The Greats

by Deborah Ellis

  Jomon almost laughs.

  He knows this book.

  It’s A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It’s the story of a man who is taught important lessons by ghosts who come to visit him.

  Of course that would be the book!

  Jomon marvels at the weirdness of it all, then forgets about it as he gets caught up in the story. The teacher reads the first few pages, then passes the book to a small girl. The girl falters as she reads, but no one seems to mind.

  Jomon sure doesn’t.

  It is just really, really nice being read to.

  Later that night, after everyone is in bed and the night guards are quiet in their office, Jomon hears his name.

  “Jomon? You still there?”

  It’s Dev.

  “I’m here,” Jomon replies.

  “I have to talk to you,” Dev says.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m so mad at my father. I don’t want to talk to him. But I do want to talk to you. I need to talk to you.”

  “I’m listening,” Jomon says.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Dev says. “I don’t like being here. I need to tell you my story, then maybe I can move on.”

  “Move on where?”

  “I don’t know. Out of here, at least. Can I tell you my story? Do you have time now?”

  Jomon thinks that is a ridiculous question, but he answers anyway.

  “Now is perfect,” he says.

  The boy in the cell next to him takes a deep breath and begins.

  16

  Great-Grandfather’s Contribution

  My name is Angel Liang Fowler. People call me Dev. Short for Devil. My relatives all said, “That’s no angel, that’s a devil.” So they called me Dev. You can call me Dev, too. I don’t like it but I’m used to it.

  I was just a baby when my mother died in the fireworks explosion.

  I don’t like fireworks, or any loud sounds. I can handle the cannonball fruit exploding because it’s nature and I grew up with it. But any loud human sounds? I don’t like them.

  My mother died and there I was — squawking, colicky, not a good baby. A good baby is one who is quiet and sleeps all the time. A good child is one that no one ever hears from. Who decided that? If I could go back, I’d make more noise, not less. What did being quiet ever get me? And the truth is, even if I had been a better baby, they still wouldn’t have wanted me.

  My mother’s parents didn’t want me because I didn’t look enough like my mother. My father’s family didn’t want me because I looked too much like my mother. And my father didn’t want me because he wanted to feel sorry for himself more than he wanted to take care of me.

  I know this is true because they all told me to my face. To others, they’d say I was too much trouble, or I’d be better off in town instead of in the village. But to me, they’d say, “You have too much Chinese in your face.” Or, “Your skin is so dark. Your mother’s skin was beautiful and yours is so ugly.” My father would just look at me and say, “Take him away.” And he’d open a bottle of rum and take a long drink.

  Back and forth I went, between my mother’s family and my father’s family. I picked up some schooling. Taught myself, mostly. One of the old men in the neighborhood took me under his wing, coached me in arithmetic and grammar, got me ready for high school. He said we owed it to our slave ancestors to become educated because they couldn’t be.

  I think maybe his eyesight wasn’t so good and he couldn’t see how worthless I was. That’s why he was so kind to me. Or maybe he was just a kind man. I’m hoping to get the chance to ask him when all of this is over.

  I spent most of my childhood away from my father. He would pop around every now and then, and I’m pretty sure he gave my relatives money to help feed me and all that, but he never spent any time with me.

  Then, when I was ten or so, Dad got religion.

  He’d had a bad bout of drinking. He was lying in some street, swimming in vomit and his own pee. As he told it later to anyone who would listen, he looked up and saw an angel from God. She was dressed all in white. She told him, “Jesus loves you,” and he was all healed.

  He wasn’t, but you’ve figured that out already.

  This angel was really a human woman. She was with the Jordanites. Are they still around? They dressed all in white and held services out in the open, like on Bourda Green or Stabroek Market square. They preached on street corners, too. That’s how my father got involved. He was passed out drunk on the corner where they wanted to hold a service.

  They treated Dad really well, those Jordanites. They helped him get sober. They cleaned him up and fed him and found him a decent room to live in. He got saved and then he came and got me from my relatives’ house.

  There were no books in my father’s relatives’ house except for the Bible. To get me out of their way, Dad’s relatives would say, “Go sit in the corner and learn a Bible verse.” I learned a lot of Bible verses!

  When my father saw how many verses I knew, and how easy it was for me to learn them, he bought me a white suit and paraded me out at services. And I liked it! People didn’t care that I was ugly. They cheered when I quoted Colossians 3:2 or Luke 10:19, or whatever they wanted to hear.

  But Dad got thirsty again. He needed money for drink so he got the brilliant idea of using me to get it. Away from the Jordanites who had saved his sorry life, he put me out on the street in my white suit to quote Bible verses and collect money like a trained parrot. He’d tell people the money was for the Lord, but he spent it on bottles.

  I knew it was wrong. I was happy to be with my father when it looked like he really wanted to be with me, but as soon as I figured out that he was just using me, I was done. But I was a kid. What could I do? I started mumbling my Bible verses so people wouldn’t pay much. That just got him mad.

  In the end, Dad was his own undoing. He got thirstier and thirstier and needed more money than I could bring in.

  One day I woke up to find that he’d sold my white suit and everything else I had, except for the skivvies that I wore to bed. He laid in a stock of hooch and yelled at me to get out.

  So I left, in nothing but my underwear.

  I slept in the tool shed at the school. The caretaker gave me a pair of trousers and a shirt. I exchanged work for food. I managed to get my diploma. No one came to watch me graduate. I took my diploma home to show my father. He was dead. Killed himself. He’d been dead for some time. The flies were terrible.

  I was seventeen.

  Flies and fireworks. I hate them both.

  The next years blurred by. I worked. I did every job I could find. Moved cargo on the docks, cut sugar cane, cleaned out ditches that were clogged with mud and sewage. Hot, nasty work! It was the Depression, which hit Guyana like it hit every place, but there was work for those willing to sweat and suffer. And then the war started. More work for more people. Easier work. Better paying. For a time, I guarded boats loaded with bauxite before they were shipped out to the United States. Bauxite was used in making fighter planes. All kinds of work. I saved my money.

  I married your great-grandmother in 1942. Her name was Indra, and I knew her from school. She was very smart. Could have run the country. Should have run the country. She proposed to me! I was astonished that she asked, and because of that, I said yes, even though I probably shouldn’t have. I wanted to love her, and I acted like I did. Maybe I did love her. I was always kind to her. I never drank. I knew how to behave. But deep down in me there was a pit of loneliness, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.

  A year after we were married, we had a son, Barnabas. He was your grandfather.

  Indra’s family was from India. They came to Guyana several generations before, as indentured servants. When Barnabas was a baby, there was famine in Bengal. Indra and I joined a committee to bring people from the famine zone to
Guyana. It was a lot to take on, but we knew how to work, and to work for something good. Well, we were young. It made us happy. It was good.

  The newcomers from Bengal brought with them terrible stories of starvation, of animals and people dying in the streets. Some also brought leprosy.

  Leprosy was already in Guyana. It was everywhere. But we think my wife caught it from the people she was helping. It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know they had it.

  First she got white patches on her skin. She ignored them. She was busy. She cared for our son and so many people, and leprosy never crossed her mind. Eventually, she couldn’t ignore it any longer. She went to the doctor. He sent her to live in the leprosy hospital in Mahaica. Our son was raised by the nuns in the Lady Denham home just outside the gates of the hospital. It was a home for the healthy children of leprosy patients. The children who had leprosy lived in other homes, inside the fence.

  I stayed behind in Georgetown. I had just gotten a good job, assisting a shipping supervisor at the dockyards, and we thought Indra would get better and come home. I worked hard and spent very little money on myself. I visited almost every month. Each time I did, I took presents. Indra liked those little tins of peppermints, and white nightgowns with yellow ribbons. Barnabas got toys and new clothes, although I don’t think he liked them. I often saw other children wearing the clothes and playing with the toys.

  Sometimes I helped out the nuns by doing small repairs around the grounds, painting sheds, installing new window screens. Barnabas followed me around, helping when he could, talking, talking, talking. He didn’t notice that I never knew what to say to him. How does a father talk to his child? Mine almost never talked to me.

  Barnabas didn’t notice. He was happy doing all the talking and telling joke after joke. The jokes weren’t always funny, but I always laughed. It was something I could do for him.

  Later, when his mother passed away, he came back to Georgetown to live with me. He had no jokes left. I didn’t know how to help him find new ones. I didn’t know how to help him do anything.

  I tried to be a better father to my son than my father was to me. I tried to let him know he was important. I tried to keep him safe. But I wasn’t there for large parts of his life, and I don’t think he ever forgave me. I should have taken a lesser-paying job closer to the leprosy hospital, so that I could see him every day.

  My father failed me, and I failed my son.

  The pressure of that failure pushed me down.

  I waited until my son was far, far away.

  Then I killed myself.

  As soon as I did it, I wished I hadn’t.

  But by then I was dead.

  It was too late to change my mind.

  17

  Jomon stays quiet for a long time after Dev finishes talking.

  The only thing he says is, “I’m going to call you Angel.”

  He needs to think.

  It’s all so strange.

  There is Hi’s name, Hiram Jomon Fowler, so close to his own, Jomon Hiram Fowler. There is the way both Hi and Angel know the Soothing Song. They both look like him — the position of their ears, the shape of their foreheads and chins — and they seem to be able to read his thoughts.

  Most strange of all is Angel’s story. It is familiar to Jomon. Parts of it, anyway. He can’t remember where he heard it, but he knows he’s been told bits of this family story before.

  Maybe they are just like Scrooge’s fragments of underdone potato, when he first sees the ghost of Jacob Marley.

  Or maybe they are real.

  Jomon winds his fingers through the bars in the window and leans his head on the door.

  They don’t know me. If they knew me, they would know I’m not worth bothering about.

  “Why aren’t you?” asks Angel.

  Jomon hears the voice right behind him. He turns to see Angel and Hi inside the cell with him. Angel is sitting as far away from Hi as possible, which isn’t far in that small space.

  “Why aren’t you worth bothering about?” Angel asks again.

  Jomon shakes his head.

  “Just tell us,” says Hi. “What makes you so unworthy? What horrible thing did you do?”

  “It’s what I didn’t do!” Jomon spits out. He slumps to the floor with his back against the cell door.

  “Tell us,” says Hi.

  Jomon can’t get the words out.

  “If you could do one thing better,” Angel says. “What would it be?”

  Jomon answers without hesitation. “I would say goodbye to my mother.”

  He starts to cry. He lowers his head, ashamed to be crying in front of the other two boys.

  When he finally looks up again, he is all alone in the cell.

  The sounds of the night take over, and Jomon sleeps.

  18

  “I think we can all agree we have a crisis on our hands.”

  The chief executive officer of the national museum looks from one official to the other.

  They are all together in his office. He looks down at the note in his hand and reads it out loud.

  “Gather has gone for a walk.”

  “I would rather call it an opportunity,” says the marketing manager. She’s the one who came up with the Name the Sloth contest.

  “An opportunity to lose our jobs,” says the head of security. He always wears dark glasses, even indoors. People assume he has a problem with his eyes, but he really wears them because he thinks they make him look like a TV detective. “If it gets out that we let an expensive exhibit be stolen right out from under our noses, we’ll be in trouble.”

  “You will be in trouble,” says the financial officer. “Why did you let the workers just cover that wall with plastic? Anyone could get in!”

  “If you had released more money,” says the security head, “we could have hired twice the workers and gotten the whole thing done in a day.”

  “I only release what I am authorized to release.” She looks at the chief executive. “You’re the one with the authority. It’s your responsibility.”

  “That’s right,” says the security head. “And if you had approved my requests for armed guards and cameras and a pack of vicious dogs, we could have avoided this whole mess.”

  The marketing manager is enjoying herself. The lost sloth cannot in any way be blamed on her. Maybe her colleagues will all be fired and she could be the boss!

  “My idea,” she says, “is to have a Find the Sloth competition. This way, Gather’s disappearance will look like a plan instead of carelessness. I’ll have a press conference to announce it.” She might have to go shopping for something special to wear on television.

  “Impossible!” says the security head. “We must be sworn to secrecy. No one is to leave this room until …”

  His sentence trails off. He remembers he has an appointment with his barber that afternoon.

  “We have to do something,” says the chief executive. “Gather is our most valuable exhibit. What are we going to do if our funders find out?”

  “Maybe she wasn’t stolen,” says the financial officer. “What does that note say again? Gather has gone for a walk? Why not just say, Gather is missing? Maybe Gather really has gone for a walk.”

  “If that is even a remote possibility,” the security head says, “then we had better be absolutely certain to keep it a secret. If we tell people there’s a giant prehistoric sloth roaming around Guyana, there will be panic in the streets.”

  His voice is firm, but he is a little bit excited at the possibility of a nation-wide panic. He has a mental picture of himself standing on top of a tank, urging calm. He is not sure where he’ll get an army tank, or what purpose it would serve in calming people down, but he likes the picture.

  “I agree,” says the chief executive. “No one else can know. We’ll get the sloth back in
the hall, repair the wall, and no one will be the wiser.”

  “The only people who know are the four of us,” says the security head. “Plus the person who wrote the note. Who is she?”

  “Calls herself Mrs. Simson,” says the chief executive. “The cleaner.”

  “Fire her,” says the security head.

  “No, sell her on the secrecy, then give her a raise,” says the marketing manager.

  “Not too big a raise,” says the financial officer.

  “We’d better go talk to her,” says the chief executive.

  They all leave the office. There is some confusion at the door because the chief executive isn’t sure whether it looks more powerful for him to go first or to make others go first, but they sort it out and tour the museum at a walk-run, looking for the cleaner.

  “Why is the Gather exhibit closed?” asks a teacher with her first-grade students gathered around her like baby ducks.

  The officials rush by without answering and are serenaded by six-year-olds chanting, “We want Gather! We want Gather!”

  They go through the whole museum without finding Mrs. Simson. The only space left to check is Gather’s room.

  They head quickly to the door of the exhibit hall and pull it open.

  Mrs. Simson is on the bench. She rises to her feet and looks squarely at the chief executive.

  “Six words,” she said. “It took you this long to read six words. Now what are you going to do to fix this?”

  19

  It’s chore time at the detention center.

  Young prisoners are bent over their brooms, sweeping the yard of leaves and debris so that snakes and scorpions have nowhere to hide. Other prisoners are wiping down railings, mopping floors and emptying trash cans.

  Jomon, Hi and Angel were released from solitary earlier that morning. Jomon and a small girl named Cora are assigned to the Welcome mat.

  “Clean off all that dust and dirt,” says Guard Boyton. “I want it looking like new.” She leaves them to it.