Brown Girl In the Ring (25 page)

“That ain’t funny!”

“No, I guess you right.” Crack’s voice was fading fast. His eyes were sunken in his head, his lips cracked and dry. He was probably burning up with fever. His sores oozed. His spirit light was fading. Shakpana was riding him to death. But Crack’s eyes blazed out at her from the dying body, hatred flashing from them. Ti-Jeanne feared his gaze alone could strike her. She stood well out of his way. She looked around for something heavy to beat him off with, if she had to. But Crack dropped to his knees, huffing for breath. “Just a little more,” panted Shakpana with his lips.

Crack slumped to the ground. The Shakpana glow left his head. His spirit casing dulled and frayed away to nothing. He was dead.

“Good,” said Osain. “That bud pinch off the vine.”

“Well, brother,” came a voice like the wind creaking in tree boughs, “what you still doing there in my daughter head?” The Jab-Jab was walking on its hands around the room. Its legs waved awkwardly in the air. It crooked its head up at Ti-Jeanne inquiringly. She couldn’t help it. She laughed.

“Legbara, your daughter still need plenty healing yet,” said Osain with her mouth. “Body get better, but spirit still bust-up, I think.”

“Is okay, Papa Osain, thank you,” Ti-Jeanne told him, a little surprised at her own audacity. “I think you start the healing good already. I could do the rest myself.”

“All right, cousin. Till later, then.”

“Later.”
Later?

“Walk good.” And her head was her own again. She could see the sun coming up on the horizon. The day was new.

With a clattering noise, the Jab-Jab righted itself. It cackled at her, patting its two-by-four belly in self-congratulation. “Heh-heh! Daughter, ain’t I tell you you go be Duppy Conqueror this day?”

“Is allyou do all this, Papa, not me.”

“Well, is you call all my duppy to come do your bidding. And child, you do a thing I never see nobody do before. For a few minutes there, you hold eight of the Oldest Ones in your head one time.” His face got serious for a minute. “Don’t try it again, eh? It could burn your brain out.”

“No, Papa.”

She was speaking to thin air. She hadn’t slept for two nights. It was time to go home. She took the elevator down to the ground.

Beat big drum, wave fine flag-o,
Quashee come to town.
No more fear Jack’s obeah bag-o,
Quashee knock him down.

—Traditional song

D
aylight made Ti-Jeanne squint. Light glinted off the windowpanes of those mega-high-rises that still had them. She walked east along Front Street. She grinned idiotically at the familiar tall, narrow wedge shape of the Gooderham Building jammed into the tip of Berczy Park. Mami called it the flatiron building.
Had
called it. Sadly, she remembered her last glimpse of her grandmother’s face, blowing a kiss. As she got closer to Saint Lawrence Market, she began to see stalls piled high with goods for sale. It was market day. She had forgotten. The sunny day had spilled the marketplace at Front and Jarvis out onto both sides of the street. The clamour of people was deafening. Despite her fatigue, though, Ti-Jeanne edged her way happily through the crowd. She had a yearning to lose herself in this noisy throng of people going about the business of staying alive.

Bob Kelly’s cabbages were round and fat this year. She must come back and get some; Pavel had been promising to show her and Mami how to make cabbage rolls. Now it would just be her.

Bob nodded at her, too busy dickering with a customer to stop and chat. She nodded and smiled back. The smile felt so good on her face that she kept it there for a little while after she’d passed Bob’s stall.

The next stall was the shoe repair. Sweat trailing down her plump neck into the deep cleavage of her bustline, Emma Joyce was busy tracing the shape of a young woman’s patched running shoes onto a scrap of the tire rubber she used to make new soles. For Emma, this was a hot day. She looked up, put her hand to her forehead to wipe it, and saw Ti-Jeanne. Her face did something complicated, then she called out, “Girl, I’m so sorry to hear about your grandma. Jenny told us.” Her customer stared curiously at Ti-Jeanne, relinquishing her other shoe out of her hand only when Emma pulled on it.

“I know,” Ti-Jeanne said. “I go miss she.” She missed her grandmother already. Mi-Jeanne too. It was hard to find her mother and lose her again in the same day. Ti-Jeanne wondered what Emma had heard, exactly, about the whole thing. She didn’t feel like trying to explain about Rudy.

“Are you going to carry on now that she’s gone?”

“Yes, are you?” Mary Hayward had joined them, wiping her hands on her apron. “Here, take this.” She handed Ti-Jeanne a pot of her honey. “Oh, and Jenny’s up at your farm. She said she was looking after the baby there until you got home.”

A little knot of worry eased. Josée had kept her promise. “Thank you. I ain’t know what I go do. I have to think about it.”

By the time she was out of the market, she was juggling a half pound of rabbit pemmican—working one rich, meaty strip in her mouth—a bottle of cranberry jelly, a carved gourd rattle (“for the baby”), and Mary’s honey. Grief still darkened her thoughts, but the attentions of the market people had soothed her a little.

The sun was at noon. Her breasts were leaking through her shirt. Fortunately her jacket concealed that. Since Baby’s birth, she had learned that the first few months of motherhood were about fatigue and leakiness. She hoped Baby was tolerating the cow’s or goat’s milk that Jenny was probably feeding him. He’d been a colicky baby.

She barked with laughter as she was walking past the Moss Park Armoury Building. Someone had used cement to convert the cannon that stood out front into a massive penis. Plastic shutter rods made a spray of semen. The men lounging on the steps of the armoury snickered at her reaction. The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn’t eased, but there was room there for humour, too.

A few minutes later, she was finally home. She stood outside her front door, reminding herself that Mami would not be inside to greet her. Then she remembered Mi-Jeanne’s body. She hadn’t been able to take the time to bury it when the duppy had been herding her and Tony out of the house. “Oi, Papa,” she muttered, “I wonder is what Jenny think when she see
that
?” Well, Jenny was a tough old woman, had seen a lot of harsh things in her time. Ti-Jeanne opened the door and stepped inside. She called out, “Jenny?”

“Ti-Jeanne? Hush. You’ll wake them up, dear. Come on upstairs.”

Lord, who could “them” be now? She hoped that Tony hadn’t made his way back to the farm. She wasn’t quite ready to deal with him yet.

Jenny greeted her at the bedroom door with a sad smile and a big hug.
“Yoy,
my darling. I’m so, so sorry about your grandmother.
Yoy, Devla, che choromos.
What a hard thing! May she sleep well, my dear.”

Ti-Jeanne held on, long and hard. Finally Jenny led her into the room, one hand still around her waist. Her mother’s body was lying in the bed.

She didn’t know how she found herself kneeling by the bed. Mi-Jeanne looked weak, but her breathing was deep and regular. She was alive! Ti-Jeanne sat down hard on the bed. Mi-Jeanne stirred a little but didn’t wake.

“I found her lying in Gros-Jeanne’s room,” Jenny said, bending down to put Baby in Ti-Jeanne’s arms. “Good thing it was me that found her. She had lost some blood, but I fixed her up.”

“Is my mother,” Ti-Jeanne whispered.

“I know, dear. She told me when she came to. She was just groaning and twitching at first, and I thought the bullet might have damaged some nerves, but I think she’ll be all right with rest.”

“The bullet ain’t kill she.”

“No, it didn’t. He was a bad shot, whoever he was.
Te xal o rako lengo gortiano!
May a cancer eat his throat.”

No wonder Mi-Jeanne hadn’t been able to attack Rudy. She remembered now that she hadn’t seen Mi-Jeanne among the ghouls who had finally confronted Rudy. “The duppy must be come back to she body when I free it.”

“I don’t understand, dear.”

“Nothing.”

Baby stirred awake, yawned, opened his eyes, and gave her a big, gummy smile. Ti-Jeanne noticed how his whole body seemed to smile at the sight of her. She smiled back, nuzzled his cheek. He was already rooting hungrily at her breast. Ti-Jeanne unbuttoned her jacket, yanked up her shirt, and gave him the nipple.

Jenny patted his head. “He’s beautiful, your baby.”

“Help me up, Jenny?” A mother found, lost, then found again. This final shock was too much. Ti-Jeanne went into her grandmother’s room. Jenny settled her on her side in the bed, so she could feed Baby as she slept.

“You look half-dead, dear. I’ll watch over you and the little one.”

Dreams took her immediately. They were meaningless pictures only, floating through her head. No visions.

• • • •

Dr. Wright was keying in the hospital code almost before her half-awake mind registered the beeping earbug. Emergency.

“Ottawa General, Cardiac,” the operator’s voice said. His words deactivated the urgent piping that only Margaret could hear.

“Dr. Wright. You paged me?”

“Ah, yes. Sorry to wake you, Doctor, but you have to get to the hospital right away. It’s the Premier. Looks like she’s rejecting the transplant.”

“Fuck!” Beside her in the bed, Mira groaned and sat up, woken by the sound of Margaret’s voice. She was used to these late night calls. She waited.

“Ambulance is on its way to get you, Doctor.” In fact, Margaret could already hear the siren screaming through the Ottawa streets.

“Yeah, here it is now.” Margaret clicked off, got up, and began dressing.

“You gotta go?” Mira asked.

“Yes, love. Sorry.” She leaned over and gave her partner a quick kiss.

The ambulance arrived with a screeching of wheels. Someone was already leaning on the doorbell. Margaret headed for the stairs. She yelled back over her shoulder, “Looks like the Premier’s fucking cacking out on me!”

She grabbed her coat, was out the door while she was still putting it on, mumbling a greeting to the ambulance attendant. She clambered into the back of the van. As the ambulance pulled away, Margaret looked up to the bedroom window of the house she and Mira owned. Mira was standing there, waving.

Margaret buckled in, keyed on a monitor, and called Don Fang. The screen showed him in Uttley’s room, face still crumpled with sleep.

“What’s doing, Don? She in rejection?”

“Well, the heart’s rejecting her, actually. Take a look at this.” He pressed some keys. Margaret’s screen split into two. Half of it was Don’s face, the other half a constantly refreshed readout from the CareVue that was monitoring Uttley’s progress. Lungs failing. Kidneys failing. Severe skin lesions. “Yeah,” said Uttley, “that’s GVHD all right.” Graft Versus Host Disease. Cells from the donor organs were attacking Uttley’s immune system. “Damn!”

“Thought so. Worst case of it I’ve ever seen,” Fang said worriedly.

“Get her on an immunosuppressant drip, fast. OKT5 should do it.” That was like detonating a bomb to kill a fly, but it looked as though they had no choice.

Fang gave the order, then said, “The reaction’s so extreme. It’s like that heart can’t wait to get out of there.”

When Uttley awoke two weeks later, she would have only vague recollections of an extended nightmare. While Margaret Wright and Don Fang were fighting to establish a symbiosis between their patient’s body and its new heart, Catherine Uttley’s unconscious mind had been conducting a battle of its own. At some level in her dreams, she’d been aware that the lifesaving organ had been placed in her body, had felt relief and a sense of welcome toward the donated heart.

But then the dream had changed. She had realised that she was being invaded in some way, taken over. The heart’s rhythm felt wrong, not her own. It had leapt and battered against her chest as though it were determined to break out. Uttley had been stern at first. “Stop that. You’re here to help me. Just settle down and do your job.” The heart’s frenzied buffeting had slowed to a more regular pace, but then Uttley began to feel a numbness spreading out from her chest with each beat of the heart: down her arms, through her trunk and legs. Bit by bit, she was losing the ability to control her own body. The heart was taking it over. Uttley became alarmed, had tried talking to the alien organ. “Please,” she said. “This is my body. You can’t take it away from me.” But the creeping numbness spread up her neck. She was now completely paralyzed. All she could do was wait for it to reach her brain. She had known that when that happened, she would no longer be herself. Unable to move, unable to save herself, she had felt her brain cells being given up one by one. Then blackness. Nothing.

And then she was aware again. Her dream body and brain were hers once more, but with a difference. The heart—her heart—was dancing joyfully between her ribs. When she looked down at herself, she could
see
the blood moving through her body to its beat. In every artery, every vein, every capillary: two distinct streams, intertwined. She had worried for nothing. She was healed, a new woman now. “Stupidness,” she said, chiding herself for her unnecessary fears.