Even the anger and hatred in me had served a purpose. I could not have faced Eric and his cronies without it. I could not have brought Petra home without it. The hate had been part of the plan too, as much as the love.
Yes, I had been surrounded by love, all my life, but I could not see it in the midst of the hate within me. It took a stump of wood to make me see it, and that morning it allowed me to take possession of my skin, my eyes, my body. I pulled in those loose, flapping folds, and fitted them perfectly to my soul.
I hated myself right till the day before my mama died.
I returned to Mama’s kitchen that morning knowing that Papa would be there. I felt him. The crackling electricity of him roused me from the pen. Just as I’d felt Mama’s death from Kingston, I’d felt my Papa’s presence from the pen. You see, as much as Papa would have wanted to pretend that I was not a part of him, our shared blood had bound our spirits too. That night I had stood over his sleeping form and breathed in his breath, our spirits had knotted, through my love and his hate.
I stood by the kitchen door and watched his head loll over the steaming mug on the table. The stench of him reached me even from outside the door, the whiskey and the sweat. His hair had become grey, and in the middle of his silver pate the strands had thinned so that his sun-rusted scalp formed a startling contrast.
He must have sensed me there, for he suddenly looked up, and instantly I saw fear flash across his face.
For one second, my steps faltered. It had been such a habit to wait till I’d assessed Papa’s mood before entering the kitchen, that my feet involuntarily hesitated.
“Hello, Papa,” I said.
Those grey eyes blinked in confusion. I looked into them, searching for the ice I’d remebered so well, but it was not there. It had melted into a watery, whisky-pinked film. The eyes seemed smaller too, no more the grand silver that had once dominated his beautiful face. It was the lines! The lines that had once crinkled so handsomely when he’d smiled, now pleated his face so heavily that his jowls hung low, dragging his eyelids with them.
I stepped closer. The stench burned my nose.
“Hello, Papa,” I repeated, more to convince myself of his identity than to get a response.
He blinked again. And then he fell off his chair.
One minute he was blinking up at me, and the next, he was on the ground, the coffee mug shattering into pieces between his legs. I think that he had tried to jump backwards, forgetting that he was seated, and the chair tipped over.
I grabbed a towel from the counter and ran to help him up, to sop where the steaming liquid had darkened his filthy pants, but Papa crawled backwards, away from my outstretched hands.
Just then Paulette appeared at Mama’s bedroom door, looking into the kitchen with confused, sleepy eyes. It took a while for her dazed mind to grasp the scene before her. She looked from Papa, huddled against the fridge with a trail of brown coffee leading from the table, to me, standing in front of him with the kitchen towel dangling helplessly from my hands. I saw the clarity overtake the slumber within Paulette’s eyes, saw her bottom lip scoop decisively over her top lip, and she gave me a long look, a triumphant glimmer in her eyes.
Then she turned her gaze back to Papa, and said, “What happen, Troy? Not happy to see your daughter?”
And with that she closed the bedroom door and left Papa whimpering on the floor before me.
You might think that I was happy to see my papa like that, crying before me with his hands held protectively over his head. You might think that I was happy about it since that was the same position he’d forced me into so many times. But that was not the case.
I was not happy to see my strong, handsome Papa groveling on the floor. If I had been, then I would have been no better than the rest of them, and I would not have benefited from my journey.
This was not what I had wanted from my papa. I had wanted his love, never his fear. But I knew then that I could not have what had never existed, and I knew that I loved my papa too much to see him so afraid. Remember what I had learned just minutes before in the dew, that I could not hate the match for starting the fire. My papa had done exactly what he’d been supposed to do. What would I have become if my papa had not deemed me different and unworthy of his love? I would have become one of them, looking for a fair-skinned donor to ‘wash the black’ out of me, the very black that Fin Thomas had fallen in love with. The black that had created my dear, dear Grampy.
So, once more in my life, to make my papa happy, I left my home. I dropped the kitchen towel onto his wet pants and he cried out when it landed softly on his leg. Then I walked out the door.
I saw his car parked outside the gate, the one he’d bought from Mr. Spence with Mama’s kitchen money. At first I did not recognize it, for all that was left of the red paint were a few dull red patches within the rust. The rear window was completely gone, a greasy piece of cardboard taking its place, held in by layers of duct tape. Suddenly, while staring at the dilapidated car, I was jolted by a memory—this had been the car parked behind Jasper’s on the side of the road! I looked at the license plate and sure enough, there was the ‘P’. Papa’s beautiful red car had been converted into a taxi!
I walked back up to my stump and sat with my back to the house. I heard the shuffle of his feet as they hurried down the kitchen steps, but I did not look around. I knew that the whimpering man whose urine had expanded the amber pool of coffee across the kitchen floor was just the rot in the stump that had finally been exposed.
When I returned to Mama her eyes were wide with knowing. She watched me silently as Paulette wiped her emaciated limbs with rosewater, her eyes telling me that she had heard Papa’s fall, and that she knew that I had seen what he had become.
Even in her illness, she had not changed—never to utter a bad word about my papa. While Paulette took the bottle of Savlon to wash the bed pan at the outside pipe, I fed Mama warm cornmeal porridge. She swallowed slowly, as if even the tiny grains were too large for her throat.
“You went … to the angels,” she finally whispered.
I blinked at her. Of course she must have known about the dew angels! She’d once been Grampy’s little girl, listening to his tales as eagerly as I had. I smiled at the sheepish way she’d said the word ‘angels’, like an older child not wanting to let go of the notion of Santa Claus. I nodded and put another spoon of porridge to her lips, but she shook her head indicating that she wanted no more.
“Lettie and I … we used to go. We use to watch … it run off each other’s … face.”
I laughed again, partly because of the image of them as girls in the dew, partly because of how strong her voice sounded.
“Grampy was full of story, eh, Mama?”
Mama shook her head. “Not story, Nola, the angels come. Not all the time, but … when you need them. God’s … helpers.” I nodded.
“So beautiful.” Mama closed her eyes and swallowed. “I saw you, you know … on those mornings when you … came back from them. So beautiful. You had that glow. That’s how I knew … you were going to be … fine.”
I could not speak.
“God was always … with you. From you were born, I could see … you had Him right there with you.” She looked at me with her wide eyes. “You were born with your eyes open. We had to wash them … with aloe, cause you came out with them wide open, like you knew everything that was goin’ on. I heard them whisperin’ that it was the devil. Them think that I never hear … but I heard them whisperin’. But Grampy took you from them, and him put you on my chest and him say, Sadie, she small like a bird, but she have the wings of a vulture!” Mama laughed softly, her eyes glazed with memory, but I could not laugh back.
My heart was too hungry for her words to even smile. Her eyes focused once again on my face.
“You think I … let you go.”
It was not a question, so I did not answer, and Mama sighed deeply, rippling the sheets. “It was … the best I knew to do.” She lift
ed her hand from mine and pointed to the wardrobe. “Get it,” she said.
I did not move right away for I did not want to break the mood of Mama’s unusual chatter, but when she closed her eyes and turned her head exhaustedly into the pillow, I went to the wardrobe and retrieved the flour bag.
“Open it,” Mama whispered when I put it beside her on the bed.
I pulled the knot of cord and peered inside. The thick wad of papers were folded over once and tied with another piece of cord. I could see some of the letters on the edges of the paper, the blue of the ink now bleached pink with the combination of fruit splatters and age. I took the recipes out of the bag and handed them to Mama, but she brushed them away.
“No, the other thing.” She pointed weakly at the bag.
I looked inside again and saw a brown paper bag, also tied tightly with a pale green strip of cloth. I took it out and handed it to Mama, and this time she took it from me and held it against her chest.
“I never let you go. I kept part … of you with me. The part … I prayed over. I knew you were doin’ good when I held it … against me and my heart … sang, and I knew you were havin’ it … bad when I held it and my heart sank. This was how I spoke to you, my child… from all those miles. I never let you go.”
Mama handed me the brown bag, and tentatively, I pulled the cloth and opened it. What I saw made me laugh and cry at the same time. I couldn’t believe that Mama had saved it all – Grampy’s belt, Granny Pat’s picture, and Delroy’s blade of grass. The things from under my mattress.
“Mama,” was all I could say, for my throat burned with emotion.
“I saved you.” Her fingers chilled over my hand again. “You couldn’t stay. He was too afraid of you, Nola … and it was gettin’ worse when you started … staring him down; taunting him. When I saw that … cutlass, I knew it had to stop.”
Taunting him? What was Mama talking about? I never tried to taunt Papa when I looked at him. I just wanted to see his eyes. “Mama, I wasn’t …”
“Yes, the fear was goin’ from you … and he saw that. That was enough … to taunt him.”
I touched Grampy’s belt, the old leather shedding a fine powder on the bed. I rolled Delroy’s dried blade over my fingers. Then I stared down at Granny Pat’s face. She stared back from my own face. Funny how I’d never noticed before how sad her eyes were.
“Did she smile a lot, Mama, even with everything that they did to her?” I asked.
Mama looked blankly at me. “I didn’t know her so good.”
“Didn’t know her?” I gave Mama a confused laugh, thinking that exhaustion was now affecting her memory. “Grampy say that she used to rock you and tell you stories! You don’t remember Granny Pat, Mama?”
Mama twisted her head to the side and gave me a slight frown. “Nola, that’s not Granny Pat … that’s Papa’s Aunt Linette … the one who raised him.”
When people speak about their head spinning, it may sound like an exaggeration, but I can tell you that after Mama’s words that morning, my head reeled. Her words hit me like someone had taken the flour bag of recipes and pounded me over my head. I remembered when I’d found the picture in Mama’s drawer, and when I’d seen my own face staring back at me, I’d assumed it was Granny Pat’s picture.
But now Mama was saying that this black face was not Granny Pat’s, but Papa’s aunt! Papa’s family! It was not just from Mama’s loins that I’d unearthed a secret, but from Papa’s also!
“Why you think he was so ‘fraid of you, Nola? Why you think he had to keep you down … keep you weak? Because he couldn’t face that … power again.”
So this had been my papa’s ghost.
“You had to go. You couldn’t stay. That’s why… I gave you nothing to stay for. That’s why I was happy… when you stayed away from us… away from him!. I had to get you strong. I had to get you not to need us!” Mama took a deep breath and her lips shook. “Those wings that Grampy said you had … Papa would have torn them off. When the witch told me she had you … I told her, Please don’t make him kill her! If him find her, him goin’ kill her …”
I saw the tears in Mama’s eyes, but she was not looking at me. She stared into the distance, and I saw the same glaze that had opened her eyes wide, but blind, during her sleep. I realized then, that my Mama had not forgiven herself. Even though she had sent me away to save me, she had not forgiven herself for what had happened to me. That was why she had called me, why she could not sleep at night, and why she could not die.
I wept. Finally, I let the pain out of my chest. The pain that had been harboured there through my happiness and my sadness. I opened the plug in my heart, and I let the pain flow from me till my body was weak and I could not sit up in the chair.
Mama reached for my head and put it on her rotting chest, the spot I had dreamed of lying on all my life. Finally, I had the answer to my mama’s frozen face, why she had stuck me in my eye that afternoon instead of hugging me. It was because from the moment I was born, from the moment she saw my face, she was preparing me to leave. She was giving me nothing to stay for, nothing to pine for when I left.
She gripped my sobbing head and held me so tight that I could hear the light flutter of her heart, like a baby bird’s wings, getting ready to fly from its nest.
Mama, with her skeletal face and unsmiling lips, had loved me enough to not love me. She’d saved my life, for if I had remained in Redding, I would have done what Dahlia and Merlene did. I would have done what Petra had done. I would have done what Mama had done.
Those words my Mama spoke to me that morning were the last words she spoke except for the two she uttered in the early hours of the following morning. When I lifted my head from her chest, her eyes were closed and she was breathing deeply, finally in a peaceful sleep.
When Louisa and Delroy came, we could not rouse her. Neither could we rouse her for her midday broth, or her evening supper. She slept as if she had not slept in years, as if she had walked for miles and miles with a laden market basket, and it had finally been hoisted down so she could rest.
I knew what they didn’t. That Mama had finally lifted her feet from that rotting scallion field and was heading towards the open gate.
Louisa and Delroy stayed that day, for they knew it was close to the time, and across my mama’s bed, my eyes told Delroy ‘thank you’ for all he’d done for me, and ‘thank you’ for taking such good care of my sister.
His eyes answered me, “Never break”.
In the early hours of morning, while we all sat around her bed, my mama lifted a finger, ever so slightly. I bent over her, pressing my ear against her lips.
“The angels,” she whispered.
We did not for one instant question Mama’s wish. It was so fitting that she’d spent her dying hours with all who’d known about Grampy’s tale, about the miracle of the angels – me, Delroy, Paulette, and even Louisa. We all knew Grampy’s tale, and we all knew that that was where Mama wanted to spend her last hours on this earth.
Delroy lifted her feathery limbs from the bed and Paulette wrapped her in blankets while I rushed to get the cot’s tiny mattress from Grampy’s room. As Louisa opened the kitchen door, we all stopped in awe at what greeted us.
If I had been by myself, I would have thought I was seeing things. I would have blinked my eyes to clear the vision, but as I turned to look at the others, I saw the wonder on their faces too, and I knew that what was before me was real.
The mist swirled outside as if a breeze were blowing through it, but the leaves on the trees stood still. Silvery swirls snaked like fingers into the kitchen and beckoned us out into its folds. We walked within the chilly blanket to the coolie plum tree, and I placed the mattress on the carpet of grass so that Delroy could lay Mama on it. Paulette sat on the ground beside her, putting Mama’s hand to her lips, whispering softly against the fragile twigs of her fingers. Then Delroy, then Louisa whispered in her ear, and I saw Mama’s eyelids flutter at my sister’s words.
When it was my turn, I put my hand on my Mama’s chest, the spot that I had wept on, and I told her how much I had felt her prayers in Kingston, how much they had swooped down and lifted me out of trouble. I told my Mama that she had not let me go—that she had saved my life and I told her that I knew how much she loved me.
As my lips brushed against her cold cheek, I felt the wetness of the dew settling on her skin, and when I looked up at her face, I gasped at how beautiful she looked. The chill of the dew had plumped the sagging lines of Mama’s face, and she smiled from a face that looked like that of a young, eager girl.
I had never seen my Mama look so beautiful as that morning when she passed from this world, when the dew clung to her skin and gave her her halo. I knew then that the miracle of the dew angels was just that, a miracle. I knew that just as Mama said, they came when you needed them, and as with any other miracle, when you believed.
Just as the sun tipped its first ray on to the earth, and the mist became blue with its promise, my mama’s spirit left her body. She simply closed her eyes, and went to sleep. The hands that had chopped incessantly, that had worked themselves to the bone, fanned their fingers out against her sides in the rest that they had so craved. My heart soared knowing that Mama was finally where she’d waited so long to be, just like Petra, with the winds finally silenced.
EPILOGUE
They say that Papa did not attend Mama’s funeral, but when the new preacher of the Open Bible Church began reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm, I felt the hairs on my neck rise, and the electric pulse tingle through me.
He came. I did not see him, but I knew he was there, watching from somewhere as they put his Sadie into the ground.
He loved Mama. I knew he did, and she knew that he did. There are just some kinds of love that cannot go beyond the boundaries that a person constructs. That was my papa’s love for my mama—confined to its boundaries.
Louisa has never told me why Papa had come from her room that night, because I have never told her that I saw him. But I understand, now, that when love is given unnatural boundaries, it can take the wrong path, like a dammed river finding a tiny hole in the wall. The pressure of that one little drip could soon burst that reinforcing wall apart.
Dew Angels Page 36