From Harvey River (10 page)

This character Jekyll was the mentor of Claude McKay, the great Jamaican poet and novelist, who would sometimes list Jekyll as his father on the forms he had to fill out while he lived in the United States. McKay became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and he wrote the sonnet “If We Must
Die,” an anthem of black resistance that Sir Winston Churchill quoted in a speech to rally the people of England during the Second World War.

If we must die let it not be like dogs

hunted and penned in this inglorious spot

while round us bark their maddened dogs

making their mock at our accursed lot.

At the end of a day's shopping in Lucea, the Harvey girls were always met outside of the town by a family helper who would have been sent to assist them with carrying their parcels back to Harvey River. The girls would ride home full of the latest news from Lucea and laden with purchases–from lengths of fabric, stockings, hats, and lingerie to bottles of Lydia E Pinkham's Vegetable Compound for “female” complaint. They always brought back some small gift for David and Margaret, usually a bag of cakes and pastries from Aunt Fanny's bakery that were more “refined” than the substantial cornmeal and potato puddings that were baked every weekend in the Harvey household.

Many years later, my mother and her sisters would continue to fall into their fabulous-Harvey-girls-get-dressed-to-go-to-town routine whenever they were together. Even when they were old women, they were still the fabulous Harvey girls.

 

A
fter she had reached sixth class, the highest class at the village school, my mother's oldest sister, Cleodine, was sent to Mrs. Marston's special school for young ladies, the closest thing to a finishing school that David and Margaret could afford. Her siblings watched in awe each morning as their big sister unbuttoned the five buttons–from hem to mid-calf–of her long skirt, mounted upon one of her father's horses and rode off sidesaddle to go and learn how to become a proper young lady. Cleodine liked it when they waved to her.

In no time, Cleodine began to affect a perfectly upright walk, because she was made to wear a backboard. This being early in the twentieth century, the Englishwoman instilled in the handful of elite village girls who attended her school good Victorian principles. She taught reading and writing, with great stress on proper penmanship, along with art, music, religious studies, and domestic science. Cleodine excelled in all these subjects to such an extent that, years later, she was able to perfectly hand-letter her wedding invitations, design and sew her own gorgeous wedding gown, demonstrate to the organist just how she wanted the wedding march to be played with loud flourishes, and supervise the craftsmen in the renovation of her marital home, which her husband had named
“Dunrovin'.” After Cleodine directed the remodelling, she re-christened the house “Rose Cottage” and filled it with the finest mahogany furniture of her own designs as she became the wife of a man she did not love.

 

Cleodine was dressed in her long, white crepe de chine gown. It was fitted all the way down to her hips and then it flared out so that she looked like an inverted lily. Her veil of illusion tulle frothed out from her face and then rose and fell behind her. Her head was ringed by a circlet of orange blossoms. Her face glowed as she wept, “I do not love this man that I am about to marry.” A little voice rose up inside her, asking, “Was there ever a sadder bride?” “No,” Cleodine answered the voice. “No,” she said out loud, “I am the saddest of all brides.”

They are preparing the wedding feast. The aroma of good country cooking hangs like a spice canopy over the village. The domestic perfume of seasoning: top notes of curry; sharper notes of garlic, onions, and pimento; base notes of black pepper and thyme, which flavour the flesh of cows, goats, and chickens. Feast food is being prepared in big, black three-legged pots. In kerosene tins they are boiling a fierce pepper soup, made with the rubbery genitals of bulls, a cow cod soup to make the groom potent and virile. At the thought of this, Cleodine wants to vomit.

Over the front gate they have arranged an arch of June roses intertwined with asters and arum lilies. In the centre they have hung two silver bells, from whose mute clappers stream white and silver ribbons. Under the arch the bride will pass, going out of her parents' house a virgin. She will go to the parish church and return, passing under it again, as a wife, a married woman. She does not love this man Clement Campbell, this man who is fifteen years older than she and who has been
travelling and working in Cuba and Panama, who has come back to the neighbouring village and bought land and built a big house with a sign on the gatepost that said, “Dunrovin'.”

This man had come to her father and asked him for her hand before he ever had a conversation with her. At first she outright refused to marry him, but in the end her mother, Margaret, insisted, saying that Cleodine had always had her own way from birth and that she thought she was better than everybody else, and that it was her father, David, not she, Margaret, who had encouraged her to think like this. “You mark my words, you will pick and pick till you pick shit,” said Margaret, sounding exactly like her father, George O'Brian Wilson. “Who do you want for a husband, the king of England? This man is a good man, a fine-looking man, he will be a good provider, what the hell more could you want?” It was all well and fine for her to be doing pupil-teaching up at that Englishwoman's school, but it was really high time for her to get a husband who could support her queenly tastes and show the way for her sisters.

When he came to call on her, he brought gifts that he had bought during his travels: three yards of pink silk cloth, three scented white soaps in a box marked
Muguet du bois
, two pairs of silk stockings, kid gloves, and then the diamond-and-opal ring. Cleodine had read in a book that it was bad luck to wear opals if they are not your birthstone, that opals should be worn only by people born in October under the sign of the scales. The stone in the ring reminds her of her mother's left eye when a spark leapt from the fire on which the workers were boiling sugar and put out the life in it, leaving a white cloud over the pupil for the rest of her life. This is what the stone in this ring reminds her of, and it sets her to remembering other things, other times, another man.

 

I have imagined that there was a man named Alex Marston, and when he was brought home from England, in 1915, nobody in the village saw him for weeks. They said that he was kept sedated with laudanum to see if sleep and rest could knit up his ravelled nerves, which had become shell-shocked during the war. Every time he woke up they fed him on soup made from one whole pigeon with the neck wrung, not severed, so that the blood did not drain out but stayed inside the body to be boiled down into the soup. When the bird was cooked so that its flesh fell away from its bones, they added red wine to the soup and his mother fed it to him herself.

One afternoon the eight girls who attended Mrs. Marston's school were sitting outside on the front verandah doing embroidery, cross-stitch, faggoting, drawn-thread, and the stitch called hardanga. Once, the hardanga stitch was lost for years and it did not resurface until an old seamstress from Westmoreland dreamt how to do it again. After that dream she woke in great excitement early on a Sunday morning, applied her needle to the bodice of a plain blue linen dress, and drew up the hardanga from oblivion, where it had languished for more than seventy years in the land of lost stitches. It had slipped off every seamstress's needle at exactly the same time and date in the same way that other stitches were lost by ancient Indian tribes, Inuit peoples, and Celtic craft workers. Every once in a while, when the culture of a people undergoes great stress, stitches drop out of existence, out of memory. The hardanga had disappeared when the great Jamaican freedom fighter Sam Sharpe was executed in 1832. Perhaps the women who had stitched his flowing white garments had hidden the hardanga stitch in the seams. These women, who had washed the clothes whiter than any Biblical Fullers soap with the foaming suds of blood-red ackee pods, had ironed the hardanga
into the seams of Daddy Sharpe's robes, causing the stitch to be shut up there for three-score years and ten.

The girls were sitting on the verandah embroidering away while Mrs. Marston read to them from Jane Austen's
Sense and Sensibility
. Mrs. Marston always reminded them of how kind she was to start this school, to teach a select handful of girls how to become proper young ladies. Mrs. Marston also needed the money that their parents paid her, because her husband had taken up drinking in a serious way.

Alex appeared at the doorway in his pyjamas and dressing gown and stood there watching his mother reading to the girls. Cleodine, who was now a pupil-teacher at the school, was supervising the embroidering done by the younger girls, and looked up and saw him. His uncombed dark hair and wild eyes made him look like Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights
. Mrs. Marston got up hurriedly and led her son back inside the house. After a few weeks he seemed to be much better, because Cleodine saw him exercising the horses in the pasture. One afternoon she was walking home alone, having stayed behind to help Mrs. Marston finish a dress. She was a better seamstress than Mrs. Marston any day, but the Englishwoman always tried to make her feel as if she was conferring a great honour upon her by allowing her to help. There were still things she wanted to learn from the Englishwoman before she stopped coming to help with the teaching of the younger pupils, so Cleodine fixed her face in a wry half-smile whenever the woman said things like “It is not often that I allow anyone from the village into my private quarters, but I'll make an exception in your case, Cleodine.”

When she had walked down the hill leading her horse after helping Mrs. Marston with her dress, the style of which she thinks is utterly unsuited to Mrs. Marston's short thick body,
she finds Alex waiting for her at the end of the long driveway.

“Hello, Cleodine.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I asked who was the tall, slender girl with the legs like a colt.”

She knew how to heal him. He said that whenever the battle erupted inside his head with gunshots and sirens and death screams, if he heard her singing, the noises would go into retreat. He would often pass her notes which read: “Sing for me and push back the enemy, my precious Cleodine,” and she would find a reason to say to Mrs. Marston, “I need to practise a song that I'd like the younger girls to learn.” Then she'd go to the school piano and play and sing, ostensibly for the younger pupils, but she and Alex knew who the songs were for. Once he wrote a song for her, using words like
anodyne
and
columbine
and
adamantine
and
love-divine
to rhyme with her name. She helped his mother with the school for two years, two years in which she saw him almost every day until the noises in his head got worse and they sent him back to England.

 

She did not love this other man whose hands were rough and calloused from years of hard manual labour in Panama and Cuba, who affected the manners of a Spanish gentleman and peppered his talk with Spanish words. His “aie Cara and aie chica” meant nothing to her, but she will never settle for becoming an old maid, never.

They came into the room and found Cleodine alone, staring at her image in the mirror. She had ordered everybody to leave her alone for a few minutes before the wedding, but they came barging in anyway, the wedding bessies, Tinnette and Marie, two sisters who looked after every bride of consequence in this village. They themselves had never married, but they
knew every single thing that a bride is supposed to do or not to do on her wedding day.

“You must never let your groom see you in your wedding dress before the wedding.”

“The bride should always carry money in her shoes or in her bosom on her wedding day, to make sure that she has a prosperous marriage.”

Marie begins to fire questions at her. “What do you have on that is old?”

Her grandmother Frances's pure silk slip, given to her by her husband, William, who imported it from England. It was embroidered with raised roses on a vine trellis. It had been kept wrapped in a piece of tissue paper with white roots of fragrant khus khus grass and mothballs in a big brass-sided trunk for the wedding day of her son's first daughter.

“What do you have on that is new?”

Her crepe de chine and Brussels lace wedding dress, which she had made herself with the help of her mother and her sisters. They beaded it with rhinestones like false diamonds and more than three hundred teardrop pearls.

“What do you have on that is borrowed?”

The mother-of-pearl buckles on her shoes given to her by her godmother who lived in Falmouth, in the parish of Trelawny. Cleodine had thought of running away and going to tell her godmother that she could not go through with this wedding because she did not love this man. They say the man she loved is crazy, and now they have sent him away to England; but her godmother sent her those buckles with a letter that said she could not be happier that she was making such a good marriage.