He felt like a man escaping custody. But during his incarceration in the small, dog infested room, he had grown accustomed to the plastic cover on the toilet bowl which he had to sit sideways on; to the shower which beat against the sides of its tin enclosure; to the dining table which his knees knocked against, causing the legs to buckle and almost fold and toss the food untouched to the dog, as it was a folding table made for playing cards; and the bed made of three found mattresses of three difference sizes, which slid each time he mounted them, and her. He had got accustomed, like a man who has acknowledged that he has to spend time against his wishes, in a confined space, getting to know the restriction and abiding with it, because there is no other way.
“How much farther?”
“We’ll be there soon.”
He looked at the cluttered dashboard that had more instruments on it than he had ever seen in a taxi in the city; and was searching for the one that told the time and speed.
“Why are you doing twenty-five?”
“In this town, the limit is thirty, sir.”
“So, why are you...?”
“Can’t go faster, in this town.”
They were on a street where the buildings were large and empty, and he thought of olden times when sugar or flour or sawdust must have been made in that building, and the streets were crowded and the traffic moved like this creeping taxi, as the townsfolk traveled in polished, scrubbed carriages, with rubbed-down horses.
On his left was the vast body of water the colour of lead; they called it The Lake, but he had never seen a lake this size; and close by, to the side of the street, was a ship that stretched for two blocks, looming, and he thought of disaster. What was she doing now, left alone in the angry farewell of silent words? Was she kissing the dog to make up for his anger? Or kicking the dog to transfer her disappointment with the man who had entered her life just as two ships pass each other in fog or falling snow? He thought of the ship which was large enough to enter oceans, faltering in its arrival at this port, and hitting a large rock, with its invisible dimensions below the surface, and crumpling; and voices raised in terror and frustration.
When he had seen her body, and the softness of her limbs, her breasts which his anxious hands covered; and he felt her body shudder and then collapse, as his touch became lighter, moving over her not quite brown, not quite white, cool skin, she had held her eyes closed against his passion; but her body kept shaking. In her eyes was something like terror, something that said she was fearful of the ecstasy she had started to enjoy.
And he’d told himself then, that he knew.
A horn sounded. He did not know about trains. It could be the train signal getting ready to leave. He could not see any building which looked like a train station. But in these small towns, the station could be a shed. Buried behind the two-storied brown-painted buildings which flanked the street. The street was quite crowded. And the slow-moving cars reminded him that it was Sunday; and he guessed that no one here took a train on a summer afternoon on a Sunday, preferring to be in Sunday school, or walking beside the unmoving Lake with dog and kid and girlfriend and lover, watching the ship that has not moved in years.
“Here we are!”
And the ride he was taking with his eyes and imagination has come to this sparse end, with men and women loitering outside the station, and the train huffing and chugging. The ticket seller pauses to ask a woman how was her trip to the big city, and whether her son is still in the hospital, when the horn goes again and he wants to pull the ticket seller from behind her cage and spread her on the floor.
“Have a nice trip sir, there is no hurry as the train ain’ going nowhere, it just got in and I’ll tell you when you are to board, if you want a coffee just around the corner or potato chips or a pop you can sit here then, and I’ll see you and tell you.”
She is lying on the three-tiered bed and her eyes are soaked in water and they seem like soft slits of passion and they are looking into the eyes of the white-haired dog who looks like an African albino through a meeting of two bloods, and she asks the dog why her man does not like him, that he is only a dog.
He sits by a window. The train cuts through a village on the outskirts of the town. And he can see the barbecues belching smoke; and a man with thick pieces of dead animal in his hand in a bowl with forceps. The train is going through the backyard of village after village. The roses are still red. The green is the grass on which the children fooled the rules of football, touching the football and touching the grass. And then there is only corn. In the city the corn is already dead. But in this rumbling, inhospitable cutting through the privies of these homes, the corn raises its head and can reach a tall man to his shoulder, hiding secret and compelling crimes, unseen by the eyes of the woman, old as an aunt, who sits on a collapsible chair and breathed in the perfume of the red dead animal. Beef.
Years ago, he would walk through the ears of corn, and rip the blond hair from the stalk when no one was looking and turn himself into a European with a silk moustache. Or if he was reading a book about buccaneers, make a beard like Sinbad the Sailor, and mow through the waves of the green and the corn and come out at the end, miscalculated like a pilot who had not learned his lessons, on the compass. A wrecked frigate.
“Ship, sail!”
“Sail, fast!”
“Hommany men ’pon deck?”
“Twenty!”
“Give me twenty grains o’ corn, you idiot! I only have three in my hand. How-haw-haw!”
Five years after that evening when the sky was golden, as if there could be autumn in the island, and the sea, not a lake, was blue and white with the waves like the moustache of old English-men, she held his hand, and led him into the ocean of corn, where there was no current and no neighbours, where the trade winds could not reach, with the girl his only rudder, leading him into the valley of information and learning; and it must have been three minutes at the most, but three minutes filled with a lifetime of the mystery of this young girl’s experience; his hand was trembling; and he thought she was taking him into this deepness to continue, she and he, the children’s game. “Ship, sail! Sail fast!” It was he who had told her five nights before, when their school books had been put under the table for the weekend, “Twenty! Twenty men ’pon deck!”
“You little idiot!”
Now, the train has moved from the crowded yards with the small swimming pools, many of them raised above the lawns, with a ladder for a midget taking the shaking steps from the grass to the brink of disaster. It was the woman who had told him, just as he came out of the small shower walled-in by tin, where each drop sounded like a cataract, it was the woman who had told him, “Last summer, you know? Ten children drowned in swimming pools, the round ones, you know? This summer, and it’s early in summer, August only, you know? Already thirteen fallen off step-ladders into the water, and drowned. The yards are larger. And the pools are dug into the green ground. It is very peaceful. It is Sunday afternoon, and no children are splashing in them. The corn comes right up to the kitchen garden bed in a corner of the paled backyard far from the pool, and he can see green tomatoes and some red, lettuce and other green things too far in the distance to name; he can see moustaches and beards on the corn. He wonders who were the first boys and girls, men and women, who ran through these green tunnels, hiding from danger; and who rode these green rails hiding from the inhabitants of the other country across the vast body of water? He had forgotten to ask the man the name of the lake. And in the book about the town, he had not reached that paragraph of its history.
The fields are running beside the train. They have the same speed. But he does not know the miles per hour. Two passenger cars and a truck come into his view on the right side, the farther side of the window. He pushes the shade up. They are beside him now, abreast, well within range. If he had a gun with power with a scope glass for accuracy, the cars and the truck would be brought into his sight, and pow!, with just one shot he could explode them. In his
mind he aims, using the cigarette in his mouth as the rifle; but the smoke clouds his aim, so he exchanges this for the pencil he was using to write the entry under Sunday the 6th in his diary; and all of a sudden, the two cars and the truck are left behind in the rumbling of the train as it goes into a bend. The fields of corn are running beside this monster of iron.
And in them he sees the figure of a woman. Jane. He knows her name, because her name is the name of her plight. Her clothes were originally white, long and flowing over her legs which have caused so much pain and brutality and loving longing, and which have become the legs of any man assuming he was white. Jane is running beside the train. Her eyes are balls of horror, for in them he can see himself, without having seen her in that large yard on the other side of the body of water; can feel the cow-skin rip into her soft black back, the skin was no longer beautiful and black. A painting of barbed wire with thick powerful brush-strokes of red became her back. And she was the one who carried the largest bale of cotton, the largest collection of twigs, the largest of her seven children on her back. Her strong legs keep her abreast of the train, and her arms reach to the side of the train, where the short steps are, the same size as the step-ladder from which the thirteen children, not her children, not her cousins, fell into the raised, plastic swimming pools in the first short part of this summer. But with all her strength and desperation to jump on board, the train is still too fast for her agility.
Jane walked the hundred miles from the place across the water, without knowing how to swim, without knowing how to read the geography of the map, and all she knew was that the map had a meaning less intractable than geography and theodolites and compasses. The sun this Sunday afternoon is crisp and warm. Jane walked during the night, and slept like a big city bagwoman wherever her bodily strength exhausted her mind that held this promise of walking through the endless corn fields, beside the iron rails of this monster taking him away from the woman with the dog to the big city where no corn grows.
No cotton grows on the streets of the big city. Only a sign on a store on Yonge Street, and racks outside in the whirling wind, that say Au Coton. It is not the same cotton that Jane knew and lived through, and nearly died of. And just before Jane grows small and smaller in the disappointed distance, he sees the large black body of a man, naked down to his shorts, covered in perspiration. Jane’s husband, Jim. And even though Jim cannot stand beside the road and raise his finger, and cajole the driver of a car to slow down and stop, he understands the protocol of catching rides. He sent Jane, a woman, to do his dirty finger-raising business. It was like that back in that yard in the other place across the body of water, when chickens and ducks, pigs and cows, and some snakes, roamed in a greater freedom of space than even he and Jane; and in that time, it was he who understood that a little mistake, a word said under the breath but loud enough for Mas’r to hear; the misappropriation of one of those freed hens in the yards; the miscalculation in the pouring of molasses for the horse and jackass, leaving too deep a bottom in the bottom of the pail; and his ignorance of mathematics and addition, but his proficiency with subtraction: twenty hams was put in the smoke-filled shed with the hickory leaves and the smoke broke out as if the whole goddamn place was on fire, Mas’r; and he said, under his breath, but too loud, Amma wish this goddamn place were going up in flame with these hams; but when he checked their smoking and their curing, one was gone. One gone! These two words became like a bell in the night, like a boot at the door, like a tap on the shoulder in a crowd, like the leather in the boot of the Gestapo, all over that land across the body of water. “One gone!” And dogs barked. Lights came on. Lanterns were carried. Dogs yelped, tasting the sweetness of blood. Whips were cracked for suppleness. And for length. And for deadliness. And men jumped on the backs of horses. Rifles and pistols were taken from their shelves, already oiled and ready for use. Bullets and shots were fired for practice in the air. And the small children, who knew those two words, laughed in their sleep, and wished, and wished. So that small miscalculation of arithmetic; and how was he to know, since no one had sat him down under the tree in the large yard, after his endless chores, to say, “One and one is two. Two and two is four. One from four is t’ree!” And for the love of his body; and for the love of his woman, and the love she bore him, he sent her forward, he pushed her forward, to take her rightful place of leadership, and she took and endured the sting of justice. It was a chastisement he could no longer bear. It was a punishment his black body held no unmarked area the size of a postage stamp to endure. That is why Jane came closer from the deep green patch of corn to hail the train.
He can see the man’s disappointment. And the man’s shame. For the man knew he was a man, even in the circumscribed circumstance of his life and of his woman’s life. But he had no power to behave as a man. As the way he knew, if he were living in a different land, he was to behave. It was surprising that the man naked down to his shorts, torn and tattered from catching them against branches and barbed wire and the teeth of howling dogs, perhaps the almost deadly flight of a bullet; his clothes in the same condition as his woman’s, it was surprising that he did not take his failure out on his woman and beat her in the full sight of the disappearing train.
“Never get tired of that scenery,” the conductor said, punching a hole in the ticket. “Ya know. Years and years I been making this trip. In summer, winter, the fall and spring. And ya know. Always grabs my attention just to look out and see the things and the fields. Interesting, ain’t it? He gives back the ticket, takes another from his pocket and places it above the seat. He does the same thing two seats beyond. Those two tickets are of a different colour. So, the colour must mean destination. Did Jane have a colour scheme for her hoped destination? Could Jim have told her what to choose? “Tell ya something,” the conductor says, sitting in the opposite seat. “You seem to be a sensible gentleman, educated I would say. And I hope you take this the right way, but I would swear that in them fields o’ corn, there’s people living. I don’t mean living as against dead, you understand. What I mean is this. There could be people in them fields carrying on a life like you and me. With differences of course. If you see what I mean! You ever seen it that way?”
“Could be.”
They sit in silence, and the passing of time coincides with and runs beside the scenery they are watching.
“Well, have a good trip for the rest o’ the way. Been good talking to ya.”
He moves away, down the shaking corridor. The tune he is humming is barely recognizable, Georgia on my mind....
Why were there no mile posts beside railroad tracks so a man can tell how far he has traveled? Or how fast? It was so strange that you had to be in the carriage, the cage, the hub, or was it the caboose, to see where you were going. He is getting tired, and the monotony of the speed measured against the lasting green fields is beginning to dull his mind and his attention, just like the sensation in a plane, looking through the window shaped like a toilet seat, at clouds that bury the bulk of the plane and come harmless and dangerously close. He is not the kind of man who could slump into a seat, take out a paperback book and read, then fall asleep. Or talk to the stranger beside him. What would he say to this unknown man? Normally, he closes his eyes and pretends to be invisible. Or asleep. But during this trip, an escape from the woman who loved kissing the dog, and kissing him afterwards with the same lips, escaping from the dog as much as from the woman, he has pressed his head against the plate-glass window and the images of his conscience strike against the cool glass; and he sees the half-dressed Jane and her naked husband, Jim.
Now the train is beside water. And he thinks of that childhood, years ago in the sun, when there was only water at the end of his reaching eyes, wherever he looked. Ship sail; sail fast! There were ships, many ships; ships with sails bringing cod fish from Newfoundland; and the crows of the sea, those carrion-eating birds were numberless on the decks like albatrosses; and when the crows regain their dignity and sail away from th
e rotting, rotten fish, all that is left are the bodies of men and women. He cannot see the faces of these men. He cannot see the faces of these women. Only their skin and bones, no more covered with the salty delicious flesh of the cod fish but with its bones and white scabs and greyish skin, like the sin of age and disease and withering sickness. Every Saturday morning, his mother soaked a saucepan full of that cod from the Banks of Newfoundland, and after hours of softening the flesh, removed the bones, scrubbing away the white and the grey from the slab of cod no thicker than the cover of his green-backed exercise book, in which he wrote exercises in English composition: The boy stood on the burning deck!; and then the fresh small tomatoes grown in plots that were miniatures of the fields he passes on this train; and the lard oil, the sickened thin cod came alive in taste and deliciousness, as she poured it thick and richer after her operation, all over the thick, cloiding dish made from corn, dried and shelled and husked and ground by hand in Mr. Thorpe’s Corn Grinding machine; and called it cou-cou. They told him when he left the island where this feast was manufactured, that cou-cou was from Africa; and now, in this body of water through which the train passes, over it, on a bridge, that past is bridged by the memory, and he can see those dying bodies left by the carrion-eating birds. Amongst them, there is no Jane. That was not a name she was christened with in Africa. There is no one called Jim. But he knows no African names. Once, in a fit of anger, he erased the name his mother told him he was given, while she stirred the okras into the slippery pot with the ground corn, and put in its place And large X. But X means nonentity. X means illiteracy. X marks the spot. Once, in the cod fish sauce thickened with tomatoes and fresh eschalots, he found a bone the shape of an X. It did not hide any mystery. So, he spent the afternoon, roaming through the village sucking it, as the boys played cricket; as the girls played rounders and as the men drank rum. His mother was at home reading Revelations, chapter 13. She loved Revelations. She loved Chapter 13. And she loved the first verse most of all. A crumbling, dried cross, or an X, depending upon his haste or impatience to read the verse five times each night, marked the spot. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. They were surrounded by water, the Caribbean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean depending upon which hill he sat on and watched the sea. And later in the fading day, at dusk, the boys and the girls gathered in a circle, and played the game, Ship, sail; sail fast! Later still, the same night, the mothers and his mother sat in the backdoor looking out into the yard filled with sleeping chickens and ducks and centipedes, and his mother held them all in thrall, “Once upon a time, there was a horse that had seven heads, and ten foots, and my God, one dark night as I walking home from the Marine Hotel where the Englishmen stay....” His mother never worked at the Marine Hotel. But the vision of seven heads and ten feet, crippled him and he drew closer to the same girl who had taken him into the corn, to feel her comfort, to be protected from these beasts of the land, and to feel her breasts. “Wait!” she said, in an embarrassingly high voice, a stranger now to his advances, “who you think I is, boy? Who you think you feeling-up boy?” She pushed him aside, and he was spared greater embarrassment in that cool darkness where he could not see even his own feet in the thickness, and no one could see his furtive trembling hand, similar to the hand of Jane, disappearing from the side of the rails going back into the dense green corn. It was fifteen years after that rebuke before he had the strength to raise his hand from his side to touch a woman on her waist. And he saw the horse his mother was talking about, and which had ten heads, and forty feets; and he was in a road by himself, and the horse was coming in his direction and the eighty crescents of iron in its cantering madness were like the fright in a dream of standing in the middle of a tunnel with lights at the side, overhead, and curving in the short noisy distance round an invisible bend and hearing the loud clatter of an approaching train but not being able to decide which end of the tunnel is the entry or the exit, and then in his confusion all goes black, and only the noise now closer to a roar, brings him to resignation and the making of the sign of the Cross, two times on his shaking breast. Just before Jane had disappeared out of the rectangular train window, the man had seen her make a sign, and now that he had vomited that part of his past, he realizes that it was a Cross she was tracing in her broken ambition to hitch a ride to a big city where she thought her rags would be replaced by silk and stockings and pumps.
There Are No Elders Page 4