Soucouyant

by David Chariandy

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR SOUCOUYANT

  David Chariandy fully inhabits his story, his authorial labours surefooted and invisible. His closing chapter reprises that authenticity, revealing childhood horrors that shock us to a final understanding.

  —The Globe & Mail

  A haunting coming-of-age story.

  —Publishers Weekly

  This elegant and accomplished book strikes me as Southern in its historical preoccupation with racism, violence, and dispossession, and the impact of these things on contemporary experience.... This is a very successful novel, partly due to an unerring consistency of tone, which is eerie and melancholic, but also due to Chariandy’s tender portrayal of Adele, whose exuberant spirit, even in fragile, deepest madness, is never entirely extinguished. Chariandy is an observant, eloquent writer.

  —Toronto Star

  Not many books have re-read appeal, at least not to a critic. But after finishing David Chariandy’s Soucouyant, I returned to the beginning and started all over again, finding renewed pleasure in each lyrical line.... Chariandy’s heart-wrenching tale of a son trying to reconnect with a mother who has sunk deep into the mysterious nowhere land of Alzheimer’s leaves a deep imprint upon the soul.... The texture of his prose is silken, his phrasing melodic.

  —Montreal Gazette

  Soucouyant pulses with life and vigour, even as it breaks under the weight of age and sorrow. Chariandy writes with a rich clarity that never feels cluttered, an elliptical approach to both characterization and storytelling that feels utterly natural and unmannered.... The result is a novel that’s impossible to predict, and impossible to pin down. To read it is to be reminded of the power of writing, of storytelling, of lives laid bare, in all their secrets and mysteries, on the page.

  —National Post

  Old skin, ’kin, ’kin,

  You na know me,

  You na know me …

  —verse fragment from a Caribbean tale

  One

  SHE HAS BECOME an old woman. She looks out from the doorway of her own home but seems puzzled by the scene, the bruised evening sky and the crab scurry of leaves on the shoreline below. These are the bluffs at the lakeside edge of Scarborough. This is the season named fall.

  ‘You should step in,’ she says, reaching for the security chain but finding it already dangling freely. Her eyes only then darting up to meet mine.

  I crouch to unlace my shoes, avoiding the stool that has always been untrustworthy. I hang my coat on the peg tucked invisibly beside the fuse-box. She notices these gestures and slows with thought while leading me through this shipwreck of a home. The same drafts and groaning floors, the same wildlife calendar with the moose of September 1987, now two years out of date. In the kitchen, she sets a kettle on the element and turns the stove dial while saying ‘on.’ Then checks again to make sure.

  The gas has been disconnected. I see this immediately and know that we will wait in vain for the flame to catch or the kettle to scratch to a boil. She is silent now and her eyes are downcast and away from me. There’s a cavernous rhythm that seems to emanate from the floorboards and rafters, though this is only the lake having its say in the quiet of our brooding. This could continue for a long time. With the sun going its way and the shadows thickening around us. With this old woman, my mother, so entirely unwilling to admit that she has forgotten me. With both of us free from our past.

  I do this.

  I stand and unbuckle my belt. I unbutton and zip down and let my pants fall to my knees. Mother doesn’t laugh at me advancing with wobbly duck steps. She doesn’t panic when her hand is held and guided to the skin of a dark young man.

  Here. Press your fingers against the walnut-shaped lump of bone at the side of my knee. Hold them there until my knee bends and some rogue tendon bunches against that lump and against your fingers before suddenly snapping over. With a click. My body’s trick.

  Her smile.

  ‘He have strange bones,’ she says. ‘Quarrels deep in he flesh.’

  ‘Your son.…’

  ‘He grandmother too. You can’t do nothing for bones. They like history. But you can boil zaboca leaves to remedy body ache. And planten leaves to slow bleeding. And there used to be something called scientific plant which could protect you against curses and bad magic.…’

  ‘Your son. Your youngest son. Remember, Mother?’

  ‘Aloe on light burns. Everyone does remember that. But there was something else. Something wet and pithy they could give you when you burns was brutal. When you skin was gloving off.…’

  I STAY WITH MOTHER, though I haven’t truly been invited to stay. On that first evening of my return, Mother walks suddenly out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor. I hear the low grate of a deadbolt. Later, I make my way up to the other bedroom on the second floor. The bunk bed that I once shared with my brother is still made, though the sheets and pillows smell of dampness.

  My bedroom window looks out over the weathered edge of the bluffs to a great lake touched by the dying light of the city. Below, some forty feet down, a few trees lean about on a shore of sand and waterlogged litter. Dancing leaves and the tumble of an empty potato chip bag. Despite the view and the fact that many consider the surrounding neighbourhood ‘a good part of Scarborough,’ our place is difficult to boast of. We are alone in a cul-de-sac once used as a dump for real-estate developers. The house is old and bracing now for the final assaults of erosion. Even in summer, all windows facing south are kept shut. Because of the railway track, scarcely ten feet away.

  I’m jolted awake during the night. The house has taken on some brutal energy, and dust motes have turned the slanting moonlight from the window into solid beams. The noise peaks and only then is it clear to me that a freight train is passing. I wait for the caboose to pass and the lake sounds to pool back. I watch the wind blowing ghosts into the drapes. I dream, close to waking, of the sound of footsteps in the air above me.

  IN THE MORNING, I walk in on a young woman sitting with Mother at the kitchen table and reading a book. She has hair of wild bronze, frizzy mixed-girl hair barely kept in check by an elastic, and she is wearing the white two-pocketed shirt that Mother used to make me put on for special occasions. She has apparently set food in front of my mother, cornmeal porridge with sugar and vanilla essence beaten in. A pot of tea so strong that it seems to stain the cups and corrode the spoons. Seeing me, she stands abruptly, her hand darting involuntarily to a mark on her neck. For the shortest while, she reads my face and body before dropping her hand and sitting back down.

  ‘I’m her son,’ I say.

  She picks up an eating spoon to offer some of the porridge to Mother, who purses her lips but otherwise doesn’t move her face. The book is now splayed cover up on the table. The Diatonic Mode in Modern Music, the title reads. The mark on her neck is red. A puzzle against the light brown of her skin, the sharpness of her collarbone. A birthmark most likely.

  ‘Are you a nurse?’ I ask. ‘I’m just visiting. I won’t get in your way.’

  ‘How considerate of you,’ she replies.

  And then ignores me, though her eyes look like they’re thinking far beyond her continued attempts to feed Mother. I nod and leave quietly, spending most of the morning and afternoon in my room and staying clear.

  In the evening, I’m alone in the sitting room when I hear from above the sounds of a faucet squeaking open and the deepening rush of water in the bathroom tub. I hear two voices and muffled splashes, t
hen the young woman singing and Mother joining in without hesitation or flaw. I want to hear more of this singing and to know how Mother can manage to carry any song at all in her condition. I wait for the bath noises to stop and the drain to stop sucking, but I walk upstairs and into Mother’s room before it’s at all safe to do so. Mother is topless and facing me, and the young woman is standing behind her, giving her a massage. Mother’s eyes are closed and she is still humming, her voice grating as the young woman kneads into the flesh hidden from my sight. The glossy wrinkles on Mother’s upper shoulders and neck, the portents of her body’s true damage. There’s an oily thickness in the air and on my tongue, and the nakedness and intimacy humiliates me somehow. I turn to leave but not before the young woman catches my discomfort and smiles wickedly.

  I hear it that night. Unmistakable this time, the young woman in the attic above. The creak of her movements.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I enter the kitchen just as the young woman and Mother are sitting down to breakfast. Cornmeal porridge again and more of the vicious tea, but also a mango with a thin knife laid out beside it. The lake is unusually quiet and the sun has turned the kitchen walls lemon.

  ‘I’d like to help out with the groceries,’ I say. ‘I just need to know what to buy. I could cook too. I’m not such a bad cook.’

  The young woman shrugs and picks up the mango and the knife, but this time Mother’s stare transforms into unmistakable nervousness. I do my best to smile reassuringly, but Mother looks away and then steals glances at me while adding spoon after heaping spoon of wet brown sugar to her tea. She has created a warm and overflowing cup of syrup before she finally manages to articulate her worry.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks. The woman is looking up and waiting for an answer too, the knife motionless in her hand and the juices from the mango inching down her arm.

  I don’t know how to answer this question. I don’t even know how Mother is reading me. As a stranger who suddenly roams her home, or as her younger son who has mysteriously returned after discovering, two years earlier, just how impossible it was to be around her. I don’t know if Mother has been hurt by my absence, or if she’s even noticed it. I don’t know what meaning there can be between us now.

  ‘You mean you don’t remember, Mother?’ I try.

  This works perfectly. Mother steels her eyes and tightens her mouth. She finds her old pride.

  ‘Of course I remember,’ she says, bringing her cup to her lips.

  LONG AGO, SHE began to forget. It started with ordinary things. Shopping lists and recipes, bus change and savings cards, pens for jotting down those household tasks that always manage to slip away. But then Mother began to forget in far more creative ways. She began to forget names and places, goals and meanings. She began to forget the laws of language and the routes to salvation and the proper things to do with one’s body. She began to excuse herself from the world we knew.

  My brother and I were the first to notice. We were young children when it started and naturally alert for the smallest signs of adult weakness. When Mother wasn’t looking, we’d climb up to the cupboards and eat peanut butter and corn syrup, lime pickle and molasses. Also the most perverse delicacy we could then imagine, Crisco shortening, spooning up the white sludge with our fingers and leaving greasy prints on the cupboard doors and the walls and the door-knobs. Mother couldn’t understand why she never remembered to replenish her cooking goods. Why she never remembered to give the home a good all-round scrubbing. We were never caught.

  Of course Mother was minding five or six other children in those early days. Her wits were already strained to the limit. Friday evenings, the children’s parents would come and apologize for the days when they were forced to work overtime at their offices without proper warning. They would smile apologetically when handing Mother envelopes. But what messages were these people passing her, really? What kind of people envelop their words? This was still the earliest stage of Mother’s condition and she had already learned to conceal her confusion from others and trust that in time things would become clear. She would wave the children’s parents goodbye and open the envelopes carefully with a knife, sorting through the small number of fives and tens. Dirty numbers. Meaning new safety boots for her husband and belts for her boys and, of course, more endlessly dwindling cooking goods. Money was still too precious a meaning to forget.

  But soon there came the times when Mother hurriedly dressed one boy in his snowmobile suit and ushered him to his parents waiting outside. Only then to remember (too late) that these parents had a girl. That girl with the haunting glass-marble eyes and the brilliant golden hair. Or brown. She would have had brown hair, Mother reminded herself. Mother would laughingly explain to the parents just how difficult it was to tell the difference between boys and girls these days. Just look at the rock stars, she would say. Nanny standup. But her jokes fell flat and Mother steadily lost her jobs. She was supposed to be minding children, after all. She was living on the edge of the bluffs, near an active railway.

  Metal monsters in the night. Dirty numbers and greasy door-knobs. This was our belonging. Memory was a carpet stain that nobody would confess to. History was a television set left on all night. The car chases and gun fights sponsored by oil companies. The anthems at the end of broadcast days.

  THEN A CRISIS in something called ‘the economy.’ Father was laid off at the factory but later rehired as a temp after two agonizing weeks. The work was erratic. The factory wouldn’t need him for weeks on end, but then, faced with a last minute order to fill, it would suddenly call upon him round the clock. Father became a maniac on those days, a blur of energy bursting through the front door to bolt cold dal and rice from tupperware in the fridge. Frantic nap. Bathroom. Frantic nap. Chugging lukewarm cups of instant coffee, then back out to catch another shift, a toppled milk carton in his wake, pattering white upon the floor.

  Mother’s jokes continued to fall flat. One afternoon, Father took his first long chug from his coffee mug before running to the kitchen sink to retch endlessly. Waving away our concern as another belt of sickness took him. Mother had accidentally filled the sugar bowl with salt, and Father had unknowingly made himself a briny pickle of a coffee. All four of us were in the kitchen that day, three sitting quietly until Father’s spasms at the sink had passed. Such an awesome sight, his big shoulders heaving up. It was my brother who finally broke the silence.

  ‘It’s April Fool’s Day. Right, Mother?’

  ‘What you say, child?’

  ‘You know. April Fool’s Day. When people do jokes and nobody suspects because nobody remembers what day it is anyway?’

  ‘Yes …’ said Mother, ‘you’s right, child. It certainly is that day.

  Merry April Fool Day, Roger.’

  ‘You know, girl,’ said Father, finding his breath, ‘thirty years, and I still don’t know how to celebrate in this country.’

  MY BROTHER ALWAYS knew the right thing to say. He was older than me but also surer in his talk and more sensitive to manners and gestures and tones of voice. He figured out a while ago that Mother’s condition offered him a special freedom, and so instead of going to school he spent most weekdays alone in his bedroom.

  ‘Child,’ Mother might ask, ‘why you ain’t at school?’

  ‘It’s a PD day, Mother.’

  ‘PD day?’

  ‘A professional development day. When the teachers get a day off and spend their time smoking and thinking up trick questions. Don’t you remember, Mother?’

  ‘Of course I remember, child. You think you the only intelligent person in this house?’

  Meanwhile, my brother screened all of the letters that appeared in our mailbox. He could tell a report card envelope merely by its density and weight. He used a flashlight or a bright bulb to spot official school seals through unopened letters, and so he intercepted and destroyed messages from guidance counsellors who were expressing their concern that my brother was skipping even the most practical courses
in shop and automobile repair. Some of the letters explained in simple and patient terms that schools were now learning to respond to hands-on students ‘just like yours.’ One of them came with a glossy pamphlet describing a new program where students would get to work in ‘relevant’ settings for half of the school year. Behind the cash register in fast food restaurants, for instance. ‘Real-life business skills.… Common-sense education.…’ The pamphlet showed a rainbow of coloured faces.

  But my brother wasn’t interested in school. He was going to be a poet.

  I didn’t know this at first because we rarely spoke. Like our father, he seemed inaccessible and slow to meet your eyes. He was big too, and with a bruised edge to himself that you weren’t ever in a hurry to poke at and ask what’s the matter. But then, one sharp spring morning, my brother told me to make two peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off and to take two bananas from the fruit bowl and to come with him for a while.

  He carried a red toolbox which he normally kept locked underneath our bunk bed. We walked to a secret edge of the bluffs near the back of our home, and we slid-stepped down the slope of clay, holding onto brush and radically leaning trees and even thistles when a fall suddenly threatened. We reached the shore and walked east until we got to that place where a fenced sewer pipe from the old factory blocked us from going farther. A gull was perched on the inside lip of the pipe, its feathers puffed up and ragged and its legs forking a trickle of water that moved like oil. We climbed over the fence and sewer pipe, and did ten minutes of wobbly walking along the stones and washed up trash until we got to a place where you could squint your mind and imagine that you were elsewhere. The wet skins of lake-smoothed stones. The bones of driftwood bleached by the sun. The dense silence of the bluffs towering above. And of course, the great lake with its unmarred horizon.