From Harvey River (23 page)

I
n the evenings, when she finished with her sewing, my mother liked to sit by the window in her rocking chair, watching for her husband, Marcus, to come walking down Orange Street. He moved like a young man, shoulders back, taking long, easy strides. Every time she saw him strolling down the street it was as if she was seeing him for the first time when he came up to her in her father's yard and said that he was thirsty, and since she was watering the plants, could she give him something to drink too? As she sat by the window waiting for her husband, she remembered how nobody loved to see an unusual sight more than her father, David, who had died in 1942, after years of being confined to bed. And she wished that he was still alive so she could have described to him some of the really strange people who passed right outside the front window of her house in Kingston.

Take Elephant, for example, the terrible giant with limbs thick and coarse as the trunk of the banyan tree, who, it was rumoured, made up his bed at night in the Mullings Grass Yard on Spanish Town Road, where hills of fire coal rose black before the Blue Mountains. The mules that pulled the dray carts of Kingston were tethered there too, and they were said to be his only friends. By day, Elephant was to be found under
the big trees in Victoria Park. He had a kind of open-air office there, where he was in the business of beating up people for pay. For a shilling or two, Elephant and Tom Pram and other “Big Tree” men would smite your enemies, hip and thigh. One day, as Elephant was lumbering up the street with a pack of children running behind him calling out, “Elephant, Elephant,” he turned around like a great, wounded pachyderm and threatened to cut out their insides with a broken bottle, and we all had to run home and take refuge under our beds. When she heard about this, Doris ordered her own children to gather around her as she sat at her sewing machine. When we were all assembled, she told a cautionary tale about the children who had teased the prophet Elisha. “Go up you bald head,” the wicked children had chanted to the great prophet, and he had caused two great she-bears from the woods to tear apart forty-two of the teasing children. After that cautionary tale, some of us never teased Elephant again.

Elephant still had feelings, unlike Bag O' Wire, who just stared straight ahead and never, ever uttered a word. He looked like a stone man covered with tar and pitch, and like Elephant, he carried a rank, filthy burlap, or “crocus,” bag over one shoulder that had earned him his nickname. Bag O' Wire was Jamaica's national traitor. Everyone knew that. He had been an official in Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association and he had betrayed the great leader. His present condition was seen by one and all as divine retribution for selling out Mr. Garvey.

Then there was Bun Down Cross Roads, who, unlike Bag O'Wire and Elephant, still rose each day, bathed, and dressed himself in clean clothes, but instead of going to work in his office in Cross Roads, he now sold fruits from a tray on his head. Arson. That is what Doris told her children that he had committed.
He had burned down his business to collect the insurance. After he got out of prison, he was reduced to selling fruits, but he called out his wares with the confidence of one who was to the manor born. That is, until anyone teased him, and then he would curse enough forty-shilling badwords–words that you could be fined forty shillings for uttering–to stain the air around.

“Why the young men always tease me?” Mother Muschette, the poor damaged woman who stood dressed in her wedding gown outside the Kingston Parish Church and waited in vain for her groom, a younger man, to appear, always asked my mother that question. In between stays at the Asylum, “Madda” Muschette lived on the street, pulling away from any man who passed too close to her. My mother could not recall if she had seen her there when she worked briefly in the Asylum; but every time Madda walked past our window, with the groups of jeering boys chanting, “Madda Muschette, where is your husband, Madda Muschette?” she would look directly up at the window to see if Doris was seated there, and she would cry out her sad question to her. My mother would order the boys to get away and stop tormenting the unfortunate woman.

But she would have told her father, David, that of all the people who walked the streets of Kingston there was none more tragic than Pearl Harbour, the long-haired, willowy, fair-skinned fallen woman. Everybody knew Pearl's story, how she came from a wealthy near-white family of doctors and professional people but now led the life of a “sport” or a “harlot.” Pearl was often either moderately drunk or stone-blind drunk, and she possessed a scorching vocabulary that she had no doubt picked up from doing business with sailors. She was a terrifying sight, this woman who had once been a great beauty,
as she lurched through the streets of Kingston during the day in her stained and rumpled nighttime dresses. She looked like a moon-in-the-gutter or a flung-down star that had been bombarded with black ice. Everyone taunted her and sometimes she cursed them, saying how their mothers were whores too, or else she pretended that she did not care what they said. For after all, she was “a living dead,” too drunk to care. Even child-abusers, hypocrites, murderers of body and spirit, and robbers of widows and orphans all felt they were better than she, that they were entitled to use her as a vessel for their venom and contempt. Poor Pearl Harbour. Such stories, there were such stories about Pearl Harbour. Like how she had got her name when she serviced an entire man-of-war ship. But one of Doris's customers, a hospital matron for whom she sewed uniforms, had told her another story about Pearl. The matron used to work with one of Pearl's doctor relatives, who told her that as an innocent young girl poor Pearl had fallen hopelessly in love with a handsome ginnal, a trickster, whom she had followed to wicked Kingston. She had opened her soul-case to him, and he had rummaged in it, sold the contents cheaply, and then discarded her. This act of betrayal had drawn her down to utter perdition. She was now a walking corpse. “Back to back, belly to belly, I don't care a damn, I done dead already.” They could have written the words of this song, “Jumbie Jamboree,” for her.

Then there was the German watchmaker, Mr. Gruber, whom all the children loved to stand and observe performing his meticulous tasks. Mr. Gruber was a man who did things with balletic grace and precision. A short-statured, sandy-haired man of few words, he would sit in his small shop with his magnifying glass screwed into his right eye, and wield the
delicate tools of his watchmaker's trade. He never acknowledged the presence of the children who liked to stand outside the door of his shop, but every day he would put on a spectacular performance for them. At 4 p.m., Mr. Gruber would carefully lock and bolt the doors of his shop, then wheel his shining Rudge bicycle out onto the street. He'd position himself alongside the bicycle and begin to tap his feet on the black surface of the hot asphalt. Soon he'd be tapping faster and faster until he is running on the spot. Then he begins to push the bicycle forward and to run alongside it, picking up speed as he goes. Faster and faster runs Mr. Gruber and then, when you least expect it, he leaps straight up into the air, hovers like a hummingbird for a fraction of a moment, before he lands squarely on the bicycle seat. He then bends over and with his rump in the air and his head thrust forward pedals furiously up the street. By this time the children are all cheering, “Spring mount, Mr. Gruber, take a spring mount.”

A few doors up from Mr. Gruber's was Mr. Mead the chemist. Whenever my mother sent one of the children to buy glycerin for earaches, or a black, foul-smelling sticky ointment that was excellent for reducing swelling, Mr. Mead would send them back with exact instructions as to the proper use of these medicines. “Remember to tell your mother to use one and a half drops of this, no more, no less. You only need to use enough ointment to cover the top of a sixpence, not a shilling, a sixpence.” Mr. Mead ran the drugstore at the corner of Orange and Charles streets and he must have discovered the fountain of youth back there in the curtained-off room behind the store where he filled prescriptions, for he looked the same year after year, a tall, dark man who wore a fresh, white jacket every day. Next to Mr. Mead's dispensary was what everyone
called “The Hat Shop.” But Doris had told her children that the two sisters who fashioned standoffish, pastel buckram and silk flowers into Sunday hats for ladies were “milliners.”

On the other side of the street was Smith's Garage, where Mr. Smith once hosted a very formal cocktail party. All sorts of elegantly dressed people rolled up in cars that he had no doubt repaired, and entered into the transformed interior of his workplace, now scrubbed clean and festooned with crepe-paper decorations. An invitation had come in the mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Vivian Marcus Goodison, and Marcus, giving no sign that he was still troubled by the loss of his own garage business, had put on his suit and looked very dapper. Doris, for the first time in a long time, had made herself a new dress, and together they had crossed the street and attended the cocktail party. When they came back she taught the children the phrase “hors d'oeuvres,” and she gave them some devilled eggs which she had wrapped in a napkin.

As Doris sits by the window, she hears the calls of the vendors and the servicemen who go up and down Orange Street, each with their own unique song. The bottle man who would ask “aaaaaaaaaaaaany pint bakkle?” and the travelling soldering man–who was probably the Jamaican incarnation of Ogun, the West African god of iron, now coming to weld the holes in the pots and pans and chamber pots of transported Africans–announced his presence with a hissing “Sssawdereeen.” The mango sellers had complex calls, because more often than not there would be two of them pushing a cart laden with luscious, ripe mangoes. One would sound the call and the other the response:

Mango

Hairy mango

Number eleven

Mango

Governor

Mango

Blackie

Mango

Sweetie come brush me

Mango

Ripe and green

Mango.

Theirs was the most melodious of all street calls, the most poetic, except for the call of the Arab dry-goods seller, who would chant:

Attar of roses, attar of roses

good for your noses

Come to you from me and Moses.

Sweet and sour of breastmilk, Johnson's baby talcum powder, and the faint vinegar of perspiration, that was my mother's perfume. I remember one of her two long grey-and-white plaits had come loose from the crown into which it was pinned across her head, and was dangling down one side of her smooth face that was the colour of a biscuit (till the day she died she never had a wrinkle). I reached out and held on to the escaped vine of her hair. In this early memory of my mother, she was breast-feeding my baby brother as I sat pressed up against her in the big cane seat rocking chair, so I must have been about three years old. For what seemed like a long time, there was only the rubbery sound of my baby brother sucking hard on her left breast, then I felt her soft body shift in the
chair as she shifted him from one side to the other. Then the cry of the soldering man came hissing in through the window that faced the street: “Sssawdereeen.”

The children are all asleep. As always Doris watches by the window for Marcus to come home. It is the rainy season, time of hurricanes, June too soon, July stand by, August look out you must, September remember, October all over. It is a rainy August night, and Marcus has not yet come home. He has been out putting up the telephone lines that have been torn down by the high winds and the heavy rains, so that important people can communicate with each other again. In those days most people did not have telephones in their homes. Sometimes at night she falls asleep before he comes home. Sometimes he comes in and wakes up her and the children to feed them ice cream. Royal Cremo's Neapolitan Brick ice cream, vanilla-cherry, and chocolate-striped ice cream. These sleepy late-night celebrations took place unexpectedly, for no particular reason except for the fact that Marcus, like Doris, always loved celebrations and rituals.

Then as always she hears his footsteps coming up the stairs, and when he appears in the darkened doorway he looks like the logo on the bottle of Spanish sherry that one of his friends gave him for Christmas, featuring a silhouette of a man in a wide-rimmed hat and a flowing cape. She feels great relief. Only after he takes off his hat and raincoat and galoshes does he look like Marcus. The mysterious black-cloaked, hatted figure has disappeared, and he says something like, “This is not a night for man nor beast to be outside.” “I worry about you out there in Kingston at night,” says my mother. “You worry
too much,” he says. “I promised your father that I would not make you worry.” He had promised her that she would never have to worry, that they would have a nice life. “I have certain dreams and plans,” he had told her when he was courting her. “I want to have my own garage business and I'd like me and my wife”–when he said the words
my wife
, he had looked meaningfully at her, then repeated the phrase–“me and my wife, to run a first-class guest house up in Malvern,” and then he had asked her if she had ever been to Malvern. She said, no, she had been only to Montego Bay and Savanna la Mar, but that she never stopped hoping one day to go to Montreal to visit her sisters and see snow for herself.