Bivouac Page 14

  “When are you leaving, Femi?” Ferron asked.

  “Don’t know yet. Still have some time. I have a meeting with that woman, the minister . . . Vera Chen, I think her name is. We have to work out a plan of action, you know.”

  “He is fucking her, you know,” Theresa said, laughing. Ferron wasn’t sure how to react.

  “You want that to happen, don’t you?” Femi laughed. He was very calm about the whole thing. “She’s a lesbian, you know that.”

  “Well, just don’t pretend you can’t remember her name, alright?” Theresa said sharply.

  “I wish your imagination was reality,” Femi said, turning to Theresa. “I would have already fucked the Queen of England.”

  “Maybe you have.” Theresa stopped smiling. “Maybe you have fucked her and Lady Di and the fucking House of Windsor. Why leave them out?”

  They were at a traffic light. Ferron quickly opened the door and stepped out. “Look, I will see you,” he said.

  Femi opened his door quickly and shouted over the roof: “I am telling you, Ferron, they killed him! I am not making it up!”

  “I believe you,” Ferron said, walking toward the sidewalk.

  “Then why the hell are you avoiding me?” Femi seemed genuinely concerned.

  “I’ve been busy. It’s just been hard, Femi. Look, I will call you, alright.”

  “Ferron, he was your father!” Femi shouted.

  “That’s right, Femi. My father. So they killed him; what am I supposed to do with that? What are you going to do with that? You have someone to kill? This is not a damned Shakespearean play, Femi. I did all that I had to do. You do what you have to do, but just bear in mind that our histories with him are different, eh?” He could see that Femi wanted desperately to talk. But the traffic was picking up behind them.

  “Move the rass car, man. You think this is yuh living room?” a man yelled as he weaved past them on his bike.

  “I will call you, man,” Ferron lied.

  “Make sure you do that.” Femi sat back in the car and slammed the door shut. Theresa was wiping her face. She did not look at Ferron. They drove off.

  Ferron was not sure if she would call him that night as she had promised. He walked toward the black-walled, zinc-roofed building that stood on an intersection just outside of New Kingston. She would be finished now. Showering, perhaps. He hoped that the air conditioner would be on in the lobby.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  Music was one of my father’s things. We had always had a piano and my brother was a trained musician and so was my sister. I wasn’t trained at all but taught myself to read music and played what I could of Beethoven and Chopin and some of the others. But I learned to play jazz by watching my brother. At a certain time (I must have been in sixth form) I took to composing, actually writing down the notes and chords with great precision. It was weird. I wanted to get out of the sixteen-bar round. My brother looked at these pieces and said (very hurriedly, I thought) that he couldn’t read them. I hope he meant that they were unreadable. They have disappeared. But I became the jazz pianist at school in my last two years and enjoyed it no end. (I even played behind T.P. Bates’s mouth organ at Oxford in 1949.) In those days parties were piano-parties and one became known as a pianist and one was always in the team that played. My own shyness prevented me from ever really learning to dance in an orthodox way. Foxtrots, one-steps, waltzes, tangos, etc., never entered my repertoire. I have (after Oxford and with the help of liquor) managed calypso and African highlife, nothing more. What I became, up to the seventies, was an aficionado of jazz, particularly what used to be called bop or progressive. Affluence in Africa gave me the chance to buy records, but since returning to Jamaica my interest has been flagging, especially as jazz is removed from public entertainment on television and radio and I do not have a radio powerful enough to get the BBC. My son Ferron does, but he doesn’t listen to jazz.

  nineTEEN

  Ferron found himself playing games when he talked to Mitzie, and she understood the games and joined him. They met in Hope Gardens in the evenings and once she brought the baby with her. It was a girl and suddenly Ferron decided that this was his child. He asked about the baby a lot and thought of a time when they would talk to each other—the baby and himself. Mitzie was amused, nothing else. She didn’t encourage him.

  They played games with words, especially when it came to very intimate things, things to do with sexuality. One evening the sun was sinking and they decided to stay longer in the gardens and climb the fence after. They sat there silently looking out and then, for no apparent reason, she began to tell him about her first time. She spoke slowly, as if trying to enter a world that she had stayed away from for years. She spoke as if she were savoring each word on her tongue, feeling the texture of the landscape of red soil, the bauxite smell in her nose, the green landscape of sloping hills. Ferron listened without interrupting. He was drawn into her world and he wanted to stay there, hidden.

  “One day, I was home. I use to live with my father. My mother never stay with us. She was living with a nex’ man. Well, one day, Daddy leave me alone in the house. He said he was gwine come back late. When it get dark I hear somebody knock on the door. It was Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones was Daddy good friend; them use to work same place. Mr. Jones use to live in the same district so I use to see him. He was a nice man. I use to like him a lot because of the way he could tell jokes. I like people who can tell jokes good. Well, I tol’ him that Daddy wasn’ there but he said is not Daddy he come to look for and that what he wanted was to talk to me. Well, that man could talk and he make me so laugh that night that it just happen. He never raped me, even though I never want it at all, but after a little I couldn’ help it, I was laughing. Tha’s all I remember. Laughing, and then, after he left, crying. I jus’ sit down and cry and cry. I know he was frighten and every time he see me after that he would ask me if I was alright. I never tell Daddy. I just stop go church and Daddy never ask no question. Well, everything was normal until it come back to me how Mr. Jones in the bar talking ’bout what a sweet lickle juicy girl I was and how Daddy don’ know how to mind his own pickney. Das when I start hate him. It reach Daddy, but ’im neva say anything to me, but ’im stop talk to Mr. Jones. You see after that, when time I use to see that lickle monkey, I would spit mek him see. I never even go to his funeral. I hate the man. But I learn from him. That is man all the way. You see, if it wasn’ for him, I would be in the church still, maybe have a good husband with good education like you, and happy. Mos’ men, is only something them looking. That is why I like you: you is a nice guy, you not into them things.”

  She would say things like that, laughing at Ferron, almost teasing him, and he knew it. While she spoke, she rubbed her hand up and down his back as if daring him to remain unmoved by her presence. He wasn’t, but he did not show it overtly; he just played word games that made her understand.

  “You know too much, you know?” she said, pulling on his chin so that he would look at her. “I don’t trus’ people who know so much ’bout me. They use it.”

  “Who would I tell?” Ferron asked.

  “Me,” she said.

  “What you mean?”

  “Fling it right back in my face . . . That is how people stay,” she said, staring hard at him. “You wouldn’ do that?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah man.”

  “Me serious, you know?” she said, still staring at him.

  “I know, I know,” he responded, avoiding her eyes.

  “Good,” she said, now smiling. Then she drew closer to him and spoke softly: “Now is your turn. You are not a virgin?”

  It was a game. He was never explicit about what he wanted to say but he still wanted her to understand what he was getting at. She played the game even more deftly than he thought at first. His ploy was to get her to take the initiative, to be the first to suggest that they kiss, that they hold hands, that t
hey touch. He wanted to respond, to be led. She understood this and allowed him the luxury he wanted—the freedom from responsibility. She knew exactly what he wanted, and she gave it to him in that teasing way. She did not mind the control, and she exerted it at times, really to make him uncomfortable, uncertain. Their game was a well-orchestrated pattern of hints, suggestions, half-statements, that begged for completion. The ground rule was simple: who could hold out the longest—who could say the most without committing, who could say the most with the least said.

  “You love him?”

  “Sort of.”

  “How you mean?”

  “Well, ’im is a nice guy.”

  “How?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “’Im is gentle.”

  “You mean he doesn’t beat you?’

  “No sah. Yuh crazy?”

  “How then?”

  “How then what?”

  “How is he gentle, then?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “We make sweet passionate love, love. Passionate like fire.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “You like that, eh? You like when I talk stoosh like that?”

  “What?”

  “The way I say that?”

  “I just like to hear you talk. That is all.”

  Her eyes would sparkle with the game, daring, wanting to see him respond to her by being uncomfortable, uneasy.

  “Maybe.”

  “You just trying to find my weakness, right?”

  “What weakness?”

  Eventually the words became flesh.

  They kissed to see if they both agreed on what a good kiss was. It always began with the tongue, with words, then the tongues would come alive, fencing in the wet softness of their mouths. At nights, afterward, Ferron would feel a soreness in the thin membrane beneath his tongue.

  Those were simple days. He woke in the mornings with just about enough time to take a shower and catch a bus to the university. He would work in the library all day, ignoring everyone around him. At lunchtime he bought a bag of water crackers and two bottles of soda which he would eat slowly and lazily under a huge guinep tree near the Student Union building. At the end of the day, he walked toward the gardens to wait for Mitzie. Usually she came a few minutes after he arrived. She was not working, but she seemed to have some appointment every day, just before they met. Ferron suspected that she was still seeing her “sugar daddy,” but he did not mention it—he was afraid to bring it up; afraid of what he would hear, afraid of what she would do, what she would demand of him. They would stay in the park until about nine o’clock, then they climbed the gate to get out since the park closed at about six o’clock. They would walk to the bus stop and take the bus down to Half Way Tree where they usually parted ways. She headed for the Maxfield Avenue bus across from the broadcasting station; he would linger in Half Way Tree Square until the last bus to his home was loading up. He would head home, go directly to bed, too tired to think, too tired to open his mail. He lived in a hole during those weeks and the only person who saw him alive was Mitzie. Theresa called almost every night at about two o’clock in the morning. He listened to her share intimacies, her longings, her feelings for Femi. He offered little of himself, but she never seemed to mind. The talk became very sexual sometimes, and she would tease him, ask him what he was doing. One night she thanked him for a great call when they were saying goodbye.

  “Did you notice?” she asked.

  “What?” He was dying to get into bed and sleep.

  “My breathing. Did you notice my breathing?” She laughed.

  “What about it?”

  “Oh, nothing. Forget it. I just wanted to thank you. You help me a lot . . .”

  “Okay,” he said. He must have sounded a little impatient or uncertain, because she spoke quickly, giggling.

  “You’re sounding nervous. Don’t worry about it. We’re like that, we women. I just wanted to thank you, not freak you out, alright?”

  “I see,” he said. Unsure of where to go with this.

  “You think I am crazy, right?” There was a certain anxiety in her voice. “You don’t think I should have done it.”

  They talked on for an hour after that.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  How on earth did I develop an interest in politics? My father was not a politician that one could see, but he did bring Booker T. Washington and Aggrey to my attention and I believe that he took me to hear Marcus Garvey—or, to put it correctly, I was with him on one occasion when he went to listen to Marcus Garvey. He never made a thing of it.

  Sixth form must have been the time, but I came to politics through literature. A number of factors must have been around in sixth form. Shelley, Public Opinion, the school magazine, and poetry. What I remember is the story about Roy Ashman’s essay, based on Joad’s “Why War,” which ended with the words, “I am a communist because I am an atheist and a coward.” This was in a school magazine and created a scandal on the verandas of upper St. Andrew where they still sat discussing scandal when Roy Ashman’s Spitfire ran into a mountain over Spain. Perhaps I wanted to emulate that fine spirit who had been kind to me (he was a very good jazz pianist and he encouraged me).

  twenty

  The next day, Ferron took a minivan down to Half Way Tree to catch a bus to Norbrook. Half Way Tree was sweltering in the midday haze; a dead dog stunk in a garbage heap behind the bus stops. The Norbrook van was empty, the only bus at the stop. He hoped another van would come along. This would whip the men into action and precipitate a veritable race all the way to Constant Spring. Everything was predicated on the principles of competition. At the moment there was no competition, so the driver and conductor were taking a break. The driver sat on the crumbling wall that overlooked a gully littered with debris from decades of storm run-off and indiscriminate dumping. The driver sipped a cold Red Stripe, watching out for another bus to come careering around the corner.

  Ferron hoped Uncle Wayne would know where the key was. He had never been unwilling to let Ferron have the place, but he relished the ritual of being asked. What was disturbing was the danger that one day he would simply forget that he owned this cottage, that he did have keys, that he did have relatives. Ferron feared that one day he would visit him and the old man would look blankly at him, not recognizing him. It would be fitting retribution. The truth was that none of his relatives visited him for anything other than to get something from him: information, the keys, old papers, and so on. Beyond that, Uncle Wayne was dead. He had declared this himself several years ago. I am no longer a living member of this family. My will is completed. If you have not heard from my lawyers, that should tell you something. This was how his open letter to the family ended. No one spoke about it, perhaps out of deference to Old Man Ferron, who, it was felt, had suffered so much at his brother’s hands that to speak of this would have been insensitive. Uncle Wayne was dead.

  His declaration had come when he moved to the retirement home in Norbrook. The former mansion of some well-to-dos who abandoned the country in the early seventies, this well-manicured home was the destination of the wealthy and well-situated. It was staffed by a team of efficient and uniformed women who had learned to serve these people in a manner that reminded them of another time. They were well paid to take all kinds of crap and nonsense with a professionalism that always impressed Ferron when he visited. He was struck by their pragmatism: never angry, never mumbling, never fawning or overly friendly, just efficiently playing the roles of “maids” these people expected.

  Uncle Wayne was detached from the present as well as the family. He surrounded himself with things that reminded him of some forty or fifty years ago: photographs, paintings, magazines, books, furnishings—just about everything he kept in his room. The irony of what he was attempting was not lost on him, but he was quite clear about how he wanted his world to look. While he recognized
visitors, he rarely welcomed them. Those he really did not care to see were treated with absolute blankness. He was not beyond pretending a kind of Alzheimer’s when he wanted to get rid of people. At least it was never personal, always democratic. Ferron had watched visitors—an old lover or some lawyer acquaintance—left to feel quite foolish standing there. They would leave in embarrassment.

  With Ferron, he seemed to make an exception—as if his nephew was his one reminder of a life beyond the home. He would talk about the past, but more often than not he would make silly, disparaging jokes about the poor education that Ferron must be getting at university, about the dullness of young people today, and repeatedly he would speak of the “poverty” of Ferron’s father—his idiotic Marxism and generosity that could only wreck his life. When Uncle Wayne heard about the old man’s death, he laughed: “I have been dead for how long? Four years, five? And nobody’s buried me yet. Now look at him, dead for a few days and already he is buried . . .”

  “We cremated him,” Ferron said.

  “Bad idea, bad idea,” he muttered. “Not good for the ozone, you know? Did they burn him naked or clothed?”

  “I don’t know,” Ferron said. “We did not get his clothes back. But I never went to ask for them.”

  “I would prefer to be burned naked. But I prefer burial,” Uncle Wayne said, staring into the trees. “Sometimes I lie down here with my eyes closed, and I try to move my limbs, and I can’t. I feel as if my brain is working, but the rest of me isn’t. I can’t even hear my heart. I feel very dead. I know that if someone were to come in and check me, you know, look at me, they would think I was dead. Imagine someone burning me in that state. It must be painful as hell.” He stopped and laughed at his accidental joke, then repeated the words slowly: “Painful as hell.”

  He, like everyone else, had expected that he would die before his younger brother. It was not so much his age—although he was in his late seventies—but his body, its will to go on. Ravaged by years of alcoholism, wretched and violent marriages (he was always the abused one), cigarette-smoking, Uncle Wayne had suffered two major heart attacks, a stroke, and at least four death vigils (one after a tragic car accident when a close friend died—they were both completely drunk). They waited, he waited. Death would not come. He would find his appetite again, ask about the news, talk about the weather, and then it would be clear to all that dead as his body may have been, he was going to live on.