Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  I know this system.

  When I worked in Oaxaca in the late 1960s we’d set aside one whole day a month to do banking. Our money was sent down by the National Science Foundation in Washington and the University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The morning of banking day was spent slowly shuffling from desk to desk with a thick wad of papers. At each station a clerk would prepare a fat sandwich of forms and oily carbon paper and wind it through the rollers of a big black manual typewriter. This ever-expanding paper stratigraphy would migrate slowly from desk to desk as morning drew to a close. Finally, by siesta time, our monthly deposit was finished. We’d leave for lunch, returning a couple of hours later to repeat the process in another room of desks. By evening we’d have a withdrawal. The blinking ATMs that I used last fall in Oaxaca represent many vanished jobs.

  Driving into the centre of Brown’s Town I park across from the market under a No Pissing sign and slip through an iron gate into St. George’s Anglican. Norma, the local justice of the peace, will witness 32 signatures on my sheaf of estate documents. We sit in the front pew as various old parishioners come in to practice hymns on a battered upright. Norma witnesses and embosses the first pair of signatures. “B flat on your other hand,” she cries and sings the note. She turns and whispers to me, “She’s got arthritis.” I watch an old Black lady wearing a ball cap and flowered blouse hunching over the keyboard. She picks out “You in your small corner, and I in mine” so slowly that no one but Norma would ever recognize the melody. “Sharp! Sharp dear.” Norma coaches and corrects. Another signature and seal are embossed. Thirty more to go. This will be another Jamaican soon come.

  This Jamaican Great House I’m visiting crowns a hill above the Black River plains. Where its owner’s slaves once laboured at its base their descendants now drive goats and grow poor root crops and bananas. As dusk descends tiny white lights limn the distant Santa Cruz mountains far to the east. And to the west and north where the Lacovia and Nassau ranges border this great plain, huge cane fires are burning. Devilish columns of black smoke vanish with the fall of night but orange flames remain visible, surrounding the dark plain like an invading army rolling across this often uncivil and troubled island. Local newspaper headlines tell the stories:

  Man Chopped In Front Of Son

  Jacket Man Kills Father

  Man Held Prisoner Under Woman’s Bed

  Madman Beaten For Taking Off Child’s Panty

  Woman Vows To Spread Aids

  J’can Drugs, Rapes Girls For Porn

  Molester Prays For Victims

  Woman Beats Man With Broomstick

  Man Loses Lip In Fight Over Battery

  Mom Burns Son For Dirty Uniform

  Man Vows Never To Steal Mangoes Again

  Male Teachers Flee Classrooms To Escape Female Student Predators

  2016

  We’re travelling north up the A3 from Kingston through Red Gal Ring, Stoney Hill and Golden Spring toward Toms River. This highway stretch is like loose string in a drawer — a tangle of multiple hairpin turns and cliff-hangers hacked through the steep hills and valley cuts immediately west of Blue Mountain.

  I’m also driving Jamaican — too fast and furious — dodging each pothole surprise at every blind corner. It’s a video game until an apparition suddenly menaces up behind — a big-shouldered, black SUV limned with strobing strings of purple LEDs. Its driver pounds the horn — he wants by despite the big bus barreling toward us on the niggardly narrow blacktop. I dip around a washout just before the bus rockets by a mere hand-width from my mirror. As I enter its black exhaust nimbus the flashing dark brute at rear pounds past, thundering music from two pairs of 18-inch woofers flush-mounted just forward of the chromed landau hardware on its rear quarter panels. This high-risk move is now explicable — the speeding, big, black speaker-box is a hearse. The formaldehyde marinated corpse inside is being dubbed and dance-halled into ground chuck. The dear departed has nothing to lose as this sound-system death-chariot leans hard into a blind turn ahead and disappears toward Devon Pen. By the time that midnight chariot reaches the north coastal delta the departed will be pureed. There’s an old local joke: “Why did the Jamaican pass on a blind corner? Because he couldn’t see anyone coming.”

  There is nothing subtle about Brown’s Town’s settlement patterns. The elite public buildings and institutions along with houses of the rich are built on the heights. Thus Hillcrest, an Anglican retreat centre, St. Hilda’s Girls School, the library and the courthouse have the high long views while the market and the banks occupy the lower middle ground. As Main Street descends into a valley running into the interior the shops and bars get grittier. Down there is where I hang out when passing time in town.

  Today I’m having lunch in Jerkies, an unassuming lunch place across from the Live for Now Bar, a loud dark hole papered with glossy posters of women with big brown bums and thunder thighs. I grab a takeout beer from the bar and cross the street back to Jerkies to order a late breakfast of ackees and salt fish. As I sit down farmer Paul’s son Marco pulls up in his latest hot car and joins me at the table. He’s a big affable guy with dreads who builds and tunes racing cars for the Jamaican circuit. He learned all his mechanical skills from the internet. He’s a modern Jamaican guy.

  He’s also all too typical. Although he’s not much past 30 he already has five kids with four different mothers. “Ya gotta have fun,” he tells me. This fun has created an island of overworked single mothers with not much time for parenting. And the guys do little more than drive-by fathering. The result is an uncivil every-man-for-himself culture. The country spins its wheels, moving neither forward nor back. So the smart and ambitious leave “for foreign.” There are more Jamaicans living in Toronto, Miami and London than on the mother island. The culture stubbornly refuses to change.

  Driving Jamaica’s north coast highway I hear a siren. So I look in the mirror of my now 24-year-old Toyota Corolla Sprinter and spy an ambulance behind with flashing lights coming up fast. Now even though I’ve been driving on the sinister side in Jamaica for a decade and a half, at heart I’m still a sucky Canadian. I pull over to let the emergency vehicle pass.

  But nobody else does. All those vengefully insecure Jamaican-behind-the-wheel male maniacs driving the long row of additional two-decade-old Toyota Corollas, mini buses and dump trucks laying down smokescreens hold their ground. They’re not going to take any shit from some agony patient. We’re all running one of the two lane sections of the highway that’s equipped with those sharp hills and blind corners that are perfect for passing. The ambulance tries but just doesn’t have the power when all the Corollas put pedal to metal. And the only way to pass a big-shouldered Jamaican dump truck is to take another road. The ambulance with its pathetic emergency is just gonna have to grind along burning oil like the rest of us.

  When I get home sweet Hermin, the housekeeper, is there and, as always, brilliantly avoiding cleaning anything above waist-height or behind furniture. Dead roaches add interest to the floor. As I start my standard rant about the lack of basic civility on Jamaican roads she rocks back and forth on her bare feet using the string mop as a stabilizer. “Number One” is what she always smirkingly calls me. “Did you read last week’s paper about the guy who a few days ago wouldn’t let an ambulance go by?” No surprise I had not. “His mother was in it. She died.”

  I can complain about Jamaican guys but if you have a flat tire on a potholed highway — something that only happens every couple of hours — it’s always going to be some dreadlocked guy piloting a totally crapped-out vintage Corolla who’s gonna stop and help you with the change. It’s never going to be the I-shop-in-Miami, have-family-in-the-U.K.-and-Toronto middle-class Jamaican who stops. “Fuck you, Sunburn. I gotta get on with my blingy 4x4 and my success.”

  2016

  As the plane climbs it swings over the gridiron of warehouses and light industry immediately west of Toronto’s Pearson Airport. Soon Lakes Ontario and Erie wil
l slip below as course is set for Jamaica. Like a kid I still book window seats so I can watch the world roll out when the sky is blue. Jamaica bound — port side southbound, starboard on the return — I anticipate the swirls and drifts, some two hours ahead, of the reefs and bars that escort the Bahamas through a robin’s egg sea. A lifetime of flying has still not dulled my interest in the land and seascapes that pass beneath the plane.

  I have long abandoned queries to flight attendants — what’s that river, that bay, those lakes, those mountains? They seem an incurious lot. A flight is a takeoff and landing, home and a hotel with some troublesome service in between. Their flight could be a subway ride for any interest in geography.

  Past Cuba the sea roughens as the descent begins. Suddenly one can see through it to reefs and rocks, then coast clips by, and returning Jamaicans begin to crane at the windows. Velvet hills rise as we arc toward the Sangster airstrip just east of Mobay. We skim past my favourite bar and the wheels hit. We’re down.

  While in the long line snaking slowly toward immigration three uniformed Amazons single me out from the crowd. The largest of the trio is what Jamaican men call fluffy — dangerously overweight. She dangles my entry form like a dead rat and shouts for the benefit of the hundreds of badly dressed tourists in the holding area.

  “Mr. Mitchell, you have been to Jamaica many times and should know by now that red ink is reserved only for government officials! Go back outside and fill in the form in blue or black before you come back!”

  At least 500 people turn to regard the geriatric slow learner with the red pen.

  I’m forced to beg and borrow from a large, hairy tourist in flip-flops. His pen is from a lumberyard in Sudbury.

  A couple of hours later I’m at the house. At 94 Ossie is old and ending. The water pump has died, the phone is broken, the car tires bald, the water heater leaks, the propane cylinder is empty, the toilet is broken and his computer has quit. There is no food in the cupboard, and the fridge is empty. I find only a few ounces of powdered milk mix and crusty leftovers from my last visit three months prior. Only the dogs have been fed.

  The next morning I’m up early and open the door to the cage — the elevated barred-in patio-deck overlooking the back garden. At that moment I’m suddenly home. The early morning light burrows through the heavy vegetation, highlighting a branch here, a frond there, then twists off to bring another plant to stardom. In defiance of weeks of drought, the vegetation is exuberant — the leaves glisten and everywhere there are flowers. Huge poinsettias drape like velvet, thousands of magenta blooms cover the 25-foot-high bauhinia and one vine’s yellow blossoms garland across the many crotons and banana palms. The mahoganies shoot skyward while the 80-foot guango towers protectively over all.

  And above it all five cirrus clouds hang like hooks in the new blue sky.

  There is so much presence in this yard — so much is-ness and there-ness, just sheer being everywhere. And the light continues to flutter through the trees and brush, creating highlights before shading them so as to show off something in behind making the scale change endlessly so the depth pistons in and out. There is so much going on. This is why we take photographs, to arrest ephemera, the temporary and the evanescent so that we can capture it like a caged bird and examine it, understand it and own it in an album or on a hard drive. I have utterly failed hundreds of times to capture all this garden’s is-ness. I have set up cameras before first light programmed to expose every five seconds all day long until the light fails and the data card fills, but the garden is still not really there the way it is when you quiet yourself and just sit.

  But life moves. White and yellow butterflies dog-fight through the bush. A flock of glossy black cling-clings peck through the grass and bathe in our little water bowl while jabbering crows boss from the bushes and streamertail hummers buzz the blossoms. A flock of parakeets briefly rattles through the treetops and moves on. All is well. And with our arrival it has begun to rain. More riches.

  ***

  A mid-September morning of hard, brassy light in which every limb and needle is edge-enhanced on the acrobatic white pines. A crystalline cold grinds down from the barrens. One of my transplanted red pines has already died.

  I have come down the river alone. The river and its inlet have been abandoned. I’m the only one for miles. The trees still show no sign of autumn but when night comes on sharply I know it’s waiting in the wings. The sun slips away at half past seven and following a suddenly cold night it doesn’t return until the following seven. Night and day, dark and light, are now near equals.

  2015

  After running the north coast highway for a couple of hours the consensus in the car is that it’s time for lunch. A further vote is for a sit-down place by the sea that’ll be more comfortable than rebar stools in a jerk joint. A few miles on near St. Ann’s Bay the perfect place appears a few hundred feet off the road and right on the beach. It’s new, freshly painted, with bright, gauzy swagged drapes hanging between white-washed pillars. The entire place is enclosed by a decorative railing. There are no walls. The place has a certain country elegance.

  We chose a table on the waterside. The dazzling blue Caribbean descends toward us from the far horizon — a faint line separating the sea from an uninflected sky. Two-thirds of the way down from that level the waves curl and flash on the offshore reefs. Then the waves recompose themselves and run the rest of the way to the lip of the sand beach mere yards away. The white sand slopes up to a windrow of chip bags, pop bottles, plastic toys, takeout containers and condoms just a few feet from our wicker table and chairs. It’s the standard 21st-century beach shoreline of any place on Earth.

  The place is big. It takes a waitress 10 minutes to get to us. We are the only customers. She seems surprised that that we’ve entered the restaurant because we wish to eat and drink but she does go off to see if she can locate some menus. Another 10 minutes. She returns with two menus for five people. Then she vanishes. We’ll manage. We study the eight-page menu carefully, eventually choosing drinks and dishes. Ten minutes later she is again surprised to discover that we want to order. She vanishes to locate an invoice book. Soon come.

  Ten minutes later she returns with an order book, sheets of carbon paper and a ballpoint. We begin to tell what we want. Her ballpoint doesn’t work. She vanishes. A few minutes later she’s back with reliable technology — a pencil. We order — beer, wine and a couple of the cocktails luridly illustrated in the menu. She laboriously writes it all down and disappears.

  Twenty minutes. She returns to announce, “White wine finish.” The wine drinkers then order Red Stripe beers. “Gin finish.” The cocktail drinkers switch to beer. She retreats.

  She returns in half an hour with a tray of tall drinks that look like vanilla milkshakes surmounted by a red cherry and a leaf. This shipment would be clearly intended for another table if another were occupied. We accept the mystery drinks and enquire about the food. She leaves. Ten minutes.

  She returns with a menu. “Conch finish.” I reorder something else. “Red snapper finish.” They reorder something else. Twenty minutes later she returns with the intelligence that “shrimp finish.” I order the most basic and ubiquitous Jamaican staple, rice and peas — white rice and red beans cooked in coconut milk. Ten minutes later she returns. “Rice and peas no ready for an hour.”

  We’ve only been here an hour; it’s now coming up to two p.m. We finish our drinks, pay 50,000 Jamaican dollars for the big white drinks and drive to the Juici Patties takeout in St. Ann’s Bay. “Soy patty finish. Fish patty finish.” I’ll make toast when we get home.

  2016

  If I’d been on this clifftop 622 years ago I’d have seen Christopher Columbus’s little fleet searching for a channel through the reef that guards Discovery Bay. However it’s 2016 so the only ship I see is an exceedingly ugly Chinese bulk carrier loading bauxite at the Noranda pier on the west side of the bay. The ship
lists hard to starboard as ore spills through a mid-ship hatch and a cloud of red dust rises. Its young Chinese crew wash down bowls of rice and peas with Bigga pop at the clifftop jerk centre during this loading. When their ship clears the reef early next morning Jamaica will be thousands of tons smaller. A replacement ship riding high offshore waits to haul more of the island off to Houston.

  Few Jamaicans seem know just how much of their beautiful island Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller is giving away. She has surrendered a pair of ecologically protected islands on the south coast. Reefs will be destroyed and endangered creatures vanquished so the Chinese can flatten the pair of Goat Islands for a new Panamax deep-water container port. And over a thousand acres of land have been passed to the Chinese in return for a four-lane, 42-mile-long toll road across the island. There is little transparency or public discourse when these quiet deals are cut halfway around the world in Beijing. A supine Jamaica has agreed to be the stepping stone for future Chinese investments throughout the Caribbean. The red flag with the yellow star flies over an indebted little nation.