A Million Aunties

by Alecia McKenzie

  It’s funny how you can go along for years, get up in the morning, go to work, come home in the evening, eat, watch TV, never suspecting a thing. You stop eating rice, and all’s fine and good. Then out of the blue, you start waking up at night in a sweat, shouting until you’re hoarse, frightening the daylights out of your wife and kid. It was always the same dream, and it made me ashamed that I wasn’t strong enough to blot it out. I’m a tall man—Chris gets his height from me—and I still had the strong arms and shoulders like when I played ball in high school and that first year of college. But I would wake up yelling, crying, shaking like a little kid.

  I’m in the dark, hiding behind a tree. I know I’m surrounded although I can’t make out the men approaching. I can only feel their presence, feel them drawing close. I push my body hard against the tree, trying to be one with it, disappear inside it. And all of a sudden they are there, with machetes, and they start chopping, cutting me into pieces. I welcome the blows. This can’t go on forever. I know I’m dying, although it’s not coming fast enough. Then just as I’m about to lose consciousness, the sun comes out, and I’m still alive, whole. When I look out from behind the tree, I see them, the men who had been hacking at me and then weren’t, they’re now dragging old men, old women, little children from huts and chopping them like pieces of wood. I start running towards them, as the boom-boom of shots mixes in with the cries. My own screams blast me awake.

  The dream started coming more frequently, around October ’83, when the military went down to Grenada. In our years of marriage up till then, it was the first time I’d seen Eileen jerked out of her “America is on the whole a good place” attitude. It was now “Your country, Herb.” Your country doing this, and your country doing that. Her anger boiled over when she overheard someone at the mall saying, “We goin down there to kick some ass.” Oh boy. She didn’t find that funny at all, she who had become more American than me. She let loose a stream of patois in the mall, which they probably didn’t understand. Lucky for her, maybe. She still hadn’t learned not to mess with crackers.

  The doctor said it was all the images on TV and in the papers that were making things worse. I asked for pills, but he recommended that I hold off for a while, the damned fool. The sleepless nights were making me irritable and Eileen was suffering too. We were bickering nonstop. And yes, it was mostly my fault. One evening I came home and looked through the refrigerator for something to snack on. But each plastic box contained only the sticky crap. I threw the rice all over the kitchen floor, and I didn’t end with that. I cleaned out the refrigerator by throwing every bottle, every vegetable, every carton onto the tiles. At first Eileen tried to stop me. Then she and Chris left me alone, until I got tired and went to bed. The next morning, I found it all cleaned up.

  That December, she left for Kaya Bay with Chris for two weeks, saying I needed some space and time to myself. I never told her how much I missed them, how fourteen days seemed like fourteen months.

  The doctor recommended a change. Go somewhere else, see new scenery. Some of my friends from high school had already gone north. Les had relocated to Brooklyn the year before. He said there were jobs, that things really were getting better all over the place.

  We moved the next year, right around the time that Jesse was running for president. Packed up just three weeks after he visited Firenze and everyone went out to hear him speak, filling all the seats in the auditorium at the university. I knew he didn’t have a chance in hell of making it to the White House, but when the basket came around, I dropped in a hundred-dollar bill to help fund his campaign. A lot of people did the same, we all felt so proud he was in the race. He made a pretty penny that evening, as Eileen said. Chris was excited to see him, less excited to be moving and leaving his friends.

  “Why do we have to move?” he kept saying. I left it to Eileen to explain that Daddy had a new job. Anansi-man Daddy had to recreate himself, put himself back together.

  The change of city lifted my spirits, even if we missed my sisters, Aunt Veronica, and the water around the Shoals. The dreams eased off, and Eileen and I argued less. She was happy she could finally buy some of the food she’d yearned for—patties and roti down on Nostrand—and I liked being able to go for a beer every now and then with Les. Until he got divorced and moved again for good. To Canada.

  Chris settled in, and started doing real good with basketball. Over the years, he got better and better, and Eileen and I loved going to the games. I was sure he was going to be drafted by the end of high school. In my mind’s eye, I saw him playing on TV, saw him reaching up for a long-distance shot.

  But art won.

  He and I got into the habit of looking past each other, even when Eileen was sick. But then Lidia came into our lives, with her laughter like sunshine. We couldn’t have asked for a better daughter-in-law, Eileen said. More like a daughter even. She helped me sort Eileen’s things, two months after we put her in the ground, and I remember when we came upon the box of drawings.

  “Wow, look at this,” Lidia said, as she leafed through the pictures. Chris had even done a portrait of Jesse Jackson. “These are really good,” she enthused. I nodded.

  Eileen had kept everything Chris ever did, with pencil, crayon, pen. I hadn’t realised he’d spent so much time on this. Lidia asked if she could have the drawings, and I gave them all to her. I wish I’d kept one.

  I wonder where they are now. I would like to ask Chris. But we can’t talk about Lidia or anything else. Not yet. His agent Stephen might know though. He called me the other day, just to see how I was. I’m doing fine, I said. Sometimes I forget things, but I’m doing all right. We didn’t talk for very long, only a few minutes. I hope he’ll call again and let me know when Chris will be back. Not that I’m missing him, but I have the feeling my time is running out.

  chapter three

  They Like the Art

  You know, I never had so many visitors in mi life,” Miss Della said to Chris one morning as they were having breakfast. She’d made roast breadfruit, plantains, and mackerel, and he felt he was eating in the morning what he should’ve been having for dinner, but he was getting used to it. He’d just remarked on how nice it was that people kept dropping by to see her, but her burst of laughter made him realise it was his presence that was attracting the visitors.

  “Before, people would just shout out hello and go bout their business, cleaning up their house and ting, but now everybody want to come in and waste mi time chatting.”

  “Sorry,” Chris chuckled, surprising himself. He’d thought his laughter had gone for good.

  “No, no, don’t worry bout it, darling,” Miss Della reassured him. “Is not every day they can come see man painting flowers like you. And look how everybody saying how much they like the paintings. We is a nation of art lovers, you know.”

  She gazed round the walls of the kitchen, at all the paintings he had put up, and murmured, “Dem really do brighten up the place and lift yuh spirit. That’s why everybody passing through now, like mi house turn museum. Even Miss Pretty coming in to look. First time she been inside. Although maybe she think is Stephen come back, poor soul.”

  Chris glanced at his artwork and gave a rueful smile. He still wasn’t where he wanted to be. Yes, the things looked more like flowers now, compared with when he’d first got here, but that final aspect, the lightness of touch, was still missing. The stream of people coming by and making their encouraging sounds had spurred him on though. He’d got to know them all. Miss Vera, who was a dressmaker, and lived in the town, although she kept her shell of a house on the hill. She was constantly making jokes, but her eyes held loss, something he recognized. He’d given her a painting on one of her visits, and she’d bustled away so he wouldn’t see her crying. Mr. Jordan, the citrus farmer, who he felt sure had a soft spot for Miss Della. Chris teased her about it sometimes. And Miss Pretty, who walked the streets in her faded fur coat, and hardly ever spoke. Her eyes were a muddy river, carrying years of tangled th
oughts. Her passage always unsettled him, and set the dogs barking. One day, she had come into the yard, ignoring the animals, and watched him as he painted. Then she had walked into the house uninvited and examined the works on the walls.

  “Do you know my son?” she’d asked before leaving, and he’d shaken his head dumbly. “He’s a good artist too,” she said, staring at and beyond Chris.

  She passed by every day after that, stopping to see what he was doing, the damp-animal odour of the fur coat overwhelming, but she never spoke to him again.

  Now he needed a break.

  “Miss D, I’ve been thinking,” he said, after swallowing the last piece of breadfruit and taking a sip of the fresh mint tea she’d made, with leaves cut from a robust plant she’d brought up from the nursery.

  She smiled at him attentively. He knew she liked it when he called her “Miss D.”

  “Well, when I was little, I came here with my mother. I guess I was about eleven or twelve, and we spent the whole time in Kaya Bay. I would like to go back there.”

  He hadn’t been anywhere since he’d arrived with his knapsack, except twice to Kingston to buy paint and canvas boards, where he’d found the cost staggering. A trip to the coast would refresh his mind.

  “It not too far, you know,” Miss Della said. “Depends when you want to go, I might just go with you. I have some cousins up there.”

  “Mom used to have an uncle who lived there. It would be great to find him, if he’s still alive. He used to paint as well. And teach at the high school too, I think. Alton Patterson. That was his name.”

  Miss Della arranged everything—got in touch with her cousins, acquired the number of his uncle, and secured each of them a room in her cousins’ house. In doing all of this, she found out that her relatives were now running a successful bed-and-breakfast, and the idea that they were kind of in the same business made her laugh as she relayed the information to Chris. The final bit of organization was to ask Mr. Jordan to take care of the dogs and to have the only taximan she trusted, Brandon, pick them up on a Friday morning and drive them to Kaya Bay.

  Brandon—tall, muscular, with looks and a smile that gave Denzel Washington a run for his money—came to fetch them just after six, when it was already bright outside. Chris helped Miss Della into the front passenger seat, where she could stretch out her legs, before he curved himself into the back. He felt like a boy again, ready to cross the island as he’d done so many years before with his mother.

  “We takin the new highway. It much-much quicker,” Brandon said as they set off. “Cuts the journey by half. But crazy when it raining.”

  Chris knew that a foreign company had won the bid to build a massive new highway through the mountains but not everybody was happy with how it had turned out. When Miss Della listened to her radio talk shows, he overheard the complaints about dangerous inclines and assertions that the work had been built with imported convict labour. He didn’t know if any of it was true.

  The scenery as they ascended from Gap Point made him want to take pictures, but he resisted the impulse, instead mentally storing the images of the azure hills and the low-lying clouds. As they went round the bends, both he and Miss Della couldn’t hold back their exclamations at the views that stretched on either side of the highway: trees, green valleys, hills, and more hills. Postcards, all of it. Brandon smiled at their expressions of admiration for the scenery. He kept his eyes on the road, as the highway twisted through the mountains. Still, if his brakes somehow failed on one of the descents, the highway had emergency ramps to the side that would take you upwards, cutting your speed. This was mainly for trucks, Brandon told them.

  Before they reached the halfway point, at Unity Valley, the mist came down and all at once they couldn’t see anything.

  “It happen all the time,” Brandon said. “Just out of nowhere like that. Don’t worry.”

  He slowed to a crawl, even as other vehicles on the road sped past him.

  “All dem-driver must have superhero vision,” Miss Della commented. “Damn set of fools. And when they cause accident is not dem gwine dead, but other people.”

  After the mist, it started drizzling, but now the hills had given way to the sea, and everything in the distance had different shades of blue—the cobalt water, the lighter sky, and the grey-tinged clouds. Chris leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  He remembered one particular day at the beach with his mother. He’d never seen her so relaxed—her face looking as if she’d shed a mask, her movements free as if she’d discarded a suit of armour. In fact, it was the first time he’d ever seen her in a bathing suit, and she splashed round in the sea with him as if they were the same age, throwing the salty water at each other.

  On the beach, later, she bought him a coconut, and as he sucked the water through a straw, he grew puzzled and uncomfortable, not liking the conversation the vendor struck up with his mother.

  “So dat is yuh son?” the man asked.

  “Hmm mmn,” his mother answered.

  “And wey him father?”

  “In America.”

  “Ah hope him treating you right?”

  “Yes. No problem there,” his mother assured the man.

  “I don’t want nobody takin advantage of you, you know, pretty lady. People tell me seh America no easy.”

  Chris wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but his mother was acting in an annoyingly girlish manner. As he looked at her petite form in the shade of the coconut tree, her skin glowing from their time in the sun, he realised that his mother really was a “pretty lady,” as the too-familiar man had said. He wrapped one arm around the coconut, holding it against his chest, and with the other he took his mother’s hand.

  “Mom, let’s go,” he urged.

  The vendor burst out laughing. “See dat? Yuh son jealous, man.”

  His mother didn’t laugh. Chris gazed into the distance, feeling his skin burn, but he knew his mother was looking at him. After a long moment, he glanced up to catch her smile, and the sweetness made him stand tall and smile back. She said “bye” to the vendor and walked away with Chris to the water’s edge, where they sat and drank their coconut water. He didn’t really enjoy the taste, but he decided against telling her so.

  They were staying at a small hotel, the Kaya Inn, just a five-minute walk from the beach and from her uncle’s house. She’d told Chris that Uncle Alton had invited them to stay with him and his wife, but she preferred that they had their own space and could come and go as they liked. She warned him to always say “Uncle” and “Auntie”; no first names here for adults when you were a kid. Not like in Firenze.

  He’d met Uncle Alton the day after they arrived on the island, at his rambling house filled with plants, paintings, and way too many chairs, it seemed to Chris. Rocking chairs, high-backed chairs, stools, all in a dark wood and scattered throughout the vast living room and on the verandah. It was as if Uncle Alton were waiting to host a conference or congregation.

  Uncle Alton stood medium height—about a head taller than Chris’s mother—with a broad open face, short curly black hair, and a ready smile. His wife, Auntie Connie, came from Canada, and had short auburn hair and hazel eyes. She hadn’t been able to shed her nasal accent, even when she said things like, “We so glad to see oonu, you know.” They had a dog named Lola, which made them much more interesting than Chris would’ve otherwise found them. He and Lola took to each other right away, and were soon running round the garden.

  * * *

  Later, when they got back to Firenze, his mother framed a photo of him and the dog, he holding a stick high and Lola leaping up to snatch it from his hand. A different kind of dog from Miss Della’s band.

  “We getting close to Kaya Bay,” Miss Della said. “Look how the sea nice.”

  They kept their eyes on the water as Brandon followed the curvy coastal road, and then, between St. Ann’s Gap and Kaya Bay, they came upon the accident. Two buses blocked the road, facing in opposite directio
ns with a short distance between them. Cars had stopped and a crowd was on the sidewalk. As Brandon pulled over and they got out of the taxi, they saw it—the body leaning out of one of the buses, the neck with no head.

  The people on the sidewalk appeared to be in shock, not knowing what to do. Chris gathered that most of them had been in the buses. “She just feel sick and lean her head out to throw up, and the other bus come down.” He looked at the woman who had spoken. She seemed to be in her early thirties, tall and slim with long braids. It was as if she was trying to explain to herself what had happened.

  “Poor thing, poor thing,” Miss Della said.

  Chris felt his stomach churning, and he breathed in deeply to quell the rising nausea. Why did he have to see this? Hadn’t he earned the right to some peace? He forced his mind to look at the shapes—of the buses, which had been imported from India, bearing the manufacturer’s brand. He examined the solemn people around him—all different heights and levels of roundness. One man was sitting on the ground silently crying. The young woman who had spoken followed his gaze. “Is the driver of the bus that take off her head. He come round the bend too fast. She never have time to pull back inside.”

  His eyes returned reluctantly to the decapitated figure, and his mind noted the elongation of the bloody neck, framed by the bus window. He felt he knew her. A woman in her sixties, the bile in her stomach increasing with each bend in the road, until she had to lean out the window to vomit, her last thought being of her children, in that second when the other bus roared up.

  He knew with certainty that Lidia’s final thoughts had been of him and her parents, just as his would’ve been of her. He walked away from the crowd to where the head lay on the road. Farther along, he saw masses of flowers escaping from a fence, and he strode in their direction. Bougainvillea. Mockingly pink and vibrant in the sunshine. He picked a huge handful of the petals and walked back to the blackened orb on the asphalt. He scattered the flowers gently over the woman’s head, feeling the dozens of eyes watching him. Miss Della came over to join him, and they stood there silently for a few moments before returning to where Brandon leaned against a shop wall, inhaling deeply on a cigarette. The police had arrived by then and were ordering the bus drivers to move their vehicles to the side, so the traffic could continue. As Chris trudged back to the car alongside Miss Della and Brandon, he passed the woman with the braids who’d explained what had happened. Their eyes met, and he reached out and gave her arm a comforting squeeze. He noticed the film of tears behind the grateful smile. He knew they would never see each other again, but he would remember her.