Collected Short Fiction (30 page)

6 a.m. Mr Wills came in the bar looking for soda but it aint have none. We have to get some soda for Mr Wills sir.

6.30 a.m. the papers come and I deliver them to Doorman Vignales at 7 a.m.
Chas. Hillyard

December 1
. 10.30 p.m. C. E. Hillyard take over duty at C – Hotel all corrected 12 Midnight Bar close 2 a.m. Mr Wills 2 Carib, 1 bread 6 a.m. Mr Wills 1 soda 7 a.m. Nightwatchman Hillyard hand over duty to Mr Vignales with one torch light 2 Fridge keys and Room Keys 1, 3, 6 and 12. Bar intact all corrected no report.
C.E.H
.

1962

I HAD ALWAYS
considered this woman, my mother, as the enemy. She was sure to misunderstand anything I did, and the time came when I thought she not only misunderstood me, but quite definitely disapproved of me. I was an only child, but for her I was one too many.

She hated my father, and even after he died she continued to hate him.

She would say, ‘Go ahead and do what you doing. You is your father child, you hear, not mine.’

The real split between my mother and me happened not in Miguel Street, but in the country.

My mother had decided to leave my father, and she wanted to take me to her mother.

I refused to go.

My father was ill, and in bed. Besides, he had promised that if I stayed with him I was to have a whole box of crayons.

I chose the crayons and my father.

We were living at the time in Cunupia, where my father was a driver on the sugar estates. He wasn’t a slave-driver, but a driver of free people, but my father used to behave as though the people were slaves. He rode about the estates on a big clumsy brown horse, cracking his whip at the labourers and people said – I really don’t believe this – that he used to kick the labourers.

I don’t believe it because my father had lived all his life in Cunupia and he knew that you really couldn’t push the Cunupia people around. They are not tough people, but they think nothing of killing, and they are prepared to wait years for the chance to kill someone they don’t like. In fact, Cunupia and Tableland are the two parts of Trinidad where murders occur often enough to ensure quick promotion for the policemen stationed there.

At first we lived in the barracks, but then my father wanted to move to a little wooden house not far away.

My mother said, ‘You playing hero. Go and live in your house by yourself, you hear.’

She was afraid, of course, but my father insisted. So we moved to the house, and then trouble really started.

A man came to the house one day about midday and said to my mother, ‘Where your husband?’

My mother said, ‘I don’t know.’

The man was cleaning his teeth with a twig from a hibiscus plant. He spat and said, ‘It don’t matter. I have time. I could wait.’

My mother said, ‘You ain’t doing nothing like that. I know what you thinking, but I have my sister coming here right now.’

The man laughed and said, ‘I not doing anything. I just want to know when he coming home.’

I began to cry in terror.

The man laughed.

My mother said, ‘Shut up this minute or I give you something really to cry about.’

I went to another room and walked about saying, ‘Rama! Rama! Sita Rama!’ This was what my father had told me to say when I was in danger of any sort.

I looked out of the window. It was bright daylight, and hot, and there was nobody else in all the wide world of bush and trees.

And then I saw my aunt walking up the road.

She came and she said, ‘Anything wrong with you here? I was at home just sitting quite quiet, and I suddenly feel that something was going wrong. I feel I had to come to see.’

The man said, ‘Yes, I know the feeling.’

My mother, who was being very brave all the time, began to cry.

But all this was only to frighten us, and we were certainly frightened. My father always afterwards took his gun with him, and my mother kept a sharpened cutlass by her hand.

Then, at night, there used to be voices, sometimes from the road, sometimes from the bushes behind the house. The voices came from people who had lost their way and wanted lights, people who had come to tell my father that his sister had died suddenly in Debe, people who had come just to tell my father that there was a big fire at the sugar-mill. Sometimes there would be two or three of these voices, speaking from different directions, and we would sit awake in the dark house, just waiting, waiting for the voices to fall silent. And when they did fall silent it was even more terrible.

My father used to say, ‘They still outside. They want you to go out and look.’

And at four or five o’clock when the morning light was coming up we would hear the tramp of feet in the bush, feet going away.

As soon as darkness fell we would lock ourselves up in the house, and wait. For days there would sometimes be nothing at all, and then we would hear them again.

My father brought home a dog one day. We called it Tarzan. He was more of a playful dog than a watch-dog, a big hairy brown dog, and I would ride on its back.

When evening came I said, ‘Tarzan coming in with us?’

He wasn’t. He remained whining outside the door, scratching it with his paws.

Tarzan didn’t last long.

One morning we found him hacked to pieces and flung on the top step.

We hadn’t heard any noise the night before.

My mother began to quarrel with my father, but my father was behaving as though he didn’t really care what happened to him or to any of us.

My mother used to say, ‘You playing brave. But bravery ain’t going to give any of us life, you hear. Let us leave this place.’

My father began hanging up words of hope on the walls of the house, things from the Gita and the Bible, and sometimes things he had just made up.

He also lost his temper more often with my mother, and the time came when as soon as she entered a room he would scream and pelt things at her.

So she went back to her mother and I remained with my father.

During those days my father spent a lot of his time in bed, and so I had to lie down with him. For the first time I really talked to my father. He taught me three things.

The first was this.

‘Boy,’ my father asked. ‘Who is your father?’

I said, ‘You is my father.’

‘Wrong.’

‘How that wrong?’

My father said, ‘You want to know who your father really is? God is your father.’

‘And what you is, then?’

‘Me, what I is? I is – let me see, well, I is just a second sort of father, not your real father.’

This teaching was later to get me into trouble, particularly with my mother.

The second thing my father taught me was the law of gravity.

We were sitting on the edge of the bed, and he dropped the box of matches.

He asked, ‘Now, boy, tell me why the matches drop.’

I said, ‘But they bound to drop. What you want them to do? Go sideways?’

My father said, ‘I will tell why they drop. They drop because of the laws of gravity.’

And he showed me a trick. He half filled a bucket with water and spun the bucket fast over his shoulder.

He said, ‘Look, the water wouldn’t fall.’

But it did. He got a soaking and the floor was wet.

He said, ‘It don’t matter. I just put too much water, that’s all. Look again.’

The second time it worked.

The third thing my father taught me was the blending of colours. This was just a few days before he died. He was very ill, and he used to spend a lot of time shivering and mumbling; and even when he fell asleep I used to hear him groaning.

I remained with him on the bed most of the time.

He said to me one day, ‘You got the coloured pencils?’

I took them from under the pillow.

He said, ‘You want to see some magic?’

I said, ‘What, you know magic really?’

He took the yellow pencil and filled in a yellow square.

He asked, ‘Boy, what colour this is?’

I said, ‘Yellow.’

He said, ‘Just pass me the blue pencil now, and shut your eyes tight tight.’

When I opened my eyes he said, ‘Boy, what colour this square is now?’

I said, ‘You sure you ain’t cheating?’

He laughed and showed me how blue and yellow make green.

I said, ‘You mean if I take a leaf and wash it and wash it and wash it really good, it go be yellow or blue when I finish with it?’

He said, ‘No. You see, is God who blend those colours. God, your father.’

I spent a lot of my time trying to make up tricks. The only one I could do was to put two match-heads together, light them, and make them stick. But my father knew that. But at last I found a trick that I was sure my father didn’t know. He never got to know about it because he died on the night I was to show it him.

It had been a day of great heat, and in the afternoon the sky had grown low and heavy and black. It felt almost chilly in the house, and my father was sitting wrapped up in the rocking chair. The rain began to fall drop by heavy drop, beating like a hundred fists on the roof. It grew dark and I lit the oil lamp, sticking a pin in the wick, to keep away bad spirits from the house.

My father suddenly stopped rocking and whispered, ‘Boy, they here tonight. Listen. Listen.’

We were both silent and I listened carefully, but my ears could catch nothing but the wind and the rain.

A window banged itself open. The wind whooshed in with heavy raindrops.

‘God!’ my father screamed.

I went to the window. It was a pitch black night, and the world was a wild and lonely place, with only the wind and the rain on the leaves. I had to fight to pull the window in, and before I could close it, I saw the sky light up with a crack of lightning.

I shut the window and waited for the thunder.

It sounded like a steamroller on the roof.

My father said, ‘Boy, don’t frighten. Say what I tell you to say.’

I went and sat at the foot of the rocking chair and I began to say, ‘Rama! Rama! Sita Rama!’

My father joined in. He was shivering with cold and fright.

Suddenly he shouted, ‘Boy, they here. They here. I hear them talking under the house. They could do what they like in all this noise and nobody could hear them.’

I said, ‘Don’t fraid, I have this cutlass here, and you have your gun.’

But my father wasn’t listening.

He said, ‘But it dark, man. It so dark. It so dark.’

I got up and went to the table for the oil lamp to bring it nearer. But just then there was an explosion of thunder so low it might have been just above the roof. It rolled and rumbled for a long long time. Then another window blew open and the oil lamp was blown out. The wind and the rain tore into the dark room.

My father screamed out once more, ‘Oh God, it dark.’

I was lost in the black world. I screamed until the thunder died away and the rain had become a drizzle. I forgot all about the trick I had prepared for my father: the soap I had rubbed into the palms of my hands until it had dried and disappeared.

Everybody agreed on one thing. My mother and I had to leave the country. Port-of-Spain was the safest place. There was too a lot of laughter against my father, and it appeared that for the rest of my life I would have to bear the cross of a father who died from fright. But in a month or so I had forgotten my father, and I had begun to look upon myself as the boy who had no father. It seemed natural.

In fact, when we moved to Port-of-Spain and I saw what the normal relationship between father and son was – it was nothing more than the relationship between the beater and the beaten – when I saw this I was grateful.

My mother made a great thing at first about keeping me in my place and knocking out all the nonsense my father had taught me. I don’t know why she didn’t try harder, but the fact is that she soon lost interest in me, and she let me run about the street, only rushing down to beat me from time to time.

Occasionally, though, she would take the old firm line.

One day she kept me home. She said, ‘No school for you today. I just sick of tying your shoe-laces for you. Today you go have to learn that!’

I didn’t think she was being fair. After all, in the country none of us wore shoes and I wasn’t used to them.

That day she beat me and beat me and made me tie knot after knot and in the end I still couldn’t tie my shoe-laces. For years afterwards it was a great shame to me that I couldn’t do a simple thing like that, just as how I couldn’t peel an orange. But about the shoes I made up a little trick. I never made my mother buy shoes the correct size. I pretended that those shoes hurt, and I made her get me shoes a size or two bigger. Once the attendant had tied the laces up for me, I never undid them, and merely slipped my feet in and out of the shoes. To keep them on my feet, I stuck paper in the toes.

To hear my mother talk, you would think I was a freak. Nearly every little boy she knew was better and more intelligent. There was one boy she knew who helped his mother paint her house. There was another boy who could mend his own shoes. There
was still another boy who at the age of thirteen was earning a good twenty dollars a month, while I was just idling and living off her blood.

Still, there were surprising glimpses of kindness.

There was the time, for instance, when I was cleaning some tumblers for her one Saturday morning. I dropped a tumbler and it broke. Before I could do anything about it my mother saw what had happened.

She said, ‘How you break it?’

I said, ‘It just slip off. It smooth smooth.’

She said, ‘Is a lot of nonsense drinking from glass. They break up so easy.’

And that was all. I got worried about my mother’s health.

She was never worried about mine.

She thought that there was no illness in the world a stiff dose of hot Epsom Salts couldn’t cure. That was a penance I had to endure once a month. It completely ruined my weekend. And if there was something she couldn’t understand, she sent me to the Health Officer in Tragarete Road. That was an awful place. You waited and waited and waited before you went in to see the doctor.