No Safeguards Page 6

  “Early in my life, I watch everything my father did wrong. And was the same mistakes a lot of poor people make. They get married young while they still poor and have lots of children that make them poorer. I decide I ain’t getting married before I get rich, and I wasn’t going to full up women all over the place with children that I would have to turn my back on, and no rum shop will ever see my face. I stick close to the church. I stayed a altar boy until I go to Aruba and would o’ been one there too, but they didn’t have no Anglican Church. That didn’t stop me from going to church. I used to go to the Methodist.”

  I wanted to ask him how he satisfied his sexual needs, and did my utmost not to say: Kirton, you’re sure the only thing you did for Showalter was to cook for him? Kirton, you’re sure some of those shares in that portfolio didn’t come from Showalter for unmentionable services rendered?

  Zachary Kirton, (it should be spelt Curtain), Zachary Kirton, may you rest in peace. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes.

  APRIL 14, 1966

  I send Anna to the Anglican Sunday school because her father was Anglican. Yesterday, two days after her tenth birthday, she asked me why I don’t go to church. I think she sees all the well-to-do women in Havre doing the fashion parade every Sunday and is wondering why I’m not among them. “God is in my heart, child,” I told her. “All I have to do is look in there and I will find it.”

  “It, Mama? How can you call God it?”

  “It, child. It. God is a force, an energy — like electricity — that makes some things work. It makes us kind, forgiving, generous; it makes us treat other people the way we want them to treat us.”

  Anna frowned. I saw she was puzzled, but she asked no further questions.

  DECEMBER 14, 1968

  For as long as I can remember I used to jot things down. Little poems. Feelings. Impressions. How a grasshopper looked crouched on the ground. An orange-and-black butterfly spread out on a flower. The weaving and unweaving of the lace-frills of the waves breaking on the seashore. At puberty, it was the changes in my body and my feelings for boys. A lot later, just before Kirton asked for my hand, they were about Benjamin — the girls he was seeing, my torn feelings at 18 when I was sure that even though my body tingled and ached for his, I couldn’t marry him: nought plus nought is nought. Children and poverty don’t mix — one thing Kirton got right. The lives around me were open books. Tch! Tch! Cynthia. You read them and later forgot the lessons. My years with Kirton, I sneaked out of bed when his snoring started — that man snored liked a hungry boar and slept like a corpse — and wrote my journal. I married Benjamin soon after Kirton died, and all the reasons I had for not getting too close to him at eighteen came true after I married him.

  What would my life have been if instead of marrying Kirton, I’d taken those classes? Mama died 18 months after I married him. I would have been able to go to England then.

  AUGUST 23, 1987

  It is comforting to know Anna held on to scraps of my religious beliefs.

  “You know, Mama, what you told me about God when I was little, I never forgot. You know Caleb is taking this course to become a fully qualified minister. Right?”

  I nodded, afraid of what I’d say if I opened my mouth.

  “After I married Caleb, they told him that seeing that I would be part of his ministry, I should follow the course too. But I wouldn’t have to take the exam.”

  “Oh! An exam. A regular university degree. In theology?”

  “No, Mama. Three men from the church headquarters in the States will come and examine Caleb, and if they’re satisfied with his answers, he will move from pastor-in-training to probationary pastor.”

  “And get a stipend, I hope. Seems to me they’ll have a good reason to fail him.”

  “The reason he’s still on the course is he comes home tired every day. Part of the course is how to win converts from other religions, and not to let them win you over to theirs. True Believer. He’s this character that’s supposed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He argues with Atheist, Agnostic, Buddhist, and Unitarian. When they tell True Believer that humans wrote the Bible, True Believer is supposed to quote the part in the Bible that says God inspired men to write it.

  “And True Believer tells Buddhist that unless he gives up his beliefs in reincarnation and wash himself in Christ’s blood he will go to hell; and Buddhist answers: ‘I have to go to hell; each person has to, several times even, and stay there until he is ready to move on to a higher state.’ But True Believer tells him, he doesn’t have to, that it’s as easy as accepting Christ. Unitarian asks True Believer if he would drown his disobedient children or stone them to death. And True Believer says, yes, if the Holy Ghost orders him to, just like God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. And Unitarian tells him: ‘What if it’s not the Holy Ghost; what if it’s madness?’ True Believer answers that madness is the result of possession by evil spirits and evil spirits can’t live in bodies that Christ’s blood has purified. And True Believer then tells him the story of Job.”

  “Why you all don’t just use his initials? TB suits him just fine, the incurable kind.”

  “Mama, so that’s how I came to see that what you told me when I was ten made some sense; but it was a long time before I could challenge Caleb. You see, he would have had to leave me, or leave the church if he wanted to remain with me. They are very strict about that. Believers can’t be married to unbelievers.”

  Cur-like obedience to foolish doctrines. I’m not sure her father was much different.

  7

  ANNA’S RATTLING BREATH breaks into my recall. I stand, touch her forehead. It’s cold and damp. I stare at her chest — heaving, rattling, battling, as it struggles to expel air and acetone. I snort and realize that I too was holding my breath until she expelled hers.

  I sit, chew my thumbnail, and my mind turns again to my Vincentian past. For the nine years I lived with Grama I felt that she shouldn’t be caring for me, that my place was with Anna, that she needed me. Most nights I fell asleep thinking about her, wondering if she was happy, wondering if we would ever be reunited, wondering if she was warm, especially when the BBC news gave the temperatures for Montreal or said that there was a blizzard. Night after night I dreamed we were together, and would awaken right after, usually in the middle of the night, and spend a long time thinking about her. We heard from her every two to three weeks. She sent us a parcel at Christmas and on our birthdays. Then she remembered our birthdays. Grama told us that Anna sent money to pay for our expenses, but I read all her letters (Grama caught me once and reprimanded me), and in each of them Anna apologized for not sending any money.

  Paul conquered Grama’s heart. She loved him unconditionally, dotingly. On Friday afternoons, when Paul and I returned from school in Kingstown, she’d be standing on the front porch waiting for us. As soon as the car door opened, Paul would break loose as if from prison and run straight into her arms, and she lifted him up, and he kissed her (the lifting was replaced by bending when Paul became too heavy, but the kissing never stopped). And while I was transporting our dirty clothes to the laundry room, Paul would be inside planting kisses on Aunt Mercy’s cheeks before rushing back to Grama, by now seated on the living room sofa, waiting for him to show her his workbooks covered with stars, and regale her with all that had happened at school and at Cousin Alice’s that week.

  With me her physical contact was never more than a perfunctory, dutiful kiss, and an occasional hug. In the first three or so years that I lived with her — before she became tired of saying it — she would sometimes say: “You’re already an old man, Jay” — her eyes narrowing, boring into me, her forehead deeply creased. “Not a hint of adventure in you. Not a playful bone in that old man’s body. What are you in mourning for? Your life hasn’t even started. I never see you with a cricket bat. You don’t go out to the playing field to kick a soccer ball with the other children. Do like your brother.
He can’t play because of his asthma, but he goes out there and enjoys watching the players.” Sometimes, if she thought she’d been harsh, she’d come to stand or sit beside me. “Don’t think I’m blaming you for being yourself.” But she would sigh and add: “Jay, I want you to be happy.” One time I was standing on the front porch watching her dead-head the roses and bougainvillaea that encircled the porch; she looked up at me, and said: “Stop being so sullen.” She sounded worried. It had upset me. I felt like an ingrate. Now I think she probably felt that she had failed in some way, or was guilty that Paul took up most of the space in her affection. The doubts parents have, I suppose. I have since seen it firsthand in Anna’s trials with Paul.

  The first few years with Grama were tough. I had to steel myself just to visit my father and deal with the shame I felt, and avoid saying anything that would hurt his feelings. When I came to Canada, away from it all, it struck me, how warm, affectionate, and harmless my father became when he was drunk, and I wondered why he wasn’t that way when he was sober. One late afternoon when I’d returned from visiting Caleb, Grama asked me jokingly: “How’s your father doing in his alcoholic heaven?” I was silent, and she saw that her words were hurtful, and she came out to the front porch where I was and put her arms around me and muttered: “You are too young — too young for all this. Too young.” Then she sighed, left me there, and returned inside. There was an unusual silence at the supper table that evening. Even Paul was quiet.

  No, it would be wrong to find fault with Grama. During the July-August holidays, she played scrabble and Chinese checkers with me, and we read together. She plied me with the books Caleb had prevented me from reading. She would come in from the store and have a short nap, write her journal, after which we’d have supper and read for two to three hours. She had all the books written by Trinidad’s Prime Minister Eric Williams and the works of the earlier West Indian novelists: Lamming, Anthony, Selvon, Mais, Naipaul. Her favourite Caribbean novelist was Earl Lovelace; she loved the poems of Lorna Goodison; and she ordered many of the books of authors mentioned on BBC, especially books of poetry by poets whose works she’d heard and loved. She’d have me read their poems aloud to her: Blake’s, Yeats’, Auden’s — I remember. Paul would pause from his own reading to listen. She had read “London” and “Sailing to Byzantium” so many times, she knew them by heart, and she would break into laughter, sometimes to the point of tears, over Auden’s “As I Walked out One Evening.” I remember her saying: “What a happy childhood that Mr. Yeats had. I hope it wasn’t paid for with pillage.” Three days before Paul and I left for Canada she received a copy of Brave New World. She’d ordered it after listening to a BBC programme on Aldous Huxley. At one point during the programme, she’d grown wistful, then sighed and said aloud: “Who knows what my life would have been if I had emigrated?” I wish she were alive today so I could ask her what she meant, just to hear her say it. The answers are plentiful in her journals. Grama, we cannot conquer fate.

  When my voice changed at 13, she gave me a book that explained puberty, and read it along with me, pausing every so often to emphasize the consequences of careless sex. And I could never forget the discussion we had about Wide Sargasso Sea, which was on my CXC syllabus. She told me it was full of historical inaccuracies, that the sort of liberty the Black servants are shown to enjoy a few years after the abolition of slavery, was nonsense, that Rhys was flattering the white readers she knew would be buying her books. But she warned me not to raise the issue in class, for my literature teacher was the great-grandson of a plantocrat who’d resisted all British attempts to introduce universal elementary education to St. Vincent, “and even today they still own most of the wealth in St. Vincent.” I didn’t think the teacher would have minded, but I followed her advice. In the end I chose to write my essay on the villains and heroes in Wide Sargasso Sea, and she suggested I should compare Rhys’ villains with Shakespeare’s. What a woman! I know now that Paul and I were lucky and privileged to have her as grandmother and guardian. No wonder Paul worships her. Few Vincentians read beyond the textbooks they’re forced to study. If you want to hide something from Black people, put it in a book. I’m sure some racist came up with that but it’s only Black people who repeat it. Above all else she gave me a love for learning that Anna couldn’t have given me, especially if she had remained with Caleb. Yes, I think I can forgive her for her partiality to Paul.

  Before Anna left Caleb, while we lived in Georgetown, I played with Percy and Samuel, and on occasion with Frederick and a handful of schoolmates in the schoolyard. I was afraid to disobey Caleb and play with the other children on non-school days because the second time I’d done so Caleb found out and flogged me. We weren’t to “mingle with the damned.” The apostle Paul had advised the redeemed to shun the company of the unredeemed for they were “leagued with the devil and the Antichrist” and would “put snares in our paths.” And God himself had decided before he created the world that these people should go to hell. For the same reason Caleb didn’t want us to visit Grama often. I couldn’t believe that Grama worshipped the devil nor could I understand why, thousands of years before Grama was born, God had decided to send her to hell. Once I heard Caleb and Brother Simmons quarrelling about this in the living room — Brother Simmons’ booming voice saying: “That doctrine is rubbish; that is the stupidest thing I ever hear. So, Pastor, why you beg sinners to give their heart to the Lord? And what about: ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance?’ Is Christ himself that say that. I will take Christ word over what Paul say any day.” I did not hear Caleb’s answer because just then Anna grabbed my hand and pulled me through the main door so I wouldn’t hear the rest of the quarrel. Brother Simmons stayed away from church for a long time after that and, when he came back, he stopped teaching Sunday school. About a month before Anna left Caleb, I asked her why God decided to send people to hell even before they were born, and she replied: “I told you already that hell does not exist. Your father gets carried away by what he reads in the Bible. God is kinder than your father thinks.”

  Thinking back on it now, I see that by the time Anna left for Canada, I’d lost all desire to play with anyone. I relive being on the beach with Daddy — I watch him pile and crack open stones, I hear the wind soughing in the coconut fronds, the breakers pounding the shore, the rattling of the backwash: background noise to the exploding blows of Daddy’s sledgehammer — before I became afraid of him. Maybe Grama felt that the beatings had stultified me. Now I feel guilty. I haven’t written Caleb since Christmas. At some level I want to know that all is well with him. I love my father — sometimes I wonder why. And I know the scriptures that “keep [my father] from falling down” have become cudgels he whips himself with. Caleb would say “flaming swords.”

  With Grama, I could have roamed the village if I’d wanted. During school holidays I helped her with her flower garden, or walked to her land, about a kilometre away, and brought back plumroses, oranges, mamie apples, passion fruit, mangoes — whatever fruits were in season. On occasion Millington, the only friend I had in Havre, went with me. After lunch I’d read or go swimming in the sea. Sometimes on evenings, after Grama and I had finished reading, I’d sit alone on the back porch with the light deliberately turned off, wanting to dissolve into the darkness. Sometimes, Millington, whom I met in grade three and who began at Kingstown Secondary the same time I did, would be there with me, and we’d quiz each other about things we’d studied. Sometimes we’d sit there in silence. Maybe because we didn’t know what else to do.

  Were we truly friends? We’d never spoken of our inner needs and fears. We’d never spoken about girls we’d “conquered” or “spoiled” — the usual talk of our classmates — for we’d done neither, and were probably anxious about our own sexuality. Perhaps that was why we were comfortable with each other. He had one other friend that I knew of: Alan, a talkative fellow from Green Hill. The same week we received our high-school-leaving result
s, he was spending time with Millington. Millington went to church every Sunday, belonged to the Boys’ Brigade and the Methodist Youth Fellowship, but never spoke to me about religion. I felt he was straitjacketed by it. Once he shared a joke with me, and it had seemed so out of character. “Jill took Jack below the hill to taste his liquor. She did and washed out her mouth. Jill’s baby came six months later, and Jack thought he was the father.”

  Millington lived half way up the hill on Pasture Road, in a two-bedroom wooden house perched on tree-trunk stilts, to which goats were tied on evenings. They had a pit latrine and an outdoor kitchen where his mother cooked with firewood, in cast-iron tripod pots — like most Haverites then. She looked white — a mixture of Kalinago, European, and Black probably — and was always singing hymns: one I remember well — “Dare to be a Daniel/ Dare to stand alone/ Dare to have a purpose firm/ And Dare to make it own.” And I remember only because the song contrasted so vividly with her life that seemed all drudgery. Once I met her sitting on the porch grating coconuts to make coconut sugar cakes. The next day Millington brought me a couple.

  Millington’s father, Edward, was a short, scrawny, bowlegged man, mixed-race too. He left home at dawn to work on distant construction sites, when work was available, or on his land, when work was not. He returned at dusk in both cases. Millington’s mother carried his breakfast and lunch to the land. During vacation Millington did and always wanted me to accompany him.

  Millington was a year older than I. An aunt in the US paid for his school uniforms, transportation, and textbooks — the only thing personal he ever told me. Grama liked him, called him “an upright young man,” and every August gave him a hundred dollars to help with his school supplies. When she found out I’d never visited Millington, she asked me what sort of friend I was to Millington. After that I’d climb the hill occasionally to visit him. My first couple of years in Canada I sent him a card at Christmas. I see the same pattern in my friendship with Jonathan. It’s he who takes all the initiatives.