Brown Girl In the Ring (26 page)

By the time they let her have visitors, most of tubes were out of her body and she could sit up in bed for long stretches of time without getting fatigued. She felt
wonderful.
She was champing at the bit, impatient to get back to work on her election campaign. She spent most of her waking moments tapping notes into her palmbook.

“Good news, Premier,” said her policy advisor, breezing into her room and immediately yanking his palmbook out of his briefcase. “You just tipped the polls at fifty-two percent support. Without any campaigning yet, even.”

“Yeah,” Uttley replied distractedly. “Listen, Constantine, I’m going to change my tactics a little.”

“What? But I’ve got the press statements already written, the news spot lined up—”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. It’s just occurred to me; this volunteer organ donation thing will never work. Human beings will never be eager to deed away bits of themselves, even after they’re dead.”

“But…” Constantine spluttered.

He was usually the one providing the social analysis. Uttley knew that it hadn’t been her strong point, trying to figure out why people acted the way they did. But lying on her ass in that bed for so long had given her time to think.

“No, it’s easy. We still come down hard on the pig farming thing. That’ll keep the animal rights people on our side. But we’ve got to provide people with an alternative that’s just as successful. Can’t have the organ shortages of the eighties and nineties.”

“What’s your plan, Premier?” Constantine was looking at her warily. Probably already figuring out how he was going to convince her back to her original position. Oh, but she admired the man’s craftiness!

“We’ll do what they used to do in Switzerland. I’m going to propose a new bill, one to create a presumed consent statute for all Ontario residents. It’ll state that anyone who dies is a potential organ donor, unless they’ve signed an opt-out card. See,” she said, sitting up eagerly to explain it, “no one will be forced to be a potential donor. Anyone can sign the opt-out card, and their bodies will never be touched. But most people won’t bother. Constantine, one donor cadaver can benefit fifty people! In the old days, twenty or thirty people would die each year in Ontario while they waited for transplants.”

Constantine frowned at her. “Excuse my bluntness, Premier, but when did you develop a social conscience?”

That took her aback for a second. Had she become so different since her operation? Was she losing her edge? No, couldn’t be. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, man. Stupidness.”

“Huh?”

“It’s called ‘enlightened self-interest,’ right? Solves the Virus Epsilon problem, and makes me look good, too.”

“Yeah, makes sense.” Constantine was already tapping figures into his palmbook, figuring the odds, plotting their course.

Uttley laughed. “You’re not a policy advisor; you’re a goddamned bookie.”

He looked up with a predatory grin. “And your bookie says the odds look good. We can do it, Premier.”

“I know we can.” She settled contentedly back into the pillows. “There’s another thing, too. We’re going to rejuvenate Toronto.”

“Premier, you know that project has always been death to politicians. No one’s been able to do it yet.”

“Yeah, ’cause they’ve tried it by providing incentives for big business to move back in and take over. We’re going to offer interest-free loans to small enterprises that are already there, give them perks if they fix up the real estate they’re squatting on.”

“What small enterprises? The place is a rat hole, complete with rats.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Something tells me we’ll discover that there are quite a few resourceful people left in Muddy York.”

There is a brown girl in the ring, tra-la-la-la-la,
A brown girl in the ring, tra-la-la-la-la,
A brown girl in the ring, tra-la-la-la-la,
And she look like a little sugar plum (plum, plum).

—Traditional song

Y
ou put small-leaf thyme in the peas and rice?” “Yes, Mi—yes, Mummy.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, blind Mi-Jeanne dandled Baby as she spoke to Ti-Jeanne, who was working over three huge pots at the hot stove. Baby kicked and chortled happily. For some reason he seemed a much more contented child now.

“And you sure it have enough rabbit stew and curry goat?”

“Yes, man!”

Ti-Jeanne was finding it awkward, having her mother back. There was a lot between them that Ti-Jeanne would have preferred be left unspoken, but after twelve years of silence, Mi-Jeanne was eager to unburden herself. In the nine days since the spirits had helped her to breach the CN Tower, Ti-Jeanne had learned more about her mother, grandmother, and even Rudy than she had ever known. The knowledge was uncomfortable. She would rather not have known about the passionate, violent love her grandmother had had for an insecure bully who had finally hit her once too often. And why did she need to hear about soft-spoken, dignified Dunston, the man who had been one of Mami’s flock and had become her lover?

But the most difficult to listen to was Mi-Jeanne’s tearful admission of how much she had resented the daughter she had brought into the world. “When Daddy find out I was making baby,” Mi-Jeanne had told her, “is like he cut me dead. I used to be he doux-doux darling, he little girl, but not after that. And after you born, you eat up my whole life. It was ‘baby need this, baby need that.’ I couldn’t take it. I sorry to admit it to you, Ti-Jeanne, but I couldn’t take it.”

Shame made Ti-Jeanne’s face hot. It bit too close to the bone. She knew what her mother had been feeling.

Ti-Jeanne felt as though she and Mi-Jeanne were doing a cautious dance around each other, negotiating terms. Between that and preparing for Mami’s nine-night, she had barely had time to acknowledge the grief she felt at Mami’s loss.

It was Jenny who had insisted on the nine-night, a wake for the recently dead that would calm the dead spirit and point out its way to Guinea Land, sent off with the love of the living it must leave behind. “This is how your granny would have wanted it,” Jenny told them. “A shasto, a party, to send her soul off with joy. This is her way.”

Thank God for Mami’s flock, eager to teach Ti-Jeanne their rituals. They would hold the ceremony in the palais and, afterward, a feast for anyone who cared to come. Ti-Jeanne had made sure to send word to Josée. The street rats that had helped Ti-Jeanne nine nights ago would eat well. Though it couldn’t ever make up for Chu.

Roopsingh had donated some of his precious store of curry and the use of three institutional-size cooking pots to the undertaking. “Me and Gros-Jeanne ain’t always walk good, you hear? But is she save my leg when I get blood poisoning that time.”

In fact, the gifts that were pouring in from Mami’s past patients meant that Ti-Jeanne had not had to use too much of her winter stores. There had been rabbits from Paula and Pavel; wild rice from Frank Greyeyes; and, priceless beyond words, a jug of deep red sorrel drink from old man Butler, he who depended on Mami’s foot-itch paste every winter. Caribbean sorrel bush wouldn’t grow in Canada’s climate. Old man Butler had made the drink from some of his pre-Riot hoard of the dried fruit. As he presented Ti-Jeanne with the jug, he’d said, “Me only had ’nuff for you and your family, seen? Nobody else to get. You, and Mi-Jeanne, and the baby. But mix the baby own with little water, you hear me? It too acid for he belly.”

Someone pounded at the door. “I going to see who it is,” Ti-Jeanne told her mother. It was Bob Kelly, with three of his cabbages. And a bad cold. Ti-Jeanne showed him into the examination room and gave him some of Mami’s horehound cough syrup. She’d have to make more soon. Hard on his heels came a woman with a dislocated shoulder.

“Let me see to she,” said Mi-Jeanne. Her sensitive hands clicked the joint back into place almost painlessly. Then came a man bearing his little son, screaming from the pain of an earache. And a young man with food poisoning from eating something he’d scavenged from the dump outside the market. The day went by quickly as Ti-Jeanne and her mother dispensed medicine and tried to keep an eye on the cooking and on Baby. Ti-Jeanne heard herself mutter a “Thank you” to her dead grandmother for insisting that she learn how to treat the sick.

At one point, pot spoon in one hand and medicine dropper in another, Ti-Jeanne walked wearily out to the front porch and sat on the railing. The cold air cleared her thoughts. In the surrounding park, the large, bare trees blew in a slight breeze. Ti-Jeanne relished the few minutes of peace. Harold the goat was tugging at the last few clumps of grass of the season. His grazing brought him close to the porch. Suddenly he looked up at Ti-Jeanne and sneezed, “Eshu!” Briefly Ti-Jeanne could see his bones through his flesh. Another vision, a joke from her spirit father. She laughed. “Legbara, is you sending me all these sick people to treat, ain’t?”

No answer.

“Well, Papa, look my answer here. I go do this for a little while, but I ain’t Mami. I ain’t know what I want to do with myself yet, but I can’t be she.”

The goat gnawed at an itch on one hind hoof and walked on.

No one else came to the door until dusk, when it was time for the ceremony. Maybe Legbara was satisfied with her answer.

Now the flock had taken over the palais, and the drumming had started, Mami’s send-off party. The bulk of Paula and Pavel was taking up fully half of one of the short pews. Paula cradled a sweet, round-faced newborn girl to her breast. Delivering that baby without Mami’s guidance had almost been more terrifying for Ti-Jeanne than facing her grandfather in the tower.

Bruk-Foot Sam was leading the chanting, a call-and-response that the flock seemed to know well. Mi-Jeanne sat tall and proud in one of the pews, hands folded in her lap, tears running down her cheeks.
It look like she tear ducts get leave behind when she jook out she eyes,
Ti-Jeanne thought. She shuddered at the image of her mother desperately mutilating herself.

Eshu’s stone head glistened with white rum. Frank Greyeyes stood up and presented his pipe to the four directions, redolent with burning tobacco. Eshu would like that. Holding Baby, Ti-Jeanne crept out through the open doorway. She still didn’t feel a part of these ways that had been so much a part of her grandmother’s life.

Jenny was coming up the path, leading Tony by the hand. His arm had been bandaged against his body, leaving one sleeve of his jacket empty. He looked sorrowful, apprehensive. Silently Ti-Jeanne went to meet them. Tony said her name softly, then stopped. It was Jenny who spoke up for him. “He’s sorry, darling. He wants to do penance.” Ti-Jeanne scowled. “It won’t bring your granny back,” Jenny said, “but her soul’s at peace now. It’s his that needs the healing.” Then she went into the palais, leaving the two of them to stare at each other.

Jenny was the only one outside the family who knew the truth of what had happened. How could she talk so casually of Tony needing healing? What about the rest of them? He had
killed
Mami!

“Ti-Jeanne,” Tony said, “I can’t ask you to forgive me. Nobody could.”

She just stared at him stonily.

“If you saw what I saw, what Rudy could do…”

“I did.”

He sighed, almost a sob, and looked at the ground. “Yes, you did. And you faced up to it, despite the odds, despite being frightened.” He looked at her again. “I don’t think I could have done that. I don’t know how a person learns to be so strong.”

In the palais, the drumming reached a new intensity. Ti-Jeanne turned to look. Bruk-Foot Sam was dancing Damballah, his twisted leg carrying him as ably as the well one.

“Since I felt that drug in my body, the full bufo drug, I mean, I can’t slash any more. I can’t put that stuff in my veins. Ti-Jeanne, I’m so sorry that I did this to you and your family.”

His face was a mask of grief. Ti-Jeanne looked into his eyes, feeling none of the desperate obsession she used to have for Tony, none of the longing for him to make her life right, either. And, to her surprise, no hatred, not really. Just pity. Her heart was free. She couldn’t forgive him yet, but maybe one day…

She took a deep breath. “Go on inside and say good-bye to she.”

A little of the pain lifted from his features. He reached out and patted Baby on the head. Baby blinked but only seemed a little startled. Ti-Jeanne waited for her child to object to his father’s touch, but it didn’t happen. Tony looked at her, sadly, once, and hesitantly entered the palais.

Ti-Jeanne still wasn’t ready to rejoin the service. She sat on the stone steps of the crematorium and began playing peek-a-boo with Baby. He chortled at her, his fat cheeks bulging. The sight filled her with glee. She grinned back, then gently pulled his tam down to protect his ears from the cold. She smiled at him. “So, bolom baby,” she said, “what we going to name you?”

Wire bend, story end!

I still don’t quite believe that I’ve done this. Writing a novel feels like wrestling a mattress, and it was accomplished with the help of so many people. Effervescent thanks to:

My mother, Freda; my brother, Keita; and my family, for endless support, encouragement, and belief.