No Safeguards Read online

  Then I liked being on the beach with him on sunny days when the Atlantic is a glassy blue and almost asleep. On cloudy days, it’s like tossing grey smoke and seems vexed. When it’s rough and roaring and chewing up the edges of the shore and trying to drown the land, I smell the ocean spray and feel it on my face and arms and legs, and taste the salt when I lick my lips; and the salt turns my arms and legs whitish after the spray has dried. Daddy likes it when it’s rough; that’s when it throws out the stones he needs. After my fifth birthday I stopped going to the part of the beach where Daddy works.

  No matter how hungry Ma and I are, we wait until Daddy gets home, because he’s the head of the household. The Apostle Paul, who my brother is named after, said so. Caleb seated at the head of the table. He’s slouched forward, his eyes red, his face grey with dried sea salt, his perspiration odour strong; Anna’s at his right still wearing her apron; I on his left; Paul’s in his pram a little way from Anna. Caleb thanks God for the food and for the blood of Jesus that washes sinners clean, and all three of us say hallelujah and amen — even Paul gurgles. Next Caleb removes the lid off whatever Anna prepared. She passes him the plates, and he spoons the food onto them. I want a second helping, but Caleb eats the food that’s left after the first serving. I stare at Anna. Sometimes she looks away silently, and sometimes she says: “Your father works hard, Jay.”

  We live in the upstairs of the church. People from the place called America own it. Our part has three bedrooms. The people from America have white skins, yellow hair mostly, and blue eyes, and I listen carefully when they speak. They say wahda for water, call me “a maaty faan boy,” and tell Anna: “Sister, yer food’s maaty good.” Sometimes I don’t know what they mean and ask Anna when they aren’t around. They stay in one of the bedrooms when they come to visit. One time when four of them came they stayed in my bedroom too, and I slept on a piece of foam on the floor at the foot of my parents’ bed. I like it when they visit. They bring chocolate and peanuts and popcorn, and the women smile at me and kiss and hug me — and Caleb never gets angry and beats me while they’re visiting — and they say I’m a cute, lovely boy with “a whole heap o’ good manners just lak the Lawd wants ya to.” I wish Daddy would say so to me sometimes. And they question me about Bible stories, and give me a hug or candy when I answer correctly. It’s only when they come that there’s a lot of delicious food in the house, as much as when Anna and I, and now Paul, visit Grama Kirton. Caleb doesn’t go with us when we visit Grama.

  2

  THE SUNDAY AFTER Anna came back from the hospital after Paul’s birth, Daddy made a special collection “to ease the difficult times the Lord’s been putting his servant through.” Members of the congregation give us fruits and vegetables and eggs. One time Samuel’s mother, Sister Simmons, arrived at the manse with a live rooster, and said: “Pastor Jackson, I giving you this fowlcock ‘cause I wants you to be mighty and powerful when you goes on the pulpit to chastise sinners.” I watched Anna chop off the rooster’s head, then immerse the whole body in boiling water and strip the feathers. Afterwards she took out the entrails. I felt sorry for the rooster and refused to eat the meat when she served it to me.

  One time I asked Anna — it was after I’d heard the story of Job — why God had made us poor. I turned around and saw Caleb standing in the doorway listening, and I began to tremble. But he did not beat me or scream at me; instead he said that one day God might make us rich. “We poor mortals don’t know what plans the Almighty have in store for us. I will trade what little the Lord give me and make all the profit I can, so he will see I am a good steward and reward me. I am seeking the kingdom of heaven and all its righteous, and after that all things will be added unto me.” I didn’t understand. It sounded like one of those stories Brother Simmons called parboiled.

  Since Paul’s birth I stare at Anna and wonder if she’s sick. She lies down a lot. She has headaches and says her head spins like a top. I don’t see it spinning but I’m afraid to say so. Sometimes when she smiles at me it looks like she’s making faces. She can’t wear jewels. The Queen in the picture at school wears lots of jewels. Caleb says it’s a sin to wear jewels. Grama wears jewels too: earrings that sparkle and gold bangles. Daddy says: “Love of gold shrivels the soul.” Sometimes I hear Ma mumbling to herself for as long as half an hour. One day I saw her wiping her eyes and told her not to cry, but she said that it was because dust had got into her eyes. When Daddy is home, she walks as if she’s tiptoeing and deep creases appear in her forehead, and I know I must stay quiet. He hates noise, and gives Ma angry looks when Paul wails.

  Before, whenever I felt grumpy, and Ma didn’t pay me any mind, I’d sing: “Anna, Anna, Have you any wool? No, Sir; no Sir: I have none.” And I’d get a smile or a tickle. But since Paul’s birth, she ignores me or says: “You’re too old to be singing such foolishness. You hear me, Jacob? You’d better not let your father hear you.” So I’ve stopped. I tried to make up another song: “Anna, Anna! Little miss, get over here and give me a kiss . . .” But Caleb would beat me if he heard me singing it, and Anna might scream at me. Sometimes when Caleb is beating me, Anna cries, and Caleb tells her that, if I end up in hell, it would be her fault. And one time he hit her and said: “You want to cry? Take that.” He hit her again. “Cry! But you better don’t make the neighbours know, or it will be hell to pay.”

  Between age four and six, before Paul’s birth, I begged Anna often to tell me the story about Jacob, one of the men in the Bible that I’m named after.

  Jacob was the younger son and wasn’t entitled to his father’s blessing, but he tricked his father into giving it to him.

  “God was on Jacob’s side because Jacob got rich.”

  “He stole the blessing, Ma. Why wasn’t he punished? His mother too; she should have been punished.”

  “Jay, God’s ways are mysterious. It was all arranged by God.”

  “So I am named after this same Jacob. He lied and cheated.”

  “Don’t say that. God will be angry with you.”

  After Paul was born, I asked her: “When Daddy gets old and I am to get the blessing, can Paul trick Daddy into giving it to him?”

  “No. It’s not done like that anymore. You will get your own blessing and Paul will get his.”

  “That’s fair. I prefer that.”

  But as to favourites, she doesn’t have time for me since Paul came along.

  My seventh birthday. “I hate my father; I hate him! I don’t care if I go to hell.” I begin to cry. I feel the bandage on my right foot where I cut my heel a week before. Caleb had heard me singing: “Put it in. Shove it in. Shove it in. Ram it. Ram it! Ram it!” — a calypso that’s playing on all the radios. While Caleb began to unbuckle his belt, I ran out the house, across the road, into a field of bananas, then into an open field, sharp stones cutting my soles, tall weeds stinging my bare legs and sometimes my face. And then a sharp pain in my left foot. Only then did I look back and saw that Caleb wasn’t following me, but there was a streak of blood on the weeds I’d trampled. I looked at my left foot and saw the gushing blood. I hopped to the base of a tree-high rock, sat there, leaned my back against the rock, and pushed together the red lips of the gash in my left heel and held them closed. I was certain I would die there and go to hell. The blood looked bright red in the yellow light of the sunset. I began to cry. What had I done wrong? All my classmates sang and danced to “Put It In! Shove It In.” How was I to know it was a sin? Then I remembered: Eva-Marie, the bomination. My turn had come. God moves in mysterious ways.

  The fireflies were dancing all around me when I heard Anna’s frightened voice calling. “Jay, where are you?” Go away, I said silently. Go away, let me die. I want to die. I don’t care if I go to hell. But she came to the base of the rock and shouted “Thank God,” and sat down beside me, and pulled me to her bosom. Her chest heaved; she swallowed loud and wiped her eyes with her apron. I pointed to my cut heel. S
he tore a strip from her apron and bandaged my heel. By then it was dark. Holding on to her, I hopped on one leg back home. A short while later a car came to the house. She took me to the clinic, and the nurse sutured the cut and gave me an injection.

  Caleb promised that I would get that beating “with compound interest” the next time I stepped out of line, and tonight I wonder when God would take my life for the bomination I committed.

  Tonight I want Anna beside me, as she sat at my bedside, her belly big with Paul in it, every night until I’d fallen asleep, when I had the flu right after my birthday last year.

  ***

  “Jay! Jay!” I hear Anna’s voice from far away. “Wake up! You’re having a nightmare.”

  My pyjamas and the sheets are wet with pee and sweat. Anna changes the sheets and gives me a clean pair of pyjamas that I got from Grama. She turns her ears to the door to make sure Caleb is not awake. He’s snoring. She closes the bedroom door and sits on the bed, and hugs me tightly for about a minute. Then she asks me to tell her about the nightmare. I don’t want to. She coaxes me.

  The nightmare resembles a joke one of the missionaries from The States had told Caleb. I dreamed that Percy, Samuel, and I are dead and are wandering the earth for 40 days before going to face St. Peter. We know St Peter will send us to hell. Just maybe, just maybe, I tell them, we might come to an understanding with St. Peter. “We should take gifts for St. Peter.” Percy says the streets of heaven are paved with gold, so it means that in heaven they like gold. He steals his mother’s wedding band to give to St. Peter. Samuel says that in heaven they like honey, so he steals a bottle of pure, amber honey for St. Peter. I remember that Peter was a fisherman, so I steal a big fried red snapper for St. Peter.

  On the 40th day we find ourselves mounting up in the air and come to land on a slab of concrete against a huge gate of iron rails. “Ah yes,” St Peter says as he comes to the gate. He pulls on his long silver beard. His eyes beam like two torchlights. “Three naughty thieving boys.”

  “St. Pe-pe-peeter,” Percy stammers.

  “What!”

  “I brrroughht you ssssomet’ing”

  “Let me see.” His hand comes out from between the rails and takes the packet from Percy. “Gold! It has no value here. We walk on it. The streets are paved with it.”

  I hear a scream and see Percy falling down to hell.

  “Lemme see what you brought,” St. Peter orders Samuel.

  Samuel hands him his packet. St. Peter takes out the bottle of honey and holds it up to the light. His torchlight eyes shine through it. “Good honey, this, but we have better in heaven. You fool. Here it’s honey for breakfast, honey for lunch, and honey for dinner. If you’re going to bribe me, give me something I will enjoy.”

  And with that Samuel drops down to hell.

  “Your turn, Jay.”

  I hand my package wrapped in foil to St. Peter.

  “Fish! Smells good.” His eyes are like live coals now as he rips away the foil. He bites into the fish, then drops it onto the ground, and starts fanning his open mouth; his eyes tear. “Pepper! You fool! If you are going to bribe me with fish, keep the chili peppers off it!”

  And on his last word I too am falling down to hell and screaming.

  Anna is silent at first, then leans over and kisses me on the forehead; her arms tighten around me. She stays silent for about ten seconds. I feel her hands beginning to sweat. “Jay,” she says, removing her arms and twisting her body around to face me, “Hell does not exist . . . Your father must not know I told you this. This must be our secret, our own little secret.”

  That night. That fatal night. Next morning, I am sure that it was all a dream, part of the nightmare. As I’m leaving for school Anna says: “Remember our secret?”

  I’m puzzled. “That hell does not exist?”

  “Shh, not so loud.” She puts a finger on her lips.

  3

  THE NURSE COMES to the bedside and takes a quick look at Anna. I listen to her rasping breath and for a while hold my own until she lets out hers. When the nurse leaves I stand at the head of the bed and stare at Anna’s face half-hidden in the dim light. I sit down again. My fingers feel numb. I open and close them to warm them up. Ma, you can’t die. Don’t do this to me.

  ***

  She was born in Havre de la Paix (shortened to Havre), a town of fewer than 1,200 on St. Vincent’s Leeward coast. Havre is snuggled in a cove semi-hugged by two spurs of intermixed limestone and black volcanic rock jutting out into the sea like floating ribs from the mountain range that forms a spine the entire length of the island. A booklet by one of the town’s residents states that Havre was built “on the floor of an extinct volcano, one of many extinct volcanoes on the leeward side of the island the force of whose eruptions had blown out their seaward rims.” At Havre’s northern end, the spur is less steep. At the shore, where the crater’s rim had been blasted away (so that there the arms don’t join), the spurs rise sheer from the sea, forming solid walls on both sides. They continue inland for a good 50 metres before rounding out in a steep slope. I surmised that, over time, soil had accumulated in the blown-out crater on whose floor the town is built. From the front porch of my grandmother’s home near the seashore, I’d look inland, up at the mass of black rock intermixed with limestone that forms a 270-degree girder, crowned at the top and contoured at the bottom with wild vegetation. In the rainy season, the summit is bonneted in mist, and the rocks hold dozens of fountains that turn off when the dry season comes. After Georgetown, on the windward side of the island, with its numerous gentle intersecting valleys and miles of flat and rolling land, I found Havre both suffocating and comforting. But in its calm sea without whirlpools I became an excellent swimmer, ignoring my grandmother’s fears; she’d grown up in Georgetown beside the Atlantic’s roaring, battering three-metre waves and many whirlpools with invisible hands waiting to pull you in.

  To the north, over in the next valley from Havre, is all the flat land that can be found on this part of the Leeward coast. All of it was at one time Laird’s Plantation. Beyond that there are the mountains, often cloud-capped, and blue-grey when they’re not, and a volcano, waiting to blow out its own seaward rim. A month after Anna married Caleb and moved to Georgetown — a Good Friday morning just before sunrise, it had tried, and forced the residents of Havre and all of northern St. Vincent to move into evacuation camps. Beginning with rumbles that sounded like thunder, followed by a loud explosion, it shook the island and sent a succession of fireballs far up into the sky before they fragmented and cascaded in showers of ashes and red-hot stones.

  About two kilometres north of the volcano, the mountains come to an abrupt halt at the seashore. One time when Grama, Paul, and I went to the area by boat, to a picnic at the Falls of Baleine, I saw that there, for almost a kilometre, black rock streaked with coral and limestone rises perpendicular from the sea. The main road does not go beyond Laird Plantation, now a tiny fraction of its original size. The Lairds inherited it from other Whites to whom it had been given or sold when the French and later the British took the island from the Kalinago. In 1795 most of those who’d survived European attacks and diseases (many had mated with free Africans, whose means of coming to St. Vincent is still in dispute) were banished to Honduras. The others were corralled into an area under the volcano on the windward side, where the descendants of those not killed in earlier volcanic eruptions — over a thousand died in the 1902 eruption — now live. When I lived in Georgetown I sometimes saw them there, and busloads of them were always heading to and from Kingstown. When Grama, Paul, and I visited Grenada, we saw a monument at Sauteurs, at the cliff overlooking the sea where the Grenadian Kalinago had jumped to their death rather than surrender to the French. The town’s name memorializes the event: Sauteurs — leapers. A Catholic complex — Church and school — is located on it. Grama told Paul and me to bow our heads and remain silent for a minute
. A bug-eyed Paul pestered her with questions afterwards. Grama told us then that her father was Kalinago, one of the few times she ever mentioned him.

  ***

  I catch myself biting the nail of my right thumb, a habit Grama had tried in vain to break. I check my cellphone. Nothing. No message from Paul. I stare at Anna’s outline in the dim light, at her chest rising and falling and quarrelling with the air it’s pulling in and pushing out.

  ***

  I’d always sensed, even before I went to live with Grama, before I could put it into words even, that Anna was not quite the child Grama had wanted. She’s certainly not the mother Paul thinks he deserves. The week our visas for Canada arrived, Grama confirmed my suspicions. “When you all reach this age, the hormones turn you all giddy, and you all think adults know nothing, like if adults weren’t adolescents too; and you all want all sorts of independence that you all can’t handle. That is what happened to your mother. Three years into high school she dropped out. In her second year, a group of evangelists from the States came to Havre ‘to win souls for Christ’.” She chuckled and slowly shook her head. “They said the Second Coming would be on August 23, 1970. They told people it was pointless to struggle to get material things when in just over a year the Rapture would happen. Your mother fell for it. She stopped swimming in the sea. ‘If men look at my body and lust after it, God will hold me accountable.’ She stopped wearing perfume, jewellery, and bright colours; she started hiding her hair under black scarves; she bamboozled my seamstress into sewing her three long-sleeved, ankle-length smocks, each one a different shade of grey. Then they baptized her.