No Safeguards (3 page)

T
HE NURSE COMES
to the bedside and takes a quick look at Anna. I listen to her rasping breath and for a while hold my own until she lets out hers. When the nurse leaves I stand at the head of the bed and stare at Anna's face half-hidden in the dim light. I sit down again. My fingers feel numb. I open and close them to warm them up.
Ma, you can't die. Don't do this to me.

***

She was born in Havre de la Paix (shortened to Havre), a town of fewer than 1,200 on St. Vincent's Leeward coast. Havre is snuggled in a cove semi-hugged by two spurs of intermixed limestone and black volcanic rock jutting out into the sea like floating ribs from the mountain range that forms a spine the entire length of the island. A booklet by one of the town's residents states that Havre was built “on the floor of an extinct volcano, one of many extinct volcanoes on the leeward side of the island the force of whose eruptions had blown out their seaward rims.” At Havre's northern end, the spur is less steep. At the shore, where the crater's rim had been blasted away (so that there the arms don't join), the spurs rise sheer from the sea, forming solid walls on both sides. They continue inland for a good 50 metres before rounding out in a steep slope. I surmised that, over time, soil had accumulated in the blown-out crater on whose floor the town is built. From the front porch of my grandmother's home near the seashore, I'd look inland, up at the mass of black rock intermixed with limestone that forms a 270-degree girder, crowned at the top and contoured at the bottom with wild vegetation. In the rainy season, the summit is bonneted in mist, and the rocks hold dozens of fountains that turn off when the dry season comes. After Georgetown, on the windward side of the island, with its numerous gentle intersecting valleys and miles of flat and rolling land, I found Havre both suffocating and comforting. But in its calm sea without whirlpools I became an excellent swimmer, ignoring my grandmother's fears; she'd grown up in Georgetown beside the Atlantic's roaring, battering three-metre waves and many whirlpools with invisible hands waiting to pull you in.

To the north, over in the next valley from Havre, is all the flat land that can be found on this part of the Leeward coast. All of it was at one time Laird's Plantation. Beyond that there are the mountains, often cloud-capped, and blue-grey when they're not, and a volcano, waiting to blow out its own seaward rim. A month after Anna married Caleb and moved to Georgetown — a Good Friday morning just before sunrise, it had tried, and forced the residents of Havre and all of northern St. Vincent to move into evacuation camps. Beginning with rumbles that sounded like thunder, followed by a loud explosion, it shook the island and sent a succession of fireballs far up into the sky before they fragmented and cascaded in showers of ashes and red-hot stones.

About two kilometres north of the volcano, the mountains come to an abrupt halt at the seashore. One time when Grama, Paul, and I went to the area by boat, to a picnic at the Falls of Baleine, I saw that there, for almost a kilometre, black rock streaked with coral and limestone rises perpendicular from the sea. The main road does not go beyond Laird Plantation, now a tiny fraction of its original size. The Lairds inherited it from other Whites to whom it had been given or sold when the French and later the British took the island from the Kalinago. In 1795 most of those who'd survived European attacks and diseases (many had mated with free Africans, whose means of coming to St. Vincent is still in dispute) were banished to Honduras. The others were corralled into an area under the volcano on the windward side, where the descendants of those not killed in earlier volcanic eruptions — over a thousand died in the 1902 eruption — now live. When I lived in Georgetown I sometimes saw them there, and busloads of them were always heading to and from Kingstown. When Grama, Paul, and I visited Grenada, we saw a monument at Sauteurs, at the cliff overlooking the sea where the Grenadian Kalinago had jumped to their death rather than surrender to the French. The town's name memorializes the event:
Sauteurs
— leapers. A Catholic complex — Church and school — is located on it. Grama told Paul and me to bow our heads and remain silent for a minute. A bug-eyed Paul pestered her with questions afterwards. Grama told us then that her father was Kalinago, one of the few times she ever mentioned him.

***

I catch myself biting the nail of my right thumb, a habit Grama had tried in vain to break. I check my cellphone. Nothing. No message from Paul. I stare at Anna's outline in the dim light, at her chest rising and falling and quarrelling with the air it's pulling in and pushing out.

***

I'd always sensed, even before I went to live with Grama, before I could put it into words even, that Anna was not quite the child Grama had wanted. She's certainly not the mother Paul thinks he deserves. The week our visas for Canada arrived, Grama confirmed my suspicions. “When you all reach this age, the hormones turn you all giddy, and you all think adults know nothing, like if adults weren't adolescents too; and you all want all sorts of independence that you all can't handle. That is what happened to your mother. Three years into high school she dropped out. In her second year, a group of evangelists from the States came to Havre ‘to win souls for Christ'.” She chuckled and slowly shook her head. “They said the Second Coming would be on August 23, 1970. They told people it was pointless to struggle to get material things when in just over a year the Rapture would happen. Your mother fell for it. She stopped swimming in the sea. ‘If men look at my body and lust after it, God will hold me accountable.' She stopped wearing perfume, jewellery, and bright colours; she started hiding her hair under black scarves; she bamboozled my seamstress into sewing her three long-sleeved, ankle-length smocks, each one a different shade of grey. Then they baptized her.

“‘What you intend to do with all your clothes?' I asked her.

“‘Burn them. They're sinful. They imperil men's souls. And I've stopped wearing slacks. Deuteronomy forbids it.'

“She even extended her foolishness to me. One August Monday I was getting ready to go on a picnic and couldn't find the pair of Bermuda shorts I wanted to wear. I turned my dressing table inside out. In the end I wore something else. A week later I went to look for a pantsuit to wear to a social Mr. Morrison was having, and I couldn't find that either. And then it hit me. ‘Anna', I called out to your mother sitting in the living room, ‘you know what became of my tangerine pant suit?' She came into the bedroom with a big grin on her face. Jay, I could hear the blood beating in my temples.

“‘I am only obeying God's commandment. Deuteronomy says . . .'

“Jay, she didn't have time to finish. ‘God's what? You damn fool!' I grabbed her by the shoulders and I shook her. ‘Go, bring my clothes for me, forthwith.' I gave her such a shove she stumbled.

“‘I put them in the garbage. I threw them out already. “The woman shalt not wear that which pertaineth unto a man; neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord Thy God.” God commands me to show you the errors in your ways.'

“Jay, I don't know how I kept from strangling Anna that day.

“The evangelists rented a small wooden house up there.” Grama pointed to the northern spur, up to the hill where the church, bigger now and made of cement blocks, stands. “The converts met up there every evening to sing and pray. They called it tarrying. ‘Child, see? You're trapped in a tarry ring.' I sometimes teased her. An adolescent phase. Adolescent angst. It will pass. I'd already read an article about it in
Psychology Today
. This child will come to her senses.

“The only point I fussed with her about was her frequent fasting. By the second year I was able to solve the transportation problem to school and have her come home every day. ‘You're a growing child. You need your daily nourishment, plenty of it too. How can you concentrate and learn on an empty stomach?'

“‘The Holy Spirit is more nourishing than anything you'll ever feed me.'

“‘
The Holy Spirit
! May, a woman from Georgetown whose rotting body they found in a locked-up shack up there a few months ago, had stopped having sex with her husband
because the Holy Spirit had ordered her to
. Two years later she gave birth to a child, and people rechristened her Immaculate May. Anna, dear, stop abusing your body in the name of religion. You promise me?'

“Jay, your mother stared at the floor and said not one word. With my thumb I lifted her chin and attempted to stare into her eyes. She closed them.

“Your mother was an average student; in intelligence nowhere near you, and definitely not your brother. She failed all her third-year exams. She read the Bible when she should have been studying. Sometimes I'd overhear her trying to convert Mercy while they were doing chores. I used to listen to them and laugh.

“At the end of July 1970, your mother announced that she was not returning to school. I argued with her. ‘The Second Coming might be near. The early Christians had thought so too, but, one thousand nine hundred and seventy years later, it hasn't happened. In the meantime a body, filled or unfilled with the Holy Spirit, has to eat; and everyone knows you eat better if you have a good education.' Jay, your mother refused to return to school.”

A week later, Grama and I were on the back porch, the sun about an hour from setting in the Caribbean Sea; I standing, Grama sitting, Paul inside reading. I took up the conversation from where she had left off. “What happened on August 23, 1970?”

“Jay, sit.”

I sat in the lounge chair beside her.

She was silent for a while, her face showing deep thought. Then she told me where I would find a bible on her bookshelves and to bring it for her. She sent me back for her glasses. She resumed the story.

“On the morning of August 23, 1970, your mother and the other converts, between 35 and 40 of them — the men in white trousers and shirts, some with shoes, some with flip-flops, and most plain bare-foot; the women in white dresses and white headscarves, some in shoes, some in flip-flops, and many barefoot — gathered in the shack up there. A huge gathering from here and all the surrounding villages came to stare at the singing and praying
saints.
Mercy and I among them. The
saints
would interrupt their praying and singing and stare out to sea every time the breeze gusted. At midnight — we were a huge crowd outside: everyone who couldn't come earlier because of work or what have you was there — we broke into loud laughter and began to heckle them. Some Rapture! ‘This look more like
rupture
?' Sefus Butcher called out to them. Even so, I couldn't convince your mother to return to school.

“The Rapture didn't happen in 1970 — or for that matter, since — but the Church of the Elect continued to grow. Every year the missionaries from the States would come and give out aspirins and gauze and second-hand clothes. People are cheap, you hear me. It's something priests and politicians know well. They made new converts and rented one- and two-room shacks all over the island, meeting-places for their converts. Now instead of giving a precise date, they said the Rapture was imminent.

“The next big dispute between your mother and me began one day three years later — around eleven o'clock one morning. Anna was leaning against the front porch railing, reading some tract or the other the church in The States sent her. I was sitting on a porch chair braiding my hair. Jay, I told your mother in dialect — she wasn't allowed to talk to me in it, just like I forbid you and Paul to — ‘Yo' mean to tell me, the one pickney I have is a jackass!' She was just past 17. I'm seeing her clearly like if it's happening now: in a grey-three-quarter-sleeve smock almost to her ankles, head tied in a dark brown rag. I told her: ‘I can't go on feeding and clothing you. If you were still in school it would have been different. Your father left me well off: enough to educate you all the way through university. You have to find a job. Your holiness is bad for both of us.'

“‘I don't have any qualifications.'

“‘You should have thought about that when you left school to join that bradabangbang up there.' I'd already come close to wearing out poor Mercy's ears complaining about her. Jay, my patience had run out. Gone completely. I said to your mother: ‘You bewitched or what? Their white skin and Yankee talk mesmerize you?'

“Your mother replied: ‘You won't understand. Mama, you have to be born again. The natural man cannot understand the things of God.'

“‘I guess that includes women too,' I told her. ‘Your dear St. Paul — that misogynist and supporter of slavery — wouldn't have wanted women, natural or unnatural, to understand anything.'

“Anna said: ‘I don't have to put up with your blasphemy. God will take care of you in his own way. I'm leaving this house of iniquity.'

“I thought she was joking and played along. ‘How will you eat?'

“‘God will take care of me,' your mother replied.

“‘Child, stop your foolishness.'

“‘Mama, I'm serious.'

“‘What? You're going off to get knocked-up? That's what happens to know-it-all young women who leave home. I'm warning you: don't come back here with any man's bastard. Don't come back here crying to me with any inside you, in your arms, or pulling at your skirt.'

“Anna closed her eyes, stood stiffer and straighter than a coconut-trunk, and began quoting scripture.” Grama put on her glasses then, flipped through the pages of the bible, until she found what she was looking for. “This is what your mother recited to me: ‘Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body what ye shall put on.' Then your mother put down the bible, stretched out her arms as if she herself was the cross Christ was crucified on; next she clasped her hands under chin, threw back her head, gazed upwards and recited” — Grama picked up the bible and read: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Grama closed the bible and put it on the patio table. “Jay, I would have laughed if I didn't see the horror awaiting her. I was frightened.