Читать книгу Is Just a Movie - Earl Lovelace - Страница 13

Mammie

And then, that evening, Sonnyboy going home from school, walking up the hill that branched into Rouff Street when he hear his name called. When he look around, it was his mother, behind him, returning home, hurrying up the hill to catch up to him. She had left that morning to go to Maraval to check out the possibility of a work with a woman who wanted a housekeeper to live in. She had gone, expecting to convince the woman who wanted the housekeeper that she could do the job without living in, since she had children of her own to mind. She had walked to go and walked to come back the four-five miles since she didn’t even have money for car fare (buses did not run there). The woman was sympathetic, but she really had to have someone to live in. However she had a friend, she said, higher up the Maraval road, who wanted somebody. The woman give his mother the address. It wasn’t very far, she tell her. If she catch a taxi at the corner, she will get there in five minutes.

Taxi?

“Yes,” his mother tell her. “Thanks. Thank you.”

But she didn’t have money for taxi, so she had to walk back home and it was there she was heading when she see Sonnyboy. She would go and see about the work next day by taxi, but, the taxi fare? The only person she could think of getting it from was his father. So, she had steered Sonnyboy in the direction of Rouff Street.

“All I want from your father is taxi fare to Maraval. Nothing else,” speaking out loud as if she wanted to make it clear to herself as well as to him that she wasn’t doing this to try to get back with him. “And if he don’t have, for him to go and get it borrow from his brother or one of his friends.”

When they reached Rouff Street, Sonnyboy see in the yard his father, sitting on a big stone underneath the mango tree and around him the congregation from the neighborhood, all of them hushed and waiting.

He watched his father take up the pan and set it on one knee and with a stick in his hand begin beating the pan, coaxing out the notes,

pam pam pam paddam pam

Pam pam pam pam

that when he hear them is the melody of the hymn that for years had been sounding in the ears of the hill from the church of Mother Olga and Mr. Trim:

I am a warrior out in the fields,

and I can sing. And I can shout . . .

And everybody waiting for the absent sounds to enter the world, to enter life. And his father, hitting each note to establish its presence searching for the sequence of notes that would produce the melody of the song.

And I can

And I can

And I can tell

And I can tell it tell it tell it,

And I can tell it

and I can tell and I can

I can I can I can,

the sounds called forth from their slumber, sparkling, clear-eyed into the world:

And I can tell it

And I can can can tell it

And I can tell it

And I can tell it all

About . . .

And everybody waiting for those notes, like a family waiting for a relative they had never seen but would recognize when she came:

And I can tell it all about

that Jesus died for me

When I get over yonder

In the happy paradise,

When I get over yonder in the fields.

And Sonnyboy hear the notes flying out like flocks of birds from the nest of the pan, like a sprinkling of shillings thrown in the air, like a choir of infants reciting a prayer. He hear them again, like a rush of butterflies in a swarming dance, angular and precise like sharpened steel knives, soft like rain falling on a galvanized roof, like dragonflies dipping their tails into the water of a pond, the first steelpan notes in creation. And his mother grip his hand and stand up there, looking on as if this man, his father, was a stranger she was seeing for the first time and he knew, Sonnyboy knew, without a word from her that she wasn’t going to ask his father for the taxi fare to Maraval. After he play that tune, people lift him up off the stone into the air and when they set him down, they put the pan in his hands. And like the congregation was waiting for this occasion, fellars pick up their own drums, some of them bring out pieces of iron, some dustbin covers and anything that could sound, could ring, and they went out on the street and down the hill, everybody following, Sonnyboy and his mother standing there on the same spot; until, with the crowd gone, she hold him round his shoulders and he put a hand round her waist and the two of them set out to walk back home to Zigili Trace, the two of them so wrapped up in each other that they didn’t see Miss Catherine at her window looking down at them in the quiet street, until Miss Catherine called out to his mother, to them, with the gentleness of a blessing, Lystra and her big son, the words remaining long seconds in the air, Sonnyboy hearing them too, huge and gentle, fulling up his head, his heart, his belly: Lystra and her big son. And his mother answering, yes, in that moment hugging him with all her fear and fragility and her wanting and her love, “Yes, me and my big son.”

And they didn’t good reach home when they hear down the hill the police siren wail and the sound of scuffling and the metallic clang of pans hitting the ground and after a while screams and grunts and the animal panting of men running, and, coming up the hill, a relay of voices shouting the story in the one word: “Police!”

A little later Sonnyboy’s father came to the house to ask his mother if they were all right. He was barebacked. His head was bandaged with the jersey he had been wearing. He was smiling as he tell them how he get away from the police by pushing the pan under a house and crawling in beside it. He was lucky. Sonnyboy felt his head grow big and his eyes begin to burn. He was waiting to hear the rest of the story. But that was it.

The day of creation was the day of humiliation. His father was angry, but nobody was outraged. Nobody. Sonnyboy felt his heart drop into his belly. And that was when the words that would pass his lips many times in his lifetime entered his heart, unfurled like a banner, “I not fucking taking that.” Next day he carried them with him as he walked to school with the awkward elegance of a king sailor dancing on a stage by himself alone. Later that day as he discussed with Blackboy, Redman and Ancil and George the events of the night before, he said the words that in repeating he was claiming, “I not fucking taking that,” only to be overheard by the headmaster Mr. Mitchell, who called him up to be punished. Asked to stretch out his hand to receive six lashes from the strap, Sonnyboy put his hands behind his back, shook his head and made his announcement to the astonished schoolmaster that was his declaration to the world, “I not taking fucking that,” and he walked out of the school never to return.

Two weeks later his mother get the letter that she had been waiting on from her aunt from the States. On a Saturday afternoon she take him and Alvin and walk with them up past the savannah by the Botanic Gardens and the zoo. She buy each of them a snowball and sit down between them, on a bench and read for them the letter that she had just received from her aunt in the States. Her aunt was sending for her. She had to go. She would leave Alvin with her mother and send Sonnyboy to stay with his grandmother in Cascadu.