Red Jacket (35 page)

Throwing Words

“Can I get you a drink, Father Atule?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Something hard? Soft?”

“Water would be good, for the moment.”

“Seltzer water? Perrier?”

“Anything at all. Out of the tap is fine.”

“How is Dr. Carpenter?”

“They've given her something stiff for the pain, so she's knocked out. Ms. Patterson will let us know if there's a change, for better or worse.”

“You wouldn't be doing what we call ‘throwing words' with that ‘for better or worse,' would you, Father? This is Perrier. Will it do?”

“It'll do fine, thank you. And James is fine, or Jimmy. I assure you I don't throw words. That's a St. Chris thing, and subtle. I'm not from St. Chris.”

“And not subtle?”

“The present situation isn't one for subtlety.”

“Do we have something to speak frankly about, then, James?”

“Jeremiah isn't exaggerating. His mother is ill, perhaps terminally.” Jimmy pauses. He has not told anyone what Grace's illness is. The words “flesh-eating disease” are liable to send people into a panic, not least because hospital personnel are often at a loss as to treatment. UA has an excellent Centre for Medical Research, however, and doctors on call to deal with situations like Grace's, for the Caribbean has its share of ugly outbreaks of disease. She is very lucky.

He sips his water and studies Mark's face. It is inscrutable, guarded, even impassive. Is that the kind of face that senior bureaucrats cultivate as part of the job? He decides that since Mark is Jeremiah's father, it gives him a right to know how ill Grace is. Besides, the discussion he intends to have concerns their son. For sure the news of Grace's bizarre disease must undo the man's deadpan countenance!

“The survival rate for necrotizing fasciitis is thirty to forty percent.” Jimmy speaks the doctors' verdict slowly, emphasizing the scary figures.

“I'm truly sorry to hear that.”

“We all are, for sure.” Jimmy doesn't spare the irony in his voice. Mark's countenance is unaltered. If that is his entire response, Jimmy can only wonder what persuaded Grace to go to bed with the man. “I'm also confident you know what we need to be talking about.”

“We're dispensing with subtlety, right? So why don't you just tell me?”

“You should tell me, Dr. Blackman. The responsibilities are yours, not mine.”

“I'm sure I don't know what you're referring to.”

“I'm referring to what's to be done if Grace dies.”

“I think that's for her family to decide, don't you?”

“Her family will decide whether Grace should be buried here in St. Chris, and when, and so on. As far as I know, her affairs are in order, and there's a will.”

“I'm glad you're sure about so many things. I won't ask how since it's not my business. I'll just say it all sounds as well arranged as one could hope. It will be very trying for those concerned, but we'll have to cope. That's life, isn't it?”

“I'm glad to note that ‘we,' Dr. Blackman.”

“For God's sake, man. Do I have to ask you to call me ‘Mark'?”

“I wouldn't think of doing so otherwise. Still, the only important name that needs calling now is Jeremiah's.”

“I feel deeply for the boy. It will be difficult for him, initially, but children are resilient. He'll get over it. And he's clearly attached to you and to Grace's mother, who I understand is his primary care-giver in Geneva.”

Jimmy is still on his feet. Mark hasn't offered him a seat, and he thinks of taking the initiative — “Why don't we sit?” — but decides not to. Somehow the situation needs them both erect.

“I won't say this is awkward for me, Dr. Blackman. It isn't. In my line of work, there's not much that's awkward anymore — horrible, heartrending, desperate, but not awkward. My dilemma centres on whether or not to betray a confidence in order to do the right thing.”

“And what confidence is that?”

“Ah! Grace still hasn't told you. Is that it?”

“Told me what?”

“Who Jeremiah's father is?”

“She's not told me who his father is, but she's said he's not my child.”

“And you believe her?”

“Shouldn't I?”

“If Grace dies and the child's father is alive, he's Jeremiah's nearest kin and must assume responsibility unless there's some serious reason he can't.”

“You don't need to instruct me, or to sound like a law book. What you say is obvious enough. I'd like to know, however, how any of this is your business.”

“For sure I don't need to instruct you. As for the law book, your reference to it may not be ill advised, but I hope it won't come to that. And it's my business because Grace made it my business. I promised her I'd look after him.”

“He's a fortunate young man.”

“Your wife knows Jeremiah and is obviously fond of him. She also knows Ms. Patterson quite well. If I have to, I'll break Grace's confidence and count on her to forgive me, since I've always thought you ought to know the truth.”

“About what?”

“You know very well what.”

“Aren't you effectively breaking that confidence now?”

“I've not said anything to do so, nor am I responsible for the understandings that you take from this exchange.”

“Man, the Jesuits do an amazing job with you fellows. And you're in the best company: Thomas More. Bill Clinton. And priest or no, only one thing explains all this. You love her, don't you?”

“I love them both very much, yes.”

“Right. For all I know, you've screwed her.”

“That would be none of your business. Jeremiah certainly isn't my child. We met when Grace was two months pregnant and in danger of losing him.”

“Christ, man. Sit down. I'm sitting down.”

“Thank you, but I'm fine standing.”

“If I don't sit, I'm likely to fall down. Could you get that phone?”

“For sure.” Good God! On top of callous, the man is weak, self-absorbed. “It's for you, the principal.”

“Hello, Gordon. What? Right. Thanks a lot. We'll be right there.”

A Dream

So Maisie folds Gracie in her arms like a baby and takes her down the road to Beloved. When she reaches the storefront church, she reverses into the heavy wooden doors, forcing them open with her broad backside, and the two of them go through to see Reverend Douglas, who is waiting. Several ladies make up the congregation, and there is even a small choir, a bright blaze of birds the colour of parrots and macaws. Reverend Douglas walks up to receive Maisie and her whimpering charge, arms wide open, big as a baobab tree, and she folds the sobbing Gracie into the great tent of her white robes and takes her up to the altar where Jeremiah is waiting, dressed in red and white, the youngest of seven altar boys who swing gold censers as they wait for Jimmy to begin saying Mass.

Gracie sees clear-clear the miniscule red crosses alternating with green banana trees that decorate the stole gently riding on Reverend Douglas's ample bosoms. She sees the large golden flamboyant tree emblazoning the front of Jimmy's chasuble, a cross set against a background of myriad tiny red crown-of-thorn flowers. They are Ma's work, Ma who is sitting in the rocking chair on the ramshackle porch at Wentley, painstakingly embroidering crosses and crowns, bananas and flamboyant trees, as she hums, “Have thine own way, Lord.”

And there at the altar is Gramps, straight and strong, instructing Jeremiah on how to tend the forest of medicine plants that he has set out in rows and rows of pots at the back of the barracks hut in Wentley.

“Tell her, Gramps,” Ma says, fresh as morning drizzle.

“You've got to get up, Gracie. It's time to go.”

Ma walks over quickly, for though she is stout, she moves light as wisps of silk cotton seed. She leans down to give Gracie a hand, but Gracie can't move, sake of pain. Her entire lower arm is blown up, a fat reddish balloon. The pain inside is hot like boiling water. If anybody offered to cut her arm off, she would let the knife do its terrible work without a moment's thought.

She understands. It is Carnival, and the inflated arm is part of her costume, and they are all dressed-up to play mas, a whole band of players in green and white. They wear masks, and their heads are covered with caps like the old-fashioned bathing caps that grandmothers wear at the beach. The party room is tiled green like the birthing room in Geneva where Jeremiah was born. She hates green. She hates this room with green tiles for walls.

There is one very black face that she recognizes, even though he has on a mask. The half moons of his tribal markings won't let him hide. It is Jimmy, and she can see that he is smiling because his eyes are sideways slits. How she loves his long curling eyelashes! How his touch floods her body with light and movement! His face is red-brown and his eyes are blue-green like the sea at Richfield. He calls to her, “Your aura is brilliant turquoise, my sweet lady.” She reaches for him, but he fades away with the slip-slop sound of his slippers. She calls, “Charlie, Charlie!” but he doesn't hear.

He wants her to pay attention. He points and she follows his hand, which is covered in tight-fitting sterile rubber gloves and is directing her gaze to a huge circular glass window above them, with people sitting around, looking down, as if they are in a theatre. They are a most attentive audience, leaning forward, rapt. Some look through goggles or long lenses like periscopes. Perhaps they are filming the party. She will try to be pleasant though her arm hurts so much. She must ignore the cameras, so she looks away, but Jimmy beckons and points again.

Her gaze follows his outstretched finger. A small hand is holding ground orchids in yellow and purple, pink and orange! The trailing flowers riot against the dark skin of this little person. As he waves them, the flowers turn into birds.

“It's a secret, Mama. I can make the flowers fly.”

“That's amazing Jeremiah, but where the hell is your grandmother?”

“Don't curse, Grace. You know better than that.”

It is Gramps, and he has called her Grace. Gramps doesn't know how hard it is. They don't know, any of them. Only Colin, the red boy who died from kwashiorkor knows, and Sylvia, the yellow-turd girl, and Carlos, her fit-to-be-dashed-away baby. They are the strangely coloured people who belong nowhere, who exist as diversions for God and everybody else. Well, she's had a baby that she could have dumped. What else is required of her? She has studied hard, worked hard, tried to make the world a better place. Charlie knows. Charlie showed her so many things. She giggles. “More, Charlie,” she says. “I want more.”

There are more costumes, many more revellers. They wear medieval hats, dark gowns with braid and hoods of gold and black, mauve and green. First they march. Some sit above, but most are herded together on benches below. From time to time the herded ones stand up, throw their hats in the air, then sit, and open bottles of effervescing drink, which they spray at one another, laughing. Wave after wave, they stand, sit, and pop open fizzy bottles of white smoke.

There is music, tambu music: penny whistles, drums, fifes, and rhumba boxes accompany a grand procession. There are so many faces passing that she knows. She must try not to be sour and sick. She must join the procession, attend the party, but she is hot all over, full of fire. The man with the rubber gloves speaks. “Grace! It's me.”

“I figured it out, Jimmy. God is Anancy, a trickster spider. His time's run out. That's all. That's the explanation for the way the world is.”

“There's a children's storybook called
Waiting for the Thursday Boat
in which God is a little black girl. I daresay he could manage to be a trickster spider as well.”

“Don't get all clever on me, my Jesuit friend. I am sick unto death. I deserve the truth.”

“Pilate asked about the truth, but he walked off before he got the answer. It would have been better if he had waited. He'd have discovered that nobody deserves truth; we all wait for it, humbly.”

“I deserve it, Jimmy. I worked and worked. Isn't that enough?”

“There's no enough, Grace. There's not even the best you can do, only what you manage at any given time. Sometimes that's brilliant; sometimes it's barely sufficient. It's necessary to accept that, to recognize limitations, yours, mine, everybody's; to know that when we get things done together, it's a bloody miracle; to understand how many miracles have happened every day, go on happening every day, just so we can continue to be here.”

“Sounds like platitudinous bullshit, to me.”

“First Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 19. It is bullshit.”

It is dark now. The sun has gone down, or the lights have gone out. She hears sounds, women singing softly, a lullaby perhaps. There is a procession: Granny Vads and Grandma Elsie; Ma and Phyllis and Daphne; Pansy and Princess and Pansy's girls; Miss Constance and Mrs. Sampson; Miss Carmen, Miss Glosmie, Miss Isolene, and Mrs. Buxton; Reverend Douglas; Mrs. Scott and Stephanie and Susie; Felicity and Babs; Maisie and Sylvia; Sister Monique and Sister Tekawitha, Elise and Lili; Amitié and Azzara; Joyce Zaidie-Klein; Mona Blackman; even Mrs. Sommersby.

The woman who leads them wears a red sari spotted with drops of something, wine or oil or blood. Each person in the line holds onto the sari, which stretches longer and longer as more women join, walking up a path covered with petals of red, purple, yellow, and orange. The leader is someone she knows, but the wind blows sheets of sand across the line of singers so she can't see who it is.

At the edge of the desert in Mabuli, dunes flare and subside, one minute lit by a ferocious sun, the next dragged down into the swell of dark night sands. A small boy is in a boat, oars in his hands, silver pinpricks of sweat on his face. They get larger as he ploughs through the brown drifts. Two men push the boat from behind, white haired, white bearded. One is black, and one is white. They melt into each other, and change, and change again. A tall black man lifts the child from the boat and hoists him over his shoulder. He has been weeping. Tears leak from under his long lashes into the tiny indentations that pattern his cheeks before they spill again, myriad eyes. The child wraps his arms round the man's neck. The door of her room opens and, as they come in, she sees them both, clearly.

“Jimmy? Jeremiah? Don't cry!” She opens her arms. “Come to your Mama!”

The boy, a bird, a kite, lands on her bed in half a second, trailing his limbs about her.

“Kidoki!”

She folds her arms around her son, but he isn't there. She looks up, but the weeping man with the scarred cheeks is gone. Never mind, she thinks as she closes her eyes, she will see them soon. When she does, maybe she'll get back into the ring with Papa God. It was Gramps way, after all, hassling with the Almighty Father. Perhaps it might work for her too.