CHAPTER
27
One Christmas, a beggar had come to Redding. He had come bearing a tattered, lady’s handbag and a dirty sheet of cardboard. He had spread the cardboard on the sidewalk beside the bus stop and made himself a bed on which he slept most mornings. At noon he would parade up and down Calabash Street, palms turned upwards and saying to anyone who turned their eyes in his direction, “Mi hand empty, mi belly empty, a little someting in mi hand will put a little someting in mi belly.”
In the evenings, he would pull sheets of white paper and stubby sticks of charcoal from his handbag and would proceed to draw, as if in a daze, till the sun went down. Every time he completed a sketch, he would cock his head to the side to appraise his work before fastening it with thin strips of wire to the fence behind him. Each ‘sketch’ was just a mass of lines and smudges; some sheets a jumble of shades of black, some intertwining spirals of wispy streaks.
One evening, Nola stood on the other side of the bus stop. She giggled to herself at the way the man leaned back to study his scribbles before adding yet another streak to the smudged chaos. That was when she saw it – a woman, standing with arms outstretched, breasts heaving from her chest like great boulders towards the sky. Nola blinked in surprise, shook her head, and looked again at the sketch, but the man had moved to the fence with the paper, and as he hung it, the image was lost within the smudges.
The beggar disappeared after just two weeks of his sidewalk stay. When he left, the only sign that he had been there were the blackened smudges of his charcoal shavings on the sidewalk.
Nola’s memories of Redding were like those smudges. People and experiences in her life that should have been crisp and clear in her memory were hazy and blurred. When the lines became too crisp, when the faces cleared and their voices rang through her memory, her heart began breaking all over again.
Petra did not like Nola, but it did not matter. The curl of the girl’s lip, or the narrowing of her eyes when Slugga insisted that Nola call her ‘Aunt May’, did not matter. Nothing could faze Nola now, for she’d been through worse, and she’d survived, with her sketches, and a grin to show for it.
Aunt May tried to clear the haze; to get it all to matter. She tried to speak to Nola, tried to squeeze her hand and pat her head, but all the woman received for her efforts were stiff hands and blank looks. Nola swore she would never again fall for that trick. Never again would she become attached, to begin to feel that within all the pain, that life did hold some happiness. Never again would she let her guard down.
She sought to fill her time with busy things that allowed no spare room for memories. She was assigned the housecleaning duties, once Petra’s job. With the baby, it had become difficult for the girl, so Nola was given the task of cleaning the kitchen and the other common areas like the living room and garage. Aunt May said it was just until the new school term began. Nola had wanted to ask, school? What’s the use of school in a life filled with smudges? But she did not say this to Aunt May. Instead, she agreed to help.
She became so busy that soon she forgot the smudged sketches in her mind. Each day she swept the floors, then mopped them till the house reeked of pine. She wiped down the kitchen counters with bleach so that the flies could not find any scraps to pitch on. She wiped the mildew from the cupboards above the counter and packed the washed dishes in them. She hauled the bags of garbage from the drum, tied them shut with the twist-ties, and dragged them out to the gate for the garbage truck to take away. She swept the rug in the living room till its mustard-coloured fibres rose in soft balls and clung to the straw of the broom, and she lifted the cushions from the settee and dusted the lizard mess and cockroach eggs from beneath them. She even learned the bus route to the market, every Thursday grinning her way through the crowds and the meat and vegetable stalls to purchase the items Aunt May needed for the week. At night she collapsed onto the musty comfort of the floor in her room, grateful for the fatigue that sank her limbs into the linoleum, leaving no energy even for dreaming.
Aunt May worked in the house, too, seeing to the bills and preparing meals for which the tenants paid extra in their rent. Nola marveled as the headmistress stood before the stove in her stained apron and her head crowded with curlers, tasting stewed peas from the bubbling pot and clapping her lips with a pondering expression. She would always then add a pinch of salt or a sprig of thyme, her curlers rattling as she nodded with satisfaction at her decision.
Without the dusky-beige mask, Slugga was not really Slugga. In her place was Aunt May, with her freckled skin and her concerned looks, and her fierce protection of Tiny and whatever mewing thing was behind that closed door. Without the mask, Nola was able to see the little quirks that broke free the new persona of ‘Aunt May’—Aunt May laughed heartily at jokes, holding her head far back and chuckling till her eyes streamed with mirth, and at the end of the laughter, she would wipe her eyes and announce, “Oh, how I laugh!” Aunt May would rattle out a list of things that had to be done, and at the end of the list she would say, “… and other such delights.” Nola, the cesspool truck is coming to suck out the pit today. When they come, tell them to make sure that they drain out everything, and throw in the acid … and other such delights. Slugga, without her mask, without Redding Secondary, became like a mother hen—to Petra, to the tenants of the house, and to the baby in the room.
The baby! If Nola had not heard the cries and witnessed the piles of soiled diapers that came from the room each day, she would not have believed that a baby existed. The baby was never taken out of the room.
Just once, early one morning, Aunt May and Petra emerged with a bundle of yellow blankets, but they did not stop for Nola to see what was inside as she stirred cornmeal porridge on the stove. They rushed through the front door and into a waiting taxi at the gate, Aunt May mumbling something about the clinic. They returned early afternoon, while Nola had been sweeping dried leaves from the garage, but again they walked quickly past, the blanket cooing happily as it jostled against Aunt May’s chest.
It was a ‘she’. That much Nola grasped from the dropped words about her formula, or her bottles, or her diapers to be soaked. No name, just her. Even the tenants commented on the mystery of the child.
Only one other person, besides Aunt May and Petra, was allowed into the room. Mrs. Lyndsay, the cotton balled dew angel whose dog was attached to the ackee tree. Mrs. Lyndsay had been the dew angel, the pink and white enigma who’d stunned Nola that first day with her whiteness. Almost completely blind, she was from Connecticut. She had moved to the island with her Jamaican husband 36 years ago. When her husband had died after just seven years of marriage, Mrs. Lyndsay did not have the heart to leave the place where her beloved had been laid to rest, and was now a Jamaican in every way except for her cotton ball colouring.
She had cataracts, thick jelly that covered her eyeballs and made her blue eyes seem as if they were staring up from beneath a thick layer of ice. Her neck stuck forward permanently with the habit of trying to focus, but all that penetrated the film were blended shadows. Thus the dog. Not a useless watch dog as Nola had assumed, but a guide dog.
Anyway, Mrs. Lyndsay was the only other person allowed to go into the room and ‘see’ Petra’s baby. She’d been a nurse in Connecticut, and had even worked as a receptionist in a ‘foot doctor’s’ office in Jamaica for many years before her eyes grew their film. It was through Mrs. Lyndsay’s reports that Nola learned that the baby’s name was Kendra, and that she was now gripping things and taking them to her mouth. “Love her belly, that little one,” Mrs. Lyndsay would laugh, “suck the bottle so hard that she nearly take off the whole nipple!”
“Not healthy, not healthy!” Nathan would exclaim, shaking his rattling old head emphatically. “Baby need fresh air! Can’t spend all him days lock up in a room!”
One day Nathan cornered Aunt May as she came down the kitchen steps with a pailful of diapers. “Maysie! I was just tellin’ Lynsie here that what you and Petra d
oin’ to that baby is not right! Not right at all! Babies need outside air. You should be takin’ him for some early mornin’ breeze and some evenin’ breeze, make him lungs strong!”
Aunt May sighed. “Yes, Nathan, the baby gets the early morning air and other such delights—just that all of you are still sleeping or gone to work, so you wouldn’t know!”
Nathan gave a satisfied hhmmphh and gave Mrs. Lyndsay an ‘I told you so’ look which was wasted on the woman’s icy gaze. Then he picked up his rake and set about raking the smoothed dirt around them.
Mrs. Lyndsay coughed. “Nathan! It wasn’t you just talkin’ ‘bout catching asthma from dust?! What you trying to do, kill us all with your damn raking?!”
Nathan was the tender of the garden. He was a gardener by profession, working in homes in the upper St. Andrew area of Jack’s Hill, mowing lawns and plowing beds of gardens that he claimed were so big that some required his services twice a week. During the evenings he pottered around Aunt May’s backyard, tending lovingly to his personal crops—the rambling pumpkin vines at the side of the house, scotch bonnet pepper plants and gungu pea shrubs. The luscious calalloo plants behind the ackee tree were Nathan’s eighteenth batch that had flourished in the man’s special mixture of rat-bat and donkey dung. If one wished to see Nathan’s leathery forehead become shiny with excitement, they need just ask a question pertaining to the ratio of dung to soil.
Olive, Aunt May’s third tenant, was in her early twenties, a curvaceous package of rambunctiousness who was very rarely actually spotted in the house. During the days, the woman was either working or sleeping, the latter being the more probable, and at nights, she toured the town. Olive claimed she was a maid, employed to a ‘stocious’ hotel in New Kingston, but Nola was never certain how many days of the week the woman went to work. Most evenings did not see her return till the sun winked through the thinning darkness, and most afternoons when her shift was to begin, the woman complained bitterly about a bout of flu that she could not shake, and refused to leave her room.
The only reason Nola was familiar with the hours in which Olive stumbled into the house was because when the woman came home, she could never seem to find her way out of the kitchen. Of course, Nola, being in the room right beside it, was awakened by the holy racket she made in her frantic search for personal belongings. The first time Nola heard the pandemonium, she leapt up from the floor of her room and peered frantically round the fridge to see the strange woman rocking precariously over the cutlery drawer. All its contents were on the ground, and when Olive spotted Nola’s alarmed face by the fridge, she loudly accused her of taking her toothbrush out of the drawer and replacing it with knives and forks.
The next time, when the clatter brought Nola racing again to the fridge, she found the woman throwing the broom and mop out of their narrow cupboard and trying to ram her body into the tiny space. This time, when she spotted Nola peeping from the fridge, she accused her of stealing the toilet.
So, from then on, when Nola heard the racket begin, she would race to the kitchen and lead the woman up to her room before she could accuse her of stealing something else. As they stumbled up the staircase together, Nola would have to shush the woman as she sobbed about how much she loved Nola since she was the only person in the house who ever smiled at her.
It was Olive who asked Petra one afternoon where the baby’s father was. It was one of those days when Olive had shaken the ‘flu’ long enough to appear in the kitchen dressed in her pink and white checked uniform.
“You nuh see that the baby drainin’ the life outta you, Petra?” she said as she slurped a cup of ginger tea. “Where Ricky? From that baby born, I don’t see him come back here. After is not you make the baby alone! Why him think that is you alone must raise it?”
Petra froze in the middle of loading the sterilizer with bottles. With Petra’s back turned to her, Olive had not seen the girl’s reaction, and continued the conversation, oblivious to the tension rising thickly in the kitchen.
“Me say, them man round here worthless you see! Every one of them! Them just love breed up the young girls, then them leave them with the pickney to raise while them gone to find another girl to breed! Look how you was a nice, nice girl, Petra – goin’ school and everyting, and now you just draw down and mash up like any street dog.”
Petra still said nothing, but her lips were tightly pursed and she was ramming the bottles in so roughly that some of them tumbled back out and she had to thrust her hips against the cupboard to catch them.
“Nice, nice girl you was, goin’ to school and everyting, draw down now to nothin’ because of them nasty man!”
Nola dropped the pot into the sink. “Olive,” she said, turning to face the woman, “I thought you say that you had to be at work at two o’clock? Is twenty to two.”
Olive sucked her teeth, “What them pay me can’t even buy me a pack of Craven A for the week!” But she dumped her cup of tea into the sink and sauntered off, giving a dismissive wave at the doorway.
Nola gave a silent sigh of relief as the clip-clop of the girl’s shoes disappeared up the stairs. She sneaked a look at Petra. She was shoving the cover onto the sterilizer, but when Olive’s bedroom door slammed upstairs, she stopped and gripped the counter, her knuckles yellow beneath the strain on the taut skin. Then suddenly, she spun to face Nola.
Nola blinked with shock at the expression on the girl’s face. It was not with shared relief that Petra stared back at her, but blazing anger.
With just two steps, Petra’s face was so close to hers that Nola could smell the bitter rage on her breath. “Let me just tell you someting, you smoke-stink country gal!” She practically spat out the words, “I can fight my own battles. I don’t need you, or anybody else tryin’ to fight them for me, you hear me?!”
Nola was speechless, shocked even more at the tears than of the anger that pooled in Petra’s eyes.
“The next time anybody ask me ‘bout my private business, you make me answer! Don’t feel sorry for me, country gal! I don’t need nobody feelin’ sorry for me!” Her nostrils flared as she cocked her head to the side, the heat of her breath still rising like a fire into Nola’s own nostrils. “You think you better than me just cause I make a mistake? You think you better than me just cause Aunty dig you out of your little country hole and bring you here? Well, lemme tell you something, gal, Aunty know that my mistake not goin’ stop me from makin’ someting of my life, so you can just get off your high-donkey thinkin’ that my aunty love you any more than she love me!” She gave a bitter laugh. “The only reason you is here is ‘cause Aunty think that she owe you someting; owe you someting for mekkin’ your parents kick you out of your own yard!”
She opened her mouth to say more, but as the tears spilled from her eyes and dripped down her cheeks, she snapped her mouth shut, turned on her heels and marched out of the kitchen, leaving Nola to blink in shock at the empty space in front of her.
CHAPTER
28
Nola stood there for a long time, unable to move, unable to register the outburst. By Petra’s reaction, anyone would have sworn it was Nola who had spoken out of turn and not Olive. But even more than the girl’s inexplicable rage, something else snagged on Nola’s mind. It was the way Petra had kept referring to her baby as a ‘mistake’, and how when she’d said it, her lips had curled with something very close to disgust.
Very soon, Nola understood why.
She was mopping the floor beneath the staircase beside Petra’s and Aunt May’s shared room when she heard the familiar whimper. At first, she ignored the sound, assuming that Petra was in the room with the baby, but when the cry escalated into its irritated wail, it became clear that the baby had been left unattended. Aunt May was outside with the Jamaica Public Service man checking the electric meter.
Nola dropped the mop and raced to the front door to signal to her.
“Aunt May!” she shouted, “the baby cryin’!”
Aunt May turned to look at
her, a frown plastered on her forehead. “What’s that, Child?” she asked.
“The baby, she cryin’, and I don’t see Petra!”
Aunt May nodded. “Run in for her,” she said, and turned back to the JPS man.
“Wha’?” Nola asked, taken aback by the flippant instruction.
Aunt May’s arm jiggled irritatedly. “Run in for her!” she shouted again, and waved Nola off.
So Nola ran back towards the room where the cries had become such emphatic screaming that they were now punctuated with harsh hiccups. She winced as the sound pierced her ears. The crib was in the corner of the room by the window, on the other side of a double bed laden with unfolded diaper shirts and rompers. Through the rails of the crib, Nola could see a vigorously moving blanket. She rushed to the crib and lifted one end of the squirming cloth. A little foot, stiffened by temper, kicked its reddened toes up at her. Nola hurriedly lifted the other end of the blanket, and gave a startled step backwards.
The face beneath was red with anger and swollen with tears, but so much more distorted than from mere hysteria—the eyes sloped upwards and the tongue hung heavily out of the the full lips, swollen from crying and laying squat and slimy on its chin. The look of fear in the baby’s eyes shook Nola loose from the shock that had frozen her, and she hurriedly picked up the stiffened body and cooed gently, holding it tightly against her chest. The baby caught its breath and gave another piercing wail, flailing its tight wrists against Nola’s cheeks as she bounced up and down.
She murmured in the calmest voice she could muster, “Don’t cry, little baby. It’s alright. Don’t cry.”
The baby hiccupped and whimpered again, but thankfully the screaming stopped, and very soon Nola felt the little head turn and rest its cheek against her shoulder, the tiny fists gripping her blouse as if they would never let go. The little body was still shaking, so Nola pressed her palm behind the fat folds of the neck, trying to assure her that she was safe. The soft down of curls brushed Nola’s fingers, and the sweet, baby smell of her wafted around her like a soft cloud. Nola could not explain it, but suddenly her heart felt as if someone had just poured steaming water over it. It melted right there in her chest.
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