Kingston Noir

by Colin Channer

  When they cut her from the tree, the girl’s two eyes was still open, for she dead watching the future—schoolchildren running toward her; and music-music; a woman with a knife; rain falling against a gray door. To this day, you can still smell her soul-rebel piss on the ground—all nanny goat and guinea weed strong. Go Half Way Tree, sun-hot, and check for yourself if is not true. No water wash away that smell.

  Three days and three nights rain fall, then Friday morning rain clear up and the smell right there again: womanish and fortify. Patsy hair dry now, but water dripping from the handbag.

  Dread in the oven baking/Baking—I-rical dread top ranking today; he even rhyme in his dreams now. See mi little sistah, call her/call her—

  That slave girl did not know her place, they say. She was too force ripe. The day they hang her, people come to Half Way Tree all the way from St. Catherine. When they see the way her feet dance, everybody captive. One man take a piece of the rope for souvenir; another a bit of the branch. Cotton tree draw spirit tings, that’s what they never know.

  Patsy, twelve o’clock: Them can’t take away my dancing feet; them can’t take away my dancing feet. The sky over Kingston all dutty-gal bathwater. After school, and a boy bet another one he can make Patsy move. He throw a stone and hit her on her shoulder. Patsy don’t move not even a finger. Then he throw another one. Then the other boy throw a piece of bottle glass. Patsy eyelid flinch, but still she don’t move. Soon more stones coming; one hit the door on the clock tower. Her neck-back bleeding. She grip the knife tight, but she don’t turn or shift her eyes, not one rass.

  After that, market people sell under the tree—navel orange and fall-down mango; naseberry and custard apple in season; sweet sop and sour tamarind. Sometimes evening when they clear up, they feel a shift in the air; hear the young girl skirt shuffle; fruit flies over the spot where her feet did dance; her breath smell like spirit weed. For not even fire or frankincense and myrrh can stop a duppy like that.

  Bloodfiah! The dread leave his ganja nylon and run grab the boys by their two shirt collar. They tear from his hands and take off down the street. Patsy still stand up same place, her head cock to the side like she listening something—a sound past the cars and shot-dead news on the radio, past screeching birds, cuss-cuss, and baby cry. Is a tune she hear, people say. No, is murder duppy she hear, a man say. And for once someone is right. Hear her: jah.

  A woman took the girl’s lace-up shoes as a souvenir. She put them in her garden in Liguanea and planted flowers in them. Purple and white periwinkle. You should have seen her feet dance, she said to lady guests on the terrace. The shoes had been a gift from mistress before the girl turn ripe and talk-back. The girl sprinkle arrow root in one sole and put leaf-of-life in the other. Is powerful herb and balmnation that. There was Spanish needle in her pockets and ram-goat-dash-along in her hair—

  And look, two tears fall down Patsy face—is the first people see her cry. They roll like slow-motion movie. When they get to her cheekbone, they pause, then start again. Her head tilt to the side; her eyes fix on the padlock, the spot where the shoes did dance.

  Early-early Sunday morning the door wide open and Patsy stand up in the clock with her knife raise in the air like statue of conspiracy. How she pick the lock, only God know. Is her eyes she use to open it, people say. Three police car with bluelightsbluelights. Murder in the clock, the people say. Patsy come with a knife to cut her rope; to stop the past and change the future—

  To run, run, run with leaf-of-life and Spanish needle to save the baby with colic and too-hot fever; to dance him in her arms with balm and deliverance; before him dead and take away forever. Brazen girl, she said she would not work with baby sick in crib. Said she heard the baby cry out for her from afar-afar on the other side. Let me dance with him, she said. And when they tried to stop her, she took off through the field, then turned, picked up a stone, and threw it right in overseer’s eye. Is you the father! she shout. And she take up her foot and run toward the crying in her heart—

  But Babylon handcuff her already. They taking her straight to Bellevue. Hear her in the police car: I dance at my graveside, the year with no number. Nobody see me, but I dance there. Sunday organ obituaries playing on the radio, but tomorrow is reggae and dancehall again. Judgment! the dread call. Half Way Tree back to business as usual. A strong woman-piss smell, and fruit flies.

  LEIGHTON LEIGH ANE NORBROK

  BY THOMAS GLAVE

  Norbrook

  But now the secret, that secret—his, and the nasty-dutty (but rass gorgeous) black bwoy’s—is at rest in the corpse. The corpse that cannot be hers, he thinks. Insists. But it is. The corpse that fits so snugly—so snug it is obscene, death being the final and most repugnant obscenity, an absolute execration, to use the phrasing of a friend from some years ago, a friend he now remembers he had secretly loathed. No. That cannot be her corpse. Not in this casket bedecked (no, festooned, he thinks, curling a lip although he is hardly aware of it) with these most outrageous flowers … with these impossibly mawkish arrangements. Not here in this Anglican church of his childhood, with the late morning’s invincible sunlight slanting down through the church’s stained-glass windows, through those not particularly interesting windows his grown-up architect’s eye had learned to disdain … a church and all of its outfittings should be lean and clean, he thinks … at least a church that serves the sort of people this one serves: their sort of people. Those who know where particular forks on the table belong and how crystal ought to be arranged for christenings. Leanness and cleanness, to facilitate entry of … what? The spirit? The Lord? But whatever, he thinks, just not dark like this one. Not flanked by too-tall, dark mango trees on one side, like this one. Not, like this one, obscenely, unforgivably containing her body. The body of his sister. The only one he had ever known. Lying on her back with those flowers—

  She, a well-brought-up Norbrook girl and a child, like himself, not only of the Shepherds, but of those Shepherds, their parents: those Shepherds of the best part of Norbrook not yet invaded by swaggering drug-trade butus in Benzes and gold chain–wearing never-see-come-sees who had finally managed, after years of clawing, to crawl so far above the Half Way Tree clock. Those Shepherds, known well enough by residents of the older, unostentatiously stately homes along upper Norbrook Road and even in certain apartments in Grosvenor Terrace and Manor Park, who, if more good sense and less lacerating grief had attended them, surely would have despised those flowers; surely under different circumstances would have regarded them, as she would have, with a special and unmistakable brand of scorn. For indeed, in regard to the bouquets and displays, what in God’s name had his parents been thinking? Thinking, to have placed upon the coffin and at its right side such violently red roses that, virtually shouting their presence from the front of the church and the casket, suggested something quite beyond the quotidian normalities of the heart—something tawdry, even, well beyond the dignified and restrained realm of the eminently respectable church in which he, his parents, and that vast blur of close friends, more distant friends, and other family members whose names he could, on this sultry and impossible morning, barely remember, now stood? The church in which he could not possibly, he had told himself as the service began, be standing now beside his parents, the both of them completely silent but, he had noticed, uncharacteristically stooped; his grandmother, off there to the side just past his father and three uncles, barely able to stand (her aged face wet, her face so very very wet, the faces of two of his three uncles so unbearably and impossibly wet—but still they, those tall, straight-backed men, like his father, and his mother, remained standing, actually able to stand). What had any of them been thinking?

  But then, of course, none of them—no, not one, not even one of his deeply pragmatic aunts who had returned to Jamaica from Fort Lauderdale for the service as soon as she had heard the news of Leigh Anne’s death—or, rather (but say it, he thinks, damnit, the fucking word, the word that none of them had been able
to utter) murder—none of them had been thinking clearly over the past eight days. Not thinking clearly ever since the police—ever since—

  Four shots to the chest and one to the neck, one of the policemen had said, severing or rupturing the (the medical someone or other had said that, dear God)—

  But then say it, you—what was the word he had heard one of those men in London, when he had traveled there with two cousins last summer, call another man? Cunt. In Sloane Square, of all places, to which he had dragged his cousins one unexpectedly warm, in fact sunny, afternoon in search of a pair of Victorian buildings he had wanted to photograph for one of his bosses who had always nurtured a passion for the more fanciful aspects of Victorian design—“an architect’s delight,” the boss, an Appleton-loving man named David, had said more than once—when they all had witnessed that man (a white man, yet, though obviously grubby, pasty, and clearly not from that part of London) shouting in the street to another man (also a grubby, pasty type—the sort who looked as if, with his gray crew cut and incipient beer belly that matched his comrade’s, he would without question have to get rowdy and belch volcanically between brews at football matches)—shouting something like, Well go on, then, and take it all the way if you like, and see if I care, you stupid cunt.

  Sounds like a pussy with teeth, one of his cousins had snorted, laughing at the vulgarity of that type of Englishman. Not top- drawer, his deceased grandfather would have said. Not quite out of the top drawer, his Uncle Wilson, longtime admirer of Her Majesty, would have sniffed.

  And so then say it, you cunt, he thinks. Tell the fucking truth, for once in your life. (But do not think of the nasty-dutty black bwoy. Do not think—no, don’t dare—about how Leigh Anne, upon learning about that, had looked at him. Had not looked at him.) Say that she is dead. Leigh Anne Faith Shepherd, your only sister and only sibling, is dead.

  She, he does not want to think, the only one who had ever known. Known about that. She who, after knowing, for years, had looked at him. Had not looked at him. She who had been murdered.

  That’s the word, you stupid cunt. Murder.

  But then there had been no time, really, since the news, this news, for any of them to think. No time for them to reflect on the utterly incomprehensible news that some gunmen—possibly two or three, although an elderly neighbor who had heard the shots from her front veranda swore that she had in fact seen four men (although in truth the darkness had obscured their precise number)—had “surprised” her.

  Surprised her, the police had said. This deduced from their initial investigations. Surprised at the gate of her driveway the lovely twenty-six-year-old Miss Shepherd, lately of Cherry Gardens, where she and her fiancé Peter, to whom she would have been married at the end of next month, had moved only six weeks ago.

  “Surprised” her, yes—something deeply hideous about the word, as if the event had been somehow akin to a birthday party—and had shot her to death in a “fusillade” of bullets—that was the phrase, wasn’t it, that you often saw these days in the media accounts of such events in Jamaica? Surprised her early that evening, eight or so evenings ago, as she had pulled into the driveway of the new house that she and Peter had been fixing up slowly, lovingly. Meticulously. She had pulled in at just a little past seven while perhaps listening on the Land Rover’s radio to Irie-FM, which she had always loved; thinking perhaps that she and Peter might that evening make an early night of it, since he was due to depart for a six-day work trip to Cayman the following morning. Pulled in, lovely girl, sweet adorable younger sister, younger by two years, thinking nothing of her imminent death in a “fusillade of bullets.” Surprised and—

  Red? Would there have been a great deal of red across her form suddenly slumped behind the Land Rover’s wheel, and on its front seats? But the flowers, he thinks. Yes, much too red. Not at all our way of doing things, he thinks. We were not thinking. Nobody was thinking.

  But then, how can he possibly be thinking now, right now, his sobbing parents beside him, of what the nasty-dutty black bwoy thought of all this? Of the flowers? How can he possibly be thinking of him now as he stands here among his family? Standing here feeling what cannot be possible, and must not be now nor ever again: that obscene stirring in his—oh, but yes, exactly. There. The place where that kind of movement begins, down there, where the drowsing curled animal stirs until, awakened by the slightest secret start or shudder, it presses itself outward, out, in search of the warmth and the grip that is the outer flesh’s resistance and welcome. Feeling all that and then the drowsing animal’s stretching to attention as, that suddenly, all at once, he smells once again the flesh and stink of the nasty-dutty black bwoy, it is simply not possible for him to be standing as tall as he now stands, next to his bending parents … standing and trying to be … trying to be himself, Leighton, whoever “Leighton” is and has always been to them, to all those aunts and uncles and the grandparents … and to his parents, by God. And how can I be here? he thinks. I don’t know. No, I really don’t. I’m standing here thinking of him and feeling him on me again because … because she was there. Because on that particular night she saw, and remembered—or at least never forgot.

  Saw, yes. She saw, having walked in on them. Four years ago. Him and the nasty-dutty black bwoy, in their parents’ house on that lovely and still, so still, Norbrook night. Still but for the peepers. Still for once, miraculously, with no noise of traffic at that hour from Norbrook Road; no dogs in neighbors’ gardens barking in argument with dogs barking in rage; and a moon, a moon as generous as gold, that had gleamed its determined but gentle white through so many Upper St. Andrew streetlights. That night, in the blood, in the flesh: remember it. Remember, as you knew then, that there are times when people, people like your beloved younger sister, should have stayed as late at the party to which she had gone with those several friends as she had said with such certainty only a few hours before she had planned to do—because if she had done that, if she had kept to her word, you would then finally, finally have been able to do all the things that you had so longed to do and had never done, never dared to do, even if, especially if, they were things to do with and to a bighooded nasty-dutty black bwoy who labored, sweaty and dirty as those people always were, with his sweaty-dirty, but not young and gorgeous and big-hooded, uncle in your parents’ garden. Then, in those most secret times, you can at last be free, you can soar, you can even be dangerous and disgusting and take some of the nastydutty black bwoy all the way down your throat (Jesus Christ, the hood), and taste him in the very back-back of your throat, Massa God, before he pulls it out and whips you with it in the face because no one will know, no one who knows you will ever know. There are times when you know, as you knew that night, that your parents were indeed in Fort Lauderdale for the weekend (they had called back to the house only a few hours before that evening, and Yes, dear, your mother had said—her voice as always so warm but cool, her voice as always so assured provided that your father was not anywhere nearby—we arrived safely, though Daddy is a bit cross because, well, you know, he’s tired, eh? But everything is fine so far … Yes, my dear, and Aunt Hyacinth says hello again). In Florida for the weekend and not due to return until the following Tuesday … you and Leigh Anne by that time of course old enough to stay at the house on your own, the two of you well into your twenties; knowing that they were away visiting the aunt who lived there and several other relatives, and shopping up there as people like themselves so loved to do when provided the slightest opportunity; knowing that your sister was going to her blasted party over in Russell Heights shortly, so that you had been able to tell the helper, Yeah man, go home at five thirty, Leigh Anne and I can take care of everything from here, no problem—you so confidently told the helper, although you did not, in that moment, actually anticipate that anything would really be possible with the nasty-dutty black bwoy who still, that late afternoon, sauntered about the grounds with his machete looped on the side of his pants: the gardener’s nephew who came ofte
n to assist his uncle, and whom you had imagined on first glancing at him to be named Ransford or Davion or one of those typical ghetto names that black ghetto dwellers love to give their children.

  But the bwoy’s name had in fact been Michael: a slender black Michael with beautiful teeth and lips—beautiful everything, as it turned out—who, like his uncle, your parents’ elderly gardener, had always smelled of the garden and of the sun, sun and earth and sweat: a younger, always bare-chested man with those nipples, that stomach, those narrow hips, that backside, and with who knew, until that night, what size and shape of hood: that nasty-dutty black bwoy who, like his uncle the gardener, walked always with a machete slung in such a manly way on his waist and had learned from an early age, like his uncle, to call you “sah”; that bwoy who had actually looked at you and looked at you so many times over the years—he, the gardener’s nephew, daring to look at you, the Shepherds’ son—as you, sometimes just as daring if not more, had looked back at him, at that blackness that had never been yours: those Shepherds were not black, they were most certainly not black. You looked, though carefully, quietly, with lowered glance; sometimes even daring, gazing out from your grilled bedroom window, to watch him water the hanging baskets or bend over to chop away weeds from the ornamentals … he being nearly the same age as you, perhaps a year or so older? Yes, he had actually told you his age when, at last, impossibly, your hand, that night, had found its place on his hood, as he had gripped you at the neck and forced your face into his chest—

  (But Leigh Anne is—is—is dead, he thinks. The one person who knew, the only person aside from the gardener’s nephew and himself who knew.)