The Day I Fell Off My Island

by Yvonne Bailey-Smith

  ‘I did say afternoon, Miss Melba,’ he repeated in a louder, but still half-hearted greeting.

  Grandma hissed, ‘And I did hear you.’ Then she turned on her heel and left him standing there.

  We children had no idea why he was standing in our yard, or why he’d come, and clearly neither did Grandma. The only thing that was obvious was that he was definitely not welcome or wanted. When he finally uprooted his bulk, he took the path towards the next village. I suspected then that Grandma was a bit of an Obeah woman. Her face visibly relaxed as he ambled from view, but I could also tell that she knew he’d be back. That night I dreamt that a large hand pushed through the jalousie window in our bedroom and grabbed at one of my feet. I instinctively retracted my legs. When I woke in the morning the dream remained in my memory.

  One week later he was back in our yard. Grandma sensed that he was coming hours before he arrived and commented loudly that the weird-looking patoo – which had flown overhead sometime earlier, its massive owl eyes visible in the brilliant morning sunshine – was bad luck. ‘Everybody know seh de patoo nuh fi fly a day time. It eider a go bring death or someting final.’

  This time, he made no attempt to greet Grandma. ‘I come for my children,’ he shouted. The words spluttered from his mouth and seemed to linger for a second in the air before hitting Grandma somewhere deep in her stomach. Nevertheless, she held herself straight as she addressed him sternly.

  ‘Which children would that be?’ she said in her best speaky-spokey English.

  ‘The three over there,’ he barked, any attempt at politeness gone from his voice. His eyes shot past me without registering my presence and a lumpy finger pointed towards my siblings who had all been busy making mud cakes out of loose earth at the edge of our yard, until they heard the angry voices. They were now standing to the side of me and Grandma. Each of them instinctively swung their heads to the left, following the finger towards some invisible place beyond them. When they realised that beyond them was just an empty space, they began looking at each other. Patricia looked at Clifton, who looked at Sonny, who looked back at Clifton and Patricia in turn.

  ‘You are my children,’ my mother’s husband declared gruffly.

  Confusion spread across their faces and they began shaking, as though a blast of cold air was passing over them.

  Meanwhile, angry veins rose to the surface of Grandma’s usually smooth dark skin. ‘Pickney! All a yuh! Gallang. Go find sinting fi do. Mi ave tings to deal wit yasso.’

  ‘Patricia, Clifton, Sonny. Come!’ I called. They followed me to the side of the house where we squatted low and peeked around the edge of the verandah. ‘Stop yuh noise.’ I said, placing my index finger over my mouth for extra emphasis as we waited for the inevitable explosion.

  ‘Mek mi tell yuh sinting,’ Grandma shouted at the devil man. ‘De only instruction Violet give wi wen she lef all dese pickney dem wit us is fi sen dem to school and bring dem up in de Lord’s way. Soh mek mi tell you again! Leave wi yard an nuh come back.’

  ‘Those children are all mine,’ the man shouted, ‘except for the bullfrog-eye gal. It’s because of you she didn’t even want to give my children my name. She told me how much yuh hate me! What did I do wrong apart from take her off your hands? Who you think was going to marry her when she did go and produce dat ugly bullfrog-eye pickney already?’

  He was talking about me. I knew about my big eyes and I was used to being called ‘bullfrog eyes’, but only by other children, not by a grown man who happened to be the ugliest person I’d ever seen. I wanted to run out and kick him hard in the shins, but I knew that my grandma was more than capable of dealing with him. Her breathing could be heard from ten yards away and I imagined dragon-like smoke curling from her wide nostrils. I guessed that she’d removed her false teeth, which she always did when she was having a big argument or debating some issue, to stop them from flying out when she got into her arguing stride.

  ‘Yuh wutlis ugly Satan devil man!’ Grandma bellowed. ‘A what mek yuh tink seh yuh got any right fi mi grandpickney dem? Yuh tek me daughta an yuh batter her till she half lose her mind. One time yuh did leave har nearly fi dead. Yuh breed har up every minute like she a dyam rabbit, and every time yuh dun wit har, yuh gwaan to one next woman an lef har fi fend fi harself!’

  ‘Ole woman, mi not leaving here without—’ the ugly Satan devil man started to reply, but Grandma Melba continued, speaking over him:

  ‘An who ave to bring up de pickney dem dat yuh breed har up wit? Nuh, me an Sippa! Every last one a dem! She nuh keep one a dem wit har wen dem born. An dis a de first time yuh a lay yuh red eye dem pon de pickney dem yuh call fiyuh. Ah nuh forget seh me did meet yuh mada and even she, yuh own mada, tell mi seh yuh rotten from de core and dat yuh is de devil son! An bout yuh have de tarmarity fi call yuhself church minister!’ Grandma was in full flow. With every utterance she made I felt more triumphant. There was no way she was going to let this man take my sister and brothers away from us. ‘Yuh better come outa mi yard,’ she roared, ‘before yuh live fi regret yuh ever set foot yasso. Go weh fram mi!’

  ‘Let’s see which one of us is going to win this one, you miserable old witch!’ the ugly Satan devil man spat, when Grandma Melba took a moment to breathe.

  ‘Yes! Mek wi see!’ Grandma fired back. ‘Mi seh come outa mi yard – yuh brute, yuh Ugly Satan Devil Man, yuh!’

  The last of the remaining white of his eyes sank into the redness, and his whole body shook with anger. With one furious backward glance, he strode away from the house. Grandma Melba shut her eyes and sucked her teeth hard. For the second time, Grandma sent the ugly Satan devil man on his way.

  Chapter 10

  I woke early the morning after the ugly Satan devil man was ousted from our yard and hurriedly made up the bed in the Hall, which I’d sneaked into not long after the household had fallen asleep. By now this was an almost-nightly routine, so desperate was I to avoid the smelly, urine-soaked bed that I shared with my brothers and sister. I pulled on my yard dress and walked out into the cool morning air. I rubbed my bare feet hard against the thick dew-covered grass and admired the white of my soles against my dark brown skin. I decided that my toenails needed cutting and promised myself to look for a neat piece of broken glass, with which I could pare them down. Then I fetched the big grass broom and did the morning’s sweep of the dirt yard. After that I set off with a bowl of corn to feed the chickens. My chores completed, I decided to wake my brothers and sister, anticipating the usual groans and moans of ‘Lef mi, why yuh nuh lef me?’ from Patricia, and Clifton, and Sonny, dragging the smelly sheet back over their heads each time I pulled at it.

  At some point a lime tree had been planted too close to the house and now some of its branches grew across the entrance. As I climbed the last step to the verandah a jutting branch caught me across the face. I clamped a hand over my cheek to ease the stinging and hoped that blood hadn’t been drawn.

  When I entered our bedroom, the smells were as strong as ever, but even through my one open eye I quickly realised that the children were not in the bed. I stared at the crumpled mess and the empty bed seemed to stare back as if taunting me. Somehow Patricia, Clifton and Sonny had managed to get themselves out of bed very early without me knowing about it. They’d stolen my thunder. I always got up first, not them! It was my job to drag their lazy butts from the urine-soaked bed. But where had they gone? I rushed back the way I’d come, this time avoiding the branch, and ran towards the latrine. For some strange reason it was a place where they could often be found. One of them would be inside and the other two would be stationed directly outside, chattering and laughing, or even involved in a game of marbles or blind man’s cradle. This wasn’t necessarily about waiting their turn to use the latrine, they just seemed to enjoy being in that spot. But, on this particular morning, they weren’t there.

  ‘Patricia!’ I called out, with no expectation that she would reply.

  Grandma often said, ‘That pickney gal h
ave wax innah har earshole,’ and I knew that if she did choose to come, she’d turn up in her own time, wearing her belligerent ‘don’t-ask-me-to-do-anything’ face; Patricia seemed like a child with a secret life that only she knew how to access.

  ‘Patricia! Clift-tonnn!’ I called out, over and over again, but there was no response. In a final effort to try and locate them, I bellowed out all three of their names, ‘Patricia, Clifton, Sonny! Answer me now, man!’

  Grandma came towards me, brows furrowed.

  ‘Chile, a wah do yuh, meking up dis whole heap a noise so early innah de morning?’ she asked.

  ‘De children dem nuh innah dem bed, Grandma,’ I replied.

  ‘Wah yuh mean bout de pickney dem nuh innah dem bed? Soh weh dem deh?’

  ‘Mi nuh know, Grandma. Das why me a call out fi dem.’

  Grandma walked back to the house. She flung open the doors to the Hall and walked through the narrow passageway that led to our room. She tarried briefly by the bed before reaching out and dragging the yellow-stained mattress and the excuse for a sheet from the broken jutting springs.

  ‘Chile, drag dis disgusting stinkin ting and put it some place out of mi sight.’

  I did as I was told and quickly returned to Grandma’s side.

  ‘Chile, you did see yuh Grandfada dis morning?’

  ‘No, Grandma, mi nuh did see him dis morning.’

  Her voice sounded weak with the worry. She knew Grandpa’s movements well, so asking whether I’d seen him was odd. It was like she was trying to fill in time inside her head.

  ‘Come, chile,’ she beckoned to me, ‘dem have to be somewhere pon de place.’

  While we searched the village for the children, neighbours going about their early morning chores greeted us constantly.

  ‘Marning, Miss Melba, marning, Erna.’

  ‘Marning, marning,’ we replied.

  By early afternoon, we’d walked several miles and covered a number of our fields. There was no sign of the children. No one had seen them. All three seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  When we reached Little Lees, a particularly lush piece of land where everything grew in wild profusion, Grandma stopped and sat down heavily on the stump of a fallen tree. I sat quietly beside her. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. Grandma suffered from high blood pressure, which sometimes caused her to have heavy nose bleeds. As she sat contemplating what could have happened to three of her precious grandchildren, a trickle of blood made a slow-motion exit from her nose. I reached into my pinafore pocket and pulled out one of my still-dazzlingly white handkerchiefs. I moved closer to Grandma and wiped away at the rapidly solidifying blood.

  ‘Dem gone,’ Grandma whispered after what seemed an age. ‘Im tek dem.’

  It suddenly dawned on me what Grandma was saying. The children hadn’t gone on an early morning hunt for mangoes. They weren’t playing a prank on us. They were gone. Taken by the ugly Satan devil man. He’d returned to our house in the night. He’d sneaked up the back steps, woken the children, and persuaded them to leave with him. It was like the rooster attack, but without the killing. I was riveted to the spot. I recalled that fateful day when the telegram had arrived and when, a week later, at the precise hour that the telegram said he would arrive, the man with bloodshot eyes had turned up and greeted my grandmother who ignored him. I remembered his second visit, when he hadn’t bothered with a greeting, but had spoken through tightly clenched teeth: ‘I come for my children!’ Then the dream came back to me of the hand reaching through the jalousie window. It wasn’t a dream at all, it was real! The devil man must have been checking out the sleeping arrangements. Maybe he’d been coming back to our house regularly at night and had become familiar with our movements. Maybe he knew of my midnight excursions to the Hall and knew that I wouldn’t be in the room when he returned to steal the children. Grandma had never entertained the notion that the children actually belonged to the ugly Satan devil man. She and Grandpa Sippa were the ones who’d raised them. His utterances were just left to hang in the air, until the moment that Grandma realised that her precious grandchildren had been taken from her care. Now there was nothing else to do but wait for Grandpa. There was no one to whom we could report the missing children. There was no police station, and no police. The most official thing in our village was the little sub-post office. This was a crisis and there was no one who stood in charge of a crisis. The worst thing that had ever happened prior to the children’s disappearance was the stealing of the odd goat or chicken. And, like Briscoe, the culprit was usually quickly found and the matter left to the owner to deal with.

  While we waited for Grandpa Sippa to come home, Grandma suffered a more serious nose bleed. I fetched the tin bucket from the back yard and held it under her head and watched as thick dollops of red blood poured from her nose. It only stopped when what looked like a pint of her blood had been deposited into the bucket. I led Grandma to her room and tucked her up in her bed; the events of the day had just proved too much for her.

  Grandpa returned home in the early evening, loaded up with provisions and ready for his cooking marathon. I went part of the way along the dirt track to meet him and, in the time that it took us to walk back to the house, I filled him in on everything that had happened. Grandpa bent down, removed the stuffed jute bag from his head, and stretched himself back to a standing position, groaning slightly as he did so. His six-foot-four-inch frame refused to pull itself up straight any more, and he seemed like an over-tall tree, slanted slightly to one side, just like his nickname ‘Leanside’. Grandpa didn’t speak, but instead asked for a drink of lime water before removing himself to the breadfruit tree where he sat in quiet contemplation.

  Later that evening, Grandpa dispatched me on an errand to purchase some lined writing paper. These days when he wrote, his hands would shake a little, so lined paper helped him to place his words in a more or less straight line. I returned with the paper and watched as he lit a Tilley lantern and then wrote at speed what turned out to be a very long letter to our mother. What we didn’t know then was that it would be several months before we found out what had happened to little Sonny, Clifton and Patricia, and it wouldn’t be from our mother.

  Chapter 11

  In late May, Grandpa Sippa finally received a letter from his daughter Madge, in England. We were all – Grandpa, Grandma and I – surprised and worried to death that we had heard nothing from my mother for months, but ‘no news better than evil news’ Grandma constantly reminded me, until it became like a mantra.

  Aunt Madge’s letter began in the way that all letters between family in England and their folks on the island began:

  May 1968

  Dear Mass Sippa and Miss Melba,

  I hope when these few words of mine reaches you they will find you in the best of health. I am writing for two reasons: one, because Violet is sick with her nerves. And two, because when me and Herbie visited her, she told us that she got a letter from you and Miss Melba to tell her that Philbert come out and took the children away from you. According to Violet, his trip was suppose to be to look at some land he wanted to buy near his family up in Merchant Bay. There was never any talk about him taking the children away from your care. Violet has always been happy with the way the two of you look after them.

  Mass Sippa and Miss Melba, it seems that Violet isn’t happy about this decision at all, and this situation has contributed to making her sick. Not one of us can make any sense of why her husband took the children from you and bring them to live with people they don’t know.

  I am sorry to tell you, but Violet’s nerves haven’t been so good since she arrived, and now this goings on with the children is not helping her situation at all. It seems one of his relatives, we believe it was his mother, wrote to Violet and told her that the children’s aunt was beating them all the time and making them work without being given enough to eat. She also told her that the children no longer went to school. It seems that
when Violet heard all of this her nerves took her so bad that she didn’t know who she was by the time she got to hospital. The doctor treating her say that they had to give her something call ECT. We are not quite sure what that is, apart from that it’s some kind of electric shock to her brain. They say it help to calm people down, but it seems to us it mostly makes people forget things because my poor sister hardly knew who we were when we visited. Still, since our last visit and as I am writing this letter, I can say that we have seen some improvement and she is expected to leave the hospital soon.

  We are sorry for all this happening and sorry to be worrying you. But as we know, at the end of the day, they are his and Violet children and only them can sort the mess out.

  Not much more to say now. We are both keeping well. England is still hard, just bills and more bills for everything! Not even water you can drink without paying for it. Nothing you can eat without putting your hands in your pocket. It’s not like the island where you can just reach up and pick a mango, everything has a price. Still, enclosed is a few shillings that me and Herbie scraped together to send for you. I hope it reaches you safely. Herbie send his best.

  Take care of yourselves now, and may God bless you.

  Your loving daughter, Madge

  Merchant Bay! This was the first inkling we had of where the children had been taken. Until now, we didn’t know whether they were even still on the island. Our village was on the north-east side and apparently the children had been taken clear across the island to the south. The ugly Satan devil man may just as well have taken them to England. Our two donkeys, as sure-footed as they were, would never be able to manage such a long journey. Even if we could travel by bus to find the children, we had no way of knowing where we would pick up a bus for a journey that would probably take much more than a day. And where would we stay when we got there? And how would we get the children back from their flesh and blood father?