Ma sees her look, says, “Thank you for sending the books! Gramps read the medical articles, recommend them to your Pa. And you know your father. When he see it write down, it persuade him. So we not eating so much of the stew peas and salt beef and pig tail no more.”
“I’m glad, Ma,” Grace says. “Is Gramps make the shelf? And the cabinet? I never know he was a woodworker.”
“Stewie! Bring them in here Christmas last, proud as any peacock! He doing good at Pursea’s.”
Grace is glad. Stewie struggles so hard. “You don’t finish about Mortimer and Pansy and the children, Ma.”
“Oh, Mortimer love those children bad, Grace. The man would give hand and foot for them. And he look well pleased every time Pansy belly start swell.”
“So what bout Gramps, Ma? Where he is?” She is wondering where Gramps could be sleeping. Ma points to the door leading to the back porch.
“Go on and see if him wake, my darling.”
Grace pushes the back door open, preparing her eyes for the bright afternoon light, waiting to see the low banks of monkey fiddle and jump-up-and-kiss-me, the skeleton of the burnt tree supporting one end of the clothes line, and the pole bearing the other end upon which, by Stewie’s account, he has hung a wire ring so Conrad can dunk balls. Gramps will be asleep in the old wicker-bottom rocking chair that was still rocking Princess when she left.
Stepping through the door and down, for the porch is at a lower level, she finds she’s not standing on rickety boards but on a firm floor. Nor is there any green glare from the sun on its journey home. Instead, soft light coming through a curtained window shows Grace a long, thin room created from enclosing the back gallery. Under the window Gramps is lying on a high old-style metal double bed. Grace is overjoyed to see him propped up on pillows, asleep in his singlet, breaths of air gently billowing his chest and fluting his broad nostrils.
Clearly plenty things have changed in the time she has been away. So Gramps bed, which had always been in storage under the house, its metal cool even in the hottest time, is now rehabilitated and brought inside. Tucked into the far corner of the porch, it is pretty much taking up the width of the room. Someone, maybe Stewie of the just-acquired joinery skills, has made a table the same height as the bed, thin, so it fits into the narrow space between the bed and the outside wall. On this table are Gramps Bible, spectacles, a newspaper, a pen, and a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. As she stands watching him, Gramps snorts, an exhalation that pushes him into wakefulness. He opens his eyes, looks at Grace, taps the bed with his heel and pulls up his knees to make space for her.
“Come, Gracie. Take a kotch. Tell me how the colonizing of the white folks coming along. Everybody up there eating patty and singing ‘Slide Mongoose’?”
“Don’t know bout the singing, but everybody eating patty, for sure.”
“Good. I know you would fix up them Toronto folks.”
When Ma calls her “darling,” Grace knows she’s home, but it is Gramps calling her “Gracie” and confident that she “fix up the Toronto folks” that persuades her at least momently that she has a place in the world. Gramps could give lessons to Papa God.
22
A Parcel
Last thing before bed, Grace skims a letter that’s just come from Maisie.
Larkins’ Home
14 March 1979
Dear Grace,
Sorry to be hounding you all the way across the ocean, but when I tell my story you will know why. Sylvia is pregnant, and I don’t know what to do. Is not any big deal that she is pregnant. Woman getting pregnant ever since, but when I think of that girl with a baby, I tremble. She can’t take care of herself much less a small, helpless human being. Remember I told you the last time we talk that I had a feeling she was up to something? Well, about three months ago, one week after she turn fifteen, she find a little basement room and a pyah-pyah job and say she done with school and not coming back home either. I try to pass by where she live, but half the time she not in her basement hovel. Of course once morning sickness start, she quick-quick find herself back into this house. Now she only sleep and watch TV. If I push her, she give me a hand, but sometimes I have to ask when last she bathe. I tell her she need to go and see a doctor, but she refuse to go to our family doctor. As for who the father is, if I bring up the subject she fly into a rage. I hope she don’t have any baby that yellow and wiry-head like she, for her mother was a very black woman, not light skinned like me. Sometimes I think all this is because they used to taunt her at school, call the poor child “yellow turd.” And nobody do a thing till I come on the scene. I find myself to that school one time, and it don’t happen again. By God’s grace her father don’t know yet that she making baby for luckily he been working in Calgary since just after she leave here. That time he say he tired to fuss with her and if she want to go out on her own so be it. I myself think she must have some mental sickness. If you have a phone anywhere near, Grace, I beg you to call me and I will call you right back. Not to say I expect you to tell me what to do, but I always feel better after I talk to you. I am sorry to be weighting you down like this for I know you gone to see your sick Grandpa, but who else am I to talk to? Church people up here is for when things going good and you paying your tithe and not causing any disturbance. I going now to try coax her to go to the hairdresser and buy some clothes that can at least fit her. I hope your Grandpa is improving. He always sound like such a decent man when you speak of him. PLEASE call if you can. Enjoy the sunshine and home cooking. Your good friend,
Maisie
The letter is there Monday, the day Grace reaches home, waiting for her. Today, Tuesday, Ma goes off early to work at Mrs. Sampson’s as usual, and Pa leaves at the same time on his way to his tiny office at Wentley Park. By half past seven, Princess, Sam, and Conrad have set off for school, Conrad, who is all of eighteen, bossing the other two though they are not very much younger, annoying them by asking whether they have their homework and their lunch pans, shepherding them out the door in a state of mild rebellion.
Ma makes breakfast for all of them before she leaves. Gramps isn’t awake when time comes for her to set out, so she asks Grace to give Gramps his breakfast. Shortly after eight, Grace hears him getting up and moving around. When the door leading to the stairs into the backyard gives a squeal, she knows he is going to the outhouse and will be back before long. She spoons the porridge into bowls and takes down mugs to pour cocoa-tea from the same thermos that has been there since she was small-small.
Gramps climbs the stairs, goes back into the narrow porch-room and lingers there for a while, and then he comes through to the big room where they eat, do homework, and relax. Since she’s gone abroad, the three youngest sleep in this room, and Ma and Pa have the one bedroom to themselves. Ma says Edgar and Stewie, when they are home, sleep on a mattress they roll out at the foot of Gramps bed.
When he comes to the table, Gramps rests the brown paper package Grace noticed beside his bed at his place and sits. He smiles at Grace, his face and eyes bright like he’s just knocked back a couple glasses of white rum or pimento dram, but she knows it is because of how rejoiced he is to see her. They sit across from each other and join hands as Gramps says grace. After that, they start on the porridge. But there is something ominous that has not escaped her notice. In the prayer, Gramps has called her “Grace.”
“Grace,” Gramps says when he finish eating, “I have a hard task, and I think I best get right to it.”
“What kind of hard task, Gramps?” She looks up from her contemplation of the last honey crystals on the side of her bowl. Gramps licks away the remnants of cornmeal, his tongue making a tour of purple-dark lips, collecting tiny yellow blobs from the hairs in his moustache.
“I want you to bear with me, Grace,” he says. “I have a long story to relate, and you are at the centre of it. It behooves me to tell it because I alone know all the ins-and-outs. I must tell it now as I don’t know when next I’ll see you.�
��
Grace feels the cornmeal rising in her throat.
“I have in this parcel, exactly nineteen letters. They are precious things, full of love and concern for you.” He pauses, tenderness overtaking his countenance. “Have you any idea who might have written them?”
She doesn’t understand Gramps. Of course she has no idea! True, if the letters are wonderful, then she has nothing to fear. But down in her-belly bottom, she knows something is not right. She shakes her head to answer Gramps.
Gramps is merciful. He doesn’t take long, and he holds her hand, and he looks straight in her eyes, and does his best to soothe her with his voice, as he tells her an unbelievable story.
“The truth is you are very lucky, Grace. You have not one, but two mothers: Ma Carpenter, who raised you like you came from her own womb, and your birth mother, the one out of whose belly you did come. Her name is Phyllis Patterson. She wrote these letters to you, the first one shortly after you came to this house, and one on each of your birthdays after that. I am glad, and, in truth, relieved, to give them to you. They have been a heavy burden all these years.” Gramps looks out past Ma’s cosmos to the road beyond. “Indeed, this long time I’ve wondered,” his voice is close to a whisper, “again and again, especially when that blue air mail letter arrive every year, if we had any right to take you from her, give her no news of you, not even tell her your name.”
She takes the parcel Gramps passes to her. She doesn’t say anything, and they sit there at the table looking at each other. It is she who first looks away to consider the bundle in her hands.
“It don’t make sense, Gramps. Young girls in St. Chris make babies all the time, send the babies to other people to raise, or give them up for adoption. That is routine matters, as you would say. Why this big secrecy with me?”
“Your father take advantage of your mama when she was only a child herself, not even thirteen yet. It was not any boyfriend-girlfriend business. She had just barely start her menses. He never care for her, never had no thought for the seed he put in her belly. We wanted to give her a chance to have a life.”
“So what about my father, Gramps? Where he is? He live in St. Chris?”
Gramps face turns into stone, and the gleam in his eyes vanishes, like you dash water on a fire. “Less said about that one, the better.”
“What you mean, Gramps?”
“He was a wicked fellow, Grace, barely a human being.”
Grace is sitting on the big tree stump in the yard, looking at the package wrapped in brown paper and tied with coarse string in one hand and her friend’s perfumed letter in the other. She hasn’t opened the brown paper package. She is struggling with what Gramps has just told her, so no way can she afford to think about Maisie and Sylvia yet.
“In every way apart from the bond of flesh, you are truly Ma and Pa’s child, Gracie, for you joined this family as a baby and they raised you as their very own.” These are Gramps last words.
She closes her eyes, crosses her arms in front of her, envelope in one hand, package in the other, hugging herself. Not that she is cold, for this brisk Wentley air that shakes you, wakes you, but doesn’t slice through you, is one of the things she misses. The yard is still cool, for she can imagine the sun taking its time nibbling the wet grass as it saunters up the other side of the low hill behind the forest where Gramps grows his medicine plants. When it breaks the ridge, that time it starts to gallop. Before you turn round twice, it’s three o’clock and the day done race away, gone.
What challenges her now is how to grasp that these things concern her, Grace Carpenter. She must own them, for, as Gramps says, they are her life. But Gramps tale sounds to her like a St. Chris version of The Young and the Restless. Does anyone deserve a life made up by a third-rate screenwriter? Does she? Do Ma and Pa know all that Gramps has just told her? Why hasn’t she asked Gramps if they know? On top of everything, she is vexed. How come nobody gave her the slightest inkling she was coming home to be loaded down with this? And it is only a couple weeks away from her birthday. What a birthday present!
23
First and Last
Last year’s letter from Phyllis Patterson is the first one Grace reads. She doesn’t really read it, just skims, but she’s a good skimmer.
25 March 1978
My dearest daughter,
Today you are eighteen years old. That means you are grown up, an adult under the law. You can vote, and you can take your place in society. I am so proud of you. I don’t know what you look like, or whether you are still at home in St. Chris or out in the world making your own way. But it doesn’t matter, because there are some things I do know, for I have prayed for them all my life. I know you are a good person. That means you care about other people, starting at home and then going out into the community where you give service. No matter how you contribute, I am certain you do. I also know you have worked and studied hard, and so you have had good success in all your efforts. I know that whatever path in life you choose, you will achieve your goals and be a shining example to others of your race. I know you love God, whether or not you are a churchgoer, for not all those who go to church love Him and many serve Him who never darken a church door. I smile at the word darken, as if all the faithful have coloured skins.
And I know that because of all these things, you are happy with the face you see in the mirror each morning.
There is a last thing that I have asked God for all through these years. When they took you away from me and refused to even let me give you a name, I know your Grandma Evadne and Mr. Carpenter thought they were acting for the best. Their concession was that I could write these letters, and even then there were stipulations: write on your birthday (which I haven’t always done, but how were they to know?), and post by month’s end. I think they were convinced that I would stop, once I forgot you. But Mr. Carpenter said he would give you my letters. I am holding him to his promise. You have been a part of my life all these years and kept me going through many difficult days. I’m sure your adopted parents love you, but I want you to know that I have loved you too.
I pray for you with all my heart today. I pray that you continue in good health, loving God, and being a credit to your family and community. My heart is full, so I will end now just as I began. Have a happy birthday, my grown-up daughter. God bless you today and all your life long.
Your mother,
Phyllis
The next letter, from the same address, is dated 26 March 1977. She doesn’t think she can read through the whole bundle. It occurs to her that it’s near the end of March. Her birth mother must be about to write this year’s letter. She doesn’t want another letter. Maybe there is a way for Gramps to tell this person she needn’t write anymore.
It’s cool still, though the sun is gaining on mist and cloud. Next door she hears the squeak of the Williams gate, opening and closing to let Miss Constance in. Miss Constance goes to Mass every morning, and she just has time to go and come back before her invalid parents wake.
Grace is not sure she likes how this new mother sounds: she’s too full of praying and God, especially for somebody that grew up in a big, foreign city like New York. Then she recognizes the silliness of that. Caribbean people go all over the globe and carry their God, whether Jesus, Jah, Allah, Krishna, or whoever, with them. But it’s hard enough to find out that you have a mother you never knew about: she is not able to cope with any saint. She’d rather a mother who, like Gramps, is a rogue who knows God is one too.
All this trouble sake of one little hole in a woman’s body! “Woman Hole.” She had forgotten Woman Hole, a place near Tavern Town where, never mind the dangerous curve, people stop on the road to pitch their garbage down the hillside. There’s no actual hole, and nobody can see where the filth lands up. Which tells her how people conceive of a woman’s vagina: a hidden-away place where you off-load stinking, rotten things. It’s good agricultural soil all the same, for plants are forever rooting there. Weeds take root in the refus
e heap; dump pikni catch in vagina dungle.
That decides her on what to tell Maisie. There’s no reason why Sylvia can’t have the baby. She seems to want it, and it has grandparents who will love it, no matter what. Sylvia is lucky. The baby will give her something to care about, her parents aren’t poor, and at fifteen she is over the age of consent. It’s a horse of a very different colour from the one Phyllis had been obliged to ride. Maybe that explains her pious-sounding birth mother. Maybe religion is like Tiger Balm, and when you have pain and trouble, you just rub it all over your aching self to get relief.
27 March 1979
Dear Maisie,
First, I have to say a Big Sorry. I know you said I was to call, and I had every intention of calling, but every day turns into the next without my going with Pa to Wentley Park, or with Ma to Mrs. Sampson. I think I am reluctant to leave Gramps for however short a period. I may well be back in Toronto before you get this, but I’m writing anyhow.
The good news is that Gramps is better than I expected, for when they brought me home I thought he would be on dying, which he is not. It’s only two and a half years since I left but those years have made a big difference. He looks tired and a lot older. It seems to be his heart, the organ itself or the blood vessels, for I don’t think it is yet sorted out. My problem is that I have never thought of Gramps as old — after all, he’s only seventy-seven and plenty people here live until they are eighty and ninety, and some even make it to a hundred.
A lot else has happened and even if I wanted to tell you about it, I wouldn’t know where to start for I am still trying to put it into some kind of order in my own head.
Anyway, this was to be about your problems, not mine.
Don’t pressure Sylvia. She’s pregnant, the baby-father is not around, and she’s probably depressed as well as overwhelmed. Just go-long with her, and try to get her to cheer up and take an interest — doesn’t matter in what. The baby could be a very good thing for her. That is how you have to look at it and get her to think about it. If the two of you are on the same side when her father gets back, things are bound to go better.
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