Poppa put a forkful of food in his mouth.
Corporal Letchworth slurped his drink and swallowed noisily.
Slowly, Pollyread lifted her mug of cocoa and sipped delicately from it.
Jackson, to his own amazement, heard himself say: “Another thing, Mama.” What are you doing? His own voice banged inside his head. He felt Pollyread’s eyes like searchlights from across the table.
“What other thing, Mister Man?” One shoulder lifted, as if in preparation.
“Cho-cho,” Jackson croaked, and his sister’s eyes swiveled heavenward in anticipation of disaster. Despite the warning in his head, Jackson thought he was doing the right thing, and was determined to proceed. If only he could find his voice.
“Cho-cho was up there too? I thought —”
Jackson croaked at the same time as Pollyread rescued him. “Not up there, Mama. Here.”
“In the house?” Mama, forehead rippling with confusion, bent over and looked under the table. She straightened. “But Cho-cho always in the house.” She looked at Jackson as if her son might be a little soft in the head. Pollyread’s eyes said: You start it, now you finish it.
“Him was in the house that night,” Jackson said in a rush.
“What night?” Poppa chimed in, suddenly interested.
Jackson didn’t dare pause — he’d probably choke — so he rushed into his story of the thunderstorm, which re-created itself in his head. The thunder and lightning of the twins’ misbehavior rumbled and flashed behind his eyes; the words poured out like heavy water flushing through his conscience. He fixed his unblinking gaze on the table in front of him. Hands. Four pairs of hands resting on the dining table. He told his jumbled tale to them, the words clattering onto the table like marbles, all colors and sizes, making different sounds. To his surprise the fingers made no effort to catch the words. Finally, the last one rolled off into the surrounding silence.
One set of fingers, Poppa’s, had started to drum on the table. Jackson knew the signal. Trouble. But he felt lighter. He hadn’t known what he was going to say, or even that he was going to speak at all. But the words that had tumbled out of him, which had now evaporated into the air like mist in sunlight, had been bundled up inside him for days. And now he felt … like a balloon.
The drumroll of his father’s fingers merged with another rumbling, which grew like a wave and overwhelmed Poppa’s annoyance. Mama. Laughing. Cackling.
“Philbert …” Jackson finally looked up. Mama was gasping for breath, everyone else watching her closely. Pollyread’s fingers were pressed over her mouth. “Is a good thing … he not in court … giving statement. He would confuse … the judge … everybody.” Mama wiped away tears of laughter.
“Well, he don’t confuse me,” Poppa said, stern as a piece of board. “I know exactly what he saying. That dawg —” Right on cue, Cho-cho scrambled out from under the table and stood on his hind legs to put his front paws on Poppa’s leg. Poppa looked down on the dog as though a small spaceship had landed on his thigh. A squeak escaped between Pollyread’s clamped fingers. Then Mama noticed Cho-cho and her laughter inundated the table. Corpie added his hearty growl, and Poppa eventually threw up his hands in despair and allowed himself an embarrassed smile. Jackson alone kept himself serious, waiting. Just in case.
The policeman pushed back his chair. “Well, my work don’t finish for the night yet. Sister Maisie, thank you kindly for an excellent repast. Don’t be too hard on the little ones,” he added, bathing the twins with a broad smile, “they did mean well.”
Mama’s laughter drained away, and her eyes brushed the twins with shadow as she grunted noncommittally.
The adults stood up.
“Poppa?” Pollyread called softly.
Poppa, on the way to the door with Corporal Letchworth, turned to look at her.
“When you come back, I need you to help me write my speech,” said Pollyread, with a little smile twitching the corners of her mouth.
“Speech?” Mama and Poppa spoke together.
“For Monday,” said Pollyread in a little voice. Normally she would have preened in the center of this pool of attention, but Jackson understood her air of reluctance: She was testing, like Cho-cho sniffing the air, to see how far they had emerged from under the cloud of parental displeasure.
“What is happening on Monday?” asked Corporal Letchworth.
“Prize giving,” Jackson ventured.
“Ah yes,” said Corpie, remembering. Nova, his daughter, one of the bright sparks of grade five, would almost certainly be getting a prize.
“You giving a speech at the prize giving?” asked Mama, sounding a little distracted, still chewing over the strange stories she’d just heard. “You didn’t tell anybody that?”
“She is valedictorian,” said Jackson, proud of his sister — and relieved at the apparent success of the distraction.
There was a collective intake of breath and then a brief cloudburst of congratulatory clapping and laughter. Mama, back fully with them now, beamed. “You need to take out you best shirt and wash it tomorrow. And put it out in the sun. I will be down at market. Your good shirt need to mend, Jackso, I don’t know what you do with you clothes. I will do that when I come back.”
“Yes, Mama,” they chimed together.
“You know what you going to say?” Poppa asked, delight and pride bubbling in his voice. The sun rose again in Pollyread’s eyes. Jackson relaxed a little.
“Sort of,” Pollyread replied. “But I need you and Mama to help me polish it.”
Jackson, once again, had to acknowledge a grudging — and in this case welcome — admiration for his twin’s technique in parental manipulation. Pollyread probably knew exactly what she was going to say. Finding things to say was never her problem. Miss Watkins had told her two days ago about being valedictorian. But she had not told their parents, and had sternly sworn her brother to silence about “her” news. It was as if Pollyread had instinctively known that the value of such news was going to be enhanced by when it was shared, and had decided that this was the moment. Bringing in Mama and Poppa before a word had been written down was a means of completely dispelling the last traces of the pall that had hung over their heads throughout the evening. Jackson heard in his mind the ba-DAM of the winning domino slammed down on the table in the corner of Shim’s rum bar, where the men played most nights. His sister, he had to admit, was a master — mistress, she would insist.
The library of Marcus Garvey Primary was in the old building in which the parents of many of today’s children, Poppa included, had themselves attended school. It now housed the principal’s office, teachers’ common room, and library, which was actually a large cupboard where supplies such as boxes of chalk and exercise books and ledgers had once been kept. Those things were now piled in a corner of Miss Phillipson’s office, threatening to topple at any moment if someone stamped too hard on the old wooden floor. Probably, in the days when the old building had been a dwelling house, this space had been the pantry. Shelves ran along each wall, and there was room for a narrow table that Miss Phillipson had brought a few years before. “The man whose name adorns this school was a writer and printer,” the principal would declare from time to time. “We honor his name with these few books as we have here.” Few enough they were, and Miss Watkins was their zealous guardian.
She had Pollyread look up the word valedictorian in a battered dictionary. Its root word was the Latin vale, farewell. The valedictorian, therefore, was the person who said farewell. Pollyread liked the word farewell. It had more substance to it than good-bye, was more grand. Everybody said good-bye and for all sorts of little things, like going down to Town or going home after a visit. Leaving Marcus Garvey Primary for the last time, to move to Town and onward into the wider world, was surely something worthy of a farewell, one with a tragic wave and a little eye water. As in “vale of tears,” which old people were always talking about “soon shuffling off.” A perfect fit, Pollyread thought.
>
“You will be speaking on behalf of your classmates,” Miss Watkins had cautioned right away at their first little conference in the library.
“Yes, Miss.”
“So you need to ask them what they want you to say on their behalf.”
“Yes, Miss.”
“What they would say if they had the chance to speak.”
“All of them, Miss?”
“Penelope!”
“That would take a very long time, Miss.”
Miss Watkins knew her star pupil well: She had followed this road of words many times before, sometimes right into a brick wall or a swamp.
“You know very well what I mean, Polly,” she said sternly.
“Yes, Miss.”
Pollyread was going to miss Miss Watkins. There would be new teachers at St. Giles in Town, and surely a few of them would be nice, and interesting, and helpful. But none of them would be Miss Watkins, who was all of those things and more. She liked Pollyread, and wasn’t afraid of her nimble mind or her sharp tongue or her cunning ways, because Miss Watkins was like that herself. Pollyread had read once in a book about someone “who wore his authority lightly.” Poppa had explained that it meant someone whose authority and power did not need to be thrown about to impress people; people recognized it right away. Miss Watkins was like that. She wasn’t like some other teachers at Marcus Garvey Primary who tried to intimidate the brighter children because they asked questions that those teachers didn’t always know the answers to. Pollyread wanted to talk about those teachers in her valedictory speech. Not by name, of course, but so that everyone would know. But she knew she couldn’t. It would only get Miss Watkins into those teachers’ bad books for encouraging such facetyness. Besides, her parents would be embarrassed. But, Pollyread thought wistfully, she would be a heroine to her classmates….
Now she was just one of the 327 students sitting in assorted chairs and benches in the cooling quadrangle of the school yard — for the moment anyway. Soon, too soon, her moment would come. Hopefully it would come before the rain. They sat under a vault of blue sky — God’s bald head, as Pollyread thought of it — but it was fringed by dirty gray clouds that were heavy with the near certainty of rain. Rain was always welcome in Valley, and you didn’t curse it in case it kept away out of pique. But there were times, and this was one of them, when your life was hostage to the clouds’ whimsy. This afternoon, children and adults, students and teachers, families and well-wishers, threw eyes and anxious prayers at the sky.
Pollyread was in two minds about whether she wanted God to wait until she’d finished her vale before pulling the clouds over his bald head. She wanted her moment up on the stage, in the spotlight. But she knew that many people present felt that she enjoyed the spotlight much more than was proper for any “little” girl. That was their business, and not the source of her uncertainty. But today’s spotlight was bigger than any she had ever had before, bigger even than Common Entrance. That morning, surprise though it had been, was in front of just the school. And the surprise of it had helped: She’d just said things as they came into her head.
This time, however, she had known about today for a week. She had a speech written out. Miss Watkins had coached her on it, and typed it out on a typewriter she had at her home. The two folded sheets were in the pocket of Pollyread’s school uniform, crackling every time she moved. And most of the people who lived in Top Valley were gathered, and many from Cross Point and as far down as Cuthbert Ridge. As the school had marched in to the loudspeaker playing “Land of Hope and Glory,” she’d noticed Corporal Letchworth and his missus, sitting beside Mama and Poppa and similarly dressed in Sunday AME clothes. She’d also seen Constable Phillips and another policeman whom she didn’t know looking out of place in uniform on the edge of the crowd. In case Jammy showed up, she figured. He had two siblings at Marcus Garvey, though she doubted that he had any interest in seeing them get prizes, if they did.
Everything was in place. All the parents, those whom she knew wanted her to give a good speech, and probably some others who didn’t. (Don’t pay mind to bad-minded people, Mama had tried to teach them.) It was a ceremony, a ritual she had taken part in every year from grade one through to grade five. Like a familiar dream. It went on too long, and the speeches were boring, and the sun was hot, and a couple times she remembered there had been showers, causing consternation and the rearranging of things. But all that was past. Today was real. And would be the last prize giving. In fact, it would be the last day that she would be a pupil (inmate, she sometimes thought) of Marcus Garvey Primary. After this afternoon, the world would change forever. Inside her, she felt it changing already.
And that was why she felt nervous. Everyone — her classmates, her parents, the teachers, Miss Watkins, and even Miss Phillipson, who had been very friendly over the past week, perhaps because she knew it was her last week of Pollyread — was looking forward to another perfect prize giving. And she, too-big-for-her-boots Penelope Elizabeth Gilmore, might spoil it for them.
So maybe it was time for Massa God to intervene. Pollyread looked up at the sky. His bald head was still very much there, beaming blue down at them. But smaller. The fringe of clouds was a little thicker now, and ragged. Perhaps … she didn’t dare even think the full thought, in case she put her goat-mouth on the proceedings. (And where was Goat, she wondered.)
* * *
Grade four did a calypso as their contribution to the afternoon’s entertainment. One of Miss Singh’s daughters, Sintra, was the lead singer, dressed as a market woman and carrying a little basket on her head with an ease and skill that Pollyread envied. Sintra would be, Pollyread reflected, the next “star” at Marcus Garvey Primary, because after the calypso, dressed in her rainbow blouse but school uniform skirt, she collected several prizes.
Grade five’s performance, an Anancy story dramatized, with Revival singing at the end, went on too long. By the time Vince “Trueblood” Parchment, Jammy’s younger brother, who played Anancy, had wiped the last speck of porridge from his mouth, God’s bald head was like a dainty little blue saucer adrift on a huge iron-colored tablecloth.
An eye on the relentless clouds, Miss Watkins hurried her grade sixers onto the stage. “Just stan’ up anywhere,” she hissed over and over as they filed up onto the little stage, tripping over one another’s feet. “And talk clear!” They did three poems by Louise Bennett. Miss Watkins had made them into a little play, with different students starring. Pollyread and Jackson were in the chorus. Aidrene Albert, show-off AA, champion elocutionist of the district, led the first poem, Jeremiah “Bus Driver” Darby the second. But it was Christine Aiken — shy, hang-back Christine, adorned in bandanna cloth, her lips, finger- and toenails bright red — who had the crowd clapping in time and banging on their chairs by the end, her energy and flair in the last poem carrying her classmates to an excellence of timing and intonation not achieved in rehearsal and bringing a wide smile of prideful delight to Miss Watkins’s face.
* * *
Various members of the board had given out the prizes to different grades. Now the sixers were to be honored by the chairman himself, a tall, serious reverend who had not found Christine’s antics amusing. He came onto the stage on one side while the sixers went off on the other, back to their seats.
Jackson’s quartet got the cup, a large one, for the best agricultural project of the year, a little herb garden that Jackson had designed and supervised, driving his less work-inclined friends like (they claimed) a slave master, and ending up doing much of the work himself anyway. They had a fine time giving one another high fives as they bounced back onto the stage and Bollo held the cup aloft as though he had been personally responsible for the triumph. Their parents drowned out all others with their clapping.
Aidrene won the prize for speech. She was destined for Town the following week to compete against eleven-year-olds from all over the island in the national speech championships. One of Uncle Josie’s small buses was already book
ed for the day to collect a busload of Marcus Garvey children, including Pollyread, to be there to cheer AA on, led by Miss Watkins.
Tafiri Smith, to no one’s surprise, won the prize for art. He was a quiet boy, except on the soccer field, where, dreadlocks flying, he was a fierce and talented striker, the star of Marcus Garvey’s team. The eldest child of a couple who farmed just below Cross Point, Tafiri led a troop of neatly turned-out siblings to school every morning, one in every grade. A cry of “Righteous!” came from Tafiri’s father as his son collected his prize, art supplies.
Jeremiah Darby, to the surprise of many, won a prize for “most diligent student.” He was the class clown, but only when there wasn’t any work to be done. When there was, his head was bent closest and most steadfastly to the desk, and not only because of his thick-lensed spectacles. Jeremiah did his trademark bob-and-weave bus drive up to the stage; even Miss Phillipson smiled.
To almost everyone’s surprise, including her own, Christine Aiken won a prize for “most helpful student.” Expecting to take no further part in the proceedings, she hadn’t bothered to change out of her costume, and came onto the stage barefoot, pulling down her bandanna skirt. From the back of the crowd, her mother beamed. She couldn’t applaud, as she held a child in each wiry arm. They clapped their sister for her.
“And the final prize,” Miss Phillipson announced, “is for the best overall student in grade six. Our Common Entrance scholarship winner — Penelope Gilmore.”
Pollyread felt herself drowning in the applause, and numb. Not with shock or surprise — Miss Watkins had told her from days earlier how the program would be organized. But the long afternoon of prize giving and performances and speeches had left her drained of energy, almost sleepy. Still, Mama and Poppa would be smiling broadly and puffed with pride, so she put a small plastic smile on her face as she went onto the stage.
The smile on Miss Phillipson’s face seemed genuine. That did surprise Pollyread. She thought that the principal was probably just relieved to know that Pollyread, finally, was moving on out of her life. Pollyread, feeling a little guilty for her wicked thought, stretched her own smile as she took her prize — she glimpsed the words A–Z of between the strips of decorative ribbon — and shook the principal’s cool, small hand, and then took the book from the chairman of the board’s larger, rougher fist.
Blue Mountain Trouble Page 17
