From Harvey River (19 page)

They had had one last dinner party in their Malvern house. One last big dinner party before the new owners came to take possession, before the truck that would take them into Kingston backed into the yard, drove over one of the flowerbeds, and parked by the front door so that they could load what was left of their house filled with fine mahogany furniture onto the back. For that dinner party, my mother had cooked their favourite meal. Pot roast and rice and peas and brown stew chicken and fried plantains. And because no party in Jamaica is a party without curry goat, they had said to hell with the expense and purchased a young kid, and slaughtered and curried the tender flesh. As she spread the table with the damask tablecloth Cleodine had given her as a wedding gift, and put out all her fine wedding things, remembering all the “daintiness” that her sister had taught her, my mother was overcome by the knowledge that this was the last time that she would ever spread a table in this house where she had come to be so happy. A realization so final that she had to sit down suddenly in her seat nearest the door through which she would come and go to and from the kitchen to the table.

My mother remembered the morning they had bade miserly Dorcas and her house of meanness farewell. She had woken and found herself singing, “The strife is o'er, the battle
done; Now is the Victor's triumph won…Alleluia!” She and Marcus had carefully assembled their possessions and packed them into a truck belonging to one of their friends, on the day their house was finally ready to be occupied. “Thank you very much, Grandma Dorcas, for your kind hospitality,” they had said to the wretched, miserly old woman, and then they had practically run outside to the truck and driven joyfully to their own house. Marcus blew the horn all the way from his grandmother's house to theirs. They sang a song that newly emancipated Jamaicans sang on the first of August 1838. “Jubilee, Jubilee. Me get full free. Me can stand up when me want, siddown when me want, liedown and gettup when me want, for me free.” Yessir, they were free to laugh and talk and sleep and wake as they pleased, to cook big dinners and entertain any number of friends they wanted. “Why the hell would I spendup my money to feed a whole heap of hungry-belly people who should stay home and eat at them own table?” was Dorcas's response to a suggestion my mother once made to her that they invite some of their neighbours over for Sunday dinner.

She was well-acquainted with every corner of this house, every door, every window. “Brussels” and “tarshan.” My mother had carefully stitched every one of the lace curtains that were now being taken down from the windows of their house. She could identify a Brussels lace from a Venice or chantilly lace with her eyes closed. She would rub a forefinger over the surface and correctly identify the lace in question. She had arranged every bed, chair, and table in that house, where they had kept the front door open from morning till night because they so loved to see their home filled with guests. They had planned to one day convert that house in Malvern into a paying guest house, for nothing gave them more pleasure than to see their
friends and relations enjoying hospitality Doris and Marcus style. But they never did get around to it.

“Doris girl, your nice life done,” said a voice inside her. She walked over to the table and stared and stared at her place setting before her, trying hard not to cry. To calm herself, my mother rubbed the crest of the bird perched on a limb at the centre of the dinner plate. She ran her finger along the limb on which the bird sat, and a voice rose up in her. It said, “Doris, this limb is now broken.” She imagined at that moment that the bird on the dinner plate flew up and out through the dining-room window from which the lace curtains were now removed. “You soon come back man, Marcus, and you cannot live in town, you just going to pay Kingston a visit,” said their friends. My mother would remember little about that last dinner party in their house they were about to lose because she deliberately kept herself busy tending to the needs of their guests. The friends who were talking and laughing too loudly. The people who kept hugging her and saying, “We don't know what we are going to do without you.” Some of them were even crying openly as she remained resolutely dry-eyed, but she would always remember one incident.

“Time for a song now, Marcus.” My mother felt her heart fall when their friends began to say that. “You know we can't let you go to Kingston before you drop two tune, Marcus.” O God why they want him to sing, Doris thought to herself. Why can't they put themself in his place? How would they feel if this had happened to them? Would they feel like singing? O Lord no, Marcus just tell them you don't feel good, tell them you not up to it tonight, of all nights. She watched his every move nervously, rubbing the insides of her arms along the sides of her belly, which had become high and wide after she
had given birth to four children. “Say no, you not singing tonight.” She shook her head and tried to get him to catch her eye, but he refused to look in her direction. Instead he headed into their bedroom. She hurriedly put down the tray of cold drinks that she had been offering to their guests, saying in a “put-on,” cheerful voice, “Have a last drink on Marcus and me.” When she saw him come from the bedroom with the guitar, she made for the open front door and stood in the doorway with her arms folded. He took a seat in the living room beside his prized gramophone, the second thing that he had bought for their house after their marriage bed. She could tell that he was determined to avoid her look, which she had learned from her mother, Margaret, that cross between a cut-eye and a stare-down look that she'd brought with her from Harvey River.

What she did not understand was that his heart was so heavy right then, that if he did not sing, he was going to break down and bawl like a baby. He reached up and lifted the big heavy-headed needle off the seventy-eight record. It was Leadbelly singing “Goodnight Irene.” Before that night they would always listen to that record together, sitting side by side on the loveseat, the third thing that he had bought for their house. He always wanted her to sit on his left. “On the heart side,” he would say, “I want you always near to my heart.” Always with one arm thrown around her neck and his long fingers stroking her rounded upper arm, they would listen to Leadbelly, and Marcus would say, “Wait, wait, the nice part coming now.” This was how they liked to wait for Leadbelly to reach that part in the chorus when he sings, “Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene, I'll
get
you in my dreams,” for when he reached that part, they would both turn and face each other at the same time and laugh out loud. Every time, they laughed together as if they were hearing Leadbelly's lascivious tone
for the first time, “I'll
get
you in my dreams.” They'd laugh till she caught herself laughing at Leadbelly's slackness, and she'd stop and say, “Marcus, you are too out of order,” as if she had not become a little out of order herself, now that she was a married woman.

But that last night in their house, she could find nothing to laugh about as she watched my father carefully sit himself down alone on their loveseat so that the seams of his trousers fell just so. She watched as he held his guitar close to his chest, just like he sometimes held her when they were alone, and she knew she would never laugh at that song again. She watched as he shut his eyes tight and began to rock back and forth, and with a lump-in-his-throat voice, took up where Leadbelly left off. When she heard his voice begin to vibrate and break up, she stopped clutching herself and balled her hands into two fists by her side. She leaned forward, gathered up her strength, and began to call out to him silently, insistently from her place by the door. She felt herself begin to haul up strength from her belly-bottom, until she was almost standing on her tiptoes, and she strained towards him begging, no, commanding him without words: bear up. Don't break. Marcus, don't you cry before them. Not even if they are our friends, don't make them see you cry. “Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in the town, sometimes I take a great notion, to jump in the river and drown: Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight, goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I'll see you in my dreams.” That night she gathered up her strength and force-fed it to him so he could part company with Leadbelly. When he switched to his repertoire of rude songs, she touched her open hand to her belly-bottom in gratitude to her woman strength. “Bredda Manny O mi find a Candy, Bredda Manny O mi find a Candy, Bredda Manny O mi find a Candy dash it wey you nasty bitch
a puss shit.” That night he did make them laugh, he made them laugh, he made them dance.

Later, as they lay on their marriage bed, without having bothered to remove the white candlewick bedspread, he had cried then. “How many times must I lose, Dor?” he had asked her. “How many times?” It was then he told her how his mother had lost her land. She had lost it, he said, because of him. He had gone as an apprentice truck driver at the age of fourteen to work in Port Antonio and there he had fallen sick with malaria fever. They had sent a message to his mother to come to him in the hospital and she had, in the emergency, used her house and land as collateral for a loan of thirty pounds from a Mr. Russell, the justice of the peace of that parish. Her son was sick, she was in a hurry, she did not read what she signed and that is how she lost her land, in the same way that thousands of poor Jamaicans have lost their land for nearly two hundred years. When she came back to Malvern, after a month of nursing her son, Russell had foreclosed on her house and land. She had taken her case to the authorities at Black River Courthouse, but Russell's friends who sat on the bench had found in favour of Russell. Everybody said it was the loss that had killed her.

“How many times must I lose, Dor?” And then it was she who was holding him close to her chest, saying, “no mine no mine no mine,” and assuring him of the many opportunities that existed for him in Kingston, the businessplaces just begging for a good and capable man like him to come there and work. It was she who was saying that everything happens for a purpose and that one thing she was looking forward to (although she was not an idle sort of person) was going again and again to the Ward Theatre to see moving pictures and concerts.

The more she thought about it, growing up in Kingston would make the children grow bright and uncountrified. Barbara, their brilliant first-born, could go to a very good school like St. Andrews High School for girls. But she had also said, as he kissed her in gratitude, that if after experiencing all the wonders of Kingston, they still really didn't like it, they should move right back to the country, where they would buy another house after they had worked and saved enough money. That night she knew in her heart that from then on, she was going to have to be the strong one, the one who would have to adopt her sister Cleodine's straight-backed walk and grim determination to move forward, come what may. And then he said to her, “Dor, let us make sure we keep our business to ourselves.” My father had learned his lesson from the early experiences of their marriage and the mischief-making of his friends, like the cerassee sisters, and thereafter he always declared that what happened between a husband and a wife was strictly their personal business.

All the children in the Harvey household had grown up seeing their mother and father in agreement on most matters affecting the family. Sometimes if they disagreed openly and Margaret became loud and belligerent, as she was wont to do, David would suggest that they step into their bedroom and close the door and argue it out there. Sometimes as they lay in bed at night the children could overhear them talking about whether David should keep going to Cuba or not, or whether they should sell some of the land, whether David and his brothers should take a certain case, because everybody knew the accused had done what they said he had done. But before the children it was always, “Your father and me,” or “Your mother and me think this or that.” When Margaret did not get her own
way, she would say, “Mr. Harvey and I think this or that so.” And so Doris began to rehearse what she would say to anybody who asked her how could she leave the country for hard life in town. “We have decided to try our luck in Kingston.”

 

part three

 

O
n their first morning in the city of Kingston, before daylight, my father had woken up and dressed in the dark so as not to disturb her and the children. As he left, he whispered to her that he was going to return the truck that they had hired to bring them to Kingston to a driver who was waiting on Spanish Town Road so he could drive it back to its owner in Malvern. He said too that the same friend who had found these accommodations was taking him to see about a job and he wanted to be there early. She had murmured something like, “Where you going without breakfast?” and then she had fallen again into exhausted sleep. When sunlight, pouring in through the row of windows facing the street, made its way over the piles of furniture, across the wooden floor, and over to the small windowless room that was now their bedroom, my mother woke and heard the street cries of Orange Street for the first time. The night before, after entering the city of Kingston from the Spanish Town Road, when my father had turned the truck that carried them from St. Elizabeth up Orange Street, they had almost met with an accident. As my father rounded the corner, they saw thundering towards them a dray cart being driven at breakneck speed by two masked men! My father braked and pulled over suddenly as the cart
flew by, trailing the smell of shit. These were the pit latrine cleaners of the city of Kingston, many of them descended from East Indian indentured labourers who had been born as untouchables and deemed fit only to clean sewers, handle corpses, and to do the lowliest work assigned to human beings. Although there was no law in Jamaica which made them untouchables, these men still elected to do the sewer-cleaning work done by their forefathers.