by Dionne Brand
When you live out here, six kilometres from Pinery Road and Concession 11, you become impervious to the cold. The winter is thermal. You go out on your “property” only in jeans and a flannel shirt. Granted, your feet must be well shod for the wetness, but you gradually do not need a jacket. You need a dog and you need a gun, but not a jacket or a coat. I have left the dog at home. Unfortunately I do not have a gun or perhaps walking the six kilometres home could be easy.
Snow is quiet. It is not like rain. It has the sound of nothing happening. It is like a deep breath held and held. I sit in the car and the cold of it begins to creep in. There is a way that land defeats you, just the sum of it. In a cold car at Pinery Road and Concession 11, you notice its width. When it’s covered in snow you know that it is hardly sleeping. It is like a huge brown-backed being waiting.
In the snow every distance is long. At Pinery Road and Concession 11 there is a peace, except it is too much peace. I imagine remaining in the car until all this peace and snow covers me and I melt into the forest. I settle into eternity. I would prefer the world to stop now, or at least my part in the world at Pinery Road and Concession 11. But it doesn’t, so I contemplate the walk to Burnt River.
Burnt River is where the librarian doubles as the post mistress. I cannot say how I have managed to live in this country place. Summers and winters. Like my grandmother I hardly speak to anyone. I keep to myself. Each morning when I am not sitting in my dead car at Pinery Road and Concession 11, I go to town, Kinmount, about ten minutes by car along Highway 121. I buy a newspaper, bubble gum from the gum machine, and on occasion any supplies I need for the house, my bunker on Concession 11. Gradually, but it has taken me months, I exchange a few words with Mr. Dettman at Dettman’s Store, where I buy my newspaper and bubble gum. Dettman’s also rents videos. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that I’ve seen every video Dettman’s has in stock. Mr. Dettman, no more talkative than I, manages something approximating civility when I enter. A nod. I nod back but I am much more eager to please or not to cause offence here in this town, which is all white except for the Chinese people who took over the restaurant in my last year in the bush. So I not only nod but also say good morning and take some time looking over the movies for anything new. Nothing, so I buy my paper, my bubble gum, and on the mornings when I feel that I must show Mr. Dettman a loyalty, a bottle of distilled water. Then I get into my car and head to Concession 11. I enjoy my bubble gum on the way home. Sometimes I buy two pieces. I like to put my quarter in the machine and wait for the routine surprise of colour. I like the reds and the blues. I never buy more than two pieces or else there would be no reason to go to town except the newspaper.
If the red flag on my mailbox is up I am delighted. It means that there is news from away. My grandmother’s “away” was England. Mine is Toronto or Ottawa, sometimes England or the United States. To be sure, one of the benefits of living in the bush is that it gives you distance. A lovely distance from everything. There is no urgency, as when you live in a city. It does not matter if you do not return a phone call or get some very important thing done. Very important things do not need to get done. Very important things do not happen. Except for the porcupine climbing the pine in spring, or the moose crossing the river one winter, or the snowplow plowing me into the driveway after all my shovelling. Or the wood I have to fetch and pile near the stove to be dried and the other pile I have on the veranda. All right, all the stages of wood I have to arrange, the pile under the tarp I have to shake the ice off of, the pile near the doorway. The whole business of ordering the wood in the fall from the farmer who does not have a phone. Sound man. I drive to his place down Highway 503 and call to him. He comes out up to his arms in blood. I hope that he hasn’t killed his wife, but I am already out of my car and cannot retreat. She appears a few seconds later to put my mind at rest. Calfing he says, explaining his hands. I order two cords of wood; I give the money to his wife and leave. When he brings the wood several days later his arms are blistered. Poison ivy, he says. He drops the wood in the driveway, and we talk about wood: how much I’ll need; when the cold seems like it’s going to come; no, I might not burn any wood till late October this year counting by the Farmers’ Almanac; oh yes, this will do me fine this year, not like last year when I ran out.
These are the very important things of living in the country. There is a drought each year in midsummer. The river up the road recedes; my well water is not even two feet high. In May, June, and July you can hardly go outside for the mosquitoes and black flies. I have a green cylindrical hat with netting for walking; I have a white mosquito net draped around my bed. I bought it second-hand somewhere. There were a few holes in it I had to mend. It’s very good laying under it, making sure no mosquitoes get in when I do. I lie there at night in the very, very dark of the country, the smell of pine and cedar around me, the very quiet of the bush pressing in, and I listen until I fall asleep.
But now I am sitting in the car at Pinery Road and Concession 11 deciding to make my way to Burnt River and the post mistress. It is mid-afternoon. I’ve left the dog at home alone all morning. She’ll be needing to get out by now. She’s a good dog. Aggressive and unfriendly. I get out and lock the car. There’s really no need here, even if it wasn’t stalled. There is no one here who would steal it. This is not a desperate place. It is a still place. To steal a car requires a kind of quick desperation. If there is desperation here it is the kind that is slow burning, the kind that drinks beer and smokes cigarettes and is overwhelmed by the bush or the river, the kind that makes the body grow large and lumbering and listless. There is no one on this road today. Only me. I stand in the middle of the road and take in my choices: to the left along Pinery Road where I’ve never turned; to the right six kilometres of turns and bends and possible surprises to my house and the dog; to the north into the bush of deep snow or to the northwest into the open field where I can lie down and be swallowed up by tonight’s snowfall and wind; or to the post office. Cautious, I head for the post office.
What I am doing out here I do not know. I mean of course in the sense that I did not know I would end up here. End up is not the right phrase. My life is not over. Land may be a better word. Landing is what people in the Diaspora do. Landing at ports, dockings, bridgings, stocks, borders, outposts. Burnt River is another outpost, another destination. Conrad was a seaman who had his darkness; I have Burnt River. But I had no destination in mind. I am without destination; that is one of the inherited traits of the Diaspora. I am simply where I am; the next thought leads me to the next place. I have come to Burnt River to write. I have ended up writing a few books in Burnt River. I landed in Burnt River and I am writing a few books. I had no money so I came to Burnt River. I left somewhere else and came to Burnt River. I am in Burnt River. I am lucky that the name of this place is beautiful, though it is beautiful in that same oppositional way as everything else. River and Burnt. The history of this name I do not know, but it is like all names in the New World cut through with something terrible that happened. Altered, as River is by Burnt. And what this place was called in its own language I do not know. But River must have been in it. One night, one of the rare nights that friends visited, sleeping in the upstairs of my house someone had a dream of something with a great wing passing over the house. The next morning one of those friends who was Six Nations asked, “Whose land is this, I wonder?” Whoever’s it was, they had passed over the house. I thought of this winged being when I was alone. Sometimes at night I felt it pass and linger at the tops of the scrub pines. It was not a peaceful thing, though it meant no harm to me, I think.
You would not know it to look at me but I am like my grandmother a person of sure perimeters. Though I have arrived all the way here in Burnt River I am not adventuresome. Burnt River is just below the forty-fifth parallel, and I have arrived here — well, to be sure I have meandered here — from the tenth parallel. But that is not to say much. I still take the small steps of my grandmother; I lif
t my eyes only to the immediate area of the house I live in, the small bit of road I can see from the window. Though I look intently and I know each dead weep of grass within my view. I pore over the spindly shrub pine clacking together in the wind. One winter I shovelled the hundred-foot driveway, three feet deep in snow, the whole winter long, crying at my misfortune, before I got the idea to call a snowplow. I always had the idea that while my grandmother did not move much she observed well. So, hunkered in my house in Burnt River I scrutinize each window’s drama of trees and sky. But in the beginning I did not notice wildflowers. So intent on the hardship of living out here and missing the city and missing friends. I never bathed in the river, I never jumped off the bridge in town. Life was always something waiting to happen later. Until one day at this same spot at Pinery Road and Concession 11, when it was fall and all the grass had turned brown and wilted, I saw something violet. I thought, “What a fool!” struggling up like that with winter coming. And all through the fall I thought, “Well, I never!” when violet kept appearing on the side of the road. Finally I thought, “Well, what else is possible? Nothing but to make a go of it, I suppose.”
After a hundred metres or so, I turn and look back at the car. Its hulk is already embraced by the snowy road. The road knows that wherever you find yourself you are.
More Maps
According to my grandmother, the world was the house, its perimeter its shadow which the sun made each morning to the back of the house, withdrew at midday, and refigured in the afternoon in the front yard. Her bed was the ship of the world and her broom was her harpoon to spear us when we reached beyond its boundaries. She sailed in that bed, sending signals to the grocery store, written on brown paper bags. One pound red beans, ten pounds rice, five pounds sugar, two pounds salt fish, four pounds split peas, ten cents worth of oil, one-half pound lard; on copy book leaves in her rickety writing she ordered the shopkeeper, “Dear Lloyd, please trust me these goods, until …”
She sent children in directions she herself never arrived at. To Cipero Street, Rushworth Avenue, High Street, Carib Street, Coffee Street to Harris Promenade; Cipero Street and Coffee Street. Places whose names carried the last whiff of receded cane estates; Carib Street, curling up a shattered mountain, and High Street, rising from a wharf. Harris Promenade where she once fainted and where eighteenth-century Spaniards once promenaded in the evening. There was a bandstand there, palm trees painted white, a Catholic church, an Anglican church, a courthouse. She sent us to towns called Cocoyea Village, Marabella, Vista Bella, Les Effort, Princess Town, Mayaro. She only navigated and travelled the seven windows of the house, and the two doorways.
October
1
Marlene and I are sitting in a café on the Danforth. She has been ill recently. I haven’t seen her in a while. I have been afraid that she would succumb to her illness. I cannot bear the possibility of losing her. So I haven’t seen her. An odd way of loving her, I know. It’s the way I love my family. If I don’t see them, if I don’t know the particular details of their lives, I won’t miss them when they go, or I’ll stave off their leaving, or they cannot possibly leave without my knowing. If I do not know a thing then it has not happened.
Last summer, I decided that I must see her, because along with this kind of reasoning come sudden attacks of panic as to the logic of it, sudden misgivings as to the inherent miscalculations, the smaller, incremental losses — the minutes I can still see her with my eyes passing, the conversations I am preempting. I have been fearful lately, which is not to say anything really. I have been living in Burnt River alone with my dog for the past three years. One can easily grow paranoid in the silent snow and the lightless dark, the big nights and the short grey days. It seems that it is always winter here. I long for the summers, when I am pursued by the sun around the veranda and look for Blue Jays and foxes and try to categorize the seemingly infinite variations of pine. I know tamarack grows near water and bears will visit if there is a drought. I am as watchful in the summer, of the road, of the well, of movement in the river, of cars that seem to slow down at my driveway. But Burnt River, summer or winter, is not sufficient to explain my present fear. My fear has a particular origin.
It began in another house on a cliff falling into a road. Marlene lived in that house. In the back of the house there was an office where she and I worked. From the back of the house you could see the Carenage, St. George’s Harbour, and out to the Caribbean Sea. Above this house, one Tuesday morning, Marlene and I along with three others heard bombers in the sky. It was around 5 a.m. The noise woke us up. We switched the radio on only to hear that the Americans had invaded the island, Grenada. The radio played patriotic songs rousing the people and the military to report to various places — St. Patricks, Sauteers … Then it abruptly went off the air. I showered quickly, thinking somehow that if I showered and put on my jeans and sneakers I would be ready for this invasion. Everyone else in the house awoke and did the same. In the dawn, from the balcony, we could see warships out in the ocean. We were trapped in this house for several days. We did not know what was going to happen to us. I thought that we were going to die. We paced, we drank rum, we talked about the falling revolution, we quaked and crouched in a corridor when the bombs fell, we waited listening for the burst of the bombing raids. I felt myself growing thinner and thinner with nervousness.
Marlene and I are sitting now in a café on the Danforth. It is fifteen years later. There is a question I need to ask her. I have finally figured out this question and I am finally not ashamed or embarrassed to ask her. I haven’t seen her in a long time. She is ill, her left shoulder is slightly immobile. We are drinking cappuccinos and I ask her, “Marlene, did we, ah, did you go crazy after? Did you have trouble with life?”
2
It is the 19th of October 1999 and I remember this. I was in Grenada; there was a coup on the 19th of October. A state of emergency. Four days later the Americans invaded the island. On the day of the coup I was sleeping late. I had been ill. I would usually be at work by 9 a.m. I would walk along Harris Street to the office. Harris Street was three or four tiers up the hill surrounding the harbour. I would see the ocean to my left. I would see schoolchildren on my way. They would look combed and shine. They would idle along their way to school. I would see middle-class women cutting flowers and trimming bougainvillea fences. I would notice other people going to work. Every now and again, I would slip on the gravelled road, I would see the houses of St. George’s in steep ascending stacks around the harbour.
On the 19th of October that year, I slept late. I lived in a house with a breadfruit tree in the front yard. The house was blue. The house was on a typical hill. Hills were inevitable in St. George’s. The whole town inclines from a harbour. The incline is steep and murderous anywhere. In the rainy season a deluge would gouge the brown earth from the front of the house to the back. The breadfruit would fall, bashing themselves on the concrete steps. Once I saw a mongoose in the backyard. My house was made of concrete and painted blue. Next door there was a young woman with a baby and a little boy in a flimsy wood house. Her front door was rotted away at the bottom. She had white frayed curtains which swung haphazardly in the window to my side. That day I didn’t hear the baby crying. I usually heard the baby crying in the morning. But my head was full of a pain and fever, so I didn’t hear the baby cry. I was awakened instead by the sound of a great crowd. This same burning head had led me to this island. I had come here in search of a thought, how to be human, how to live without historical pain. It seemed to me then that a revolution would do it. But I woke up that morning not because I heard the baby’s usual noise but because I heard the crowd.
Three days before, the prime minister had been placed under house arrest because it was alleged he had violated democratic centralism. In a moment of naïveté, of textbook fascination, I had supported this decision. The same moment of naïveté of his jailers, no doubt, but I thankfully was not in charge of a whole country, though it was m
e, or people like me, who had never held power and who had only had dreams and who when touched by the reality of it could not hold it, people who, although they spoke about the imperialist power of the United States, did not somehow believe that power. Or perhaps they were people so consumed by the intimate nature of their disagreements that they could not sense that anyone else could be concerned with their trouble nor that there were outside forces about to put an end to their project. This part of the story is history. The coup took place, the Americans invaded. That was the end of the socialist path in Grenada and the English-speaking Caribbean. And so far stories end like this in history books. Whatever the textbook analyses, though, whatever the representations of tinpotism from abroad, whichever pundits said in clear hindsight that they knew it was coming, all of that was irrelevant that morning. That morning felt as close as family, as divine as origins.
I think it was a Friday. As I said, I woke up ill. A headache blinding me like the sun across my eyes. And the sound of a great crowd in the morning. Not the baby. The baby’s mother had already taken the baby to meet the crowd. The crowd was on top of another hill above me. Someone ran to my door and said, “They free Maurice!” It was a friend. She said that she was leaving now, going back to the country because there would be trouble in town. Said goodbye to me as if she would never see me again. She left. We never saw each other again. I dressed anxiously. The fever in my head felt as if I had inhaled water. I quickly summoned my resources to leave the house. There was now a strange quiet, stranger than the usual quiet of mid-morning there. This quiet was an empty quiet, as if I were the only one left on the street. I hurried along Harris Street trying to find someone to talk to. A few people were still at home but turned away when I passed by. They did not want to speak to anyone, least of all someone who had lived among them only a few months. The sea to my left was its usual blue, the slight wind from the ocean at its usual play, the sun now smart and piercing, my head feeling as if I were drowning in air. No one was at the office when I arrived. I waited until Alice got there and the new clerk we had hired, a young woman from Cariacou. Alice bustled in saying that she had just come in a taxi and that she was going to return home because there was going to be trouble. She seemed to know that all was falling down. She gave me a note for Marlene, something about her paycheque and where to send it. She cleaned out her desk, putting the contents into her large black purse. I asked her if she wasn’t going to town to see what was happening. She said, “No, my dear, I’m going home.” The woman from Cariacou looked as if she wanted to bolt. She had only started work that month. Alice told her to go home. Things passed over her face. She had just got a good job, was this the end of it? Nothing like this ever happened in Cariacou; she ought to run, go back home. She had to go to town to fetch the transport to the place where she now lived in Goauve. I said I would go with her, go to town myself and see what was going on. We locked up and Alice left, heading out of the way of the trouble. The woman from Cariacou and I walked around the incline of the harbour and down toward Market Square.