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A
Hurricane for Irene
By Jessie Calliste One: Middle Beginnings (Excerpt)
I used to think that a story has a beginning, a middle
and an end. This story does not have an end, and I’m
not sure it even has a beginning. Sometimes it seems
like all middle, except I don’t know the middle of
what. I can pick a point to start telling the story,
but it always seems to have already started. Perhaps,
for this story, like in life itself, the best part is in
the middle.
When she was 16, my mother jumped out
of her grandmother’s kitchen window, zipped through
guava trees, flashed past cackling chicken coops, jetted
down an unlit hill, and did not stop until she got to
the island of Trinidad. There she paused for a drink of
water, marriage to my father, Lincoln, and the start of
her family.
Lincoln had finally gotten to her.
When she met him, he was a 24 year-old charmer, a true
saga-boy who flaunted his “good-catchiness” like a
kaleidoscopic fish in the mating season. He was back
from Trinidad, where he was studying accounting at
Codrington College. He cruised around the neighborhood
on his champion’s bicycle, the one that won him the
national cycling competition the year before.
He would perch lopsidedly astride the
bicycle, lingering for the occasional chat with the
budding young women, wowing them with his liquid hair
and velvet eyes, with his hands-free legwork and
national-winner head-stands—all the while keeping a keen
eye on the curvy girl who lived up the hill. The one
with the moon glaze in her eyes and the sunshine trapped
in her skin. Surely, someone had placed a little piece
of the sun on the inside to illuminate her.
And that laugh. Like a merry stream
after an invigorating rain. He could hear it from
half-way down the hill when he sat on his mother’s
verandah after supper in the obscurity of the evening.
Sitting there blended with the night, with only the dull
glow of the cigarette to mark his presence.
He had asked his mother about that
laugh, but she had instructed him to take his mind off
that one, son, he’s gon’ marry an Indian like himself,
not no half-black girl with no mother and no father to
give her nothin’. And he shouldn’t tink that just
because the grandmother is a DeGale, wid white blood in
she veins, that she has somethin’ to she name. Because,
what he don’ know, son, is that the fadder done cut her
out of the will already. And who could blame ‘im for
that? That black man she married threaten to give the
father six pair o’ kicks and half-a-dozen of the other
and that’s why the fadder had to cut her out of the
will. Now, all that ’oman has is a life interest in the
land, and not a penny to she name. They may have nice,
pretty face an’ ting, but that’s all he’s getting’, so
don’ say his mudder didn’ warn him.
He knew his mother already had
someone in mind for him to marry. Florrie. An Indian
girl who showed up with an envelope containing fifteen
dollars for his mother every two weeks. Florrie always
seemed to know exactly when he was home from college,
had his schedule down with Timex precision. She hung
around him, asking him the same stupid question in her
bad English, running out of things to say after the
initial, So, how you like school, bwoy? If his mother
had ever bothered to ask Florrie where the money came
from, she may have learned that it rightfully belonged
to Mr. Sandiford. From the cocoa which he grew on his
four acres and sent Florrie to sell in Grenville every
fortnight.
And why not young Irene? Sure, she
had no mother or no father to give her property. She
had no cocoa money to give to his mother every
fortnight. In fact, she was not even yet a woman. But
her body, with its ripe, defiant bosom and bold, wayward
hips, strongly disagreed. And why argue with it?
When his mother tended the garden
behind the house, he would ride his bicycle past Mamma’s
house several times a day, trying desperately to look
cool on the steep uphill ride. He would start jangling
the bicycle bell when the crimson arms of the hibiscus
tree first twisted into view, timing his approach to
give a certain interested occupant sufficient time to
get from the house to the yard. He would slow down to a
conversation pace and ready his wave hand for the
too-casual greeting, being careful to look cool all the
while.
He must have succeeded with the cool
approach.
Irene soon developed a special
interest in sweeping the yard. Not at the back of the
house where the gouva trees copiously freed their
leaves, but at the front of the yard, under the hibiscus
tree. A spot which seemed perpetually in need of a
good, long sweep. It didn’t matter that cousin Sybil
swept the yard bright and early every morning. She
could never get all that red off the ground. Such was
the nature of hibiscus trees.
At the sound of a certain bicycle
bell, Irene would grab the bamboo broom and race pel mel
from the pantry, her steps transforming into a dignified
stroll as she approached the edge of the yard. She
would sweep the ground under the hibiscus tree with
clinical absorption, surreptitiously noting my father’s
approach. Of course, the broom had seen so many sweeps
that it was doing more dirtying than cleaning. But, no
one seemed to notice. Certainly not Lincoln.
To hear her tell it, my mother
married my father because he was educated and athletic.
We knew better. There was something else that she
talked about with that long-ago sound to her voice.
Something that brought that mischievous brilliance to
her eyes, and a playfulness about her mouth. It was his
hair. Hair that fell in a solid darkness to his
shoulders, rich and dense, with a single dangerous,
gravity-taunting loop at the top of his head. Hair
that, she admitted slyly, she was determined to claim
for her future children because it would not beat her up
nor break the comb.
I saw my father then. Riding his
bicycle at top speeds. With his immovable hair loop,
impervious to the wind and all the hurricanes that would
dare strike.
* *
* * *
Even without the hair, the bicycle
and the education, my mother would have married my
father. She was ready to have her own home, her own
husband and family. Ready to give love in the hope of
finally getting back some for herself. And to escape.
From the life that she had known since she was eight
years old, when she and four year old Dykes were brought
by boat from St. Vincent. After the neighbor told her
that her mother was dead. Dead at the age of 30 by her
father’s hands.
Dead because she had taken Irene and
Dykes, had escaped his nocturnal beatings and started a
new life with a gentle Cuban and a new baby girl. Dead,
because even though she had fearfully avoided him for
over a year, he had caught her one moonless night and
beaten her to near death’s door. Dead because he knew
that he had gone too far this time; because there was
too much blood, because she wouldn’t wake up.
Dead because he dragged her limp body
to a public stand pipe in a deserted, four-cornered
street and opened the pipe over her head. And left her
there. With the water flowing into the blood and the
blood flowing into the water, and her liquid life force
moving much too swiftly, carrying her down the long
drain toward death.
He had run off into the night and
stowed away, like a caged animal, on a cargo boat to
Barbados. Fearing that he had killed her this time.
Knowing that he was too cowardly to stand trial for
murder.
Hoping that, somehow, she had
survived.
And she had. Long enough to catch
pneumonia and die a few weeks later at Mamma’s home in
Grenada.
My mother spent a lifetime hoping her father would
show up.
He never did.
* *
* * *
In Grenada, far from the home she
knew, she was no longer a child. She was rapidly
changing into a work-horse. It was the lot of the
parentless. After all, she had to earn her keep, to
prove herself worthy of the saltfish and bluggoes, of
the privilege of a night’s rest on flour-bag sheets
under her grandmother’s canopy bed.
She may have been worthy of food and
shelter. Love and affection proved more elusive. As if
in dying, her mother had recanted what she had once so
freely bestowed.
And, in the beginning, she had
searched. As if for something precious that she had
misplaced, not wanting to accept that it was gone.
She had searched among the daily
rituals of cleaning and cooking, in the never-ending
battle to keep the water barrels filled, in the
cutlassing, tilling, planting, harvesting of the young
jungle Mamma called a vegetable garden, in the feeding
of the horses and pigs, and goats, and chickens, in the
wood gathering, in the mountains of grown uncles’ dirty
clothes to be hand-washed, starched and ironed each
week.
And still she searched. Though she
had begun to weary of the weekly five-mile hikes to the
garden, of the daily trips to fetch water from the
spring at Kankazo, of the miles of muddy, unpaved road
riddled with vicious potholes and sharp twigs lying in
wait for naked feet. Feet caked with the reddish mud
from the spring, because Mamma had said she don’t need
shoes for that kind of work, they will only hambug her.
But there was not a hug to be
salvaged, not a kiss to be snared, not a gentle word to
be uncovered.
She had come to hate the water
barrel, because if it was empty in the mornings, she
couldn’t attend the River Sallie Government School with
Sybil and the others until it she had filled it again.
Often, she was late for school, or didn’t make it at
all. Because that water barrel never seemed to stay
full, her uncles’ clothes never seemed to stay washed,
the wood never stayed gathered, the floors never stayed
scrubbed, the coconuts never stayed grated, the animals
never stayed fed, the garden never stayed cutlassed,
planted, harvested, tilled, manured, or whatever was the
particular need of the day.
And, it was not that she didn’t like
school. It was easy living, compared to staying at
home. Besides, she was good at it. Especially with
history and English. She liked to read the poems and
short stories in The Royal Reader. She had even
started writing her own poetry, and when her friends
wanted to write love letters to their boyfriends, she
was the one they asked for help. That’s how she knew
about Lincoln. His mother had asked her if she could
come every month and read Lincoln’s letters to her, and
to write him back for her please, because she never had
the chance like young people nowadays to learn to read
and write.
Even her teachers at school told her
how bright she was. Teacher Uthlyn had visited Mamma,
had asked Mamma to let Irene take the exam to go to
secondary school, because she is a bright child and she
could go far, Mrs. Donald. But Mamma had already taken
her out of school. Had told Teacher Uthlyn she couldn’t
afford to spare her, that Irene was her right hand and
her right foot. She had asked Mamma about taking sewing
lessons, but Mamma had sent Sybil instead. And she
watched Sybil take the bus to Grenville on Monday
morning, dressed in her new plaid dress and polished
shoes, on her way to learn knitting and sewing.
And in the evenings, when all her
chores where done, she taught herself to sew on Mamma’s
old Singer hand-machine. And in the end, Sybil couldn’t
sew a stitch and it was Irene they came to for mending
the uncles’ pants and shirts and darning the table
cloths, and embroidering the pillowcases, and making the
flared cotton skirts that her cousins wanted to wear on
Sunday afternoons.
All she had in the world was her
little brother, Dykes. She knew she had to take care of
him because there was no one else to do it; he still
cried in his sleep at night. She knew she needed to
care for the festering sore-foot that kept him moaning
as he shuffled around the house. He was not cut out for
hard work; he was better with book learning. Mamma had
sent him to the garden one early morning, and, while
trying to use the cutlass, he had sliced-open his foot
instead of the coconuts. No one took him to the health
center, and the wound turned into a festering sore.
Irene would trash around in the
bushes behind the chicken coops, searching for corraila
for Dykes’ sore-foot. She would wash the delicate herbs
in a calabash, pound it into an emerald mush, and add
lard for easy spreading. Before she went to bed, she
would kneel on the floor where he slept under the bed in
the sitting room, have him stick out his sore-foot, and
apply the green paste, while he squirmed and grimaced
his way through the entire ministering.
She spent her youth ever hungry for
approval, needing to please, trying to wring it out of
nothingness. And like her father, it never came. Not
in any way she could tell. And, after a while, she
accepted that there never going to be enough love,
enough attention, enough mothers and fathers to spare
for children like her.
Understood, that if she displeased
anyone, Uncle Roy would call her into the pantry and use
the pecie on her until she peed herself. That she
shouldn’t be sick, shouldn’t complain of period cramps,
because even on wet, rainy days, when it was muddy
outside and the sand-flies were angry from being
displaced, it was safer to kneel in the dirt under the
house and pretend she was grating coconuts while she
waited for the pain to ease. Because, to expect
anything else would be ungrateful.
Still, there were days when she could
almost forget. Forget to search for that hug and kiss
and kind word. Forget that she once had a mother and a
father, and a home to call her own. Like Gardening
Fridays, when she, Sybil and Jenkins were sent to work
the land at The Point. She would saddle up old Braham,
the donkey, for the two-hour walk, and arrange to meet
her friends there. They would spend the day first doing
the chores – cutlassing the land, planting potatoes,
corn and peas – then bathing in the river, cooking over
a three-stoned fireplace, and settling down for a feast
of smoked herring and roast breadfruit, smothered in
coconut oil and washed down with coconut water.
Later, because they were expected to
bring home the dried coconuts, they would spend the
afternoon peeling coconuts, competing to see who could
shuck the most. Sometimes, she would peel up to 40
coconuts, and be the envy of the bunch, even beating
Fefe and Avis, the older boys in the group. At the end
of the day, when it was time to leave, they would clean
the corn, load the donkey with vegetables from the land,
and set off for the day.
And at night, when she was too sore
and tired to think, she would crawl into her own bed on
the floor under Mamma’s canopy bed. She would call to
Mamma to put down the curtains, which were really the
bedskirts, and she would go to sleep, selfless and
innocent in her ignorance, too tired to wish for parents
who might have told her Ananci stories, tended to her
cuts and bruises, plaited her hair, chastised her about
her grades, and asked what she wanted to be when she
grew up. And, Dykes would call goodnight to her from
under the bed in the sitting room, and she would shout
back, don’t forget to do his homework and make sure he
says his prayers when he’s done.
And afterwards, they would go to
sleep. To dream the dream of children without parents.
Of a mother, and of a father, and of what might have
been.
So when my father proposed to her at
the age of 16, even the innocence of her youth, the
window in her way, the night with it’s disquieting
secrets, the passage money, the solitary voyage on
turbulent seas, the unknown world of Trinidad, were but
small impediments. Because, finally, someone who loved
her was waiting, with her uncle, Frank and a birth
certificate that made her 21and of legal age to marry.
Of legal age to live.
Jessie welcomes any feedback you would
like to provide. You may email her at
jcalliste@comcast.net
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posted 22 August 2006 |
