Blue Mountain Trouble

by Martin Mordecai

  “So, James,” Mama said. “The parson man remember you from when you was a little baby?”

  Jammy laughed. “No, Miss Maisie. He remember my modda. He tell me that after he baptize me, she join his church and come every Sunday. Even though she is born and bring up Adventist. And few time she bring a man with her that parson believe is me father. And then they disappear, he say, and he never see either of them again. Every time he come to the Castle, he just looking at me and looking at me and say that he know me. Every time. And one day he come back with that paper from his church, the cerfiticate. He say he remember me mother through I look so much like her, and that lead him back to the cerfiticate.”

  Poppa’s voice was quiet. “James Bartholomew what?”

  “What you say, Mass Gillie?” In the telling of his story, Jammy had become more and more relaxed and now, as he seemed not to hear Poppa clearly, he sounded almost offhand.

  “Is not only James Bartholomew that is on the baptism certificate,” Poppa said. “It must have another name. The name of the father.”

  Jammy looked Poppa straight in the eye. “You know that name, Mass Gillie.” The sly, arrogant tone that Jackson had first heard that morning up at Morgan’s Mount was back.

  And Poppa, just like then, bristled. “I know?”

  “Yes, Mass Gillie,” Jammy said softly, teeth gleaming in a slow smile. “ ’Cause is your name,” Jammy said quietly, and as if he was offering Poppa a present. “Gilmore.”

  * * *

  The four of them stood like trees. Pollyread’s head felt as it did after a long bout of studying, ready to burst. The pain from the fall with Jammy and the confusion of the goat was all gone, but her brain felt stuffed with cotton wool.

  Was this what the “story” had come to? All the hints and sly looks between Bollo and Trucky. The sudden, curious changes in tone of their parents when talking about Jammy. Is that what Jammy’s story meant? That his name was really Gilmore, same as everybody else in this yard? That he was family?

  Worse — Poppa’s outside pickney!

  Pollyread’s mind bounced off that idea like a rubber ball, seeking other explanations for comfort. There was none to be had from the many that shuffled through her head like a pack of cards. As people said, Friends you choose, your family choose you. And that was no comfort at all.

  But Pollyread had no choice but to come back to a sinking feeling, like undigested food at the bottom of her stomach, that Jammy wasn’t lying. Mama wouldn’t be so calm. Maybe she knew all along. It wasn’t unusual for families, especially the women, to harbor the offspring of other liaisons (a Common Entrance word that caused a lot of giggles) and raise them. If Jammy was Poppa’s outside pickney … The ball started bouncing again…. Coming back to Poppa, who looked so — what? Defeated. Why was he looking like that? Defeated by Jammy! Lordy. What was Poppa seeing on the bare hard ground he was staring at? Shame that his children should find out? Truth is the lightest basket to carry. Now the truth, Jammy, rested as heavy on his shoulders as if the real person was sitting there.

  “Gilmore?” Pollyread heard her own voice breaking the silence, squeaking like a rusty hinge.

  “Say what?” Jackson asked in a croak.

  The parents said nothing.

  “Trueblood name Parchment,” Jackson insisted, speaking of Jammy’s brother Vincent, in grade four.

  “And don’t your name is Parchment?” Pollyread heard her own voice coming from far away.

  “That is what I am called,” said Jammy, crossing arms on his chest.

  You mean, that is what is written in the book at the police station, Pollyread thought. Thank God is not Gilmore. She turned to her mother, who was closest to her, for some kind of understanding. Mama was looking at Poppa, waiting for him to speak. Poppa walked off toward the house.

  Jammy looked pleased with himself. Pollyread felt anger puddling in her stomach. But she also felt helpless. Off-balance. Usually, words were how she helped herself to understand her world, and her thoughts, her feelings. She would say something, or ask a question — sometimes without actually thinking about what to say. And clarity would present itself like a light, or like a wise person, smiling and showing the way through the macca bush to understanding. Tonight, though, she didn’t trust herself to say anything more. The words that had spurted out of her had only brought confusion and rebukes from her parents.

  Poppa sat down heavily on the steps to the house, its dark shape looming over him. In the stark light from the overhead bulb he looked tired. Older. His stillness seemed to draw everyone else toward him, including Jammy. Mama, still cradling her belly, sat beside Poppa and rested a hand on his knee. Another silence settled in like the mist, which had returned.

  Poppa looked up finally, at Jammy. “It was for your mother to tell you,” he said. Pollyread took comfort from the tone. Like he used to explain a homework problem.

  Jammy’s laugh was coarse and bitter. “If I didn’t go to prison I would die without knowing who my father is.”

  “It wasn’t in my place,” Poppa repeated.

  “What did your mother say?” Mama spoke softly. Everything was hushed, Pollyread noticed.

  Jammy snorted. “Might as well I tell her I find some money on the road. She don’t care. Is like she blame me for her fall. She’s a hard woman, Miss Maisie.”

  “She wasn’t always so,” said Poppa. He looked out toward the gate, staring into the mist at what only he could see. “She have a hard life. She is a good woman. She never expect you but she never dash you away, and there was plenty people telling her to do that.”

  “My father too?” His face was expectant.

  Poppa thought for a moment and then nodded. The answer turned off a light in Jammy’s eyes.

  Pollyread realized that she had been taking very shallow breaths. Remembering Miss Phillipson’s timely advice earlier, she drew in deeply and exhaled. Her fingers, which uncurled themselves from a fist, ached. She took another deep breath and let out more of her fear with it. Her whole body felt weak. She looked over at Jackson, whose eyes screwed up with questions.

  * * *

  “But it wasn’t as simple as that,” Poppa said, his voice as dark as old wood. “By the time you mother confirm with you, Royston did get a paper from the Ministry for farmwork in Canada.”

  “So?” Jackson couldn’t see into his eyes but Jammy’s angry tone was a challenge.

  “He felt he had to go.”

  “Had to?”

  Poppa waved his arm at the night. “This was going to be his, not mine. Paps was leaving it for him, we all know that from we born.” Poppa looked past them again. “But if he gave up that farmwork paper, another one wouldn’t come again for a long time. If at all.”

  Jammy, eyes fixed on Poppa, was silent.

  Farmwork was something that all Valley children knew about. Next to your birth certificate, and if you were lucky a land title, a paper from the Ministry in Town, entitling you to go to the United States or Canada to work on a farm chopping sugarcane or picking apples or tobacco, was the most valuable piece of paper you could hold in your hand. Many were called — when the Ministry appointed a day for interviews, thousands of men from all over the island found themselves at the Ministry gate from the day before — and a comparative few were chosen. The chosen didn’t always return. The unchosen kept trying, again and again and again. Jammy’s father had been blessed.

  “I was in Town,” Poppa said, “setting up my life.” He squeezed Mama’s hand on his knee. “Going on fine.” He gave a little chuckle and Mama smiled. Then he looked up at Jammy. “Is through you that my life change.”

  “Me? How?” Jammy’s natural belligerence coarsened his voice.

  “Is a long story,” Poppa sighed. Jackson groaned inwardly, but was dying to hear it.

  * * *

  “When your mother come to Town, I didn’t know her,” Poppa said. “Your father bring her to introduce to me, and ask me to look out for her. Being as she was new to T
own and I’d been there over a year.”

  Pollyread knew some of this story: how Gilbert, the second son, had been sent to family in Town to learn a trade because the land was going to Royston, the eldest.

  “What she was doing in Town?” Jammy’s resentment had subsided again. Like the twins, he wanted to hear the story.

  “Her family send her.” Poppa’s voice had a harder edge. “Because of you.”

  “How you mean, Mass Gillie?”

  “Is Town you born. But you make up here.”

  Pollyread understood. Miss Mildred, like many a girl before and since, had been sent away to some other family member for being pregnant. To wipe shame out the eye of the family. Jammy was the shame, Mildred’s the punishment.

  “Things was going fine for me,” Poppa resumed, winking at Mama. “I was learning carpenter trade, and mason. I was going to night school, studying accounts and commerce. I was going to be a contractor, like Mass Jonas, Pops’s cousin.”

  “And I was training for nurse,” Mama said. Which the twins knew.

  “The family in Town was taking advantage of Mildred, working her like a slave. She eat what leave from their table. I used to have to carry extra milk and other little things for her,” he said, “like how she was eating for the baby as well.”

  Mama laughed. “He was so attentive to Mildred, I thought your father was the babyfather.” Pollyread didn’t find this funny at all.

  “You mother and me was just getting to know each other then,” Poppa explained, looking a little embarrassed.

  Big brother Royston came to Town from time to time, to see Mildred and to leave what money he could to buy things for the baby. “And then one time he come and show us the paper he get from the Ministry, for farmwork.”

  There was no question of his not going.

  “But what about Miss Mildred and the baby?” Pollyread interjected, angry with her unknown uncle.

  “It was too good an opportunity to pass up,” Poppa said.

  “Too much money, you mean,” Pollyread argued, as if money was not a good reason for anything when weighed against the needs of a mother and baby.

  “When you poor, child,” Poppa sighed, “money can seem like everything. Farmwork is also an opportunity. Like scholarship.” He looked at his children, quieting them with his eyes.

  Royston promised everybody — his father, his brother, his babymother — that he was coming back. A cousin of Mildred’s from the district also went to do farmwork. He didn’t return either.

  So, after more than a year with no word from Royston, Gilbert was summoned home.

  “I didn’t want to come,” Poppa said, glancing down at the ground. “But if I said no, Pa would have had to go on working the ground until he drop dead. And it wouldn’t have taken very long for that to happen. Only two years as it was. But at least I was able to give him that.”

  They were talking around Jammy, who stood there like a statue, only his head moving as his eyes followed the speakers. Pollyread guessed that a lot of this was news to him too.

  “So what happen to Miss Mildred?” Pollyread asked.

  “She try to make it in Town, but it was too much for her. And as big and strapping as you see Jammy there, as a baby him was sicky-sicky, always taking to doctor. She just couldn’t manage on her own.”

  Pollyread and Jackson, looking at each other, struggled to imagine Jammy as a sickly child.

  But Mildred was lucky, Poppa said. There were only girls in her family, so when time came it was she, the eldest, to take over the family ground near Cross Point or leave it to be captured by somebody else. “She work like a black on that ground.” Pollyread had heard the expression before and never quite understood it, since the people saying it and about whom it was said were all black.

  “So how he come to be up here with you?” Jackson asked, as if Jammy wasn’t right beside him.

  “Very helpful too,” Mama said with a smile. “Help me round the house and help your father at ground. A nice little boy.”

  “Them days,” said Poppa.

  Jammy showed emotion for the first time, a soft smile warming his face. As if he too was remembering a nice little boy.

  “Why?” Jackson insisted.

  “Family business,” Poppa said. “Miss Mildred was trying to raise another boy pickney, I don’t even remember his name now, he leave up here long time with his father.”

  “Melrose,” Mama supplied.

  “And Melrose father treat Jammy rough. Jammy own way from he small, and not accustomed to having man telling him what to do. Plenty quarreling in the yard.” Poppa turned to Jammy. “You remember?”

  “Wicked and dreadful,” Jammy growled. “Him was wicked to I-man.”

  “So Mildred ask you father to take him over for a while,” Mama said. “To teach him things and make himself useful.”

  “And he was useful,” Poppa said. “Very useful.”

  “So what change him?” Pollyread wanted to know.

  “Ask him.” Mama challenged Jammy: “Why you just disappear so?”

  Jammy snorted. “The little pickney start taking up all you time,” he said, looking from Mama to Poppa and back. “It get so you never even notice if I was here or not.”

  “They were little babies,” said Mama in simple explanation. “They needed us more.”

  Jammy didn’t respond, but his memory of that childhood time was clear on his face. Pleasure and pain were like one of Mama’s marbled cakes.

  “And that was when I needed you most,” Poppa said, “ ’cause Maisie couldn’t help me at ground after they born. And you just disappear so, braps.”

  “Disappear with my brooch,” Mama said. Her face and voice had hardened.

  “No, Miss Maisie,” Jammy exclaimed, trying to object to the accusation. But Jackson, who had no idea what Mama was talking about, knew from looking at him that Jammy had taken the brooch.

  “You and the brooch disappear same time.” She slapped one hand against the other to emphasize her point. “What we was to think?”

  “The brooch disappear long before me,” said Jammy with a last effort at argument.

  “If you never take the brooch,” Mama said, “how you know when the brooch disappear?” Her tone, which Jackson knew well, was like a searchlight into the darkness of attempted untruths.

  Jammy looked down at his feet again, silent for a moment. Then he looked up with a little smile. “I will get it back for you,” he said.

  “Get it back?” Mama’s eyes crinkled.

  “From where?” Poppa asked.

  Jammy grinned like a mischievous little boy. “Jackso. Go get a flashlight.”

  “What you want flashlight for?” Poppa asked.

  Mama handed Jammy one from her handbag. “See one here.”

  They all watched and listened, entranced, as Jammy directed Jackson on his belly under the house, Cho-cho tagging along and getting in the way. Jackson returned, choking and spluttering, with a puzzled look on his now gray face and a matchbox in his hand. He held it out to Jammy.

  “Give it to your mam,” he said. Which Jackson did.

  Trembling with nervousness, Mama inched the little yellow-and-black box open. And sneezed.

  Everything flew, landing in different places on the ground. Pollyread, quicker than Jackson or Mama, who cried out like a little bird, saw the brooch glinting in the half-light and pounced on it. A small golden bow nestled in the palm of her hand, dusty and in need of cleaning. A red jewel tied the knot. Beneath the grime, it was the most beautiful thing Pollyread had seen.

  “My mother give me that,” Mama said with pride in her childlike voice. “I did plan to leave it for you, Pen.”

  No one, it seemed to an irritated Pollyread, smiled more broadly than Jammy.

  * * *

  “But we don’t finish our business here, Mister Jammy,” Poppa said, solemn like in church.

  “What you mean, Mass Gillie?” Jammy’s back straightened and his chest lifted. For the f
irst time, and to her dismay, Pollyread noticed. Poppa said Jammy stood like his father, Poppa’s brother. He stood like Poppa too.

  There was another presence here. A presence that was an absence. Pollyread felt it. A presence. An absence. Uncle Royston — Jammy’s father. (Whew!) Absent from Jammy’s life. But present in it by his absence. Jammy’s badness had grown out of his father’s absence. Badness that had brought them now into this circle of light in which the four Gilmores — the five Gilmores — were present. And present still in Poppa’s life, in his tenderest thoughts. Someone Pollyread had never seen. Not real. Like Goat. But very real. Like Goat.

  And Pollyread realized that Uncle Royston’s absence was a presence in her life also, and Jackson’s. If he had not got his paper to Canada, he would have been the proprietor of the Gilmore land in Top Valley. Jammy would have had ground to plant, maybe even the ground at Morgan’s Mount, and would be growing food there instead of a devil weed. And Poppa and Mama would have remained in Town. And the twins would have been born there. Valley would be somewhere they visited, to see their country cousins …

  Mama and Poppa’s anger swept Pollyread’s thoughts away like cobwebs as they laid into Jammy, verbally, about all his transgressions. Kicking a man when he’s down, Poppa would have called it under other circumstances, but gave no mercy on this occasion. Which seemed fair to Pollyread: Jammy had shown no mercy to them.

  He’d felt an entitlement to the ground at Morgan’s Mount “as ’cording to how we is family and all, Mass Gillie,” he’d said with a nervous smile.

  Poppa laughed harshly. “So you come to threaten me on my land because you think is your father land, and him would want you to have it.”