The Rolling Calf: The Chain-Dragging Duppy of Jamaican Roads
On the country roads of Jamaica — the deep rural parishes, where the bamboo arches over the lanes and the nights are black as the inside of a drum — the most feared sound in all the island's rich catalogue of night-noises was a chain . A clanking, dragging, link-by-link iron sound, coming along the road in the dark, sometimes ahead of you, sometimes — worse — behind. The wise did not wait to see what carried it. For everyone knew: that is the Rolling Calf on his rounds — the most dreaded of all Jamaica's duppies , the restless dead of the island — a monstrous calf or young bull that comes rolling and charging down the night roads, blocking the traveler's way, its eyes blazing like red coals or headlamps of fire, flame at its nostrils, and around its neck the chain: dragging, clanking, wrapped and trailing, the sound that reaches you long before the eyes do. And the terrible intimacy of the legend — the thing that separates it from every imported ghost — is that the Rollin...