“Up there.” Precious pointed at the sloped ceiling of the climbing aircraft. “If He calls, I am ready to join my husband.”
The man grasped her meaning and didn’t particularly like it. “Go where you want to,” he grumbled sourly. “I’m going to Miami. I not going anywhere else.”
“He leads,” replied Precious stoutly, “and I but follow. Where He leads, I go.”
Just then the aircraft shuddered and trembled as if it had hit a bad stretch of gravel road, and Precious gave a little squeak of terror, closed her eyes, and muttered a fervent prayer.
The man bolted up, gathered his briefcase, and shuffled up the aisle as far away from Precious as he could get.
“Thy Will Be Done,” said Precious aloud as the aircraft flew into a cloud that pummelled its riveted body with invisible fists.
“Amen, sister! Amen!” bawled an old Jamaican woman sitting behind her. The aircraft gave a sickly wobble. “If dis be de time, I am ready!” the old woman crooned.
“So am I!” Precious flung piously over her shoulder. “Ready as ready can be!”
“Show me to de land, oh Lord!” bellowed the old woman with a tinge of hysteria in her voice.
A stewardess hurried over to stand beside them. “Would you please not talk so loud!” she ordered briskly. “We’re in turbulence and you’re frightening the other passengers.”
“If dey be not ready, dey should well be frightened!” croaked the old woman.
“Amen!” seconded Precious.
“Hush you mouth!” hissed a young mother sitting across the aisle with her small child. “You frightening me pickney!”
“Lamb need not be afraid,” rasped the old woman. “It is craven old sheep dat should tremble.”
“Ladies, please!” pleaded the stewardess as the plane shuddered from a solid body-thump.
“Yes, sir!” squealed the old woman in a quaky voice. “We lick a good pothole dat time.”
“But no fear in we heart! For we know we destination,” reminded Precious, turning to mutter between the seats.
The plane rocked and dipped and yawed like a carnival ride. “Now is perfect time for a hymn!” the old woman croaked.
Then she began to sing “In the Sweet By and By,” joined in by-a shaky Precious whose usually melodious voice wavered and cracked with every lurch and shudder of the metal pipe in which she was sealed and fastened high up in the breeze.
When the plane finally landed with a jerk and taxied to a stop, the old woman breathed a loud sigh of relief and proclaimed, “Thanks be to God! We reach safe!”
But by then Precious had regained her sense of earthbound composure and was too embarrassed by her pushy airborne evangelism to offer any reply but the backslider’s halfhearted “Amen.”
The entire planeload of people shuffled through the tubular corridors that unwound to the mêlée of Customs and Immigration Clearance, Precious hangdog and blushing at the scowls and dirty looks darted at her by fellow passengers.
She arrived at Shirley’s house to a splatter of wet kisses from her two grandchildren, who danced and skipped gleefully at her coming to live with them, and a warm but reserved greeting from Henry, the too-too son-in-law, who was a doughy-faced white man with red hair and a freckled nose. The children paraded her through her new bedroom, prancing and jumping beside her with uncontrolled excitement and delight as though she were a new puppy. They showed her the bathroom, the closet, the kitchen, the cellar, squealing over every revelation. They took her to the backyard tree house, which both of them scornfully explained they were too old to enjoy anymore.
Cheryl-Lee, the younger daughter, confided in her about that nasty Timothy Pigeon who lived down the street and whom she intended to punch out next time he snickered at her in the school hallway. Henrietta, the older one, interrupted with superior criticism: As far as she was concerned, punching out a geek like Timothy Pigeon was not worth the trouble. Certainly, it was not worth detention. Precious lectured in a stern grandmotherly voice that Jamaican girl children did not punch out boys, but then she quickly bit her tongue when she remembered that she had once knocked out a boy with one thump outside the tuck shop after he had squeezed her batty without permission. Cheryl-Lee wanted to know what a girl in Jamaica would do if a Timothy Pigeon was always snickering at her, and Precious lied and said that she would ignore him. How could you ignore a geek? Cheryl-Lee asked insistently. Precious did not know what a geek was, and was about to ask when Henrietta suggested that instead of punching out Timothy Pigeon, Cheryl-Lee should drop a lizard down his pants. Cheryl-Lee thought that was a wonderful idea and asked her sister to help her catch a lizard for dropping down Timothy Pigeon’s pants, and the two children gambolled off down the street promising to return as soon as they had found the rightsized lizard.
Groggy with a hangover and befuddled at the newness all around her, Precious wandered back into the house where she found that Shirley had strapped on a gun under her armpit and was ready to leave for work. She kissed Precious goodbye and drove away after telling Henry not to cook any dinner for her since she would not be home until about 3:00 in the morning. Then Precious was left alone with Henry, wondering if she should warn him that his daughters were out looking for a lizard for Timothy Pigeon’s pants.
She decided that she shouldn’t interfere. Her brain was still-thirty thousand feet in the breeze. She was in a place which-struck her as strange as the moon and made her feel like a gate-crasher at a wedding.
She excused herself, went into her bedroom, closed the door, and crawled under the bed to catch her breath and take stock.
Precious took stock. Except for the distant burble of the-television in the drawing room, the household was quiet. From under the bed, America reminded her very much of Jamaica, the cobwebs under the bed being uncannily alike in either country. The stale mustiness of the mattress and the comforting dimness of the airless crawlspace between bedspring and floor were quite what she was accustomed to find under a Jamaican bed. If she didn’t know better, she would even think that she was under her own bed in Runaway Bay after a row with Theophilus.
It was still hard for her to believe that Theophilus was dead, but if he was dead under the bed, the one place where Precious always stared unflinchingly at the truth, then she could be quite sure that he would be just as dead in the open air. Her house in the Jamaica mountains was locked up and periodically tended by Maud, whom she had employed to tramp up the hill three times a week to dust and look after the dogs. She was still in a muddle about the house, but even her decision to let matters rest as they were for the time being didn’t seem so confusing under the bed.
At her age migration was certainly only a temporary measure. She did not really think that she would be living in America for the rest of her life, but she had had to get away from Harold’s house with the perpetual fussing and turmoil. Now that she was under a bed in America, she could plainly see that Mildred was wrong to snoop on Harold’s tooth-box and begrudge a hard-working man his hobby. But Harold was also wrong in his scheming to pull Mildred’s teeth. Yet Precious also had a sneaky feeling that Harold wanted to pull Mildred’s teeth because Mildred was being a Dog in the Manger with the pum-pum. Long experience had taught Precious that when a wife starved her husband of pum-pum, the husband was likely to plot to pull out her teeth.
Her reverie was interrupted by a creak of her bedroom door. She glanced over the cobwebbed floor and glimpsed a small brown face peeping inquisitively at her from the edge of the bedspring. The face melted in the bedside gloaming and, after a flurry of pattering feet, a child’s excited shriek of discovery rang through the house, “Grandma’s under the bed! Grandma’s under the bed!”
Precious hastened to wriggle out from under the bed just as-there was a rap on her door and the pasty face of Henry swivelled around the jamb.
“Precious,” he asked solicitously, “are you feeling all right?”
“I feel fine,” Precious declared with dignity.
&nbs
p; “Cheryl-Lee said you were under the bed.”
Precious brushed herself off, opened her mouth to make an indignant denial, but resolved that migration and green card would not turn her into a liar.
“Dat is where I do my best thinking,” she sniffed.
Henry, looking scientifically interested in this new thinking technique, cocked his head and approached.
“I better make sure I dust and vacuum under your bed, if that’s the case. You might be spending a good deal of your time under there.” He bent down on his knee and peeked under the bed. “I’ll get the vacuum right now,” he announced.
“You don’t have to vacuum-.-.-.” Precious started to protest, but it was too late.
A few minutes later he returned and vacuumed thoroughly while Precious sat on the edge of the bed, twiddling her thumbs and feeling like a fool. He scurried down the hall and returned with a throw-rug, which he placed on the floor, saying that it would be easier for her to slide under the bed if she first lay with her back on the rug. He demonstrated by sliding smoothly under the bed with his back flat on the throw-rug.
“It’s rather snug under here,” he said from beneath the bed, his voice taking on a slight metallic bedframe echo.
He slid back out, stood, and carefully arranged the rug with his foot. “I must try thinking under a bed sometimes,” he chirped. “Maybe it’ll help me clear my head.”
Precious tried to make some noncommittal reply but managed only a disgruntled growl.
Cheryl-Lee stood in the doorway solemnly bearing witness to the whole proceedings. “Daddy,” she asked quietly, “can I think under Grandma’s bed, too?”
“I don’t know,” said Henry, looking nonplussed at Precious. “I think you better ask Grandma.”
“Grandma?” the child asked piteously.
Precious sighed, thinking that she had never before in her life met a man that she would rather thump down on the spot more than her American son-in-law.
“I suppose so,” she grumped.
The child giggled, lay on her back on the rug, and shot under the bed. “It’s dark under here!” she squealed.
She scooted back out and propped up her elbow on the rug. “Grandma, will you come under here with me?”
So Precious reluctantly had to get down on the floor and slide under the bed with the grandchild. Soon Henrietta popped in and demanded to think under the bed with Grandmother, and before long Precious found herself pinned under the bed between two squirming children while Henry bent down and shouted encouragement and thinking technique at them.
“Did you find a lizard for Timothy Pigeon?” Precious asked in a whisper, propped snugly on each side by the wriggling bookends of her granddaughters.
Henrietta giggled. “Yes! You wanna see it, Grandma?”
“But don’t tell Daddy,” Cheryl-Lee warned. “Or he’ll tell us not to do it.”
“Don’t worry,” Precious whispered back. “Knowing your father, he might want to bathe de lizard to get it ready for Timothy Pigeon’s pants.”
Both children cackled gleefully at this idea, shaking so hard on the tiled floor that they vibrated Precious between them.
“Everybody still cozy under there?” Henry sang out in the daybreak treble of the capon.
Chapter 8
Every home is a honeycomb of intersecting routines, private ceremonies, and personal habits. And so was the one in which Precious now lived and to which she tried to adapt. The children had their fixed schedules of school and play; Shirley had her bizarre police work that gave her the nocturnal habits of an owl, departing in the evenings for night patrol and returning early in the morning when the children were first stirring; Henry had his beauty shop where he gave perms and managed a staff of five beauticians, requiring him to leave shortly after the children caught the school bus and just as Shirley was settling down for her day’s sleep.
For the first week Precious was caught up in adapting to this hustle and bustle of intersecting domesticity without getting in anyone’s way, but after only a few days she had such a good grasp of who should be awake when, who should be rushing out of the door, who should be settling down for a day’s or night’s sleep, that she could contribute to the smooth running of the household in little helpful ways by settling down this one, fixing a snack for that one, or playing the cuckoo clock for any who overslept. Having served her domestic apprenticeship under the most cantankerous man to ever step foot across threshold, Precious was grimly of the opinion that no man or woman born was her match when it came to mastering household quirks and complicated timetables.
That Henry was a beautician struck Precious as suspiciously odd if not downright unmanly, but she was careful to keep a straight face and offer no unwanted criticism. She just knew in her heart that she would never sit down and chat about women’s hairstyles or perms or hair straightening with Henry no matter how hard he begged. If he wanted to discuss the criminal mind, slaughter in Africa, or the guttersnipe tactics of English football hooligans, she was more than willing to reply to the extent of her ability to hold intelligent conversation on these male topics. But if he should broach the subject of perms or dyes or hairstyles to her, she intended to yawn politely and remind him of his manhood.
During her first few days in America not an hour passed when Precious did not stumble upon a stupefying sight that made her just feel to stop and stare. America struck her as vast, strange, bizarre, and its exotic newness would have overwhelmed her senses and made her giddy had she not determined ahead of time to sternly repel geography. Of course, she knew that her-foot now walked the shores of a far-flung continent, but she-would still not allow herself to be bullied by the atlas. She remembered that Theophilus had told her that when he was in America, for one whole day all he could think about was, “Rass, dis place big, you know!” and that even as he stood at a urinal he had found himself silently and obsessively muttering, “Rass, dis place big, you know!” over and over again. But that was Theophilus. He was willing to kowtow to geography. Precious, on the other hand, knew who she was and what she was and was determined that no amount of continental land mass or foreign spectacle would reduce her to spatial muttering in the toilet.
Still, the first few days stunned her with such an unexpected array of sights that for nearly a week all she could do was gape and gawk. If she was not careful, migration was going to turn her from a decent Christian woman into a Peeping Tom, she told herself sternly in the evenings during contemplative moments of retreat under the bedspring, and while she did her-best to refrain from staring, she could not help herself when she encountered outlandish scenes she had seen before only in Cinemascope movies.
It was not so much the foreignness of the place, for as a Third Worlder of moderate means Precious had been amply exposed to glimpses of America in television, movies, and magazines and knew what to expect. But what stunned her on her first drive through America was that the whole place appeared spanking new and shiny. Compared to Jamaica, which seemed steeped in a perpetual mildew and grubbiness, America shone as if it had just been polished. But the curious thing was that it was a shine and a sheen visible only to new immigrant eyes, for when Precious repeatedly mentioned how America looked gleaming and shiny to her, Shirley said gruffly that the whole stinking city was getting nasty and shabby, that Precious felt as she did only because she couldn’t yet see American grime. There was Jamaican grime and there was American grime, and your eyes had to get used to American grime before they could see it. For an example, she pointed to a white man slumped against a bus bench and said that he was an American beggar, and when Precious looked at the man and saw that he was not only white but that he wore shoes and a presentable pants and shirt, she scoffed and said that such a man certainly wouldn’t be a beggar in Jamaica, to which Shirley replied, “Exactly! What dey call poor here is a joke to us. Is de same way with grime. Our grime is not deir grime and deir grime is not our grime, even though an ignorant person might think dat grime is always grime,” and P
recious felt so stupid and put in her place that she stopped passing comment about America and contented herself with merely gawking.
Precious made one last brave attempt to defend her maligned Jamaican senses and score at least one point by sarcastically remarking to Shirley that at least murder was still murder in Jamaica or America and the two countries had that-much in common. But Shirley again scoffed and said that murder in Jamaica was one body with a machete chop or perhaps one measly bullet hole, but that murder in America was at least two bullet-riddled bodies along with a gunman suicide. That was real murder, not your fool-fool garden party that know-nothing Jamaicans called murder.
Precious sat glumly in the front seat after that and held her peace, for the discussion was beginning to give her a complex. Shirley drove slowly through one neighborhood after another, past shopping malls and stores and parks, and tried to point out all the sights and places of interest, but because of her complex, Precious could hardly concentrate enough to listen. Finally she blurted out, “I not going let you give me a complex. I say de place look shiny and new. And it look shiny and new. And dat is dat.”
“Mummy,” Shirley chided, “this is not Jamaica.”
“I am aware of dat!” Precious grumbled. “But you can’t do everything better dan us! You can’t have you own special grime dat only you can see! And you can’t murder better dan we murder! Out of order!”
“Mummy, I’m just saying dat we do things big here. We don’t murder one like Jamaicans do. We bag ten and fifteen on de spot. Sometimes we bag twenty-five, thirty.”
“Stop you boasting! And stop running down you homeland! You born and raise in Jamaica, too!” Precious said shrilly. And she steadfastly refused to listen to any more of her stuck-up daughter’s patriotic ranting and raving.
The hardest thing for Precious to get used to was the constant spectacle of whiteness all around her, the unending procession of white face after white face frothing down the streets and through the malls in a perpetual tide of foam and spume.
Dog War Page 5