From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  It had been a scorching hot Saturday morning, St. Elizabeth was in the grip of a long and hard drought, as a thirsty, sweating little Marcus trudged through the town square bearing a basket full of holy laundry. Suddenly he heard a great commotion, and when he looked he beheld a group of boys who had stripped themselves naked and were splashing gleefully in the waters of the horse trough:

  “Hey Marcus, come bathe wid we.”

  He didn’t think twice; he just put down the basket and, taking off his shirt and short pants, jumped into the cooling waters of the horse trough. He was having such a good time that he did not see his grandmother Dorcas approaching. She snatched him out of the horse trough, slapped his bottom right there before everybody, and made him put on his clothes, retrieve the basket of laundry, and walk before her to the manse, where to his terrible shame, she reported to the minister that he was a wayward and sinful child. The minister then proceeded to give him a long, long lecture and concluded by saying: “My son, do not be like the horse or the mule which need to be bridled.” My father never felt warmly towards anything to do with horses after that.

  But when he saw the car, he knew that his life was somehow bound up with this machine, which was powered by a noisy motor, instead of with an animal that ate grass, produced stinking manure, and needed to drink from a water trough. Marcus had joined the band of youngsters following the boy who held the lantern to light the way for the car, and when the car stopped he watched in awe as the driver descended and handed a tin can with a long spout to the boy, who gave the lantern to another boy to hold while he went in search of water. My father stood there, gazing intently as the driver took out a set of tools, knelt down, jacked up the car, and unscrewed one of the wheels to change the thin narrow tire that had suffered a puncture. The boy with the lantern held the light high so the man could see to do his work. The first boy returned with the tin can filled with water, took back his lantern-bearing job, and the driver lifted the bonnet of the car, poured water into the engine, and closed it. Then he did something else, he took his leather belt from his waist and used it as a replacement for the fan belt which had snapped. When all these repairs were done, the driver swiftly turned the crank handle to restart the car, jumped in, and departed with the light-bearing boy running ahead of him into the night. My father would have followed them to the other end of the island had he not feared his grandmother’s wrath.

  So he went home instead and dreamt of the horseless carriage; and he knew that one day he would, like the driver, know how to give it water and to change the tires and replace broken parts and keep it going, for to him the car was more beautiful than any horse he had ever seen. So when big people asked him, “What you want to be when you grow big, Marcus?” he would reply, “I want to be a driver.”

  Cars were brought to the island of Jamaica by wealthy estate owners who imported the luxurious machines along with great steel drums of gasoline to power them. For years after, the great steel drums that had contained gasoline could be seen, abandoned, in open fields, gleaming under the hot sun, defying nature to break them down.

  Because Marcus was so determined to become a driver, his mother had sent him to one of her relatives to learn how to drive a truck. By the end of one week, just by observing what his cousin did, my father was able to drive. His cousin was amazed when he, partly in jest, said to him, “Show me how you woulda drive, if you coulda drive,” and the thirteen-year-old Marcus got behind the wheel–half-sitting, half-standing, because he was not that tall–and with a smile of pure joy, drove the big old truck until it reached a steep incline.

  “All right, all right driver,” said his cousin, “gimme back mi truck, for me can barely manage this hill, what says a new driver like you.”

  Driver. He had called him driver, and the word fell like a benediction on the young Marcus’s ears. After that my father set out to learn everything about cars and trucks. He would walk from Malvern into the town of Black River to seek out the company of the older men who had been trained to maintain the island’s first motor car. Men who were happy to share their knowledge, to explain what made the horseless carriage run and how to keep it running.

  Life was good for my parents in those early years. Unlike her mother, my mother had no difficulty conceiving, and went on to have nine children in all, one every two years from the time she was in her mid-twenties until she was in her early forties. After a year and a half of marriage, she gave birth to the beautiful and intelligent Barbara; two years later a son was born and named Howard, after her beloved brother; and then came Carmen Rose, whom we called Betty; and then Vaughn, who did not like his name, so he christened himself Bunny. (The five remaining children were born in Kingston, in the following order: the twins Kingsley and Karl, then Keith, me (Lorna) and Nigel.) Their house in Malvern became filled with children and friends always coming and going. There was plenty of domestic help with raising the children and doing the laundry and keeping the house clean, but my mother maintained strict control over her kitchen because my father always claimed that he could taste the difference in the food that she cooked as opposed to food cooked by anyone else. “I can taste your hand, Doris,” he always said.

  Christmas was the most wonderful time of all. Everyone wanted their car in top shape for the great season of party-going, and the garage was busy day and night. Even the most hard-pay customers would settle their debts in the season of Peace and Goodwill, so Marcus was always able to buy wonderful presents for Doris and the children. Toy pianos that played real tunes, lovely sleeping dolls and spinning tops and music boxes. Fabulous lengths of silk and soft shoes for Doris and more and more lovely furniture for their house. Their house, which always smelled of delicious food cooking, where the Salvation Army choir would stand outside and sing carols and Doris would invite them in and give them Marcus’s famous Christmas eggnog as a thank you for serenading them. The Bible promised seven years of plenty, and that promise was made good during those prosperous years before they moved to Kingston. “In those days, we had the very best,” my mother always said. And then war broke out in 1939.

  My father had feared his grandmother’s wicked tongue too much to tell her when his business began to lose money. “You pass you place, Marcus, to go and want to have garage business. You see me, I know my place, you woulda never catch me a eggs up myself bout me a open business. High seat kill Miss Thomas’ puss! Nayga people must know dem place, what a way you bright fi go open garage business, is better you did keep you good, good work with the bank manager, it serve you right. Is that Hanover woman you go married to who encourage you inna that damn foolishness.”

  As it turned out, Marcus was to lose everything he owned. In the late 1930s, car parts and gasoline became increasingly scarce, and many of my father’s customers were forced to convert their cars into horse-drawn carriages by removing the engines. Also, Uncle Charley, who was supposed to look after the bookkeeping side of the garage business, drank and spent money in the same manner in which he ate.

  Marcus never told his grandmother when the business closed. When she sent to call him, it was a week after he had had to padlock the gates himself, and pay off the two mechanics who worked with him. Dorcas had summoned my father when people in the village had brought her news of his failed business. He received a message from her that said: “Come and see me, but don’t bring your wife.” He went to see her and found her sitting up in her rickety old iron bed, her airless bedroom lit by one small, irritable little kerosene lamp. The room reeked of her old lady musk smell, the camphor oil she used to anoint her creaking limbs, and the kerosene oil from the lamp. She spoke these words to my father through the semi-darkness:

  “I decide out of the goodness of my heart that since you fall so low, you can come back here and live with your wife and children and help me to plant red peas and cassava. But, you and that Hanover woman and your damn children will have to live under my jurisdiction. Although you are a big married man now, I am still your grandmother and und
er my roof, my word is law.” The old iron bed creaked and groaned as Dorcas threw herself into her homily on the sins of flying past your place. She all but stood up in her bed in order to remind my father how she had never failed at anything in her life, because, “He who is low, fears no fall.” She repeated her offer to have my parents come back and live with her, an offer she accompanied by the thumping of her fist on her bony chest to underscore the phrase “My word is law.” My father responded by leaping up from the chair in which he was sitting, and as he strode out the door, he said, “Don’t worry about me, don’t worry about me, my wife, or my children. We will be all right.”

  “I would prefer to die than to live under her roof again,” he had said to my mother of Dorcas’s offer. After Marcus’s refusal, his grandmother took his name off her will and bequeathed her land to the government. Going to live in Harvey River was out of the question; there was no way to earn a living there. So my parents decided that their only alternative was to move to Kingston.

  They had had one last dinner party in their Malvern house. One last big dinner party before the new owners came to take possession, before the truck that would take them into Kingston backed into the yard, drove over one of the flowerbeds, and parked by the front door so that they could load what was left of their house filled with fine mahogany furniture onto the back. For that dinner party, my mother had cooked their favourite meal. Pot roast and rice and peas and brown stew chicken and fried plantains. And because no party in Jamaica is a party without curry goat, they had said to hell with the expense and purchased a young kid, and slaughtered and curried the tender flesh. As she spread the table with the damask tablecloth Cleodine had given her as a wedding gift, and put out all her fine wedding things, remembering all the “daintiness” that her sister had taught her, my mother was overcome by the knowledge that this was the last time that she would ever spread a table in this house where she had come to be so happy. A realization so final that she had to sit down suddenly in her seat nearest the door through which she would come and go to and from the kitchen to the table.

  My mother remembered the morning they had bade miserly Dorcas and her house of meanness farewell. She had woken and found herself singing, “The strife is o’er, the battle done; Now is the Victor’s triumph won…Alleluia!” She and Marcus had carefully assembled their possessions and packed them into a truck belonging to one of their friends, on the day their house was finally ready to be occupied. “Thank you very much, Grandma Dorcas, for your kind hospitality,” they had said to the wretched, miserly old woman, and then they had practically run outside to the truck and driven joyfully to their own house. Marcus blew the horn all the way from his grandmother’s house to theirs. They sang a song that newly emancipated Jamaicans sang on the first of August 1838. “Jubilee, Jubilee. Me get full free. Me can stand up when me want, siddown when me want, liedown and gettup when me want, for me free.” Yessir, they were free to laugh and talk and sleep and wake as they pleased, to cook big dinners and entertain any number of friends they wanted. “Why the hell would I spendup my money to feed a whole heap of hungry-belly people who should stay home and eat at them own table?” was Dorcas’s response to a suggestion my mother once made to her that they invite some of their neighbours over for Sunday dinner.

  She was well-acquainted with every corner of this house, every door, every window. “Brussels” and “tarshan.” My mother had carefully stitched every one of the lace curtains that were now being taken down from the windows of their house. She could identify a Brussels lace from a Venice or chantilly lace with her eyes closed. She would rub a forefinger over the surface and correctly identify the lace in question. She had arranged every bed, chair, and table in that house, where they had kept the front door open from morning till night because they so loved to see their home filled with guests. They had planned to one day convert that house in Malvern into a paying guest house, for nothing gave them more pleasure than to see their friends and relations enjoying hospitality Doris and Marcus style. But they never did get around to it.

  “Doris girl, your nice life done,” said a voice inside her. She walked over to the table and stared and stared at her place setting before her, trying hard not to cry. To calm herself, my mother rubbed the crest of the bird perched on a limb at the centre of the dinner plate. She ran her finger along the limb on which the bird sat, and a voice rose up in her. It said, “Doris, this limb is now broken.” She imagined at that moment that the bird on the dinner plate flew up and out through the dining-room window from which the lace curtains were now removed. “You soon come back man, Marcus, and you cannot live in town, you just going to pay Kingston a visit,” said their friends. My mother would remember little about that last dinner party in their house they were about to lose because she deliberately kept herself busy tending to the needs of their guests. The friends who were talking and laughing too loudly. The people who kept hugging her and saying, “We don’t know what we are going to do without you.” Some of them were even crying openly as she remained resolutely dry-eyed, but she would always remember one incident.

  “Time for a song now, Marcus.” My mother felt her heart fall when their friends began to say that. “You know we can’t let you go to Kingston before you drop two tune, Marcus.” O God why they want him to sing, Doris thought to herself. Why can’t they put themself in his place? How would they feel if this had happened to them? Would they feel like singing? O Lord no, Marcus just tell them you don’t feel good, tell them you not up to it tonight, of all nights. She watched his every move nervously, rubbing the insides of her arms along the sides of her belly, which had become high and wide after she had given birth to four children. “Say no, you not singing tonight.” She shook her head and tried to get him to catch her eye, but he refused to look in her direction. Instead he headed into their bedroom. She hurriedly put down the tray of cold drinks that she had been offering to their guests, saying in a “put-on,” cheerful voice, “Have a last drink on Marcus and me.” When she saw him come from the bedroom with the guitar, she made for the open front door and stood in the doorway with her arms folded. He took a seat in the living room beside his prized gramophone, the second thing that he had bought for their house after their marriage bed. She could tell that he was determined to avoid her look, which she had learned from her mother, Margaret, that cross between a cut-eye and a stare-down look that she’d brought with her from Harvey River.

  What she did not understand was that his heart was so heavy right then, that if he did not sing, he was going to break down and bawl like a baby. He reached up and lifted the big heavy-headed needle off the seventy-eight record. It was Leadbelly singing “Goodnight Irene.” Before that night they would always listen to that record together, sitting side by side on the loveseat, the third thing that he had bought for their house. He always wanted her to sit on his left. “On the heart side,” he would say, “I want you always near to my heart.” Always with one arm thrown around her neck and his long fingers stroking her rounded upper arm, they would listen to Leadbelly, and Marcus would say, “Wait, wait, the nice part coming now.” This was how they liked to wait for Leadbelly to reach that part in the chorus when he sings, “Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene, I’ll get you in my dreams,” for when he reached that part, they would both turn and face each other at the same time and laugh out loud. Every time, they laughed together as if they were hearing Leadbelly’s lascivious tone for the first time, “I’ll get you in my dreams.” They’d laugh till she caught herself laughing at Leadbelly’s slackness, and she’d stop and say, “Marcus, you are too out of order,” as if she had not become a little out of order herself, now that she was a married woman.

  But that last night in their house, she could find nothing to laugh about as she watched my father carefully sit himself down alone on their loveseat so that the seams of his trousers fell just so. She watched as he held his guitar close to his chest, just like he sometimes held her when they were alone, and she knew she
would never laugh at that song again. She watched as he shut his eyes tight and began to rock back and forth, and with a lump-in-his-throat voice, took up where Leadbelly left off. When she heard his voice begin to vibrate and break up, she stopped clutching herself and balled her hands into two fists by her side. She leaned forward, gathered up her strength, and began to call out to him silently, insistently from her place by the door. She felt herself begin to haul up strength from her belly-bottom, until she was almost standing on her tiptoes, and she strained towards him begging, no, commanding him without words: bear up. Don’t break. Marcus, don’t you cry before them. Not even if they are our friends, don’t make them see you cry. “Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in the town, sometimes I take a great notion, to jump in the river and drown: Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight, goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams.” That night she gathered up her strength and force-fed it to him so he could part company with Leadbelly. When he switched to his repertoire of rude songs, she touched her open hand to her belly-bottom in gratitude to her woman strength. “Bredda Manny O mi find a Candy, Bredda Manny O mi find a Candy, Bredda Manny O mi find a Candy dash it wey you nasty bitch a puss shit.” That night he did make them laugh, he made them laugh, he made them dance.