Barbados: On a black, marble-wrapped grave with an epitaph in cursive is a ball which happens to have all the tell-tale signs of a weather-battered leather ball. The tragedy of the unceremonious setting for the resting place of - arguably - the greatest West Indian pacer of all time creeps up on you.
No one dared touch it to find out.
Given the curious detailing at the church of coastal dilapidation, walking about the ill-kept cemetery didn’t provide many cues.
But, even as these questions cropped up with Bridgetown’s Grantley Adams International Airport within eyeshot, Malcolm Marshall lies in rubble, a grave of flotsam. Cigarette butts, broken glass shards of rum bottles with labels still hanging on them, plastic cups swaying to the touch of the wind, a couple of corner posts for flowers, but only wild grass grows now.
No one to tend to the grave, no one to care if it was there or not.
Marshall is all by himself, and no one seems to want to preserve, with sensitivity, the remains as the St Bartholomew’s church in the Chamocks witnesses another funeral possession on the day.
As you walk through the other graves, you realise none of them is being tended to. They are all turning from limestone to mud with signs of activity and life only found in the garbage strewn around them. At this rate, it won’t be long before Marshall’s grave is reduced to the same.
Everyone in Marshall’s current proximity has heard of his excellence, the pride that suddenly allowed an Island of lost identity to feel confident again, but that was all a while ago. Now, Marshall is but a figment of yore.
Priests from his parish privy to his religious inclinations were asked about his ideologies, and they said he was from a time so long ago that they couldn’t comment.
There was none around who even knew, let alone cared, that one of the greatest cultural exports of the game, of Caribbean song and hue, happened to be buried right there, twenty feet away from a broken steeple.
“Yeah, his son (Mali, Marshall’s son and the writer of the aforementioned epitaph) visits the grave or so we hear,” said a singer in the church band.
She wasn’t very sure of what Marshall meant to the visitors, and there have been a fair few since the beginning of the T20 World Cup.
“He places some flowers and says a prayer or two, but normally, no one comes around here. It’s far from town, yeah, so only those who are serious about cricket come either on their way to the airport or from the airport. That’s that.”
That’s the thing with the Caribbean. They have never really been able to get over the past and yet they don’t remember it. It’s all but a lucid dream to them.
They’re invested in the future without knowing what it will be and they’re the same about the past and its uncertainties.
“I love Marshall. Anyone growing up in my era was proud to play cricket because of him, he is a legend, but I never saw him play live. Radio offered a bit and newspapers told us what was going on but we knew not to mess with Marshall,” says cab driver Roger.
That’s perhaps why Roger didn’t want to enter the cemetery. He wasn’t bothered that Marshall died of cancer at 41 in 1999. He wasn’t concerned that the cemetery didn’t even have a barricade for a hero.
All he knew was someone named Marshall won some cricket matches while looking good, angry, anti-establishment and scary.
Marshall was all of that and more, but to see his forever laid out like this, an open cemetery without fanfare is representative of what West Indies cricket can be: unforgiving, amnesiac, and tragic.