Sic Transit Wagon

by Barbara Jenkins

  She tiptoes to reach the box of matches on the ledge next to the bottle of salt. She lights one burner of the three-burner pitch-oil stove and sets the pot to boil. She opens the door of the wire-sided food safe and takes out the tin of Fry’s cocoa and the saucer of water with the tin of condensed milk sitting in it and rests them on the table. Four red ants are floating in the water. How do they pass through the fine mesh, she wonders, as she dips them out with a finger, wiping dry the damp finger on her skirt. She measures out one big spoon of cocoa powder, tips the spoon over into the big white jug, then pours three big spoons of condensed milk, cutting off the thick stream with a finger, which she licks clean. She puts the cocoa tin back into the safe and closes the door. She takes four cups from the top of the safe. They are real breakable cups with pictures of pink roses and green leaves on their sides. She likes to run her fingers over the surface of these cups. Mammy had bought them as a present to herself and the children. Mammy can’t bring herself to use the enamel cups that everybody else uses. “They get chip-up too quick,” she says, “and then the rims get rough and look nasty.” The girl thinks again about the little pink and yellow purses at Seemungal’s. She likes pretty things too, like Mammy, she decides.

  When the water is bubbling she pours it into the jug and stirs. She pours out four cupfuls of cocoa tea and leaves them on the table to cool. There is enough left in the jug for Mammy when she comes home. She peels the shrivelled pieces of banana leaf off the top of two of the hops bread, tears open the loaves, and pours condensed milk from the tin on the four halves. She adds a little water to the saucer and puts the milk tin back into the safe. She hands the little ones each a cupful of cocoa tea and half-a-hops-bread-with-condensed-milk right where they are sitting on the back steps. They all sit there having their supper as they wait for Mammy to come home from work. She can hardly wait to tell Mammy the news about the party and about the little purses at Seemungal’s.

  When Mammy pushes open the back gate, she looks tired, but, when sees the four children sitting on the steps, her smile comes on, lifting up the creases at the corners of her mouth. She comes over to share hugs, but when she picks up Tony to put him on her lap she says, “He feeling hot, like he has fever.” She touches the girl’s head. “Go pick some chandelier and make a tisane for him.” The girl leaves her bread and cocoa on the step, finds the chandelier bush in back yard, picks some leaves and puts them to boil with a cupful of water and a heaped spoonful of brown sugar. She passes the pale greeny-brown brew and a spoon to Mammy, now sitting, rocking from side to side and hugging the little ones on the back step. Mammy feeds Tony spoonfuls of the hot bitter tea, blowing on each spoonful to cool it. She is still wearing her work clothes: the white uniform of the kitchen staff at the mental hospital. Her forehead is wrinkled at the top of her nose and the creases that run down its sides are now even more deeply grooved than when she came home. “Take the towel and wet a corner in the bucket, then wipe Lynette and Caroline’s faces. Make them blow their noses properly. I don’t want that cold to get any worse.” Tony starts whimpering peevishly, pushing away the cup of tisane; Mammy coaxes him a little, then sighs, exhaling a low desperate whisper, “Lord, put a hand.”

  The girl hears the faint plea as she returns to her bread and cocoa. If the Lord listens to Mammy and does decide to put a hand, the first thing He would do is put His hand over her mouth to prevent her from saying anything to Mammy about anything, just in case she can’t control what she says and mouth open, story jump out. She sits quietly on the step. She eats her bread. She drinks her cocoa. She brushes the crumbs from her skirt as she rises to collect the empty cups from the little ones. She goes to the kitchen and pours the last of the cocoa into a cup and brings it out to Mammy. She bites her lips together as she touches the top of Mammy’s head and when Mammy looks up, the girl hands over the cup.

  The girl lifts Tony on to her hip and walks with him out the gate to the corner. She hugs him, sways him on her hip, tries to distract him from his whimpering while they listen to the shrieks of neighbourhood children bringing to a close their street games as their mothers hurry them indoors. She stands and listens to the cheerful hailing out of grown-ups walking home from work with the darkness coming on. She knows, she understands, that she can’t tell Mammy about the class party, the exchange of presents, and the little yellow and pink purses at Seemungal’s. Not tonight. She turns to go back to her yard. She looks down at the pavement, careful about where she is putting her bare feet. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Maybe, tomorrow will be better.

  THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

  The main news item on the radio was about a girl of nine and her mother’s still-hot flatiron. My sister and I, immersed in a dolly-house game, heard it over the neighbour’s Rediffusion turned full blast to share with the whole yard. The announcer’s words, telling the unthinkable, froze the moment. Lynette halted the little pink plastic teapot in mid-pour; my cup stopped halfway between saucer and lips; the breeze held the coconut palm branches in their up-sway, spiky leaves like flashing swords; the Plymouth Rock hen stilled in mid neck-stretch over a paralysed congaree. Then, my younger sister’s eyes lifted from the teapot into my waiting eyes. We didn’t speak about it but we had reason to remember that news item the following Saturday.

  Lynette and I went with the neighbourhood children to our regular double-feature, twelve-thirty show at Olympic Theatre. That Saturday the main feature was The Day the Earth Stood Still. We sat in the darkness of the hot, airless cinema completely absorbed in the action on the shimmering screen, and even after the doors were opened at the end and we emerged, blinded by the sharp, white, afternoon light, we still hadn’t left the world of the film. On the way home we relived it, acting out the scene in the elevator and its panicky aftermath when the star boy, an alien disguised as an earthling, pushed a button and shut down all the power stations in the world. “Klaatu barada nikto!” we chorused, saving the world from annihilation. The other children hived off as we passed their yards and soon we entered ours, walking round the house to the two back rooms where our family lived.

  As we passed under the open window I could hear my little brother whimpering, but otherwise there was silence. I wondered why Mammy hadn’t picked him up to comfort him. When I got to our door, facing on to the common backyard, I saw our neighbour, with whom we shared the house, sitting on her steps with a bowl in her lap. She turned her head towards me, glanced in that low, cut-eye way at the level of my shoes and turned back to shelling peas, dropping them into her bowl in a deliberate gesture as if that action was for the record. Her daughter, a girl of twelve like me, was standing in their doorway. She didn’t look my way. She was studying her bare feet like they were a subject for exams. Even though the neighbour and her daughter seemed to be busy with their own business, I felt that it was me that they were really paying attention to. It was like I was in a drama and I had just come on stage, and they were spectators waiting to see what the character I was playing would do. I felt my face and hands go clammy.

  I stood in the doorway and at first wondered why there was a bundle of clothes on the floor and why my baby brother was mewling and rocking his body against it. I went in closer and saw that the bundle was Mammy, lying on her side, drawn up in a ball, her face turned away from the door. I knelt beside Junior and peered over. She was lying on her folded left arm, her face buried in its crook. Her other arm, her right arm, was hanging down, bent in a peculiar way. As I leaned against her I tried to feel for the rise and fall of her chest, but I wasn’t sure whether what I could detect was her breathing or mine. I wondered whether she had fainted, as children sometimes did in school, but I had never known Mammy to faint. I shook her shoulder but she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. I shook her again and again, harder and harder. I didn’t know what else to do. I tried to call out, to call her name. I couldn’t. I opened my mouth but my throat had closed off, something had stoppered the voice in me, shutting it off. All I had was a
coldness in me and a need to shake and shake my mother, to make her wake up, to move, to say something, to make her aware of me. I rocked her shoulder back and forth until I heard, coming from far down in her chest, a noise, a deep, hoarse, “Uhgggn… uhgggn…” like a hurt creature, and with that noise, some of the heavy coldness in my body lifted away, for then I knew for sure that the thought I hadn’t allowed myself to think was not the reality.

  She made that awful animal noise again as she squirmed her head slowly out of the crook of her arm and turned so I could see her face. It was not a face I knew. It was like a face from a scary film. Her eyes were puffed up and all around them was grey and puffed up too. One cheek was swollen, a thin trickle of blood streaked from a nostril and made little puddles in the tiny basins of her pores. Her mouth hung down, her lips were parted and I could see her top gums showing raw, red pits at the front. This face didn’t look like my mother’s. I pulled back from her and pulled Junior away too.

  It was then that my eye caught the small figure wedged in a corner. My littlest sister was sitting on the floor, staring straight ahead. I lifted my brother and went over to her. She was sitting in a wet patch and she didn’t seem to know that, or to know me. I touched the top of her head.

  “Noelle, what happen?”

  She didn’t answer. I bent over, putting Junior on the floor next to her. He put his head on her shoulder. She looked up at me.

  “Noelle, tell me what happen.”

  She looked down at her hands, twisting, fighting each other in her lap. I held her hands still, stooping to catch her whisper, “Pappy come.”

  Lynette had not moved from the doorway. I motioned her towards me. She walked stiffly, like she was a robot, looking ahead but not seeing or hearing anything. I held her face in my hand and shook it. Her eyes focused on me and I could see she was on the edge of crying. I said, “Don’t start any of that crying foolishness. You have to behave like a big girl.” I went over to Mammy.

  “Mammy, try to sit up.”

  Mammy struggled hard to lean on her left arm to raise her upper body. I pushed at her back, helping her to roll forward, to be more sitting than lying. She was hanging down her head so I couldn’t see her face, only her crown, where pale scalp showed through her fine, thin hair clotted into dark clumps. I stood there not knowing what to do next. I had never been responsible for an injured person before and I had no lessons in first-aid to guide me. But I had read enough books and comics and seen enough films to have some pattern to follow. Somehow I got hold of myself and at first behaved as if I was following a manual. There was a cup on the table; I picked it up and went outside to the pipe in the kitchen shed. I filled it and brought it to her.

  “Here, drink some water.”

  She took the cup and brought it to her lips. A drop of blood dripped from her nose into the water as she put her lips to the rim but she didn’t notice. She sipped a little and, wincing, handed back the cup. We didn’t say anything to each other and I wondered what to do next. The two little ones in the corner started crying, not loudly, but it was more than I could deal with and I snapped at them.

  “Stop that right now; you making it worse.”

  They looked up, shocked, stopped crying, then hid their faces in each other’s shoulders. I took the enamel basin from under the bed and sent Lynette outside to the kitchen pipe, to collect water. She brought it back a couple of inches deep. I set the basin on the floor next to our mother.

  “Try to wash your face”

  Mammy leaned over the basin and cupped water in her left hand, splashing her face. Little swirls of red fading to pink filtered through the clear water, but her face was still patchy with clots. She wasn’t very good with her left hand and the floor got splashed too. I took an outgrown, outworn school blouse destined to become rags and bit through the end of the fabric to help with tearing a piece off. I passed the rag to her. Mammy dipped it into the water and did a more thorough job on her face.

  “Here,” I handed back the cup, “rinse out your mouth.”

  She did as I said, spitting into the basin. The water turned red.

  I took the basin and rag outside, emptied the water into the drain, rinsed out the rag, squeezed it, refilled the basin and went back inside. She was sitting up better this time, but still on the floor. Now that I could see her face, it seemed to me that it was worse than when it was bloodstained, because I could see each part separately, like evidence in a detective story: shifted nose, broken lips, missing teeth, cut cheekbone, gashed temple, bruised eyes. And there was that right arm hanging down crooked, that she wouldn’t let me touch. I had never seen her as bad as this after one of Pappy’s visits. What should I do next? I had done as much as I could and I didn’t know if what I had done was the right thing. I felt that it was all more than I could bear. Why was life like this? Why was life something that happened to you and you didn’t know how or why or what; you in a constant state of not knowing? Not knowing what to do when something happens to you that is bigger than you and you are the biggest person around and you have to do something, and what you do must be the right thing. I didn’t know whether to ask a neighbour for help, or whether to go down the road to use the phone in the shop. And to call whom? Police? Ambulance? Who would help? I thought about that and remembered that when the neighbour was having a baby, she sent for the nurse who lived nearby.

  “I am going up the road for Nurse Brooks to look at that arm.”

  Nurse Brooks, the official neighbourhood midwife and, as I was to discover years later, unofficial abortionist, came with me wearing her on-duty white uniform. She was bearing her big black bag, the one that we children believed she delivered the babies in. We helped Mammy to a chair near the table and I stood beside her as Nurse Brooks told me what to do. She rested Mammy’s arm on the table and I held the upper arm tight as Nurse Brooks pulled the lower arm. Mammy was by now white and limp and cold and damp; she squeezed her lips tight shut, squeezed her eyes tight shut, would not shame herself by making noise, would not cry, would not let her business go outside. When the broken bone ends were lined up to her satisfaction, Nurse Brooks laid two wooden school rulers along the arm, one above, one underneath, wrapped around an elastic bandage and pinned it in place. She took one of Junior’s diapers and made a sling.

  “That will do for now but you have to go to the hospital and get a plaster-of-Paris cast put on that arm… for the latest tomorrow. Let me deal with your face now.”

  She splashed a capful of Dettol into the basin of water, clouding it white, dipped the rag and cleaned the injuries. Mammy didn’t protest as Nurse Brooks dabbed the Dettol solution into her cuts and I know it must’ve stung a lot. Maybe the pain in her arm had made the other pain slight in comparison. When she was done, Nurse Brooks sent me out to the sink to wash the basin and when I got back I realised that she and Mammy had been talking about what had happened.

  As she was making to leave, she said, “You women have to learn to stop provoking your men. If they have rules, stick by the rules. What you expect when you break rules, eh? Punishment.”

  After she left, I sat by Mammy’s side on the floor and wanted to ask her what she had been punished for. I wanted to know what had she done to make him to act like this. This was not the first time he had beaten her; what did she do to make him do this to her again and again? Did we children have anything to do with whatever was going on between these big people? Was it our fault? None of us ever spoke about it, even Lynette and me, we bigger children. It was just something that happened, that you put up with because you had no understanding and no control. It wasn’t different from other things I didn’t understand like earthquake, flood or fire. Even licks in school was not different from man beating woman, or even death, which could come to anybody at any time. But this time I wanted to know about us, about what caused sudden calamity in our family. I looked up at Mammy, still seated on the chair.

  “What happened?”

  Her answer dripped from between her sw
ollen lips, like feeble drops struggling from the tap when water has been shut off.

  “I let you… go… theatre… without… asking him… first.”

  “But we always go twelve-thirty on Saturday.”

  “He don’t know that. He just happen to come here today and see the two of you missing.”

  “And just for that, he do you this?”

  She dropped her head.

  “What he hit you with?”

  She looked away, not saying.

  “Why you didn’t hit him back?”

  She looked down at me, puzzled.

  “He would’ve killed me. He would’ve killed Noelle and Junior too.”

  “Why you don’t just leave him? We should just leave him.”

  She looked down as her breath came out in a long, worn-out, draining sighs.

  “And who will mind the four of you? Where we will live? My mother dead, father dead, sisters and brothers have their own troubles.”