Читать книгу The River's Song - Jacqueline Bishop - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

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Grandy came a few weeks later, bearing gifts as usual. This time it was star-apples, june-plums and sugar cane. Whenever she came, Grandy brought all the fruits in season and I always hurried home from school when I knew she was there. Today, as I came into the yard, I spotted her sitting on the verandah, almost hidden by the hibiscus tree, rocking in the rocking chair. She was eating a piece of sugar cane and fanning herself, and her face broke into a huge smile when she saw me.

I stood for a moment just looking at her. Mama and Grandy looked so much alike! Same high wide forehead and bushy “Indian” eyebrows. The only difference between the two was their weight: Grandy was much heavier than Mama, with an ample bosom I secretly believed was made for me to rest my head on. I made a mad dash for the verandah and stood before her.

“Just you look this bright girl that pass her common entrance examination!” Grandy said, eyeing me. “Just you look this bright girl that going to All Saints High School! Come now and give your old Grandy a kiss.”

She pulled me down into her lap and I buried my face in the side of her neck and the chair rocked harder as she laughed and laughed. Grandy had a smell all of her own. A kind of fresh country smell, doused in rosewater. Grandy handed me a piece of sugarcane from the plate beside her. The emerald streaks through its dull yellow colour gave promise of just how sweet the cane would be. I bit into it and my mouth immediately filled with the sweet juice.

“I just can’t believe it! You getting so big and all! Now you off to high school when it seems like only yesterday I was at Jubilee Hospital looking down at you curled up on your pink baby blanket. Such a tiny little thing you were, we had to pin you down on the blanket so the wind wouldn’t blow you away. A-baby-no-bigger-than-the-palm-of-my-hand. Now you’re getting ready for high school of all things!”

“Grandy,” I nuzzled even further in the side of her neck, “you forever telling me that story!”

“Well, it’s God’s own truth! I’m not lying! It does seem that way to me! Getting ready for high school!”

“Not before I spend my summer holidays with you!” I said, knowing how much this would please her. Later, when I asked her for money to buy tamarind balls and lollipops, and begged her to carry the dress my mother had bought but was refusing to allow me to take with me, I knew from experience she would agree to at least one of my requests.

“You little trickster!” she pushed me roughly away from her. “Think I don’t know what you’re doing? No tamarind balls for you today!”

“Me, Grandy?” I gave her my most big-eyed, innocent look.

“Yes, you! You’re the biggest trickster of them all! Worse than Anansi ownself! If Anansi could trick everyone and get two plantains to eat, you could do the same thing and get four!”

I lowered my eyes feigning shame.

“Ginnal!” she handed me another piece of sugarcane.

We sat together, quiet for a little while, both of us eating sugar cane. I was still on her lap and she kept rocking in the chair.

My summer holidays would begin next morning when I set off with Grandy to Lluidas Vale, the tiny village deep in the dark-blue mountains of Portland. It was where my grandfather, Grandy’s sister, Aunt Clara, and Grandy’s mother and father, none of whom I’d ever known, were all buried. It was where my mother had been born and had grown up, and where I spent every summer holiday.

“You finish packing the clothes to take with you?” Grandy wanted to know.

“I’ve almost finished packing,” I told her.

“Almost not good enough,” she gave me a push and smiled.

When she smiled, folds of dark brown skin crinkled around her dark brown eyes, and it was almost as if, beneath her skin, several different peoples were warring to assert themselves, but no one was quite winning.

“We have to make sure you’re done packing tonight, for we leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”

I smiled and said nothing. Every year there was a tug-of-war between my mother and me as to which clothes I’d take with me to the country. All my shorts would go, because I would be outside most of the time and it was the hottest time of the year. I would take the one yellow bath-suit I’d had for years – getting too tight for me, I thought, but not as far as my mother was concerned. All my old jeans and T-shirts – my yard clothes – would go, for I needed those to wear about the place. But what I most wanted to take was the sheer pink dress Mama had bought two weeks ago for my graduation from primary school. But she’d spent good money on the dress and I wasn’t to take it out of the plastic bag it was hanging in, much less consider taking it to the country with me.

Last night, when I thought Mama wasn’t looking, I’d taken the dress out and kept looking and looking it over. It had garnered oohs and ahs at the graduation. Many people wanted to take my picture. The sheer material shimmered in the lights, and the large bow at the back, with what looked like fish-scales, changed colours depending on how the light hit it. Quite a stir that dress caused. Easily the prettiest dress in the entire place.

And now Mama wasn’t allowing me to take the dress with me to the country, because I didn’t know how to take care of anything, was always ruining the things she used her hard-earned money to buy. Every year she complained Grandy didn’t supervise me enough, allowing me to have my own way, running all over the place like some wild animal, staining-up and dirtying-up all my good things. Every year when I came back home she’d say all I had in my bags were rags and she couldn’t believe Grandy was the same woman who had grown her, who would breath fire on her when she was growing up if she got so much as a spot on her clothes; here she was so lax with me now.

“Just what do you think you’re doing with that dress?” Mama demanded when she caught me with the dress on my lap. “Gloria, don’t you realize you’re getting to be a young lady now? That it’s time you started taking more care of your things? Tell me, Gloria, you really think I have the money to be buying back the things you ruin over the summer?”

I stood there, pretending to be listening to her, but what I was really doing was singing a little song in my head to drown out her ever-present voice.

“You need to take more care of your things! You need to become more responsible! Take Nilda for example. She is your age, yet the two of you are light years apart in behaviour. If Nadia is not home, Nilda takes care of herself and the younger ones, as good as her mother! Nilda don’t dirty-up her good clothes, she can even wash her own clothes! Why can’t you be more like Nilda?”

This was always her question to me. Nilda this, Nilda that, why couldn’t I be more like Nilda? Meantime I kept trying to figure out how I could take the earrings with the tiny ruby and emerald bird – as well as the dress. The earrings with the dress! Now that would show Junie, Sophie, Monique, and especially that girl Yvette, who was boss! I really wanted Yvette to see the dress, for she, more than any of the other girls, was always running her mouth that nothing I brought from Kingston was anything new. Nothing special. Nothing she hadn’t seen before.

“Mama,” I said, committing the crime of interrupting her, “Can I just please take the dress with me to the country? Just please? I promise to take extra good care of it!”

She looked at me as if I was crazy. “No,” she said with finality, “you cannot take the dress with you.”

I’d stood there just looking at her. Why didn’t my sad face move her? I never seemed to get away with anything with my mother. It was then I decided what I would do. I even convinced myself it was Mama’s fault that I had to resort to my plan. After all, I’d asked her up front to take the dress and she’d refused. Now she was forcing me to get Grandy to take the dress for me.

My mother was still talking as I schemed. “By the time you come back home that dress will be fit only for the garbage! Mango stain, guinep stain, all sorts of stain will be on that dress.”

Grandy always said if Mama had more children, or if she had a man to come home to in the evening, then these little things would never bother her so much.

“She only fuss so much with you because you’re the only one. She focus all her attentions on you. It wouldn’t be the same if she had other people in the house…”

Sometimes I did wish Mama had something or someone else to attract her attention, especially when I wanted to go outside and play and she refused to let me. But in truth, I really could not see Mama with a man or with any more children. I could not see Mama with anyone but myself. There were the times when she took my face in her hands and just stared and stared down at me. She would straighten out my eyebrows and kiss me on the tip of my nose and I knew I was the centre of her universe.

“I can see everyone in your face,” she would say. “I can see Mama, Aunt Clara, I can even see your father…” she always paused when she mentioned that-man-your-father, “his bones, his eyes, the set of his face. When you turn sideways I can really see your father. But not only him. Many different people in our family I can see in your face.”

Mama rarely spoke about my father and, the few times she did, always hesitated before talking about him. Mostly she spoke about him only when she was upset about something I had done, or the difficulties she was having in raising me by herself. Then she talked about how my father had abandoned his responsibility and left her alone to raise me.

“Lying, conniving wretch!” she would always begin. “I wonder if he even still with that so-called wife of his! The years of my life I wasted with that man! Lying, conniving wretch!” This would usually suffice for a few months – until she added something else to what seemed to me an unending list of all the bad things my father had done to her.

“A man,” my grandmother was always saying. “Your mother needs herself a good man. Someone to come home to in the evenings. Someone, other than you, Gloria, to fuss and bother herself over. You can’t yet understand it, Gloria, and I can’t begin to explain right now the difference a good man can make to a woman’s life. All I can tell you is things would be very different if your mother had herself a nice gentleman-friend.”

And Grandy was always on the lookout for a man for Mama. Every time she came to visit she would tell Mama which one of her “schoolmates” in Lluidas Vale was still single, and which one asked after her lately. If Grandy was there when a man she considered eligible was visiting Mama, she would go out of her way to try to make the person feel more comfortable, and always ended up doing just the opposite. Grandy would heap praises on Mama, about how well she could cook, how neat and tidy she was, how kind-hearted and giving. Grandy continued like this until Mama excused herself from her guest, and called Grandy into the back room. A hushed quarrel would follow.

“Stop it! Just stop it!” Mama would whisper. “It’s not what you think! He’s just a friend.”

“Friends make the best husbands,” Grandy would reply, loudly enough for the visitor to hear.

“For Christ almighty’s sake,” Mama would say, “stop it! It’s nothing like that. I tell you, he’s just a friend.”

“All right!” Grandy lowered her voice in defeated anger. “I just hope one of these days someone other than your “friend” walk through that door!”

Mama would go back to her visitor on the verandah, and Grandy would sit down inside seething. If Grandy happened to look over at me, she would start on what a disappointment my father had been; she was sorry the day my mother ever set eyes on that-man-your-father. She would say all of this very loudly, as if she’d forgotten Mama had a visitor on the verandah.

“Rotten good-for-nothing scoundrel. Mash up my daughter life. Give my daughter a child and run away and leave her to deal with it alone. This was never the life my child was meant to live.” Grandy’s eyes would cloud over and fill with tears. Her chest would heave, she would reach into her bosom for a handkerchief, look around the two tiny, crowded rooms Mama and I called home and shake her head.

“Not that I have anything against you, Gloria,” she’d say when she saw tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. “You know I love you more than life itself, for you is my own flesh and blood, and somehow we always manage to love our own flesh and blood. But your father, Gloria, your father – I cannot lie, I cannot stand the man!”

I remembered him vaguely. My father. When I was younger he would visit on Sundays, sit me on his lap, and try to talk and play with me, but everything was so stilted, so out of step, he would just give up. He was someone who wandered in and out of my life, and expected me to be cheerful whenever he was around. Then there was the bothersome change in my mother when he visited. She seemed to lose her voice and could not speak. He had to keep asking her to repeat everything she said. Worst of all was the fact that she always seemed to be trying to get rid of me when my father was around, sending me out to play in the yard, (something she did not ordinarily do), telling me to go visit one of the women in the yard (again, something she did not ordinarily do).

If my father happened to stay for dinner, my mother took down her best plates for him to eat on, gave him the biggest and best pieces of meat and piled on layers and layers of rice and peas, potato salad and lettuce and tomato until he had to tell her to stop. He would look down in embarrassment at the huge mounds of food on his plate – although he always managed to eat everything up and sniff around for more. If my mother happened to look at me at meal times during his visits, it was always with a look of disapproval at the many rice grains scattered around my plate. I, of course, always made sure there were lots of rice grains scattered around my plate to keep my mother’s eyes busy.

These visits came to an end one Sunday afternoon when a woman turned up in the yard looking for Mama. She arrived just after my father left and had obviously followed him. Mama and this woman ended up in a terrible fight. This woman told Mama she was my father’s wife, that they lived together in Vineyard Town with their four legitimate children, and why didn’t my mother and her bastard-child leave her husband alone!

My mother almost died from the shock of it all. My father had told her he lived with his parents, strict Christians, in their home on Red Hills Road, and as soon as he got his own place, we would all be living together. The one good thing that came from the incident was the friendship between my mother and Rachel. For while everyone else in the yard gathered around the two women, spoiling for a fight, Rachel had sense enough to realize Mama had never fought a day in her life. When the woman pulled out a long silver butcher’s knife out of her bag and started brandishing it in my mother’s face, she didn’t know what to do. She just stood there, mouth open, looking at the woman. I started crying loudly and Rachel pushed through the cheering crowd and grabbed the woman by her neck as if she was nothing but a peel-neck fowl she was about to skin.

“Listen to me, and listen to me good. You cannot just walk into this yard where this woman live, pulling knife against her and expecting to get away with that.” The crowd stopped their cheering and quieted down, and you could tell some of the people were beginning to feel ashamed of themselves.

“Now I want you to get out of this yard before I have to do something to you. Make sure you through the gate and up the street by the time I count to three. One …”

“Tell her to leave my husband alone!” the woman said, struggling in Rachel’s arms.

“No,” Rachel said, through her teeth, “you tell your husband to leave her alone. Two ..”

Looking around her, at all the faces now turning sour, the woman dropped the butcher’s knife in the dirt and fled. I never saw her again. And I never saw my father again.

But just now there was the problem of the pink dress. Yes, I would get Grandy to take the dress. Another tug-of-war would begin. For Mama was convinced Grandy was spoiling me, and Grandy was convinced Mama didn’t know what she was doing. Mama often reminded Grandy I was her child and she had given birth to me. Grandy would laugh and say she had given birth to Mama in the first place.

“Why, for example,” Grandy wanted to know, “you have this child bathing in cold water in the mornings, I will never understand. Don’t you know she can catch chronic in her bones and die? Don’t you know you should warm the water for her to bathe in?”

“Warm water!” Mama would point to the small gas stove in the kitchen. “If she need warm water, she can warm it herself! There is the kettle! There is the stove!”

“Nonsense!” Grandy would reply. “Is something you should do for her. It was something I used to do for you, even when you were a big girl, big enough to go get yourself pregnant! Come Gloria,” Grandy would say, “I warmed this water for you. Come let me give you a bath.”

Grandy started by pouring the hot water from the kettle into the plastic basin in the bathroom. Then she added cold water, testing the water with the tip of her finger until it was just the right temperature. She then dropped a piece of bluing into the basin and watched it spread through the water, until it was the colour of the deepest parts of the ocean.

“Step in,” she would say softly.

“She not a baby, you know!” Mama would shout. “You only put bluing in the water when you trying to keep ghosts off of babies and Gloria not a baby any more!”

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Grandy would say. We were now two half-circles coming together to form a perfect whole.

Once I was in the water Grandy began by soaping my rag into a creamy lather, then started washing down my back, my arms and chest, my legs, my fingers and toes, inside and outside of my ears. “Stand up,” she would say, and, very gently, she would wash between my legs. Often as she did this part, Grandy talked to me in a hushed voice, telling me all sorts of fanciful tales.

When she was done giving me a bath, Grandy told me to stick out my tongue. She examined it, and my teeth, rubbing my tongue with a clean rag. When she was satisfied everything was as it should be, she wrapped me up in a towel and held me in her arms. Mama’s eyes would roll up to the sky.

Yes, I would let Grandy take the dress. By the time I came back home Mama would be so happy to see me she would forgive whatever I’d done to the dress. And, I would take extra good care of the dress so as not to get any stains on it.

I got up and followed Grandy into the house, changed out of my school clothes and came back out on the verandah with two star-apples. Before long Nilda came over and sat down beside me.

“Here,” I offered her a star-apple, but she shook her head. Something was bothering her. It seemed lately something was always bothering Nilda.

“They’re at it again,” she said quietly.

“What for this time?” I could just hear Nadia’s and Jesus’ voices rising in their house.

“The usual.” Nilda was using her toes to toy with a piece of dried leaf at her feet. After a while she stopped doing this and let her head hang down in front of her. “Aren’t you happy you don’t have a father, Gloria? Aren’t you happy you don’t always have to deal with all that arguing? That you can have peace and quiet in your house? Aren’t you happy about that?” She sounded so hopeless I didn’t know what to say.

“No, you don’t want one, believe me. You don’t want a father. You don’t want that cussing and fighting every day. Believe me, you definitely don’t want that.”

Both Jesus’ and Nadia’s voices kept getting louder and louder. Everyone could tell a fight was brewing and a small crowd was forming outside their door. Furniture was being shoved back and forth and curses were flying.

“I’m tired of this life … all those women!” Nadia was shouting.

Grandy, who was preparing dinner inside, came to the door with an onion in her hand. She listened for a while, shook her head and went back in the house.

“Another one … another one pregnant for you … and you can’t even feed the ones you already have! Look at this place … look at how we living, Jesus!” There was silence for a while before Nadia spoke again. “Where you think you going? Why you putting on those clothes? I’m talking to you! Talk to me, Jesus!”

There was the sound of cloth tearing and bodies tumbling around inside the house. Nadia cried out in pain and Jesus came running out, his shirt in shreds. Nadia was close behind him with a pot of water. She threw it at him, but he dodged and ran through the gate. Her eyes were red and her bottom lip was swollen. She must have fallen and burst her lip because Jesus would never hit her. He had many faults, Jesus, but hitting women was not one of them.

“What?” she looked out at the crowd and got even more upset. “You never see a man and woman fuss in all your lives? What you all staring at?” The crowd started to disperse. She looked over to Nilda, and the sight of the girl’s misery must have enraged her even more. “Nilda,” she shouted, “get your tail into this house right now.”

Nilda rose without saying a word and went to her mother. I watched her go and realized there was a heaviness about her that hadn’t been there before. I would have to try and talk to her one of these days, that girl Nilda.

“I can’t believe they’re still living like that,” Grandy said, coming out on the verandah again. “All these years and they’re still cussing and fighting? Man is trouble own self you know, Gloria. You would never believe all the trouble man can get you into. Lie, lie, lie. Nothing lie like man. And as changeable as star-apple leaf! Why they can’t stay with only one woman, God alone knows! Now that you’re going to high school and have your whole future in front of you, you have to stay far away from them. They can blighted your future!” Her eyes moved quickly over my thin frame, stripping me of my clothes, looking beneath my skin, past my bones all the way down into my body to see if it had started to mature, to see if my body had started to betray me. Not finding any evidence of what she was looking for, she looked relieved.

“Well, anyway,” Grandy said, “you still a little girl. We still have time to work on you.”

I wasn’t sure what it meant – them working on me – but I knew it had something to do with becoming a woman. I did not know what made one a woman, I only knew that becoming one was very dangerous. Something to lead one astray. I only had to look at the women around me. The way something about their bodies had betrayed them. Rachel. Nadia. My mother. This woman thing involved something, I concluded long ago, easily lost and almost impossible to regain. I was glad I was not yet a woman. Was far, far, in fact, from becoming one – though if anyone asked me what made one a woman, I would not know what to say.

I got up and followed Grandy into the house. I went over to where the pink dress was hanging and took it out of the plastic bag knowing my grandmother would look over and see it.

“Oh!” Grandy said when she saw the dress, a gleam coming into her eyes. “ Now, isn’t that a beauty.” She came over and took the dress and felt its material. “Such a beauty. Oh, what a beauty is this sheer pink dress!”

The River's Song

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