“Teeth? Show who teeth? What she mean by dat?”
Aloysius said he did not quite know.
“Thank God, it soon done!” the widow breathed, scanning the letter. She continued reading.
“Aloysius, remember me. I have not forgotten . . . nastiness and filthiness and more nastiness . . . And I hope to see you again one day either in this life or in the next one.”
“What next life?” the widow asked, handing Aloysius the letter with a visible sigh of relief.
Aloysius took the letter, ran his fingers gently over it, folded it up carefully, and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
“Inga believe she live before and she goin’ live again,” he muttered.
“That is not what scripture say,” the widow said firmly. “She believe in what dey call ‘reincarnation,’ but scripture don’t say nothing about dat. Reincarnation is foolishness.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The widow leaned back on her rocker and gave it a brisk ride. The floorboards creaked and the endless acres of Busha’s land spread out below the railings of her veranda seemed to her to bounce up and down like a stormy ocean.
Since Aloysius had been released from the asylum, the widow had taken him firmly in hand. Their friendship had begun quite unexpectedly. The widow had been taking a shortcut across an open pasture, a thing she did only if she was late for evening service (from childhood she had been terrified and distrustful of cows). As bad luck would have it, she ran smack into a herd of grazing cattle. A calf began running friskily around her, pawing the ground, and the beast even lowered its head as if to charge and buck her with its nubby horns. She tried to shoo it away with her umbrella, which did no good, so she stopped in her tracks and let loose a piercing scream.
Aloysius came running from the small house under the flame heart tree, drove off the playful calf, and escorted the widow to the road, even helping her climb over the cut-stone wall. She was immediately grateful, remembered that he was a repentant sinner who had spared Busha’s life, and invited him that very evening to come to her house after service and take dinner with her.
That was more than three months ago. A relationship had developed quickly between them since then, which led eventually to Aloysius moving into the back room of the widow’s house, doing some little yard work around the garden for her, and getting in exchange good hot meals, companionship, and daily management.
The relationship between the two of them was ruled entirely by the widow. She knew from experience that man without woman was prone to vagabond behavior, dissolute living, and assorted wickedness. Management was what men needed—management by a strong woman. In God’s plan, man was a shop and woman the shopkeeper. Ever since the death of her husband, the widow had been an unemployed keeper in search of a shop. She had been lonely and depressed. Her days had been spent in dreary solitude; some nights she could only cry herself to sleep. Her one daughter had risen high in the world and gone off to live and bear children in foreign places. Men were scarce. Those who could walk and talk already had a string of women. The few unattached ones were at death’s door.
Yet the widow was not ready for the graveyard. She was only four years older than Aloysius, strong and healthy in mind and body, and bent on living another thirty years. That is, of course, if she could find a man. For the widow was no fool. She well understood the ways of womanly flesh. No matter what parson might say, without a man to air her out every now and again and prevent her vital passages from clogging like old pipe, a woman could easily drop dead in her prime.
So three weeks after she assumed management of Aloysius, after she had made him take regular baths, fed him several hot meals, given him fresh sheets to sleep on, read him passages nightly from the Bible, the widow lured him one rainy night into her bedroom and got a good and healthful cleaning out in the pitch darkness.
The next morning she drew the sweetest breath since the days of her childhood. An annoying pimple on her nose began drying up. When she walked down the hillside to tend to her callaloo garden, she bounded over rockstone and gravel like goat kid. The whole day long she hoed and cleaned out garden beds, singing hymns all the while like she was at a revival.
Of course, there were problems with Aloysius, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome by management. For one, the widow insisted that he never hold stupid conversations with bush and tree and rockstone and dog and lizard in her company. She made it plainly understood that if they were walking arm in arm on their way to church he was to make no reply to any bush or tree that should shout at him. The simple rule she asked Aloysius to live by in her presence was this: If it don’t have mouth to chat wid, you can’t chat wid it. If he wished to visit his favorite tree and chat with it, that was his business. He was free to come and go and chat with anything he pleased so long as she was not present.
Then there was the matter of his ignorance, which the widow could not abide. In her book, it was a sin for a Godgiven mind to be shut off in the darkness of illiteracy. She therefore began teaching Aloysius to read. She planned to give him lessons in Handwriting, Geography, Arithmetic, English language, and Scripture. When she was done with him, he would be able to read the Gleaner and the Bible. To this end she held lessons every morning on the veranda overlooking the vast reaches of Busha’s pastures. Already he had learned his alphabet.
One day during a lesson the widow made the mistake of asking Aloysius his full name and he began his usual demented recital. At first she thought he was joking, but when he continued to determinedly rattle off any number of stupid names, she cut him short at “Parliamentarian” with the fierce command of, “Stop dis foolishness!” in such a tone that he gasped and stopped.
He leapt to his feet, held his throat, and stammered, “Excuse me, ma’am! Me have to go to de toilet!” and ran into the toilet where he could bend over and gasp out, “Patriarch Verdure Emulative Perihelion . . .” and all the rest of his thousand names.
When he came out of the toilet a half-hour later the widow had made tea and was calmly preparing a lesson on diphthongs.
Busha could not get over it. The wretch who used to work for him, had broken into his house and locked up his dogs, had nearly caused him to be killed in his own drawing room, was within a matter of months walking around free and clear through the village like he paid taxes. Not only that, but the brute had also been adopted by the farting widow Dawkins, with whom he consorted openly in the streets. Granted that the widow had cleaned up Aloysius, made him wear fresh clothes every day and put shoes on his feet, he was still a damn lunatic as far as Busha was concerned. You don’t change mongoose nature by dressing him up like puss.
In the first few weeks after the trial, Busha’s bitterness had reached a vengeful pitch. He had importuned the crown counsel to appeal, had written letters to the Bellevue Hospital warning them against releasing Aloysius, and had even considered a lawsuit against Barrister Linstrom for his part in helping a dangerous criminal escape just punishment. (Busha finally gave this idea up when his own law firm refused to hear any more of it.)
Busha raised such a fuss that one day Barrister Linstrom went to the asylum to see how Aloysius was being treated. He was allowed to walk with the lunatic a few feet around a scrubby garden that was being tended by a uniformed inmate carrying on a conversation with his dead mother.
The barrister warned Aloysius to watch out for Busha, for there was no telling what he might do for revenge.
“Busha not going trouble me, sah,” Aloysius said.
The barrister didn’t agree. “I’m telling you, he’s raising a fuss. He even talked about suing me.”
“No, sah. Busha won’t sue you.”
They strolled for a moment or two in silence half-listening to the inmate gardener’s chat with his dead mother.
“You know, sometimes I believe dat de worse thing you ever did,” the barrister said in disgust, “is to spare dat damn white man’s bumpkin life. Look where it got you! Look how it make him behave! You spare him life, you lose you
freedom, you girlfriend, every little thing you had. And for what? So de damn ungrateful wretch can carry on a campaign to keep you locked up in dis place for de rest of your life?”
Aloysius chuckled. “Busha just vex, sah. Him soon feel better.”
“Tell me something, Aloysius.” Linstrom stopped walking and peered at the madman at his side. “Why you spare his life, eh? What was it, just a spur-of-the-moment thing?”
Aloysius looked confused at this question.
“Busha is me friend, sah. Me couldn’t stand and see dem kill him so.”
“You friend? Busha is you friend?”
“Yes, sah!”
“You really mad to rass,” Linstrom grunted. “Dey should lock you up in dis place for good.”
“Sorry, Mumma,” the mad gardener murmured. “Me never meant to mash you toe.”
It got so that Busha could not endure the sight of Aloysius in the street without having a strong urge to run over the lunatic with his car. He had dreams about shooting him. Some nights he would wake up, get a gun, and sit on the veranda in the dark, hoping that he would catch the madman coming up his driveway so that he could lawfully murder him.
One night Busha went so far as to start walking down his driveway intending to go into the bushland where Aloysius lived, but he came to his senses at the gate and padded back up to his darkened house with his troop of puzzled dogs straggling after him in the moonlight.
When Aloysius became friends with the widow Dawkins and started appearing with her in church, it was almost more than Busha could bear. Busha could hardly stand to be in the same parish with Aloysius, much less the same church. The first time the lunatic showed up with the widow clinging to his arm, Busha stomped out of the service. After that, Busha made it a point to try to avoid any service that the widow and her new madman friend might attend.
One day Busha and Sarah brushed passed the widow and Aloysius on the church steps, and Busha muttered in a snide voice, “Is you I should be praying to. You is me God.”
“Him trouble you, Busha?” the widow asked with a piercing stare.
“Him nearly make dem kill me,” Busha grumbled.
“Dat is in de past, Busha,” the widow said firmly, putting herself between Aloysius and the white man. “He pay for dat crime and repent of dat sin. It don’t become you to hold grievance, Busha. It don’t become.”
“Come, Hubert,” Sarah urged, tugging Busha’s arm.
“If you want to live wid madman dat’s your business, Mrs. Dawkins,” Busha growled. “But don’t tell me how I must behave when I see a wretch in front of me.”
“You is out of order to speak dat way to me, Busha, especially after we just come from service. Very out of order.”
But all was not lost with Busha and his dream. Sarah still held firm against being buried in Kingston, but she had relented on the mausoleum. With some effort and persuasion, Busha convinced Mr. Saarem to build the mausoleum in the graveyard at Moneague. Two weeks later the construction crew descended on the dishevelled graveyard and began cleaning the foundation for a mausoleum—which the locals promptly christened a “duppy shop.”
Busha lovingly supervised its building and stopped in every evening from the fields to examine the day’s progress. His left arm where he had been chopped was healing well enough for him to use it to shift a gearstick or even use a machete. But there was still stiffness in his middle finger, and when he talked to people he hid his injured arm behind his back so no one would have to look at it.
But with all the mausoleum, Busha was still not the same man as he was before the injury. There was great bitterness in him. Some nights he could not sleep. He kept his gun under his pillow and started at the smallest sounds.
One evening he and Sarah were sitting on their veranda watching darkness fall over the pastures. Busha had seen Aloysius on the road walking with the widow Dawkins and was raging about him again.
Sarah sighed.
“You know, Hubert, sometimes I think we should leave dis place. Sometimes I think we should migrate. You just not de same man you used to be.”
“Same man?” Busha glowered at her. “You expect me to be the same man after what happened?”
“You just have so much hatred in you heart for dat poor lunatic. Dat’s all you talk about nowadays. De man save you life, Hubert! Why can’t you accept dat and forget about it?”
“Save my life? I must accept dat he saved my life?”
“Yes. He saved you life.”
“He did not save me life! You save me life by shooting dat brute! He did not save my life!”
“Hubert, he jumped on de one who was going to chop you. Because of dat I was able to get de gun. I saved you life. But he saved it too. What’s the difference?”
Busha got red in the face, a sure sign that he was about to explode in anger.
“De difference is you’re my wife!” Busha sputtered. “And he’s a nasty old mad negar! Dat’s de difference! Would you like to spend de rest of you life thinking dat every breath you drew was because of some old negar? Would you?”
Sarah sighed forbearingly.
“What’s the difference? As long as I’m alive.”
Busha could not endure being opposed. He meant to jump up and storm out of the house and walk off his temper in his pastures. But he didn’t even make it to his feet.
Instead, he broke into a heartfelt, lonely, misunderstood sob.
* * *
Mr. Shubert was presiding over the dimly lit interior of his shop where a number of villagers were chatting the evening idly away. Through the window of the shop Mr. Shubert could see the stark white walls of Busha’s duppy shop rising in the graveyard. There was a ghastly hush to the shell, and Mr. Shubert was struck by the horror and vanity implied in a man building his own tomb. It wasn’t enough that one day every Jack man and woman in the world had to die, Mr. Shubert thought with a shudder, some few stupid men had to carry on about it like it was an ocean voyage.
The villagers had been making fun of Busha’s duppy shop and from that the chat had turned to the change in Busha since his injury. Remarks were made about his bitterness, anecdotes were told about his sudden short-temperedness, his meanness.
Mr. Shubert was sitting behind the counter on a stool poring over his exercise book. As proprietor of the establishment, he did not often mingle in the conversations of his customers, preferring to hold himself aloof from the throng that trekked daily through his shop. But this one time he had a sudden insight he wanted to share, and he cut sharply in on a longwinded story being told by a slightly drunken cultivator named Bishop ($79.78 down in the book).
“The trouble wid Busha,” Mr. Shubert said, raising his head, “is dat him don’t know God blessing when him see it. It’s like Shakespeare say in dat schoolboy poem: De quality of mercy is not strained. / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon de place beneath. It is twice bless’d: / It blesseth him dat gives and him dat take. We all owe life and love to one another. Every single one of us. Dat is de way God plan dis world to be, and dere is no escaping it.”
The cultivator blinked and drew himself up to full, drunken, argumentative height.
“Owe life to one another?” he jeered. “How dat? What dat mean?”
“Just what me say. We all owe life to one anodder, no matter how high up or low down we be in de world.”
“What me owe you?” the cultivator demanded to know, swaying in his tracks. “What life me owe you? How dat can make any sense now?”
“Well,” Mr. Shubert said nastily, “if you want to know, you owe me money . . . dat’s down in de book. But dat not what me mean.”
“Lie!” the cultivator bellowed. “You only bring up dis argument so you can tell people here dat me owe you money and shame me! Dat’s de only reason. Me know how shopkeeper brain work, you know, sah!”
Wounded at this suggestion, Mr. Shubert glared at the man.
“I shoulda know better dan try and explain anything deep to ole negar,�
� he said peevishly.
“Deep!” the drunken cultivator guffawed. “Dat me owe money to you shop? What deep ’bout dat? What so deep?”
A few of the onlookers jumped into the fray and a spirited argument raged. Mr. Shubert attended his exercise book and paid it no mind.
He knew his people too well: Once ole negar got started on a point, only Almighty God knew when he would stop.
The Lunatic Page 21
