We sat on driftwood and ate our sandwiches immediately, taking a bite of banana with each bite of peanut butter, the way Father once showed us. After this, my brother unlocked his toolbox and showed me what he hid from everyone else. Books. A battered Gideon Bible, perhaps stolen from a nearby car motel. A book entitled Surviving Menopause by one Philip G. Winkler, MD. A Finnish cookbook with the cover ripped off. A very old leather-bound book written in some strange but beautifully sinuous script. Another book that merely listed chemical compounds following some obscure principle of organization. Other strange choices too. And why not? Why shouldn’t a poet know a lot and draw from all languages and meanings? My brother took his books one by one out of the box and placed them carefully on the stones. He removed a real fountain pen and a notebook with handmade paper, the sort all rough with invitation. He sat there not writing but as if he were just about to write, and he held that pose for a long time before me.
I don’t remember my brother ever writing anything that day. I remember him pointing out to me the smeared toothpaste of clouds upon the sky and the guerrilla art of bird shit on the rocks. I remember him describing the oatmeal of lake scum and the constellations of trash and plastic bottles that had washed up on shore. I remember my brother fishing a packet of chewing tobacco from his coat pocket and how he found in the trash around us a juice bottle chipped at the rim but good enough. I sat there with my brother well into the arcing afternoon, chewing and spitting. I never spoke to him about Mother’s condition or Father’s increasing distress because we were talking about poetry that day and mindful of things far greater than our personal circumstances and fears. I remember the bite of the wind on my face and the endless steel of the waters. I remember feeling light and almost dizzy with an exultation only partly due to the tobacco. I remember watching our spit rising in the bottle, all swirling amber and leather in the sun. That stuff so precious.
BUT MOTHER STILL staggered into forgetfulness. She wandered the streets of our neighbourhood and upturned people’s garbage bins, looking for ‘the good things these wasteful people does throw away.’ She ‘borrowed’ things from corner stores and people’s garages, failing to recall the concept of private property. Relying on some deeply Caribbean hunch, she kicked any dog that approached her, once sending a miniature poodle spinning around its owner like a tetherball. She became easy prey for the most unimaginative of crank callers, and she’d answer and listen for long moments before calling out for us to catch the refrigerator since ‘it running,’ her hand cupping the wrong end of the phone for privacy. Left alone at home, she’d forget where the washroom was and would be forced to wait for agonizing hours until someone came home to show her. Later she’d see no reason why she should wait, and we began to notice that certain potted plants smelled of urine. We tried to stop her from accomplishing many household tasks like washing clothes, but we didn’t always succeed. She performed experiments with bleach and vinegar on our shirts and jeans, and we ended up wearing the acid wash look in entirely the wrong year for us to be considered fashionable.
One afternoon, she left a pot of milk on the stove that soon bubbled over and filled the air with acrid smoke. Returning from school, I smelled the calamity and ran up the stairs to a scene of confusion and teary eyes with Mother running about the house trying to find and rescue a three-year-old child from the imagined fire. When she crashed into me she screamed not with relief but with outrage. How could I be a teenager already?
‘Tell me, how!? How!?’
ALWAYS HER QUESTIONS.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve and a half.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirteen next week.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Mother … I wish … I mean, I’m scared sometimes, Mother.…
‘Don’t be stupid, child. I does know what your name is. I just wanting you to say it properly. Caramba, child, just say it properly for me, nuh, and stop setting up your face like some baby…!’
THE WEEK I turned fourteen, Father took us out to an all-you-can-eat buffet. He was uncharacteristically happy. He’d voted for the winning Conservative party in the past election, and he felt that he had thus contributed in some small way to the strengthening economy that the newspapers were describing. There’d surely be the chance for full-time work at the factory or somewhere else very soon. My brother was also happy. He’d attended a poetry reading in the city and some old guy in khakis had approached him and urged him to keep writing and to begin submitting his work to magazines. My brother explained to us that he wasn’t ready to show his stuff to anyone just yet, but he added that he was happy to know that there were people out there. People who cared about these things. Father said a quiet grace and then ordered my sixteen-year-old brother a beer, to my amazement and secret jealousy. We then laughingly set out on what my brother called our hunting operations, with the goal of happily confirming beyond all doubt what others in the restaurant might have already suspected about the appetites of dark-skinned people. We were sitting down with plates piled high when we noticed that Mother had disappeared.
We split up and searched everywhere. We went to the ladies’ washroom and called into it and asked women who looked at us suspiciously to please check the stalls. We angered a raccoon while checking the dumpsters behind the restaurant. We asked people table by table if they saw someone leave. A black woman. Excuse me, but would you by any chance have noticed a black woman? Finally the manager pushed open a door and found Mother in the staff dressing room, sitting in a corner. Her hands were clasped around her knees and her long pleated skirt fanned out neatly on the floor. Her head was down but we could see that her makeup was streaked. I waited for my brother to say something reassuring, something appropriate, but he was quiet. I waited for Father to act but he remained quiet and still, though he clenched and unclenched his thick fingers. I called to Mother, but she didn’t answer.
I lowered myself beside her. I sat there reading the soap bucket stains on the floor with her for a few moments. A zag like a ‘w,’ an unclosed ‘o.’ I took her hand in mine. Mother raised her head and looked at me. It took a while, but then she smiled.
We all returned to our table and quietly ate the food now cold and gelid on our plates. We skipped the dessert bar with the voluptuous strawberry tarts we had earlier noticed. Mother sat beside me on the bus ride home, and at one point she cupped her hand on top of my own.
‘I knew it,’ she whispered just for me to hear. ‘I knew you would never leave me.’
I STARTED TO think about Father’s paralysis that night. The clenching and unclenching of his fingers. The futile grasping. There were money matters to consider since Mother couldn’t mind any children now. We couldn’t afford to lose this income. And what if Mother needed special treatments? What unimaginable end was she travelling toward? Weeks later, we found that the papers were right and that something called ‘the economy’ did indeed strengthen, but the factory still laid off dozens of full-time workers, and temporary work became even more scarce.
Dirty numbers. But perhaps Father was thinking of something else, of the relationship that he once had with his wife. It’s never good to think deeply about the relationship between one’s parents, that most unbelievable of relationships. But Mother was black and Father was South Asian, and though they met here, they both came from a place where there were serious misgivings between these peoples. There was something special in their relationship. Despite history and tradition, they had loved each other.
But now things were changing. I witnessed moments when Mother would pause and stutter when she tried to call her husband by name. Those dreadful moments when Mother sitting empty-eyed might suddenly look down to see Father’s fingers laced in hers, some coolie-man’s dark fingers laced in hers, before politely freeing herself.
‘FATHER? ’
He didn’t answer me at first. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his ritual before anyone else woke up, morning light u
pon the polished darkness of his skin. He had stopped attending church a few years ago in order to free up time on the weekends to work, but he insisted on reading the Bible all the way through over and over again, straining to commit to memory whatever he could, even the ponderous genealogies. His lips were now moving silently through The Book of Numbers.
And these are the names of the men that shall stand with you: of the tribe of Reuben; Elizur the son of Shedeur.
Of Simeon; Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai.
Of Judah; Nahshon the son of Amminadab.
Of Issachar; Nethaneel the son of Zuar.…
‘Father? Could we see a doctor?’
‘We already seen a doctor, boy.’
‘But what about another doctor? Maybe someone who could help her.’
‘Ain’t nobody who can help her. She gone far beyond the help of men, boy.’
There was a muffled voice. Mother had left the TV on again and an early morning news anchor was reporting on some distant disaster or atrocity. Was it famine? Genocide? When do we remember these things? I only remember Father turning back to The Book of Numbers. Elizur the son of Shedeur, Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai.… I must have moved or made a strange sound for he looked up sharply. His face softening.
‘Hey, boy. Stop that now. She only forgetting. Worser thing have happen.’
BUT THIS WAS the problem. Mother wasn’t simply forgetting. She might be standing near the kitchen window, looking out over the rippled granite of the waters, when a word would slip from her mind and pronounce itself upon her lips.
‘Carenage,’ she might say, almost surprised that she had done so. ‘We was moved by the soldiers to an old village name Carenage. Named after the Spanish ships that anchored there long ago to get careen. Clean up from barnacle, yes? Free up from they weight and make smooth again after the trip from Africa. There was an old woman who did know. A woman with long memory and the proper names of things. We was moved, but there was a boy who get sick with the cough. He woulda dead, but she tell us what to make. A tea of shado beni and other bush. We all laugh, laugh in relief when she spoon the stuff to he lips. He bitter face and the flutter of he hands trying to push the taste away. He first sign of fight in days.…’
‘Kakashat,’ she said another time. ‘For sugars and blood pressure and growths.…’
‘Zootie. You wouldn’t know it unless you had wisdom. It stings when you touch it. But in a tea it could save you life when you body won’t give up it water.…’
Mother never deliberately explained to me her past, but I learned anyway. Of lagahoos, and douens, and other spectres of long-ago meaning.
‘Soucouyant,’ Mother said aloud to herself one day. ‘I saw one in the morning. A morning thick with burnt light. I walking a narrow path of dirt, you see, my ankles painted cool by wet grasses.…’
Her voice trailed off. She noticed me sitting beside her.
‘You know what a soucouyant is, child?’
‘Isn’t she an evil spirit? Someone who sucks your blood at night? ’
‘Yes,’ Mother answered after a pause, really only the shortest pause. ‘Yes, child, you is absolutely correct.’
‘HOW OLD ARE you?’
‘Fifteen. My … my name is …’
‘You telling me you name? You think a mother could forget she own child name? You think I going crazy? Answer me! You think I going crazy? Well, suppose I show you what really crazy? This … this now … is crazy…!’
OUR LAST DINNER together as a family. We still had dinner together though Mother had become less interested in eating. Father said a prayer, thanking the Lord for the strength he gives to all who suffer, the protection he gives from the spirits of darkness. Mother was fine for a while, but then she started drifting. She was using the serving spoon to poke at the obscene dish of beef and macaroni that Father had poured for us from a can when she stopped to touch the back of her head and afterward the thin scar at her chin. She traced the lacy roughness as if discovering it for the first time. A braille, it told a story.
‘Chaguaramas,’ she explained. ‘She loss she skin at the military base in Chaguaramas. She wore a dress of fire before it go ruin her. I wore a hat of orange light, a sheet of pain, yes, on my head and neck. I turning to her, turning to help and undo it all, but I trip up. My chin busting up against something sharp. Darkness washing me all over. When I wake, I back in our home in Carenage. They call the old woman and she here now reaching up into the tall parts of the house. Reaching and stretching like she appealing to the creatures of corners and ceilings. She gathering cobwebs, you see. I remember that she put a pillow for my head, and that she tell me lie face up. I remember the numbness at the back of my head and the cobwebs falling light like a spell upon me, the blood no longer itching down my neck. And I remember the one they laid beside me like a mother. She head completely tie up in whitest gauze. She muffled sounds not quite like crying.’
Silence around the table. Father was mechanically forking food to his mouth, spooning on more and more hot sauce and cooling his tongue with short intakes of breath. My brother didn’t look up either and seemed preoccupied with the task of arranging the macaroni on his plate into a series of commas without words. Only the great lake spoke its piece, its wash and roll and wash.
‘HUGH JAZZ?’ Mother asked us, holding the phone. ‘Is you all see a Hugh Jazz here?’
WE EACH LEFT Mother in our own ways. Father left first and in a hurry as usual. In a fraction of a second, the foreman informed us, after the guillotine strike of a falling sheet of steel. Mother was already in the midst of a particularly bad week and couldn’t seem to understand the situation or be persuaded to leave the house. My brother was eighteen at the time and so he went to identify the body. I persuaded him to take me too, dizzily watching as they slid the body into sight at the morgue. The iron waft of blood made me think of Mother’s misplaced menstrual pads. I noticed the slashed flesh on Father’s neck which leered out at me like a tongue. I noticed the dark skin which had lost its beauty and turned to grey wax. I noticed Father’s chest which didn’t sport a single hair. Would someone have shaved his body after death? Was he always so hairless? Why hadn’t I ever noticed this before? I looked at Father’s hands and saw for the first time a pin-prick beauty mark on the back of his wrist.
‘Sir…? ’
My brother was silent. He wasn’t looking at the body at all.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s him. Our father.’
Later, at a hastily arranged meeting in the factory office, a group of lawyers and foremen told my brother, Mother, and me that Father was very distracted that day and was simply not paying attention. This made sense. We were all getting more and more distracted these days. Why hadn’t Father recognized this? Why wasn’t he more careful? My brother shook his head silently and one of the lawyers misunderstood and ensured us once more, both gently and firmly, that it was indeed the error of the deceased. We didn’t argue but we also sat silently for some time, each of us lost in our thoughts. We heard someone clear a throat but we continued to sit silently, not knowing what we were supposed to accomplish here amongst these suited men and women. After this last awkward pause, two of the lawyers whispered to each other and finally one stated aloud that the company would be most desirous to provide a reasonable out-of-court settlement, especially in order to avoid any potential legal misunderstandings or grievances.
‘We are nothing if not desirous,’ the lawyer explained. ‘Indeed, we are prepared to offer you all something indubitably substantial. Something the wife of the deceased might draw upon throughout her retirement. We’re talking about stability. It’s what we all want, isn’t it? I’m sure that’s what your father would have wanted.’
They were right, though my brother wasn’t listening at this point. He seemed to be mesmerized by a streak of bird shit on the office window. Exclamation point, he murmured just loud enough for me to hear, but that was all. Mother was completely silent and unresponsive. When the time came,
I touched her arm and placed the pen in her hand and pointed to the lines she needed to sign. Her signature seemed to change on each new page. Mother’s creative writing. But nobody seemed to care.
MY BROTHER WENT next. He was growing more and more gloomy and introverted. He stopped speaking to Mother and me, though he assumed a new role as the working man of the family. He got a job at the Happy Chicken restaurant in a strip mall deeper in the city. He wore a disposable paper hat. He watched an employee training video that opened with an animated caveman bonking a woolly mammoth on the head with a club, the voice-over explaining that the obtaining of tasty yet convenient food had been important since the dawn of Western Civilization. My brother memorized the specials of the day exactly as they were told to him. The maximum satisfaction pack and the super-maximum satisfaction pack. Fast food language. The poetics of the sale.
He became someone else in those days. Someone fuller and more potent in people’s imaginations. Late one evening when we were both waiting for a bus, he noticed a woman looking over at us with what appeared to be gradually mounting nervousness. My brother looked at me and then behind us and then back at the woman, who at first smiled nervously and then panicked and walked briskly off towards safety, her heels clicking on the pavement. Riding the bus with me a couple days later, my brother looked up from his old and barely legible edition of A Girl’s Gay Garland of Verse to see a man in a suit stifling a laugh. What the hell was this guy’s problem? What exactly was so funny about seeing a young man read a book? My brother carefully marked his page before approaching the man and addressing him in a deep but even voice.
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