Red Jacket (27 page)

Offspring

There was nothing untoward in his manner, nothing suggestive in how he held her hand, so Grace is alarmed that she finds Jimmy Atule's touch erotic. She puts it down to the fact that her hormones are doing strange things. He is cool, solicitous, and delicious eye candy, to be sure, but she meets many sensitive, attractive men in her work. She is here on business, he is a person dedicated to God, she's caused trouble enough, arriving pregnant and unwell, making a call on his time and creating extra work for the staff.

Suddenly aware of the pointlessness of it all, she changed tack, then ended the chat, after his interfering advice to inform the baby's father. He was so sweetly apologetic.

“Can we finish this some other time, Jimmy? I'm suddenly weary.”

“You're sure it's tiredness, not anything else?”

“Just tired.”

They got up. He reached over and made the sign of the cross on her forehead, saying as he did it, “You don't mind?” She shook her head, no.

“Good night, Grace.”

“Good night, Jimmy.” She stood watching him as he went, one hand sliding across her stomach. She's still heard nothing from Mark. Fine baby-father, never mind he's no idea she is pregnant. She is increasingly coming to the conclusion that she isn't going to tell him, whether he gets in touch or no. Charlie said when they first made love, “If you get pregnant, Grace Carpenter, I'll be over the moon.” She'd been daftly oblivious about contraception that time too.

In her room, she undresses, lies down, turns out the light, and settles into the sheets, preparing again to consider this lunatic attraction to — she rehearses the litany — her professional colleague, her host, her doctor for all intents and purposes, a man vowed to celibacy and a life dedicated to God. Jesus! Then the enormity of what he said hits her. She doesn't know a thing about Mark, has no clue about his personal life, let alone his lovemaking habits, so she and her baby can well be as risk-prone as any Mabuli woman having sex with a mate who frequents prostitutes.

“Oh my God!” she says aloud. “Oh my sweet Lord Jesus. What is this foolishness I've done?” She opens her mouth to scream, then she realizes where she is, who she is. Screaming would be selfish and silly, but she needs at least to talk to someone. Maybe she can wake the priest, or that nice Sœur Monique. She jumps up, starts to dress, almost falling over her feet as they search on the floor for her shoes.

“Turn on the light, stupid!” Having turned it on, she lies back on the bed again, her mind going back to conversations in Geneva. They all take it for granted that since any new sexual partner might be HIV-positive, everybody insists on a condom. She knows it is neither the case that new sexual partners are mostly HIV-positive nor that everyone makes that assumption and so uses a condom. Otherwise AIDS wouldn't be epidemic. Still, she has no excuse, she, of all people!

Up on her feet again, no shoes on, she walks end to end of the small room. She sneezes and, too agitated to search her bag for tissues, uses the sleeve of her nightgown to wipe her nose. Maybe it is better in this kind of situation to be dirt poor and have no prospects. Then it is less of a big deal.

She is immediately ashamed. The thought is selfish, supremacist. Sinful.

There must be some sensible thing to do. She remembers an Outward-Bound-type program Steph coaxed her to join one Canada Day weekend in the second year she was at U of Toronto. She tried at length to explain to her roommate why she didn't want to participate, reasons having to do with bears and the icy water in rivers and lakes, but Steph, indomitable, prevailed. She learned some useful things, one being what to do in states of panic. She tries to remember. Take long deep breaths. She does. Check vital signs. She is all there, maybe losing a baby but still, all there. Sum up the danger. Right. If she has AIDS, there is nothing to do about it, not immediately, anyway. If she doesn't, there is nothing to worry about. Either way, panic will achieve nothing.

It doesn't work. She is going to the priest. She doesn't care if he is terminally exhausted. She doesn't care about anything except the fact that she has to talk. She gathers the blanket round her shoulders because she is freezing and is turning the doorknob when she hears Gramps, clear as a bell. “You're a big girl now, Grace.” A big girl who's done something superbly stupid! Just then Jimmy Atule's celibacy strikes her as a mighty shrewd choice. She decides she will talk to him in the morning.

Next day she sleeps until eight. She doesn't know exactly when the priest gets up, but she knows that he says Mass quite early in the chapel. Since she's been better, he's given up passing by her room in the morning and now leaves by nine most days, the time at which she's been waking up. She has to speak to him before he leaves for the day.

“Father Jimmy!” she shouts from the verandah when he's riding by on his bicycle, heading for the centre.

“Morning, Dr. Grace!” he shouts back, “Comment
ça
va?” When he sees her running for the steps, he directs the bike towards the building and brings it to a stop near where she is standing.

“Look, you can still lose that child. Rushing to and fro isn't a good idea.”

“I'm sorry,” she doesn't quite hang her head. “I must talk to you. Please.”

“You're not hemorrhaging again?” He is off the bike, up the stairs, ushering her back into her room. She sits on the bed while he pulls up a stool. “Something wrong?”

“I'm fine.”

“Absolutely for sure?”

“Absolutely.” Get on with it, idiot. “This isn't professional, Jimmy. It's personal. It will take fifteen minutes. I know you're busy.”

“Why don't you just tell me?”

“Suppose I have AIDS? Suppose I give it to the baby? I couldn't bear that. The child doesn't deserve that. I don't know what I'd do.” She is looking at him, hands over her belly, hugging herself, starting to cry.

“Chances are that you and the baby are fine.”

“How can you say that? You can't know. I can't know till I'm tested. And that's not possible here. Right?” She wipes her face with the back of her hand.

“Yes. Benke is too far for you to travel to, in your condition. Abortion is an option, but I can't advise it, of course, nor could you do it here. And you'd still be at risk.”

“But you just said I'm probably fine.”

“That's true. And the baby too.”

“But you can say anything. You're not pregnant. You're not at risk for HIV/AIDS.”

“I'm not pregnant, that's true.” He hands her a big blue kerchief. “But nobody who works with HIV/AIDS patients avoids being at some risk.”

“Makes you very brave, doesn't it?” She is being horrid, but she doesn't care.

“Grace, life is hard, even if you're rich as the King of the Ashanti and healthy as a hippo. When you come down the hill to the centre, you'll see women, children, and men who embarrass us all by their courage.”

“I'm sorry. I'd no right.”

“It's okay. As you said, I'm not pregnant.”

“I just feel stupid and powerless and responsible.”

“What do you know about the baby's father?”

“You mean do I know if he sleeps around?”

“Is he someone you just met? Or someone you have a relationship with?”

“I knew him a long time ago. We worked together at the university in St. Chris. He was dean of my faculty. I hadn't seen him for ages.”

He sighs. “Is there anything to be done to help you to feel better?”

“Well, maybe I could call him. You know, ask him the questions I ought to have asked before I slept with him.”

“So this is a new relationship?”

“New, yes, but I wouldn't call it a relationship.”

“Well, what with recent sandstorms, we don't have the best phone connections in the world, but we can usually put a call through. You'll have to come to the centre, though. And we'll have to know the destination of the call to figure out when to make it, given time constraints.”

“It's Washington, and they're six hours behind us, so if we called at about three, I should be able to get him.”

“I'll ask Sœur Tekawitha, then. Do you have a number? And we'll need his name of course.”

“His name is Mark Blackman. He's Executive Director of the Caribbean Inter-American Development Bank. I'll find his number and bring it with me.”

“Good. We'll organize it, then. Have you had breakfast?”

She shakes her head.

“I'll ask Amitié to hurry it up.”

One Night with You

Grace is taking her evening stroll down the verandah at about nine o'clock. It runs the length of the building, meeting the chapel at one end and the dining room and kitchen at the other. If she walks back and forth a few times, it amounts to exercise. She is encouraged to do that, taking it slow. She passes Jimmy's room going and coming. There is no light in his room when she first goes by. She presumes he is still working at Tindi or out at one of the other MATE Centres, so when she walks past his door again, she is surprised to hear something crash and shatter, followed by a regular, violent thumping. She waits a few moments, knocks, hears no answer, and opens the door. In the dimness she sees the priest lying on the ground in his pajama bottoms. His body is vibrating like an old wind-up car engine refusing to start. It hammers the hard wood boards. His eyes show only the whites, brilliant in the half-dark.

She reaches for the light switch, flicks it on.

“Jimmy? Jimmy?” No response. Around him on the floor are shiny blue shards of a broken pottery lamp.

God! What is it that you do for seizures again? A heavy, carved walking stick standing against the wall catches her eye, and she grabs it, resting it on the ground so it won't fall and hit him. He is biting his tongue, but she knows she shouldn't do anything about that. As she is pushing the broken pieces of the vase away from his body, she sees pills on the floor and an open vial with a few tablets inside — Diazepam, according to the label. Container in hand, she surveys the room for something to put under his head as a pillow. She puts down the pills and is bunching up the bedspread when she notices that though he is still sweating, the spasms have slowed, so she waits. When the jangling abates and his eyes are back in place, she asks, “Can you hear me?” He nods. She offers her hand, but he hangs on to one of the bedposts and with effort pulls himself to his feet.

“For sure, this is awful. Upsetting for you. I'm fine. Please go back to your room. Thank you so much for your help.”

“How's your tongue?” She watches as one hand starts to go to his mouth, at the same time as the other begins slipping from the bedpost, as if in slow motion. Then the first one falls to join the second as his face and limbs begin to go slack and crumple
.

“Do you need the Diazepam?”

He nods, clutches at the bedpost again, fighting to stay upright, groping his way onto the bed. She takes a pill from the box.

“Water?”

He gestures towards a small glass beside a statue of the Virgin on his bedside table. She wonders if it is holy water, but gives it to him anyway, along with the pill. He swallows it, but too late. His body stiffens as he slides into semi-consciousness again. At least he is on the bed. She doesn't know what to do. If she leaves him to get help, something worse might happen with no one there. She has CPR training and she's seen fits before, so she decides to stay.

The colour has leaked out of his skin so that it is the dirty grey-brown of St. Chris river water after heavy rain. This time he lies entirely still. It occurs to her that rousing him might help.

“What can I do, Jimmy? Can I get you anything?”

His pupils swivel and he looks at her goat-eyed, so she wonders if he does indeed see her. Then he is patting the bed for her to sit. She hesitates, but the gesture is insistent, so she eases herself onto the opposite corner near the bed head, all the time looking at him. He pushes himself up, resting against the plain metal headboard and faces her.

“I killed her.” It is barely a whisper, so she has to bend to hear.

“Killed who?”

“I killed Nila.”

“Who's Nila? Besides, that's absurd. You couldn't harm a flea.”

“You want to split hairs? I can do that. I'm a Jesuit. Remember.”

“That isn't funny.”

“Indeed, it's not.”

“Like I said, Jimmy, you couldn't … ”

“Very well. I caused her death. Her name was Nila. She was my wife.”

Another time she may have been surprised, but not now. “I don't believe that either.”

“You mean that I was married? Lying isn't one of my sins.”

“I've no reason to doubt that you were married. I meant that you caused her death. Didn't you love her?”

“Very much.”

“Well, it doesn't make sense. If you loved her, why cause her death?”

“A sin of omission. Not what I did; what I didn't do.”

“What didn't you do?” Persistent
cokee
noises all around in the dark remind her of the tiny tree frogs that used to comfort her in Wentley when she woke from a bad dream.

“You know Descartes, Grace?”

She nods. What has he to do with anything?

“He's supposed to have made this body/mind dichotomy, echoing the ancients' flesh and spirit division. These days the fashion is, ‘Forget this mind nonsense. There is only the body, the tangible material thing.' I've always wondered if they never heard of Huxley, hallucinogens, LSD, even good weed.”

She reminds herself that he has just been through something harrowing at the same time as she marvels at this Catholic priest who sounds so accepting of mood-enhancing drugs, psychedelics, marijuana.

“The idea that space-time is a continuum and black holes can double back time on itself is sound science, as any Trekkie can tell you.” He is talking quickly, flecks of spit banking up at his mouth corners. “But any other predicting is suspect. If you're a scientist forward-seeing from your vantage point on a wormhole and you foresee what I foresee, your foresight is valid but mine isn't.”

He's overwrought. Suppose he lapses again? She is unsure about what to do, decides she can't leave him. “Can't I get you something?” she interrupts, distracting him.

“It's all propaganda,” he goes on, ignoring her. “Trouble is, while some people are peddling religion, science, philosophy, and so on, our African Everywoman is having sex with a man whose AIDS-infected penis is going about its traditional, historical, as-by-divine-right man business.” He is gesticulating, his voice rising. She must get him back to talking about his wife.

“We were talking about Nila.”

“We are talking about Nila, about how she died. We're discussing the fine phenomenon you just witnessed.”

“What exactly is it, Jimmy?”

“I fall into some kind of trance —”

“Seizures aren't so unusual.”

“It's not just seizures. Everyone else falls down. Me, I fall down and prophesy.”

She allows a respectful time for that to settle, and then offers, “In our part of the world, seeing the future isn't so strange, though Ma and Pa didn't like us fooling with horoscopes, tea leaf reading, and the like.”

“I'm not talking about astral charts and palmistry, Grace. I wish I were. I've read all about clairvoyance, sweated on my knees, fasted for days. It's real. It can run in families. God knows, I do foresee things! I wish I didn't, but I do.”

“So what has that to do with Nila's death?”

“The night we were married I went into a trance, before we had sex, before the union was consummated. I could have called it quits and packed her off back to her parents. I didn't. Even after we'd sealed the deal, in the terms of Holy Church, I could have stopped her when she insisted we go to the Alps. I could have said, ‘Not there. Bad things will happen if we go there.' ”

“You saw that Nila was going to die, but you didn't stop it?”

“It would have been easy. This is Africa. I'm her husband. I could have said no, absolutely not, and that would have been that.”

“You may have done that and she might have died anyway, somewhere else, in another way.”

“I've told myself that. I've told myself many things: that the clairvoyance had happened only once before; that prescience isn't real, I was imagining things. But I knew I wasn't. We made love, went to Switzerland on our honeymoon, and she died.”

“What happened?”

He shuts his eyes, presses his fingers against his temples, utters each phrase like an old-fashioned Teletype machine, slowly clacking out data. “We were in Montreux, standing on a hillside, looking down at Lake Geneva. A small avalanche erupted, jumped her from behind, like a giant, leaning down, flicking snow right at her, with his finger. It rolled her down the slope. They rescued her in no time. But she was dead.”

“And you had foreseen that?”

“Clearly.”

“I still don't think you can blame yourself.”

“I'm long past blame.”

“Oh? What then?”

“I've grieved for her every day since she died. I've forgiven myself to no avail. I haven't worked out why I didn't prevent it. When I contemplate it all, my thoughts end up in bad places.”

“In that case, don't think about it.”

“I have to. For one thing, never mind Diazepam, the seizures haven't stopped, as you can see.”

“You just now saw stuff that's going to happen?”

“I just now saw stuff.” He is mimicking her, but he is shaken.

“So what do you do when it happens?”

“When I was a novice, I had an awful premonition during the Ignatian retreat. I reported it to John Kelly, my retreat master, and the novice master, Erasmus Azikiwe. They eventually organized me, sent me to Rome. I saw neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists. In the end, they arrived at a protocol.”

“What protocol?” Protocols she understands. Maybe she can help.

“I take the pills if I can get to them fast enough. I meditate if I discern up ahead that it's coming on. I'm supposed to consult my spiritual advisor and my superior, if it happens. And my shrink.”

“Does the protocol work?”

“Well, the pills and meditation haven't done badly with short-circuiting the clairvoyance. They've worked up to now.”

“Can I ask what you saw just now?”

“You can, but I wouldn't do that to you.”

“Is it always about death?”

“Yes.”

“And the dying is always bad? Death doesn't have to be, after all.”

“It's awful every time, in itself, and because I feel trapped, out of control. I can do nothing about what's going to happen. This one was monstrous.”

“Why?”

“Not just one, but thousands of people, slaughtered, mutilated.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Me too.”

They sit in silence for a while.

“Here's the thing. I'm the only son in my family. My father is not without resources. I'm educated, travelled, well read, ostensibly cultured, some would say handsome. I've no excuse for being anything other than a well-adjusted fellow with no reason to harm anybody. I didn't want Nila to die. I loved her. But when it came to choosing, I didn't choose for her good or even mine.”

“Maybe the Devil made you do it.” It is superficial, trite. She is angry at having said it, for she believes him, wants him to know she isn't taking his story lightly.

“You're right,” he says, wryly, sadly. “They say he's in the details.”

“I've seen him there often enough.”

“Me too. At any rate, I've figured things out this far. It's about courage, which we have in different doses, and faith, which we also have in varying amounts. But mostly it's about ‘man and man,' as you Christophians say, a concern for others embedded in us, a sense of community, if you want, which is why I'm glad the protocol involves others.”

“That's good progress, don't you think?”

“Maybe, but that's not the details, that's the very general picture. And we both agree on where the Devil is.”

She knows where the Devil is all right. She hears Charlie's flip-flops slapping along the dry, impacted earth as he walks away for the last time. Who took his life? Then Charlie is there, saying, “Tell him! Tell him you know about death taking someone you love!” But she shoves him back into his Charliebox, telling herself it is the priest's troubles that need attention.

“Can I do anything now?”

“What I want most from you, Grace, you're in no position to give me. Which is just as well.” She takes a while to grasp what he means and doesn't entirely till he reaches across and pats her stomach. “If there wasn't a baby in your belly, I'd make love to you with every ounce of strength in my body, long and hard.”

She is mortally ashamed afterwards and begs Charlie, beloved of men, and the child inside her, to forgive her, but she wishes the baby out of her womb right that very minute. She is sure that Jimmy's arms around her, his mouth on hers, their tongues rolled up into one sweetie ball, his penis stroking her insides, will banish all evil, renew every shrivelled thing, heal the sick, raise the dead, and create enough heat and energy to light his MATE Centre for years. Then she recalls that not six weeks before she was twined around another man, sucking his mouth, behaving like the nasty girls who wait behind Wentley Park Elementary School until games are over, so they can hitch up with sweaty, force-ripe boys, and do it in the cane fields, quick and careless.