Blue Mountain Trouble

by Martin Mordecai

  “Come,” Miss Brimley said eventually. Thin shoulders lifted and bony hands gripped the edge of the table. In a moment, with the help of the knobbly walking stick that took her everywhere like a third leg, she was stepping off toward the back of the little library. The twins fell into step on either side of Miss Brimley’s stick, in case she wanted to rest a hand on a younger shoulder. They were all now about the same height, the twins growing up, Miss Brimley growing down.

  Miss Brimley always looked to Pollyread as though she was made of wood — breadfruit, Jackson had said once. Her skin was pale brown, like Mama’s morning coffee, and shot through with darker streaks. Her voice was brown too, and probably, Pollyread thought, her hair before it had turned the gray that the twins had always known. Miss Brimley was, the twins agreed between themselves, ancient. Poppa had made his first visit to Cuthbert Bank branch library as a boy younger than the twins, and she’d seemed old to him then. Miss Brimley’s house, where she had been born, was one of the few upstairs buildings in the whole district. It had clearly been a splendid place once, when Miss Brimley’s father, inheriting from his father before him, had owned almost all the land they could see between Cross Point above and Cuthbert Ridge below it. Pollyread knew this from Poppa, who had repaired the house at various times and restored some of the old furniture. Miss Brimley’s mother was English and she had gone to school and university there. To everyone’s surprise, Evangeline had returned to Cuthbert Bank.

  “Books are what have kept me sane all these years, Mr. Gilmore,” Poppa reported Miss Brimley as saying to him once, mimicking even her tone of voice: a little scratchy but businesslike. “If I am sane.” (Pollyread, if ignorant of Miss Brimley’s problem, could appreciate the remedy.) With her own money and initially with her own books, Miss Brimley had converted some outer buildings adjacent to her house into a lending library for the district. Eventually the island’s library service had made it the Cuthbert Bank branch.

  At the back of the library, behind the last bookshelf on that side of the room, was a small round table that was understood to be private. No one else sat there unless invited or instructed. It was where Miss Brimley had a cup of tea or a sandwich and drink, brought to her from her house that was across from a little garden that was Jackson’s chief delight when coming to Cuthbert Bank. But there was no thought of flowers or herbs in anyone’s head this time.

  There were only two chairs at the table. At Miss Brimley’s nod of the head, Pollyread sat; Jackson stood.

  “So,” Miss Brimley said, her voice soft to indicate that this was a private conversation, but matter-of-fact in tone, “tell me about this goat of yours.”

  And, gulping for words and understanding, they told her. Hesitantly at first, waiting for the other to speak first and then jumping in to elaborate or explain, they soon settled into the flow of their story. Pollyread felt relief rising in her, as when on a hot day she sank down into the cool waters — provided there was water, of course — of Bamboo River. She realized that she had not enjoyed keeping the goat a secret from everyone except Jackson. All the secrets she had, some kept even from Jackson, shrank to the size of a guinep compared to this one. And as she heard the increasing lightness in his voice, Pollyread knew that he felt the same release.

  “What you think it mean, Miss?” Jackson asked when there seemed no more for them to say.

  Miss Brimley had listened in her own silence, not interrupting them. Occasionally, Pollyread saw her eyes drifting out the window to her little garden and the mountains beyond, but not because the old woman wasn’t listening, more as though she was thinking, or remembering.

  She smiled at the twins. “Heaven alone knows, Jackson,” she said cheerfully. “It seems you definitely saw something. Clouds can make funny shapes, but never the same shape twice that I’ve ever heard of. And both of you saw the same thing at the same time. That’s interesting too.”

  “You think is … obeah?” Pollyread asked. She felt the earlier tension nibble at her.

  “No, I do not,” said Miss Brimley, her voice suddenly stern. Pollyread stiffened.

  “Obeah,” Miss Brimley continued in a gentler tone, “comes from people, for doing things that will give one person advantage over another. People around here have tried it with me from time to time.” She chuckled at the memory. “Once —” She cut herself off, frowning and looking off through the window. “But you don’t want to hear about that.”

  The twins did, of course. Miss Brimley was full of wonderful stories that left you knowing there was more. “In the old days,” Miss Brimley went on now, “they used to worship all sorts of things, and see omens and meanings in a lot of things that we don’t pay much attention to nowadays. Most of us anyway.”

  “You mean,” said Pollyread, hesitating between words, “when you was a little girl, Miss?”

  Miss Brimley exploded in laughter, slapping the handle of her chair and almost barking in a voice that filled the whole library and escaped through the open windows into the sunlit afternoon. It was completely at odds with her scrawny old body. Still, Pollyread glimpsed, like bits of glass glinting in a pile of earth, sharp flashes of Miss Brimley when she would have been a little girl.

  “I’m not that old, pickney, mercy me,” she said, wiping her eyes. “No, I’m talking about l-o-n-g ago time, hundreds and thousands of years ago. Old Testament time. Baal and all those other gods and idols the prophets were always preaching about.”

  “Those were goats?” Jackson asked.

  “Not all of them. But many were animals, and I’m sure there were goats among them. They’re wonderfully vigorous and lively animals, don’t you think?”

  Pollyread, thinking of the prankish energy of Mass Cleveland’s goats, especially when one of them escaped into somebody’s ground, had to agree. Their goat was lively too. And with a power like Bamboo River now, after the rains.

  “Those animals were symbols of different things,” Miss Brimley said brightly, struggling to stand. “I think I have a book that might help you discover what the goat stood for.”

  They helped her to her feet and she tapped off with her stick toward the shelves, then changed direction as two children and a woman came into the library, requiring her attention.

  “I’ll find it for you before you leave,” she said to the twins. Then paused. “That new baby you told me about.” Miss Brimley looked into the twins’ puzzled faces. “It may be significant.”

  Jackson’s and Pollyread’s eyes collided like marbles. Abeo?

  Jackson, I have some new things to consult with you about. But let me get these books for Penelope.”

  Miss Brimley called Jackson her “consultant gardener.” (It was a word he heard on the radio sometimes, and kept promising himself to look up in the dictionary at home.) He knew from the tone in her voice that she was teasing him a little, but understood that she was complimenting him too — whatever consultant meant. Almost every time he came to the library, she would take him out into the backyard to show him her flower beds and her garden of herbs that grew in an apparently random ramble down the hillside behind her house. Jackson had helped her to plant the herbs the previous year, fulfilling very definite ideas Miss Brimley had about the casual effect she wanted to create. He would make suggestions to her about placement of plants according to sunlight and water runoff, passing on information that he hardly knew he had, so naturally had he imbibed it from working alongside his parents from when he was old enough to be trusted with his own knife for digging. There was an old man, Bampy, who had lived on the edge of Miss Brimley’s land forever, and who was supposed to look after everything that grew, but was only interested in what could be eaten, and therefore sold. “Every year,” Miss Brimley complained to Jackson, “his yam hills get closer and closer to my flower beds. If I die before that old rascal, he’ll move them right up to the verandah. And there’ll be string beans on my grave.”

  Jackson went over to the table where Pollyread was sitting with two books Miss B
rimley had given her. On the way, Jackson stopped at the shelf that held the National Geographic magazines, his favorite reading at the library, and scooped up a few copies. Miss Brimley had been subscribing, she’d told Jackson, since she was his age, and she’d kept every copy, moving them over to the library when she was finished with them in her house.

  Pollyread barely registered his presence, even when, as she appeared to be from time to time, looking directly at him. Eyes glassy, her mind was somewhere far. Thinking about Abeo, Jackson figured. Searching for symbols. Jackson held his own thoughts about Goat tight, in case they flew off into dark places. He turned his mind toward the pages in front of him, with their pictures of distant countries and strange peoples. Sometimes the people didn’t seem so strange. Once he had been reading a story on Ghana, turned a page — and was looking at the market at Redemption Ground! The luscious fruits and vegetables sprawling over the edges of the hamper baskets much like those of Mama and Aunt Zilla and the other Valley women. Fussy shoppers aggressive in search of a bargain. Even the children running around! Pollyread and himself could have been in the picture. At home, as he had excitedly retailed his discovery over supper, Mama had smiled and said: “Well, is there we all come from. We bring it with us.”

  Other times, like now, it was enough to just flick the pages idly, letting the pictures flare at him like matches. One picture in particular flamed: a mountain that reminded him of Angel’s Peak. He paused and spread his hands on the pages to hold the magazine open on the table. He started reading.

  The mountain was in Colombia, which was a country not that far away, where they spoke Spanish (which Jackson would learn if he went to secondary school in Town). The whole article was about Colombia, which had cities even more sprawling than Town, mountains even taller than Angel’s Peak, people of as many shades as he was accustomed to seeing here, and a bounty of plants and flowers tumbling off the pages.

  And then he saw it. Jammy’s plant!

  He went stiff, staring at the page. “What happen to you?” Pollyread asked, finally noticing him. His turn to ignore her. But that was because his throat was tight shut, his body rigid.

  The picture popped off the page at him. The same small bush with the yellow-green flowers set like jewels in clusters of light green leaves, oblong-shaped.

  He scuttled over to the entrance, where everyone was required to leave their bags, shoved his hand into his backpack, and extracted his prize.

  Back at the table — still not a word to his now intensely puzzled sister — he lay Jammy’s bush beside the picture in the magazine.

  The exact same thing!

  “What is that piece of bush? Where it come from?” Pollyread demanded. Her voice rang out in the little library. A sharp “Sh-h-h!” came back from Miss Brimley. The rebuke bounced off Pollyread. “Where that bush come from?” she whispered, but so fiercely she might as well have shouted. Miss Brimley got to her feet with surprising swiftness and was coming toward them before Jackson could think of a response.

  “What is causing all this noise over here?” Miss Brimley’s walking stick underlined the sudden firmness of her voice. “Would you care to enlighten us, Penelope?” Miss Brimley’s eyes seemed to be looking into her soul. And not much liking what she saw there.

  “Is not her, Miss Brimley,” Jackson said, bright as a new ten cent. “Is me cause it.”

  “Caused it? How?”

  “This.” He held Jammy’s bush. “And this.” He pointed down at the magazine on the table.

  Three pairs of eyes looked back and forth between the bush and the page.

  “Is the same bush,” Pollyread cried.

  “Yes,” Miss Brimley said a moment after, her voice softer than before.

  Jackson felt very pleased with himself.

  Miss Brimley picked up the bush and brought it close to her eyes. She angled it in different ways and moved it closer to, then farther away from, her face. It was a point of pride with her that she didn’t need to wear glasses, but the fact was that, as she herself put it, her eyes were growing dark.

  “I don’t think this is just my eyes, Jackson. This is something entirely new in my experience.” Her fingers played with the oblong yellowish-green leaves with the deep grooves down the middle. She looked at him. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before,” she said after a while, speaking as though asking herself a question. “Where did you find it?”

  Jackson waved his arm in the direction of the mountains. “Up Morgan’s Mount.”

  Miss Brimley sighed again. “Ah.” She looked down at the magazine.

  “And you think it’s the same plant as this one,” Miss Brimley continued, a bony finger wrapped with stringy veins resting on the open page.

  “It resemble.” Jackson felt the words scrape his throat. Maybe he was wrong. Pollyread would never let him forget it if he was.

  Pollyread herself was bent over the magazine, reading with an intensity that Jackson could feel.

  Miss Brimley ignored her for the moment and held out the bush to Jackson. “Are there plenty of them? These plants?” He nodded. “Wild?” He shook his head. “Someone’s planting them?” He nodded. “I see, said the blind man, adjusting his spectacles.” It was a little saying of hers that made him smile.

  Pollyread’s voice cut in. “It name erythro … throxy … throxylon coca. Erythroxylon coca,” she finished, looking triumphantly up at her brother.

  “Cocoa?” His throat was still dry. He didn’t understand. Jammy’s bush didn’t look anything like cocoa. There was a tree in their backyard, shade for some of Mama’s wild orchids. And cocoa grew plentiful in the district. Trucky’s father had a grove of them on his ground. But cocoa leaves were much bigger.

  “This is not our cocoa,” Miss Brimley said. She sat down in the chair next to Pollyread. “Let me see.”

  Jackson, standing between the two chairs, was too far away to see more than a blur of words on the pages. Fidgeting while Miss Brimley and his sister read and turned pages, he was about to move off in frustration when he noticed Miss Brimley’s hand press down hard on the page she was reading. Her back stiffened. Pollyread cried out, “Say what?”

  “What?” he asked. Neither of them replied. Pollyread was watching Miss Brimley, whose eyes seemed to be looking clean through her to something far beyond. Jackson got the strange feeling that he was the only one awake.

  “This,” said Miss Brimley, “is not good.” She was talking to herself, as though Pollyread and Jackson were not there.

  Jackson asked, “What is not good?”

  For a moment he thought no one had heard him. Then Pollyread said, “Is cocaine.”

  “Cocaine? What about cocaine?” Jackson heard irritation in his own voice. “Cocaine is not something that grow.” He knew about cocaine, a terrible drug that people in Town and foreign used and killed themselves with.

  “It make from coca,” Pollyread said, her own impatience beginning to show. “It say so here.” She indicated the magazine on the table with her chin.

  “Lemme see.” Pollyread got up from her chair to allow him to sit down. In the next chair, Miss Brimley was sitting quite still, no longer reading.

  Jackson began at the top of the page that was open, and soon was skipping words and then lines, his eyes looking for the words “coca” and “cocaine.” Eventually, as Pollyread and Miss Brimley had done, he found them. But a weird thing happened. Despite his efforts to pay close attention, some of the words of the article faded and blurred, while others were sharply in focus. His thoughts were jumping on those words like they were stepping-stones across a turbulent river: “narcotic” … “addiction” … “crack” … “lifetime” … “death” … On the other side of this river was darkness.

  His chaotic thoughts were broken into by Miss Brimley gripping her stick and getting to her feet, slow but firm in her movements. “You have to tell your father about this,” she said, sounding grim. “This is a devil plant.”

  * * *


  Miss Brimley’s stick tapped insistently on the wooden floor. “Do you hear me, Jackson Gilmore? You must go straight home and tell your parents about this. Take the magazine.” She looked sternly at Jackson first, then Pollyread. “They will know what to do.”

  On cue, it seemed, a horn sounded. “Roadman,” Pollyread called out involuntarily.

  “There you are, then,” Miss Brimley said with a little smile. Then, unexpectedly, she started fussing nervously. “Is he close? I’m not hearing as good as I used to.” She sounded suddenly like a frail old lady, which neither of the twins had ever thought her before. “Oh, dear,” she muttered to herself, the devil plant and the goat and everything else completely forgotten. “Where did I put them?”

  Pollyread asked, “Put what, Miss?” but Miss Brimley paid her no mind, instead turned a full circle around herself, eyes glazed. Finally, she said, “The books,” more to herself than to Pollyread, “where … ?” And then, with an emphatic bang of her stick on the floor, “Ah!” and she tap-tapped her way toward the entrance to the library.

  Jackson, meanwhile, ignoring the confusion around him, had grabbed his piece of bush and the National Geographic magazine and was right behind Miss Brimley, leaving a slightly bewildered Pollyread to catch up.

  Miss Brimley smiled broadly as she said, “Here they are,” and took two books out of one of the drawers underneath her table. She was, to Pollyread’s relief, her old self again.

  She held out two books, one in each hand. “Congratulations,” she said. “I wanted to add ours to the heaps and heaps you’ve no doubt been getting from everybody.”

  They spoke in chorus, uncomfortable but pleased. “Thank you, Miss Brimley.” With all the excitement of the past hour, everything else had flown clear out of their minds.

  “We want to have a celebratory tea party,” said Miss Brimley, “but we’ll have to do it another time. Miss Walters had to go to Town this last weekend, and I didn’t know when you’d be coming down to visit us.” Miss Walters had lived here with Miss Brimley for as long as all but the very oldest heads could remember. She wasn’t, as far as Pollyread knew, any kind of relative. The important information about Miss Walters was that she made the most delicious cakes and tarts of anyone living between Valley and Town. Both she and Miss Brimley were thin as bamboo, but generations of children had been fattened from Miss Walters’s oven.