No Safeguards
Page 20
“But not . . . the mother . . . he needed.” She began to cry.“Remember when he first came, he asked me why we were here? ‘So you can earn a living emptying bedpans’?” She paused. “Mrs. Mehta opened my eyes. ‘Send him back to St. Vincent to finish his schooling. Here’s not the right place for a child like Paul.’ But it was too late. I didn’t listen to what Paul was saying.”
Beads of sweat popped up on her forehead. I took a tissue from the box on her night table and dabbed them. I upped the oxygen meter by half a point. She nodded. “Jay, he needed a mother who could follow him in what he was thinking and learning, somebody like Mama. Jay, he was telling us that the school he was in would destroy him, and we didn’t listen.” She paused. “For four years, Jay, I’ve wanted to beg him for forgiveness. Now I am dying and he isn’t here. Say sorry to him for me, Jay. Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t listen to him.”
***
The room is quiet. I stand and stare at Anna’s outline in the half upright bed. She has stopped breathing. I look at my watch. 5:13 am. I press her bell. The nurse comes, then Dr. Christine Lim.
Dr. Lim nods as she lifts the stethoscope from Anna’s chest and reaches for the clipboard with Anna’s chart. She looks up at me and asks: “Have you someone at home?”
“No.”
“You should. You’re the one needing attention now.”
20
IT’S JUNE. ANNA’S illness became serious a month before I was to write my major comprehensive exam. I had it rescheduled for late fall. Still no word about Paul, and now I’m thinking something I was loathe to before: that Paul might be one of those swallowed up in the landslides that buried thousands when Stan struck.
***
It’s a month since my mother’s death and two days since my return from St. Vincent. I delayed the funeral for two weeks and placed obituary notices in the Montreal and Vincentian newspapers, hoping that Paul might be e-mailing his school friends, who’d see the notice and inform him. I don’t have Paul’s e-mail address.
I told those Haverites who asked for Ma Kirton’s Genius that Paul was distraught and didn’t want to be at the burial ceremony. Some frowned; a few snickered. Most likely Vincentians living in Montreal —at least ten belong to Anna’s church — had already phoned home the information.
Caleb — looking a full decade older than 60, physique gaunt as a Bushman’s, eyes sunken, skin a translucent mahogany and scrolled like antique porcelain — came to the funeral. I told him that Paul was doing research in a remote region of Guatemala, and couldn’t be reached.
Caleb and I met a few days later in a café overlooking the Kingstown harbour. As grey and glossy black grackles flew onto the tables to gobble up any unattended food, and the horns of arriving and departing schooners sounded, we chitchatted — each uncomfortable with the other — about the changing weather in St. Vincent, the fear that the banana industry would be gone in a few years, the increase in tourism, a recent news item about black tourists being kept out of a hotel in the Grenadines, hotels blocking the public entrances to beaches to keep out the local population, the increased number of sex workers because of the tourist industry, etc. During the long pauses Caleb fidgeted, and I stared out at the ships in the blue-green water and at the northern tip of Bequia, a grey blur in the distance. “I was just thinking,” Caleb said toward the end, breaking a long silence, “that with all that good breeding your grandmother give you, and all that education you got in Canada, that you find me doltish. Doltish.” He gave an embarrassed grin, revealing his false teeth. “Is Anna who teach me that word. Before I used to say dotish.” He paused again then looked at me attentively. “No use talking to you ‘bout religion ‘cause your grandmother already turned you and your brother into infidels.”
“Ma became a Baptist — a Foot-Washing Baptist — five, no six, years before she died.”
His face beamed, and he half lifted himself from his seat with excitement. “I know it! Once God done choose you, you can’t get away. Can’t get away.”
I contemplated my father, remembered his beliefs centred on hell, his frequent citation: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”; my own singing along with the other youngsters: “Saviour, while my heart is tender / I will yield that heart to thee: / All my joys to thee surrender: / thine and only thine to be.”
“God ways mighty mysterious, you know,” Caleb said, staring out blankly over the harbour. “I sit here thinking that I put down preaching and take up drinking after Anna leave me, and I put down drinking when she come back from Canada and tell me to stop. And if you all didn’t go live with your grandmother and I didn’t have to come and visit you all there, I would own nothing today. As much as I hated that woman, she put me on my feet. And she didn’t have to do it, because her daughter did done divorce me, and it was my fault. Your grandmother had modern ideas. I know that now.” He smiled. “Imagine: I used to forbid your mother from reading books to you. I remember when Paul win that spelling bee and his picture was in the papers, I could o’ hardly stay on the ground. That is how proud I was. And I know he win it ‘cause your grandmother pay good money to send him to the best school. The day I see his picture on the front on the paper, I say: ‘Praise God I don’t drink no more ‘cause I don’t want to bring no more shame to my children.’”
I put my hand on his and squeezed it.
“Beulah want you to come have supper with us before you go back. Will you come?”
“Sure. With pleasure, Daddy.”
Caleb smiled and seemed relieved.
Two days later I went, a Saturday afternoon.
Beulah is Kalinago; homely; somewhere in her fifties; tiny: hardly more than five feet. Her bright, brown eyes stared at me unabashedly from an almost circular shale-coloured face. She looks sexless, mannish even: narrow hips and mere hints of breasts. A scarf of grey-green stripes hid her hair. She wore a loose shift of calico print: red, yellow, and mauve flowers on a green field. Most likely she’d made it herself. The outmoded sewing machine, one with a foot pedal, was in a corner of the living room. Caleb and she belong to some sort of holiness church. She’s childless. Caleb’s her second husband.
I had come without a cap or raincoat during a drizzle. “You too careless with your health,” she scolded me, and instantly went out the back door of the kitchen and returned with a root of ginger, which in minutes she transformed into steaming, aromatic tea. “This will sweat out any cold that taking root in you.” Dinner was a large bowl of spicy, delicious goat stew — the goat was culled from her herd — with lots of meat, tannias, eddoes, breadfruit, christophene, green papaya, and pigeon peas, chased down with ginger beer. She didn’t eat with us. Instead she kept moving back and forth between the table and the kitchen sink while waiting to take the empty bowls from us.
She and Caleb live in a simply furnished, modest two-bedroom bungalow, about two kilometres inland from the shack where I used to visit him. About a year after Caleb had promised Anna to stop drinking, he came to visit Paul and me at Grama’s place; and in one of the two sentences he usually exchanged with Grama, he mentioned that the plantation near Georgetown had been bought by the Vincentian government and was being leased in ten-acre plots with buy-options to landless people. Grama asked if he was leasing any. He said he’d love to but didn’t have the obligatory two-thousand-dollar down payment. “Go make the arrangements,” she told him. She lent him the money. When he came to wish us goodbye the July we left for Canada, he informed Grama that he’d just made the final payment for the land and would soon be repaying her. In one of our infrequent letters, he told me that he’d acquired a second holding and was building a house.
He no longer breaks stones for a living. “We get enough from the land, just barely enough, to live on, but we live. By the grace of God, we live.” While he and I talked, Beulah went out into the drizzle and returned with avocados, hog plums, grafted mangoes, and tangerines for me.
“I’ll write you often,” I told him. On the way into town I remembered what he’d said about God making him wealthy one day if he was a good steward, and I wondered how much of Deuteronomy was colouring my father’s thinking. I was happy to see his new-found confidence, but saddened by the doctrines that probably informed it. Guess I have to be grateful for small mercies. Whatever gets us through life and keeps us out of prison, the insane asylum, and in Daddy’s case, away from the bottle. I know nothing about my paternal relatives. I’ll have to remedy that, but one challenge at a time. First I must find Paul.
Aunt Mercy, frail but still independent, occupies Grama’s house. She’d moved in with Grama after Paul and I left for Canada. She apologized that she hadn’t been able to care adequately for the garden. To me, it seemed well cared for. Grama had expanded it after we left. Bougainvillea ran along the porch railing in banners of fuchsia, mauve, and splashes of white. Two poinciana trees she’d planted at the front the same year we left were now about four metres high and flowering: one pink, one yellow. The white and pink queen of flowers that had always been there was now at least three metres high. At the back, where the land bordered the beach road, she’d planted a hibiscus hedge and four royal palms. The palms were now the same height as the house. The trees on the rest of the land that stretched up the steep hillside to where the new road had been blasted out of rock were covered in bromeliads and epiphytes. The tracks that Paul and I had made to get to the mango, plumrose, guava, and golden apple trees were overgrown. My grandmother’s will reserves 20 percent of her estate for Aunt Mercy’s needs. Anna had been her liquidator and had transferred power of attorney to me.
***
It’s 8:12 pm. I hear the stomping of Jonathan’s turned-out feet even before he gets to the door. He’s been sleeping at the flat since Anna’s death. Night before last when he came in his father’s car to pick me up at the airport, I told him I was fine now, but Jonathan’s defiant. He stays in my room, plugs in his laptop there, and works quietly. I have moved into Anna’s room.
Beatrice called me earlier to find out if she should bring me food. I thanked her and said no.
“You got in touch with Paul yet?”
She’s definitely fond of Paul and he of her. One evening around the time Paul came out of his depression I met him writing. He said it was a story he was calling “the charcoal people, people like the members of Ma’s church, and that Beatrice was the narrator.” He must have noted my perplexed look for he said: “Those people turned to charcoal in kilns of conformity . . . ideology. People like Ma. People like Madam J. Fuel. If you and I don’t watch out, we’ll become charcoal too.”
21
I REMEMBER PAUL’S journals. He began keeping them quite young, probably in imitation of Grama, somewhere around six, around the time he started school at Excelsior. In the early days he pestered us about the words he couldn’t spell. Would his journals tell me anything? No, I won’t read them without his permission. I remember when Grama caught me reading one of Ma’s letters to her. It was the one about her acceptance into nursing school. Grama had already read it aloud to us. But I wanted to be sure she hadn’t left out anything.
The sun was setting out in the harbour, its light tinting the room golden. Grama’s form was silhouetted against the window, and for a moment I couldn’t see the anger in her eyes. The lower drawer of the china closet from which I’d removed the letter was still open. She pulled the letter from me, put it back in the envelope, returned it to the drawer, and pushed it back in.
I’d wanted to know everything about my mother, and I knew adults told each other things they hid from children.
“Stop staring at the floor and look me in the face. Never you read anyone’s letters or diaries or personal papers without their permission. Never you do that! It’s a serious violation of people’s privacy.”
No, I won’t venture into Paul’s journals. They’re probably locked away in his filing cabinet anyway.
I go to my bedroom and quietly take from the night table the three letters and two postcards that Paul sent me during the early part of his travel. Jonathan is snoring away. I go to Anna’s room and sit on the edge of the bed and turn on the reading lamp. I re-read the first letter, reliving the joy I’d felt when I received it. It arrived two weeks after Paul had left. In it Paul calls me Kuk-Kuk, the name lovingly stamped with guardian, adviser, brother, defender, at a time when Paul affectionately looked up to me — before he became Ma Kirton’s Genius.
Havana, Cuba.
25 March 2005
Dear Kuk-Kuk,
Surprised. Right? How’s your schoolwork progressing?
Cuba’s great and beautiful, and people are nice and everything. I am happy to say that here there are no signs of the consumer society that’s poisoning us North Americans and choking our landscape with garbage. But it’s not what I expected. But, then, I’m not sure what I expected. I sort of had the fantasy that I’d see El Commandante giving one of his long speeches. I have this weird feeling that something’s wrong. People look happy enough, though — happier than in Montreal, for sure.
I’m in Havana at the moment. It’s really fantastic to look at all the beautiful buildings and squares — plazas, they call them here — everywhere from the colonial period, even though most of them need a good repair job. They’re impressive, but I can’t forget they were built on the backs of slaves and the poor. (Cuba and Brazil were the last New-World states to abolish slavery.) Havana, they say, is very European. I haven’t been to Europe, so I don’t know. Santiago, people here say, is Africa transplanted to Cuba. I’ll be taking the train there in a couple of days.
Just thinking how great it would have been if you and I were making this trip together. Surprised to hear me say that, right? Remember when we went to St. Lucia? That’s when I found out all your names and you became my Kuk-Kuk. Remembering what an asshole you were the night before I left, I should rename you Fucked-up. Anyhow, for now, you’re a tiny bit forgiven and have become again my Kuk-Kuk.
One Love,
Paul
Anna was excited about the letter. I didn’t let her read it. “Why didn’t he write to me?”
I remember the St. Lucia excursion well. I was 13, Paul seven. Havre’s Methodist Church had organized it as a fundraiser. We’d spent a weekend there.
I recall the ship sailing into the Castries harbour with land on both sides all the way into downtown Castries, Paul’s hounding Grama to take him to the Union Nature Trail, and Grama frantically asking the hotel staff how to get there. He had binoculars that Anna had sent him a couple months before. He’d spent a lot of time on deck looking at the birds skimming the surface of the sea and identifying them by their crests, mantles, and what not. In the end we didn’t visit the Trail because the guides didn’t work on Sundays, and the ship back to St. Vincent set sail Sunday at midnight. He’d wanted to see the Saint Lucia parrot in its natural habitat. In his scrapbook on Caribbean birds he had photographs of it.
(A year later, instead of a weekend excursion to Grenada, Grama made it a five-day trip. We took the plane — a 30-minute flight — and Grama called ahead to arrange an outing to the Ridge and Lake Circle Trail so Paul could observe the birds and she could see the wild orchids. But it rained four of the five days we were there, and we didn’t go. We never even got a chance to bathe in Grande Anse’s turquoise waters and could only stare at it from atop the fort overlooking St Georges. When we got back to St. Vincent, Paul compensated by spending an entire day at the Botanical Gardens observing and photographing the parrots breeding in captivity there. Yes, you gave Paul what he wanted. He hounded you until he got it.)
Kuk-Kuk.We’d needed travel documents for the St. Lucia trip, and Paul wanted to know everyone’s middle names. His is Ezekiel. He p
aused on Habakkuk and knocked his teeth together: “Kuk-kuk!” He laughed. “It rhymes with . . .” His eyes glowed.
“You better not say it.”
“Can I call you Kuk-Kuk?”
“No.”
“I want to call you Kuk-Kuk. I mean it in a nice way. As a friend. Can I? Please, Big Brother?”
“No.”
Thereafter he called me Kuk-Kuk, and when Grama slipped and called me Kuk-Kuk too, he told her to stick to Jay. And he never used it when strangers were around. In Montreal, after Paul became full of vitriol, Kuk-Kuk died and Jay was reborn, often with a qualifying expletive; except, when in contempt, I became “Jacob Habakkuk Zephaniah,” followed by explosive laughter and thigh-slapping.
I pick up the postcard Paul sent from Belize. It’s a scene taken at a sixty-degree angle of Hopkins Beach. It shows a deserted beach of golden-sand and a broad expanse of blue-green water — intent on evoking serenity. The text is in tightly-packed, very fine script:
Dangriga, Belize
April 14, 2005
As you can see, I’m in Belize. Hoping tomorrow to meet with a Garifuna historian. They’re descendants of the Black Caribs (Kalinago, Garifuna) the British banished here from our home island at the end of the 18th century — in order to occupy their land. They’ve kept their language and traditions. Cool. Rediscovering how much I loved to bird-watch. The tanagers here and the vast range of parrots — mostly green — and trogons are something to see. Nature’s artistry. Wow! Exciting! Bro, this trip is great. I’m finding my bearings. Getting in touch with my deeper self. I can feel the ugliness oozing out of me. I know now it’s what I came to do. Keep your ears in good form. You’ll hear a lot when I come back.
One love,