“I don’t understand this. Where has he been? How did you fool everyone …”
“I can’t say. Just come to Kingston. Tomorrow, the next day, but you must come soon. We don’t have very long, and you must not tell a soul.”
“I’ve known many people who have died … once. My whole family in the country really. But I’ve never known anyone who was about to die a second time.” That was meant to be a thought, but I must have said it aloud because I heard Agnes asking me to repeat myself.
“Lewis asked for me?” I asked instead.
“He doesn’t know I’m here,” Agnes admitted.
“Then why are you telling me this?”
“Because I know what he needs, what he needs to do before he’s gone. I know the peace he needs to make, and you’re it.”
Agnes was in her car before I had a chance to get hold of my thoughts. Actually, I don’t even remember her leaving the verandah.
“You can stay here ’til morning,” I called out to her when I finally came to my senses. “The mountain roads around here aren’t lit at night, and it’s dangerous for someone who doesn’t know the way.”
“I don’t like spending too much time away from Kingston,” she said. “Besides, I have faith in the Lord to guide me.” And with that, she was gone.
I climbed into bed at about one in the morning, but was back up and pacing across the verandah by two. I couldn’t figure out what I was feeling. I was scared. I was relieved. I was in disbelief. The front gate was still open, so I wrapped a robe around my shoulders and walked along the path leading to it. It had finally cooled down some, and the fronds of the coconut trees were once again swaying in the breeze. I could make out a light flickering in the distance. Pooh Harvey was closing up his bar. Saturday nights were always a hot time there, and he usually had to threaten people to get them out. Before I could reach the gate, a small goat belonging to Mack Shakespeare, who lived up the hill, wandered into the yard. There were two bells about his neck, and they made a hollow dinging noise whenever he moved. I tried shooing, even pushing, but he held his ground. I didn’t have the energy to fight with him, so I closed the gate behind him. I made my way back up to the verandah where I sat and watched him nibbling at the grass.
The shrill ring of the telephone woke me up. I had fallen asleep on the verandah, and as I sat up in the patio chair, I could feel a stiffness in my neck. The sun felt warm and alive against my face. The phone rang again, and I ran into the living room to pick up the receiver.
“Just checking in,” came Wilton’s friendly voice. When I had first met him I thought, no one can possibly sound this happy.
“Checking in on sunny Jamaica,” he continued. He reminded me of a chirping bird.
I can’t remember exactly what I told my husband, something about not sleeping much the night before and needing to curl up in bed the rest of the morning. There was still so much I had never and probably would never share with Wilton about my past, so I couldn’t even begin to explain Agnes Gooding’s visit the night before.
I showered and dressed in much of a daze; don’t even remember the water hitting my skin or putting on my white button-down shirt. Mack Shakespeare’s goat stumbled out of the yard when I opened the gate to drive my small blue Volkswagen through. I don’t recall much of the scenery that unfolded those first few miles. It was almost as if there was someone else driving the car—some invisible person. The hands squeezing the steering wheel and the feet working the clutch, the gas and the brakes didn’t belong to me. It wasn’t until I reached Bamboo, some eight miles away, that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since the slice of cake the night before. But there was no room in my belly for food—only nervous tension. Still, when I neared a group of higglers, I stopped to buy some oranges and bananas, in case I became hungry during the drive. I didn’t haggle with the market woman, just paid the requested amount, which seemed to upset her quite a bit. After all, she had been denied an opportunity at showcasing her prime bargaining skills. I just wanted to start back on the road. I had a date with my past; I had a date with a ghost.
With two hours to go until Kingston, all that lay before me was the green of the valleys and the early morning mist. Suddenly, I couldn’t stop my mind from drifting back to the day my life strayed from the course I believe God had truly meant for me.
-2-
“Souci, me t’ink me hear wrong.” She drew in a staggered breath. “When Winston tell me say.” She exhaled. “You at work.” She drew in another breath. “Gyal, you should let Joan come in … an’ you should go home.” It took about thirty seconds for Michele to get those two sentences out. She was standing at the front of the clinic with her left arm on the door as she tried to catch her breath.
“What for?”
“What for? You auntie funeral just two days ago. What you doing here now?”
“What you want me do instead?”
“Tek some time off, mon, fe God sake.”
“An’ go where, an’ do what? Is bettah me keep meself busy.”
“You cyan keep you’self busy planning you wedding.”
“What is dere fe plan, Michele? Is not like me have fe reserve de church or anyt’ing. Preachah know me getting married t’ree Sundays to come. An’ me dress, well, Greenie stitching dat now. What else is dere?”
“Well, you fiancé t’ink you gone mad.”
“Maybe dat’s true.”
“Bwoy, you stubborn bad. Is not like anyt’ing a go come to an end if you leave it be fe one week. Besides, is not like you have any patients or like de doctor a go come in today.”
I rolled my eyes and sucked my teeth for added effect. So what if I had never attended any kind of nursing school. I still took my job as nurse very seriously, thank you. I bandaged cuts, dispensed aspirin and cough syrup, kept things tidy and talked to whoever needed talking to, whenever they needed talking to. That’s more than Doctor Bennedict did. He was only in the clinic on Tuesdays, and even then, he only spent four hours. I suppose he believed there weren’t enough people getting sick in Stepney, so he chose to divide his time between a quarter dozen or so other such country destinations. Truth is, there were sick people. Quite a few of them. They just didn’t think they needed some fancy doctor to confirm this. Suspecting was one thing, knowing for certain was something entirely different. Of course, Michele and I had our own theory as to why the doctor didn’t come around much. We figured it was because Stepney probably qualified as the single most boring place in the entire world.
Doctor Bennedict had given me the position, not so much because I was qualified, but simply because there were really no other candidates. I was one of the few girls who had finished secondary school. It wasn’t that most of the other girls had no intention of going through with their schooling, but too often they ended up in the family way long before graduation came around.
“It nuh mattah wheddah or not de doctor is in,” I said to Michele. “An’ dere is somebody here. Two somebody. Dem is ovah dere sleeping.”
Michele squinted across the room. “Satchmo drunk again?” she asked. “An’ who’s de oddah one? Is dat Rose?”
“Um-hmm.”
“Well, wha wrong wit’ her?”
“She run in here claiming Lucille Mason cock her finger, roll her eyes, an’ chant some kind of African rig-marole. She say de ooman cast a spell ’cause Jimmy Mason was making eyes at her.”
Michele laughed. “Jimmy Mason mek eyes at everybody.”
“Is true, but Rose have de bad fortune of having Lucille catch Jimmy making eyes at her an’, well, she come in here looking fe some pill dat might tek de spell off.”
“You give her one?” Michele whispered.
“A pill fe obeah? An’ where would I get one from? We nuh even have antibiotics, what says magic potions.”
Michele peeked over at Rose. “What kind a spell get put ’pon her?”
“She nevah say.”
Michele bit her bottom lip. “So why she sleeping here?”
“Cause she been up all night, an’ she ’fraid fe sleep in her own house.”
“Souci, you sure she only sleeping?”
“What else would she be doing, mon?”
“Me nuh know. Is just, if me was you, me would check fe mek sure she was still taking in air. Anyhow, mek me go look aftah me pickney dem, you hear,” Michele said as she backed out the door waving.
I followed my best friend out onto the clinic’s small, wooden verandah and watched as she ran part way down the road. Michele yelled something I couldn’t understand, then disappeared behind her father’s bar. That’s when I turned my head in the other direction, the one that led up the main road and out of Stepney. I didn’t have a long way to look since Stepney was only so big.
Stepney sits in the middle of St. Ann in north central Jamaica. It’s only about eighty miles from Kingston, but the ride by automobile stretches over two and a half hours because of the torturously twisting mountain roads that have to be maneuvered in order to reach it. You’d be better off taking a chance on the back of an ornery country mule than in the seat of a car.
Stepney is too far removed from the white sand beaches of the north coast to add to tourism. Nine Mile, the neighboring village, at least has Bob Marley to boast of, but nothing and no one from Stepney had ever captured any attention. The village doesn’t even appear on maps of the island. The main road is “main” because it is the only one with electricity, and all the shops can be found there. It isn’t even paved. There’s a pretty white church at the end of the road, atop a hill. The Greene family’s tailoring, shoemaking and undertaking business stands next to Jimmy Mason’s grocery store and Tommy Blackshire’s pub. There’s a tiny post office on the village’s outskirts, but we can’t really claim that as our own since it is shared by five or so other districts. A police station is near the post office, but the only thing Sheriff Fairclough and Deputy Spencer ever seem to battle is sleep. They can usually be found with their feet balanced on the front counter, their chairs leaning on the two hind legs, and a bottle of Appleton Gold tucked neatly beneath their desks. The station is usually only open weekdays, sun up through sunset, so if a crime is going to be committed, the victim had better hope the criminal strikes during business hours. Stepney’s public servants have never taken kindly to being disturbed at home, but the only crime that ever really takes place in Stepney is “bad word cussing,” and that’s pretty seldom, unless you happen to be passing by Tommy’s bar during a heated game of dominoes.
A muffled sound came from inside the clinic, but when I turned in its direction, I realized it was only Satchmo changing positions on the cot, so I returned my attention to the dirt road that kept climbing upwards until it seemed to touch the sky. The grass grew high and free on both sides of it. When I was a little girl, I thought that if I ever reached the very top of that road, I would enter heaven—if I were good. If not, I would just fall off and die. One day I gathered enough courage to run up the road. That’s when I realized that it didn’t touch the sky, but curved around the mountainside and continued on indefinitely.
I looked off in the other direction, to where the main road continued through Stepney. There was the spot, right in front of Jimmy Mason’s grocery, where my aunt had fallen that day. It was a Monday morning, and she had just turned onto the Main Road with Mavis Parker. They always walked to the Crossroads together. Mrs. Parker had been in a particularly good mood that morning because her husband had felt the need for her company the night before. With her basket securely balanced against her fleshy hip, she prattled on and on about this and that. The sun was merciless that day—even at that early hour. One moment, my aunt was staring off at it, listening to Mrs. Parker. The next, she was on the ground—her bananas, mangoes and ackees all coated in the red Stepney dirt. She blamed her fainting spell on the heat, but I blamed it on sickness. The hair on her head, which had once been so thick, had become as wispy and as thin as a moth-eaten piece of cotton.
Aunt Mattie tried to avoid Dr. Bennedict because she didn’t want to spend what remained of her life worrying, but I nagged her until she reconsidered. After the doctor’s lips formed the word cancer, she walked straight out of the clinic and into the church. She wrapped a set of rosary beads around her hands and prayed to her lord for three hours. When her body began to hurt from simply climbing the three, small steps that led up to our house, she just figured her lord was too overwhelmed to listen. After all, Mavis Parker was always hogging up his time, begging for a donkey or a good harvest or good customers or good weather. When my aunt noticed the bones pressing against her skin, she realized that her life was slipping away. She had never believed in spells or chanting or any such nonsense otherwise sane people seemed to lose their good sense over, but during those final few months, something crossed over in her. She even paid a visit to the obeah man in neighboring Prickle Pole. But for all the roots and goat’s blood he prescribed, she could not stop her life from slipping into the dust.
My eyes began to tear, so I breathed in deeply and walked back into the clinic. I needed to take inventory of all the supplies we didn’t have. The clinic had become not only work, but also home to me. It was close to the bar, to people, to laughter and to life. I had slept there every night since my aunt’s funeral because I didn’t like the shadows that grew out from the darkened walls of the house we once shared. Most of all, I didn’t like the avocado tree in the front yard. It looked too much like a skeleton stretching its ghastly fingers out into the night. I had a good mind to have Farmer Bygrave chop it down, but Aunt Mattie had always liked avocados.
At three o’clock, I took my place on the clinic’s top step. It was the only time of day when there was any real activity, and if I was lucky enough, I was able to catch part of an argument taking place over at the bar—the result of some card game or domino game gone wrong. Jimmy Mason stood in the doorway of his small grocery store swatting flies. Some of the school children giggled and sang songs as they skipped home from school. Then, right on cue, Farmer Bygrave appeared on the main road.
“Aftahnoon, likkle Miss Souci.”
“Aftahnoon, Farmah Bygrave.”
“Just going fe get a bit a me daily tonic,” he said before walking through the front door of Tommy Blackshire’s bar. Everyday around three, Farmer Bygrave visited Tommy’s for his “daily tonic”—three parts white rum, one part pineapple juice.
As the number of kids passing by dwindled and Jimmy Mason eased back inside his store, I pulled out the paperback I had tucked away in the front pocket of my frock. It was one of those romance novels with the perfect, bronzed hero posed across the front cover, holding onto a ridiculously large bosomed, small waisted damsel. I read so many of those books that once they were finished, I could never really remember what they were about in the first place. But I loved them just the same.
I had just resumed where I had left off in the book when I heard what sounded like a car. I turned in the direction of where the road led out of Stepney, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Since the road curved around the mountainside, it was impossible to see someone approaching until they began their descent on the Stepney side of the mountain. The noise became greater, so I continued to look after it. Seconds later, a small van appeared. I rose up from the steps of the clinic and watched as the van passed me by and continued on. There were three people inside, and they seemed unsure of where they were. I was pretty certain they were lost. The last time anyone saw any through traffic in Stepney had been two days before, and that was only because it was Tuesday, the day Doctor Bennedict made his weekly visit to the clinic in his shiny blue American car.
The van came to a stop about thirty yards from where I stood. Several of the townspeople, including Farmer Bygrave, “tonic” in hand, approached it. The doors opened and two men walked out. They stood at a bit of an angle, so I couldn’t get a good look at their faces. They appeared to be white men, so I was pretty sure they had taken a wrong turn somewhere. At first, I thou
ght they had only stopped to ask directions, but then I noticed they had come upon an obstacle in the road. What a commotion. In the space of a couple of minutes, every man, woman and child in Stepney seemed to have materialized on that main road. I could hardly make out what was being said, and the visitors were now completely surrounded by the villagers. I started moving toward the commotion when Michele cut me off.
“Gyal pickney, you wouldn’t believe who one a dem mon is. Dem saying is Edward Montrose son. Cecil Montrose nephew. Me t’ink him is some kind a politician himself.”
“You lying! One a de white mon dem?”
“Him is not white. Him is just very, very, very light bright … me t’ink.”
A politician was as close to royalty as Stepney could ever hope to see, and Edward Montrose and his brother Cecil had been two of the greatest to ever come out of the Caribbean.
“How come dem come here?” I asked.
“I t’ink dem was on dem way back to Kingston from Brown’s Town or Alexandria, an’ dem get loss. Dat’s how dem happen t’rough here, an’ dat’s how dem buck up on de fat sow.”
With all the people standing around, we could hardly make out Mavis Parker’s sow Katie, but I was pretty sure all the commotion annoyed her to no end. Mid-afternoon was her usual naptime, when she would waddle to the middle of the road and stretch out for an hour or so. She had never gotten in the way of whatever traffic might have trickled through. But there she was this day, stretched out in the middle of a road hardly wide enough for one way traffic, and drawing a crowd. Mr. Parker tried to budge her by using the tip of his run down left shoe. Katie didn’t flinch. Greenie tried reasoning, but it fell upon deaf ears. After some time, Deputy Spencer groggily made his way through the crowd, but he was also no match for the swine.
“I cyan’t see de politician’s face,” I mumbled.
“You want fe get closer?”
Crickets' Serenade Page 2