How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

In a nest of dusty papers stirred by the rusty blades of a creaking ceiling fan, Wilma sits on the nearest tall chair (this is not a story Wilma particularly likes to tell at all, far less seated below the person she is allowing into her weaknesses). And when a constable has provided another chair on which to place her bag and opened a window so that the stuffiness will not make her sneeze, Wilma starts her story.

  Wilma explains how her own mother had tricked her into marrying Carson with the promise of land. Not just any land, Wilma explains to the policemen, but a patch of nearly an acre set on the side of a hill spiked with banana trees. Wilma was fourteen at the time, she says, and she had not understood the barter. To her it sounded like she would win twice. A husband would protect you like a father, Wilma’s mother had explained, and she would get a big parcel of land that would make her very rich indeed, never mind that Carson was by then a man of thirty-four. Wilma would tell you that her mother had never said, to the day she died, what she had gotten out of the deal.

  Wilma explains that she was one of a brood of nine siblings, three of whom had died before the age of eighteen. Wilma remembers, prior to her marriage, sharing with the remaining five a soft drink in a Codd bottle stolen from a market stall and, as she licked the surface of the ball stoppering its mouth to give herself a taste of the dribble they had left behind, vowing to make something of herself, so she could buy one of these drinks every single day if she wanted to. Wilma says that she married Carson, whom she had only met once, on a Thursday morning in the parish church and that she had made her own dress. Wilma says that the thought of whether or not she loved Carson never even entered her mind when her mother suggested the marriage. It is this nonsense about love that causes all the federation, says Wilma. She had never had the time for such things, then or now. And then Wilma has to be reminded, gently, that she is telling the story of how she came to have Lala.

  * * *

  1 October 1965

  Wilma Wilkinson was a woman of order. So there was nothing unusual about her calmly cleaning her workroom while her daughter waited stoically on a three-legged stool, bits of blood and sick marbling the collar of her dress. Esme made periodic sharp and shuddery intakes of breath above the scrape and slap of Wilma’s reorganization, a signal that Wilma appreciated, in the scheme of things. It meant that Esme remained alive.

  A clean house is a clear head is what Wilma always said, and there was no doubt in her mind on seeing the state of Esme that this situation would require a clear head, so she had started studiously removing clutter the moment her daughter had been able to stammer out what was wrong with her, having burst through the door of Wilma’s sewing room, and had continued tidying up while Esme sat and worried that, at any minute, Carson might come into the room behind her.

  A Sunday School teacher had once told Wilma that the best way to deal with any bad situation, even a really bad one, was to make a mental list of things to thank God for. So while she tidied, she did: she thanked God that her only child was still alive, she thanked Him for the fact that He had seen it fit to bless her with offspring, irrespective of the circumstances of Esme’s conception, she thanked Him for the fact that this same child had made it back into the realm of her mother’s protection, even if it was after the deed had already been done.

  Wilma packed away the newly cut pattern for an empire-waist dress, carefully rolling the brown-paper templates for bell sleeves and a gathered skirt. For some cuts the brown paper was still attached to the fabric below it by common pins, and Wilma did not want to lose any. Common pins were notoriously easy to lose and nearly impossible to find again. Wilma stacked and restacked a rainbow array of folded fabric, fat little squares awaiting her refashioning into the garb of graduations and weddings and church services to come. Wilma had stored each piece according to its color and not its owner, or the date each outfit was due or even according to the style of the magic she was to make with the contents. Wilma found the stacks of fabric disconcerting if she did not fold and store them by color, grouped into the many shades of every hue of the rainbow.

  Before Esme rushed in, Wilma had been thinking about chicken.

  Specifically, the two whose necks she would break the very same day, whose bones she would savor between her teeth by evening. She had been watching them clucking outside her window before Esme threw herself against the door of her sewing room and splintered the wood around the handle. Wilma had been musing that the chickens ate corn and dug for worms like any other day, oblivious to the fact that it would be their last. So engrossed was she in this rumination about the chickens that she had not heard when the back door closed, had not caught the frantic thunder of her daughter’s sprint across the wooden floor outside the sewing-room door before she burst in, had known nothing until the door splintered and then slammed against the partition, almost causing her dress form to collapse in the process. She must have started cutting Molly Marshall’s dress for Easter with an unusual diligence, she had thought, that must have been why she hadn’t heard anything, that must have been why she hadn’t felt anything move in her spirit while Esme was being raped. Esme was her daughter, after all, Wilma had thought, she was supposed to have a sixth sense that warned her if anyone was doing her harm. Sixth senses should not depend on whether you wanted this daughter or not. Sixth senses were a matter of kin and not of liking.

  Molly Marshall’s dress was an unusual pattern for her, something Wilma had had to think hard about to ensure she got the fit just right. Wilma had not much liked Molly Marshall; she was one of those women prone to fainting, claiming to be overcome by everything from the smell of sheep shit to the news of the collapse of the West Indies Federation. Wilma did not trust such women, they tended to attract calamity that impacted everyone around them. That morning of the rape, says Wilma, was the morning she decided that she would never make a dress for Molly Marshall ever again.

  Wilma Wilkinson swears to this day that Esme did not scream or say a word when Carson attacked her. She had the ears of a dog then, protests Wilma, she had honed her hearing listening to pins drop – she would have heard the girl if she’d made any noise at all. Wilma says that that morning the first she knew of the disaster was when she heard the sewing-room door splay open a few seconds before her daughter appeared beside her cutting table, like an apparition, clothes torn off her, face and arms scratched, a huge knot on her forehead, another she would find later at the back of her head, like an egg in a nest of flying frizzy hair.

  Carson was no bodybuilder, but he was a big man, a giant who carried his weight in his waist, a full 45 inches around, according to the pencil marks on one of the little flash cards in Wilma’s sewing box. His waist, Wilma knew, was the barometer of her husband’s strength, the key to his power, and as it was, it was more than enough to keep a slight teenager pinned beneath him. Make no mistake, says Wilma, she did not doubt Esme about what had happened, not for a minute. She had failed, she knew, to keep Carson contained. Locking the child in the little outhouse each night had not been enough.

  Only when the worktop was clear of any sewing detritus did Wilma turn to tend to Esme. In the background, above the clucking of the chickens, she heard Carson bathing, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, opening the tin of Germolene she kept in the little cupboard above the bathroom sink and applying it to scratches the length of his face.

  She couldn’t go into their bedroom and wrench the little tube of plaster-pink antiseptic cream from him to attend Esme’s bruises, not when he had tainted it with the healing of his own bruises. So instead she had fetched a little bottle of rubbing alcohol from a shelf in her sewing room, the same one she used to soak a wad of cotton and hold to her thumb when she was pricked by a pin or a needle as she worked. “This will sting,” observed Wilma, and it did. She spent a few seconds applying it to Esme’s bruises, after smoothing the soft wool of her daughter’s hair out of her eyes and back into some semblance of order, after guiding her out of a shredded skirt. She watched her wince when she applied th
e alcohol and she hated Carson for using the cream.

  Esme had watched her mother replace the alcohol on the shelf, slick her hands with castor oil and lift them to Esme’s hair and start to massage her head, taking special care not to touch her forehead, searching softly for the sore lump at the back of her scalp. She found it, something to be worked around in future when she tried to settle on her pillow at night, something to be approached sideways with a warm cloth when she bathed, something to be ignored in conversation.

  “It don’t matter,” said Wilma when the tenderness of the massage made her daughter cry. “The hurt mean it healing.”

  Wilma had believed then that her Esme was too tired to respond, too deflated by what had befallen her to confirm that the hurt was a sign of hope, of recovery, and therefore a grace to be thankful for. It was a tiredness Wilma also gave thanks for because it meant that her one child would not ask her why did she have to leave her in a little wooden outhouse in the backyard at night that stank of the shit of generations of Carson’s family. It was a tiredness that meant Esme could not detail how her own father had shoved her down in the yard in broad daylight, how he had damaged her. It was a tiredness that overcame Esme’s tendency to talk, to speak up, to ask questions that Wilma did not wish to answer.

  The sewing room was quiet. The chickens clucked joyfully, as if suddenly aware that their lives had been spared. A number of safety pins, attached end to end, trailed from the collar of Wilma’s simple cotton dress and danced as she rubbed oil into Esme’s hair, limbs, face, and back. Above her worktable was a wedding picture of Wilma, in the arched doorway of St. Saviour’s Anglican Church, standing dwarfed next to Carson in a patterned dress and matching hat, the intricacy of the design swallowed by her new husband’s shadow. Wilma had often wondered whether Esme thought her mother had looked like a little girl then, whether the angle of her right arm as she cradled a bunch of homemade flowers had reminded Esme of the wishbone of a chicken, whether Esme thought too, as Wilma did, that in the wedding picture she had looked happy, like she thought she had won something.

  Wilma had seen her looking at the photo as she kneaded, had wanted to explain to her that she was the same age as Esme when the grainy picture had been taken, had hoped that Esme would understand that this, this was exactly what she had been trying to protect her from when she started making a bed for her in the outbuilding, had felt and swallowed the need to explain to Esme what it had taken she herself so long to understand about Carson. But Wilma had not told that story then – Wilma had been too busy steeling her spine.

  “Mammy,” Esme had started to whimper, holding onto her mother’s hand when it found the bleeding knot at the back of her head. “Mammy . . . Mammy . . .”

  At that moment, explains Wilma, she recalled her own daughter’s apparent need to wade in the deep waters of emotions she had no time for. At that moment, says Wilma, she was taken back to the minute the midwife had placed a squalling baby in her bony arms and asked her to name her baby girl. It might have been the delirium of birthing that had made her fourteen-year-old self smile, thought Wilma, and whisper, “It’s me!” Because in this new baby she had seen her own face – had sensed a brighter, better version of herself, and the hope for the realization of all the things she hadn’t known she wanted to be.

  It might have been the business of clearing away all the evidence of birthing that had caused the midwife to hear Esme when she asked Wilma to name her child. The midwife paused to say how beautiful a name it was, how fitting for this beautiful new baby. It might have been Wilma’s need to believe that the child was indeed beautiful that had caused her to keep the name, to labor over its spelling as she recited it to the priest in the parish church a few weeks later while he blessed the baby with holy water. But with Esme whimpering before her, Wilma had suddenly understood how foolish she had been to label her daughter’s life with a virtue so fickle as beauty.

  “All that fussing don’t make no sense,” Wilma had warned her. “What’s done is done.”

  “Mammy, mammy, mammy . . .”

  Wilma went wooden when Esme held onto her. The voice that had refused to warn her when Esme was being raped remained silent as she looked back out through the window, past the chickens, to where the banana trees met the road and the bus stop where the Rocklyn bus trundled past with its cargo of laborers and hawkers and mauby sellers made drowsy by the breeze billowing through the open sides. Wilma was already thinking about which story she would tell about what happened to Esme if it ever got out.

  “Listen to me, Es,” said Wilma, “listen good. Don’t tell nobody ’bout this, you hear?”

  The house held its breath – the chickens stopped their clucking, the tap in the bathroom turned off, and the breeze barely blew through the open window. Wilma, and the world, waited for Esme’s answer.

  “You hear?”

  Esme could not speak, so she nodded, because it seemed to be what Wilma wanted her to do.

  “I have a new skirt,” said Wilma, “just finished this morning. For you.”

  Wilma could have guessed that Esme did not want her to leave to get the skirt. She should have known that if she left, the feel of hands in her hair would stop, and Esme did not want it to stop. She should have understood that if she left her daughter there to fetch a skirt that barely fit her, she would be out of her sight and Esme would be more aware than ever of the awful singing that had recommenced from the bathroom. She should have figured that Esme wanted to sit and have her scalp kneaded better by her mother, her hair coaxed into behavior so that a wild wind landing on her scalp would find her hair unwilling. But she didn’t acquiesce when her daughter held onto her mother’s hands, willing her to stay.

  “Stop, now,” said Wilma, shaking off Esme’s grasp. “I am going to take you by your Auntie Earlie.”

  Wilma could not have understood then that her refusal to stay, at this moment, was what cracked a little fissure of hurt wide open in Esme’s mind. She did not guess that this, and not the nights in the outhouse, would be what her daughter would hold against her in future.

  “And even when he rape me,” Esme would accuse her in later years, “you di’nt stay and comfort me. You di’nt stay!”

  Wilma went to get the skirt and came back with something with a waist she could not fasten. It would have to do, said Wilma, balling an extra skirt and two blouses into a bag. Carson started singing a hymn from the shower. Wilma straightened the corner of her sewing table so it hit the right spot on the tile, took off her sewing apron, and slipped on her outdoor shoes.

  It was at that moment that Esme realized, against the soundtrack of Carson’s singing, that he was the one who would stay.

  Almost ten months later, Auntie Earlie sent Esme back home with Lala.

  * * *

  17 August 1984

  Wilma’s eyes mist over in the hush of the police station, where the policemen have been engrossed in her chronicle and Sergeant Beckles himself has ambled over to perch on the corner of a rusting metal desk, crossing his hands at the wrists and setting them on his knee to listen to a little woman, aged more by life than by years, tell her story.

  She assumes it is a curse, says Wilma, this way the Wilkinson women have with men, this ability to so bewitch a man that he becomes besotted. A grown man cannot help himself, explains Wilma, in the presence of a young Wilkinson girl. This is the way it has been for generations. It is not the man’s fault, says Wilma, there is nothing he can do about it. It was this way with her mother before her, her daughter and granddaughter after her. It was this way with her. If she had to trace her lineage back, beyond the ancestors the Black Power people find, she imagines that she would discover Delilah, the woman who was the downfall of Samson. Some Sundays, says Wilma, she feels for Delilah just a little bit. It must not be easy to be pursued by a man like Samson. Selling him for silver was probably the only way for Delilah to get rid of him once he set eyes on her. Equally, it must not have been easy for Samson to find himself in help
less pursuit. Most Sundays, says Wilma, she prays for the Samsons of the world.

  Wilma doesn’t catch the looks the constables are passing, she can’t see through the tears that cloud her vision or hear anything but the story she is telling them as she talks it. Esme had that curse, says Wilma, and, though God knows she tried, Lala came along with it too. There ain’t nothing about the girl that’ll make you call her a looker, says Wilma, but the men on the street used to watch her like she was the last drop of water in the land of thirsty. A man killed her mother, says Wilma, and Esme died and left that girl and Wilma took her and raised her like her own, raised her to keep her eyes down and her dress long and her breasts covered and still men looked. Lala started sneaking out to meet this Adan when she was only fifteen years old, Wilma tells the policemen. What is a good grandmother to do? When she set eyes on this Adan she knew he was bad news, but Lala had that Wilkinson way and the man couldn’t leave her alone. She knew that there would come a day when Adan would wish he had never met Lala. She just hadn’t bargained, says Wilma, on that day coming so soon.

  The constables are scribbling. They want to know more about Lala and about the last time Wilma saw Baby alive. She has never seen Baby, says Wilma, she never laid eyes on her while she was alive.

  “How you mean never?” questions Beckles, incredulous. “Not even once?”

  “Not once,” Wilma confirms, and the tears dribble down her cheeks. “I told Stella I would have nothing more to do with her if she went to live with that man,” says Wilma. “I told her not to come back once she set her feet outside my door.” She nods. “She went anyway.”

  Sergeant Beckles is touched by Wilma’s account of her daughter being one of these women who can bewitch a man. He himself has fallen victim to just such a woman, a woman who inhabits his dreams while his wife snores beside him. A woman called Sheba whom his good sense should not permit him to love. He understands. He calls Napoleon aside. He is going to visit Lala’s husband, he tells him. He is going to find out what drove this man away from his wife and young child so that he was nowhere to be found when this child was kidnapped, that he was not part of the search party when Baby was found. He is going to see why Wilma calls this man a louse. Short of work, what could have made this man leave the two of them in that little shack alone with Baby so young?