Soucouyant

by David Chariandy

  ‘You looking for something?’ says Mrs Christopher abruptly.

  ‘I just sold the house,’ I say, sitting up a bit more. ‘I sold the house, and I want to give you some of the money.’

  ‘You sell it for a good price?’

  ‘Not bad. I’d like to give you $10,000.’

  I wasn’t entirely sure what her reaction would be. I thought maybe she’d hold her hands to her mouth, her eyes widening with excitement. I thought maybe, just maybe, she’d scream with happiness and lurch toward me to offer a hug. I didn’t think she’d be like this. Silent and stonily staring.

  ‘How much you sell the house for?’ she asks.

  ‘About $50,000.’

  ‘Fool! It worth more than that! You get cheat!’

  ‘It’s what I could get at the moment. I had to sell it quick.’

  ‘It not enough.’

  ‘It’s more than enough for me. It’s not worth any more hassles.’

  ‘For me, I talking. It not enough for me.’

  ‘What…?!’

  She leaves to fetch a notebook from her bedroom. She shows me the math. It’s long and complex and my mind is still grappling with this unexpected reaction, but the subtotals are clear enough. ‘In-home care at standard wages for 254 weeks.’ (The hours of each week here written most carefully in different coloured inks.)

  ‘General living costs for patient.’ (Also broken down weekly.) ‘Monies earmarked and available to be drawn out of Adele’s bank account on a monthly basis for precisely these services and necessities. ’ And finally, ‘Payment Owing.’ I’m looking here at the figure: $100,344.10. She’s actually included the ten cents.

  And this is just the latest subtotal. Mrs Christopher flips back a dozen or so pages in her notebook and shows me headings such as ‘Wages Received as a Domestic Worker with Allowances for Room and Board’ and then ‘Minimum Wage for Landed Status Workers in Canada.’ There are neat dates beside each weekly entry, and I notice one dated 24/07/1963. Mrs Christopher then flips forward to the final written page in her journal and touches the tip of her tongue to the corner of her mouth while doing a quick calculation. Total amount owing: $345,033.48.

  ‘You’re joking!’ I begin. ‘The years you weren’t paid minimum wage? Have you lost your mind? I’m not responsible for what happened to you in the past! I wasn’t even close to being alive in 1963…!’

  ‘Well, you is alive right now!’

  ‘… and, anyway, it’s legally my house! I don’t have to offer you anything and here I am offering you a lot. For god’s sake, she was your friend…!’

  ‘Yes, she was my friend. She was my friend long before you was a small nothing swimming around in some man’s stupid thing, so don’t you remind me she was my friend. That not at all the point. You check the math yourself. Is all right and proper.’

  I can’t believe this is happening to me. I don’t know what angers me the most, the demand itself or the fact that I expected gratitude, just simple gratitude, from this woman.

  ‘I’ll give you half of the $53,000,’ I say.

  ‘It still ain’t enough. The whole house ain’t enough. But if you give me fifty-three, I’ll forgive you the rest.’

  ‘The whole…? Forgive…? I’m her goddamned son!’

  ‘That not the point either. You think you blood alone mean you ought to be rich with plenty monies? Is that what they teach you in that white-man school? I know what I deserve. You just check that math. And don’t you dare use the Lord’s name in vain in my presence, child. You mighta have money and learn high-high talk and whatnot. You mighta have a happy life with plenty food and clothes, but don’t you dare talk like that in my house.’

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ I say, nodding madly. ‘You think I’ve had it easy. You think I haven’t paid any price at all. And so you want me to pay for what you’ve experienced. You want me to pay for all the things that have happened to you. Then you’ll be satisfied. Then you’ll finally be happy.’

  She looks coolly at me and sighs.

  ‘No, child,’ she says. ‘That won’t make me happy. Justice don’t never make anyone happy. Is just justice.’

  And so, after a pause, I agree. I agree swearing to high heaven because there’s obviously no such thing as fairness in this world or any hope of reasoning with that whole idiotic generation before me. Mrs Christopher might as well have thousands of dollars to buy more ridiculous hats and iron-reinforced brassieres. More flower-scented toiletries and Pentecostal lunacy. I storm out of her place without putting on my shoes and squelch through the muddy courtyard of her apartment complex in my socks. I ride the bus home, asking people what the fuck they’re looking at. When I get off at my stop, I catch a glimpse in the bus driver’s rear-view mirror of an insane black cowboy. I walk home and grab my chequebook and yank on Father’s construction boots and catch another bus back to Mrs Christopher’s house. At her kitchen table, I write a cheque for fifty-three fucking thousand dollars and then rip this out and tear it up. On another cheque I write out fifty-three thousand dollars without the adjective and thrust it toward her. Mrs Christopher takes it calmly and silently and holds it up to a light to check for watermarks. Watermarks! I grab my shoes from the hallway as I leave again, then wheel to face her.

  ‘Mrs Christopher? Just one more thing, please? Just one more moment of your precious time. I’d like to teach you something. I learned it long ago. It didn’t come easy to me, but I eventually got it. I’m sure you’ll be able to get it too. You just have to listen carefully and then practice over and over again. Ready? Are you ready?’

  She looks warily at me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  She blinks twice.

  ‘Did you catch it?’ I ask. ‘You’ll have to listen carefully, Mrs Christopher. Listen to the sound at the beginning. I didn’t say tank you, like you and my parents. I said thank you. I pronounced the th. Thhhank you. Thhhank you.’

  She laughs.

  It’s the first time I’ve heard this woman laugh, and it amazes me. It’s unlike anything I could have imagined coming from her. It’s not malicious or cynical at all, not a huff or wicked cackle, but something joyous. Something loose and free and green. Something that rolls unguarded in any way.

  For a moment, it completely disarms me. Then I storm out of her house and walk all the way back home, arriving late into the night and unable to sleep. But the next day, I find myself lying awake in bed as the morning sun angles above me with its wintry light. I find myself repeating the words softly to myself.

  ‘Thhank you. Thhank you.’

  It is a funny sound, sort of. Teeth that way on your tongue.

  I’M THROWING toiletries from the bathroom cabinet into a heavy-duty garbage bag when I hear a knock at the door. It’s Meera.

  ‘You could have told me,’ she says. ‘I deserved to know.’

  ‘I didn’t know how to reach you. I tried your parents’ house, but you weren’t there.’

  She looks up at the bruise on my head. She leans to look behind me down the hall and into the sitting room where items from every part of the house lie strewn all over the floor and chairs in no real order. She looks back at me, first at my face and then down at my lapels. It’s only then that I realize that I’m still wearing Father’s embroidered cowboy suit.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks.

  ‘I sold the house. I’m trying to move out.’

  ‘Like some help?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I NOW HAVE exactly three weeks to get the house in order for the new owners. They’ll gut the place and start all over. They’ll replace the banisters and rails and pave what’s left of the backyard. They’ll get rid of the ivy planted during my childhood, a nuisance obstructing the windows and clogging the eavestrough.

  The furniture is its own challenge. My parents had been meticulous about maintaining the couch and easy chair, using upholstery slips and protectors whenever possible. The new owners are not interested in keeping the furniture, so
I’ll have to sell it somehow. I balk at this task and decide at the last minute to donate it to the church. The women with big skulking sons arrive to pick it up, never really saying much to me, but they bring me enough home-cooked meals to last a few days. Peas and rice, chopped watercress, a stew of provisions and chicken with Scotch bonnet peppers. The proportions are massive. Meera and I squeeze the dishes into the fridge and heat up only what we can eat, hoping to stretch out the leftovers for another week.

  We don’t say much to each other, and we don’t even try to touch. I sleep in the sitting room on an old mattress salvaged from the basement. She sleeps on the couch. Her crossed ankles, her bent wrist for a pillow. She is now too quiet and still to be truly sleeping and she opens her eyes to look back at me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have checked up on you.’

  ‘Please don’t apologize to me. Don’t do that to me.’

  IN ALL, THERE’S much less to do than I feared. Mrs Christopher has already claimed for the church much of Mother’s clothes and personal belongings. Upstairs in the bedrooms there are only a couple of pink lamps to worry about. There’s still a mirror on my bedroom wall. Looking into it one morning, I notice some dents in the door frame behind me. I turn and look closer and realize that they’re notches that record my changing height during childhood. I run my fingernail down them. A Morse code.

  ‘We should get to work on the basement,’ says Meera.

  ‘Sure.’

  Harder work. It takes me three full days to cut up, bundle, and otherwise ready the contents of the basement for recycling or garbage pick-up. I planned on saving some of the photos, but at the last moment I put them in a grocery bag to throw out. At other times, I slow down and focus too much on details. An old silver-plated spoon, now bent and useless. A recipe book with ingredients added in pencil. Half a spoon of nutmeg. Pinch of mace. A rusted can-opener which smells slightly of fish. A set of brass candle-holders turned green with age. Another box, this one of waxed cardboard and bearing an oily patch but otherwise sound. I lift a corner and see the wings of a dead moth that has been pressed into the wax now hardened into amber. On the floor, the softest white powder, its life a streak of ash.

  Other unexpected things too. Tucked behind an old and unassembled box of shelves, I find a pair of shears with wooden handles and rust-eaten blades. Frozen open and thoroughly ancient. One morning, Meera steps out of the basement and into the living room bearing a crumpled paper in her hands. She sets it down in front of my untouched bowl of cereal on the kitchen table. The paper is soiled with mold and on the verge of disintegration, but I can easily make out THE GLOBE at the top of the page, as well as a few of the headlines of sections: ‘Situations Vacant … Situations Wanted … Domestics Wanted … Properties for Sale.…’

  ‘It was stuffed behind a rafter,’ she explains. ‘Maybe used as insulation.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Here, look here at the date. November 7, 1885. I can’t believe it’s still legible. There’s more of this downstairs. What do you think we should we do?’

  I shrug, shake my head no, express something unintelligible even to myself. I carry my bowl to the garbage and throw out the rest of the sodden mush.

  I DON’T HAVE the energy to sort things through. I don’t have the will. Meera appears comfortable when working in the basement, but for me the dampness has started to eat through my clothes and skin. I’ve been feeling tight in my chest and dizzy when standing up too quickly. I lie awake at nights in my sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, alternating between nausea and vertigo. The spinning blur of the world.

  The next night, I rummage through the garbage bag filled with the discarded contents of the medicine cabinet. I sip from half a bottle of some liquid medicine, its cap crusted red and brown. The label reads nineteen-eighty-something, the original patient’s name smudged entirely away. I chug down the rest of the bottle and lick the crystals from the mouth of the bottle, grinding them between my teeth. I look for other things in the cabinet, and drink another unidentified bottle. Downstairs, I drink vanilla essence and half a bottle of Angostura Bitters, tasting nothing. I finish off the dregs of a bottle of rum and follow this with a barfy pull from a bottle of lime cordial. Meera stands behind me now, a look on her face.

  ‘What?’ I ask. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘I wanted to explain. I didn’t know how. I didn’t think you’d understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  SHE GREW UP IN the shadows cast by this house. This eyesore in the neighbourhood, this wreck of troubled lives. She grew up blocks away but within its noises and radiations. A father calling in a language of poverty for his wife to return. A mother wandering the streets and calling in that same shameful language, calling for her boys to return home. Her voice pitching wildly as if some final calamity had beset the whole neighbourhood. Her bare feet in winter. Her parka in the middle of July, her face streaming with sweat.

  ‘It’s a disgrace,’ proclaimed Antoinette, Meera’s mother, to others in the neighbourhood. ‘It’s absolutely absurd. The woman should be institutionalized. I’m not at all unsympathetic to her situation, of course. But we have standards here, do we not?’

  Antoinette was different. She came from the same land as that troubled woman, but she herself was fundamentally different, and not simply because she didn’t happen to suffer from such an unfortunate mental condition. Antoinette had come from ‘a good family’ in Trinidad, a family who was educated and comfortably middle-class for whole generations. Her parents had sent her away to school in London, where she had completed a first-class degree in economics and then an MBA. After her marriage to a Welsh sculptor, the birth of her daughter, Meera, and a relatively amicable divorce, Antoinette had been lured to Canada by the offer of a consultancy position in a dairy corporation trying to internationalize its business. She was even briefly profiled in a May 1974 issue of Maclean’s magazine devoted to ‘immigrant success stories.’ A postage stamp picture of her beside Meera, then a child of five, standing in front of their small but well appointed bungalow in Port Junction.

  The article didn’t mention the other sides to Antoinette. The many tinkling glasses of scotch and ice that she drank when returning from work in the late evenings or at night. The chronic migraines and mysterious sicknesses. The impatience and temper that might flare up at a moment’s notice, and that her daughter learned to match, both women’s voices hoarse with accusations of insensitivity. The article didn’t truly delve into what a black woman like her might have had to endure daily before earning some fleeting acknowledgment in a national magazine. Certainly, the article didn’t mention any of the truths that Antoinette had decided to keep to herself. That her coming from ‘a good family’ was stretching the truth quite a bit. Her parents had owned a hardware shop in the city, and they had sacrificed immensely for Antoinette to attend school far away. Her mother had died of a severe flu while Antoinette was in university, and soon after Antoinette’s father had retired early to spend most of his time with his son’s children.

  ‘Why an Indian name?’ Meera once asked her mother. ‘Why not something French, like your name? Or Spanish, like Jacinta…?’

  No real reason. Although, many years ago, Antoinette would accompany her father on trips to a rural village of South Asians near the island’s agricultural centre. While her father delivered wares and attempted to drum up new business, she would watch pottery being prepared and fired. She visited the clay pits just outside of the town where the slippery red earth was dug up and then kneaded by foot. She watched as the refined mass was shaped by foot-pumped wheels and baked in kilns that were hand-fed with wood and fallen fronds and coconut husks. Kilns that were difficult to control and could only be made to function properly through the skill and judgment passed on through word of mouth alone. Peasant knowledge that had endured the trip, generations ago, across the Black Water from India. She was struck, somehow, by the entire scene. One of the girls selling pot
tery was named Meera. Liquid eyes, a slip of clay on her cheek. Antoinette had promised herself to name her first daughter Meera.

  ‘Do you think I could pass for Indian?’ Meera asked. ‘People say I can pass for many things. Even, in winter, a southern Italian.’

  ‘This is the seventies, Meera. This is Canada. What you look like is completely beside the point. You have endless opportunities for wealth and happiness. Always make sure to capitalize. Always make sure to distinguish yourself.’

  Meaning, especially, to distinguish oneself from such folk as the troubled family living only a few blocks away. The family that wasn’t likely to be profiled in any magazine article on immigrant success stories. But in the eyes of many children in Port Junction, Meera seemed unable to distinguish herself. Perhaps these children hadn’t bothered to read Maclean’s, or else failed to grasp fully the significance of coming from ‘a good family’ of coloured folk. Perhaps, too, these children never developed warm feelings towards Meera’s extraordinarily good grades at school, and so Meera was often bombarded with questions both serious and mischievous. Is the wandering lady your mother? Could you tell her to stop picking the flowers in people’s gardens or peeing in our inflatable swimming pools? Is the yelling man your father or an uncle or something like that? Can you understand what he says when he speaks? And what about the boys? Are you afraid of the older one who sulks about and never meets your eyes? That dangerously fisted look in his face? What about the younger one? The little nigger or paki who’s always bursting into tears at the slightest little name or push. Are you sure you’re not related? Well, do you think he’s good-looking? Are you planning on sitting beside him during recess? Maybe holding his hand? Maybe holding his dick…?