The Angels' Share

by Garfield Ellis

  I am not sure he understands that I do not want these details. But he is like a man about to cleanse himself. We are not ready for this kind of sharing. It is not normal for fathers to give these kinds of details that are falling so easily from his lips.

  But he continues with a dreamy smile: “As I touch the bar, the man that stood between us moved, as if by cue. So I ordered my drinks and then turned to her and said something silly—I don’t know where it come from, Take the ribbon from your hair. And she looked at me and never skipped a beat: Shake it loose and let it fall.

  “You see, the thing is she never had a ribbon in her hair. It was just something silly for her to respond to, so I could work my way into the conversation. And her hair had that . . . you know, fluffed-out and half-wild look, as if someone just take the ribbon from it and she just shaking it loose. Ninety-nine out of a hundred women would have said the obvious, I have no ribbon in my hair, but she said, Shake it loose and let it fall, as if to say, I can match you. And just then, the bartender gave her one of the two drinks I ordered, as if I had ordered it for her, but I had not. But once she took it, I just pretended it was hers in the first place. And every time I remember that, I still believe it was just destiny.

  “So she told me thanks and she drank the drink and ask me why I stopped there, if I had forgotten my line, Ain’t it sad to be alone.

  “That is your line, I told her. My line is, Help me make it through the night. Sometimes you have to be original.” Father smiles at me.

  “I am waiting to hear if you ever began to be, old man.”

  He ignores me. “She had come from Montego Bay just to volunteer for the festival and independence celebrations. In those days, that is how it was: the festival and Miss Jamaica pageant and these things were much closer to the people and volunteers would come from all over the island just to help coordinate and organize the events. So I asked her why she never entered the contest and she smiled and told me that only white people win the Miss Jamaica beauty contest.

  “So I raised my glass and tell her, White flat batty women, without shape. You wouldn’t qualify. And if you had been on the stage, I wouldn’t have had the guts to invite you for a walk.

  “And she said, Come, I am tired of this anyway.

  “And you see how it is now. I have wondered about that all my life. Why did I go with her? You see, I was never really inviting her. I just made a statement—it just came out—the right words for what she felt at the time. She took it for an invitation, said yes, and I had to go. I just swallowed the drink and walked out with her. And that was the beginning of that.”

  “Or the end of that.” I stare him square.

  “What you mean?”

  “Who was the other drink for, the one she took? That was the end of that, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, well, that is not important right now.” He is sheepish and for the first time does not meet my eye.

  “So who did you walk out on? Your friends? No, don’t tell me, another woman, wasn’t it? You went to the contest with one woman, met another woman, and walked out on her.”

  “Well, it’s not like that and that’s not important right now. Just let me finish the story.”

  “Father, how can you just brush people aside like that?”

  “It was the woman.”

  “Same thing Adam said. Oh, I forgot, she wasn’t flesh and blood and the other one was. So what happened to that other person?”

  He goes silent for a while. “Everton,” he finally says, “sometimes life just push you in a certain direction and you just have to go, follow your heart, take a chance.”

  “I hear you. But thirty-five years later you are chasing after her. What went wrong, you went to another bar, met another woman? Why you coming now to search for her? Wasn’t she your heart’s desire? Or she turned flesh and blood?”

  “She never changed. She never did.”

  “So, why, what happened? Why are you not with her now, Daddy?”

  “Ambition . . . and show off.” It is a whisper on the hot afternoon.

  “Yes?”

  “Airs too.” A sad, low sigh.

  “Airs, she had airs?”

  “She had none. I was full of it.”

  “I see, a young, cocky civil servant, who grew handsome. She wasn’t good enough for you.”

  “Let me tell you a story about her.”

  I grow still to let him speak.

  “About a year after we met, the people of West Prospect made a resolution to have water tanks placed at strategic locations along the road from the river to their district. So there was a meeting and the resolution was made. As the extension officer, I took the resolution to Kingston and lodged it with the agricultural office.”

  “Resolution?”

  “Yes. Those were formal days. There would be a meeting and the farmers would get up and say something like: Be it known that on this day so and so, the people of West Prospect have resolved that three tanks should be placed at so and so place and near so and so road adjoining West Prospect and Boagaville and a road should be cut for movement of traffic, people, and livestock, et cetera.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. And I would take it back signed and everything to the Jamaican Agricultural Society for them to action. So after about six months, no news was forthcoming and the farmers demanded to see the minister. So I invited him. To everybody’s surprise and probably because it was politically expedient, the minister agreed to see them.

  “So anyway, I picked her up for our usual weekend down here and since the meeting was the Friday night, I took her along with me. She was a woman who loved agriculture and we had many great ideas for developing this land and the whole countryside. She knew most of my ideas including the fact that I wanted to run for parish representative.

  “Everybody was at the meeting—the head of the Agricultural Society and all the senior farmers of the area. And I had a special pride of place as the man credited for having arranged the meeting when the parish representative had tried for years and had been unable to do it.

  “So the argument about the tanks began and the minister started explaining how things take time and that he never heard about the situation or he would have fixed it right away. And that he never knew things were so bad. Anyway, the long and short of it is that by the time my president and the minister finish with the people, every farmer there was convinced that they had done their best and could not do any more.

  “But not Hope, she raised her hand and said she had a question. So the minister ask her, Yes?

  “Mr. Minister, how long have you been in charge of this constituency?

  “So he said, Since independence.

  “And it is just now that you know that the people want tanks?

  “By the time he could answer, she laid into him, man. She really gave it to him. You are a hypocrite, she said. If it wasn’t election time, you wouldn’t be here and that liar beside you is no different. I know for a fact that the resolutions went to his office directly and he has done nothing about it. All politicians are hypocrites. And the whole time she was speaking, I was trying to tell her to stop. But she gave them such a tracing that day that when she finished even the farmers she defended distanced themselves—everybody including me. Not even I defended her.”

  “Well, disrespect is difficult to defend.”

  “No, but you don’t understand: everything she said were my words. Everything was what we discussed. She was saying the things I told her, things I wanted to say.”

  “Yes, but good judgment is good judgment. You don’t get anywhere by embarrassing the minister and the head of the Agricultural Society.”

  “But they needed to be. Those resolutions would circulate in that office for three years. When I was there, I don’t remember a file ever being retired. And the Ministry of Works was just down the road. Can you imagine a file in an office that takes three years to get to another office half a block around the corner? They deserved it.”

&n
bsp; “So what’s the problem?”

  “I was a fool. I was a coward. Ah, this land, this Jamaica hope.”

  He stands and braces himself against the tree as if the storytelling has weakened him. He looks across the land and whispers it again, “Jamaica hope.”

  “What is that?”

  “You don’t see it? This was our dream. We planned to develop this land, the whole south coast, into the bread basket of Jamaica.”

  “It is the bread basket.”

  “But it is not half that it could be. Look at all of this . . . still forest.”

  “It is above the river.”

  “That’s it. That was the challenge. That is what we wanted to do with our lives then. The challenge we had.”

  “Daddy, I am sure whatever choices you made were the correct ones. Why are you killing yourself over this thing?”

  “I let her down.”

  “You let her down?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  “I wanted to be a civil servant so bad. I wanted the job. You see, they wanted a new parish representative to challenge for the head of the JAS. I was the man they wanted because I had the land down here, I had the name, I was an extension officer who got things done, and I had the education. The only way they felt we could fix this place was if we were in charge of something in Kingston. I was to be the challenger. That was the only way I could have fulfilled the dream, our dream.”

  “So?”

  “A man who wants a certain office must have a certain kind of woman. You understand? After that speech she made . . . you know, it was going to be difficult. I had to make a choice.”

  “Oh, Daddy.”

  “You know, it is only in the evenings that it bothers me, this here memory of her. For we never usually got here before afternoon . . . never . . . no matter how early we started out. Only evening time, and she use to sit down right there and ask why we only make love in the afternoon. Sometimes it is like a burden on me, but I loved her. I loved her, you know.”

  “Yeah, not even flesh and blood.”

  “Never!”

  He is crying. I find his side and wrap my arm around his shoulder as he wipes his eyes.

  “Father, bringing up all this past is not good for you. Why you crying now, old man?”

  “I want to see her again. I have to see her again. I want to look at her face again. I want to touch her one more time before I die.”

  “And when you see her, what then?”

  “I want to tell her that I am sorry.” Then he holds my hand. “Son . . .” He is more nervous than I have ever seen him; his fingers tremble on my flesh. “Son, when we see her this evening, you must give the old man some time.” His eyes are watery and pleading. There is vulnerability in his face. He seems much older than yesterday. “If I want another day, I am going to beg you another day.”

  I will not resist him. My trip is ending. I will be back in Kingston very soon. I have only lost a week of leave. He can have all the time he needs.

  “Old man, if you want another day, you have another day.”

  “And Everton?”

  “Yes, old man.”

  “After this, after this trip, we have to talk. There are things I must tell you. Things I know you want to know.”

  I do not know the places he has been to. I do not know the things he has seen, and judging by his tears, I have never felt the love he has felt. But I stand here with him now, and he is like a child in my arms. I can only guess at the turmoil inside him. And I wonder what has brought us here. Why the land he sacrificed his love and woman for is still here after thirty-five years, untouched and undeveloped.

  “We have time, old man, we have time.”

  Now my heart is full and my breast is swelling. I want to ask him if these things we will discuss are about my mother, about me, about the many days he was missing from my life. Is it finally time for my ten questions? But instead I pat his shoulder and turn from the tears in his eyes. I cannot ask much of him now. He is empty of stories for the evening.

  Only tears now, only tears.

  SEVENTEEN

  The last time I saw my father cry was at my mother’s funeral, at the casket, at the head of the line with Una by his side. I remember even through my grief looking on and wondering how strange it seemed that he was standing there with one woman at his side while mourning another.

  Somehow he looked quite dignified and humbled to be standing there showing the level of his humanity. I was drawn to him even more after that because something of the moment forced me to question my conviction that he had never loved her.

  Though she loved him till she died.

  She never married. And sometimes I would tease her about it. How she lived a life in the shadow of this man who did not care for her, as if waiting for him to return to the point wherever it was that they separated; waiting to begin again, to be young again, and to have him ask her to marry him.

  And even those days and nights when I was sure that I heard him sneaking in and out of the house, it seems she was content to live with just a piece of him, or maybe she felt that no other man was good enough, or maybe the sweet nobility in her was too proud to betray her heart. Or maybe she was afraid to ever love or trust again.

  She did not talk about him much, but sometimes at my prodding or when she was in a certain mood, she would sigh and tell me not to ask her anymore why they never married. Or say sadly that “is only one woman you father ever love.” And all my life I thought that woman was Una.

  But now I know differently.

  My mother told me they met while she was a young church girl working alongside the chief of the Agricultural Society, and he was a young and brash field officer with dreams of running the whole thing someday. “Him was very ambitious,” she would said, “very ambitious.”

  Now having for the first time gotten a good glimpse at his life, I am not sure what ambition has brought. I had only seen it before through the eyes of an infatuated child. But now I am forced to see it objectively and I am not sure I am able to get the sum of it.

  Sixty-seven years old, retired some months ago with a pension and a few acres in Hampshire. Over forty years in the civil service, a brash young man with ambitions of leading it all, yet forty years later he is retired, having moved no further than assistant section head.

  Why? How come, in a world and a time of independence, when the country yearned and craved for young men like my father, when lesser men had become ministers and ambassadors, has my father not achieved more? Is the answer to all this somehow wrapped up inside this quest on which he has taken me?

  And my mother, where does she fit into all this? I hear of this woman Hope, and I have a small sense of how Una came about. But what about my mother? How did she fit in, where did she fit in? Why did he not love my mother?

  Does my father love me?

  “Him love you,” she always said when I insisted he did not.

  “Then why him don’t make me live with him in him big house?” I would ask.

  She would turn the question back at me: “This house not big enough for you?”

  I always felt she deserved more.

  And even on her deathbed, she still wished the best for him, for near her last breath she whispered that I should love my father. That he was a good man and one day he might need me.

  And oh, I have dreamed of that day, when I, the stone that the builder refused, would become the head corner stone. But I have grown beyond that now. I moved out on my own and wanted less and less the responsibility of anything but my own life and career. And in any event, he always seemed so strong, so large and competent, that I had always believed I would probably need his help long before he would ever need mine.

  My mother was not an educated woman, having barely completed primary school. But she could cook. Her gift was to feed people. She was trained by her mother to keep house and take care of a man. That is all she knew to do: cook and keep house. And if the Lord provides
a man, take care of him with heart and her life.

  She made a living by both. Working as a helper and cooking for families in Jacks Hill. Then when she joined the church, she started cooking at conventions and special occasions till the word spread and she was able to stay home and fulfill cooking contracts from her own little kitchen. Later she got a contract to run the kitchen at the steel factory in Spanish Town. From that she bought the house in which we lived and which she had rented for years. Later the same contract sent me through school.

  Between steady work and the church, she found contentment that few others I knew ever achieved. But no matter how she tried, no matter what she said, I knew there were places in her heart so parched that nothing else could ever grow. And no matter what she told me, I knew that those were the places where my father resided.

  I wondered at times at the fairness of it; that while she had remained so scarred, he had healed so well to be always laughing, happy and on top of the world.

  And though the doctor said it was diabetes, no one can convince me that she did not die of a broken heart.

  The night she died, I tore his picture from her wall and shredded and burnt it to yellow-gray ashes. And then I searched through her things for everything of his that she had and I made an altar of them and set fire to that too. For I hated that she should have died so; that she should have loved so much that it killed her.

  And though the anger burned in me so much that at times when he visited, I could not meet his eyes, I have never felt that I could hurt him back the way I think he deserved. Because she worked so hard to make me love him. “He is your father.”

  I have grown past that now . . . past those sudden feelings that sometimes overtook me.

  And now I wonder if this is what she was talking about when she said he might need me one day. But I do not think so. I do not think she would have dreamed that he would want me to follow him on this crazy journey. Nor do I think that she would have imagined that he could break down over the memory of another woman.

  So now he has promised that we will talk. And God knows I have questions. I will make a new list of questions as long as this journey on which he has taken me, and I hope he is ready to answer them.