From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  David and Margaret were not sure at first that it was right for their daughter to go off and live in Montreal, Canada, but eventually they concluded that she just might become even more dolorous and grim if she were not allowed to travel, and even if she did go to Montreal, at least they would never have to witness her turning her back on their beloved Church of England, so they gave her their blessings and she departed by steamer to Montreal, from where she later sent for her sister Rose.

  Albertha’s solemn, almost stoic nature was to stand her in good stead during those early days in Montreal. In her letters back to Harvey River, she never told how she looked forward to her days off from doing domestic work in the houses of wealthy people in Outremont and Mount Royal. She did not reveal how hard it was for her, someone who had grown up in a house with domestic help, to have to do housework for strange people. Keeping strangers’ large mansions clean, and looking after their demanding children who would call her not “Miss Jo” but Albertha. Come here Albertha, do this do that Albertha. How hard it was to work and live in the houses of people who were not interested in who she really was, or where she came from.

  She would write only to tell her family about the wonders of snow, about the church services she attended at St. James Anglican Church, because, contrary to David’s fears that she would become a Presbyterian, Albertha had in fact gone in the other direction and become completely taken with the liturgy in Latin, incense burning, High Anglican, almost Roman Catholic services held at St. James, situated in downtown Montreal. Once she mentioned a bus trip that she and Pamela and a few other young women who also worked in service had taken to the Laurentian Mountains, but, for the most part, her letters were short, contained not one word of complaint, and always had Canadian dollars folded into them.

  When she was forty years old, Albertha was introduced at a church social held at the Christchurch Anglican Cathedral to a Barbadian man named Geoffrey Seal, and to the horror of her sister Rose, who by then had joined her in Montreal, she began to walk out with him on her days off. Rose could not believe the change that would come over her older sister whenever the portly Barbadian appeared. Miss Jo would become animated and talkative and would often gaze affectionately at the man who was almost as wide as he was high. She even took to repeating his little gems of wisdom: “You know, Mr. Seal told me something this evening when we were having dinner in the restaurant at the Hudson’s Bay store, he said that Montreal is the Paris of Canada,” this said as if everybody, even the smallest child in Canada, did not know this for a fact.

  Mr. Seal and Miss Jo were married within the year. None of Miss Jo’s friends or relations could understand how she who had held to such high standards all her life could have married a man who fell so woefully short of their youthful ideals. An unkind person could have said “Seal by name and nature” when they saw a photograph of Miss Jo’s groom. In addition to not being blessed with fine looks, Mr. Seal did not even have a great sense of humour. He, like Miss Jo, probably had never once cracked a smile at a rude folk song or laughed out loud at the slack wine-up way of country people. He was, by all accounts, dour and dull, but he was completely besotted by Miss Jo and she with him. His life was made complete when on their wedding night he discovered that Miss Jo, at age forty-one, was completely chaste and unspoiled. He proceeded thereafter to tenderly love and care for his virgin bride so that the serious, unsmiling Miss Jo became the placid and contented Miss Jo who did not give one row of pins about the disapproval of her family. Her sister Doris was the only one of her siblings who did not condemn her marriage, saying she was happy that Miss Jo had finally found love, after so long.

  From the day that Rose was abducted by the village mad-woman, everybody in Harvey River watched carefully over her, and David and Margaret insisted that she should always be accompanied by one of her siblings at all times. Whenever this job fell to Cleodine, she would respond to the admiring cries directed at Rose by saying, “She is pretty, yes, but she is not as bright as me.” Unlike Cleodine, Rose did not grow to be a brilliant or even a very competent student. She was intelligent enough, but she seemed to always prefer the company of younger children, and in classes at the village school, she was prone to long spells of daydreaming, looking out at the sky and the Dolphin Head Mountains with that sweet half-smile. And yet the teachers would never take a strap to her as they did to all the other children when she did not remember her twelve times table, or when she did not know how to spell words like supercilious and peradventure. It was as if it was understood that Rose functioned mainly as an icon, bringing joy, goodness, and light to her surroundings.

  The true love of her life was a young man named John Clare, the son of a poor sugar estate worker, who had gone to school with her in the village. Intelligent and ambitious, he wanted to study to be a teacher; but his painful shyness always reduced him to silence in the presence of Rose’s luminous beauty. He never could get up the courage to confess his love to her. How could someone so radiant love a quiet, knock-softly kind of man like him? She, for her part, kept wondering how come he never flirted with her or sent her mash notes, or invited her to go in a group to dances in Lucea and Montego Bay like the other young men. Could he not see that she saved her best smiles and warmest greetings for him? She did not care if he was poor, she would have worked with him to make a life, she would have borne him beautiful children. But all he ever did was stare at her and tremble, nervously brushing his hair back from his forehead, so she concluded that he did not care.

  On the day she left the village for Montreal, to join her sister Miss Jo, he just stood in the square with hot tears running down his face, one hand pressing on his windpipe, as if he were trying to force out the necessary words to make her stay. He stood like this, watching her leave his life forever, all because he did not have the words. He did not know it, but he was the namesake and descendant of a great poet, John Clare, who had enjoyed some success in England in the eighteenth century, and then, because of his struggles with ill health and poverty, spent the latter years of his life in terrible misery. He wrote a poem called “Secret Love,” and if only Aunt Rose’s silent suitor had known it, he could have asked his poet forefather to speak to her for him.

  I dare not gaze upon her face

  But left her memory in each place:

  Where’er I saw a wild flower lie

  I kissed and bade my love goodbye.

  When she had gone to apply for her passport, the officer processing Rose’s papers had fallen in love with her, and tried all kinds of delaying tactics to discourage her from travelling to Montreal. He mislaid her application. He found fault with the way in which the forms were filled out, so that she missed the boat which sailed from Kingston to Montreal only every few months. It brought Canadian codfish, sardines, and wheat flour, and loaded up in Kingston with sugar, bananas, and rum. As there were not many people travelling to Canada from the West Indies at that time, berths were limited to a few on every cargo ship and Miss Jo, knowing of this, had gone to great trouble to secure her sister a place. Eventually the man did process Rose’s passport, but only after her father accompanied her to the passport office and threatened to report the man to his superior officer, making him realize that Rose was not just a beautiful, inexperienced young girl from the country who had nobody to look out for her. And so Rose took the next ship from Kingston to join her sister Albertha in Montreal, and there she found work babysitting for a French-Canadian boy named Billy Lefèvre, whose alcoholic parents would often abandon him for weeks at a time. Invariably they would not have the money to pay for her services, so she would end up feeding and caring for the boy, who called her “Tanti.” She would take him home to stay with her until his drunken parents resurfaced, and would often have to take him along with her on the other babysitting jobs she took in order to get money to feed them both. Eventually, after several such jobs turned out badly for her, she had to leave the Lefèvre boy behind with his unfortunate parents, and she found a job working i
n the household of a Mr. and Mrs. Lord. Mr. Lord was a newspaper magnate and Mrs. Lord was a patron of the arts. The entire family fell in love with Rose and they all became fiercely protective of her because every time she stepped outside their mansion, someone tried to take advantage of her luminous beauty.

  Wherever she went in Montreal, men were drawn to her–always the wrong men. On the bus some bank clerk or a graduate student attending McGill University would sit beside her and get off at the wrong stop just to follow her home, calling out after her, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, I will die if I do not see you again.” Her doctor fell in love with her, and kept arranging for her to come and be examined for sundry suspected illnesses. As a result of this unfortunate experience, she lost faith in the medical profession and pursued alternative forms of healing. She ate healthy foods and exercised every day and grew more and more beautiful and attracted more and more unsuitable men. Men who would forget to mention their wife of twenty years and their five children. Men who would threaten to commit suicide if she did not return their love, and who would then disappear after a few months, sending her notes that read: “My Beautiful Rose. You are too good for me, you deserve someone much better.”

  Perhaps the father of the son born to Rose when she was in her early forties wrote such a letter to her before he disappeared from her life. Nobody ever knew who he was, for Rose carried the secret of his identity with her to the grave. But in 1951, Rose gave birth to a beautiful, healthy boy child, whom she christened David after his grandfather. When everyone saw a photograph of the boy, they all said he looked like an angel that had been sent to make Rose happy. Here was one man who would surely love her and stay with her as long as she lived.

  It could be said that uncle Flavius spent his life trying to find and keep God. His true quest began one Friday night in the village square, when he, being at a loss to find suitable amusement for himself in quiet, peaceful Harvey River, decided at the urging of his brother Edmund and other locals boys to accompany a band of mockers on a mission to harass a group of Salvation Army evangelists. This was the best that they could do to provide themselves with some form of Friday-night entertainment.

  When they got to the meeting, the Salvation Army band was in full swing; the trumpets were blasting and the kettle drums were booming as the white uniforms of the Army members gleamed under the light of bottle torches. The band of mockers gathered and started singing along with the Salvation Army chorus, dragging out the words of the hymns. “I weeeel cleeeeeeeeg to theeee ooooooole ruggeeeeed crooooooosss,” they sung, clinging to each other, shaking their heads and twitching their bodies as if convulsed by the Holy Spirit.

  Flavius, like all other members of the Harvey family, was a talented actor, and he began wowing the crowd with a spirited virtuoso performance, causing his scoffer friends to laugh uproariously, ridiculing the efforts of the valiant band of Salvationists who had walked miles across rocky roads to bring the word of God’s army to the Hanover people. The leader of the Salvationists was a tall, indigo-skinned man with a powerful baritone voice. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that gleamed in the night. He had a shock of white hair and he played the big kettle drum. When the boys started their heckling, his response was to beat the drum hard. Harder and harder he hit the stretched goat skin until the drumbeat began to overpower the heartbeats of many of the people gathered in the square.

  People stopped laughing at the mockers and stood trans-fixed by the power of the drum sound being pounded out by the man with the hair that stood out in the darkness like a halo around his head. The lenses of the man’s glasses were throwing back reflections from the blazing bottle torches, so that his eyes looked as if they were on fire. He began to stare straight at Flavius, and the next thing you know, Flavius fell down, calling out, “Jesus, Jesus, O Lord Jesus.” At first everyone thought that he was joking, still mocking the Salvationists, and then they all fell silent.

  “Flavy, stop form fool now, the joke gone too far, come make we leave and go home before them lock we out,” said his brother.

  Flavius lay silent on the ground, unmoving, not responding to Edmund’s voice or his gentle, then not so gentle, shaking.

  “Lord have mercy, what is this pon me now. Flavy, gittup.”

  Eventually Flavius did stir, but this was only after people in the crowd doused his face with water and passed a bottle of white rum back and forth under his nostrils.

  “Duppy box him. Me tell you say duppy box him, see how him rally when we sprinkle the white rum, everybody know say duppy fraid a white rum.”

  Flavius rose up and walked over to the band of Salvationists and asked if he could join them. He marched off singing with them into the dark Hanover night, returning late to his father’s house. From that fateful night he spent the rest of his life seeking the Almighty with great zeal and fervour. During the course of his life he held membership in every known church in Jamaica, except for the Church of Rome and the African-based Myal, Revival, and Pocomania sects. Over and over again, he recreated that conversion experience as he joined one church after the other, each time convinced that he had found the perfect one to suit his spiritual needs. After much searching, he finally found a home in the Christadelphian Church, having fallen out over doctrinal differences with the Anglicans, Salvation Army, Baptists, Wesleyans, Moravians, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, and Brethren–Open and Closed.

  His father, David, blamed Edmund for what happened to Flavius. “It’s because of you why Flavius now has no abiding city, he would never go and tease any Salvation Army people if you did not put that idea in his head. Flavy is a respectful boy, he was perfectly happy in the Anglican Church, where he was born and raised. It is you, you Mr. Edmund, who encourage him in that mischief, now look at him walking up and down shaking tambourine–because he has no other musical ability–in a Salvation Army band!”

  Although his father’s anger at Flavius’s conversion really made Edmund want to leave Harvey River–which Edmund had never liked in the first place–even more, his reasons for leaving soon became more urgent. It had to do with a girl from Chambers Pen.

  “Fall her, your son fall my daughter, Mr. Harvey.”

  That is what the girl’s father had said when he came to report his daughter’s condition to David, who confronted Edmund about the matter when he came in late that night.

  “You are going to do what is decent and honourable, as befits a son of mine.”

  Two weeks before the wedding, Edmund ran away to Kingston. Margaret accused David of chasing away her son. She wept and cursed her husband for days. “How you know if this child really belong to Eddie? What I was saying was we should wait till it born and see if it have the Harvey little toe, every Harvey child have the same shape little toe, if the child don’t have it, it is not a Harvey, if it have it, then of course, Eddie must face up to his responsibility, now as it stands, you threaten him, him catch him fraid, and now him run gone and I might never see my boy child again!”

  After Edmund fled Harvey River, it would be three whole years before they heard from him. He eventually wrote to his mother from Kingston, telling her he was now driving a big Ford taxi. Thereafter he would send her letters containing a few pound notes and the occasional photograph of himself standing with one foot on the running board of his taxi. But as they say in Jamaica, “what is fi you, cannot be un-fi you.” Seven or so years after Edmund fled by night from Harvey River to avoid a shotgun wedding, he saw the woman who was to have been his bride walking up East Queen Street in the city of Kingston, where she had come on a shopping trip. And he could not do it, he could not just drive his taxi past her. He stopped and offered the mother of his son a drive.

  He had been sending money to support the boy Neville, who was indeed born with the Harvey little toe, and who from his photographs one could tell was big for his age, bright, and well-mannered. Edmund begged the mother of his son a thousand pardons. He told her that people had told him
things about her to turn his mind from her and that had made him confused. He apologized for the fact that she had been humiliated, shamed, and mashed-up by his desertion. She told him that she had read certain psalms for him in order for bad things to happen to him. She cursed him like a dog as she sat there in the front seat of his taxi and he kept saying that he was sorry. Then he asked her if she wanted something to eat. “My God, you must be hungry after you curse me so.” And when he said this she had laughed. He took her for a meal at Arlington House Hotel, where Alexander Bustamante, who had come back from his stint in the Spanish Foreign Legion and who would later become the first prime minister of independent Jamaica, used to take his meals. She went home with Edmund that night and two months later he married her and a year later they had another son, Roy.

  But the marriage did not last. Taxi men just do not make good husbands. They are always on the go, they don’t thrive in normal domestic situations. Eventually, Edmund’s wife immigrated to England and sent for their two sons. He never spoke of their brief marriage again.

  All the river water could not cool

  the fatal furnace within

  When the soles of his feet remained behind on the floorboards as he tried to walk to the front verandah, it was as if my uncle Howard had shed the last of the attachments that bound him to the earth. They were lying there on the polished mahogany as if he had traced his feet on cardboard and cut them out to send to Canada for his sisters Albertha and Rose to buy him new shoes. For weeks his skin had begun to appear more and more translucent, parchment-like and luminous. Then all his soft black curls fell off, and later his teeth and his fingernails came out. He died one January, after the feast of the Epiphany. When the three wise men were coming, he was going.