Dew Angels

by Melanie Schwapp

  Paulette—Lettie! So that was who the woman was!—Mass Tackie’s ‘nurse’ daughter of whom he’d been so proud. Her heart dropped at the confirmation that Mass Tackie had died, but she knew that he and Grampy were nowhere else if not playing a game of checkers underneath a tree in that field.

  Paulette! Grampy had spoken a lot of Paulette, the friend with whom Mama had got into all her escapades as a child. She’d left Redding when Nola had been very young, so Nola had not recognized her, but here she was, taking care of Mama when Papa wouldn’t.

  Nola looked around the empty room as a thought suddenly hit her. “So where you live now, Louisa?”

  Louisa gave a watery smile. “Memba I told you that I got married, we ….” Her voice faltered over the word ‘we’, but she looked away and continued, “We bought Pastor’s house. That’s where I live now. I been beggin’ Mama to come and stay there with us, but she won’t leave here.”

  Nola smiled. “So Papa was right. You found your prince.”

  Louisa laughed. “We take care of each other. Him work with me in the store. We bought that too, you know. We bought Razzle Dazzle! We bought it with the money from his father’s business, when Mrs. Spence couldn’t handle it no more after the stroke. Him sell his father’s business and we used the money to buy it.”

  Nola’s head felt as if it was buzzing with all the news that Louisa was throwing at her. It had been easier to listen in Kingston, when she’d been so distanced from it all. Now each bit of news pelted her like a rockstone—Papa not living there anymore; Louisa owning Razzle Dazzle; Mrs. Spence having a stroke!

  Louisa gave a nervous laugh. “How you think I knew you was here? When you’re at Razzle Dazzle, you see and hear everything that happen in Redding!”

  Nola wanted to say, “Yes, that’s how Mrs. Spence knew everybody’s business,” but she did not.

  “It was that Jasper. Him take you up in the taxi, right? Well, him run right into the middle of the street, screamin’ that him just see Nola Chambers’ duppy, and it spit right in him face! You should’a see what happen, Nola!” Louisa chuckled, her hand covering her mouth delicately. “Some people drop to them knees and start to pray that your duppy don’t come and trouble them too!”

  Nola hung her head with renewed shame. “I don’t know what happened to me, Louisa. Nobody recognized me when I was walking through the street, like they forgot ‘bout Nola Chambers, and I was happy ‘bout that. Then, when I got up here with Jasper, I just felt so angry that I …” She shook her head in frustration, her mouth searching for elusive words.

  Louisa touched her shoulder gently. “I know. I was there, ‘memba?”

  So sweet, Louisa. Still the same sweet soul, trying to make Nola feel better.

  Nola smiled gratefully. “So who’s the lucky man?” she asked. “Who in this place was lucky enough to marry Louisa Chambers?”

  Louisa twisted the thin band of gold on her left finger. “That’s what I wanted to tell you, Nola, but you never seem to be interested.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “Delroy.” She swallowed, and blinked long lashes anxiously at Nola. “Delroy, Nola. Delroy is the person I got married to. I am Mrs. Louisa Reckus.”

  CHAPTER

  57

  So funny, how after all those years, Redding still had the knack of putting Nola right back into her place. No matter what Aunt May had preached, about her being an adult now, a teacher, with her own school, her own ‘family’, Redding had, in just a few hours of her standing on its red soil, put her right back into her place.

  Who was she to have loved Delroy Reckus? Who was she to have loved one of Redding’s golden boys? Delroy Reckus belonged to Louisa! He belonged to beautiful, perfect Louisa. Of course! The laws of Redding didn’t apply to anywhere else but Redding, and no matter what had happened in Kingston, no matter how happy or contented or successful she was there, it had nothing to do with Nola’s place in Redding.

  Delroy, the one thing in Redding that Nola had yearned for, was married to her sister. Nola had not even realized, until Louisa had made the announcement how much she had yearned to see that face with its adolescent dusting of hair. She had been yearning, so, so badly, for the chance to finally finish the conversation that they’d begun on the hillside, right before the green truck had barreled over her life. She’d tried to quell the yearning, tried to hang that face in the midst of all the other sketches on the fence and tell herself that he was just like the rest of them, but it had been there all along, lurking like a virus in her bloodstream. Those arms that had lifted her out of the rain, and wrapped her in Grampy’s towel, were now wrapped around Louisa.

  She did not ask if Delroy knew that she had not died in the fire; that she’d been in Kingston the whole time. She just fell into place. She told Louisa how happy she was for them, then she asked if Paulette now lived in Mass Tackie’s house.

  Louisa only paused for an instant at the change of subject, then she explained that Paulette slept in Mama’s room to administer her medication through the night. Then she invited Nola to stay at her house—at hers and Delroy’s house, but Nola told her no, that she wanted to be able to sleep in Grampy’s old room.

  After Louisa left, Nola sat with Paulette in Mama’s room, wondering if the house had always been this silent. It seemed that when she’d lived there it had always rung with sounds. During the days, there had been the constant scraping of Mama’s knife on the chopping board, or the hiss of pots bubbling their sugary juices over into the fire. During the nights, there had been the tinny beat of Papa’s radio, the night creaks of the house, the heavy sleep breaths of everyone, and of course, the ticking of the living room clock.

  Now there was just silence, as if the house had stopped living.

  She asked Paulette questions, to try to stop the ringing and to fill the empty silence.

  She proved to be easy to talk to. She scooped her words from the air with a smile as she spoke of Mass Tackie and his pride in her. She loved her job as a nurse, she explained, because her poppa had always told her that she had a gift for making people feel better. She loved living in Kingston (in Mona, near the University Hospital where she worked), but she’d taken a year off to tend to Mass Tackie when he’d gotten ill, and that year had now stretched into sixteen months when she’d realized how ill Mama was.

  Paulette asked her about her own life in Kingston, and Nola told her about Nathan and Aunt May and their surprising love for one another, of Kendra and Hopey and Ab and Mams. When she told Paulette about the Dah-Lilly school, and the woman raised her brows and scooped the word ‘really’ from the air, Nola’s chest pulsed with pride.

  Nola asked if Mass Tackie had suffered before he’d died like Grampy had, and Paulette smiled sadly and said not for long, he’d been tired—eager to go. They laughed quietly about the friendship that he and Grampy had shared, and they both agreed that wherever they were, they were sitting under some tree together playing a game of checkers, goading each other about who was the bigger cheater.

  Then the conversation switched to Mama’s illness, and Nola asked how come they’d never taken Mama in to Kingston to see the specialty doctors there. Paulette hesitated, then told her that it had been too late when they’d found out how sick Mama was. She told Nola that Mama had known she was sick long before she’d told anyone. She’d felt the lump in her breast, felt it becoming a pulsing mass with a life of its own and she’d let it be.

  Mama had done the same thing that Petra had done! They’d both chosen to have their bodies eroded.

  “What you think changed her, Paulette?” Nola whispered. “What you think made Mama stop laughing?”

  Paulette stared down at Mama’s sleeping face, leaning forward to blow a piece of cotton off her forehead. “The same thing that eventually change all of us, Hon … love.”

  Mama did not sleep well through the night. She tossed and moaned, and once or twice she called Nola’s name, but when Nola stood over her and murmured, “Yes, Mama … see me here,” she looked rig
ht through her. Paulette explained that she was not really awake. Only dreaming. That was how it was at night, Paulette said. Always worse at night because of the moon. The same magnetic powers that pulled the waves to and from the shore, also pulled the dreams from the soul. It was so with all her patients, Paulette said.

  So they rubbed her legs as she moaned, put cool cloths on her forehead when she became drenched in sweat, and warm cloths on her neck when she shivered.

  Nola had no time to cry as she watched Mama’s torment, for Paulette kept her busy with her brisk orders—Drip some ice on her lips, Nola. Pull her leg back on the bed and pump it so, let the blood flow through it.

  By daybreak Mama fell into a restful sleep, her body flopped across the bed like a broken doll. Paulette slept too, her legs splayed wide in front of her in the plastic chair, her snores scooping up the quiet dawn air.

  But Nola could not sleep. She lay in the cot that Louisa had sent up for her, listening for the whisp in Grampy’s room. The heavy silence just made her heart heavier. Where you are, Grampy? Why you gone and leave me?

  Then suddenly it hit her! Grampy had always spoken to her when she’d been on her way to the dew angels! The dew angels! She hadn’t thought of them in so long. She laughed to herself. Imagine her, 23 years old, and still thinking of an old man’s stories!

  She flung the sheets off her body and ran to the kitchen. She pulled the door open and stepped outside, turning to ensure that the door clicked properly behind her. Then she stopped. It didn’t matter! It didn’t matter if the door was open or closed! The mongrel was gone. Papa was gone. There were no belts hanging in Granny Pat’s wardrobe, no one to bellow her name across the mist and make her knees weak with fear, no sore on her lip to smart beneath the wet dew. She released the door handle and watched as the door swung open, pulling a white swirl of mist inside. It dissolved in the warm kitchen like a bashful ghost.

  She giggled in the giddiness of the moment, spreading her arms wide. She jumped off the steps and ran through the mist. Free! I am free! She chuckled again as her arms sliced the mist, sending the silver swirls upwards towards the blue-grey sky. The grass cramped her toes and lifted its scent into her nostrils, and even with Mama’s sickness resting so heavily on her soul, she could feel her spirits lift. Her spirit had craved this for so long—the peace of the Redding dawn.

  “Ellie!” she said breathlessly as she reached the coolie plum tree. She wrapped her arms around the trunk and pressed her face into the deep creases. “Ellie, I miss you so much.”

  Where Ellie’s hooves had once trampled the ground into barrenness, grass now grew like a thick carpet. It was grass that would have made Nathan stammer with excitement.

  Nola was surprised to see that the tree stump was still there. When she left Redding, it had been rotting, softening from the inside out. As she leaned closer, she realized why it still stood. It had been burned. The stump was charred, the top smoothed from flames and subsequent weathering. Then her heart pulsed. This was where they’d burned Ellie! The fire had sealed the trunk as hard as a rock.

  Nola sat on the hardened wood and listened. There it was, the light rustle through the leaves. She felt her skin prickle with the excitement of their welcome. I’m back, she whispered, I’m back! She held her head towards the sky, smiling as the dew settled on her. Even though her hair was now in cornrows, she could still feel the moisture creating its silver cap. She felt her body getting lighter and lighter, glowing from the wash, and suddenly, in the midst of the rustling, Nola realized something—She was this stump! She too had been burned, and the insects that had been gnawing her to mush destroyed. She was still alive, and best of all—She had come back! They’d thought she’d been destroyed, but they’d only made her strong. Yes, she was charred, but she’d also been weathered smooth, and tough.

  She’d been preserved. Preserved! The word was like a soft answer to her soul. Hadn’t she stood over the heat of the stove and stirred the jams till the sugar melted and the fruit juices were preserved, could no longer ferment? How could she not have seen that the fire was necessary? How could she not have seen that you couldn’t hate a match for its flame, for that was what it had been created to do? Nola knew then that they had been the flames for her—every one of them—Papa, Mrs. Spence, Clarice—her matches. She could not hate them anymore, for they had been only doing what they had been made to do.

  NOLA

  That was the day that I stepped into my body. You may think it strange, that I had lived outside of my body for so many years, even when I became happy with my new life in Kingston, even when I overpowered a creature like Eric McKenzie and carried my friend home to her family. Well, this story is proof that I did.

  Until that morning with the dew angels, I had always thought of that black vessel of my body, the thing that transported my soul, as my enemy. It was the thing that had caused me too much pain to claim ownership of it. So, like a child caught marking on a wall, then shaking its head in denial that it was the one responsible, I stood aside from my body and shook my head in denial of it. Until that morning, my spirit walked beside my body like a prisoner handcuffed to its enemy.

  My name is Nola Chambers, and the story you have just read is my life. People who glance at me as they are passing will notice that there is something strange about my face. The right side of my lip rises into a slight smile, as if I am always smirking at the world. It is not until they look closely that they see the gleam of the skin where the natural lines have been smoothed and tightened by fire. Those are my scars, and it took me a long time to grow into them, to wear them as my badge of honour for having survived my life. My expression is not mocking.

  If anything, it is filled with awe and gratefulness because I have been so blessed.

  In answer to the many questions of, What happen to your face? I used to mutter, Was in a fire—long story, and then to the persistent ones, I would relate my story as if it had happened to another, a girl named Nola that I once knew. I do not claim deceptiveness in having told my story in the third person. I can only claim to have been so unwhole that I could not speak in my own voice. I can only claim to have felt so much hatred and fear for myself that I had to hide behind the words of some distant soul.

  You see, in hanging the smudged sketches of my past on that fence, I had also hung myself. I told my story at a distance from that fence, with the details of myself smudged and distorted just like the others, so the pain would not have been as sharp. I tried to clarify my place in this world through someone else’s voice. I did not know that the one person whose acceptance I needed most was my own.

  One day as a child, after I had been beaten by my papa and kicked into the rain, I accepted the fact that I was in my skin, and I would always be hated for it. But that was a lie, for I told myself that I accepted the fact that I would be hated by others, what I really meant was, hated by myself! I hated that I was born into the dark, wide-eyed body that was passed on to me by my ancestors. I thought I was the ‘shame’ of my family—the mistake brought back to taunt them in their hard earned, light-skinned perfection. Deep down, I did not even believe that it was my right to be alive. I had always felt that every day of me being alive was undeserved, for every day of my life meant another day of that beautiful little boy being dead.

  I had not always been aware of my pain. I carried it deep in the core of me, and it had come in waves, sometimes with a force that knocked me to my knees, sometimes with a dull ache, that, with enough distraction, I could ignore. I had worn my body as I had my sister’s hand-me-down dresses, as an ill-fitting garment that had been deemed for someone else, and by default had ended up wrapped around my soul.

  When I arrived back in Redding, I thought that I had found understanding of myself and the world in the choices that I had made, and that I was healed because I’d knitted a protective cloak around my wounds. But there is a difference between understanding someone, and loving them, and a healed, contented soul should not need a protective weave. Th
at is why I had shocked myself and spat in Jasper’s face. Jasper had brushed against the tender scars beneath my weave, and my actions had been none other that the involuntary retaliation of a wounded animal. My wounds were as raw as the night I had stumbled into that taxi with Aunt May, and even though the souls of my feet had shed the possessive yellowing from the Redding soil, my soul had not. My soul had still been in its chokehold.

  My wounds did not truly heal until that morning when I returned there. They did not heal until I’d seen myself in that charred stump. My hatred for my skin, my eyes, my face, my soul, my life, came to an end that morning. No lightning bolt. No clap of thunder. Just the dew and a stump of wood. It came when I realized that there had been no mistake in my creation. My life had been carefully and meticulously planned by God, and I had been preserved.

  That morning I realized that all through my ordeals, I had been pampered. I had been passed from soft hand to soft hand while I was being weathered. You see, from the ashes of my fires, I had risen, with friends so dear to me that I could not imagine my life without them—the dear, sweet, loving hands of Grampy, Louisa, the river, Dahlia, Merlene, Delroy, Aggie, Aunt May, Nathan, Mrs. Lyndsay, Kendra, Ab, Mams, Mattie, Hopey, and even Petra—yes, Petra, despite her confused resentment of me, had taught me more about myself than anyone else ever could. She showed me my strength, my loyalty, my bravery, all qualities which would have remained stagnant within me if she had not pulled me from my daze. Petra had been my mirror, the looking glass that had made me straighten my shoulders and brush back the matted tufts of my hair.

  They were all angels, every one of them. They were the dampness of the dew on my skin after the harsh burn of the fire, tending my bruised soul and helping me to stand once again on my shaky legs.