“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Penelope, as you know,” Miss Phillipson said, turning back to the audience, “is also our valedictorian. And she will now say a suitable good-bye on behalf of all the grade sixers.” Miss Phillipson smiled as she emphasized “all.” Miss Phillipson adjusted the microphone to Pollyread’s height, then retreated to the chairs at the back of the stage, followed by the chairman.
Pollyread looked pleadingly at Mama, whose white church hat made her easy to find near the back of the crowd. Mama pointed her thumb at the sky in a blessing of encouragement. Poppa, standing with the men at the back so that the women could sit, waved his hand and grinned. Pollyread looked up at the sky. Massa God winked the last little piece of blue at her. Cloud obscuring the mountains around, enclosing their world. A distant rumble of thunder like furniture being moved around an immense house.
Pollyread pushed her hand into her uniform pocket and wrestled the piece of paper with her speech out, unfolded it. Saw the lines and lines of letters that were supposed to be the words that Miss Watkins had painstakingly typed out for her to say — and understood not one of them! It was as though she were a baby again, when she’d put down Poppa’s books on the floor and stare at the black markings, certain that great secrets and delights dwelt therein, because Poppa enjoyed staring at them but, frustratingly, having no means of tasting those delights, even when she licked the page.
She looked up from her sheets of gibberish to see if anyone else had noticed her confusion. Her audience, faces she’d known all her life, was a vast quilt of colors. She recognized the colors, but not the faces! But she sensed their collective expectation.
“Friends. Romans. Valley people.” Pollyread heard her own voice like a stranger’s elsewhere on the stage, or like the words had come out of the sky — surely that was where they had formed, and then fallen into her open mouth.
Pollyread heard a sharp breath taken in behind her. Miss Phillipson. And titters — teachers. The quilt of people in front of her rippled with laughter.
“Once upon a time …” Her voice was swallowed by a pounding inside her head. Voices in the audience hooted with laughter like flapping birds. If her feet had not felt like cement pylons, she would have bolted from the stage and kept running forever. Then a muted but firm voice behind her said: “Take a deep breath, Penelope.” Accustomed for years to obeying that voice, Pollyread filled her lungs with what felt like fire, and blew it out. The world seemed to vanish for the moment. Only that voice was real. “Now,” said Miss Phillipson, “take another one.” And Pollyread did. And balance was restored. The faces, no longer laughing but still filled with lively expectation, came into focus again. She even glimpsed Mama’s — worried, willing her strength and calm. She looked down at the paper she was holding and saw words, just words, not blurries or blobs, which had a moment ago resembled bird droppings. For good measure she took another deep breath of air that was clean and cool with promise again.
“Sorry,” she said, and sighed. “Once more from the top.”
“Reverend Giddishaw,” she read out from her paper, “Chairman of the School Board. Mrs. Joy Grenair, Junior Education Officer, Ministry of Education. Miss Annabelle Phillipson, Principal, Marcus Garvey Primary School …” Miss Watkins had warned her that she had to read these names at the beginning; it was the proper, expected thing to do. What Miss Watkins hadn’t told her — they hadn’t rehearsed that part of it, Miss Watkins had just typed them in — was Miss Phillipson’s first name: Annabelle. Pollyread didn’t know anyone in Valley named Annabelle, but that wasn’t it. Annabelle was a child’s name. The picture of Miss Phillipson as a baby, fuzzy one second and very sharp the next, a few days old like Keneisha’s baby, Abeo, but with half-glasses and large ivory-colored teeth, flooded Pollyread’s mind. The markings in front of her, just when they had become words, went silly again. Disaster rushed toward her in a mighty wind that tore at the paper in her hand.
Except that the wind was not of disaster but, Pollyread recognized immediately and with rapturous thanksgiving, of salvation.
Enough! said Massa God with a roll of his thunderous shoulders, and shook all the rain in the world from his dark gray cloak of clouds.
“Man scatter,” was how Poppa described the scene later, cackling like a schoolboy.
The rain fell like a plague of little stones flung into the crowd. People dodged and danced in a futile attempt to avoid the missiles. Pollyread, struck still by the sudden barrage and numb with relief, watched, fascinated, as the paper in her hand folded around her fingers like a bandage, dribbling streaks of red and black onto her wrist and the ground. It didn’t occur to her to get off the open stage to shelter. In a few seconds her uniform became a slimy second skin and she could taste the sweat and pomade from her scalp running into her mouth. The rain on the zinc roof of the old school building drowned out her very thoughts. Her mouth tasted salty and her eyes were burning. She realized, saltiness rising behind the floodgates of her eyes, that she had started to cry. She swallowed her rainy tears, hoping nobody noticed. Just as she thought the barriers would give way she felt a hand on her shoulder, turning her around. “Come, pickney,” Miss Watkins said, tender but urgent. “You favor wet chicken. Come.”
With as much dignity as she could command, Pollyread allowed herself to be led off the stage by Miss Watkins, into the shelter of the staff room. As they walked past the sound system box, there was an explosion and a flash of blue and red lights and a sharp smell of burning that made both of them cough and laugh.
Miss Watkins, who was none too dry herself, got a towel from somewhere and shared it with Pollyread.
“We’ll have to call you the rainmaker, Penelope,” said Miss Phillipson from right beside her, making Pollyread jump. The principal’s voice was as cool as the air. As if Pollyread was responsible for the deluge. But there was a little twinkle — it may have been rain but Pollyread decided it was a twinkle — in the corner of Miss Phillipson’s eyes. And she remembered that calm, quiet voice that had saved her from doom. Pollyread gave up her straight face for a smile.
“Yes, Miss,” said Pollyread, and found herself bobbing in a curtsy, something she only did when she and her friends were practicing quadrille for the festival — the rain must have seeped into her brain.
Not quite the vale she had envisaged. Closer to a vale of tears. But she was still standing.
Miss Phillipson was a magician. As soon as she dismissed the school for summer holidays — a distant matchstick figure on the stage waving frantically and shouting at people who mostly couldn’t hear her — the rain stopped. Within five minutes, the sun was out, blades of light flashing off the puddles of water.
In a jumble of emotions as thick as the shifting clouds, Pollyread walked out of the school yard of Marcus Garvey for the final time with Mama. Poppa, Jackson, and other grade-six boys and some fathers had remained to help stack up the chairs. Wherever life takes us, her undelivered speech had proclaimed, we will always carry a piece of Marcus Garvey Primary School in our hearts. At the time of writing it, she’d joked to herself, Which piece? The coolie plum tree? Her favorite place at the school, especially in season — that she’d miss. Miss Watkins had asked her what she meant and the best she’d been able to say was, “Like a smell that you never smell again, but you always remember how it smell.”
She’d said good-bye to all her teachers, solemnly promising those who asked that she would indeed come back and see them. She didn’t know whether she would, or whether she even wanted to. She was already missing Miss Watkins, and already forming the determination to be a teacher too, and come back to Top Valley and teach, eventually becoming principal — though not a principal like Miss Phillipson. But Miss Watkins lived below Cuthbert Ridge so maybe, when Pollyread and Jackson came home for holidays …
The future suddenly yawned at her like a hungry dog … weeks and months away from (she swiveled her head) all this … down in that violent city full of wicked people who
mocked country bumpkins while they were busy killing one another and smoking God knew what — cocaine! … There was one comforting thought: They would be with Aunt Shiels and Uncle Josie. They were family and had a large house — the twins would each have their own room for the first time. But most of the time they would be at school anyway, at the mercy of those crude Town children…. Maybe Jackson was right: Stay home where you belong and where you have your place and people.
But as she was walking between the cracked concrete gateposts of Marcus Garvey Primary, clinging like a baby to Mama’s damp dress and inhaling her familiar smell, Pollyread knew that the contraption of barbed wire and fence posts posing as a gate that Mr. Wadsworth the caretaker would drape across the opening when everyone was gone was already separating her from whatever her life had been up to that moment.
* * *
For a Monday afternoon, especially a rainy one, Shim’s Grocery and Saloon was well patronized, both sides of it. There was an unusually large population of children, especially grade sixers, who had been aware from grade three or four of the tradition at Shim’s that on the first day of summer holidays every grade sixer got a double scoop of ice cream — free. Mrs. Shim knew all the children anyway, so even overgrown grade fivers didn’t have a chance of fooling her. In any case, all other children got their cones at half price.
Miss Clarice had three fires going that she had kept valiantly alive through the rain. On two of them kerosene pans were perched, one with her mainstay soup, the other with boiled corn. The heaped coals of the third fire bore, among the hot stones and ash-caked wood, chunks of yam with blackened skins, pieces of saltfish, and cobs of corn roasting to black-and-yellow perfection.
There was no need for anyone in Valley to cook supper tonight. Pot turn down, as Poppa would say.
Jackson was one of a fluid group of boys, between six and ten in number, who were challenging one another to one-hand catch with a rubber ball — the other hand bearing an ice-cream cone or a cob of corn, or in Trucky’s case, both. Good-natured mockery and teasing fell sooner or later on everybody, because catching the ball was of less importance than keeping the food safe in hand.
Keeping his eye on the yellow rubber ball, which seemed to get smaller and darker as the evening came down, Jackson tried to focus on tomorrow. He would be able to lie in bed if he wished, or get up as early as he liked and go out into the backyard and inspect the plants. The damage there had not been entirely repaired — there was still work to be done, and he could start on that bright and early tomorrow morning if he wished. Or he could wander around Valley, looking for some of these same friends he was playing catch with. Free as a bird, he thought, catching sight of a flock of white wings whispering home in the purple light.
But he wasn’t free yet. Tonight still had to be got through. There he’d be caught between his parents’ eyes, with Pollyread skewering him for good measure. Tonight, Jackson thought as he flung the ball at Janja, was going to be the night of decision. Nothing had been said by anybody, but Jackson knew. This being the end of term, there would be talk of the summer holidays — and beyond. Plans would be made about uniforms and books and organizing with Aunt Shiels and Uncle Josie for them to stay there during the next term. Everybody talking around Jackson, as though, despite not getting first choice of St. Giles, he would still be going there. Mama, unusually for her and without telling the twins why, had dressed herself up one morning and gone as far as Stedman’s Corner with them a couple weeks back, and caught the bus to Town. She was back home by the time they returned from school, still closemouthed. Talking it over, the twins had agreed on her mission: to organize for Jackson to go to St. Giles. Pollyread was delighted, as though the whole thing was her idea. Jackson had kept his own counsel.
He wished he knew what he wanted. He knew what he really wanted, that hadn’t changed since he’d known himself: to grow things. To work the backyard, and the ground by Bamboo River and, now that Jammy had been evicted by Corpie and the judge in Town, the ground at Morgan’s Mount. That was what he still wanted: to work with Poppa and grow things to sell, for people to eat, and flowers to make houses beautiful. The thought of being surrounded all the time by the big buildings of Town, walking on the dirty asphalt streets, heat and sweat and noise all the time …
But he probably wouldn’t be allowed to do what he wanted. He was beginning to accept that. And he had had time to think about things, and was getting used to the idea of King’s College. By himself. Without Pollyread. Just boys for a change. Like now, he thought, watching the ball fly between his friends. None of them would be at King’s, indeed no one else from Marcus Garvey. He felt sad about that. But they had the whole summer ahead now. And perhaps there would be new friends to be made in Town. Maybe Town wouldn’t be too bad after all. Miss Pollyread would just have to manage at St. Giles without him.
Still, maybe he needed to talk to Poppa before they got home. Man to man.
* * *
Leaning against the doorpost of the grocery side of Shim’s, nibbling on her roast corn, Pollyread watched the boys playing and the smaller children running after one another outside the circle of the ball game. Light and shadow, sun and cloud, chased each other across the open ground also, playing. Distantly, thunder rumbled every few minutes. Behind her, Mama and her friends were enjoying soft drinks and beers inside the grocery. The men, including Poppa, were on the other side, in the rum bar. Women were not unwelcome in the bar, but when gathered in numbers like now, they tended to stay in the grocery, which had a longer counter. Today Mr. Shim had found extra stools from somewhere and everyone who wanted a seat had one, including Mama, who looked tired.
But Pollyread wasn’t listening to what the group of women behind her was saying, nor was she paying much attention to the children scattered around Stedman’s Corner. Pollyread felt distant from it all, unable to share in the jollification of her schoolmates. Her thoughts were coated with the cool moist evening that was coming down, darkening Stedman’s Corner.
From she’d known herself, Pollyread had always had two ambitions in her life. The first one changed from time to time. One month it was to be a teacher like Miss Watkins. Though she didn’t know whether she could deal with bad-behave children. Or a librarian, like Miss Brimley, because Pollyread couldn’t imagine a greater joy than having books end to end in her life.
But her other ambition was as fixed as the time of AME’s Sunday morning service, from ever since she was small until now. It was to sell produce in Redemption Ground market at the edge of Town. Like Mama.
Listening to the women inside with Mama, who had known Pollyread for as long as she’d known herself, Pollyread was remembering when Mama used to take her, or send her with Aunt Zilla, to Redemption Ground. Remembering the banana trash and the orange peel and the flies, and the smell of meat and fish from the butchers at the other end of the big shed that was the main market. Remembering the fruit that was always there to eat, and the other vendors’ children to play with, jumping over the piles of produce and baskets, the vendors grabbing and shouting after them. Mid-morning, the fried dumplings and saltfish that would appear like manna in the white-and-blue enamel bowls. In the late afternoon before they started packing up, a little corn pork or oxtail and boiled green bananas, with hardo bread and, in season, poor people’s butter, avocado pear.
But what Pollyread remembered most keenly from those times was the feeling of being at the center of the business of the world. The customer’s fingers testing fruits and vegetables under the watchful eye of the vendor. The quiet haggling for the best price, the quarrels and making-ups, the loyalties between purchasers and vendors that extended over years and generations. Mama’s deep apron pockets, where the crumpled paper money and the tinkling coins lived.
Every now and then someone would want to buy something and Mama’s back would be turned, or she’d have gone to the toilet at the far end of the shed. “Watch these things for me, Miss Gladys,” she would call to the tall, thin lady wit
h the gold front tooth who had occupied the spot next to theirs from before Pollyread was born. “Two dollar fifty for cabbage,” Pollyread would sing out right after Mama left, knowing that cabbage was the scarcest thing that week and everyone else had it for three dollars or more. And once the customer stopped, Miss Gladys could only look at her hard, because to say anything about the correct price would drive the customer away. Pollyread would sell several kilograms of cabbage before Mama came back to hear the tale from Miss Gladys. “I never know, Mama,” she would say innocently, plum juice and syrup in her voice. “I think I did hear you say two dollar, I was trying to make some more money.” And she would push the money down into Mama’s big apron pocket and walk off, looking contrite and aggrieved at the same time, but filled with pride in herself. But for her having been there at that particular time, she would say to herself, the cabbage wouldn’t sell at all. Miss Gladys still had a big pile of three-dollar cabbage in front of her!
She missed all that excitement, even the scoldings. Between studying for the Common Entrance exam and recovering from it, she had not been down to Redemption Ground as often as before. And now …
Phrases like big opportunity for the pickney dem and better life for herself were repeated over and over by the women and men inside Shim’s until they floated in the air like banners.
Book is like bird, Mama was always telling the twins. You can go anywhere in the world in them, and them will take you anywhere you want to go. A book was a world for Pollyread, and she spent a lot of her time in the world of books, happy as the day was long — and the day was never long enough for a good book. Books, it seemed to her now, were taking her away to a new life — so people said over and over. Pollyread wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She felt, inside herself, a closing of windows.
Blue Mountain Trouble Page 18
