Dew Angels

by Melanie Schwapp

  Val’s hands were still shaking when she brought the papers to show Nola and Aunt May. Smart, conniving wretch! Aunt May had said when she’d seen them.

  Smart, DEAD wretch, Nola had said, and they’d all tried not to laugh because of the morbidity of the joke.

  It meant arranging a long payment schedule for all the taxes that Eric had reneged on over the years, but it didn’t matter. The supermarket was Val’s. No more handing over the profits at the end of each week and receiving a pittance of a salary in return. No more answering to the barks of a dog like Eric McKenzie.

  Petra’s healing on the outside was quick. She spent only one week on the ward of the public hospital. Two ribs and her left index finger had been cracked in her tumble down the stairs, and her right leg had to be fitted back into the hip socket. The doctor marveled at how fast Petra’s lesions purged their puss and meshed into scabs. Nola marveled along with the nurses and doctors, making absolutely no allusion to the thermos of bitter tea that she brought to the hospital each day.

  But, the deep emotional scars that had been re-opened by Eric’s brutal treatment and subsequent abandonment, combined with Petra’s guilt at having left her baby, created a wound that needed more than Aggie’s potion could heal.

  Petra had locked herself away. No tea, none of Aggie’s scriptures, none of her weekly sessions with her doctor, could get her out. Even as her skin glowed, once again, with health, Petra’s eyes reflected the glazed state of a numbed soul. Even after Kendra became familiar, once again, with her face, and began smiling and chatting with ease around her, Petra only touched the child hesitantly. It was as if she was afraid to become attached, as if she didn’t trust herself to stay. Even within Aunt May’s hugs that had always brought delighted giggles, Petra stiffened and turned her head away.

  He’d taken Petra away, Nola thought angrily. He’d cracked her open and removed her soul, and they’d only retrieved the empty shell to repair. She knew only too well about an empty shell. Her own mama had lived in one.

  It would take time, Aunt May told them, and Nathan nodded solemnly as he touched Aunt May’s shoulder in reassurance.

  Hopey did not leave Petra’s side. When Petra was eventually discharged from the hospital and Hopey transferred her watch to the bedroom, she would play with Kendra in there, bouncing the child on her lap and laughing raucously at her antics. Many times she would look hopefully at Petra and say, “Peetty baba, Peta. Peta baba so peetty!”

  When it was obvious that Hopey had no intention of leaving Petra’s side to go to live with Val, they put her to sleep in Nola’s room while another cot was placed in Olive’s room for Nola.

  As to Nola, the first thing she did on returning to Palm View was to go to Ab’s shop and tack Necka’s beard over the doorway. The thing looked even more flimsy hanging over the door. Like a stinkin’ wad of tangled old thread, Mattie said.

  That morning after she’d returned with Petra, when she’d walked to the shop with her swollen face, Ab had looked at her as if he’d seen the devil himself. He’d been up all night, Mams said, waiting for word on her whereabouts. His face had darkened with rage when he spotted her face, and when she held up the little beard, he just turned and walked away.

  Mams said she’d had to tell him, about the locks and the disguise when Nola did not come home that night. He had not known who to call, or where to tell anyone that she might have gone, and he’d cussed out poor Mams for her carelessness. “Him was a fret, Nola,” Mams said, “Fret like it was him own head that did lost!”

  But he left the beard up, and many times Nola found him looking up at the wingy tail, a look of perplexity on his wide face.

  Two months after bringing Petra home, Nola went back to school. She’d decided that she would the moment Eric had announced in the kitchen that she ‘smoked weed all day’. She’d resolved she would, when she’d seen how distraught they’d all been at her disappearance that night. And she’d determined she would, when she’d seen the despondency in Petra. She would give Aunt May no more reason to sit over her Milo and pray into the steam, or to set her jaw so that it rippled beneath the strain, like Mama’s.

  Truth was, even with Petra’s dark moods, the house crackled with the electricity of renewed beginnings—Hopey and her delight in Kendra, Val and her ideas for Nathan to package and sell his magical fertilizer, Hopey plucking long white hairs from Mrs. Lyndsay’s chin beneath the ackee trees in the evenings, Ab and Mams’s shop and the rest of Palm View and Preston Roads running once again without the shackles of Eric and his cronies—new beginnings.

  Nola worked hard at school since she had missed out on so much. Many evenings found her sitting in the living room with Aunt May till the house was filled with the breaths of everyone else’s sleep. They hashed over math and science problems. Nathan woke periodically to bring them hot mugs of tea or Milo. Mrs. Lyndsay tried one night to bring them hot drinks, too, but after mixing two cups of a white, chalky liquid, using flour instead of cocoa, she was asked to help them by checking in on Kendra and Petra.

  In two and a half years, at nearly the age of nineteen, Nola graduated from high school and went straight into what she’d felt had been her calling from the very first time she’d sat over that math book with Dahlia Daley. She registered to study teaching. She then went on to specialize in ‘special needs’ education at the Mico Teachers’ College. It was, Nathan who said, “a gift”, one he could have seen clearly from the time she’d spent with Kendra, teaching her how to eat and speak. Nola did not tell him that her desire to help those with challenges was the farthest thing from a gift. Rather, that it arose from a pain. A pain so severe that it sought to be numbed by fixing others. Those who were weak, and different, and exiled—those were the ones Nola craved to help. Those were the ones she wanted to hold against her chest and show them that they were special.

  With Aunt May’s help, and everyone else cheering on from the sidelines, Nola graduated with honours. Her first move was to look for somewhere to open her own school, one where Kendra and children like her could be taught in a comfortable environment.

  It had not been easy for Kendra at school. They had all watched with aching hearts as day after day Kendra came home cranky, sometimes with welts on her arms for the spankings she’d gotten for not cooperating with the rules of the school. They all knew that Kendra always needed extra coaxing when it came to following rules and regulations. The teachers just never had the time or patience to deal with such needs, even though half the school was made up of students like Kendra, some with even more severe disabilities. Aunt May had stormed into the school many times after Kendra had come home withdrawn and sad, demanding to know the reasons for the welts on the child’s arms, but it never made a difference.

  Eventually, the school told Aunt May to take Kendra home and deal with the child herself, since she was so dissatisfied with their attempts. And, so she did until she and Nola opened the Dah-Lilly School for the Challenged.

  At first, it was only one room, rented at the side of a Chinese restaurant where the smell of food had everyone’s mouth running like leaking pipes all day.

  The wailing on the first day of school was nerve racking, even though the total number of students in attendance was five. The crying was so bad that Hopey had to be taken outside by Nathan and hushed like one of the children when she held her head and sympathetically joined in the sobbing.

  Petra drew up the registration forms and wrote down the names and addresses of the students, their allergies and medical histories, and fee payment schedules.

  Nathan planted five hibiscus plants (in clay pots so that when they moved to a larger property, the plants could be moved with them) in honour of the first five students, to commemorate the great day, while Hopey prepared chicken soup on a hot plate outside, the commencement of the lunch programme to be offered each day.

  One of the students, Deborah, sat quietly in a corner, and when Aunt May approached her and asked if she wanted to use the brand new c
rayons, she told her that she just wanted to go back to her fucking yard. When Nola saw Aunt May’s eyebrow strings haul the two brows up to her hairline, an involuntary snort of laughter escaped her lips, and when Aunt May turned a startled glance in her direction, Nola could not control the giggles. Before she knew it, Aunt May had joined her with chuckles of her own. Soon, they were both laughing so hard that they could not stand, and they stumbled around the classroom, slapping the walls and their knees in mirth.

  It was not till they stopped to catch their breath that they realized that the crying had stopped and the children were staring at them with wide eyes and open mouths.

  And so began the first day of the Dah-Lilly School for the Challenged.

  As to Palm View Road, unfortunately Eric McKenzie had only been the first of a long line of his type to venture onto the street. Things were changing in Kingston, and the pulse of the change was occurring right around Palm View and Preston Roads. Once again, faces began to appear at Ab’s shop that brought the grip of familiar fear to Nola’s heart. The faces were like giant mirrors, positioned on Palm View, but reflecting the cruelty and harshness of life in areas miles and miles away, areas that were growing concentrically nearer to Palm View. Many wore scars slashed into their faces and chests, and those who had none on their outer body carried them on the inside.

  Times were hard, jobs were scarce, and those businesses which sought employees skimmed the thin surface of society for the more educated. Rising food costs and living expenses were viewed as sabotage from the government to keep the ‘Black man down’, and the anger and resentment for the upper crust of society diffused into the streets like a poisonous gas. It was as if Barry had formed a secret church, and his doctrine was suddenly spreading like the flu.

  The eyes that filtered on to Palm View were numbed to the softer elements of humanity, and they spread their diseased ways of thinking among the boys who already lived there. The government had taken their living away, and they had to take it back—from whomever they could get it.

  Nola saw the change in those she knew, saw the way Panhead’s walk altered, with the head now cocked to the side as if daring the world to defy the authority of his shadow. They, too, now stepped into the streets in front of speeding cars, as if life had become a game of ‘dare’. They, too, leaned on walls and smoked their joints, speaking of ‘shipments’ and ‘payments’ and ‘irons’ and ‘shottas’ as if they were discussing the weather. Nola recognized the expressions. She’d seen them all on the day she’d snuck past Eric’s street. Hungry and greedy at the same time.

  Palm View was changing before their very eyes, like a beautiful ripe mango left to rot. They’d wrestled Palm View out of the hands of Eric McKenzie, and now a larger army had come to claim it. The homeowners who’d once stood in their gardens, watering their plants and catching up with neighbours now remained behind tightly shut doors. The fresh coats of paint that had whitewashed their walls and curbs every Christmas were replaced with flyers advertising dances in the surrounding areas. Litter lay in the gutters along the street, and after heavy rainfalls it galloped with the run-off and piled high at the entrance of the narrow tunnel that led to the main gully. With the gully entrance blocked and the run-off having nowhere to go, the rainwater backed up and flooded the streets, sometimes even entering the lower floors of the homes.

  Close to Christmas, the bakery closed its doors and moved to a plaza near Red Hills, commemorating its grand opening with Mattie’s four-pounder Christmas puddings. They were a hit and the large orders required that the bakery employ Hopey for one whole month, to help wrap the puddings in their festive burlap and red ribbons.

  By early January, Ab and Mams had come down to Aunt May’s to announce that they’d been approved to open a vegetarian stall in the food court of a Constant Spring plaza. They were going to rent a house nearer to that area until they could afford to build their own. Everyone knocked their stout bottles together and wished Mams and Ab good luck.

  It was, therefore, within the natural flow of things that Aunt May decided to sell the house. Everyone would have to find somewhere else to live.

  The announcement brought much wailing and tearing at chests in the kitchen that night, but the sadness was short-lived, for the next morning Nathan marched into the kitchen and announced that he could not bear to carry his secret burden any longer, especially when faced with the threat of losing his one true love all over again. He got down on his soil-chapped knee and asked Aunt May if she would be his most honourable wife. When Aunt May’s cheeks turned red and vibrated with her blushing acceptance, it was decided there and then that Mrs. Lyndsay could not return to Connecticut since the cold winters would most certainly aggravate her arthritis and send her straight to the grave. Then Hopey hid herself within Nathan’s gungu bushes and blinked unwaveringly from between the leaves when they tried to coax her out, refusing to budge until they promised ‘never, ever, ever’ to separate her from Kendra. All, but Olive who had signed up for a one year job as a waitress on a cruise ship, decided that they were not to be parted, and the task at hand changed from looking for separate new homes, to finding one large enough for them all in a ‘nicer’ but affordable neighbourhood.

  It had been Dahlia and Merlene’s house. That was the only thought that passed through Nola’s mind as she stood on the patchy front lawn and stared at the stripping, mildewed walls. This had been Dahlia and Merlene’s home, the one that Dahlia had spoken so lovingly of; the one where she’d made those special memories and dreams. It was as beautiful as she had described it.

  Nola did not see the collapsing eave that hung like a broken fingernail over the front door, nor the wooden window box whose skeletal remains screamed of a termite infestation. While the others stood around her and commented on the amount of work the house would need, her heart only soared. Aunt May was quiet, too, watching Nola intently as Nathan rattled on about the crab grass he would use to create a luscious lawn. Aunt May knew that Nola only saw Dahlia and Merlene’s beaming faces, looking out from that rotting window box and beckoning for her to come inside.

  She had come home! Imagine that. She had traveled a full circle —from the pink house, to the street shack, to Palm View, right to this home in Havendale, St. Andrew. Imagine that! The once lonely, shunned Nola Chambers now stood in front of Dahlia’s Kingston home, surrounded by a family—not a family bound by blood, but solely by the happenstance of Fate. Here they stood, within the gaps of the broken barriers which should have kept them apart, but, instead, had formed their own fence of strong links. Their bundle of sticks.

  CHAPTER

  53

  The sale of Palm View was surprisingly quick. It was bought by a woman with a huge silver knob pierced through her right nostril. She never even looked upstairs when she emerged from her sparkling white BMW and met with Aunt May in the living room, exclaiming only at Palm View’s easy access to downtown Kingston—Bam, bam, bam and you can take Mountain View straight to the airport!

  She apparently made frequent trips to Panama to supply her ‘roving boutique’ business. Aunt May, thinking the woman would negotiate the price right down to nothing, named a ridiculously high figure for the house, the woman lit a cigarette thoughtfully and then offered cash up front. Aunt May blinked for a good few seconds before handing her an ashtray.

  However, even with the sale of Palm View, the tenants in Dahlia’s old home in Havendale had to be given notice, and what was supposed to have been a three-month wait to gain possession of the property turned out to be a five-month wait. The tenants—a man, his common-law wife and her brother—had been paying ‘cash only’ rent to Eric, which Necka had collected each month, and which Val had continued to collect when she’d discovered her ownership of the house. Val had not wished to live there, the memories too painful to face, so when she’d heard of their plight for a home, she’d offered to sell it to Aunt May.

  The tenants were outraged, insisting that Eric had promised them first option to purchas
e if the house went up for sale. When Val explained that Eric had acted without her approval, the tenants embarked upon a campaign to make the move as disagreeable as possible.

  Once in possession of the house, they cleaned, they painted, they hammered, they planted and, together, they made their new house a home. It took five weeks, and at the end of it all, Hopey cooked a pot on mannish water with the genitals of a ram goat; curried goat and rice; and a huge cornmeal pudding—and they had a wedding.

  Everyone came—Ab, Mams, Val, Miss Myrtle, Peaches, Mattie, Ruthie, Miss Dillon. They all ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ at how beautiful the bride looked in her pale yellow dress and crisp curler-lined hairdo. Nathan beamed in his grey church suit and shiny black shoes, and when it was time for him to say his vows, he wept openly. Poor Hopey howled.

  Nola and Petra stood beside the blushing bride, Petra taking the flowers when it was time for the bride to place her dimpled hands into Nathan’s calloused ones, and Nola patting the sweat from the resurrected ‘dusky-brown’ mask.

  Afterwards, they danced to Ernie Smith and Pluto Shervington songs, and when Pluto’s song “I Man Born Yah” played, they all sang raucously—‘I man born yah, I nah leave yah, fi go a Canada, no way Sah, pot a boil yah, belly full yah, sweet Jamaica!’

  The party lasted till way past midnight. If a flushed Aunt May had not said “Oh how I laugh” one hundred times, then she hadn’t said it at all. Eventually, Nola had to steal away to the coolness of the front yard to rest her throbbing feet.

  When she heard a shuffle behind her she thought it was Nathan coming to fuss about her treading on his newly-planted lawn, but it was only Ab, grinning from ear to ear as he handed her a stout.