Soucouyant

by David Chariandy

After some unknowable period of time, she gets off and walks the rest of the way downtown, looking for a church. She finds a small place with stained glass and an announcement in a different language. She knocks at the door but receives no answer. She continues to knock and an old olive-skinned priest finally answers, a short man with a meaty face. He chews on something and after swallowing passes the sleeve of his robe over his mouth, a waft of garlic from him. A pang of longing passes through her and she feels herself choking. Even just the scent of garlic.

  ‘It’s seven o’clock. What are you doing here?’ he says. A thick accent, but one she somehow understands.

  She wants to answer the question. She doesn’t want to cry and she won’t. The priest frowns at this pretty Negro woman battling herself and he looks around to the empty street and back into the dark church behind him. He motions her inside with a flick of his short thick neck, checking the street once more.

  He leads her into the foyer and tells her to wait. She sits and stares at the stained glass and the untranslated scenes of saintly activity before she realizes that he’s been gone for an unexpectedly long time. How long has she been left sitting in the dark foyer forever? Why is she losing her sense of time these days? She is about to leave when she notices a glow coming from deeper in the building. She walks slowly toward it, creeping along the walls and expecting something mean, some final cruel trick, as she pushes the doors open into the chapel.

  Lights. Hundreds, maybe thousands of lights. There are lit candles everywhere, weeping wax tears in all of the alcoves and all of the tables. The priest is stretching up his dumpy frame and struggling with a lighter, trying to reach the last of a set of candles in an alcove. There is a woman there, a dark-skinned woman with a child. A scar on her face, the words Matka Boska Czestochowska written underneath and explaining something. Who is this woman? How did she get to be here of all places? The candles around her are just beginning to bleed and the lights are now coming from all places at once, a shimmering brilliance flooding her eyes.

  ‘HAS SHE EVER asked you for lemon meringue pie?’ I ask.

  The young woman doesn’t respond. She’s been wrestling for almost half an hour with the gas valve behind the stove, which appears to be stripped or stuck. She curses through gritted teeth as she tries again with the wrench. I’ve offered to help and she’s told me to mind my own business. She picks up the wrench and tries again, but it slips, and she bumps her elbow against the wall. She swears and nurses it for a moment.

  ‘What on earth are you going on about?’ she finally responds.

  ‘Lemon meringue pie. Has she ever asked you for this? It was one of her favourite things. She used to get so excited about having it, but then she’d make the strangest face when eating. A twoness. ’

  ‘A two-ness?’

  ‘You know. The velvet sweet and sharpness at once. A twoness. ’

  ‘So what look did she have when she saw you again? I mean, when you showed up here a few days ago after abandoning her for two years? Was it two-ness on her face again, or just plain disgust? ’

  SHE’S A COMPLICATED matter, this nurse. She delegates house-work to me, mostly by leaving notes on scrap paper explaining that we are out of milk, that the hallway is getting dusty, that we both prefer full cream over milk in our tea. ‘We,’ meaning everyone in the household except me. Two notes on the kitchen table, one stuck to the bathroom mirror with tape, one upon my sneaker warning me to take off my shoes before entering next time. Otherwise she ignores me.

  She’s so casual about my presence that I start glancing at myself in mirrors around the house, especially the dusty warped one in the entrance hall. My forehead and mouth, my nose and ears. Those definitely aren’t Mother’s ears. Am I really so obviously her son? Is it wise for this young woman to so quickly take me at my word? I steal glances at her in turn. Mixed girl for sure, probably black and white. Her lashes and the lush dart of her eyebrows. Her thin back and her collarbones. Her birthmark a comet, maybe. A flare of energy travelling down her neck. She dresses in jeans and women’s shirts mostly, though she sometimes pinches things from hangers in my room. Shirts from my childhood, a sweater and a pair of socks. She leaves books about the house. Unrelated titles like Konansha’s Romanized Japanese-English Dictionary, and Vocational Training in Latin America , and The Complete Book of Inflatable Boats. A few of the books appear to be second-hand coursebooks with titles like The Republic and Molecular Chemistry. I pick up one entitled On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, and it falls open to a dog-eared page with a passage underlined in pencil:… it is possible to live with almost no memories, even to live happily as the animal shows; but without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

  Or, to say it more simply yet: there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people or a culture.…

  ‘I’VE NOTICED you’re reading Nietzsche,’ I mention to her later.

  ‘What? ’

  ‘Nietzsche. The philosopher. The German philosopher,’ I add, hoping to appear knowledgeable.

  She sighs at this. She hurries to the front door dressed in grey drawstring sweatpants and an old Jimi Hendrix concert-style T-shirt. My sweatpants and my shirt. She tugs on a sports jacket and then rummages in the closet for her shoes.

  ‘So you’ve studied nursing?’ I try. ‘You’ve studied old people nursing…?’

  ‘Palliative care.’

  ‘Yes. Palliative care. Is that your thing, your specialty?

  More silence as she sits to lace on her runners, her left knee to her chin and now her right. I can’t seem to help myself from talking.

  ‘You know, it’s kind of funny. But I don’t think we’ve really introduced ourselves.’

  ‘Cindy,’ she says.

  ‘Is that with an ‘i’ at the end? As in Cyndi Lauper? Or with a ‘y’ at the end, as in the model, Cindy Crawford?

  ‘With a ‘y’ at the end.’

  ‘What’s your last name?’

  ‘Crawford.’

  She stands and puts on a baseball cap, struggling a bit with her kinky and voluminous ponytail. She brushes some loose strands from her face and she turns to open the door.

  ‘Cindy?’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I know I don’t deserve much. I don’t deserve any answers at all, and so I won’t ask for them. I just want know that Mother is safe. That she’s in someone’s hands.’

  I’ve tried to say this in as unemotional a voice as possible, but there’s something ragged that I can’t help. The young woman doesn’t look back at me but removes her cap and struggles once more to fix it satisfactorily on her head. She takes the security chain off the door and exits.

  ‘Meera,’ she says, just before pulling the door shut.

  FROM THE WINDOW in Mother’s room, I catch a glimpse of her jogging down the main road, back straight and hands calm and relaxed, her ponytail bobbing heavily in a regular rhythm. She disappears from sight.

  ‘Meera,’ I repeat aloud. ‘Hello. I’m fitness conscious and my name is Meera. Pleased to meet me.’

  I have a bit of time. I move quickly to the storage room on the second floor which is cluttered with chests and boxes and bicycle parts. I locate the retractable ladder leading up into the attic, wincing at the grating noise it makes when being pulled down. For some stupid reason, I softly call out hello, hello, then test the ladder with my foot before slowly climbing up into the cramped space which has now become her home.

  The lake sounds are always strongest up here. At the back of the attic is a porthole of smoky glass and a mattress at one end of the sloping roof. The bed is unmade and beside it is a cup of coffee with drying dregs and a bowl with a bit of sodden breakfast cereal at the bottom. Also beside the bed are some chunky looking rings, one a big glass bauble with a plastic spider suspended within. There is a whole bunch of books scattered about, again with wildly dissimilar titles
, but what catches my eyes are the some half-dozen clay pieces set out about the floor of the room, rough hand-shaped bowls and plates and a smoother and more abstract form suggesting a human limb. All seem made of the same crude and unbaked material, a reddish clay with beige streaks and crumbly particles suspended within. Clay from the bluffs, perhaps.

  As I reach for one, they all begin to buzz of their own strange life. I’m startled for a moment before I recognize the passing of the commuter train, the noise then fading away. I contemplate leaving the attic, but then notice an old chest of drawers in the corner. I open it and find a stash of shirts and pants, underwear and socks. I notice that two pairs of socks are my own. I retrieve these and then after a moment of hesitation pocket a pair of Meera’s underwear too, which are blue and ordinary. I look once more about the attic before stepping down the ladder backwards into the storage room, humming to myself.

  Meera has already returned. She is leaning with crossed arms in the doorway of the room, a V of sweat on the front of her top just above Jimi Hendrix’s afro and bandanna. She is looking at something on the floor, and I follow the line of her sight to her underwear which has slipped out of my pocket during my climb down.

  ‘Just wash them when you’re finished,’ she says.

  ‘I wasn’t … I mean, I’m not going.…’

  ‘I mean it. Warm water, not hot. And hang to dry.’

  I PASS MOTHER in the bathroom a couple hours later. The tap isn’t running, but she’s sitting on the side of the tub and humming softly while running her fingernails between the wall tiles and then inspecting the material under her nails.

  ‘Does she frighten you?’ I ask her softly.

  ‘Who, dear?’

  ‘You know. The stranger.’

  ‘Oh,’ she laughs. ‘You don’t have to worry, dear. He my youngest son.’

  I DECIDE THAT I won’t stick around for the charade of dinner. I eat a bowl of cereal in the mid-afternoon and dress hurriedly in my room for a long walk. I head downstairs and find Mother standing near the front door with its glazed side-pane, the translated light of the setting sun upon her. She’s wearing her bathrobe and she purses the robe into a collar around her neck when looking at me. I pass her as carefully as possible.

  ‘I’m just going out, Mother.’

  ‘Out…?’

  She looks behind her now as if sensing something from the growing dark of her home. I put on my runners then change my mind. I rummage around the back of the closet and eventually slip my feet into the leathery skins of my father’s old work-boots, still supple after all these years. Cold steel toe.

  ‘I’m just going for a walk, Mother. I’ll be back.’

  ‘I … be … back,’ she repeats, slowly, looking back into her home again.

  I tell her ‘bye’ twice and step out into the driveway and into the cul-de-sac, the lights of the better houses and properties of this neighbourhood just beginning to show across the train tracks and in the distance.

  FOR A LONG TIME, I never understood what ever could possess my parents to live here. This lonely cul-de-sac in the midst of ‘a good neighbourhood,’ this difficult place that none of our neighbours would ever have settled for. It could have been the great lake, of course. That mirage of steel and pastels stretching out to the very horizon of the world, that inland sea inspiring all sorts of reckless imaginings. My parents couldn’t have been impressed by the house itself, its dilapidated and rotting frame, its peeling eggshell paint, its windows cloudy with cataracts or roughly boarded up, all blasted with the sounds of passing trains. They couldn’t have been inspired by the idea of long-term ownership, since any fool could see that the lake was slowly advancing, eroding inches of the backyard each year.

  I can imagine the scene they would have made during the first few weeks of renovations. Mother in her straw hat and flowered skirt, pads of foam tied around her legs for greater comfort when kneeling. She would have had to kneel occasionally even when she wasn’t planting her beloved annuals, or clearing the brush around the gardens and plots grown wild, or bagging up the months of trash dumped in the cul-de-sac when the property was yet unclaimed. When she moved to this neighbourhood, she was newly pregnant with my older brother and increasingly tired. Father was his old manic self, spending long days repairing damaged walls and laying down new pipes, and wiring and repainting and insulating every room including the attic with fibreglass, though paying for this activity with a week of nights when every inch of his naked flesh seethed with fearful itchiness. He would also have been on the roof to paint and re-tile, and perhaps this is how they first met a neighbour curious enough to wander down that lonely cul-de-sac. Mother on the ground pulling off a stained and odorous glove and extending her bare hand. Father calling above from the roof, a dark angel in the sky. His greeting ordinary and apocalyptic at once.

  ‘Morning, neighbour.’

  This was the historic community of Port Junction, you see. It was considered one of the last remaining ‘good’ parts of Scarborough, meaning distant from the growing ethnic neighbourhoods to the west. There were no high-rises here, and the homes were almost all new and fully detached and on sensible non-eroding properties. Many properties sported antique lawn ornaments and the sort of ‘rustic’ fencing you can buy at hardware stores. Many postboxes bore silhouette illustrations of horses and buggies as well as family names in old-fashioned scripts. The Mackenzies, the Rosses, the Laurences. There was also a large sign farther down the main road, originally put up by a property developer but maintained by the community thereafter. The sign read ‘Old Port Junction: The Traditional Community by the Lake.’ It showed a picture of a boy on a beach bending down to pick up a shell. His mother and father were looking out upon the lake, their eyes and the waters a perfectly matching blue.

  Also, there was the annual Heritage Day parade. Every year in spring, our neighbours would organize a march that would pass by the main road just beyond our cul-de-sac. The flyers explained that everyone was invited to participate, since the Heritage Day parade was being revamped these days to recognize ‘people of multicultural backgrounds,’ and ‘not just Canadians.’ But Father always seemed to be working, and Mother couldn’t ever remember the day when the parade took place. And trouble grew in later years when she couldn’t remember the parade in the first place but would peer out from behind the kitchen drapes, observing with wide eyes the spectacle passing slowly by on the main street. What was happening? Why the costumes and uniforms and semi-orderly marching? Was it serious? Was there a war or a violent expulsion underfoot? Every year, I had to explain that this was just a parade, a celebration. ‘A performance, Mother. Just a performance.’ I felt especially compelled to explain the distressingly amateurish bagpiper. His puffed lips at odds with the sounds he made. His soul-shuddering cry.

  ‘It’s an instrument, Mother.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said softly, clutching the collar of her bathrobe.

  ‘Mother? It’s a musical instrument, Mother. Music.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Music.’

  Then one Heritage Day, Mother disappeared. She had been wandering more than usual, and I had promised myself to keep an eye on her, but I only remembered when the noises of Heritage began to grow. I called out and looked around the house before recognizing the severity of the situation. The noises from outside swelled and I looked despairingly out the kitchen window and down the cul-de-sac toward the passing parade. I didn’t want to go outside, but I had no choice anymore. I threw on my shoes and a coat and opened the front door, prepared to run across the tracks and into that crowd of eyes and beyond to wherever my mother might be.

  I saw and froze.

  Mother was without a blouse or skirt or pants but mercifully in a bra and pantyhose. At the same time, she was wearing at least half a dozen pairs of underwear that she had somehow yanked up, one over the other. She was wearing shoes. Somehow, it was important for me even in that moment to check that she was wearing shoes. I realized that the parade had come
to a halt. The participants were looking at Mother in their midst and also down the cul-de-sac at me. Some were leaning toward each other to whisper, and others were gesturing to get the attention of those farther away. I wanted to vanish. I wanted to get away, but then another parade seemed to start. Mother was now being helped somewhat unwillingly toward her home by an older man and woman. She seemed, magically, to grow to inhuman proportions. She swelled as big as one of those inflatable puppets you sometimes see on poles at parades. As looming and caricatured and awkwardly handled as that. Coming toward me. Coming home.

  I still hadn’t moved from the porch. I froze before that image and sea of faces until the two old folks helping Mother stopped in front of me.

  ‘Brave face,’ said the old woman, smiling gently. ‘It’s OK now. Just help your mother inside.’

  ‘She’s OK, now, lad,’ said the old man, an arm missing from the sleeve of his uniform.

  ‘My god, what’s he waiting for…?’ yelled a middle-aged woman in a flamboyantly blue pioneer costume.

  ‘Have you noticed them?’ said a man holding a bell and wearing a tricorne hat. ‘The boys? They’re always like that. They’re always shrinking away and skulking about. They never meet your eyes.…’

  ‘… his mother, for god’s sake. And he just stands there. I mean, what kind of people are we allowing to live here, anyway?’

  I CAN’T FIND HER.

  I’ve returned from my walk and searched the entire house but Mother’s nowhere to be found. She isn’t in the sitting room or her bedroom. The bathroom is empty. I run downstairs to check the front door closet, noticing that Mother’s coat is still there, her slippers and sneakers too. A good sign, a bad sign? An old woman bare-footed and lost in the dark and cold?

  I race back outside and look nervously down the railway tracks. I turn and call out toward the neighbourhood, but my voice seems to fall flat and empty upon the houses in the distance. The eyes of their windows.