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Sunshine. Blue skies. Cool breeze.
Oh man, the morning of December 7th 1941 haemorrhaged perfection.
Ah, but almost immediately after the glorious morning sun had comfortably occupied the second half of the day, the unexpected happened: extremely foul clouds of grey and black obliterated every scrap of the sun’s bright light over the tiny East Caribbean island of Santa Maria. Seconds later the wind died. Lightning flashed and thunder clapped. Above and below the inimical skies frightened animals vanished. Chokingly, humidity hung in the air and knowingly, men, women and children braced themselves for Earth’s ultimate day – yes, thatbrute … Fate’s muscle-bound brute with the specially modified baseball bat had begun his frightening demolition game.
And the transformation of the island to rubble was about to commence.
Like a seething volcano the island began to brim over with bedlam – yet, astonishingly, within the walls of the Victoria Hospital the story had been vastly different. See, aside from the swift illumination of candles to compensate for the sudden electrical outage, hardly anyone in the hospital had noticed signs of impending spoliation. The hospital, fifteen or twenty minutes walking distance from Castries, the capital of the island, had been just as wanting as the town that was a mere caricature of wooden houses and narrow streets. But, in a narrow street close to the town’s centre, a stone’s throw from the solid concrete building that just happened to be the court of law, a huge diamond glittered. The glittering was the result of the immense Roman Catholic Church, and this symbol of worship was designed to impress! Man, listen, unlike the many ‘false’ churches on the island, this RC Church was notbuilt of ordinary wood and a tin roof. No sir, I ain’t kidding! God’s exquisite palace was all bluestone, slate roof and, in the traditional manner, adorned with polished stained glass windows that depicted images of fanciful angels and superannuated saints.
Then there was the clock. Oh-my-gosh, the clock! This timepiece turned out to be an illicitly large object that had been injected with a massive dose of Roman numerals and, just like a ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ poster, the ever-ticking thing had been pasted in a prominent position on the outside of the church for every living being to view. That blatant display of pseudo-elegance was supposed to radiate ice cube coolness, you understand – but what, I had often wondered, was the realtrue-to-the-soul-purpose of this costly clock? Unable to figure out the mystery, one nice and sunshiny day when the world was at peace with itself, I confronted a Vatican appointed cassock. I posed my delicate question delicately. Father Cassock looked at me with KGB suspicion. A bible was the cool tool of his trade and he carried that well-thumbed tool as if it was the first edition of the Ten Commandments; and the childless Fr Cassock, a seemingly wise and aging man, answered my question in a whisper – dunno why the haloed bugger whispered but he whispered nonetheless– that the time-gobbling machine had been placed outside the consecrated edifice as a reminder to one and all that time was not on anyone’s side; that the time had come to gallop into the church’s womb, deterge one’s sinful soul and pray for one’s ticket to ride unconstrained into the ‘next world.’
Fine. Except that not every so-called believer had been ready to die for that utopian ticket.
And so, one night while the island sweltered in the unforgiving Caribbean heat, without warning a colossal lighted match from one of hell’s factories came a-visiting and conflagrated the heart and soul of the penurious town. Man, not only had that vicious fire effortlessly emulated the 1666 London fire by cindering every wooden building in its path, it had also made charcoal of the only department store in the town.
Now sip on this: as if by some act of apostolic voodoo, the ferocious inferno had kept its nasty fiery fingers away from the ornate Catholic Church as if the church had been shielded by a gigantic invisible waterfall! The townsfolk, you know, the rosary-carrying flock, unable to explain the reason for the church’s survival quickly believed that God’s magnificent building had been clad in a cloak of blessed asbestos!
Amen!
That was what I said when I heard this fockery after an uneasy eavesdrop.
Because when one considers that in Lisbon in 1755, the dens of inequity known as the city’s brothels had escaped unscathed when a monumental earthquake plus a tsunami followed by a horrendous firestorm blitzed countless churches filled with praying and weeping worshippers, one is left God-confused!
All the same, no one was confused when, as a remembrance to the angry flames that had barbequed the little town of Castries, a somewhat mediocre gazebo was erected in the square a stone’s throw away from the super-fireproof church. Also within the square, on the far side of street where mylittle nondescript library stood, an enormous tree flourished. What sort of tree was it? Dunno man dunno. How old was it? I shrug my shoulders at this conundrum but, someone who had claimed knowledge said that in the month of December 1492, fluffy little minutes after a Genovese smoothie named Christoforo Columbo had alighted from one of his ocean-hardened ships (Nina? Pinta? Santa Maria?)the seed of the now magnificent leafy monster had been planted. No, not so, said some men of ‘superior’ knowledge. Christo-baby and his motley mob had been assailed by an army of Arawaks the moment their feet had touched the ground, therefore the grand prize for the planting of the awesome tree could not have been awarded to him.
Now sample this: another group of unintentionally funny and shambolic men had insisted that a seedfrom thetree in the Garden of Eden had been the real mama of the town’s tree. When asked the mysterious question: whohad planted the seed on the insignificant island of Santa Maria? In one unanimous voice the sham-religious dicks shouted –‘God!’ the very same tyro God that had banished his innocent and motherless children, Adam and Eve, from his pristine Garden for the ‘sin’ of nibbling on an ‘apple’ from his untouchable tree. Following blindly in the footsteps of brainlessness, these very same Godfearers went on to swear that the town’s ‘antediluvian’ tree had been specially selected by the Pope of the day to protect the world’s only fireproof church until Judgement Day!
Man, things got worse. The constant bombardment of religious excreta brought the heavy industrial fan to a standstill because, on the opposite side of the pointless ‘debate,’ the un-scrubbed and the uncircumcised – you know, the usual later day cretins that placed brass pennies on the power of evil – contradicted anyone who had had the effrontery to declare that the Church’s fire-defeating bluestones had notplayed any part in the church’s fiery survival at all. So to whom did they credit the miraculous deed?
Dydina Fyrestorm.
Yep! Madam Voodoo! The witch-bitch with the twitch that itched to show the world that she had not switched or ditched the solid pair of iron balls that she had been born with – that same obeah witch, others had claimed, because she was easily the most notorious and nefarious woman on the entire island, for personalreasons had saved the church from incineration!
Man, that sort of obeah superstition had glowed bright in yesterday’s newspapers.
Today though, according to the angry black clouds that obfuscated the blue sky over the beautiful isle of Santa Maria, biblical fire and brimstone would soon descend upon the land. In the interim, on the opposite side of the troubled world, the fanatical Japanese were indiscriminately decimating the dormant and unprepared US Navy in Pearl Harbour and, somewhere on the death fields of Europe, the odious Grim Reaper laughed. Oh yes, he laughed. But not so the folk of Santa Maria; all they worried about was the loathsome bastard with the lethal Yankee cudgel.
Intriguingly though, while the uncontainable stinker had been busy contemplating the best-worst way to mash-up the island, the normal course of events had run smoothly enough in the maternity ward of the hospital to ensure that, at 13.35 p.m. a boy had been brought safely into the world.
The boy
