In truth, Miss Ivy hadn’t wanted to see Gail find happily-ever-after. It had seemed unfair that, after only one year, Gail should be rewarded, when, for almost twenty years, Miss Ivy had endured that man’s clammy hands and gotten nothing for it—except a hand-me-down fur coat. Was that jealousy? Had it stopped her from doing and saying more to help Gail? Miss Ivy had asked herself these questions every night since the shooting. This whole thing was a downright weeping shame: Mr. H in a casket, Gail in jail. That’s why it didn’t matter how sick she felt, Miss Ivy had to go to a wake—any wake—tonight. With the things she’d seen and the things she knew, she was the only person who could truly mourn for them: two lives lost just so … no, three … she counted the baby, too.
Winston had stopped singing. She slipped the fur coat over her dress and banged on the paneling between their rooms.
“Winston!”
“Oye!”
“You going wake?”
“Yeah, I leavin’ now.”
“Wait for me. I comin’.”
Just as she turned the doorknob, another pain gripped Miss Ivy. Belly or chest—she couldn’t tell. The ache climbed her left side with the casual pace of an iguana in a zaboca tree. She braced against the wall and waited. Maybe she should stay home? No, she needed to go, she needed to do her duty, she couldn’t leave even a toe space for spiritual wickedness to step in. Her mother, a frequent wake-goer, had taught her that: My pet, you must go no matter you love them or not. Go and release them, make them could travel in peace. Otherwise, they spirit coming back every night, to pull your toe and beg your pardon. Miss Ivy didn’t want Mr. H’s spirit anywhere near her bedside at night. She took a few deep breaths and moved into the corridor. She was The Mighty Miss Ivy, Pleasantview’s seer-woman, Mother Superior of the whole village, no kiss-meh-ass pain was going to keep her back tonight.
Winston stood in a dark suit and fedora hat, holding a guitar case, a bottle tucked in his armpit. Under the forty-watt bulb he was a young, dapper version of himself. “W’happen, girl?” he said, as Miss Ivy took a crooked step toward him. “You still feelin’ sick?”
With the arm holding the guitar case, he offered his elbow. She took it, the camphor ball smell of his clothes coming as a welcome revival to her senses. “Is just a gas pain,” she said, afraid to admit, out loud at least, that it was her heart hurting.
“All you need is a sip of this babash, girl,” Winston said, waving the bottle. “My cousin-and-them make this down Moruga. It go burn out any problem you have inside you.”
A young man gave Miss Ivy his seat. “Thank you, son,” she said, raising her palm in that saintly gesture she’d seen in religious photographs—people expected these things from her. The young man bowed and backed away.
She drew the fur closer around her body. Sister Yolande, who sat behind, asked, “Ivy, why you don’t take off that thing? Look how you sweating.” Miss Ivy could’ve explained that she’d been cold-sweating all night, that her chest felt heavy and her intestine was a knotty shoelace. But she would’ve rather died than seem fragile to these people; they still believed in her “supernatural” powers.
“Yolande, mind your damn business,” she said, mopping her face and neck with a rag.
One by one, folks passed and touched Miss Ivy’s shoulder, the braver among them asking things like, “How you coping, doux-doux? You alright?” as if she were Mr. H’s widow. Pleasantview people had more respect for her long service to that family than the damn family itself, it seemed.
As the gripe got worse and worse, Miss Ivy watched the All Fours players without really seeing them, except whenever a team exploded with “Hang Jack!” She mostly cocked her ears and tried to listen to the hushed-tone conversations around her … They lie: she didn’t shoot him, she stab him … She go get-off because the lawyer pleading insanity … He daughter—the lesbian one—she move back home. Then, Miss Ivy heard something that spliced a different kind of pain through her body: Why you think Ivy here and not in the wake up-the-road? Miss Joan don’t want she by the house. Ivy did see the whole thing in the cards and she never warn Mr. H ’bout Gail.
On any other night, Miss Ivy might have spun in the direction of the voice, and laced into the speaker like the Roman whip that beat Christ: Look, haul yuh ass! What you know ’bout me and Miss Joan? Tonight, though, Miss Ivy couldn’t summon the strength for a fight. They were correct: Joan blamed her—not for Mr. H’s death—but for other things, unspoken things. Miss Ivy had suffered for twenty years under Joan’s cloaked-up rage: “You need to do better, Ivy … That window is spotty; wipe it over … This floor, don’t use the mop, use the scrubbing brush and get on your knees—I know you’re accustomed.” And Joan had always behaved like it was Miss Ivy’s fault Mr. H couldn’t keep his hands to himself: “You need to dress more appropriately for work, Ivy … I don’t want to see your panty-line, Ivy … Walking through my house, shaking your ass like that? Are you looking for attention, Ivy?” But Miss Ivy had needed her job, and Joan had needed her to hold the house together, so they’d become false friends and close enemies for twenty-something years. And for every one of those years, Joan had said, “Good help is hard to find, Ivy,” when she’d handed over the Christmas bonus. Miss Ivy had always known “good help” meant “silence”.
She shook her head now, recalling how many times she’d swallowed shame and forgiven Joan, but Joan had never forgiven her for Mr. H’s sins. She might have, if she’d been there to see Miss Ivy fight: like that time he’d threatened to push her head deeper in the toilet-bowl if she didn’t open her legs; that other time she’d been at the kitchen sink, chipping ice for one of the girls’ birthday party, she’d pointed the ice pick and he’d prised it away, threatening to rake it across her face. “I will say I catch you thiefing,” he’d said. “Who you think everybody will believe? Me or you?”
A big Crix tin appeared in front of Miss Ivy’s face. Thinking the dryness of the cracker might help soak up the roiling bile in her stomach, she withdrew a trembling handful, and crunched as loud as she could—to block out the voices and the hissing shame. Somebody else offered coffee from a thermos but Miss Ivy knew better than to drink wake coffee—sugarless and deadly like black disinfectant.
From her bag, she pulled her own little canister. She held it at arm’s length to avoid spillage, unscrewed the cap and fanned steam away. Ginger tea with cinnamon and honey, her mother’s homemade recipe for bad-stomach. Miss Ivy brought the thermos to her mouth and closed her eyes over the first sip. She was no longer in Pleasantview, or even in Trinidad. She was on another island altogether: Grenada, in the kitchen of the tiny estate house, watching Mammy at the two-burner stove. Gnarled black hands, knuckles swollen, grating ginger root, then splintering cinnamon bark, then boiling it all together. The tiny house engulfed in spicy aromas.
Miss Ivy felt the peace she’d only known back then, the peace of a common-fowl chick sitting in the coob, under its mother-hen’s wing. You does see your mother before you dead. Miss Ivy hoped that old saying was true, because she hadn’t seen Mammy since she’d left her in Trinidad, at twelve years old.
At Winston’s voice, “Of course, I go sing,” she opened her eyes and was back in the rumshop yard.
Winston sat on a chair facing the crowd, his back to the All Fours tables. He removed his fedora and rested it on the chair next to him. Under the street lamp, his bald head shone like a dog’s balls in moonlight. Miss Ivy guessed that’s what he wanted: to be seen, not in shadow, as he delivered the song he’d been practicing in the toilet.
She was surprised when, instead of Sinatra, Winston began strumming the familiar local chords of an extempo. “Help me,” he encouraged the crowd, and they joined in, clapping and singing:
Pa-da-da da ta-da ta-da ta …
Is a real shame and a tragedy,
What happened in this small com-mu-nity.
Sad to see: a big businessman,
Get tie-up with that tricky young woman.
Although she know the man was married,
She push-up to make a baby for he.
When she couldn’t get he money as she did plan,
She abort, then shoot the innocent man.
“Santimanitay!” the crowd sang, to end the verse. Then everybody laughed and applauded Winston.
Not Miss Ivy. She sat dead-faced, staring at him, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
Winston knew what an ugly betrayal that verse was. He knew it hadn’t been an abortion, but rather a beating from Mr. H that had started the bloodshed. She and Winston had been the only people there when Gail had thrown open her blue back-door and bawled for help. Miss Ivy had gotten to her first and found Gail on the floor, her dress pink everywhere but red between her legs where she had it balled-up and pressed down like a drain stopper.
“Father-Jesus! You try to kill the child yourself?” Miss Ivy had said, grabbing a kitchen towel. And when Gail said, “No, he beat me,” Miss Ivy had offered the best lie she could, “Don’t worry, sometimes they could still save it.”
Winston had shown up and by the time they got Gail into the back seat of his car, the towel was soaked and blood was everywhere: on the upholstery, the glass, Miss Ivy’s housedress. Even on Winston’s hands. Those same hands still strumming the guitar, they had been shaking as he backed the vehicle out of the yard that evening.
How could Winston make a mockery of all that? For what? A few claps?
One of the All Fours players sprang up. Holding a half-empty rum bottle like a microphone, he moved toward Winston’s chair, singing, “Pa-da-da da ta-da ta-da ta,” in a voice that could grate cassava. When he pointed at the card-players and ordered, “Play the tune!” they began a rhythmic pounding of the tables and the upside-down buckets on which they sat.
Winston plucked the guitar. He had no choice, with the crowd clapping and chanting the extempo lavway: Pa-da-da da … Miss Ivy could see, though, his flat smile peeling at the edges, like print on a cheap jersey. Winston hadn’t expected an extempo battle, he hadn’t expected anyone—especially a nobody, non-calypsonian—to challenge his lyrical mastery. Yes, Lord, she prayed, let Winston punish. Let this All Fours player put him to shame, with serious lyrics to make people think and weep out their liver-string tonight.
What you say just now, that is not true,
So the facts I came to reveal to you.
Old-man minding girl and he showing off,
But in the bedroom he was really soft.
So she pick-up with me who young, fit and quick,
And she fall in love with my sugar-stick.
I say I didn’t want she with no other one,
That’s why: she get rid of the old man.
“Santimanitay!” the crowd screamed, and the wake came alive then. People hooting, slapping their thighs and their neighbors’ backs. People inside the rumshop running out to join the gleeful melée. This fella had taken the mauvais langue even further than Winston; he’d suggested Gail had killed for better sex. Pleasantview liked nothing better than a good bacchanal!
Miss Ivy laughed, too, but at the disappointment on Winston’s face, and she found herself trembling with a kind of false excitement she recognized as panic. Like the first time with Mr. H, him riding her on the bed she’d been trying to make, he’d turned on the vacuum and she’d let its screams be hers as, in her head, hooves pounded and animals grunted. Her eyes had been on the door, but she’d been seeing something else: her ten-year-old self in the stables of the Estate with that groom—the one who’d been bringing her peanut-candy for weeks and promising a horse ride. “Two more guava season and you go be ripe,” he’d said, cupping his hands to measure her bee-sting breasts before sucking them. He’d helped her mount the new horse, Paraclete, then jumped up behind and yelled “Ya!” and the faster the horse went, the faster he’d made it go, until she’d thought she would fall off, she’d thought she would be trampled and die that way … under the horse or under the groom.
She must have groaned.
“You alright, Ivy?” Sister Yolande said, leaning over the chair between them as the noise died down. “Watch how your eye red and your face wet. Like you well laugh?”
Miss Ivy answered, “Girl, if you can’t laugh, you go cry in this life, oui. Hear the wotless-man-and-them pouring shame like oil on the li’l girl head. Black and poor and plus a woman—that’s the recipe for shame self.” Miss Ivy raised her voice then, “Father Lord, forgive these jackasses!” she said.
A few murmuring heads turned with amused looks, then turned away.
“You don’t study them,” Yolande said, patting Miss Ivy’s shoulder. “I go put these fellas in they place!”Then she hurried off, to the clearing where Winston still sat with his guitar. “Pa-da-da da ta-da ta-da ta,” Yolande began, gospel choir reverberation in her voice. She did a two-step calypso dance to make her ass a swinging pendulum in Winston’s face.
Miss Ivy stood, easing the sweaty, heavy fur from her shoulders, as she clutched the chair in front of her. She wanted to see and hear Yolande better. And she needed to do something with her body, something different. She was a tired, old rag who’d spent years sitting in dirty water. How many card-readings had she pretended to do—for old women, young women—and always about a vicious man or a lost child? Too many times she’d lied to give Pleasantview women false hope, to feel like she was helping them. But nothing had ever changed—in her life or theirs. Miss Ivy felt tattered, oversoaked and renk with secret female blood. She was dying to wring herself clean.
Yolande pointed a red-nailed, accusing finger at Winston and she sang:
Dog does run down puss, when dog feel to play.
Then turn around and bawl the puss is to blame.
How much young girl that old man hold down?
And allyuh never talk ’cause he money strong.
One baby dead, but it have plenty more.
Fu-ne-ral, they bound to show up by Miss Joan door.
Yes two bullet land, but three bullet miss.
Gail shoulda cas-trate the son-offa-bitch.
“Santimanitay!” the crowd roared. They were all on their feet now, over Miss Ivy, their silhouettes towering and clustering around her like a black forest. Winston strumming, the bucket brigade beating, the bottle-and-spoon man knocking lik-ki-ting-lik-ki-ting-lik-ki-ting—everybody on a faster rhythm now, faster than any extempo, and growing more frenetic with every second. They had started this night pretending to honor Mr. H’s life and mourn his death. But Miss Ivy felt the ground trembling now, under the weight of a spiteful honesty descending on the rumshop like a chariot: Pleasantview was damn glad Mr. H dead! He had dishonored so many of them in life. He’d bought and discarded women, made men feel helpless and small. He was a son-offa-bitch and Yolande had given everybody license to say so.
In the press of bodies, Miss Ivy felt herself being carried away, swaying back and forth, unsteady on her feet. Just as she had been on the deck of the rusted ferry listing its way from Grenada to Trinidad, her neck craned as far over the rail as possible, waiting for the next spasm of vomit, a towel tucked over her blue dress. Mammy’s voice rolling in and out upon the waves, “Weeping endure for the night, m’child. But joy cometh in the morning. Yuh belly still small, we go fix it. Stop cryin’ and lef’ that nasty stable-boy from your thoughts. You damn lucky Auntie keepin’ you in Trinidad!”
The pain returned. Worse than ever, it clamped Miss Ivy’s chest and back, keeping her upright and in place for more punishment. She shut her eyes and held tighter to the chair. Something was surfacing inside—being squeezed up from a long way down. She wanted it to come out. She made up her mind to wait for it and to bear the terrible, terrible squeezing pain. Sweat leaked like a briny hemorrhage from her open pores.
A new lavway started in the crowd. All Fours Player croaking, “Doh answer the telephone, Joan!” and the crowd responding, “Doh answer the telephone!” Back and forth the chant went, “Doh answer the telephone, Joan! … Doh answer the telephone
!” Still, Miss Ivy waited. Bongo drums appeared from God-knows-where, bongo dancing began, bodies flailing under the flickering streetlight … lik-ki-ting-lik-ki-ting-lik-ki-ting … still, Miss Ivy waited.
At last, her throat constricted and her mouth fell open. She groped for someone, anyone, and a young woman reeled and reached out.
With eyes wide and unseeing, Miss Ivy whispered to her, “He rape me,” then, as if a cork had left a bottle, there came a loud rush of words, “Allyuh, he used to rape me! He was a raper-man!”
The drumming stopped, the wake fell silent.
Everybody in the rumshop yard heard when Miss Ivy cried out, “Satan, receive your son! You’s my onliest hope now!” Then the vomit flowed, she collapsed over the chair, as over the rim of a boat and, while tumbling toward those imagined waters, her mind clung tight to a thread of blue ….
The blue hundred-dollar notes inside the envelope Gail had sent her to retrieve from the bedroom, to pay the hospital; the blue notes Joan had given her for twenty-something years of salary and Christmas bonus and fortune-telling and secret-keeping … blue, as the shirt Mr. H had on when she’d walked into his study and told him about the blisters and the burning and how she must’ve gotten it from him, and the blue blocks of laundry-soap she’d bathed with every time the blisters returned … the blue pieces of cloth she’d always pinned to other people’s children to protect them from maljo and the jealous spirits of unborn babies, all the while thinking of her own …. The blue blanket on the floor of the stable and the bluish eye of the horse-fly squatting on it, studying her, and when she’d turned her head away to stare over the stable-boy’s shoulder and between the flapping galvanize sheets, the crisp Grenada sky … the chipped blue paint on a pirogue in Gouyave bay, its net paid out, and the darker blue of the troubled waters as men frightened fish and herded them forward, while other men with blue-black glistening skin stood on the shore pulling seine, pulling together to bring in the net, pulling to a rhythm, pulling to the excited voices of children on the beach. Ivy was there, again, among those picky-head children, some with plaits still tight, some with plaits loosed and hair exploding, all black and barebacked and all in underwear, hers a blue panty—they hadn’t yet learned that boys and girls were different, and she hadn’t yet learned how to feel ashamed.
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