As he passed the villages he knew he would probably never see again — the houses with their gardens of crotons and zinnias, the roadside stalls from which he had often brought fruits for his mother, the limers idling by the bridges, the little landmarks: an overdecorated temple, an old Presbyterian church on a hill, a parlour perched on the edge of a precipice — he considered he would never again have to make promises he wouldn’t keep or be subjected to bouts of reproach and anger. His mood lightened as he got closer to his bungalow and he calculated how he would spend his free time. He would build a pond at the back of his house and fill it with fishes. He would plant a variety of fruit trees. Caimites, sapodillas, soursops and tonkobeans. In the nights, the aroma from the fruits would seep into his house as he was finally completing his course on meteorology. Then he thought of the tiny tadpoles swimming in his eyes and the waviness of distant objects, and he decided he would visit an eye doctor. Maybe he would surprise his daughter with a visit, and one evening he might disembark in Canada and see Wally waiting at the airport.
He was fifty-seven; in three years, he would receive a pension. He had saved enough money to last until then as he had no real expenses. At Soongsoong Japourie, he told the shopkeeper, “Today was my last day in the job.”
“So what you going to do now?”
“I have plans,” Orbits told him. “Plenty plans.”
On page twelve of the book Orbits had bought from the Book Swami was an illustration of a man floating on a cloud and looking down at stick figures. On the opposite page was the statement When you hit sixty prepare to see the world again. He liked both the illustration and the statement. See the world again, he thought. He tried to imagine both Florida, where his daughter lived, and Wally’s Toronto. “I going to visit some foreign places soon,” he said to the sceptical shopkeeper. “But first I have to plant my fruits and dig my pond.”
“You know sometimes I does wonder why I slaving out in this place day and night. Who I leaving all this to? No children, no old fowl.”
Orbits understood what he meant, and he had thought of this himself. He told the man, “The important thing is to occupy yourself with a plan.” He had actually read that from the Book Swami’s tract. “A bucket list.”
The shopkeeper tittered at the term before he grew serious. “Sometimes these plans don’t work out as planned. The bucket does tip over and break you crown. You hear about you friend in the radio? The one who pick you up a few weeks aback.” When Orbits shook his head, the shopkeeper said, “The police find a ton of guns in his place. Look like he was planning something serious. A coo.” Each evening, he walked across to the shopkeeper and listened to news of Skullcap, who had clammed up in the police station. “I hear he tell them lawyers that god will tell him when is time to talk. Like he and god have a special line. If god use to study all these crazy people he wouldn’t have time for anything else. Like building new planets and shaping new animals and thing.” During these visits, Orbits mentioned amendments to his list, irritating the shopkeeper, who felt this was an unnecessary and trivial distraction from the news he was sharing.
“I finish with all that,” he told the shopkeeper one evening. “I have my bucket list.”
Some of these he actually accomplished. He phoned Cascadoo and stood in the backyard garden while the other man dug his pond. This is good mud you have here,” Cascadoo said. “Sapatay. You could do anything with it.” From Cascadoo he heard that Mona was engaged to the baby-faced candidate who had visited his office and who had lost his deposit. Moon’s husband had won the election, and Orbits wondered how soon Halligator and his band would come to him with their demands. Maybe the thugs would meet their match in his delusional but strong-willed wife. After a week, Cascadoo told him, “I finish here. All you have to do now is throw some cascadoo in the pond. Not me, eh. The real cascadoo fish.”
The fruit trees Orbits planted himself. He was not accustomed to manual labour and he had to rest frequently to calm the pain in his chest, but as he gazed at the rows of plants, the mud fresh at their roots, their buds shining and tender, he felt fulfilled, as if he had completed some great task. In this mood of accomplishment, he contacted his wife. He revealed he had bought the house in the little village they had once visited. She could not remember until he mentioned it was on the day she had driven in her Bluebird to his work. “Ah yes,” she said. “I recall it now.” She sounded exactly like her mother, and he asked about her parents. Her father had passed away and her mother had occupied herself by joining groups concerned with the education of girls. She planned on taking the same route herself when she retired from her principal position, and Orbits recalled she was a year older than him. He was also impressed that she was now a principal even though he had always expected it. He mentioned this to her, and in the moment of her silence, he asked for Dee’s address.
That night he wrote his daughter a long letter in which he used phrases like, “Don’t put limits on yourself,” and “We can accomplish anything once we have a plan and we stick to it. Know yourself. That is the most important thing.” He also wrote Wally an even longer letter in which he outlined all his plans. “I finally going to finish that course in meteorology,” he wrote. “Straight on to part four.” It was a cheerful letter and he did not reveal the pain in his chest or his growing vision problems that had made driving impossible. His daughter replied within a week. She had visited the island a couple times, but because of her job at a hospital, her visits were limited to just a few days. She had her own place in Florida, and if Orbits visited, he could babysit his granddaughter. Immediately he began to make plans. Two weeks later, he got a letter from Wally. “You wouldn’t recognize me now,” Wally wrote. “After my heart attack the doctor put me on a strict diet. Massive attack in a mall. I roll down an escalator and I could swear before I pass out I hear somebody saying, ‘Get me a harpoon fast.’ But I in recovery mode now.”
***
Orbits’ heart attack was not as dramatic. He had just finished clearing the weeds in the backyard and was looking at the reflection of the sky on the pond, the water disrupted by the fishes that rose to the surface; and when he noticed the rippling patterns seeming to fray, the clouds shattering and reforming much too quickly, he felt at first it was just an atmospheric disturbance. Afterwards, he realized his luck in looking up at that moment because he fell on his back rather than forward onto the pond. He wrote to Wally, adopting the joking tone of the other man’s letter. “It look like me and you will end up side by side in the same hospital room remembering all the good old times.”
But first he had to visit his daughter. He suspected his daughter’s unexpected cordiality, expressed through her letter, was because she was now a parent. Maybe she really needed him to babysit. Regardless, he would finally get the opportunity to draw closer to her. During the trip to Florida, he looked through the window and recalled the flight following his honeymoon when his former wife, not knowing of his long-lasting fascination with clouds, had lightly mentioned how real they seemed. Now, because of his deteriorating vision, they appeared dotted with tiny black spots that looked like the mile-corbeaux he had seen, as a boy, high up in the sky.
During the first days in Florida, Orbits was continually surprised by the coolness of the nights, by the number of car dealerships as they drove through the place, by the mix of cacti and familiar tropical plants, by the animals wandering around without a care, by the formal but genuine affection between Dee and her husband, who was not, as he had assumed, the Chinese-looking person he had spotted at his father’s funeral, but a lanky, balding American minister, quiet with everyone but his daughter. “The cutest little thing in the world, isn’t she?” he asked Orbits one night.
“Her mother was just as cute,” Orbits replied. He felt embarrassed with the statement, but he could see that Dee was pleased. He couldn’t connect this grown woman with the girl who had been irritated with him during their scheduled visits a
nd who had cut him off altogether later on. Five days after his arrival in Florida, following a visit to an ophthalmologist, she asked him if he would consider spending more time with the family. Both she and her husband were working and it would be good to have a relative seeing about their daughter rather than a babysitter. “It’s how these Cubans and Mexicans operate,” the husband said.
Orbits was overjoyed. “The minute I get back I going to make preparations,” he told her. And he did. He would visit later in the year, maybe before Christmas, where he would get the opportunity to celebrate with his family. The bungalow he would rent or lock. Perhaps he would fix his eyes and his heart in the hospital that employed his daughter. In the evenings, in his backyard or on the porch, he would marvel at this unexpected and satisfying end to his struggles. Sitting on a wicker chair on his porch, listening to the shrill cries of the parakeets blending with the musical notes of the bullfinches, observing the scattering of the evening, the night percolating through the bamboo, the coolness separating the fresh clinging odour of the para grass from the astringent aroma of the lime and lemon, Orbits could finally feel that he was satisfied. He owed no one, was obligated to no one.
He had seen the island move from poverty to obscene wealth and, when the price of oil fell, the money long squandered, back to poverty. But he had been untouched by these fluctuations. For all his life, he had had little idea of what the future might bring; he never planned for anything, and whenever a slice of luck fell his way, he briefly imagined it was the world settling to balance the torment of his early years. Now, for the first time, he began to see the opportunities within his grasp. The fastidiousness that had marked his time at the Ministry of Agriculture returned: he began to calculate and apportion — groceries, renovations, flights, surgery, presents, clothes for himself.
He wrote to Wally of his visit to his daughter, using phrases about fate and destiny he would have once scoffed at. He mentioned the visit in Florida to an ophthalmologist who had referred to the black specks as floaters. “It looks like I can’t escape from floating,” he wrote. “Maybe the man upstairs is granting me what I always wished for. If I can’t get to the clouds, he bringing the clouds to me.” He also revealed his plans to the shopkeeper, who countered with his own problems in getting a visa and who mentioned plane crashes and foreign diseases.
It was a heart attack rather than a foreign disease or plane crash that ended Orbits’ plans. He had been describing to the sceptical shopkeeper all the animals he had seen roaming about in Florida, armadillos and deer and opossums, when the pain in his chest shot through the left of his body and then spread everywhere else before it leavened into numbness. “Ay-ay, what happen to you?” the shopkeeper asked. “You fall asleep just so?”
Half an hour later, he told the ambulance personnel, “The man talking about a deer he spot behind his daughter house and before he could tell me if he shoot it or not, he just kilketay on the counter here.”
“You know him?” the personnel asked.
“Was a councillor. Just the other day he see about a man drain. Teacher or something. Look at how people does go, eh. Easy-easy. One minute he talking about deer and thing and the next minute he just cal-laps. Life is a funny thing. I don’t know what going to happen with his bucket list. I warn him about that.”
“You know his address?”
“A house not too far from here. I tell him the house was haunted but he didn’t listen.”
Orbits’ funeral was held in the house he had desired for half his life. Cascadoo came with his daughters and a few farmers. He showed them the pond he had recently dug and the fruit trees, many already with fresh buds. Mona came, too, with her new husband, who seemed badly affected by her tears. The couple had seen about most of the funeral preparations and had contacted Orbits’ former wife. Moon, the woman with whom he had had an affair, did not attend, but her husband, the newly elected councillor, made a speech in which he said that during moments of greatest distress, one should never despair because it is simply the world restoring itself and righting the balance. Dee, who had flown down with her family, nodded as if it were a wise statement. During the cremation, her daughter, one and a half years old, looked at the blue smoke from the pyre curling upwards and disappearing into the clouds and she put her little hand out as if she could touch it. Her grandmother, who was holding her, said, “You can’t touch it, sweetie. It looks real but it’s just smoke.”
Her son-in-law took the girl and pointed to the clouds, “That’s where your grandpa went. Can you see him?” The child nodded, pointing from one cloud to the other
About the Author
Rabindranath Maharaj is the author of six novels and three short story collections. His fifth novel, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, won both the Toronto Book Award and the Trillium Fiction Prize. Previous books were shortlisted for various awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Chapters First Novel Award, the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Rogers Fiction Award. In 2013, Maharaj was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. He was born in Trinidad and now lives in Ajax, Ontario.
DISCOVER ONLINE
A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice
With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.
The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.
Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.
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Copyright
Copyright © Rabindranath Maharaj, 2019
Published by ECW Press
665 Gerrard Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2
416-694-3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes/ a misFit Book
Cover design: Troy Cunningham
Cover image: K.V. Maharaj
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Maharaj, Rabindranath, 1955-, author
Fatboy fall down : a novel / Rabindranath Maharaj.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-452-5 (softcover)<
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ISBN 978-1-77305-312-7 (PDF)
ISBN 978-1-77305-311-0 (ePUB)
I. Title.
PS8576.A42F38 2019 C813’.54 C2018-905341-0 C2018-905342-9
The publication of Fatboy Fall Down has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country and is funded in part by the Government of Canada. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, and through Ontario Creates for the marketing of this book.
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