The Greats

by Deborah Ellis

  Back to the story.

  I asked Sister Carolyn if I could join the nuns’ choir because I wanted to learn about music. She said no, but she created a new choir out of all the old-enough kids in the children’s homes. We sang hymns and Christmas carols and put on a concert to raise money for the hospital. We raised enough to buy new sheets and pillows for every bed! Sister Carolyn taught me how to read music, play the piano and — secretly, because this was against the rules — she taught me how to tap dance. She’d been a chorus girl on Broadway before she became a nun!

  Pops came to one of our concerts. He told me afterwards that he liked it and he was proud of me.

  I loved him for that, but I wished he’d made more of an effort more often. What was wrong with me that I wasn’t worth his effort? I gave him my effort all the time!

  Ma died of pneumonia when I was thirteen. I left the hospital that had been my home. I left the nuns and the patients and the way of life I was used to. And I moved in with my father in Georgetown.

  We didn’t talk much. He didn’t seem to know how. He always made sure I had food and clothes and money for school things, but we were like guests living in someone else’s house.

  School was hard at first when the kids found out that I’d lived at the leprosy hospital. Some of them made fun of me by saying, “Unclean! Unclean!” like in the Bible. One boy held up his arm with the hand tucked up inside the sleeve, like it had been eaten away by leprosy. Mean, ignorant stuff.

  So I did something mean and ignorant back. I said, “Man, the world wishes you had leprosy. Anything would improve your ugly face!”

  The boy’s friends laughed, but I felt bad right away. Leprosy isn’t a joke. Then I told them about all the people I knew at the hospital, their names, where they were from, what they were like. And then I started in on the nuns. I turned into Sister Barnby. They laughed. I got invited to join the school drama club. I became almost popular.

  Things were going along okay. I got busy with my own life and so I didn’t notice Pop’s sadness as much.

  And then, in my last year of high school, everything fell apart.

  We were in rehearsals for Measure for Measure. One of the other actors asked me to stay after to help him with his lines. We were running lines backstage when he leaned over and kissed me. And I kissed him back. And someone saw. And told.

  I was expelled. The other boy couldn’t be expelled because he was the principal’s son, but I think I was the lucky one because that principal was an ass, and I can only imagine the hell that kid lived in.

  My father was told why I was kicked out of school. He never said a word to me about it. His face was sad, but his face was always sad. I guessed that now he was sad to have me for his son.

  Three days after I was kicked out of school, my father told me that a cousin of a man he worked with was willing to rent me part of his flat in New York City. Pops found me a job as a dish washer on a cargo ship that would take me to New York and pay me a bit of a wage at the same time. I left Guyana a week later. Pops took me to the docks. He handed me an envelope full of money. I was so ashamed I could barely even say goodbye.

  The work on the ship was hard, but being on the ocean was terrific, and coming into New York was amazing. I thought Georgetown was a big city, but New York? Incredible.

  Anyway, I managed to find the apartment and was greeted with the news that Angel, my father, was dead. He had killed himself. I had just turned eighteen years old.

  Soon after he died, I got a large bank draft in the mail. Pops made sure to take care of his affairs before he killed himself so that I’d have enough money to keep going until I could pay my own way. I appreciated the money. I stretched it out on food and rent and bus fare and acting lessons. Every time I handed over a dollar, I wished I could have called Pops to tell him what I was doing.

  I did all right. I got a job as a night cleaner in a big hospital. I went on lots of auditions. Got lots of rejections, but I did land the occasional job. One of the first jobs I got was because I’d gone in early for my shift at the hospital to entertain some of the patients before I had to get down to cleaning. One of the patients had a nephew who worked in an off-off-Broadway theater and got me a small part in their musical revue. Once I’d smoothed out my Guyana accent so Americans could understand me better, I booked more jobs.

  I did a series of television commercials for a fruit company. I had to dance around with a basket of fruit on my head, a man version of Carmen Miranda. In one commercial, I popped up in a grocery store where ladies were trying to decide what to buy. In another, I popped up in a white lady’s kitchen when she was trying to decide what to feed her kids for a snack. I was paid well for those jobs.

  There were marches and rallies all the time in those days, for civil rights, to stop the war in Vietnam, to end poverty. Some of these rallies would have entertainment to help people feel good about what they were doing. Sometimes I’d take the stage as Sister Barnby and do a quick bit about going to the White House to give Richard Nixon a piece of my mind. Often, I sang backup for the headliners. I got to be on the same stage as Dick Gregory and Joan Baez. It was quite a time.

  I never forgot that kiss in high school, trouble though it caused me, and in New York City I found out I wasn’t alone. I met more people like me — men who liked men and women who liked women. There were clubs we could go to where no one would bother us. One was called the Stonewall Inn. I went there a lot. I was there the night the police raided it and the riots started. I was one of the people arrested. After some nights in jail, I got deported back to Guyana.

  My career was over. Everything was over.

  There wasn’t much paying work for an actor in Georgetown, so I took a job at one of the newspapers, writing obituaries and ads. I ran into a girl I’d known in high school. We’d been in the drama club together. She was a teacher now. I got work at a radio station. I decided to marry this girl — your grandmother. We had a son together — your father — and stayed married for quite a few years until she told me she would rather live alone. She said she knew I was gay. She said that was all right with her, she wasn’t put on this earth to judge. But she said if she was going to be lonely in a marriage, she’d rather just live alone with our son and have some breathing room around her.

  I moved out. I became like my father and like his father — a part-time father. I could see clearly the road I was on. I was determined to stick it out until my son was raised.

  I lasted until he was twenty-five.

  Then I’d had enough. I was lonely. It was against the law to be gay in Guyana, so I had no companion and no hope of ever finding one. I was just alone.

  So, I killed myself.

  The moment I did it, I wished I hadn’t.

  But by then, I was dead.

  It was too late to change my mind.

  30

  Jomon and the three grandfathers sit in the twisted roots of a cottonwood tree.

  “We’ve all told you our stories,” Hi says. “What have you decided?”

  “What have I decided about what?”

  “Are you still planning on killing yourself?”

  Jomon looks from one boy to the other. He can see bits of his own face in each of their faces.

  “You all did,” he says. “You all got to go. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “We told you we regretted it,” says Angel.

  “I don’t believe you.” Jomon looks at Hi. “If you’d stayed alive, would you have changed your life, or just been the same miserable man, drinking and hurting everyone around you? Would you have taken the time to get to know your son? I think you killed yourself because you were too lazy to try to have a real conversation with the only person who really cared anything about you.”

  “No, no. I killed myself because I wanted to be with my wife.”

  “That’s a lie,” snaps Jomon. “You believe
it because drunks believe their own lies. If you wanted to be with your wife, you’d do the things she liked to do. You said she liked to look at new things? You could have spent your own life looking at new things, starting with your son. She would have been with you then.”

  Jomon thinks of the things his mother loved. She loved to sit and draw with him at the kitchen table, using his crayons to create beautiful pictures of the Guyana countryside. She loved to sit on the front porch under a full moon, letting the moonbeams wash over her face. “Moonbathing,” she called it.

  He hasn’t done either of those things since she died.

  He turns to Angel. “I don’t believe you, either, because if you’d stayed alive, you would have had to live with everyone knowing you had a gay son. You got him out of the country and set up for a new life, but do you really think that made up for him knowing you were ashamed of him?”

  “I was not ashamed,” Angel says to Barnby, who is looking at the ground. “I was afraid for you. That’s why I got you out.”

  “That explains why you sent him away,” says Jomon. “That doesn’t explain why you killed yourself instead of going away with him. You were prepared to end your life but you weren’t prepared to change it? You could have been happy.”

  “I didn’t think I deserved to be happy,” says Angel. “My father never wanted me.”

  “So what?” asks Jomon. “Your son wanted you! I think you never wanted to be happy because then you’d have to admit that you wasted most of your life being miserable.”

  “No, no, I …”

  But Jomon has already moved on to Barnby.

  “I understand you the least of all. You had way more opportunities than either of these two. You knew you had talent. I know you were lonely, but there are a lot of lonely people in Guyana. You could have helped them. Imagine what my father …”

  Jomon feels himself starting to cry. He shakes it off and gets to his feet.

  “You’re all liars and cowards,” he yells. “You have nothing to teach me.”

  Nearby, in a small clump of trees, Gather is getting alarmed at the rising sound of the human voices. Humans shouting often led to humans killing, and she does not want to be killed again.

  The boy doing most of the shouting is coming closer and closer to Gather, getting louder and louder with each step. Gather peers down at him through the tree branches.

  “I’m better than all of you because I’m going to kill myself before I have kids. You’re the first suicide?” he asks Hi. “Well, I’m going to be the last. The whole sorry family ends with me.”

  The three other humans are now on their feet, moving quickly toward the shouting boy and Gather’s hiding place.

  She feels trapped. She needs to move. Plus, she smells a large stand of cannonball flowers on the other side of a big open area — an area, she can see from her great height, that is covered with humans.

  There is a battle between her fear and her stomach. Her stomach is winning. She gets ready to move.

  “You don’t have to end the family pain by dying,” shouts Angel. “You can end it by living.”

  “What’s the point?” Jomon yells back. “You can’t tell me it’s not all lousy.”

  “You are so stubborn,” says Barnby. “You’re just like your father.”

  Jomon runs at Barnby and lands a punch, right to Barnby’s head. Barnby drops to the ground.

  “I am just like my father!” Jomon shouts. “He saw nothing good in this world, and neither do I! You are all just empty, useless ghosts. Tell me one thing worth living for. Just one thing. You can’t! Because there is nothing! It’s all garbage. It’s all —”

  Gather steps out of the thicket, right in front of Jomon.

  First comes one giant, hairy leg, a leg as tall as a person and as thick as a tree, with a foot as big as a boat and toenails long and curvy.

  Out swings her other leg, then her tummy, round like the moon. Then her arms ending in claws that can get her any fruit or flower she desires.

  Jomon looks up, way up. Then up some more.

  The words he was going to say vanish from his throat. All thoughts are forgotten as Jomon stares up at Gather. The three grandfathers stand by his side.

  Jomon has been to the museum. He knows what he is looking at.

  “It’s Megatherium,” he breathes. “But they’re supposed to be extinct.”

  “So are we, my great-great-grandson,” says Hi. “So are we.”

  31

  Mrs. Simson is having the time of her life.

  She is zooming around Guyana in a police car, talking with people about missing boys and a missing sloth, seeing places she has never dreamed of seeing.

  Her life up to this point has been cleaning at the museum and going to church. She has cleaning clothes and church clothes

  Today, she is wearing her cleaning clothes.

  When all this is over, she thinks, I’m going to buy some adventure clothes.

  “Oh, my goodness,” says Officer Grant.

  A small crowd fills the road in front of them. Rising far above it is the top of a creature that hasn’t walked the earth in ten thousand years.

  Mrs. Simson leaps from the police car before it comes to a complete stop. She pushes her way through the crowd with the ease of an eel slipping through seagrass.

  “Make way,” she says, her voice resonating with absolute authority. “Special deputy in charge of animal antiquities, coming through.”

  The crowd doesn’t fight her. People push each other gently to get a better view, but no one shouts or throws things. Some raise up their smartphones and cameras to take pictures. Others lift their children to their shoulders so they can see.

  Mrs. Simson moves through the crowd and then she is with Gather.

  Looking like the Queen of the Continent, the giant ground sloth is surrounded by four teen boys — two in the front and two in the back — and a growing crowd of admirers.

  Angel and Barnby walk behind Gather. Her caiman-sized tail sways from side to side. Sometimes the boys manage to jump out of the way. Sometimes, it knocks them down. When Angel gets knocked down, he laughs and laughs, then gets up to get knocked down again.

  Barnby listens to his father laughing. He sees the smile on his father’s face, so wide, so bright, shining all the way to his eyes. Then Gather’s tail sways his way again. He gets swept to the ground and, with his father, he laughs and laughs and laughs.

  “Gather! Gather, we found you!” Mrs. Simson shouts above the laughing and the crowd.

  The sound of Mrs. Simson’s voice reaches Gather’s ears. The great sloth stops and slowly turns around. She brings her big head right down to Mrs. Simson and gives her a sniff.

  “Hello, my friend,” says Mrs. Simson, stroking the fur on Gather’s prehistoric cheek. “It’s good to see you again.”

  But Gather is hungry. She twists back around and starts moving again in the direction of her supper.

  “Where’s she going?” Hi asks.

  “Anywhere she wants,” says Barnby. Angel thinks that’s the funniest answer ever.

  Officer Grant moves to the front of the sloth to keep the way clear and to walk next to Jomon.

  “Are you taking me back to jail?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t have him yet,” says Hi. “He has something he has to do first.”

  To get to the forest and the cannonball trees, Gather follows the road through the village. It is not a smooth walk. There are cars and bicycles, minivans and carts pulled by horses. There are mounds of melons, bright umbrellas over stands of plantain chips and colorful displays of dresses.

  And there are people going about their ordinary day in their ordinary way — some with smiles, some with scowls, some looking tired and some so deep in their own thoughts that they barely see what’s around them.


  Then they see Gather, and everything changes.

  The frazzled mother about to yell at her kids sees Gather and holds her children gently out of the way. Two men in an argument about who owes who and how much, see Gather and the debt is forgotten.

  No one shouts. No one is afraid.

  The crowd behind Gather grows and sticks with her as she leaves the road and heads across a field that will bring her closer to the forest and food.

  Jomon hears Mrs. Simson answering questions from the crowd.

  “She won’t bite you,” says Mrs. Simson. “She only eats plants. You’re right, we don’t see many like her around anymore.”

  Between the field and the trees is a cemetery. Gather walks straight through the rows of grave markers to a cannonball tree. To the oohs and aahs of the crowd, she raises herself up on her haunches until she is taller than most of the buildings in Guyana. She reaches out an arm, plucks a stalk of flowers with her long, curved fingernails, and begins to eat.

  Everyone watches.

  Jomon stands ten feet away in a line with Hi, Angel, Barnby and Officer Grant. People fill in behind them and around them, giving Gather plenty of space to enjoy her meal.

  Jomon watches people take selfies with Gather, but from a respectful distance, not trying to pet her or interfere with her. He sees a camera crew arrive from a television station.

  He sees tiny blue flowers, yellow butterflies and a procession of leaf-cutter ants crossing a fallen tree. He sees old people showing things to young people, and children pointing to a woodpecker high in a tonka tree.

  All around him, people are pulling up weeds and tidying long-neglected graves. He sees people pushing others in wheelchairs, residents of the local care home, so that they can be part of the event, too. He hears some people praying, some people singing, and some people saying, “Here’s your great-aunt Ada’s grave. Did I tell you about her? She was always so nice to me. Eyes in the back of her head, though. I couldn’t get away with a thing!”