Red Jacket

by Mordecai, Pamela;

  “We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about whether or not she has any right in my home, uninvited.”

  “I thought you said Phyllis had asked her.”

  “The point is, Phyllis shouldn’t have.”

  “Did Phyllis explain why she brought her home?”

  “She said she wasn’t thinking straight, and started a long story. I told her I didn’t want to hear the length and breadth of it.”

  “Maybe it was a good, but complicated reason?”

  “No good reason is possible!”

  “Well, if you put it that way. How did the visit go?”

  “You don’t think I stayed to have a chat with her? I scooped up my son and concocted a reason to leave. She was devouring Jeremiah with her big coolie eyes, gobbling him up like she was one of Asia’s starving millions, and him the last morsel.”

  “You’re shocking me, for sure.”

  “Oh, please! You’re no white-as-the-driven-snow saint with pure-as-pasteurized language.”

  “For sure I’m no saint, and even if by any stretch of the imagination I could be white, I would prefer it not to be like the driven snow, which, as you know, has bad associations for me.”

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I forgot.” Lord! How could she say that? She knows he still feels responsible for Nila’s death. She remembers a proverb Gramps liked to invoke, clapping his hands by her ears to get her attention: “The tongue does not love the throat.” She has no excuse. She knows better, especially after years of having to speak with circumspection in her job. “I’m sorry, Jimmy. Me and my big mouth are very sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I think you’re angry because you can’t get your way in a matter you’ve decided concerns only you.”

  “It concerns me and my son.”

  “In other words, not you alone.”

  “I decide for Jeremiah till he’s old enough.”

  “His father has an equal right to do that.”

  “I won’t discuss it.”

  “Any talk about Jeremiah is a discussion about that.”

  “This isn’t a discussion about Jeremiah.”

  “His step-mother merely looking at him just prompted you to use some rather colourful language.”

  “His what?”

  “The wife of his father. That makes Mona Blackman his step-mother.”

  “Why are you being so cruel?”

  “You’re the one who always advocates being sensible. Is it sensible to object to Phyllis’s actions without giving her a chance to explain them?’

  “I gave her a chance. I just said not to give me a song and dance about it.”

  “Oh, come on, Grace.”

  “What reason could she have requiring more than two sentences?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t either. You can’t till she tells you. Don’t you find that there’s also something, shall we say, perverse, about sleeping with someone else’s husband and regarding yourself as the aggrieved party?”

  “He said he didn’t have a relationship with his wife. How was I supposed to know? And my aggrieved-ness relates to her intrusion into my home.”

  “What about your intrusion into her life?”

  Shortly after Jimmy’s visit, Grace decides that a strategy is called for to deal with any claim to rights over Jeremiah that Mark and Mona Blackman might advance. She consults Joyce Zaidie-Klein’s husband, a lawyer specializing in custody disputes, and by reputation, a tough litigator.

  “I’d like to discuss a hypothetical situation, Mr. Klein.”

  “I don’t do hypotheticals, Dr. Carpenter.”

  “Why is that?”

  “People make things up, or leave things out, and my time is expensive. I want them to get their money’s worth.”

  “Understood. The facts. I have a son. His father has no idea that he exists.”

  “You are not married to his father?”

  “No.”

  “Never were?”

  “My son is an accident of misfortune, you might say, though, being perfect, he undoes his origins. As I say, his father is unaware he exists, and the longer I keep it so, the better, partly because I assume the law will be on my side if I can prove, should the occasion arise, that his father has had nothing at all to do with him.”

  “I wouldn’t assume anything on the part of the law.”

  “The assumption seems reasonable enough to me.”

  “The law isn’t reasonable. And since I’m the lawyer, why don’t you let me form the opinions?”

  David Klein advises her that, since Jeremiah’s father will probably find out about the child eventually, she should tell him directly. When she refuses, he tells her that if he wishes, Mark Blackman can easily get access; indeed, sue for shared custody.

  “Wouldn’t he have to prove the child is his?”

  “Of course. But that’s easy to do.”

  “What if I don’t let him near the child?”

  “For Jeremiah’s sake, you’ll want to avoid the trouble that would bring.”

  48

  Secrets

  Grace knows everybody hides things, good things sometimes, like she mostly hides Charlie. She knows Phyllis has secrets, maybe not of her own making, but still secrets. She is sure the biggest one is her father, Ralston, whose name Phyllis spewed at her at the end of their quarrel the day her mother brought Mona Blackman home.

  Gramps warned Grace when he gave her Phyllis’s letters that her father was a bad man and made it plain he did not wish to speak of him. Phyllis’s attitude has always been much the same. Out of deference to Gramps and consideration for Phyllis, she’d asked no further about him. Once Phyllis says his name, though, she reckons he is up for discussion. She is curious about him, wicked though he may be, and besides, her child is his grandchild. That justifies her interest. What if Jeremiah has inherited some congenital disease from his grandfather? She asks about him repeatedly, insisting she has a right to know whose blood is in her body, whose genes have gone into her child.

  “All in good time, Grace,” Phyllis responds. “All in good time.”

  The “good time” arrives one Sunday afternoon, about a week later. Phyllis invites her to sit at the kitchen table and sits facing her, just as Gramps had done.

  “It’s hard, Grace, what I’m going to tell you.”

  “It’s better for me to know, Mum, even if it is hard.”

  “That’s true. Can’t quarrel with that. But he ... Your father ... Ralston Patterson was not a good person.”

  “We’re making headway. I now know his name.”

  “Don’t his name is on your birth paper?”

  “The space where my father’s name should be is empty.”

  “I’ve never seen that paper, so I never knew that.”

  “Gramps gave it to me with your letters. Anyway, now you know.” So Phyllis’s surname and Ralston’s are the same — but surely they weren’t married?

  “Somebody was being considerate, so they never put it down,” Phyllis says.

  “Meaning what?”

  “I’m going to tell you how he and me share a name. I’m going tell you everything.”

  “Good.”

  “Far from it.”

  Through the long windows, Grace sees a crude wind force its way through trees and bushes at the same time that some ghostly off-switch suddenly outs the light in the sky. She shivers. Phyllis too. Asleep in his playpen in the living room, Jeremiah moans.

  “I am sitting on my bed, reading, when I hear Ralston coming, banging on the metal gate, flowerpots, front door, and then he come in and slam the door to his room. I wonder if I should ask him if something is wrong, but I decide to let sleeping dogs lie, so I go back to concentrating, for that time I can’t read so good.

  “All of a sudden I smell somebody beside me stink of beer, cigarettes, and sweat. I feel the bed slope as he put his weight on it. I never even have time to ask him what he is doing in my room, and he never even say ‘dog’ to me, just shove me onto
the rug on the floor beside the bed. To this day I don’t know why he never just do it on the bed. I make that rug myself when I was eight. I walk all up and down Hector’s Castle begging people for cloth, and the rug remind me of so many people: Ma Phelps up Loomy Road that give me a piece of tartan, say her sister send it from Scotland for her eightieth birthday; Mrs. Budhai that give me a scrap of green silk, a bit of the sari her grandmother wear when she step off the boat from India; Sister Mingo that give me a strip of heavy navy blue cloth her mother use to cover the windows in wartime, still strong and sound as a drum.

  “Is there he pin me, wiggling his underpants down his legs. Is only when I see his prick stand up, big and sticky, with the front part peel off that I realize he come into the room without no trousers. I see plenty man bathing in river and at standpipe, but I never see a penis in that state before.

  “He drop down on me, haul up my skirt, lock his knees round my thighs, and wrestle down my panty. Poor me, fool, just staring, surprise mix up with fright, when I should be doing something to save myself. Not that I could move that easy, for he holding me down, and never mind he slim, he strong like the wiss vine we use to play Tarzan in the guango tree.”

  Upstairs, a window bangs. Thunder rumbles far off. Raindrops, small frightened birds, peck at the windows.

  “When I could speak, I talk so soft is only me hear. The worst part is the words follow the motion of his hips, like the penis was poking them out. A pain like a knife cut my belly, then blood. I pass out as his seed was coming in me.”

  “Mum …” Grace starts to get up. They need something. Rum, maybe, or brandy.

  “I am not finished yet. Please sit and hear me out. Ralston was my mother’s child by another man. He was my half-brother. Daphne give us both her family name.”

  It is a long time before Grace speaks. “And that is the person you say I am exactly like?”

  49

  Graduation

  They celebrated first in the morning with a sung Mass in the dining room. Mass isn’t strange to Grace. She had gone to Catholic ones with Steph and to Anglican ones at St. Chad’s. Jimmy explains that a sung Mass is just that: a Mass that is sung. She’s heard the “Missa Luba,” but never in a church, and she’s never heard Jimmy do more than hum a few notes.

  His face is many smiles, the clan markings describing new patterns all the time.

  All twenty graduates attend Mass. Families come too, which is why they use the dining room. The musicians are a surprise: Ousmain on the kyondo, Monique and Tekawitha on kikumvi, Elise and Lili controlling the boyeki, called “scrapers” in St. Chris. As she listens to Jimmy leading the call and response of the Kyrie, she is tempted to forgive his wicked God a little. Then she recalls the news Phyllis gave her about Ralston, and the tiny well of forgiveness dries up.

  That evening twenty Mabulian community workers trained at the centre sing a song of their own composition and dance to its music across a makeshift stage lit by banks of torches on either side. They set up the stage in front of the main communal hall, between the arms of covered walkways that lead from the central structure to the women’s and children’s wards. Sitting out front, the families of the graduates, friends from the surrounding villages and nearby towns, most of the community of persons living with HIV/AIDS at the centre, the centre staff, and their distinguished visitor all clap and stamp out the rhythms played by the five musicians. Thunder rolls in the distance, background to the drums and xalams that accompany the performers.

  The graduates studied for the first four months of the year: how to type, use a computer, keep a journal, input data on a spreadsheet. They learned more about HIV/AIDS. Many live with the disease, so they already know a great deal. Amitié is an expert. “I will teach you. I am a diagram. I am a history.” Whereupon she recites the stages of the disease, its earliest symptoms, how it spreads, finally producing her daughter, Azzara as evidence that, with AZT, it need not be passed to babies. “Mabuli, c’est un bon pays. Vous pouvez être testés. You can be tested. Vous pouvez avoir des médicaments. You can have medicine. The Oti told our government to spend money on health workers and education, to support community efforts, to work with international agencies. We know the power of the Oti. Nous connaissons bien la force d’Oti!”

  They perform the “Pat-a-Cake, Take Your Pills” handclapping song invented by Elise and Lili, the dazzling display of their quick arms and bouncing hips prompting the audience to prolonged cheering. Then, in sometimes deeply moving, and often wildly funny presentations, graduates saunter, leap, or sashay onto the stage and announce, coyly or mock-tragically, ranting or quietly, “I am a person with the Skinny. I live with HIV/AIDS. Je vis avec le VIH/SIDA.” Then they dance or sing or act out their individual stories.

  If the core staff at Tindi are proud, the graduates preen like ibises as they sing at the end of the ceremony the song with which they started:

  We who come from the land of walking stones

  whose forbears overthrew a tyrant

  when they met and chanted hymns

  and histories and holy songs

  will overcome also this cruelty

  with bonds of solidarity;

  will overcome also this cruelty

  with mighty bonds of solidarity.

  50

  A Hypothetical

  Jimmy doesn’t go to sleep right away that night, upset because Grace is clearly ill. She is thin, her skin dull, her eyes sunken. He asks her what is wrong.

  “It’s nothing, nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure, as you would say.” She is a bad liar. She goes to bed after the ceremony, pleading the avowed tiredness. So does he. Unable to sleep, he gets up, pokes his head out, smells rain, and reckons it will come before morning. Further down the verandah, he notices the light on in Grace’s room. He dresses, walks down to her door, and knocks.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Grace. Jimmy.”

  “Is there something wrong, Jimmy?”

  “That’s what I came to find out.”

  “I’m fine, thank you. You can’t come in. I’m in my nightclothes.”

  “I’ve seen you naked, Grace. Besides, you have robes, dressing gowns, wraps. Put something on.”

  “You need sleep, Jimmy. I need sleep. Go back to bed. I’m turning out my light.”

  “If you don’t open this door, you will regret it, Grace Carpenter.”

  “Is that a threat, Jimmy Atule?”

  “Not a threat. A promise.”

  She is hugging a robe around her when she lets him in. Invited to sit, he chooses a chair by the door. Birds honk, squawk, whirr like rusty machinery. Fat bugs bounce against the window screen.

  “I don’t remember it being so loud.”

  “Nature continuing the celebrations.” He is proud and not hiding it.

  “Your graduates are going to do great things.”

  “I hope so. But they’re not why I’m here.”

  “Why are you here, Jimmy?”

  “We need to do a hypothetical, Grace.” It is Grace who intro-duced hypotheticals to him. He often runs them with Monique and the folks in admin now, as well as at project meetings.

  “If you insist.”

  “Over to you, Dr. Carpenter. What are we looking at, hypothetically?”

  “Let’s say someone just discovered incest in her family.” She doesn’t answer right away, but once she starts, she soldiers on, quick march. “She’s beside herself. She’s a person of colour, abroad, in a strange place. She’s not European, so the experts available aren’t the best fit. What can she do?”

  “Can you say all that again, please?” He has taken it all in, but retelling will mitigate some of her revulsion.

  “The subject is a woman of colour, from my part of the world, living in Europe, who has just found out about incest in her family. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Skating over life on a surface of irony.

  “What do you recommend?”

  “How old is this woma
n?”

  “I don’t know. My age.”

  She is talking about herself. Once he is aware of that, he decides he has to take her through it, step by step, all the way, regardless of where they end up. Rites are reassuring. That is their nature. Careful rehearsal, a path cut gradually, firmly through. At the centre they prepare the dying and their families in this way.

  “And is she involved in the incest, in other words, has she discovered that someone with whom she is having a sexual relationship is a family member?”

  “Jesus, Jimmy. That’s sick.”

  “Come on, Grace. You know it happens all the time.”

  “I know, but … ”

  “But it’s not supposed to happen to you or me?” He isn’t being hard. She has to see people in incestuous relationships as “we,” as “us.”

  “I’ll avoid the ‘It’s fine for you to talk’ bit and just stick to the matter at hand. It’s her parents. They were half-siblings, different fathers, same mother.”

  “Mmm. That would be difficult too.”

  “I’m not sure she’d be better off in her home country, which is very conservative, but I don’t know how she can find help in the place where she is.”

  “How well do you know this person, Grace?”

  “Well enough, I guess.”

  “And has she just learned about this situation?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I understand the ‘if this’ part of the hypothetical.”

  “Isn’t the ‘then what?’ part obvious? Then what can she do?”

  “She’s a well-adjusted person?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’d say she should be cautious about seeing any old professional. Does she belong to a church? Have any ties of that kind?”

  “She’s not so good with God.”

  “Right. Is she living with anyone?”

  “She has offspring, but no spouse.”

  “Does she live with the incestuous parents?”

  Her “no” is ferocious.