Debra serving out some guava juice at this point in the talk, and she volunteer to help out and go and see Ghost in hospital. She say she know about the public hospital, where the different wards is—male medical, male surgical, and so on. She say she know the rules and regulations about visiting time and number of visitors allowed and she say how we kinda people wouldn’t know how to deal up with them security who like to rough up people who wearing church hat and talking and behaving hoity-toity. Denise want to take on the hoity-toity challenge Debra throw down just so, but Louisa jump in quick and say, Well, thank you, Debra, that’s very kind, we appreciate your offer. Everybody agree that Debra is the most suitable person of all of us to tackle the petty bureaucracy of government-run space.
That same afternoon self, Debra set out with a bag of mango, orange, and sapodilla we gather up hurry-hurry, to visit Ghost and take him our get-well-soon message. When she come back Monday morning she say, Ghost not doing too good, nah: the bullet still inside and he have to have operation. Well, things start to get technical now and is like we have to intervene beyond mango and sapodilla. We send back Debra next day; she don’t mind, she getting off work early and her role now enhance beyond cooking and cleaning: she is the designated mediator. Her mission is to find out who is the doctor on the ward, when the operation is, whether police pressing charges, and so on.
Debra come back and say the operation is for next week Thursday if the theatre have current and if they get through the backlog from last Thursday when current gone whole day. She say she know the fellow who does make up the list for the surgeon and he say he could put Ghost name high up on the list if he get some encouragement for him and for the surgeon too. All-a-we vex like hell about this grease-palm business, what the hell the oil and gas royalties is for, what taxes is for, what else health surcharge is for if not to make everything in public hospital and public clinic available for everybody in the public, irregardless, and ent these people getting pay already, from we same tax, etc., but, after all said and done, all-a-we know is vent we only venting; we know this is not a whistle to blow so easy, when people out there in the know have it to say that even the head of the district hospital authority been seen to be redirecting brand-new hospital equipment and supplies the Health Ministry pay good money for, to his own private clinic. We not powerful but we not stupid; we know the cards stack in their favour not our own and if we play mad and say we going public about corrupt practice, before you could say bribery and corruption, Ghost would be discharge immediately with the bullet still inside him and then what we will do? Paying the same surgeon to do the operation in his private clinic was out of the question. So we agree to shut up, sub up, and help out; it will be cheaper in the long run. Eventually talk done and everybody boil down and agree and pull out wallet and purse, cash only, no cheque.
Debra continue to visit in the hospital, Ghost get the operation, Ghost discharge, Ghost home recuperating. And Debra bringing us the latest news about how Ghost progressing. That he living up a steep hill over by so, with a dirt track to the house Ghost and his father scramble to build together. And that now that his father dead, is his mother and sister living there with the sister three children. That the sister does do a little hairdressing—braiding, weaving, straightening—and how she expand to nails too with her biggest girlchild helping out, learning the same beautician business because it does pay good, because everybody want to look nice, and that the school the same girlchild pass for is only a waste-a-time place, the teachers don’t come to class and the children only having sex in the classroom and taking videos with they cell phone and sending it all around the place and some even selling it on the Internet, and how she don’t want her daughter mixing up in that kind a thing, is best she help out with the business and learn something she could make a living with. Debra say to us, All you don’t have to study Ghost at all, nah, he mother and sister helping he out. We self wondering among ourself, but of course not out loud in front of Debra, how come poor people does have enough money for hairdos but only buying Crix biscuits and Chubby sweetdrink for they children when the day come, and how come little-little schoolchildren can have cell phone with camera in it and not have books for school, but, in the end, we exhaling, we well glad that it looking like Ghost pulling through all right. So we listen to Debra and we lay Ghost to rest for the time being as we have plenty other thing to deal-up with.
Outside in the yard, we seeing that the mealy bug finally ecologically controlled by a fast-multiplying ladybird colony they bring in from India and fruit trees flowering good again. Mangoes ripening and falling in the yard and rottening, zabocas too high in the tree for we older folks to pick; is only iguana and manicou enjoying the fruit. Nowadays gardener and them don’t want to climb no tree for you. They only coming in a team, cutting lawn zrrr, zrrr, zrrr with the whacker, blowing grass cuttings vroom, vroom and then gone, quick-quick to the next yard, and you standing there like a fool with your purse empty, and nothing you really want do getting done.
One Sunday morning Maureen hear people calling, Morning! Morning! at the gate and she look out the kitchen window. She see two neat and tidy people, a man and a woman. The woman wearing a floral-print shirt-waist dress, white sandals, a white hat, carrying a straw basket in one hand and holding a pink parasol in the other. The man in a long-sleeve white shirt, blue tie, black soft pants, and black lace-up shoes, black parasol. Maureen wondering what they could be selling and she go to the gate and she see the man holding a big maco Bible and the woman basket have magazine in it. They say, Good morning, madam, and we are messengers of the Lord coming to bring you blessings from Jesus.
Maureen tell us afterwards she feel something was familiar but she couldn’t say exactly what until the man say, Miss Edwards, you don’t remember me? Alfred Thomas. She say the name sounding familiar but where she know him from? The man say, I used to get lime and zaboca from your yard. She say she look at him good-good. And in the eyes and the eyes alone, she recognise Ghost. His hair cut flat down to his scalp, his face clean-clean; she say is the first time she see he have forehead, ears, cheeks, chin like everybody else. She say she didn’t say the name Ghost out loud because maybe the woman didn’t know about his past and it wasn’t her business to reveal nothing, so she just say, Oh yes, is you, Alfred, I didn’t recognise you. He say, I seen The Light, Miss Edwards. Jesus reach out to me and save me. I was in hospital and a pastor come and show me I was on the wrong path. He point me in the right direction and now I am save. Miss Edwards, I want you to be save too and everybody I uses to know. You have a few minutes to spare for the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? Maureen say she didn’t know what to say. She had time for the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, yes, of course, but she didn’t have no time for Ghost, now known as Alfred Thomas. So she say she have food on the stove and maybe another time when she wasn’t so busy. He give her a magazine and the two of them gone up the hill by where Denise and Mavis living.
Every Sunday Alfred and a lady at the gate, sometimes the same lady as first time, sometimes a different one, but always is Alfred. And every Sunday people hiding and making excuse not to go out by they gate and fight-up with Alfred attempt at religious conversion: they just about to go and bathe, they have plantain frying and can’t leave the stove, they on a phone call to they daughter in foreign. We don’t really care for the evasiveness but the man become a absolute botheration. And whole week-a-day, we people raking up and sweeping up and piling up whole heap a rotten mango and carcass of hollowed-out zaboca skin and seed that drop when the iguana and parrot done with them and we wondering how after one-time-is-two-time and how you never appreciate what you have until it done. And in the middle of all the grumbling and all the what to do, you know, is Debra self who again pull us out of this stalemate situation.
One Sunday, Maureen gone out to man the cake stall at the church bazaar, and when the two proselytizer come by the gate, Alfred lady ask if she could use the bathroom, please, so Debra let the two-a-them come
in. Alfred and Debra waiting in the gallery for Alfred lady to finish her business in the bathroom when Alfred spot the julie mango tree laden with fruit. He ask Debra who does pick it. Debra say, Well, where the picker pole could reach they get pick, but plenty too high to reach. Alfred say, Tell Miss Edwards I coming Tuesday to help out.
So said, so done; Tuesday morning bright and early Alfred at the gate. Debra had already tell Maureen what Alfred say but Maureen say she will wait to see with her own two eye before she believing anything Ghost say. Alfred tell Maureen he come to help pick the mango and she let him in. Well, he pick and pick and full up a whole crocus bag. He tell Maureen the day work come to two hundred dollars. Maureen pay him, then she and Debra had to go and share mango through the whole neighbourhood, because how much mango one person could eat, eh? Is a setta work to pulp and juice and freeze, and who have freezer big enough to pack-up with a setta mango pulp? You tell me. Hazel pay him two hundred dollars the following week to pick out her zabocas and he buy back most of what he pick for a hundred dollars and take the bag with him. He say he have an order to supply the little street-side vegetable stalls. And so it went with the pootegal, the orange, the sapodilla, the pommecythere, and the grapefruit. People find theyself paying Alfred to do what Ghost use to do for free.
One day, Alfred come to Maureen yard and he find a big truck park-up in the yard. It mark Green Fingers Tree Removal Service. He hearing brrz, brzzz, brrrzzzz. When he look, he see two big man with a chain saw cutting down the pomerac tree, branch by branch from the bottom branch. He rush for the man holding the saw and start to pelt cuff. The man drop the saw and it start to race around by itself in circles till the next man catch it and turn it off. What you think you doing? Alfred challenge the man. The man say, The lady here call us to cut down the trees. Maureen, hearing the saw stop and hearing the commotion, come out to investigate. She explain to Alfred that she cutting down all the fruit trees because it now a nuisance to have them: too expensive to upkeep, too much waste, too much mess in the yard with leaves and fallen fruit. She add that furthermore, from now on she buying what she want from the grocery. Alfred sit down right there on the ground between all the leaf and branch and the red star-spatter of buss-up pomerac and start to bawl like a little child who get plenty licks. How you could do a thing like that? he say. You don’t know how much a people all over the place depending on them pomerac and sapodilla and mango. You have any idea what them fruits and them does mean to people like we? Is how long I know all you? Why we can’t talk about this man-to-man like two big people? Maureen tell the tree-cutting men to stop a minute while she has a quiet word with Alfred. The two of them go to the gallery and sit down and talk. Debra bring out some lime juice for the both of them and they talk some more. When Maureen come back outside, she tell the cutting crew to go back to the company; she don’t need them and she will call the office and settle up.
Since then, Louisa finding two big hand a green fig by the back steps and when she check, the big bunch that was hanging down on the fig tree down the slope gone. Denise mop bucket always have a few lime or pootegal and orange when they in season and the tree and them still have some left back. Most morning, Nicky finding a nearly ripe zaboca on the kitchen window sill and no rotten ones on the ground. And Mavis enjoying not only julie but starch and graham mango with no flies and rotten fruit under her julie tree. If Maureen husband forgetting to close the gate at night, Maureen not making no fuss with him, and when two chain-link post with ten feet of link wire at the back by Denise lose they footing and slip down in a little landslide in the rainy season, nobody bothering to put it back up.
When we ladies meeting for Sunday after-church breakfast, some wit may remark to the hostess that she enjoying the nice homemade pommecythere jam but where you hiding the pommecythere tree, girl? And a next time, a person may wink when she complimenting on a sweet mango nectar at the home of someone who can’t boast of a mango tree, and all the rest of us smiling-smiling, because we figuring that is really like a Ghost does be passing through in the night.
The Dragonfly’s Tale
by Sharon Millar
Northern Range
(Originally published in 2013)
Carmelita
Weeks before Christmas, in the hills of the Northern Range, a boy disappears from home. He is seventeen years old. His mother, Carmelita Nunes, calls on the Orisha gods and prays to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. Her son is not yet a man and she knows that makes him both more dangerous and more vulnerable. On the first day of his absence, she draws a thick black line through the almanac hanging on the kitchen wall. On the third day, a black Friday, she dresses in her best clothes and calls a taxi. When she passes through the village, sitting in the backseat, some people raise their hands in gentle waves while others stare, their arms still. The village had lost hunting dogs and caged parrots, but never a boy. Even the aging white French Creole, who has never spoken to her, and old man Lum Fatt, who still dreams of China, come to see her drive down the winding road toward the police station.
Carmelita is not naive, but weeks before, when her two other children had come to the house to talk about Daniel, she’d turned her head and raised the volume on the radio. First Oriana had come and then Johnny. It was only after Daniel had raised his hand to her, the hand moving from his side with lightning violence, that there was talk of sending him to Johnny in town. “Send him,” Oriana had said, “send him so that Johnny could teach him about respect.” He’d stayed with Johnny and his wife for less than two days. Oh God, Carmelita thought, after Johnny called to say Daniel was heading home.
“You can’t talk some sense into him?” Her voice echoed down the telephone wire.
“I have Lilla to think of, Ma. She’s afraid of him.”
Most of the young boys make their money growing weed in the forest, ducking and hiding from the police helicopters that swoop like clumsy dragonflies before chop-chopping their way back to the city. That’s all it was, she thought, nothing the other boys aren’t doing.
To keep him at home, Carmelita showed him how to curry birds: chickens, ducks, pigeons. Cutting, chopping, frying, stewing. She held a plucked duck over the open fire, singeing the skin, cut the fat gland off the end of a chicken, and killed a pigeon quietly without breaking its tiny bones. She showed him how to add pimento pepper and ground ginger as her mother had taught her.
“South boys work in oil and town boys work in banks,” said Daniel as he watched her cook, “but what happen to the village boys from the north?” He spoke to the duck, sitting cold and pimple-skinned on the counter, not to her.
“You think any tomato or christophene could ever compete with that black gold? Those south boys born into that. It come like they own that fountain of oil. And town boys only eating sushi and managing money market.”
The duck was now in the pot, its skin sizzling and browning, mixing with the seasoning, flooding the kitchen with such a good scent that it was as if he were saying something that she wanted to hear, something happy. When she looked up from the pot, his topaz eyes were on her, baleful and sly. She tamped down the doubt that she’d grown this child. Looking away, he shook his head, a quick movement, like a dog trying to get water out of his ear.
Later, he told her that sometimes they worked from a small base on Chachachacare, the abandoned island that once housed nuns and lepers—he’d seen women, dark silhouettes on the pirogues. “They’ll kill me if they know I talk,” he told her later that night. “They tell me so all the time.”
“Who is they, Daniel?” she asked. “Who is they?”
But he was too busy eating his duck to answer her.
That night she looked up the word sushi in the dictionary, but it was not listed in her old pocket version. Though she did find the word cocaine.
* * *
It is only after they pass the large immortelle tree, the big taxi juddering into first gear on the hairpin turn, that Carmelita allows herself to breathe. Now that
she is out of view, she can stop feeling shame. No doubt the villagers will have milled around in the road after she left, looking for the silvery flashes of the big Chevrolet as it rounded the corners of the hill.
Mr. Ali is only called up to the village in emergencies. Right next to her on the backseat is the faint brown stain from when Myrtle nearly sliced off her finger and Carmelita had to hold her hand up over her head while Mr. Ali barrelled down the hill. Myrtle is a good friend; thirty years of looking at each other across a hedge, day and night, and minding each other’s children, made them like family. Myrtle had come over last night to tell her the village talk.
“People saying that Dan cross Chale Jamiah,” she said. “Is one of two things happen to him, Carmelita. Either Jamiah’s people pick him up or the police hold him. The only thing we could do is pray.”
Carmelita had run this conversation over and over in her mind all night. She’d played it like a movie, each word an image. Everyone knew Chale Jamiah grew tomatoes. No one dared to say that tomatoes couldn’t build that big house in town; there was even talk that he’d bought an oil rig. You could sell tomatoes from morning to night but even the simplest child could do the math. Tomatoes didn’t buy oil rigs. He was a big whistler as well. They said he could whistle any tune. A nice-looking man who whistled and grew tomatoes. She’d met Jamiah once years ago when he’d come to the house to pay his respects after Frank had died. “Farmer to farmer,” he’d said, and she hadn’t thought any more of it.
When Frank collapsed in the lettuce bed at the side of the house, Carmelita was soaping baby Daniel’s head, shielding his golden eyes, he chittering in the lukewarm water of his kitchen-sink bath, little happy chirrups of contentment as the water poured over his head. She’d run to go to Frank, leaving Daniel in the water, wailing and slippery. By the time Mr. Ali made it up the hill, Myrtle had covered Frank’s face with a flowered sheet. After this Carmelita began to pray, imagining her prayers carrying the soul of her husband. She’d picked roses for Mother Mary while keeping her eyes open for five-toed hens to woo the Orisha gods. On some nights she’d burned incense for Ganesh who shared a shrine with Jesus under the hog plum tree. She wasn’t taking chances with Frank’s soul.
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