“Wait a minute, hold your horses. Don’t you love Beth?”
“Of course.”
“And don’t you want your children to know that you’re committing to stay with her and with them for the rest of your life?”
“Yes, but the wedding thing—is money for this and money for that. First it was material to make dresses. Now is flowers for the church, tomorrow is something else. And we don’t even get to the food and liquor—or the rings.”
“Are you sure”—Shannon stood to leave—“that there isn’t something else at the bottom of it, Shad?”
He breathed a hard sigh. “You know the truth? No Jamaican man like to get married. We just not used to it. Is like you give a woman the right to think for you. I don’t even think American man like to get married, want to be tied down. Look at the boss. He free and single, run his own life. He have two children, but he don’t marry again.”
Shannon sat down heavily. “Shad, let me tell you something. What you see is just one part of the picture. You see Eric free and single, as you say, but you’re not thinking about the mothers of his children, who pay for it. He’s only free and single at our expense. We’re the ones who have to do everything alone because he isn’t there when we have to help the children with homework, cook dinner, discipline them—everything.”
She knew she was raising her voice (the beer adding to the volume), hoping Eric could hear her. “What kind of life do you think that’s been for Joseph’s mother and for me? And don’t you think the children resent his absence? They can’t respect a father who’s never there, who forgets their birthdays. He barely has a relationship with Joseph and Eve. You can see that for yourself.”
“I see that, true. He should have—”
“Leaving me aside, think of it from his point of view.” She swept her hand over the counter, almost knocking over the bottle. “He’s shut people out, isolated himself. Miss Maisie, his housekeeper, has to take care of him when he has diarrhea because he doesn’t even have a family member to help him.”
Shad looked down, one hand on his hip, the other stroking his scalp. “I hadn’t really thought—”
“Well, think about it.” Shannon slapped the counter. “You said yourself that he’d lost his passion for life. I mean, just look at him, sitting alone on his verandah at night. I bet he’s thinking about the mistakes he made and the people he’s hurt. No wonder he’s miserable.” She pushed the empty beer bottle toward him. “Free and single, my ass.”
Despite her jaunty walk out of the bar, Shannon’s heart was sinking as she climbed the hill to the Delgados’ house. Tears welled up in her eyes, reminding her of the pain she’d felt after she’d told Eric she was pregnant and his ardor had withdrawn, like a wave pulling back from the shore. The worst, ugliest pain came when she was leaving that last time. He’d stood awkwardly in the lobby, avoiding her eyes, giving her a brief hug before she boarded the bus to the airport. She’d cried all the way to Montego Bay, her chest aching.
“Oh, God,” she groaned as she approached the house, “what happened to us, Eric?” The only answer came from the night-blooming jasmine, its melancholy fragrance swamping her memories.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
His name for the new pastor was Buffoon. Shad had heard the word once on the radio when a talk show host had labeled a politician, and he and Rickia had looked it up in the dictionary on the laminated coffee table.
“A person given to undignified behavior that causes amusement to others,” the child had read out.
“That sounding just like Pastor Buckingham.” Her father had laughed. The family had adopted the name, although Joella had wanted to call the minister Batman because of the oversize black sleeves of his robe, which he flapped throughout services. Beth said they were all disrespectful, that he was a good person, married to his wife like a God-fearing man.
Now observing the short, round fellow working himself into a sweat even before the sermon had started, Shad concluded that the Buffoon was nonetheless better than his predecessor, Pompous Ass. A judgmental man, he’d been replaced by the Kingston Baptists for his misdeeds, their name for a run-in with the law that would keep him in prison for several years.
Wiping his brow, the Buffoon waved his free hand like a magician’s wand. “And now, a musical rendition from Sister Eustacia.”
Soon Sister Eustacia was warbling “In the Old By and By” over the piano, a combination of screeching and banging that made Joshua, perched on Joella’s knee, arch backward to find his father.
“Hang on, boy,” Shad whispered. “We soon go home to Mamma.”
“We should have stayed home,” Joella muttered.
Beth would have taken care of things, would have remembered to bring a toy for Josh to play with—but she wasn’t here today. She’d been up all night with Ashante, who’d been bothered by some unnamed fear that kept her awake and crying.
“You don’t have to come to church today,” Shad had suggested when Beth pulled up groggily on her elbow that morning. Miss Mac’s mahogany headboard towering above had made her look even smaller in the bed.
“I have to—”
“No, you stay home. I take the other children to church so you can sleep.”
She’d given him a look that said she was grateful but shouldn’t even be talking to him. In the two days since his declaration that he wouldn’t be at the altar when she got there, she’d barely said a word, had made him suffer the silence of her unhappiness—even as she stubbornly continued her wedding preparations. When he’d insisted again that she stay home, she’d offered little resistance.
“Mamma look like she tired,” Rickia had commented after Beth dozed off. “I can stay home and watch Ashante. I keep her in our bedroom.”
Buffoon got back to the too-tall podium, which cut him off at the nose, leaving him only two inches of visual clearance.
“Beautiful rendition, Sister.” He flapped his wings. He smiled at the singer. “Beautiful.” He turned to the congregation, fanning themselves on their folding chairs. “Give her some love, Brothers and Sisters.”
They obliged, a few even calling out belated Amens.
The pastor removed his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve. “The old by and by, what that mean?” he asked, beaming. The only answer that greeted him was the shuffling of feet. Shad looked out the open window behind the choir. Deep turquoise water lay under a bright blue sky, the waves curling, breaking in the sunshine even before they hit the shore, affirming for Shad that God was out there today.
Buckingham smiled on. “The by and by. It mean ‘times long ago,’ don’t it? And we’re going to talk today about some of the words of the Old Testament that tell us about some dreams that Joseph—he was a dream interpreter, you know—anybody know that, that Joseph used to interpret dreams? Is not only the obeah man can interpret dreams, you know.” The pastor chuckled and a few members of the congregation joined him, the ones who visited the obeah man smiling uncertainly.
Half an hour later, Shad was still holding Joshua, shushing him, putting him down on the floor, picking him up again, patting him, wondering how much longer the child could hold out without bawling the place down. The pastor flapped and crowed, standing on tiptoe sometimes, jumping up and down a few times as he reached ecstatic heights. In the end, all that the young father remembered from the sermon was a quotation from Acts, at least he thought he remembered Pastor saying it came from Acts, words that ran around in his head long after he’d left the church.
“ ‘Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions,’ ” Shad repeated aloud as he poured oil into the frying pan for the family’s Sunday dinner. “That what Pastor was saying today.”
Beside him, Rickia was rolling a raw chicken wing in batter. “What that mean?”
“It mean that old men look back on their past and dream about it. They done live their life already.” Like Mistah Eric.
“And the young men?”
&n
bsp; Her father looked up at the grease-spattered wall. “The young men create their own visions, and they have all the time ahead of them to make their vision come true. They have to look ahead and create a future for their family.” He dropped a drumstick into the frying pan.
“How come they don’t say your old women will dream dreams and your young women will see visions, Dadda? Is only men can have visions?”
“It don’t mean that women can’t do it. In them days, the men was the head of everything and the women stay home.”
The girl rolled out her bottom lip. “All the women in the Bible either tempting men or having babies. Men don’t give them no respect.”
Shad dropped two wings into the sizzling oil. “You going prove them wrong, I know, sweets.” He grinned at his second child. He threw in the slices of onion and green pepper from the bowl beside him and sprinkled some thyme over them.
A dancehall song, a man bawling lyrics Shad couldn’t make out, leaped from the living room. “Go tell your sister to turn down the radio, please, because her mother just waking up—and set the table for dinner.”
Shad was turning off the gas under the chicken when Joella appeared at the kitchen door. “Dadda, a man outside want to see you.”
“Come, finish frying the plantain for me while I check it out.”
The man turned out to be a stocky Rastafarian wearing loose white pants and a black scarf tied around his forehead. He was standing between two tall, striped drums, one on either side of him.
“Ras Bongo, what bring you here?”
“Carlton tell me that Mistah Eric’s daughter needing drumming lessons.”
“I don’t know how it going now because I hear she in punishment.”
“She the same little girl come with Jethro to the drumming circle the other night?”
“Same one.”
“She good,” the man said with jerking nods, his dreadlocks swinging forward on both sides of his face. “I could use a few extra shekel. I and I going to pass by the bar and talk to her father. What you think?”
“Ask the mother first, up at the Delgados’ house.”
“Irie.”
The family was already seated at the dinette table when Shad went back inside. They were waiting for him, faces turned up, eyes down on the fried chicken and rice and peas.
Still in her nightshirt, Beth maintained order. “No dinner until we say grace,” she commanded. “Ashante, take your hands out of the bowl.”
“See Dadda here,” Joella said. “We can say grace now.”
“Where’s Josh?” her father asked.
“Sleeping.”
They all held hands around the table, except for Ashante, who was allowed to chew on a piece of plantain to keep her quiet.
“God,” Shad prayed, “we thank you for the food you provide us, and for the money to buy it. And we ask you to bless us this week, and show us the way forward with school and the new hotel and everything. Thank you for having a loving family and taking care of each other, even when we get old. And, one special favor we asking you, make us wise and blessed in your sight—so we can see visions and make them come true.”
When he opened his eyes, everyone else’s eyes were on him. “What?” he asked Beth.
“See visions?”
“Why not? Is our time now.” He passed the plantain to Rickia, remembering her comment about men’s power over women, remembering Shannon spitting free and single at him. “And for you, madam”—he passed the chicken to Joella but addressed her mother—“all I have to say is this: five hundred US dollars. Is half the money Shannon giving me to take her around, but I giving it to you for the wedding. The rest I going to put to Joella’s high school.”
He picked up his knife and fork and cut away at the crispy chicken. “You can put what money you want towards it from your own salary, but five hundred is all I have to give—and I don’t want to hear one more thing about wedding and money, you hear me?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
* * *
The last twenty-four hours were the longest Eric had ever experienced. What had started as a simple case of jerk-pork revulsion had settled into fever, nausea, and an inability to keep anything down, even water. By midday Sunday, his bed was damp with sweat. He rolled from one side to the other, hoping to find a dry spot. The vibrating crash of the waves breaking beneath the cliff, usually unnoticed after all these years, made him feel worse. Nothing seemed to help, even looking at the island, which normally kept him in balance. Its strident noontime brightness was making his nerves raw.
Shannon hadn’t come by this morning, although she wouldn’t be working on a Sunday. He’d hoped she’d come, just to keep him company. He’d thought about her last night in the wee hours when he’d woken with a vicious headache. It would have been nice to hold on to her sturdy, womanly form when he had to climb out of bed, but he’d held on to the bed for support on his way to the toilet and groped his way back. He’d spent this morning—in between listening to the church bell clanking and the taxis honking as they turned the corner into Largo—feeling good and sorry for himself.
“I’m dying,” he’d groaned to Maisie as soon as she’d appeared after church.
“No wonder, you don’t drink nothing, you don’t eat nothing” was her matter-of-fact response. She’d removed her blue church hat and placed it beside her handbag on his chest of drawers. The ginger ale she’d brought him had made him feel worse.
“You want me to wipe you down, clean you up a little? You might have visitors and you smell kind of . . . fresh.” She’d wrinkled her nose, and he knew it meant he smelled like a pigsty.
“Help me to the bathroom.”
While he struggled through a shower, Maisie had stood outside the bathroom door, reminding him of his life’s deficiencies. “You need a woman to take care of you, Mistah Eric. All these years you manage on your own, but you know what they say, wanti-wanti no get it, getti-getti no want it.”
“What’s that mean?” Eric had asked as he dabbed his body with a towel.
“People who want something can’t get it, and people who get something—you know, it just come too easy, so they don’t want it.”
Eric didn’t answer, the drying and thinking making it impossible to talk at the same time.
“I mean to say”—Maisie’s voice didn’t budge from outside the door—“you have plenty nice woman and you don’t even want one of them. Look how much men would like to have even one.”
After he’d thrown himself back in the bed, Maisie’s dark moon-face had hovered above his pillow. “I going to give you little bush tea.”
“No mumbo jumbo, Maisie.” He waved her away.
“A little bush tea with pepper elder and you good, man.”
“I’m getting better.”
“You look worse.” Maisie had crossed her arms above her rounded belly. “You losing all your liquid.”
“Dehydration?”
“Next thing I have to call the doctor and they give you that oral hydra-thing to drink, and it taste nasty. My niece baby had diarrhea last year, and is me have to give the child the nasty drink, but she live.”
Eric had rolled over in defeat. “Okay, give me the tea.”
Sipping tea later, his head propped up on two pillows and another under his knees, Eric thought about the woman’s words and her reference to Simone and Shannon. The locals had never been bashful about telling him how to run his life, particularly his love life. Every few months some villager referred to one of his lady friends and teased him about the ease with which he attracted them. Some even goaded him to do the unspeakable.
“Why you don’t just marry Simone, Mistah Eric?” Tri, draped on the bar on Christmas Eve, had asked. “Like how she still young, you can still have some pickney running around the place, don’t it?” The old man was well into finishing a bottle of white rum, and Eric had told him to go home and sleep off the idea.
Talk of marriage always chilled Eric to his bones. His parents’
marriage had been quarrelsome, and his marriage to Claire, Joseph’s mother, had only been to stop her comments about her friends getting married. Since their divorce nineteen years ago, marriage had become a taboo subject for him. Claire had remarried a few months back to a surgeon, and he’d felt strangely betrayed. A Catholic, she’d said she’d never remarry, as had he, although his decision had nothing to do with religion.
Some men could stay happily married for fifty years, wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t. That wasn’t him, he’d told everyone, and he’d never encouraged any of his girlfriends or passing trysts to think anything to the contrary. Love affairs would end, bonds would be broken—and time had proven him right.
“I’m not into long-distance relationships,” he’d told Amanda, a self-described “recovering hippie” who’d stayed at Miss Mac’s boardinghouse a few years back. It was her last night in Largo, and they were lying on top of the sheets after another round of her tantric sex, which he’d insisted on calling tangled sex.
“I can come down every couple months. I’m only in Florida.”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should just leave it there. It’s been fun, right? We wouldn’t want to spoil a good memory.”
She’d stood up, naked, not a small woman, not a young woman, wiping one eye with the back of her hand. “I guess this is what you do for entertainment. You find women traveling alone and sleep with them for a few nights. Passes the time, right? You know what they call men like you, Eric? Users, teasers.” She’d pointed to the door without raising her voice. “Get the fuck out of my room.”
From time to time he’d think of Amanda, with her droopy breasts and wavy, gray hair, and he’d wonder if she’d seen the wisdom of his words.
His feelings on long-term commitment hadn’t changed, and even if he’d felt inclined to tie himself down in a marriage now, no one was on the horizon. Shannon and Simone both had lives elsewhere, no matter what Maisie implied. One was comfortably settled in Toronto, and the other had never even hinted at moving back to Largo.
The Rhythm of the August Rain Page 12
