Blue Mountain Trouble

by Martin Mordecai

  Then the baby started wriggling, and opened her flower of a mouth to release a sturdy shriek. Pollyread was mortified. She had snoozed and gurgled in the arms of Christine and Aidrene, happy as anything, it seemed. Why didn’t she like her? She was holding her as best she could, and she didn’t smell any different to the other girls, she didn’t think. And she had looked at her so — specially, just a few minutes before. She was sure of it. Pollyread’s arms were stiff with embarrassment. She didn’t dare look at Aidrene or Christine, in case their eyes were laughing at her.

  Miss Gloria and Keneisha did laugh.

  “She looking,” said Miss Gloria.

  “Looking for what?” asked Pollyread nervously.

  “She hungry,” Keneisha said.

  “She looking for her mam’s bubby,” Miss Gloria chuckled, and Pollyread then realized what the bawling and the smacking of lips and the squirming against her chest really meant. And felt a sharp pang of disappointment that she couldn’t nourish this little squiggling creature that simply wanted what she was entitled to and which Pollyread couldn’t provide. She giggled, the air around her suddenly lightened by the baby’s tickling. “Nothing here, pickney,” she said down into the little screwed-up face about to let go a further squall. “Sorry.”

  Miss Gloria rescued the baby, whose name Pollyread still didn’t know, holding her comfortably in one hand as she helped Keneisha rearrange her blouse with the other. Baby and breast were finally brought together, the crying swiftly subsiding into sucking gurgles before the fascinated eyes and ragged breathing of the three visitors, knelt in chorus on the floor before Keneisha. Pollyread rocked back on her heels, her eyes and thoughts moving only the short distance between the two faces, Keneisha’s and the baby’s, inches apart and occasionally touching, forehead to forehead.

  Run. Run like the wind. Jackson heard those words pounded by his feet into his head as he ran. A character in some book had said this, but he couldn’t remember what book or who. It might even have been an animal story from when he was younger. It didn’t matter. What mattered, he told himself, was that he run like the wind.

  At the same time, he wasn’t sure why he was running. He wasn’t running away from anybody; no one was chasing him. School was finished for the day. There were chores waiting at home, but they could be done when he got home.

  The idea had been forming, like something growing from one of the tiniest seeds he’d planted in the ground, since he and Poppa had come down from Morgan’s Mount. Empty-handed. And ignorant about what was being grown. On their land. His ground. Somehow the massacre in the backyard on Saturday night had clinched it for Jackson: all those broken, bleeding plants, while Jammy’s up on Morgan’s Mount were hale and hearty. It wasn’t fair. And though Poppa spoke more than once of settling things with Jammy, there was no mention of going back up there.

  Then, during science class today, when Miss Bovell was talking about genus and species, she had brought in several plants, ones that everybody in the class knew, to point out the scientific differences between them. A growling had begun in Jackson’s stomach that was not hunger. A niggling, like an itch in a place your fingers couldn’t quite reach. An itch that had made him squirm all through Miss Bovell’s class and the next — thankfully the last of the day — with Miss Watkins. And which had propelled him, stealthily, first out of the classroom and then around the back of the building and over a broken-down fence that was meant to keep animals from straying onto the property.

  He paused to draw breath. He was on the bank of Bamboo River without remembering how he’d got here. The weekend rain had made the river cheerful again. His schoolbag weighed a ton, but there was nothing to do but lug it along with him. Meanwhile, there was a pencil in his head, sketching in the way he had to go….

  In a blink, Jackson found himself on the other side of Bamboo River, as if someone had pushed him suddenly from behind, and he took off again, running. He didn’t allow himself to think of anything beyond the next bush to be navigated or tree trunk to be hurried around. He sank into the sounds he was making and remained there, following a path his feet remembered taking a few months before with Bollo and Trucky, away from Bamboo River. It would have been easier to go the way he and Poppa had taken two weeks before. But that would have meant passing home. Mama … Cho-cho …

  Run. Run like the wind.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, panting and sweaty, he was beside another gurgling stream of water. He couldn’t remember the name people gave it but he knew where he was.

  He followed the water to a jackfruit tree that he remembered Poppa telling him marked the boundary of Gilmore ground. The idea crossed his mind to cut one of the big fruit and carry it home for Mama, who loved jackfruit. Too heavy.

  Jackson looked quickly around him, guiltily, as though he had no right to be here. He had to remind himself that this was Poppa’s land, and one day would be his. Around him, now that he’d stopped crashing through the bush, was silence, except for birds. He heard his heart thumping. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, his lungs filled with the sweet rich jackfruit aroma that nearly choked him. The little river at his feet seemed to be laughing at him. The sweat on his arms and face felt cold.

  He looked carefully around him. He’d never approached the Gilmore ground from this direction before, and it looked quite different: bigger somehow. Or perhaps — yes, indeed, Jammy and his friends had started bushing the ground next to Poppa’s. The seedlings there were smaller, more recently planted but in the same tidy rows. Despite himself, the farmer in Jackson was impressed at the industry and care that was evident. And it was evident still: A rhythmic, syncopated sound that he recognized as chopping drew his eyes to the top of the expanded clearing across the stream. There, two men were hacking away at bush and grass, the whump of the cutlasses jumping around each other like dancers. Even though the men had their backs to him, Jackson melted behind the jackfruit tree, telling his nose to ignore the cloying smell.

  And tripped over something. Something that suddenly moved.

  * * *

  “Wha de rass!”

  The explosion of words seemed to throw Jackson forward to the ground. His schoolbag fell on his back, winding him. He had tripped over a leg, a man’s leg from the sound of the voice.

  “Who you is?” The voice was like a dog’s bark.

  From two meters away, sprawled on the ground, fighting for breath, Jackson saw the red eyes first, then Rasta locks. Then gleaming teeth. And smelled him.

  “Wait,” Jammy said. “Don’t you is Mass Gillie bwoy?” He was smiling. Jackson had accidentally kicked Jammy awake. And he saw why Jammy had been sleeping so soundly: a sumptuous brown-paper spliff still held between two fingers but now burning close to the flesh.

  Jackson didn’t answer. Jammy’s smile irritated him.

  “So is what bring you up here, bwoy?”

  “I is not a bwoy.” Anger made Jackson’s voice strong and seemed to pull him up to a sitting position from where he could see Jammy properly.

  “So, you is man?” Jammy teased.

  “You is not man either,” Jackson replied, though he remembered Poppa’s remark about Jammy having pickney growing in a girl’s belly in Town.

  “You far from home to be so facety, bwoy.” His scorn stretched out the repeated insult. “I-man sure Miss Maisie raise you better than that.”

  Mention of his mother fired up Jackson further. He remembered, though he hadn’t been there, Jammy frightening Mama in the early morning. “Better than what? And how you would know better from worse?”

  Jammy’s shoulders stiffened and he scowled, as if focusing on Jackson for the first time. “What you come up here for?” he grunted. “You come to study? I see you bring you schoolbag.”

  Without thinking about a response, Jackson looked across at the rows of plants embedded in the Gilmore ground. His ground. And remembered the backyard, which he should have been at home replanting. His anger boiled up all over again.r />
  “I come to tear up your plants. Just like you tear up our plants.” He heard his own voice, like a stranger’s, attacking Jammy. The threat of destroying Jammy’s plants had not even occurred to him before this. He remembered Poppa’s furious slashing at the plants the first time, and felt some of that same anger suddenly enlarge his chest like hot air pumped into it.

  “What plants?” Jammy’s eyes were as fierce as Jackson’s voice. And then they softened and slipped away from Jackson’s. Jammy took a deep draw on the spliff and held the smoke inside a while. “Bird in the air have nest,” he said dreamily, the words floating on wisps of smoke, “but I-man have no place to rest I head.”

  Jackson got to his feet and hoisted his bag onto one shoulder.

  “Where you going?”

  Jackson didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure.

  And then he was. He remembered what he had come up to Morgan’s Mount for in the first place. Run like the wind, Jackson heard in his head. He jumped as far as he could across the stream, landing in water up to his ankles, and scrambled over to the other side, struggling to stay upright from the unbalancing bounce of his schoolbag.

  “Oi!”

  Jammy’s shout from behind him pricked Jackson to move faster. As he ran his eyes scanned the nearest row of seedlings for the winjiest one, which he hoped would also have the shallowest roots. He grabbed it close to the ground. Thanks to the weekend of rain, it came up easily in his hand. He hoisted his bag on his shoulder and took off. Run like the wind.

  “Josephs!” Jammy called. “Ketch that little bwoy!” Jackson sensed Jammy getting to his feet but not running. Josephs must have been one of the two men bushing farther up the slope. If so, he could cut Jackson off easily by just running straight down the hillside to the river.

  “Ketch him, Josephs! Pick up you foot and run, you lazy —!”

  Jackson took Jammy’s advice better than Josephs. He found strength in his legs he could not have imagined. And he knew this side of the hill well. The cries and curses of Jammy, and Josephs’s shouts for him to stop, faded away, left behind as he scrambled up the hillside or drowned out by the bellowing and singing of breath in his own lungs, he didn’t know which. But when he collapsed at the top of the slope against the big mahoe tree that divided Morgan’s Mount from Top Valley, so exhausted at that point that he didn’t care if Josephs and Jammy were just steps behind, he was alone with his burning lungs and jellied legs. He couldn’t see very far back into Morgan’s Mount, but he was fairly sure no one still followed.

  He looked at the strange seedling in his left hand with a feeling of triumph. He’d got what he went for. He didn’t know yet what he was going to do with it. But he knew that the plant was important to finding out what Jammy was doing on Poppa’s ground — his ground. If he could find out what the plant was. And he had a few ideas about that too.

  She sweet, you see?”

  “Who?”

  “Abeo. Keneisha baby. She smell like hardo bread.”

  “Baby smell like bread? What kind of baby that?”

  “New baby.”

  “Funny.”

  “You just feel to hold it all the time and smell it.”

  “Until it poop.”

  “So? Baby have to poop. It’s natural.”

  “Not in my hand, it don’t have to poop.”

  “So your baby not going to poop?”

  “Which my baby?”

  “Your baby. The one you and you wife going to have. It not going to poop? Them going to be special baby? Different from everybody else baby?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  “So what mek?”

  “It going to poop, yes. But it going to poop in its mother hand.”

  “You think so.”

  “I know so. I-man not going to be holding up any baby full of poop.”

  “I-man will see.”

  “Hmmm.”

  * * *

  “I going to miss her, though.”

  “Who?”

  “Abeo.”

  “What happen — she going somewhere? She just born.”

  “No. I going somewhere.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Town.”

  “When you going Town?”

  “Stupid — to school.”

  “Oh.”

  “You forget about Saint Giles?”

  “I not going to Saint Giles.”

  “I hear them talking.”

  “Talking about what?”

  “Mama is to talk to the principal. She went to Saint Giles with him.”

  “Really now.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Nobody don’t ask me? Suppose I don’t want to go to Saint Giles?”

  “Why you don’t want to go to Saint Giles?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “But suppose I didn’t. Nobody don’t ask me if I want to or not.”

  “I asking you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  “I not going to see her growing up.”

  “Who?”

  “She who brings happiness.”

  “Who that bring happiness?”

  “Abeo, of course.”

  “I don’t know what kind of happiness she going to bring.”

  “How you mean?”

  “One more mouth for Miss Gloria and Mass Mose to feed. Besides, Keneisha too young to have baby.”

  “True. But plenty woman get ketch early.”

  “Them too fool.”

  “And I don’t suppose man have anything to do with them getting ketch.”

  “Man fool too. Baby is madness.”

  “But is not the baby fault. They don’t ask to be born.”

  “Maybe not. But baby is crosses.”

  “You was a baby once, you know.”

  “You too.”

  “I wasn’t no crosses.”

  “Hush up in there!”

  * * *

  “Jackso.”

  “What?”

  “I ’fraid.”

  “What you ’fraid for?”

  “Town.”

  “Anybody with sense in his head ’fraid for Town.”

  “Not Town, not really.”

  “Then what?”

  “Leaving here.”

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “Yes, of course I want to go. But …”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know. Abeo make me feel a way. And Mr. Cowan.”

  “Mr. Cowan?”

  “Yes, when I see him this afternoon.”

  “What happen?”

  “Nothing happen. It was the same as usual. He dress up going down to Shim’s. Only … and it was the same thing with Abeo. When I watch Keneisha feeding her. Like … like I wasn’t going to see them again.”

  “You mean like something going to happen to them?”

  “Not exactly … more like something going to happen to me.”

  “Something like what?”

  “Leaving Valley.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know when something special happen …”

  “Like what?”

  “Like … a rainbow. Just after it rain.”

  “Yes.”

  “The first time I see a rainbow, when I was little, after that I thought it would be there after every time it rain.”

  “And it wasn’t.”

  “Right. Now, when I see a rainbow it make me happy.”

  “Me too.”

  “And sad.”

  “Sad?”

  “Kinda. Because it going to be gone in a minute. And the next one, whenever it come, going to be completely different.”

  “All rainbows look the same to me.”

  “Maybe. But you are not the same.”

  “How you mean?”

  “You older.”

  “Older?”

  “Yes. Maybe just by a few days. Or a few weeks. Since you see the last rainbow.
But you is older than you was when you see the one before. So the rainbow look different.”

  “Well, is a different rainbow. It must look different.”

  “But is you just say that every rainbow look the same to you…. You understand what I saying now?”

  “Maybe … but what this have to do with Keneisha and the baby?”

  “This afternoon, when I was holding her … it was like a rainbow make me feel. Happy. I never see anything so pretty. And when I coming home, everything and everybody seem … special. Like I never see them before, and not going to see them again. By the time I reach home … I was crying.”

  “You crying now, yes?”

  “A little.”

  “Hush.”

  * * *

  “By the way.”

  “What?”

  “Where you was after school? Everybody looking for you.”

  “Everybody like who?”

  “Trucky and them was making up a side for cricket. And I was looking for you.”

  “For what?”

  “To tell Mama.”

  “Tell Mama what?”

  “ ’Bout Cho-cho and the rain.”

  “You tell her?”

  “No. But we have to tell her.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Where you went?”

  “Business.”

  “Business? What kind of business?”

  “Plant business.”

  “Poppa send you somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “So what kind of plant business?”

  “Is a secret.”

  “You going to tell me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “When?”

  “Eventually.”

  * * *

  “You mean you worried about something that don’t happen yet.”

  “Kinda.”

  “And you feel sad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though is something you want to happen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  They were walking silently down to school, Pollyread ahead, when out of the sparkling morning air, a man’s voice burst into Jackson’s thoughts. A voice he knew. “Howdy, little missus.”