Red Jacket (16 page)

Doublespeak

En route to the council meeting on Thursday morning, the first letter Mark wrote Grace comes to mind, word for word. He knows the text perfectly because he'd drafted and redrafted it until he was satisfied.

Dear Grace,

It was a pleasure to see you after so long and to work with you on a matter that, though not on the agenda, proved an important one for our consideration.

I must admit that I'm not aware of all the parameters surrounding the issue in question, and so precisely what we are faced with. Never-theless, we made such excellent progress at our first meeting, despite time constraints, that I'm optimistic about what we might accomplish with steady and consistent application. Thus, I'm suggesting that we meet soon again, or at least find a way to discuss concerns that I'm sure are paramount in both our minds.

I'd be glad if you could call me as soon as you can. You could be anywhere between Venice and Vladivostok, so over to you!

All good wishes,

Mark Blackman

The second letter was shorter; he's pretty sure of its wording too. He'd been annoyed at not having heard from her, and in two minds about writing. He tells himself now that he was equally careful, never mind his irritation.

Dear Grace,

I am concerned at not having had a reply to my recent letter. I hope it's the burden of work that has delayed your response and not ill health.

This comes simply to reiterate my earlier sentiments. As I said previously, I feel that the project we worked on together is important and has a great deal of potential, never mind the considerable challenges it presents. I would like to pursue it and to meet with you soon, to that end.

If you feel the same way (and I must assume, given the enthusiasm you displayed, that you do), I'd be glad to hear from you as soon as possible, so that we can make appropriate plans.

All good wishes,

Mark Blackman

People busily on the move greet him as they pass. He nods, noblesse oblige, holding course for the council room.

Grace hadn't replied to the second letter either. Why had he written at all? Why not phone? The cloak and dagger appeal of coded messages? The sweet angst of anticipating a response? Fear of rejection, better delivered on paper he could crush and throw away? Whatever, it hadn't occurred to him to call. He'd left his home number with his personal assistant, though, so if she called, she could get him.

Back to St. Chris

Ma at the door of the barracks hut, her hair just now starting to grey, but her stance solid as ever, bosom thrust out, shoulders thrown back, legs straight and firm as the sides of Hogman Gorge. She watches as the Half-a-Million, a fast, new bus named for its price, sets her daughter down, and Grace collects her backpack and starts walking up the path. The cosmos, purple, yellow, and mauve, wave welcome right and left, their green eyelash leaves making a low forest of shade to cool her dusty feet.

Up the wooden steps, backpack just inside the door, and then Grace gives her mother a long, tight-tight hug. It feels strange for now her head is not as usual on Ma's shoulder, but they are nearly jaw-by-jaw. Either she has grown taller since she went to foreign, or Ma is growing down, the way old people do. But Ma is not old. Gramps is old, but not Ma, neither Pa.

When finally they come apart, Grace asks, “How you stay, Ma? And Pa? Gramps? Sam and Princess? And the boys?”

“Everybody fine, Grace. Well as can be expected. The young ones is at school and your Pa at work. Gramps taking some shut-eye just now, but he soon wake. Doctor put him in bed for a week, say he have a touch of pneumonia.”

Gracie hugs her mother again, smelling carbolic soap, sweat, and the faint odour of seasoning, thyme and pimento.

“You must be dead beat. Sun hot already, and the year just start!” Ma smiles, lifts up Grace's backpack and takes it inside. “Come sit down and drink a glass of lemonade and eat something. I have the escoveitched fish that you like, hard-dough bread and pickles from the last batch Gramps make.”

Grace sits at the table. Ma disappears for one minute, comes back with a basin of water, a spotless white washrag, and some sweet soap. Grace nods thanks, washes her hands, and then takes Ma's hand and holds it against her cheek. She smiles as Ma retrieves the hand, puts ice from a Styrofoam container on the table into a tall glass that she takes from a small curio cabinet, and pours out lemonade. Grace bows her head and blesses the food, mostly a concession to Ma, Pa, and Gramps, but also because here in Wentley, God is already nearer. She takes a long suck on the lemonade and starts with her fingers on the fish and hard-dough bread.

Ma talks as she watches Grace eat, filling her in on all the news “Pansy expecting again. This one make four, and she lose one. That girl don't even allow a good year between making those babies. I tell her, ‘Pansy, if you take the pikni off the breast so soon, you going to start a next one in no time.' But you know Pansy. Say she don't want no baby to drag down her breast. I don't know how she work that out, for each new baby is another breast-feeding and more dragging down!”

“So they doing okay? The children? She? Mortimer?”

Ma shrugs, eyebrows and shoulders lifting up one time. “Give him his due, Grace, he treat her with respect, and he is a good provider. And he don't oblige her to wear locks nor cover herself from neck to foot. The ital food, yes, he insist on that, but that not such a bad thing. We pretty much eating ital.”

Grace examines this room where she has perhaps spent most of her waking life. On a bookshelf are books she has sent home, second-hand books on health, nutrition, house repairs. They are from her exile, a way to keep connected.

Ma sees her look, says, “Thank you for sending the books! Gramps read the medical articles, recommend them to your Pa. And you know your father. When he see it write down, it persuade him. So we not eating so much of the stew peas and salt beef and pig tail no more.”

“I'm glad, Ma,” Grace says. “Is Gramps make the shelf? And the cabinet? I never know he was a woodworker.”

“Stewie! Bring them in here Christmas last, proud as any peacock! He doing good at Pursea's.”

Grace is glad. Stewie struggles so hard. “You don't finish about Mortimer and Pansy and the children, Ma.”

“Oh, Mortimer love those children bad, Grace. The man would give hand and foot for them. And he look well pleased every time Pansy belly start swell.”

“So what bout Gramps, Ma? Where he is?” She is wondering where Gramps could be sleeping. Ma points to the door leading to the back porch.

“Go on and see if him wake, my darling.”

Grace pushes the back door open, preparing her eyes for the bright afternoon light, waiting to see the low banks of monkey fiddle and jump-up-and-kiss-me, the skeleton of the burnt tree supporting one end of the clothes line, and the pole bearing the other end upon which, by Stewie's account, he has hung a wire ring so Conrad can dunk balls. Gramps will be asleep in the old wicker-bottom rocking chair that was still rocking Princess when she left.

Stepping through the door and down, for the porch is at a lower level, she finds she's not standing on rickety boards but on a firm floor. Nor is there any green glare from the sun on its journey home. Instead, soft light coming through a curtained window shows Grace a long, thin room created from enclosing the back gallery. Under the window Gramps is lying on a high old-style metal double bed. Grace is overjoyed to see him propped up on pillows, asleep in his singlet, breaths of air gently billowing his chest and fluting his broad nostrils.

Clearly plenty things have changed in the time she has been away. So Gramps bed, which had always been in storage under the house, its metal cool even in the hottest time, is now rehabilitated and brought inside. Tucked into the far corner of the porch, it is pretty much taking up the width of the room. Someone, maybe Stewie of the just-acquired joinery skills, has made a table the same height as the bed, thin, so it fits into the narrow space between the bed and the outside wall. On this table are Gramps Bible, spectacles, a newspaper, a pen, and a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. As she stands watching him, Gramps snorts, an exhalation that pushes him into wakefulness. He opens his eyes, looks at Grace, taps the bed with his heel and pulls up his knees to make space for her.

“Come, Gracie. Take a kotch. Tell me how the colonizing of the white folks coming along. Everybody up there eating patty and singing ‘Slide Mongoose'?”

“Don't know bout the singing, but everybody eating patty, for sure.”

“Good. I know you would fix up them Toronto folks.”

When Ma calls her “darling,” Grace knows she's home, but it is Gramps calling her “Gracie” and confident that she “fix up the Toronto folks” that persuades her at least momently that she has a place in the world. Gramps could give lessons to Papa God.

A Parcel

Last thing before bed, Grace skims a letter that's just come from Maisie.

Larkins' Home

14 March 1979

Dear Grace,

Sorry to be hounding you all the way across the ocean, but when I tell my story you will know why. Sylvia is pregnant, and I don't know what to do. Is not any big deal that she is pregnant. Woman getting pregnant ever since, but when I think of that girl with a baby, I tremble. She can't take care of herself much less a small, helpless human being. Remember I told you the last time we talk that I had a feeling she was up to something? Well, about three months ago, one week after she turn fifteen, she find a little basement room and a pyah-pyah job and say she done with school and not coming back home either. I try to pass by where she live, but half the time she not in her basement hovel. Of course once morning sickness start, she quick-quick find herself back into this house. Now she only sleep and watch TV. If I push her, she give me a hand, but sometimes I have to ask when last she bathe. I tell her she need to go and see a doctor, but she refuse to go to our family doctor. As for who the father is, if I bring up the subject she fly into a rage. I hope she don't have any baby that yellow and wiry-head like she, for her mother was a very black woman, not light skinned like me. Sometimes I think all this is because they used to taunt her at school, call the poor child “yellow turd.” And nobody do a thing till I come on the scene. I find myself to that school one time, and it don't happen again. By God's grace her father don't know yet that she making baby for luckily he been working in Calgary since just after she leave here. That time he say he tired to fuss with her and if she want to go out on her own so be it. I myself think she must have some mental sickness. If you have a phone anywhere near, Grace, I beg you to call me and I will call you right back. Not to say I expect you to tell me what to do, but I always feel better after I talk to you. I am sorry to be weighting you down like this for I know you gone to see your sick Grandpa, but who else am I to talk to? Church people up here is for when things going good and you paying your tithe and not causing any disturbance. I going now to try coax her to go to the hairdresser and buy some clothes that can at least fit her. I hope your Grandpa is improving. He always sound like such a decent man when you speak of him. PLEASE call if you can. Enjoy the sunshine and home cooking. Your good friend,

Maisie

The letter is there Monday, the day Grace reaches home, waiting for her. Today, Tuesday, Ma goes off early to work at Mrs. Sampson's as usual, and Pa leaves at the same time on his way to his tiny office at Wentley Park. By half past seven, Princess, Sam, and Conrad have set off for school, Conrad, who is all of eighteen, bossing the other two though they are not very much younger, annoying them by asking whether they have their homework and their lunch pans, shepherding them out the door in a state of mild rebellion.

Ma makes breakfast for all of them before she leaves. Gramps isn't awake when time comes for her to set out, so she asks Grace to give Gramps his breakfast. Shortly after eight, Grace hears him getting up and moving around. When the door leading to the stairs into the backyard gives a squeal, she knows he is going to the outhouse and will be back before long. She spoons the porridge into bowls and takes down mugs to pour cocoa-tea from the same thermos that has been there since she was small-small.

Gramps climbs the stairs, goes back into the narrow porch-room and lingers there for a while, and then he comes through to the big room where they eat, do homework, and relax. Since she's gone abroad, the three youngest sleep in this room, and Ma and Pa have the one bedroom to themselves. Ma says Edgar and Stewie, when they are home, sleep on a mattress they roll out at the foot of Gramps bed.

When he comes to the table, Gramps rests the brown paper package Grace noticed beside his bed at his place and sits. He smiles at Grace, his face and eyes bright like he's just knocked back a couple glasses of white rum or pimento dram, but she knows it is because of how rejoiced he is to see her. They sit across from each other and join hands as Gramps says grace. After that, they start on the porridge. But there is something ominous that has not escaped her notice. In the prayer, Gramps has called her “Grace.”

“Grace,” Gramps says when he finish eating, “I have a hard task, and I think I best get right to it.”

“What kind of hard task, Gramps?” She looks up from her contemplation of the last honey crystals on the side of her bowl. Gramps licks away the remnants of cornmeal, his tongue making a tour of purple-dark lips, collecting tiny yellow blobs from the hairs in his moustache.

“I want you to bear with me, Grace,” he says. “I have a long story to relate, and you are at the centre of it. It behooves me to tell it because I alone know all the ins-and-outs. I must tell it now as I don't know when next I'll see you.”

Grace feels the cornmeal rising in her throat.

“I have in this parcel, exactly nineteen letters. They are precious things, full of love and concern for you.” He pauses, tenderness overtaking his countenance. “Have you any idea who might have written them?”

She doesn't understand Gramps. Of course she has no idea! True, if the letters are wonderful, then she has nothing to fear. But down in her-belly bottom, she knows something is not right. She shakes her head to answer Gramps.

Gramps is merciful. He doesn't take long, and he holds her hand, and he looks straight in her eyes, and does his best to soothe her with his voice, as he tells her an unbelievable story.

“The truth is you are very lucky, Grace. You have not one, but two mothers: Ma Carpenter, who raised you like you came from her own womb, and your birth mother, the one out of whose belly you did come. Her name is Phyllis Patterson. She wrote these letters to you, the first one shortly after you came to this house, and one on each of your birthdays after that. I am glad, and, in truth, relieved, to give them to you. They have been a heavy burden all these years.” Gramps looks out past Ma's cosmos to the road beyond. “Indeed, this long time I've wondered,” his voice is close to a whisper, “again and again, especially when that blue air mail letter arrive every year, if we had any right to take you from her, give her no news of you, not even tell her your name.”

She takes the parcel Gramps passes to her. She doesn't say anything, and they sit there at the table looking at each other. It is she who first looks away to consider the bundle in her hands.

“It don't make sense, Gramps. Young girls in St. Chris make babies all the time, send the babies to other people to raise, or give them up for adoption. That is routine matters, as you would say. Why this big secrecy with me?”

“Your father take advantage of your mama when she was only a child herself, not even thirteen yet. It was not any boyfriend-girlfriend business. She had just barely start her menses. He never care for her, never had no thought for the seed he put in her belly. We wanted to give her a chance to have a life.”

“So what about my father, Gramps? Where he is? He live in St. Chris?”

Gramps face turns into stone, and the gleam in his eyes vanishes, like you dash water on a fire. “Less said about that one, the better.”

“What you mean, Gramps?”

“He was a wicked fellow, Grace, barely a human being.”

Grace is sitting on the big tree stump in the yard, looking at the package wrapped in brown paper and tied with coarse string in one hand and her friend's perfumed letter in the other. She hasn't opened the brown paper package. She is struggling with what Gramps has just told her, so no way can she afford to think about Maisie and Sylvia yet.

“In every way apart from the bond of flesh, you are truly Ma and Pa's child, Gracie, for you joined this family as a baby and they raised you as their very own.” These are Gramps last words.

She closes her eyes, crosses her arms in front of her, envelope in one hand, package in the other, hugging herself. Not that she is cold, for this brisk Wentley air that shakes you, wakes you, but doesn't slice through you, is one of the things she misses. The yard is still cool, for she can imagine the sun taking its time nibbling the wet grass as it saunters up the other side of the low hill behind the forest where Gramps grows his medicine plants. When it breaks the ridge, that time it starts to gallop. Before you turn round twice, it's three o'clock and the day done race away, gone.

What challenges her now is how to grasp that these things concern her, Grace Carpenter. She must own them, for, as Gramps says, they are her life. But Gramps tale sounds to her like a St. Chris version of
The Young and the Restless
. Does anyone deserve a life made up by a third-rate screenwriter? Does she? Do Ma and Pa know all that Gramps has just told her? Why hasn't she asked Gramps if they know? On top of everything, she is vexed. How come nobody gave her the slightest inkling she was coming home to be loaded down with this? And it is only a couple weeks away from her birthday. What a birthday present!