Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  But when the last dregs in her coffee mug have gone cool, Luela finds the quiet disorienting. Today she doubts she will be content too long sitting among these pieces by herself.

  A walk through the Hindquarter and Centervillage will be good for her, Luela thinks, and for Etienne, too. After all, he was born on the bluff. Thinking about what she would point out to her nephew, it occurs to Luela just how much things have changed since she was a teenager. In Centervillage alone there are four new businesses.

  Perhaps these two postcards that came in the mail from Italy may cure the boy of his gloomy attitude, Luela thinks later in the day. The postcard addressed to her has a picture of her favorite Italian actress. You wouldn’t believe the fun we’re having, Kath has written on the back. I don’t know why in the world we waited so long to do this. I feel wonderful.

  The postcard addressed to Etienne has a picture of a cowboy boot with tiny stars indicating the large Italian cities. In the border around the boot, Kath has drawn an arrow pointing to the location of the village of Gaeta.

  In the living room, when Etienne sits down to look at the postcard sent to him, Luela assumes he will read his mother’s happy words aloud. But Etienne reads them to himself. There is no postmark on either of the cards, but Luela thinks he suspects as she does that the happy words were written before his mother got sick.

  Witnessing Etienne’s gloomy slouch as he lowers himself into a chair for dinner makes Luela even more convinced that getting out of the house will help him feel better. His uncle Kiryl has been asking after his nephew ever since Etienne returned from the camp. The day before yesterday, when she ran into Kiryl’s wife in Centervillage, she said Kiryl had not yet found the pictures he promised to give Etienne. Perhaps Kiryl will look harder if Etienne visits, his wife suggested.

  Luela spoons rice onto Etienne’s plate, worried about the news that Chevy Platt’s health has taken a turn. There is no greater joy than seeing elderly relatives while they are still alive, George taught his daughters. And it is something that Luela can pass on to Etienne. Tomorrow morning, rain or shine, sour face or happy, she will make sure that Etienne walks over to New Jamaica so that Kiryl Platt can take him to see his great-uncle before that man leaves this world. For that, Etienne will thank her when he is older.

  Chevy Platt left stern instructions that he wanted what he called a southern layout. The body is washed and dressed at home. Then it is laid out for a day of viewing—not on the bed where the living sleep, but on a cooling board where the world-weary rest before returning home to their Maker.

  In Simms Corner, in the bedroom where Chevy had been ailing for weeks, Etienne has taken a place beside the bed, between his uncle Kiryl, who stands beside the head of the bed, and his cousin Yancy, who stands beside the foot.

  Kiryl’s wife and her sister, before they left the house to spread the word of Chevy’s death, dressed the remains in the maroon suit Chevy loved as a young man, when he lived in Glace Bay. Kiryl tells the boys he remembers the southern layout ritual from the visits he made as a child to Cape Breton to attend the funeral of former miners who had come up from the southern United States.

  “Hands and arms at the ready, young men,” Kiryl says, motioning Etienne and Yancy closer to the bed. “We will raise on my call.”

  Etienne slides his hands under the lower back of the body while Yancy grips the ankles. Kiryl, showing the same dour face he had worn when Etienne arrived, prepares to lift by the shoulders.

  “Bring him up.”

  Etienne is surprised at how light the remains feel as they hoist the body from the bed. In Chevy Platt’s face, every sharp angle of bone pushes out skin that looks as thin as wax paper.

  The long table Etienne helped Kiryl haul up from the cellar now sits covered in a silk cloth. With each steady step of the slow procession toward the cooling board, Etienne inhales more of the talcum powder wafting off the body. But there is also another odor, like the smell of burnt skin. Is this what death smells like? He has never been this close to a dead person. But after they lower the body onto the table, Chevy Platt does not look dead. He looks as if he has lain down to take a nap.

  The dark suit to dress the body for the funeral is hanging on a hook on the wall near the cooling board. “Why does the undertaker have to change the suit?” Etienne asks later, when Kiryl is pouring two glasses of soda pop in the kitchen. “I thought you said your father is not having an open-casket funeral.”

  “Those are the man’s instructions,” Kiryl says. “We don’t always know why a man does what he does. I could guess. So can you.”

  Kiryl Platt has not yet found the pictures of Omar he promised to give to Etienne. But he has found a few old letters that relatives in Halifax and across the bay in Preston received from the Platts in Mississippi.

  “Your aunt tells me you need something to do while your parents are away,” Kiryl tells Etienne as he hands over the letters. “Why don’t you come work for me at the business? Your mother did, you know?”

  Without acknowledging his uncle’s offer, Etienne accepts the letters then insists he must go. “You don’t have to drive me back,” he tells Kiryl. “I will take the bus.”

  Did Luela know she was sending him to all of that, he wonders as he gets off the bus on the bluff. Was that more punishment for his being sent home early from the camp?

  The Platts’ business on the bluff is now called Platt’s Hardware and Appliances. From the bus stop, Etienne wonders if any of the people he can see passing the building have heard the news. He is convinced that very little about working the cash register there would interest him. The one time he was inside, the few customers who came in seemed to recognize him but said nothing. One day he was certain he had seen one of the women who had been rude to his mother at the picnic.

  Passing Basinview Baptist, Etienne almost turns to go by the cemetery to see the graves of his family. He did not know Chevy Platt but thinking now that soon the old man will be joining other deceased relatives there makes him sad. Etienne is about to leave the road when a thought occurs: there are Sebolts buried in the cemetery as well. But after attending to Chevy today, does he really want another visit with the deceased? He halts abruptly with an even worse thought: his mother might be buried here soon. Trying to shake that thought, Etienne continues up Dempsey Road toward the Hindquarter.

  Luela has waited until after Chevy Platt’s funeral to tell Etienne she has news about his mother.

  “Your parents are flying back from Italy today, directly to Montreal,” she tells Etienne the next afternoon. “They are taking your mother to the hospital there this evening. She’s not feeling well, but it could be just another cold. The hospital visit is merely precautionary. Your father says your mother is doing fine.”

  Etienne receives the news with a blank face. Later he is glad that Luela and Chamberlain have gone to work. He wants to be alone. After a while he takes a walk down the hill. There are a few boys shooting tin cans with their pellet guns over at the place they call the Bowl, but today he would rather walk to Nobody’s Acre. It is quiet there. He likes it when warm breezes interrupt the cool air.

  On Nobody’s Acre he sits on a boulder trying to imagine his mother here. Did she bring him out here when he was a baby? If he tries hard enough, can he remember?

  Thinking about the words on the postcard from Italy, he tries to imagine his mother happy, as she was the day the two of them walked together on Dempsey Road. But what he imagines instead is her being carried out of an airplane. She is lying in an ambulance that careens along a street in the Côte-de-Liesse, heading toward a trauma room at the Sacred Heart of the Lachine. He cannot imagine himself at her bedside, as he was the last time she recuperated in a hospital bed. At her request he sang a song imitating the Italian balladeer on a record Timothee’s grandfather used to play when he lived at their apartment. His mother always said he had a nice voice. But that evening she could not have enjoyed his singing, plagued as she was numerous times by hacking cou
ghs.

  Two boys arrive carrying baseball gloves and bats. While one of the boys stands at home plate with a bat, Etienne directs the other boy to a position in right field. A few pitches and Etienne can feel his mind begin to clear. But when he is hitting fly balls for the boys to catch, his mind drifts back to thinking about his mother. Everybody is calm about her return, and he is trying to be. But it is difficult.

  Heading back, Etienne imagines he will show his mother the letters he got from his uncle Kiryl. But not until she is feeling better. “You need to learn about the other side of the family,” his aunt Luela had said. He knows more now, but what he knows does not please him. From the letters it is clear that despite Omar’s requests, the family in Mississippi—including Omar’s mother—had never wanted him to come down for a visit. If that was true, why on earth would Etienne want to get to know the Platts better?

  Etienne decides he needs something else from Halifax to cheer his mother, because the letters might make her sad. Passing the Penncampbell house, he notices a woman on the porch. Is that the mother of the girl in the picture with his mother at a county fair? He waves, but all she does is stare. He arrives at his aunt’s house, recalling the day of the picture party, when his mother took him to the back of the family house to see the shed. “If I had a crowbar with me now,” Kath said when they were inside, “I’d pull up one of these planks from the floor.”

  The interior of the shed smells damp as Etienne enters. In one corner, he kneels and touches several boards. He runs his fingertips over the brass square etched with the date the floor was laid. This would be a good board to take, but a better choice would be a board with etchings on the end.

  When Etienne jiggles a board, a heavy nail pops up and hits him in the chest. He puts the nail in the pocket of his jacket and then pries the board loose. He carries the plank out of the shed. He will find a way to hide the plank from Shirley and George, and from Luela. He wants this to be his secret.

  From the backyard he can hear people talking on Dempsey Road. What happened to all the noise his mother says used to rattle the Hindquarter? Centervillage is noisy, but up here it is dull city. With the plank on the ground he uses a heavy rock and the nail to pound a row of punctures across the board. Sixty or so days until he starts school in Montreal. By then his mother will be well again—that will happen. After leaning the board against a small boulder, Etienne jumps high. When he lands, the board splits where he wants it to, sending a sharp thunderclap across the bluff.

  Overdue Lessons

  The weather in Montreal near the end of July is sweltering. With no air-conditioning in the apartment, the heat irritates Kath, who gets out of bed thinking today is the day she will begin gathering material for her fall classes at Greeves Adventist Primary. How is it possible that, once again, it is time to prepare her lesson plans? Where on earth did those early summer months go?

  That is a question she is not in a hurry to answer, Kath thinks, leaving the kitchen with her cup of tea. She slept well last night. And with several hours before she must go to her doctor’s appointment, she enters the bedroom thinking over other tasks she could do. Her memory cabinet arrived last week from her parents’ basement in New Jamaica. Cleaning out more drawers might be easier than working on her lesson plans. But just imagining the dust mites and mold that might erupt from that job gives her a fit. And besides, those drawers contain too many letters she is in no hurry to revisit. Why on earth did she save the letters from Oscar Mislick? She has heard he is now a high civil service commissioner in Ottawa. Who was the girl who let herself be taken under the spell of that man’s words?

  She sits at her desk, almost feeling the warm seawater of Gaeta on her feet. Before she fell ill, she and Timothee had explored the seaside town like a new couple. From rough wooden piers, they watched the sun redden behind gray clouds. In restaurants with low ceilings, they sipped spirits that gave their throats the most delightful burn. The small bedroom where they slept at Timothee’s great-aunt’s house had thin curtains for a door. Still, they somehow managed to find ways to be intimate. But the idea of any more fun ceased the day she woke up on the ground-floor hospital room in Naples, thinking her lungs were going to burst. The doctor there said the new fibrosis would be difficult to arrest. As each day went by, though, she began to believe her lungs would clear in time to make the trip to Morocco. But it did not happen, Kath recalls as she retrieves a folder of papers from a drawer in the desk.

  “It’s better in here,” she told Timothee yesterday evening, when he came home to find that she had gotten Etienne and his friend Fabrice to move the desk into the bedroom. “This way Etienne and the boys do not have to listen to my hacking cough when they are in the living room.”

  In the folder with the material for her lesson plans is the speech she gave last year to begin her class. Icky, icky, icky, her new fourth-grade students would say if they knew how many times she had given this same speech.

  After working a while, Kath slips on her low-heel shoes for another trip down to the lobby. Retrieving the mail is usually Etienne’s daily chore. But just the sight of any document emblazoned with the gold-crusted crest of Saint Richelieu is enough to cause several hours of moping. What Etienne saw a few weeks back, and suspected was a fall tuition bill from the school, was a letter from the headmaster detailing his concerns about admitting Etienne for the fall. Timothee replied in long paragraphs expressing his admiration for the school and his fond memories of his time there. He also included half the payment for the fall tuition.

  Money talks, Kath thinks at the bank of mailboxes, where she retrieves a large envelope from Saint Richelieu. Kath pulls more letters out of the mailbox, realizing she will miss her son in the fall, despite his moods. Etienne’s gloomy face at dinner last night may have resulted from the discussion Kath and Timothee were having about today’s doctor’s appointment. At least sending him to school will prevent him from hearing his parents discuss more of those.

  These low-heel shoes carrying her to the elevator will also do well for the walk to the medical school campus. “A woman surviving into adulthood with the type of dormant chest infirmity you are suffering is a medical rarity,” her new doctor has said. She has been in his care for only three weeks, but already he has suggested several novel therapies. If the medical device he will fit her for today does not yield results, he will suggest another hospital stay. The stay, he says, will be solely for tests and observation, but she is not sure she believes that.

  Another letter from Marcelina Higgins. Kath shakes her head in the elevator. This is the second letter she has gotten from Marcelina since returning home to Montreal. She left for Italy suspecting that Marcelina was not too happy with her for failing to complete her assigned task of bringing a project for the children in the monthly weekend academic program. To make matters worse, Marcelina was also not happy to see Kath agree with one of the neighbors who complained that Marcelina had not selected any children from New Jamaica to sing at the picture party. “Couldn’t you have at least chosen one for the children’s quintet?” Kath had asked.

  The French make the best maps of West Africa. But the stack of maps Kath gave to Marcelina apparently did not spur enough ideas in the students or their teacher. Help, help, help, the letter from Marcelina begins. It ends with an invitation for Kath to come to Halifax one weekend and teach a lesson herself. The children will learn plenty being taught by a college-educated woman who used to live on the bluff, she writes.

  The letter also includes a newspaper clipping from the summer 1953 issue of the Colored Freeman. The article discusses one of the towns in West Africa with inhabitants claiming to be descended from the men and women who, in 1823, waded ashore from the grounded HMS Perspicacious. For years, Shirley has been sending Kath similar articles from the Colored Freeman. One article about foreigners landing on the northern coast of Africa made Kath wonder about ancestors of hers who might have come ashore somewhere there. Today she imagines herself free of illness, dri
ving in a convertible from the city of Mogador, Morocco, down the Pepper Coast toward Freetown, Sierra Leone. There she would walk the beach looking for items that her great-grandparents Ephram and Ivy Sebolt discarded as they waded ashore.

  Mere rumor, her father says about the stories of former residents of Woods Bluff living in Africa. Both of those ships went down at sea, George maintains. But this newspaper article gives the name of a town in a northeast corner of Sierra Leone, where the boundaries of Guinea and Liberia meet. Families there have discovered old church records that prove a claim they have been making for years: that many families in the town have ancestors who once lived in Nova Scotia. Kath refolds the clipping, revising the dream she had of driving down the Pepper Coast. Now she would also turn inland, driving through flatlands and hills to the town the article says is called Halifaxship.

  If that Marcelina is anything she is persistent, Kath thinks, as she slides the clipping back into the envelope. It will be a pleasure to write a lesson plan for a class using the information from the article. But she is not sure she will be able to return to the bluff to teach it herself.

  Enough procrastinating, Kath tells herself as she opens the fat envelope from Saint Richelieu. Time to get to the real work today. As she suspected, it hurts a bit to read the words welcoming her son to the Saint Richelieu Cohort of 1953–1954. She hesitates a moment, but then signs the enrollment papers. After writing the check, she hides the envelope to be mailed back to the school beneath a pile of papers on her desk. All is well. Etienne will be away in the fall, she hopes, with plenty to keep his mind off worrying about his mother.

  Just look at the time. It is nearly eleven. Instead of beginning her schoolwork, Kath rises from the desk and heads for the living room. She gives her orchids a misting, having decided to find a way to make these next few months easier for her husband. Timothee has offered to drive her home after her doctor’s appointment today. But she will telephone his firm from the doctor’s to say she will take a taxi. That will also avoid getting into another disagreement with Timothee about the woman she plans to interview tomorrow morning for help around the apartment a few days a week. Timothee insists that is unnecessary. He says that he will pitch in. But she is having none of that. She is doing this for him.