Shado beni for consumption.
Kooze maho for stomach ache.
Verveine for boils.
Mami apple for head lice.
The old woman had long memories and the proper names for things. She knew the meaning of Chaguaramas itself. Named after the palms that used to line its beaches. Named by a people who had been scattered by exploding weapons, by sicknesses that burst in pustules upon their skin. They were dispersed, these people, but their voice still haunted the place. Chaguaramas. The old woman knew the meanings of other names too. Carenage, for instance. Named after the Spanish ships which anchored there long ago to be careened. Cleaned of barnacles and made sleek and efficient again after the trips from Africa.
‘What were they carrying?’ Adele once asked.
‘Ghosts,’ the old woman answered, a smile of exactly five white teeth.
Most of all, the old woman could heal, a skill she had inherited from a long line of knowledgeable women. In Carenage, she found a regular patient, a man named Irvine who trusted her magic, and who always arrived at her door with cuts all over him, this one here splitting his left nipple. A knife-fight, he announced to the old woman, though she knew like everyone else that he’d accidentally hooked himself again. He had worked his whole life as a fisherman in Carenage, but he simply wasn’t meant to be one. The sea water assaulted his arms and legs with boils, and the sun leeched the sight from his eyes. As the old woman applied a poultice of herbs, Irvine described some of his catches. Parrot fish and grunts. Wahoo and dolphin fish. Blue doctor fish.…
‘So much living flesh in the sea,’ he used to say.
‘And endless floors of bone,’ she answered.
IRVINE HAD A daughter named Joy, a girl of flawless skin and almond eyes and something else, something free and beautiful in the way she walked or gestured when speaking. There was an eternal restlessness within her, a restlessness that Adele, her friend, recognized too. At twelve, Joy told Adele that she felt too big for Carenage. Joy swore that they would somehow get away and never come back to this fish-stinking place. Irvine sensed the dissatisfaction of his daughter and tried to appease her by making long treks to the city for the small things he could afford. A cheap but new pair of shoes, a faded dress of raw silk.
It wasn’t enough and Joy became impatient. She told Adele that she was leaving, and she disappeared one night. Irvine was worried sick. Days later, Joy returned, but she seemed changed, unusually shy and irritable. Then Irvine noticed the rust of old blood on her dress. He found his cutlass and ran out of the village. To do what? To run west and attack a city full of rich and light-skinned men? To run east and attack a military base full of white soldiers? And for what? For whose honour, anyway? There were no answers to these questions. He never returned.
Adele ran too, but for the old woman.
Stinking Suzy for toothache.
Ditay payee as eyewash.
Mapurite for private diseases.
And Zwill Root for bringing on a stubborn monthly blood. A foul and heavy syrup that immediately brought on cramps and did the work the girl wanted.
The old woman of the village could do so much. She could treat consumption. She could start and stop bleeding. She could patch a wound with spider webs. She knew so many things. But she had limits. She couldn’t do much against the ancient moods of terror and sorrow. And she couldn’t do all things, really, against the specters of history.
ADELE IS NOT supposed to notice. She’s not supposed to ask questions when her mother returns home in the dark of morning. She’s not supposed to wonder about the smells that linger on her mother’s dresses. Aftershave or sweat, sometimes that most curious smell of the soldiers, something like dampened chicken. Adele never draws attention to bruises that appear upon her mother after certain nights, dark blossoms upon her neck or upper arms or between her thighs. And Adele never breaks the rules when, in unusual cases, the soldiers return with her mother. Adele always lies as if asleep on her cot, her back to the sounds coming from her mother’s bed. Hurt sounds in the throat. Creatures who enter in the night and ravage the flesh.…
‘… LA DIABLESSE, the lady with a cow foot and the face of a corpse. The Douens who is children that die before they get baptize. They feet twisted backwards, afterbirth streaming over they bodies.…’
‘Are you still listening to me, Mother? I’m not talking about superstitions. I’m leaving you now, but I’m telling you what I know, what you accidentally told me…’
‘… and that’s why, child. Why you must always speak the proper rites. Why nothing dead can lie still without the proper rites. And why you must always curl you body away from the evil at night.’
BUT ONE NIGHT, Adele looked back. There was the sound of someone entering, the smell of aftershave and chicken and a deep voice saying alright, but almost nothing else. Adele wondered at this silence and she rolled ever so quietly to look. She saw, in a shaft of moonlight, her mother straddled atop a man and looking out of the window as if lightly daydreaming. Beneath her was a man who seemed to be holding his breath, his face pink-purple and contorted in something like pain. His eyes locked suddenly on hers, and Adele saw something truly puzzling. Something she never would have imagined on a million, million faces like his. Something almost like shame.
ONE DAY, ADELE’S mother comes home in a bad way. She has made no money this night, and her dress is torn. One eye is badly blackened and the parts of her mouth either swollen or burst. It’s worse than ever before, but Adele knows not to ask. Adele sits quietly on her cot, combing the blonde hair of an American doll while her mother tries for hours to conceal her state with makeup. Her mother leaves again the next evening, but she returns home empty-handed. She can’t be bought in this condition, not with ruin so naked upon her. She tries the next night again to no avail. The neighbours in Carenage have long been disgusted by this display, by the depravity of this country woman, and by the example she is offering to her child. None will lend her any help during the lean week. No handful of rationed meat, no oil or salt, no simple meal of ground provisions.
‘I hungry, Mother,’ said Adele.
‘Hush, child,’ said her mother, smudging her eyeshadow. Her hand shaking.
‘I can’t help it. I hungry.’
‘Hush, child. Hush, hush, hush.…’
By the end of the week, they are living on diluted doses of sugar water and bananas so green with tongue cleaving tackiness that they immediately bloat their stomachs and send them running to the latrine. Adele’s mother begins living outside of herself. She starts wearing her best dress inside the house, an old chiffon bridal gown that she bought in the city, her costume for work. She obsesses over her bruises in the mirror, chanting obscenities, softly naming invisible beings and events. She plucks her eyebrows until there is nothing left. She attacks her greased hair with an overheated hot comb. The sizzling unfelt, the stench of burning hair.
‘Mother…,’ Adele calls.
‘Hush, child!’
One day, Adele comes home to find a sloughed form on the floor, her mother’s empty dress. Adele looks up and sees her mother standing naked in the galvanized tub that they use for baths, the damage in plain sight. Her mother is still holding a pair of scissors to the ragged wounds on her wrists. There is blood rivering down her arms, and she is just about to sit down into her warm coffin when she notices her daughter. There is a moment of indecision, a moment of glassy stillness, when neither seems to know what to do or feel. Then the clatter of metal on the floor and that naked figure calling out. Calling Adele. Some sweetness, some hopeless longing in voicing that name.
Later, Adele visits the old woman to borrow wheat flour and oil and sugar, explaining that this is the last time that she’ll do so, the very last time. The old woman stifles a bitter laugh until she sees the girl’s eyes, and then adds a coconut to all Adele has requested as well as ingredients for tea. At home, Adele and her mother break the coconut and knead the ingredients into a bake. They fix the cocoa tea
. They eat silently in front of a candle, flickering shadows about them.
‘It was an accident,’ Adele’s mother explains.
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Accidents happen.’
‘I know, Mother.’
SOMETIMES, THROUGHOUT the island, air sirens would wail. Lights would have to be extinguished and blinds drawn. Late one evening, Adele is caught alone on the road leading to the village, a jug of milk balanced neatly on her head. She is travelling from the dairies for her mother, and in typical fashion she has wandered dreamily before realizing how late it has become. There is the noise of an engine behind her and two soldiers in a jeep yell at her to get off the road and jump into the gutter and put her hands over her head in case a bomb falls. Adele does as she is told, listening to the sirens and peeking up occasionally at the soldiers who aim their rifles up into an indigo sky cut many times with searchlights. There’s no plane. There never is. Adele wonders what good a rifle would do if there ever was a plane. When the alarm subsides, one of the soldiers helps her settle the jug of milk back on her head.
‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘You’re safe now.’
The soldier looks again and his eyes lock suddenly on hers. The expression on his face changes into something vague. The soldier searches his pockets while glancing a couple of times at Adele, quick flicks of his eyes. He shakes out a cigarette from a package and lights it. He draws the smoke in heavily, closes the lid on his lighter, and then, noticing the gaze of the girl on this metal object, passes it to her.
‘What do you say?’ calls the other soldier, already in the jeep.
The first soldier takes another drag of his cigarette and cups his hand over Adele’s, showing the girl how to hold it and click. Here, try again. Click. Click. She can’t make it work. She hands it back and he smiles and then, searching his pockets again, removes something and presses it into her hand, a folded piece of paper. When Adele unfolds it, she sees that it’s an American dollar bill.
‘Hey nigger-girl!’ shouts the other soldier, impatient at the delay. ‘The Okie’s talking to you. What the hell do you say to a white man? ’
ONLY FIVE DAYS later, during the evening when her mother is out at work, Adele answers a rapping on the doorway of her home and is shocked to see the soldier they call the Okie again. He carries a box. Down the street, a small group of astonished neighbours crane their necks but keep to a respectful distance. The soldier smiles.
‘Remember me?’ he says.
She stares and doesn’t reply. Both seem unsure of what to do next, but he lightly taps the box and leaves it with her. She watches him walk down the muddy street and she hears the sound of a jeep starting, though she can’t see the vehicle. She notices the neighbours staring, and she pulls the canvas sheet over the door and sits on her bed to see what he has given her.
Treasures from afar. Five more dollars tightly rolled and secured with a muddy elastic band. A package of chewing gum. A thin bar of milk chocolate. A postcard from some part of America showing deep green pines and a lake that looks to any sensible eyes like a sea. Lake Superior, the postcard says. There are also three pictures she recognizes instantly: Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich. Most startling of all, an apple. It’s wrinkled and bruised, but an apple nevertheless. Adele stares at the fruit for close to an hour, touching the wrinkles, smelling its skin, even carefully licking the moist bruises. Then, when she can’t wait any longer, she cuts it in eighths and eats it down to the core. It is chalky and turned, she later realizes, but she understands it then as the most precious fruit in the world. A promise that something else is possible.
She is crushing the bitter seeds between her teeth when she hears the sounds of her mother approaching. She hears the occasional clop of her shoes on stone, but also the voice of a neighbour.
‘We seeing it all now,’ he says. ‘You training her good, yes, you old whore? You teaching her all you tricks with the soldiers.…’
Adele’s mother bursts through the canvas door and sees the neat arrangements of gifts on the floor. She asks where they came from and without waiting for a reply she turns upon Adele, pinching her arm tightly and shaking her violently. You are never to talk to them, her mother screams, her eyes wide and awful. You are never, ever, to talk with those people or accept anything they offer you.
‘Why?’ yells Adele.
‘Because I am your mother! Because I tell you so.’
The shaking and pinching grows worse, and Adele fights to free herself. Their struggle becomes so wild that together they tip over the pot that had been sitting on the table for breakfast. The thin porridge spills out upon the floor and Adele’s mother immediately kneels to shovel back in what she can. Look what you’ve done, she hisses. Look what you’ve done to us. Her horrid chiffon gown rides up her thighs, and Adele notices her torn underwear and the evil wink of her private parts wired with hair. Adele understands it then. This is what her mother wants for them. To eat rubbish off the floor, to crawl about like animals. To suffer even worse than animals.
‘You disgusting,’ she tells her. ‘You a whore.’
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that,’ her mother answers. ‘I is your mother and you don’t never speak to me like that.’
‘You not my mother. You horror. All horror!’
Saying this, Adele feels something scorching wash over her, staggering in its power. But something else too, a chill that begins in her stomach and rises upward. Her mother has stopped shoveling the wasted food from the floor but she is still kneeling, her face down and her shoulders moving as if sobbing. Then, an unexpected sound rises from her. It begins low before rising in volume and pitch until her mother screams it out like laughter. A sound that chases Adele as she flees the house and runs through the streets of Carenage. Then farther still, outside the village, along a path so old that none could remember its origins.…
‘AN OUT-OF-THE-WAY path, she ankles painted cool by the wet grasses. A mango knotting the sky with its branches. It fallen fruit upon the ground. The slick and blackened peels. The drone of drunken insects.…’
‘Mother…?’
‘… a brilliance passing overhead and a silence like glass. I see it then, the creature. It using water in a rusted oil drum as mirror. It putting on she skin, syrup sounds and soft elastic snaps. Gloving on she fingers when it roll she eyes.…’
‘Mother! How can I tell the story if you don’t listen to me?’
She snapped back to the room. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of burned cotton. She quickly put the iron back on the stand.
‘You said you going, boy?’ she asked casually, distracted by the wedge-shape burn on the shirt. ‘Where you going?’
‘WHERE ARE YOU going?’ the Okie asks. The war was drawing to a close and the security regulations had been relaxed. Still, a coloured girl getting through the base’s checkpoint was unusual. The Okie had been polishing his boots in front of his tent when he looked up and called over to the girl who had been leaning against one of the tent-poles across the road, her hands curled under her chin, an unreadable expression on her face. She lifted her head and walked over. Stared for a while at the sight of a white man polishing his own boots. Around her, other soldiers had started to cluster.
‘Looks like you’ve made a friend,’ says one, smiling.
‘Maybe more than a friend,’ says another, laughing.
‘Where’s your mother?’ the Okie asks, ignoring the others.
‘I run away,’ Adele says, but nothing more.
The Okie asks the others to shut up, but they don’t listen. He checks his shirt pocket, shakes out a cigarette and lights it. He blows a plume and hands the girl the lighter once again. She just holds it in her hand, looking up at the faces around her. The whirl of attention. Who is she to have such attention?
‘What is she? Five, Okie? Shouldn’t you wait until ten?’
‘I told you to shut up.’
And then Adele notices it. Her mother’s chiffon gown
, the image that she had fled since dawn. It has cornered her here. A garment without a body, animated through terrible magics. The jerked and slouching movements as if borne on damaged feet. The emptiness where a head and face should be.
‘What’s bloody wrong with the guards, today,’ shouts a soldier. ‘Who the hell is that?’
‘Nobody,’ answers another. ‘The girl’s mother. Some whore from Carenage.’
The dress spots Adele and flies toward her as if borne upon storm-winds. A hand appears from the sleeve, and it holds her with a grip that no human could ever match. Adele is dragged like a doll toward the gates of the base, back toward the village and the life that awaits her there, and all about is laughter at this spectacle. Finally, the pulling stops. The dress wheels to face the soldiers, and a voice comes forth like a mother’s. It shouts and lays accusations against all those milling about to take in the sport. It calls men by name and shames them and charges them with stupidity and cruelty. It shouts out their unfaithfulness, the helplessness of their bodies, the lies of their manhood. There is a shift in the laughter around her, an uneasiness growing into malice.
‘You lies,’ she screams. ‘You lives of comforting lies.…’
A smash of oil and filth in Adele’s nostrils. She gasps and staggers with the violence of the attack, and turns just quickly enough to see a soldier moving away with the empty wash bucket. Giggling like an idiot. The water filled with oil and tar and solvents entirely soaks her mother, the intended target, but some of it has splashed upon Adele too, clogging her nose and soaking the back of her neck, her head. It stinks so much she retches. Gasoline vapours. It will never come out, Adele knows instantly. They will forever stink of something shat from the bowels of the earth and cooked in hell. They will never be clean again.
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