No Safeguards (10 page)

He let go of me, retreated to the platform, and resumed staring out at the ocean.

We were silent for a couple of minutes. With his face turned away, Caleb said: “Jay, remember Samuel? The other evening he ask me ‘bout you. It's holiday time now. He's home. Go look him up.”

***

I stared hard at Anna propped up with pillows in the bed. “What did you and he talk about that you didn't want me to hear?”

“Raise the head of my bed a little higher.”

I did.

She was silent. I asked her again.

“I remember sitting there on a pile of unbroken stones, trying to recall the Georgetown I knew. My eyes roved over the distant coconut palms, the manchineel, the sea almonds, the masses of green and white ping-wing leaves glistening in the sun. A strong breeze was blowing and it whistled through the leaves of the ping-wing. Further up the beach, the fronds of the coconut palms were closing and opening like fans, and the trunks were swaying. The waves crashed heavily at our backs.

“I jumped when he spoke. ‘Anna, that boy suffering and is our fault. Anna, I break down after you left me.' I didn't answer. He moved to another pile of stones, almost a metre from me, and sat with his back half-turned to me.

“‘When I leave home that night, Anna, I been so ashamed of myself. I did only need to be by myself for a day or two to find out what made me hit you and how I could stop it. But you left me and I had no home to go back to.'

“Jay, I thought to myself, you hit me because you could. No law, nothing was there to stop you. You hypocrite!

“‘Anna, you was my crutch. You kept me from falling down. I find that out when you left me. Without you, without the children, I became nothing.'

“I answered him in my thoughts.
I? Your crutch!
‘
Head of the household.' ‘Under my subjection.' ‘ Obey my orders.' ‘Husbands control your wives'. I your crutch! Caleb, this must be your idea of a joke.

“I told him to find a new crutch because I wanted him to stop drinking. I tried not to sound angry. ‘If you love Jay so much to want to live, why not go a step further and stop drinking?' I told him I wanted you and Paul to be proud of him. ‘Caleb, Paul doesn't know you and, at four and a half, he wants to know his father. But I won't let him meet you looking like this.'

“‘
You
? You mean your
mother
.'

“‘Both of us, Caleb.'

“He didn't answer. He stared out at the breakers.

“‘If you weren't drunk all the time, Mama would let you visit the children.' Jay, I told him to look me in the face and promise me that he would stop drinking.”

Her breath was whistling. I tried to stop her then. I felt guilty that I'd asked her to dredge all this up. I glanced at the oxygen gauge. “Raise it to five.”

“Sure you want to continue, Ma?”

She nodded.

“Your throat must be dry. Let me get you some apple juice,” I said to let her rest her lungs while I was gone.

“Where were we?” she asked after drinking half a glass of juice.

“You told him to promise you that he would stop drinking.”

“He answered: ‘Well, the rain don't stop falling because you and your mother tell it to.'

“‘And if you tell yourself'?' He didn't answer and kept staring out at the Atlantic. ‘Get yourself some decent clothes, Caleb. Put some teeth in your mouth. Make friends. Go back to church. Lay off the bottle. Get a wife or girlfriend. Do whatever it takes to stop you from drinking — for the sake of your health, your dignity, and the dignity of your children. Caleb?'

“For a long time we both said nothing.

“‘I want Paul to meet you. I'm afraid of what he might tell you, though. He states his opinions freely. Can you clean yourself up and meet us at the bus terminal in Kingstown on Saturday morning around ten? Wear your dentures and stay away from grog beginning today. I can smell it coming through your skin. It will kill you, Caleb.'

“‘Can't wear dentures. Nothing to hold them. Need new ones.'

“‘Alright. Come without them.'

“‘Your mother going be there?'

“‘She has to be there, Caleb. Paul will be meeting you for the first time since he was two. To him you and I are strangers.'

“He said nothing. I walked over to him and stretched out my hand. He took it, held it for a moment. ‘Look me fully in the eye, Caleb,' I said. ‘Saturday morning, around ten?' He nodded. Jay, you won't know how happy that made me. It was the first time we'd spoken to each since I left him.”

But that wasn't the end of it. The Friday night he called her. I heard them on the phone with him: Anna telling him: ‘Caleb, you are drunk.' The phone ringing a second time and Grama answering it and swearing like a Bay Street whore: “Go drown your fucking self, Caleb! You call yourself a father! They should castrate men like you. I'll castrate you myself if you ever bring your drunk, stinking self onto my premises . . . Fuck you too!' The phone slamming and Grama saying to Anna: “Now this jackass upset me. I won't be able to sleep. I wanted to tell you this could happen. That's why I told you not to tell Paul anything. Imagine the shit we'd be in tomorrow morning! Jay can handle it. He's been handling it since birth.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I placed a hand on Anna's wrist and stared directly into her eyes. “Ma, what did Daddy tell you on the phone that night?”

“‘I not coming to no effing town tomorrow. Eff you and eff your mother! What you want from me, eh? Ain't you already divorce me? Who effing you up in Canada? I hear they godless up there. You turn lesbian yet?' That's what your father said to me, his voice a loud slur. And then next morning, I was at the gate talking to Mr. Morris, and Mama called: ‘Anna, Your drunk husband is in town, wondering where we are.'”

***

On the Tuesday following, we did meet in town. Caleb wearing new clothes, his beard shaved, his face deeply crevassed but looking less haggard. He seemed wobblier and gaunter than usual. I wondered where he found the strength to break stones. We walked a short distance from the bus terminal to a hotel restaurant — Grama holding Paul's hand, I on Anna's right, Caleb alone behind us, carrying a small black plastic bag. At the restaurant, we joined two tables in the far corner of the deserted patio dining room looking out onto a square. The waitress, a very black, attractive, young woman, her plentiful hair in a hairnet, joked with Paul as she took our orders. He'd been quiet the entire trip, and now wouldn't say what he wanted to drink. The sailor suit he wore, clothing Ma had brought him, was a size too big. He'd refused to wear the cap.

“He likes apple juice,” Grama said, looking at him.

He shook his head slowly.

“Well, say what you want?”

He didn't answer.

Caleb ordered nothing. He yawned a couple of times.

The waitress went off with the orders. Paul scrutinized Caleb when he wasn't watching.

The waitress returned and gave Anna and Grama their coffee and me my orange juice.

“Have some of my juice,” I told Paul, who was directly opposite me, beside Grama. I pushed the glass toward him. He drank from the straw. After drinking almost half, he pushed the glass back to me. So far we and Caleb had said nothing beyond the hellos at the bus terminal.

“A lovely day,” Grama said, looking across at the sun-drenched two-storey buildings that lined the street across from Heritage Square. “How's the building business, Mr. Jackson?”

I tapped on the table in front of Daddy.

“Oh. Talking to me? What did you say?”

“How's the building business?”

“All right.”

“Lots of orders?”

“Enough.”

Paul got up, headed over to me, and whispered in my ear. I rose and took him to the bathroom.

When we returned, Grama said: “Paul, you've been pestering me with questions about your daddy, and now you're not even speaking to him?”

Paul smiled, turned and buried his head in her bosom.

“Come, Paul,” Anna said, taking a tissue from her purse. He went to her on the other side of the table where she was sitting beside me. She wiped the corners of his mouth.

“Paul, ask Daddy the questions you were asking me in the bathroom.”

He came to stand beside me and began whispering in my left ear. I pulled my head away. Paul giggled. I looked at him reprovingly. Paul sauntered off to resume his seat beside Grama. Now Paul held his stare when Daddy caught him looking. Finally he smiled at Daddy. He pulled Grama's head toward him and whispered in her ear.

“Sorry, Paul, I ask my own questions.”

“Paul,” Daddy said, “I bring something for you. You have to come and get it.”

“Go,” Ma said.

Grama pushed him gently, and waved him on with impatient hand gestures.

“What's it?” Paul asked.

“You'll have to go and see for yourself,” Ma said.

He headed toward Caleb, who picked up the paper bag from the floor, and gave it to Paul. Paul removed a small square carton and began turning it over in his hands.

“Open the box,” Caleb told him.

“Paul, I think I'm going deaf,” Grama said.

Sheepishly Paul said: “Thanks, Daddy.”

He had trouble opening the box and handed it to me. It contained a toy jeep with a remote control and the operating batteries. I put the batteries into the jeep and into the remote, and showed him how it worked. He learned quickly and soon had the jeep circling around the table.

He stayed at Caleb's side. He interrupted his game. “Do you have a cold?” He stared into Caleb's eyes.

“No. Why?”

“You smell of limacol. Grama wets my head with it when I have a cold.” He picked Caleb's hand up off the table, put it against his cheeks, and opened his eyes wide. He put Caleb's hand back down, looked at his own, then frowned. “Jay, show me your hands.” He came to where I was and rubbed my hands. He inspected Anna's and Grama's, then went back to Caleb and took his hands and felt them. “Your hands feel like sand and they are yellow, and feel like . . . like leather, like rough wood.”

“That's because I work hard.”

“What do you do?”

“I break stones with a hammer.”

Paul stood back and tore his eyes wide. “
You
break
stones
! How?”

“With a hammer.”

“You are strong!” He stared, squinting, sceptical, at Caleb's arms.

“Not really.”

He picked up Caleb's left hand and sniffed it once, then a second time. “Your hand smells like . . . like apples when they're spoiling. Jay, come smell Daddy's hands.”

Grama intervened. “Okay, Paul, it's alright. Your daddy had a headache this morning and rubbed something on his forehead for it. The smell's still on his hand.”

Paul sniffed Caleb's hand again. “What did you rub?”

“Tiger Balm,” Anna said.

“Ask Daddy what I told you in the bathroom,” Paul said.

“You ask him,” I said. “I'm not your carrier pigeon.”

“Are you coming to live with us?” Paul asked Caleb.

Anna brought her hand to her forehead. “Paul, are you sure you don't want something to drink?”

He shook his head.

“To eat?”

He nodded. “A cookie.”

“Would you like some milk too?” Grama asked.

“Yes, thanks. Daddy, are you coming to live with us?”

Caleb began to fidget. Anna and Grama exchanged anxious looks.

“Not right away, Paul,” Grama said. “Your Daddy's work keeps him very busy in the country. Now Paul, it's your turn to offer your father something. Something to eat, maybe? Ask your father what he would like to have.”

“Grama, Daddy can't chew. He has no teeth. Daddy, what happened to your teeth?”

“I lost them.”

“Is that because you don't brush them? Teacher Nancy says that when we don't brush our teeth they rot, and we get toothache, and it hurts and hurts, and our teeth rot away, and we can't chew our food.”

“No. That's not the reason. But I can eat cake. I'll take a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.”

While Caleb ate Paul looked at his mouth furtively, then at me, and laughed.

Later, at supper Anna asked Paul if he liked his daddy.

“He's old. Is he Jay's daddy too?”

“Sure. Didn't you hear Jay call him daddy?”

“Maurice says the man he calls daddy is not his daddy.”

“Who is Maurice?”

“My friend. Teacher Nancy picks on him because he's a cry-baby.”

“Would you like to see your daddy again?”

“Yes, but you and he live so far away.”

S
EEMS LIKE PAUL
will be always claiming my time. The year after Anna visited us, Grama sent him, two months before his sixth birthday, and reading even before he was five, to Excelsior Academy, a private school in Kingstown. I, going on twelve, started at Kingstown Secondary that same September. Responsibility for Paul took over my life. I'd wanted to join the drama club, but it would have meant remaining in school after 3 pm and returning sometimes on Saturdays. But at 3 pm, I had to walk to the northern end of Kingstown — Kingstown Secondary was at the southern end — half-way up a steep hill, and along the Leeward Highway bordering the Botanic Gardens, to meet Paul.

Grama made us stay in town. The ten or so secondary-school students from Havre who attended school in Kingstown returned home every day. Another three hundred students from Havre and the surrounding villages attended a newly built secondary school in Esperance, over the hill from Havre. But the teachers at Esperance Secondary weren't university graduates, and the curriculum didn't include foreign languages, literature, physics, and chemistry. Because of Paul's age, Grama felt that the two-way 70 km journey, up and down steep slopes and a potholed road full of hairpin curves, would overtire Paul and diminish his learning. So we boarded with Cousin Alice, Grama's cousin.

Cousin Alice lived in a two-storey house halfway down from Sion Hill. Her kitchen, living room, bathroom, and two bedrooms were on the upper floor. The entire downstairs — the back wall was built into the hill — was divided into five rooms, which she rented out. There was a narrow shed linked to the main structure by a covered walkway. Half of it was the tenants' kitchen and the other half was their bathroom. There was a tap and cement washbasin on one side of the shed where the tenants did their laundry.

Paul nicknamed her Chalice. She was in her late forties. Her father had been a British colonel who'd been posted to St. Vincent to oversee the island's constabulary. His framed photograph, in military attire, hung above the china closet. Her mother, Grama's paternal aunt, had been his housekeeper and mistress. Cousin Alice was their only child. There was no photograph of her mother. Paul asked her why. She told him he was not a magistrate and she'd committed no crime.

Her voice was piercing with a faint lisp. Her skin was off-white — like cooked tripe — and crisscrossed with veins like blue lines on a desert map. She was less than five feet; her stooped back made her chin tilt outwards and upwards and her breasts almost touch her bundle of a belly. Her face was tapered; her bulging grey eyes were at the same level as her flat nose; her lips were two thin lines that looked like a wound when they were rouged. She wore her sparse chestnut hair in a bun at the back of her head; it left her forehead bare and made her seem to be always sniffing. Paul felt she was cross-eyed. I didn't think so. She squinted and always looked at everything and everyone aslant. Her flat bottom made Paul giggle and wonder what she sat on. (His turned out to be just as flat). Once in a quarrel, Tungkance, one of the tenants, called her a mule.

“Why did she call you a mule?” Paul asked.

“She's downstairs. Go ask her yourself.”

“I know why,” he told me later when we were in their bedroom. “It's because she doesn't have children.”

She expected us to be silent when in her house. I complied as much as I could. Paul didn't.

She got home every day around 5:30 and rose at four every morning to attend matins at the Anglican cathedral. She never gave me a key, so, at 3:30, after collecting Paul at school, he and I would go to Elma's Restaurant for a glass of milk and a slice of cake; next we'd go to the library to do our homework or read, timing it so that we'd arrive at Cousin Alice's just after she got home. For the first two years I did the trip to Excelsior at lunchtime too. Along with 20-plus school kids from the country, we ate our lunch at Elma's. Elma put us in an alcove away from the other kids, and Louise her helper always came to ask if we'd had enough to eat.

In addition to the vegetables and the dozen eggs that Grama sent each Monday, she paid Cousin Alice for our room and board, with a little extra “so she won't skimp on the meat and fish she gives you all.” On Friday afternoons we travelled back to Havre in Father Henderson's car. On Monday mornings we were packed into the regular bus that carried one and one-half times the passengers it was licensed for, those Paul's age and younger sitting on the laps of adults — the journey: a constant ascent and descent of almost perpendicular hills along the edges of precipices without guardrails, some spots with just enough space for one-way traffic; the sea: sapphire, lace-fringed, lapping against the beige-and-black cliffs 100 or more metres below. That was our routine for six years, except during vacation: two weeks at Christmas, one at Easter, and the months of July and August.

At first I had trouble studying because of Paul's pestering questions. “If you don't shut up, I'll bop you. I have to study.”

“And I will tell Grama. You don't have the right to hit me. I will tell her you threatened me.”

“Little good it will do you. I'll just bop you again when we're in town, and give you double every time you tell.”

“And you'll be sorry, because one day I'll be a king and I'll make my guards cut off your head.”

“Yes. The name of your kingdom will be Wonderland, and your courtiers will be rabbits who'll constantly disappear in people's pots.”

I never bopped Paul, and the pestering never stopped.

“Jay, did you know?”

“No, I don't know.”

“Let me see what you're studying. Oh gases! I want to learn it too. Read it out loud.”

“You are driving me crazy.”

“Explain what oceanic islands are.”

“I have a warning, not an explanation: leave my textbooks alone.”

“When will my penis get to be big like yours?”

“Never. For troublesome boys like you it shrivels up and falls off.”

“Oh, you're so funny.”

Eventually I got Grama to buy us three 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. But it only lessened the pestering, and I had to arrange with Grama to free me from chores on weekends so I could get serious schoolwork done. She'd carry Paul to the store on Saturdays and leave him to read in the back or let him sit on a high stool at the front where he could observe the shoppers. Some Saturdays and the occasional Sunday he had practice at the Steelband Hall. On Sundays he was barred from disturbing me. He craved Grama's praise too much to disobey her when he was in Havre. In town the only way I could get him to swallow his cod liver oil pills and the Sanatogen powder mixed into his milk was to threaten to tell Grama. Cousin Alice would observe our breakfast battles, shake her head and say: “Cynthia's princes.” She prepared toast, juice, hot milk, and an egg each for us; sometimes instead of toast we got oatmeal; she sat with us long enough to down her cup of cocoa and a slice of bread slathered with guava jam. The jam was a gift from Grama, from guavas that came from her land.

Cousin Alice's boyfriend, Mr. Bolo, was a security guard at the telephone company where she was a secretary. He was tall and bulky — had to bend to enter the main door — with coal-black skin, red lips, yellowish deep-set eyes, and an unsmiling face. Something was wrong with his throat: he was always clearing it. Secretly Paul called him Major Elly. He visited her without fail every Wednesday around 7 pm and stayed for two hours. The first time Paul saw him, he asked her if he was her boyfriend. Her brow wrinkled. “Yes. What else you want to know, you feisty bugger: the colour o' me drawers?”

Paul shook his head, unfazed, his face stamped with a mischievous smile. Later he asked me: “Would she have shown me her drawers for real?”

I saw Mr. Bolo on Monday mornings as well. He collected from me the foodstuff that Grama sent as well as our weekly supply of freshly laundered clothing and took them to Cousin Alice's place during his lunch break.

Cousin Alice's Wednesday supper was special. “Wednesday, dessert day!” Paul would exclaim in her presence, and wink at me. She served sponge cake, always sponge cake bought from a bakery. On Wednesdays she didn't eat supper with us. In a gold, green, or burgundy satin dress, her perfume strong, her line-like lips carmine, her grey eyes glowing, giving her usually sad but now freshly powdered face a younger, happy look — she'd wait for Mr. Bolo to come. She'd put a bottle of rum and two glasses on the sideboard and move about with a feather duster, peering here and there in the living-and-dining room for dust. Paul and I would eat supper quickly and then head to our room, where, when he was older, a giggling Paul would ask me how fast I thought Major Elly was driving into Chalice, and whether she would “get big and have a baby.” Once Paul remarked that it was “useless watering her garden. Nothing grows there.” I looked at him surprised and asked him what he knew about it.

“Lots. I read, you know; I see what animals do.”

He certainly watched all the episodes of “Nature” — not at Cousin Alice's: she kept the TV in her bedroom — and the various programmes of animals in the wild. (Grama taped them for him and allowed him to watch them on Saturday and Sunday at home or in the backroom of the store, but restricted his TV time to two hours.) One time he said he'd want to be a cougar if he were a wild animal. I laughed, noting the obvious contradiction. “You're laughing because you're a toothless dog that can't even bark.”

Mr. Bolo was married. His own home was six houses down the slope. One Wednesday his daughter, a girl of around 12, came to Cousin Alice's house to tell him that Mrs. Bolo had collapsed at her gate, and an ambulance had taken her to the hospital. We'd heard the siren and would have been able to see where the ambulance had stopped, but Mr. Bolo and Cousin Alice and Paul and I were in our respective bedrooms. The next day, Tungkance — she was pale like Cousin Alice, freckled, two metres tall, and had melon-size breasts and a “bumptious” bum that rippled when she walked; “that harlot,” Cousin Alice called her — came out into the front yard, leaned her back against a white cedar tree there, and hollered up to Cousin Alice: “Adulteress, you hearing me? Adulteress, God wrath will come down on you, sure as the sun rise over Sion Hill and set in the sea. I'm warning you: leave Betsy Bolo husband alone; leave the man alone. His wife sick.”

Cousin Alice had just got in from work. She rushed to the front door, closed it, shut the louvres on both sides of it, and closed the curtains. “Listen to that cow!” she said to herself. “Just listen to that harlot! Listen to
her
sermonizing
me
!”

“What does adulteress mean?” Paul asked her.

“Look, boy!” She glared at Paul and stamped the floor.

Paul went to our bedroom, spent a minute, then returned. “I checked it in the dictionary,” he told her. “I know why you don't want to tell me.”

“Cut it out, Paul!” I glared at him.

Paul quieted, his eyes squeezed small, his forehead wrinkled in protest, his breath raspy.

For several weeks after that Mr. Bolo's visits were never more than half an hour, and I overheard the tenants whispering among themselves that Mrs. Bolo had a brain tumour.

Marcella, Tungkance's daughter, a year older than I, lived in the room with her mother. (Two other children, darker than Marcella, visited Tungkance on occasion; they lived with their father and stepmother.) Marcella had long braids, was honey-coloured, unfreckled, sleek and pretty. She wore lipstick, short tight dresses that were then in fashion, and high heels. She attended Saint Stephens Secondary School: a ramshackle building across the street from the Grenadines Wharf. On occasion another tenant, Melvina, sometimes asked Tungkance what rich white or “mulatto” man she had lined up for Marcella. On evenings when it wasn't raining the tenants sat on plastic chairs in front of their rooms, the lights of Kingstown gleaming below them, and conversed like this. Their laughter and teasing and gossip about the people they cooked and cleaned for would drift up to Paul and me. “She got the right colour,” Melvina would say. Tungkance would tell her to lay off her daughter and mind her own business. But Melvina would continue: “When you is young and you is pretty, you is lucky. You don' have to have education when you is pretty and you don' have to sweat in a hot kitchen and take abuse day in and day out, ‘cause plenty rich man line up to take care o' you.” (This on an evening when Tungkance was fretting with Marcella because she hadn't done her schoolwork: “You want to be servant like me for rich people? Is that you want?”) Melvina was soot-black, knock-kneed, and duck-shaped — not exactly in the coterie of women who were taken care of. She had a grown daughter who lived in the country with Melvina's mother.

A Tuesday when Cousin Alice was attending a meeting of the Anglican Women's League and Tungkance and the other women hadn't yet come in from work — they got home between 7:30 and 8 pm after the families they worked for had supped, Marcella and I had arranged to have sex. I was fifteen at the time. I only had time to fondle her breasts because Paul began banging on the door, shouting: “I know what you're doing. Let me in. Let me in. I want to do it too.” For days after, Paul would giggle and pester me. His brown eyes flaming, he'd say: “Kuk-Kuk, you did the nasty thing,” and giggle. “What's it like? I'll tell Grama. I won't tell if you stop forcing me to drink Sanatogen and take those awful cod-liver-oil pills” — his face all screwed up. “Yuk! Tastes terrible when I burp.” My answer was a firm no. He did tell and Grama responded: “Oh, Paul, when will you start writing novels?”

My second Christmas in Montreal Cousin Alice had scribbled in a Christmas card that she and Mr. Bolo were now married and that Marcella was the first runner-up in the Carnival Beauty Pageant that year. But when Cousin Alice attended Grama's funeral, she needed help to get out of the car. Her back was arched into a semi-circle, and she couldn't stand without the support of a walker. Mr. Bolo had died three months earlier from kidney failure. Caring for him, she said, had almost killed her. Marcella, beautiful: trim, svelte body, symmetrical face, seductive smile, perfect teeth, came with her to the funeral and stayed at her side. She's now a civil servant and lives with Cousin Alice: “My hand and foot, Jay. My hand and foot. A blessing, you hear me, Jay — a blessing I don't deserve.”