“Does she have a relationship with her parents?”
“In touch with her mother. Doesn’t know her father.”
“Did the parents have a relationship?”
“I just said it was incestuous!”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“The father raped the mother.”
“Okay. The incest was a matter of just that one time, was it?”
“Christ, Jimmy! They had a child. This is about her.”
“I can’t answer you off the top of my head. I need to think about it.”
“She may jump off a bridge.”
“Okay. I won’t be responsible for any deaths. I think you should suggest to this person that she find the best, nearest available help from a professional from her part of the world, or whatever culture, society is most similar. If that’s impossible, then find the best, nearest shrink.”
“A professional from her region; failing that, the best therapist. Is that it?”
“It is if I have to make a call so she won’t kill herself. If she isn’t allergic to religious places, I can suggest a couple institutes. There’s a fine one in Rome, run by a Jesuit: staff highly trained and diverse. One in Syria too. Damascus.”
“Well, since you recommend them. Can you give me contact info?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks. I think you’d better go now.”
“Will you be okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night, Jimmy.”
“Good night, Grace.” He wants to hold her in his arms, hug her, comfort her, but he doesn’t.
En route to Ouaga Airport, Grace and Jimmy make a detour, stopping at the novitiate.
“What’s a Catholic seminary doing in Mabuli?” Grace is sulking.
“There are places they should and shouldn’t be?”
“Oh! I forgot. Fair numbers in Mabuli are Catholic. Your church, sticky paws all over, has numerous hostages from among whom to entrap the unsuspecting.”
“It’s not a very large number of Catholics, and you needn’t be mean to my church. I wouldn’t be mean to yours if you had one.” They are on stairs that sweep down to a courtyard in a stand of date palms. “The novices just made a new stone garden. There.” Jimmy kicks a stone all the way down the stairs. “At the bottom, with benches.”
“A what?”
“A stone garden, my beloved. You’re meant to rake the stones and be soothed.”
“Oh. A meditative raking of stones! My life, absent the meditative part.”
“Mine too. Lots of us have lives of raking stones, or lives raked by stones.”
“You sit too,” she instructs when they get to the bottom of the stairs. “You haven’t told me about Rome, Jimmy, though I’ve inquired more than once. For all I know, they called you up to discover what some woman was doing in your room in the middle of the night.”
“They don’t summon us for that kind of stuff. They’d have too many Jesuits to deal with.”
“Seriously, Jimmy. What happened?”
“It wasn’t so bad. I told them the woman who’d been in my room was generous with her favours.”
“I said, don’t joke.”
“They were kind, Grace. They read me Father Agbidi’s letter. I assured them that I wasn’t flouting church teaching, but I said my conscience insisted that I tell mates of both genders whose partners had the disease that condoms were an option. If I failed to, I was effectively condemning people to death, women especially, and with that my conscience had serious problems. I said I was preaching only the best behaviours — fidelity and chastity.”
“They bought that?”
“I wasn’t selling them anything. It’s true.”
“Did they send you to your shrink?”
“I saw him.”
“Did it help?”
“A little.”
She leans her head back, closes her eyes.
“Don’t you want to talk about last night, Grace?”
“What’s more talking going to do?” She remarks on the three baobabs patrolling the fence line. He explains about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the chapel inside the third tree.
“The Father looks ragged, like he’s on his last legs.”
“It’s a tough job.” He chuckles, by himself, then confesses. “I know it’s you, Grace.”
“I know you know.”
“You still don’t want to talk about it?”
She shakes her head. She is crying. Eventually she stops, wipes her eyes and blows her nose on a tissue.
“Can we go to the chapel now?”
“No chapel, Jimmy.”
“What I want to show you is in the chapel. We must go before sunset.”
“Okay. The chapel, then Ouaga. I want to go home to my son.”
They go to see Manokouma’s windows. He makes her cover her eyes, open them in front of the Angelus window with the ruddy, freckled Mary.
Back in the stone garden looking at the bloody sky, he takes a stab at it. “There’s more to it than this, though, isn’t there?”
She nods.
“You might as well tell me.”
So she off-loads her cargo of grief, the burden of a self that she now judges to be ruined at the root: Grace, the dump pikni; the red jacket in a black family; the child too terrified to open her mouth; the sibling with a sister who disclaimed her; the misfit at St. Chad’s. She rails about the evils that fate has engineered, things for which she can have no responsibility: Fillmore Buxton, family member and would-be rapist; Colin who died by hunger in rich Toronto; Ralston, incestuous despoiler of her teenage mother. She berates his God for not breathing a word of warning so she could avoid the humiliating débacle with Lindsay, for not restraining the mean tongue that engineered the argument that led to Phyllis’s stroke. They are actions for which she is responsible, but his God might have extended a hand of gentle caution.
And then on tiptoe, for the first time at last, she lets Charlie out of his box.
They spend the night as guests of the novice master, leaving for Ouaga early next morning. Jimmy drives like a madman, and she makes the plane.
MARK
51
To Come or Not to Come
It’s late now, nearly eleven, almost time to call Mona, and certainly time to stop thinking about a woman he screwed once, or more accurately, on one occasion, and hasn’t seen for four years. Besides, tomorrow isn’t going to be just another day. It doesn’t appear from Gordon’s call that either police or army have made any progress in discovering who has killed the minister, so any number can play.
Mona and Grace are still tumbling about in his head with occasional others from the past: Mireille, a stunning Haitian woman and the only student he’d ever been involved with, and Irene, a professor of his when he’d just started graduate work, brilliant, moody, way out of his league. Stop! he tells himself. He’s a one-woman man. Grace is his woman now, his wife.
At this point he knows he is in serious trouble.
There’s always been a heated argument in St. Chris about fidelity and the pervasiveness of men’s “wild-willy” habits, with the good churchmen (often the most wayward) maintaining that men are perfectly capable of keeping their particles in their pants, except for church-sanctioned use; social historians averring it was the white colonial oppressors who had encouraged wanton rutting to create new human chattel; and randy fornicators insisting, “If God make man, don’t wild willies must be part of His plan?”
He admires fidelity, probably because infidelity stridently broke up his parents’ marriage, the offending party being his father. When the union was collapsing, punctuated by quarrels at dusk and daybreak so loud they blasted through concrete walls, his mother would tell his father, “I love you to distraction, not destruction. We can’t go on like this!”
Mark had just turned twelve when she left, straight for the airport. His father married his pregn
ant girlfriend as soon as the divorce was final. Although the agreement had been that Mark and Ben, his brother a year younger, would stay in St. Chris with their father until their mother sent for them, his father’s bride was not happy about old offspring being imported into her new marriage. They’d gone to his mother’s cousin in Barbados as a stopgap measure. It turned out to be a big gap: it took six years to stop it.
In many ways, he’s grateful for that. Barbados, also known as Bim, was a much better place than St. Chris to get a taste of what the world was like. A small white élite, wealthy and powerful, had a heavy hand on the economic and political life of the island. Not that you’d get that admission from too many black Bajans, whose version was that whites were in the island on their sufferance. Black Bajans were mostly content not to buck the status quo. Bim sported a rock-steady dollar, a high level of literacy, a wild Atlantic coast in the east and sweet warm Caribbean waters in the west. For many tourists, it was the paradise of the Caribbean.
Barbados had been salvation for Ben. Mark had suspected that his younger brother was homosexual even before Ben was a teenager. By the time they finally talked about it, Ben had figured things out, no doubt with help from friends also struggling with being who they were. St. Chris has a barbaric attitude to people attracted to the same sex, men especially. Ben’s rite of passage had been easier in Bim than it would have been in St. Chris. So Mark is grateful to Barbados. It gave himself and Ben an education, beach cricket, and sun-warm sea, and it gave Ben the chance to be safe and sane. Sex is such a vexed and vexing business. Or should he say gender? He supposes he means both. Now, with this HIV/AIDS business, it is impossible, in the way that his mother used to say to him and Ben, “You children are impossible!”
How on earth do young people manage? Not that old people manage much better, but chances are if you stick with a faithful wife and with one or two women whose habits you know ... The absurdity of what he’s thinking doesn’t escape him, just as he knows there’s no comfort to be taken in the idea that sex with a condom is safe — if it doesn’t slip, leak, burst, all of which have happened to him. Maybe they should characterize condoms the way they do polls, “accurate to within three point five degrees nineteen times out of twenty.” Sometimes he considers whether one day, in a store or bank or classroom, he’ll encounter a young person behind a desk, a counter, a lectern, maybe a pulpit, whose face will tell him unequivocally about one of those leaky prophylactics. He doesn’t dwell on it; all men must wonder. A few years before, the island’s funny bone had been tickled by raucous jokes about shipments of condoms from China, the downfall of greedy local investors who’d neglected important baseline statistics. By no means a laughing matter!
HIV/AIDS is not funny either. They all know that, he and the other Caribbean males who “run tings,” women being among the “tings.” Still, most have no intention of forgoing bareback riding to go undercover in rubber contraptions.
He’d proposed to Gordon Crawford that they arrange for Grace to meet with the seven UA deans and the principals of teachers’ colleges, most of whom would be at graduation. He knows she’s been pushing regional governments to consider an HIV/AIDS education program for secondary schools, but she seems less concerned about universities and he wonders why. Perhaps she assumes they will all come on board in time, or perhaps it’s personal and has something to do with him.
Which is of course ridiculous!
He is suddenly furious with himself that even now, after her clear dismissal, after her stalwartly maintaining her distance, even now he would be glad to be assured that he means something to her.
He checks his watch. Eleven. Time to call Mona.
“Hi Mona, honey. How are you?”
“Much improved.”
“I’m glad. Listen. I better tell you right off. Bad news … ”
“Oh, no, Mark! You sick? I can change my flight and come sooner!”
“I’m fine. It’s you I’m concerned about. I don’t think you should come.”
“But I just told you I’m okay.”
“It’s not you creating the problem, sweetheart. It’s the damn place that’s boiling! Nobody know how much hotter it’s going to get.” He doesn’t know why it comes out that way.
“Queenstown hot in November? Not that all those academics and politicians don’t deserve to sweat. But that’s no reason for me not to come. Is Trini I grow up in!”
“I’m sorry, hon. I’m dead tired and my brain and mouth are not connecting so well. It’s got nothing to do with temperature. You’ve not heard any newscasts?”
“Nuh-uh. One of the perks of your not being here! No newscasts.”
“You remember a fellow named Edwin Langdon? Came here as a mature student? Graduated the year we got married?”
“Cute chap? Short? Dark? Used to capture the podium at speaker’s corner and preach the virtues of self-reliance?”
“Him same one. He’s minister of education since the last cabinet shuffle. Was. They shot him this afternoon.”
“Shot him? You mean shot him dead?”
“Dead.”
“Good God Almighty! Who? Why?”
“No one’s sure, so I won’t give you what’s mere conjecture. There’s been unrest in some of the tourist towns, including Halcyon and Stanton. People in the party have been attacked as well.”
“But are you all going to be okay? What about graduation?”
“That’s why council’s going on into tomorrow. We stopped early today so people could be in by six. The city is under curfew till the fellows figure out what’s going on, if maybe the bullet was meant for someone else. Makes most sense and would be the best scenario.”
“A sorry business when a confusion in murder victims is the best scenario!”
“We’ve talked with the PM’s office, the police commissioner, and the army folks. They feel it’s a bigger risk not to proceed, so we’ll probably go ahead with graduation, and at that point UA will use all media to confirm that the ceremony is still on.”
“But what a tragedy, Mark!”
“It’s going to be under tight lock and key, and any jollifications that were planned for afterwards have to be cancelled, what with the curfew.”
“That’s really sad for the graduates and their families and all.”
“We’ll do our best to keep everything as normal as possible, but there’ll be soldiers, police, etc. So you see why I’m saying you shouldn’t come.”
Short pause. “If you’re there, the graduates, their families, I don’t see why I can’t be. In fact, I should be.”
“They’re different, Mona.”
“I don’t see how. What sort of signal does it send to people, if you let students, their families, and friends run risks, but not your wife?”
“If you come, you’re taxing an already over-taxed security system.”
“No more than anyone else, Mark.” It is the tone she uses when she’s made up her mind. “My flight leaves early, so I’ll be at The Xooana in good time.”
“Fine.” It is the tone he uses when he’s yielded against his better judgement. “Council shouldn’t go past midday, so I’ll be here. Celia will meet you.”
“I’ll look for her. Don’t collide with any bullets.”
“I won’t. Fly safely.” He falters. “I love you.”
“Love you too. Night-night.”
Her mother says her navel string is “cut on stubborn,” an obstinacy now compounded with foolhardiness. It’s just a fact that if she doesn’t come there will be one less person to worry about. He replaces the receiver and sits back with such force in the antique armchair that it nearly tips over. Truth is, the whole business with Grace promised to be a lot easier if Mona wasn’t coming.
GRACE AND JIMMY
52
A Pain in the …
17 November 1998
Dear Gracie,
We plan to come to see you at the SCR Hotel tonight but like how they shoot the Minister nobody must be in the
street past six. We come in early yesterday for we get a drive in the morning with Mr. Sampson and we get in just a little past two. We are safe here and the church folks taking very good care of us. Not all of us come up from Wentley I will explain when we see you like how you leave to go Haiti this morning and also seeing as they never consider to invite us to anything only the ceremony never mind we is your family. We sorry we don’t have no way to see you before the graduation on Saturday. Edgar say he meeting you at airport when you come this evening but if we all come with him to collect you he not going have time to bring us back down here and then go all the way to his place so we will all just have to wait till the very occasion. There is plenty talking about the horrible shooting and Pastor is holding special midday service to pray for the country and against the violence and of course for the peaceful rest of Mr. Langdon soul. We will go to the service and if they keep a vigil here in pastors residence tonight we will stay up for that too. I know that God still in charge and life taking is serious matters. Lord help the person who take the Minister life for his soul in grave danger. As usual your Ma cannot stop talking. Is just glad we glad to have you nearby.
Everybody here and leave back send love.
God bless.
Ma
Grace folds up Ma’s letter, puts it in her handbag on the floor beside the bed where she always keeps it, and turns off the bedside lamp. It’s early, not even seven, but already dark outside. There is no noise on campus, which is odd, until she remembers the city is under curfew, the prime minister having read the riot act the previous afternoon because of the shooting of the minister of education. Luckily, the plane from Haiti had landed at four on the dot with almost no one on board, so she’d been at The Xooana by twenty to six. She had expected Edgar to meet her, but he hadn’t turned up. Someone from UA had come, a Ms. Achong, and they’d reached The Xooana quick sticks, for the roads were empty.
She’d tried to call Ma and Pa at the number for the church house where they were staying, but it just rang and rang. She wonders how the letter from Ma came to be at the desk and worries about where Edgar could be. She hopes he is okay. She feels odd, disconnected, as if things are slipping away, awareness, alertness, energy: it’s not so much fatigue, more an ebbing, as if someone is modulating her life the way you turn down the volume on a radio or TV.
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