No Safeguards Page 3

  “‘What you intend to do with all your clothes?’ I asked her.

  “‘Burn them. They’re sinful. They imperil men’s souls. And I’ve stopped wearing slacks. Deuteronomy forbids it.’

  “She even extended her foolishness to me. One August Monday I was getting ready to go on a picnic and couldn’t find the pair of Bermuda shorts I wanted to wear. I turned my dressing table inside out. In the end I wore something else. A week later I went to look for a pantsuit to wear to a social Mr. Morrison was having, and I couldn’t find that either. And then it hit me. ‘Anna’, I called out to your mother sitting in the living room, ‘you know what became of my tangerine pant suit?’ She came into the bedroom with a big grin on her face. Jay, I could hear the blood beating in my temples.

  “‘I am only obeying God’s commandment. Deuteronomy says . . .’

  “Jay, she didn’t have time to finish. ‘God’s what? You damn fool!’ I grabbed her by the shoulders and I shook her. ‘Go, bring my clothes for me, forthwith.’ I gave her such a shove she stumbled.

  “‘I put them in the garbage. I threw them out already. “The woman shalt not wear that which pertaineth unto a man; neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord Thy God.” God commands me to show you the errors in your ways.’

  “Jay, I don’t know how I kept from strangling Anna that day.

  “The evangelists rented a small wooden house up there.” Grama pointed to the northern spur, up to the hill where the church, bigger now and made of cement blocks, stands. “The converts met up there every evening to sing and pray. They called it tarrying. ‘Child, see? You’re trapped in a tarry ring.’ I sometimes teased her. An adolescent phase. Adolescent angst. It will pass. I’d already read an article about it in Psychology Today. This child will come to her senses.

  “The only point I fussed with her about was her frequent fasting. By the second year I was able to solve the transportation problem to school and have her come home every day. ‘You’re a growing child. You need your daily nourishment, plenty of it too. How can you concentrate and learn on an empty stomach?’

  “‘The Holy Spirit is more nourishing than anything you’ll ever feed me.’

  “‘The Holy Spirit! May, a woman from Georgetown whose rotting body they found in a locked-up shack up there a few months ago, had stopped having sex with her husband because the Holy Spirit had ordered her to. Two years later she gave birth to a child, and people rechristened her Immaculate May. Anna, dear, stop abusing your body in the name of religion. You promise me?’

  “Jay, your mother stared at the floor and said not one word. With my thumb I lifted her chin and attempted to stare into her eyes. She closed them.

  “Your mother was an average student; in intelligence nowhere near you, and definitely not your brother. She failed all her third-year exams. She read the Bible when she should have been studying. Sometimes I’d overhear her trying to convert Mercy while they were doing chores. I used to listen to them and laugh.

  “At the end of July 1970, your mother announced that she was not returning to school. I argued with her. ‘The Second Coming might be near. The early Christians had thought so too, but, one thousand nine hundred and seventy years later, it hasn’t happened. In the meantime a body, filled or unfilled with the Holy Spirit, has to eat; and everyone knows you eat better if you have a good education.’ Jay, your mother refused to return to school.”

  A week later, Grama and I were on the back porch, the sun about an hour from setting in the Caribbean Sea; I standing, Grama sitting, Paul inside reading. I took up the conversation from where she had left off. “What happened on August 23, 1970?”

  “Jay, sit.”

  I sat in the lounge chair beside her.

  She was silent for a while, her face showing deep thought. Then she told me where I would find a bible on her bookshelves and to bring it for her. She sent me back for her glasses. She resumed the story.

  “On the morning of August 23, 1970, your mother and the other converts, between 35 and 40 of them — the men in white trousers and shirts, some with shoes, some with flip-flops, and most plain bare-foot; the women in white dresses and white headscarves, some in shoes, some in flip-flops, and many barefoot — gathered in the shack up there. A huge gathering from here and all the surrounding villages came to stare at the singing and praying saints. Mercy and I among them. The saints would interrupt their praying and singing and stare out to sea every time the breeze gusted. At midnight — we were a huge crowd outside: everyone who couldn’t come earlier because of work or what have you was there — we broke into loud laughter and began to heckle them. Some Rapture! ‘This look more like rupture?’ Sefus Butcher called out to them. Even so, I couldn’t convince your mother to return to school.

  “The Rapture didn’t happen in 1970 — or for that matter, since — but the Church of the Elect continued to grow. Every year the missionaries from the States would come and give out aspirins and gauze and second-hand clothes. People are cheap, you hear me. It’s something priests and politicians know well. They made new converts and rented one- and two-room shacks all over the island, meeting-places for their converts. Now instead of giving a precise date, they said the Rapture was imminent.

  “The next big dispute between your mother and me began one day three years later — around eleven o’clock one morning. Anna was leaning against the front porch railing, reading some tract or the other the church in The States sent her. I was sitting on a porch chair braiding my hair. Jay, I told your mother in dialect — she wasn’t allowed to talk to me in it, just like I forbid you and Paul to — ‘Yo’ mean to tell me, the one pickney I have is a jackass!’ She was just past 17. I’m seeing her clearly like if it’s happening now: in a grey-three-quarter-sleeve smock almost to her ankles, head tied in a dark brown rag. I told her: ‘I can’t go on feeding and clothing you. If you were still in school it would have been different. Your father left me well off: enough to educate you all the way through university. You have to find a job. Your holiness is bad for both of us.’

  “‘I don’t have any qualifications.’

  “‘You should have thought about that when you left school to join that bradabangbang up there.’ I’d already come close to wearing out poor Mercy’s ears complaining about her. Jay, my patience had run out. Gone completely. I said to your mother: ‘You bewitched or what? Their white skin and Yankee talk mesmerize you?’

  “Your mother replied: ‘You won’t understand. Mama, you have to be born again. The natural man cannot understand the things of God.’

  “‘I guess that includes women too,’ I told her. ‘Your dear St. Paul — that misogynist and supporter of slavery — wouldn’t have wanted women, natural or unnatural, to understand anything.’

  “Anna said: ‘I don’t have to put up with your blasphemy. God will take care of you in his own way. I’m leaving this house of iniquity.’

  “I thought she was joking and played along. ‘How will you eat?’

  “‘God will take care of me,’ your mother replied.

  “‘Child, stop your foolishness.’

  “‘Mama, I’m serious.’

  “‘What? You’re going off to get knocked-up? That’s what happens to know-it-all young women who leave home. I’m warning you: don’t come back here with any man’s bastard. Don’t come back here crying to me with any inside you, in your arms, or pulling at your skirt.’

  “Anna closed her eyes, stood stiffer and straighter than a coconut-trunk, and began quoting scripture.” Grama put on her glasses then, flipped through the pages of the bible, until she found what she was looking for. “This is what your mother recited to me: ‘Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body what ye shall put on.’ Then your mother put down the bible, stretched out her arms as if she herself was the cross Christ was crucified
on; next she clasped her hands under chin, threw back her head, gazed upwards and recited” — Grama picked up the bible and read: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Grama closed the bible and put it on the patio table. “Jay, I would have laughed if I didn’t see the horror awaiting her. I was frightened.

  “For a full thirty seconds your mother sneered at me, then folded her arms across her breasts and burst into song:

  The Lord’s my shepherd.

  I’ll not want.

  He makes me down to lie

  In pastures green. he leadeth me

  The quiet waters by.

  “Still singing, your mother went into the house and began to pack. ‘You bring pickney into this world; you don’t bring their mind,’ I shouted to her.

  “She sang her reply:

  My father is rich in houses and lands.

  He holdeth the wealth of the world in his hands.

  Of rubies and diamonds, of silver and gold,

  His coffers are full; he has riches untold.

  “‘Can I borrow a suitcase?’

  “I didn’t answer. I still didn’t believe she was serious. I put the comb next to the hairbrush and the jar of Vaseline on the patio table beside me, and if I hadn’t been sitting I would have fainted. I remember that Mr. Morris came to the foot of the porch steps then. ‘Look like you’re having family problems, Sis,’ he said.

  “‘You’re a lucky man, Bertie. A lucky man, you hear me. You don’t have any child to make you wet your pillow of a night.’ Jay, the tears came then.

  “‘Go easy with Anna, Sis. We the older heads know the cliff. We mustn’t let the young ones run carelessly and fall over it.’ He went back inside his own gate and into his house.

  “If your mother ever thought she was spirit, she found out soon enough that she had a body too. God fed the sparrows and clothed the lilies and dropped manna for the Israelites in the wilderness, but no such remedies awaited your mother. She moved in with Mopsy, a string-like, malnourished woman, with pop-out, iguana-like eyes — a deaconess, if you please, in the Church-of-the-Elect. She was one of a handful of field-hands who still squatted in the mud huts on Laird’s plantation. Jay, imagine: your mother, who had a bathroom to herself in my house, was now bathing in the river with passers-by looking on. Fully clothed at least. Her church doctrine required it. And she began to shrink. Those workers didn’t earn enough to afford proper meals.

  “I gather that at the end of the first month, Mopsy said to her: ‘If you going to stay here with me, you is going to have to come help me with my weeding.’

  “Already inclined to be thin — even though big-boned — over that month, your mother lost 12 pounds. Mercy became alarmed when she ran into her three days after the discussion with Mopsy. Mopsy and Anna were returning from working on Laird’s estate, their hoes slung over their shoulders. Mercy confronted Anna: ‘Wind will blow you away. And what that hoe doing on your shoulder?’ That same evening I sent Mercy in Pembroke’s car to Mopsy’s house, to pack Anna’s things and bring her back to my house.

  “A few months later Pembroke offered to sell me his store. I sold some of the shares your grandfather left me and ten of the twenty acres of land, and bought Pembroke’s store and the building that housed it.” (When I went to live in Havre, Pembroke was the overseer at The Laird Plantation and lived in the overseer’s house. He was the oldest of around 20 children the proprietor, old man Laird, had fathered with the house servants and field-hands. Grama and Pembroke were friends. She, he, and Mr. Morris often chatted on the front porch late into the night. At 86, he came to Grama’s funeral hale as ever and stood at the graveside without needing a cane.)

  Grama continued: “Anna and I ran the store. For the next five years, your mother and I never had a quarrel, until she announced that she was going to marry your father, her senior by ten years. The missionaries were going to install him in the church and manse they’d built in Georgetown. It was where they’d had their greatest success. Georgetown folks needed those things they were bribing people with. The sugar factory had closed, and almost everyone out there was out of work.

  “I told your mother she would regret it. That I wouldn’t be surprised if religion had already twisted up the man she wanted to marry. And was I ever right. We were standing in the dining room. I held her arm and led her to the two-seater, and sat beside her. It was a Sunday, around 3 pm. She hadn’t too long come in from church.

  “I took your mother’s hand in mine. ‘Child, where did I go wrong raising you? It’s clear in my head, clear as this bright, sunny Sunday afternoon, that I took a wrong turn somewhere.’ Your mother did not answer me.

  “‘And hear me out on this: when Caleb Jackson finds the Christian cross too heavy — and he will — you know who will have to drag it? You. And don’t you tell me “the Lord’s will be done,” because you don’t know a damn thing about man’s will, so forget about the Lord’s. And please don’t quote me any scripture. Six years ago, you left my house, and I got frightened that you would finish on some trash heap, so I sent Mercy to bring you back home. I don’t think you ever had sex, and I know it’s that more than anything else that’s itching you. I was young myself. You’re thinking that it’s something everybody is getting except you.’ Jay, I begged her to not have any children right away. ‘Wait till you get to know Caleb before you conceive. Find out first if you can count on him. It’s easy to leave when you don’t have children. There’s no load to carry; nothing to hold you back. Even when the man looks trustworthy, it’s not a good idea to have more than one child, because men, after they’ve stripped the bloom off us — after they’ve turned lovely Rosy into Rosehips and pumped her soul-case dry, they drop her for firm, fresh flesh. You all fundamentalists don’t believe in birth control. I’m begging you, Anna — don’t let that man turn you into a brood sow and praise God for it. Rapture!’” — Grama sucked her teeth, paused and turned her head away briefly. “‘You love to say that Christ’s yoke easy; you better not let Caleb put bit in your mouth and saddle your back.’”

  “‘Mama, you’re snarling.’

  “‘I am! Don’t worry about my claws. Start sharpening yours.’”

  Grama stared out at the dusk now covering the Caribbean Sea, and was silent for about ten seconds. “Maybe you’re too young to be hearing all of this. But I’m telling you just the same. Everything has a cost. Most times it’s hidden. Soon you and Paul will be in Canada, away from me.” She paused. “I’m worried. I don’t want you and Paul to go there and throw away your lives.” She brushed a gnat from her face.

  “Back to your mother. Jay, let’s face it. I knew I had one daughter; sometimes I wish I had a son too.” She took a loud breath. “I married your mother in style. She was marrying a pauper. I swallowed my pride and put out the outlays for the wedding, bought furniture for the empty manse, and gave her half of all the linen, dishes, pots, and pans I had.

  “I’d thought your father received a stipend from the missionaries, so I was shocked when, unannounced, I visited your mother eight months later, already pregnant with you, and found nothing worth eating in the house. In Georgetown, I knew everyone over 30. I ferreted out your parents’ business. The weekly collection was dimes and quarters. Never added up to more than a few dollars. Could barely cover the electricity bill. And no stipend from the States. Nothing. Your father was following some sort of course at home, which he had to pass, and only after that would he get a stipend. I sometimes met him with the papers spread out on his desk and a pencil behind his ear. ‘Mr. Jackson,’ I told him — I had vowed never to get on familiar terms with him — ‘You haven’t the means to support children.’ To Anna, I said: ‘Child, if you continue to starve like this, your baby will have congenital defects.’ I went out and bought her vitamins and protein supplements, and I met her in t
own every Saturday to put $40 in her hand — ‘Not for you,’ I insisted. ‘You don’t deserve it. For my unborn grandchild.’ And, Jay, when you came due and she had to be hospitalized, and Caleb put her in the pauper’s ward, I was livid. I had her transferred to a private ward forthwith. ‘Not for you,’ I told her: ‘You’re too hard-headed. For the sake of my grandchild.’ And I paid the hospital bill.

  “After your birth, I found out they’d christened you Jacob Habakkuk Zephaniah. I begged them to shorten it to Jay. Then I looked Caleb straight in the eyes and said: ‘You’re a father now. You need a job. God feeding the sparrows, but he’s not feeding you and your family. I am. Now if you expect prayer to feed you, you better start getting results, because, beginning today, I stop.’ It was then that your father took advantage of the building boom created by those people who’d gone to England in droves decades before and were returning home to retire. The stones he collected never covered all the household expenses, but I saw he was making an effort so I didn’t cut off my assistance; I only halved it.

  “I warned Anna again: ‘One child! One!’ I grabbed her by the shoulders, right here, on this back porch where we are now, and shook her. So five years later, when she became pregnant again, I said: ‘Child, this time, you’re on your own.’

  “Jay, I was raised mostly by my mother’s mother. A broomstick of a woman. Wise and with more love in her than water in this sea.” She swallowed. I heard the catch in her throat. “My unmarried mother was 17 when she had me. We were not a beating family. I don’t beat. As you know, I can be stern and I do more helling and damning than I should — and nobody has to tell me I’m bossy — but hitting” — she shook her head — “out of the question. I told the wretch I married after the death of your grandfather: ‘If you ever hit Anna, this marriage is over, and don’t you ever yell at her.’ One good thing I can say about your granddad Kirton is that he adored Anna. As a baby the moment Anna started wailing, he would rush to comfort her, change her diapers, wash and powder her. I never heard him say an angry thing to her, and he knew children should be hugged and encouraged to use their imagination. So, imagine the rage I was in when Anna told me Caleb often strapped you. Jay, I hope your mother forgave me for the cussing I gave her that day. ‘Why didn’t you grab Jay and leave?’ I asked her. I told her, come hell or high water, I was going to rescue you. I would ask her in private: ‘Is Caleb still hitting Jay?’ And she would lower her eyes and say no. The day she showed up here dizzy and said she was leaving Caleb, she confessed that she’d lied to me, that the beatings were still happening.