My father maintains his vigil. Granny threatens to save the contents of her chamber pot from the night before and empty it onto his head. Could she have thrown it from her living room window to his shaded spot by the street? Luckily she never tries. She may well be telling him that he doesn’t deserve even that amount of attention. If there is any creature lower than a gutter rat—one too low to merit even her worst display of disdain—then he is it. How does my father take that? As a qualification he can do without? How much of that kind of water is he able to let run off his back? Poor man. He has to be in love. He has to be wearing his own suit of armor. Lashed to his mast like Odysseus, he hears the most taunting, terrible things, but what saves him, what restores him, are the ropes, the armor of his love for my mother. Others without this charm would have withered away, like the proverbial Marxist state, but not my father, he smiles and shrugs at the barrage of looks, insults, gestures, silence, loneliness.
Watch my father’s body there under that breadfruit and sapodilla tree (I do not see a repository of my cancer; I do not even see me). The shine of his status as sentry and his conviction are twin headlights that blind my mother’s parents. They redouble their efforts to get rid of his particular glare, then are divided by the sense of his inevitability in their daughter’s life. My grandmother stops shouting at him, while my grandfather still raises his cane and causes the young man to walk away briskly. My grandmother then opens the windows on the west side, ostensibly to let in the sea breeze but really to exhibit in all those window frames a new and friendly demeanor. My grandfather shouts at her that he can smell the rank intent of that black boy, rotten as a fish market, blowing into his living room and spoiling his thoughts.
But the windows stay open. And my mother at them. With the love Morse of her clavicles and her cleavage as she grows bolder. Smiling, then waving. And no hand in sight to box her or grip her by the ear and draw her away from there. Until one night she boldly leaves the house and goes to him and they talk for five minutes rapidly as if words are about to run out in the Southern Hemisphere.
My father’s parents wonder what has become of their Malcolm.
“The boy only intend to visit town.”
“Town swallow him up.”
“No, one woman turn he head, stick it in a butter churn, and swill it.”
“He lost to us now.”
“True.”
They say this to each other, often and interchangeably, but hardly speak to him except to make pronouncements on the size of foreign lands.
“Guyana small?”
“What’s the boy talking about?”
“Why, England and Scotland combined are the size of Guyana.”
“How much room does the boy need?”
“That city woman take he common sense in a mortar and pound it with a pestle.”
Their two voices are one voice. Opportunity is here now. The English are letting go of the reins. A whole new land is about to be fashioned. And the boy is planning to leave! What kind of woman has done this to our Malcolm? The boy is lost. Talking to him is like harnessing a stubborn donkey. This isn’t love but some obeah or voodoo or juju, some concoction in a drink, some spell thrown in his locus. A little salt over the shoulder, an iodine shower, a rabbit foot on a string, a duck’s bill or snake head dried and deposited into the left trouser pocket, a precious stone, lapis lazuli, amethyst, or anything on the middle finger, a good old reliable crucifix around the neck, made of silver, not gold, and at least one ounce in weight and two inches in diameter. A psalm in papyrus folded in a shirt pocket next to the heart. A bout of fasting, one night without sleep, a dreamless night, and a dreamless, sleepless, youngest son restored to them. He wants to stay around the house, he shows them why he loves his mummy and poppy and the bounteous Guyanese landscape. There is no plan to flee. There is no Georgetown woman with his heart in her hand. And his brain is not ablaze in his pants. His head is not an empty, airless room.
My mother and father have one cardboard suitcase each, apart from her purse and his envelope tied with a string that contains their passports and tickets, birth certificates, and, for him, a document that he is indeed a clerk with X amount of experience at such and such a government office, signed “supervisor”—a worthless piece of shit, of course, in the eyes of any British employer. But for the time being, these little things are emblematic of the towering, staggering optimism that propels them out of Georgetown, Guyana, over the sea to London, England.
So what do they do? My mother is a shy woman. My father, in the two photos I’ve seen of him, is equally reserved. Not liable to experimentation. The big risk has been taken—that of leaving everything they know for all that is alien to them. My mother knows next to nothing about sex, except perhaps a bit about kissing. My father may have experimented a little, as boys tend to do, but he, too, when faced with the female body, confronts unfamiliar territory. Each burns for the other, enough to pull up roots and take off into the unknown. Yet I want to believe that they improvise around the idea of her purity and respect it until their marriage night. That they keep intact some of the moral system they come from even as they dismantle and ignore every other stricture placed on them by post–World War II Guyanese society: honor your father and mother; fear a just and loving God; pledge allegiance to the British flag; lust is the devil’s oxygen. All that circles in their veins.
Over the twelve days at sea they examine what they have left and what they are heading toward. At sea they are in between lives: one life is over but the other has not yet begun. The talking they do on that ship without any duties to perform at all! My mother tells how her father, despite his routine as a merchant seaman, finds time to memorize whole poems by the Victorians: Tennyson, Longfellow, both Brownings, Jean Ingelow, Arnold, and Hopkins. The sea is his workplace, yet he makes time to do this marvelous thing. She tells how when he comes back to land he gathers them all in the living room and performs “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or “Maud” or “My Last Duchess” or “Fra Lippo Lippi” or “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire” or “Dover Beach” or “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” or “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” He recites these poems to his creole-thinking children, who sit there and marvel at the English they are hearing, not that of the policeman or the teacher or the priest, but even more difficult to decipher, full of twists and impossible turns that throw you off the bicycle of your creole reasoning into the sand. If any of them interrupts my grandfather, he stops in midflow, reprimands them in creole, and resumes his poem where he left off. When particularly miffed by the disturbance he starts the poem from the beginning again. Does my grandfather recite these verses before or after he gets drunk, swears at the top of his voice, and chases my grandmother around the house with his broad leather belt?
My parents are out on the high seas. They have only the King James Bible in their possession. They plan and rehearse every aspect of their new life.
“Children. I want children.”
“Me too. Plenty of them.”
“I can work between births.”
“Yes, both of us. Until we have enough money for a house. Then you can stay home with the kids.”
“We could get a nanny to watch the kids while we both work.”
“What kind of house you like?”
“Three bedrooms. A garden at the front, small, and back, large.”
“A car—a Morris Minor. With all that room in the back for the children and real indicators and a wood finish.”
Neither has a notebook or dreamed of keeping one. They do not write their thoughts, they utter them. If something is committed to memory, there has to be a quotidian reason for it, apart from bits of the Bible and a few calypsos. My grandfather’s labor of love, his settling down with a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and memorizing lines that bear no practical relationship to his life, must seem bizarre to his children. Yet by doing so he demonstrates his love of words, their music, the sense of their sound, their approximation
to the heartbeat and breath, their holding out of an alternative world to the one surrounding him, their confirmation of a past and another’s life and thoughts, their luxury of composition, deliberation, their balancing and rebalancing of a skewered life. I imagine my mother benefits from this exposure in some oblique way—that the Victorians stick to her mental makeup whether she cares for them or not, that a little of them comes off on me in the wash or my gestation in her.
There is an old black-and-white photo (isn’t there always?) of my father and fragments of stories about his comings and goings, his carryings-on, as the creole-speak goes, his mischief. “Look pan that smooth face, them two big, dark eye them, don’t they win trust quick-time? Is hard to tie the man with them eye in him head to any woman and she pickney them. He face clean-shaven like he never shave. He curly black hair, dougla-look, but trim neat-neat. The man got topside.” My father’s hair, thick and wavy and credited to a “dougla” mix of East Indian and Black, in fact comes from his White father and his mother of African descent. The look exaggerates an already high forehead. Automatically, such an appearance, in the Caribbean and elsewhere, is equated with intelligence—“topside.” And a European nose (from his Portuguese father), not broad, with a high bridge (good breeding, though the nostrils flare a bit—sign of a quick temper!). And lips that invite kisses. “They full-full and pout like a kiss with the sound of a kiss way behind, long after that kiss come and gone.” He is six feet tall and thin but not skinny, that brand of thin that women refer to as elegant, since the result is long fingers and economic gestures. Notice I say economic and not cheap. A man of few words. A watcher. “But when he relax in company he know and trust, then he the center of wit and idle philosophizing. He shoot back a few rums, neat no chaser, with anyone, and hold his own with men more inclined to gin and tonic. He know when to mind his Ps and Qs and when to gaff in the most lewd Georgetown rum-shop talk with the boys. What chance a sixteen-year-old closeted lady got against such a man, I ask you!”
But most of the puzzle is missing, except for the big piece of my hereditary cancer, so I start to draw links from one fragment to the next. He begins to belong—fleetingly, at first—in my life. As a man in poor light seen crossing a road mercifully free of traffic, its tarmacadam steamy with a recent downpour. As a tall, lank body glimpsed ducking under the awning of a shop front and disappearing inside and never emerging no matter how long I wait across the street, watching the door with its reflecting plate glass and listening for the little jingle of the bell that announces the arrival and departure of customers.
Or I cross Blackheath Hill in South London, where I lived as a teen, entranced by the urgent belief that my father is in one of the cars speeding up and down it. Blackheath Hill curves a little with a steep gradient. It’s more of a ski slope than a hill. Cars and trucks, motorbikes and cyclists, all come down the road as if in a race for a finish line. Going up it is no different. Vehicles race to the top as if with the fear that their engines might cut off and they will slide back down. Through most of my teen years of crossing Blackheath Hill, I want to be seen by my father. I have to be close to his car so that he does not miss me. I measure the traffic and watch myself get halfway, then, after a pause to allow a couple of cars to pass on their way up, a brisk walk, if I time it right, to allow the rest of the traffic to catch up with me, to see the kid who seems to be in no particular hurry to get out of the way looking at them. I step onto the sidewalk and cherish the breeze of the nearest vehicle at my back. Father, this is your son you have just missed. Isn’t he big? Pull over and call his name. Take him in your arms. Admonish him. Remind him that cars can kill and his little body would not survive a hit at these high speeds. Tell him to look for his father under less dangerous circumstances.
I am searching the only way I know how, by rumination, contemplation, conjecture, supposition. I try to fill the gaps, try to piece together the father I never knew. I imagine everything where there is little or nothing to go on. And yet, in going back, in raking up bits and pieces of a shattered and erased existence, I know that I am courting rejection from a source hitherto silent and beyond me. I am conjuring up a father safely out of reach and taking the risk that the lips I help to move, the lungs I force to breathe, will simply say no. No to everything I ask of them, even the merest crumb of recognition.
“Father.” The noun rings hollowly when I say it, my head is empty of any meaning the word might have. I shout it in a dark cave but none of the expected bats come flapping out. Just weaker and weaker divisions of my call. “Father.” It is my incantation to bring him back from the grave to the responsibility of his name. But how, when I know only his ex-wife, my mother, and her sudden, moody silence whenever he crops up in conversation?
* * *
You ever have anyone sweet-talk you? Fill your ears with their kind of wax, rub that wax with their tongue all over your body with more promises than the promised land itself contains, fill your head with their sweet drone, their buzz that shuts out your parents, friends, your own mind from its own house? That’s your father, the bumblebee, paying attention to me.
My sixteenth birthday was a month behind. He was nearly twenty. A big man in my eyes. What did he want with me? A smooth tongue in my ears. Mostly, though, he watched me, my house, my backside when he followed me home from school. His eyes gleamed in the early evening, the whites of his eyes. He stood so still by the side of the road outside my house that he might have been a lamppost, planted there, shining just for me.
My father cursed him, my mother joined in, my sisters laughed at his silence, his stillness. They all said he had to be the stupidest man in all of Georgetown, a dunce, a bat in need of a perch, out in the sun too long, sun fry his brain, cat take his tongue, his head empty like a calabash, his tongue cut out, he look like a beggar. They felt sorry for him standing there like a paling, his face a yard long, his tongue a slab of useless plywood in his mouth. “Look what Kathleen gone and bring to the house, shame, dumbness, blackness follow she here to we house to paint shame all over it and us. Go away, black boy, take your dumb misery somewhere else, crawl back to your pen in the country, leave we sister alone, she got more beauty than sense to listen to a fool like you, to let you follow her, to encourage you by not cursing the day you was born and the two people who got together to born you and your people and whole sorry village you crawl out of to come and plant yourself here in front of we house on William Street, a decent street, in Kitty, in we capital.”
I should have thanked my sisters; instead I begged them to leave him alone. Ignore him and he’ll go away. My father left the house to get hold of the boy by the scruff of his neck and boot his backside out of Kitty, but he ran off when my father appeared in the doorframe. With the light of the house behind him and casting a long, dark shadow, he must have looked twice his size and in no mood to bargain. Your father sprinted away, melting into the dark. I watched for his return by checking that the windows I’d bolted earlier really were bolted, convincing myself that I had overlooked one of them, using my hands to feel the latch as I searched the street for him. But he was gone for the night. My knight. Shining eyes for armor.
My mother cursed him from the living room window, flung it open and pointed at him and with her tongue reduced him to a pile of rubble and scattered that rubble over a wide area, then picked her way through the strewn wreckage to make sure her destruction was complete. “Country boy, what you want with my daughter? What make you think you man enough for her? What you got between your legs that give you the right to plant yourself in front of my house? What kind of blight you is? You fungus!”
As she cursed him and he retreated from the house sheepishly, she watched her husband for approval. These were mild curses for her, dutiful curses, a warm-up. When she really got going her face reddened and her left arm carved up the air in front of her as if it were the meat of her opponent being dissected into bite-size bits. That’s how I knew she was searching for a way to help me but hadn’t yet fo
und it. Not as long as my father was at home. Soon he would be at sea, away for weeks, and things would be different.
That is, if my onlooker, my remote watcher, my far-off admirer, wasn’t scared off forever. And what if he was? Then he didn’t deserve me in the first place. If he couldn’t take a few curses, he wasn’t good for anything. If I wasn’t worth taking a few curses for, well, I didn’t want a man who didn’t think I was worth taking a few curses for! I loved him for coming back night after night when all he got from me was a glance at the window. Sometimes less than a glance. Just me passing across the window frame as I dashed from chore to chore under the four baleful eyes of my parents.
It seemed like he was saving all his breath and words for when he could be alone with me. Then he turned on the bumblebee of himself and I was the hapless flower of his attentions. He told me about my skin, that it was silk, that all the colors of the rainbow put together still didn’t come close to my beautiful light-brown skin. That my face, my eyes, my mouth, my nose, the tip of my nose, my ears, my fingertips, each was a precious jewel, precious stone. He likened the rest of me to things I had read about but had never seen, had dreamed about but had never dreamed I would see: dandelions, apple trees, snow, spring in England’s shires, the white cliffs of Dover. In his eyes my body, me, was everything I dreamed of becoming.
That was your father before any of you were a twinkle in his eye. More accurately, that was my lover and then my husband. Your father was a different man altogether. I saw the change in him. I cannot account for it. A stranger occupied my bed. His tongue no longer sweet-talked me. All the laughter of my sisters, the halfhearted curses of my mother, my father’s promise of blue misery, all came true in this strange man, this father, this latter-day husband and lover.
He simply changed. My hands were full with you children. He went out of reach. He cradled you as if he didn’t know which side was up, which down. He held you at arm’s length to avoid the tar and feathers of you babies. Soon I earned the same treatment, but if you children were tar and feathers I was refuse. His face creased when he came near me. What had become of my silk skin? My precious features disappeared into my face, earning neither praise nor blame—just his silence, his wooden tongue, and that bad-smell look of his. I kept quiet for as long as I could. I watched him retreat from all of us, hoping he’d reel himself back in, since the line between us was strong and I thought unbreakable; but no. I had to shout to get him to hear me. I shouted like my mother standing at the upstairs window to some rude stranger in the street twenty-five yards away. I sounded like my father filling the doorframe. My jeering sisters insinuated their way into my voice. And your father simply kept walking away.
Year of Plagues Page 32