Bivouac Page 11

  “We don’t know,” Ferron said.

  Femi nodded. “It was the police,” he said, as if that would make complete sense to Ferron. When it was clear that he still did not get it, Femi continued: “They’ve been investigating the whole mess from day one and before. Before. They’ve been watching him. When he went to Mandeville, they were watching him. When you drove back, they followed the car to the funeral home. They went in to make sure it was him. Something funny in all of this, wouldn’t you think? She has been having him watched, this Madam Minister Vera Chen. Quite a bitch. She has demons, you know?” He laughed. “Courtesy of Lucas’s inside track. Personally, I think she is a man. Ever heard her talk? And she keeps all those women around her. She was a friend of your father’s. They were in the same circles. Then, he said, she was a beautiful woman who seemed impervious to the charms of men. Smart, but no dogma—ideologically bereft. She was once a socialist, you know? Well, look at her now. Watch her closely; she will be prime minister before you know. She has it in her—that capacity to order the execution of enemies.” He took a long drag and exhaled as he spoke. “Well, they’ve been watching the house—your place. They may be out there now, waiting for us. I think that short man behind us is one. Don’t look. Watch the eyes. He’s been looking. Looks CIA, doesn’t he?” He laughed at what he meant as a joke. “I think they’ve bugged the table.”

  “You’ve found out all of this in this little time?”

  “Connections.” Femi looked at his watch and stood up. He wore a pair of jeans and a light cheesecloth shirt, which was unbuttoned to the curve of his slight paunch. Femi was in good shape. He felt for his cigarettes in his breast pocket, slipped a cigarette between his lips, black with tar. The cigarette bobbed as he spoke. “Time to exercise the back. She can be impatient.” He laughed loudly, lighting up. People close by turned around to look. “We should go to the north coast, man. Negril. We will talk better there. Have a few ideas. There will be plenty booze, brother. I have a job to do with you. I promised the old man.”

  Ferron wanted to ask what he had promised and whether the promise had been made that night on the lawn, rum fumes dancing in the air. He had dreamed of that too . . . the conversation—but it remained vague, a peculiar sensation of longing or yearning with no definite edges, no shape or form.

  “Only if you want to, though . . . And bring the girl . . .” Femi was saying, sucking on his cigarette.

  “I think she would rather not . . .” Ferron had no intention of making the trip, but suddenly he wanted to hear more about the death, the police, the thing his father had asked Femi to talk to him about, but he was afraid to ask.

  “Well, bring anybody. Somebody else.” Femi winked. His keys were out of his pocket, jingling. He placed three hundred dollars on the table. “For one meal,” he said. “Can’t get used to it.”

  They walked through the inner courtyard, milling with people walking about licking cones. Some had their heads stuck in gallery brochures from the national collection which was mounted in the old colonial building. Bamboo patches spotted the cobbled courtyard in neatly arranged oases. They walked into the bright haze and heat of the parking lot.

  “You really think they killed him?” Ferron asked.

  “To kill—” Femi stopped as if musing on the issue of killing. “What is it to kill? Your mother says they killed him three years ago. She buried him then. Lucas says they pushed him down the stairs. You’ve heard that theory. Compelling, eh? And you say he died, he just died—a freak accident. I think you have more faith than Lucas. You believe in freak accidents. That takes faith. Lucas can’t reach there. He has found a killer.” He flicked the cigarette butt into a neat pile of dust swept carefully to the cement curb in the parking lot. “But you are still angry, maybe with him. Maybe you think he just jumped. Us? We say they killed him. They killed him because they cared that he died, because they were there when he died, and it mattered to them. Because they is a necessary construct—a political necessity.”

  “So you don’t think somebody killed him?” Ferron asked.

  “Aaahhh, now that is a different issue.” Femi started to walk. “I had a friend in Poland. Warsaw, I am sure it was. Can’t recall now. He was studying there, medicine, natural science, or something—there was blood involved. Who cares? Shit, he was there almost four years, maybe five. Never a bright one, but he went. The people sent him. Hard life, you know? Hard life? Cured him of his visions, you see. The whores were nice, but the women, they read too much Gone with the Wind, and Conrad, eh? Didn’t like blacks up there at all. Well, one night he goes drinking. He is dead the next morning, my friend. I went to school with him. Dead. They said he drowned in his vomit. Drunk. Would you believe that?”

  “If it is true,” Ferron said, hesitantly.

  “No. You don’t. You musn’t, because . . .” They were at his car. “Because you have enough fight in you, enough indignation, enough anger at what they have done before, enough imagination, to believe otherwise.”

  He unlocked the car door. Heat poured out. Ferron could feel it. The inside decor was black.

  “I was looking for a shaded area, but . . .” Femi said, peering inside, as if trying to find the source of the heat. “She will have one with air-condition next year.” He sat in the car and smiled at Ferron, shutting the door. He rolled the glass down. He had another cigarette in his mouth. “We leave Friday. Give me a call. You should come. Maybe I will convince you to write, or to be a fighter—a true revolutionary. Then you will come with me to South Africa to kill a few Boers. Eh? And bring the girl, Delores. I want to talk to her. Tell her. She knows me.”

  Ferron watched him race along the serene driveway of Devon House, reflections of the overhanging trees skipping across the slick roof. He drove it hard, as one did a rent-a-car.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  I entered Jamaica College with the mistaken notion that I was entering the school of Tom Brown’s School Days and the school (Greyfriars, I think) in Billy Bunter’s Magnet. My great shock was to find that prefects did not have studies. It took me about a term to recover from this. I was put into 2b in January 1938 and can only remember distinctly that in the term examination at Easter I got 100% in English Language, including a free composition. I do not recall any friends in that first year. We still lived in the country and I went off on my summer vacation pleased with myself at having made the third eleven at cricket. I was a fast bowler. By the third term of 1938, I had made some friends, but two stand out—PL and BE. PL was the nephew of Ethelred Erasmus Adolphus Campbell, a chemist by training but he came to be known as the fighting barrister. My sister seems to have known PL’s aunt and he was given the charge of “looking after” me. It was characteristic of him that it took him two terms to find me. When he did he pressed me into service as a courier in his endless verbal battle with Phillip Hanson. I carried the most scabrous messages between PL and Phillip Hanson, repeating precisely what each said. Fortunately, although I was the bearer of quite horrible news, I did not suffer the fate of a Greek messenger. I stopped being a courier when I became captain of the Colts cricket team in 1939. I should have learned my lesson then. Alas, I may have carried far too many messages for Hanson over the last few years. Can I blame people for mistaking me for a friend of his?

  SIXTEEN

  Ferron sat reading the Daily Gleaner near one of the high windows at the end of the library. There were over a dozen huge files filled with yellowing Gleaners on the table in front of him. He wrote into a notebook. The fan clunked noisily overhead. The light slanting into the library was tinted green with the trees and leaves from the courtyard. Everything in the Institute’s library seemed to be made of dark wood panelling. The wood tiles on the floor glowed. An old man in a light-blue shirt slept at the other end of the room. Mr. Langston was a poet from the forties. He wrote very little these days—just a few sonnets for the Gleaner to remind people of his status as poet laureate. It was a title he had won in ’43. Fer
ron found it hard to believe that Mr. Langston was once regarded as a leader in the groups of young intellectuals and artists who were trying to forge a Jamaican aesthetic. Now he seemed archaic, stagnant. He simply slept in the library in between leafing through old copies of the Times Literary Supplement. At four thirty, his wife would drive around in their old, beat-up Volkswagen and take him home. He would smile benignly to all the librarians. “Tomorrow, if I live. In thunder, lightning, or in rain . . .”

  He snored in his tiny corner. Nobody bothered him—they had firm instructions from the director to let him be. Ferron liked Mr. Langston because the poet seemed to know how to laugh at himself. Sometimes, Ferron felt, Langston was parodying the character of an old poet who took himself too seriously. Mr. Langston was the only person who made sexist remarks that Ferron felt comfortable laughing at. It was something more than indulgence—it was a strange realization that this old man would never change. Perhaps it was his frailty, this harmless quality that made some of the female librarians reprimand him with a smile—as you would a child. He would giggle and wink at Ferron. He was what he was and would die that way. Not like Ferron’s father, who had seemed to be perpetually in flux. For instance, Mr. Langston, as far as Ferron could tell, would never have an affair. He couldn’t deal with the fatigue involved.

  Tucked somewhere on the editorial page was the grinning face of Femi. By some clever machinations he had managed to convince the editor, an old university friend of Ferron’s father, to let him write a column—a regular dialogue about international politics placed in the context of Jamaican life. When Femi explained it to Ferron, the motives were far less altruistic: he wanted to write five pieces that would, quite simply, “put things in the proper perspective, you know? Let this whole damned country know how they murdered him.” Ferron vowed not to read the newspaper for a few weeks. But this was impossible. Femi’s rhetoric was eloquent, cutting, stirring, and startlingly frank among the lesser efforts of the long-standing journalists. He would begin with some issue that related to his international connection, which would lead to some narrative that was the occasion for the canonization of Old Man Ferron.

  He began the piece about Ferron’s father’s profound blackness, his Africanness, with a reference to Bahia:

  Last week I found myself in Nigeria without crossing the Atlantic. There in the teeming energy of Bahia, Africa was alive. A Yoruba priest talked to me. He was searching for the old ways lost in Nigeria in Bahia! I would not have believed in my blood alive on this side of the Atlantic had I not been tutored by a scholar of Africa, a brother who died in his struggle to celebrate his ancestors in this island. He gave his life for the retrieval of Africa in this place where the colonial masters sought to deny the Middle Passage’s living testimony. This is why he died. He died because people are still afraid of Africa in this country. When an Oxford man, a graduate of the best college in this country (a black student at a time when they were scarce), the son of Negro missionaries who went to Nigeria to save souls; when an avowed socialist speaks of Africa, people grow silent . . . Death is not unusual . . .

  Femi’s poetry threatened to consume the piece. He went on to discuss the politics of Pan-Africanism and the martyrs for its cause. The piece ended with the perfectly intended effect of creating intrigue.

  No one will know for sure what killed him. No one will know how he fell; what wind blew, what hand. But many know that in some quarters, some lofty homes ornately decorated with Americana, no tears were shed. You wonder why? We are killing our people, devouring them like mongrels and spitting out their bones to be dried by the blasted wind. “How long shall they kill our prophets, / while we stand aside and look?” The ghetto poet was right. He was very right. It is a shame . . .

  Sitting in the cool courtyard of the Institute, Ferron could not help laughing out at the cleverness of Femi’s scheme. Ferron had waited patiently for Femi to come to him with more solid evidence that the old man had been killed, that there was something more diabolical about the freak death. In his head, Ferron knew that the nurse had killed the old man. He knew it in a way that gave him some kind of comfort. It offered a narrative for the old man, a truly tragic narrative that was, in a twisted kind of way, quite gratifying. He understood what Femi was trying to do; he understood that Femi was trying to find the means to mourn the old man as more than the mere victim of a stupid accident—picking the wrong door and then plunging to his death in some idiotic and insignificant manner. He also realized that the story about the nurse would not satisfy Femi, for in her could not be located all that was perverse and corrupt about the capitalist society that they lived in. She was probably poor and underpaid, a victim of the system, someone who would not make a good figure of intrigue and tragic consequence. Ferron knew he would not tell Femi about the nurse, not for years anyway.

  Femi did come by and offer theories or possibilities. His intention was to suggest that it was possible that the old man mattered enough to the political world that killing him was important. He listed stranger things, stranger deaths of lesser people. In his mind, Ferron realized, even if the death was not a cut-and-dried murder, it was worthy of such status. Old Man Ferron deserved to be assassinated. He deserved to have been under surveillance, to have been hounded, persecuted, and finally killed by a system that did not like his politics, his intelligence, his independence, his Africa. Femi’s earnestness about all this had irritated Ferron at first, then it became clear that Femi was working out his own guilt, over his abandonment of the old man when he most needed friends. The articles were his guilt-offering, the myth was his sacrificial act of atonement—the hope that by deifying the man, he, Femi, would find favor with fate, with the gods, with his struggling conscience.

  * * *

  Several evenings before, the two had sat in the open-air cafeteria outside the Creative Arts Centre on the university campus drinking beer in the pink glow of sunset. They went through a whole crate of Red Stripe. Got themselves completely mellow as the campus grew darker and darker. The cafeteria was no longer in use—it had been an experiment by the university to supplement the meals on the hall for off-campus students that had floundered because of poor management and embezzlement. The tables had been nailed to the cement floor, so they, and the inappropriately ornate wrought-iron chairs, their enamel white paint peeling off to display the rusty red of the aging metal, were all that remained of the cafeteria. Students used it as a studying spot or as a drinking place in the evenings. It was deserted that evening, and Femi wanted to get drunk—he needed company, he said. Ferron had planned to drink just a few bottles, but when he contemplated the rest of his evening—Mitzie not wanting to see him, or perhaps wanting to see him so she could ignore him—the serene cool muteness of a drunk evening, embraced by the Friday-evening stillness of the campus, this lazy sensation was too tempting. He allowed himself to sit and drink with Femi. Femi wanted them to talk like men, he wanted them to salvage the memory of the old man.

  “You look like him,” Femi said.

  “I look a little like him.” Ferron remembered a photograph of the old man when he was a student in England in his early twenties. He was slim, low-shouldered, and rather delicate-looking. But this was an athletic delicacy—the tidiness of a small-framed cricketer—compact, efficient, and fit. Ferron tried to read the smile of this man, strolling down a London street in his tweeds, hands in his pockets, pants baggy and flowing. This was long before he had met his wife, long before Ferron was thought of, long before so much had happened. It would have been about the same year the old man’s father had died—blind, broken, and with only the companionship of a wife and the calm of the Holy Spirit at his death bed. The children had been informed, but none could take the time to return. Wayne was drunk and out of reach somewhere in Aruba—he would return weeping and lamenting and threatening to kill himself for having failed his father like that. Ferron’s father stayed on in London—going home would have been too expensive; but more critically, going home would hav
e meant breaking the peace of distance, of another world that had so seduced him. In those days, he said to Ferron once, he wanted to forget Jamaica, to forget his father, to forget that he came from somewhere else. Going home would have meant having to remember. He did not want to, so the old man died alone.

  Looking at the photograph, Ferron always wondered what regret ate at his father’s mind as he strolled through London in those days; what pain was shaping itself in him that would stay with him for the rest of his life. People never really die until you are there to see them dead, the old man had said when his wife was struggling with the question of whether to travel to Ghana to be with her mother. She went, and then mourned for several months, singing old songs and weeping. Then she was over it. The old man said it was because she had been there to see it all. Ferron was beginning to understand this. The sight of the corpse of one’s origins is a way, he thought, of facing mortality, of facing one’s beginnings and one’s end.

  “You look exactly like he did,” Femi insisted.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  They drank through long silences. Femi looked like a lonely man sometimes. This was one of those moments: sitting there in a strange country with the son of an old friend who belonged to another life, drinking his mind to a numbing calm, not sure where he would spend the night—a hotel room or another woman’s bed.

  “What did he say to you, eh?” he started again. “Before he died. What did he say?”

  “He was in a coma,” Ferron said.

  “I mean when you last spoke . . .”

  “Nothing profound . . . Usual things. He had just burned a steak.” Ferron knew this would please Femi.