by Jacob Ross
She went crazy
Cuz she belly
Kill all she baby
What would she say to Missa Thorne? She wasn’t going to prepare no words becuz the truth need no rehearsin’.
She might tell him – if he had the time – about the year it had taken to bring this cutting to what it was now. Of how in growing this gift for him, there was also cruelty: the destruction of the stunted and malformed, the burning and uprooting. She might make him aware that she paid for her cruelty with blood. Becuz this rosebush wore a fortress of thorns that did not spare her hands.
But it was worth the trouble, not so? Was enough to know that its flowers would fill his office with their lovely scent, to be replaced with new flowers even as the cut ones died.
The morning of the rally, she dressed in her white canvas shoes, the blue cotton dress and soft straw hat that she took out only for funerals and church. She visited the rosebush with her fork, a small milk tin of kerosene, her cutlass and a knife. She prepared two small parcels – one with the rooted cutting, the other with freshly cut flowers – both of which she nestled in a larger bag.
Slim was down there, urging the village into two government buses on the road. He saw her coming and stopped his words. The militiaman looked her up and down, then at the thick brown paper bag in her hand. ‘Crazy Anni, where you going?’
‘Town,’ she said and headed for the open door of the vehicle.
‘Town close down,’ he said. ‘Is to the rally people going today.’
‘Me too,’ she said.
His eyes wandered to the bag. ‘Is your lunch you got in there?’
‘You could say so,’ she said.
‘Pickup time to come back is seven o’clock. By the big green bridge. Make sure…’
She didn’t hear the rest of what he said. She’d already stepped into the smell of old leather, perfumed bodies and the abrupt silence of the packed bus. She ignored their eyes. The row of girls on the backseat brought their heads together. A burst of stifled chuckles shook their shoulders. Ole Miss Anni…
Linda, who sold sweets and groundnuts by the roadside, roared at them and shut them up.
An hour later, she was looking down on the bright-red galvanized roofs of St. Georges.
The big bus bucked and shuddered as it swung onto the Western Main. Then a slow crawl along the Esplanade through a river of bodies with fluttering banners – all heading for The Park.
Slim dropped them off at the beginning of the curving road that ended in The Park.
‘Seven o’clock,’ he shouted, directing a rigid finger at the old iron bridge that spanned the dirty river where it met the sea. ‘And I not waiting for nobody.’
She stepped out into a sizzling sun, a dizzying swirl of flags and the heavy press of bodies. Voices throbbed the air around her while she stood at the edge of the curving road, the bag dangling from her hand. So much blastid people…
In her mind this journey had always been a straight line from her doorstep to the receiving hands of Missa Thorne. Chupid me!
She walked along the edge of the forward-creeping crowd, and when she could no longer get past them, eased herself into the press. Bodies carried her forward. From time to time, a meaty shoulder floundered into her and she tightened her grip on the bag.
She lost track of time, was mindful only of the shuffle forward. At some point, a loudspeaker crackled and a voice washed over them. It shouted names, paused for a long moment, then called out Mister Thorne’s. At the sound of it, a clamouring seemed to rise out of the earth. Comrade Thorne, the loudspeaker said, would be the last to address them. That, she knew, was not going to be anytime soon.
She lifted her eyes above the vast procession of heads, over the awning of the high stage, shivering with red and white flags. The Grand Etang Hills were blue-brown in the distance, against a bleached out sky. Her mind drifted to her garden – no rain for a month; no promise of it. The island was crisp as a biscuit, and these young people – so full of sweat and sap – did not give a damn.
It was evening and she’d almost reached the stage. Further back, she’d lost her left shoe. One moment there was a surge, next the grass was prickling her foot. Even if she’d seen it, it would’ve been impossible to retrieve it.
She could see them on the platform now; she could match their voices to their faces. She’d already heard the short man with the head of piki-piki hair talk about better roads and drainage; the thin youngfella with the pointy beard explaining why the island needed newer, bigger guns. And that grinning yellow woman in the loose brown dress who told them what women of the island wanted and weren’t getting – her quick mistrust of that one startled her.
Not like the woman who sat to the right of Missa Thorne, with big bright eyes, hair cropped close to her skull like a boy’s. A younggirl face, but broad at the hips like a full-grown woman. That one talked of schools and books and learning, all the while with a cigarette in her hand. She lit it when she returned to her chair beside Missa Thorne’s and blew a fan of smoke toward the crowd. She never looked at Missa Thorne, sat cross-legged, her eyes sweeping the faces in the crowd – exactly like the Birdmen in their heavylooking waistcoats with coiled wires sprouting from their ears.
For the first time Anni was touched by doubt. The paper bag felt much heavier than it had this morning. Chupid me – to think that offering it to Missa Thorne, him taking it and thanking her, was going to be worth all them early-morning trips down to Old Hope river, just to load a wicker basket full of loam and rotting leaves.
The movement of the crowd had taken her to the side of the platform. A young man with a wide stance and clean-shaven head was all that stood between her and the stage.
The man in the soldier’s cap was almost finished speaking and the hum of the crowd was shuddering the air. Yet she felt a quiet underneath that noise. A new electricity.
Now there he was, Missa Thorne, rising to his feet, lifted by the roar of the thousands that he’d called before him. For a moment, she was distracted by the face of the woman who sat and smoked beside him. She’d turned up her face to him, and was smiling for the first time.
Missa Thorne raised an arm and drew a sky-roar that went on and on, and got bounced back by the encircling hills. Then silence, because he was nodding at a sway of braceleted arms on the grass below. A pair of arms untangled themselves from the others. A woman called his name, and then her body began to rise, lifted on the tide of bodies under her. She teetered on the lip of the platform, held there by a forest of hands. Then she righted herself and was on the stage.
Heavily pregnant, the woman opened her arms to Missa Thorne. Already five Birdmen had gathered around her, their hands busy on her body. The tallest embraced her from behind, grinning and whispering in her ear as if she were the bearer of his child. He traced the roundness of her stomach with his palms; stopped only when decency would not allow his fingers to go further. Then he patted her shoulders, spread his fingers wide, and all the other Birdmen stepped away.
The woman delivered herself to Missa Thorne. He embraced her as if, all his life, he had been waiting for this woman so that he could press his beard into her hair and rock her with the slow care of a lover. And then he released her to the Birdmen who guided her off the stage.
Now Missa Thorne was speaking. He was saying the same things that those who had come before him said, and yet it sounded different. He was gathering all their words and putting his life-breath into them. Like the children in this park, Anni, too, felt the lift – of being carried on a voice that needed no choir to support it and no big black book to give it weight.
She saw how all this giving of himself had aged him. Even from that last time when he’d come to Old Hope, the lines had deepened on his forehead, the beard was now salted with white. Mebbe it was from remembering the bomb that killed the girls. Mebbe it was because it made him turn to killing in return.
Yet, he did not pause in the middle of a speech to look behind him; he did not throw quick glances to
the mid-distance, or seem to be listening for something in the air beyond the hearing of this crowd…
She must have been lost for a while, her attention drifting, because Missa Thorne was lifting his head in that concluding way of his, before the stroke of thunder that always came from him at the end of every speech: ‘Forward ever, backward never…’
She didn’t know what she said, or if she said anything, but the young man in front of her turned round blinking, as if she’d pulled him out of a dream. He dropped his eyes to the bag she opened up to show him. He stepped aside and let her through.
She’d almost gone past the Birdmen when a hand closed on her elbow and the world around her dimmed. A body bounced her backward. She felt herself falling but hands closed around her armpits and kept her on her feet.
On the stage, Birdmen had made a circle around Missa Thorne, their backs to him. A big fist closed around the hand that held the bag. Fiery threads of pain ran up her arm and pooled around her shoulder, as the thorns of the rose sank into her.
They were hustling her backwards when a voice cut through. She recognised it as the woman’s – the one who sat by Missa Thorne. A Birdman pushed out an arm in front of her. The woman raised her chin at him and they locked eyes. He stepped aside and let her through.
She found herself walled in by the Birdmen’s heavy flesh with the woman in front of her. Those bright dark eyes were on her face. Close up, she looked much older.
Anni followed the woman’s downward gaze, saw the vinetrails of her own blood on the paperbag. ‘Is the rose,’ she said. ‘The rose for Missa Thorne. He ask for it.’
The woman was gentle when she took the bag, opened it and peered inside. Her eyes were softer when she raised her head. She slipped in a hand and eased out the flowers. She raised herself on the balls of her feet and hoisted the bunch above the Birdmen’s heads.
‘Thank you, Comrade Sister,’ the woman said. She stripped away the leaves, dug a thumbnail into the base of each thorn and plucked it off. She curled steady fingers around the stem of each flower and broke it short.
‘Thank you,’ she said again.
The Birdmen followed the woman to the other side of the stage. The crowds were spilling out onto the road, their voices raised in song. The last of the sunlight haloed their shapes against the darkness of the old iron bridge.
The woman joined Missa Thorne, the five roses pressed against her breasts. He placed a hand in the small of her back as she held up the flowers to his face. He said something to her and smiled. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
Missa Thorne took the flowers and brought his face down to smell the bunch. At the open door of the long black car, he handed them to her. The bright-eyed woman took the gift with cupped hands, her face turned up to his. Then they lowered their heads and shoulders and disappeared into the vehicle.
The park had emptied quickly. Just the darkening expanse of grass, pockmarked by discarded cans and paper flags. She looked down at the remaining bag, spilled from the larger one, torn in places, the imprint of a boot on it, and stooped to pick up the crushed cutting, its tiny wormlike roots still smeared with the mud.
She headed for the old green bridge. Ahead of her, gulls were squabbling above the shallow waters of the dirty bay. She sat on the low wall beside the bridge facing the sea. She was still staring at the shifting waters when a vehicle pulled up behind her. She heard her name, turned to see Slim stepping out of a small green van.
‘Crazy Anni, where the hell you been? I was looking for you.’
‘Bus gone?’ she said.
‘Long time,’ he said. ‘I tell y’all seven! Where you went! And where’s your other shoe?’
‘The left got lost,’ she said, and let his irritation wash over her.
The young man peered into her face, leaned closer, then dropped an arm across her shoulders. ‘Okay, no sweat. Come, I take you home. You enjoy the rally?’
‘They take only de flower,’ she muttered, holding up the broken cutting. ‘They didn take the part that grow.’
RUM AN COKE
Norma Browne got up early, cried a bit, stared at her hand and muttered to herself with bitter conviction. ‘What a waste. A waste!’
Nobody heard her except perhaps the boy, but even if he had, he would not remember much, come daylight.
Come daylight, he would lurch out of the house, hungry, ill and angry, his body starved of something that neither she nor any food on earth could satisfy. He would be away a couple of hours or maybe the whole day, and then he would return to lie below the house, the turbulence gone except in the working of his eyes. He would not be able to look at her, not until the shivering started again, very late in the evening, and he began, once more, to hit her.
She got up early because a thought had nudged her out of sleep, an idea which, with the coming daylight, became a resolve.
She waited until he left, then put on the light blue dress that she’d bought for his christening and which, ten years later, she also wore to take him to that scholarship school in St. George’s.
He was a beautiful boy then, clear-eyed and quick, his little body full of purpose. ‘Remarkably intelligent’ was what the teachers said; and to prove they were not lying, they’d written it on a pretty piece of parchment paper, framed it and handed it to her.
Not like now. Not like now at all. What she used to feel then went way past pride. If, in those days, she felt embarrassed or even terrified, it was only because she could hardly believe that someone like her could be so blessed.
With awkward haste, she knelt and reached beneath the iron bed. She dragged out a pillow and emptied its contents on the floor. Several objects rolled out, things she would never use, but kept ‘just in case’: a couple of heavy silver bracelets, a ring of pure Guyana gold, an old passport with a photo of a man who looked exactly like her son and a small blue book on which ‘The Cooperative Bank’ was printed in large letters.
She took the little book, stuffed it down her bosom and went to the main road to wait for the only bus that travelled the twenty miles, twice a day, to and from St. George’s.
It was evening when she returned. The migrating birds that spent the November and December months in the swamp half a mile away were already dropping like black rain out of an inflamed sky and settling on the mangroves.
She went to the bedroom to replace the book and leave a small but heavy parcel beneath the bed. Then she began to look for things to do. She would have gone to the garden at the top of the hill above the village, but she’d already sown more corn and peas than she had ever sown before; she’d weeded the sweet potatoes, reinforced the mud rows with wattle and bamboo, trimmed the bananas and cleared the stones which, every year, appeared miraculously in the soil. She’d put new campeche pillars under the house, added a kitchen and re-laid the yard with stones that she’d gathered from the roadside – anything that hard work could possibly achieve to ease her days. If she could have undone it all and started again, she would have. Hard work saved her from remembering – though that was not the same as forgetting. Not remembering was holding back the shame, or redirecting it – the way the drains she dug during the rainy season turned excess water away from her garden.
She saw him coming and studied his face, his walk, the set of his mouth. Such clues determined how her day went, although when he first returned he was never violent. He would have gone over to Teestone’s house next door, or to some friend of his, and pumped his veins with a needleful of that milky stuff that did such dreadful things to him.
The milky stuff, she did not understand. She thought she had already seen or imagined every awful thing there was, but nothing had prepared her for what they called de niceness – niceness, because of the way it made them feel, they said; niceness that had sucked the life out of her child and replaced it with a deadness that had reduced her to nothing in his eyes.
Before the deadness was the hunger. He was hungry all the time, but the more she fed him the thinner he seeme
d to grow. He’d become secretive and had lost the even temper he was born with. When the shivering started and there was nothing she could do for him, he would scream and hit her.
She wondered which was worse: his torment or her own shame before the village. Once she caught him doing it to himself, panic-ridden and slobbering, until he’d fed the beast inside his veins.
For this – for this especially – she did not blame him because he was her child and she had known him as a different person. True, she’d seen him do things that did violence to her sense of decency – like the time she caught him with his cousin, younger than him by two years, on her bed. She’d almost killed him – but Daniel was still her boy.
She would never know how it started, or what she had done or had not done that made him need ‘de niceness’. But now she knew who gave it to her boy and that was partly why she went to town. Nobody had told her; they’d only confirmed the truth for her.
It was that gold chain she’d bought him as a present that made her know. He’d asked for it before he did the exams, told her that if he got an ‘A’ for all of them, she should buy him a gold chain with his name written on it. And of course she’d sent her macmere, Grace, to St. George’s to get it straight away. Then she hid it in her pillowcase and waited. When he came home one day and told her that he’d got all his ‘A’s, she went straight to the bedroom and brought it out. That amazed him, not the chain but the fact that she believed he would get the ‘A’s, just because he said so.
So when she saw that gold chain around Teestone’s neck, it suddenly made sense. Everything made sense: the house Teestone was improving, the way the children flocked to him, the girls warring amongst themselves for his attention.
Over the months she’d studied him. Teddy Stonewall – that boy! That boy who’d never seen a classroom in his life, who’d never lifted a finger for his mother, who’d grown up by the roadside near the rumshop watching the world slip past; that boy who, having worked for nothing, wanted everything. Now it was all coming to him: the pretty clothes, the new, red Suzuki bike, other people’s children. Then the large cars with darkened windows began to arrive from St. George’s.