Blue Mountain Trouble

by Martin Mordecai

  Praise for Blue Mountain Trouble

  “An utterly gorgeous, magical story, rendered with sheer grace and honesty. This book will transport you.” — Daniel José Older, New York Times bestselling author of Shadowshaper

  “I want a copy … in every library, in every school staff room from Montego Bay to Port Antonio, from Vancouver to Cape Town to Bristol and to Port of Spain. Blue Mountain Trouble has a wide role to play all over the English-speaking world. Why? Blue Mountain Trouble heals. It illuminates.” — Jean D’Costa, The Jamaica Journal

  “Twins Pollyread and Jackson face a magical goat, school exam blues and a threat by a thug named Jammy in this page-turner. Can they restore peace and tranquility to their quiet mountain village? Martin Mordecai offers up a terrific and suspenseful plot in an unusual tropical setting.” — Olive Senior, author of Birthday Suit and Anna Carries Water

  * “Most delicious of all in this plum pudding of a book is the language…. Mordecai, without resorting to explanations or a glossary, teaches us how to hear and understand…. We might well reach the end of the book, a lovely quiet conversational coda about the souls of the dead and the unborn, without ever exactly knowing what a “duppy” or an “obeah” is, but Mordecai pays us the compliment of respecting that readers have more than one way of understanding a word and a concept. When human relationships are honest and precisely observed, as they are in this novel, everything else falls into place as newly familiar.” — Quill & Quire, starred review

  * “Mordecai’s balance of the ordinary and the supernatural is Virginia Hamilton-esque in its delicacy. Jackson and Pollyread emerge as distinct and entirely likable individuals, their mutual affection and love for their parents both endearing and believable…. A gorgeous snapshot of a locale and culture not seen enough in children’s books.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “First-time author Mordecai, a native Jamaican, brings the Blue Mountain region of his homeland to life in a unique coming-of-age story tinged with mystery…. Through colorful narrative punctuated with regional colloquialisms and poetic language (“When you sleep your whole life under open windows in a place so quiet you can feel the night sky move, then rain when it wakes you is like God telling you stories”), the author captures the rhythm of the children’s daily life and effectively conveys their hopes, fears and family love as they look toward the future and learn secrets about the past.” — Publishers Weekly

  “Mordecai’s descriptions of the close-knit community are clear and vivid…. Since much of the dialogue is in a melodic Jamaican patois, readers use context and pattern — and cues from the characters — to infer meaning…. Readers won’t soon forget the time they spent with these spirited characters in a uniquely beautiful setting.” — Horn Book

  “Rich in characterization with a beautifully realized setting. The elements of magic and mystery are intriguing, too, but best of all is the author’s use of wonderfully idiosyncratic, powerfully expressive, and downright musical Jamaican English.” — Booklist

  To Pam,

  who believed

  Contents

  Praise for Blue Mountain Trouble

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Goat

  Ground

  Standpipe

  Again

  A Long Day

  Guessing

  Common Entrance

  Assembly

  Facing the Music

  Holding Court

  Different Horse

  Thief in the Night

  Give Thanks

  Out of the Rain

  Decisions

  Running

  Premonitions

  Fight

  Finding Out

  The Devil Plant

  Reports

  Eviction

  Reckoning

  Explanations

  Vale

  Leaving

  Encounter

  Revelations

  Signs and Wonders

  Beginnings

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Pollyread and Jackson, walking down to school around the same time each morning was the same and slightly different. The twins lived in Top Valley, a village high in the Blue Mountains. “On God shoulder,” Mama said. Mornings sometimes, when cloud and mist were all around, there you’d be on God’s shoulder and you couldn’t see his face or his feet. (“Only his belly button,” Pollyread said once, looking around for Mama, shocked at her own boldness — and never said it again.)

  They looked down the path they were walking, and where a moment ago there was Stedman’s Corner and Marcus Garvey Primary, then Cross Point, then Cuthbert Bank and Content Gap, in steps that a drunk giant might take to the hazyblue sea far below — now all of a sudden there was only cloud, thick as Mama’s soup, slicking the grass and stones with moisture and making the path where they walked all their life mysterious and new, and sometimes dangerous.

  This Tuesday morning the whole world seemed to be moving. The clouds played hide-and-seek with the sun in the steep valleys. You could almost hear them laughing as they twirled around like sails. Pollyread in front, they went carefully down the steep, winding path, walking around the larger boulders, stepping over the gleaming stones. Mama would not forgive them for slipping and getting their uniforms dirty.

  Around them, hilltops, stones, sometimes single trees thrust like fists or fingers through the swirling clouds. All of them familiar, all of them, this morning, new, different.

  And this morning, out of that green-and-white mystery of stones and floating trees, out of it this perfectly normal Tuesday morning came the goat.

  One moment there was just the clouds and the rocks and the bush, the next moment it was there. Huge, its dark head with grandpa beard unfurling a pair of horns like Jericho trumpets.

  There, floating in the path, in a pool of brightness from an unseen sun. The twins could only see a huge head, with a billowing beard and horns like they had never before seen, on a goat or any other creature. It was like a mask, of a size that would’ve had a body as big as a minibus carrying it. Unsupported, it floated next to a big round rock — just where they would walk.

  The twins stopped dead. There was no way around it. The goat’s eyes pinned them, flashing dark fire. The eyes seemed sightless but seeing everything too, down into the very darkest corners of their terror.

  For a second or two, all was still: the goat-mask, the twins, even the clouds. They saw something like teeth. The goat tossed its head.

  Then the cloud shifted and it wasn’t there anymore. As effortlessly as it had appeared, made of cloud but very real, it was gone.

  The rock behind it reappeared, humpbacked, familiar. Cloud rolled away on silent wheels, unfurling the valley and hillsides like a banner. The twins were surrounded by things well-known and intimate, comforting as Mama’s arms. But they were shivering.

  Jackson’s hand touched Pollyread from behind. “Go on nuh?” She didn’t, couldn’t move.

  Then the ground vibrated beneath them. As if Jackson’s touch had tilted it. The hump of rock that the goat-head had hung in front of trembled. The guango tree behind it shook with a sound like rattling teeth. And as they watched, the hillside in front of them slipped away and crashed into Bamboo River below. They looked down: A meter ahead of their feet was — nothing. What was left of the hillside looked torn and bleeding, earth dribbling away like blood.

  Birdsong and the soft rattle of leaves filled the pool of silence that settled around them.

  Pollyread and Jackson looked into each other’s wide bottomless terror. First, the goat. Then … it hadn’t rained for weeks, the earth hard as cement. There seemed no reason for
the landslide.

  * * *

  “Maybe Mass Cleveland get a new goat,” said Jackson tentatively. “I hear him talking to Poppa one day, say he looking about some high-class ram from a man in Saint Ann that bring them from foreign. No ordinary ram goat.”

  “Well, that certainly wasn’t no ordinary goat,” said Pollyread.

  All day they’d waited, expecting some other extraordinary thing to happen. They had no idea what they were expecting, but they’d know it when it happened. Like the goat. But nothing happened. No one said anything unusual. No one did anything unusual. They went through the day feeling as if an X was marked on their foreheads. But no one looked at or spoke to them in any way strangely. And they had hardly spoken to anyone, even each other, all day.

  Now they were lying in bed on either side of the curtain that divided the room they shared. They’d said their prayers rather more quickly than normal, though Jackson had remembered to give thanks for being saved from serious injury and possibly worse. They hadn’t mentioned the goat directly. On the other hand — they knew. But they weren’t sure of what the goat was. Or of how to talk about it.

  Jackson turned on his back and cupped his hands behind his head. He sighed as he gazed up into the black roof.

  “I hear Mass Cleveland tell Poppa he going to crossbreed” — his tongue relished the word — “the foreign ram with them scrawny-looking goat him have running up and down hillside eating out people vegetable garden.”

  “So the new goat not going to eat vegetable and flowers? Is that you saying?” He heard the change in Pollyread’s tone, like she was turning over the page to a new story.

  “Don’t be stupid! Goat born to eat everything, even condense milk can. One goat can’t be different just ’cause it have a different father. I meant,” he went on, shaping his words carefully, “that the goat that Mass Cleveland crossbreeded, if he get the foreign goat from the man in Saint Ann, would be a different kind of goat from what we custom to see in these-here parts. You understand now?”

  That tone infuriated Pollyread, but sometimes Jackson couldn’t help himself, she deserved it. She would tell him he wasn’t her teacher so please not to speak to her like she was no dunce up in front of the class. When Mama heard him speaking like that, she would tease and call him “Politician.”

  “Different in what way, Mr. Know-it-all?” asked Pollyread, her voice sweet as custard, but with lime on the edge.

  Pollyread felt her brother stiffen on the other side of the curtain, and was pleased.

  “It will look different,” he began irritably. “It will be taller and have more meat on it and —”

  “From all those cabbages and flowers and cucumbers, I suppose,” his sister said in her driest voice. “The same ones Mass Cleveland goat dem eat now, and still skinny like puss.”

  “Cho man, Polly,” Jackson cried out, hitting his mattress. “You too stupid!”

  She could not let that pass. “I wish to do no more than remind you,” she said in her teacher’s voice, “of our respective placements according to last term’s reports, and indeed for some time now.”

  There was a long sigh from the other side of the curtain, which Pollyread’s little grin swallowed like a sponge.

  “Anyway,” she said after a while, and quietly, “I don’t think is Mass Cleveland foreign goat, even if he get it already.”

  “So what you think it is?”

  “I think,” she began, and then turned and put her head right up close to the curtain where she knew her twin’s was and, wondering if God was still listening to them, said in a whispered rush, “Ithinkisaduppy.”

  “Duppy?” Jackson’s voice came right back, loud.

  “Sh-h-h!”

  They listened for a sign of the parents in the next room.

  Generally, singly or together, they discussed anything unusual with Mama when they got home from school. But they hadn’t been sure how to mention the goat, or of what sort of discussion might follow: Mama frowned on talk of duppies and obeah and other “manifestations of darkness,” as she termed such matters.

  Besides, Mama had been in bed when they reached home, an unusual development in itself. A strong woman who often worked beside Poppa in the ground they planted, she seldom felt poorly. But this morning she’d complained of dizziness and a funny feeling in her stomach. And after supper, though she was feeling better, Poppa had shepherded her to bed at the same time as the twins.

  “Duppy?” Jackson’s voice caught between disbelief and agreement.

  “Is something,” said Pollyread, soft but firm. “Something not from this place.” Jackson knew she didn’t mean just Top Valley. “A spirit thing.”

  “Like … rolling calf?”

  “I suppose so,” said Pollyread, trying now to sound casual about the fantastical shape-shifting creature that gave every child nightmares.

  “Rolling goat maybe.”

  Pollyread had to giggle, but her brother’s attempt at a joke evaporated immediately into the darkness, leaving their thoughts to settle like slow running water into the crevices of this dark idea that had been gathering shape all day.

  Silence, like rope let down into a well.

  Out of that well of silence, rising like the mist that was almost surely rising somewhere in the sleeping valley, came Jackson’s voice:

  “Our Father. Who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy name …”

  “Thy kingdom come,” Pollyread joined in.

  “Thy will be done …”

  “On earth …”

  Every morning after that, they watched out for the goat, peering intently into whatever mist and cloud they encountered on their way to school. Someone had erected a makeshift fence around the place where the ground had fallen away, and a new path to Stedman’s Corner was already forming. Mama seemed recovered and was back at ground with Poppa. The world was as it had been, was supposed to be. “The goat like it gone on holiday,” Pollyread said, disappointed and a little irritated, on Friday.

  Very early Saturday morning, before daybreak, Jackson found himself stumbling after Poppa, whom he could hear more than see, on the path that led up one side of Top Valley, and then disappeared over into another valley that everyone called Morgan’s Mount, after the name of the peak on the far side.

  Jackson wanted to cry out to Poppa to hold down and wait for him, but he knew better. Poppa was a hurrier. When the twins were babies, he would try to walk with them at their speed, but even then he was usually a step ahead, and the distance lengthened as they found their feet and learned their way around. He would lead, they must follow, and if they couldn’t keep up, they knew the way home. He wasn’t out for no Sunday stroll, he’d say. Mama it was who had taken them for walks, and kept their toddling pace.

  So Jackson, still not fully awake, was quiet, his eyes on the path that slipped in and out of focus ahead of him. He relied for direction on the thump on the ground of Poppa’s lignum vitae stick that he seldom left home without, and the uneven smack of the thick leather sheath that held Poppa’s cutlass against his leg as he walked. Jackson’s own little cutlass, an old one of his father’s worn down over the years of use and sharpening to the size of a large kitchen knife, was stuck in his waist in a protective scabbard of banana leaf.

  Something flashed past Jackson from behind and vanished into the darkness ahead. Cho-cho. Jackson cried out as though something had hit him. That set off the little mongrel, who came dancing back like a spirit in the gray half-light, barking to wake the dead.

  “Cho-cho. Hush!” Jackson said, fierce as a flame. Which only made Cho-cho bark more. “Cho-cho!” More barking.

  “Blasted dawg,” Poppa grumbled up ahead. Quite close by, which made Jackson feel better.

  “Not me bring him, Poppa,” Jackson said quickly. “I did think we pop him when he sleeping.”

  “Sleeping? That dawg don’t sleep!”

  “Must take Cho-cho back, Poppa?”

  “Him will only follow you again.”

&n
bsp; Jackson heard the rustle of leaves as his father resumed walking up the path, his boots and stick stamping in an uneven, angry rhythm. After a while Jackson released Cho-cho, who had the good sense not to run forward again. Gradually, Poppa’s tread settled, and Jackson relaxed. Cho-cho ran between them, sniffing the ground and putting little marks of pee on randomly chosen bushes and trees.

  They were going to what Poppa sometimes called “Jackso’s ground.” The Gilmores, like almost every family in Valley that grew things, had a piece of land, or “ground,” that was generally separate from whatever small pocket surrounded the house they lived in. That Gilmore ground was some distance from the house, but on the same side of Bamboo River. It sloped gently down to the river and several Valley families had their ground there; some, like the Gilmores, for three or more generations. Original ownership of the land, if there was such a thing, was lost in the government records in Town. Individual boundaries had been established over the years by a tree, a large rock, a line of yam hills. Everyone knew their ground.

  The Gilmores were unusual in Top Valley for having two grounds. Even before the twins were born, Poppa had leased the other one — the owner known this time, a Mr. McIntyre who lived abroad — over in Morgan’s Mount. He had leased it, Poppa said, so as to avoid the palampam that often broke apart families upon the death of the father, with the already small inheritance having to be divided up, usually among several children. Whatever happened with the Bamboo River ground, for which there was no paper, Morgan’s Mount would be a Gilmore ground as long as a Gilmore wanted, with paperwork to back it up locked in a lawyer’s office in Town.

  Morgan’s Mount was too far away to go to every day. Every few months Poppa and a friend would go up there with a day’s supply of water and cooked food to clear the place. To establish possession, Poppa would say. So that people would know the land belonged to someone nearby and wouldn’t think they could just capture it for themselves. The last few times he had taken Jackson with him. “Because is his dead-lef,” he’d explain to Mama when she complained that Jackson was too young for such hard work, or he had homework to do, or some other reason. “He must learn to look after his own things.” Jackson didn’t mind hard work. To keep poverty and shame in their proper place, life was a struggle to the grave. Valley children learned that lesson with their growing, the way they learned the landscape of the district and the faces of the people around them. Besides, he loved being in the bush with Poppa and his friends.