BUFFALO SOLDIER by BOB MARLEY. Story by Bill Arnott.

 

Barbados. 2000.

A long sandy beach, terraced from tide. Gold sand in smooth steps, leading down, leading up from the water. I’d walked half an hour, maybe three kilometres, to get there. Had the beach to myself, so I thought. Morning sun was still low, inching up from horizon, seawater chill to the touch, despite being near the equator.

I had a coffee I’d brought from our unit, an apartment hotel up the way, a stoneware cup the colour of mercury. With a book tucked under my arm, the latest from Deepak Chopra. The quantum physics of spirituality, presented in a way I could, more or less, understand.

The gentle tug of tide washed over my feet as I followed the tilt of the shore. Then I made a new friend. A man whose home was the sand, higher up on the beach. Where he slept every night, and spent his days contemplating the water.

Keith was his name. Which I learned as he introduced himself.

“My name’s Keith,” he said, pronouncing it like they do in South London, with Fs where the T-H should be.

I told him my name, we shook hands. Then sat in the sand, like familiar friends reuniting, and together we stared at the sea. Two bodies of water in fact, the Atlantic and Caribbean meeting in a rough line of froth, zigzagging out to the sun. At a glance, the ridgeline of waves resembled a battalion of stallions, in white, galloping over the surface.

Keith asked what I was reading.

I told him.

He nodded, thoughtfully, then explained he’d never learned how to read.

I couldn’t determine his age. Maybe thirty. Maybe sixty. Weathered, muscled and lean. And he picked up the thread as though I’d caught him mid lecture, taking an unseen baton from Chopra, explaining how the universe worked as deftly as Deepak or Neil deGrasse Tyson. A reminder never to judge. No doubt what I’d have learned had I just read the book, rather than speaking with Keith. Only now I was learning life’s secrets aloud, rather than reading the words.

Keith carried on, comparing the vibration of atoms to the movement of sea and the rhythm of well-structured song. Bob Marley was his example, the inherent metre of musical tempo, no different than nature, the ocean, the call of the gulls overhead. And the journeys of people, not always chosen by those individuals.

Buffalo Soldier tells a story, he said, as he squinted into the sun, the low glow lighting his brow. I thought of the flow of his words, shifting from science to music, hemispheres of the brain like the long line of horses, running amid bodies of water.

Then, with the slow-gravel sound of shells washed on sand, Keith hummed the tune, as we sat at the edge of the surf, the beach now glowing in gold. And he sang to the pulse of the waves.

Woi-yoi-yo…woi-yoi-yoi-yo…woi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yo.

Woi-yoi-yo…woi-yoi-yoi-yo…woi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yoi-yo.

 

Stereo Story #758

Parts of this story were part of Bill’s review of Wired for Music, by Adriana Barton, in  Canadian journal The Miramichi Reader.