Mysteries of the Night

Our first residence on the island was the old Manager’s House at Wall House Estate that was kindly made available to us by Miss Eugenia Charles, now Dame Mary Eugenia Charles, our former Prime Minister of Dominica.

Wall House was a mile or so south of Roseau the capital, and belonged to Eugenia’s crusty, ninety plus year old, father, J.B. Charles, who with his wife and daughter Eugenia, lived in the great house.

The Manager’s House, was an ancient, small, two bedroom frame building on stilt legs that were short on the east side and long on the west. It had not been occupied for some time and required a little adjustment in our attitudes, but we were pioneering and prided ourselves on our adaptability.

The house was perhaps a hundred coconut-palm-lined yards from the two lane coastal road and just below the inner edge of a large coconut grove. It was another fifty yards from the village of Loubiere from which, without conscious effort, we quickly acquired Philomine, an ex-huckster who became our housekeeper.

Margie’s Quaker ancestors seemed to prompt her to Herculean house cleaning effort and I suspect that Philomine was beginning to regret giving up huckstering for association with “those rich American be’ke’s,” (be’ke’ is, loosely, a white person) when the cleaning was finished.

A delightful little trickle of a stream ran past the front of the house and the children played in it for hours each day. Dominica’s streams contained no Billie Harris or liver fluke infected snails as most of the islands did.

The open French bath at the rear of the house gave entertainment value to outdoor showers so they willingly bathed at the slightest suggestion. Margie and I found the cold water a little difficult but we smiled through.

Across a short field in front of the house was a utility building, assumedly for storing estate property, and uphill a little way was a separate building for drying copra. We found out later that an enterprising merchant from town used the storehouse as a cinema about once a month and always ran the volume at full-on. Our initial encounter with this movie showing was when we awoke, startled, to hear gunshots, horses, and an old fashioned steam-train on an island without trains, seemingly roaring toward us in the night. We were a little too tired that night to laugh much at that little happening, but we considered ourselves adaptable.

We had become accustomed to sleeping under mosquito nets hung from a hoop over the bed, and to the lumps in the mattresses stuffed with shredded coconut fiber. The other things we were getting used to would make serious inroads on a legal length yellow pad.

Once the celebrants in the village, virtually next door, settled down, the night was delightful; quiet and cool with rustling palm leaves and the slight sound of the little stream just outside our window openings. Sometimes, when the sea had a bit of surge we could clearly hear the waves hitting and rolling the small round stones on the shore. Dominicans prefer to close their shutters at night but we liked leaving them open even though there was no glass or screen in any opening, and there were regular nocturnal bat visitations. Dominica has a lot of bats.

We had been assured, and were convinced, that we were completely safe in the house and, indeed, on the whole island, so it was rather disturbing one night when Margie heard a determined scraping on the far side of our tiny bedroom.

“Pete!” she whispered with great earnestness, “Did you hear that?”

“Wha, What?” I said coming out of a sound sleep.

“Listen!” she said in an impatient whisper.

I started to say that I heard nothing when I too heard the sound. It was not something that I could identify, but I thought quickly of the whereabouts of anything that I might use as a club, because it sounded as if someone was trying to break into the room by prying off some of the building’s siding. Our windows were open but on this side of the building the floor was a good eight feet off the ground.

The light in each room was a single low watt bulb on a cord hung from the ceiling so lighting the subject was out of the question. I had little desire to leap out of bed in the dark at whatever it was.

“Where is the torchlight?” Margie asked, still whispering.

“The what?” I asked, forgetting my newly learned British technical jargon.

“The flashlight, the flashlight!”

I found it and turned it on, as though it were a laser with which I could slay the intruder. The sound stopped, but, though we listened intently, we did not hear an escaping felon breaking down bushes in a mad dash for the coast road.

Then it started again, cheekily, with the light shining right in that corner. I raised the mosquito net, because the reflection was obscuring the beam’s effectiveness, and knelt at the foot of the bed using my directional sense and flashlight to locate the exact spot. Suddenly a very large land crab lurched clumsily from the corner and came ambling sideways along the baseboard on Margie’s side of the bed.

It was not unlike the large land crabs in south Florida’s salt marshes. I caught it easily and put it in a bag to show the housekeeper in the morning.

Philomine offered to make Crab-back for us but we declined, even after she hastened to explain that she would keep it in a pen and purge it for a fortnight before it would be prepared.

We did plug the hole through which the crab entered.