Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  The old dad generously agrees to reveal his deepest tomato growing secrets. It seems that you begin in early spring by cutting the lawn on the first full moon. This part is going to be tricky on a Georgian Bay island. Then you get a big tub of a certain type. I can’t figure out whether this is some exotic ceramic number or just a garbage can. Then there’s stuff about filling it with special water. You toss in the magic grass clippings and drag the whole thing into your four-car garage. It sits there protected through several Ontario freeze and thaw cycles. Finally when the whole thing is bubbling and smells bad you sprinkle it on the seedlings that you’ve had going in another mysterious part of the house. Next you move outside for the May full moon. Repeat at regular lunar intervals. I think you may have to sleep with the plants to have the best outcome.

  Both the son and daughter are simultaneously translating and I’m getting confused. Are these just repeats or are there more steps? How high are the plants by June first? Are there tomatoes yet? Finally the translating slows down to a crawl and I ask if this is the whole secret to growing tomatoes. They translate my last question. No, wait, there’s more, the ultimate secret. “Buy Miracle-Gro. Be sure it’s the box with tomatoes pictured on the label. Do what it says.”

  A group of neighbours on the south end of Euclid Avenue have been orphaned this Christmas. All agree to convene for a seasonal meal at our house as we have just acquired a table that can accommodate a dozen diners.

  The food is cooked, the table set and candles lit. Everyone is in a party mood. As we move through the courses the conversation sparkles with news, gossip, jokes and lies. During dessert neighbour Rob Gray, who lived across and down the street, suddenly gasps and points to the glowing accumulation of candle wax in the middle of the table. “It’s the baby Jesus and his mummy!” he declares. When I examine the gobs of melted wax I could see how he arrived at this interpretation. All the hot air expelled by the diners had guttered the centrepiece trio of candles into a molten mass that is easily as credible a depiction of the blessed mother and child as any of the painted plaster doorstoppers sold in the shops of Little Italy a few blocks away. The whole blobby arrangement is sacralized by an interior glow from the still burning wicks.

  “It’s a miracle!” proclaims Rob. As he excitedly begins chiseling the sacred wax lump off the tabletop with his dinner knife he announces that, as the original witness to this miraculous event, he has all the concession rights — admission tickets, souvenir photos and keychain reproductions of the Euclid Avenue Madonna. Being almost the co-discoverer of this apparition and owner of the table as well as the original purchaser of the candles I feel that I should get some cut of the action. But Robert is already getting so Holy and Roman about the whole thing that he has begun to affect an Italian accent. Soon he is excitedly referring to himself in the third person as Roberto Grigio, the chosen one to whom this miracle had been first revealed. When I press my case further he finally allows that as all the old ladies in black have to somehow get to the site of the revelation he would allow me to divvy up the primary schoolyard next door and run a parking concession to accommodate the faithful. I try to picture myself shivering in a little lonely booth in the bleak schoolyard accented with dog shit — a tough way to get rich.

  On the other hand, if you’ve ever been to the Museo La Specola in Florence you know that wax figures can last hundreds of years. The booth would be a long-term investment, something even my sons could do after me if their careers as architects ever fall apart. Of course I’d never let them design the booth: their version would require zoning exemptions, consultant engineers and cost millions. While I huddled over a tiny heater collecting quarters at ground level they’d both be luxuriating in their corner offices in a penthouse far above. Not a chance.

  I still regret not photographing that dinner. Decades earlier during an assignment in Milan I had taken a break and walked to Santa Maria delle Grazie to view da Vinci’s Last Supper. It was as faded as a 1950s class photo but was clearly a precursor to the dinner of a dozen some two millennia later on Euclid Avenue. Twelve is a powerful number — think eggs, buns, months and holy suppers. Clearly it makes things happen. And as the big Church knows, there is money to be made.

  2015

  Carmel has had a handful of good years with Wood-a-bridge-a guy Zio. They have fun together, she enjoys his family. Then one day that old elephant, cancer, lumbers into their new lives. Zio struggles and tries — new diet, a bit of ooga booga, positive thinking and the harsh regime of conventional medical treatments. Don’t work. None of them.

  I see him one last time at home in Wood-a. He has begun to waste away but is cheerful. He shows us an old album with snapshots that document the days when he was “a real Gino.” His hotrod had been a souped-up Gremlin, a solecism foisted on the world by AMC, the same people that inflicted the Pacer and the Matador upon us. We have some laughs. Carmel is admirably brave. Her life ride continued to be a roller coaster. But I’ve always admired her inner resources, her ability to pick herself off the floor and resume her journey.

  Thirteen

  Jamaica: Soon Come

  “Baby, baby why oh why?

  Why did you ever leave me and now you come back crying?

  Why oh why, why oh why, why oh why, oh why?”

  “Baby Why,” The Cables

  “Heaven for climate; hell for company.”

  J.M. Barrie

  2012

  Friendship and romance can carry us to unexpected places. For over a decade now I’ve been partnered with Sheila, a British Jamaican. Come every year-end we both repair to her father’s house in the hills of St. Ann Parish near Jamaica’s north coast. There we read, write, edit and participate in a semi-rural Jamaican life that can be incredibly intense. There is always someone calling from the gate, “Mr. Murray, Mr. Murray.”

  The Murrays are Quakers, a sect with deep historical roots in Jamaica. Quakers are interested in social justice — they share what they have and help whenever possible.

  My father-in-law shuffles down the drive to the gate, steeling himself for the latest tragedy — a stolen goat, a sick cow, a relative in desperate need of medicine, rent unpaid, even bail money. At their most desperate the hailer just needs a slice of bread and cheese, some bananas or an egg. All beseeches eventually get around to some “smalls” — a little change. Or not so little. It seems that Ossie Murray gives away more of his tiny Jamaican Foreign Service pension than he keeps for himself. Long gone are the days when he was the dashing Jamaican high counsul, dean of the corps in Toronto or the Bahamas, hosting garden parties where white women swirled around him, laughing, flirting, an embarrassment to his two daughters. Now he’s barely on the daylit side of 90, a mentally vigorous man whose eyesight is failing him, a former star athlete who must now shuffle carefully in order to detect steps and potholes he cannot see.

  The Quaker community that beckoned the Murrays here is now reduced to a pair of very old Black ladies who come to the house every Sunday for Quaker meeting. At 88 Ossie is the baby of the congregation. My place in all this is to take the car and fetch the second youngest. I crawl the car slowly down the washed-out road to Enid’s house. The 21-year-old gray Toyota I drive is rather absurdly fitted out with alloy wheels and a trunk-mounted spoiler. “Yanayselly?” shout the touts and higglers in the fields. No, we don’t want to sell it although keeping it all running is getting tougher by the month. Paul, a small farmer and sometime mechanic, and I have just spent the previous afternoon taking the steering column apart and making new insulating washers for the horn and turn signals by cutting up an old Joy detergent bottle. We have wrapped the broken door handle housing on the driver’s side in wire and slathered glue on the plastic casting. We’ve bought another few weeks.

  I pull into Enid’s drive 10 minutes before the meeting. Her housekeeper brings her out slowly as Enid is blind and so impossibly bow-legged that it’s a miracle she can still support her own
weight.

  “Who’s that?” she cries.

  “Sheila’s Michael.”

  “Ah, bless you, my son. I’m an old, old lady.”

  “Enid, I’ve backed the car in so you won’t have to feel your way around the car door.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Michael, Enid — Ossie’s son-in-law.”

  “I’m an old lady; me mother and father are dead. Me don’t have much time.”

  “Enid, let me take your stick so that you can feel for the seat of the car.”

  Slowly, slowly, she lowers herself down. Hermin, her housekeeper, lifts her legs into the car and we’re good to go.

  “I’m a very old lady. Me the only child alive. Both my brothers have passed.”

  “How old are you, Enid?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to work it out but I can’t find me papers.”

  “I guess it hardly matters now.”

  “I’m an old lady now, my son. How are the dogs? I love that Mitzy so much.”

  Mitzy is a weimaraner named Misty but nevermind. The dog doesn’t care. For most of the silent Quaker meeting Enid will caress the dog she cannot see. While Ossie and the ladies make their silent peace with spirit and the universe I retreat to my room and write.

  I know meeting is over an hour later when Glenn Gould begins the Goldberg Variations on the stereo. This signals that all will now have tea. It is Gould’s last recording that we hear — meditative, slow, reflective, tinged with nostalgia and regret but still life-affirming and always so beautiful. The music is loud because the ladies are going deaf. Bach sends his solace out into the garden, over the frangipanis, the orchids, through the banana trees, the oranges and ortaniques, our coffee bushes, the coco palm, the valley behind and the green hills of St. Ann. Glenn plays to the hills of Trelawney and Cockpit Country and over the graves of a million slaves, of the rich planters and the more recent patient poor and long suffering. You may not be able to eat it but this is still Toronto’s no mean gift to a very tough world. I drive Enid home. It rains hard.

  2013

  It’s an occasion of great moment. We have all assembled in the damp and dim basement of Huntley Crescent, St. Ann Parish, Jamaica, to witness The Great Uncrating. My father-in-law, Ossie, had been a diplomat, not a handyman. His kitchen tool drawer was largely home to the careworn corpses of broken hardware items — cracked knobs, half hinges, retired water shutoff valves, lonely screws and nails — junk. The few tools that lived in the tool drawer were all challenged — by wear, neglect and lack of love. The opened drawer presented a sombre iron oxide palette.

  However, we have managed to excavate a claw hammer (missing one), a large slot screwdriver (rounded bit) and what I would call a “safety” chisel, i.e., terminally unsharp. For nine decades Ossie kept his faith — not only in God but in the threat posed by any tool with a keen edge. If a knife couldn’t cut butter he believed it would never harm a human.

  The deliverymen attack the crate with these Neolithic tools and slowly it emerges from the box — a shimmering white cube — the new clothes washer. Many weeks ago this machine left an assembly plant in Kentucky, rode an 18-wheeler all the way to New Orleans, boarded a ship, crossed the Gulf and the Caribbean Sea to land at Jamaica’s container port at Kingston. A snarling, smoke-belching, vintage highway tractor had hauled it across the interior mountains to the smaller ones in St. Ann where its crew muscled it down our path lined with ortaniques and oranges to this house.

  I volunteer to step forward, hook up the hoses and insert the power plug. The white cube is shoved into place and shimmed to an approximate level. The week’s dirty sheets are loaded in the top and the lid closed. I respectfully withdraw and let one of Ossie’s daughters push the button. A row of twinkling coloured LEDs instantly brighten the back panel and the white cube begins to make sanitary noises. We are hypnotized. We all stand respectfully in a solemn semicircle to witness the full procession of small coloured lights marking the full virgin cycle of the white cube. This great moment has been made possible by transatlantic, transcontinental finance — monies raised in England, Ontario, British Columbia and from a tiny Jamaican Foreign Service pension issuing from Kingston. It is one that none of us will forget. It’s a truly great day.

  ***

  There’s a small stone hollow at the edge of Sulkers’ Rock. It’s perhaps a foot from the shoreline and barely an inch or two above the water level of my inlet. I wash my socks, a T-shirt and gotchies in this spoon-like depression. The several pails of water it contains have been warmed by the rocks of the basin and the late morning sun. As I knead my clothes in the tepid water I suddenly sense the presence of all the women I have photographed over the years doing exactly what I am doing. And we are now doing it together, I by the Sweet Sea, they by the far off streams and rock pools of Mexico, of Nicaragua, of Peru and my other island home, Jamaica.

  We Canadians like to think of ourselves as goody-two-shoes innocents keeping the world’s peace while minding our own business. It’s false. Here in Jamaica where I’m writing this both the north and south coasts are intermittently disfigured by bauxite loading piers. At the paradisal harbour known as Discovery Bay, Columbus’s reputed landing there on his second voyage of 1494 is commemorated by a mountain of ore, an enormous conveyor belt and a grimy pier. A long line of rusty freighters chugs in through a channel blasted in the coral reef and are bullied, bow out, up to the shore. They have poetic names like Bulk Patriot and are invariably registered in Panama or Limassol. Each is only around for a day or so while ore is dumped into its hold for transport, often to Russia. Others ship to the U.S. and Canada. While this loading goes on another ship waits offshore.

  It has been estimated that Jamaica has reserves of 2.5 billion tons of bauxite “red gold” — a hundred-year supply. The Second World War’s demand for aircraft aluminum stimulated this industry and by 1957 Jamaica was the premier source of alumina ore in the world. Many of these mining operations have Canadian names — Alcan and Noranda. Alcan is the biggest in the country but American companies such as Kaiser have been involved as well. All of them used a predatory technique known as transfer pricing to cheat Jamaicans of their fair share of the country’s richest resource. Their Jamaican subsidiary would internally sell its processed ore to the parent company in Canada or the U.S. at a bargain rate and pay royalties based on that price. You can get an idea of the significance of this and its impact on a very small country with considerable poverty when you understand that during some years in the 1970s bauxite royalties were nearly 30% of Jamaican GDP and over 45% of the country’s net earnings. Yet it employed only 1% of the native workforce. Whites from North America had all the significant jobs. And every day this little island, never more than 50 miles across and less than 150 miles long, gets measurably smaller.

  In the ’70s PNP leader Michael Manley negotiated a fairer deal for Jamaica, tying the ore price to the global price for aluminum ingots as well as gaining 51% ownership for the government. But North America got him back. By leveraging a temporary $500-million IMF loan into deals for other sectors, especially agriculture, it utterly destroyed the local dairy industry and put countless small farmers out of business so that American ones from Ohio and Iowa could sell their subsidized surplus potatoes, carrots and powdered milk to Jamaican distributors. Even the humblest Jamaican farmer understood exactly who was undercutting their very production costs and bringing them to their knees.

  When I buy frozen fish in my local market in St. Ann Parish it has been packaged in Toronto. I’d like to have local and fresh but it’s not there. And every year the signage of Canadian banks marches farther across the country. Scotiabank has been here for a long time — it had branches in Jamaica long before it ever had one in Toronto. But now the Royal Bank has absorbed local banks as has the Bank of Commerce. I suspect that many locals don’t understand that these banks operating under cryptic initials — RBC, C
IBC — are Canadian.

  ***

  My little harbour has hosted many of what we once called god’s creatures — buffleheads, loons, beavers and beetles, muskrats, minks, garpikes and enormous black water snakes. I once saw two snapping turtles screwing in it. At least that’s what I think they were doing as they roiled around and around stirring up mud like a pair of bulldozers.

  But today when I stare into the shallows all I see are catfish. They float tail down, languidly gumming the surface and swishing their barbels. There are dozens and dozens of them. None of them looks much like lunch.

  2014

  I pull up to the front door of the big agricultural feed store on Brown’s Town’s main street and enter. When I’m languidly accosted I explain that I need a 15-kilo bag of dog food. I’m sent to a young man who drags it off a shelf in the middle of the store. He directs me to a centrally located desk while he lugs the heavy bag toward the front of the shop. While I stand at this desk various entries are made in a vintage desktop computer. After some minutes an old printer at the back of the store begins to slowly regurgitate an invoice. Eventually it is fetched and handed to me. I’m then directed to another desk at the far side of the store. I wait while the cashier finishes a patois conversation with another woman who’s carrying a bundle of scandal bags, the local name for the opaque black plastic bags that disguise their contents — groceries, toiletries, medicines, occasionally even secrets.

  I may pay by credit card only if I show two pieces of photo ID. I’m prepared for this. Ten minutes later I’m carrying an expanded sheaf of papers back to another centrally located desk where after waiting my turn — more conversations — my papers are examined, a new sheaf added along with a prominent stamp in purple ink. I’m next directed to a desk near the door where a uniformed security guard examines my paperwork and passes it on to door-side clerk behind a desk. After careful inspection he adds the imprint of an even more impressive stamp to several papers in the pile. They’re returned to me. I’m told to locate the original retriever of the bag. I do. Seven people beside myself, the lone customer, have now found employment through this transaction. Forty minutes have passed. I finally own a bag of dog food.