The Marvellous Equations of the Dread

by Marcia Douglas

  Rita screams; two men grab Bob and pull him away. She speeds down the road. Later, she will remember the palms with no lines, but only in a dream dreamed close to half light. In this dream, she says, “But I know you,” and he says, “Eat jelly coconut with me tonight in the clock at Half Way Tree.” All day she sings background without ceasing.

  Jah live.

  Rude Bwoy

  A prophet is never recognized in his own country, especially when that country has fallen into the mouths of dragons. Bob waves to a woman in a BMW across the street. It’s his lawyer, Christine. “Is me, Bob!” She closes the tinted windows and weaves through traffic. There was a time when BMW stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers. He thinks of the foolishness of that now.

  He returns to the park, searching for the boy from the night before. He wants to shine his shoes again, to see the light in his eyes from Africa reflected there. In the daylight, the park is different from how he remembered it, but the boy’s tree still leans, and there’s a man selling peanuts and asham.

  “You see the little youth that sleep inna the park?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the play-play guitar.”

  “Oh, me remember him. Him in juvenile detention! Is a bad youth.”

  “No. Me see him last night.”

  “Him kill a Chinie man in August town. Man-slaughter.”

  It doesn’t make sense. Bob has a feeling that he has stepped into the middle of someone’s dream. The fall-down skin itches and there is a dull pain behind his eyes. An idea comes to him.

  “You know Bob Marley?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if me tell you him come back?”

  “Yu mad like. Mind I don’t call Bellevue Madhouse on you. Move!”

  “Just listen me, nuh? Is me, Bob. Bob Marley.”

  “Reel out a tune fi me.” The man laughs and leans back against the wall.

  Bob sings a familiar chorus, but the sound that comes out is like scratched vinyl.

  “Move!” the man says. And this time there is fear in his eyes.

  The prophet holds up his arms and backs away, crossing the street with the flow of pedestrians.

  On the other side, three brethren are reasoning outside Aquarius Recording Studio:

  “As far as I&I concern, is Marcus Garvey the first Rastafari,” says the long-beard one.

  “Garvey prophesy and pave the path, but him was not Rasta,” says the one with the yellow tam. “Garvey say, Look to Africa for the crowning of a black king. Him prophesy His Imperial Majesty, Haile I, but that don’t make him Rasta.”

  “Rasta is a mysterious thing, is a thing of the heart. Some people Rasta and them don’t even know them is Rasta.” The short one eats a tangerine.

  “Can a man deny His Imperial Majesty and still be Rasta?”

  “Not even His Majesty-self admit he is Jah.”

  “And what is the meaning of Jah to I&I?”

  Bob pauses at the curb. “Haile Selassie/ is the chapel,” he sings.

  Taken aback by the scratched voice, the three men turn and stare at the tall-tall Ras with the brass Africas.

  “Haile Selassie/ is the chapel/All the world/ should know – And a cathedral too. Selassie is cathedral too,” Bob says.

  “Yes-I,” the breddren say together, dread-awe and one accord, watching the percussion earrings.

  Bob keeps on walking down the road. He stops at a corner, still singing in scratched vinyl. I search and I search/Sacred book of life. A small group of children gather to hear the madman sing.

  “Is a radio him have in him throat,” says one.

  “No, him hiding it in him shirt pocket. Is a mime, but the song scratch.”

  The bus comes and they all leave; Bob misses their little voices, the way he misses the boy, and misses his children. Would his children know him now? A girl looks out from the bus window. She smiles a shy smile as the bus takes off.

  FROM THE ANGEL’S LEDGER BOOK

  [nutmeg on a rusty grater]

  The street children in Kingston dance in and out of traffic, cleaning windshields. The wipers swing back and forth, but the tinted windows stay shut.

  Two children on Spanish Town Road grieve for the goat drowned at the bottom of a gully. Late at night when the yard sleeps, their mother pulls the goat by its beard, skins its flesh with a sharp blade. She pares ram liver and places a slither beneath her tongue, seasons the rest with salt and yellow curry, garlic and thyme. In bed, her sheets smell of goat skin and forgotten skellion.

  At Children’s Hospital, all the babies in Ward 13 are crying. The angel rings a bell, but they do not stop. The crying ricochets to 1766 and back, makes a wind-devil under the big cotton tree.

  In a Kingston yard, children filled with sugar-water beat a drum of goat’s skin. The riddim seeps underearth, runs east and stops at a crossroads where it shifts the minute hand of a clock.

  Mural

  At the corner – a deaf man. He reminds of Leenah – the way he holds his finger and makes an arc in the sky. It’s getting late, Bob understands. The clock does not work. He walks Half Way Tree to Crossroads, then all the way to down town. Someone has painted his face on a storefront – he holds a mike, his locs flying west. Two children lean against the mural. The girl rubs her back against it, and the boy says to Bob, “She have ringworm,” then he reaches for the painted mike on the wall. “Is me the next Bob Marley,” he says. “When I turn the next Bob Marley I won’t hungry no more.”

  “You think Bob Marley never hungry?” says the girl.

  “Him was a prophet, my moddah say that,” says the boy. “God cast him bread on the water.”

  Bob takes the bottle of kananga out of his satchel and hands it to the girl. She opens the top and smells it.

  “It smell like obeah perfume,” she says. “But me like it.”

  She rubs some on her arms, then thinks better and flicks the rest at Bob’s face. The boy takes the bottle and flicks at Bob too. They both giggle and Bob jumps, playing dandy-shandy with the drops; kananga wets his cheeks.

  “Save some for my back!” the girl says.

  As Bob leaves, she takes a pencil and draws little circles on the mural. “Bob Marley have ringworm,” she says.

  The worm in her voice follows Bob as he walks with no rhyme or reason, still testing his new legs.

  Backstage at Ward Theatre a group prepares to rehearse River Mumma and the Golden Table. No one sees him slip in in the shadows. It is cool inside and he slips down into a velvety chair, leans back and closes his eyes, imagines his seat sinking into dark matter, all the way to a home-sweet-home lamp. The room smells faintly of sweat and talcum powder. He remains in that drowsy-between as someone rearranges props; there are feet up and down, and voices. In the dream-distance, his mother shouts, Nesta! Calling him by his old name. She holds a cup of warm milk and stands in a doorway. She is robust from yellow yam and dasheen.

  Lights. He wakes up.

  On stage, the blue lamps are bright. The actor-boy, Sweet Mouth, wants to find a golden table. It is buried under a river at the bottom of a cotton tree. He steps tip-toe into the water in knee-high socks, watching for duppy. Bob laughs and everyone turns around; the rehearsal stops. Someone escorts him outside; he looks left then right; heads back to Half Way Tree.

  FROM THE ANGEL’S LEDGER BOOK

  [seed fall]

  “A very pleasant and interesting ceremony took place at Halfway Tree market yesterday afternoon when, on the invitation of the chairman of the St. Andrew Parochial Board, His Excellency the Acting Governor planted a tree to take the place of the historic cotton tree, which had to be cut down in connection with the building of the Memorial Clock Tower in the capital of St. Andrew.”

  – February 27, 1913 – The Gleaner.

  “It [the West Indian cotton tree] hath very large roots and spredeth at the spurs with cavities, soe that men may stand there as behind the arches and great supporting pillars in churches and stately structuers.�
�� – John Taylor writes this with his feather pen in 1687.

  December 31, 1766 – A young boy is hung at the big cotton tree. Sundays, while master and family were at church, he played the black keys of the house piano, picking out rebellion – the sound so wail-and-war, it riled up the people, made them remember their true names. Now they have put turn-luck in the master’s water. The sugar cane is withered and the overseer has a fever that will not leave. Seven men and three women have escaped to the hills. There is a word –

  January 30, 1832 – Moonshine, and two make love under the great silk cotton at Half Way Tree; they embrace in the crook of a root, soft-soft pods fallen all around. They must leave early morning; mistress must not know. Later, when their tongues touch, they feel a word rise up, an ancient word, forgotten – The silk cottons on this island converse underground. There is a language sent via rootways; it sounds like this / / To destroy a cotton tree is to disrupt a long-time discourse.

  February 03, 1832 – Two slaves are whipped under the great ceiba at Half Way Tree: runaway lovers. The angel is there when the woman’s child miscarries. Her wail ricochets blood-red, into the yet-to-come.

  Ceiba: Taino. The mango came from India, the breadfruit from Tahiti, and ackee from W. Africa, but on this island, the ceiba/silk cotton lived from the beginning.

  Rain day, 1509 – The angel is there when a Taino girl hides under the great ceiba. On the run from a Spanish soldier, she crouches in the twist of a root and he does not find her.

  Tea of ceiba, bark and leaf – good for venereal disease and urinary tract infection. The people learn this.

  In another country, the great ceiba marks the centre of wheel-and-come. One cycle ends here and a new one begins.

  Woe Day, Woe Day, Year of Forgetfulness – A woman watches workers cut down the tree to make way for the clock. A limb breaks, and her gasp sounds all the way back in time-ago where a boy with a noose –

  Light as spirit laugh, the wood is both coffin and cricket bat. The wise ones sprinkle rum before they set out in ceiba canoe.

  April 21, 1966 – This year is the 200th anniversary of the murder of the ancestor at the great silk cotton at Half Way Tree. No one knows this. Business as usual.

  And this day, too, is the day His Imperial Majesty, Haile I of Ethiopia arrives in Jamaica; his small feet touch the ground.

  King Edward VII and the Duppy Conqueror Meet at Half Way Tree

  Later, back at Half Way Tree, Bob fumbles for the keys to the clock tower. He slips in quickly and closes the door, lights the spliff that has been hidden in the depths of his hair. He needs to think. Sliding down against the wall, he closes his eyes and takes in the smoke. There is a little space under the eaves where a bird has made her nest. The smoke fills her lungs and she dozes off feeling warm and languid.

  The tower was built in 1913 in memory of King Edward VII. King Edward visited Jamaica once, a long time ago, to fulfill a last request of his mother, Queen Victoria. Touring Kingston, he was accompanied by his wife, Alexandra, and the Governor General; and when his carriage paused by the old cotton tree – where the clock tower would later stand – he stroked his beard, admired the nesting birds and thought it a nice respite. No one even knew he had had that thought, but when he died and the grand tree was cut down so the tower could go up in his name, his ghost crossed sea in an Atlantic steamer and took up residence in the clock tower. The clock had four faces, facing the four directions, and King Edward’s ghost liked to turn the hands for passers by. On the day in August 1962, when Jamaica received independence from Britain, King Edward’s ghost, drunk with whiskey, fell to the floor. I am/Thou art/You are/He is/We are/Ye are/You are/They are, he sang. That’s when a duppy slave boy, murdered at the cotton tree, reached up into the tower and spun the steel wheels around and around. He spun with such intent, he turned back time all the way to 1766, for two whole seconds – long enough to dance one more beat, and try, try to retrieve the word at the tip of his tongue, the crowd marvelling at his lynch-step feet – but it was too late. Back in the tower, he took a sniff of King Edward’s whisky, then disappeared in the Kingston heat. Few know that this is the real reason the clock at Half Way Tree did not work for many years.

  Tonight, as Bob smokes his spliff, he hears a clinking sound, this time of ice in a glass.

  “Is who?” Bob calls.

  There is a long silence and then a cube falls to the ground.

  Bob pulls at his spliff and closes his eyes and when he opens them again there is a man with a big belly and a bushy white beard crouched in the opposite corner.

  Bob studies him for a while, then breaks into a smile.

  “Is you them call Faadah Deadmas?”

  “Your Majesty, for you.”

  The bird stirs in her nest and Bob blows a little smoke up to the rafters.

  “Is only one King I rate.”

  Edward raises an eyebrow.

  “The King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Elect of God, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, the Most High, Jah Rastafari.”

  “Well, that’s a mouthful,” Edward says.

  “Is H.I.M. I rate.”

  There is another silence and then Bob holds out his hand.

  “Them call me, Bob. Bob Marley,” he says.

  They stay there for a while, Bob smoking his spliff, Edward coughing and sighing. And then because the English king seems so forlorn and despicable trapped there in the clock tower with his whisky, Bob finds himself saying, “My father was an Englishman.”

  King Edward puts down his glass and shifts his legs. Bob inhales the last of the herb.

  RASTAMAN

  Three Legged Horse: Bob Marley Speaks

  I&I never really know my faadah. Him run-way, leave me when me was just a youth. Little white man with narrow shoulders. You know that cancer that was in mi foot? I believe is a white man cancer. You see how life funny? Is cause-a my faadah, Norval Marley, the English man who abandon me, why mi foot did sore. That’s what me know.

  Me see a photo of mi faadah high up on a horse. Him wearing a hat. And his foot in the stirrup. People say all you had to do was blow on him and his two eyes spill over; he was a cry-cry man. Bet him would hear that little bird up in this clock and start cry over it, just like that. But don’t let that fool you. Only a coward throw away his son in the street. Coward is coward. Check this. One day him take me to town and drop me off at an ole woman house, give me a sideways look and dodge through the gate. The ole woman see he nah come back and she give me a cot at her bed-foot. After she fall sleep, me hide under the stink pillow and cry eye-water just like mi small-back, pussy-heart so-called faadah. That night me hate him so till. Me hate him! The back of him head and the white shirt – that was the last me see of him. Wouldn’t even fight for me to raas.

  From that, every night me hear him gallop in mi sleep. Gallop gallop. Sometimes it rain and even the rain sound like horse a gallop. Horse hoof pounding the yard. Hear this, the horse in my dream have three legs and one night me run after the horse and catch him and wrestle with him. The horse rear up on the two back legs-them, but me grab onto the front one and me hold mi ground and don’t let go.

  Me want know why my faadah throw me away like that, and me cry out in mi sleep, “Why?” The three-legged horse pulling away from me, but me keep mi two foot on the ground and me don’t let go.

  Every night for three years, me wrestle with that man on that three-leg horse and one night I decide to give him back him name, and when I open my mouth to give it back, the horse get way and gallop a bush.

  But hear me now, I get to realize I-man never need that rider on that three-legged horse because I&I have only one faadah and that faadah is the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Haile Selassie I, Jah Rastafari.

  Is him I rate.

  FROM BLOODFIAH, RECORD OF DREAMSLOST

  Track 17.0: The Queen of Sheba: She Who Parts Her Hoof

  [Version]

  There
is a story that goes this way: after her visit to the land of Israel, the Queen of Sheba missed her hoof and wrestled with a horse in her dream. She wrestled thirty nights with this horse. “Give me your hoof,” she said, but the horse would not give in. On the last night, she tore off the horse’s hoof and tried it on for size, but because it was not cloven, it would not fit. Meanwhile, the horse – now three-legged – escaped and leaped through the bottom of the queen’s dream, galloping to a boy thousands of years away fighting injustice in his sleep.

  Just before morning, a goat came leaping in the horse’s stead and, at the smell of her salt-water sorrow, wrenched off its hoof and gave it to the queen. Makeda danced with the goat’s hoof until early morning and when she awoke, she felt a new peace. She kissed her baby asleep in his cradle, pleased that she had righted the hoof, albeit in a dream. This, they say, is how Queen Makeda made peace with the connivings of Solomon.

  Jah bless.

  In the Pocket of Forgetfulness

  Bob had waited a long time to utter those words, rehearsed them over and over as a child. “Me hated him for not coming back.” And now, here after his own death, in the clock tower at Half Way Tree, standing in another man’s skin, he is having his say before an old English King.

  King Edward takes another sip of his whisky. “A good drink helps with many a trouble,” he says, and disappears.

  Bob hears the ice in his glass; every now and then a cube falls and melts on the floor. He has gone all day without eating and is beginning to feel faint. He empties the canvas bag again. He needs some money. Maybe he can sell the radio or the wooden cane. It is old but well-made, intricate in design. He can sell it at the craft market downtown. Then the thought comes to him to turn out his pockets. They are all empty, except for one – something wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. He sits down in the centre of the clock tower, unwraps the tissue and finds a gold ring engraved with a lion. He still has no remembrance of why he has returned and does not recognize the ring at all, but at sight of the imperial lion, his eyes fill with tears. Taking it as a sign from the Almighty, he praises Jah who in his great lovefulness has sent a ring with his own seal, so his son can buy a plate of food.