Brown Girl In the Ring (5 page)

Mami Gros-Jeanne was waiting at the door of their cottage, a hardened knot of a woman in her limp black dress.

“Is where the ass you been all day? You don’t see the child hungry? Get inside and feed he! You just as bad as your blasted mother!”

“Yes, Mami. I goin’, Mami.” Ti-Jeanne scuttled inside, unbuttoning her blouse as she went so that the child could suck.

“Stupidness,” Mami muttered behind Ti-Jeanne’s fleeing back.

Baby was soon full; he would sleep for a few hours. Ti-Jeanne spent the rest of the evening as she so often did, braiding Mami’s wiry salt-and-pepper hair while the old woman sat and chopped herbs at the “kitchen” table.

Riverdale Farm had been a city-owned recreation space, a working farm constructed to resemble one that had been on those lands in the nineteenth century. Torontonians used to be able to come and watch the “farmers” milk the cows and collect eggs from the chickens. The Simpson House wasn’t a real house at all, just a facade that the Parks Department had built to resemble the original farmhouse. There was a front porch that led into a short hallway. To the left and right of the hallway were two small rooms in which the Riverdale staff had led workshops in spinning and weaving. Mami used the right-hand room with its fireplace as her parlour/dining room, the left-hand one as her examining room. Upstairs had been two offices. Those she had converted into bedrooms: one for herself and the other for Ti-Jeanne and Mi-Jeanne. Now that Mi-Jeanne was gone, Ti-Jeanne shared her bedroom with her baby son. The back of the house had consisted of male and female public washrooms, but they were no use now in a city without a sewage system. Mami’s followers had built her an outhouse just outside with a cesspit and had converted the two washrooms into a cold-storage room and a ventilated kitchen where she cooked on a wood stove that someone had found for her.

“You minding me, Ti-Jeanne? For foot itch, you must pound garlic, and mix it with pot salt to put between the toes. That does kill it.” Mami Gros-Jeanne was always training Ti-Jeanne in the work she did as a healer.

“Yes, Mami.”

“This batch for Papa Butler. He coming Sunday for it. I done tell that man that he must wash he foot every day. He does wear one pair of stinking socks from September to June. Stupidness.”

“Yes, Mami.”

“What you does put on a cut to heal it?”

Damn. One of Mami’s spot tests. “Ah, aloe?”

“And if we can’t get aloe no more? Tell me a Canadian plant.”

Shit. It was the one with the name like a tropical plant, but it was something different. What, what? Oh, yes: “Plantain leaf.”

Her grandmother grunted. Ti-Jeanne had given the correct answer, but that grunt was the only acknowledgment she would get. She swallowed her resentment.

“And for headache?” Mami continued.

That one was easy. “Willow bark.”

Tony had once teased Ti-Jeanne almost to tears about her grandmother: “What’s that crazy old woman doing over there in Riverdale Farm, eh, Ti-Jeanne? Obeah? Nobody believes in that duppy business any more!”

“Is not obeah, Tony! Mami is a healer, a seer woman! She does do good, not wickedness!” But Ti-Jeanne herself wasn’t so sure. There was the drumming that went on in the crematorium chapel, late into the night. The wails and screams that came from the worshippers. The clotted blood on the crematorium floor in the mornings, mixed with cornmeal. Obviously, other people than Mami still believed in “that duppy business.”

Ti-Jeanne didn’t place too much stock in Mami’s bush doctor remedies. Sometimes herbs lost their potency, stored through Toronto’s long, bitter winters. And they had to guess at dosages. For instance, willow bark made a good painkiller, but too much of it caused internal bleeding. Ti-Jeanne would have preferred to rely on commercial drugs. They could still get them, and Mami’s nursing training had taught her how to dispense them. People brought stuff to her nearly every day, loot hoarded from drugstores during the Riots that had happened after the bankrupt city had disbanded its police force. People often had no idea what the Latin names on the packages meant; they just hoped it would be something Mami would consider to be fair payment to treat whatever ailed them. She had built up quite a stockpile of antibiotics and painkillers, so Ti-Jeanne didn’t understand why Mami insisted on trying to teach her all that old-time nonsense. If Mami didn’t know how to cure something, she could look it up in one of the growing piles of medical books lining the walls of the cottage.

Only half listening to the old lady’s muttering, Ti-Jeanne fretted silently about Tony. Suppose the posse boss realised that he was trying to make a break for it?

• • • •

When horse dead, cow get fat.

—Traditional saying

Fretfully, Uttley shifted a little under the thin blue sheets, glancing over at the telemetry readout beside her bed as she did so. Even that slight movement sent the three green lines of the readout careening into a crazy S-curve before it settled back down into the irregular, thready rhythm of her failing heart. Catherine Uttley lay back in her hospital bed and brooded. Anything more strenuous than that exhausted her alarmingly quickly.
Cool it, girl,
she told herself.
Stick this one out, and you’ll sail right into another five-year term.

The Ontario premier had never been physically strong, but she’d always kept in the best shape that she could: healthy diet, as much exercise as her work and her body, weakened by meningitis as a child, would allow. She’d refused to accept the fact that her health would eventually fail her. But of course it had. When the doctors first confirmed that she was going into heart failure, she’d been furious, so much so that they’d hospitalized her immediately, fearing that her soaring blood pressure would bring on a full-blown heart attack. She’d been livid. Damn it, there were senators twenty years her senior still hale and hearty!

It was Constantine’s visit that had put her on an even keel again. Good man. A lot of people underestimated her soft-spoken policy advisor with his smooth, nothing features and his smooth, nothing body. She’d laughed with him about it often, called him her spin doctor. Doctor Shark. He’d shown up that day while she was sulking in her hospital room. It seemed like he’d just materialised, so nondescript that it was hard to remember just when he’d entered a room. He’d sat down quietly on one of the standard hospital-issue green plastic chairs.

She’d greeted him gloomily. “Come to get me to transfer the reins?”

“Premier, you understand that this is an opportunity for you, not a setback?”

“Fuck you. I don’t understand anything of the sort. Election in seven months, and I’ve hit rock bottom in the polls. They’re going to vote for Brunner, damn his tanned, muscled hide. Or Lewis, God forbid, with her smarmy make-work programs.”

“Madam Premier,” Constantine had said then in his lecturing voice, “your voter pop’s been down ever since the Temagami thing. Brunner’s been a shoe-in for months.”

“Constantine, you know I had to give the blasted Indians their blasted stewardship. I practically had orders from the feds, what with Amnesty International breathing down our necks. Their international sanctions had been starving the Canadian economy for years. We needed to be able to export Temagami pine and water again.”

Her telemetry’d gone sailing off the scale. A nurse stuck her head in the door. “I’m all right,” Uttley said irritably, waving her away. “I’ll be good.”

“Seriously, Premier,” Constantine continued. “Fact of the matter is, once you get a new heart, you’ll be back on your feet in two, three months. And when you go on air before the operation and announce that you won’t have it unless it’s a human heart—”

“What?!”

“Calm down, calm down. Here, lie back. Let me get you a glass of water.”

“Constantine, sit the hell down and tell me what you’ve got up that greasy sleeve of yours.”

Constantine took his palmbook out of his attaché case, tapped in a code, and held it out for her. “The latest polls. Support for porcine organ farms since VE made its appearance.”

The disease that had jumped from pigs to humans through the an-antigenic porcine organ farms was so new that the scientists had only named it “Virus Epsilon.” The acronym had stuck. Uttley glanced at the graph. “Yes?”

Constantine tapped in some more data. “Twenty-three percent of those polled are voters. Look at what happens to your chances of reelection when we sway them to your side by having you bring back voluntary human organ donation.” He keyed in a new chart. Uttley felt her eyebrows rise at the result: 62 percent voter support in her favour.

“Nice,” she said. “And we get them to vote for me by telling them I’m going to die because I insist on a medical procedure that no longer exists?”

“You’ll make it exist again. Introduce a bill to the House. Use VE to justify the need for the bill. Make a statement to the press that you’re convinced that this is the safe, moral way to go: ‘People Helping People,’ you’re going to call it. Tell them you’re so determined that you’ll back your words with your life; you’ve demanded the medical system find you a compatible human heart, and you’re imploring the public to sign the voluntary organ donor cards you’re going to distribute in all the local papers. Tell them you’ll refuse the operation unless it’s a human heart. Voters’ll eat it up.”

Uttley smiled. “You son of a bitch. I’m going to dazzle them with my moral courage!”

“Exactly.”

“But what happens if I don’t find a human heart in time? I don’t suppose any of the hospitals follow voluntary organ donor protocols any longer.”

“Oh,” Constantine replied mildly, “I’ve got some leads. Besides, if it comes down to the wire and they have to operate before finding one, just put in a pig heart. We’ll make up some story to cover.”

It was a brilliant plan, and it was working beautifully. Polls showed her support at 58 percent and rising. Only one problem—no donor yet. Very few people were completing the donor cards. Seemed people weren’t prepared to signs parts of themselves over after all, even if they were never going to use them again. Human heart or no, her doctor was determined to operate within the next few days. “I don’t care what you tell the media we put into your chest, Premier, but by next week, I’m going to have a healthy heart beating in there.”

Uttley tapped at the remote in her hand to raise the head of the bed a little higher. Yes, that was better: she could breathe a little more easily now. Slowly she slid over to the side of the bed, got her palmbook from the bedside drawer. She lay back again, gasping as though she’d just run a marathon. When she could find the energy, she punched in the number. “Constantine? Found a donor yet?”

Bluebird, bluebird, through my window,
Oh, Mummy! I’m tired.

—Ring game

T
i-Jeanne was having the usual nightmare. This night, as every night, it startled her awake. She opened her eyes into the dark of the tiny bedroom. Nothing there. The weeping echoing in her ears was only Baby, crying for his four
A
.
M
. feed.

“Lord, keep quiet, nuh? I coming!” Ti-Jeanne stumbled over to the narrow crib, changed the fussing child, then brought him back to her bed to feed him. Sitting up against the headboard, Baby in her arms, she drowsed, lulled by his rhythmic sucking. She started to think about Tony again.

It hadn’t been Ti-Jeanne’s decision to leave Tony; it was Baby’s. Three months into her pregnancy, the bolom inside her had begun to move. It would kick, making Ti-Jeanne think of the shoes those kicking feet would soon need. And clothes, too. And food for its growing body. Those things had to be bartered or paid for. When she was with Mami, she could at least earn her keep by preparing poultices and wrapping bandages. Grateful customers would give her goods and sometimes money. Mami said anything she got was her own, so she lived well by helping her grandmother.

When she’d gone to live with Tony, though, they survived mostly on what he could bring in by running errands for the posse. Roopsingh kept asking her if she didn’t want to work in his nightclub. The back of Roopsingh’s restaurant was actually a club that opened late in the evening hours and went until cockcrow. Roopsingh hand-picked the attractive waiters and waitresses who danced in the floor shows and hooked on the side. They made good money, but it wasn’t for her. In any case, Tony wouldn’t have let her do it. So even though she hated his involvement with the posse, hated him selling drugs, she put up with it, believing he would find honest work soon.

When she became pregnant, she had known it almost immediately. She’d worked too long for Mami not to know the signs. As she fought down the nausea every morning, she began to worry about how she’d look after the baby. Tony wouldn’t be much help. He was too flighty to make a good father.

Ti-Jeanne had tried to ignore the thoughts fighting in her head; she wanted to think only of Tony. Tony’s hands on her body, making her skin tingle. Tony’s lips, whispering honey, following where his hands had been. She resented being forced to think about the future, about anything but Tony. Resentment battled with the urge to care for the baby growing inside her. The two feelings fought and grew, swelling as her belly swelled. Love and resentment scrabbled, punched, kicked inside her till she had thought she was carrying triplets and her belly would burst with the weight. Finally she went back to her grandmother, who had simply made a kiss-teeth noise of disgust, then brought her fresh sheets for the bed in her old room.