Even though Red Dog had proven himself useful for extra-spending money, Maud still hated him with a passion. She saved all the choice morsels from the kitchen for White Dog, giving Red Dog nothing but gristle and scraps. One time she even stuck a bird pepper in his bowl of cornmeal. Red Dog took one greedy chomp on the pepper, exploded in a bewildered howl, and took off for the river.
“What happen to Red Dog?” Precious wondered, watching him tear down the hillside.
“Him don’t like de cornmeal, mum.”
Sometimes Maud would serve Red Dog bush mixtures in his food that would bind his bowels for at least a week. Then she would add a herb and give him a thorough washing out.
Precious had noticed Red Dog’s peculiar bowel habits, and this morning she broached the subject with Theophilus while both dogs slumped on the cut-stone steps and covetously eyed their masters’ breakfast.
“Dat dog don’t doo-doo de whole week, you know dat, Theo?”
Theophilus looked stunned. “You follow de dog around all day to watch him doo-doo?”
“I don’t follow de dog around, Theo. But I know how dat-dog stay. You watch. One week he don’t do anything at all. Not a lump. Not even a little dumpling.”
“Lawd Jesus, woman, I eating me breakfast!”
“Sorry.”
Maud had sauntered onto the porch during this exchange.
“Him goin’ go this evening, mum,” she promised inscrutably, collecting the dishes and trudging off toward the kitchen.
Precious shook her head in amazement.
“Theo, I swear dat girl is a prophet. She is always right. When she say Red Dog goin’ doo-doo, is better dan money in de bank!”
Theophilus glared at his wife, a fork laden with green banana poised halfway to his mouth.
“I don’t want to talk ’bout dog doo-doo when I eating me breakfast!” he thundered.
“Sorry,” Precious said meekly.
Theophilus departed for school to preside over standing committees, blanch unruly bottoms, and teach Norman Invasion. As he clambered into his car, he took in a deep draft of the surrounding mountain scenery and joyfully bellowed with a magisterial sweep of his arms, “Now, dis is what man call peak! Dis is peak, Precious! See peak dere, and dere, and dere.”
With Theophilus gone, Precious went into her bedroom, latched the door, and, before dressing for work, crawled under her bed to have a heart-to-heart chat with Jamaican Jesus.
She had talked to Jesus since she was a child, usually holding pious conversation with him in the open air as she walked down a quiet parochial road after church. But since her braining she just felt better about confessing sin when her head was shielded from blowing tin can by bedspring and mattress. So she took up talking to Jamaican Jesus while hiding under her bed.
In the beginning, she spoke to Jesus as if he were a foreigner to whom a Jamaican could not pray except in standard English with proper use of “who” and “whom.” But then she attended a revival meeting one Sunday in which the evangelist proved that Jesus was indubitably a Jamaican for Jamaicans just as he was an American for Americans and Trinidadian for Trinidadians, for the reigning power of Jesus defied all earthly nationality and pettifogging borders. If a sinful sheep in Timbuktu called out to Jesus it was Jesus the Timbuktuan shepherd who appeared. How could it be otherwise? What would it be but errant colonialism for Englishman Jesus to appear unto Jamaican sheep?
It was a profoundly enlightening sermon to Precious and convinced her from then on to talk Jamaican patois to Jesus under her bed as if he were a street-corner higgler.
This morning Precious crawled under the bed and confessed to Jamaican Jesus that sometimes she was a little short-tempered with Theophilus, but he often drove her crazy with his constant yapping over peak without considering rape and murder of isolated wife. Jamaican Jesus said he was getting sick of all the gobbling about peak, too, and felt like giving the brute the tin can. Precious suggested that this Saturday night when Theophilus came to her for his weekly conjugal ride she would withhold pum-pum from sinful Brutus and teach him to hush up the infernal chatting about peak, but Jamaican Jesus said that for a wife to impose such a burden on a hard-working husband was slack and out of order.
Precious said yes, she supposed so, but added that not a day passed when she didn’t feel put out with Theophilus for dropping her among wild mountain peak like an abandoned bird egg.
Whether all this was nothing but forehead gossiping with neckback or one sleepless neuron in the unlit occipital lobe whispering in tongues to another, it did not matter much to Precious. What mattered was that when she talked to Jamaican Jesus she always got a sensible answer and felt as comforted as a materialist with his martini.
A few minutes later Precious emerged from under the bed to work on achieving the flawless appearance that suited a Christian sister whose self-appointed mission was to serve as a-human monument to piety and upright living for the backsliding riff-raff. She said goodbye to Maud and set out for the main road.
Because she did not have her own car and did not drive and Theophilus left too early for her liking, every day Precious had to tramp down a rutted marl driveway wearing her best work frock and meticulously manicured face because she lived in the Godforsaken bush, but never mind, she told herself grimly as she daintily avoided spiking cow pat with her high heels and pricked her way down to the asphalt road, wilderness was the price she paid to make her husband happy, the heartless wretch.
The thought of a happy Theophilus cheered her spirits so much that she began to warble a hymn as she walked down to the main road. It was not a vengeful hymn about slaughtering sinners and tossing them into burning pit—those were not hymns for a woman of her sunny disposition. Rather, it was a peaceful hymn about taking a boat trip across placid waters and reuniting with long lost friends on the far shore. Cows looked up at her as she walked past humming this hymn, because, as she noted to herself with quiet satisfaction, even an insensible bovine was drawn to melodically sung words of salvation.
She finally arrived at the main road, paused to apply one or two quick repairs to her grooming, before unfurling her umbrella and taking up roadside post to await a minibus.
This was another inconvenience that country dwellers had to suffer in silence—striking ridiculous poses on a desolate roadside while waiting for a rickety bus that followed no set route, came at no predictable time, and was frequently so crowded that a few unlucky passengers often had to ride with the top half of their trunks swaying giddily out the window.
After much baking in the hot sun while looking and feeling-like a buffoon, she finally got a ride in an overstuffed country bus and arrived at her workplace, which was a hotel in Ocho Rios.
Being busy made the day fly by quickly, and soon Precious found herself waiting for Theophilus at her customary pickup spot just outside the hotel gate, through which a steady stream of waiters, gardeners, and maids poured out into the evening. He finally picked her up and they rode mainly in silence up to the remote country house.
It was Friday and traffic was heavy, the roads being clogged with lumbering trucks travelling between Kingston and Montego Bay. Theophilus drove too fast and several times she warned him about dangerous overtaking. He asked her if she wanted to drive, knowing fully well that she didn’t know how.
Chapter 3
Precious and Theophilus arrived home to find Maud standing in the doorway, waiting impatiently to collect her wages and go home. She had cooked dinner and left it sitting on the table, covered with a dishtowel against flies. Night was falling and the sinister dimness beginning to stain the bushlands and fields made Maud fretful and uneasy, for she was afraid of walking down the hill alone in the dark.
Precious paid Maud her wages and wished her a safe walk down to the main road. Maud sniffed and said she would be lucky if she made it to the bottom of the hill because it was already gloomier than usual for the time of the year and the road was dark and wicked. Gunman could hide behind any bush
and she would see him only after she had suffered a fatal shot. Precious glanced expectantly at Theophilus, hoping that he would offer to drive the maid down to the bottom of the hill, but he was already at the table and facedown in his dinner.
“Well, do de best you can,” Precious advised helplessly.
“If you find me dead body on de road, ma’am,” Maud sniffled, “beg you tell me mother and see dat me get one Christian burial in Clarendon.”
“De gravy gone to sleep,” Theophilus growled, his mouth bulging full of food.
For Precious, Saturdays and Sundays on the mountaintop were days hollowed out with emptiness and boredom. The maid being off on weekends, there was no one to talk to, no passing pedestrians to ogle, no gossip to share and no rumor to monger. There was just nothing eyeball could see on these drab and wasted days but empty overgrown peak, and Precious could only putter about the house and garden and try her best to keep her mind occupied.
For the rest of the morning, she clopped around the house in floppy slippers making a stew for Theophilus who, as usual, had disappeared down to the corner bar to place a bet on the horse races, leaving her bouncing uselessly from one room to the next, straightening, dusting, sweeping here and there, fussing with doily and flower pot, while the seconds and minutes dripped interminably on her uncovered head. With the stew bubbling on the stove and cobweb routed out of every corner, she rattled down the porch steps and out into the garden to weed the flower beds and plant bulbs and seeds.
White Dog came loping over and sniffed her up and down-as she knelt and hunched over the garden soil with her trowel. Red Dog soon ambled over and tried to add his own friendly lick.
“Yuk!” Precious snapped. “Dog tongue! Go ’way, dog! Come back when you have dry tongue.”
Theophilus claimed that dog mouthwater was cleaner than a human’s, but Precious still could not abide a nasty dogtongue mopping, she was very sorry. She had seen with her own eyes dog nose skimming a hairbreadth above a cowpat. She had once seen White Dog jab his snout halfway up the crinkled pink batty of Red Dog and take a narcotic whiff that went straight to his head and made him giddy. That same nasty snout would brush against her skin over her dead body.
Precious was busily digging into the soil, kneeling on the edge of the flower bed and unwinding an endless worm from the roots of her gardenia bush, when suddenly she sensed a dog nose poised to spear deep into her own private batty. She turned quickly to see White Dog sniffing avidly at her nether parts with an excited quiver in his moist nostrils.
“Dog, you mad?” she asked, glaring at him over her shoulder.
White Dog guiltily backed up, ambled away, and slumped in the shade of a tree.
“Lawd, what a way you long!” Precious moaned, reeling the worm out of the soil.
Saturday night was Brutus’s night to ride. In the early years of their marriage when Brutus was young and frisky, he rode as avidly and often as a bus passenger with an unlimited transfer. But with advancing age, Brutus had gradually settled for longer, less frequent rides, until his schedule had dwindled to this one compulsory Saturday-night outing. Rain or moonshine, starlight or fog, Brutus wanted a ride on a Saturday night.
Romping in the moonlight, White Dog and Red Dog could hear scuffling noises drifting from the darkened house and rustling the cool mountain vapors that floated over the pastures, and somewhere deep inside their dog brain they might have puzzled over why every Saturday night sounds of squeaking bedsprings, thudding bedposts, and human muttering came purling out the curtained window.
On this particular night, as the two dogs slumped on the grass and occasionally got up to pace and peer quizzically in the direction of the mysterious sounds guttering from the house, they both suddenly jumped at a piercing female shriek—a jubilant wail of joy, born-again vision, Irish sweepstake winnings—that rang from the darkened bedroom.
White Dog looked at Red Dog as if to ask if that was the mistress.
Red Dog stood up and looked back as if to scoff that Christian women like the mistress didn’t make that kind of slack noise. Winding himself into tighter and tighter circles, Red Dog flopped wheezily on the grass.
A cool breeze wafted down the slopes, fanning the pastures with the sweet scents of wild mountain flowers.
Inside the dark bedroom, Theophilus was chuckling with manful triumph. “What dat noise you make, Precious? Brutus sweet you?”
There was an embarrassed silence, then a languid reply. “Theophilus, I believe you proper calling in life is pornography, you know dat?”
“Pornography, what! If Brutus sweet you, say dat Brutus sweet you! Nothing to be ashamed ’bout if Brutus sweet you.”
A flutter of wifely resignation. “All right. Brutus sweet me. You happy now?” Bedspring cracked and creaked from the sounds of middle-aged bodies settling down for the night’s sleep.
Theophilus chuckled. “Boy, Brutus! Middle age might reach you, but you can still do de job!”
And the whole domestic foofaraw was capped by a faint sigh of demure assent from Precious.
“Oh, yes!”
The Sabbath following was always devoted to hymning and praying off the effects of nasty carnality beastly Brutus schemed to provoke out of her every Saturday night, and that was exactly how Precious spent this Sunday. With a grumpy Theophilus in tow, she went to church determined to atone for her wanton squealing of yesterday.
Theophilus always looked sullen in church, and this Sunday he was no different. Church ached his back, aggravated his corn, gave him a buzzing in his ears, made his belly run. Not that he said or did anything disruptive or out of order during the ceremony. He just slumped in the pew looking woebegone and dejected.
The only time he would perk up was if a parishioner had dropped dead during the week and the minister had a few words of eulogy to say about the deceased. Theophilus would then instantly shed his gloominess and lean forward to listen. Afterwards, on the drive back up to their mountain house, he would moan about how only last week the faithful departed had been drawing breath and cussing bad word but now was dead and gone, carrying on quite as if no one in the parish was allowed to die without giving notice.
This Sunday they learned that an elderly gentleman who had lived in the parish for well over fifty years had suddenly died, and on the way back to their mountain home Theophilus as usual was carrying on as if the deceased had not well outlived his promised three score and ten.
“Safe and happy at last,” Precious opined solemnly.
Theophilus gritted his teeth and the gear of the car as he steered up the steep and narrow road.
“Precious! De man is not safe and happy. De man is dead and gone.”
“My faith tells me dat he is safe and happy,” Precious replied, cool as river rockstone.
“I suppose when I dead and gone you goin’ talk ’bout how I-safe and happy, too!”
“Theo, you not goin’ dead and gone for many, many years. And knowing your disposition, even when you safe and happy, you probably goin’ carry on miserable and cantankerous just to be contrary. But I not worried. My God know how to handle you.”
They drove the remainder of the way up the hill cobwebbed in the stolid silence of the long-married.
That very next day Theophilus, recklessly overtaking a van around a corner, collided headlong with a semi truck and instantly became safe and happy.
Or dead and gone.
Chapter 4
Sudden death brings out the best in neighbors. It makes them boil soup and bake pies and brings them filing to the casket to mutter consolations and peer grimly at the deceased. Even acquaintances who had not particularly liked Theophilus in life, finding him too this or that for their taste, in his death were quite willing to drive up the hill and lament his passing, hanging head as if their best friend had been struck down.
Shirley, the Higginsons’ one and only daughter who was now a Miami police, came to Jamaica for her father’s funeral, bringing her gun but leaving behind her husband and c
hildren. She explained that she did not agree with children attending funerals, for she had had to undergo just such a trauma at the age of ten and it had given her a lifelong dose of the heebie jeebies. She would never permit her own flesh and blood to experience a similar shock.
The dentist son, Harold, attended the viewing and funeral with his wife, Mildred, and his two children, both of whom gambolled in the front yard, skipping and throwing stones and drawing occasional scolding from mournful adults. One of the children, the boy, was romping with White Dog when Red Dog snuck up and tried to nip him on the foot. But the boy was already schooled in the sneakiness of dog and as soon as he realized that Red Dog was out for a nip, he kicked him briskly on the snout. Red Dog yipped that he was not a football and scurried for the underbrush, tail between his legs, with the boy scampering gleefully after him, trying to punt him over the gully mouth.
The adults congregated solemnly in the wooden house on the hilltop, drinking fruit punch and rum and viewing Theophilus, who was laid out in a draped black coffin on the dining room table, braced against the burdensome weight. One woman remarked how well Theophilus looked and expressed the wish that she, too, would look as good at her own viewing. Another opined that the dead headmaster didn’t look a day over thirty-five. A third decried the waste of burying a man in such a good suit when so much ragamuffin abounded in Jamaica, but another declared that she intended not only to be buried in her best frock, but also in her pearl necklace, for she knew perfectly well that if she didn’t carry the necklace to her grave her husband would hand it over to another woman, and she damn well didn’t buy a necklace to hang from any other neck but her own.
Dog War Page 2