From Harvey River (16 page)

Marcus and Doris were married in the Lucea Parish Church on August 2, 1931. My mother frowned and wept during the entire wedding ceremony, because brides at that time were not supposed to look joyful. The worst thing a decent young woman could do was to look happy on her wedding day, for surely that meant that she was looking forward to the sensual pleasures of the honeymoon bed and only a bad woman would enjoy that. My mother wept copious tears. My father smiled broadly throughout. Albertha and Rose sent her a trousseau from Montreal. Included in this wardrobe for a new life were silk and satin nightdresses, some with matching bed jackets and nightcaps. Her flowing wedding gown of crepe de chine with silk godets and her chantilly lace train, fifteen yards long, was the talk of the parish for years.

The couple went off to live in St. Elizabeth, attended by Doris's personal helper, Ina, and laden down with trunks full of fabulous clothes and housewares. As was the custom then, my mother wore an elaborate hat and a long duster coat as she drove away with my father in his Model T Ford.

 

N
ow that all her other children had left the house, Ann became the object of her mother Margaret's homilies on how sorrow followed closely to joy as surely as the night followed the day, therefore one should not be so laughy-laughy, so quick to pop story and want to go to fairs and concerts and dances with unsuitable friends. She, Margaret Wilson Harvey, as everyone knew, always had a deep mistrust for anything resembling excess happiness, and just to prove herself right, look how she herself had gone and forgotten and been so happy over her son Howard, and had not God taken him from her? Had her other son Edmund not run away to Kingston, never to return to Harvey River? Had God not allowed a spark from the cane-boiling fire to cool into a cloud in her left eye? Had not George O'Brian Wilson's legal family been allowed to cut her out of his will, rob her of the house and land in Lucea that he had specifically willed to her after she had cared for him in the last years of his life?

Her daughter Ann needed to learn from her mother's misfortunes; and if she did not want to learn from her mother's misfortunes, she should at least learn from that cautionary tale about an own-way girl who had come to a bad end in a village near Harvey River. The girl, it was said, suffered from
a powerful case of “don't care.” She never listened to a word that her mother said, and she liked to laugh loudly and to “sit down bad” that is, she would not sit with her legs closed and crossed at the ankles, preferably slanted to the side, so that others would not be able to look up under her dress. This girl loved to dance and she ignored her school work and took to sneaking out of her parents' house at night and going to dances in the company of some other no-good giggling Don't-Care girls from neighbouring villages, loud-laughing common girls. Well, one night she slipped out, and there it was she met her fate. The girl danced till near morning to the titillating beat of the “Merry Wang” and the frowsy rub-up “Mento.” No doubt she danced to “Penny Reel O,” a very slack song with lyrics like, “Long time me never see you, and you owe me little money. I beg you turn your belly gimme, make me rub out me money, penny reel O.”

The dawn was rising over Hanover when she finally returned to her parents' house, but they had locked and bolted the doors and windows. So she sat outside in the yard on a stone, shivering in her long satin dance dress, with the back plunged low. As she sat there, it came to her that she should go and have an early morning bath in the river. She went down to the cool river, which in the dawn hours was a light jade green, the colour of young jimbelins. The water was deliciously cold and surprisingly warm in some spots, and she swam and swam until the sun came up fully over the village. She had no towel, so she rose out of the water and put on her dance dress over her wet skin, and to the eternal disgrace of her family, she walked home with her wet satin dress clinging to her voluptuous form, her hair long and dripping wet across her shoulders in thick ringlets. Cool and relaxed, she walked towards her parents' home and met them coming down the one street in the village,
dressed in their church clothes. They passed each other in the square and never exchanged a word. But the entire village witnessed this shocking scene and by the time her parents reached the church, the parson had put together a fiery impromptu sermon about harlots and loose women. This incident was in fact a blessing for him, because he had planned to preach one of his old stale standbys about the prodigal son. Well, you know that terrible Don't-Care girl died soon thereafter, probably from pneumonia or
TB
which, according to Hanover people, she had contracted by wearing low-cut dresses which exposed her lungs.

But some other people claimed that the Don't-Care girl had met a mermaid when she went for her early morning swim in the river. They said that she had made friends with this “River Mummah,” who had combed the girl's hair with her golden comb and taken her down to the deepest parts of the river. Down there, River Mummah had shown her where her golden table was spread with delicious things to eat, delicacies rescued from the holds of sunken galleons which had come from faraway lands, laden with spices like saffron and coriander. She had fed her on cured saddles of mutton and haunches of venison and special breads and light cakes which never went stale and never grew soggy underwater. She had introduced her to many water souls, some of whom had met aqueous deaths for love. Some had run away and chosen to drown themselves and live as restless water spirits rather than as wretched slaves. People said that the Don't-Care girl had not died from pneumonia or
TB
but that the mermaid had come for her and that she was living under the river, forever dancing now in its restless currents. Some people even claimed that on some Sunday mornings she could be seen walking through the village, dressed in her wet satin dance dress.

And do you know that even after Ann was told this story the girl still clung stubbornly to her joy, to her sense of humour and her dreams? She announced that she wanted to go to Rusea's High School to study, maybe to become a lawyer. Her mother pointed out that this was impossible because David had succeeded in giving away almost everything they ever had to people in need. Besides, she knew David did not believe that girls should be educated. Like many men of his time, he thought that it was a waste of money to educate girls, who anyway would just end up getting married and having children. All that they had left was some land which Margaret was not going to sell to finance Ann's dreams, so she had better do what her sisters Cleodine and Doris had done and find herself a husband.

 

F
or the rest of her life, my mother would compare any woman who was inclined to be stingy and controlling to my father's grandmother Dorcas, with whom they lived during the first few weeks of their marriage. Those early weeks of marriage had proven to be difficult for Doris and Marcus. The one-bedroom cottage in which he had lived his bachelor life was being made into a house fit for a married couple who expected to have children, and that is why they were staying with Dorcas. A tall, brooding, silent woman on whose land flourished a variety of fruit trees, she forbade anyone to ever pick so much as one lime without her permission. The sweet-sops, soursops, naseberries, starapples, oranges, and mangoes sometimes rotted under the trees because she did not feel like giving her permission for anyone to pick them. Sometimes she would gather baskets of fruit and hang them from the ceiling in her kitchen, where they would over-ripen, dripping their sour nectar down. Bees would buzz around these laden baskets of spite-fruit, mice would nibble on them, and fruit bats would slap their leathery wings against them, but she would not give them away if she didn't feel like it. My mother, who loved nothing more than feeding people, was stunned and appalled by Dorcas's miserliness. “Nobody in Hanover would
ever do something like that,” she would say, “these St. Elizabeth people are very peculiar.”

On the day of Doris and Marcus's arrival in Malvern, the trustees of the Munro and Dickinson Trust were holding their monthly meeting, and the square was alive with horse-drawn carriages and several brand new Ford Motor cars. Doris did not fail to take note of the fine store that sold beautiful imported fabrics, and another dry goods store run by Cleve Tomlinson, who was Marcus's friend, and the fine courthouse building which, if anything, was even more impressive than the one in Lucea.

Marcus had many friends in the town of Malvern. Among them were teachers from the Bethlehem Teachers' College, and some were like the lively Gertie Holness, who ran the shop and bar situated on the main road and who was to become one of my mother's best friends. These friendships proved invaluable to her as she spent the first few weeks of her marriage enduring the tight-fisted ways of Dorcas, who considered Doris at twenty-three to be a mere girl.

The newlyweds attended church in Malvern on the first Sunday after their wedding to “turn thanks.” It was and remains the custom in rural Jamaica that the bride and groom should always go back to church on the Sunday after their wedding to show themselves to God and the community and give thanks for the blessings of their new life. Doris took great care with her “turn thanks” outfit. She always described it in exactly the same words, the outfit she wore on this important occasion.

“I wore a dress of smoke-coloured Brussels lace with matching leather shoes that my grandfather George O'Brian Wilson made from my own last and a dusty pink cloche hat festooned with one blush pink rose.”

All the marriageable women of Malvern had come out to see the stranger woman whom Marcus had chosen as his wife,
the woman he had gone to Hanover and picked out over all of them. “They came to see a show that day,” said Doris, “and they did see one.” They returned to their homes defeated. Marcus had married a princess. Which woman in St. Elizabeth could dress like that? And her walk, that straight-backed upright walk which she had learned from her sister Cleodine, who had learned it by wearing a backboard. Many of the women who came prepared to hate her for stealing their most eligible bachelor now wanted to befriend her so that she could help them to look fabulous, sophisticated, and uncountrified.

All the women except for Patsy and Ramona O'Riley, sisters who had both had their eyes on Marcus as a prospective husband. “If I don't get him, then it must be Ramona,” Patsy would often say. Marcus was easily one of the most attractive men in Malvern. He owned his own house and had a good job, and he could make anyone, even the dour Dorcas, laugh with his outrageous jokes. Marcus was the friend you needed to have if you were ever in a jam. He was the friend you could tell a secret to and you would never, ever, in a million years, hear it back. He would lend you money and forget it. He would overlook your worst faults. “We are all human,” he would always say. “If Patsy don't get him then it must be me,” Ramona said.

In those first weeks of living with Dorcas, Doris suffered greatly from homesickness. She missed her mother and her father, her sisters and brothers, more than words could say. Sometimes at the dinner table, sitting down to one of Dorcas's frugal repasts, she would cry softly and lament out loud something like, “I wonder, oh I wonder what they are having for dinner today.”

Marcus became anxious, but he was doing everything to make sure his bride was happy. They were putting the final touches on their house, which was now redesigned with the
rooms situated one behind the other like the boxcars of a train, a house with high ceilings, separate living and dining rooms in the centre, and four bedrooms, two joined to the living room, two to the dining room, and the kitchen and bathroom behind. A big well-fruited yard with flowerbeds and its own water tank. Everything was being put into place in their new home. He so wanted Doris to be happy.

“How is Mrs. Goodison?” asks Marcus's best friend, Stanley Parsons.

“She not so bright today, I think she a little low. Miss her people, you know.”

Stanley was secretly relieved that Marcus had not married Patsy or Ramona. He was hoping to land one of the sisters himself and he did not stand a chance if Marcus was around. He had a good reason to call upon them.

“Patsy gal, it look like that stranger woman that Marcus go and find clear a Hanover, head not so right you know. I hear the big woman just bawling like a child night and day for her mother and father.”

The next week Doris and Marcus go to church, and after the service people come up to ask her if she was feeling any better.

“I am fine,” says Doris.

“Oh, I thought I hear that you are suffering from melancholy.”

And so it went on. Any little personal thing that Marcus told Stanley made the rounds via the bush telegram operated by Patsy and Ramona.

“What kind of mixed marriage that is anyway. Marcus should never married outside this parish. I hear the wedding had all kind of people mix up, whole heap of big shots siddown beside poor nayga.” This was true, thanks to David
Harvey's egalitarian thinking, but some snobbish St. Elizabeth people who attended the wedding had not liked it.

One night my mother dreamed that she and Marcus were sitting down to dinner and that someone was cutting away the floorboards under her chair. She screamed loudly and the cutting stopped, then began again. This time they were trying to saw away the floorboards from under the entire dining room.

“Marcus, you don't see what they are doing?” she said as she related the dream to him. And much as he didn't want to admit it, Marcus soon realized that it was probably someone close to him who was behind all this, maybe even Stanley trying to destroy his new life before it had time to take root.

“So Marcus, how the Missus getting on?” Stanley asks him.

“That is she and the Mister's business.”

After a while when their source of information dried up and more and more people began to speak highly of Doris's legendary good nature and kindness, Patsy and Ramona found other people to savage. For the rest of his life Marcus was careful to watch his words around certain people. In later years he would always tell his children, “The only person who can harm you is somebody close to you. Be careful who you choose to be your friend.”