signs of the intruder. I released an exhale when they reached the door unobstructed. Dean was not so relieved. He trained his eyes on the steady stream of powder as it exited the room, until he noticed the pattern of the particles pooling around an object in the frame of the door. Instinctively he ripped one of the sheets from the bed and threw it towards the door, an action which precipitated a collective gasp from everyone, as the sheet quickly mirrored the contour of the man, before falling to the ground.

The white sheet vibrated rhythmically on the ground, and from beneath it came a deep rumble of a fallen voice, repeating one word, punctuated by the most evil of laughs, that sent drained the remaining life from me: "Chris." "Chris." "Chris."

I turned to my family, who all watched hopelessly as the knowledge set in that morning was a light year away. I closed my eyes to steel myself for what lay ahead. I opened them again to the same low rumble chanting my name, "Chris." "Chris." "Chris." Dean's chiseled face loomed above me, his other features hardly visible against the flood of sunlight behind him. When he was sure that I was alert to his voice, he said once more as his arms shook me back and forth:

"Chris. Chris! Wake up. Or we're going to miss the bus."