“Blood?”
“Jesus Christ!”
“It’s blood, all right.”
The five women thought of their children, daughters and sons. The five women thought of their husbands. And one by one, but together in their fear and in their horror at the spectacle and what they knew the spectacle could mean, they went back over all those times, when their own children had been left with uncles and brothers-in-law, with close friends of their families, with their own husbands, fathers of their children, and they dared not travel back with too much memory and clarity and honesty. It was blood on her leg.
No one wanted to ask the question.
They knew the answer without having to pose the questions even to themselves. They knew it could be one thing only. One cause. One kind of violence. It was the violence they knew. That they had lived with from birth. Pain and blood. Blood and pain, in a combination of joy, of sorrow, of natural function, and, for those blessed with fertility, the pain and blood of giving birth.
“Why does it always have to be so?” said the woman whose daughter had been handcuffed. “Why does it have to be so, all the time?”
Her eyes were filled with tears. And she made no effort to hide her disconsolation. She was now holding the child’s body, in her arms, and was rocking back and forth, her tears falling into the blonde hair of the child, who was now sobbing, and who had in all this time, not spoken a word. “Why is it always this way with women? And for women?”
“Call the police.”
“Who have the number for the police? I never had to call the police before.”
“Call any number. Call all the numbers. One must be the police. Call 767!”
“That is SOS on the telephone dial.”
“So call it, nuh! The police bound to come . . .”
WHEN HE WAS
FREE AND YOUNG
AND HE USED
TO WEAR SILKS
In the lavishness of the soft lights, indications of detouring life that took out of his mind the concentration of things left to do still, as a man, before he could be an artist, lights that put into his mind instead a certain crawling intention which the fingers of his brain stretched towards one always single table embraced by a man and a wife who looked like his woman, her loyalty bending over the number of beers he poured against the side of her glass he had forgotten to count, in those struggling days when the atmosphere was soft and silk and just as treacherous, in those days in the Pilot Tavern the spring and the summer and the fall were mixed into one chattering ambition of wanting to have meaning, a better object of meaning and of craving, better meaning than a beer bought on the credit of friendships and love by the tense young oppressed men and women who said they were oppressed and tense because they were artists and not because they were incapable, or burdened by the harsh sociology of no talent, segregated around smooth black square tables from the rest of the walking men and walking women outside the light of our Pilot of the Snows; and had not opened or shut their minds to the meaning of their other lives; legs of artless girls touching this man’s in a hide-and-seek under the colour-blind tables burdened by conversation and aspirations and promises of cheques and hopes and bedding and beer and bottles; in those days when he first saw her, and the only conversation she could invent was “Haii!” because she was put on a pedestal by husbandry, and would beg his pardon without disclosing her eyes of red and shots and blots and bloodshot liquor; the success of his mind and the woman’s mind in his legs burnt like the parts of the chicken he ate, he was free and young and he was wearing the silks of indecision and near-failure. But he mustn’t forget the curry: for the curry was invented by people and blessings, Indians, or perhaps they were the intractable Chinese; the curry was the saviour of his mind and indigestion just as the woman guarded for no reason in the safe soft velvet of her unbelieving husband’s love, guarding her in her turn as they sat opposite each other in the different callings of paint and metals and skin and negatives and thirst during all those dark days in the Pilot; the curry was the saviour of a madness which erupted in his mouth with the aftertaste of the bought beer and the swirling bowels after the beer and after the curry; she was like the lavishness in the light except that the colour surrounding her in the darkened room hid everything, every thought in his mind, just as the wholesome curry in the parts of chicken hid the unwholesome social class which it could not always distinguish from the bones any suitable dog in shaggy-haired and shaggy-sexed Rosedale would eat, and if the dog in Rosedale and the dog in him did eat them, the dog might make them, like this woman sitting with her drinking man, into an exotic meal packaged through some sense of beer and the sense of time and place, and looking at it in one imaginative sense, turn it into something called soul food: now, there are many commercial and irrelevant soul food kitchens these days in nighttime Toronto, and any man could, if he had no soul and silks on the body of his thoughts, if his soul were occupied and imprisoned only with thoughts of her sitting there badly in the wrong light of skin, he could make a fortune of thoughts and sell them like dog meat and badly licensed food to all the becauseful people who wore jeans and heavy-weave expensive sweaters walking time into eternity in dirty clothes and rags because they were the “beautiful people,” as someone called their ugliness, like her of soon-time piloted to a tavern, married to a man who did not deserve the understanding of her; these the becauseful people, people who didn’t have to do this because they didn’t want to think about that, because they were people living in the brighter light of the soft darkness which they all liked because they were artists and people; the becauseful people like her liked her and likened her to a white horse, not because of the length of her legs or the grey in her mind, but because in the lavishness of the wholesome light of the Pilot she looked as secure and was silent as the fingers of the tumbling avoirdupois of the man who made mud pies in the piles of quarters and dollars, mixmasterminding them in the cash register. It is so dark sometimes in the Pilot that if you wear dark glasses, which all the artists wore on their minds, you may stumble up the single step beside the fat man sitting on a humptydumpling stool and where she always sat on her pedestal of distance and protection chastised in pickled beer, and you may not know whether it is afternoon on Yonge Street outside, for time now has no boundaries, only the dimensions of her breasts which her husband keeps in the palm of his flickering eyeballs; it is so dark in the early afternoon that with your dark glasses on, you might be in Boston walking the climb in the street climbing like a hill to where the black and coloured people live; or you might be here in Toronto walking where the coloured people and the kneegrows say they “live” but where they squat, here where E.P. Taylor says he does not live but where his influence strangles some resident life and breeds racehorses of the people, where Garfield Weston lives in a mad biscuit-box crumbling in broken crackers; in the lavishness of the night thrown from your dark glasses, you might stumble upon a pair of legs and not know the colour of time, or what shape it is, or where you are, or who you are: he thinks he should haul his arse out of this bar of madness and mad dreams, drinking himself into an erection stiff to the touch of ghosts in her legs and the legs of the tables. He had seen her, “this young tall thing,” walking to the bar through winter in boots and rain in blue jeans and sandals, insisting without words in the fierce determination of her poverty and dedication to nothing she could prove or do that this was her personal Calvary to the cross of being Canada’s best poetic photographer, unknown in the meaning of her life beyond the tavern, unknown like the word she would use, “budgerigar,” having years ago thrown out Layton, Cohen, Birney, and Purdy in the dishwater of her weather-beaten browbeaten body and heavy sweaters; he could see her mostly among women stuck to their chairs by the chewing-gum beer, free women freed by their men for an afternoon while art imprisoned the men with beer, wallpaper along the talking walls like flowers, their own flower long faded into the dust of the artificial potato chips they all ate in the nitty of their gloom because it w
as like grit for their reality, their “dinner” an unknown reality like her word, “budgerigar,” in the despised bourgeois vocabulary and apartment-lairs of their lives; and in this garden of grass growing in their beds he had handpicked her out five years ago, this one wallflowering woman who wore large hats in the summerstreet, and cream sweaters in winter. She always sat beside the man who sat as if he was her husband; tall in her thighs with the walk of a man, this white horse-woman with the body of a bull; and the eye of her disposition through the bottom of the beer bottle warned him that “the gentlest touch of his desire might be fatal to the harmony” of the two ordered beers which they drank like Siamese twins in the double bed of their marriage. He, the watchman-man, was harnessed by island upbringing and fear in the lavishness of the dim light, ravishing her ravishing beauty with his eyes they could not see, eyes they saw only once and spoke to once when they saw him entering or leaving; for five years. For five years of not knowing whether the sun would sink in the space between her breasts, or whether butter ever dried in the warmth of that melting space, he watched her like a timekeeper. Once he saw her leaving her husband’s side and he followed her spinster’s canter all the way in his mind down the railing guard of parallel eyes honouring her backside sitting on the spinning stools where the working class reigned and into the bathroom, past two washbasins and the machine that saved pregnancies and populations with a quarter, on to the toilet bowl, under the dress she had plucked with her hand and had pulled up her dress and did not soil her seat or sit on it because it was in the Pilot, and he smiled when she reappeared with fresh garlic on her lipstick mouth; and he looked at the edges of her powder, and he looked into the lascivious dimness and saw her and smiled and she smiled but the smile belonged to the mud-piling man at the cash register or to another table where they were talking about the Isaacs Gallery and the Artists’ Jazz Bann where Dennis Burton’s garter belts were exhibited in stiff canvas and wore houndstooth suits and the thick heavy honey of colours and materials thicker than words. He had walked around her life in circles and bottle rings of desire and of lust and she was always there, the centre of dreams frizzled on a pillow soaked with the tears of drinking; he followed her like a detective in the wishes of his dreams, and from his inspection of a future together got a headache over them and over her, and over the meanings of these dreams. Mickey and Cosmospilitane and other dream books did not ease the riders of the head in his pain, and nothing could unhinge his desperation from the wishful slumber of those unconscious nights of double broken vision. And then, like a cherry falling under the tree because the sun had failed it, after long thoughts and wishes of waiting, she fell into his path, and he almost crushed her. He remembered the long afternoons waiting for the indelible rings of the melting bottles to ripen, waiting for the departure of shoppers who lived above the Rosedale subway station to stop shopping in the Pickering Farms market so he could shop and not have to listen to the loud-talking friendly butcher in the fluorescent meat department, and whisper loud under the suntanned arms of the meaty housewives and commonlaw wives, “One pound of pig’s feet, chicken necks, and bones—for soup,” and hear the unfeeling son of a bitch, “Er-er! Who’s next?” behind the counter dressed like a surgeon with blood on his chest, saying, “You’re really taking care of that dog, ain’t you, sir?” Godblindyou, dog! Godblindyou, butcher! This meat is for the dog in front of you; and he remembered her now, single, on this summerstreet under the large hat, as she was five years ago under the drinking mural under the picture of hotdogs and fried eggs that some heartless hungry painter drew on the wall where she sat beneath when she was in the Pilot. He fell into the arms of her greeting like an apple to the core and he looked down into her dress and saw nothing, not even one small justification for the long unbitten imprisonment of his mouth and his ambition, thinking of the nut-seller selling his nuts next door. She was away now from the Pilot. And he did not even know her name: not for five years; he never was introduced to her name. “Hurley or Weeks . . . Weeks or Hurley . . .” Either one would do? “They are both mine, and I use either one any time,” but Weeks is her maiden time; although she was no longer a maiden, though single and with no husband for weeks and months now. There was no large gold ring on the finger of her personal self-regard, which she said ended mutually on a visit of her once-accompanying husband warming radically, like forgotten beer, into her haphazard lover; there was no bitterness in the eyes of her separation because she missed only the cooking which he would do every evening, when she said she was too tired, or couldn’t be bothered to cook, which was every evening, when he would do the cooking in her kitchen and leave her afterwards like the dishes, panting from thirst and a thorough cleaning, so her eyes said on this summer afternoon, hungry in the frying pan of their double-bed bedroom, where he kept the materials of his stockings, feet and trade, his love of meddling with medals and metals and sculpture, and where she kept a large overgrown blow-up of her brother’s success in the cowboys and movies in the West, shooting the horses over the head of the never-setting bedpost, her brother with a gun in his hand, a gun loaded at the ready to be fired at the nearest rivalry of bad men and bad women, a gun which he gave her, a gun which remained nevertheless loaded, hung-up, cocked, and frustrated and constipated from no practice or trigger-happiness; and this she talked about; she did not stay in one place, she said she was rambling, not along the streets, because she did not like to walk, but that she was rambling and that she had to be alone in the constitutional of her thoughts, from one bar to the next bar; she admitted she might have a problem, but it was not this problem which changed her husband’s heart into a dying lover drifting apart at the semen in the widening sea of her jammed ambition: “I do not know what I want to do; I know what I don’t want to do, and that is stay married, but I don’t really know what I really want to do.” She bore her wandering in her hair, loose and landing on her broad shoulders like the rumps of two cowboy horses; and her dress was short, short enough for the eyes to roam about in and follow her over all her landscape at a canter—that’s how she was put away; she was put away as if she could be put to pasture for work and for love and for bearing responsibility: “I know I don’t want to have a child. What am I going to do with a child? I know I can have children and I know I can have a child. I want a child, but not now, because a child needs love . . . and and and I I I haven’t any left right now for . . .” He looked at her and wandered and wondered why she couldn’t give a child a chance, a chance of love, with all the pasture in her body, all her body, with all her breasts, with all her milk bottled in brassieres that had no bones stitched in them, with all her thighs that spilled over her dress hem, “A-hem!”—but perhaps she was really talking about another kind of love and another need for love, which was not the same as the need for love her lover-husband needed from her when she was a child in his arms late at night, and was crying with him in the double-minded cradle of his sculptures. Haii! Austin! He looked into her eyes and made a wish that her body under his eye would not be completely bloodless as her hands sometimes seemed five years ago when she was fresh from the basement washroom, and the snow on the women walking out of the cold corner of Yonge and Bloor in the arctic months; that her body would not reveal the theft he had in mind to put it through, the theft her husband had put it through; that she would not be like Desdemona and wax, but that she would be a queen from the entrails of Africa and Nefertiti, plucked out in olive blackness luscious to the core of her imagined seed, like the Marian from the alligator troughs of Georgia. He dreamed a long dream standing there on the street with summer before her, and he killed the colour of her body because it needed too much Eno’s before it could go down; and he wrapped her in a coffin stained in wood in blood, and made her again to look like Marian from way across the bad lands of enroped and ruptured Georgia. Haii, Austin! He was back in those good old days, good because they had no responsibility for paying the good deeds artists incurred in debts and made them bad, bad debts and artists on the
segregation of walls and memories; he was here and he was there in Georgia in the double ghost of a second, for artists were bad for debts and for business in those young days when he was free and the only silk was his ambition; he remembered her in those days, and on this summer afternoon already obliterated in the history of the past, nights in the crowded Pilot Tavern, searching the faces of the girls and women for one face that would have a meaning like Marian’s, and he could not find one head with truth written in its clenched curled black peppers of hair, one mask with the intelligent face of Nefertiti, the history of Africa from Africa, not from the store on Yonge Street, “Africa Modern,” selling blackness cheap to whites, written brazenly upon its ivory; a mask, a mask from that land not unlike Georgia; he had watched for one face like a timekeeper keeping a watch that had no end of time in it, and he had to paint the faces black, blacken them as he had blackened the red clay sculpture a woman did of him once, like an Indian in his blood, and had made it something approaching the man he wanted to be, something like the man Amiri Baraka talked about becoming in the later years of his new Muslim wisdom; he remembered the sweet-smelling Georgia woman in those soft nights when the bulbs were silk as moths among the books overhead like a heavy chastisement to be intelligent, like a too self-conscious intention; with the sherry which she drank in proper Southern quantities, like bourbon warm to the blood; and her fingers were long and pointed and expressive, impressing upon his back, once, her once-beautiful intent, as they writhed in pain with glory and some victory, after she lay like a submarine in a watery pyre of soft soapy suds, white flowers of Calgon upon her black vegetation, going and coming, he remembered her in the shiny cheap stockings proclaiming her true colour of mind and pocket and spirit and background and intention: a black student; a black woman, black and shining in that velvet of time and black skin, a black woman, black and powerful down to her black marrow; there was something in the ring of her laughter, perhaps in the gurgle of her bourbon, in the dinging of her voice when she laughed in two accents, northern and Southern, something that said she was true-and-through beautiful, and because she was black, and because she was beautiful, she was beautiful; she could withstand any ravages of history, of storms, of stories that wailed in the rope-knotted night of Georgia; she could stand on a pedestal under any tree which no village smithy in white Georgia would dare to stand up to: a man who had no burning conviction could not put his arms as high as her waist, for she had seen certain sheets of a whiteness which were wrapped around a black man’s testicles in a bestial passion play, and she had seen, in her mother’s memories, this play as it showed the germ of someone’s bed linen made into sheets that were worn as masks of superiority, testing a presumption that some men would always walk on all fours like a Southern lizard. Haii, Austin! This woman standing on the summerstreet in the silk of time stopped without desire; and that woman lying in the rich water with her smell, whom he remembered best holding down her head in love, in some shame, looking into a book of tears because his words were spoken harder than the text of any African philosophy. He remembered that woman and not this woman, well: Marian, his; ploughing the fields of poverty and a commitment in her barefoot days, dress tangled amongst the tango of weeds, sticking in the crease of her strength silken from perspiration, and her dreams cloggy as the soil, and in her after-days in the northern rich-poor city, her long-fingered hands again dipping into the soil of soiled sociology Jewished out of some context, maintained backyards, maintained yardbird poverty, backward in instruction the smell of soil the soiled smell of the land in which she was born, the smell of poverty, a new kind of perfume to freshen her northern ideas, a new kind of perfume truer than the fragrance of an underarm of ploughing, more telling than the tale in the perspiration of her body, in the fields, in the sociology, in the kitchen, in the bed, in the summer subway sweaty and safe with policemen and black slum dwellers from Dorchester, in the heat, in the bus stations, in the bathtub in Boston; a perfume of sweet sweat that clothed her body with a blessing of pearls, like a birthwrap of wet velvet skin: “Honnn-neee!” the word she always used; honey was the only taste to use; “honey” was the only word she used always; for it was a turbulence of love and time from the lowered eyelids, from the vomiting guts up to the tip of the touch of her skin. She was a woman; she was a woman without woe; she was to be his woman, she should be here in the summerstreet; now in the summerstreet, he watches this alter-native of that woman, he understands that the transparency of this dress, tucked above her knees by the hand of fashion, is really nothing but the vagueness of this doll; he sees now that this transparency is the woman, like the negatives she meddled in for five years’ time, like the film on a pond’s surface, like white powder, like a glass of water with Eno’s in it, like a glass of water in the sun, the water clear and unpolluted, the water the topsoil of the sediments at the sentimental bottom; he wanted to mix this water with that water in the bathtub in Boston, the water and the mud into some heart, into that thick between-the-toes soul of the Georgia woman; he wanted to break the glass that contained that water for the Calgon bath and the sherry and the bathwater; break the vessel, spill and despoil, spill and expel this watering-down of the drink of his long thirst; stir it up and mix the sentiments in the foundation with the upper crust of the water, shake it to the foundation of its scream and yell and turn it to the thickness of chocolate rich in the cup, thick and rich and hot and swimming with pools of fat, so he could drink, so he would have to put his hand into the black avalanche of feeling and emotion and sediment, deep and gurgling as the tenor in her laughter, down the tuning fork of her throat resounding with love and make her say a word, speak a thought, be some witness to the blood in her love. This was his Marian in the vision in the summerstreet. This was Marian. And the five-year stranger, estranged from her husband’s love in a transparency, in the costume of a lover, this woman who used to sit upon the pin of his desires, now on this summerstreet where he thought he saw her, she is nothing more vivacious than a feather worn in her broad-grinned hat: not like the scarf she wore, with conch shells and liberty scars and paisley marked into it with water; this negative of Marian passed like the cloud above the roof of the Park Plaza, where one afternoon she sat drinking water, when he was playing he was playing golf in the new democratic diminutive green of the eighteenth-floor bar; and a cloud passed overhead like the loss of lust of a now-dead moment, with the woman; and when the sun was bright again, when the sun was like the sun in Georgia, fierce and full, when the sun was a purpose and passion, when the sun was as bright as the sweat it wrung from the barrels of a black woman’s breasts, the laughing beautiful Marian was there, not in his mind only but larger, dispossessing the summerstreet in the buxom jeans of her hips, red accusing blouse belafonted down the ladylike tip of the gorge of sustenance between her breasts, and around her neck, around her throat, a yellow handkerchief and a chain of a star and a moon in some quarter of her sensual religion. He saw her with passion and with greed, he saw her clearer than the truth-serum syrup of a dream, than the germ of love, true as the Guinness in the egg, and the Marian was his stout, this woman. He remembered all this, standing in the summerstreet: when before she climbed the steps to her hospital, she held his hands like a wife going in to die upon a cot, and drew him just a suggestion of new life closer to the relationship and her breasts, and with the sweet saliva of her lips she said in the touch of that kiss, “Take care of yourself.” He was young and free again, to live or to travel imprisoned in a memory of freed love, chained to her body and her laughter by the spinal cord of anxious long distance, reminders said before and after, by the long engineering of a drive from Yale to Brandeis to Seaver Street to Brandeis, dull in the winter Zion of brains, dull in the autumn three hours in miles, hoping that the travel won’t end like an underground railroad at the door of this nega-tive woman, but continue even through letters and quarrels and long miles down the short street up the long stairs in the marble of her memory, clenched in her absent embrace but re
joicing with his fingers in the velvet feeling of her silken black natural hair . . .
The Austin Clarke Library Page 81