Red Jacket (5 page)

“The ladies downstairs are all asleep, so I am asking you to tell Mr. Buxton when he come back — for he will come looking for me when he don't see me at the bus stop — that I have gone, and he will see me back here by bedtime.”

“I'll be certain to tell him, Mrs. Buxton.”

“Thank you very much, Miss Grace.”

Grace listen as Mrs. Buxton hurry down the stairs and go out. When she hear the door close, she turn back to her book. She is near the end, sucking the juice of the last pages like her favourite mango. After a while her eyes get heavy and close, and she is dreaming the dream of the big mama fish and the baby fish. Together they gently bruise the bright water, leaving behind fine veins of froth in a train of disappearing webs. As the water is turning dark and cold, something wake her — not a noise, more a peculiar sensation in the air, a feeling of stifling, like the room is different and not in a good way. She half open her eyelids to look through the window opposite her bed, but there is nothing unusual outside.

She rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, swinging her legs to the ground, bending down to put on slippers, when she look towards the door and see a man just beyond the end of her bed. She half-think, “He must be come for the message!” In the self same minute, she is frozen with fright, for Mr. Fillmore Buxton is standing between her and the door, stink of sweat and worse stink of liquor, his belt loose, and his hand on his pants front that is poked up in a pyramid. He is a big man, not tall but meaty, and there is no other way out of the room. Oh Jesus! Hard as she try, she can't move hand nor foot. Can't blink. Her mouth can't open to scream.

Fillmore Buxton is pulling the zip down so his trousers are sliding onto his hips, penis poking through the slit of the pants, stiff and swell up like a big cucumber. The falling-down trousers don't hold him back. He take two steps forward, throw her down on the bed, drop himself on top of her. While one hand push down on her chest, the other one is working her skirt up round her waist and dragging down her panty. The stiff penis is ramming her, the insistence of it stifling her breath. She panic, fear in her belly, for if he shove that baseball bat into her parts, she know she will split wide open. Now, hard as ever, it is pushing into the hair between her legs, but it not getting through the thick tangle, and her bursting lungs grab a gulp of air when the thing settle briefly in the V between her legs. The oxygen turn her brain like a crank, and she recall the advice that Ma give her and Pansy since they small. “Pinch. Scratch. Poke. Bite hard, anywhere you can bite!”

Grace can't move knee or elbow or finger, for the thick, heavy man cover her slim body, pinning her to the bed, but one of his cheeks is now and then close by her mouth as he move up and down, trying to get inside her. When next it arrive, she open her mouth and bite, making sure top teeth meet bottom teeth, as Ma instruct. She hear a scream loud enough to jolt a duppy out his grave and the man grab one side of his face, roll off of her and sit up, eyes squeeze tight and face and mouth twist up.

She spit out something soft and fleshy. Warm wetness in her mouth and blood on the side of his face, and she shove him off the bed, run through the door and down the stairs, holding the panty so it don't drop. She can't run like that, though, so at the door, she let it fall, step out of it, and gallop into the street. Barefoot and bawling, she run and run, dodging the oversize speaker boxes, up Mansfield Avenue, past the telephone exchange, past the butcher shop, past the pharmacy, round the corner by Kingdom Hall, up along Meinster Road, past the Anglican Church of St. Bride, not noticing the sharp stones and pieces of glass on the road that cut her foot-bottom. When she come to her senses, she is running to her friend Olive's place. Olive is boarding too and always telling Grace how lucky Grace is to be staying with family.

She bawl so loud and long when she reach Olive that she barely manage to relate what happen. She still sobbing and wiping her nose as she bathe, dress in her friend clothes, lie on the bed under a blanket though it is a hot evening. She gaze up at the ceiling, paying no mind to the queasiness in her stomach, the bad taste in her mouth, the battalion marching through her head in heavy boots, considering for the umpteenth time if it is worth it, all this grief to get a education. Don't life in the way Ma, Pa, and Gramps have lived it, is just as good? But that is daydreaming, for sure. When Miss Tingle, the Latin teacher, start scrawling their weekly test on the blackboard, she always sing out, her back to the class, “
Iacta alea est
. The die is cast, my dears!”

Grace know she can't go home because too many people sacrifice too much for her to be at St. Chad's. The day she and Pa climb on to the bus to Queenstown with her grip was the day the dice land on the table of her life.

She save her lunch money and buy a small knife with a dread blade.

Grace Gets Ready

25 March 1976

Dearest daughter,

Happy birthday! There's a small group of us here who practice playing music together. Today we started off by playing a “Happy Birthday!” medley for you in blues, honky-tonk, calypso, and reggae style. It was great fun.

I realize you must be finishing school this year. I hope it was a good experience. I'm hoping too that maybe you are planning to go to college in September for you are now sixteen, and I know you are bright as ninepence! It's not likely you can go without a scholarship, but I'm sure you are smart and hard-working enough to win one. Last year on your birthday I started a bank account for you. I can't save much, but I put something in every week. I will let you decide what to spend it on. I am still praying that one day I will see you for I want so much to be part of your life, not to say money will buy me a part after all these years, but I've learned to be practical. As your Granny Vads says, “Air pie and breeze patty can't fill anybody belly.”

By the way, it's not only patty, cocoa bread, and hard-dough bread you can get here, but all kinds of Christophian food: avocado pear, plantain, yam, breadfruit, gungo peas, cocoa, and dasheen. They have our pumpkin too. It's different from their pumpkin, though the two of them resemble. Their pumpkin can only make pie. It can't make soup nor boil and eat like ours. So never mind all the things they have, we have a better pumpkin!

I will sign off now for I have homework to do. I'm taking an accounting course. The nuns need a person to do accounts, for Mr. Lieberman, a Jewish gentleman who has done that job for a long time, is retiring to Florida at year's end. He is training me and so I am trying to soak up the figures.

God bless you, my daughter.

Your loving mother,

Phyllis

Saturday. August nearly finish. Grace lucky enough to get a part-time job at the Teachers' Credit Union near where Miss Carmen live in Queenstown, so she work through July and half of August and just reach back home to Wentley. The two weeks since just fly past, don't even wave a good greeting!

Dusk coming on and she outside on the rickety steps round the back of the barracks hut, book on her knee. That is where she and her friend Edris oftentimes sit reading and talking. Right now Edris is crying and crying for her Gran, who they bury ten days ago, who is the only mother that Edris ever know. Mrs. Bird was in hospital for a long time, and she get bedsores so bad they kill her.

“Parson say is God's will,” Edris say, tears dripping. “How that could be and Gran just turn fifty couple years back?”

“Gracie, you reading in that darkness?” Gramps stick his head out the door.

“No, sir.”

“So what, then, Miss Granddaughter?”

“Thinking about what parson tell Edris, Gramps. Don't know how God could want anybody to die from bedsores.”

“The God I know is not a fan of bedsores.”

“Edris say nobody don't contradict parson, for they are faithful believers. So you not faithful then, Gramps?”

“Never confuse church and religion. One is people praising their God, the other is folks running a business — half the time, a monkey business.”

He chuckle a gravelly chuckle, and Grace laugh a short laugh. Edris don't laugh, only jump up and say, “Good night, Mr. Carpenter. See you, Gracie,” and leave quick-quick, for now, night coming down. Grace get up too and go inside out of the cool night air, but she don't forget the questions of church and faithfulness.

Sunday morning, and they sitting around, waiting for Ma and the younger ones. Gramps and Pa go to Methodist Chapel and the big children go with them today. That service is not so long as at Evangel Tabernacle where Ma worship and where this morning she take Princess and Sam. Stewie, Edgar, and Conrad gone to collect the man blossoms of the breadfruit tree for Ma to use and make a special sweet dessert. Meantime they brew coffee from Gramps beans that he grow, pick, dry, and roast himself, and also cocoa-tea for Ma, Grace, Sam, and Princess
. No Pansy any more, for is more than a year since
she
gone her own way with Mortimer.
Gramps is the coffee man. Pa is in charge of boiling the balls of country chocolate, flavouring the dark liquid with sticks of cinnamon. There is milk from the Williams cows next door, and brown sugar that Pa bring home, each crystal separate and clear like a tiny honey-yellow diamond.

Today, breakfast is a celebration, for Grace not only pass her O level exams, she come first at St. Chad's and first in all St. Chris. Mark you, she know already that she going to study in foreign, for she take the tests to go to university in America, and she score so high that plenty universities offer her scholarships. It's only a half happy time for her all the same. Edris just scrape through two subjects, and that is after her mother in New York spend plenty money on extra lessons. Edris was counting on good passes in English and Math to get into the school for practical nurses in St. Chris.

“I well vex with God, Gramps. Seem like he arrange whole heap of bad things for Edris, and she don't do him nothing. Is you same one warn me about religion, and I getting to see it as unreliable.”

“Gracie, I try to show you the difference between religion as a business and worshipping God in spirit and in truth, like the Bible say. If you are dealing with God in spirit and in truth, sometime you and him going to fuss. Edris and her people mix up with a deity that give orders, count sins, and don't brook argument. I assure you, is not me alone but many I have met who wrestle with their God.”

“Don't hear nobody in this house wrestling with God.”

“Well, is not polite to fight in public,” Gramps retort. “The Lord say you are to retire to your quarters.”

Grace smile, sort of. “What I must do about church in foreign, Gramps?”

“I don't say you must join a church, but you should find folks to pray with. Look for a community where you feel at home and not envied when you achieve, where all rejoice at your successes as you rejoice at theirs. And when you pray, let it not be with a caveat that none come off better than you.”

Grace feel guilty. She don't need to have more things than other people, but she like to come first in class, get the highest marks. She wonder if she should confess this to Gramps, for it sound as if he is saying it's a bad thing.

“While we are on that matter, I also wish you to promise me that when you are famous, you will make things possible for others — especially those of your own race.” That let her off the hook. She can only be famous if she do better than everybody else.

“What about Edris, Gramps?”

“Be her friend, Gracie.”

She hug Gramps tight. Whether she will see him again depend on so many things, she dare not take these last days for granted. More than all, he is the person who stand between her and yielding to the fear of not belonging. Having him beside her in Wentley or a long stone's throw away in Queenstown is one thing. But when they are oceans apart, will Gramps shielding magic still work?

The Chancellor

“They say here that Grace Carpenter is probably the brightest woman to have passed through the gates of the university.”

“Who say?”

“Today's
Clarion
, Dr. Blackman.” The woman taps the paper. It says here, “On Saturday, 8 November 1998, Grace Carpenter, perhaps the brightest woman to pass through the University of the Antilles, will receive the university's first Distinguished International Service Award — ”

“I think that's a bit much. Plus it gives the wrong impression. She was never a student.”

He doesn't wish to think about Grace Carpenter. Focuses instead on the aforesaid gates, just discernible through mango trees that flank one side of The Xooana Inn, where he's at the end of a working lunch with Celia Achong, the administrative assistant assigned to him when he visits the University of the Antilles, a.k.a. UA. Not that gazing at the gates mitigates his trouble.

A couple months before this visit, he'd asked Gordon Crawford, the principal, about progress on the renovation of The Xooana.

“Completed last week, on time, under budget,” Gordon had said proudly.

Mark thought things in St. Chris were looking up.

“Excellent. Would you book me in for graduation, please? Sorry, not me — us, Mona and me.”

“You? The chancellor? At The Xooana?”

“Yes, Gordon — unless you think it's inappropriate?”

“No, of course not. Not at all.”

“Thanks very much. We'd prefer to be nearby.”

Chancellors have always stayed at The St. Chris Four Seasons. Mark, who is the university's fifth chancellor, is staying at The Xooana to make a point. A training facility for students in the Faculty of Tourism, the hotel also houses the bar, dining, and lounge facilities that constitute the senior common room, and it's where the university puts up its guests. Too late it had occurred to him that, in its wisdom, UA might have decided to accommodate Grace Carpenter at The Xooana as well.

“Does Dr. Carpenter have children? Is she married?” Celia asks.

“I've no idea.” He has no up-to-date information about Grace. He doesn't wish to think of her because he's not looking forward to their meeting, whenever it occurs, as it must occur, at some point between today and Saturday when graduation takes place.

At the workshop in Cambridge, she had told him the best way to keep tabs on an institution was to have your ear to the ground — “a cockroach perspective,” as she put it. She could be plainspoken. “Get off your bony black ass and tour the place — meetings, offices, confabs, bullshit sessions. Sneak in and listen. All the better if they don't know who you are, and I assure you, love, most of them won't.”

She's right, of course. When he visits UA, most people have no clue who he is. Why should they? His face appears only now and then in the papers, and he's not a movie star, recording artist, or sports personality, so it's of interest only to the few who know him.

He'd taken a turn around the bank one morning, shortly after she offered the advice on walkabouts. “Took a long stroll this morning. GREAT idea!” he'd scribbled on a postcard, dropping it into the mailbox himself. He'd wanted to say more, but decided not to. Had the postcard ever reached her?

“I don't think there are many people who'd disagree with
The Clarion
.” The sound of Celia Achong's voice bids him back.

“She's a brilliant woman,” he allows. “No doubt about it.” He wipes away patty crumbs and then inspects the flecks of iron mould in a napkin almost identical to one Grace had given him in Cambridge, snitched from the common room of their hosts. Only senior personnel use this dining room, and truth to tell, he's chosen it in the hope that if she is here, Grace won't venture thither.

Holding his spectacles up against light leapfrogging through tall French windows, he watches it settle on the polished wood of floor and furniture, make shadows for a while, then make new ones as it hops on, hurrying up the day. This morning he'd peeked in near the end of a presentation Grace was making on HIV/AIDS education and seen her leaning on just such a window, face tilted to one side, the same brisk sunlight making a halo round her head, earnest gaze and fervent tone binding her audience. She'd held aloft and wiggled her little finger, as she declared, “When I consider the state of the world, I'm tempted to think there are more brains in this one small digit than in God Almighty's fat head.”

He sits still, recalling the ensuing silence. Angel Gabriel passing over.

“Are you okay, sir?” Celia's wide eyes are concerned. She knows he has cataplexy, some kind of sleeping sickness.

“I'm fine, thanks.”

Celia looks back at the newspaper. “It says she's at a meeting in Haiti this afternoon and won't be back till Friday evening. I guess it must be exciting to be constantly on the move, seeing the world, meeting people.”

He doesn't respond.

“I'm sorry, sir,” she keeps on, “but it's a pretty big thing, she being a woman and all?”

He leans his head to one side, half nods, half smiles. She folds the paper and looks at her watch. “Is there's anything you'd like me to do, sir?”

He doesn't tell her she's taken a load off his mind with the news that Grace won't be around until Friday evening. If she is coming back late on Friday, there is little chance of her meeting Mona until Saturday, even if she is staying at The Xooana. With luck, they will be together only briefly then.

“No, Celia. I think everything is under control. And honestly, I'm fine, but I have to run. I've got papers to read before Council. Will you take care of this?” He points with his chin to the remnants of lunch.

She nods.

“Thanks very much. I'll be in Garvey. See you at two.”