Coffee, Cream and Curry

by Judy Powell

  The one mile walk did her good. She walked with ease down the uneven road because it was one she knew like the back of her hand. Beth had been born in this community and was familiar with most of the people here.

  For a period in her life she had gone away. After departing at fourteen years old she had not beheld the place again until she was forty-one. Even so, it was still home to her. That was nineteen years ago and she never regretted returning.

  One thing she did regret, though, was not returning for her father’s funeral. He had passed away when she was twenty-eight years old. He had suffered from high blood pressure for many years but the stroke came suddenly. There was no second chance for him. He was dead at fifty-eight years old.

  Although Beth had been away and had hardly kept in touch with the people of the village, or even her family, she had heard that he had fathered two children by his second wife. He had left her mother years before and had started a new life with Loretta Moore, the postmistress. She remembered the years when she had desperately wanted to be a part of her father’s life but she had never heard from him. It was as if she no longer existed.

  As Beth turned off the main road unto the dirt track that led to the neighbouring community she cleared her mind of the memory of the man she had loved so much. She shifted her bag to the other shoulder and climbed the hill to her mother’s house.

  The little green house looked almost the same way it had forty-six years ago when she had left Bonny Gate to go to work in Kingston. It was the same deep green with brown trimming and there was a big mahogany door in the center. The paint was peeling in places and it was obvious that new paint had been slapped over old. The only additions that had been done were the kitchen and the bathroom which were now a part of the new building.

  When Beth was a child they’d had to use the outhouse and all the cooking had taken place in a little shack fifteen yards away. She remembered the chilly morning visits to the outhouse and the bother of treading back and forth between the house and the kitchen with pots and pans and food.

  But it was 1980 now, and practically all the houses now had electricity as well as indoor plumbing. No one had the time nor the patience for the old life.

  Beth climbed the steep steps, making sure to hold on to the rail, and rested her bag on the porch. She tapped gently at the door. There was no answer. She frowned then tapped again.

  “Coming!” A cheerful, sing-song voice rang out then the door opened to reveal a plump, coffee-coloured young woman with rollers in her hair.

  “Morning, Jennifer,” Beth greeted her. “I was wondering if you were still in bed or something.”

  “No, Miss Beth. I was out back chopping coconuts.”

  “So why you chopping coconuts and you know I’m bringing the Sunday dinner?”

  “I know, Miss Beth, but it was some coconut drops I was planning to make this evening. The school children, them love it, you see!”

  Beth gave a grunt then pushed past the girl and went inside where she set her bag on the dining room table.

  She turned to Jennifer. “What I tell you about leaving Mama here all by herself to go down to the school? You know I don’t know like it. What if, as you leave the house, she get up and stumble or something like that?”

  “But I don’t stay long, Mam. I only go down when I know they have recess and that’s from about ten o’clock to about ten-thirty. Then I head right back.”

  “Jennifer,” Beth’s voice was cold as she glared at the woman who was no longer smiling, “if you don’t get your act together I going to kick you out of here. You just watch yourself, you hear me? Get one of your little sisters to carry the drops down there but don’t you leave my mother alone in this house.”

  “Yes, Miss Beth,” Jennifer whispered and lowered her head. Then she turned and walked towards the kitchen.

  Beth watched her fleeing back then turned towards the main bedroom. As she entered, the smell of Vicks and Bengay assailed her nostrils. The curtains were drawn and the room was in darkness.

  “Mama? You up?”

  “Elizabeth? That’s you?” A frail voice responded from the corner. “You come already?” Irene Gordon sat in a rocking chair, covered in blankets.

  “Mama, why you like to sit in the dark?” Beth went over to the window and pulled the curtains apart. The sudden entrance of light made the old woman blink.

  “Whether it dark or light, it don’t matter to me anymore,” she sighed.

  “Stop saying that,” Beth said as she lifted the latch on the window and flung it wide open. “At least you can get some sun and some fresh air. Feel how in here hot. You want to die of heat stroke? It’s almost midday and this place feels like an oven.”

  “Lord, why you letting in the draught?” was her mother’s response. “Suppose you make me take up bad cold?”

  “A little fresh air not going to kill you. You lock up yourself in the house too much, man.”

  Beth went and sat at the on the foot of the bed and looked at her mother. The strong curve of the woman’s cheek had disappeared long ago and had been replaced by sagging folds of flesh. White hair peeked out from under her head wrap and she clutched at the blankets with flaccid arms.

  But the greatest change had been in her eyes, which now stared vacantly in front of her. The deep brown eyes which used to draw such admiration were now hidden behind clouds. Those eyes would never see again.

  “How you feeling today, Mama?”

  “Well,” Irene sighed, “the arthritis not too bad but the sugar high. I can feel my skin scratching me.”

  “Jennifer giving you your medication on time?”

  “That girl, Jennifer, is a real trial. She wake up late so I can’t get my breakfast on time, and although she supposed to give me the medication she forget sometimes. I don’t know why I have that little gal in my house.” The old woman scowled and pursed her withered lips. “When her Mumma run her from the house I don’t know why you take her in. She’s a worthless, good-for-nothing little gal. You better just send her back home, you hear.”

  Beth listened to her mother’s complaints but only shook her head. She knew that Jennifer was an airhead but she was not that bad. Her mother was getting senile and it was becoming more and more evident everyday. For her, everything was an exaggeration, but especially her resentment for the girl she thought was stealing her daughter’s love and attention.

  For Beth, these visits to her mother’s house were painful events. Each Sunday she watched her mother decline further into the darkness of senility. On top of that, everyday that she came to the house and saw Jennifer she remembered her own pain when her mother had sent her to work for Mrs. Henley in Kingston. She remembered the confusion, the hurt, the feeling of having been abandoned. She remembered the nights when she had wept alone in someone else’s house, someone else’s bed, miles away from the little green house in which she had been born.

  In Jennifer she saw herself, and although she was tough with the young girl she never spoke down to her, never disrespected her. She wanted Jennifer to be tough just like she’d had to be. To survive as a woman in Jamaica, you had to be tough.

  “Mama, you hear from Gloria or Fred?”

  “No, me dear,” her mother sighed, “is only Simon sen’ a little something in the post the other day. Jennifer read the letter to me and it had a fifty dollar US checque. She get Glendon fi put it in the account for me yesterday.”

  Beth gritted her teeth. Of her mother’s five children she was the only one who still lived in Jamaica. Gloria and Fred had both migrated to England in the nineteen fifties and Simon had left ten years ago to get married in America. Albert, her oldest brother and second in the family following Gloria, had died in the sixties from lung cancer. They had all gone, every last one of them, leaving her with the responsibility of caring for their blind, diabetic, arthritic, close to senile mother. They, the ones her mother had loved, the ones she had kept close to her while she was shipped off to Kingston, were nowhere around when
their mother needed them most.

  And now it had fallen on her to be her mother’s main source of support. Yes, they sent money, but not regularly. And where were they when she needed to go to the doctor, when she had one of her spells of depression, when she wanted to talk? Sometimes Beth wondered why she had bothered to move back to Bonny Gate. It would have been interesting to know what the others would have done with their mother if she had never come back to the village.

  Beth continued to stare at her mother who seemed to have drifted off into a light doze. As she looked at her she wondered what she had done to this woman for her to have found it so easy to give her up.

  Her mind went back to the day she had stormed out of Mrs. Henley’s house. Her heart tightened at the memory. It was as if it were yesterday. Ignoring Mrs. Henley’s face Beth had rushed down the walkway and through the gate without looking back. She ran and ran until, exhausted, she flopped down on a bench at the nearby bus-stop. An old lady who was standing there looked at her quizzically but Beth ignored her.

  She sat panting, both in exhaustion and terror. She did not know where she was going to go from there; the only thing she knew was that she was never going back to that house.

  By the time the old woman had boarded a bus, leaving her alone at the bus stop, the reality began to sink in. How in God’s name was she going to survive? She could not go back to the Henleys and she had vowed never to return to her mother’s house. They had put her out and she was going to show them that she could do without them. At fifteen years old she would have to become a woman in an instant.

  As people came and went, Beth sat pondering her situation. Before she knew it over two hours had passed and she still had not devised a plan. She knew very few people in Kingston and none of those could help her.

  Then her mind went back to old Mrs. Plunkett who lived down the street from the Henleys. She was a retired teacher who had loaned her a few books. Mrs. Plunkett must have seen Beth’s desire to learn, her determination to survive. She was always encouraging her to come over to her house and browse through her many shelves of books. This kind woman was her only hope. With a heavy sigh she stood up and headed back in the direction from which she had come.

  Thirty minutes later Beth was sitting in the old lady’s living room, relating everything that had happened.

  “What are you saying to me, child?” Mrs. Plunkett’s usually serene face was frozen in shock. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  As the tears rolled down her cheeks, Beth sobbed, “Is true, Miss Plunkett. I would never lie to you, Mam.”

  “Get my walking stick, girl. We are going down to that house right now. ”

  “But I don’t want to go back there!”

  “We can’t let that man get away with this. I have to put a stop to it. I wonder how many young girls he has put this kind of thing to?” Mrs. Plunkett’s heavy bosom heaved with her anger. She grabbed the walking stick from Beth’s hand, shrugged into her sweater and walked off, leaving Beth to follow behind her.

  It was an ugly scene. Mr. Henley never came out of the house but his wife came out to the front porch. As soon as she saw Mrs. Henley, Mrs. Plunkett blasted her. Mrs. Henley defended her husband but she was unconvincing. It was as if she was just saying the words out of duty to him.

  Beth stood on the steps behind Mrs. Plunkett but she could see Mrs. Henley’s eyes, the way they shifted away from Mrs. Plunkett’s glare, the way they turned down to her feet as if she were ashamed. Beth almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

  Mrs. Plunkett threatened to report the incident to the police but Beth spoke up at that point.

  “Is alright, Mam. I just want my things.”

  While they waited on the porch Mrs. Henley went to pack a bag with Beth’s few belongings. Within fifteen minutes Beth and Mrs. Plunkett were leaving the house.

  The next five years went by in a blur for Beth. She stayed with Mrs. Plunkett for almost two years, assisting the elderly woman in the small nursery school she ran. But then she died and Beth had to find another way to survive.

  At age seventeen she again found herself on the streets of Kingston with nowhere to go. She had not been back to Bonny Gate all this time and had only received one letter from her mother, through Mildred. She never replied.

  When Mrs. Plunkett’s relatives came to claim the house Beth moved on. With the little money she had saved while working there she rented a room on Maxfield Avenue and began to look for work. During her first year she survived by doing ‘day’s work’, cleaning, cooking and washing.

  Luckily, Mrs. Plunkett had been a very religious woman and many of her church sisters had visited the house continually. It was from this group of church women that Beth was able to get her first clients. She worked so well that eventually she was recommended to other people and she soon had consistent work. But still, the money was never enough. She was barely able to survive.

  Then her big break came. A bar opened up on the street on which she lived and she was one of the first women to turn up on the door step, seeking a job. By this time she was eighteen years old and had been independent for three years. She was young, but her maturity and experience of life must have shone through her youth. She got the job.

  With two incomes, life began to improve for Beth. She was able to rent a slightly bigger place but continued to live on the same street. She did not want to move too far away from her new place of employment, especially when she had to find her way home alone at nights.

  It was a lonely existence because she was not the outgoing type and had few friends. Looking back, she wondered if that was why she fell so easily for the first man who showed any interest in her, the first one who ever expressed admiration for her.

  Their meeting was different from the usual bar conversations where men would compliment her figure and looks and even try to get physical. She knew how to handle that. This man was different. He made her blush. And when he looked at her, Beth’s heart did a funny thing. It actually hurt.

  It all started when Devon offered to walk her home one night. He was a real gentleman, never once trying to touch her, not even when they arrived at the house. She had actually thought about inviting him in but then thought better of it, and he never asked. She was glad.

  But the next time he walked her home he did ask her for a kiss, and she let him have it. It was hard to say no to the tall honey-coloured man with the narrow moustache and the hint of a beard on his chin, who stared down at her with light brown eyes fringed with thick eyelashes.

  But it was not how he looked that got to Beth, it was what he said and how he said it. He was the only man who ever spoke to her in proper English and he actually called her by her full name, Elizabeth. It made her feel special.

  As they held hands at nights while he walked her home he would say, “Elizabeth, my sweet”. Then she would giggle and reply, “Devon, my prince.”

  It was five weeks before Devon saw the inside of her room and another eight before she could drum up the courage to ‘be a woman’, as he called it.

  Three months later she realized she was pregnant.

  “I don’t believe this,” were the first words out of Devon’s mouth when Beth told him. “I thought you knew how to prevent this.”

  “Prevent this? But I don’t know nothing ‘bout these things.”

  “So, you don’t talk to other women? They always know how to mix up different things to take so they don’t get pregnant. Which bush did you come from, where they don’t teach you these things?”

  Beth remained silent, shocked at the disdain in his voice. He had never before used that tone to her.

  “Devon, you tell me you know everything about this. You say you would teach me.” Beth fought back the tears as she looked up at him. “You never say anything to me ‘bout taking something to prevent babies.”

  “But I thought you knew. This is something that women know about. I should not have to tell you this.”

  Beth looked down and a tear slid
down her cheek. “Well…nobody never tell me.”

  Beth sat on the chair and peered up at Devon. He looked just as confused as she did. She hated to see him like this, the man who had always seemed so strong, so capable, so sure. But worse, she hated feeling the way she did - confused and desperate.

  Even when she had gone through her darkest moments she had always felt that she had control of her life…but not now. What was she going to do with a baby?

  Devon stood rubbing his forehead then he looked down at Beth. “I have a question to ask you. And don’t get angry.” His tone was serious and somehow Beth knew that what would come next would not be nice.

  “Beth. Are you sure this baby is mine?”

  At first, Beth did not understand the question. “Sure? Yeah. I can’t make no baby by myself.”

  Devon shoved his fists into his pocket and paced the room then he stopped in front of her again and, staring intently at her, repeated the question.

  “Are you sure this baby is mine? Are you telling me that I am the only man you have ever had? There is no-one else?”

  Finally, his meaning began to sink in. Beth’s mouth fell open in surprise then she snapped her jaws shut in anger. She stood to her full five feet, seven inches and glared at the man across the room.

  “What you think I am? Some kind of whore? You think, because I live downtown, all I do is sleep around with man? You well know that you was the first man I ever have, the one and only man, and you have the gall to come put question to me ‘bout, if you is the father of my child?”

  For a moment Devon looked ashamed, then he said, “I want to believe you, Beth, but when I am gone during the days I don’t know what happens behind my back. You’re a nice girl and everything, but it’s not like we see each other every day, and anything can happen when my back is turned. You’re a sexy girl and I know that you have a lot of men running you down. Look at how they behave around you down by the bar? I just don’t want to find myself caught in some trap just because I slept with you a few times.”