Bivouac

  Augustus: Is alright, woman, calm yourself. Yes, boss . . .

  Ferron: I . . . my father used to live here, years ago. We own the place . . . My family, I . . .

  Augustus: Is Teacher Morgan people, Laura . . . Is the fornicating gran’son. Sexual sins missis, sexual. Jees U, I shoulda guess. Look on the nose . . . What I can do for you, sah? We stop sen’ the rent after we never get back no receipt, an’ it look like the people them dead off. You aunty . . . Which part you park the car? We never hear it at all . . .

  Ferron: I didn’t drive. Walked up the hill . . . I mean we flew.

  Augustus: Oh. I see . . . Easier. Well, about the rent . . .

  Ferron: No, not the rent. I just came to see the place. My father is dead, and I came to talk to him.

  Laura: Augustus. Who? Lawd, what a way the man favor Teacher Morgan. Voice strapping same way . . . An’ correc’. Very correc’.

  Ferron: You knew them . . .

  Laura: Everybody roun’ here know them, son. Dem teach mos’ everybody—

  Augustus: Him never come ’bout rent, Laura. Find the man a drinks, eh . . . or a mango. ’Im jus’ come to talk to the old man. You know that man could teach you anything. Listen to this. Wait, wait. First, tell me how old you think I is . . . Tell me.

  He looks like a man a hundred and fifty years old, not because he looks frail because he is not frail—his body is erect, his limbs tightly muscled, his face handsome in the purest ways that man can be handsome. But his eyes have the depth of time, as if he has lived forever.

  Ferron: Seventy-five . . .

  Augustus: Ha ha. Laura, Laura, you hear that? Bwai, put on twenty years to that, quick-quick. Alright, so hear me now. Listen me. I learn this when I was six years old.

  He opens up his chest, raises his hand, and begins. Laura watches with a mixture of pride, indulgence, and slight impatience with a show-off.

  Augustus:

  I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

  Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:

  Follow your spirit, and upon this charge

  Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

  Laura: Dyam colonizers!

  Augustus’s eyes are wet.

  Augustus: Your grandfather teach me that, and I teach your old man. I teach him all kinda things.

  Laura: Ah, that one. Won’t stop drive up an’ down, up an’ down. Singing all kinda song. A fornicator too?

  Ferron: I don’t think so. I don’t know. No one lives an exemplary life.

  Augustus: Maybe not. But why not? Man is man.

  Laura: Man is man, fi true.

  Augustus almost speaks those words for her because she takes so long to say them. They are smiling.

  The old man is laughing. Sometimes they cannot see him, but they have heard him marching up and down with his cane as a rifle to the shoulder.

  We peasants, artisans, and others,

  Enrolled among the sons of toil,

  Let’s claim the earth henceforth for brothers,

  Drive the indolent from the soil

  On our flesh too long has fed the raven

  We’ve too long been the vulture’s prey,

  But now farewell the spirit craven

  The dawn brings in a brighter day

  He has forgotten the words already . . . He chuckles. Ferron looks at him. Ferron remembers the words like a buried memory, like another language with sounds he knows, meanings he knows, but with words he cannot recognize. He sings.

  Ferron:

  Then comrades, come rally,

  And the last fight let us face,

  The internationale unites the human race,

  Then comrades, come rally,

  And the last fight let us face,

  The internationale unites the human race.

  Old man: It did not die in me with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. I prefer Mamba socialism. There somebody keeps hearing you screaming, “I told you we could do it, Yankeee!”

  Ferron: Where are they buried? My grandparents. They are buried here, somewhere . . .

  Augustus: Only the teacher. The wife buried at Dovecot in town. Teacher buried in the back, with him father and mother . . . And the pigeons been laying eggs in the rafters ever since. Nobody don’t want to touch the old hut. That thing must be over one hundred years now. Bush and piece a old cedar. But the pigeon dem like it . . .

  Ferron: Show me . . .

  Augustus: Right by the lickle patch of tree. Nobody don’t go there again so the bush grow over, you know? Over beyond thereso. That is the path. Not many people walk that way these days . . .

  The path here is thick. Down into a small valley where the earth is soft and wet and thick weeds grow and twist about the waist. Then there is the slope which you climb till your face is pimpled with sweat, and you look back and stare at the house glowing against the sea’s green and blue. Beyond the coffee bushes is a dark cave of green where, in a mound of cement, lies the past.

  Ferron: Thank you.

  It is still now.

  Old man: They said their ghosts hover above the house, my grand ones, swooping down, one wind lifting a tattered sheet’s edge—animation, now brilliant O, shifting breadfruit leaves to a rustle and watching eyes glow toward the hills.

  Ferron: Did you go to heaven?

  Old man: Have you screwed Mitzie yet?

  Ferron: There are reasons for everything.

  Old man: Slumming with the lumpen, eh?

  Ferron: I am mourning your death. We do strange things when we mourn.

  Ferron feels he is betraying something. The old man is no longer standing there. The voice is nothing all of a sudden. Ferron looks for Mitzie. She is leaning on a post in a black lace dress. She is smiling. Her body is moving slowly until, like a pneumatic drill, it begins to batter the earth. He has no money in his pocket. She asks for love instead. He tries to find it.

  Old man: You want to know where they went.

  Ferron: To heaven?

  Old man: I always wondered about that. I was worried I would never see them . . . I plan to be in heaven . . . I used to talk to them when I was a boy. Friends, you know. They seemed to crawl from the roots of the trees and stand there in white, smiling. They always had a message for me. They have a message for you, now. They are carrying the kola nut in their fists, waiting with a knife to share it . . . I played around the gray tombs . . .

  Augustus and Laura watch the two playing cricket and ramping in the bushes. Ferron starts to run through the trees, trying to remember where the paths are. The old man, feeling lazy, does not follow. Ferron is trying frantically to remember. Laura and Augustus look on.

  Laura: Him looking very strange. Where him going?

  Augustus: By the graveside. The man looking for roots . . . Even fornicators have roots.

  Laura: Sexual . . .

  Augustus: What?

  Laura: Sexual . . .

  Augustus: Yes.

  Augustus thinks that perhaps Laura has not heard the word from her brain properly. She is supposed to say, “Wish him all the best.” But the way that word has made her smile makes him think better of correcting her. Sometimes she has her own mind and it takes her to places he has never been to. He lets her go. She always comes back, smiling.

  Laura: You hearing what I hearing?

  Augustus: Going mad. Is like Teacher Morgan duppy a ride him . . . The spitting image . . .

  Laura: Call Rastaman Lewis. Mek him bring the drum . . .

  Ferron’s heart feels as if it will give way on him. The blood is rushing too quickly.

  Ferron: These overgrown paths where, fired with Arthurian legends, you galloped, mad-child on a wild irreverent steed, dizzy in the patchwork of sunlight through branches.

  The child overwhelms the adult, and now Ferron is sprinting, beating hoofbeats against his chest, light blazing green on his face; grass and bramble rushing at him and cutting across his body, whipping him. He keeps running like that, in and out of light, unde
r the cry of the dizzy hawk spiraling in the simple blue sky. His shouts echo in the tree trunks.

  The Rastaman beats the drums and sings. Ferron is stopped by the sound. He looks around. The light is fading very quickly. It will soon be morning.

  Old man: They think you are oppressed by a spirit.

  Ferron: I have wanted to talk to you. That is why I came here. I hoped you would be here . . .

  Old man: They will continue to play the drums until you calm down . . .

  Ferron: I never did speak to you about them. About her. Your mother. She thought we were a nuisance . . .

  Old man: You were too young. Too young when she died . . .

  Ferron: But she came back here. At the funeral, I thought of her flying across the island all night until she reached Sturge Town and this graveside.

  Old man: She must have traveled all night . . .

  Ferron: And then you came to her, when you had traveled, and she was waiting . . .

  Old man: I praise the glorious summers of pimento . . .

  Ferron: I should see her . . .

  Old man: Over there, on the barbecue. She has been waiting a long time for this—for you to come back . . .

  On the barbecue where dry brown pimento beans roast, the ancient chair she sits in is there where a rotting orange tree leans and sheds acrid leaves. The chair is light and fading, sucked dry by sun and salt wind. See her bandannaed there, sharp calico against the hill’s gray; earth mother, her wrinkled hands outstretched, trembling; her eyes glowing. She looks nothing like the photograph. Here, her eyes are open. Ferron touches, trying to find his way back.

  Old man: She is smiling. She is happy to see you . . .

  Laura: Slow him down now. Him coming down now.

  A shot cuts across the evening. Birds, in massive flocks of black spots against the sky, rush from the bushes and call into the night. Then there is silence. On the barbecue there is blood. Sheets and sheets of material, simple cotton sheets, dance animated on the barbecue, trying to cover the bloodstains.

  Conductor: Browns Town. Sturge Town, St. Ann’s Bay! Ready one, Ready . . . one. Your time, driver . . .

  Praise the silent homecoming, praise the songs of the ghosts sealed in my mind’s chrysalis, praise the constant leaves spinning in the pure air, praise the hands that birthed, worn as they are, for they glow, stained red with first blood, spilled into the navel-string soil where for years the ancient red-barked trees have stood. Praise these things.

  Old man: I can’t tell you a damned thing about this space. Can’t tell you a thing about this crazy house on the hill. Don’t fall back. I may not be behind you. What did I say to Femi? Trump card. I keep that hidden; you will keep asking of me. Dead people have pride too. It’s all like magic.

  He says this with that twinkling eye and that laugh. As if the death, the whole morbid incident, was a grand scheme for attention.

  Old man: I like Mitzie, though. Well, Delores gone to Miami. Everybody have their reasons. Five years ago is pure capitalist run to Miami, now is pure lapse socialist gone to Miami. Same story, running and running and running away, but you cyaan run away from yourself . . . Anyway, her hips was just too low for the baby business, nuh so you say? You can bawl now, Ferron. You mess her up good. But it will pass too, like everything else.

  There is big laughter. Femi, Kamau, and Quackoo, and now the old man, emptying their stomachs of everything. Ferron is watching from the darkness, still waiting.

  It is morning.

  Burning Spear’s hypnotic bassline thumped in the back of his head. The green sunlight, filtered through the clutter of leaves around his window, woke him. He stood on the porch and looked out to the village that spread beneath him, and then to the island, and then the sea, a flat glassy surface stretching to the line of the sky’s beginning. Somewhere to his right, on a clear hill, stood the white chapel with its crucifix piercing the blue sky. The bell sounded, calling the believers to service.

  Alone on the hill, Ferron could feel the gathering of everything he thought he understood about living and dying, and as he studied these things, he found that he had nothing to speak of. So he slept through the ritual of days, riding the enchantment of a reggae man, playing the steady predictability of sound with uncanny success—every sound was a way to move, to breathe, to walk. For Ferron, this was the stability he wanted to understand. Something simple, something void of the complexities of meaning. He watched the island from the porch as morning turned hot and relentless in the sky.

  AFTERWORD

  Driving along the smooth belly of the coastal roads, the voices of Caribbean poets danced through the car, intoning a landscape and a way with words that seemed so ancient, that seemed to be of another time, and yet so ageless and true. He thought of the poems and books he had written—this he who is an I, but who must create a he to allow the fiction to generate its own chaos of meaning. And these poems, these poems carried with them the complex laboring of poets who tried to make words soar, soar into the heavens. It was a bad recording, cracking, muffled, but the words of the dead came back to him, came back with nostalgia and this story of a history and a place. These were the voices of those who had come to pay tribute to a dead writer, and now, fifteen years later, so many of them were dead:

  . . . We are burying our brains,

  our Rhodes Scholars, our people of letters,

  and the tenured, nailed-down intellectuals;

  but we fear the village is emptying

  quickly, and the children, untethered, have

  abandoned the kraal. They leave the frames

  of the houses to sway in the dust,

  and the words that remain in the trees

  grow jaundiced with overuse.

  The way the words transport him from this long black road lined by groves of high-smelling wisteria, and the dense green of swamp bush, where among the clutter of trees, warm, ticking, police patrol cars lie in wait for some dreaming soul, feet too heavy on the pedal, trying to fly when flying is the only logical thing to do—the way the words carry him to another place is the way stories begin.

  At home, still unsteady from the dream of the ride, still trying to piece together a true history of the time so long ago that myths have taken root and it is hard to tell the truth from the story that has made the truth palatable—the story that seems so much better—he is startled by the recollection of things that were hidden away, by the presence of voices he had forgotten were there in that theater giving tribute to the dead writer. In this place of remembering there is a spark of a story taking shape. And with the children gathered around, he sticks the cassette into the tape deck and lets it run.

  On a tape, never before heard, is a muffled recording, a BBC recording of over thirty years ago, a time after Fidel was triumphant and Nkrumah had declared the dream of a United States of Africa, a time when he was a seed taking shape in his mother’s belly, this voice comes back over time, and the children stop somersaulting and shout: “That’s Daddy, that’s Daddy!” And indeed, the voice, with all the inflections, all the smooth and slight tenor of its tone, is his voice; it could be no one else but his voice. He embraces the children and tells them that it is their grandfather. They do not understand. He does not try to explain, for he, too, startled by the familiar in the voice, plays it back again and again. There are no discernible words, just this wash of a voice carrying over time.

  From this far, all memory must take shape in fiction. From this far, even the sacred becomes the fodder for myth. From this far, the voice repeated becomes a ritual of making things again and again. There is a great fiction in this story that is told that must be so. From a backward glance comes a way of placing the contradictions of our life into perspective, only to shatter them again. But this is the way of the world.

  * * *

  In the house next door, a woman stands mute and dumb; the gallons of whiskey cannot blunt the pain. A man lies passed out on the sofa in a suit. Two girls lie in bed weeping. Their brother, wh
o was in age between them, walked into a truck and died. Everything he was is gone, and the house next door is dead; the simple wreath tells us to tremble as we pass. The woman steps out with a cigarette in her mouth, her eyes are red, her hair is disheveled. The child was not her own, but the child was the child of her lover, the child was her child. He hated her, but he came into her arms and wept when he felt pain. Now she stands mute, staring into the vacant parking lot. This death sweeps the apartment complex, and nothing moves, nothing moves.

  He has lived to make words unfold like this, lived to leave a legacy of errors, of lies, of myths, of dreams. The ending of the book is inevitable in this world of the dead. In many ways, this story comes back because of remembrance, but in others, it comes back because of fear of what might have been.

  The tape keeps playing over and over into the small hours of the night. His wife calls him up to check one of the children. He wakes in another place. Then he falls asleep again, staring at the green light of the tape deck, rising and falling, tracing the cadence of his voice, a clue, a gene track going so far back, so far back.

  KWAME DAWES’s debut novel She’s Gone (Akashic) was the winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (Debut Fiction). He is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. In 2016, his book Speak from Here to There, a cowritten collection of verse with Australian poet John Kinsella, was released along with When the Rewards Can Be So Great: Essays on Writing and the Writing Life, which Dawes edited. His most recent collection, City of Bones: A Testament, was published in 2017. His awards include the Forward Poetry Prize, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Silver Medal, several Pushcart Prizes, the Barnes & Nobles Writers for Writers Award, and an Emmy Award. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and is Chancellor Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Dawes serves as the associate poetry editor for Peepal Tree Press and is director of the African Poetry Book Fund. He is series editor of the African Poetry Book Series—the latest of which is New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Sita)—and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2018 was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Photograph by Andre Lambertson