The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  I move quickly to her side. And I put my arm around her shoulder. She puts all her weight upon me, and I stumble. She is more than two hundred pounds, heavier than me, heavier than the man.

  “Is she gonna be okay?” the man says. Not much concern is in his question.

  I do not answer him. I want to push him into the empty grave we are standing beside.

  “Happens all the time,” he tells me. “People, all kind and colour, choose a spot, and doesn’t blink a eye. But the moment I brings them out, and they see the spot they reserve and pay for, wham! I brings them out here, and shows them reality, it hits them like a goddamn whammy!”

  “I am all right, son,” my mother tells him.

  “You all right, lady,” he tells my mother.

  “Daddy uses to sit under a tree, I remember, the spitting image of this one we now standing underneat’, in his cane-bottom chair . . .” And she laughs. “It was a mango tree, I remember . . . in a cane-bottom chair, reading. And the last colour that he paint this same cane-bottom chair in, just before he emigrade to Amurca, was green. I remember. You remember?”

  I do not remember. And I do not answer. I had never seen the Old Man sitting under a tree.

  But I can see the colour of the barbecue advertised at bargain price on the rolled-up page of the newspaper ad, and a jumbo-sized box of detergent, as my mother fans herself with the makeshift Chinese fan, passing it back and forth before her face.

  “Go-back, and bring that motor car, that always talking to we, up here, boy!” she tells me.

  I feel she needs to say something confidential to the man, so I leave promptly, and head down the incline to the office, where the New Yorker stands silent. I hear my mother laugh, a second time, and the last thing I hear her say to the man is, “And I hope you didn’t forget that I mention to you that I want to be put ’side o’ my husband . . . when the day come . . . if it is your willing . . .” And from my distance, approaching the New Yorker car, I see my mother looking up into the air, into the tree whose leaves do not shake.

  I take the path for cars, back to where she is leaning against the tree that shall shade her husband’s grave. From the distance where I am, I think I see her shoulders heave, and a large gentleman’s handkerchief is held to her mouth, as if she is stifling a deep emotion, or if she expects to cough up something from her chest, and is preventing this thing from erupting through her mouth.

  I park the car under the tree, and she gets into the back seat, leaving the door open, ignoring the reprimanding car telling her, “Your door is ajar!”

  She fans herself. But now, she obeys the reprimand, and closes the door.

  I remain in the front seat, looking through the haze of the windshield, at a large mausoleum that contains the body of Mr. Rueben Starkman, beseeching him to “Rest in Peace. Beloved Husband of Martha Starkman. Born 30 July 1920. Died 25 December 1992.” How did Mr. Starkman die? I try to imagine how he died: collapsed over the dinner table, while carving the turkey? Or in bed, on a full stomach of stuffing and skin, celebrating the holiday season, or yuletide—or even Christmas, and virility, and abandon? And I wonder how many more days, or years, before it will be time for the stonemason, who cut Mr. Starkman’s biography into the polished marble, to wait until he shall cut Martha’s details into this granite memorial.

  “We come a long way, boy,” she says. “One more stop. In the mall. The convenience store next.”

  And she gives me a smile, and the smile breaks out into a giggle. I am back there, in that small island, years and years ago, when she was young and frisky and would throw me up into the air, and giggle, and catch me, on the way down . . . and she would go back to eating the kernels of roasted Indian corn, clean from the cob.

  “Wonder if he still breathing? Wonder how the coma . . . ?”

  It takes me a while to realize she is speaking about her husband.

  There he is, in intensive care, in the Willingboro General Hospital, out of sight, on an iron bedstead painted in white enamel, with a rubber sheet to protect the mattress and prevent his pee from rusting the iron frame of the bedstead, a guard against his incontinence, and from becoming too acrid and rising unbearably into the nostrils of the white-uniformed nurses and the white sheets pulled high up over his body.

  “Wonder how Daddy breathing?”

  I stop the New Yorker at the convenience store in the mall, and wait for her to mention her request.

  “What do you want?” I ask her.

  “What do I want? You being funny with a question like that? What you mean, what I want? What you think I want?”

  “Pringles potato chips?”

  “Boy, use your damn head!”

  “Chewing gum? Soda pop?”

  “Don’t be a blasted fool! What would a grieving woman, a widow woman, want at a time like this? You is a professor?”

  The wickedness in her smile paints her face with a girlish blush. I can see her, years and years ago back there, smiling as she tears the peel from the sugar cane with her bare teeth.

  “Hennessey!”

  “You mean brandy?”

  “Cognac, boy!”

  “And a bottle o’ soda to go with it, and . . .”

  We are stopped at the farthest end of the parking lot in this shopping plaza where I have bought the bottle of Hennessey. I had entered the liquor store alone, and as I was wandering along the brightly lit aisles, fascinated by the different kinds of brandies and cognacs sold in this small New Jersey town, and marvelling at the cheaper prices of liquor compared with Toronto, my mother had crept up behind me. Just as I was about to lift the half-size nip-bottle of cognac from the shelf, she whispered into my ear, “Not that! What two big people going-do with that nip-bottle? The big one, man, the big one. The forty-ounce. You could take-back some to Canada, by pouring it in a nip-bottle. The biggest one, boy!” She was speaking directly into my car, in a whisper, although there was no one close to us. She spoke in whispers whenever she had important things to say. And her whispering made me feel that she and I were two teenagers, much below the legal age for buying liquor, later to be drunk in the back seat of a car, or else on a corner of a dark road, parked out of sight, our drink hidden in the brown paper bag in which it was bought. “Get the forty ounces, man!”

  Her smile forestalled all comment on her little conspiracy, and I was washed in it, and made to feel I was a conspiring friend, rubbing my hands together in glee, in sweet satisfaction for having broken New Jersey’s liquor laws. It was the kind of feeling that went through my mind when I had stood before the man at the cash register, and saw him ring the purchase into the noisy machine.

  We were still smiling when we returned to the New Yorker.

  “Your door is ajar!” it said to us, just before we closed the doors.

  We are sitting in the car, still parked; and with the doors closed, and the motor turned off.

  “Keep she running,” my mother says. “In case a police. We could drive-off fast, and lose him.”

  And we sit and sip, and watch men and women enter the plaza to shop; and I sip the brown liquid that scorches my throat, and listen to my mother’s voice, as she revels in this illegal drinking. I do not normally drink cognac. My drink is beer. But I am with my mother, in her talking car, and this is America, the land of the free, she tells me all the time, and the occasion is a communion I had never expected to fall upon me. She is talking: “. . . that much he owe me, he owe me that much. After fifty-something years o’ marriage, after I bring him here to Amurca, paid for his ticket on Amurcan Airlines, from the money I mek working overtime for the Jewish lady in the brownstone on Columbia Heights . . . I was holding-down three jobs to bring-him-over, with the rest of the family, five boys and the girl, from Barbados to Brooklyn . . .” She takes a sip of Hennessey. “. . . so, he have to now make his peace with me. And with God. The pastor, Revern Doctor James of the Delaware Valley Baptist Church, last Monday, pray for hours and hours over Daddy, that Daddy would come out o’ th
e coma. Daddy start going-church only a few days before the coma hit him. Never once, in Barbados, and seldom here in Amurca, he went-church. He preferred to listen to the church services on the radio, coming from Voice of the Andes and the South. Night after night . . . Yes!” She takes a sip. “I sit on his hospital bed sponging-him-off with a washcloth dip in cool water. But Daddy don’t have a chance in hell! . . . Pour li’l more Hennessey in this plastic glass for me, please. Cover it up with a touch o’ some more soda water, in case a police . . .”

  She is on her third Hennessey. I am still nursing my first.

  “. . . and so, I sit on his bed, on the right-hand side of his bed, rubbing him down; and waiting. Waiting for a sign. Far’s I concerned he gone. He’s gone. He is a goner . . . It is so cruel, though, for the man you married to, fifty-something years, to just fall into a coma, without warning, communications between you and that man cut off, punctured like a motor-car tire, all the air gone . . . to just fall into a coma, my God, and dead, without telling you goodbye, thanks, abba-synnia! Nothing? Not a damn word of farewell? Nada. Caput. No leave-taking. Not even a adios?

  “And one night. Around three. In the morning. Daddy start gargling words in his throat. Trying to talk. To me. And guess what that man I married said to me? After thirteen nights of me mopping-off his forehead with a cold washcloth? Guess what he said to me.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “He didn’t say nothing. Not. One. Damn. Thing. Not a iota!”

  She takes out the large white gentleman’s handkerchief, and dabs her lips with it. She crushes the plastic glass with her hands, and wraps it in a large white napkin from Kentucky Fried she found on the floor of the New Yorker. It was from the three barrels of chicken she had ordered in, two nights ago, when her other children, the five boys and the girl, arrived from Brooklyn.

  She places the plastic glass in the plastic garbage bag attached to the knob at the bottom of the dashboard. Through the window, she drops the plastic bag on the ground; she changes her mind, opens the door; the engine is running softly all this time, and she bends down, and picks up the plastic garbage bag, and drops it on the floor. The car says, “Your door is ajar.” She laughs.

  “How can uh door be uh jar?” she says, laughing.

  She laughs some more at her humour, and pours herself a fresh plastic glass full of soda water, gargles it about in her mouth, and spits the water on the ground. It splatters with the same sound as vomit, onto the pavement.

  “Beg pardon,” she says.

  I put the New Yorker into first gear.

  “Funeral home next! Let we hit there before the sun set . . .”

  “But he is still breathing,” I tell her.

  “Yuh can’t wait till he dead, to choose his coffin!”

  She is laughing as she says this.

  “Yuh can’t wait till he gone to buy a box to put-he-in.”

  She is still laughing as she hands me a bottle of mouth spray.

  “Take a sprig,” she says, “in case the police . . .”

  I squeeze a spray into my mouth, and think immediately of sitting in a dentist’s chair. And she takes two more deep sprigs, as she calls them.

  “Otherwise, he might find himself in a plain deal-board box, like the ones they buried convicts in, in Amurca.”

  “You picked out the funeral home?”

  “I got one in mind.”

  “You picked out a church?”

  “The one we just pass. With the long white Cadillac park in front.”

  “Which funeral home?”

  “Goes Funeral Home.”

  “He going by Goes!”

  “I don’t find that funny. Talking so ’bout your stepfather . . .”

  “I do not find it funny either.”

  “When you come to the next lights, make a slight turn to the right—No! Not the right! The left! No, no, what I saying? Left! Make a slight turn to the left, and you going see the place on your right, staring you in your face. Goes! I know these directions like the back o’ my two hands!”

  I take her word, make the turn, and find myself climbing a slight hill, bordered by large trees, like the ones on the Rancocas Burial Ground and Crematorium property. These trees hang over to form a canopy over the blacktopped road; and the New Yorker goes into the semicircle of the driveway, as if it is steering itself. We stop at the front door. The canopy of trees is blowing softly, but gaily, just like my mother’s voice.

  Goes Funeral Home has four white, fat pillars built in the style of Southern colonial mansions. I think of Gone with the Wind. And I imagine that I am in the deep South. No ivy clings to these unblemished, white pillars. The trees are blowing gently in the breeze.

  On this building there is only the Stars and Stripes. It hangs in languorous slow movement from the pillar, from the flagstaff, nearest the front door. No name is written on this building.

  “Press the bell, boy.”

  And I press the bell. I look at the large trees, and at the three highly polished, black cars that are parked between lines drawn in white luminous paint on the black surface of the tar. Facing the cars are three names, printed on strips of wood: Manager. Assistant Chaplain. Chief Embalmer.

  “Press again, man.”

  While my finger is still on the white dot of a bell, the door opens. Silently, as if there is no hinge. A smell hits my nostrils. It is a smell I have never known. This smell comes out and hits me in the face, like an exhaled bad breath, the very moment the door opens. This smell that has no name. This smell . . .

  “Oh, good afternoon, Missis Springer!”

  The man is almost singing greetings. His hand is outstretched in a handshake. His voice is sweet. And soft. And deep. And baritone. I think of Billy Eckstine. Of Perry Como . . .

  “And good afternoon to you too, sir!” he adds. “This must be the son from Canada, who teaches in the Ivy Leagues!”

  My mother remains silent. I am thinking that it must be the atmosphere that dampens her spirit.

  “Welcome. Please enter. I am your funeral director . . .”

  He offers his hand to my mother; my mother puts all her weight on his much smaller frame; and he loses his balance, just for one second, but he adjusts himself to her weight, while she breaks out in tears. She starts to sob, loudly. And then her sobbing becomes a wail, a moaning, like it was in the burial ground.

  Half stumbling, he leads her inside the vast white room, decorated with off-white couches, and white wingback chairs of the same upholstery material, and mahogany chairs painted in off-white. Fresh-cut white lilies are in nine white vases.

  In four corners of this vast room are floor lamps. They give off a golden, soft illumination. It is very quiet in this room. And very cold.

  My mother turns the neck of her blouse back to form a collar, to keep her body warm. She folds up the newspaper with the advertisements for fruits, and puts it into her purse.

  “This coldness, boy,” she says. “This coldness . . .”

  And she breaks down without warning, and collapses, and cries out, making sounds with her breath: holding her breath, and then exhaling, as if she is choking on her own sadness and sorrow.

  “Can I offer you some coffee, Missis Springer?” the man says. “Sugar and cream? Or milk?”

  “Li’l Hennessey.”

  The man raises his eyebrows. His eyebrows are bushy. His eyes become larger.

  “Well, if that will help.”

  “And the coffee, afterwards. Cream, please,” she says.

  Her tears remain and stain her face, and walk across her white face powder, as she holds the large white starched gentleman’s handkerchief in a firm grip, in her left hand. With her right hand, using her three middle fingers, she taps out a tune whose rhythm is different from the one her shoes are tapping on the off-white carpet.

  “And for you, sir?” the funeral director says, from a white door built invisibly into the white panelling.

  “Sorry?” I say.

  “H
ow do you like your coffee?”

  “Black,” I tell him.

  He disappears once more, into the white panelling. My mother looks at me, and says, “Boy, what a thing, eh? This coldness.”

  “Could kill a man,” I tell her.

  “We have to choose a nice coffin, for Daddy. With a large enough opening . . . a oval suitable for viewing, that viewers in the church, the brothers and the sisters, could see him good. And dress him in his black suit. What you think?” she asks me. “All I doing, for the whole day, is spenning money on a dead man. What a thing, eh, boy? Let we look at something solid. Like something in greenheart wood, with a lining of red silk. You think they have greenheart wood in Amurca? Something solid I want. Lignum vitae. Before I left the first place, I left a cheque with that thiefing bastard, the graves people, for two plots. One for me, and one for Daddy. Boy, if you was living here, instead of in that cold place called Canada, I woulda take the opportunity and buy a plot for you. Yuh can never tell ’bout death, boy. Flourishing today; gone tomorrow . . . Lord-in-Heaven! And God only know what kind o’ figure I facing now, with Mr. Goes! But he must be sent-’long nice, in the best manner I can afford, although he don’t deserve it. But it is me who would have to face the embarrassment if he didn’t send’long in the best manner I can afford, and nice. What you think?”

  I know she does not really expect me to answer. I think she is getting accustomed to the cold, shivering impersonality of this white waiting room.

  “These Amurcan undertakers, eh, boy? Back home, we christen them ‘duppy agents.’ They can take you for a ride, and when they let you off, and you are still able to dismount and get down, when the last tears are shed by the graveside, and they drive off, you are left only for the poorhouse. So, here I am, spending this kind o’ money on a man I have no love for, only hate! You know if I can buy one o’ these coffins on the layaway plan? Put a li’l something down, and every month when I catch my hand, pay-off the rest, on the first o’ the month? You have that up in Canada?”