He told Doris how his quest for the one true church had taken over his life. How sometimes when he prayed he found himself begging God to take him home so that he could see his Maker face to face.
Flavius said that his search for the one true religion had come about because of his need to really and truly know the Almighty, and that was what was causing him to change from one church to another. Since he had begun his quest, he said, he had received many visions in which his body moved or was moved in strange ways; and he was taken up to other worlds and shown things that he, like St. Paul, dared not speak of.
Doris sat there in silence for a while and then she reached across the table, took his hand, and said, “Oh poor you, no mine, no mine, I know that one day you will find what you are seeking for. We all have to stick together now. Now that we are motherless and fatherless.”
For weeks after they returned from my grandmother’s funeral, my father came home early every night and paid special attention to his grieving wife. Every evening he brought her some small present like ice cream or cake, and he tried to cheer her up by bringing her stories. My mother, who loved nothing better than a good story, was sitting with her feet in his lap as he pared her nails one Saturday evening (she would never cut her nails on a Sunday as she considered it bad luck). “Dor,” he says, “guess what happen to me today? I had to make one quick swerve so as not to crash the telephone van because this man in the car ahead of me suddenly let go of his steering wheel. My God, the man give up on life right before me,” he said. And then he paused for a moment before he said, “But you know, Dor, I can see with him.” There was a short silence, a slightly extended beat before my mother, outraged and appalled at the thought, rose up and roared like a great wounded mammal, “Never you say a thing like that again.” She wrenched her foot from my father’s hands and stood up over him, shouting: “Nobody should ever take their own life, nobody. That is the biggest sin. The only sin that God will not forgive. The only way to die is to go when God call you like how He call my mother, Margaret Harvey!”
In the early morning hours of Monday, September 2, 1957, when the Montego Bay-into-Kingston train reared up off the tracks at Kendal and headed for grassland, my brother Howard’s shoes flew off his feet. They were indigo-coloured suede and they had completed his dance outfit, a powder-blue zoot suit which perfectly suited his slim, six-foot-two frame. We, his brothers and sisters, had watched him admiring himself in the wardrobe mirror that Saturday evening, watched how he had put himself together just so. How when he finished straightening the lapels of his light blue suit, worn with a light blue shirt, and laced on his dark blue suede shoes, he had tenderly, carefully put on his midnight blue fedora, arranging it low on his forehead, slightly to the side. That Saturday evening he was bound for a dance at Forrester’s Hall, 21 North Street, in Kingston. There he was to meet up with a group of sporting friends who’d convinced him to break one of my mother’s commandments. There is no evidence that among his friends was a girl with red hair, but maybe he felt that the fundraising outing in Montego Bay the next day, which was organized by the nuns and priests of St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church, was sanctified and that a Papal blessing had the power to cancel out my mother’s edict. Or maybe he was just feeling restless, adventurous like any young man clad in a powder-blue zoot suit, his head crowned and protected by a midnight blue fedora. Besides, he was over twenty-one, and he could hardly tell his friends that his mother insisted he stay home on a Sunday. So he boogied, yanked, and shuffed all night and half-danced down to the railway station at Pechon Street and boarded the train from Kingston to Montego Bay in the early hours of Sunday morning, where he spent the whole of Sunday partying with his friends.
On Monday morning, the telephone at our house rang at about 3 a.m. It was one of my brother’s friends.
“Hello, Mama Goodie, Howie at home?”
“Why are you calling at this hour of the morning to ask me a question like that?”
“Please, Mama Goodie, just look and see if he is there.”
My mother at that moment became fully awake, put the telephone down, and went to the room where her sons slept, to check if her eldest boy had come home in the early hours of Monday morning as he often did after a weekend of partying or “bleaching,” as Jamaicans call staying out all night. His bed was empty.
My brother’s friend blurted, “Mama Goodie, I’m sorry to tell you, but I believe Howie was in the train that crash early this morning at Kendal and kill a whole heap of people.”
Calm, for some reason my mother became completely calm, her mind goes underwater, for the next few hours she will do everything as if she was swimming under the waters of the Harvey River. She woke up my father. They woke the whole house, consisting of their eight other children, who were all fast asleep. “Your brother Howard was on a train that crashed this morning.” My siblings and I always felt hurt and deprived, hard done by and wronged by my mother’s ban on outings on a Sunday or public holiday. When all our schoolfriends boasted of the grand time to be had at Alterry Beach, at Dunn’s River Falls, or Puerto Seco Beach, all the Goodison children could do was keep quiet.
“See me tomorrow on the choo-choo train, sorry you won’t be on it,” said our schoolfriend Jimmy, who was to come home from the Kendal crash without a leg.
In the cold before-day morning, my parents drive down to Kendal. The whole way there my mother sings over and over in an unsteady watery vibrato the same hymn, “God Is Working His Purpose Out.” They reach the site of the crash and hand in hand they make their way through the mass of maimed and dead bodies which had been flung violently down in the wet grass by the horrible capsizing of the derailed train. My father is openly weeping. My mother–who had tied a scarf over her long pepper-and-salt hair, which she had plaited as if she was going swimming–is singing softly. Over and over she rides the calming current of the hymn’s words as she and my father look and look quickly away from the bodies lying in the wet grass, searching for their son.
Then my mother sees her tall first-born son walking towards her. His forehead is bloody where death clawed him, but he is walking towards them barefooted, the morning sun behind him. Flying glass had ripped open his head, but his best friend, Hoover, who was sitting beside him, received a fatal head wound. My mother would always wonder if the Angel of Death had mixed up their names, or if her brother Howard, guardian angel of the nephew named for him, had somehow intervened.
On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became an independent country. The Union Jack went down and the black, green, and gold flag of our newly independent Jamaica was hoisted. On the radio they said that the Queen had given Up Park Camp, which was where the now departing British soldiers were billeted, as a gift to the Jamaican people, who wondered how she could have taken it back to England anyway. Independence Day was not celebrated on August 1, which was the day that slavery was finally abolished in 1838, but on August 6, and our leaders said to a country in which 80 per cent of the people are black that the black in our new black, green, and gold flag, stood for “hardship.” “Hardships there are, but the land is green and the sun shines.” And my father, Marcus, is dying.
For a year he suffered from constant indigestion. Eventually his dinner had to be cooked differently from the rest of the family’s so that he became like a child again who had to be fed baby food, soft bland foods like steamed chicken and mashed potatoes and egg custards. Sometimes in the night he vomited in the bathroom. What did Doctor Donaldson say, Marcus? “That I have a stomach ulcer. He gave me these Gelusil tablets.” For months he ate small, round, chalky white antacid tablets all the time. He ate them by the dozen, hoping that their soothing, milky chalk would coat the angry inflamed sores in his stomach. But they only got worse. My mother said, “I tell you that Doctor Donaldson is a quack. He is the Company doctor. He does not care a damn about you. You better try to see a doctor at the University Hospital.”
At the University Hospital the doctors cut Marcus’s stomach open, then
quickly sewed him up again because the sores in his stomach were cancerous and spreading rapidly. At age fifty-five he lay in the front bedroom of the house at Harbour View that he and my mother had just bought. He lay there, in a drugged sleep, his body rapidly shrinking, taking up less and less space in their double bed.
“Marcus, what do you think we should do about adding on another bedroom?”
“I don’t know, Dor, can’t you see that I am not dealing with worldly things now?”
And Doris, who knows this but does not want to hear it, breaks down and weeps.
“Papa, guess what, Karl take my good shoes and give them away.”
My brother Karl, who was born a social worker, would make periodic raids on our possessions, taking our shoes and clothes and giving them away to the really poor children of Kingston, then lecture us, his siblings, about having more than one pair of shoes when some people have none. Normally, my father would have told him that he should at least ask us first before he helped the really poor with our things. But my father just smiles a half-smile and says:
“That’s just material goods.” Then he closes his eyes.
My cousin Joan sits with him sometimes, she just sits there, quietly holding his hand. I tried to but I cannot sit still and watch my father die. So I learn to cook egg custards and milky baby foods to feed to him. Sometimes he says, “Come and sit and keep my company,” but I cannot sit and watch him die. On Monday, December 6, 1963, his stomach became rock hard. He was vomiting blood, and the only place for him was the hospital.
“Hello, Dr. Thompson. How is my father?”
“Marcus went about an hour ago.”
My brother Nigel was outside in the street playing football. I stood on the verandah and called out to him.
“Nigel, Papa dead.”
He said nothing. He just kept on playing football, kicking the ball up and down the street. He played until the street lights came on and he kept playing, kicking the ball harder and harder. He played until people began to turn off their lights to go to bed, he kept on playing football. Then he stopped and abruptly sat down on the sidewalk under a street light and dropped his head into his hands.
Cleodine knows they call her “Mule” because she has never birthed a child. Sometimes they even call her “Grey Mule” because she is so light-skinned, but they never call her so to her face, never. Behind your back is “dog” but to your face is “Miss Dog.” No, they never call her anything to her face but “Miss Cleo, Mi Missus.” Or her married name.
All she wanted was one child. One child. Not a whole brood like her sister Doris, whom she once referred to as a “baby-factory.” She eventually adopted a child from a nearby village, a girl with a yellowish complexion like hers. But try as she might to make her into a young version of herself, confident, gifted, erudite, and superior, the child proved to be gifted only at mischief-making; and by the time she ran away to Kingston with a truck driver at the age of sixteen, she had managed to earn the undying dislike of every member of the Harvey family, so dedicated to creating trouble for others was she.
“Queen Cleodine,” her husband used to call her. “My queen,” he called her. She wouldn’t have believed that he would ever have the gall to disgrace her because he used to say himself that he was so lucky to be married to somebody like her. She had eventually told him, “Since you are mixing up with these common women in the village, you are never, never again in life to touch me.” She is determined as always that they will never haul her down, never. Her back becomes straighter than ever. She walks to church each Sunday, dressed perfectly. She is partial to fine linen dresses tastefully trimmed with hand-embroidery. Her pumps are leather, soft for her long feet. She fashions her hats herself, there is no chance, none, that some blasted commerown will ever wear the same clothes as she. She walks through them every Sunday, fixing her spectacles on her narrow nose bridge.
He built her coffin while she was still alive. One day her husband came up with the suggestion that since she was so particular and fussy, since she did not like for a lot of strangers to be crowding up her yard at any time, that they should make arrangements for their funerals while they were still alive. She said nothing, just allowed him to call in the carpenters and make the two coffins, then he stored them under the house. It was her brother Flavius who noticed them and Ann remarked on it too, that her coffin was stored directly under her bedroom. It was as if the man was hoping that she would fall right through the mattress and the floorboards and nestle perfectly into the cedar dress that he built for her. Her brother Flavius asked Clement why in the name of God he had put his wife’s coffin right under her bed. Clement acted as if he hadn’t even heard. Flavius just stood right there in the yard and began to pray the Lord’s Prayer.
In her heart Cleodine was praying too, calling on David and Margaret and all the Harvey generations to protect her. In a dream her mother came to her, right there on the front verandah, she came and said that she was sorry, that she had been taken in by appearances; that she should have looked past this man’s dashing caballero act that he had learned in Cuba and Panama; that she should have seen that he had lived the loose life too long and that he would never truly be able to settle down. Now that had to be a dream, for Cleodine never heard her mother say she was sorry in all the time she was on earth. Cleodine got that from her. She too did not believe in saying “I’m sorry.” She believed that you should try to do a thing right in the first place and then there would be no need to be sorry. After that dream Cleodine woke up in the middle of the night and played the organ until morning. She was alone in the house so she disturbed no one.
Still, when her husband suddenly fell ill, she nursed him, cooked for him herself, tried to give him all the healthy food he didn’t want to eat. “Leave out the fatty pork and the beef,” she would tell him, “that kind of food is not good for your heart.”
They eventually hauled out his coffin from under the house and put him in it. My mother went down for the funeral with some of her children. She was a widow too now but she had nine children. If each child represented an opportunity to help a parent, my mother had nine more chances to get a drink of water than her sister. At the funeral, when Cleodine was sitting in the front pew with her eyes dry, Doris went and put herself beside her sister and took her hand and sat there with her hand in hers for the entire funeral.
The day after my mother died, I go to Papine Market to buy food for the people who would be coming to pay their respects to the family. Weighed down by loss, I walk slowly into the market and as I approach the stall where my friend Peggy sells yams, she calls out to me, “My friend, what happen to you?” I come up and stand by Peggy, who is seated before a big heap of yams, and I say, “Peggy, my mother dead.” And the minute I say that, she turns to the woman to her right, then to the one to her left and the one behind her and tells them, “Her mother dead.” Immediately these women leave their stalls and come and circle me and begin to sound the Jamaican Om: “nuh mine nuh mine nuh mine nuh mine.” I just stand there weeping, allowing their sounds of consolation to push back my grief. And as I am standing there in their midst, my mind drifts back to the time I’d told my mother I wished that I was dead, and how she had almost killed me for saying something so horrible.
I had been about twelve years old at the time. It was a Saturday morning, and just as I was escaping deep into one of my sister Barbara’s books, my mother called me into the sewing room and presented me with a two-page shopping list which she had drawn up in her beautiful, confident handwriting. “A good fist, we Harveys all have good fists,” she’d always say in admiration of her own handwriting. And so, with her good fist, she had smashed my plans to spend the day reading The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.
I didn’t like going to buy trimmings. It meant taking the bus downtown to King Street and walking from store to store and trying to get the exact match to the things on the list. My mother’s standards were very exacting. If the colours were a little off, or
if you bought one-inch belting instead of one and a half inches, or if you bought buttons which in her opinion looked cheap because you had skimmed off some of the trimmings money and bought an ice-cream cone from the cafeteria on the second floor of Times Store, she would become harsh, angry, and insulting about your lack of good taste. At such times she looked just like her mother, Margaret, did in a photograph taken with David in the yard at Harvey River on their fortieth wedding anniversary. “Mummah look vex in this photograph because Puppah give away almost everything that they owned,” my mother would say.
As I stood there, wilting under my mother’s fierce gaze, I thought on the injustice of my seeming to be the only one of her children who was available to buy trimmings. And the more I thought upon this, the more I became convinced that a serious wrong was being done to me. The boys could not be sent to buy trimmings for the same reason that my mother did not let them do housework, such activities being unmanly. My sister Barbara was at work at the newspaper, and my other sister Betty was never able to go out on her own because of her epilepsy. It just did not seem fair to my teenage self. I started to cry at the misery of it all, at being the only one chosen to do this errand which, as my mother pointed out, would help to put food into our mouths. I stood there weeping as she handed me the list of zips of various lengths and beltings of different widths and buttons to be bought at Triff Hyltons and covered buckles and accordion pleating to be collected at Amy Cruz’s. Through my resentful tears, I said, “I hope that a bus runs over me and kills me when I go downtown, and then you will be sorry that you forced me to go.”
I would live to regret saying those words for many years to come, for my mother repeated them to everybody as proof that I was a Don’t-Care girl with a divided mind who was in danger of “becoming dead to trespasses and sins.” She was not intimidated by my hysterical adolescent attempt to guilt her out. She ordered me to go and buy the trimmings anyway. As I left the house in tears, I wondered what would happen if a bus did run over me. Would people say, “the poor little girl get a warning man, her mother should never force her to go downtown and buy no trimmings that day, I am telling you, the woman well hard, look how she send the poor child to her death.” Fortunately for both of us, I completed my trimmings errands without being killed by a bus, and now here I was, more than thirty years later, crying in Papine Market because my mother was dead.
From Harvey River Page 22