Читать книгу A Tall History of Sugar - Curdella Forbes - Страница 13

Chapter III

i

Rachel took her son to the big school when he was six years old. Until then, he had hardly appeared to the eyes of the world. She could have sent him to basic school, kindergarten, which was an option, when he was three or even two years old, but she did not. Quite a few children went; his friend Arrienne had gone; it was there she learned to read, and write her ABCs. In those days basic school was not compulsory the way the big school, elementary, was, and Rachel was not the only parent who chose not to send her child. Most preferred to save limited resources for when the children were old enough for the big school. (Almost every child was taught his or her ABCs and all were taught to spell their names at home, even by parents who could not read. Fear of disgrace was the fear of being unable to recognize one's own name on a bulla cake before swallowing it whole.)

Rachel was not among those who chose not to send their child early to school. She simply had a different vision from everybody else. Though the big school did not admit children until they reached the age of seven, she had gone and begged the head man-teacher to take Moshe the year before, and the year before that, until, a year before the officially required age, the co–head teacher, who was the head man-teacher's wife, saw that the child could read far above his years and could write his ABCs, so she relented. Rachel had taught him during the years at home, using the Reader's Digests she got in the post and the Nola books she bought at the drugstore in Ora. And Moshe was a natural. He took to books like ducks to river water.

Rachel avoided the basic school for fear her son would be killed before he was old enough to defend himself. It was not that she feared the children at the big school less, but that she knew the children at that school feared the man-teacher and his wife more. The two, without any sense of irony, were known to beat without mercy for fighting and bullying in any shape or form. Moshe was delicate as stringing roses in April, and his transparent skin bruised at a touch, so that but for her obsessive care, he would have been a mass of scabs and wounds.

As it was, he was often bruised and wounded, since there were things from which she could not shield him—falling down when he ran; cutting his knees when he kneeled on the ground to watch snails or sow seedlings on his side of the kitchen garden; dreaming (this she did not know) of terrible flight and kidnapping by mattress when she and Noah fought in the front room (after such dreams he woke up black and blue); burning and peeling when he forgot to wear his sun hat (the wounds wept for days when the sun cut him like this, and she had to wrap him in white cloths loaded with cucumber and slices of aloe vera, and keep him confined to the back room, where he slept, in the dark).

For the first five years of his life he did not know any other children. His world was circumscribed by his mother's life, and his mother's friends, which were two. Rachel was a woman who kept to herself and seldom left her yard or the one-acre farm adjoining her yard. This was where she planted most of the provisions the family needed for their meals. She accompanied her husband to the hospital to tend the sore that never healed, and it was in the same place, Ora-on-Sea, that she shopped for necessities she could not plant—brown soap, mixed meal, kerosene oil, replacement lamp wicks, salt beef or salted cod—though she could as easily have shopped at Miss Caro's or Miss Lill's establishments in the district. But she shopped in Ora-on-Sea because she was a woman who liked to keep to herself and didn't like people knowing her business.

Miss Caro and Miss Lill sold groceries in extremely flexible amounts and combinations depending on what people could afford; the two shopkeepers also gave credit (trus), writing up what people owed on wrinkled strips of brown paper that they stuck on a wire spike attached to the wall behind the till. Giving trus was an act of kindness much valued by villagers who received their wages once a fortnight and had many mouths to feed, but trus was also in Rachel's view an invitation to open yourself to gossip. Rachel was a proud woman. She would rather do without than take trus, and she would rather avoid the local shops than be exposed to the knowledge of her neighbors' dependency.

She used to sew a little, earning a bit extra from the skill her father had forced her to acquire. But she gave it up at about the time Moshe was found, to shield him from inquisitive eyes and questions. People had no reason to come to her house if she wasn't sewing their clothes.

She had no relatives living nearby. Her two brothers and six sisters, who had not been as academically gifted as she was, had made opportunity for themselves and migrated to England. Her sisters moved to Canada when Canada opened up through the Domestic Workers Scheme. Her brothers, left lonely behind, went across to America. It was Rachel, the oldest, who stayed, because somebody had to look after her father after her mother died giving birth to Charlie, the youngest boy. Then, when she might have gone after her father died, there was Noah, and it was too late.

Every now and then she visited her one female friend, Miss Hildreth Porter, who lived two miles away. Otherwise Miss Hildreth visited her, and they spread themselves on mahoe-stump stools in each other's yards (that is to say, Miss Hildreth, a thick-girthed woman of great size, spread herself, while Rachel, more slender and dainty, placed her feet side by side and covered her knees with her spread skirt), and sitting in this way for an hour when Rachel visited Miss Hildreth, and three hours when Miss Hildreth visited Rachel, they discussed the foolishness of neighbors; the cruelty of some people to their children; the nastiness of people who gave their children bush-rat soup to cure whooping cough; the pedigrees of careless young men who sought to put themselves with the daughters of respectable families even though they well knew their own families were infected with yaws, consumption, madness, thievery, marley-gripe, fluxy-complaint, sugar, and other diseases; the indecency of girls who frequented the wharves in Ora when the ships came in from far countries, turning themselves into sailor-bait in exchange for English guineas and American greenbacks; the growing wildness of the young; the ungratefulness of those who had gone overseas and forsaken their relatives; the epidemic of divorce cases in the Gleaner, shameless men gleanering their wives—be it advised my wife Leonora has left the matrimonial home and I am no longer responsible for any debts she may incur—what a wukliss man, exposing his dirty linen in public like that; the coming of independence in 1962 ( Moshe was four years old) and the memory of the first time they voted, dipping their hands in red ink; the goodness of Yahweh Elohim Most High.

Theirs was a strange kind of gossip because they almost never mentioned anybody's name (except Yahweh's ), but spoke in generalities. If a name was mentioned, it was always a name from the past, someone they had heard of or who was long dead. They wove a history of districts without calling anyone's name who was living or who was not remotely dead, retailing stories without implicating anyone's reputation, as if history could be cut off from memory or kin that remained. But their gossip took this form because the two of them prided themselves on abhorring slander and backbiting, and this was why they were friends, and did not keep other women friends. (This was why Moshe so often drew people with vivid skeletons, and abstractions where their faces should be.)

Rachel had another reason for her friendship: Miss Hildreth lived alone, and Rachel's heart, despite her great pride, was compassionate.

Her other friend was Samuel. He came on Sunday afternoons, arriving in time for two o'clock dinner and leaving before sunset. He was Rachel's distant cousin from the remote district of Manyenni, fifteen miles south of Tumela. Their conversations were of a different kind from the ones Rachel had with Miss Hildreth.

Rachel and Samuel discussed the state of the world, the condition of apartheid in Rhodesia, the language of dreams, the lost codes in the distorted scriptures, the existence of satanic verses, and the efficacies of oils for healing the soul. Such oils were often stashed on the back shelves of drugstores in Jamaica's capital towns. The trade in these was brisk, a parallel economy on which the drugstores thrived because there was always a large clientele of the rural folk and sometimes the upper social echelons who believed in these remedies. Oil of Hold Him Tight. Oil of Do Wha Mi Seh Yu Fi Do. Oil of Tun Him Back (Turn Back Evil). Oil of Win di Case (for winning court cases). Oil of Tun Him Mouth Backa Him (for retributing insults).

One night, Samuel told her, it was revealed to him in a dream that there was an oil, the Oil of Patmosphere, which was a wonder cure for ancient ills, and he was astonished, when he went to investigate, that it was sold in MacKenzie's Drugstore in Montego Bay, but at a formidable price that would take him many years to save. "Man," the drugstore owner told him, "this is rare oil, requiring special composition. In more than fifty years no one but you has come to inquire of it. I cannot sell it for less."

Miss Hildreth and Samuel often saw Moshe, for he was allowed, as children seldom were, to play nearby while the grownups talked, though he was not a retarded child but overbright for his years and forgot nothing that he heard. Miss Hildreth fell into the habit of prophesying his future. "Him gwine have a hard time, Rachel. Dat skin an dat hair gwine mek him way in dis world hard-hard. Hard travail. Mi si it. Ehn-hn." This unresolved body in which history has made ructions will make his pilgrimage difficult. This is what I have seen.

And Rachel always answered her with a gentleness she showed to no one else. Having decided to "keep friend" (she felt, sometimes, against her better judgment), she had committed to accepting the obligations, including soft speech, that came with friendship, "No, him not gwine weary. It a-go sen him places, yu go si." (In her secret thoughts, "yu go si" translated into "retro me, Hildreth," a counterspell.)

Moshe learned to distrust Miss Hildreth and would never go near her. He found her unkind, and detested the things she said about him. In her presence, which he endured because his mother made him stay, he learned to close his ears, and if he allowed himself to hear anything that she said, it was only so he could discover how to guard from her his palaces, rooms of escape where like all only children he had learned to make a home. Before the closed doors of such rooms, counterspell he pinned Miss Hildreth like the donkey's tail flat against the wall. The wicked witch of the west, knocking unavailingly at the door.

Samuel he loved. For Samuel did him the grace of ignoring him, most of the time. Not only that, Samuel was a man of dreams. Moshe beheld him rise like an issue of smoke from a labyrinth, and the child was enchanted so that later when he discovered his gift of drawing, he drew, over and over again, scenes of Samuel flying, streaming tails like a comet, while his hundred eyes gleamed among columns of hair.

Once in a while Samuel noticed him, but in the strangest way, as if the child were a strand woven in his outlandish skein of dreams. One day he said, "Why yu tink this boy is the color of milk and honey?" posing this as a philosophical question, to which he fully intended to give the answer. With Samuel, a question was ever a rhetorical ruse.

Arrested, Moshe paused the toing-and-froing of his homemade horse on the squeaky verandah floor. The horse was built from a water bottle fitted at its bigger end into two condensed milk tins mounted on wheels cut from discarded Michelin tires and attached to the tins by cord strung through holes in their tops. The tins had been roped together a second time by more cord strung through the bottoms. The narrow, protruding part of the bottle formed the horse's neck and head. The horse was flexible in the space where the two tins met, but with its wheels it could have been a truck except that Moshe made it a horse, shouting, "Giddy-ap, giddy-ap, skuy!" from inside his head as he galloped it across the breathless floor.

"Hush," he told the horse now from inside his head. "Hush, brrrrr," and held his breath, waiting for the answer to Samuel's riddle which had mentioned him in it.

"Is the Oil of Patmosphere. Is the same way. Same way. The answer is there."

"Wha di answer?" Rachel asked, smiling.

"You have to come at it in a special way. Can't come at it like how people think."

Rachel waited for the unraveling, still smiling.

"Is Revelations," was Samuel's final pronouncement. "The boy is the power of Revelations."

Moshe became oblivious to the good-natured quarrel that followed this cryptic comment, Rachel insisting that Revelations had nothing in it about milk and honey; that was in the Old Testament, quoting to prove it, I will bring them up into a land flowing with milk and honey, the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and Samuel insisting that she had missed the principle, it was about the future when all that was different would be one. The lion would lie down with the lamb.

Revelations. The listening child shivered with satisfaction. He liked that. Revelations was the book in their Bible where everything was going to come to an end with a tremendous bang, and the world would be made new. It was horrible and exciting, all at once. On his knees on the verandah pitching marbles with himself or playing with his pitchy-patchy trucks and his horses of bottle and tin, he pretended not to hear the conversation, but he muttered and played with the word under his breath, seeing how many permutations it could bend into, like river eels. Revelation. Relevation. Evationreli. Revellelation, Revelelelelelelelation, Reli. Vation. He giggled. The word astounded him with its beauty. The beauty of water playing on stones. He liked being associated with such loveliness.

"So how you use it though?" Rachel was asking. "The vision tell you that part?"

"Oh yes, oh yes," Samuel said in an exalted voice. "I receive everything clear-clear as day. I get up off my bed right there in the night-middle, and I write it down so that the vision would not escape from me. See it here." He showed crumpled brown paper torn from bags into which flour or sugar had been parceled. "Anoint your whole body and your hands with this oil, it must be on your palm when you shake another person hand. Say to the person, God be upon you and your hand will be like a grease, greasing the soul."

"Plenty people wipe all manner of thing upon they hand and shake other people hand with it and it kill who they shake hand with," Rachel observed. "Hidin murder in they hand. It good to extend a hand of fellowship."

"Oh God, oh God," Samuel said excitedly. "Das it exactly. Man, it sweeter than sugar."

The child frowned. It seemed on the one hand that it was not good to shake hands, but on the other, that shaking hands was good if it was done with the sacred oil. How would you know who had the right oil on their hand? Could you say, Mi nah shake yu hand cause mi nuh know wha yu put pon it? That would be rude to a grown person. He pondered that for a while and decided that it was the kind of question best left until one was grown up, since only bigpeople shook hands.

Twice Samuel brought him locusts to eat, a powdery brown fruit over a hard brown seed inside a hard brown shell shaped like a foot that you had to break with a stone. The fruit inside was delicious; it looked and tasted like cotton candy but had a foul smell like unwashed socks. Children called it stinking-toe. There were no stinking-toe trees in Tumela but only in Manayenni, the district beyond God's back where Samuel lived.

Apart from Samuel and Miss Hildreth, the only other persons who came to the house were the telegram boy who brought bad news on his bicycle, and was paid sixpence if the receiver of bad news had it to pay; and the Yahweh elder who journeyed from Ora once every hundred days to give Rachel scripture lessons, for in those days (and maybe even now) there was no Yahweh church in Tumela (Yahweh was not even recorded until many years later). The elder was a desiccated man who suffered from peptic ulcers and was uncomfortable around women. Because of this he muttered his teaching and left in a hurry. To supplement this desolate communion, Rachel received through the post office small books and pamphlets expounding the mysteries of Yahweh, and it was with these that she fed her strange beliefs and made her fragile peace with the life of poverty that she felt had dished her dirt.

So you understand, then. How growing up under the influence of these untoward ruminations and friendships and the isolations wrought by his mother's idiosyncrasies and his missing skin, Moshe became a mystic who soon lost the power of normal speech and could only be heard by someone who had also grown up in this way, or a way similar, like the boy in the story who, ostracized by his articulate siblings, falls back into nature and begins to ventriloquize the language of birds. When this happens, the boy is already in the forest, in the middle of his pilgrimage.