How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  That very same afternoon she says she is going out, just to buy a Coke from the convenience store, while Adan and Tone are planning. When she leaves she is dressed in a skirt that Wilma would approve of and an appropriately modest black blouse, and she takes the bus to Wilma’s house and she begs her.

  “Please,” she reasons against Wilma’s stony face, still full of the remembrance of being ignored on the beach when Baby was found. “Please, I need some help to bury Baby.”

  The begging reminds Wilma of Esme, of those times she came back to her mother’s house, asking to be allowed to stay. Wilma remembers that Esme might still be alive if she had taken her in, if she had refused to allow her to return to Rainford. It is this memory – this guilt – that makes her put her shoes on at last and take Lala with her to take the bus to the bank in town, where Carson’s pension has been building for a moment such as this. Wilma feels a weight lift from her shoulders when she withdraws enough for a sendoff they can all be proud of. Their hands touch when Wilma gives Lala the money, and Wilma presses the crisp wad of currency, folded in half, into her granddaughter’s grasp, folds the young, fat fingers over the head of the island’s first Premier on the surface of the uppermost hundred, and smiles, as if Lala has done something good.

  But when Lala returns home and presents the money to Adan, a storm gathers within his countenance; he is not pleased.

  “Somebody tell you ask you grandmother for the money to bury Baby, Lala? You ain’t feel that I could get the money to bury my own daughter, Lala?”

  Lala is contrite.

  “We have to pay it back,” says Lala. “It is just a little loan so Baby can have her sendoff. I know you could get the money, Adan. That is why I borrow it, I know you could pay it back quick-quick.”

  He seems appeased, just barely, and she retreats to the periphery of the interior of the house, well out of the way of any sudden malevolent sentiments that might arise in him against her.

  * * *

  Baby has the best – a tiny white coffin with gilded handles and curlicued angels, printed leaflets with her picture on the cover, a pink satin dress. Wilma sits in the front in one of the pews reserved for family and reads a psalm and accepts the condolences of her neighbors. Adan is drunk and boisterous the entire time, asking those who join them to mourn if they like the casket, if they see the little angels on the side, if they can guess how much it cost to have this casket, these angels. He had those little angels made special for his baby, says Adan to anyone who will listen, his baby must have the very best. My poor, sweet, baby girl.

  During the interment, he stands with a group of his friends, asking Jacinthe, who is present to pay her respects, when she is leaving the country and going back to the cold. Adan asks whether she will be available later to go somewhere and have a drink with him. He needs someone to talk to, says Adan, he needs to talk to her.

  When the little coffin is wheeled toward the burial ground, he is quiet and does not participate in the hymn singing. There are mourners whose numbers reflect more the notoriety of Baby’s death, Lala supposes, than any real sense of personal loss. Adan has few friends, Lala fewer. Still, the church is packed, the locals spilling from the small wooden gospel hall into the street, sweating and stinking in the midafternoon sun, jostling each other for a better view of the dead baby’s father in his hastily made suit, of the mother too distraught to stand, and of Baby, lying stiff and plastic-like in her long pink satin dress. It has taken Adan and Lala over a month to have the funeral, whisper these mourners, and it wasn’t just the police investigations that caused the delay, it was that they had no money to pay for a funeral. This, say these mourners, is the real tragedy of Baby’s death – not that she was kidnapped and killed by strangers but that her own parents had been unable to afford to bury her. They point out the father, his crisp white sneakers, his thick rope chains of Italian gold. Some parents, say these mourners, do not understand priorities.

  Behind the gospel hall rise the mountains, skirted by foggy fields of green banana, dotted here and there by gaily painted galvanize roofs that resemble the far-flung tiles of some broken, celestial Rubik’s cube and not the impossibly perched homes of mountain dwellers at all. It is toward these houses that the mourners look when their noses catch the scent of coming rain. It is away from them that their feet run when their eyes confirm it, and soon it is just Wilma and Lala and Adan and his soldiers and Jacinthe and Tone and a few stragglers left standing in the sopping grass and the sticky soil and the weeping clouds as the coffin is lowered into a little hole smaller than Adan’s bed and Baby is gone forever.

  After the funeral there is a wake at Wilma’s, but Adan and his friends do not attend. Wilma is a bitch, Adan tells them, he not going anywhere around her or her house. And in this unspoken command they understand that they are not to venture to the wake either.

  Jacinthe ain’t no regular woman is what Adan tells the fellas who congregate with him after the funeral, under the last streetlight before a dark stretch of beach, stretching and slouching on raw plywood benches hammered and nailed to the base of a big dunks tree. The tree is too tall, too old, too hardscrabble for the spines on the bark to cause them any real discomfort or for the thinning branches to provide any real shelter, but it is a cool, clear night, and shelter and comfort are not what they need.

  After Adan talks about Jacinthe he grows quiet and nobody seems to know what to say and nobody wants to say the wrong thing because, after all, Adan has just buried a baby girl by a woman who is not the woman he is now speaking about with such unaccustomed adoration. The wise among them are aware that in this strange light, at these conversational depths, fights are started and slights are shared and none of them wishes to cause or be caused any offense.

  They had stood beside Adan and watched her – a caramel-colored bird of a woman, with a head of blond-streaked curly hair – take her place with the mourners at Baby’s funeral.

  Ragga does not know Jacinthe, other than what he has heard, and neither does Shotta. But they have both now heard Adan speak about her under the streetlight, and the fact that she merits a mention within this congregation makes her, without more, worthy of reverence.

  Jacinthe ain’t no regular woman.

  Tone mentions to Shotta and Ragga that he had seen Jacinthe several weeks before, sitting in the kitchen of one of his clients, drinking tea and smoking a cigarette and laughing the same loud, brash laugh she’d always had. He doesn’t mention that when he saw her, two lines of coke stretched between her and the client. That she was shaking the way addicts do, as if they are living at warp speed and vibrate with the sheer effort of staying still. He doesn’t mention that he took her back to Adan’s house, to remind Adan that she was still within his reach if he wanted her, to remind Adan that he wasn’t meant for Lala, to remind Lala that she wasn’t meant for him. This, Tone is convinced, is what caused the fight between Adan and Lala. This is why Baby is dead.

  Shotta is lounging on the bare aluminum bones of a beach chair, its plastic strapping missing in the way of those things whose loss can never be rationalized, the how of which can never be explained with logic. Shotta has the disposition of a sloth. When you see him sitting, or sleeping, you could think that he is dead, but Shotta is not dead. Shotta comes alive only when a gun, like the key to a windup toy, is slotted into his hands. Then his steps are so nimble – his movements so deft, so speedy, so sure – that he is hard to reconcile with the supine skeleton in the creaky beach chair. Shotta is so still on the chair that you cannot tell whether he is just sleeping or deceased, a fact that causes one or another of the fellas to nudge him ever so slightly from time to time to be sure he is still in the land of the living.

  “Jacinthe is good people,” confirms Adan.

  “You gotta keep good people near,” Shotta booms. He has the voice of a giant, for a man so puny. He has an uncanny charitableness for a killer.

  Rat returns and bumps fists with each man before emptying his pocket of the
red bottle caps of the local beer he has arranged with a shopkeeper to collect every evening at the time when the shopkeeper cleans the bar in preparation for the night’s patrons.

  “How things?” Ragga asks him.

  “Sufferation strong,” whines Rat. Rat is counting beer caps for a competition for which the prize is a car. He is determined to drive this new red car to this very spot after it is presented to him, to give the boys a ride. Then he will sell it and buy a ticket to Australia, where he plans to watch kangaroos and marry an Aussie girl because he likes the way they talk from a film he watched at the cinema once. Sometimes at night he dreams about these women, talking to him in that easy drawl, welcoming him to Australia. Rat has worked out that selling this car will get him just about enough money to get there, to set himself up so that the girl doesn’t think he is using her. So he can still buy himself a shirt and pants and make himself a plate of pelau if this girl takes her time inviting him home to live with her once he gets there. Rat has long surmised that long hours at the chicken-processing plant, or on the docks at the port, or painter work or mason work or waiter work or work driving a maxi-taxi covered in graffiti will not get him to this Aussie girl, so he does not bother with these options.

  * * *

  “What Jacinthe doing back here?” Rat wants to know, above the clink-clink of bottle caps dropping like coins into an empty ice-cream container. “She come for the funeral?”

  “She was here before the funeral. Just come for a visit,” Tone says, “just passing through.”

  He does not relay how Jacinthe had told him, as they negotiated the goat’s-foot vine on the approach to Adan’s house, that she had come back because her father had begged her to, because he thought she needed help. It didn’t matter, Jacinthe had said, she hated New York. She had thought that in New York she would find her mother, and years after arriving there she hadn’t been able to find her. Moreover, she always felt like she needed to wash her hands, her face, her hair once she came inside her apartment from outdoors, as if she was polluted just by standing in the street there.

  Adan is kicking the soles of his sneakers against a patch of nut grass. These sneakers were once so white that they seemed tinged with blue against the deep velvet of his black, black skin, but the rain during the burial and the resulting muck have smeared them in ugly shades of brown and gray and he is trying to clean them off again. White Reeboks with dress pants are all the rage, and he bought himself a new pair with Wilma’s money – the brightest, whitest pair he could find – to say goodbye to his baby girl, but now he is marveling at how easily they were soiled once the rain fell, how unlikely it is that they will ever again be quite as white as they were when he took them out of the box. Some things, Adan is thinking, can never be made new again.

  “In truth?”

  Shotta’s raw local accent belies that he was actually born in Guyana. It is a peculiar ability he has to embody so utterly the essence of wherever he is living. Listening to him, you would think Shotta has been on this block since birth.

  He hasn’t. He therefore does not know about the high-brown, half-white girl Tone and Adan met when they were teenagers, daughter of a prominent local businessman. He does not know about that day they were in town, hustling locals to pay them five dollars each to arrange for tourists to help them buy perfume and leather shoes duty-free, when they first met her. Jacinthe had skipped school that day and chosen to pass the day in town instead, haunting the perfume and makeup counters at the department stores until the school day was done and she could congregate with the other schoolchildren in front of the glossy storefront of the Norman Mall. She’d removed her grammar-school tie, let her shirt ride outside her skirt, colored her lips with a Revlon sample. She’d bumped into them, asked for a light for her cigarette, this schoolgirl, and Adan had given her one. Adan had tried his lyrics on her just to see if she would bite, if he had the same effect on her that he had on almost every other woman who met him without knowledge of his proclivities, but Jacinthe had stood back and watched them and laughed. A derisory laugh, like they were beneath her.

  “A duty-free hustle?” she’d snorted. “Charming.”

  They’d become friends in one day, listened wide-eyed to her stories of vacations in exotic locations abroad and servants who made her bed and rides in her father’s Mercedes like they meant nothing at all. What she really wanted, said Jacinthe, was to find her mother, who’d gone back to America when she was a little girl. She didn’t hear anything from her, she missed her. When the day ended with them walking Jacinthe to the gates of her school in time to be collected by a driver, they’d felt like they’d known her for ages. And right before they said goodbye, Jacinthe had reached under her blouse and produced two Zippo lighters she had shoplifted and handed one each to Tone and Adan. A memento, she’d said with a wink. And Adan was in love.

  “I wouldn’t come back here if I had a chance to get away,” Rat says. “I didn’t coming back at all.”

  “It ain’t like that for Jacinthe when she here,” clarifies Adan. “Jacinthe father got nuff money, she could do anything she want.”

  He says it with an element of pride, as if the promise of her inheritance of wealth somehow reflects well on him.

  “I still didn’t coming back,” says Rat, “not me.”

  Tone drags on his spliff. When he had seen Jacinthe that day by the client, he had persuaded her to come with him to see Adan. He’d trusted that whatever attraction they’d had for each other would have reignited naturally, that Adan would have used his lyrics, his charm and tried to pursue her. It would have been a matter of time before Adan and Lala would have ended, Tone had thought then, Baby or no Baby. But, of course, that wasn’t how things had turned out.

  And now, thanks to him, Baby was dead.

  Chapter 25

  Lala

  5 January 1984

  How do you learn to love a man?

  You first ask yourself this question when you are a new bride. These are the days when Adan’s robberies buy you clothing to replace the awful dresses Wilma made. He buys you neon-yellow denim dresses and orange suede ankle boots with kitten heels and studded leather belts you can wear across your hips when you go with him to the dance hall to hear Alpha 24 and watch bad boys bob and weave to their best approximations of the music of their ancestors, while wearing their fortunes around their necks. These are also the days when Adan first demonstrates his ability to box these clothes off of you, to tear these dresses and beat you with the heels of the very booties he first presented in a bow-topped box.

  On the night you first ask yourself this question, you braid your own hair in fat box braids piled high on top of your head and you allow it to fall in heavy plaits down your back. You are wearing a little acid-washed denim jumpsuit that strains across a thickening belly and ends in a miniskirt you keep tugging back down your thighs, and a pink undershirt you have slashed and refastened with safety pins because this is the style. On this night you are still filled with heady joy each time you glance at your left hand and see Chinky’s handiwork, its tiny diamond casting rainbows across your eyes. You are still inebriated with the exultation of being free to dress this way, in clothes Wilma would disapprove of, and bought for you by a husband, not just a boyfriend she despises.

  On this night you have ironed Adan’s tracksuit and fretted over how to navigate the cuffs and collar so that they will sit perfectly on wrists you are only just learning to fear, and then you watch as your husband gets dressed, splashes himself in cologne, puts on the bright white sneakers you have spent the better part of an afternoon rubbing with White-X.

  When the two of you arrive at the pasture on which Alpha 24 is hosting their New Year’s dance, Adan is swarmed by a bunch of his friends – women in fishnet jumpsuits and miniskirts and gold hoops that eclipse the movement of their jaws as they chew Chiclets gum. Men who call Adan Big Man and Governor and touch their own bling-encrusted fists to his and nod. And in this group of laughing, drinking,
dancing buddies stands Tone, quietly sipping a soft drink against the gaily branded side of a stall that vibrates in time to “Pass the Kutchie.”

  How do you learn to love a man?

  You may think you learn by doing. So after you have pressed your husband’s clothes and whitened his sneakers and walked with him to the dance in your kitten-heel orange booties, you might tramp those suede booties through the damp grass to fetch him his drinks, his food, and his Fanta, and then you might stand in front of him, allow it to seem like you are in his care, with your eyes perpetually on his cup to see when he might be in need of a refill. You might think that the flutter in your stomach when you watch him, the beauty of his black, black skin and white, white smile, and a broad high brow beneath a brown Kangol, is the love you are learning by doing all these things, it is the love you are meant to have and it will cushion the bruises the better you become at it.

  How do you learn to love a man?

  You might think you learn by obeying. So after your husband has had one too many gulps from a flask of whiskey, you do not say anything when the laughter gets louder, the jokes get bawdier, and he seems less immune to the fawning of vultures dressed to look like peacocks. He tells you to go home, you need your rest and the music might be too loud for the baby and he rubs your belly and says he will send one of his soldiers with you to keep you safe on your walk there. You do not say anything when the soldier he summons is none other than Tone, the strong young man you first met by a gutter, a man who now wears the brooding countenance of a gathering storm. You do not tell your husband that he should not send you with this particular man; if he knows what is good for him, he should require you to stay by his side.