Читать книгу Bivouac - Kwame Dawes - Страница 20

Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

I prefer to call it a low-grade depression, but even the word depression seems trite when I think of what happened to my brother. He wanted to die. So he drank. If you asked him, he would say he did not want to die. But he knew he wanted to die. I don’t want to die. I just don’t mind dying now. I feel dead. Man feeds on usefulness. I have never felt as useless to the world as I do now. I used to think that I would relish that kind of useless—that I would take the time and write books, travel, reconnect with friends. But that is the kind of thing that people happy with the world and with their minds do—people with friends who are not treacherous, people with money. I have no money, I have no prospects. I add nothing. So dying would not be terrible—it does not frighten me. And this is not bravado.

Felix, the taxi driver who picks me up in the morning, said he was sure he saw one of those white Toyotas loitering around the house when he came in at five in the morning. I asked Felix why he had come at five. He said he comes early so he can sleep a little. He can’t sleep at home. Too many people—his nieces and nephews, his grandchildren, and so many people he and his woman have taken in. So he sleeps in the car outside the gate, waiting for me. He said he saw one of those white Toyotas with four men. He thought a politician was in the house meeting me and that they were waiting for him. I told him there was no politician in my house. He stopped talking. He seemed very sad. He shook his head. Then he told me that five nights before he had dreamed of a baby. He did not explain. He just went on to another story. He said he was in Trelawny two days ago digging yams from his ground in his home district. It was around dusk. He heard the hoot of a patoo. He said his skin got all prickly. He stopped and said nothing else. Then when we were near the parking lot, he asked me if I had heard about the former member of Parliament who was gunned down in Jack’s Hill last night. I told him I had heard. He said, and I can’t forget it, “All now, you would t’ink all this murdering woulda done, but now is the time to clean up shop.”

When I came out of the car, he said I should mind my step. I decided to be tragic and give him something to quote if I was gunned down that day. “No man knows his time or hour. Fear is a waste of time, Felix. You know that.”

He did not say a word, he just smiled in the way that people do when they are talking to a complete buffoon.