There was nobody he wanted to see, he tried to tell her, but she said he was an important person, a good man, and Mitchell acquiesced without bothering to ask why, or who it was, because what difference did it make, everything he had to say and anything anybody had to say to him, all of it came from a very lean and common script, and what did it matter who read the lines, and no one came anyway, it was just he and Josephine alone in the house, she working quite contentedly at her desk on designs for a show she had been contracted to put on at one of the better hotels, he remained supine on her bed, wearing only his gym shorts and sweating unhealthily, listening to the alarm clock of pain in his lower right arm, unable to move, his mind recycling an impoverished array of thoughts, asking himself how do you match up the moments and the answer was, you can’t.
When the aunt returned with the boy Josephine set aside her pens and colored pencils and went into the other part of the house to be with them. He heard the child pestering her, he heard her husky laughter. At suppertime she marched back into the bedroom, headstrong and feisty, to tell him he didn’t have a say-so in the matter, he must get up and come eat a bite of Auntie’s chicken-back and dumplings, don’t bother dressing just come, and so he followed after her down the hall, shirtless and barefooted, and took his seat with the family at the kitchen table, Auntie gracious and solicitous, the boy in his high chair, enthralled again by Mitchell, absently smearing his bits of fruit and dumpling on the board in front of him, Josephine popping morsels into his mouth when she could get his attention, Mitchell practiced holding a spoon in his left hand but ate sparingly, unable to find his appetite, Auntie said if he would eat a little more she would bring him a rum, and then she got up and brought him the rum and put a plate of sweet biscuits in the center of the table. They talked, careful not to say anything that might plug the trickle of his forgetting.
After a second rum, he found himself entertaining the idea that this now was his life.
He watched the women clear and wash the dishes, comforted by the mock indignation of their gossip, uncensored and unsweetened, about a neighborhood romance between a too-old man and a too-young but slutty girl. Josephine took a washcloth and wiped off the boy and his high chair, saying to Mitchell, Come, we will let him look at a show and then it is his bedtime. They adjourned to the front parlor, Josephine going ahead to turn on the television, and sat down, the boy cross-legged in front of the screen, Josephine on a plaid settee, Mitchell adhering himself to the surface of a red vinyl-covered chair, like the type commonly seen in doctors’ offices in another country. Auntie followed a minute later, lowering herself into a rocking chair. The TV was old, a big wooden box with its own legs, covered with a large doily and a vase of plastic roses, and it projected an ethereal blue light throughout the room after Josephine had flicked off the overhead. Television was still a novelty on St. Catherine and there was only one station, the bulk of its programming transmitted from Barbados, frequently jolted by static interference. They were all immobilized by a commercial for the Royal Bank of Canada and then, to his dismay, on came “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a rerun from the early Sixties, the unearthly blue light in the air, emanated from the characters, was like a clear, odorless exhaust of mortality, at the sound of the first laugh track he got up and went to the kitchen, poured himself a third rum, and came back to the parlor and sat down, his eyes wandered over the chromoliths of Jesus and Virgin Mother and Child and another of St. Catherine being unpinned from her wheel by the bridegroom Christ, then back to the screen, Dick Van Dyke tripping over an ottoman as he entered a room, it was the wrong thing to be watching, it made being here with Josephine and her aunt and son seem promiscuous and far too unreal, it was a starburst of decomposing nostalgia and he felt it thrusting him back to a boyhood he no longer claimed or wanted for himself. He knew the only thing to do was get back up and get back inside the sanctuary of her bedroom but first there was the television’s own awful attraction to overcome, he could also just stay there and bathe in its soporific light, but then it was Josephine, not Mitchell, getting up, stepping behind the set to pull aside the lace curtains drawn across the open window and look out onto the street, where he too had heard someone stop in front of the house, a car door clicked open and then slammed close.
Eddy has come, Josephine said, walking back through the parlor and out into the hallway to answer the soft rap at the door, and then she was back in the room with Edison Banks, Banks was nodding at him with a sheepish grin, soon disposed of, saying, Stay put, mahn, don’t disturb yourself, but Mitchell was frozen with embarrassment anyway, humiliated to be discovered in the awkward and counterfeit position of bare-chested domesticity, and then the prime minister had taken a seat on the settee, next to Josephine, who by way of explanation was saying, Wilson, Eddy is an old friend of the family, you know. Banks ignored him, though not with any blatancy, catching up on family news with Josephine and her aunt, and Mitchell slipped away to put on a shirt and came back to his chair, stricken by curiosity, the boy was being admired by Banks, bounced on his knee, and Mitchell could not help but gaze overtly upon this man who had made himself the hope incarnate of his people, by appearance alone he succeeded as the model citizen, a well-shaped symbol of the new St. Catherine, he had the physical charisma granted to slim, self-assured men and seemed to be made absolutely solid and unbreakable by the understated but prideful arrogance that honed a razor-edge of glamour to the sword of power, and yet watching Edison Banks with Josephine’s son he could easily believe that not all the innocence had gone from the world, that still there were dreams that were more than the illusions of powerless men. His mind shifted toward gratitude and kinship, he felt a transcendent sense of relief foreshadowing the healing that he imagined, wrongly, was the purpose of this visit.
Edison Banks asked permission from the women to speak with Mister Wilson alone, and when Josephine had scooped up the child and they had withdrawn from the room, he asked permission of Mitchell to speak informally as well as frankly and with confidentiality, and then he turned his attention full upon him, his eyes seemed suddenly hounded, the cinnamon hue of his skin bleached by the light of the television. There was no exchange of pleasantries, no attempt to explain how it was he had come to be there, other than the fact that he had expected to see Mitchell at the memorial service for the teacher, where he had hoped to take him aside and ask him what he was asking now, without any other consideration but a respect for the truth, was there anything that had happened on Mount Soufrière that he thought it best not to entrust to the police, for political or personal reasons?
Mitchell received the question as his first and perhaps only opportunity to tell the truth, as he knew it, and it was the only time he ever did, unburdening himself to Edison Banks, whose expression hardened as he listened to the story, the tulip-shaped scar disfiguring one of his eyebrows glowed white on his high forehead, and he leaned out on the edge of the settee to prop his elbows on his knees, his elegant hands cupped over his meticulous beard, and asked for a brief moment of clarification.
“What was in the woman’s pack?”
Mitchell didn’t know and he refused to speculate.
“Is it possible that she lied to you? Is it possible that she and the other woman, your friend—”
Mitchell cut him off. “Absolutely not.”
Looking slighted by the curt tone of the denial, Banks held up a hand in concession to the point, sighing heavily with regret, sorry he had found it necessary to even suggest such a possibility, he was after all an apostle of infinite faith, the woman’s death was a mystery that perhaps would remain a mystery, or perhaps it was not so big a mystery at all, but Wilson, Banks said emphatically, do you understand, we forgive each other our sins, we act with this future of forgiveness in our hearts, in order to move on. We have no days of real glory here, no heroic structures, no history of dignity. We have only fools and forgiveness and the rest, the balance, we must invent.
You have lived among us, Banks said, you ha
ve been a student of our souls, you know this is how we let our histories pass, unrecorded except in the ruin of hearts, in the dust and bones of our ancestors, in the violent spilling of their blood, in the changeless faces of children who wrap themselves in newspaper and fall asleep on the street ... Edison Banks paused, his eyes locked upon Mitchell’s, his lips bending in irony and he shook his head, self-amused, ridiculed by the television and then he continued, less fervently, saying he did not come to make a speech, he had come to make a request. Few people understood the powerlessness of being powerful. He was powerless, for instance, to interfere in the filing of a criminal charge, powerless to interfere in the jurisdiction of the courts, he was powerless to prevent political opponents from manufacturing lies and fabricating illusions and so he was asking Mitchell Wilson to reconsider his accusation against Corporal Cassius Collymore of the PDF.
“Why?”
Because, Banks said with resignation in his voice, a confessional sag to his frame, it could only bring disruption and harm to his nation and his nation’s struggle. Because, Banks said, raising his head and tilting it backward away from Mitchell, his eyes imperious, finishing with him, because the whole sense of the act of the woman’s murder suggested another murderer than Cassius Collymore, truth to tell, mahn, I don’t know who killed the woman, it has yet to be determined, but perhaps this man was innocent, examine your memory and examine your conscience, and if you say so then it is so but then that will be an occasion when you will need my help and I will be powerless to help, and the dead woman will need your help, Wilson, and you will be powerless to help her, you see.
Both men nodded bitterly at one another. Mitchell made a cold demand to be told about Isaac Knowles and was flabbergasted by what he heard.
“I am not convinced of this,” said Edison Banks. “I know much less about all this than you might suspect. These tales of this fellow Isaac, perhaps they are only another ananci story”—he paused, diverting his gaze toward the television which anointed their discussion with laughter—“but you know, Wilson, whatever you might say about the other woman, the woman who has left the island, eh? the woman who might know more than either of us about this affair, perhaps that would be ananci story too.”
“Isaac Knowles is my friend.”
“But you are serious?” said Banks, taken aback. “But this the first I hear of it.”
“This bandit stuff,” Mitchell said, frustrated, impulsively pointing at the program. “Where are you getting this from, the TV? This is horseshit.”
“But you are serious, really?” Banks repeated, incredulous, coming to his feet, saying, in that case, as a personal favor, he would ask Wilson to leave this island, he would ask him to stay away until they straightened these matters out among themselves.
Mitchell remained slumped in his chair, listening to the driver of the prime minister’s car start its engine at the same moment that Banks opened the front door to go out of the house. He was too pent up, the encounter had left him overcharged with useless energy and he went back through the dimness of the house to the kitchen to fire back another rum, desperate to tame his aimless urge to action, pouring a second one when Josephine came to collect what was left of him.
“Wha happen, bwoy?”
She was in her nightgown, sleepy-eyed. It was as if he had come home blasted in the middle of the night to tell his wife he had just been laid off, cut from the payroll that made it possible for them to be together.
“I think I’ve just been deported.”
She brought him by his good hand to bed, saying only this, you cy-ahn trust Eddy, Mitchell, he out of all dem fellas is de only one, and then she harbored him within the flesh of her compassion, this night she made her love wordless and melting for him, a tender respite from his impotence, and in the early light of morning when he dressed and left her house, fearing her remonstrations he didn’t tell her where he was going, only that he was coming back to her. Don’t wait on him, he said, hoisting his daypack over his shoulders, but he’d most likely be home for supper.
Again he walked down to the esplanade, again the light was blinding and seemed to shine right down on his nerves and witlessness, and he queued up a second time with a workforce of laborers at a line of lorries ferrying men to leeward, wondering when he had done this before, he couldn’t remember, and he climbed onto the back of a slatbedded truck, crowding in with the rest of them when they were told to hop aboard, someone making room for him to sit down on one of the benches, saying Sah, we is very very deep-sad about the girl Big Sally. Along the road he saw the familiar posting of old billboards, erected by the coalition during the final days of the campaign against the tyrant Pepper, political relics, the didactic murals—heroic peasants with uplifted eyes and hoes slung over their shoulders; children thankfully learning their ABC’s—were beginning to flake and peel and their identical slogans—Stop the Oppression; We All is One—fade, but someone with a bucket of red paint had altered their attribution, the formula for change and unity—PEP + PIP = PEAS—had lost all but its first three letters, and its E had scaled the alphabet to become a crude, splattered R, as if to suggest to the population that the PEP had never quite been able to switch gears away from its former function and was still capable of rebelling against the status quo, regardless of their role in its construction. The R of course expressed evolutionary logic, survival of the fittest, and stood for Revolution, though he knew of no announcement from the party to this effect. Farther up the road, past a brown swamp of mangrove and near the junction with the leeward highway, they slowed and moved as far to the left as the asphalt allowed, to let pass a caravan of twelve lorries, similar to their own, transporting hundreds of peasants south to the capital where, it was said among the men on the truck, they were to demonstrate against the PLDP (Mitchell later heard that during the rally, three dispossessed squatters, to dramatize their plight, allowed themselves to be symbolically crucified on makeshift crosses and paraded through the streets by several thousand outraged supporters; in the process, shop windows were broken and tear gas, making its debut on the island, was fired, and it could reasonably be said that this was the day the nebulous slow burn of opposition on the island combusted into bright blue flames).
In the hour of barnyard jostling and sweat and black tobacco smoke it took to reach the police checkpoint, they were entertained by a PEP man and a PIP man engaged in an argument remarkable for the beauty of its oratory applied to the ridiculous nonsense of their mirror-image demands, each of them wanting their workers’ union to strike against different halves of the same government. Is like de mahn refuse to bring home food, said one of the onlookers, and de womahn say she ain goin cook, and so who goin sit hungry but we children, nuh? Tell me Catherinians is not lunatics, bwoy. It seemed Kingsley supporters among the police commanded the leeward checkpoint, and there the PIP fellow loudly denounced his PEP counterpart, who was then ordered down off the truck and left standing in the middle of the road, no one paying him the least attention, his arms flung out from his sides and saying, JesusfuckinChrist, what I do? what I do? And then, when the lorry was almost but not yet out of sight and anyone who looked could see, one of the officers stepped over and struck the man with his ferule, the driver downshifted up the mountainside and the scene closed with the dry-mouthed aftertaste of brutality. Mitchell hopped off himself when the truck turned inland toward one of the cocoa estates and continued on up the glorious coast, its ridges cradling fertile savannas dotted with idyllic farms and groves, hitchhiking to Kingsley’s home village and then walking the last quarter mile to Poppi’s house. The yard was filled with peasants, standing around, not much given to talk, as if they were waiting to be hired, or addressed. Mitchell said his good mornings and they nodded back expressionlessly. When he knocked on the door the maid answered and grunted, Wait. His wrist, which had been quiet all morning, started to pulse again, like a small engine, and he wasn’t thinking properly about what it was he was doing here, come to see the ancient paras
itic hulk of a vampire, but here was Kingsley at the door, just who he was, a pea-hearted cunning maniac, frog-eyed and corpulent but still the man he once was, a man of lean and youthful lusts, who had once swallowed three gold coins and then pulled down his pants to shit them out in front of a crowd of cheering workers at a rally of the Mental and Manual Worker’s Union, back in the old days, when he was their leader, a flea up the skirts of Britannia and Her Majesty the Queen. Rumors sifted down and filled Kingsley’s mad and venal world, and now they had him dabbling in obeah, offering blood sacrifices to monkey gods and holding séances and all manner of foolishness. They made him out to be larger than life when really all he was was a dangerous infant, empowered with urgent infant needs, a full-bodied human shape with unformed, ungerminated but voraciously needy interiors squalling me, me, me, not a dreamer like Edison Banks but a burning bottomless hole in a people’s culture of existence. He was wearing the same glossy black suit he favored, his collar unbuttoned and his necktie loosened, his swollen feet poked into bedroom slippers, and he was drunk, at least that was the impression he gave.
“You are of no use to me, Mistah Wilson.” Mitchell turned his face down and to the side, embarrassed for himself and intimidated by the inhuman authority, the terrorizing force of it, Kingsley so effortlessly communicated with his gaze, and Mitchell’s own eyes came to rest on the row of vehicles parked down behind the kitchen, quite a collection of them meaning the house must be full, he had interrupted what didn’t take much imagination to think of as a war council, and of the three Rovers on the lot Ballantyne’s was among them, he knew its plate numbers by now, but now the numbers clicked in defining revelation and he realized what he should have known all along, that it could only be Ballantyne who picked up and disposed of Sally’s daypack off the slopes of Mount Soufrière. Tillman hadn’t, Adrian hadn’t, nor had he seen it being carried off by any of the cops.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 64
