Bivouac

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  They are all alive, all walking around in their own triumphant ways. They are comfortable. They are happy. Rupert, the hypocrite, has relished the opportunity to do me another favor by giving me this job when I had nothing else. So he continues to be painfully pitying—it is as if nothing has changed, and I am still that scholarship country boy from St. Ann, trying to be part of it all. And look at me. Well, there were no guns. There was no crisis. There was no fire burning down Kingston. We thought we had made the change, but we failed. Maybe it is my turn now to be gunned down. Me, the man in the middle, the man who can’t seem to take a side, really. The man torn between the working class of my father and the middle class of my aspirations. Jesus. I need to get out of here . . .

  TWENTY-THREE

  Femi left the country a month later. They saw him off at the airport. Theresa cried a lot while they waved to him from the gallery. Afterward, they drove to Port Royal and she treated him to fish and festival. They walked along the black sand beach mostly in silence. He told her about Mitzie, about how he had been back to find her several days after they came off the hill. She had moved. It was difficult to believe that she had disappeared from his life so completely. It unnerved him, disturbed him. Theresa listened and reached to hold his hand. He let her hold his hand, as they continued to walk in silence.

  Femi had done what he wanted to do. It was now properly in the psyche of the country that Old Man Ferron died under mysterious circumstances. Femi’s book on the old man would be out in a year, and that would settle the issue once and for all. It all meant less and less to Ferron. The emptiness was far too complete.

  His mother had written him asking why he did not go to see her. She said she felt the same emptiness, that even though the old man was no great husband, he was all she had, he was what she lived for. Now he was gone and there were the children, but they did not need her. She said she did not want to be a burden. Ferron read, saddened by his failure to be with her, to depend on her; saddened that he had to lie to her about Theresa. He had written her and told her of how much he missed the old man too.

  Just under the shadow of the walls of Nelson’s fortress, Theresa said she needed some distraction. She pulled Ferron to her and they began to kiss. Then she stopped, and asked how Delores was.

  Delores was now in Miami. Delores had called to tell him she was going—she was migrating. She had said, “There is nothing for me in Jamaica.” Her tone was brusque, a tone she put on when she’d worked every detail out and did not want anyone to try to change her mind. He’d asked what she would do in America. She was going to go to school, and then she was going to work with her father’s brother who had a small business there that was growing. She did not plan to stay long in Miami. As soon as she had made enough money, she would move to somewhere like Oregon or North Dakota—somewhere as far from Jamaica and Jamaicans as she could manage. And she would be fine. Very fine, she said. He was tempted to make a joke about her proving to be a classic middle-class brown woman, but had thought better of it. She was not leaving for those reasons, not for social status, not for money. She was leaving, he knew, because she could not push from her mind the image of that man raping her. She was leaving because Ferron, her fiancé, had not protected her, was not willing to die for her; because the only person she’d expected to think of her as whole, after what had happened, could not bring himself to do so. She was leaving because she feared being raped again, and because everyone seemed to think she should get over it, that in Jamaica you just had to deal with that kind of thing.

  He’d said, “Sorry, Delores.”

  “For what?” she’d asked. There was a hint of tenderness in her voice, which made him continue.

  “For everything—for hurting you, for not being able to help you, for abandoning . . .”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. Shit happens.” She’d asked him about his woman. He told her that Mitzie had disappeared. She said, “Poor Ferron, everybody leaving you. Eh?”

  For days he kept changing his mind about whether she was being sarcastic or sincere. In the end he realized it was both. He asked if she wanted him to come to airport.

  She said, “If you have to ask . . .” and left it at that.

  He did not go to the airport. Another of his failings.

  He did not tell Theresa all this. He just said that Delores had left the island and things were done with them. Theresa said, “Hush, baby,” and this was pure pity, which made him uncomfortable, because it was clear that she saw him as a victim of failed affection, like her. Two pathetic people losing the ones they cared about. He could not explain that what Femi was doing to her was nothing like his mess, but that would have been pointless. She squeezed his hand in solidarity and pulled him along.

  * * *

  They got back to his apartment at midnight. She asked if she could pick him up in the morning to go to the country. She explained that she wanted nothing meaningful from their relationship, just the company. She had taken a few days off work to recover from Femi’s departure. He said he would be waiting. But as he spoke he knew he would already have left town to go up to the old family house in St. Ann before she arrived next morning. He would be somewhere else, trying to find something that he still did not know quite how to define.

  * * *

  It was still dark when he walked across the dew-sodden lawn to the bus stop. Theresa would cry, but she would be alright.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  For the time being, I suppose I should stay here. The money is horrible, but anything is better than walking home with nothing. I get to carry my briefcase. I leave in the mornings as if off on a mission—off to work. The neighbors see me in my bush jacket leaving early, and see me return in the evenings. There is dignity in this. When they run into me, I can say, “I am at the Gleaner,” so it seems as if I am alive, as if I am bouncing back, as if nothing has happened. But a lot has happened. It is a lie. I have nothing. I have no money. I am depending on my wife to look after us, to pay the rent, to hold it together. I am waiting every day for word from somewhere saying that I can be useful, I can have some dignity. I wish I had the gumption to do myself in. I wouldn’t know where to start, really. But this is what a suicidal man’s life looks like. Not hopeless. It is never hopeless in and of itself. It is just the fall. The distance of the fall that declares the hopelessness. I can’t stay here, though. It is killing everything in me. The absurdity of what we are doing. The idiocy of trying to pretend. The letter came from the high school in Mandeville. They want me there. So I will go. At least there I will be useful, will relish what I am doing. There I can construct new fictions for myself. There I will not have to face the dark house every evening, the despair of counting pennies, the weight of my uselessness, their eyes staring at me with pity.

  * * *

  Sometimes I think it is better to avoid certain thoughts. I have been avoiding love. I can’t write about love here. I am so intent on my vitriol that to speak of love would break me. This morning I wept in the cab coming in. Much of this seems pathetic, and I fear I will start weeping as I write this. One of those women will notice, and the whispering will start. But I will take that job, so why should I care now? Perhaps I should weep. Perhaps I should create an episode of scandalous insanity. Like that poet—such a good poet—who took to walking through the lanes of uptown stark naked for a week. He never made the papers. His family, you see, and there is that power here still—the power of family and connections. But his was such a grand gesture. I should attempt it. But all I am doing is distracting myself from speaking of love. I wept because I looked back this morning, to see my wife standing there watching me drive out. I watched her turn to the hibiscus hedge and finger one of the flowers. That simple gesture of tenderness broke me. No matter what I do now, I can only feel gratitude to her. I have left her with nothing. I have taken her from her rooting, from those people who could care for her and
lift her up, and brought her to this. Now she sits there in front of me, while I crack the shell of a soft-boiled egg, and she tells me with gentle pragmatism that they are wicked, all of them, all the hypocrites who have called me their friends, and she tells me that I should go and teach in that high school, and she reminds me that I started teaching in high school and I loved it, and she reminds me that I am a brilliant teacher, and she reminds me that she has taken so much from me, the drinking, the smashed cars, the fights, the women, and she has still loved me. And there she is, standing by the hedge, fingering the petals of the hibiscus. For the last year, she has moved around like a woman in mourning. I did not realize this at once. In fact, I only realized it a few months ago. She has been mourning me. She speaks to me as if I am already dead. It is with awe, but with a curious sense of resignation—a sense that nothing really has to change. And when she is not watching me, I see the way she moves, the slow deliberate walk, the self-sufficiency in her handling of matters, the respect shown to me, never arguing, but a kind of adoration, even, and I know that she is mourning me—that I am dead. I wish I could say that it makes me sad, or makes me feel awful. It doesn’t. In some strange way, it makes me feel deeply loved. Of course, this makes sense. She does love me. She has loved me despite my waywardness. But this morning, I was covered with such sorrow about that. About how pathetic we now are. She is watching her husband pretend to be employed, leaving in a taxi we can barely pay for, going off to make money that makes not even a dent in the debts we have; going off before she puts herself together to start to conduct the miracles of the day to keep us alive. I love her. She was always beautiful, that face, those sharp cheeks, that brilliant smile, those hips, those glorious hips, that blackness in her, that ennobling blackness in her.

  None of this will stay. It is sentimental. It counts for nothing, really. Two hours trying to make this something useful. I am hungry. My last meal. I should strip to my drawers and stand on my desk and howl.

  This morning I saw that white Toyota again. It swung behind the cab on Barbican Drive and stayed with us all the way down Lady Musgrave Road, down Hope Road, past Cross Roads, and then tucked into one of the law offices just up the road. I stepped out of the cab and looked directly at two of the men who were leaning on the car smoking, shades masking their eyes. I have imagined them as the bearers of my death. But that seems so pointless. Sometimes I think that Vera Chen has actually set them on me to protect me. Well, they will have no one to follow next week.

  This country suddenly feels so small. So damned small and petty.

  TWENTY-four

  It is a hot day. The sky is simply blue. Stretching. The sea beats the pebbled beach. Wind. Against the green of the hillside, the black road twists in the shape of the coast. The minivan called chariot hurtles breakneck, avoiding death, although there is death everywhere, like the rapid-fire DJ resists the collapse of words into nonsense—just sounds tumbling—by deft acrobatics of the tongue. In white flowing robes, the conductor swings with the wind from the doorway of the van, laughing.

  Conductor: We going now.

  Ferron: How far is it from here?

  Conductor: We are going, we are going . . .

  Ferron: How far, to . . . ?

  Conductor: On this red, gold, green train . . .

  Ferron: To Sturge Town . . . ?

  Conductor: On this red-a, gold . . . en-a green train . . .

  Ferron: Excuse me, sir . . .

  Conductor: Tickets . . . Tickets . . .

  Ferron: Excuse me, sir . . .

  Conductor: Sturge Town to Kingston . . . Not far . . .

  Burning Spear eats up the asphalt. The van finds its rhythm in the bass and drum, and settles on the road, low, steady, the tires soft and sticky. Handling well, the turnings are easy.

  Fern Gully is a snake’s head. It starts on the Devil’s Mountain and spews its store of sperm into the sea where the eight rivers meet. There is a prostitute there who Ferron remembers. She was twelve and he was thirteen and she frightened him with her bold eyes and her sharp bony hips. They ran and ran along the beach. He paid her five dollars, and when she was finished she straightened her black lace dress and leaned against a coconut tree trunk changing her shoes. That was yesterday, and the old man was dead and sailing to become ashes in a rented hearse. A black taxicab.

  Ferron: Yes . . . Yes . . .

  Conductor: Small up yourself, daughter . . . Press, driver . . .

  Through the car window, the smell of pimento. The old man is awake, his eyes are bright, trying to see around the corners of the hill, not able to wait for the next magical vision. The old man is so much younger, drumming out a rhythm on the steering wheel nervously.

  I have, says Ferron from under a cloud, I have walked the paths you roamed, have smelled the spice of pimento, have clasped the old hands, in your colored world, kept cool in the mountain air, and the overgrown paths. We met on the road in the bush where Femi levitated, talking to you.

  The old man smiles.

  What did you say? Ferron asks him slowly. What did you say to Femi, in the bushes there? You said something. You were speaking about me. My head was swelling.

  The car strains up the hill. Changing gears, changing gears. The old man is drumming a rhythm on the sweat-slick steering wheel. His beard is streaked with gray. There is cotton in his nose. Ferron reaches across and pulls out the cotton. There is dry blood on the cotton. Ferron throws the cotton from the window. It floats up into clouds.

  There is a path, the old man says, as the crow flies, from the house on the hill to the school. It comes out there. Used to walk that path every day, while your grandfather walked the road in his black suit and straw hat. I think sometimes he thought he was back in Warri greeting the natives with a bow. I would try and get to the school before him. There, there is Breadfruit Bend, because of the trees. There used to be more. Donkey Grove over there, Star-Apple Corner because so many city people would drive off the corner, Tamarind Arch . . .

  The old man is proud of the recollections, giving each sharp bend in the road the endearment of such names. His laughter is nervous nearing the house, the child in him drumming out the tattoo.

  Old man: And flying over France, I would imagine from up there what this old cracked house would look like from above. The rusting zinc, the pimento barbecues, the groves and groves of bush. Then the plane would be suddenly lighter. Tiny explosions of light and smoke far below us. From the sky, this house would look like paradise. It was like bombing your own home. And he is always talking.

  Ferron: You said something to him . . .

  Old man: We are doing this for history. Context. Your grandparents are buried here . . .

  Ferron: Did you want to be buried here?

  Old man: I thought about it a lot. When I was a young man in London, I did . . . Now . . .

  Ferron: I don’t know what we did with the ashes. I left them at the funeral home, I think . . . Maybe they have them still...

  Old man: Coping mechanism?

  When he smiles his small brittle teeth glint yellow in the sun.

  Ferron: How did you really die?

  Old man: The blood exploded in my brain, you saw it . . .

  Ferron: They pushed you. They did, didn’t they? That is what this is about.

  Old man: Lucas said they pushed me from the top of the stairs.

  The old man is laughing at himself.

  Old man: I think I felt something. Pushing, and I fell through as if flying.

  The trees encroach on the house. It has become green, the planks of wood for walls are gray-green in the shade. The awnings are peeling. Metal awnings as rusted as the zinc roof. The windows open wide, crucifixes in boxes. The goats graze nonchalantly. There is no one around.

  Old man: That is the house. That is the house there, broken and sun-beaten. It used to be green. Come . . .

  Ferron: We can’t, the fence is too high . . .

  Old man: Hold my hand. We will fly . . . fly . . .
<
br />   Ferron: Jesus . . . we are flying . . . How?

  Now on the porch, the two stand and stare at the line at the edge of the sea, where it spills over into nothing. On a clear day, you can see Cuba. On a clear simple blue-sky day.

  Old man: I used to play on this porch. Scratched out worlds in my tiny head. Look there. Do you see it?

  Ferron: What?

  Old man: Cuba. Cuba. When Wayne left, and Nettie and Fiona, it was me and the two old ones. They told me about Africa, and then one day he showed me Cuba. It was early, early, pink in the sky, and Cuba was there, green in the haze. It had always been there, I just did not know . . . I told this to Fidel, this story. He touched my forehead with his lips and called me comrade. His hip pocket bulged. He never pulled out his gun. He said it was too heavy. He only pulled it out to use it.

  Augustus and Laura are identical twins with the same gray-green eyes and short white hair, wispy in the wind. Their skin is cocoa-pod yellow, and they tremble their thin hands when they speak. Augustus finishes every sentence Laura speaks in his head. He has heard everything she has said this week and it is only Monday. They wince at the sunlight, watching this man try to play a game of cricket without bat and ball on the overgrown front lawn. The son is playing too.

  Augustus: What you want here, sah? I can help you? Who you is?

  Ferron: Sorry, I . . .

  Laura: Is who out there, Augustus? The man on the porch, is who?

  In the light you can see the distracted stare of Laura. She sees things in thick woolly shapes now. There is light green, orange, yellow, but all in thick woolly shapes. She discovers pictures by the pattern of words.