The Thing that is Worse than Jumbies

An old woman lived in a house with a big mango tree in the backyard.

The ripe mangoes fell and lay like little suns in the grass, and lines of ants would carry away morsels of the sunshiny flesh, and the skins of some of the mangoes left on the tree would have puncture holes with blackened rotting edges where the birds had pecked at them and spoiled them. 

The village children would look enviously at the ripening, wasting mangoes on the tree and at last they would climb over the fence and pull down some of the glowing fruit, timidly and then more boldly. For sometimes they would see the old woman looking out at them, but before they had time to run away, she would slip out of sight if she saw them looking at her, as if it were she and not they who were doing something wrong. 

She would gladly have given them the mangoes they stole. All they had to do was to speak to her.

But the old woman had been raised by stern and loveless parents who made her afraid; and fear is a contagion. Among the older folks, some had known the old woman’s name long ago, but they had forgotten it. She would walk through the village unsmiling, unspeaking, and, like the children who stole her mangoes, the villagers feared her because she feared them, and none of them spoke out and so the matter could not be settled. 

The old woman had had a child of her own, but she had sent him away so that he would not suffer as she did. He travelled until he came to a place where the people did not know what jumbies are, the spirits that moan and hiss and dream of the evil they will do when mankind strays too close and falls into their clutches. 

And then at last the old woman could bear no more and she too moved away, to a small house on the cliffs where the wind wailed and the sea sobbed against the rocks, and the trees grew warped and leaning and everything made of metal rusted in the sea blast.  

To get there you had to pass the silk cotton tree where the jumbies cluster among the roots. But she was not very afraid of them, because she knew there were worse things than jumbies. 

Years passed, and eventually word came that she had died, and her child sent a message for a man from the village to clear out the house where the wind wailed and the sea sobbed. One of the villagers agreed, and so he pushed his handcart hurriedly past the silk cotton tree and came to the house.

But when he came back down his cart was still empty and he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. For a long time afterwards he was low-spirited and silent, and the villagers thought he had met one of the jumbies that waft among the shadows under the silk cotton tree. 

The old woman’s child, now a grown man, came back to the village and went up to the house and pushed at the door, but it wouldn’t budge, and they peered through the windows, but they could hardly see inside for great white drifts like the crests of foam on the waves below.  

They could hear, though: above the sound of the wind and the sea came wailing and sobbing in another voice, and it was the old woman’s, from inside the house.

So they thought she must somehow be alive after all, and at last they had pity on her, and they heaved at the door until it opened with a great rustling and slithering, for it wasn’t locked, because until the end, the old woman had hoped she might have a visitor one day.

The door had been blocked by sheaves of paper covered with the words that she had never spoken to the villagers, for they didn’t have ears to hear her. But the old woman had to say them somehow. In one room they found more scribbled pages all stuck together with damp, and some thought it was sea spray, but others thought to themselves that it was the old woman’s tears.

And they understood she had moved to the house on the rocks by the sea because she couldn’t hold in her words any more, but there was no one to listen, and she was too afraid and too proud to let the villagers see her weeping or hear her wailing. 

And so she had braved the silk cotton tree with the jumbies slithering between the great roots, carrying her belongings in her arms, and gone to live alone in the little house.
But now the old woman was nowhere to be found.

They opened the doors and windows wide and tossed the papers with her words to the wind and they whipped into the sky like seagulls and were gone, and the white pages that were wet with her tears tumbled down the rocks into the sea and were carried away by the white sea foam. And they said, there, all gone, now the place will full up with breeze and sunlight.

But the old woman’s son turned on the villagers for driving away his mother and they quarrelled among themselves, too, because really, said some of them, what harm the old woman ever do we? 

But others answered, but wha’ we ever do she?

Then her son cried, what allyuh ever do for she? She was one ah allyuh.

And the villagers had no answer. 

So the son put a curse on them all. 

Then he locked up his mother’s house and went alone back down past the silk cotton tree, with never a shiver at the jumbies that glimmer among the roots, because now he too knew there were worse things than jumbies. 

But the old woman’s voice remained, and it wailed endlessly like the wind and sobbed against the rocks. At night when everything else fell quiet the villagers would hear her, and they got up from where they sat on their verandahs, and went inside and locked up their houses. But the sound followed them in through the cracks below the doors and between the window louvres.

They would lie half-awake in the night and pull the bedsheets high around their ears. But they got no rest. Like that one mosquito that whines in the dark, the sound of the old woman’s weeping would find its way in under the sheets, and the wind would shrill her name in their ears, and now they could never forget that there are worse things than jumbies.