No Safeguards (23 page)

“You have to get beyond that.”

He comes to sit on the side of the bed, his back to the dressing table. He puts his hand on mine and keeps it there for a long time without saying anything.

“Know something, Jay. I forgave Ma.”

“Would have been nice if she'd died knowing it.”
For what?

“During those months you didn't hear from me, I was thinking about a lot o' things. You don't understand what happened to me when I came here. You don't. You saw my acting out, that's all you saw. But Ma should have known better. There are many mothers here who should know better, but they don't think or they refuse to think. Coming here was like taking me from a boat and throwing me into the sea and telling me to swim and keep clear of the sharks. Trouble is no one had taught me how to swim or how to defy sharks.”

“No one can. Life's a blind journey. Besides Grama wanted us to come.”

“Yes, but if Grama had lived here and seen how this society's run, she would've felt otherwise. She'd have known you don't take someone from a secure environment and toss him into chaos without prior preparation. You came prepared. You'd already learned how to be responsible for yourself and me, from the time you were 11.”

I see his point. I nod. “Well, Grama is dead so we can't ask her. But you are right up to a point. Ma did realize that bringing you here when she did was a mistake.”

“I'm glad she acknowledged it. When?”

“On her deathbed . . . I'll tell you about it some other time.”

“Clarify something for me, Jay.” He stares hard at me.

“Clarify what?”

“Are you gay?”

I reply as calmly as I can. “Do you mean if men arouse me erotically?”

Paul snorts, closes his eyes, all the while shaking his head. “Yes. You're so damn clinical!”

“Have you seen
Kinsey
?”

“No.”

“Well, sexuality is a lot more complex than being gay or straight.”

“Did you remain in touch with that beautiful Jamaican dougla girl who had trouble with her H's, that girl you dated three or four years after we came here. For a while you two had a serious thing going.”

“Tamara. No.”

F
OR A LONG
while neither of us speaks.

“Back to Jonathan, Jay.”

“What about Jonathan?”

“He wants you all to himself. You
don't
know that? That's why I left and came home.”

For a while I'm silent. “Life comes with constraints, Paul.” I stare into his eyes before adding: “Yours is your asthma.”

“And looks. Adipose challenged too.” He chuckles.

Ouch.
“Ma's was a fear of men after Daddy's abuse. You remember how you used to tease her about joining the Baptists to find a husband?”

“What about it?”

“She'd sometimes say: ‘I have news for Paul. I had enough battles with Caleb to last two life times. Baptists believe that men should control women. These born-again men . . .' She laughed. ‘The other day I heard this woman comic on the radio saying that women should have keys to their vaginas that they could leave at home. That way when rapists jumped them, they could say: “Sorry, buddy: I left the key at home. Not just leave it at home: put it in a safety deposit box.” Then her face got serious and she said: ‘When I got here I used to work for a deacon in the Pentecostal Church. He tried to rape me. Those scandals with those televangelists, they never surprised me.'” For a moment I reflect on the full story she told me on her deathbed. “Ma had her head on, Paul — she did — more than you ever gave her credit for. One of her church members, Brother Isaac, an undocumented immigrant, almost half her age, proposed marriage to her. ‘Sistah Hanna, will you join me in ‘oly matrimony, and become my queen?' . . . ‘Some king.' Paul I never heard Ma laugh so much.”

Paul looks away, uninterested in the story.We're silent for a while. Paul breaks it. “I'm older. Nineteen months older than when I left. Feels like two lifetimes.” It's as if he's speaking to himself. “I've had a lot of time to think, to reflect, to learn.” He gazes at me, makes sure he has my attention. “I wanted to be away from you especially, because even more than Grama, you've parented me. You're the only unbroken link I've known. One day I'll tell you what I went through.”

“Paul, Stan struck Guatemala, and you didn't even contact us to let know you were safe.”

“I was afraid to write or call. I'll tell you the full story. One day.”

“What did you want to tell me the evening before you left?”

His face tautens and he angles his head to the right and breathes out loud. One hand goes to his chin, the other to the back of his head. “That I was disgusted by the fool I'd made of myself . . . my life was in shards; I didn't know if they could be put back together . . . that I wanted to commit suicide: the things that brought on my depression. You'd never imagine how envious I was of you.”

I'm silent. I never believed that someone like Paul who'd thrived on academic excellence could so easily turn his back on it.

“It's why we had to share a joint. It would have been too painful otherwise. And maybe I might not have told you after all.” He looks away, grins guiltily. “And there was . . . never mind.”

“
Never mind
what?”

“You won't understand.”

Another long silence. Paul breaks it. “I need your opinion on something. You remember Brady and Jack, right?”

I nod.

“The day after the villagers burned down their house, Elka, one of those who still lived in the shanty on Laird's Estate, told Grama: ‘It served them right.'

“‘How what they did in the privacy o' their own home concern you all?' Grama said.

“‘Is abomination, Ma Kirton. Pure abomination! They lucky we didn't burn them up too, just like God burned them sodomites in Sodom and Gomorrah.'

“‘It's not their fault, Elka. God made them that way. We should leave it up to God. If they're to burn then let God do it.'

“‘No, Ma Kirton. No!' She stamped the floor. ‘If God did make them so he wouldn't o' destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. You have it all wrong. Is ‘cause they choose to serve Satan. We is Christian soldiers, Ma Kirton. The Holy Ghost live in us and inspire us to take action against them.' Then she frowned and stared hard at Grama. ‘I see where you is coming from. You is in their league, Ma Kirton. You is in their league.'

“‘What you mean, Elka?'

“‘You want me to be plain. Well, I will be plain. Rumour have it that you and Mercy is lesbians. And the way you is in agreement with abomination . . . hmm. Watch it; your house going be next.'”

“Really! Paul, you heard that?”

Paul nods.

“Grama, what did she say?”

“She reached under the counter and took up a box of matches and handed it to Elka; next she opened the till, took a five-dollar bill from it, and put it on the counter. ‘Here's the matches and take this to pay for the kerosene.' Elka left the shop then.” Paul pauses. “Jay, you've never heard people whispering about Grama?”

“No. Remember, I was rarely in the store.”

“You think there was anything to those rumours?”

“No . . . Aunt Mercy and Grama were friends since Ma was a toddler, before Granddad's death, before Grama remarried. She and Grama were like sisters. You saw how they lived. Some parasite of a man that Grama spurned after she left Bradley probably started it. Grama was too independent for them.”

“Could have been Sefus Butcher.”

“Sefus who?”

“Butcher. You wouldn't know him. He used to hang around the store saying he was courting Grama. Bantering mostly. A comic. Grama felt that if he'd lived abroad, he would have made a good living as a comedian or storyteller. Mostly Grama hid from him. Sometimes she'd send me out front to reconnoitre; when he was there, she'd give me her instructions to take to Lucy, or send me to call Lucy if there were no customers. But she couldn't always to do that. Sefus proposed marriage, a common-law relationship, even setting up a rumshop upstairs.”

“‘Who will bankroll you, Sefus?' Grama asked him. He lived in a mud hut right up under the rocks. That same year or the year after the November rains washed it half way down the hill.

“‘Youself, Ma Kirton, and with the profit I make I will pay you back before you can say: “Sefus, honey boy, I love you with all my heart.” But by that time, me and you going be husband and wife, blend together like cake, sweet-sweet, sweeter than cake, and what's mines going be yours and what's yours going be mine.'

“He told her one day: ‘Ma Kirton, the only thing missing from your life is my sweet loving. I keeping the piston well oiled for when you ready to get the engine rolling.'

“‘Lay down the tracks first, Sefus. Lucy, what I will do with this piece o' twine?' She pointed to Sefus. ‘Tie up myself with it?' He was tall, almost two metres, but couldn't have weighed more than 65 kilos.

“‘Ma Kirton, you is not listening — if you try me — all o' me — you will be a contented queen.'

“‘Sure, Sefus: on the toilet seat with grugru branches on my head.'

“Three customers had come into the store. They laughed.

“‘Sefus, I'm seeing you and hearing you, and understanding you.' She cleared her throat, looked at Lucy, and winked.

“‘But, Ma Kirton, you never taste me. Don't let looks fool you.'

“‘Sefus, carry your sniffing someplace else. Nobody in here is in heat.'

“‘That's ‘cause you and Mercy does
zamay
.'

“That day — it was during school holidays — Aunt Mercy was in the storeroom at the back listening to him. She came to the front. And you know, Jay, with that stare she has when she angles her head, screws up her forehead, tears her eyes wide, and fixes you, she said: ‘Go long, Sefus, you already get enough love in Laird stables where your pappy raise you.'

“Jay, everybody laughed. Everybody.

“‘Make me catch you alone one o' these nights when you going home, I will show you what I learn in Laird stables.'”

Paul takes a deep breath. “I loved listening to Sefus. One day a woman came into the shop with her arm in a sling, and when she left Sefus said: ‘Is sweat rice that cause that.'

“‘How you know? She tell you?' Lucy asked him.

“Sefus laughed. ‘He catch she doing it. Since then he going round saying, he can't leave her, that she tie him.'

“‘Sefus, that don't mean
she
can't leave him.'

“‘Lucy, if she did want to leave him you think she would o' sweat the rice in the first place?'

“Grama never told me what ‘sweat-rice' meant. She said she didn't know. You know what it is, Jay?”

“No.”

“It's when a woman lets her menstrual blood drip into her man's food. Zora Neale Hurston writes about it. Some women believe it will make a man stay forever.”

“And men who want to keep women for life, what do they do?”

“I don't know. He was a boat repairman and used to work mornings and take the afternoons off. ‘How come you always here, Sefus? How come you're not at the rum shop?' Grama said to him one time.

“‘Ma Kirton, I saving my liver for when you and me get married. The doctor tell me to stay off grog. I come here and admire your golden eyes, watch your sweet smile, drool over your honey lips, and don't get me started ‘bout your bouncing behind.'

“I think Grama enjoyed his flirting and his thinking. One day he and Elka got into an argument about God and the Devil.

“‘Elka, the Devil didn't have no mother. God is his mother and father. Everything in him come from God, so God and the Devil is one. And that means that Jesus and the Devil is brothers. Is another one o' those stories where God set one brother up against the other.'

“‘Sefus!' Elka shouted. ‘Stop it! You is blaspheming! Stop it!'

“‘Ma Kirton, you see why I want you to married me? You and me know them stories in the bible is pure make-up thing. Elka, if God didn't want me to think he shouldn't o' put brains in my head.' Jay, you missed a lot not being in the store. I'll be using a lot of that stuff in my fiction.”

Silence.

I break it. “Give Bill a call. He's been worried about you.”

“I will, tomorrow. I sent him a card from each of the countries I visited. It was he who told me I should come clean with you.”

“About what?”

Paul looks at the floor, swallows loud, then breathes loud and turns his head away for a while. He takes another deep breath. “When I told him about wanting to leave home, he asked why and said that going away should be about more than just running away from family; that most people who leave home discover it's themselves they're trying to run away from . . . ” He sighs, stops talking, purses his lips and shakes his head. Something about this is stressing him. “I told Bill how impressed I was by Thoreau's Walden sojourn. He said to forget about Thoreau, that Thoreau was preparing himself for that since birth. ‘If you must go away, go somewhere with a different culture, where no one knows you. It will help you to see with new eyes.' He'd gone to Chile, excited by Allende's election victory in the early seventies, and had to be evacuated by the Canadian High Commission when trouble broke after Allende's overthrow.

“I told him about the nasty, homophobic stuff I used to lay on you.” He stares into my eyes, then looks away and pauses. “Jay, you're lucky. Damn lucky.”

“Meaning?”

“You're healthy. You never faced high school bullying. You even had Ma all to yourself. You've had Jonathan, faithful as a dog, for a friend. Now you can even have him as a boyfriend, if you were so inclined. You hit six on the dice all the time. The guys I chilled with.
Un vrai calvaire
. All they did was smoke and listen to crude rap. They were afraid to think. They wanted to destroy everything they were afraid of or didn't understand . . . I know that now.”

Seems to me you weren't so different
. “So why did you hang out with them?”

“I
had
to hang out with them. In high school you belonged to a posse or you were toast. Toast, man. Toast. Guys saw who your posse was and knew there'd be trouble if they messed with you. I needed those guys for security. It was that or get pushed around, beat up, and dissed all the time. But there were dues, membership dues. Understand what I mean?” He swallows.

“I left here to learn to be on my own, to put distance between them and me, and distance between you and Ma and me.” He stares at the floor, compresses his lips. “It was the right decision. Didn't always seem so, but it was the right decision.” He's nodding slowly. “Bill was right. There was a lot to learn. As long as I was learning I was distracted. I was in places where no one knew me, so no one could judge me. I didn't have to prove anything to anybody. I felt free. Afraid too. And always vulnerable. And I began to understand that in life we are alone. Those evenings by myself were what I needed. It wasn't easy. But it was good medicine.” He frowns, then looks at me, and smiles nervously. “In Central America I had a lot of time to look back on what was happening, and I could see that we are like Armistead Maupin's characters. You know his books?”

I shake my head.

“You must read them. We know that we're dissatisfied with what we have. We think there's something better, but we're not sure what it is; we know there's some place we want to get to, but not much more; we set out looking for it, but what we find isn't the place we're looking for. We search in the concrete for something that's not concrete at all. And as to that thing we call happiness, we're all searching for it, and we rarely find it, and if we do, it lasts no longer than fog at daybreak. And we are angry that it doesn't last or come when we want it. And sometimes we feel we have to lash out at somebody for this.”

“Like you lashed out at Ma.”