“Mi feel like an orphan, Barry.”
“I sorry, Carmel.” And I am. For her.
“When you coming for the funeral, Barry?” Carmel’s voice is heavy with hope.
“You know I don’t business with funerals.”
“Yes, but this mi papi.”
“I sorry, Carmel. I sorry . . . but I just can’t.”
Sigh.
Click.
I stand there awhile before I put the phone back in its cradle, and then I sit down in the chair next to the phone and catch myself. I recognize what I feeling. The cycle of grief, the way hearing about a person’s death, let alone my own father-in-law’s, resurrects old pain.
My father dead before I reach my sixteenth. Mr. Patmore Walker, Esq.—son of Mr. Gideon Walker, Esq., son of Mr. Jesse Walker, Esq., son of Solomon, son of Caesar, son of Congo Bob—worked as a junior clerk in the courthouse. He was the first in his family to go to school but not quite first in class so he didn’t get the single island scholarship to a British university available to my people in 1929.
He wanted to be a teacher, so he should-a started his own school with kids sitting on mats. I would-a advised him so, if he’d lived long enough. Making my way in England, I learned that when the fortress draws up its ramparts, you gotta start building your own empire. Don’t wait for nobody give it you.
But he was a passive, placid man, except where he and his wife was concerned. My mother might-a been a humble maid for the Pattersons, but she had high ambitions that her husband never met, with his highly intelligent mind but lowly job at the courthouse. Theirs was not one of those marriages of everyone else’s inconvenience, which was rare in the Ovals, but they nonetheless quietly, consistently bickered.
My father was home after work, every evening on the dot; he didn’t disappear without no explanation, didn’t spend hours over at the rum bar, didn’t lie, didn’t cheat, didn’t beat.
His favorite pastime was reading the Agatha Christie novels his pen friend sent him from England, transporting himself to the land of the British who’d brought us there, who still ruled over us, and in whose power it was to give us, or not, medicine, education, employment, electricity, running water, and, for those who could sell a few cows to pay for it, the right to passage on a steamship ploughing a watery furrow all the way to the center of the world.
This one evening my father was washing himself down in the yard from the huge barrel of water that it was me and my older brother Larry’s job to fill to the brim every morning from the tap, carrying two pails, each balanced on a shoulder rod.
I heard him singing his favorite Roaring Lion calypso, which my mother hated, which was why he was always singing it.
“If you want to be happy and live a king’s life, never make a pretty woman your wife.”
One moment my mother was shelling peas out back; the coal pot was cooking up something aromatic to satisfy my wolfish teenage appetite while I was (halfheartedly) doing homework on my bed; and Larry was over at his girl Ellorice’s—and the next, my father had collapsed.
His heart had stopped and couldn’t be kickstarted into action again, no matter how hard we and the neighbors tried. It was only when his ribs started to crack that we gave up.
He was thirty-three years younger than I am now.
I never heard my father sing again. Never had him to guide me through life, although that meant I was also spared the fear of his disapproval because at this stage me and Morris was already hanky-pankying.
He died at a point in the father-son relationship when I’d had enough of him telling me to work harder at school, enough of carrying the weight of his expectations, when I hadn’t worked out what I wanted for myself yet. I’d become a sullen, monosyllabic arse.
I didn’t understand then that when your people come from nothing, each subsequent generation is supposed to supersede the achievements of its parents. My father had escaped the fields of his predecessors, and he wanted me getting letters after my name and a career worthy of my intelligence. Bettering ourselves was no joke when we was only a few generations away from the hold of the SS Business Enterprise out of Africa. Especially when back home change came slow. The colonial overlords ran tings, and the red-skinned Antiguans from “good” families in St. John’s was next, followed by the redskins, who didn’t come from families of note but who had the appropriate doses of alchemically advantageous admixture for a certain degree of success in the island’s pigmentory hierarchy. Lastly was we darkies.
This is why my father had been saving to RSVP a Yes to the British Colonial Office ever since they first sent embossed, gilt-edged invitations to all the citizens of the Caribbean.
He knew we all had to leave to get on. And we wasn’t like those badass, kamikaze Jamaicans full of the blood of Yoruba warriors living on an island twenty-six times larger than ours. No sah, and we was cut off from each other on remote plantations and villages. The Jamaicans had massive mountain ranges to escape to. What we have? Volcanic mounds.
How was we supposed to rise up? And do what? End up back in the sea again? Yuh mad? We didn’t even get universal suffrage until 1951. For most of his adult life, my father couldn’t vote. How that make him feel?
Maybe that explains me to myself too. I don’t like to buck the so-called system, like those gay exhibitionists Morris loves so much. I like to infiltrate the system and benefit from it. Same goes with my marriage. I don’t like being an outsider.
Yes, I am my father’s son.
If only I could bring him back and get reacquainted. Ask him how he escaped the curse of we people by being a good husband and father. The curse Carmel’s father carried all of his life—a wife-cheater and a wife-beater.
As for my mother, news reached me in 1968 that she was laid up with a cancer that had worked itself into all her organs without her even realizing what it was. That woman never gave in to no illness, because people couldn’t afford to back then. They soldiered on using teas, herbs, and compresses.
I got the telegram early one Sunday morning and caught the first boat home with Larry, which didn’t leave for three days and took two weeks.
By the time mi reach Antigua, mi mother gone.
Like with mi father, I didn’t get to say goodbye. To this day, mi feel it deep inside and I cyan’t talk about it to nobody—not Morris, not Maxine, not nobody.
How many times I told Carmel I don’t do funerals. She don’t listen.
* * *
Last one I attended was 1979, after Larry smoked himself to an early appointment with Saint Peter at the Celestial Gates. Forty Embassy Filters a day for twenty-five years did the trick. Back then the cigarette companies never said they was selling cancer sticks. Didn’t even have warnings on the packets. Smokers got hooked on something they thought gave them harmless pleasure.
Toward the end, Larry had a room in St. Joseph’s Hospice on Mare Street, run by the Angels of St. Joseph’s. He was the first of many to enter what we came to call the Place of No Return. Larry was unconscious most of the time, but when he did come to there was a certain peace and acceptance in his eyes as he prepared himself for the great journey ahead, with the assistance of a morphine drip.
Larrington Emmanuel Walker was older than me and came to England before I did. He started off a ticket-collector and ended up a train driver for National Rail, based on Liverpool Street.
When we was kids he used to put me on the handlebars of the big black bicycle the Pattersons had given my mother for us and we’d freewheel hell-for-leather downhill. Nobody worried about so-called health and safety in those days. Makes me laugh when I see children today cycling on the pavement wearing helmets. They too damn cosseted. Childhood is about getting knocked about here and there. You supposed to acquire a few scars that will last the rest of your life. Number of times I came off that bike. Number of times Larry put me back on it again.
Me and Larry was sent out several times a day to the shops on Temple Street to get food for our meals. Bread from Dic
kie Lake’s for breakfast; flour for dumplings and saltfish from Mr. and Mrs. Ho’s for lunch; maybe one ounce of cheese and one ounce of butter from Mrs. Connor’s for evening tea to go with the leftover bread. When Larry got a job waiting tables over at a hotel in town and caught himself a wage and some tips, we’d go down to the harbor and enjoy a secret tot or two of smuggled rum from the fishermen, acclimatizing my inexperienced palate to the one good thing to come out of the history of sugarcane.
As I got older, Larry showed me how to sweet-talk the girls, which I went along with, hoping it might cure me.
He was also the first one who taught me the power of secrets and silence, long before the Odette debacle.
Me and Morris was at my house one afternoon when we was seventeen, school had finished early, and no one was around. It was raining heavily and muggy-hot, steaming, the windows was open, fan palms all wet and dripping outside, and we had been on fire all day the way only teenagers can be, feelin’ like we was goin’ explode. Soon as we got inside we was all over each other, while the rain hammered on to the corrugated-tin roof of the bungalow.
Larry, who should-a been at work but for some reason wasn’t, suddenly threw the door open in a hurry to get out of the rain and caught us right there on the floor by the door.
He reeled like someone had just fired a gunshot into his chest, staggered backward, and was gone—the light wooden doorframe with torn mosquito netting swinging back and forth like something from an outback horror movie.
Me and Morris scrambled up from the wooden floor, realigned our arms and legs, and returned our school shirts and shorts to their rightful places.
Morris didn’t want to leave me alone in case something bad went down when Larry returned, so he stayed with me while my mother came home and cooked dinner for us, asking why we boys was so quiet when normally she couldn’t shut us up.
When the rain stopped, we sat on the stoop and waited for Larry to come back. I remember thinking I might end up like Horace Johnson—suicided on the end of a rope.
Larry finally appeared out of the shadows, unsteady, which meant he’d been drinking homemade hooch at some rum shack down in St. John’s. I braced myself for whatever onslaught was goin’ be the beginning of the end of my life as I’d known it.
Instead, Larry squeezed my shoulder as he passed me to go inside. “You two chupit boys is damned rass lucky it was me. Watch yourselves, you right pair of eedyots.”
Five years older.
A hundred years wiser.
Full of kindness.
That was my brother.
All of this happened in 1953, a year after The Diary of Anne Frank reached Antigua and every boy in school was reading it. I remember thinking that Larry was the kind of man who would-a harbored people like her in his attic, people being persecuted.
He never said a word about it afterward, even though sometimes I’d see him watching me and Morris like he sensed we was still carrying on with all of our stuff, even in late 1970s London.
Occasionally, me and him would be sitting alone somewhere, and our conversation would quieten, and I knew we was both thinking about it, but neither of us knew how to start talking about it.
I could tell that Larry didn’t approve of it, didn’t understand it, and I was pretty sure he didn’t like it, but he accepted it because I was his little brother.
He was a good man, a true man of God.
So . . . some of us was gathered in his room at St. Joseph’s Hospice, singing hymns, and his nineteen-year-old twin sons, Dudley (law student) and Eddie (apprentice BT engineer), was sitting on both sides of my brother, holding his hands, still the sweet boys who used to come visit us on Sunday afternoons. Larry was a good father to them, raising them alone after Ellorice passed when they was nippers, but it hit them hard, especially Melvin, the eldest, who had six years on the twins and got derailed.
All of a sudden, the door burst open and none other than Melvin barged in, fired up with drugs.
“I hear you’ve been bad-talking me, saying I don’t deserve nothing from Dad’s will because I am a useless junkie!” he shouted at his brothers. “I want what’s rightfully mine, a third of everything, and if anybody gives me any beef, they’ll end with a hook for a hand. Guaranteed.”
I looked over and saw that Larry had not only opened his eyes but that he seemed more alert than he had been for days. Yet his face had drained of whatever color was left and I could see his heart was breaking.
When Melvin noticed Larry was awake, he had two choices: beg forgiveness or storm back out.
Sadly, he was too wired up to shift gear.
Later that day Larry left his body with only two of his sons to watch his spirit pass.
At the funeral my three young nephews was so tall and dignified in their new black suits, even Melvin. The sun was brightening up a wintry sky, and everybody was singing “How Sweet Thou Art” with the kind of churchified sound that is moving, in spite of the fact that as usual the loudest singers was those who can’t even hold a tune. Then, just as my brother’s coffin was being lowered into the grave, Melvin kicked off again and all three of them began brawling. All-a-we elders dived in. I pulled Melvin’s arms behind him, even though it was like trying to hold back a raging bull.
Once order been restored, the burial resumed.
Soon as the men began shoveling earth over Larry, that point in funerals when even the hardest nut got to crack, Melvin fell to his knees and went to pieces.
That’s when my legs buckled.
My only brother was being ferried across the swampy River Acheron, what the Ancient Greeks called the River of Pain.
I was at the shore, keeled over, clutching my stomach, head thrown back, howling.
’Tis in my memory locked.
I wasn’t just grieving for Larry but for my parents as well, because I’d not allowed myself that luxury when they’d passed. Grieving for three loved ones at once is a Major Incident motorway pileup.
As for Melvin? Never did get his act together. Ended up caught in what I call the “revolving door for recidivists”—at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
Last saw him early ’90s. Dudley told me a few weeks back that one of Melvin’s pickney was killed by a gang. Boy called Jerome, known as JJ, fourteen years young, lived with his mother, last name Cole-Wilson. We’d not known he existed and apparently Melvin ain’t seen his chile in over ten years.
He failed him. No excuses. He did.
Dudley is a criminal lawyer specializing in corporate fraud. Eddie runs his own IT company with a staff of 350, most of them based over in India.
One out of three’s not so bad, Larry.
Some parents get worse statistics.
If you listening up there, somewhere?
Lord, I really need to talk to Morris about all of this.
* * *
The phone rings again just as I’m heating up my morning porridge in the microwave, with water because there ain’t no milk left.
I know exactly who it is, Carmel’s rottweiler, Miss Donna. I really don’t want to answer it because by the time she done with me I’ll have burns requiring a skin transplant in my right ear. My daughter can curse like a fishwife when she ready. Except she knows I’m at home because her mother just told her so, and, as I don’t believe in answering machines—ever since an indiscreet “aquaintance” from the days when I was in the directory looked me up and left a message which, thankfully, I got to first—I’ve no choice but to pick it up.
We speak, or rather, she does.
I am heartless-unsupportive-thoughtless and, in case I don’t get the message, unfeeling.
“I’m flying out to Antigua this afternoon,” she finally declares, having expectorated all over me until she ain’t got no more phlegm left. “Maxine says she can’t get out of a work commitment. Some silly fashion shoot or other. It’s left to me to represent the family.”
No comment. I’m taking the Fifth.
“I will drop Daniel off at yours at aroun
d midday. Yes, Dad, you can look after him. He’s got this week off to revise for his mocks, so don’t let him go out anywhere or have any friends over, okay? Nor will you be introducing my son to any alcohol. I’ve kept him teetotal until now and away from the drugs they all seem to take these days. I should know. Honestly, twelve-year-olds on a detox program. And definitely no girls in the house. I’m relying on you to behave yourself this coming week, to set an example. Do you understand?”
Silence.
Welcome to Planet Donna Deluded.
“I said, do you understand?”
Who the hell she think she talking to?
“Am I making myself clear, Dad?” she says, like a parent issuing a final warning to a naughty child.
Alles klar, mein Führer.
“Clear as crystal, dear,” I reply.
“Good. I think it’s time you got to know your grandson.”
* * *
Daniel staying here? Oh my days. This is too much. (a) Morris has got the hump with me; (b) I’m letting my inner coward dominate my outer bravura; (c) Carmel feels I’m letting her down (and she don’t know the half of it); (d) Donna thinks I’m even more evil than previously thought; and (e) now I’ve got a teenage lodger, so to speak.
What I goin’ do with him? We have not been alone together for years, it is true. Probably since I took him to Chessington Zoo when he was, what, twelve? If only Morris was around in case the lad turns out uncommunicative. Morris has this socially adroit way of engaging others in mindless chitchat, which can come in useful sometimes.
I am not usually given to panic, but first thing I do is start collecting the numerous empty cartons, bottles, and wrappers deposited on the various surfaces in the kitchen. (How they get there?)
Soon as I open the bin, the stink of decomposing food nearly knocks me out. Actually, I been noticing the kitchen smells a bit renk. Now I know why.
Next I take the bag out front to dump in the rubbish bins on wheels: one black, one green. I do believe one is for that “loony-liberal” recycling nonsense and the other is for general rubbish—but, as Carmel’s not bothered to tell me which is for which, I put everything in the green one.
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