He trotted down a slanting road in to Locust Hall. A mulatto cane cutter, poxy progenitor of twenty-one husky mule-driving sons, stood under the raised portcullis, talking to a woman. Pulling at a murky clay pipe he was slyly coaxing her to a spot in the cane piece. His juice-moist bill, bright as a piece of steel, shone in the fern-cluttered gut. Blacks on sluggish bat-eared asses mounted the hill mouthing hymns to drive away the evil spirits.
Father, O Father
... past the fading rays of night
Awake! awake!
Game-vending squatters streamed down from Flat Rock, cocks gleaming on trays which saddled their heads. From the shining hills the estate's night hands meandered in, pecking at greasy skillets. Corn meal flecked the snowy marl.
Reminiscently Bellon ruffled the horse's mane. "You old war horse, you." Once, long before the storm, the blacks at Arise, one of the old man's estates—a stark, neurotic lot—had burned and pilfered the old sugar mill, while the buckras were confabbing on the seashore of Hastings. Rayside, then but a frisky colt, smelling a rat, had made a wild dash for the city—neighing the tidings to the buckras.
Now it fell to the young heir to be returning to Waterford, the last of the old man's estates, on the back of the heroic old mare.
It was ten o'clock at night and he had yet fourteen miles to go.
A lone moon-swept cabin or a smoker's pipe light, blazing in the canes, occasionally broke the drab expanse of night. The road trickled on, deepening into a gully. There rose above it rocky hedges, seeding flower and fruit. Swaying in the wind, the cane brake grew denser, darker. The marl lost its prickly edge and buried the animal's hoofs in soft, gray flour. Laboriously she loped through it.
The road gently lifted. It perceptibly dazzled the myopic beast. The marl returned. It blazed white, and shone. The earth about it seemed bare and flat and the cane brakes thinner. And the moon hung lower. A rickety donkey cart suddenly came jogging down the hill. A creole woman, atop an ass, trotted by. The wind soared to a higher, sturdier level. It blew like breezes on the gay Caribbean sea. Had it been noon, or dusk, blackbirds would have speckled the corn fields or sped low above the reeling canes. But the moon ribbed the night and gave the canes, tottering on the high flat earth, a crystal cloaking.
Now the road faltered, steadied, and as the road slanted, the marl thickened until it became flour dust again. The cottages at The Turning hove into view.
"At last," the captain cried, and the lanky mare quickened at the proximity of feed. Her reins fell on her back, limp with sweat.