"WITH MY little eye, I saw him die." I recited my Cock Robin poem, but kept repeating one line ad nauseam, to some people. I wanted to tell how they murdered my principal but I would only blurt the one line in the passers-by's faces and inevitably frighten them.
'Move, Fly! Shut up yu mouth. Yu really hurting mi nerves now.'
The old woman who'd shared her bun with me a few minutes earlier as we sheltered under the bus shed from the drizzle turned on me. She claimed to have been a professional with a PhD, but I don't remember her field of employment. She told me she was sick and tired of me, the damn Cock Robin poem, and my madness.
'Yu telling everybody about the principal they kill. The woman is not yu relative. Yu just up and down like a yo-yo. Get a hold of yuself, man! Gunmen shot and killed my husband and son and nobody investigated. I stop cry. I have to live on nothing. Only God knows how I manage. Relatives tell me to be strong. I have to be strong with nothing. I live on next to nothing and you carrying on about somebody yu hardly knew.'
'ASHES TO ASHES'
They'd shot and killed the one decent principal who'd given me a sense of worth and importance. I remember running from the graveside, terrified, when the officiating minister said 'ashes to ashes'.
'I saw him die. I saw him die!' I'd repeat like a stuck radiogram needle. I recited, I walked, I ran, and, very often not knowing where I was, I sang in my lost-ness. I did not remember where I lived, I became like a small child again, I sang nursery songs and wondered why I couldn't find Nurse and Mrs. Banton, nor they me. I revisited the Boulevard. I passed by the school and bawled out the dead principal's name. The new security guard drew his gun on me and, sooner rather than later, I was near Green Pastures. I recognised the shopping centre; I was elated and sang.
'Little Miss Muffett, Muffett
Sat on her Tuffett, Tuffett
Eating her Christmas pa, pa, pa, pa pie?.'
'No, Mr. Fly. That was Little Jack Horner. Miss Muffett eat curds and whey. What's curd and whey, Mr. Fly?'
Before I could answer, the child's mother jerked her away. 'Don't ah tell yu not to talk to him?'
'Yes, Mummy. Why?
'He's a mad teacher.'
'Is my teacher mad, Mummy?'
'No.' And she looked directly at me and muttered, 'Show me another one who isn't.'
'That's not right, ma'am. I heard what you said to the child.'
'What yu going to do about it? Yu shouldn't be here molesting decent people. Ah going to call DC Lowe and let 'im move yu from the plaza. Yu jus' frightening people.'
THE DISTRICT CONSTABLE
When I heard the woman threaten to call the district constable, I hurried away and up the dead-end marl road to Bedford Hill. The DC did not like me (I was always writing something, and I believe he couldn't) and that was enough to keep a good distance between us. Enough to make myself scarce.
I walked, kicking the loose stones, and the dirt with them, to the end of the short road where the Bedford land began. I had often gazed at the barrack-like house from the main road but I'd never gone near it, even though I had spent a couple months working in Green Pastures. I wouldn't turn left to it; later, maybe. I'd go up to the top of the hill confronting me.
That first climb over the shrub-covered hill was a camouflage, for the land unexpectedly levelled and opened wide with about an acre of the greenest guinea grass I'd ever seen. Two dogs watched me from the embankment I'd just climbed. I noticed they didn't bark and they didn't wag their tails at me either. But that was a secondary thought to what exposed itself before me as I lifted my feet high and moved through the tall, thick grass, bowing and lifting and bending and stretching and switching as if the wind with an airborne baton was conducting their expansive blades in four-fourths time. Bow down, up, up. Left, right, shimmer, shimmer. I beat out my rhythm to a different place from the near-green grass and clumps of shrubs to the distant mountains, white-capped by thick fog and abundant euphoria. This place was damp, not cold. Every shade of green was evident. The green of the grass was different from the bottle-green of some thick-stemmed plants skirting it, different from the green of the sugar cane and its lighter, centre-striped fronds, different from the green of the broad-leaved bananas, from the green of the ever-running pumpkin and its dark capture-land vine, from the blue-green of the not-so-far-away hills.
GRASSY SITUATION
Beyond the grassy situation, I noticed that everything grew everywhere and any old how. There were no organised beds of any plant. No rows of rooted vegetables, no orchard with edibles, the more I walked, the more I'd stumble on something else and something different. A coconut tree grew tall beside a pear, next to a breadfruit, near a mango, behind a guinep, under the ackee and pushing pimento. There were no
children to pick up the tamarind pods
carpeting the ground in a thick, dark brown. I salivated as I ate a six-seed one and enjoyed its tangy sourness.
I looked where I was going after I stumbled on a heap of stones and noticed there were eleven such, near a shady grove. The grove was in deep shadow and wet, and I dropped my haversack, stretched myself and inhaled the overpowering smell of the coffee rose and the fallen, over-ripe jackfruit. At the bottom of the grove, where the light was, white water poured at standpipe force from a rock. I washed my face and then, with hands behind my back, bent and opened my mouth and allowed the brackish water
to fill my being. I swallowed and stopped when my stomach neared bursting point. It was mineral water. If the water is as powerful as they say, then healing will take place in me.
When I heard the sounds of living things, I peered through a thicket of gungo peas and saw the enclosure with animals and birds. They lived in the same pen, all mixed up. Pigs walked with goats, with a couple of cows, a donkey, a sheep, and chickens. The dogs and cats eyed me from the same vantage point under the house: an elongated, barrack-like house with bedroom windows all opening to the back view.
THE TEACHER
The sight or the smell of me caused a commotion and two people came out. They'd been watching me. They were old. He was tall, dark-skinned, good-looking and slightly stooped. She was short, fair, fat and shaky.
'We've been watching you, son. I hear you're a teacher?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Then why yu not in school? What really happen to yu?'
'It's a long story, ma'am. I have to go now. Good evening.'
'It's getting late and rain is coming. Yu can spend the night here. If what they say is true, I knew your grandfather, Raymond Welsh.'
'Yes. That's my name.' I accepted their invitation with untellable relief. I was exhausted and quite prepared to throw my hungry body down on a bed.
'Bertie! Bertie! Set up the bath.'
'It ready an' hot, Missa Bedford.'
'Miss Prudence!'
'Yes, Miss G. Suppah ready an' ah pick out some o' Missa Fred's clothes. Dem will fit 'im.'
'Take the clothes with you to the bathroom and make sure he get a good soaking.'
'Yes, ma'am. He caan get out till de water cool down on 'im.'
I wondered who they were talking about. I'm a big man - though tall and thin, yes - but I don't expect people to be talking about me in that fashion. Nevertheless, Mother Bedford, her preferred name, pointed me to the bathroom where a brown brew, poured from a black kerosene tin, sent off its steam in my nostrils and frosted the mirror over the basin.
'Yu ready, sir?'
Ready? I certainly wasn't expecting company, but before I could protest, the huge Miss Prudence appeared in the bathroom and took over, after she scornfully flung my clothes in a bucket filled with disinfectant. I attempted to test the temperature of the stew with my right foot but in a flash the rest of my body followed and I was soon submerged. Firm hands and a resolute bosom steadied me in the hot brew in the blue tile-framed bath tub. And the woman began to pray, at the top of her lungs, that the evil spirit and iniquity I possessed would pass out of me before midnight. I groaned and tried to pray with equanimity. I prayed that my life would be spared and that my by-then boiled genitals might yet enable me to have even one child. When Miss Prudence sopped my head and back and wiped the stuff running freely from my nostrils with the same towel, I moaned again: 'Lord lettest now thy servant depart in peace.' I was at her mercy. I could not move without clothes.
My shrivelled body was soaked. It felt like a saturated sponge. A wicked thought crossed my mind, but at that point somebody knocked on the door and handed me a mug with a brown bush brew that could easily have been dipped up from the bath. Miss Prudence advised me that she was waiting to take the empty vessel to the kitchen; in the same breath, she pointed to clean clothes on a stool near the door. I was vulnerable. I gulped the venomous-looking drink, anxious to get out as soon as she left. I wouldn't let her see my vital body parts, I imagined, floating in the tub. I had a strange sensation.
I dressed quickly, but lingered as my stomach retched violently. But the tea stayed down. The feeling of nausea soon left me at the sight of the evening meal on the carefully set table.
I RESTRAINED MYSELF
'You know what your problem is, Raymond?' Mother Bedford asked after I had told her my story.
I was getting peeved, for if I knew, I wouldn't be here. But I restrained myself and told them that I saw everything going on around me but I was overpowered by the urge to walk and run and recite the one poem that had leeched onto my brain.
'You suffering from self-pity, man. That's the lowest level you could reach. Eh, Papa?'
'Yes, Mama. Yu going to waste yu life, man? Your grandfather served this country well.' And these two people, Altamont and Gwendolyn Bedford, went on and on about service and wasting time. They seemed to agree with whatever each other said, touched and held hands frequently, called each other Mama and Papa, and communicated, almost suspiciously, with their eyes. Each one depended on the other to confirm statements s/he made or information s/he gave.
'Eh, Mama?'
'Don't is so, Papa?'
After a while I focused on the meal and tried, without disrespect, to tune them out. Pigs' trotters with broad beans and spinners, served with rice yam, green bananas and fried, ripe plantains was the main fare. I couldn't drink anything then, but a jug of lemonade sat on the table. There was no dessert but I was too full to care. During the meal, my hosts cross-questioned me and blamed me for my present situation.
'You're in that position because yu think nothing of yourself.'
'Yu don't think he could inherit something?'
'From who, Mama? I know his people and not one of them stay so. What yu want, Raymond, is two dyam good licks to straighten yu out.'
'Don't say that, Papa. He is a big man; he's spoilt already. Sorry yu didn't grow up with my children. We raise eleven and not one mad. Two coming in tomorrow and ah want you to meet them, especially the doctor.' Mother Bedford beamed and began to bore me as she called their names with swollen pride and boasted about her children's achievements. All of them study abroad and never have to work till they finish. We pay for them. Full teaching and full boarding.'
'You're to be commended. You are very lucky parents. Many don't have your success,' I told them.
'It was tough sometimes, and I can tell you, the last one gave us hell, but we had a big cook-out when she graduated and added her heap of stones like the rest. We call them our monuments. Yu see the eleven heaps of stones?'
I nodded and she continued, especially about the doctor. 'He is a specialist and he can cure yu. Yu have to get a visa, yu know. Yu have to go to the Good Samaritan Clinic where he works.'
'They all have degrees. You have a degree, Raymond?'
'Yes, sir.'
'What? And yu up an' down the street like a half-wit an' 'ave people call yu Fly?'
'Tek it easy with him, Alty, man. See if we can send him up to New York for treatment.'
'Yes. I owe his grandfather one.'
They talked about their children again and again and were pleased that police never knocked on their door for none of them.
They got my message when I suddenly dropped my head forward, my chin on my chest, and pretended to sleep.
'Poor fellow, let him go to bed,' I heard.
BIRD MUSIC
The morning broke with every living thing in the pen making its own noise. I dressed quickly and moved to the open window. This was a real dawn. Nothing adulterated it. Day with its soft light and bird music was slowly breaking. I stared with excitement at this new scene, for you never see the same dawn twice, you know. The sight was baby blue, cotton white, sunshine yellow, and fragile light creeping into being. I took a deep breath and did not close my eyes because I knew about transitory scenes. I inhaled a fresh morning and bent over the window sill to stretch and see further.
I saw a dark grey open-back van and two men putting stuffed crocus bags in it. I saw my nemeses Sgt Gilbert and Sgt Thompson, right there. I knew it was them but I still rubbed my eyes and looked again. I knew why I had seen them so often in the area and why they had on several occasions called to me in uncertainty. I saw Bertie, the yard man, who'd fixed the bath last night. He climbed in the van and helped to pack the bales. I moved away when I saw Mr Bedford, hat on head, walk towards the vehicle and pick up a black scandal bag resting by the right wheel. And I moved fully away in time to answer the knock on the door and receive a mug of aromatic, high-mountain, country coffee.
'Thank you, Miss Prudence, this smells good.'
'After breakfast, Miss G say dat yu people coming fo' yu.'
I asked her to repeat what she had said and was about to hug her when I remembered the power she'd exerted in the bathroom.
'Yes, sah, him an' her know everybody in dese parts and Bertie go an' call dem last night,' she said as she looked through the window. Then she spun around and asked me, point blank, if I'd seen the van down there.
'Listen, Miss Prudence, I have enough problems of my own. I stay out of people's business.' Before she could say another word, I picked up my bag. I'd find Mr and Mrs Bedford, thank them for their civility, and go out on the main road to meet Nurse and Mrs Banton.
'Hold on, Miss G say to drink dis, t'ree times a day.' Miss Prudence handed me a container with the dark brown brew. 'If yu want to get better, drink it.'
I thanked her and walked down the steps to the marl road in time to see the van drive by, under the escort of Sgt Gilbert and Sgt Thompson. I stood behind the bougainvillaea until they were out of range.
Mr. Bedford, carrying the black scandal bag he'd picked up earlier, walked back to the house as quickly as he could and in through the side entrance. DC Lowe, who had obviously stood guard during the operation, bowed to him as he passed.
'I see,' I said to myself.
I noted nothing of this incident in my book and I have no intention to report any of it to my inspector friend. But I'll probably think about it some more when I, Fly, return from New York.
