The Rhythm of the August Rain

by Gillian Royes

  “Do you mind if I record you?” Shannon said, but Leah declined and the photojournalist took out her notebook.

  In answer to the first question, the Rasta said that she and her husband were members of the Nyabinghi, but they didn’t belong to a church. “Our God is Jah, and Jah is God of all, and Jah-Rastafari don’t need no walls.” She and her man had been together for thirty-eight years, and she’d become a Rasta after she met him. What seemed to interest her most was describing the ital food she cooked, which she pronounced eye-tal.

  “Is spiritual food, and it must be full of itality. It must increase the livity, the strength that Rastaman get from God, and everything must be natural, natural as possible. If we drink juice, we must juice the orange with our two hands, you see me? When we cooking, we don’t put in no salt, and we don’t eat nothing coming out of a tin, nothing that mix up in a factory, nothing with no chemicals. We eat plenty fruit and vegetables, no pork, no meat. But we eat fish and sometimes little chicken, when we can get it. We don’t eat no crab or lobster or shrimp, though, no bottom scavengers.”

  The conversation ended when a boy, tiny dreadlocks sprouting from his head, came to the door and said he was hungry. Shannon asked if she could take a few photographs before she left, and Leah agreed, as long as she could take them with her grandson. Shannon photographed the two standing on the step, the boy sticking out his chest, his feet at right angles.

  Back on the road, Shad directed Carlton to drive to the village square.

  “We have one Rasta man who fix everybody’s shoes,” Shad explained while wiping his brow. “I don’t like to disturb him, like how he working now, but he might be able to give us a little direction.”

  “We’re doing well for a first day, don’t worry,” Shannon said. “It always takes a few days to start getting into the story.”

  Ras Walker’s shoe stand near the village square was a small bamboo shack; from its roof hung a red flag with a lion in the middle. Inside the shack, shelves were laden with shoes held together with elastic bands, one shelf reserved for new leather sandals with a stamped pattern. Three tall drums stood on the ground underneath them.

  “Ras Walker, blessings!” Shad hailed the man behind the counter, and hammer in hand, the man touched his heart in greeting. “I have a nice Canadian lady visiting us who need to talk to you. She is the baby mother for Mistah Eric and she writing about Rasta people.” Shannon winced a little at the introduction, understanding for the first time what her standing in Largo was now: Eric’s baby mother.

  The news seemed to have an effect on the middle-aged Rastafarian, who said he could give her five minutes. He had a customer coming back shortly to pick up his shoes. With his waist-length locks and enormous smile, he’d be an excellent subject for a photograph, Shannon decided as Shad retreated to wait in the car with Carlton.

  “Shad don’t recommend anybody who not a good person,” Walker told her, “so you must be trustable. You will overstand what I and I have to say.”

  “I won’t take up much of your time,” Shannon said, settling on the stool he offered. “I’m working for a magazine and—”

  “You know anything about Rasta?”

  “A little from what I’ve been reading.”

  “Is a whole different way of seeing the world, you overstand?” The man selected a tiny nail and tapped it into the sole of the shoe he was working on.

  “One thing that fascinates me is the language you use. Why do you say I and I, or I-man, and overstand, when other people say I and understand?”

  “Rasta language is not like everyman language. Some people call it livalect, different from dialect, you know, because I and I believe words is a powerful thing. Where you have sound, you have power. Words have a meaning higher than man. That mean”—Walker searched for another nail—“you say I, but we say I and I because we believe that a man always connected to Jah. No man stands alone, so is I and Jah, I and I, not I one.”

  “What about overstand?”

  “When you say understand now, you using a weak word. Being under is weaker than being over, right, so Rasta say overstand. I and I use power words, not weak words. You must ask Shad to translate for you.” Walker chuckled. “He know the language good. Is in every song he play on the radio in the bar, ask him.”

  While Walker continued hammering nails into the heel of the shoe, he told her that he was from St. Thomas, the parish south of Portland and over the mountains. When he was a teenager, he’d worked with some Rastafarian fishermen and had come to like their attitude toward life. He’d started growing a beard and dreadlocks, although his mother didn’t approve. The men came from the hills above where the Walkers lived, from a community known as the Bongo Rastafari. The leader of the group was Prince Michael, a man Walker respected a lot because he was a wise man. When he was in his early twenties, Walker had moved to the community, and there he’d learned shoemaking. More important, he’d learned to reason, to debate the meaning of life and his place in it.

  “We would wear white. You ever see those people? . . . No? You not on that side of the island and you don’t go to Kingston, that’s why. They wear turbans on their head, so you don’t see the dreadlocks.”

  “Why do Rastas do that, grow their hair long and let it get—?” Shannon asked, waving a hand over her own head, thinking of Eve’s question.

  “You ever hear of Samuel one, verse eleven? They was talking about Samson. When his mother was asking Jah to give her a son, she promise that her child will serve God all the days of his life and that no razor shall come upon his head. And Jah give her a powerful son. But he meet a woman called Delilah, and she cut off him hair and cut off him strength, and he get weak after that. Rasta believe that hair is strength. Jah give us our hair, and I and I not supposed to cut it.”

  She nodded, juggling mentally—translating the patois, scribbling in her notebook, thinking of the next question. “Why did you leave the Bongo community?”

  “It was too strictlike, and I and I more of an independent type, you know? Too much strictness tie up I and I mind and spirit.”

  Ras Walker bent his head to the shoe again, but Shannon had one more question. “I noticed those drums in the back.” She closed her notebook. “Do you play them?”

  “Sometimes. But my son play better than me. He teach drumming.”

  After taking photographs of the shoemaker over his metal repair boot and beside the flag, Shannon walked back to the car. She had a lot to think about, she realized, a lot more research to do, including beginning to look into Katlyn’s disappearance.

  “Do either of you know where Gordon Gap is?” she asked Carlton and Shad when they were under way. The two men discussed the location and decided that, no, it wasn’t Gordon Town near Kingston, and, yes, it must be the village in the hills above Oracabessa, about thirty miles west of Largo.

  “You know somebody up there?” Shad wanted to know.

  “No, but I want to make some inquiries.”

  “We finish for the day?” Carlton asked.

  “Yes, all done,” Shannon said. “Shad, would you like to have lunch with me?”

  “Sure, man, like how my kitchen at home cold now.”

  Before Carlton left them at Lambert’s, Shannon arranged to pay him weekly, and he agreed to pick her up at ten the next morning. All was quiet in the Delgados’ house when she and Shad walked in, only the wooden floors creaking under them in the midday warmth. Bertha was in the kitchen polishing silver, the chocolate Lab stretched out on the cool tiles beside her.

  “Miss Jennifer take the children to Carel Beach to swim and Eve gone with them,” Bertha reported. “You hungry?”

  While she was making their lunch, the housekeeper talked about her own daughter, who’d been a teenager when Shannon had seen her last. “She working in a hospital in Baltimore, doing nursing. She making plenty money. I don’t see her for three years now.”

  “Don’t you miss her?” Shannon asked.

  The woman looked up
in surprise. “Every month she send money for me to build my own house—it worth the missing.” Bertha laid out the lunch and left them in the kitchen.

  “This morning—it was helpful to you?” Shad bit into his tuna sandwich.

  “A good start, but there’s so much history and philosophy behind the whole Rasta thing, I hope I can do it justice. There’s a big difference between reading about it and talking to Rastas in person, you know.”

  “One interview at a time, right?”

  “It’s more complicated than that, though. There’s something else I need to be doing at the same time.”

  “Just let me know and I tell Carlton to take us there.”

  Shannon set down her sandwich. “Remember I asked about Gordon Gap? That’s my other reason for being here.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I’m looking for—something happened to a Canadian woman over thirty years ago and my editor wants me to find out what happened to her. She came down to Jamaica to learn about the music and dance here. She was my editor’s friend, and from what Angie—that’s my editor—says, she was a sweet woman, in her late twenties, who was a bit naive, kind of idealistic. She came from a poor family and went to college on a scholarship, majoring in fine arts—that means like painting and dance and so on. Angie said she was really caring, always had a stray dog or cat she was taking care of, a good-hearted person. Before she came down to Jamaica, she was working in a store that sold dance clothes and she was teaching modern dance in a studio in Toronto. She’d always loved reggae music, and she started talking about coming to Jamaica to learn more about the dances down here. Her plan was to go back to Toronto and teach them.”

  “How she disappeared?” Shad narrowed his eyes.

  “Angie doesn’t know, and I could only find two brief newspaper articles in the Globe about her disappearance—about the disappearance of her body from a hospital morgue. The articles never mentioned which hospital.”

  Her listener’s eyes stretched wide as he put down his sandwich. “What you mean? Her—how her body disappear?”

  “That’s what I’m supposed to find out. All I know for certain is that she had a Rastafarian boyfriend and left where she was living in Gordon Gap. Then she was found on the steps of some hospital very sick, and after her death her body vanished into thin air. She was an only child, so it must have hit her parents hard when they were told. The father came down, but he couldn’t find out anything. Both parents have died, Angie said, but she wants to know what happened.”

  “What really happened to her, though?”

  “She was young and foolish, I’m thinking. Maybe she fell in love with this fellow—”

  “And she get caught up in something like drugs or crime.”

  “Something that killed her.”

  “And they take her body because they didn’t want it examined.”

  “Then why did they take her to the hospital at all?” Shannon insisted. “They could have just buried the body after she died. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  Shad dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “I asking myself, what would I do if my daughter disappear like that? I would hunt under every rock and bush, I’m telling you. But, you know, maybe the father didn’t know where to start. Jamaica can be a difficult place to do any business like investigating things. The police busy all the time fighting gunmen, and they don’t pay you no mind.” Shad narrowed his eyes. “This kind of job call for somebody who dedicated to it, who understand how to talk to witnesses and look for clues, seen? And even if is a cold case—so they call it on TV—somebody need to finish it off, so living people can get satisfaction, you know?”

  “It doesn’t seem right, I agree.”

  “Like the dead woman just crying out for you to find her resting place, Shannon. I can hear her—you can’t hear her?” He tilted his head back. “Shannon, Shad,” he wailed in a high-pitched voice, “come and find me. I’m here, I’m here.”

  “You’re a trip, Shad.” Shannon shook her head and smiled.

  Shad took a sip of his lemonade. “You know where in Gordon Gap she was living, though?”

  “Haven’t a clue, and I don’t know how I’m going to get around to it, with all the research for the article I have to do and the photographs I have to take. It’s a big job, eh?”

  Shad pushed away from the table, looking smug. “I knew there was some reason I supposed to help you. All I doing in the car now is falling asleep, anyway, because Carlton don’t talk much.”

  “But now there are two jobs to do. What if we have to go in different directions?”

  “No problem, man. Let we just focus on looking for this lady and you can interview any Rastas you find on the way. Plenty Rastas all across Jamaica, and if she have a Rasta boyfriend like you say, my head telling me he was living in a camp near Gordon Gap. We can kill two bird with one stone.”

  “Gordon Gap tomorrow, then.”

  They discussed Shad’s hourly rate for his part in the deal. He was happy for the extra money, he said, because he and Beth were spending all their money on the wedding, and with Joella going off to Titchfield High School in September, the extra cash would come in handy.

  “By the way,” Shannon warned him, “you’re the only person in Largo I’ve talked to about Katlyn—that’s her name. I don’t want anyone to worry about me, and I know they’d try to stop me from looking into it because it could be dangerous. I haven’t told Eve because she’d probably end up telling Casey or Jennifer, you know kids. As for Eric, he’s bound to try and stop us, and he’s going to be negative about the whole thing, but they’re paying me extra to find out about the woman, and I—I have to do it.”

  “And Beth going to complain that I going to dead before the wedding, so I not telling her neither.”

  After Shad left, Shannon went back to her room and turned on her laptop. While it was booting up, she slid open a drawer of the antique desk and removed the photo Angie had given her, the editor looking at it morosely before handing it over. The colors had faded and the serrated edges had started to curl, but nothing could hide the beauty of the young woman who stared back. She was wearing a peasant blouse and squinting into the sun, her oval face framed by long, dark hair and bangs. Under her straight nose was a tentative smile, one that hoped that the world was as kind as she was.

  Shannon shook her head. Katlyn, Katlyn, she mused to the woman’s image, you got in over your head, didn’t you?

  She slipped the photograph into her laptop bag and moved to the armchair next to the window to transcribe her notes. She had just finished sending Angie and Chantrelle emails when she heard Jennifer and the children arriving back. Wayne, the Delgados’ five-year-old, was wailing about something. Eve came in a few minutes later in her bathing suit, her nose bright red and her hair more disheveled than ever.

  “How was the beach?” Shannon asked.

  “I learned to bodysurf.”

  “Did you get sunburned? You’re kind of—”

  “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “What’s the matter with yours?”

  “There’s a creepy-crawly thing in the tub.”

  A lengthy shower followed, and Shannon was about to knock on the door and tell her not to waste the hot water when her daughter emerged, toweling her hair. “Do you have any gel?”

  “I have mousse—and I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  “You might not like it at first—”

  “Then don’t tell me.”

  “How would you like to take drumming lessons?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Shadrack Myers, otherwise a healthy man, didn’t have a strong stomach, especially in the backseat of a car. The coast road at least allowed him to gaze at the ocean and gulp sea air, but the trip to Gordon Gap allowed him no escape. The uphill twists from Oracabessa had his head out the back window, trying to think of something other than his stomach, trying to keep up his side of the conversation.

&nbs
p; “And Eve is thinking about taking classes from Ras Walker’s son,” Shannon was saying from the front.

  “Yeah,” Shad gulped. “I know his son—a nice guy, good teacher.”

  “I was wondering if you could set that up for me, maybe on your way home?”

  “Sure, sure—”

  “I can do it,” Carlton said, his first words of the morning. “He live down the road from me.”

  “Would you?” Shannon gave the driver one of her smiles. She’d always had pretty, white teeth, Shad thought, teeth that could twist a man’s arm to do anything.

  To Shad’s relief, around the next corner a road sign that drooped to one side welcomed them to Gordon Gap. The tiny village was too small to have a square, but offered an intersection with a bar and a grocery store. When Carlton pulled up at Shad’s direction, the backseat passenger almost fell out the door.

  “Feeling better, are you?” Shannon teased when she joined him outside the shop.

  “Yes, man.” Shad beat his chest. “Nothing like mountain air, you know.”

  “Now, tell me why we’re going to the grocery first.”

  “In a little town like this, just like Largo, the postal agency is inside the grocery store, and the shopkeeper know everything that go on in the town.”

  Sure enough, the cranky woman inside served as both the grocery-store owner and the postal clerk.

  “I hope you can help us, ma’am,” Shad said. “We inquiring about a lady name—” He turned to his companion.

  “Katlyn Carrington,” Shannon put in.

  “I don’t know anybody with that name,” the store owner said.

  “She live here about thirty-five years ago.”

  Miss Randall screwed up her lips. “That was before my time, but you can speak to Mistah Thorne. He live round the corner, been here all his life.”

  Mr. Thorne was sitting in the shade of an ackee tree playing dominoes with three other elders. It clearly tickled the old man that he could impress his visitors and vanquish his opponents at the same time.