Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  “Ye nat gwan get lovin’, if dat de ting ye after. Mi nat girl like dat, fe sure.”

  He laughed at this, flashing his straight white teeth and shaking his head as if the very idea of it was ludicrous. Millie could have fit her whole world onto that smooth tongue of his. The girl’s heart flipped and thumped like a flying fish thrown up on the beach, and she promptly fell in what she assumed must be that thing called love.

  Some nights in the small cabin in Cidar Valley, Millie and the others would hear their parents together—the heavy breath of them, the creaky rusting springs of that saggy old bed. To Millie, that thing between her parents was all routine: warm, rhythmic comfort, just one of the many noises of their weathered wooden house. She was sure the sound of their loving must have thudded her to sleep as a baby—and probably it had, because look how many more babies her mother and dad had made since then.

  But this was different: Winston’s hands were so alive she could feel the pulse in them as they slid over her smooth body. His breath was hot and salty down her throat, stubbing out her own. She could have stopped him, she knew that, but she wanted the full of it. Millie knew what was coming and she settled into it. Winston’s broad chest crushed down against her and she could feel every blade of beach grass digging into the soft skin of her behind as he expertly eased her knickers down below her knees.

  “Dis a dream?” he queried in her ear as he pushed down into her. Millie closed her eyes, smiled at the bittersweet pain of it, and asked herself the same question.

  It was after their glistening, sweaty bodies had clutched at each other in the sand dunes, when they were walking hand in hand in the cool morning air, that the young man told her he was leaving for Montego Bay in two days’ time. Millie was heartbroken, but could not countenance her foolishness. Instead, she chose to believe Winston when he assured her he’d come to see her at his first opportunity. In her lover’s eyes, she was certain she saw truth.

  “Mi nat gwan forget bout ye, girl. Sometin’ deep tellin’ mi we gat future. Wide-stretchin’ future. Mi write ye at de shop. An iv mi privileged, den de young lady will respond.” He held her to him, gently wiping away her tears. Millie, a simple mountain girl who had never known such feelings, felt so full with happiness she thought she might die with the lightness of it all.

  * * *

  Willemina was not surprised to learn from a neighboring shopkeeper that her young charge had been seen being courted by a visitor to Kingston. Whereas women used to come to the store alone, these days their husbands often came with them, and the girl’s gentle curves and budding breasts had also begun to turn the heads of young men on the street. Fear in her heart, Willemina had already sat the girl down and warned her to concentrate on her schoolwork and the shop. “Big up dat belly-a yours, ye ain’t gwan do nuttin’ but be stuck in dat dere valley ye grow up in, chile.”

  “Yes, Auntie.” Millie had tried not to show her amusement.

  “An don’t roll ye eyes at mi, chile—ye tink mi crazy even mention it but, girl, mi know wat is a-comin’. Happen te many a young woman come te de city frum mountain or de plantations, chasin’ big dreams.”

  “Aunt Willie, ye nyah haffi worry bout mi. Though mi tank ye greatly fe concern. Mi only come te Kingston te sew up an find mi way in dis yere big, big world. Only ting gwan big up dis belly-a mine is ten ton-a bammy cake an lots ov ackee fry-up.”

  Willemina watched the girl walk away, remembering her own young self and that handsome man who had promised her the world to entice her to stay on the island and make mischief outside his marriage. And by God, that mischief was sweet and worth making. But now here she was, alone and taking care of someone else’s child in that godforsaken shop he’d bought to keep her there.

  When Millie returned from the beach that first day, Willemina quizzed her about where she’d been all morning. The doe-eyed girl told the old woman she’d been “wandering.” Willemina was no fool. The girl had wandered, true enough. She’d been seen by gossip’s eyes, holding hands and giggling with that Montego Bay boy. Willemina had had enough young girls through her classes over the years to recognize the dreamy step of a child who felt she had just become a woman.

  “Ye fool, hear mi? Fool. Dat farm boy nat gwan return fe girl like yeself. In any case, ye far bettah dan dat kind ov youth.” She cupped her hand tight beneath Millie’s chin, spoke firmly, though she understood the heartbreak of it all.

  Millie had heard stories about the root of Aunt Willemina’s wealth. About the wealthy Haitian man with a wife and children who had set her up on the strip with her own sewing shop in her own name when she had been feisty and beautiful. She took the older woman’s speech for half a lifetime of regret.

  * * *

  Millie had seen enough of her own mother’s pregnancies to know what was happening when her breasts began to swell and she couldn’t keep her morning bammy cake down, but she wasn’t afraid. Winston would come back calling for her. So she waited. For five months, she waited.

  For her part, Willemina pretended not to notice the gradual swelling of the fifteen-year-old’s figure. During quiet spells in the shop, Millie examined dress and sweater designs to find those which would best conceal her indiscretion; her frowning guardian watching discreetly from behind the counter.

  Millie had no confidantes in Kingston to speak of. The other girls in her sewing class shunned her—a hick from the hills who wore quaint, homemade clothes and spoke with a heavy patois that was hard work to decipher. Millie wrote regularly to her family in Cidar Valley, but knowing what great things they expected of her, she had no heart to tell them of her situation. Circumstances being what they were, they could ill afford to visit now that her sewing income had disappeared.

  * * *

  The first letter arrived some five weeks after Winston left Kingston, the postwoman winking and raising an eyebrow at Willemina as she slid the scented envelope across the sewing shop counter. The delicate cream rectangle screamed out against the olive green of the countertop. The boy’s loopy cursive handwriting surprised the woman, given the cane-field loafer he was.

  “Dat chile don need no more trouble,” Willemina whispered to herself as she carefully tucked the small, thick package into her apron pocket.

  When Millie reached the six-and-a-half-month mark, Willemina still hadn’t mentioned the change in her figure. One day, though, after overhearing customers gossiping about Millie’s predicament, she approached her charge with a proposal.

  “Maybe bettah iv ye work out back de shop, mi bin tinkin’,” she gently suggested after closing. “Ye demonstrate capability in de classroom enough te start customer alteration instead-a counter an shop tings. Wat seh ye work out de back nex few mont?”

  The girl nodded gratefully as she sorted through the bucket of orange buttons, bagging them into groups of ten. “Mi sorry, Auntie. Mi nevah mean te get meself in dis yere trouble. Mi nat know iv ye can manage on ye own.” Head bowed to the button sorting, she was afraid her eyes would well up with tears.

  “Course mi can, chile, wat ye talkin’ bout? Tough ole woman like meself can handle few mont tendin’ te civility. Mi nat grave bound yet, God bless.” Willemina had been awful lonely before the girl came along, and most of the time she was even secretly glad for the expectance of a newborn in the house.

  Millie barely left the house during the last three months of her pregnancy, being by then unable to conceal her shape. On the one occasion her father made a shopping trip to town, she pretended to be bedridden with a cold: pulled the sheets up to her chin and peered at him over them, curled on her side. Mr. Lucas had sat gloomily next to her, thinking the sweat on his daughter’s brow was the feverish kind.

  Millie had no idea what the future held for her, and with an extraordinary mix of optimism and denial, she never allowed herself to think beyond the next day of living.

  * * *

  Willemina watched as the customer slowly made his way around the shop, running his fingers over button boxes, ribbo
ns, and meter rolls, occasionally glancing up at her. She eased herself off the service stool behind the counter and made her way toward him, under the guise of tidying shelves.

  “Where’s the young helper?” the white man asked casually.

  Willemina suddenly recognized him as the goods driver who hauled her sewing stock from the port every other month. “She nat in today,” she replied, busying herself with a feather duster.

  The man wasn’t happy about that. He frowned, tapped two fingers impatiently on the elastic rack, as if he wanted to pursue the matter.

  “Scuse me, ma’am?” Another voice came from behind Willemina. She turned to see a thin, nervous-looking woman. A shy girl of around thirteen stood anxiously next to her.

  “It bout de school?” Willemina didn’t mean to snap, but she was tired of the inquiries and anxious to get rid of that man. “Mi nat takin’ application fe twelve mont now, mi sorry. Dere a list on de counter if ye wan put down ye detail an how much ye wan pay.” The woman looked bitterly disappointed, but her daughter appeared relieved.

  Turning back to scan the shop floor, Willemina realized the man had vanished. Was she ever glad for it. She couldn’t recall the fellow’s name but she’d heard talk about that one around town. Word was he had a habit of wandering those dirty-nailed fingers of his just where they were most unwanted.

  Out in the back shed, Millie couldn’t get the backstitching right. It was hopeless. The shed was like a steam room, and she could barely breathe. But then, maybe it wasn’t that hot: sometimes the heat just got at her like that these days. Her stomach moved to and fro as if the baby were boiling up in the heat of her like a dumpling in oxtail soup. Millie stopped fiddling with the needle for a moment, wiped the sweat from her brow with the bottom of her white cotton blouse, then froze. A shadow had fallen across the sewing machine. And there was a hand. Thick white fingers resting on her shoulders.

  “What’s yer name?”

  That voice was familiar somehow, but the hands were so firm on her shoulders she didn’t dare look up to see who it was. The right hand was moving now. It was sliding down into her blouse, squeezing the top of her breast, which was already swollen from the baby and the heat. He either didn’t care about the baby or couldn’t see it there against the sewing table. Her lower back ached. The first cramp hit her hard and fast so she couldn’t breathe.

  “No need to be scared, miss,” he assured her. “You and I are going to get along just fine. I’ve missed seeing you in the shop, you know.”

  Millie was confused. He was leaning into her now. Glancing up, she could see dirty yellow stubble on his chin. His voice was thin and rusty. She still couldn’t place it.

  Another cramp hit her, like a blow to the lower back. The baby was coming. “Uuughm.” Millie slumped forward over the sewing machine, braced herself against the sewing bench.

  “Best ye step away frum de young lady, ye hear mi!” From the door of the shed Willemina could see the man’s back, as he bent down over the seated child. His right hand was out of sight and the woman didn’t like to think about what he was busying it with. Willemina had known something was wrong, felt it in her bones. Lord, she should have checked on the girl earlier.

  “No need for that, Miss W, the girl and I are getting along just fine, aren’t we, sweetheart?” His hand was still there, down her blouse, sliding down toward her nipple, the jagged nails grazing her skin.

  “Mister, mi seh step away frum de girl. Mi nyah gwan ask again.” Willemina took a step into the shed, edged sideways toward the meter stick leaning against the wall. Both his hands were at it now, and she could tell by Millie’s breathing that the baby felt her fear.

  “Get on away and leave us be, woman! The wrong trouble round here could bring strife for your license.”

  Bastard. Willemina knew he drank with the police up the boulevard; some Sunday mornings on her way to church she had seen him there, still swaying from the night before.

  “Wille . . .” The girl was panting now, slouching lower over the sewing machine. The man’s hands stayed where they were.

  Willemina swooped up the meter stick, took four quick steps forward and brought it down hard on his head. The stick connected with his skull, holding there for a moment with static, then splintered suddenly in two. In the silence that followed, the man half turned toward the shopkeeper, stunned. Eyes glazing over, he dropped on top of the girl, his body looped over her shoulder, his face falling slack on the sewing desk. Millie screamed under the dead weight of him, her entire body convulsing as she pushed the unconscious man off her.

  Before Millie could stop it, a terrified scream escaped from her throat. “Lawd, de baby. De baby, Auntie! De baby gwan come!” She immediately clamped her mouth shut, looking toward the open door of the shed. Willemina rushed toward Millie, stooped down, grabbed the man by his boots and wedged his limp ankles under her arms. Drawing strength from God knew where, she leaned back and dragged the body out of the hot shed.

  Returning, she told Millie, “Mi sarry, mi dear, but dere nat time fe move ye now. Dis baby on it way, though why it gatta choose such time fe come gwan baffle mi till end-a mi days.” She gently closed the door of the sewing shed.

  Millie could feel her insides pulsing. It was as if the baby had suddenly decided it wanted no more of her. She bit down hard on her trembling lips and tasted blood.

  The birth was quick, but ripping. Just fifteen minutes of pushing. Puddled in blood on the unpolished concrete floor, Millie looked down at the tiny wriggling thing lying faceup between her legs. The three-weeks-early baby stared around him, squinty-eyed and suspicious as if scanning the place for something untoward, then opened his tiny throat with a piercing squeal.

  “Wha ye lookin’ so surprise fe?” Millie addressed the newborn. “Look like ye nyah know wat world ye comin’ in te. Mi nat gwan bite, ye know.” She loved the thing. How strangely and immediately she loved the little thing.

  Willemina tied the umbilical cord close to the baby’s stomach with thread from the wall rack and let the exhausted girl be, disappearing to close up shop and fetch a tub of warm water and some towels. The no-good driver was nowhere to be seen, the outline of his body-drag just a swirl in the dirt outside the shed door.

  On her return, the shopkeeper tended to Millie so casually it seemed she’d carried out the ritual countless times before. “Wait till it all come out an den go an clean yeself, girl, in de shower.” She bustled about mopping the red from the floor.

  Millie barely heard her. She was dumbstruck. This warm, scared little thing had been spun out of her, growing all that time while she tried to ignore it. Well, she couldn’t now. Here it was, mouth open and searching for her. What should she care about that no-good Winston? What should she care if he never showed his face again? This here was a beautiful thing, this baby. A miracle.

  “Eddison. Eddison William.” Millie repeated the name, then pushed her rough, black nipple into the baby’s open, waiting mouth.

  * * *

  Things soon returned so much to normal that, but for the baby, Millie sometimes thought Winston and the nine months following their encounter had been a dream. Mr. Lucas, shocked by his daughter’s waywardness, nonetheless offered to take in the baby, have his wife raise it in Cidar Valley as their own. Willemina would have none of it. “De girl ole nough fe mek baby, den she ole nough fe look affer it fe nex fifteen year as well,” she insisted. Millie thought herself immeasurably lucky to be kept on under the circumstances.

  As Willemina’s health deteriorated, it became clear that the young girl was being groomed to take over the sewing shop. Staffing the shop by day and working on alterations in the early evenings, baby Eddison slung tightly around her chest, Millie never had time to stop and think about whether the shop was the good fortune she had wanted for herself. At least, not until the day Winston turned up again.

  One evening after closing time Millie was upstairs in the house looking over the accounts when she heard the raised voice of A
unt Willemina down in the shop. The girl hurried down in her white nightgown, the baby tied across her front, and found the old woman bashing a young man over the head with a stiff cardboard meter roll. Recognizing him immediately, Millie darted between them, confiscated the weapon from the old woman and began beating him with it herself.

  “Ye lyin’ field bwoy! Tink ye gwan waltz inte mi life jus like dat wen mi nat heard frum ye almost one year now. Mi nyah wan none of ye. Be off, ye hear mi, before mi do some real damage te dat handsome face-a yours so ye cyant go usin’ it fe trickin’ udda unsuspectin’ girls! Go on, be off!”

  Eventually Winston retreated out through the shop’s front door and down the steps. “Send a young woman lettah, money, don hear frum er even affer she lead mi on an mi believe wi life together an she mi sweetheart!” he screamed. “An mi wonder why ye don write back. Mi don listen te udda worker on plantation. Dem seh mi crazy but mi seh nah, mi see it in er eye, dis woman gwan be mine if mi haffi kill fe getta. But de udda worker right, ye crazy woman. Crazy!”

  Millie stared at him from the doorway. “Lettah? Ye nyah send no lettah, ye lyin’ Montego Bay bush pig!”

  Winston noticed Willemina retreating into the shop, pointed a forefinger at her. “Ask de ole woman. Mi send lettah without fail. Each mont. An money too.”

  Caught out, Willemina moved slowly to the cash register and removed a stack of unopened envelopes from the locked cupboard underneath the till. “Sweet lawd, whatevah will be now will be,” the old woman said, shuffling away in resignation.