Before Boysie read the poem, he tore it out of the paper. The women were all in tears. They were all on the couch. Somebody had turned off the record player.
“She killed him!” It was Dots, screaming all of a sudden. “She killed Henry as sure as I name Dots!” Bernice held over, and took Dots in her arms and patted her on her back, like a sobbing child. Estelle did not try to restrain her tears. Boysie was finding it difficult to read. He read the poem to himself first, and he recognized it as the one Henry had shown him in the Paramount Tavern. Then he read it aloud, for the women, in a shaking voice, his pronunciation as shaky as his voice:
But was it really time that killed
The rose of our love? Was it time?
And was it time to die? Is it time?
This rose?
It was not, could not, be time. Time
Has no power over roses, or over love
Or over me, or over you.
Time has no gun over love or over beauty.
The women cried, in a wailing bawling tone, as Boysie had read the poem.
“She killed that man, she kill him, as good as anything,” Dots said again, tears and snot running into her mouth. Bernice took out her handkerchief, and wiped Dots’s face; and she held it to Dots’s nose, and she blew into it. “She killed him! I was thinking about Henry a minute ago, inside there in the bathroom … it came to me like a feeling in the pit o’ my guts … I could feel something was wrong this morning. I still say she kill Henry. Suicide? Ain’t no suicide! … what suicide? Henry never had a blasted chance in this white man country …”
“But look! he get his chance now. He get it now. And he get it like a real hero, too. They have his poem on the front page, where it belongs.”
“He get it now. But now, he is a dead man …”
“Read the part where Henry talk ’bout the roses again, please Boysie,” Estelle asked. And Estelle listened, with her eyes closed with water, with her hands folded together in knots of fingers, while Dots screamed and accused; and Bernice wept and tried to comfort Dots.
Before Boysie began (he was more upset now, more upset than they knew), he sensed a great hate for Agatha come into his body. Henry was his friend. He could not picture Henry dead. Certainly not through taking his own life. Suddenly Dots screamed out. Terror and hate were in her scream. “That white bitch Agatha killed our Henry! She kill-lim, she kill-lim, she kill-lim!”
“Don’t say that, Dots. Please. Don’t say so. Nobody ain’t know how Henry dead.” It was Bernice asking her to be forgiving.
Boysie was reading the poem, and when he came to the passage Estelle had asked for, while Dots was still crying and condemning Agatha, Estelle whispered, along with Boysie’s shaking voice, the lines:
Time
Has no power over roses, or over love
Or over me, or over you.
Time has no gun over love or over beauty.
Instead of an image of Henry or of Agatha, her thoughts conjured, in front of her sorrow, the image of Sam Burrmann, with the photograph of her own private wish: with his throat cut!
AUSTIN CHESTERFIELD CLARKE was born in Barbados and came to Canada in 1955 to study at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career as a broadcaster, civil rights leader, professor, and diplomat, representing Barbados as its Cultural Attaché in Washington DC. His many honours include Lifetime Achievement Awards for Writing from both the Toronto Arts Council and Chawkers–Frontier College, an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from Brock University, the 1998 Pride of Barbados Distinguished Service Award and, most recently, the Order of Canada. He is, formerly, writer-in-residence at the University of Guelph, and the 1998 inaugural winner of The Rogers Communications Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize. Author of eight novels and five collections of short fiction, Austin Clarke is widely studied in Canadian universities. He lives in Toronto.
