How to Love a Jamaican Page 5

We would come home from grade school, my uniform would still be clean and Cobby’s would be stained with the red dirt from behind our school. Mama would shake her head at Cobby—that was all. All my life I waited for Mama to have a stronger reaction to the many ways my brother shamed himself and our family. But she always just shook her head, her expression becoming more pained with the severity of my brother’s actions. I imagined us as accomplices, Mama and I, shaking our heads together. I wanted to hear about the ways I had grown into a superior man, because if I did it for anyone, I did it for her. But if I listened for anything, I listened for silence.

  Three months before Mama died, she came to live with us. She kept asking for Cobby. None of us had seen him in months. I usually bumped into him around Mandeville Square, and every time, his whole face smiled, and he would tell anyone around him that I was the one who took all the ambition. We always talked as friends who meant to keep in contact but never got around to it. Every once in a while, he would make it to Mama’s house with a plastic bag containing tripe. As bad as her eyes were, she never made the mistake of mixing us up when we were growing up. But in her last months, Mama’s memory was deteriorating. She sometimes called me Cobby, and at times she would ask, “Why yuh nah be’ave yuhself?” But she would say it softly, as if she didn’t really care for an answer, as if she might as well have been whispering how much she loved him.

  * * *

  —

  A steep road was the only way for cars to get to our house. And only people with dusty cars, already busted-up cars, would brave the potholes in our road. Nobody vain about his car ever drove by our house. For years, I looked forward to the day when I would walk down to the bottom of the hill and escape the sun for a long time under the soursop tree to wait for a taxi going into the city. In one hand would be the worn suitcase Mama kept under her bed with other things she never had use for, and in my other hand a briefcase because it seemed to me that men who did important things carried briefcases. Now I realize that my ambition wasn’t as much for me as it was for everyone else. Leaving Mama, my brother, our district, was to be the loudness everybody desired from me. In my mind, the man under the soursop tree looked and seemed older, as if it was indeed time to leave home and his face looked comforted in the realization. But the truth of it is that the man was really a boy of seventeen, and only standing under the tree did it occur to him that he was feeling to cry.

  Now Ann-Marie is cooking up some saltfish. I can’t see what she’s doing from the dining table since her back is turned, but I hear when the chopped onion, scallion, and tomato hit the hot oil in the frying pan. After nine years of marriage I’ve memorized the ways Ann-Marie seasons food. I don’t have to watch her to know she will start the saltfish with three promises: onion, scallion, and tomato. The smell carries to my nose, and for the first time since I walked into the house and sat down, my body longs for the present, longs to be fed. Ann-Marie always cooks the saltfish at the tail end since it comes together quickly, so I know I won’t have to wait long to eat and this realization comforts me. I can see her body over the pan and I imagine that she is stirring the tomato, onions, and scallions that are softening over the fire, releasing the flavor and the juice that the saltfish will be cooked in. Then I see her moving over the sink and I know she is throwing the water off the fish. I close my eyes and push my head against the back of the chair. I smell that the flavor in the air has changed. She has added the fish to the pan. Next she will add pepper.

  Nine years. Ann-Marie and I have been married for nine years already. It doesn’t even feel half that long. We keep trying but she has still been unable to get pregnant. Sometimes I look at the life I have built—I got the job and the woman I wanted—and it is not enough. Because the woman I wanted to see me for everything I’ve done, all of it so that she could look at me with pride in her heart, never loved me for the ways I was better than my brother. And then there is the other thing that cuts deeper, that I don’t want to think about when I can help it, and which I have kept buried so deep I’ve never slipped and confessed it to Ann-Marie. It’s that she and I will never produce children, while I can’t keep track of the number of children Cobby has fathered.

  “I saw Cobby today,” I finally confess out loud.

  “Yeah? What was he saying?” Ann-Marie doesn’t turn from cooking.

  “You know, we didn’t get a chance to talk.”

  She looks at me now. “Oh, dat brother of yours. Lawd Jesus, how ’im cum so?”

  This was a conversation Ann-Marie and I have had many times in the past. Nothing was ever resolved. We asked the same questions and came to the same conclusions, that my brother mystified us both.

  “A true yuh mother spoil him.”

  I think about it. I have always thought about it. Had Mama spoiled him? She loved him, even for the ways he fell short, which I could never do. If she gave one of us a suck-suck, she gave one to the other. When she beat me for taking a slice of the fruit cake she made for the pastor, she also beat Cobby for taking a slice. Did she spoil him? She never compared Cobby to me like our teachers did. She always accepted him as her prodigal son, the one who went off and shamed her, but when he came back, she rejoiced. I stood in the background wondering about my prize for never leaving in the first place. Did she spoil him? I can’t say, so I don’t answer, allowing Ann-Marie’s assessment to fall between us.

  “Yuh tink ’bout dat ting yet?” Ann-Marie asks now, her back intentionally turned to me.

  Her company wants to transfer her to the United States. Last week when Ann-Marie received the offer, she arranged for us to meet at our favorite restaurant for dinner. I laughed at her because she was behaving like it was the weekend, ordering a whole fried fish for each of us, and a fruity alcoholic drink for herself. When she told me about the promotion, she reminded me that in my younger years I’d wanted a PhD, and she suggested that perhaps we could look into fertility treatment and adopting children. She seemed certain that the United States would open up our lives. I envied her certainty. A long time ago, I saw a news story about an adopted child who grew into the man that murdered both his parents, and I no longer had the desire to return to school. I had also observed that friends and family who emigrated to the United States and Canada returned for visits seeming intent on impressing those of us who stayed behind. They told stories about the wonders of abroad, their successes and the successes of their children, and the forcefulness of their telling made me suspect that perhaps foreign wasn’t as heavenly as they wanted us to believe. I didn’t tell Ann-Marie about any of this because I knew that if I spoke too harshly against going, she would be bitter for a long time. And perhaps in the United States, she offered while we lay in bed after we returned from the restaurant, I could forget the business with my family. “Wah business wid my family?” I had asked. “The whole thing wid yuh bredda and yuh madda and how yuh fret ova dem,” she said. I was amazed that she could compact my life into so few words. Could I really forget? I wondered. Could the distance of land and sea really do that? How to live a life without the expectation that on a Tuesday afternoon I might bump into Cobby?

  “Yuh tink ’bout dat ting yet?” Ann-Marie repeats, now facing me.

  “What ting?” I joke, and she cuts her eyes at me.

  If Mama was alive, I would never consider leaving. And now that she is gone, why not leave because I can? Perhaps Ann-Marie is right—that I no longer have to be labored by the roles of son and brother. Perhaps leaving is indeed my chance. Later, in bed, I will tell her my decision, as we tend to have our most important conversations in the dark.

  Ann-Marie can see everything in my face when she puts the plates on the table. “Esau, no worry wid him,” she says, rubbing the top of my head. “Cobby is him own man.”

  SLACK

  When this story ended—or when it began, because who on June Plum Road could tell the difference?—the mermaids were floating at the top o
f Old Henry’s tank. The green hair of one and the pink hair of the other fanned out on the water’s surface, silky straight hair, and the sparkles in their tails caught the afternoon light. Old Henry laughed when he saw the dolls in his tank, a laugh he would later regret. Because when he looked beyond the mermaids, his eyes made out two forms, the little girls, beneath the water’s surface.

  And the mother would go mad when she heard, at least for a while, sitting on the steps in front of her house, legs wide, without panties. A shame a man passing by was the one to call out to let her know about her nakedness. Her people would send for her, and news would travel back that she is cleaning for white people in New York. Many on June Plum Road won’t know what to do with this information but to wonder if she remembers to wear panties now.

  * * *

  —

  Some people would say that they sensed tragedy before Old Henry found the mermaids and the girls in his tank. Lazarus said his chickens wouldn’t lay eggs. After the girls were found, he walked up and down June Plum Road telling any ear he came across that when a whole dozen chickens won’t lay a single egg a sensible man should start to shiver. Mrs. Thomas, who everybody called Bad Mind Thomas behind her back, dropped the malice she held toward everyone in the district to say again and again, “Oh, a dat mek di dog dem a bark so!” While she walked her dogs, she heard people talking about the drownings in front of the shop. The dogs were two fluffy yellow animals her husband brought home when her menstrual blood continued to greet her after a decade of marriage. The dogs laid up on the Thomases’ couch and bed and ate out of her hands like white people on television. This is why people on June Plum Road looked at Mrs. Thomas sideways, which in turn caused her to carry malice against everybody in the district.

  Miss Marie, who taught fourth grade at the primary school before she retired, said from the hungry way she saw those two little girls move toward any little bit of water with the mermaid dolls, something told her—maybe the Lord, she would add to later versions of the story—that that kind of hunger in anyone, especially children who can’t think level-headed, wouldn’t do anybody any good. Then there was Toni, Tall Legs Toni, who said that because her C-section scar was itching her, she knew that the Lord was trying to tell her something but what it was she didn’t know. “Di Lawd works in mysterious ways,” she would say to any of the women who paid to have her hot comb dragged through their hair for the Christmas church service. But nobody paid Toni’s sanctimonious talk any mind. The women just fingered their newly straightened hair and hissed their teeth when they left Toni’s house, because she was known to visit the Obia man every once in a while when her man didn’t come home.

  The Seventh-day Adventist pastor explained to his congregation that days leading up to the drownings he started to worry that something bad was going to happen. The uneasiness even kept him up at night—some nights he would wake up with a piece of worry he had never been handed in his life. And it would be a long time before he could fall asleep again, sometimes not until the sun began to rise. He even started to believe what his mother used to say about curry—that if you ate too much and too often it made you fret. Since it was his wife’s biggest pregnancy craving, he was eating curry more often than before, some days even back to back, and his wife put curry in foods he didn’t think could be curried, like the scrambled eggs she put in front of him one morning. But then news came about the little girls and that night he could sleep. And because he was a crying kind of pastor, the kind whose voice would start to crack whenever he preached his Easter or Christmas sermon or presided over a funeral, he cried after telling his congregation how it turned out not to be the curry after all.

  Because Old Henry drank his wife’s cornmeal porridge for his midday meal and it sat heavy in his stomach and because he’d become an old man prone to paralyzing bouts of fatigue, he slept after lunch. This, even though in his younger days he used to cry shame after a man who let a meal put him back in bed. Later he would say it was as if something shook him awake. He got out of bed, and as he was going outside, his wife looked up from the peas she was shelling to ask where he was going. But he didn’t pay her any mind because all he knew was that he had to go look about his tank. He thought it was the young boys yet again turning his tank into a swimming pool. As wide as the king-size mattress he and his wife slept on, and tall enough so that Old Henry’s feet could almost touch the bottom, the tank was a cement structure behind the house used for collecting rainwater to wash clothes, to bathe, to boil for drinking.

  His wife would tell everyone who would listen to her that a crying old man is the ugliest thing to see. “Yuh tink yuh see ugly?” she would ask. “A ole man yuh wan’ fi see a cry.”

  Who knew what was story and what was God’s truth, but only Marie opened her window the day it happened, only Marie who could have stopped it, Marie who kept silent amidst all the talk of the little girls. She saw the girls pulling a cement block in the direction of Old Henry’s tank, but just before she opened her door to call out to them, she paused to turn down the fire under the pot of chicken foot soup she was cooking. And when she went back to open the door, she could only pause with her hand on the handle because she couldn’t remember why she meant to open the door. Only when she heard the mother screaming—people ways over say they heard the mother screaming—did she remember. But if the screams told her anything, they told her it was too late.

  * * *

  —

  But if we were to go back before it happened, Christmastime was what was on everybody’s minds. Not the two little dark-skinned girls, six years old, who everyone always mixed up because they looked exactly alike and their names, Kadi-ann and Jadi-ann, were so similar. Three days after they were dead, it was Christmas Day. On June Plum Road, those who could afford to were eating the goat their husbands slaughtered, those who couldn’t afford a goat were eating chicken, and those who didn’t have anything made sure to be invited to the homes of those who had extra meat. But the meat took on a disappointing taste that year. Some people thought it was because they had been looking forward to Christmas dinner for so long it was bound to be disappointing. Some of the women said they anticipated it, as food never tasted good when the same hand picking the feathers off the chicken or skinning the goat and chopping up the meat, was the same hand dealing with the blood, was the same hand dealing with seasoning the meat, preparing it, and finally serving it onto plates. No one thought to blame the two little girls whose drownings dominated the Christmas dinner conversation.

  * * *

  —

  The girls belonged to the slack woman, who moved to the district to live with her grandmother when her own pious mother refused to keep a pregnant teenager under her roof. The woman eventually took over her grandmother’s house when the old woman died. She mothered the girls without a man and took in sewing because it was all she could do beautifully. She was a dark-skinned, dry-headed girl and not even the kind of dark skin that shone so everybody, even those who lightened their skin, had to admit that shade of brown was something to look at. Her mother used to suck on Scotch bonnet peppers when she was pregnant and then when the child came out from between her mother’s legs and everybody saw she took her father’s dark coloring, the name Pepper stuck. But they used to call her Blackie or Dry Head when she was in school, and no one had to tell her she wasn’t the kind of woman anybody looked at more than once. Maybe that’s why she lay down for the first man who paid her any mind, even though he was a married man with four children and had only three good teeth in his mouth.

  When the wife heard that her husband got some young girl pregnant, she turned up at Pepper’s house with a machete in her hand. Not because she was expecting to cut Pepper, since the machete was too dull, but because she wanted to look tough. No one answered the door, so she walked around to the back of the house and saw a young girl still wearing her school uniform sitting on a rock and bending over to scale fish. No one
had to tell her it was her husband’s baby mother. She knew because the girl looked like the right kind of weak-minded to lie down for a man with only three good teeth in his mouth.

  The wife only had one question, “How ole yuh be, gyal?”

  “Fifteen, ma’am.”

  The wife left it at that, but later she would tell someone, “Mi see di gyal mi wutless husband a run roun’ wid. A one dry-head pickney who look like she could a still suck titty. Mi could a jus’ look pon har an feel sorry fi di likkle fool.”

  When she got home, she swung the machete at her husband, but he was quick to jump out of the way.

  Before the little girls drowned, all anybody knew about Pepper with any kind of conviction was that she was slack to have children for a married man. They said that even God thought to punish her, giving her two children instead of one. But she could sew beautifully. She sewed the white suits for the deaconesses at the Methodist church. When the reverend’s wife, who everyone thought acted better looking than she was, saw the suits, even she had to humble herself to whisper and ask someone who sewed them.

  * * *

  —

  Pepper couldn’t tell she had two babies inside her—when they pressed against her belly, she felt it as one touch. She craved raw rice. She used to stand over the canister her grandmother kept the rice in, willing herself to resist the temptation, and sometimes she could. Other times she would scoop a handful into her mouth, but only when the craving felt like it would kill her. That’s why when Pepper’s grandmother pulled the first baby out of her granddaughter, everything looked all right until her attentive eyes made their way to the baby’s back. She studied the baby’s back for a few moments, finally arriving at a destination. Raw rice stuck to the baby’s skin! And for a moment Pepper’s grandmother held the baby in her hands because the rice did look permanent, like a disease or a disfigurement, but when she rubbed her hand across the baby’s back, her hand came back bloodstained, brushing some of the rice onto the bedroom floor.