At the end of the meal, Poppa got up and went to the glass-fronted cabinet in the corner, next to the chair where Mama sat most nights, sewing and listening to the radio, and brought out a bottle of dark sweet sherry. Rum was kept in the kitchen, easily available for anyone visiting. The “good wine” only appeared on birthdays and at Christmas. From the same cabinet, Mama brought out four small, delicately fashioned pink glasses that had belonged to her grandmother. Poppa poured full measures for himself and Mama, and half glasses, “a tups” as she insisted, for the twins.
“Give thanks and praises,” Mama said, raising her glass.
“For clever pickney,” said Poppa, lifting his.
Pollyread beamed as she clinked her glass against everyone’s.
Jackson, bouncing his on theirs, didn’t know what to think. He wondered whether the baby in Mama’s belly — if it was there — would be clever like Pollyread or dreamy like him.
That weekend, Saturday night, the long spell of dry weather broke. The first clap of thunder woke the twins.
Rain at night when it wakes you in your bed under a zinc roof (as long as the roof doesn’t leak) is the sweetest thought you can think, the warmest memory you can own. 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. While you’re listening to the crackling laughter of lightning and the thunder clearing the sky’s throat, your feet search the bottom of the bed for the sheet Mama always leaves there, even in the hot months, and your toes wriggle into it so it becomes a second skin.
And through the boisterous rain-telling, and the rumbling thunder, beneath the thumping of your own excited heart, you listen for the sound you know will come: whining that is like a jagged knife tearing through the hullabaloo. This is Cho-cho. Who, by strict parental edict, is not allowed inside the house once the door has been closed for the night until first light next morning. “Lightning not going kill him,” Poppa said more than once when the twins pleaded for the little mongrel. “He can stay under the house bottom like all the rest of the dawg them.”
Cho-cho does — right under the twins’ window. It is there that he begins his campaign, with a pitiful whine that comes through the heavy shroud of rain as easily as a needle going through cloth. Then, sensing some movement or interest above, no matter how faint, he scurries around to the door and starts scratching, scratching. The door is nearer to the parents’ bedroom than to the twins’, and Mama is a light sleeper. Like a strangely shaped creature joined by the darkness, the twins tiptoe to the door, slide the bolt, lift the latch, and swing it open to pull in the shivering dog, lock the door and carry the dog back to their rooms and get back into their beds — all in a few seconds and without a single word being exchanged. Cho-cho plays his part too, unaccustomedly silent in gratitude.
His coat being soaking wet most times, there is no question of the dog being allowed further concession. To take his richly smelly body into either bed would be tantamount to signing a confession. So Cho-cho is bundled under one or other bed, covered with whatever can be found to keep him warm, and is shushed to sleep amid the stories that the night leans over the windowsill and tells, spitting raindrops onto your face.
Sometimes the rainstories become your dreams, and your dreams are a bridge back to the morning, and the whispering of Mama’s ancient house slippers across the creaking and sighing floorboards as she moves around her small bedroom before coming out into the dining room and opening the front door on the world. Her wakening rituals lift you briefly to the surface: the clearing of her throat, the splashing of water on her face, a little fart, an exchange of words grunted between the parents that sounds like the rumble of distant thunder.
* * *
But this morning it was an explosive fit of coughing from Poppa that popped the dreams of Pollyread, who stuck out her foot and toe-poked Jackson, who leaned over and grabbed Cho-cho by his tail just as the dog was getting ready to go into the living area. He unceremoniously dangled him over the windowsill and let him drop the couple feet to the wet ground as he heard Mama open the front door and say to herself, “Where’s that dawg?” Then, “Oh, there you is. You sleep late this morning,” with a chuckle.
Jackson and Pollyread relaxed back into their beds with a shared sigh and listened to Mama walking around the far side of the house for what she called her morning “breeze-out.”
They didn’t have more than a few moments to savor their escape from disaster.
“Oh, my Savior!” they heard Mama exclaim. “Gillie! Come! Come, Gillie! Come quick!”
“What happen, Mama?” Jackson shouted in answer, scrambling out of bed and colliding with Pollyread.
“Wha’, Maisie … you call me?” grumbled Poppa, lurching through his bedroom door into the living area. He was still in his sleep clothes, a singlet and baggy underpants, and rubbing his eyes. He and the twins tumbled through the door and raced round the side of the house to Mama, Cho-cho greeting them with yelps.
The sun was some way from clearing Catherine’s Peak, but it was light enough for everyone to see clearly.
Mama stood frozen, legs apart, staring out at their little provision ground sloping gently away from the back of the house.
“What the matter, Maisie?” asked Poppa, grabbing his wife’s shoulder. “You feel sick? Why you get up …”
“Look,” Mama said, her arm pointing straight out at the back of the yard.
Their eyes followed her arm.
It was obvious from everyone’s first glance that more than the rain had moved through their backyard last night. For a moment Pollyread wondered if the wind had been stronger out here than it had seemed to them inside. Plants and bushes and small trees were lying on the ground like smudges on what had been an orderly pattern of planting. Pepper and tomato bushes had been thrown down, cho-cho vines and yam hills pushed over and torn from their posts. Carrots had been uprooted. Large heads of cabbage had been wrenched from their beds and tossed about as in a frenzied game. In the soft, clear morning light, the colorful vegetables gleamed in their ground as they always did, but with skins bruised and innards scattered across a space that looked like a finger painting by a furious child.
“Oh, Gawd, Gilbert,” Mama moaned. “Is who would do something like this?” Pollyread could see just the side of her face, squeezed tight like a fist. For a moment Pollyread remembered last Sunday morning and her confrontation with Jammy. Was she going to vomit again?
Poppa’s hand fell from Mama’s shoulder and, like a man still asleep, he walked away from them into the ruined planting.
The twins remained frozen beside Mama. They didn’t want to even look at each other.
From time to time someone’s animal would get loose and wander from its base into a neighbor’s ground, trampling, uprooting, and eating precious plants, fruits, and vegetables. This was the cause of much kas-kas and botheration, testing friendships and widening enmities. It was one of the reasons that Poppa didn’t keep animals.
But this wasn’t the work of an animal — not a four-footed one anyway. Even from where they stood the twins could see the sliced yam heads looking like amputated limbs, some of the tomato and pepper bushes rendered cleanly topless.
Poppa stepped carefully between and over the broken rows. Every little while he picked up a broken bush, a shattered vegetable, examining it carefully before putting it down, as tenderly as he would an egg.
Suddenly, with a wrenching roar, Poppa picked up a cabbage and threw it. The green ball, its loose leaves like wings, arced over their ground and their fence into the government bush that ran down to Bamboo River. Then he picked up one of the stakes that had supported a tomato plant and started beating the world around him, the plants and the ground and the air, as if fighting a duppy, attacking the plants that he himself had put into the ground, and nurtured and coaxed to bloom with care and tenderness. He wasn’t shouting now, but furiously cursing, using words that he would hav
e been shocked to know that his children understood.
“No, Gilbert, no,” Mama moaned, walking like a dream figure toward her husband. “No, Gil. Darling. It don’t make no sense. It not doing any good.”
“It doing good, yes!” Poppa spoke fiercely, in rhythm with his savage swings. “I practicing. What I going do. To the brute. Who do this. When I ketch him.”
With a vicious swoosh, he decapitated a perfectly healthy bush, scattering leaves and peppers like butterflies, and then fell into Mama’s arms. She patted him and cooed into his ear like she did to the twins when they had hurt themselves; she seemed to be holding him up. Pollyread felt anger rising as if out of the very ground where she stood beside Jackson, moving up her body in a warm flow.
Stealing crops was a fact of farming everywhere, even in remote communities like Top Valley, and the Gilmores were not exempt. Nothing caused more bad feeling than “tiefing.” Animals, when they got loose, didn’t know better. But human scavenging was deliberate. And the worst part of it, thought Pollyread, now so angry she was beginning to tremble, worse than having the produce destroyed or stolen, even things that you desperately needed for selling, was that your little private postage stamp of a world, the envelope of your life, had been violently torn open while you slept.
Looking at the crumpled figures of her parents, holding each other up like invalids, Pollyread felt that their lives had been invaded by an evil that was in the very air around them. She wanted to lash out violently. But at who?
Mama turned toward the house, pulling Poppa.
“Come, Gillie,” she said gently. “Come have you bickle.”
He stood still, feet planted, reluctant to abandon his ruined ground. Mama tugged him.
“Come,” she said firmly, sounding almost angry, though she wasn’t. “You can’t do anything else out here now. Come eat something.”
Trailing behind her, Poppa let himself be led back toward the house, both of them stumbling over plants and roots and sticks as though they were going through an obstacle course. Mama’s face was carved in a fixed glare that excluded everything, even her children, as she passed them by. But her eyes glistened with tears. In contrast, Poppa’s face struggled with itself as though little creatures were fighting under his skin.
Pollyread felt her own eyes suddenly prickle, like something was sticking her pupils from behind. But, mixed in with her fury and her desire to find the person responsible for this desecration and tear him into pieces as small as the shredded leaves of the cabbages they’d left behind, Pollyread felt something else tickling her mind. And as she turned to follow her distraught parents back into the house, her eyes touched Jackson’s, and she understood what was troubling her.
* * *
If Cho-cho had been left to sleep outside last night, Jackson thought, none of this would have happened. The invader would have been routed before such awful damage could have been done, or at least those inside the house would have been alerted to his presence by the dog’s insistent barking.
Jackson felt so upset that he didn’t know whether even confessing their crime would make him feel better. Confession usually did. But all his former wrongs suddenly seemed like childish pranks compared to this one.
“We have to tell him,” said Pollyread, scanning Jackson’s thoughts through his eyes.
“You mad?” was his immediate reaction. But he wasn’t sure if that was how he really felt.
Truth is the lightest basket to carry, Poppa had told them more than once, when they’d been caught out in an evasion. But the consequence for confessing to so large a transgression was beyond estimation. Bright in Jackson’s mind’s eye was Poppa with the stick a few minutes ago, slashing all around him like he was fighting devils only he could see. He had never beaten the twins — an occasional single clap on the bottom when they were smaller was usually enough to make the point. Now that they were older, his cold voice or a big-eyed glare was sufficient. They had never seen him so distorted by anger as he had been just now. He had become a stranger before their eyes, transformed by an explosion inside himself, his whirling stick and chanted obscenities chilling the morning air around them. Nor had they ever seen him so broken afterward. That was even more frightening.
“You really want to tell him?” asked Jackson quietly, challenging her.
* * *
Pollyread studied her big toe drawing lines in the dirt as if it didn’t really belong to her, and didn’t answer.
Fresh air blow away shame was a favorite saying of Mama’s, and it rang in her daughter’s head right now.
The silence between herself and Jackson filled with the chattering of birds waking. Cho-cho, ignored, followed his nose out into the devastated ground and through the broken plants, quivering at the unfamiliar tang of the intruder. From inside they heard the murmur of their parents’ voices, Poppa’s still flickering with bitterness, Mama’s pouring balm on his resentment as she moved around getting breakfast ready. Pollyread smelled the hot oil from the kitchen, heard it sizzle as the first little balls of johnnycake dough were put to rest in the frying pan. The belly-scratching of hunger was not enough to distract her from the dilemma they faced.
Jackson liked to call her Miss Goody-goody and Miss Galbraith Junior (after the prim old lady who’d taught Sunday school at the African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Top Valley for longer than anyone could recall). She chafed at this. She was no goody-goody, as Jackson well knew. He just didn’t appreciate it when she pointed out to him the ethical shortcomings of some project or mission dreamed up by himself or his friends, such as raiding Mass Charley’s mango trees, whose fruit didn’t quite hang over his boundary fence by the river, which would have made them fair game. (At the same time she was not herself immune, once the mangoes were picked, to the succulence of those little blackies that just popped into the mouth and dribbled sweetness into the back of your throat. Being good, try as you might — and Pollyread really tried — was not a straightforward road from A to B to C.)
Like now. Last night. That was evil, no two ways about it. Who would do a thing like that? In the middle of the night and in a thunderstorm — to a neighbor! Because it had to be someone from Valley. Who would leave their home in that weather and come all the way from Cross Point or farther down to destroy someone’s livelihood? Pollyread looked across the pathway that ran outside their fence and saw Mass Charley’s rows of pepper and tomato like little Christmas lights in the new sunlight — untouched. So why the Gilmores’? Pure bad mind. Pure — evil.
This was like Town — Babylon, as everyone routinely called the place — where evil flared like a knife-edged flower. When she was a child growing up in Top Valley, and thrilled at every opportunity to go down to Redemption Ground, where all the vendors greeted her by name, Pollyread hadn’t fully believed the stories she heard adults telling about Town: of people robbed and raped and murdered, acid thrown, knife fights on the buses. Even in schools, she’d heard. Few Valley people knew anyone to whom these things had happened, but everyone would swear to the truth of the stories in the grand scheme of wickedness that was the city of twinkling lights and traffic. Something like last night would have made a weird kind of sense in Town. But last night hadn’t happened in Town, and Pollyread knew in her bones that no one from Town was responsible.
Despite the sun rising over Catherine’s Peak, she hugged herself from the chill she felt inside herself.
“Breakfast,” Mama called.
* * *
The children filed up the steps with heads down. Inside the house was shadowy, the only light coming from the window looking out onto the backyard. Fortunately, the yard sloped away from the house and could not be seen from the dining table, just mountains in the distance, and sky.
Mama offered grace. Normally, Poppa pronounced the blessing, or they joined hands in silent thanks. This morning he sat hunched over, with tight lips, staring at the round empty plate in front of him.
“Bless this food to our use,” Mama said so
ftly, “and us to they service, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.” As they all murmured amen, she cried: “And strike the wicked person who —”
“Maisie,” said Poppa firmly. Mama pulled herself up short, and the twins exchanged a glance: Poppa didn’t often “correct” Mama like that. “Today is Sunday. Let us give thanks that none of us come to any harm,” Poppa continued, softly, sounding more like himself again.
“Amen,” they said again, Mama also.
They ate the meal in virtual silence, speaking only when they needed something on the table that they couldn’t reach.
As Poppa was dipping his last piece of johnnycake into his cup of coffee, Jackson said, quietly, as if he was asking for a favor, “What we going to do, Poppa?”
For a moment Pollyread wondered if Jackson was asking Poppa for guidance as to whether they should tell him about their role in the debacle they had awakened to this morning. She looked at Jackson sharply, in a panic that he was having one of his crazy minutes when he would completely surprise her with something he said or did. Her brother was paying no attention to her at all, which worried her even more. His eyes were resting on Poppa’s face as though the whole world balanced on the blunt tip of their father’s nose.
“I don’t know, Jackso,” Poppa said wearily. “I still thinking ’pon it.”
Jackson seemed disappointed at his father’s answer, but Pollyread sighed audibly with relief.
“So we not going do nothing?” asked Jackson. “You not going to call police?”
For a moment there was complete silence: No one, not even Jackson until he said it, had thought of the police.
“What they going to do?” asked Poppa. “The brute well gone from this place by now.” His voice had that sad edge of earlier.
Mama sighed. “Philbert will be at service,” she said, referring to Corporal Philbert Letchworth, more widely, and respectfully, known as Corpie, who was second in command at the Cross Point police station and lived in Valley.
Blue Mountain Trouble Page 8
