In the often rainy afternoons, Daniel and I would take longer walks, starting out hand in hand, but quickly split when we saw something interesting or if we disagreed. He told me stories. The great wooden balls I had mistaken for boulders had once been attached to the trees. The trees had lived so long, these growths were like their warts — the cantankerous refusals of cells exhausted by age, ancient, angry mutations of arboreal menopause. The tree had sloughed them off; a thin membrane grown across the join at the trunk, cutting off their nourishment. “If you were to take a cross-section of trunk and analyze it, they would bear the same grain, same markings, same insistent fingerprint.
“Like cancer?” I asked.
“More like DNA,” he suggested. “Some unique, inimitable pattern that over time repeats itself.”
Those old tree warts, with their huge swirls, patterns that end at their centre, a small, profound moment of peace, a composition of beauty, a conclusion or arrival. We sat among them as though we’d found an arboreal Stonehenge.
“When Jacob was dying I discovered I have a brother.”
“Huh,” replied Daniel, not as though he hadn’t heard me, more like a fancy that, then sort of “huh.”
“Edgar. He asked to see me. He’s ten years younger than me.”
“What did he want? Acknowledgement?”
“Jacob’s.”
Daniel crossed his arms and stared at the ground thoughtfully, trying to find my point.
“I would have done something, but there wasn’t time.”
“Did you believe him?” Daniel poked and shuffled at the ground with his toe, as if searching for something he’d dropped there.
“Yes, I believed him. He looks exactly like Jacob. I felt faint when I saw him. He lives in Montreal. Alex took me to meet him, and when he saw him first at the rendezvous, he was so amazed at the likeness he squeezed my hand and muttered courage.”
“Who is his mother?”
“Ethel someone. An on-air personality from home. I remember her when I was growing up. She’s dead now. A married woman. Nora felt sure Jacob and she had an affair. The night she died she told Edgar about Jacob.”
“Leaving you to pick up the pieces.”
“Well no. Leaving Jacob to.”
“That’s the problem with forbidden love. I always felt Nora should have let Jacob feel free to marry again.”
“Well he couldn’t marry Ethel, she was married already. But yes …” I pretended to agree, but that yes was the biggest lie. I knew it was me who didn’t want Jacob to bring anyone home. Nora was just backing me up, afraid of anything making me unhappy. Why didn’t I want him to be happy? Well, I didn’t.
“Are you shocked?”
“Not at all. Maybe I’m surprised there aren’t more?” He looked at me bright with delight. At times he’d give in to a male Carib-bean tendency to a sense of entitlement as though the spreading of the male seed was a God-given duty demanding no framework of responsibility.
“That’s exactly why I never married you.”
“Hmmm. What brought that on?”
“Anyway. He waited years to contact me. He’d heard Jacob was dying. And the funny thing was — when he knew Jacob was dead he called to ask if I’d talked to him. I told him no, he died before I could. He said he’d never forgive me.”
“Offer him a dna test.”
“I did. He didn’t want a lab to confirm who he was, he wanted his dad to.”
“That’s a tough one.”
Indeed, I thought, but said “Parable of the trees,” as we made our way.
Daniel startled me when he spoke the word I hadn’t. “Indeed.”
“I think maybe you should call him when you get back. I never had a brother. You are lucky. I have often wondered what life would have been like if I’d had a sibling to play with and grow with; to have family that I could expect to last the journey with me.”
“But you’re my brother.”
“I know I should feel honoured, but I don’t. I could never have a sister and have such incestuous thoughts.”
I admired the swirls and shades that looked like a honey cake in which one stirred a spoon of molasses. Though only a round stump it was loyally imitating the grain of its mother. It was amazing to me that all through nature the new imitates the old, that it is in fact a way of expressing the same thing over again. The over and overness of all. These were not suckers of the Samaans, but they were its wooden children.
“Living is just a long corridor of echoes,” said Daniel enigmatically.
“You mean the warts are echoes of the tree!”
“Something like that,” he said. “But I was really thinking of Edgar. Your brother. He is an echo of Jacob; he is an echo of Nora. In a strange way he is even an echo of your mother, whose death caused Jacob to become Jacob and Nora to become Nora — the Jacob and Nora who nurtured you. As I suppose my father became who I know as my father, and my aunts who raised me the spinster mothers they were to me. I have become all their echoes. My father’s stern austerity.”
“And your aunts?”
“Well. I adored them. But I made pretty sure I wasn’t like them. But even when we defy the echoes it’s still the echoes we defy. So they still govern us.”
“And what is the corridor?”
“Life. The life that proceeds from there with its outcome and truths repeating themselves bouncing from wall to wall down mile after mile.”
“So what about free will?” I asked knowing we were straying into one of his deeper ruminations which I would partake in until I was lost and I’d quit. I often got lost with him. His mind was like a walk in a maze as he thought his way toward the exit and I followed.
“Free will is always dictated by the corridors — who we are, what we know, how we learned to think and feel. Values planted in us.”
“What about Tess of the D’Urbervilles? The letter under the mat? She might think she had free will but fate interceded when she never got the letter.”
And on and on we went. Was free will anything to do with fate, could free will change fate?
Could a peacock decide not to go up the Samaans at night?
“Othello. Does he have free will?”
“Hmmm. Come on now!”
We were standing flat against the trunk, protected by thick foliage.
“Why should I call him?”
“Call who?”
“Edgar!”
“Oh! To defy the echoes? To start new echoes of your own.”
The rain came scuttling down through the branches again. Daniel got up and straightened his back like a stiff old man, moved from foot to foot, looking restless, hacked at his throat to clear it. He looked at me as though expecting me to follow. I stayed put.
“See? I’m no one’s echo.”
“That’s exactly why you should call Edgar.”
It never rained for long, but sometimes the fog was so thick I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. After a squall one afternoon, the trees in heavy mist gently restoring their drenched branches, Daniel thought he saw a female figure emerge from the shelter of the Samaans, like a six o’clock bat. She must have been hidden behind the giant trunk as he pointed to a shadow moving away.
“You don’t see her?” Daniel stared at the blanket of fog, looking alarmed. “She turned and looked at me! A horrible look.”
I frowned. It really was mysterious, but in this thick fog nothing could be certain. What made me curious was Daniel’s reaction. He looked frightened, stunned.
“Family to Aesop?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. I had seen that look of fierce inquiry, of recognition, on my father’s face, and was sure it reflected some irritating remnant of romantic turmoil, now evident on Daniel’s.
“Another parable of the trees,” I said.
“Indeed
.”
An image of a cloaked figure imprinted itself on my nighttime insomnia, and what I thought was the voice of the wind calling, now conjured up a wild woman knocking on the door downstairs. “Go away, go away,” I’d say, or was it Daniel? I wasn’t sure what was real, and the dread that some desperate shipwrecked creature had visited before, to see Daniel here or Jacob in whatever world, began to haunt me. Echoes tumbling down the passage. I wished Nora was here to interpret it all.
I’d wonder where the peacocks went when it rained; whose echo was Othello?
And then I’d fall asleep.
DANIEL
I once asked a Trinidadian student to write down what emotions she experienced in response to our mountains.
Columbus named the island after them. The Trinity.
But what emotions do they stir?
She shrugged. “I really don’t think about them. They’re just there!”
Any Jamaican could give a better answer about the mountains of that nation. Maybe they feel they dare not be complacent.
I had come to think that all the hope and triumph, all the possibility of glory in the Caribbean was expressed by Mother Earth in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. I am used to the lower but sharper, explosive peaks of Trinidad which, oddly, had never uplifted me. They were mountains to be climbed on foot or by car, crossed, circumvented, lived on in pomp by the rich or rustically by the poor. I’d become aware of them when they seemed to be frustrated, bracing themselves against irritating clouds or in uncompromising rain. It seemed to me they were never brooding, never contemplative.
Trinidad mountains remind me of Carnival. You can take it for granted. If you ignore it all, it will still be Carnival this year, next year, and over and over. It is a contradictory land, people of ready impatience and stubborn composure. Trinidad’s approach is always skeptical, the laughter of its conclusions dismissive. It outlives its history, outwits it with sarcasm and, having stolen the best parts for its amusement, won’t dwell on it. These are the peaks of our trinity as a people.
In the more westerly island of Jamaica with its earthquakes, the misleading twitch of Port Royal, a lost limb, the mountains are massive, wiser, nobler and higher, towering over the people. By nature still and distant, they offer neither foreboding nor promise. It is useless to describe their astonishing beauty as they rise from where I first saw them at Mona. See God’s face and you die, they say. They are a power to believe in. I wonder if Jamaicans who brood on the despair of their history feel bound to this long vista of its witnessing.
It was in these mountains I met the finest man I ever knew. Ernest Strong.
In search of Lethe, I was confronted by her legacy.
I spent an afternoon with Ernest and Nora. I walked over from the neighbouring university house, through the adjacent valley, an English garden, planted by a British governor’s wife who built this place as a retreat from the heat, now in ruins. Mine wasn’t an ordinary taking of a physical walk; it was a walk through the colonial past, where lupins and marigolds pushed up resilient stalks, through the rubble of untended Jamaican time, and a few hydrangea bushes hung on doggedly, blooming through all the upheavals of history.
Walking up the hill beyond, the landscape was untamed: grass and wild lilies were overgrown, the ground covered in the pine needles. I came upon the border of the property, a low fence of barbed wire, sagging under the weight of bracken and ivy, with an old iron gate attached to posts, held closed by a wire loop. A small wooden sign, greened with moss, was painted in a curling cursive: Erehwemos. I figured it must be the name of the property and I frowned at its possible pronunciation. I slipped the wire loop free and let myself in, closing the gate behind me. The mist hung between the trees like cobwebs, the wind in the shadows suddenly cold. I felt shrouded in a dream.
At the brow of the hill I saw a shingled roof, but not the house beneath it. Circling an orange grove, its fruit more the colour of tangerines than ordinary yellow oranges, I impulsively picked a few. I tasted one. It was bitter. I grimaced and thought that Jamaican mountain oranges must be bad-tempered. I started down the other side of the hill when into view came the stacked wooden house, tucked into the slope. It was narrow, with two storeys, a dormer window upstairs which must have provided a vista out over the hills which descended in long strides to the city of Kingston below and beyond. Far away to the left lay Kingston Harbour and, beyond it in some mystical regression of time, Port Royal.
It’s not wise to be introduced to a man whilst clasping his stolen produce, but that’s how I met Ernest Strong: as a felon. He stood like Isaiah guarding his mountain. He was at the top of the stone steps of his rustic wooden home, an old man in a dark red shirt. His trousers, bunched gently on his weary leather shoes, gave evidence that he had been shortened by the weight of years. His soft, thinning grey hair was brushed straight back, forming a frill of lively curls at the base of his neck, where their steel set off his brownness. Arms akimbo, his hands clasped backwards holding either side of his waist in an indulgent, wait-and-see posture.
I stood, tentative, at the bottom of his steps.
“Your university,” he said matter-of-factly. “They steal my ortaniques.”
“These aren’t oranges? They’re sour as hell!”
He looked pleased, briefly describing the graft of oranges with tangerines.
“Hell of a mountain you have here.” I was still panting.
“Indeed,” he said politely, looking out over my head. “Today they are disconsolate. My wife doesn’t like them anymore.”
And with this, I became aware of Nora, nearly six feet tall, thin, with long silvery hair, standing in the doorway, apparently drawn by our voices. Jesus. What a presence she was. She appeared to tower over him, over me, in fact over the whole damn house, even the hill. She had very pale eyes that seemed to be reflecting their own Morse code of flickering stories. I was certain I would never really see into them.
“Come on in,” she charged, beckoning to me from the folds of her cheerful purple-striped poncho, the only thing about her that felt frivolous. She was an odd mixture — aloof and magnetic. She looked as though her voice should have purred, but it didn’t. Relatively thin for an actress, she threw it well, an accent neither British nor forced Jamaican, as Henny had led me to believe. She entered on cue as though by stage direction, and I have often won-dered if she hadn’t appeared and invited me in, if Ernest would have finished talking and left me in his garden.
Laying down my loot by a small boot-scraper, I climbed the steps to shake hands and took a seat on the narrow verandah. It was like a stage set. To the left and right of the steep garden at the corners of the house and straight in front, were three energetic junipers. The corner trees were wide, their limbs almost bouncing on the ground. The middle one, probably due to the need for these inhabitants of the house to have a view, had been pruned, its limbs starting farther up the grey trunk, stretching out to the left and right, as if on guard. And at either end of the verandah were two doors that led into darkened sections, stage left and stage right.
“Magnificent junipers,” I said with genuine admiration.
Nora looked sadly at the middle one and stated that it had defiantly withstood a recent hurricane. She seemed to want to pat its trunk.
Beyond the defiant tree sloped a gentle lawn dropping farther down into a steep valley where Ernest planted coffee, and farther still in the distance lay the next hill, a flat plateau.
“Is that natural?” It looked to me as though it had been purposely flattened.
“Yes. That’s the only place Ernest goes to get reception to listen to his cricket when a test match is on,” Nora explained.
“Perfect house site,” I suggested.
Ernest looked up with contempt and shook his head dismissively as if at a sissy hill.
“What does it do to a man’s ego to live in the hills?” I asked.<
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“Jamaica doesn’t have hills. It has mountains,” he corrected me. “Men with small egos can’t handle mountains. Better they live by the sea.”
“I am a sea man myself.” Now feeling like a sissy on two counts — oranges and mountains. If he noticed my discomfiture, he offered no apology, but this began a conversation about the sea, my love of sailing, my love of swimming. I discovered they both had been strong swimmers, in fact, Ernest had rowed at Oxford and Nora boasted she had swum the Kingston Harbour. She had grown up in Cornwall — “now that’s a sea,” she said, implying the Caribbean Sea was also an element for sissies.
They showed no curiosity about my presence, assuming I must be one of a steady flow of students who passed by to visit them.
I was baffled by Nora’s apologies for the depleted state of the place, as if she were talking about some ruined city I was visiting as a tourist, years after its civilization had crumbled. To me, this rugged land seemed to be germinating, cocooned by time, withdrawn to gather forces for new manifestations.
“Ernest has made this return.” Raising her brow pointedly, she sighed.
“It’s over for me,” she said softly, simply. She used her voice effectively. Ernest looked morosely at the wounded juniper. I kept my silence. Whatever inspiration this place had held for her once-hungry spirit was apparently now used up.
There was a copy of The Sun Also Rises on the arm of the rough, homemade wooden chair where he sat.
“You like Hemingway,” I observed admiringly.
“Lord, no, it’s hard work plowing through it. Ernest loves Heming-way. I think it must be easier to fuck him than to read his books.”
The Black Peacock Page 5