Bivouac Page 12

  “He wanted to cook?” Femi laughed.

  “He always said he could cook.” Ferron laughed too.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Femi’s face glowed, remembering.

  Ferron could have told him of watching the old man reading Joyce’s Ulysses in his stained shorts and worn, pale-blue bush jacket; his head looking up every few minutes to see through the window to the gate, waiting for the postman’s bell. He smoked at least two packs of cigarettes each day, his head in a perpetual cloud of blue smoke, his eyes squinting to make out the words in the tattered hardcover book. This may have been his last novel—the last novel he read—and it was hard to tell why he had chosen that novel of all the novels that lined the shelf. Ferron liked to think that he was doing research for the great West Indian novel he had talked about writing—the great novel that would surpass all novels: the novel that would straddle the diaspora. It would start in Africa, in Ghana, and find its own sense of rooting and place in that ancient soil. From there, the journey would be like that of the harmattan winds to the Caribbean, to Jamaica. He would make a novelistic journey not made by any other writing—a Marxist tome with the sophistication and experimentation of Joyce. There was a great deal of evidence at the time to support this myth. He took notes, always wrote notes in the books and in a pad that remained on a side table by his favorite chair. But no one could find the manuscript—not even a single page that looked like the beginnings of a novel. Ferron could have told Femi of that small tragedy among many. He could have talked about the profound depression that would consume his father when there was no mail, no mail for him. During those last months, he had developed a ritual around the arrival of the postman. He would become impatient when the mail arrived and no one moved to get it. Ferron knew that the old man was afraid to go and get the mail himself—afraid to admit that he was worried about where his next job would come from, if it would come at all. When no one would go, he would limp to the gate, gather the mail, and slowly walk back to the living room. He would place the mail on the center table and return to his chair, placing the book in his lap—waiting there for someone to come by so he could say casually, “Anything interesting there for me?” But there was never anything interesting. Nothing. No reply to his many requests for jobs, his increasingly undignified pleas to all those friends who “owed him.” Nothing. They all became silent. Nothing from the men he had hidden while the army was searching door to door for their hides—while men were being stripped naked and executed by drunken soldiers on the dark beaches. Nothing from the emotionally tormented friends who came to him for shelter and solace as their marriages rotted away or exploded—he was always there. Nothing from the starving writers, now wealthy and well-situated in colleges and universities all over the world—that bunch who would come to him weeping, complaining about their hunger, their thirst, or about how useless they felt, what failures—and the old man would shelter them, spend his money on them, take them out for two-day drinking sprees, just to win them over, awake in them a belief in their sorry selves. Nothing. Not a word, not a reply, no acknowledgment that they had heard from him. The old man said little about those disappointments, but every day his gloom became deeper and deeper.

  Ferron could have told Femi that he knew what a broken heart can do to a man. Ferron could have attacked Femi for his silence, his failure to reply, to offer something. But he chose not to. He just smiled at Femi’s tirades about the cruelty of the world, and drank more and more of the beer, until everything became a blur of memory and reality. The dusk created a surreal softness in his head. His mind drifted back and forth.

  During those last days, he had a nightmare. It was a dream about himself and the old man. They were in a black cab. The old man was not alive. He was actually dead in the black cab, but they held hands and the car moved quickly through the city. Ferron woke up and wrote a poem about this dream. He wrote about his feeling of calm—the absence of fear and anxiety; the ease with which he seemed able to cope with the prospect of his father’s death. It bothered him. There was a time when the death of either of his parents was the worst nightmare that he could have. In his teenage years, he would sit and imagine what it would be like to be without his parents. Once he had so consumed his mind with the fear of their death that he began to cry—just sat there in the garage and cried, for he could think of nothing worse than the death of his parents. Now, there he was, calmly facing the death of his father. It bothered him. But in retrospect, perhaps the dream was a way of preparing him for the actual death—the actual loss. It gave him a facial language, a language of posture and attitude that he could use. It gave a point of reference, a code which, while false, while constructed around a certain unreality, was enough to carry him through the first few weeks after the death. There was, after all, a part of him that saw that dream death as a good thing—as a fitting end to the life of a man who was probably already dead to the world, dead to everything that had meaning for him. It hurt Ferron to think that he had willed his own father, a man barely sixty, to death like he would a man in his nineties suffering from some chronic debilitating illness. But that was the sensation, the thought, a psychic euthanasia. It would haunt him for years after that. It would haunt him that he shed no tears, no real tears, for several days after the news. He said this once to Delores, and she simply said he was in shock. But he knew he was not in shock. He knew that he felt something, but it was not the need to mourn, to weep, to lament with tears—it was a kind of relief. It was hard to explain this to anybody. The only person he thought would understand this was his mother, but it would have been cruel to let her admit this to anybody—to let her admit that she did not see his death as an entirely bad thing; that maybe his dying was a way to end a certain darkness, an uncertainty.

  Ferron did break. He broke when he thought of a world lost. He broke when he considered that Lucas could suddenly crumble again, his mind escaping to myth and fantasy because all that was stable and constant was gone. He broke because he felt cheated of a chance to talk to the old man, to really talk to him about adult things. He broke for things that had to do with the living and not the dead. There in the arms of Delores, he had cried and cried and cried for all the tears he had not cried. He cried because he was tired, just completely tired of all the work he was doing. He cried because he did not know how to feel.

  Ferron could have told all of this to Femi, but chose not to.

  He chose not to shatter Femi’s perception of the old man as the arch-atheist by relating one of the oddest conversations they’d had not long before the death. In those days, the old man stared into the blue sky a lot. He had already accepted the new job out of town, but his heart was not in it. He stared out a lot, nothing less than a look of traveling to another time and place. There were the evenings spent listening to Pentecostal preachers on the radio. Nobody made jokes about it, nobody talked about it, but he kept doing it. Soon he was humming the tunes. Perhaps he had finally become unhinged, lost his place. But were there perhaps new fictions taking shape in his head; new characters, new voices? But nothing was said about it. No one asked. The old man said nothing, but until he left for Mandeville, he listened every night to the Pentecostal preacher, raking hellfire through the muggy Kingston nights.

  Ferron stored away these images in hope. Maybe the old man was finding the chapel in the hills of St. Ann where his father preached, where he sang hymns in what he boasted was a perfect bass. Maybe he was returning to another beginning, as if making himself ready, free of vanity, free of pride, free of pretense. Ferron did not know, but he used this story as a way of creating the hope he would see the old man again. Constantly, he would dismiss the doubt in his mind.

  Ferron would not say these things to Femi as they drank. Femi had his own memories, his own myths to nurture. They knew two different men; each a peculiar myth, each a stone to regret now. So they talked about sex, poetry, and the Cuban theater. Above all, they drank beer.

  It was pitch black when they left the cafeteria. A pow
er cut had engulfed the campus in darkness. The two men walked to Femi’s car with the ratchet alertness of followed men. Kingston’s fear seeped into the bones casually, subtly; nerves were alert to the sound of death. Their eyes peeled into the dark, one man taking one side, the other, the other. They said nothing until the car sparked to life. Then they relaxed a bit. The power returned as they turned onto Mona Road and headed to Liguanea.

  * * *

  Femi’s articles come out twice a week for three weeks. Old Man Ferron was suddenly a cause célèbre. A group of writers arranged a gala reading to commemorate his death. Ministers stated that they were investigating foul play and it was reported that the nurse who claimed the man was drunk had been transferred from her post for negligence. Femi was celebrated as a champion of a good friend. Femi enjoyed it. Ferron retreated into himself some more. He felt as if he were losing his father, felt that the man was becoming an enigma owned by others. He found himself straining to visualize his father’s face; to remember words, ideas, something shared.

  Mitzie held his head on her breasts and let him cry a lot. He betrayed the love. He found himself drifting, looking for old girlfriends, finding comfort in their condolences, which invariably became deeply physical. Soon his regret was less for his father and more for Mitzie. At night he would sleep fitfully. Daylight came too slowly.

  It was Mitzie’s idea that they get away for a while. They had argued about his behavior and his disregard for her. Ferron sought an absolute, complete, and seemingly clear way out: abandon the whole idea of a relationship.

  “Chalk it down to my restlessness,” he said. “I am no good for you.”

  “Don’t give me that shit!” she shouted. “You think it so easy, huh? You think we could go through so much and you can just use that poor tiny story to mash it up; jus’ so yuh can run weh?”

  “Alright, I don’t love you anymore,” he said.

  “Yuh think this is a joke?” She sat down on the bed and began folding clothes.

  Ferron had thought about it for days. He did want it to be over—the part of him that did not care much for the guilt, the heavy remorse he felt every time she took him in. Rocking in a minivan heading down Maxfield Avenue one evening, he decided that the best thing was to cut her loose, send her back to her sugar daddy, and he could return to his own ways, his own paths. He expected her to hate the idea, but he believed she would go with it. She wasn’t one to beg. He had misjudged the situation, thinking he had limited her options to just two simple reactions, reluctant acceptance or pathetic pleading for him not to do this. He was not prepared for her aggressive wisdom, her ability to cut through and clear a path for what she wanted. He could only resort to cheap humor in the face of her aggression.

  “So you don’t mind my screwing around?” he said, smiling.

  “You useless shit, you. You think that you have it set, eh? So you confess to me, right—you tell me how you fail me, how you let me down. Tell me how you not good enough for me so that you own damn conscience will feel better.” Her face was calm, except for an uncontrollable twitching of her top lip. “So that when I say you must go on, you can leave free of all you sins, right? Well, no. No. You gwine live with this, you hear? Maybe you don’ love me, maybe you just wan’ taste a working-class pussy; maybe you feel that now we cyaan profile. You too late now, Ferron. You hear me? Too damn late. Nobody neva tell yuh seh a girl from Maxfield Avenue not taking no foolishness from no man? Dem neva tell you? You listen to me now. If you lef’ me, I gwine ride your tail until you regret the day you look on me at dat clinic; you follow? If you try use you cheap tactics and just slip away, you will know what that Fatal Attraction business was really ’bout. So yuh better sit you tail down and talk to me.”

  She said all this staring directly into his face, in a calm voice that made it all the more sinister. When she finished, Ferron slowly walked back to the bed and sat down.

  “I don’t know what is wrong with me,” he said quietly.

  “You don’ respect me, tha’s all,” she said simply.

  “That’s not true . . .”

  “No, no . . . I not saying you don’ like me or that you don’ love me; maybe you might; but you don’ respect me. You put things to me that you wouldn’ put with you Delores, she. No. You see, me, I am the one with the sugar daddy, right; the girl who give herself for a little support; a woman who can’ even talk ’bout university or nothing like that. So you look on me, an’ you say: ‘I couldn’ marry her. Where we would be in five years, ten years?’ You know. So you look on that an’ you say: Well, is a ting. A ting. Tha’s all—a passing ting. A short-term ting. An’ who know how short? An’ Mitzie must know that sometimes a man will fuck a woman not out of love, not out of disrespect for his true love, but jus’ because right then an’ there, tha’s what him need to make a moment complete. Mitzie would know that ’cause she do the same already an’ she know, like any hard-survivor Jamaica woman know, that love is a ting that might jus’ come an’ go. Not so, Ferron? Oh yeah, ’cause my kind of loving is different from uptown loving, nuh true? Well, you gwine learn another ting, okay? Jus’ don’ come with you ‘I am not good enough for you’ shit! Everybody know that, so I giving you the best what I have. Tha’s all. Bwai, grow up, man, grow up.”

  They sat in silence. Mitzie got up and turned on the radio. A regular radio drama series—people discussing the scandals and intrigues of a small urban community, a village tucked into the belly of the city. The room was quite dark now, and they could smell fish frying next door. A sound system rumbled into action some distance away. Ferron’s mind was quite blank. Mitzie had read him, outplayed him, and taken him away from his plan. She was right. It was useless admitting it. She did not expect him to. She did not want him to admit anything. He felt the relief he had hoped for, nonetheless. That she read him so well, spoke out his doubts, called him on everything, allowed him to relax. She knew it all and wasn’t tossing him out. He wanted to stay around her all night. The silence did not bother him. He just wanted to be around her.

  “I didn’t cook nothing tonight,” she said casually.

  “We could go get something,” he offered.

  “Like what so?”

  “Fish. Fried fish,” he said.

  “You smell it too, eh?”

  “Smells damn good.” He felt even more relaxed.

  “Come, mek we go beg them some.” She was already tying her head.

  “You sure? It is their supper . . .”

  “What wrong with you, Ferron? You ever see Ma Elsie cook for she one yet? Anyway, she minding the baby tonight so you can see her. I will just give her a smalls for a plate, you know?”

  Ferron stood in front of her as she moved to the window. “What is her name?” he asked.

  “What you mean what she name? She name Elsie . . .”

  “No, no, the baby.”

  Mitzie paused for a few seconds, looking at Ferron carefully with a hint of caution and disapproval. Then, as she pushed her feet into her slippers, she spoke somewhat under her breath. “Den nuh Sharon she name?” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world and she was dealing with a very stupid child.

  “I never know that, you have never told me her name.”

  “Well, it’s Sharon,” Mitzie said with finality.

  “Thank you.”

  She moved to the window and shouted, “Maa Elsie! Fix two plate, nuh?”

  Elsie’s voice floated back in that high-pitched tone: “Yuh tink is restaurant I running, girl?”

  “Come,” Mitzie said, walking to the door.

  “Okay . . . You is something else.” Ferron stood up, laughing.

  “You think?” Mitzie said, moving toward him. She embraced him and kissed him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

  “Ferron, listen to me. Me not looking nothing from you, you understand? I not looking for you to mind my pickney. I not looking for you to mind me. I can mind myself. I not looking no hero. I just like you. And
you like me. You can manage dat?”

  “Yeah, yeah man . . .”

  She held his face between her palms. “Yuh sure?”

  “Yes man . . .” he said with complete sincerity.

  “Well, don’ feel this done, dog,” she said firmly. “No, no. Yuh hurt me; you better understand dat. An’ I don’ like a man hurt me. Next week we going somewhere, me and you, to talk, to work out your foolishness; to work out this business with you and your father. Simple.”

  “We are?” He was smiling.

  “I not joking, you hear?” she said. “Serious business. If you don’ pick the place, I will pick it. If you love me, Ferron, don’ fuck wid this.”

  She kissed him quickly and then walked out the door. Ferron followed. It was pitch black outside. He kept close to Mitzie. She knew her way in the dark.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  Who, I wonder, invented the principle of red chairs in this office? There are eight red chairs, indicating that their occupiers have a “higher” standing, are heads of departments. They are the deputy editor, Star editor, assistant editor, news editor, features editor, supplements editor, office manager, and that horrible (obviously Gardens) girl who heads a department of two called “Action Station”—truly garrulous and vulgar. The use of these red chairs is the method of keeping the workers in their place, and it works. The red-chair occupiers are extremely arrogant (they even walk arrogantly) and those chairs are sacrosanct. No one who is not designated as an occupier would dare, under any circumstances, even to “cotch” his or her backside on a red chair. But the hierarchy is breaking down. I notice that only the office manager stands up when the editor approaches. Democracy is creeping in, but the red chairs are sacrosanct.

  I suppose that I am not impressive in this office. I came in, was slipped in dubiously, and I have made no real effort to be nice to people. The resentment is deep. The editor’s secretary tries to treat me like dirt, the way she treats everybody, but I ignore her, even the sad death of her three-year-old daughter. (I think too much was made of it, anyway.) She has all the earmarks of a graduate of the Gardens. At least once a week she manages to gather a group of gawking onlookers around her to hear a harrowing report of some brutal murder just outside her area. She offers details with the relish of a man telling a deeply pornographic tale. Then she sighs and mutters something to the effect that, “Thank God those things don’t happen in my area.” But everyone knows that she is talking about the people in her area who protect the area and how brutally they do so. Death, for her, is ordinary. I imagine her to be capable of anything. This is the price of our politics.