Sic Transit Wagon

by Barbara Jenkins

  At the first row, he rolls over the loose sacking at the top of the nearest bag. At that slight disturbance, a mustiness dislodges from the sack. My hand reaches in and I take a handful of large seeds, dull, rough ovals and I close my fist and rub the contents together and as the full fragrance bursts out, I put my nose deep into my palm and inhale an intoxicating mystery, something like vanilla, but a vanilla that has journeyed through deep forests, dank leaves, slithering life, absorbing darkness, moisture, heat, decay along the way, complicating its innocent bland sweetness. I do not know where tonka beans come from, how they grow, where they are bound, what is their use. I only drink in the beans’ enigmatic essence.

  I drift on to another bag, to smooth, shiny-dark beans whose cloying scent I know from comforting drinks on rainy nights: the thick, oily, welcome embrace of cacao beans. These are rubbed, squeezed and inhaled too. They leave a trace that make my palms glide frictionless along each other, silky-smooth, soothing. We move to the last row – the thrill of forbidden pleasure, an adults-only pleasure – the spiky aroma of coffee beans tickling high up in my nostrils like a sneeze that won’t come. Rooted there, I bury my nose into first one handful, then another, astonished at the richness and complexity of scents and sensations that have come from such undistinguished, dull, hard scraps. Are not seeds just dropped and discarded, scattered and strewn from living trees, who carry on, year after year, producing these end-products of their more attractive floral displays? Or so my child’s mind runs. I squeeze, I rub, I inhale, transported in time and space, lost in my own world of the senses.

  The Cathedral tower clock calls the Angelus. Everything is suspended as the loud, metallic clang of clapper on bell rim fills the air, my head, my chest with each of its heavy strikes – bang, bang, bang, pause – four cycles of three, then a pause followed by twelve sustained strikes. The sound lingers, vibrating the air and the ear for long moments after, and as it fades, it is as if a spell has been broken and the true world has been revealed. Everything springs to life in a changed direction. The bells signal the end of the working week for Pappy and for everyone else in town and I am jolted back to Saturday in the Kennedy and Sons warehouse. Pappy is anxious to go, to meet up with the boys, to start his other life, free from duty to work and family, and I must get back home to Mammy.

  We stand there together, he wanting to rush away, I wanting to detain him, for I have not yet got what I came for. But I cannot ask again. Pappy has just treated me to a little distraction for my enjoyment and I cannot bring myself to be crude and remind him of what I really came for. He gives every appearance of having forgotten why I am there. He glances at his watch. I look down on the grimy cement floor. My palms are sweating with the fear that he has indeed forgotten and I will have to say it aloud again, will have to say that I have come to visit him, my father, only to get money. Pepsi-Joe and Sonny come out of the darkness and go towards the long, stout, heavy wooden bar that slot into the iron brackets when they close the wide front doors, barricading us inside. They look towards Pappy and me, waiting. Pappy now seems to remember the purpose of my visit.

  Standing an arm’s length from me, he draws from a back pocket a worn leather wallet and he extracts, one by one, drawing out each note into a symphony, a five-dollar bill, pause, another five-dollar bill, longer pause, and finally, with a flourish, to the mute crash of cymbals from the soundtrack, a third five-dollar bill. He fans the three bills out, a gambler with a royal flush, and, with the faintest of nods, indicates that I should put my palm out, into which one, two, three five-dollar bills are placed flat and then folded – my hot damp fingers folded by his cool, dry ones – over the limp, many-times-used paper. I untie my handkerchief, place the notes in the middle, tie all in a double knot and loop one loose end through my waistband, knotting it securely in place. He bends his head for my parting cheek peck, I deliver, then turn and run out the doorway, leaving my father until another Saturday.

  I set off along Marine Square from which life has drained, save for women, squinting in the sharp white light, spilling out the Cathedral after their Angelus devotions. As I move my palm across my face to make a Sign of the Cross in gratitude for answered prayers, the essences of the crushed seeds invade my nostrils, and I feel a strange excitement and lightness. Pappy strides off in the other direction, to the wrought-iron-balconied upstairs clubs opposite the docks on South Quay, to meet up with the boys and to play his Hawaiian guitar, to the stupefaction of hard-drinking, hard-gambling men and the adoration of soft, carefree women, reeling them in with his steel-stringed vibration, which I shall never hear.

  GOLD BRACELETS

  Thaïs’s gold bracelets were a pair of open circles, large, thick and heavy. My earliest recollection of sensual pleasure comes from sitting on her lap and playing with the bracelets on her wrists. I would close my eyes and run my fingertips along the grooves and ridges of the fat cocoa pods into which the ends of the open circles were shaped, and then the neat rows of bumps – the goldsmith’s cocoa nibs that spilled from the pods – and onto warm, smooth unadorned gold. When, as children, we begged to borrow them as essential accessories in playing “big people” with her shoes and dresses and hats, she would say, “No. Not the bracelets. They’re too precious.” When we pestered, she would say, as if that explained everything, “My father gave them to me for my twenty-first birthday.”

  I can just imagine the old Frenchman saying to her, she the eldest girl with a twin sister and two younger sisters already married, “Thaïs, it looks like you are never going to find a husband. These are for you to help yourself.” It was his last gift to her before he died. So said, so done.

  Expecting the fruit of her first mistake at twenty-six, she made her way into uncharted territory. I can imagine her, fidgeting from one foot to the other, shrinking inside herself, hoping no one who knew her or her family would see her as she was scrutinised, from white beret to white peep-toe slingback shoes, by the Sephardic Jewish assayer at the Y De Lima pawnshop window (on the side-street around the corner from its more respectable Frederick Street Fine Jewellery establishment). After sizing her up, maybe guessing her predicament, he screwed a magnifying glass into his right eye socket, scratched at each bracelet with a little knife, set the bracelets on a delicate balance and pronounced, “Twenty-four carat gold. I give you fifteen dollars. Is three months you have to redeem. You come back, you pay extra three dollars for interest.”

  She used this fabulous sum to get together the layette: light white cotton that she cut into tiny chemises and sewed and embroidered on her mother’s old foot-pedal Singer; soft white cotton that she cut and sewed into diapers; white wool knitted into bootees and bonnets. The baby – me – slept hemmed in by pillows on my mother’s bed in my grandmother’s house, while my mother did the washing and cooking for the household. “Don’t think you could lie down for nine days; nobody here to do for you,” her mother, embittered by shame, would have told her.

  Three years later, put out of the family home with the pending second mistake, my mother again left the bracelets with Y De Lima and rented a room in the next valley. My memories of that St. Francois Valley Road home are of a pet squirrel, which we fed bread and bananas, and of a baby sister, who was fed at my mother’s bosom, screened by a muslin diaper. The third mistake, another girl, again after three years, moved us to St James, the father taking responsibility, finding a better home to rent in a nicer district. This time the bracelets were pawned for payment to a cabinet maker for a Morris set – couch, one rocking chair, one armchair and a small centre table – to complement the mahogany set of bed, wardrobe and dressing table (with round mirror and stool), an earlier parting gift from her mother.

  I learnt to tell the time at that third baby’s christening when the godfather, the rare owner of a watch, unravelled the mysteries of the hands and the face and the numbers (how 4 could be an hour or it could be twenty past, and a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ that gave time a malleable quality that has never left me, so t
hat I am stranded, quaintly analogue, in today’s digital now). The fourth birth, a boy – his gender brought relief to my mother and huge pride to his father, who, according to his drinking buddies, had proved himself a man at last – precipitated another move, to Boissiere. There was a final move, this time without another baby, to Belmont when I was ten. This last move put the gold bracelets in captivity for a three-burner, table-top kerosene stove to replace the coalpot, another bed for the three little ones to share and a folding canvas cot in which I, as eldest, was privileged to sleep alone.

  One day, when I was thirteen or so, the neighbour’s son ran into the yard waving a newspaper page. “Miss Thaïs, Miss Thaïs,” he gasped, “mih mammy say to check out De Lima list and see if you have anything there.” As my mother took the newspaper from him, I saw that the newspaper was shaking; in fact, all of her was shaking. “Go,” she said to me, “go and bring the ticket.” I climbed on the dressing-table stool and fetched down the red-velvet-lined cardboard jewellery box where she kept the ticket. She leaned against the doorway as she scanned the long rows of numbers, praying under her breath that her ticket number would not match one there, but the number for her precious gold bracelets was there, among the hundred or so unredeemed items offered for sale the following Saturday. I had never seen my mother so distraught. She sat on the back step, her chin resting on her hand while she gazed up at the guava tree. I do not know what she read in the tracery of its fine branches and leaves against the sky, but I was despatched to an uncle-in-law who owned a liquor store, to ask for ten dollars.

  Ten dollars was a lot to ask for, even though he owned a shop. It was a week’s wages for a porter humping crates, boxes and barrels of alcohol from the delivery truck to the warehouse at the back of the shop. When he asked me, “So when your mother planning to pay me back if I lend her the money?” I could only hang my head; the answer to that question was not sent as part of the request. I was spilling hot tears of shame – to have to beg in front of the boys who worked in the shop, in front of the customers buying rum at four shillings a bottle – when Uncle lifted the counter flap and pressed five two-dollar bills into my hand. My mother also asked one of her brothers, the one whose living was growing roses and selling them to flower shops, and he too parted with ten dollars. “Don’t worry to pay me back,” he said; “that is for the children.” The last ten came in ones and twos, only from family, for she would never have wanted outside people know her business. Thirty dollars, two weeks’ worth of her grocery-cashier wages, went to redeem the bracelets. I was old enough and bold enough to ask, “Mammie, how you going to pay it back?” and to bear witness to the answer she gave to any and all of life’s uncertainties, “The Lord will provide.” The Lord provided for weeks on end a bountiful harvest of guavas. Thaïs armed us children with enamel basins and packed us off to pick up the fallen fruit before the swarming fruit flies could hasten their deliquescence. She stood night after night over steaming pots of boiling fruit, adding sugar to the strained liquid, then skimming and stirring and testing and pouring out jar after jar of clear ruby jelly, and it was with gifts of this that she repaid her creditors.

  I learnt that the gold bracelets sliding up and down her busy arms were my mother’s insurance against the future. If the bracelets were not on her arms, they were at Y De Lima’s. If I saw her leaving the house on a Saturday morning in the August school holiday and she wasn’t wearing her bracelets, I knew she wouldn’t be wearing them for a while yet. After the exchange at the pawnbroker’s, she would be going straight to Waterman’s and Glendenning’s for school uniform material, and with booklists to Muir Marshall and Stephen & Todd’s.

  She would shop until the money almost ran out and then, laden with packages, she would go to Eden’s flower shop and get some long-stemmed gladioli wrapped in a cone of translucent white paper, and then walk up to Holsum’s Patisserie on Park Street to choose cream horns, custard slices, cream cakes and soupees delicately placed in a small white cardboard box, and with the string looped through an index finger, she would get in a six-cents-a-ride taxi to return home to Belmont, triumphant. (I would be in my fifties before I could understand, and so forgive, the extravagance of those blooms and pastries; but I could never match that display of faith in the present or future.)

  A sou-sou running in September and October briefly released the bracelets but they were back into De Lima’s in late November – for patterned cretonne for cushion covers for the Morris chairs, for lace curtains, for new linoleum for the kitchen floor and new oilcloth for the table. Basic foodstuff was always taken on trust from the Chinese shop opposite, but the big food items for Christmas, the salt ham and the chicken, the dried fruit, rum and wine for the Christmas cake were bought on Charlotte Street from a bigger grocery and these were bought cash with an early hand in a November and December sou-sou – as was the five-foot Scots pine Christmas tree at a dollar a foot, brought home in a taxi for which Thaïs always paid for two seats, on Christmas Eve. The tree stood in a bucket filled with stones and water, yet it died, slowly, shedding its sharp leaves, which years later I learned to call “needles”. It filled the house with a bewildering, alien, sharp, medicinal fragrance. (I met that scent in its natural habitat for the first time walking through the Forestry Commission’s rows of pines when I lived in Wales in my twenties, and every time I found myself in a pine forest thereafter, I would be taken back to my mother, without her bracelets on Christmas Day.)

  Confirmation and first communion dresses, shoes, white prayer books, veils and candles with the gilt cross and lily motif; ice-cream and cake parties with neighbours at these events – all happened at the right time thanks to the gold bracelets. There was always money for church collection at Sunday Mass and small spending money for school and for the Olympic Cinema twelve-thirty double feature on Saturdays. I could never recall my mother using the phrase “cannot afford”. It would have made her ashamed to even think that there was something she couldn’t do for her children.

  The unknown future that saw the bracelets missing in action included things like Thaïs’s hysterectomy when I was eleven, Noelle’s broken arm and appendicitis, Lynette’s dental visit for “riders” (never corrected), and fillings for me when I was fourteen. (There were, though, not enough doctors’ visits for Tony’s recurring ear infections – he would need a hearing aid at forty.)

  When I was twelve, someone told my mother about a house to rent for the August holidays in Toco. Thaïs loved the sea; after a sea-bath in nearby Carenage, she would let the salt dry on her skin and go to sleep without a freshwater bath. “Medicinal properties,” she claimed. Excited at the idea of a seaside holiday for her children, she contacted the owner of the house and arranged to rent it for four weeks in the school holidays. It was one of three, set in a loose cluster at Trois Roches, and that first venture started the family tradition of August holidays in Toco.

  I remember the packing of cardboard boxes of clothes, food items, matches, and candles for “spending time by the sea” as these holidays were called. The blue house, up on a hill, was at the eighteen and a quarter mile post. (The location, the bend in the road, the shape of the hill, the cliff on the other side of the road is deeply engraved in my memory, but I searched in vain for the blue house on every trip up that coast in the following years of my adult life).

  The cycle of daily life at the Trois Roches house stays in my dreams. Mornings, off to the sea. A short climb down the cliff and on to the narrow beige sand strip and a leap into clear foamy Caribbean water. This is where we all learnt to swim, by surviving the waves and currents of the little bay with the three large black rocks sticking out of the water. Lunch back at the house, a quiet time, and then back to the sea. Later, as the sun was about to set, Thaïs would look across the bay for the sight of the sails of returning pirogues and, skins still sticky with the residue of drying seawater, we would take a steady walk down to the village, past the church at Mission and on to the fish depot. Here my mother would choose a red
fish or a king fish (head and tail for the night’s broth; slices fried or steamed for lunch next day) and, with the scaled and gutted trophy, we would set off back to the house, counting off the quarter-mile-posts along the black tar road.

  At night, the gas lamps made a hissing noise like a den of dragons snoring. The lamps attracted thousands of suicidal rainflies. They smashed into the lights, the walls, the furniture; they collapsed into the fish broth, the cocoa tea, the bread and butter; their grey translucent wings collected in drifts in corners; their black wriggling bodies crawled aimlessly across the floor. The next morning’s sweepings left a rug of squirming black and grey out the back door. (It was years later that I understood that these rainflies are termites and that the little blue house on the hill was but one stage in the process of a gentle continuous recycling of material by these tiny, purposeful creatures).

  Through September the gold bracelets languished at De Lima’s awaiting their release by a sou-sou hand in late October and a brief appearance on Thaïs’s arms before their annual Christmas captivity. It was Thaïs’s dream to be, one day, actually wearing her bracelets for Christmas. That did not happen until many years had passed, we children had grown up and all but one had departed home.

  It happened after my mother was summoned to New York to care for her sister who had had a nervous breakdown (precipitated in part by the nightly parade, on TV, of cargo planes bringing home bodybags from Vietnam, including one containing the shattered remains of a young man she had cared for when he was a child). The gold bracelets were going to pay for the plane ticket, but her horticulturist brother helped out and Thaïs, at fifty, left Trinidad for the first time, arriving in New York wearing her gold bracelets. There the land of opportunity allowed her, though still an illegal alien, to work at childcare and household help, care for her sick sister and train as a geriatric nurse. For the first time her gold bracelets were secure. She had the means to eat, pay rent, spend on the education of her, by then, US-relocated grandchildren, buy gifts, send money home to care for her own last child left behind, furnish an apartment and live in a degree of comfort that she had never imagined.