Red Jacket (14 page)

The Chancellor Considers

The chancellor's suite at the University of the Antilles is a stunning combination of state-of-the-art and down-home. It boasts TV viewing on a gigantic screen, music on a Bose system, a kitchen to make a gourmet chef's mouth water. At the same time, the rooms celebrate the island, from bamboo floors through furniture of blue mahoe to intuitive paintings by Pamungo and Ngosao. If the North thinks it knows posh, St. Chris is where it must come to be set straight.

Eyes closed, Mark is relaxing in a leather recliner, a surprise gift from Mona. It had been waiting there when the principal showed him the suite on his first visit as chancellor.

Celia sticks her head in just as Mark settles back in the large leather chair.

“Can I make you a cuppa to start the day, sir?”

“No, Celia. I'm fine, thanks.”

“I'm off, then. I've still a few things to do.” She turns to go and then swings round to ask, “Have you spoken with Dr. Carpenter?”

“Actually, no, not yet. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered.” She smiles again and he thinks he detects something. For a split second he has a vision of the St. Chris trash weekly,
Kris-eye,
with front page headlines that shriek, “Honoured Guest Back to Rub Chancellor's Belly?”

Mind made up to set the outlandish imaginings aside, he goes into the kitchen, turns on the kettle, and finds that he's still wondering about the look on Celia's face. He's being paranoid. It's been years, and besides, they were discreet. Except of course for the farewell at Logan Airport, for which he now curses Grace. But it's absurd. Nobody who knew them had been anywhere nearby.

Now Celia is gone, he does want a cup of tea. Feeling lazy, he sprinkles tea leaves straight into a china teapot — Mona insists tea only tastes right in china. He pours the tea when it's brewed, sips, sets the cup aside, tips the recliner back, and closes his eyes. Time to work out what the chaps are up to, what the agendas are.

He wishes he knew more about the brain, about the relationship between intellect, intuition, and imagination. He'd been surprised at his invitation to the seminar, a three-day meeting in Cambridge sponsored by World Resources Institute, for his research and writing had been confined to what was needed in his job and therefore had constituted mostly reports for the bank in the previous few years. Six working groups, and yet somehow Grace and he had ended up on the same one. They slogged on, three women and one man, late into the last night, and then Agnes, a South African, and Fatima, from Delhi, begged off. Though both were staying in the hotel, they had spouses put up in nearby bed-and-breakfasts whom they were anxious to join. There'd been nothing for Grace and him to do, as the unencumbered ones, but volunteer to tidy up the report for the plenary next day.

They fell asleep on the divan in Fatima's room where they'd all been working. At just after three they woke together, roused by a noisy heating vent, for though the days were unseasonably warm, the nights got pretty cool. A hiccup at the start, then it ran smooth and sweet as molasses.

“There's just one thing, Mark. I take it you're not married? Because if you are, we can't do this.”

“I am married, Grace, but we haven't lived together as man and wife for almost three years.” It was true, word for word. Mona and he hadn't made love for about that long. He and Grace ended up having great sex for the next couple of hours, after which they'd napped. He'd stirred first, content, and so cursed, as Mona said often, to be reflective.

“There are two people inside of you,” he declared, rolling over to face her.

“Two people in me?” Grace raised an eyebrow. “No way. One's plenty.”

“Not just you, or me. Two people in all of us,” he insisted.

“Sorry. I'm not following you. It must be the recent, exhausting activity.”

“One must examine one's life,” he persisted, “to gain perspective.”

“Some folks have a cigarette after sex. Some have a shower. Some have sex again. You philosophize?”

“That's because I always wanted to be a teacher.” He'd wanted to be other things too, but that one popped out, so he didn't take it back.

“Okay. Shoot. If you can.” She smiled at his penis.

“There's the ideal person, the one you'd like to be, and the real person, the one you are.”

“That's the actual person. According to Steph.”

“Who is Steph?”

“My roommate at U of T, who saved me in foreign. She did English.”

“Okay. Two people, one ideal, one actual.”

“So who bedded me?”

“Since it was indubitably idyllic, I would have to say my ideal self.”

“Cor-
nee!
I've been had by a vintage, sweet-mouth, St. Chris saga boy.”

“That's heartless!”

“As for me, I'm happy to say that was the actual me. See?” She leaned over and licked his ears, nipples, navel. They'd gone at it again till the bells rang six.

“I've never done this before,” she'd announced as they picked through the clothes on the floor. It stopped him. She was no virgin.

“Are you on the pill?”

“Why would I be?”

“Suppose you have a baby, Grace?”

“Suppose you do?”

The last day went superbly: good reports, the concluding statement not too ambitious, the final reception affording thanks, toasts, no speeches. They'd spent the last couple of hours old-talking by the river before going to the airport. She was going to London, then Geneva, and then some place in Africa.

He couldn't believe his luck: a halfway decent meeting; unexpected and excellent sex; a clean leave-taking, the woman off to be occupied with her life.

“If I get pregnant,” she said over her shoulder as she got in line at the gate, “I'll name the baby for Ma or Pa. Just tell me if you want to know.”

A couple nearby looked up. He flushed, black as he was. She saw his discomfort, smiled, and went through the gate.

Ordination

On Thursday, 15 September 1988, the feast day of Notre Dame des Douleurs, patron saint of Mabuli, Bishop Ndule of the diocese of Benke will ordain Michael Nathan Nabene, Simeon Peter Lubonli, and James Nathaniel Atule.

Crowds of tourists, believing and unbelieving, flood Benke for the national feast day. They come mostly to gape at the great church and to be part of the Procession of Renewal of La Cathédrale de Notre-Dame-des-Douleurs, as Mapome, when she was alive, always called it. When the church was built in 1806, the Mbula, a clan related to the Fulani who live in the North, near the desert, created the decoration for the cathedral in a style similar to that of the Gourounsi. Mbula artists had renewed it every year since.

The ritual preparations for this annual maintenance process involve treks to forest and kouris to find a special tree bark and a fine, loess-type dirt, which yield dyes that contribute two colours to the decorations: a deep indigo and a brilliant cerulean blue. Both, it is said, are not to be seen anywhere else on earth. There are costumes, music, dancing. At first, anyone could join the search and festivities. Now it costs ten US dollars or the equivalent in buleles
.

If visitors wonder at the choice of the Sorrowful Mother of God as the country's patron saint, it has never been a difficulty for Mabulians, who agree that the story of the Dame Bleue des Douleurs, one of three great fables from the Mabuli Chronicles, foreshadowed her selection.

Mapome began telling Jimmy the story of the Blue Lady of Dolours before he could talk. When he was old enough, they had acted it out together: she played the grandmother and he played the children's parts.

“Heheme!”

“Haheme!”

“Long ago, in a terrible hot time, a grandma was leading some sick and thirsty children up a dry kouri
,
through wasted country, past skeletons of dead animals, in search of food and water. Tired and despairing, she huddled with the children under a dolmen used by sheep and goats, for the sun was fierce.”

“What's a dolmen?”

“A kind of stone table, Jimmy, a house meant for those who have left us.”

“You mean a grave on the top of the ground?”

“Yes, you could say that. May I go on?”

He nodded.

“The infants were hungry. Their mouths were dry and their clothes ragged and dirty. They missed their parents, so they cried and wouldn't stop though their big sisters kept blowing in their faces.”

“Why did their sisters do that?”

“So the little ones would stop crying.”

“You used to do it to me?”

Mapome nodded.

“Did I stop?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes you cried louder.”

He said no more, and she continued the story.

“The babies scratched at rashes and blisters that had grown on their arms and legs and chests in the heat, and they howled till their bodies went limp.”

At this point, Jimmy threw his heart into the howling.

“Suddenly, it was quiet.”

“Heheme!”

“Haheme!”

“It is well, my grandson, that you are listening, for this is the marvelous part.” She rolled her eyes heavenward to stress the wonder of it and resumed. “Weeping softly, a woman in a blue kiloli appeared from nowhere. She slipped the children's hands, one into another, and began leading them.”

Jimmy and Mapome's journey began right then. It looped through the mango orchard in his grandparents' front yard, round through beds of tomatoes, yam-hills, and clumps of eddoes beside the house, and down to the slope behind.

“The grandmother watched as the tearful woman led the children into the tinder of afternoon. The children wept quietly, like the Blue Lady. Tears washed down their faces, arms and legs, slowly merging to form a stream at their feet.”

Jimmy was good at howling, but better at quiet weeping. His features crumpled into a tragic, sniffing, lip-quivering assemblage that broke Mapome's heart every time, but she never interrupted the tale.

“After a while, the Weeping One directed the children's bare feet onto the damp earth. Soon they were stepping strong beside a steady trickle. They bent, cupping their hands to sip the clear water. Near the bank were reeds and plants, white lotus lilies and blue water hyacinths. Small fish swam among the waving stalks. And then like magic, they were splashing in a river, looking for njamra among the rocks, bringing them to the grandmother to cook on a bramble fire.”

Mapome sank to the ground beside a shallow creek that ran for much of the year. By now Jimmy had discarded his mask of misery. Gleeful, he raced up and down gathering leaves and dry grass for the make-believe fire.

“At the end of the day, they looked for the Blue Lady but she was nowhere to be found. That night, they slept under new gallery forest, bellies full of fat shrimp. Twigs clicked softly, and leaves twitched as trees rose beside the river. Tree frogs squeaked in the branches, cicadas cried, and bullfrogs grunted. Night birds trilled. The ripening moon, rimmed with haze, shed a blue light.”

Curled up on the grass, he and Mapome often fell asleep.

On the last Sunday before his ordination — now every day is some kind of “last” day — Jimmy wakes, looks through his window into a sky blue as the sapphire in Nila's engagement ring, and feels his chest squeeze in on itself. What the hell does he think he is doing? What is he doing? He is young, not bad-looking, loves women, and thrives on sex. And he is becoming a priest?

He pulls himself together, goes through his misgivings again, and again dismisses them as being of little consequence.

“There is something of very large consequence. You're just not facing it.”

He knows what the voice — his conscience, isn't it? — is referring to. Compared to that thing “of very large consequence,” an occasionally energetic prick and lusts he can kill with a lime were small sappi
.
What if he is a seer, some kind of evil mage? After all, he has seen two people to their deaths. There is a world of evil — demons and devils — no doubt about that. It isn't just the stuff of shrill books and Hollywood movies. Suppose he has unwittingly been caught up in that world? And if he has priestly powers, will they not make him more appealing to malevolent forces? How can he go through with it?

Thanks to the bizarre incidents of his life, he doesn't lack the courage to tell his superior that ordination will be a mistake. He doesn't know the new man, Leviticus Kitendi, well, but by all accounts he is a good sort.

His mother raps on his door. “Are you hungry, mon fils?”

He isn't hungry, merely exhausted, though the day is only five minutes old.
“
Un moment, Maman.
”

“Good. I'll wait for you. We have peanut porridge today.”

It doesn't usually take him long to get downstairs for peanut porridge, but today it requires a huge effort of will to make his limbs obey the smallest order. His mother's dark eyes ferret out trouble, even before he pulls out his stool and sits down. “What's wrong?” She shakes the
Mabuli Messenger
at him. “You are big news, you three. All over the front page.”

Jimmy shrugs. “I can't go ahead with it, Maman. I'm going to Father Kitendi as soon as I've eaten to tell him so.”

“I think you're having wedding jitters.”

“I've already had those.”

“You think they're like mumps, that you only have once?”

“Maman, don't joke. This is not something I can proceed with. Now that I know, I have to put a stop to it.”

“Has this just occurred to you, or has it been troubling you all along?”

“I won't say it hasn't occurred to me before, but I wouldn't say it has been bothering me all along.”

“It overwhelmed you this morning, then?”

“Buried me like the worst sandstorm.”

She folds the paper, swift, and exact. “I too was scared on my wedding day. My mother gave me a test. She said, ‘Think of three things that you would much rather be doing today.' ”

“And?”

“I couldn't. So she said, ‘Think of one thing you'd much rather be doing.' ”

“And?”

“I couldn't. So I married your father.”

Jimmy swallows the last of his porridge, stands, and kisses her. “I won't be long.”

“Are you going to walk?”

He nods, pats her shoulder goodbye, goes out on to the back verandah, runs down the stairs, and pauses at the bottom. The sun, set upon by feisty grey clouds, isn't giving in. It elbows its way to a thin splinter in the murk, breaking through in an apostrophe of pure light that falls on his father's most recent undertaking, a grove of red sorrel. Funny, he thinks of it by its St. Chris name, sorrel, rather than bissap, the name they give it in West Africa. Bissape is a popular drink in Mabuli. Sappi is a beer brewed from the flowers of the plant.

His father Andri thinks the plant might be commercially viable. The evening before, he'd stood on the steps at sunset swinging a bag of dried blossoms back and forth on its string as if it were a censer. “We Mabulians mostly use it for bissape and sappi, but other people use it for syrup, jam, chutney, even a sort of liquor. White people use it for food colouring. The seeds make good chicken feed, and yield cooking oil. And you can eat the leaves like spinach or add them to soup.”

“If it's such a versatile plant, Papa, why aren't we using it for all these purposes or growing it for export?”

“Exactly what I say, my son. One reason is we're not scientific farmers. We're leaving crops to the vagaries of rainfall, which is inefficient. Rain is hardly dependable in these parts. If you're serious about growing a crop, you have to work out good irrigation practices. Angélique has some friends at the college who've taken it on as a project. If this little effort here works out, I'll fund a proper experiment.” Andri pursed his lips till they touched his nose, then slid apart in a smile of benign self-satisfaction.

Jimmy picks his way down the path through the bissap bushes. He stopped to put on one of the pairs of water boots that live at the kitchen door, because the ground is still muddy from unusually heavy rains in August. Mabuli was lucky. Floods have devastated several districts in Burkina Faso, some right on the border, but Mabuli has suffered comparatively little damage. Instead, trees are flagrantly green, pastures stout, mini dams brimful.

Vexation shoves him through the back gate into a lane pot-holed with shiny brown pools and embraced by acacias. He slops through the puddles. What a waste of the Jesuits' resources! Maybe he can still hang around with them, teach, or work in one of their social action centres. Sadly, Maman's test won't serve. Marriage is a commitment to one person. Being a priest is, to use Mapome's metaphor, a camel with another kind of hump. He'll tell Kitendi the whole story, prophesying, womanizing, and all. The superior knows about Nila, but she's not been the only woman in his life.

In the superior's study, Jimmy inspects Leviticus Kitendi. He is an awkward man, given to looking absent, inattentive. It is Kitendi who told him four Christophians were coming for the ordination: the Watsons, Father Aston Cole, S.J., and Sister Rita Rose. In September 1979, his first time in St. Chris, the Watsons put Jimmy up because the island had a “visitation,” as Harry Watson put it, from weather associated with Hurricane Frederic, and the badly damaged Jesuit house was being repaired. Marva was Harry's wife. The priest, Aston Cole, taught him Rhetoric and Caribbean Literature during his teaching stint on the island while Rita Rose, a Dominican nun, was a nursing sister in the Catholic hospital where he was helping the arthritic chaplain to get around.

Preparing to recite his woes, Jimmy isn't sure Kitendi will be helpful, but he proceeds anyway. “Father, I have to make a confession.”

“Another one, Jimmy? If it will make you feel better, sure, let's do it. Shall we go to the Lady Chapel?”

“Not that kind of confession, Father. I have to tell you why I can't go through with my ordination.”

“The Lady Chapel will still do, if that's okay with you. And please, call me Levi. We are labourers in the same vineyard, remember?”

So he confesses. He tells the older man how he became friends with Marva and Harry, that Harry taught him how to cook St. Chris food and Marva gave him his first lessons in St. Chris Creole. “She made it clear she'd have been happy to give me other lessons too, and I was tempted. She was a former Miss St. Chris and in her forties at the time, but you'd have needed her age paper to know. She was stunning.”

“Ah, women from the Caribbean certainly are,” Levi muses.

“We got past that, thank God, and she was invaluable in cluing me into local customs and into the behaviour I could expect from ‘yout' in St. Chris. They were very influenced by American TV and movies, she said, and most important, I shouldn't lose my temper, because that was their aim and purpose. Plus, she said, it would be no big deal that I was from Africa, but if I cooked up a good tale about my clan markings, it might hold them for a bit. I did, and it did.”

“Sounds like quite a woman, and Harry must be a very special man. But she's not why you can't be ordained, Jimmy, is she?”

“No!” a not-so-small demon says. “That was Rita Rose.”

Not true, but Jimmy is stalling so he tackles her next. “Have you met Sister Rita Rose who's coming, Levi?”

Leviticus shakes his head.

“For sure she is no Marva Watson, and she was certainly issuing me no invitations. She merely worked havoc on me — completely upsetting my equilibrium. She was like Nila, not so much in looks but in disposition, a pressure cooker, oodles of seething psychic energy. I fell desperately in love, and was going crazy with worry. The regional superior at the time wasn't in St. Chris right then, what with the hurricane and all. Lucky for me, Aston Cole was teaching me Rhetoric, and a sort of survey course in Caribbean Literature.”