Mark Blackman. She gives herself special permission to think, “Jeremiah’s father,” for she has taught herself not to regard him in that way. She hadn’t seen him at the seminar, but then chancellors don’t wander around universities, never mind she still thinks doing walkabout is a good idea. She’d told him so once. Right now she doesn’t care where he walks or if he can walk at all. But he is Jeremiah’s father and, as Phyllis often points out, the odds are he’ll in time find out, and if he does, he might assert his rights to his child. She’s certain Mona hasn’t told him about Jeremiah, or she’d have heard from him long ago. But what if Mona decides to? She’s thinking about Mark and his wife only on Jeremiah’s account. For that reason, quickly in and out of UA suits her fine. Mona is bound to come, she of the greedy coolie eyes, so the less time around them, the better. Mona nags at her though, an irritant like the blister that’s developed over a small cut on her little finger since yesterday afternoon. It first itched and now it aches.
Why doesn’t Mona make her own baby and stop sniffing round Jeremiah?
The two men she’d gladly have made a baby for are unavailable, one dead and the other as good as dead, for making babies, anyway. So Jeremiah is it, all that there is to her life, the resolution of all her dilemmas of unbelonging. He’s certainly black enough to be a Carpenter, and he’s the person who binds her to her impossible birth mother, twelve years her senior, day in, day out; the person who erases by his bright, rumbunctious self every dread aspect of his and her heritage; the person whom she can wallow in caring for and being kin to. If his grandfather is his grandmother’s half-brother, and his father, who doesn’t even know he exists, is another woman’s husband, so what? If he isn’t the fruit of a great passion but merely of the passing encounter of two bodies in the night — well, morning, more accurately — he is still her joy, her purpose, her completion. He’s hers. Not Mark’s and not Mona’s!
As she rummages in her bag for pain tablets, she wonders if anyone has done a study on how many men in the Caribbean have children about whom they know nothing. She swallows two pills with a long drink of ice water and turns off the light, but her arm won’t let her be. She can’t figure out what’s wrong with it, nor resist gazing at it in the dimness, turning on the light to peer at it, imagining there are tiny dots forming on the skin. Nor can she find a place to put it when she instructs herself to go to sleep once and for all.
“Jeremiah, you’ve had two stories. Time for bed now.”
“Phone, Mama. Phone. I’ll get it!”
“It’s okay, son. I have it.”
She turns and reaches for the phone with her left hand, for the pain in her other arm is fierce.
“Hi, Grace. It’s me, Maisie.”
“Hi, Maisie. How you doing?”
“You sound sleepy. I hope I never wake you up?”
“I need to get up anyway. What time is it?”
“It’s nearly eight.”
“What! What am I doing sleeping at this hour? Plus dreaming I’m at home with my son. I always get up at five!”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t feel any way about calling now. But you don’t say yet how you doing.”
“Not so great. I have this blister thing on my hand and it is madding me. Getting bigger and bigger and burning me like scotch bonnet pepper. I’m looking for tablets as we speak.”
“Real sorry to hear.”
“Maybe a bit of fever too. Must be my heavy heart. Too much horrors in the world and now it come and find we right here in St. Chris.”
“You mean the minister? He is your friend?”
“He wasn’t my good friend, but is somebody I know. They should have left him in the ministry of youth. It would have been safer.”
“You think somebody kill him for purpose?”
“I don’t know, Maisie. We not Jamaica yet, but we getting close. Remember what you told me years ago, about why your family left?
“I couldn’t forget that, but I thought things was improved.”
“Mr. Langdon and I were to talk about HIV/AIDS education early next year.”
“I’m truly sorry for the loss of your colleague, Grace. Anyhow, you busy, so I best state my case. I call for two reasons, though one sound real foolish.”
“Girl, you know you can tell me anything.”
“Mama big toe swell up last night, and she say every time that happen, bad things always follow.”
“I think the bad things happen already, Maisie!”
“Maybe so, but I still worrying about you. You should go doctor if you don’t feel good. UA hospital is right there. Better safe than sorry!”
“It’s really not so bad. If it get any worse, I promise to check the hospital.”
“I also call to tell you that is not only Sylvia I bring with me; Carlos come too. Sylvia wanted to come so bad I couldn’t tell her no, and then she decide that we have to bring ‘your baby,’ Carlos. Two of them insist they coming to celebrate with you, so if you hear cheering from all the way up here, is them making noise.”
“Why don’t you bring them, Maisie? I’m sure I can get another couple of tickets to the ceremony.”
“They would love that, but I know everything is now a big confusion, so if is any worry, don’t bother yourself. All the same, Grace, I would really love you to see Carlos now he grow up! One good-looking boy! Kind of on the short side but handsome can’t done. Grace? Gracie? You hearing me?”
“Sorry, Maisie.” The blister is insistent. It is larger now, reaching onto her hand. The flesh nearby is red and warm. It strikes her that a small balloon of risen skin should not be the source of such wicked pain.
“So what about your boyfriend? I know is plenty money to come so far, but I figure the gorgeous beau would be here to cheer you in your triumphal hour.”
“I don’t have any idea who you could be talking about. You see me have time for any beau?”
“I mean the big black dreamboat that God grab for himself before you could even stake a claim.”
“You mean Jimmy? No, man, Jimmy have serious work to do. I wouldn’t ask him to leave it for this frivolousness.”
“I don’t think you should make them hear you talking bout their big UA award as frivolousness!”
“Maisie, no award could be more important than Jimmy’s work.”
“Yes’m. Whatever you say. I going say goodbye all the same. You have enough to do.”
“I’m glad you called. Say hi to everybody for me. Ring the UA switchboard a little later and ask for the Events Office. They will tell you where to pick up the tickets.”
“Okay. Check a doc if you keep feeling bad. Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Thanks, Grace. Bye, now.”
Water. She must have water. Her lips are so dry that the skin is flaking. On a table nearby she sees the plastic ice bucket she put there after she took pills before falling asleep last night. It’s full because the ice cubes from last night have melted. She drains it to the bottom.
53
Two Widowers in Barcelona
Amphitheatre full of dark bodies, cheering. Grace in the purple kiloli they gave her when she came to graduation at Tindi, her afro glowing around her head like the halo of the angel in Manokouma’s window. The weaving women who came to the centre had made the cloth on an old-fashioned loom under Sister Tekawitha’s guidance, not for Grace, just against the day when cloth for a special occasion would be needed. Sœur Monique padded the hem and embroidered on it, in Kufic script, a pattern made from the words “good woman.” Grace sobbed and hugged Monique when she explained the meaning.
She accepts her award from the chancellor, a shell carved in luminous pink stone, a lantern glowing in the last light of a prize Christophian sunset, when her right arm swells, the skin leaving the flesh and becoming a huge, shiny bladder. It explodes, scattering bits of bloody tissue, leaving only a skeletal appendage of white bone, bent at the elbow in its gesture of acceptance. The shell falls, but it does not br
eak.
He shoots up in bed. It is a dream, prescient, for sure, but not as clearly present as usual, and he hasn’t had a fit, nor become ill — at least not yet. All of which he takes to be a good sign. But he has to go to her, for sure.
He is in Barcelona, old port city, with its fabulous Sagrada Familia, forever-building cathedral, its ordinary old streets, its simply ornate buildings, its pensións tucked into impossible corners, its scallywags come from all over to relieve other poor of their pennies. Billeted on this hill, Gaudi’s Parc Güell up the road, the Monastery of Saint Joseph next door to the residence where he is, he knows for sure that Iberia is African, not Moorish; the entire country’s ancient provenance. He’d trod its hard-packed earth all over the northern part of the continent.
The wall clock in his room says four-thirty. He will call Rome at six to talk to his psychiatrist, Fra Mucelli, and Benke, perhaps to get Leviticus Kitendi out of bed. Levi, Benke’s new bishop, has just replaced one of his handlers. The third man, Padre Alonso, is here in the monastery. He has to get to St. Chris fast, but before he leaves he will try to observe the protocol. If he doesn’t find Mucelli and Kitendi, he is going anyway. Alonso can tell them.
Mass is at five. He’ll see Alonso there. He should hurry.
He is glad he’d been there when they found Jeremiah in her belly; grateful she’d been with him the night he’d foreseen the slaughter in Rwanda, foul corpses mucking up his sandals, rancid flesh clinging between his toes. He’d trudged through fields of headless, limbless torsos, scattered body parts, gourds of skulls mouldy with putrid brain matter, the whole a banquet for swarms of flies who clothed their dinner with a shimmering coat, glinting green and murmurous.
The pills she’d given him then had prevented a second trance. He’d be forever grateful that she’d come in time to stop him from going back to that horrific place, though sometimes he wondered whether, if he’d returned and seen some sign, noticed some clue to where it was, whether he might have helped prevent the massacre.
“Padre, teléfono.” The boy waylays him on his way back to his room.
“Gracias, Tomás. Ya vengo.”
In the office, he takes up the phone. “Hello? It’s Father Atule. I’m calling about that flight, Barcelona to Heathrow? Have you managed that? Thanks so much. And to St. Chris? Yes? Perfect. Many thanks.”
He goes back to the church and, having brought Alonso up to speed, slips into Joseph’s chapel. Two widowers, Jesus’s father and he, chaps who’d married wives and had dreams that plunged their lives into chaos. The bearded builder looks at him across a vase of dead flowers, as tired as the saint must so often have been. Over time, Joseph told Jimmy his story. The foster-father carpenter, who could have come from any Mabuli village, had been near fifty with three male children by his first wife, all grown and gone. His two girls, nine and ten, needed a mother’s care, though. The woman, Mary, cleaned, cooked, and ran a house on swift, assiduous feet, minding his Ruth and Rachel with a sweet cunning, as if they were all girls together. And once he folded her in his arms, his blood danced. But Jehovah himself had wanted Mary for breeding and how could he face that competition?
He isn’t fighting anyone for Grace. Mark Blackman is Jeremiah’s parent by blood, but he, Jimmy, still loves the child and loves his mother too, perhaps in a way he didn’t understand, but so what? They are colleagues, friends, but he also finds her physically attractive, not in the way that Nila or Rita Rose had been, but in ways that drew them together, tethered them tight. They’ve navigated afflictions of body and spirit, a bond embracing and transcending the erotic. He smiles. Never mind what he’s told himself since then, he might well have made love to her that night, save for Jeremiah in situ.
There is a way, Joseph keeps saying, always a way. A month after John’s death, a plane ticket had come. In Rome he’d begun seeing a grizzled Italian friar, Pedro Ponti, a psychiatrist. For years Ponti, in his eighties, had ministered to mystics and stigmatics, including the saintly Padre Pio. Who’d have thought there were enough of those to make a life’s work? The friar treated him for six months, designing a way to negotiate the visions through meditation, writing him the first scripts for Diazepam. When Ponti retired, Friar Mucelli succeeded him. So far, so good with the pills: he’s been grateful for a way to muddle through. Once his handlers knew of the nightmare he had when Grace visited Mabuli for the first time, it became their affair to manage. They elected to hold a watching brief, and Rwanda began five months later.
He’ll be airborne in an hour. He is still hoping to speak to Mucelli and Kitendi, but he has to go. The dream about Grace gives him hope this trance at least might help keep someone alive.
It is Mucelli who suggested that his closeness to people is what enabled him to sense their impending deaths.
“Once upon a time, Giacomo, there was a cat called Ascension that lived in a home for old priests in Assisi. Anytime it climbed into the bed of one of the old men, he died within days. People swore it had a demon, but the priests loved the cat, welcomed her putting them on notice, so they could have the last rites, summon their families, say goodbye.” Mucelli suggested Jimmy might be like the cat who knew and loved the old men so well that she breathed in tandem with their lives. For sure Mapome and he had been thick as thieves. As for Nila, whom he’d loved more than life, if what killed her on that snowy hillside was some infirmity he’d intuited, he’d have some peace. And this time, Grace.
“Padre, el taxi!” Tomás, his dark head bobbing as he dances across from the residence, arrives at the chapel door with his backpack.
“Adiós, amigo.” He takes the bag, hugs the child and goes out.
54
An Unexpected Trip
“Grandma Phyllis, gottagoagain.”
“Are you going to come with me into the Ladies?”
“No, Grandma. Is not for men.”
“And you’re a man?”
“Yes. I need a papa so I can pee.”
“I’m not a papa, Jeremiah. I’m a grandma, and I can’t go into the men’s bathroom, so I think we have a problem.”
“We have a problem.”
Jimmy hears the conversation before he catches sight of the speakers. He sees Jeremiah stop unexpectedly, so Phyllis nearly trips over him. They are in the midst of Heathrow’s morning turbulence, with a stream of bodies, people, and occasional dogs eddying about them, but the child’s eyes find him in the confusion with the swiftness of a homing device.
Jeremiah runs to Jimmy, throws his arms around the priest’s legs, and shrieks “Tuuuules! Jeremiah going with Tules!”
“Hello, Jeremiah Carpenter.”
“Gottagoagain, Tules!”
“Jeremiah! What kind of greeting is that? Jimmy, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not glad to see you. And I’m sorry for this young man’s forwardness.”
“Tules! Gottagoagain!”
“He’s been wanting to go every ten minutes and fussing about using the women’s. I’ve been having a time of it.”
“Give us one twitch of a monkey’s tail. We’ll be right back.”
Jimmy returns minutes later, the child asleep in his arms, his little-boy frizz of hair damp on his head.
“Thanks, Jimmy. What did you do?” Phyllis unfolds the child’s stroller.
“Breathed Mabuli desert air on him.”
“When does your plane leave?”
“I’m actually on the flight to St. Chris.” He settles into the seat beside her. “I decided,” he looks at his shoes, “to join Grace for the big day.”
“Well, seems like she decided at the last minute that she wanted everybody at the party.”
“It is a very big day.”
Half an hour later, Chrisair calls the flight. Jimmy lifts the child from the pushchair, Phyllis gathers their paraphernalia and they head for the gate. The priest settles into the seat by the window in the bulkhead with Jeremiah beside him, and Phyllis sits in the aisle seat. The plane is full, the passengers mostly tourist
s.
“Are we going to have to be really quiet so we don’t wake the prince here?” Jimmy asks. “Or is he a pretty sound sleeper these days?”
“We woke before five to get the plane here, so he should sleep,” Phyllis hesitates, “which is good, for I’d like to talk to you. Serious matters.”
“For sure.” They’ve gained altitude, but still haven’t cleared the clouds.
“I been on a greasy pole with Grace for months now: up, swish, down, only to begin climbing again. She told you we had a fuss?” She makes a querulous face, looking at him for confirmation.
He smiles, doesn’t answer. “Why don’t you tell me the trouble, Phyllis?”
“She’s angry about a barrel full of things, but most of all because I say she’s exactly like her father. The minute it come out my mouth, I know I should never say so. I don’t think about her father. I never have the two of them in my mind at one time. But true is true, and when she’s ready, Grace behave own-way exactly like Ralston.”
“You’re worried about her?”
“Worry not the right word. That girl have so much education and still so foolish. Sensible people take lessons from experience, and look to consequences, but crazy people do neither. Sometimes I think that even though she do her work so well, is like she just going from one thing to the next without it really involving her. Like she there and not there at one and the same time. You don’t have to agree with me, Jimmy, but you understand what I mean?”
“Yes, I think so.” He remembers Grace’s unburdening at the novitiate the day he showed her the Manakouma windows in the chapel. He’d tried to tell her about letting past things go so she could wallow joyfully in the present. She’d smiled, shaken her head, said, “Too esoteric for me.”
Red Jacket Page 32
