How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  They go to meet his mother. The mother is friendly, but she doesn’t get up and Lala spends most of the rest of the meeting wondering why her apparent friendliness does not prompt her to her feet in the presence of a stranger. The mother is a squat black woman who buys and begs for discarded clothes and sits in her veranda all day, shredding them into long strips to be sold to seamen. While she shreds she talks about finishing her house. It is a house made of unpainted wood, swollen by rain and dark with age. At the back of the house the wooden structure has been encased in a concrete-and-steel frame that forms the skeleton of the new house she is building. This is the house she will leave for her children, Mrs. Parris says, Robert included. It takes Lala a minute to realize that Tone is the Robert of his mother’s imaginings. The house is for Robert and his four brothers, says the mother. She imagines all five of them living there together into old age, she prays her five boys all get good wives to sweep it clean each morning. Her scrawny chickens strut and cluck through a mound of building sand she has bought, which is stored by her step and births blades of grass and green things.

  When she suggests that Robert take Lala to the kitchen to pour her a cool drink of guava juice, Lala whispers, “You tell she what happen?”

  “No.”

  Lala thinks this is what it must mean to be trusted by a man – to know things about him his own mother doesn’t, things he would not want anyone else to know. His mother smells of uncooked rice and the many perfumes of the mystery donors to the Salvation Army from whom she begs these clothes. The scissors she uses for cutting are large and sharp, and attached to her apron by a chain and a manacle. It reminds Lala of Wilma. Of Carson.

  While she sips, Robert goes into a bedroom to fetch the beads. The beads are brought out on a wide, flat wooden tray. There are neon beads and Lucite beads and beads that look like braided gold and wooden beads and cowrie shells and clasps made of gilded wire. Lala’s fingers find and fiddle with the best ones, turn them over and over and peep through the middles where there are holes waiting for hair.

  “They nice,” says Lala. “I will ask my grandmother and come back.”

  Later, when the mother leaves to buy vegetables, Lala notices her atrophied left leg that seems to wish to draw itself into her side, to curl up in a fetal position. This leg ends in a foot that claws the floor like a talon and a heel that never touches the ground and is smooth and yellow. The toenails are long and painted red and Lala tries not to stare. After his mother leaves, Tone presses a bag of gold-braid beads into her hands, silences her protests about not having the money to pay for them, tells her she can have them, the mother would not mind.

  * * *

  Carson deteriorates and Wilma’s time at the hospital extends beyond the bell signaling the end of visiting hours at 7 p.m. Carson needs to be cleaned and fed and watched, and the overworked nurses at Baxter’s General do not mind if a wife wants to reserve these tasks for herself.

  Lala hears Wilma’s admonitions to stay at home and in her books until she gets back, but listens instead to her heart. She finds herself standing on the road with her chest thudding each evening that the bus exits her line of sight for Baxter’s General, and then she runs back to the beach until she is breathless.

  They go to see Rocky at the Globe Cinema, where Tone has a friend from school days who will let them in for free. They sit in the balcony, in the more expensive seats, despite the threadbare red velvet and the peeling gilt columns that separate them from the gallery below. From this heady height they pelt the moviegoers below with popcorn and candy – a trait of bad breeding that Wilma would surely whip her for, and a source of extraordinary delight for Lala as a result. Lala looks at their feet propped on the backs of the seats before them, his neat ones in Reebok sneakers she’s seen on posters in town, her huge ones in the jelly flats Wilma has forced her to wear with her frilly socks. He does not say anything when she takes hers down to remove the socks. He does not blink when she puts them up again and, sockless, pushes them closer to his.

  One evening Wilma leaves a little late and Tone, worried about why Lala hasn’t appeared, walks to the bus stop instead. They don’t have a lot of time before visiting hours are over and Wilma will be back, so Tone says he will take Lala somewhere close by, somewhere she hasn’t seen before. When they reach the mouth of a cave beneath the huge nose of a rock face, Lala hesitates. Tone takes her hand, coaxes her forward, tells her not to worry, stick close to him and she will be safe.

  On this evening he takes Lala to the underground tunnels that traverse the earth beneath Baxter’s Village for the first time. He tells her that his family has known about them for generations. These tunnels were built many years ago by soldiers stationed on the island to guard it, he says; the tunnels were intended to stop the flooding that accompanied each rainy season. It took some time before the English soldiers realized that the flooding encouraged mosquitoes to breed, and that they bore the yellow fever which killed the troops in numbers. Before that, they just knew that the rain fell, the earth flooded, and soldiers died, and so they dug tunnels to alleviate the flooding, and to keep the soldiers’ thoughts off death and firmly on the mathematical mystery of digging tunnels beneath the ground.

  He don’t show anybody else these tunnels, Tone tells her, they are his and his alone, his special place he goes to think about . . . things. And he is quiet as if he does not want to speak aloud about what those things are. The tunnels belong to him, says Tone, nobody know them like he does but, if she not scared, he will show her what they are like. Lala says she is not scared.

  The tunnels are one man wide and two men tall and they are dark and dimly lit in parts where they open into caves aboveground. Tone walks just ahead of Lala, who holds his hand tightly; it is the only solid evidence that he is in the deep dark with her other than the sound of shifting pebbles as he moves forward. They stop when the tunnel opens into a damp cave where the roof drip-drips water.

  It is here, standing up, that Lala sleeps with Tone for the first time, or so it feels in the few moments after sex. Afterward, she remembers sweat, the saltiness of his neck and the starchy stiffness of his T-shirt in her mouth when she bit into it, but otherwise she thinks she understands why the act is likened to dozing. She remembers it as a dream – the sensation that they had been forever squeezed together in that tunnel, and as if, unless she was stuck to him in just that way, a part of her would always be missing. She remembers coming out of the tunnel a changed person, sure that she must be walking differently, that Wilma would know as soon as she drifted through the door from the hospital that, despite her vigilance, Lala’s virtue has been lost. But Wilma doesn’t know, doesn’t notice, and aims her anger instead at the gold-plated earring that, much as she has warned her, her granddaughter has managed to lose.

  Tone soon starts ditching the summer job in Mrs. Kennedy’s garden. He takes to surfing all day instead, lies on a surfboard and paddles out on it every morning when there are good waves and then he stands up and dances on the surface of the sea right in front of the Kennedy house while Lala watches from the upstairs bedroom to which Wilma has banished her. This morning ritual soon becomes an all-day obsession and sometimes, although she has gone to great effort to come to the beach looking for him as soon as Wilma’s back is turned, she is forced to be content with being seated on sand that assaults her face and hair and makes her worry that Wilma will know where she’s been.

  One day she sits on the sand alone and Tone does not appear. He is not in the sea. He is not on the sand. Lala goes home before Wilma returns, worried sick that something has happened to him. Although she visits the beach each evening after that when Wilma goes to the hospital, she does not see Tone again for three months, and by then Carson is better and she can no longer get away as easily.

  Eventually she ignores Wilma’s warnings and takes to long walks for the sake not of meeting Tone, but of being free to do anything she wants. When Wilma discovers she is missing, she often waits for her at the gat
e of her little stone house with a switch in one hand and a bible in the other. Lala does not mind. While Wilma is trying to beat her granddaughter full of good sense, Lala thinks of new styles of braids and beads and the one-armed sister girl who lost her arm in that tunnel. It is because of the one-armed sister that she does not allow these lashes to deter her from escaping Wilma’s stone house whenever she feels like it. It is for this one-armed sister that she tries to find and explore tunnels and dark places anywhere she goes for the next two years.

  On one of these occasions she chooses to visit a fair. And it is at the fair, amid the gay stalls and gruff music Wilma has forbidden her to listen to, amid the creak of a merry-go-round and the hawking of sno-cones and grab bags and donkey rides, that she meets a giant on a unicycle who, despite the magic of his art, looks like he would rather do nothing but spend his time talking to her. The giant’s name is Adan.

  Chapter 23

  Tone

  13 September 1979

  When Tone’s fifteen-year-old body has mended itself and he no longer winces when he goes to the bathroom, no longer jumps each time he walks the road and a bush rustles, no longer watches the ghost-marks of black and blue handprints on his arms with incredulity, something starts to eat him. It is this thing that Tone responds to when anyone offends him, instead of the actual wrong that has been committed, and his response is therefore often disproportionate. Fish Brown tackles him during a football game one afternoon and holds his arms behind him in the same way that Tone repeatedly suffers in his nightmares, landing on top of him while Tone is facedown in soggy grass. For this Tone gifts Fish a broken nose and three lost teeth. Tone is unaware that he keeps on punching long after he has stunned Fish Brown into submission. It is not that he does not feel his fists pound Fish’s flesh like the movement of his mother’s mortar, it is rather that somehow he does not understand that the firm pillow he is punching is a person, and that this person is Fish Brown – skinny, bow-legged Fish, with the perpetually open glare of the species after which he is nicknamed. Tone stops only after he has been punching for a while and Fish’s eyes are white orbs of surprise in a bloody pulp of face and Ma Tone’s screaming reaches her son’s ears through a mist.

  Ma Tone has run the length of the fence that separates her house from the playing field to find the entrance and stop the fight. One of her other sons has fetched her because, he said, Robert and Fish had words and Robert get that look he get when he about to lose his head and nobody can hold back Robert when he lose his head, everybody tried and Robert just keeping on punching the same Fish Brown he thick-thick with since primary-school days. He says it with such amazement, such admiration that his brother could be more powerful than the many who tried to keep him off the other player, that Ma Tone rises on her one good foot before he is finished and runs despite the awkward gait her condition dictates. Ma Tone rounds the piss-wet wall of the cricket pavilion some politician has had built to ensure that boys like her son are kept out of this very type of trouble, and screams at him – “STOP! ROBERT, STOP!” – although the rusty-haired monster crouched over a prone and bloody Fish Brown does not look like her Robert at all, it looks like something darker, something she can restrain only with an appeal to the Almighty. So Ma Tone drops on her one good knee before she reaches her son’s side and pleads the blood of Jesus over the demonic force that has possessed her son, sweet Jesus, please. And this is when Robert comes to himself and hears his mother praying and sees his good friend Fish Brown, against whom he has no beef that he can remember, choking on his own blood with Tone’s two red-dipped hands compressing his throat. Ma Tone runs to her son, then grabs him against her chest, holds his face in between her palms, and searches his eyes for the sweet, slow-to-anger child she once knew.

  “You all right, Robert?” she asks him. “Robert, you all right?”

  Because, although she cannot guess what it is, Ma Tone understands that her son’s sudden violent disposition means that perhaps he is the one who is suffering something and not the swollen and broken Fish Brown, coughing blood unto the grass of the playing field.

  “I all right, Ma,” Tone tells her. But he is twisting his face away from her gaze to stop her seeing the cause of his anger so that the effort she must make to keep his face steady between her palms is a fight in itself, one that she is not winning.

  The police come with the sirens silent but flashing, and in the pulsing winks of red and blue Ma Tone searches her son’s face for what ails him until two policemen step out and drag the boy away from her grasp and her gazing. It is not, as the police think, the fact that her son is being dragged away from her and to the station that causes Ma Tone to wail. It is the tiny glimpse she gets of something in her son’s eyes just before she lets him go – something that she hasn’t seen before, when her panic at his being pulled away from her causes him to allow their eyes to meet. This tiny glimpse is all Ma Tone needs to know that there is something she does not know. And that this not knowing is very dangerous indeed.

  After his arrest, she tries her best for him, Ma Tone does. She empties the money bag tucked beneath her breasts to pay for a lawyer, she buys him the best dress slacks and tie she can find for his court appearances. She begs the family of Fish Brown not to press charges until they cross the street when they see her coming and refuse the gifts and money she sends by envoys. Despite these efforts on the part of his mother, Tone is sent to the Government Industrial School for Wayward Boys for three months. When Ma Tone visits him there he persists in not meeting her eyes, except when she tells him the girl came to ask after him, the girl he brought to visit. When she tells him he looks straight at her, and his eyes brighten before darkening, clouding over again.

  “And what you tell her?”

  “I tell her you gone ’way,” mumbles Ma Tone. “I didn’t know what else to tell her.”

  “Is the best thing you tell her,” Tone assures her. “Is better than she worrying about me in here.”

  On his release, he is rewarded with the reputation of a ruffian who is not to be messed with. He is ignored by teachers in school, given a wide berth by the bullies in the street, and chosen first for soccer teams in games that somehow then dissolve before they even get started because nobody wants to offend Tone by not choosing him, but nobody wants to risk playing with him either.

  Within three weeks of his release, a drunkard heckles him one day on his way to the beach, tugs his surfboard, and tries to insult him by saying his ass is round and wide like a woman’s. This drunkard is flung so far into the air that villagers report for years afterward that that drunkard is lucky to be alive, and Tone is returned to the School for Wayward Boys – this time for over a year.

  Tone leaves school with no certificates and the Thing He Cannot Name still gnawing at him. A friend of Ma Tone’s suggests he try renting Jet Skis to tourists, as he is so at ease in the sea, and puts them on to Capitan, who has several Jet Skis and hires them out on a concessionary basis to seaworthy young men who need to make a dollar. But then Tone is robbed of the fee for a ride on his machine by an Italian tourist, who refuses to pay the full fare and who spits in his face when Tone insists he pay him. At the end of what happens next, the tourist is hospitalized in critical condition for several weeks and the newspapers report almost daily on his condition – and, later, on Tone’s trial. When the man recovers, the newspapers show him at the airport, heavily bandaged and vowing never to return to Paradise. It is not like they say in the magazines, the tourist tells the newspaper, these people are still like savages. The magistrate tells Tone that it is men like him who are hurting the country, who drive the tourist dollar away and make bad for everybody.

  Please, Ma Tone begs the magistrate before sentencing, please, my son, my son not the same. Something happen to him, he is not the same boy and I try and I try but I can’t see the something. He is a good boy, begs Ma Tone, have mercy, Judge, he is really a good boy.

  But the magistrate says he is tired of hearing these mothers co
me into his court and say their sons are good boys. Boys who assault and batter others and cause them serious bodily harm are not good boys, the magistrate says, and he scolds Ma Tone until she is weeping and sniveling like a child in the gallery of the court and Tone is in danger of succumbing to the Thing He Cannot Name right there in the dock.

  And then the magistrate jails Tone for three years.

  Tone enters prison believing the Thing That Eats Him will now be able to swallow him whole. He spends each day in prison looking over his shoulder, fearful of a hulking monster he has not seen, rather than the hundreds of ones that he has seen, the ones who surround him. The other prisoners recognize that he is a man who is haunted, so they give Tone the one thing that is in very short supply in prison – they give him space. So sure is he that he will not leave the prison alive that Tone writes goodbye letters to the two people he loves most in the world and keeps them among the few papers he is allowed. Tone writes a letter to his mother and one to Lala, but he doesn’t have the heart to send either. Eventually, when he is tired of watching the shadows grow short in his cell, Tone tears up the letters and flushes them down the toilet.

  * * *

  20 August 1984

  The prolonged hibernation of The Thing That Eats Him might be why Tone did not recognize the dark that obscured his vision and flooded his body that moment on the steps of Adan’s house, when he spilled kisses on the forehead and nose and lips of the woman he loves and felt her flinch when his soft lips landed, featherlike, on a spot made sore from Adan’s beating. While Lala spewed hatred at him, even while surrendering herself to be held, Tone had felt that unaccustomed heat start warming the soles of his feet and making its way up his legs and arms. Tone did not recognize it at first, because he had not seen the Thing That Eats Him for so long that he had begun to doubt that it had ever existed.

  Ma Tone had told him that she had prayed while he was in prison about that darkness within him. She had declared that her prayers had been answered with such passion that Tone now admits a latent belief in the power of her merciful God. Still, he felt the Thing, lurking, when Lala told him that day on the step how Adan beat her. He felt himself start to be swallowed by this thing that day, when he saw Lala wince because he was hugging her too tightly, when he watched her weep because his chest had rubbed against her mangled breast, the tears that rushed to her eyes mirroring those then pooling in his own.