Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  He checked his pencil to see if the point was writing.

  “Yes. You can begin.”

  She tell him how she had gone to the church, the observation by her nephew, the insistence of her sisters, their discovery of the cloud on the glass of the coffin, their concern, their appeals to Claude, his dismissal of them.

  “And you think,” Constable Aguillera asked her, “you think it was deliberate, that he deliberately chose not to examine the coffin to see if his sister was alive?”

  “I don’t know. Look him there. You could ask him that yourself.”

  She pointed to Claude, who was one of the pallbearers who had brought the coffin out of the church and had rested it down for a moment, before they took it up and carried it through the town, to the cemetery.

  “He?”

  “Yes, he self.”

  “But that is the brother of the deceased. What could his motive be?”

  “You will have to ask him. Is Cain that kill Abel.”

  I walked over to him: “Claude Cruickshank?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are responsible for this funeral?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Can I see the death certificate?”

  “Yes.” But even as he is putting his hand in his pocket to get it, I realize there is a problem. “I don’t seem to have it,” he tell me. “I was sure there was one signed by the District Medical Officer and issued to me.”

  “So how can we be certain that she is dead?”

  “You have to take my word for it.”

  “With respect, you are not a medical doctor. If you don’t have a death certificate to prove her death officially, you can’t proceed with this burial.”

  “Look, Sir, Doctor Bissessar has pronounced her dead.

  The District Medical Officer has issued a death

  certificate . . .”

  “But you don’t have it.”

  “No. I don’t have it on me.”

  “Well, what are we to do? I can’t allow you to proceed without a death certificate.”

  “Sir, people have come here from all corners of the island. We have the Minister of Festivals, Members of Parliament, people from the clergy, the arts. You don’t believe these people know my sister is dead?”

  “And what about the law? We have people here claiming she is alive.”

  “Sir, the District Medical Officer has issued a death certificate.”

  “What you want to do? Open the coffin here to see if she is alive? I am not a doctor.”

  “Nor am I.”

  And that is when the idea of arresting him and stopping the funeral occurred to me. I was about to resign. I needed to arrest someone. Who better than a big shot? And what better charge than one nobody had ever been arrested on? Burying someone without a death certificate.

  “The woman is my sister, as you well know.”

  Cain killed Mabel, I thought. However, this was no time to joke. My mind was a blur. Ramona Fortune was there beside me. I was thinking of her . . . I glad you come back . . . of all the times I had placed myself on the front gallery of the police station to watch her go to school and to watch her return, remembering the time I had danced with her at the harvest in the school, not caring really about dancing, just so glad to hold her hands, touch her waist, the both of us not so much dancing as happy to be so close, holding each other.

  Remembering her hands trembling and a tremor in her body as he held her, remembering the polkadot dress she was wearing and her hair pulled back and divided in two with two plaits at the back of her head and her eyes hardly daring to look into his because her mother and father were watching; remembering too the time by the river when she was there with her sisters and although the water was muddy he dived in, just to have something to do, and grazed his chest on a stone and came out like if it was nothing and showed it to her and she touched his chest with her fingers and he was healed.

  The things we would have done together (he was thinking as if he was speaking to her) . . .

  The things . . . He could hear her thinking, dreaming, her thoughts the same as his: The Fisherman fête in Grand Rivere, the Calypso show in Skinner Park in Sando, the Jouvay mornings in Port of Spain, holding you in Desperadoes steelband going down Frederick Street . . . The things I wanted to show you . . . The beautiful funny things,…the things to see through your eyes to share with you, to laugh with you.

  “But you didn’t fight for me,” she said.

  “You went away.”

  “You let me go.”

  “If I did only know.”

  “I was still in the world.”

  “I didn’t hear from you. I had to believe that you didn’t want to see me, that that was how you wanted it, that somehow that would be better.”

  “That was how I had to want it. I didn’t see you. I didn’t hear from you. You didn’t fight.”

  “My life would have been quite different.”

  “And mine as well.”

  “One slip and your life change forever.”

  “You have children?”

  “Five. Three girls and two boys.”

  “You was busy.”

  “But we should be grateful. We should be glad. In life this thing doesn’t really happen, you know. People don’t get a chance to start again, to go back again to find the one they love again. When things go they gone – forever.”

  “And isn’t that so now?”

  “All those things I missed showing you. All those things I didn’t see because you wasn’t there to see them with.”

  “You didn’t ask me if I married.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  He saw that she had seen from the absence of stripes on his sleeves that he was still at the same rank she had left him. “You know, since I in Cascadu I have never made an arrest. I never arrest anybody.”

  “I’m sure you’re a good policeman.”

  And then he knew that he wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t make up in one day what it had taken a lifetime to accomplish. He couldn’t arrest this man. Let the promotion go. He could face himself as a man of principle, of values, of resolve. It was then he finally made up his mind. Yes. He would go out as a constable. As a big man. Maybe that would be some kind of record.

  With a new calm, he heard himself talking: “So what we going to do?”

  “You is the boss,” Claude said.

  Constable Aguillera let that pass.

  By the time he reached the cemetery he was so moved by her presence, so deep into remembering and imagining, so filled with the sadness and beauty of life that he felt his own sadness over loss, over death and felt that he had been too hard on Claude, requesting the death certificate. And Dorlene would have been buried as a matter of course but for the bawling of Brian Algood, Sweetie-Mary’s second sister’s youngest son, a child of seven who maintained that he had seen her eyelids flutter, so that when it came time for the gravediggers to ease the coffin into the grave the little boy put on such a bawling that his father who was assisting the gravedigger threatened the boy with a flogging if he did not shut up. The boy bawled even more and it was only when the man who everyone called Dollar, because all his conversations included talk of money, began to take off his belt to menace the boy with the promised flogging that Constable Aguillera was given the opportunity to get into the story in a way that satisfied everybody.

  “OK.” For by then all eyes were on this boy and many voices were saying, “Well, at least you could look in the coffin just to show him, just to assure him.”

  Constable Aguillera was patient, almost casual:

  “Dollar, why you don’t just go and open the coffin and make sure the woman alive, eh? Why you don’t do it?”

  Dollar had turned not to Constable Aguillera but to the boy, who was still bawling. “OK,” he said. “OK. I going to go myself down inside the grave and open the coffin and you better pray to God she is alive. Because if she
is not alive, today your backside is mine.”

  With men at the graveside holding the rope, Dollar let himself down onto the coffin. After a while, he signaled for them to pull up the rope. When he came up he directed them to continue pulling because he had attached the rope to the handles of the coffin, and he joined those pulling, until they heaved the coffin out of the grave.

  And yes, it was true, there sitting up in the open boat of the coffin was Dorlene Cruickshank, white as a sheet and alive.

  Resurrection

  If you see confusion. People fainting left and right, people running away from the cemetery, some falling to their knees to pray, others, doubting that Dorlene was really flesh and blood, pushing forward to pinch her to see if she was real, others, wanting to hug her, until Evrol Chance, the only one of the government ministers who had neither fainted nor run off at sight of the living Dorlene, pushed his way to her side, Constable Aguillera clearing the way for him, saying in the voice of authority, “Let the boss pass. Let the Minister through.”

  As if he had been preparing for this occasion all along, Evrol take off his jacket and put it around her. He signaled for the crowd around her to open up and give her fresh air and with one knee on the ground he calmly took her hands into his own and began rubbing them to increase the circulation of the blood until a tap on the shoulder made him turn and see from the stethoscope around her neck that it was the medical doctor, Melvina Thompson. The doctor signaled for help and some men came forward. Evrol was going to assist but the men waved him away and lifted Dorlene and carried her out of the cemetery to the car that would take her to the hospital. The crowd had not moved. Evrol knew he had to speak.

  And he spoke, in the up-tempo declamatory style of the Black Power days, bringing back to me the noises of those days, the sparkle of words dancing in the sunshine, the drumming lifting us up, both of us walking in front the single car, the Volkswagen with the flags on it and the loudspeaker. The sun hot, the day bright. Crop time, with the pouis yellow and the flamboyant red and our voices over the loudspeaker talking, telling the people, This is a march for you, this is a march for peace and justice. And people looking at us as if we gone mad, others with astonishment that we so brave that we had the courage to march for the human rights that Blackpeople had forgotten we had a right to, for the dignity that we had refused to forfeit with Independence. We came upon a Blackwoman who had rice paddy drying in the sun, who when she see us coming hurried and gathered up her rice, and was about to run.

  “No, Mother,” Evrol tell her. Because she was not quick enough to escape us entirely, “We are not here to harm you but to liberate you.”

  Liberate you . . . Liberate you, the words echoing in the vault of those years. And now at the funeral, he was speaking all these years after: “It is your love and your faith that have brought Dorlene back to the land of the living. Because even when she was in the coffin you refused to let her lie there until you had satisfied yourself that she was not alive.”

  When he was finished talking, he went to my aunt Magenta and stood before her, almost hesitant, wanting to greet her, to hug her perhaps. But, unsure of his welcome, he stretched out a hand for her to shake.

  His hand was before her. He could see her grief. He could see her looking at him, her eyes asking with sadness if this was what it had come to. Words? Speech? After his friendship with Franklyn from a childhood in which they had grown up together, in and out her house the two of them, like brothers? What did he have to say to her, after the government of which he was a member had chased Franklyn through the bush and bring him out with his head shoot off? This was it? Was this it?

  When after the Black Power rebellion was put down and Evrol was plucked, as the newspaper’s report stated, from the ashes of the revolt and made a government senator, my aunt Magenta wanted to understand how Evrol could remain silent on the killing of Franklyn.

  I wondered how she could ask that question of Evrol and not ask it of herself. Or was she in asking it of him trying to get an answer for herself. In the twenty-one years in the National Party as Evrol moved from backbencher to cabinet minister, I did not hear him once address the subject. He kept away from Cascadu unless on official business and then he left as quickly as he came. He went to live in Port of Spain. We didn’t see him and didn’t look for him either. We saw him on the newspapers in those years as he went from dashikis and long loose hair to braided hair, to dreadlocks, his tone of righteousness, his outrage modulated, the ring of sincerity losing itself in confusion of statistics, his passion castrated by calm.

  My aunt Magenta looked at his outstretched hand, and, sorry for him, for herself, for all of us, she took the hand and drew him to her bosom and held him in an embrace, like she was holding the son she had lost and the son she was losing.

  Above the poetry of that moment, the bell start to ring, balang balang, and Brother Ken raised a hymn and Aunt Magenta begin to pray. And even as the singing and the praying going on, the drums start up in the background, then out of nowhere Blue Boy, the calypsonian, cut in with his own song/chant that was to sweep the island, “Get something and wave,” and Miss Ella, who had sung the wonderful solo backed by the choir at the church, as if touched by a new spirit, joined in, her voice further lifting up the song, Get something and wave, like a resurrection morning call, getting people up from their knees, opening their eyes, women taking off their headties and their veils, men taking off their jacket and loosening their ties, the song rising still, with the bell ringing again balang balang baling. The Orisha drumming cutting and keeping time, and I don’t know where they get the iron from, but somebody start beating iron and then the steelband fellars take up the tune, first the du-dup and then the bass section, until the tenors start to ring and the whole thing come together. And that is how people start out the cemetery, everybody, Shouter and Shango, Presbyterian, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Anglican, all, everybody Get something and wave.

  It was a most beautiful sight. People who had been out of Trinidad for years and forget what it was like to be in Carnival were out in front waving wreaths and shawls. Peter Minshall the famous mas man, who had come up from Port of Spain for the funeral, and was standing beside me, watching spellbound this mass of humanity, individual and diverse celebrating this triumph, said, “My God, Calypsonian, this is the mas. This is the mas. Boss, this is it, The River, mas in black and white. Let them tell me that we can’t rejoice in black and white. Look at the beauty, look at the majesty! Look!” And he raised up the tail of his shirt with both hands as if he want to take it off and go barebacked into the band, all the time singing, Get something and wave!

  “Come,” he said, holding me by the hand, wanting me to join him, “let’s go.”

  And as I hesitated, “What happen, you can’t sing?”

  But when I open my mouth, is like the weight of all the years just fall on me and strike me dumb. No sound came out and I was back in Grenada and all I could hear was the roar of planes, grenades exploding and gun mouths flashing murder. What I was hearing was the noise of death as we sat in a circle with bowed heads hearing the radio playing over and over again the Becket calypso that was big in that season, Vincy mas: whole night we fêting, whole night we jamming . . . while the bullets sang through the hibiscus hedge and the women huddled in fear crept through the doorway of our shelter to go outdoors to relieve themselves in that pitiless afternoon of our shame. Where was everyone running? Where was everyone going with those books of psalms, where was everyone going with buckets of water, where was the fire in this evening of disaster? And I was seeing me everywhere. That is me, there and over there and over there . . . I am the military commander with the pips on my shoulder and the gun in my hand. I am the dedicated comrade, the revolutionary worker standing under the avocado tree with a smile from his teeth one moment before a gunshot ripped through his thigh and before he could shout another slammed through his windpipe. I am the man in the field of bananas, unraveling the sheets of cellophane with which to
wrap the green bananas so the sun wouldn’t scorch them, handling them gently so they wouldn’t bruise, so we would get the best prices in the markets of Europe. I am the woman in the market dressed in the khaki of the militia holding on to the revolution that is gasping for breath as the shots rattle and boom in the afternoon of grief. And all the time I trying to sing Get something and wave so I could join the rejoicing.

  But my voice is not my own. Everything is mixed up together in my mind. I could feel words of speeches reverberating in the tomb of my head; but no song. And

  I am trying to whisper with my mind to hold on to

  myself:

  My name is Kangkala, maker of confusion, recorder of gossip, revealer of secrets, in the same skin I am victim and victor . . .

  And I am seeing Franklyn dragged down from the hills dead, the long-haired girl beside him, my aunt Magenta chanting, I will not let you go until you bless me, I am hearing the song to herald the leader of the Grenada revolution, “Forward March, Forward March.” Where was forward now? I am seeing Clayton Blondell’s grandfather toting up the little track to the place that they would name Beverly Hills, the sheets of galvanize for the roof and the concrete blocks and the cement and sand, bucket by bucket, one by one, men diving for black coral in the blue-green waters in front the hotel at Gran Anse with the huge rooms and the circular bed with its bedposts plated with gold where the women of the Prime Minister flopped in surrender. I am hearing the voice of the Comrade Leader coming over the radio in that promising dawn, saying, This is the revolution, resistance is futile. Who could have forecast the dirge of machine guns wailing in the hills above the harbor, or imagined the people they call the masses holding their belly in grief, singing God bless America, thank you, my Savior President Mister Reagan, for taking away this curtain of fear, thank you for helping us take back our minds from the confusion of so many rulers of the Central Committee and the party bureaucracy, the secretaries and chairmen of everything. Thank you for making it possible for us to get a rest from the political education that give us a headache and the fine print of the Communist Manifesto that water we eyes. I could feel words in my head, but my voice had no sound.