Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Whoa, man, dat Aus-tray-lee-an a mighty strange language for sure!’ A sudden silence followed until eventually he said quietly, ‘Don’t do nothin’, ain’t nothin’ gonna happen – den we surely be rooted, man.’

  ‘What do you propose then, mate?’ I said with just a touch of sarcasm.

  ‘Pro-pose?’ Again, his voice gave the word a kind of energy of its own. ‘I pro-pose yoh and me begin a move-a-ment.’

  ‘Movement?’ I tried to laugh. ‘Neither of us can walk.’

  He didn’t appear to hear me, or if he did he missed or ignored the play on words. Now he spread his hand to take in the dark cave and its miserable occupants. ‘Ain’t nobody here but us got the strength, Brother Jacko.’

  Strength! Me? What a joke! The bastard must be mad! I thought to myself. ‘Look, mate, I’m a private, I do what I’m told and don’t ask questions.’

  ‘Dat good, man, me too.’ He paused, then announced, ‘Private James Pentecost Oldcorn, 24th Infantry Nigger Regiment, US 25th Infantry Division.’

  ‘So, Jimmy, you’re all black blokes, the whole flamin’ regiment?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Negro,’ he corrected. Even though he’d used the word ‘nigger’ against himself, he was letting me know the correct form of address for someone of colour.

  ‘Negro,’ I said, accepting his correction. Then, wishing to change the subject, I asked, ‘This movement, what will you call it?’

  He thought for a while and again I wondered to myself if he was, you know, a bit simple. ‘Operation Get Offa Yo’ Arse,’ he said finally, chuckling as he said the words.

  I thought for a moment, then to humour him said, ‘Ogoya.’

  ‘Huh? What yoh say? O-go-a?’

  ‘It’s an acronym,’ I explained. ‘Like you take the first letter of each word and they add up to something you can pronounce, a kind of shorthand for the whole title: O – operation, G – get, O – off, Y – your, A – arse, Ogoya!’ It was a word trick Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had once taught me.

  ‘Ogoya,’ he pronounced, trying out the sound for himself. ‘Dat good!’ he chuckled. ‘Dat a fine acro-name. We got here a move-a-ment, name of Ogoya.’

  ‘We’ve got only one problem, Jimmy.’

  ‘What problem? What problem we got?’

  ‘We’ve both got broken legs so we can’t get off our arse.’ It was another feeble attempt at roughly the same joke I’d tried with the word ‘movement’.

  ‘Dat our first problem,’ Jimmy replied confidently. ‘Dat da first problem Ogoya got isself.’

  And that’s how it all began.

  Jimmy left my side a few minutes later. Using his arms, and kicking with his one good leg in a sort of modified half-arsed spider crawl, he disappeared towards the front of the cave. When he returned several hours later, despite the freezing interior, beads of sweat showed on his forehead. Then I noticed protruding about ten inches out of the back of the collar of his jacket were two flat wooden planks about three inches wide. He was plainly exhausted as he dragged himself into place beside me.

  ‘What have you been up to, Jimmy?’ I asked, ‘You look buggered, mate.’

  ‘Ogoya,’ he gasped. ‘We got our splints, Brother Jack. We in business, my good man!’ He turned slightly, his back to me so that the two lengths of wood showed sticking up out of the back of his collar. ‘Pull,’ he instructed.

  ‘Jesus, Jimmy, where’d you get these?’ I asked, pulling at one of the planks.

  Jimmy held up one arm and tapped his left wrist. ‘Watch.’

  ‘What, in exchange? You gave one of the nogs your watch?’

  ‘Nogs?’

  ‘Gooks to you, nogs to us,’ I said, pulling at the second plank.

  ‘I took dem offa da stockade up front. I gave da gook guard my watch so he be inclined to agree there ain’t nothin’ happening to dat stockade. Tomorrow we get us walking sticks,’ he announced triumphantly. Turning back to face me he smiled. ‘We offa our ass, Brother Jack, the move-a-ment has begun.’

  The first time he’d used the appellation ‘brother’ I’d ignored it, thinking it was like us saying ‘mate’. Now I accepted it for what it was – a name for one’s partner in crime. The way he said it sounded good, as if I was a somebody. ‘Walking sticks, eh? Don’t like your chances, mate – bloody gook won’t come good with the walking sticks now he’s got your flamin’ watch.’

  Jimmy put his hand inside his flak jacket and withdrew a gold watchband. ‘He get da rest when he brings dem walkin’ sticks.’

  I removed my watch. ‘Here . . . it’s yours,’ I said, offering it to Jimmy. I lifted one of the precious splints. ‘Thanks for these, mate.’

  Jimmy laughed. ‘Keep it, Brother Jack, we is gonna need it sometime for somethin’ else, dat for sure. No big deal, man. Dat watch I give to da gook, it a Timex, two lousy bucks from da pawnbroker.’ He held up the metal band. ‘Solid eighteen-carat gold, two dollars – and the salesman ain’t done me no special price, neither.’ He chuckled, his finger tapping the inside of the gold band. ‘Yoh know what it says here? It says “Made in China”. Now ain’t that somethin’. Yoh got something else we can trade, Brother Jack?’

  I dug into my American parka and produced my harmonica, holding it up. ‘This, I guess.’

  ‘Well, I be goddamned. Yoh play? Yoh play da harmonica?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What yoh play? Jazz? Blues?’

  I put the little instrument to my mouth and proceeded to play the World War II hit, Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, which sounds so great on the harmonica. To my astonishment after the first few bars the cave grew completely quiet. I played through the tune to where, towards the end, a couple of bars are repeated four times, each quieter than the one before, until it suddenly bursts up into a climax. For a moment the complete silence continued and then the cave erupted, not only cheers and claps but I could see a number of the soldiers were sobbing. I waited only a moment before swinging into ‘Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy’ . . .

  Have you ever passed the corner of Fourth and Grand,

  Where a little ball of rhythm has a shoe shine stand?

  People gather ’round and they clap their hands,

  He’s a great big bundle of joy.

  He pops the boogie woogie rag

  The Chattanoogie shoe shine boy.

  It only took the opening bars for the clapping to start and you could feel that the atmosphere in the cave had been transformed. The young blokes, who’d been grim-faced and moribund, were smiling or weeping. I followed ‘Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy’ with ‘Sunny Side of the Street.’

  Grab your coat and get your hat,

  Leave your worries on the doorstep,

  Just direct your feet

  To the sunny side of the street . . .

  I guess ‘Sunny Side’ wasn’t exactly appropriate to our situation, but it worked – the soldiers were smiling, the mood had changed.

  Jimmy was ecstatic, beaming at me. ‘Now we truly got us a move-a-ment, Brother Jacko. Dat harmonica ain’t for no trading, man, dat da call to arms, dat da reveille, dat da war cry, dat da way to get da muth’fuckers offa der ass!’

  We strapped the two palings Jimmy had pried from the stockade to my leg using our belts and an extra belt Jimmy produced seemingly from nowhere. He noted my look of surprise when it appeared. ‘Dat dude next to us who dead now, he ain’t gonna need no belt no more,’ he explained. The splints he’d procured for me were much longer than his own, but he hadn’t thought to exchange them, even though, being a much bigger man, it would have been a reasonable thing to do and, moreover, I would have been no less grateful to him for his generosity. It was obvious that he’d planned to help me even before he’d declared his ‘move-a-ment’ and made me the inaugural member of Ogoya.

  I was to learn that Jimmy Oldcorn was usually well ahead of the game and would arrive at a conclusion long before any of us. Like taking the dead bloke’s webbing belt – he’d removed it even before he’d gone look
ing for splints, before we’d even properly established a relationship – now I came to think of it, before even he’d asked me what was wrong with me. He must have examined my broken leg while I was asleep.

  But he had one further surprise in store for me. After he’d fixed my splint he produced the dead man’s boots. ‘Yoh ain’t got no boots, Brother Jacko. When we get dem sticks we’s gonna be walking, man. Ain’t no point wastin’ a nice pair of Uncle Sam’s boots dat has hardly seen no action. We’s got walkin’ to do, man . . . on da sunny side o’ da street!’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Frau Kraus and the Gobbling Spider

  Over the days that followed, Jimmy began to tell me his story. He had no father and a mother who, lacking the means to care for him, delivered him directly to the doorstep of the Colored Orphan Asylum. This institution was started in 1836 by two Quaker women who found two small coloured children abandoned in the doorway of a Lower East Side building, and consequently discovered that no orphanage would accept coloured children.

  In the grand tradition of the original foundlings, Jimmy – a gooey-eyed, mewling package wrapped in newspaper and still covered in vernix – was scooped up from the doorstep by Matron Mary Pentecost directly after early-morning prayers. She took him into the dispensary and unwrapped him to discover that his umbilical cord had been crudely severed, probably by his mother’s teeth, then tied too long so that the knot at the end of the greasy twist lay between his chubby little knees. She fetched a sharp pair of scissors, retied and cut the cord expertly and treated it with a dab of iodine. As she bathed him she was not to know that within two hours the New York Stock Exchange would collapse to trigger the Great Depression. Jimmy’s birth was recorded as having occurred on Black Tuesday, 29th of October 1929, the day the world held its head in its hands and yesterday’s rich men fell to their doom.

  That morning’s bible study reading had been from the New Testament book of St James. As was the custom at the orphanage, Matron Mary Pentecost had the right to give Jimmy any Christian name she chose, so she called him Pentecost, after herself. She was a practical woman, and must have realised that Pentecost might prove too burdensome a name for a small boy to lug around, so she added James, from the morning’s reading. As James Pentecost, the infant now had an identity but was yet to gain a family name. As the bible was a poor source of Protestant surnames, Jimmy’s last name was arrived at by way of the phone directory. Matron Mary Pentecost simply opened this at random and stabbed the point of a pencil down onto the facing page. A pause or a slight slip of the point in the 1929 Riverdale telephone directory and he may well have ended up as Jimmy Oldchekowitz.

  Jimmy would sometimes repeat his real names to himself with a certain satisfaction. ‘Dat my lucky day, Brother Fish, lotsa rich men who got money in dat stock exchange dey jump out da skyscraper window – but I got me a good name an’ my life begin.’ He paused, and smiled. ‘James Pentecost Oldcorn – dat a real nice name, a gentle-man’s name. Yessir! It got a good, good sound.’

  The orphanage was run entirely by white women and along strict Protestant lines where Jesus was constantly invoked as a source of tenderness, love and compassion, but the rules employed to bring up the children were in direct contradiction to this pious ethos. The Old Testament God of wrath ruled their everyday lives, and fear and punishment were the primary means of control. ‘We soon learn dat da lovin’ Jesus for da white folk – da Lord we s’pose to love don’t care ’bout da black chillen in dat place,’ was how Jimmy once put it.

  In its then almost hundred-year existence the Colored Orphan Asylum hadn’t changed much in its attitude to the raising of children in its care. Like all coloured folk of the day, they were predestined to belong to the lowest social order and were prepared for life accordingly. The children lived in cottages in the expansive grounds, and were locked in at night under the charge of a house mother. Godliness and cleanliness were the two paramount concerns of the women who ran the institution. Jimmy’s earliest memory was of being on his knees with a bucket and soapy rag.

  Cleanliness was achieved by means of elbow grease and the scrubbing brush, while godliness was taught by rote, bible verses repeated until they were indelibly stamped onto a small child’s consciousness. The majority of the texts chosen announced in various ways that the wages of sin are death and eternal hellfire and the act of being born again, and thereby receiving Jesus into your life, the only means of redemption.

  Any of the children who, upon examination, stumbled and hesitated over the lines of a bible passage previously taught were given three separate chances to correct their mistakes. If they failed on the fourth occasion, they were sent to ‘the lock-up’. This was a locked cupboard deep in the basement of the main institution building where, according to Jimmy, the records of all children who had died in the orphanage over the past hundred years were kept in ancient wooden filing cabinets, each of which was secured by a door as well as drawers.

  But in the frightened imagination of the orphans, the basement had been transmuted into the place they’d put all the dead children. The 150 wooden cabinets standing in rows were clearly coffins. Why else would the handles be removed from the cabinet doors and the doors nailed shut? In the children’s imagination this was certain evidence that they contained the skeletons of dead children.

  The lock-up was a cabinet identical to the others with the drawers pulled out and two holes ‘the size of a quarter’ drilled in the top and again in the door one third up from the floor to allow the air to enter. The cupboard was only large enough for a small child to sit cross-legged or to stand with their arms held to their sides. To a chastened and frightened child, being sent to the lock-up meant being placed in a coffin beside the rows of dead children who had undoubtedly been left to perish because they too failed to correctly recite their bible verses. To add to the misery of the dark cupboard, the lights in the basement of the old stone building were extinguished so that a child couldn’t look through the breathing holes for the small reassurance of a beam of pale electric light.

  A terrified child would sit in the cramped cupboard and listen to the gurgling and knocking of the ancient plumbing and the moaning of the furnace flue. They would soon become convinced these were the cries of the ghosts of the dead children. In the stygian darkness the numerous rats in the basement squeaking and scratching could only mean that the hungry rodents were coming to get them.

  ‘Dem rats deys scratchin’ and chewin’ dat cupboard – dey get inside dey gonna eat you, man!’ When I grinned at this notion Jimmy pulled his head back and said, ‘It true, Brother Fish. I seen dem rats, dey same size a pussy cat. Ain’t no cat gonna fight one dem mothers! Dey get inside when you in dat box dey gonna eat you, man!’ It was plain to see the frightened little boy that still lived within him was entirely convinced.

  On another occasion he’d explained to me, ‘Some kids when dey got to ree-cite dem bible verses on der own, dey stutter – ’cos dey nervous, man! “Ha!” da matron, she shout, “Dat’s da devil talking inside you, child! Dat’s Satan spoiling God’s precious word!” Den dey take him down and he gonna go sit in the lock-up till da devil come out o’ him.’

  ‘How’d they know when the devil was gone?’ I asked.

  ‘Dat easy, man. Da matron come down every two hours an’ ask you to ree-cite yo’ bible verses. If you can do it den da devil he gone, if you stutter some more da devil still der inside.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Jimmy,’ I protested. ‘What if a kid has a permanent stutter or he can’t control his nerves?’

  Jimmy shook his head sadly. ‘Nah, it don’t work like dat. A chile put in dat cupboard, he gonna get hysterical in ’bout four hours. He gonna think dem rats dey’s gonna eat him. He gonna hear da dead children moanin’ and der bones rattlin’ in da coffin and da ghosts callin’ out, he gonna soon be screamin’ and shakin’ and moanin’ hisself. “Ha!” da matron say. “Praise da Lord! Now da devil is comin’ out! Hallelujah! Hear da devil comin’ out o’ J
esus’ precious child. Hear him moanin’ an’ cryin’ out inside dat poor child. Hear him hissin’ and roarin’ and wrestlin’ wid da Lord Jesus. Praise His precious name!”’ Jimmy paused, his eyes sad. ‘When dat chile he can’t scream no more an’ he sit huggin’ his knees shakin’ an’ shiverin’ an’ sobbin’, den dey take him out an’ carry him to his cottage an’ put him in his bed an’ da house mother she give him hot choco-late an’ she tell him how Jesus loves him, savin’ him from da devil in da nick o’ time.’

  It wasn’t too hard to guess that Jimmy had been through this experience, perhaps more than once. He’d never dwell too long on the orphanage, telling me disconnected bits and pieces, such as the devil-evicting episode. Perhaps his memories of the orphanage were too deeply buried to surface in other than episodic snatches of conversation, pushing momentarily to the surface and then retreating before too much anger and sadness became attached to them.

  I was left with the impression of a place where godliness and cleanliness took the place of love and compassion, a place of icy showers and chilblained skin rubbed raw by the hard, unforgiving edges of crude blocks of blue carbolic soap. Of small children on their knees muttering earnest and confused prayers to a Jesus they were told to love but grew to fear. Where small children lived in permanent terror that they might offend, often not understanding why they were being punished, and finally coming to accept that punishment was arbitrary.

  The naturally timid became submissive, overanxious in all things and sycophantic, while others, such as Jimmy, grew to be deeply resentful, which, in turn, eventually led them astray.

  What was also apparent was that no serious attempt was made to develope their intellect. The education they received was rudimentary, the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic taught to a point of basic competency. The boys worked in the vegetable gardens and the grounds or the carpentry shop; the girls worked in the kitchen, did sewing or quilting or simply completed the domestic chores around the orphanage. From the age of eight to twelve they worked in the laundry, which took in washing and ironing from the nearby monastery and the College of Mount St Vincent.