Garbage Chute

Before Mac extended the Pizzeria’s kitchen the dish-washing area was located to the left of the swinging doors.  It wasn’t an ideal location for washing wares but for the first few years we coped as best we could with the lack of space.  Below the kitchen sink Mac had installed a rather clever garbage chute, it was kind of weird but it worked!

The garbage chute doors were made of green-heart wood and there were two of them; the door on the inside was open during the day so that dry trash could be tossed into a large bin inside the chute. The door on the outside lifted so that the bin could be removed each morning.  When the person removing the garbage from the chute needed to empty the bin, he simply wrapped the bit of rope that was attached  to the end of the door around a nail to keep it open. The system worked well, dry garbage in the chute, wet garbage in Blusey’s pig slop buckets.

For a short period of time we had an employee who didn’t work out so well, we had to let him go due to serious laziness as well as his “tiefing” habit. For the sake of this story we’ll call the young man “George”. George’s job included running errands in the harbor, cleaning the yard and removing the dry garbage from the chute each morning and evening. George was fired the day Mac caught him sleeping on top of some full sacks of flour; it was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as Mac was concerned, the fellow had been incredibly shiftless from the day he was hired and it was time for him to go.

Two days later I arrived at my usual 3:45 A.M. to find garbage strewn all over the ground in front of the Pizzeria’s kitchen window.  That wasn’t a good sign, and my heart sank as I noticed that the bin had been removed from the garbage chute.  The outer door was open, with the piece of rope wrapped around the nail, and the door on the inside was also open.  Someone had broken into the Pizzeria during the night, and I went straight back home to get Mac.

Mac unlocked the Pizzeria door, and we were greeted by empty rum and beer bottles on the floor. That was bad enough, but when we got to the store-room  we realized that the break-in was not a petty one.  The entire safe had been removed, it had obviously been dragged through the kitchen and lowered through the garbage chute.  The safe was a large old-fashioned Chubb, so heavy that four men were needed to carry it, which meant that at least four men had taken part in the robbery.  For Mac, that tell-tale piece of rope twisted around the nail told its own story, and when the police asked if we had a suspect he named George.  He explained that only someone familiar with the Pizzeria would know just how the chute worked, and that George had recently been fired.

The police picked up George and held him for two days, but were forced to release him due to lack of evidence.  The whole Island agreed that George was the culprit, and everyone knew who had driven the vehicle that took the safe away, but with no witnesses to the crime there was no case.  The theft had been well planned, the week-end’s take had been inside that safe, but without the key to open it the thieves were going to have a hard time getting at the stolen cash.

At the time of the break-in crack cocaine had unfortunately become available on the Island and a few Bequians were becoming addicted to it. George was one of the users, and he deteriorated physically as well as mentally very quickly. Word went out that I was practicing Obeah as revenge for the theft of my safe, and because of my black candles George was going to die. My mother told me what people were saying, one of dad’s parishioners had taken her aside the previous Sunday to tell her about the gossip that was going around.  I was horrified but Mac thought it was funny – if everyone thought I was “lighting black candle pon dem” it would keep the thieves away from the Pizzeria!

My Father was not amused. Black magic, obeah, jumbies and the like had no place in a Christian church, and the following Sunday he preached a sermon about the non-existence of black magic and the evils of spreading malicious gossip.  The matronly ladies of the church nodded their heads gravely in agreement and whispered to each other, “Wat Fadder say is true, no such ting as black magic!”

My mother was pleased that Dad’s message seemed to be getting through, the sermon would put a stop to the “black candle” business once and for all.

As mom and dad stood by the church door saying their good-byes the most senior of the ladies leaned forward and whispered to Mom, “maybe Fadda right, but George he be look bad Ms. Armstrong, real bad. Judy need to stop wit de black candle or he gwine dead!”  So much for the sermon ………….