Dancing Lessons (20 page)

I think of time spent with Mr. Bridges as a way of reducing many things to more manageable proportions, including my anxieties. He has such a calming way of looking at life. Even Winston seems tamed under his influence, for he is so much more amenable now to gardening work. On his own initiative, he has forked up several more beds for planting. The fact that the land, the seeds, the plants, the tools, fertilizers, the sprays, even the water is provided by others, and that his labour alone can yield such bounty, must strike him as a good bargain, for much of the harvest seems now to be going to his baby-mothers.

But it is to Mr. Bridges that I attribute this tenderness that is taking root in me. To tell the truth, I am afraid of it. I don't know if I was tender with my children. I have never thought of it. I mothered them, but I don't know what that meant beyond looking after their needs. I don't know if I had time to be tender, they came so fast, three before I was of legal age, and I had not just the children and the house to look after but the fields as well, the goats, the chickens, the eggs we sold. I didn't do it all by myself, I always had someone to help in the fields, but I was the one who had to see that everything got done. I sewed all our clothes, mended them, stitched sheets from flour bags and salted down beef when we got some, for we were awfully poor the first few years since neither of us had brought anything to the table except for the land and the little house that he had fixed up. Everything was cut and carve and worrying about the next meal. I don't remember he was at home much, even at the start, and I was too timid to ask where he went though, my God, how I longed to know. How I longed to turn him inside out, know everything about him. And how he twisted and turned, slipped away from me so that I could never truly say I had caught him.

It was an uneven yoke, one he never wanted. It was his mother who expected us to get married. She wanted all her sons married. She thought they needed to settle down. Though her eldest and only married son, John, was hardly a shining example of being settled. I also thought she believed that Sam had wronged me and should pay for what he had done, marriage being the only possible payment.

While I was living with her, I don't know what kind of conversations she was having with Sam, but she was writing to the Richardses from time to time asking them to give their permission for me to marry, for of course I was well under legal age. They did not reply, but she never stopped trying.

Things only came to a head because of that married John attacking me one day. I was alone in the house, Ma D having left that morning to accompany her daughter, Jean, to town, I don't know what for, and Miss Gem had gone along too. I don't know where Mass Ephraim was, I didn't see him around, and undoubtedly John had not either, but he is the one who came running when he heard my screams.

I was so angry that day that I could easily have killed this man myself, and little Mass Ephraim, who must have been in his sixties at the time, would probably have done so, had John not been so much younger and stronger that he easily disarmed him of the cutlass he came flying through the door with. But it was enough to prevent him from carrying through with his intentions. Before leaving, he looked at the old man on the floor where he had flung him, after the cutlass, and I could still hear the sound of that body striking the wall.

“Oh Ephraim, Ephraim, Ephraim,” he said, shaking his head and laughing, “I would never have taken you for such a gallant. Well done, my man. We'll knock back a quart in celebration. Later.”

He had the nerve to give a V for Victory sign and smile at me before leaving. But I could see the angry purple scratches that were breaking out on his cheeks where I had scratched him and the redness of his ears.

The door slammed behind him. Mass Ephraim got up very slowly, as if in shock, walked over and leaned against that same door, and then, to my immense alarm, burst into tears and sank slowly down onto his heels, holding his hands over his face and howling. I stood helpless, trying to murmur words of comfort. When his sobs finally ceased, he let his hands drop and held up his face as if waiting for the air to dry his tears, and then he just got up and took up his cutlass, as if everything had returned to normal. He smiled sadly at me and shook his head.

“Miss G,” he said, “you don't know, young miss, you just don't know what this house pass through. Is only because of the Missis why me and Gem stay. As long as breath in mi body I wi' stay with Missis. But I pray you don't tarry here long.” And with that he went through the door. Then he popped his head back in and shook his cutlass at me. “Don't worry, little miss, me and the ‘las still here. We and Massa God will protek you.”

Left alone, I backed into a chair and eased myself down. My body was shaking uncontrollably. From fright, from anger, from relief. When I had calmed down I began to feel proud of myself too, for I had inflicted some slight damage on the beast, as I thought of him, and an even greater wound to his pride, no matter his taunt to Mass Ephraim.

Now that I had escaped serious hurt, I realized what really annoyed me was how he had crept up on me and frightened me, ripped a strip off my privacy, seen a part of me no one ever saw. I had been sitting at the sewing machine in a corner of the covered porch overlooking the backyard where nothing moved except a hen and her chicks, stitching a new dress that Ma D had helped me cut out, my feet working away at the treadle and singing loudly to myself. I thought I was alone. What was I singing? That same song my father taught me, one I never forgot and sang to myself sometimes, but only when I was sure I was alone, moving my upper body to the rhythm as I was doing now as I fed the material through.

If you don't have love songs to fit my key
Baby don't you sing your blues to me.
That's YOUR RED WAGON,
So just keep dragging YOUR RED WAGON along
.

I was in my own private world, one that no one else had ever seen, so it was embarrassment more than fright I felt when I suddenly heard steps behind me. I stopped singing instantly and before I could turn to look, I felt two arms kneading my shoulders and a hot breath on the back of my neck. It was strange that I never thought it was Sam. From the first touch, I felt it was dangerous and dirty. Before I realized who it was, I screamed with fright and tried to jump out of the chair. But by then he had already moved and was on his knees burying his head in my belly, his hands kneading my breasts, hurting me, unbuttoning my blouse.

I screamed louder then, a proper scream this time, and tried to free myself, knocking the chair over. My feet got entangled and I fell. He was instantly on top of me. I was murderously angry, and eyed the scissors on the machine above me, for I wanted to plunge them into him. When I realized that I couldn't reach them, I screamed again, and he put his hand over my mouth. I tasted the blood as I bit my own lip. I could feel his anger as I fought against him. It was strange to think afterwards that he never said anything, he just grunted as he struggled to control me. But each time he took his hand from my mouth I screamed again. So then he slammed my head against the floor and put his hand against my neck to pin me there. From the look in his eyes I truly thought he was going to kill me.

He was breathing heavily and moaning. He removed his hand from my neck and placed it on the floor to balance himself, while trying to unbutton his trousers with the other. I closed my eyes then, trying to think my way through this, praying to a God I only called upon in times of crisis. It was then that I heard someone slamming the kitchen door and Mass Ephraim calling out, “Miss G, Miss G, you aright?”

I found the courage to open my mouth and scream again. He got up quickly, my assailant, straightening his clothes just as Mass Ephraim came running into the room, cutlass raised, his normally placid face distorted with rage. I pulled myself up and buttoned my blouse, my hands trembling, feeling ashamed as I did so, wondering if Mass Ephraim would think I had invited this on myself. But there was no doubt what he thought, for he swung at John, who was on his feet now and who laughed as he easily shifted out of range and parried the blows until he got into position to grab the old man's hand on an upswing and twist it until he winced with pain and dropped the weapon.

By this time they had both backed into the kitchen. I got up and followed them in time to see John toss the old man against the wall like a sack of cornmeal. I don't know that I have ever hated anyone in my life as much as I hated that man then. I never spoke to him again, though he had the nerve to attend my wedding with his wife and children, looking scrubbed and neat and so respectable.

She was a poor white girl from German town, with lank pale blonde hair and a manner to match. But she had three of the most beautiful children I have ever seen, and Ma D praised her as a wonderful mother. I always wondered what she made of the scratches on her husband's face that day, but that perhaps was a normal occurrence.

When Ma D got home and heard what had happened from Ephraim before she even came inside the house, she didn't write this time, she went in person to see Miss Celia. I don't know what she told her, but she returned in triumph with her written permission for me to marry. The day she went, Gem never left my side, but we needn't have worried. Sam had given John a thorough beating, we heard, with a few blows thrown in by the other brothers, and it was some time before he started showing his face around the Bull Pen again. At the time, Sam's actions made me feel so proud, a sign that I mattered to him. Only later, of course, would I realize that John had not been chastised because of the injury he had done me, but for his disrespect of another man's property.

PROPERTY! NOW I CAN
laugh about it, but at the time the realization just added to my bitterness. Not long after he left me for good, Sam and his brothers sold the family property to a bauxite mining company, for an enormous sum, I am told, shared between the four of them. By this time both Ma D and their sister, Jean, had died. That bare-boned soil was found to be full of aluminium, and he was rich. I was still scratching around in the dirt, with two children at home. Never once did he offer us anything. At least not to me, but it was strange that as the children grew up and left home it was to him that they gravitated, or so I heard, for they lost no time in cutting me off.

No wonder he looked so smug and prosperous when he came to Celia's wedding. Paid for it too, I was to learn. I can still remember how I shrivelled up inside myself when I saw him. Here I was, Mother of the Bride dressed all in blue, for she had chosen my outfit down to my dyed satin shoes. I was glad my hat had a little brim I could hide under, hide my plain face, sunburned black, and my silk gloves would hide my work hands that one quick manicure couldn't disguise. Hands that spent the entire ceremony clutching and unclutching the beaded silk purse in my lap. When I stood up, the beads that I had worked loose fell to the ground, and I was trailed thereafter by a dribble of tiny pink and blue beads that got crushed underfoot. By the end of the day, the purse itself was as bare as my soul.

Celia hadn't told me he was coming. To give her away. As if we hadn't both done that a long time ago. Up to that moment in the church I had sat there feeling proud of her, though she was not at all famous then. I was proud of the good match she seemed to be making. Her husband, Herman, came from a well-to-do family of legal luminaries. He was an up-and-coming lawyer himself. The few times I had seen them together, I was touched by how he seemed to care for her.

It wasn't a large wedding, but as the church filled up with fashionable people, the groom's family, their friends, the more dowdy and awkward I felt, sitting there beside my son, Junior, who was assigned to escort me but who maintained such a space between us on the pew I knew he had no desire to be there with me. Though he was pleasant enough when he came to collect me, I have to say, bending down to kiss me on my cheek, smiling and telling me how well I looked. I didn't say much to him in the car, for there were other guests present, but the lingering smell of his aftershave made my heart ache. I remembered how even as a small boy he would help himself to his father's, mimicking him in all his masculine ways.

I looked out the corner of my eye at him, for I was too self-conscious to turn my head and look at my own son whom I hadn't seen for some years, now fully grown. Over six feet tall and handsome, looking like none of us really, more Indian than anything with his beautiful chocolate skin and curly black hair and, unlike the others, my brown eyes.

The last time I'd seen him was when he came home to collect his things after he'd been expelled from school. My prediction then, loudly flung at him as he left, was that he'd come to a bad end. But here he was at twenty looking quite prosperous, if the beautifully cut silk suit, the expensive watch, and the way he carried himself were saying anything. Of course it might have been his father's doing, but I had heard that Junior had gone into business with his old schoolmates, Michael Evans or whatever his name was and that Pinto boy—with the help of their rich fathers, no doubt—and they were doing well. Exactly what the business was I didn't know, and I didn't get the chance to ask Junior that day.

His father was the focus of all my agitation and anger and resentment. When the wedding march started and I looked down the aisle and I saw Celia on his arm, my stomach turned somersaults and I blanked out the rest of the ceremony, consumed by the unfairness of it all.

JUNIOR WASN'T THE ONLY
one of my children in the church that day. I'd forgotten Lise was there too. To that Lise would have said in her sharp little voice, “So, what else is new?” She claimed she always came last with me. That could well be true. She was an impossible child from birth. From the time she was implanted in my womb, sorrow, anger, bereavement, and regret were stalking me. I knew it was all over between me and Sam, that nothing had gone right and nothing would ever be fixed between us. Another child I didn't want, I have to admit that. And it was while I was pregnant that we allowed those people to take Celia. Would I have allowed Sam to persuade me it was the best thing for her if I myself wasn't in what people used to call a “delicate way”? Did I allow my heightened emotional state at the time to cloud my judgment?