No Safeguards (19 page)

***

The room is quiet. I stand and stare at Anna's outline in the half upright bed. She has stopped breathing. I look at my watch. 5:13 am. I press her bell. The nurse comes, then Dr. Christine Lim.

Dr. Lim nods as she lifts the stethoscope from Anna's chest and reaches for the clipboard with Anna's chart. She looks up at me and asks: “Have you someone at home?”

“No.”

“You should. You're the one needing attention now.”

I
T'S JUNE. ANNA'S
illness became serious a month before I was to write my major comprehensive exam. I had it rescheduled for late fall. Still no word about Paul, and now I'm thinking something I was loathe to before: that Paul might be one of those swallowed up in the landslides that buried thousands when Stan struck.

***

It's a month since my mother's death and two days since my return from St. Vincent. I delayed the funeral for two weeks and placed obituary notices in the Montreal and Vincentian newspapers, hoping that Paul might be e-mailing his school friends, who'd see the notice and inform him. I don't have Paul's e-mail address.

I told those Haverites who asked for Ma Kirton's Genius that Paul was distraught and didn't want to be at the burial ceremony. Some frowned; a few snickered. Most likely Vincentians living in Montreal —at least ten belong to Anna's church — had already phoned home the information.

Caleb — looking a full decade older than 60, physique gaunt as a Bushman's, eyes sunken, skin a translucent mahogany and scrolled like antique porcelain — came to the funeral. I told him that Paul was doing research in a remote region of Guatemala, and couldn't be reached.

Caleb and I met a few days later in a café overlooking the Kingstown harbour. As grey and glossy black grackles flew onto the tables to gobble up any unattended food, and the horns of arriving and departing schooners sounded, we chitchatted — each uncomfortable with the other — about the changing weather in St. Vincent, the fear that the banana industry would be gone in a few years, the increase in tourism, a recent news item about black tourists being kept out of a hotel in the Grenadines, hotels blocking the public entrances to beaches to keep out the local population, the increased number of sex workers because of the tourist industry, etc. During the long pauses Caleb fidgeted, and I stared out at the ships in the blue-green water and at the northern tip of Bequia, a grey blur in the distance. “I was just thinking,” Caleb said toward the end, breaking a long silence, “that with all that good breeding your grandmother give you, and all that education you got in Canada, that you find me doltish. Doltish.” He gave an embarrassed grin, revealing his false teeth. “Is Anna who teach me that word. Before I used to say dotish.” He paused again then looked at me attentively. “No use talking to you ‘bout religion ‘cause your grandmother already turned you and your brother into infidels.”

“Ma became a Baptist — a Foot-Washing Baptist — five, no six, years before she died.”

His face beamed, and he half lifted himself from his seat with excitement. “I know it! Once God done choose you, you can't get away. Can't get away.”

I contemplated my father, remembered his beliefs centred on hell, his frequent citation: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”; my own singing along with the other youngsters: “Saviour, while my heart is tender / I will yield that heart to thee: / All my joys to thee surrender: / thine and only thine to be.”

“God ways mighty mysterious, you know,” Caleb said, staring out blankly over the harbour. “I sit here thinking that I put down preaching and take up drinking after Anna leave me, and I put down drinking when she come back from Canada and tell me to stop. And if you all didn't go live with your grandmother and I didn't have to come and visit you all there, I would own nothing today. As much as I hated that woman, she put me on my feet. And she didn't have to do it, because her daughter did done divorce me, and it was my fault. Your grandmother had modern ideas. I know that now.” He smiled. “Imagine: I used to forbid your mother from reading books to you. I remember when Paul win that spelling bee and his picture was in the papers, I could o' hardly stay on the ground. That is how proud I was. And I know he win it ‘cause your grandmother pay good money to send him to the best school. The day I see his picture on the front on the paper, I say: ‘Praise God I don't drink no more ‘cause I don't want to bring no more shame to my children.'”

I put my hand on his and squeezed it.

“Beulah want you to come have supper with us before you go back. Will you come?”

“Sure. With pleasure, Daddy.”

Caleb smiled and seemed relieved.

Two days later I went, a Saturday afternoon.

Beulah is Kalinago; homely; somewhere in her fifties; tiny: hardly more than five feet. Her bright, brown eyes stared at me unabashedly from an almost circular shale-coloured face. She looks sexless, mannish even: narrow hips and mere hints of breasts. A scarf of grey-green stripes hid her hair. She wore a loose shift of calico print: red, yellow, and mauve flowers on a green field. Most likely she'd made it herself. The outmoded sewing machine, one with a foot pedal, was in a corner of the living room. Caleb and she belong to some sort of holiness church. She's childless. Caleb's her second husband.

I had come without a cap or raincoat during a drizzle. “You too careless with your health,” she scolded me, and instantly went out the back door of the kitchen and returned with a root of ginger, which in minutes she transformed into steaming, aromatic tea. “This will sweat out any cold that taking root in you.” Dinner was a large bowl of spicy, delicious goat stew — the goat was culled from her herd — with lots of meat, tannias, eddoes, breadfruit, christophene, green papaya, and pigeon peas, chased down with ginger beer. She didn't eat with us. Instead she kept moving back and forth between the table and the kitchen sink while waiting to take the empty bowls from us.

She and Caleb live in a simply furnished, modest two-bedroom bungalow, about two kilometres inland from the shack where I used to visit him. About a year after Caleb had promised Anna to stop drinking, he came to visit Paul and me at Grama's place; and in one of the two sentences he usually exchanged with Grama, he mentioned that the plantation near Georgetown had been bought by the Vincentian government and was being leased in ten-acre plots with buy-options to landless people. Grama asked if he was leasing any. He said he'd love to but didn't have the obligatory two-thousand-dollar down payment. “Go make the arrangements,” she told him. She lent him the money. When he came to wish us goodbye the July we left for Canada, he informed Grama that he'd just made the final payment for the land and would soon be repaying her. In one of our infrequent letters, he told me that he'd acquired a second holding and was building a house.

He no longer breaks stones for a living. “We get enough from the land, just barely enough, to live on, but we live. By the grace of God, we live.” While he and I talked, Beulah went out into the drizzle and returned with avocados, hog plums, grafted mangoes, and tangerines for me.

“You and Paul is the only blood family I have,” Caleb said as he accompanied me to the main road to catch a bus to Kingstown.

“I'll write you often,” I told him. On the way into town I remembered what he'd said about God making him wealthy one day if he was a good steward, and I wondered how much of Deuteronomy was colouring my father's thinking. I was happy to see his new-found confidence, but saddened by the doctrines that probably informed it. Guess I have to be grateful for small mercies. Whatever gets us through life and keeps us out of prison, the insane asylum, and in Daddy's case, away from the bottle. I know nothing about my paternal relatives. I'll have to remedy that, but one challenge at a time. First I must find Paul.

Aunt Mercy, frail but still independent, occupies Grama's house. She'd moved in with Grama after Paul and I left for Canada. She apologized that she hadn't been able to care adequately for the garden. To me, it seemed well cared for. Grama had expanded it after we left. Bougainvillea ran along the porch railing in banners of fuchsia, mauve, and splashes of white. Two poinciana trees she'd planted at the front the same year we left were now about four metres high and flowering: one pink, one yellow. The white and pink queen of flowers that had always been there was now at least three metres high. At the back, where the land bordered the beach road, she'd planted a hibiscus hedge and four royal palms. The palms were now the same height as the house. The trees on the rest of the land that stretched up the steep hillside to where the new road had been blasted out of rock were covered in bromeliads and epiphytes. The tracks that Paul and I had made to get to the mango, plumrose, guava, and golden apple trees were overgrown. My grandmother's will reserves 20 percent of her estate for Aunt Mercy's needs. Anna had been her liquidator and had transferred power of attorney to me.

***

It's 8:12 pm. I hear the stomping of Jonathan's turned-out feet even before he gets to the door. He's been sleeping at the flat since Anna's death. Night before last when he came in his father's car to pick me up at the airport, I told him I was fine now, but Jonathan's defiant. He stays in my room, plugs in his laptop there, and works quietly. I have moved into Anna's room.

Beatrice called me earlier to find out if she should bring me food. I thanked her and said no.

“You got in touch with Paul yet?”

She's definitely fond of Paul and he of her. One evening around the time Paul came out of his depression I met him writing. He said it was a story he was calling “the charcoal people, people like the members of Ma's church, and that Beatrice was the narrator.” He must have noted my perplexed look for he said: “Those people turned to charcoal in kilns of conformity . . . ideology. People like Ma. People like Madam J. Fuel. If you and I don't watch out, we'll become charcoal too.”

I
REMEMBER PAUL'S
journals. He began keeping them quite young, probably in imitation of Grama, somewhere around six, around the time he started school at Excelsior. In the early days he pestered us about the words he couldn't spell. Would his journals tell me anything?
No, I won't read them without his permission.
I remember when Grama caught me reading one of Ma's letters to her. It was the one about her acceptance into nursing school. Grama had already read it aloud to us. But I wanted to be sure she hadn't left out anything.

The sun was setting out in the harbour, its light tinting the room golden. Grama's form was silhouetted against the window, and for a moment I couldn't see the anger in her eyes. The lower drawer of the china closet from which I'd removed the letter was still open. She pulled the letter from me, put it back in the envelope, returned it to the drawer, and pushed it back in.

I'd wanted to know everything about my mother, and I knew adults told each other things they hid from children.

“Stop staring at the floor and look me in the face. Never you read anyone's letters or diaries or personal papers without their permission. Never you do that! It's a serious violation of people's privacy.”

No, I won't venture into Paul's journals. They're probably locked away in his filing cabinet anyway.

I go to my bedroom and quietly take from the night table the three letters and two postcards that Paul sent me during the early part of his travel. Jonathan is snoring away. I go to Anna's room and sit on the edge of the bed and turn on the reading lamp. I re-read the first letter, reliving the joy I'd felt when I received it. It arrived two weeks after Paul had left. In it Paul calls me Kuk-Kuk, the name lovingly stamped with guardian, adviser, brother, defender, at a time when Paul affectionately looked up to me — before he became Ma Kirton's Genius.

Havana, Cuba.

25 March 2005

Dear Kuk-Kuk,

Surprised. Right? How's your schoolwork progressing?

Cuba's great and beautiful, and people are nice and everything.
I am happy to say that here there are no signs of the consumer society that's poisoning us North Americans and choking our landscape with garbage. But it's not what I expected. But, then, I'm not sure what I expected. I sort of had the fantasy that I'd see El Commandante giving one of his long speeches. I have this weird feeling that something's wrong. People look happy enough, though — happier than in Montreal, for sure.

I'm in Havana at the moment. It's really fantastic to look at all the beautiful buildings and squares — plazas, they call them here — everywhere from the colonial period, even though most of them need a good repair job. They're impressive, but I can't forget they were built on the backs of slaves and the poor. (Cuba and Brazil were the last New-World states to abolish slavery.) Havana, they say, is very European. I haven't been to Europe, so I don't know. Santiago, people here say, is Africa transplanted to Cuba. I'll be taking the train there in a couple of days.

Just thinking how great it would have been if you and I were making this trip together. Surprised to hear me say that, right? Remember when we went to St. Lucia? That's when I found out all your names and you became my Kuk-Kuk. Remembering what an asshole you were the night before I left, I should rename you
Fucked-up
. Anyhow, for now, you're a tiny bit forgiven and have become again my Kuk-Kuk.

One Love,

Paul

Anna was excited about the letter. I didn't let her read it. “Why didn't he write to me?”

I remember the St. Lucia excursion well. I was 13, Paul seven. Havre's Methodist Church had organized it as a fundraiser. We'd spent a weekend there.

I recall the ship sailing into the Castries harbour with land on both sides all the way into downtown Castries, Paul's hounding Grama to take him to the Union Nature Trail, and Grama frantically asking the hotel staff how to get there. He had binoculars that Anna had sent him a couple months before. He'd spent a lot of time on deck looking at the birds skimming the surface of the sea and identifying them by their crests, mantles, and what not. In the end we didn't visit the Trail because the guides didn't work on Sundays, and the ship back to St. Vincent set sail Sunday at midnight. He'd wanted to see the Saint Lucia parrot in its natural habitat. In his scrapbook on Caribbean birds he had photographs of it.

(A year later, instead of a weekend excursion to Grenada, Grama made it a five-day trip. We took the plane — a 30-minute flight — and Grama called ahead to arrange an outing to the Ridge and Lake Circle Trail so Paul could observe the birds and she could see the wild orchids. But it rained four of the five days we were there, and we didn't go. We never even got a chance to bathe in Grande Anse's turquoise waters and could only stare at it from atop the fort overlooking St Georges. When we got back to St. Vincent, Paul compensated by spending an entire day at the Botanical Gardens observing and photographing the parrots breeding in captivity there. Yes, you gave Paul what he wanted. He hounded you until he got it.)

Kuk-Kuk
.We'd needed travel documents for the St. Lucia trip, and Paul wanted to know everyone's middle names. His is Ezekiel. He paused on Habakkuk and knocked his teeth together: “Kuk-kuk!” He laughed. “It rhymes with . . .” His eyes glowed.

“You better not say it.”

“Can I call you Kuk-Kuk?”

“No.”

“I want to call you Kuk-Kuk. I mean it in a nice way. As a friend. Can I? Please, Big Brother?”

“No.”

Thereafter he called me Kuk-Kuk, and when Grama slipped and called me Kuk-Kuk too, he told her to stick to Jay. And he never used it when strangers were around. In Montreal, after Paul became full of vitriol, Kuk-Kuk died and Jay was reborn, often with a qualifying expletive; except, when in contempt, I became “Jacob Habakkuk Zephaniah,” followed by explosive laughter and thigh-slapping.

I pick up the postcard Paul sent from Belize. It's a scene taken at a sixty-degree angle of Hopkins Beach. It shows a deserted beach of golden-sand and a broad expanse of blue-green water — intent on evoking serenity
.
The text is in tightly-packed, very fine script:

Dangriga, Belize

April 14, 2005

As you can see, I'm in Belize. Hoping tomorrow to meet with a Garifuna historian. They're descendants of the Black Caribs (Kalinago, Garifuna) the British banished here from our home island at the end of the 18th century — in order to occupy their land. They've kept their language and traditions. Cool. Rediscovering how much I loved to bird-watch. The tanagers here and the vast range of parrots — mostly green — and trogons are something to see. Nature's artistry. Wow! Exciting! Bro, this trip is great. I'm finding my bearings. Getting in touch with my deeper self. I can feel the ugliness oozing out of me. I know now it's what I came to
do. Keep your ears in good form. You'll hear a lot when I come back.

One love,

Paul

The card arrived on one of Anna's days off, and she'd got it from the mailbox. “He didn't even mention me. Jay, he didn't mention me.”

“Ma, he's doing it deliberately because he knows you'll be hurt. Cheer up, Ma. Don't fall into his traps.”

She did brighten up. Even ate supper that evening, and instead of shutting herself away in her bedroom, she stayed in the living room, and chatted about Georgetown of all places, recalling the people we knew there, mostly members of Caleb's congregation, and wondering what had become of them.

***

If the embassy doesn't locate Paul within the next two weeks I think I'll have to forgo teaching this fall, suspend my studies, and go in search of him. Not that that would bother Paul. When I began my doctorate Paul smirked and said: “If you truly had intellect you wouldn't go chasing after degrees. See, I didn't even get a high school diploma because it's all in here.” He tapped his skull. “You must collect degrees otherwise people won't think you're bright. Wouldn't you love to have my intellect?”

***

The other postcard, six weeks later, came from Honduras. It features an impressive sculpture of a Neanderthal-like figure holding something. The printed explanation says it's a monkey man, the Mayan Storm God holding a sceptre or a torch.

Tegucigalpa

April 21, 2005

I'm in Honduras. You, a historian, should be here to see the impressive achievements of the Maya. It's they who should have conquered
Europe. Just think what they might have done, if they'd only discovered the wheel.

Getting ready to move on to Guatemala. Have to see Tikal, the
great Mayan site there, to compare it to Copán, the Honduran one.

One love,

Paul

For a while I listen to Jonathan's snoring. Of late I find myself trying to read but not seeing the words. Without realizing it, I discover I'm up and pacing the space from the bedroom door to the window
.
Definitely. I'll have to go and check out the newspapers of the past months. How seriously is the Canadian High Commission working to find him? The week it became clear that Anna was dying, I sent Foreign Affairs several photos of Paul and a lot of personal data. Paul hadn't registered with the Canadian High Commission, and the Guatemalan government has no record that he left the country. His visa was for three months. To continue living legally in Guatemala he should have left the country before the three-month expiry date and re-enter. “We will try contacting the language schools in Antigua in the hope of tracing his whereabouts,” a Marjorie Bligh from Foreign Affairs told me in an e-mail. “We're fairly confident that he's not in prison. The Guatemalan authorities are under international obligation to contact us in such cases.”

***

I look down at the two letters on the bed and pick one up.

Santa Elena

Costa Rica

May 11, 2005

Dear Jay,

I'm in Costa Rica. Skipped going to Guatemala and came here instead to find out if what I'd been hearing about Costa Rica is true — that it's the Switzerland of the New World and Central America's most ecologically conscious nation. Ticans definitely love nature. No ifs and buts about that. And that's all fine by me.

I travelled south on the Caribbean side. Stayed five days in a village called Cahuita. Lots of Blacks — Blacks are rare in San Jose — descendants of Jamaicans, live there. Their forebears worked for United Fruit, and now they work for the companies that have replaced United Fruit: Dole, Del Monte, Chiquita, etc. I was struck by how friendly Cahuitans are. They live like folks back in
St. Vincent: same kinds o' houses, same sort o' farming and fishing
, and they're friendly. There's a national park there, and miles and miles of beach in the form of an upside-down L. Strangely, on the horizontal arm of the L the sand is black, and on the vertical — the more popular half and beachfront for the national park — the sand is golden. Much of it is unsafe for swimming. It's full of dangerous currents.

From there I took a day trip south, not far from the border with Panama, to Puerto Viejo. It's a tourist slum for rich White boys who surf in the day and get stoned and laid at night. On the bus back, we were stopped by immigration officers who began to check people's papers. I didn't have my passport on me. Guess what, they didn't check me. I mentioned this to my landlord. He said that it was because I looked exactly like one of the fellows who operate the Cahuita National Park. Now, of course, I know I have to carry my passport around with me while I'm in Costa Rica.

A few days later I went back to San Jose and caught a bus to
the Pacific Coast, to Jaco of all places. It's worse than Puerto Viejo
. A one hundred percent tourist town. Nothing but surfing, swilling, and
pleasuring. Giant waves that surfers love are the pull there.
Further south is Manuel Antonio National Park. There are a couple
of good beaches there — the only ones that could compare to our Grenadines beaches. I enjoyed bathing there. I had the pleasure of seeing sloths hanging upside-down in the trees, fat agoutis running across the paths in the Park, and iguanas sunning themselves on the rocks right beside the bathers, unafraid of people.

But the best part of my trip so far has been my visit to the
erupting volcano Arenal. Imagine my surprise when the bus arrived
at La Fortuna on the other side of the volcano. There were scouts looking for people to fill the hotel rooms. I'm
glad I didn't book
ahead. I got a room with hot water for US$10 a night. In the evening,
a group of us: Swedish, Dutch, New Zealander, and British, boarded a minibus to see the volcano. We saw about a dozen bursts of lava lighting up the night sky. Afterwards we went to bathe in the thermal baths nearby. When I entered the first pool a White woman touched her husband and pointed at me. They both glared
at me and got out of the pool quickly. It was only then that I became
conscious that I was the only Black person there, and it occurred to me then that I was often the only Black person on the buses once I left the Caribbean coast.

All the members of the tour except me spoke to the chauffeur and workers at the spas in Spanish, which they said they'd learned in Antigua, Guatemala. Bro, I'll be heading there. I plan to come back to Canada fluent in Spanish. People here are friendly but, once you leave the Caribbean coast, few speak English, so when they begin talking to me on the buses, the conversation goes nowhere. I have to remedy that.

The next morning, I was part of a tour that took five college students from Brooklyn and me across Lake Arenal. The students left on a hiking tour once we disembarked, and a vehicle took me along a gravel road to Santa Elena (where I'm writing you from now). I've come here to visit the Monteverde Cloud Forest: El Bosque nubloso. I wanted to ascend it on foot, but, considering my frail lungs, I took a cab; inexpensive by North American standards. Once on the summit, I took one of the forest trails and was lucky enough to see a toucan. There's something majestic about being in a forest like this. I've recognized the cottonwood — here called the ceiba; one grows in our orchard in St. Vincent; it's the biggest tree in it — and the naked Indian (el indio desnudo). Many, many more of them are trees that grow in St. Vincent. There are some magnificent subspecies of balisier here that I've not seen in St. Vincent. Being in nature is what I most enjoy about Costa Rica. I've bought a videocassette of the Cloud Forest especially for you, so you'll have an idea of what I'm writing about.