Sic Transit Wagon

by Barbara Jenkins

  So said, so done: Tuesday morning bright and early Alfred at the gate. Alfred tell Debra he come to help pick the mango and she let him in. Well, he pick and pick and full up a whole crocus bag. He tell Maureen the day work come to two hundred dollars. Maureen pay him, then she and Debra had was to go and share mango through the whole neighbourhood, because how much mango one person could eat, eh? Is a setta work to pulp and juice and freeze and who have freezer big enough to pack-up with a setta mango pulp? You tell me. Hazel pay him two hundred dollars the following week to pick out her zabocas and he buy back most of what he pick for a hundred dollars and take the bag with him. He say he have an order to supply the little street-side vegetable stalls. And so it went with the pootegal, the orange, the sapodilla the pommecythre and the grapefruit. Marlene say, Look how we find ourselves paying Alfred to do what Ghost use to do for free. Denise say is a real shame that now the nice big trees bearing in abundance, they become a expense to upkeep and a botheration, if they not upkeep. Mavis say, is like damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Maureen say her husband say after one time is two time and he not prepared at this stage in life to break his neck climbing tree for no zaboca and is either they move to a townhouse with no yard or find some other solution.

  One day, Alfred come to Maureen yard and he find a big truck park-up in the yard. It mark Green Fingers Tree Removal Service. He hearing brrz, brzzz, brrrzzzz. When he look, he see two big man with a chain saw cutting down the pomerac tree, branch by branch from the bottom branch. He rush for the man holding the saw and start to pelt cuff. The man drop the saw and it start to race around by itself in circles till the next man catch it and turn it off. What you think you doing? Alfred challenge the man. The man say, the lady here call us to cut down the trees. Maureen hearing the saw stop and hearing the commotion come out to investigate. She see Alfred on the ground between all the leaf and branch and the red star-spatter of buss-up pomerac bawling like a little child who get plenty licks. Miss Maureen, Miss Maureen, how you could do me a thing like this? Is how long I know all you? She say, Alfred, stop thinking you could take me for a fool. I done with paying you hundreds of dollars for picking my fruit from my tree what I plant in my yard and then you buying from me for next to nothing. Maureen turn and start walking back to the kitchen. Alfred roll on to his knees and start crawling behind her calling, Miss Maureen, Miss Maureen, listen, nah. Why we can’t talk like two big people? Maureen look back and signal the Green Fingers men to take a five minutes rest.

  She never tell nobody what transpire that day with her and Alfred and Green Fingers, but after that, Louisa finding two hand of green fig by the back step and when she check, the big bunch that was hanging down on the tree down the slope gone; Maureen could count on the mop bucket having a few lime or pootegal and orange when they in season even when her tree bare; morning after morning Nicky greeting one or two nearly ripe zaboca on the kitchen window sill and no rotten ones on the ground, and Mavis enjoying not only julie but starch and graham mango with no flies and rotten fruit under her julie tree. The church ladies still regularly meet for tea and sometimes a remark would pass – where you hiding the pommecythre tree, girl – when homemade pommecythre jam on the menu, and a mango sorbet can put in an appearance at the home of someone who can’t boast of a single mango tree, and the ladies would exchange knowing winks because, who knows, maybe a Ghost pass in the night.

  3

  ERASURES

  I could not look my mother in the face and ask the question aloud, the one I had avoided asking all my life. The fingernails of my left hand dug into its palm, forcing resolve, as I picked up the writing slate at Mammy’s side and wrote, printing each letter with deliberate slowness, “I am fifty years old.” My handwriting wobbled. I knew I was going to a place of no return. “It’s time you tell me who my real father is.”

  Mammy was breathing through a sighing plastic tube in her throat. Her larynx was gone, collateral damage in the war against thyroid cancer. I passed the slate to her. She glanced at the slate, then went rigid, staring, as if an expected doodled pleasantry had morphed into a tarantula. As I looked at her face, I felt remorse that I had done this to her, the one who loved me more unreservedly than anyone else in the world. For many years afterwards I tormented myself with guilt about whether I had been cruel, doing this to someone whom I loved and who was very likely going to die soon. But at the time, all I could think was that, if I had handed her a tarantula, it was one that had scuttled its dark, hairy legs in my chest for most of my life; one that I had swallowed back down over and over whenever it had tried to escape in the shape of this venomous question. I knew, too, it was harder to shape certain words and give them sound in the mouth than to shape their separate letters and write them.

  Mammy’s face lost colour beneath its hospital pallor and the skin drew tighter. She closed her eyes; the breathing tube gurgled in time with the rapid rise and fall of her chest. She looked again at the slate, then, inch by slow inch, pulled up its transparent plastic cover-sheet. The stylus raced to shape Mammy’s speeding copperplate cursive. It was as if she had held the answer captive for fifty years and had been waiting for that key question to free it. She passed the slate back to me.

  “His name is Philip Duchamp.”

  I read the slate, read it again, absorbing the words: Philip Duchamp. My father’s name. Words I had never heard spoken, or seen written before, had, just by being there, snuffed out the me I thought I was and left a me that I did not know. The letters blurred and blended as I looked at them. I saw my hand hovering over the words. I wanted to touch them, to claim them, but I could not bring myself to do so. I handed back the slate, handed back the words. Mammy pulled up the clear sheet. I saw the letters, the words, pulling apart, being ripped apart like a scab from a wound. I felt the peeling of it as if it was my own skin with a wound too raw to lose its scab so soon. But the letters that had shaped his name were no more; there was just a clear sheet awaiting a new imprint.

  “I was twenty when we met and fell in love.”

  Twenty? Only? I was born when she was twenty-five. Five years – a long time between them meeting and my birth. Why so long? Was it a happy romance or one that was fraught, I wanted to know, but I didn’t ask; somehow, I didn’t want to prompt her to tell her story my way. Instead I handed back the slate for her to say more, to say what she wanted to say.

  “When he knew that I was expecting you, he wanted to marry me.”

  But I knew that hadn’t happened. No one ever married her. Not him, my father, nor the father of my siblings, either. I glanced over at Mammy. Her eyes were closed. She looked at peace, as if the letting-go of this half-century-held secret had brought her release. How could she be looking relieved and calm when she had visited such turmoil on me? It was not enough; I wanted her to do more, say more. I wanted to shake her up, make her accountable. The stylus carved the words.

  “What happened?”

  “His family thought he would get kept back in life by me and a child. They sent him away to study. You were born after he left.”

  So, there were grandparents I never knew who didn’t want my mother; a father who, caving in to his parents’ ambitions for him, had left a pregnant girlfriend to go abroad.

  “Where is he now?”

  “He died. A long time ago. You were away. I heard he had a heart attack.”

  He had been alive to me for only a minute and already he was dead. But I still wanted more of him. I wanted to know what his life had been like, what paths he had taken after he and Mammy parted – what he did, where he lived and with whom.

  “Did he ever marry?”

  “He married someone suitable to his family when he qualified, an educated woman from a well-off family.”

  So, his parents had had their heart’s desire – a good match for their bright son. Did they also have that other wish of parents for their children?

  “Did they have children?”

  She looked up at me after reading m
y question, and for the first time I saw a look of something like grim satisfaction play over her face.

  “No, none.”

  I turned away from Mammy toward the wall of glass that overlooked the hospital helipad. A waiting helicopter started up, its blades semaphored, “No, none, no, none, nonone, nononenononenonone…” I was the only child of my father, who was now dead, yet he never knew me, nor I him. How could he allow himself to not know his only child? How could he not care what happened to me? I did not want a father who had discarded me before I was born, abandoned me afterwards and had then died without even knowing his only hope of continuance after the grave. Did it not bother him that somewhere there was his living spawn, his child, a stranger? He knew of me as a real person; I did not even have suspicions of him as a possibility, at least not until I had grown up and started to look at and listen more closely to my world. Then I had begun to decode the questions and suggestions, hints and innuendos, which as a child I did not catch.

  Complete strangers, meeting us four children together, would sometimes ask in that tactless way we people have, “All you sisters?” and at a nod or a yes, would continue, “Same mother, same father?” which, on being met with an assertive, “yes,” would draw a smirk. Some would even persist, “How come she (my) hair so hard and all you (my sisters) own so soft?” With seeds of doubt like this planted, how could I not have guessed that Pappy was not my real father, or at least wondered? I began to unearth buried memories from my childhood.

  There was the Saturday morning when I was about ten. Uncle Francois and I were cycling back from a delivery to a florist downtown. The three Peace rosebuds the flower-shop lady had rejected as too open were in my handlebar basket. We were just going past the Registry Building when Uncle Francois dropped his usual loud conversation voice to an urgent, unsettling whisper.

  “That’s your father behind us.”

  I looked round for Pappy, didn’t see him and whispered back, “Where?”

  “Look, he just passed in that big black car. Look, is him, see? He brown, just like you.”

  I saw a big black chauffeured car ahead. I saw a grey and white head of curly hair, a brown neck and a white shirt collar through the back window. I didn’t see Pappy. How could Uncle Francois say that Pappy was in the car? But he seemed so sure. I remember that, at the time, I had shivered as if a ghost had just walked on my grave. I remember, too, that I hadn’t said anything then, hadn’t asked him to explain. Somehow the whispering had made the whole event confidential – something I should be ashamed and secretive about. He didn’t have to say, Don’t tell anyone; I just knew. We never talked about that incident; it was as if it had never happened.

  If that person really was my father, why hadn’t he claimed me? What was wrong with me that he didn’t want me? He had no other child who could claim a father’s love, yet he didn’t invest any of his life and love in me. I looked at the slate in my hand. I just couldn’t use it any more; its treacherous plastic face, which adopted and discarded with such indifference, could not convey my true feelings of disappointment, of vexation. I had to use my voice, say it out loud. I turned towards Mammy.

  “Did my real father ever see me?”

  She signalled for the slate.

  “Once, when you were twelve. I took you to see his mother and he was there.”

  It came, an entombed memory, resurrected, about a night, a long ago night, when Mammy had told me to put on my Sunday dress and Sunday shoes and socks because we were going out.

  “You want me to help the others to dress too?” I had offered.

  “No, it’s just the both of us.”

  I remembered Mammy, silent and distracted, plaiting my hair, putting in the white satin ribbons that matched my dress, checking that the bow at the waist was tied to her satisfaction, making me sit while she was getting herself ready; both of us going to a strange car waiting round the corner and heading downtown, pushing open a gate and going up some steps to a gallery, and a woman getting up from a bentwood rocker and leading us to a bedroom, to a bed where an old lady lay.

  It had come to my childish mind that the old lady made as little impression on the sheet that covered her as the smallest twigs on the guava tree in the yard at home made on the sky that covered it. I could see again the old lady turning her face to us as we entered the room and her hollowed eyes, bright and searching, peering closely at me as if looking for a sign, and then letting her hand reach from under the covering sheet and Mammy taking my hand and putting it in the old lady’s hand, which felt as dry, as curled, as fragile, as a fallen guava leaf. And the old lady pulling me close and looking more intently now, and signalling to the other woman who, coming over to her and moving aside the nightgown neckline so we could see, under the nightie tucks, a wide, white bandage across her bosom, and me, not knowing what that was about and not having enough sense to even guess or ask. And I, suddenly sensing a watching presence, looked up at that very moment through an open door, and caught a glimpse of the shadow of another person in a room beyond, ducking behind a hanging mosquito net.

  “Why didn’t he want me?”

  “He did later on, but it was too late. Pappy had already taken you as one of his own. Your real father saw he had lost his right to you.”

  I read and passed back the slate.

  “Pappy loved you. He never let me tell you. After he died I still kept my promise.”

  Mammy’s handwriting had become feint, the letters large, barely formed, the lines of script drooped down the writing slate. Her hand was lying limp at her side; her head was turned away. I left Atlanta for home the next day, promising I would be back soon. My mother was already dead when the plane landed in Trinidad.

  Time passed and, one day at the Oval, I spotted Michael Duchamp sitting nearby. I had first met him socially many years before, when Mammy was still alive. On that occasion, he had looked at me closely and asked me what my maiden name was. When I told him he had said, “I think I know your family. Are they from Belmont?” Yes, indeed, they were a long-established Belmont family. On the day of the cricket match, I, feeling empowered with my new knowledge, went over to say hello to him in the luncheon interval. He was sitting with a much older man. Michael held out his arms for a hug and introduced his companion to me. “This is my oldest brother, Lennox. Lennox, this is Josephine Morgan. She was Josephine Dumas. She is Thaïs’s daughter.” He stressed the word Thaïs. Lennox stood up, held out his hand and greeted me: “I could not have passed you on the street. I can see a family resemblance.” I sat for a while chatting about the match with the two men. All three of us held the secret of our kinship but none of us would declare it. Wanting to test this common but unshared knowledge I steered the conversation back to Michael’s introduction.

  “Mammy died two years ago.”

  “I heard that she had cancer,” Michael ventured. “She died in the States?”

  “Yes, and with the whole family up there, I really feel like an orphan.”

  At this, I looked straight at both men.

  “Well, girl,” countered Michael, “life can be hard.”

  I went back to my seat as the game resumed, trembling with confused emotions. I wasn’t sure what I had expected or hoped for in the encounter. I beat up on myself, berating myself for a missed opportunity. Why hadn’t I played the innocent, which they clearly thought me to be? Why hadn’t I asked Lennox whose family resemblance he had found in my face? Could I have prompted him, an old man, to be incautious and let slip whose it was? If it wasn’t Thaïs’s, could it be Philip’s? Could it be his mother’s or a sister’s, maybe?

  When I left the Oval that day, I vowed I would visit Michael at his restaurant. I would challenge him openly with my knowledge and get him talking about the man who was my real father, to help me know him. That evening, as I copied the restaurant phone number from the directory, I plotted the flow of conversation in my head. I planned to say how glad I was to see him again and to meet his brother. I would say I wanted
us to meet to talk about a personal matter. I would agree to whatever date and time he suggested. That night dragged on. I registered each hour on the clock, unable to fall asleep, feeling myself full to exploding with excitement and anxiety. I tried to imagine how he would receive my call and what he would say to me.

  Early next morning, I called. His secretary said he was in a meeting and offered to take a message. I heard myself say, “It’s all right; I’ll try to reach him later.” This I never did. Somehow, the moment, the urgency had passed, the balloon of anticipation in my chest had deflated, my courage had drained away.