If I Never Went Home (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Chenette was in season and Granny Gwen’s legendary chenette tree, almost two storeys high, was laden with clumps of small green fruit. Granny Gwen’s late husband Ignatius had spent his entire working life at the agriculture ministry and had planted a number of different fruit trees from the seeds of particularly sweet specimens. There was a pomerac tree, Long mango and Julie mango trees, several orange trees, a soursop and a cherry tree. But Ignatius’s prize was the chenette, positioned for the right amount of sunlight, fed, manured and watered through the dry season. His dedication had paid off, and decades later his granddaughter Bea sucked on the sweet fleshy fruit while she helped to put out soft drinks, cheese paste sandwiches, mini meat pies, cookies and iced vanilla sponge cake to feed those who would be coming all day to pay their respects to Alan Clark.

Aunty Doris gave directions about where to put the food. Uncle Robin sorted out the bottles to take for recycling, and put soft drinks in coolers full of ice. Michael and Charles cleaned up. Mira and Uncle Kevin arranged chairs. Granny Gwen was in her bedroom getting ready to face the day.

People began trickling in almost as soon as the brunch was laid out. Most had seen or heard about the newspaper article and whispered their outrage. There was no disguising the collective disgust and trauma ordinary people felt when faced with these bloody pictures. It was not the final image of a person anyone should endure.

Bea was surprised that she had stopped crying constantly and took this as a good sign that she was coping better. But she was constantly exhausted and longed desperately to go back to bed. Between her and the world was a solid glass wall, blocking sound and feeling as she was slowly anaesthetised by searing grief. People spoke to her and she was able to carry on conversations, but all feeling, good or bad, had disappeared.

Mira came to check on her. ‘You all right?’

‘You want anything?’ asked Uncle Kevin from behind Mira.

‘I’m fine,’ said Bea weakly.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay close to her,’ said Michael.

As they walked off Michael gently nudged Bea in the ribs. ‘Remind me, please. How is he your uncle?’ he asked.

‘Who? You mean Uncle Kevin?’

‘Yes,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t remember him.’

‘He is some sort of half-brother. He and my dad were roughly the same age. I always assumed Kevin was Grandpa’s outside child. I’m really not sure. And there is some connection with my Dad’s eldest brother who died young, but no one has ever talked about it.’

Michael held her hand in his. ‘Maybe now you’re all grown up Granny Gwen might tell you.’

‘I doubt it. It’s one of those family things. Uncle Kevin’s always around. But his surname isn’t Clark,’ replied Bea. ‘He’s a Foster. Kevin Foster.’

Well-wishers interrupted their conversation, asking where they might find Granny Gwen. Bea went inside to find her. From the moment she climbed up the stairs into the house she felt soothed. She had always liked this old house. Granny Gwen kept it clean and tidy, ready to receive important visitors. Immediate family members were not allowed into the proper living room where crocheted cream antimacassars lay straight and undisturbed on the backs of the red upholstered chairs. Pink and white silk flowers, dulled by a layer of dust, stood proud in a vase on the sideboard. The dark wood sideboard was full of glassware and china reserved for relatives visiting from abroad or those deemed higher up the social ladder. Bea smiled as she glanced around the room. The house had remained unchanged for as long as she could remember.

‘Who out there?’ came Granny Gwen’s voice from the bedroom. ‘Robin, is you?’

‘No, it’s Bea,’ she called back.

‘Ah, I thought it was Robin,’ said Granny Gwen, walking into the living room. She was trying to zip up her dress.

‘Let me help you, Granny Gwen,’ said Bea, taking hold of the zipper.

Granny Gwen pulled her dress hem down, then beckoned Bea to sit down on the red upholstered sofa.

‘Granny, how come you letting me sit down on the good chairs? I don’t think you’ve ever let me before. But Charlie and I used to sneak in when we were little and sit on them when you weren’t looking.’

Granny Gwen laughed. ‘Well, you get big now,’ she said, snuggling next to Bea. ‘I don’t think you going to dirty it up.’

‘Promise, I won’t,’ said Bea.

They sat for a moment in silence.

‘I so glad you here,’ said Granny Gwen patting Bea’s hand. ‘When you get old like me you doesn’t know when next you go see your family that living all over the place.’

‘I should come back more often,’ said Bea.

‘Please, child. For your grandmother sake.’

Bea pushed a stray hair off Granny Gwen’s forehead. ‘Well, you still have Uncle Robin and them to keep you company.’

‘Yes,’ sighed the old woman, but the tears had already begun to leak out. ‘You know that I did have another son who dead.’

‘Yes,’ said Bea.

‘Matthew was nineteen, nearly twenty, when he dead,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Then I bury your grandfather Ignatius, God rest his soul. That was another trouble.’

Bea hugged Granny Gwen tight.

‘Granny, what about Uncle Kevin? I don’t think anybody has ever explained how he’s related to us.’

Granny Gwen stiffened and her face hardened. ‘Go on, child,’ she said. ‘You better go tell everybody I coming down just now.’

Bea sensed the sudden chill in Granny Gwen’s voice and left quietly.

The old woman didn’t seem to notice. She was lost in another space. She sighed and sank back into the red sofa, her head resting on the crocheted antimacassars.

Granny Gwen remembered that Alan, her youngest, was only a newborn baby when she had buried her first-born, Matthew. Less than two years later she had gone back to church for her husband Ignatius’s funeral. Ignatius had been chatting to her under the chenette tree when he leaned forward and collapsed in front of her, a lifeless heap. The man had barely reached his half-century. Matthew gone. Ignatius gone. Now the diminished family was preparing to pay its last respects to her sweet baby Alan.

Why hadn’t the Lord taken her instead? Why was she made to suffer the anguish of burying a husband and two – yes, two – sons? And there had been other, less visible losses. Between Matthew’s birth and Alan’s, a span of twenty years, only one baby, little Robin, had made it to full term alive. Six miscarriages. Six babies who never made it into her arms. Still, a brood of three boys was a reasonable show. The Lord was merciful, and just as he took away her Matthew he had given her a consolation prize. She regretted that it had taken Alan’s death for her to accept that gift.

As she moved about the living room, adjusting a chair here and a curtain there, she soothed herself with a lullaby she used to sing to her babies.

Dodo petit popo

Mammy gone to town

To buy a piece of sugar cake

And give baby some.

Some nasty, stinking, drunk man coming back from a fete. Drinking whole night. He should be dead. Is he should be laid out in Chatoo Funeral Parlour. Not Alan. Not her last precious child. But she had Kevin, who was practically his twin in age. Through the window she could see that he was outside today, helping as if he had always been within the fold of the Clark family. Looking at him, she felt a surge of guilt about the Saturday market visit so long ago, and how she had denied him. Her legs weakened and she sat back down again. The memories came flooding back.

*

‘Mistress Clark, how you going?’ asked Marva, the fish lady. ‘You look like you going drop baby any day now.’

‘Child, I not due for two more weeks,’ replied Gwen. ‘At least that is what Dr. Sanatan say.’

‘What you think it is? I feel is a girl you making,’ said Marva. ‘They say when you belly round so is a girl. If it’s a boy baby it would have poke out more in the front.’

‘Well, a girl child go be nice,’ admitted Gwen. ‘Two boys is a handful.’

‘And I hear Matthew girlfriend Prudence had she baby Wednesday gone,’ said Marva.

Gwen’s smile collapsed, and she felt the skin on her face tighten and burn. ‘Is true that little Jezebel get sheself pregnant, but that is not my Matthew doings,’ she declared. ‘That little madam barely sixteen and already she’s the village mattress. I bet she don’t even know who the father is. Trying to put that on my son. Ah, Jesus.’

‘So you ain’t going to see the baby?’ Marva persisted.

Gwen supported her aching lower back with her left arm and shook her head. ‘What I going see it for? That child ain’t nothing to me.’

But Marva was not giving in. ‘And what about Matthew?’ she asked. ‘He gone and see the baby yet?’

‘Why?’ snorted Gwen. ‘Is not he flesh. I tell him don’t go unless you want to end up paying for another man child.’

‘How you sure so?’

Gwen was beginning to tire, but she knew that her every word would soon be repeated up and down the market. A firm denial was required before she could go home to rest her aching back. ‘I ask Matthew and he tell me is not he child,’ she said. ‘He say Prudence worthless. Sleeping with every Tom, Dick and Haripersad. Imagine you only have sixteen years and making baby. The harlot. She should hang she head in shame.’

Marva threw a cup of water over the kingfish, red snapper and marlin laid out on the wooden tray in front of her. The fish gleamed in the sunlight.

‘Don’t get vex with me, I only talking what I hear,’ she said. ‘Town say that the child is the spitting image of Matthew. The baby have he same straight nose. If I was in your shoes, Mistress Clark, I think I would have to go and see with me own two eye before I say for sure that it not my flesh and blood.’

Marva had gone too far. Gwen felt her body burning with anger. ‘I not setting foot in no low-class house,’ she declared through gritted teeth. ‘If they so sure is Matthew baby then let them bring the baby by we.’

‘You know they can’t come by you,’ said Marva calmly. ‘Them is poor poor people. They already shame how Prudence make baby and no father there to see about the child. How they could come by your house?’

Gwen had stopped listening. She picked up her basket and waddled to the taxi stand. This village slut was not about to ruin Matthew’s life. He was a handsome young man with a good job at Trinbago Life Assurance Company in Port of Spain. Matthew had prospects. That girl had her own family. And of course it might not be Matthew’s child, no matter how straight the baby’s nose.

The teenaged Prudence christened her baby boy without a father being named. Water was sprinkled on his tiny forehead and Kevin Foster was welcomed into the fold of the church of God. As fate would have it, on the same day Kevin was christened, Gwen gave birth. Despite Marva’s predictions, it was another boy. Ignatius named him Alan, meaning ‘precious’. Gwen was exhausted but relieved. Bitter past experience had told her not to hope until she had seen the little one wriggle, breathe and cry, and she had counted ten perfect tiny toes and ten perfect tiny fingers. After all those dreadful losses Alan was indeed a precious baby.

Gwen’s labour had been difficult and the doctor insisted she stay in bed for at least a week before facing the world. She had not wanted to jinx the well-being of the baby, so there was little paraphernalia to welcome Alan. With Ignatius at work, and Robin still a young schoolboy, it fell to Matthew to gather basic supplies for his baby brother’s arrival at home. He was dispatched to Nadia’s Mother and Baby Supplies on Frederick Street with a list.

‘Matthew, you going take bus or taxi?’ his mother asked.

‘As is Saturday, I prefer bus,’ he replied. ‘Them taxi drivers does drive like they mad. I see one the other day overtake three car and only just miss bouncing a maxi-taxi that was speeding coming up the road.’

‘You have the list?’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘I forget to put Johnson’s Baby Powder. Add that on for me please.’

She adjusted the wriggling baby in her arms. ‘You coming back home straight?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ said Matthew.

‘Well, if you see Ali selling doubles by Independence Square, buy two for me. That man know how to make a doubles. I feeling to eat something so. But hold the pepper. You not supposed to eat pepper when you feeding baby or else the baby stomach go burn him.’

In later years Gwen would often reflect on that list: two dozen cotton nappies, Vaseline, one pack of wash cloths, five baby vests, a bottle of Limacol and one Johnson’s Baby Powder.

That shopping list had been Matthew’s death warrant.

People were anxious to tell her the details. Marva, who knew everything, gave Gwen an account as she had heard it. At the bus station, Matthew had seen Prudence holding her brand-new baby, and next to her the baby’s grandmother. He seemed to panic and tried to hide behind a concrete pillar. But it was too late. They had spotted him. Matthew emerged from behind the pillar, hands in his front pockets, whistling.

‘Morning,’ he said, looking beyond them. ‘All you look like you going in town.’

‘We only going up the road,’ said Prudence. ‘The baby have his one-month checkup today.’ She hesitated, then looked up at Matthew. ‘You want to see the baby?’ she asked softly. ‘He’s sleeping.’