No Safeguards (16 page)

I held my breath and only let it out when Paul left the dinette, went into his bedroom, and closed the door.

Today, when we were all seated at table, Anna asked me to say the grace.

“I'll say it,” Paul said.

Anna's eyes narrowed and her shoulders straightened.

“We're grateful to the earth and the sun and to workers everywhere for the food we're about to eat, and to Ma who paid for it and prepared it.”

“So who make the sun and the earth and give the workers health and strength?” Madam J asked.

“That's your area of expertise,” Paul said, putting a scoop of potato salad onto his plate. He sniffed at the salad and said: “Ma, how's it Jay's a better cook than you?”

Anna didn't answer. She was putting food onto Madam J's plate.

Madam J's gaze bored into Paul, her flat nose weighed down by thick, egg-shaped lenses. Her nut-brown complexion and thick lips — now glossed rust to match her auburn wig — were the only African traits visible. “Say praise God, I is not your mother.”

“So,” Paul said, reciprocating her stare, “are you president of the Serena Joy Sorority?”

Anita (late twenties, short, herself heavyset, very African looking), sitting on her aunt's left, tried to stifle her laugh, choked, and headed off to the bathroom.

Madam J clasped her hands and shook them violently, one foot pawed the floor. She lowered her hands to her lap, picked up her napkin, and began to wring it.

Paul clicked his tongue, his lips slightly apart, his eyes opened at their widest. “Jay, look! Look, Jay. She wants to wring my neck.”

“You is damn right. Left to me, boy, I would slap you into next week and back to last year.”

Paul dropped his knife and fork and clapped. He winked at me.

When Anita resumed her seat, Paul turned to her. “I call Ma Felicity Foil. What do you call her?” He indicated Madam J with an out-turned thumb.

Anita smiled nervously and focused on her plate.

“I'm calling a truce, okay,” he said, his arms crossed in an X, his fingers splayed. “Would be a shame if we didn't show some appreciation for all the time Ma spent cooking this food.”

After we'd eaten, and Anna and Madam J had settled into the living room to listen to gospel music, Paul joined Anita and me washing the dishes. “So you like
The Handmaid`s Tale,
” Anita said to him. We learned that she'd interrupted a teaching career in Jamaica to pursue an MA in English at Concordia and would resume her job as soon as she finished: the following April. She and Paul talked on about
The Handmaid's Tale.
“You think Atwood's book is frightening?” she told us, after peering into the living to make sure her aunt wasn't listening. “Think again. There's a group that believes God is preparing to set up a government in Washington based on the laws of Leviticus.”

“Yeah, I know,” Paul said.

When Madam J and Anita were leaving, Paul, his cheeks pulled back in a big grin, opened his arms to hug Madam J. Her face registered shock and she braced herself against the sliver of wall beside the coat closet.

“What kind o' unforgiving Christian is you, Sister?” his arms still open to embrace her.

“Listen, you force-ripe man.” She wagged a finger in his face. “You listen to me. Stop ‘busing poor Sister Kirton and me will forgive you.” She winked at Anna and Anita.

Paul's grin broadened. He nodded. They embraced. “I think we can be friends as long as I protect my neck. You're kind o' cooler than I thought. Now you're Madam Cool. Know something: I
love
to go head to head with you. It's fun. Not like him.” He pointed to me. “Wimps out on me all the time. No fun in that.”

On Thursday of that week, Paul rapped on my door, opened it, and stood in the doorway frowning, his body hunched forward. Anna was at work.

After a long silence, I said: “So?”

Paul turned his head sideways and asked, almost inaudibly: “Bro, if I plant you, will you grow?”

The expression was from our Vincentian childhood. It seemed out of place here. “No, I'll wither. What sort of trouble you're in now?”

“Seriously, Jay. Seriously. Like I'm trying to turn a new leaf. You understand?”

Really!

“I need your help, but you mustn't let Ma in on it.” His frown lines were deep; his eyes small, piercing; his stare intense, terrifying.

“No promises. Talk. I'll make up my mind after.”

“I need $200.”

“What for?”

“I can't tell you right now.”

“Well, then I can't lend you.”

“You prefer to see me get hurt?” He glanced at me and nodded slowly.

“Paul, this isn't some prank of yours?”

He shook his head slowly, fear in his bulging eyes.

“This has to do with drugs, right?”

Paul breathed deeply. His eyes were downcast when he faced me again. “I'm trying, Jay. I'm trying. I have debts to settle before I can turn the page. Okay, here's the straight goods: Nine-Lives, my supplier, refused to pay the goons who protect me; said I didn't advise him ahead of time that I was quitting, and this was leaving a hole in his overhead, since I won't be bringing in any income. Jay, I have $250 and I need $200 more to pay them off. They're snarling and getting ready to pounce.”

For a while I said nothing. I'd known it could come to this; worse even. Two months earlier the son of one of Anna's co-workers was gunned down on the corner of Plamondon and Victoria.
Known to police. A settling of accounts
. “And if they shake you down again?” I tried to look into his eyes, but Paul's head was lowered.

“They'll be too paranoid to. This is like one crazy business, you hear:
Fou
en hostie!
Easy to get into; once in they do everything to keep you in. Nine-Lives is like in a knot that I won't like keep my trap shut. Worrying, I guess, that he'll like have to take me out. Of course, they'll do it if I like rat on them; their insiders will tell them and they'll have no choice. They don't like the killing part; costs them too much to get the investigations bungled. But right now the goons need their
fric
, and I don't like want a broken arm or a bullet in my shin. They've given me till noon tomorrow.” He was silent for a few seconds. “I'll be alright afterwards, Jay. I'm sure I'll be. I'm sure. You know how determined I am once I set my mind to something. After that Nine-Lives will like send out feelers to get me to change my mind. I won't. I promise you, I won't. I know I won't. For Grama's sake, I won't. If I like continue as I'm going, don't you see that one day she'll read terrible things in the papers about me, or hear about it on radio or TV? I'll run away if I have to. I can't continue like this, Jay. I can't. You can't imagine the nightmares I'm having. I'm ashamed of myself, Jay. If I don't change I'll kill myself before they kill me.”

For a while I said nothing, and was flooded with sadness as I remembered the little amber-eyed bundle Anna brought back from the hospital, the little boy I'd been responsible for in some way since his birth. So much promise, so much pain, so much disappointment. I wiped my eyes, got up from my desk, and went to get the money for Paul.

When I returned and handed him the money, I told him: “Don't disappoint Grama, don't disappoint Ma — whatever you think about Ma, she loves you — and don't disappoint yourself.” Paul hugged me; we embraced tightly for almost a minute. “I'm counting on you. Paul, I'm counting on you.”

P
AUL, WHERE
are you? You haven't relapsed . . .

I get up, stand over Anna, clasp her cold, limp hand. Ma, you're dying. Leaving us for good this time. I'm only twenty-six. Paul's not yet twenty-one. You are only fifty. Why, Ma, why? I release her hand, swallow to hold back the tears, and resume my seat.

***

There were other moments when Paul reached out, but they left us more perplexed than reassured. I remember one holiday Monday in particular. I was standing in the doorway to my bedroom. Paul held a notebook and stood with his back leaning against the dining table and stared at Anna on the sofa. “I don't want to hurt your feelings, Ma.” He bit his lip and hung his head. “Jay, help me make Ma understand why her beliefs are wrong.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

He donned his mischievous grin: the one with his tongue half-extended. “By being candid.”

“Candid about what?”

“Everything, Jay.
Every single thing
.” He closed his eyes tightly.

“Wow!”

Paul squinted and shook his head with sincere pity. Then he sighed and went to sit on the sofa beside Anna. She attempted to get up, but he held on to her with a pleading look. He put his arms around her. Her face got taut.

“Relax, Ma. Relax.”

She took a deep breath.

“Listen to this, Ma.” He opened the notebook and began to rap:

Don't just cower.

Don't be a wallflower.

Oh Ma, oh Ma,

Fight the power.

Fight the power, Ma.

Fight the power.

To hell with pablum

Eat meat.

Food's not only wheat.

Apply the heat.

Get off your bum.

Down a rum.

Get on your own feet.

Toss minders in the street.

Ma, mete and defeat

The God hucksters.

Let them bleat.

Fight the power, Ma:

With a broomstick, your mind,

A lawnmower. Don't cower,

Ma, fight the power.

Get off your back. Get on your feet

Kick, box or kill the thieves

The hacks.

Don't go lower. Rise up. Higher.

Fly free as a plover.

Rise up. Fight the power.

Ma, fight the power.

Fight the power.

Fight the power.

She smiled, but the lines in her forehead signalled confusion.

Paul turned, stared at her, his eyes bright. “I'm only begging, begging you, Ma, to do Jay and me a favour and accept us for what we are . . .” His tone sincere, pleading.

“What do you mean? Jay and you . . . what about Jay and you that you want me to accept? . . . What favour are you talking about, Paul?” Her voice a siren.

He turned his head away, began flicking his fingers, and remained silent for about 15 seconds. “There's something I want to tell you, Ma. But I can't, not while you still belong to
that
church.”

Her reply was to embrace him tightly, her plea, I think, for understanding why she needed her religion.

His body relaxed against hers and he began to cry.

She glanced at me questioningly, then turned her attention to Paul. “There's so much you can't understand,” her voice quavering, her eyes torn wide, signalling horror. “You're not old enough. You haven't walked in my shoes.” She too began to cry. (I know now that terror had to do with what Bulljow told her when she first arrived here.)

Paul unwound himself from her embrace. “Ma, human nature is vast, too vast to fit your religious envelope.”

Now the horror broke and her tears came. “You are 15, Paul. What can you know about human nature?”

“Not a lot, Ma. But from your beliefs, you don't know a whole lot either.”

I watched the goodwill they'd begun to build fall apart as they returned behind their barricades and into their combat spaces.

I went into my bedroom wondering what Paul wanted to be accepted for. Was he asking Anna to accept his delinquent behaviour?

***

I stand, take a couple of tissues from the box on the night table, and dab the sweat beads on Anna's forehead. The nurse — a petite, mixed race woman, in everyday clothing — comes to check the IV and meets me standing at the head of the bed.

“Why didn't you ask for a pull-out bed?” she says.

I shrug.

“Go to the visitors' lounge and take a nap.”

I shake my head. “Thanks.”

She leaves and I sit back down.

B
Y 17 PAUL'S
vitriol lessened, and his teasing of Anna became infrequent and gentler, more along the lines of: “Ma, you know why God is spelt with one ‘o' and good with two?” By then she'd learned to respond with total silence. “Hazard a guess . . . Well, while God was drowning the world, he fell into the water and shrank. Here's a second reason: Noah, seeing how God had destroyed his own creation, removed the second ‘o'.”

Now hardly any noise came from his room, and when music did, it was likely to be jazz: Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mingus, Wynton Marsalis, Oscar Peterson . . . Gone was the gangster rap. I complimented him on the change. He said that music must be more than rain on a tin roof or banging on steel pipes. “I'm off lyrics for now. I want to learn to hear what those geniuses are saying with their instruments. It's taxing, but I'm listening and learning. I wish I'd continued to play pan.”

One Saturday, Beatrice, Anna's co-worker and church sister — tall, half-white, grey-eyed, tomboyish, voice tremulous like the older Katherine Hepburn's — came to the house and was helping Anna make pone. They were standing at the kitchen counter with the ingredients spread out in front of them when Paul sidled up to her.

“Are you making it from corn?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” Beatrice said. “You want to learn how?”

Paul shook his head. “Then I'm having none.”

Beatrice looked at him, frowning.

“Didn't you know that where a man gets his corn pone is where he gets his opinions?”

“You ain't no man.”

“Want to prove it?”

Beatrice grabbed him by the collar. Paul pretended she was choking him, and began to slump toward the ground. When she let him go he almost fell. She was laughing and shaking her head.

“See, Ma? That's how you should handle me. You take your parenting too seriously.” But he wouldn't be Paul if he didn't offer an encore. “Beatrice, is Pastor Braxton your minister?” By now he had gone to sit on the sofa.

She shook her head.

“This woman,” Paul said. “Her name's Alma. White. A virgin In her forties. Belongs to a church called Redeemed in Christ.”

Paul raised himself to sit on the armrest and put on his under-the-eyelids mesmerizing look.

“Pastor Braxton — this tar-black man, six and a half feet tall, shoulders like a bronco, voice like a thunderclap, face like a bulldog — was her pastor. Three-quarters of his sermons were on adultery. So Alma she goes to see him one day in his church office. She tells him that every night she dreams that a black man on a white horse abducts her, and she always wakes up at that point.

“Pastor Braxton passes his hand over his shining pate and fingers his jowls. He gets up, walks to an inner room. He beckons her to follow him.

“Inside the room is a couch. Braxton sits on it and hits the space beside him where he wants her to sit. She sits down.

“With one hand he caresses her lips and drops the other to her tits, then onto her thighs, then under her dress.

“She jumps and stays his hand. ‘Pastor Braxton, you're a married man.'

“And he's like: ‘Indeed, every inch a man.'

“She relaxes her hold and Pastor Braxton proceeds to assess the goods. And he's like: ‘Take off your clothes.' She obeys.

“When it's over and he's getting tissue to clean up the blood, he says: ‘Sister, you sure did the right thing. Nobody should go back to the Lord with unfinished business.'

“And she's like: ‘Pastor, you're always preaching about adultery.'

“And he's like: ‘It's my favourite sin.'

“And she's like: ‘But, Pastor, it's still a sin. Now you must marry me and make it right.'

“And he's like: ‘Sister Alma, I already have a wife. And besides, if we don't sin, Christ's death would be in vain. There you have it, Sister Alma, you fulfilled your dream: I am the black man; you are the horse. And now, you must excuse me, I've just done man's work, now let me do the Lord's.'”

Beatrice nodded and turned to stare at Anna who was frozen with embarrassment. “Sister Anna, now that's some
ministering
to the flock. At least he didn't try to empty her bank account. That one with the church on Upper Lachine Road was breeding down those undocumented Vincentians, cashing their cheques, and pocketing the money, and when they complained, he turned immigration on them.

“But listen, young man, what you meant by I should belong to Braxton's church? I ain't white and I ain't no virgin, and no doctrine ever stopped me from getting a piece of swe-e-e-e-t loving. No siree, it never did. Never will.”

By then too Paul's delinquency had ended and he'd stuck to his promise to stop peddling drugs — abruptly, as if it too were part of the obscene theatre he'd forced us to perform in week after week. “After 16,” he said, grinning, “you get a criminal record and risk going to jail and being deported.” For about three months he called himself a Rasta
sufferah
, who would one day be liberated by “the most exalted Haile Selassie, Rastafari”; marijuana was
holy herb
that put him in communion with the divine (“You mean getting high?”); Anna and I were
downpressers,
agents of Babylon, and cancers on Africa's body, and the end of our days had been prophesied.

Then one day he came home with his locks chopped off. “Looks like the
Bredahren
caught you eating pork?” But he'd done it himself, because he'd found out that the reason Rastas didn't cut their hair was because Samson's strength was in his hair. “And that shit they like lay on you about Selassie being God. Slavery: slavery! — Jay, can you believe it? — was going on inside Ethiopia while Selassie was emperor.” There was a long silence in which he stared at the floor. “You can forgive 1930s Jamaicans for not knowing this. But
today
?” He shook his head. Then said after a while: “Man, the Enlightenment gave those guys a wide berth.” He gestured washing his hands of them. “Walter Rodney lured me into this. To boost Black pride he left out the ugly stuff. Shouldn't have. From now on, I will believe only in myself.” He swallowed and looked as if he was about to cry. But up to the time he left for Latin America, one of the
Bredahren
supplied him with
holy herb
.

Then he was working part-time at “the plantation” — Subway — and had already repeated Secondary V. Apart from English, French, and history, his final marks were marginal; Mrs. Mehta had urged him to remain in school for one more year. Half way through the year it was clear that nothing had changed. He wasn't attending classes or doing the assignments. The second time his marks were almost as poor.

“Come on,” Paul said, “you don't expect me to sit in class and listen to boring teachers or slog through stuff that dulls my soul just to keep teachers and textbook publishers in business. If it doesn't feed my soul or stir my imagination, I'm not interested. I'm on the same page with Blake. ‘The School Boy.'”

“And your job at Subway?” I could think of nothing more boring.

“Let's just say, it's a tiny compromise. It keeps me from peddling drugs. Okay. You want me alive. Right? And you'll be the first to agree that I shouldn't be a parasite. It may not be evident to you, but I too have pride.”

Paul didn't apply to CEGEP. Instead he turned to working fulltime at Subway and complained incessantly about being “a plantation slave.”
He made a big show about paying for his room and board, and actually kept it up for six weeks or so.

About six months after promising to believe only in himself, he began attending meetings of ADDA (the Army for the Defence of Diasporic Africans): “Black liberators,” who claimed they were “the Black descendants of Levi . . . the two percent that will return the Black race to the paths of righteousness.” After weeks of dissing white people, he quietly left the group.

By then Paul's shoulders had broadened to around 1.4 m. But for all that, his height was only 1.5 m — almost as broad as he was tall — and he weighed over 98 kg. — a contrast to my 1.75 m, 70 kg frame. (He inherited grandfather Zachary's physique. In photographs with Grama, she is a head taller than he and less than half his girth.) Paul had an attractive symmetrical, squarish face, aquiline nose, moderately thick lips, and a cleft chin; his eye colour remained as it had been in childhood: a pale amber that shone like jewels in his smooth coffee-brown face; he sported bushy sideburns and a beard and still wore silver studs in both ears. After the Rasta debacle he turned to wearing braids. His gut was a tun, because of his daily cortisone intake and his appetite. He had a penchant for jeans with crotches almost to his knees, prompting me to quip: “It's a good thing you no longer shoplift; you'd have a hell of a time making your getaway in those.” He was especially sensitive about his feet: 6½, and his “table-top” butt. “Like Cousin Alice's.”

On the street, he affected the gangster strut: the hop-and-drop-torso-rock, heels barely touching the ground. Asthma kept him from becoming a behemoth. Not that he didn't try. He joined a Côte des Neiges gym intent on doing just that, but gave up after a month. Any exertion outside his normal range made him wheeze and sent his heart racing dangerously fast. His trainer suggested gentler, tone-up exercises. Those were “for sissies: your kind, Jay.” But Anna and I no longer feared that he'd end up in detention.

***

Paul, why are you punishing us? Where are you?

On November 5, 2003, Paul's 18th birthday, I said to him: “You think anyone from Havre would recognize Ma Kirton's Genius?” I meant his size.

“Go to hell! ‘Cause you've begun a PhD, you think you're cute? Well, you're not. All the degrees in the world won't make you White. That's what counts here.”

“Thanks for the enlightenment.”

“There's more where it came from, but you'll have to pay.”

“Who pays for sour gas?”

“Man, if there was dialysis for doltishness, you'd be permanently hooked up.”

“For you there's verbal detox.”

“Wow! I'm impressed. If this keeps up, I'll elevate you from ovine to bovine.”

***

Just over two months later, January 21, 2004, we returned to Havre to attend Grama's funeral. Anna thought it was a blessing Grama didn't live long enough to find out what a disappointment Paul had become.We'd never told her what was happening to him and the gossip around Paul didn't seem to have reached her.

My last memory of her was the final ten minutes we'd spent with her the Saturday morning, in 1997, just before we left for Canada. She'd decided not to come to the airport with us, saying that she didn't want people to see her cry. It was around 5:30 am, and the sun's glow could be seen in the sky behind the rocks encircling Havre. The sea, untouched by its light, was still grey. Grama was wearing a quilted blue housecoat. She'd recently changed her glasses. Behind the convex lenses her eyes seemed to be in deep holes, the black frames contrasting with her beige face; the half-moon curves that had emerged below her cheekbones over the years were very visible. The week before, Father Henderson had persuaded her to become a volunteer instructor in the government's alphabetization programme, and I was pleased that when we left she would have something to fill our space. She'd turned to Paul, her eyes suddenly aglow. “I hope to live long enough with a lucid mind and good eyesight to read of your brilliant success.” And she continued to stare at Paul for a long time. Then with a start, as if someone had poked her in the ribs, she turned to face me, and I could hear the embarrassment in her voice. “You will do quite well too, Jay. I have no doubt you will. Just learn to loosen up a little.”

Loosen up?
What did she mean?

The September when Paul entered secondary III and she sent him money to buy a stereo and a computer, she and Anna had quarrelled about it, and she told Anna to mind her own business; it was her money to do with as she pleased; but she stopped giving in to Paul's requests for money.

Around 11 pm the day of her burial, just after the last of those attending the wake had left the house, Anna and I were in Grama's bedroom trying to unwind. Anna was stretched out on Grama's bed; I was sitting in an armchair.

“Jay,” Anna began, then paused. “Jay, I think that Mama resented me for holding her back in life.”

“What do you mean?”
Do we have to talk about this now?

“You know how she always liked to put down my father. One of those times she said that she agreed with his argument on poverty. ‘Anna, I always felt something was fishy about the Dives story in the Bible. Now I know that Christ, the Christ that Christianity invented, was a politician like his inventors and told his followers what they wanted to hear. And those blessed-be-this and blessed-be-that that he spouted, if anybody tried to get me to swallow that swill, I'd knock him cold with the first thing I got my hands on. The facts are plain . . . Aletha Joseph, you know who she is?'

“‘Of course, Mama. Everyone does. She's the chief surgeon at the Colonial Hospital, and you and she were in class together, and you came first and she came second and sometimes third. She finished high school and you didn't. And the day after Daddy asked for your hand, you read in
The Vincentian
that she'd got a scholarship to study medicine at St Andrews in Scotland. One day Dr. Joseph dropped in the store to say hello to you, and you told me the story. And you said that it was because her parents were schoolteachers, and you said poverty was a curse, not a blessing, and anybody who said the opposite should be shot.'

“Mama nodded. ‘Your father understood that sort of poverty. He fled from it and got trapped in another.'

“‘Mama,' I said, ‘are you sorry you had me?'