She waited for this to sink in, then went on, even more resignedly.
“You just too young to understand life.”
If this was the life I was to understand, I didn’t want to. I stood up and shouted.
“I will kill him. You hear me? I will kill him.”
“You don’t know what you saying. You want to get hanged for murder?”
“I don’t care. And too besides, they don’t hang children.”
“Don’t talk like that. Something must’ve got him vexed in the club and he came down here to take out his vexation. He was drinking. He was too drunk to know what he was doing.”
“He will soon find out. Let him come back here. Then he will know what he was doing.”
Big talk, stargirl talk, I knew Mammy was thinking. Maybe it was bravado, but I didn’t want to be part of any of this. I couldn’t bear the weight of this heavy life any more.
“Instead of going up the road for Nurse Brooks, I should have gone by the police station for him.”
“You think the police would have listened to you? A child making a complaint about her father?”
“But what he did is called assault. It’s against the law.”
“Child, they would say that that is man and woman business, and send you straight back home.”
“So, he can come back anytime he wants and do this again?”
“Men feel that because they minding you they have a perfect right to do what they want to you. You are only a child. You can’t change that.”
In truth, that was how it was. Those were the real rules, there to keep us in check. Still, there had been times, more often perhaps recently, when we had strayed out from under the edges of his control, not always behaving as we were expected to. We had friends we knew he could not approve of, went places without his knowledge. It was as if we had, with Mammy’s tacit sanction, decided to do what we wanted to do when he wasn’t present. After all, we hardly saw him, and we would only behave in the way he expected of us when he was there, seeing us. We never talked about it. It was just the way we worked around and through what life had given us, given all of us, including Mammy. Now that glimpse of freedom seemed under threat.
We spent the next few hours in a kind of nothing way. I gave the children hops bread with some guava jelly that Mammy had made just the day before. The jelly was clear and red and looked like a jewel, and normally I would have put a big spoonful in my mouth and savoured its tart sweetness, but that day I couldn’t eat it. I had seen enough red.
Later, we were sitting silent on the back steps cooling down in the evening breeze when the neighbour’s daughter ran through their part of the house, down their back step, into the shared kitchen. Her whisper was loud enough for us children to hear.
“Ma, it look like he come back.”
Through my head ran the weary knowledge that you’ve got to be lucky to see him arrive as no one ever hears him arrive. You’d be doing something somewhere in the house or yard and suddenly you’d feel uncomfortable, aware of a watching presence, or you’d glance sidelong on the floor and see a pair of brown lace-up leather shoes leading up to brown socks and brown pants, or a long dark shadow would fall over your etched-in-the-red-dirt circle of marbles, or hopscotch squares and you’d look up and he’d be there and you’d have no idea how long he’d been present or how much of what you were doing he’d seen, and you’d wonder whether what you were doing was wrong, something he didn’t approve of.
He must’ve realised he had been spotted that evening because he did not enter by the front gate. He came through the lane at the side of the house and opened the back gate. We saw him at once from the back steps where we had drawn close, huddling together at the news of his arrival. I thought he was a little taken aback to find us there, all present and correct, because he slowed down and seemed a little unsure. But he quickly regained his rhythm and walked towards the seated group.
“I see all you reach back. Where all you was?”
His voice was low. Not loud enough that the neighbours could hear what he was saying, but we heard. No one answered. Neither Lynette nor I looked up to meet his eyes.
“Who tell you that you could go matinee, eh? Who in charge here? Me or you?”
I felt the menace in his words lash me about my bowed head. I knew who was in charge, but I just couldn’t lift my head to say, you, Pappy, you in charge.
“You feel you is big woman to do what you want? If you is big woman, why you don’t go and get man to mind you? Don’t look for me to give all you mother money every week to mind you.”
Perhaps it was our silence, our obvious helplessness, perhaps it was whatever had got him angry, maybe at the club earlier, perhaps it was seeing how badly he had injured Mammy this time, that made him go in a direction he hadn’t gone before, maybe he was trying to prove to himself, and to everybody, that he was right to do what he had done. For, why else would he tell his little girls of twelve and nine they should turn to finding men to support them if he stopped giving Mammy money? No one in our family would ever say a thing like that. No one would even have a thought like that. It was as if he had brought us a new way of thinking about ourselves. A very shocking way of thinking that was about a kind of people we didn’t know, who weren’t friends or neighbours, had a different kind of life from ours. Mammy’s head bent lower. The little ones looked frightened. Noelle started to snivel and Junior joined in. Lynette’s voice came out cracked, but angry.
“The little children didn’t do you anything. Why you making them cry for?”
“But look at my crosses! Who you think you is to tell me what to do? You forgetting your place. I will have to remind you who is the boss here. Like is your turn to learn a lesson today, my girl.”
In slow motion, drawing out each action as he looked steadily at her, he eased the end of his belt from its loop, folded it back at the buckle and slid the pin from the hole. We were all staring at what he was doing, transfixed. We children, at least we older ones who could understand what was happening, were never present when he beat Mammy; it was always in private, between him and her, and we didn’t know what triggered his rages. We would come home and find her bruised and bleeding, but we were never witnesses. But while this action of his was not familiar to us, we understood what it meant. He grasped the heavy buckle in his right hand, drawing the belt through the loops of his pants waist. He folded the belt in half, grasping the buckle and the loose end. He had never hit one of us children before and he was about to beat Lynette. Nothing was like anything I had known before.
A bright image filled my whole mind. It was of that little nine-year-old girl going to the coalpot where the charcoal still glowed red, taking up a thick cloth to grip the handle of her mother’s hot flatiron resting there, raising up that flatiron over her head and bringing it down on to her sleeping father’s head. The dazzling light blinded out all other thought, burning away my ability to think. Klaatu barada nikto! I had to stop him. Not fully conscious of what I was doing, I leaned over, picked up a stone, and pelted it at the side of his head. He must’ve caught the movement from the corner of an eye, because at that instant he turned his head and the stone struck his left eye. His hands dropped the belt and flew up to his face. It was as if a spell had been broken. Lynette, seizing his distracted moment, grabbed a piece of brick and hurled it at the other side of his face. Blood was trickling from the eye, and the cheek, where the brick fragment had struck, was already swelling. The yard neighbours moved closer for a better view. Mammy stood up, walked towards him, her crude sling like a shield before her. She bent down, picked up the belt from the ground, handed it to him, looked him straight in his eyes and said, “Go!”
I NEVER HEARD PAPPY PLAY THE HAWAIIAN GUITAR
I never heard Pappy play the Hawaiian guitar, an experience they say caused big, hardback men to halt at the crunch of a hang-jack moment in an all-fours card game, jaded women to rise from the fumbling laps of drink-sotted men, and broken-nosed barmen to pause
in their rinsing of glasses in basins of grey water. This was in those wrought-iron-balconied upstairs places facing the docks along South Quay where he and his Hawaiian guitar spent whole unbroken weekends after he had pocketed his tally-clerk pay envelope on Saturday mornings.
But then, there was a whole lot I didn’t know about Pappy. Where he lived, whom he lived with, what he liked, or didn’t, were just a few of the mysteries of my childhood, so, when I heard him eulogised at his funeral service, thirty-one years ago today, as the finest player of the Hawaiian guitar in town, I was both surprised and not at all surprised. It wasn’t that I didn’t know anything about Pappy, it’s just that what I did know was gleaned solely through sparse but careful observation, knowledge from the tiniest seeds of clues scattered around my world. Some of the things I knew first hand. The domestic control he exercised over us even while seldom present in person didn’t help me to judge him in a balanced way when I was a child, but today I’m not going to weigh and measure him. I guess the Almighty or maybe St Peter did the plusses and minuses of Pappy’s life long years ago as he approached the judgement seat, brown fedora in hand, seeking the final verdict on his sixty-eight years. I’d put my money on St Peter doing the job. I don’t think Pappy would’ve warranted a personal audience with the Almighty, with whom he had been conflated in my mind in my very early years, any more than he would have been known as an individual human being by his august employer, Mr Kennedy, of Wm Kennedy & Co Import and Export who, I suppose, was like a god in the universe of Pappy’s work.
Pappy’s job at Kennedy’s was to go on the docks when the ships came in and to check the company’s landed cargo and also do the same for cargo going out – import and export. I never saw what came in. We girls were screened from contact with that world where, it was reported, women tossed back their heads and laughed loudly with men who whistled and called out to them – the men guiding the massive rope-wrapped pallets swinging from cranes on the ships lying alongside, down to the dockside. But I did have a first-hand knowledge of what went out since I was often at the Kennedy & Co warehouse. As the eldest, it fell to me to go to Pappy’s workplace on Saturdays, to seek him out and wheedle him into sending some of the contents of his pay envelope back to Mammy, who would be waiting at home in Belmont, anxiously calculating in her head how the hoped-for fifteen dollars could be spread among her string of waiting creditors, to keep all reasonably happy and in check for the coming week.
Dressed-up in last Easter’s church dress, I boarded the bus as it moved sedately through quiet, residential Belmont and disembarked on lower Charlotte Street, just where the bus sputtered to a crawl, edging its cautious way through the Central Market’s overflow of vendors and their fruit and vegetables, fish and flesh – the perfume of ripe pineapple and the stench of hot animal blood mingling in a single intake of breath. I sauntered along Marine Square, so fascinated by the busyness of commercial life that I lost all sense of purpose and allowed the tide of swaying women, who balanced on their heads big, round split-bamboo baskets perched on twists of cloth, and men, who transported handcarts of boxes of goods from wholesalers to retailers, to sweep me along at their pace. I stopped to touch pavement displays of combs – family-sized, clear plastic amber ones with dark flecks trapped inside, two-sided small silver metal ones for combing out lice, small black ones for fitting in men’s shirt pockets. I had to sidestep the beggars, women with cupped hands extended, squatting on the pavement, long skirts drooping in modesty between their knees, faces half-hidden by thin ohrinis draped across their noses from which hung large silver filigree nose rings, and men who were ratty-bearded and ragged, barefooted and dirty, downcast and aggressive, subdued and loud. Everything grabbed attention – enamel cups in beige and white with blue rims, ballpoint pens that could write in three colours of ink with the slide of a knob, four-stacked metal food carriers craftily held together by rods slotted into their handles, black and white knitted alpagatas threaded with patterns of red and green wool. All this, and more, overlaid by a cacophony of sound – loud calls competing with clanging bicycle bells, the abrupt blare of car horns and the raucous shouts of donkey cart drivers.
As I passed the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, I made sure to make the Sign of the Cross across my chest, to invoke good fortune in my quest. I strayed and delayed my unwilling arrival at my destination. From the bright white glare of the pavement, I peered through the deep shade of the overhanging upper-floor balcony into the even darker interior. For a long while I could make out nothing, then jute-brown crocus bags emerged in soft focus in serried ranks, wooden pillars rose to support the storey above and I could just pick out, way in the back, a platform on which was a wooden desk, a chair and a man’s pale face, like a misplaced moon, floating above a khaki shirt. This man was the first of those I was dressed to impress on Saturdays. “Yuh looking for yuh fadda?” he called out, and I nodded in embarrassed agreement. He then turned his face to make a last quarter phase to shout into the darker recesses, “Jimmy still there?” At this I stopped breathing, crossed my fingers and said a silent prayer, for if I was late, late through dawdling, and if the answer came, No, Jimmy done gone already, indicating that Pappy had picked up his pay and left, that would be a disaster for us for the coming week, and how would I explain to Mammy why I had failed to do what she had sent me to do?
But not this time. For today, just today, I will remember Pappy still being there and him coming from that back space where he was doing whatever mysterious thing that tally-clerks do when not on the docks. He is moving slowly and fluidly towards me, wiping his hands with a white handkerchief that he is looking at intently, not pausing as he folds it first in half, then in quarters, into a neat, deliberate square, edges and corners perfectly aligned, then folding over a corner to meet the opposite one, making a fat triangle that he pats and flattens and is already placing, with a straight palm to avoid it creasing, into a back pocket, by the time he gets to me. He is bending over for me to plant an unwilling but dutiful peck on his cheek, the sickly scent of tobacco rising from his pores cancelling out, for that moment, the pervasive, unidentifiable dusty smells of that gloomy cavern. We stand facing each other, each waiting for the other to say something first.
“Mammy send me for the money.” I, unschooled in tact and diplomacy, break the spell.
“And yuh wouldn’t come to look for yuh fadder otherwise?” he challenges.
For years and years, I replayed that scene, just so – setting: the warehouse; characters: father and girlchild; situation: girlchild requesting child-support from father – and I wonder today whether I had been too simplistic, too judgemental in my reading of him all those many, painful Saturdays of long ago. In that scene of the past, it isn’t just Pappy and me there. Standing there with us, in us, were the people we thought we were, and the people we thought we should be. I was girlchild, yes, but also convent-girl, and so I was divided between two worlds – the one that contained the expectations and standards of the chaste world of Irish nuns and their ideal students, my French-creole, plantation-owning and merchant-class schoolmates, and the less privileged underworld of my own real life. As to Pappy – at work he was tally-clerk, at home, rarely visiting father, and there was also a secret life that none of us at home was privy to. Now I see that when Pappy and I encountered each other on Saturday mornings, we were in the gladiatorial arena of malehood in the mid-twentieth century when role models were Jack Palance, Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne. So when Pappy was walking towards me, he was walking towards a camera from a long shot. He had a role to play, that while moving to a tight close-up, he was trying to show that he is Man. He is Man, to be recognized as such by a visible and invisible audience and maybe, above all, by himself.
But back then, as I stood within the warehouse of Wm H Kennedy and Sons, Marine Square, Port of Spain, I understood nothing, only that my mother had sent me to my father and I was being deflected by his challenge that I wouldn’t come to see him if it were not to get money f
rom him. It was a challenge I couldn’t take up because it had a shape and size and facets and angles beyond my comprehension and I didn’t know how to deal with it at any level – joking or serious, as stated or as implied. I hung my head, ashamed that it was indeed so, that I wouldn’t come to look for my father unless I had been sent for money, and that he had drawn that shameful ingratitude of mine and of the whole tribe of us dependants to the attention of his watching and listening audience of fellow-men, who themselves had women and children to contend with.
Pappy throws off that pose and takes on the responsible, proud father one saying, “Come over here and say good morning to Mr. De Four.” That is the moonface’s name, Manuel De Four, and he is intent on spiking squares and rectangles of paper to a board of protruding nails behind his desk. I say, “Good Morning, Mr. De Four.” And he, pausing in his rhythmic paper spiking, says, “So what happen, you get too big to call me Uncle Mannie now? Come and give me a kiss, chile.” Chile tiptoes and leans forward to brush the roughly shaved cheek with her lips, and she can’t wait to surreptitiously turn her head and with seeming casualness wipe said lips against the stiff green organdie of her puff-sleeved arm. Pappy calls out to the back darkness, “All yuh come out here and see mih daughter.” Pepsi-Joe and Sonny shuffle out and one says, “But she getting big, eh Jimmy,” and the other asks, “So this is the bright one?” and Mr. De Four calls over, “She must be get the good looks and the brains from the mudda,” and they all laugh at this familiar joke that big people are always making on one another.
Putting his arm around my shoulders, Pappy pulls me to him. My face is against his scratchy, brown serge pants and I move closer in so as not to face the gaze of the men, because I am ashamed under scrutiny. I suspect that they are saying something else under those words and I can’t guess at its hidden meaning, and I’m not sure who, if anyone, is supposed to answer. Their heh-heh-heh fades as Pepsi-Joe and Sonny disappear, back into the dim interior of the warehouse, Mr De Four resumes his paper-spiking and Pappy moves me towards the rows of sacks, his arm still around my shoulders, my two steps matching his one.
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