Bivouac Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  ONE

  TWO

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  THREE

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  FOUR

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  FIVE

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  SIX

  SEVEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  EIGHT

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  NINE

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  TEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  ELEVEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  TWELVE

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  THIRTEEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  FOURTEEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  FIFTEEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  SIXTEEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  SEVENTEEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  EIGHTEEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  NINETEEN

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  TWENTY

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  TWENTY-ONE

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  TWENTY-TWO

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  TWENTY-THREE

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  TWENTY-FOUR

  AFTERWORD

  About Kwame Dawes

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  For Lorna,

  Sena, Kekeli, and Akua,

  Mama the Great,

  and the tribe: Gwyneth, Kojo, Adjoa, Kojovi.

  Remembering: Neville and Aba.

  This is nothing:

  tree hill gravel, tactile and tragic,

  the pattern of waterscape;

  noting these primary tints

  I mutter nothing

  but the bare sotto voce poem,

  like any nude he made

  limb or feeling heart.

  In this bright or yellow sky

  or blue (the symbol is arider than water)

  the familiar gesture of the rose

  is parched with dry-land laughter but cannot die:

  over and under this composed waterscape

  delicate crows only are sensuous.

  I have this all,

  a monotonous bamboo-flute or the immodest jasmine.

  “Without Dogma” by Neville Dawes

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  Already I am beginning to sound like an ungrateful complainer. They say I should be grateful for the scraps thrown before me. So I have a job. I have a job working as a ghost editorial writer for this paper. If the people who have been reading my editorials knew who was writing them, they would be startled, and in some cases quite outraged, I am sure. That Merchant Party lot is still so giddy with victory that the taste of blood is still fresh in their mouths. Peace simply leaves them hungry and thirsty. They would ravage me if they knew. The joke is that the People’s Democratic Party lot would do the same. Here I am, suffering because they did not protect me, and yet they would slaughter me for writing editorials for the enemy. Well, screw the lot. None of them have the gumption for revolution. These days, I don’t care what they have to say. I feel cheap sometimes. Some mornings I get in early enough to see the two prostitutes who must own this end of Duke Street eating their breakfast out of cheese pans in a shadowy alcove. You can see the fatigue in their eyes—that mute gaze, staring into the asphalt and not seeing. One of them has the most striking cheekbones. But she can’t hide her decay. Perhaps I would have judged them once, or simply ignored them, but now I think of myself as a kindred spirit, an old broken-down whore, hustling money from the very people who broke me down. God, I am so cynical. It wouldn’t be so bad, this cynicism, if it had the proper effect of making me feel superior, somehow above sentiment and pathos; but what I feel is a truly pathetic gratitude. This is what I have come to. I take my pay with sniveling, bitter gratitude. Who said irony helps?

  ONE

  The pains came in sharp spasms, cutting through his stomach. He opened his mouth, sucking in air. He tried to force a belch. More air in his stomach. He had eaten too fast, too late.

  They had not heard him come in. This was for the best. He did not want to answer questions, to assume the mask of mourning that was wearing thin. It had been a long day, driving from Mandeville with his father’s body melting in the backseat of the Volvo. Sorrow was tiring.

  He had eaten breakfast at four in the morning before they set out. Kingston was sleeping. They drove downtown, breaking red lights at the deserted intersections. The streets were empty except for the occasional madman or -woman shuffling aimlessly along the sidewalk, smudges against the deep blue of early morning. Ferron noticed a cream Toyota behind them somewhere above Cross Roads. Its lights were off.

  “Only dog, madman, an’ Christian, to rass,” Cuthbert muttered. As if on cue, a cluster of turbanned, white-clad “mothers” strolled in slow, dreamlike motion across Old Hope Road to their morning prayers. The soft sunlight turned their skins to a tender orange, their robes flecked with gold. The wind played with the flowing robes. They vanished behind a thick hibiscus hedge. Ferron could see the blue tattered flag on a long bamboo pole bobbing above the yard behind the hedge.

  They drove along Spanish Town Road where the traffic was a little heavier, and then headed into the country. In Bog Walk, a heavy mist hung in the air. The wiper was on.

  They stopped and Ferron stepped behind some bushes to urinate. Farther down the road, just where it curved and disappeared, he saw the Toyota tucked away to the side. He noted the coincidence casually. But from that point on, his body was tense even if he could think of no useful reason to feel that way.

  They bought some oranges, mangoes, and bananas from an early vendor. The boy’s eyes were full of sleep. He did not have enough change, so they left him with a healthy tip. He was too sleepy even to smile in gratitude.

  Cuthbert turned north toward the Mandeville hills.

  The early start was important. Cuthbert understood these government departments; after all, he worked in one. Collecting a body involved at least eight carbon-copied signatures and a file full of paperwork. At that time of the morning, with so little traffic on the road, the ride would take them less than three hours. With any luck, they would be back in Kingston before nightfall. The funeral home closed at five thirty, and the proprietor, Mrs. Abrams, wanted people to think she had a home to go to. She would not be there after five o’clock. More critically for Cuthbert, the parlor was somewhere downtown, near Jones Town. He did not want to be caught there after dark. His political connections were not on that side of town.

  After the fruit, Ferron ate nothing else for the day.

  He looked back a few times to see if the Toyota was still following. He did not see it.

  TWO

  A crow of a woman with gray patches of hair sticking out of a blue-and-gold silk scarf knotted in front had pushed her way through a crowd of visitors who were gathered around a bed at the other end of the ward, and moved toward Ferron and his mother. They had been standing there by the old man’s side for nearly an hour, not speaking. His mother used a cool rag to wipe the expressionless face. She kept whispering to the old man, asking him wh
y he was doing this to her. The old man’s bed was the last one before the door to the nurses’ office.

  The crow was dressed like the others in the group at the far end of the ward: church whites and blacks, which hung on her body at a slant. She held her Bible tight under her thin chest and looked from the bed to the faces of Ferron and his mother. The old man was having difficulty breathing. He looked thin. The woman stared at him knowingly. Two women from the other bed looked over. Soon they were all but ignoring their sick friend and watching this crow-faced woman standing before the old man’s bed. Ferron recognized the look. They were expecting a lesson—a sermon.

  “’Im soon dead. ’Im soon dead. Yes. ’Im as good as dead, now,” she said, turning to them with a knowing gaze, as if expecting applause for her prophecy. “Them always put the worse one dem right side a de door. This one gone, Jesus.”

  The other women nodded. Ferron felt his mother shaking.

  “’Im soon dead. ’Im really look bad.” She walked closer to the old man, covering her face with a kerchief. “Soon gone.” She sniffed. The other people still nodded, but they kept their distance.

  Ferron could hear his mother’s breathing quicken. He would have acted, but the woman’s audacity surprised him. His mind worked quickly, trying to understand the woman’s tone, to decipher something that made sense in it. Sympathy, perhaps, or concern. His mother did not wait.

  “Move! Move your sour little body from here, do you understand? I said move! Now!” Ferron’s mother shouted into the face of the woman who seemed too startled to move. “If you don’t leave this minute I will wrap that scarf around your neck . . .”

  “Sweet savior!” The crow-woman clutched her Bible tightly, her face breaking into a twisted network of wrinkles, her mouth hanging open in shock. She sloped her way to the other end of the room, offended, martyred, misunderstood. The others comforted her in low tones, sending admonishing glances toward his mother who kept glaring at them.

  “Vultures. Stinking vultures,” his mother said, as if trying to help the old man understand. Ferron felt her shame and anger. This was death without dignity. They had no protection from the vultures. The nurse said she could do nothing and suggested that his mother had misunderstood the woman.

  “These people mean well. Sometimes them bring a little solace to them what dying in sin,” she said with a smile. She was struggling with a syringe package. “When it come to death and damnation, sister, God is no respecter of person.” She shrugged her shoulders and walked back to her office. The crow-woman stared across the room with a triumphant smile on her face.

  His mother wanted to move the body to Kingston, but there was no money to do so and the doctor said it would be too dangerous. So he would have to stay in this small country hospital, reduced to a simple old man—a peasant, a member of the lumpen proletariat. Ferron felt that the old man would have found it all quite funny; sweetly ironic and fitting. This would have been his end in a classless world, anyway. This was his dream.

  He died that night. They got the call from the hospital while they were reading the ninety-first psalm together. His mother breathed what seemed to be a sigh, and then walked into the bedroom and changed into black. She would wear black for three years after the death.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  This is Femi’s third trip to Jamaica this year and July has not come yet. I think he is coming to cheer me up, but all we end up doing is drinking. Well, he drinks, but I must be a downer for him since I can’t find the strength to laugh. Ambassador work suits him just fine. He gets to see his women, and he really loves Jamaica. It is funny, sometimes being with him can really play tricks with you. The jokes, the Shakespearean quotes, the gossip about conspiracies and the memory of that summer we spent traveling across the Soviet Union—he is amazingly good at transporting you until you start to feel younger. But this is Jamaica. We have just come out of a bloody season and everything has changed, utterly changed, and the shadows are thick with desperate people who will kill you for reasons that you will never anticipate. He left yesterday for Rio. I might see him in December, he said. Funny, because when he called to say he was coming, he had me convinced that he was traveling with a contract for me to take up a post at a university in Liberia. He kept asking me if I was ready to go. I said I was. I am. I am ready to go anywhere. He has said nothing of Liberia since he has been here. I am too embarrassed for him to mention it.

  Last night we ran into Gregory. He looks quite greasy these days—he sweats a lot, now, which is such a cliché for someone growing fat on power. But I do not begrudge him the extra flesh. At school his lean and hungry look was quite sad; made him hard to trust—and he did suffer a great deal in the seventies. We met at the Sheraton, in the bar. I have not been there in a while, and I really did not want to go for fear that I would run into people like him. But Femi insisted, said I needed distraction.

  “My God, George, I thought you was dead, man. You were not on the list?” Gregory shouted this across the room, waving. This is how they talk in Parliament, I suppose. He was red-faced with rum, and, like I said, quite fat. And then there was that big laugh. So I laughed. What I should have said was, “They did kill Appleton on Stony Hill Road. He was on the list too, wasn’t he? And we suppressed that well in the paper.” But I didn’t. I just laughed.

  How many people read the paper for news, anyway? “Listening Post” is probably the most popular section of the paper among supporters of the party that forms the government (it was equally popular among them when that party was in opposition). Why? The paper is anti-PDP and the majority of people working here or writing for the paper are, however concealed (at the columnist level) or confused (at the worker level), rabid anti-communists. How anybody of intelligence can take such a stand is beyond me. I similarly cannot follow an anti-Christian attitude. Being against communism or Christianity in terms of debate is quite rational. But to be caught in this inflexible system of animosity is an incredible waste of energy.

  THREE

  The gas was eating away at his stomach. Acidic. They called it a nervous stomach. That and low blood pressure were his ailments. He was counting the dizzy spells. Today, there had been six. This death was becoming a burden, and yet he took it on, accepted it as his lot, and proceeded to do all that had to be done. Nobody complained. His older brother Lucas was still numb, spending the afternoons reading novels that had belonged to the old man. Nobody knew what would happen when he finished reading. He was sitting with his legs thrown over the side of the armchair reading novel after novel and smoking profusely. He had stopped smoking three years ago when he got saved. The old man smoked. It had been difficult to tell whether Lucas’s evangelism was more to win his father to a smoke-free life or to Christ. Whatever, Lucas had poured his zeal into antismoking efforts and, for months, the old man smoked more. Lucas must have given up after a while. Things returned to normal. The old man died a smoker. But smoking did not kill him.

  Now, Lucas coughed through cigarette after cigarette, barely burning each stick. Most of the family seemed to understand that everybody had their private ritual of mourning. Only Clarice, their sister, ventured to remind him that cigarettes were expensive these days. She was protecting her money; Lucas had taken to borrowing a lot of late.

  A small delegation from the church had visited the house the Sunday before to offer their condolences. They were hot in their heavy clothes and carried their Bibles and hymn books. They seemed, though, more intent on trying to speak some sense into Lucas, who had missed three important services since the death, than on condoling with the family. Lucas barely acknowledged their presence when Ferron opened the door for them. They stood in a huddle, silhouetted by the large window that filled the den with the orange glow of dusk, whispering to Lucas, who sat back, almost parodying the old man, listening to their admonitions. Finally, Lucas stood up and turned to the window. The delegation was silent.

  “He is my father. I rejected him. I turned m
y soul from him, and now he is gone.” Lucas’s voice was calm and evenly modulated. “We look alike, me and him. You can see that. Look at that. Look at that.” He lifted the bust of the old man and put it beside his face. “We could be brothers, right? And it was badly done, everybody says so, but you can see the resemblance. They made him look older, ten, maybe twenty years older. This is what he was going to look like. Maybe it was intentional, a prophecy, something to keep him growing with us, you know?” He paused, placing the bust back on the side table. “So why can’t I smoke too? Don’t I deserve to feel what he felt, sitting here? This is his seat. Don’t I deserve it, to feel . . . him?”

  “Brother,” one of the sisters tried to sound patient, “this is not of the Lord . . .”

  “Aahhh! Not of the Lord,” Lucas said, turning to her. Ferron was startled at how much his tone was like the old man’s. “Not of J. Christ Esquire, eh?” He laughed.

  Somebody breathed, “Lord!”

  “That is what the old man would say,” Lucas continued. “I have never read his books. Do you understand what that means? Do you? I never read any. None. Zero. I read everything else but . . . No . . . I am doing what I have to do. These are his shoes. These are his . . .” He paused. Ferron was expecting him to break down, and stood, preparing to clear the house of the delegation. But Lucas did not start to cry. He was trying to find the right words. “This is . . . this is him,” he finished, leaning back in the chair.

  The delegation could not get him to say any more. He was busy reading. They gathered around him and prayed. Ferron looked over to the telephone room and noticed Clarice sitting there in the half light, chewing at her nails and watching everything. Her face was expressionless. The delegation finished their prayer and promised to come by again soon. Lucas did not look up. They left as quietly as they had come.

  Ferron watched Lucas lean forward and peer through the window to watch them leaving. He turned away quickly as Lucas looked over to him. He heard Lucas chuckle slightly. There was silence for a few minutes. Lucas lit a cigarette and continued reading. He turned a page. By now it was too dark to make out his facial expressions. He was a shadow.