Blue Mountain Trouble

by Martin Mordecai

  But he didn’t like to think of the Morgan’s Mount ground, or even Bamboo River, as being his own. Dead-lef meant an inheritance after Poppa died, and he didn’t want to think about that. To do so would be to open the door to a world without Poppa, and the twins had daymares enough when he was away in Town for even a week, as he had to be sometimes.

  And there would only be Pollyread to share any ground with — up to now anyway. Land could come to girl children, but Pollyread had no interest in owning land or planting things, only in selling them. God made things grow or not, according to his mysterious will. It wasn’t in her place, certainly, to interfere with the divine process. Or to get sweaty and dirty doing it.

  With Jackson, it was a different story.

  “Jackso born with him hand inna dutty,” Mama would say, her tone conveying different things, depending on whether she was rowing with him for dirtying his clothes, or showing off the various flowering shrubs and plants he helped her with around the yard. There were times when not even the best game of cricket or football, or the best mark in class, could provide the satisfaction when he saw the pink shell of the ginger lily he’d planted under their window aflame in the soft light of morning. It was a blessing, and the breaths that he took while looking at things growing, whether he had planted them or not, could make him feel as light as the air around him.

  * * *

  And now, as the sun woke up and stretched, releasing its breath of light into the air, Jackson had the impression that they were climbing into the sky. No longer afraid of losing sight of Poppa, he stopped at one point and looked back down Top Valley. He spotted their house, tiny and fragile in the blue air and, farther down, a piece of Stedman’s Corner and the main building of Marcus Garvey Primary.

  At the top of the hill dividing the two valleys they ran into a wall of blazing sunlight and stumbled down the slope, half blinded, to the refuge of a guango tree. Cho-cho squatted between them, tongue hanging. Shading their eyes while catching their breath, they looked down.

  Morgan’s Mount was, in fact, a valley much like Top Valley, even to the ribbon of river at the bottom like a zip holding the two mountainsides together. But this valley was not as populated or as well planted as Top Valley. The patches of haphazard cultivation amid the larger splotches of bush and trees were threaded with tentative pathways like pieces of twine. Perhaps half a dozen shacks were visible, widely scattered like tiny dark boxes thrown down on the slopes. One such, on the far side of the valley, flew a pennant of smoke.

  Poppa’s arm swung up from his side suddenly, the cutlass pointing. The sun glancing off the blade startled Jackson. At first he thought Poppa was pointing to the river, which caught the first sunlight and threw it back at them. But the blade, as Poppa stood straight now against his lignum vitae stick, was pointing to the far slope. Jackson vaguely remembered that the Gilmore ground would be somewhere in that direction. Following Poppa’s arm, Jackson saw two dark figures like large insects in a field that was tidily planted in rows. Above them was the hut with the smoke. Lights seemed to flash from the men-insects as they moved. Jackson heard a growl, which he thought was Cho-cho, or distant early-morning thunder. But it came from Poppa’s throat.

  Then Poppa set off. And at a pace! His big stick plunged at the ground like a piston, driving him down toward the river. Jackson tried to keep up with him, feeling like a toddler again. Except that if he had been three or four he would have called out to Poppa to wait. Now he knew not to say a word. He could hear Poppa’s breath pumping in and out of his lungs, and Cho-cho’s yapping, which Poppa ignored, concentrating on the dark brown path his feet must follow, studded with little rocks and tree roots that could trip him up. Poppa’s hands were swinging vigorously, the stick flying out before and behind like a warning to Jackson not to get too close, the other hand with the cutlass chopping at upstart bush.

  In no time they were down at the river, by a line of small rocks that zigzagged across the stream. Jackson remembered them from the last time, and the intricate dance he and Poppa had woven across the river. This time, dry season, the river was low, and without any hesitation Poppa, ignoring the stones, splashed straight into the water, balancing with his staff. Cho-cho leapt after him unthinkingly, and as quickly retreated to dry land, where Jackson scooped him up.

  “Poppa,” Jackson called out, not loud, more an automatic reaction to uncertainty. As if to back him up, Cho-cho yelped twice. But Poppa paid no attention, perhaps didn’t even hear them. He was now on the other side of the little stream, his trousers wet below the knees and clinging darkly to his legs. Jackson called again, louder.

  His father spun around as if yanked by an invisible rope. He was framed between two of the stringy trees that shadowed the stream, silhouetted against the sunlit slope behind him stitched with rows of small plants. In one corner of the frame, a man was squatting on his haunches, pulling weeds.

  “Whaddapen?” asked his father impatiently.

  Jackson wasn’t sure what to say next. He hadn’t seen Poppa this agitated in a long time.

  “Use the stones and come cross,” Poppa said sharply, turning away again. “And hold the dawg.”

  Lifting Cho-cho, Jackson did as his father instructed. The stones were dry and stood well out of the water, so his running shoes had no problem finding a grip, but with the wriggling dog to contend with, every stone was a challenge. On the far side Cho-cho expected to be put down, and wriggled even more when he realized that he was still a captive. To calm him, Jackson knelt and rested the dog on the ground between his legs, stroking him softly while holding his collar.

  By now Poppa was thirty or forty meters ahead, marching up the slope. As Jackson was wondering whether to try and catch up, his father turned and held his stick high: Stay! Poppa resumed his striding across the ground, the steepening slope affecting his pace but not his determination. He was not stepping over the foot-high seedlings planted neatly in the rows he crossed. He was crushing any that fell under his angry feet, slashing at others with stick and cutlass.

  “Oi!” shouted a man from the bottom corner of the ground, trying to catch Poppa’s attention. Poppa, marching away from the man, didn’t even pause. He continued straight toward the upper part of the ground where there was a little shed perched on a ledge of level ground under a spreading shade tree. There, a man crouched over the fire that sent a bright thread of smoke into the air, the one Jackson had seen from the hillside. As Jackson watched, another man emerged from inside the hut, rubbing his hands over his face as though he had just woken up. He saw Poppa and stopped, still as a statue.

  From Jackson’s vantage point the man seemed tall and well built, an impression heightened by a big crown of locks: Rasta. He was shirtless, and the sunlight danced on the bunched shoulders and muscular arms crossed on his chest. Something dangled from one hand. A stick, Jackson thought. Then it glinted: a cutlass.

  Poppa was now no more than ten meters from the Rasta above him. He stopped and balanced himself on the sloping ground. His right arm lifted and Jackson caught his breath. But it was Poppa putting his cutlass into its leather sheath. Jackson sighed. The two men watched each other. The man crouching over the big pot on the terrace beside the Rasta continued his tending of the fire, but watched Poppa also.

  Cho-cho whimpered. Jackson relaxed his grip a little. There was something familiar about the big man. Jackson had seen him before. He found himself moving forward without thinking, crablike on his heels, with Cho-cho between his legs. Who was this man? He thought and thought, but could not remember. But the sense of the man’s familiarity persisted, and it wasn’t comforting.

  Poppa took a few paces forward and stepped up onto the little terrace. They were on the same level now, and about the same height. But Poppa’s wiry body was like a yam hill against the man’s tree.

  Jackson, too far away to hear the words, saw their mouths moving. They maintained their distance, Poppa standing almost at attention like a soldier. The Rasta appeared the more rel
axed of the two. But there was a coiled stillness about him.

  The Rasta smiled, and even from his distance Jackson could see that it wasn’t friendly and knew that his father wasn’t returning the smile. The Rasta’s teeth against his dark shadowed face scattered the sunlight, and Jackson, as though catching the pieces of light in his mind’s eye and making a pattern of them, realized suddenly why he knew the man, and who he was.

  Jammy!

  James Parchment — but no one except his mother and the police used either name — was a legend and a tonic in Top Valley. Parents warned their boy children they’d turn out like Jammy if they didn’t listen to their elders. The children, before they were old enough to reason the finer points of right and wrong, knew that Jammy led an exciting life, a lot of it “out there,” beyond Top Valley. As they grew older, details of Jammy’s adventures fell like potato peelings from adult conversations: Jammy was in Tower Street in Town, which they only slowly learned was the address of the General Penitentiary. Jammy was in “foreign,” abroad; and they gathered enough from other scraps of gossip to know that he couldn’t be there legally because no one in their right mind would give Jammy a visa, which was something necessary for travel to said foreign.

  Lately, Jammy had been somewhere. No one had seen him in Valley for the past couple years, and now here he was. Large as life and twice as ugly, as Poppa said about people he didn’t like.

  Jammy was still standing with his arms folded, grinning, his teeth bright like stars. Poppa threw his arm into the air, one hand carrying the lignum vitae stick aloft. Poppa looked like he was threatening Jammy, but Jackson knew that wasn’t the case. Poppa didn’t threaten, he acted. A peal of mocking laughter reached Jackson like garbage thrown down the hillside. Cho-cho yelped as Jackson’s hands impulsively squeezed him.

  Poppa spun away from Jammy’s laughing face and started back down the hill.

  “I-man will be right here, Mass Gillie,” Jammy called to Poppa’s back, loud enough for Jackson to hear. “We not going anywhere.”

  “You going back to prison, Jammy. I promise you that,” Poppa shouted, half turning his head. “Where you belong! All o’ you!” He swept the air with his stick. The sun behind threw Poppa’s shadow ahead of him like a puppet as he tramped down the diagonal of the hillside toward Jackson. He pulled out his cutlass and slashed viciously at the little plants that his path crossed.

  “Mind I-man sue you for damages, Mass Gillie,” Jammy shouted, but he was laughing.

  Poppa stopped and half turned. For a moment he seemed about to go back up the hill, this time with cutlass and stick. Jackson squeezed Cho-cho. But Poppa raised his staff, not the machete, at the mocking man above him. “Sue me, Jammy,” he said. “I want you to sue me.” And he resumed his walk, without waiting for a response from Jammy, slashing at more plants as he came toward his waiting son and the watchful, quivering dog.

  Amazingly to Jackson, when he reached them he was smiling, as though he had told himself a joke. Almost tenderly, he slipped his cutlass back into its leather sheath.

  “Come, son,” he said. His voice was gentle, as it was when Jackson or Pollyread hurt themselves. He touched Jackson’s shoulder and helped him to stand up. “Let’s go home.”

  Jammy!” exclaimed Bollo, hitting the side of his head with his hand. “You mean Jammy is here?!”

  “Jammy?” echoed Trucky.

  Jackson couldn’t help himself: A laugh popped out of his mouth. Just a little bark, like one of Cho-cho’s.

  “Jammy same one,” Jackson said, as serious as he could be.

  They were at Standpipe, as they generally had been around this time of day most days, in dry season at least, from when they were still in the arms of their mothers. There were mothers and babies there today, as well as Keneisha, Trucky’s sister, who would soon be a mother herself.

  Jackson’s announcement of the return of Jammy had had the effect he’d hoped for. Bollo — known as Calvin Tomlinson to the teachers at Marcus Garvey Primary, but to no one else in Valley — worshipped his cousin, and would hear no word said against him. If he had known that Jammy was back in the district, everybody else in Top Valley would’ve known.

  “Jammy come back,” he said, speaking to himself. “And he don’t even come to say howdy.” Anyone else in the valley would have been surprised if Jammy had announced his presence. But Bollo was crushed at his cousin’s bad manners.

  “And he turn Rasta,” Trucky added in wonderment. Robert Gordon had been, from babyhood, built like a small truck. He and Bollo lived close to each other and were seldom apart.

  “Jammy not no Rasta,” said Pollyread sharply. “He hiding behind the locks so police can’t find him.”

  “Who say police looking for him?” asked Bollo defensively.

  “If they not looking for him now, they will soon be,” said Pollyread.

  “So what Jammy had to say for himself?” Trucky asked quickly, to head off an argument.

  Bollo and Trucky were looking expectantly at Jackson now, waiting for more information. He wanted to tell them what he had heard, but somehow knew that Poppa, who had made no mention of the encounter with Jammy all the way down to home, or since, would have regarded that as a betrayal.

  “I couldn’t hear what they say,” Jackson said. “But they never smile with each other.”

  “Mass Gillie never like Jammy from time,” Bollo muttered.

  “Nobody like Jammy from time,” Pollyread shot back.

  “Nobody don’t understand Jammy, that’s why,” said Bollo, a little less aggressively. “Everybody think Jammy is a bad bwoy, but he have plenty things he want to do with his life.”

  “And do them with things that don’t belong to him” was out of Pollyread’s mouth like a whip. Jackson saw Bollo flinch and felt sorry for him.

  But as the four of them busied themselves with their plastic water containers, which they had been taking turns to fill from the standpipe while they talked, Jackson felt anger begin to puddle in his stomach. He remembered a time a few years back, right here at the standpipe, when Jammy had shown (yet again!) his true colors.

  There had been a line of children waiting turns for the trickle of water. Jammy had been part of the line. Which was moving far too slowly for his liking. So eventually he’d done a Jammy thing: simply walked to the front of the line, lifted the bucket that was filling out of the way and put his own container there. There was a flurry of protest and then silence: Jammy had a temper, and he was bigger than anyone there.

  Bigger even than Miss Icilda, whose grandson Jonathan had been waiting just ahead of the twins. Miss Icilda emerged from under one of the shade trees nearby, walked over to the standpipe and, without a word, kicked over Jammy’s bucket. Jammy made to grab her, but she pushed him off.

  “You must wait you turn like everybody,” she said angrily. “Learn discipline.”

  Jammy took a step forward, raising his hand. “I soon discipline you,” he shouted.

  Miss Icilda stepped forward also. “Lick me, then,” she said quietly, looking up into his face. “You is bad man and I am a little old woman. Lick me. Show these pickney how big man is to behave — lick me!”

  Jackson was certain Jammy was going to hit Miss Icilda. But, after a moment when his hand wavered above the old woman like something that didn’t belong to him, he spun away from her and stamped off, scattering children like chickens. Later, he’d caught a ride down to Town and wasn’t seen in Valley for several weeks.

  “So, Bollo,” Pollyread called out now, as they were helping each other hoist the full, heavy water buckets onto their shoulders, “why Jammy must pick Poppa’s land to do him business on? What him have against Poppa?”

  Pollyread, not for the first time, had plucked Jackson’s thoughts and put them into words. He was not particularly surprised that Jammy had captured land, for whatever reason, and Morgan’s Mount was an isolated spot, so perhaps no one would notice, for a while anyway. But why their land? (My land, he thought.)r />
  Bollo started to shrug and then remembered the teetering bucket of water atop his bullet head. “You would have to ask Jammy,” he said carefully.

  But the little ripple of Bollo’s shoulder, and his noncommittal words, only irritated Pollyread, her bucket perfectly poised. “I don’t have no question asking Jammy,” she snapped. “My father will deal with him.”

  “Maybe,” Trucky ventured, shifting feet and shoulders to find a balance for his own bucket, “maybe is Mass Gillie do Jammy something.” Jackson hadn’t missed Trucky’s pause, nor the tone of his voice, suggesting his classmate, and therefore Bollo also, knew something about Jammy and Poppa that he, Jackson, and Pollyread, didn’t know. Jackson felt uncomfortable all of a sudden.

  “Something like what?” he asked, bristling.

  “How I to know?” asked Trucky, withdrawing a little from Jackson’s sharpness.

  “Ask Mass Gillie,” said Bollo.

  The air around the four friends crackled with unease.

  Mama was at Stedman’s Corner when they got there on the way home from Standpipe.

  It isn’t a corner at all, really just a large, level, open space with a shop and a rum bar on one side, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Shim; Miss Clarice’s cook shed where she sold soup, cooked food, and sweets on the other; and a large, barren guinep tree that people wait under, out of the sun or rain, for the minibuses that intermittently grace Valley with their bone-rattling service. All paths meet there: It is the crossroads of social and economic life in Valley. Almost everyone who is not a babe-in-arms or an invalid crosses the little scrap of concrete-hard dirt and pitchy-patchy grass at least once every day.