Bivouac Page 15

  Had he continued to live in the run-down apartment on Molynes Road, a cubbyhole he had moved into with an old retired prostitute friend, where he practised street law, advising thugs about their rights, about how to beat the law—all for a beer or two, some food, anything—perhaps he would have been killed or simply died of starvation. But his sojourn on Molynes Road was not enforced. He always had the option of finding his way out of there. It just seemed, for a long time, too much work. This lack of will to do better would probably have killed him had a former lover from way back in his past (and one-time sponsor) not died. This woman no one in his family had met, but they knew of her because of three famously caustic letters that she had written, berating them for allowing as brilliant a mind as Uncle Wayne’s to go to waste. She had singled out Old Man Ferron for his jealousy, his mediocrity, and his misguided indulgence in Marxism. She had “discovered” Uncle Wayne while he was studying at Yale. He met her in the middle of his second year, at a time when he was most in need. He seduced her and convinced her that he needed her help. His father had written to him at the beginning of that year to say that he would not be able to support Wayne for the rest of his studies. He should return to Jamaica, work for a while, and then travel to England where the education would be less expensive. Wayne’s benefactor, impressed by his wit, charm, and apparent brilliance, decided to sponsor him. He finished his studies, and stayed in the United States for several years, living with this woman. Even when she threw him out over some sordid business with one of her maids and he called her a white cow and returned to Jamaica, she never stopped supporting him; it was, according to Wayne, her way of punishing him for insulting her—letting him know that since she had made him, she owned him. He was too lazy to resist. He accepted her money when he needed it.

  Her decision to leave money for him was predictable. Even in death, he would laugh, she still wanted to have her slave under control. She’d had her attorneys arrange for Wayne’s move to the home. Everything was paid. His “inheritance” had one critical stipulation: he had to spend it entirely on himself and could not leave anything for any of his heirs. Wayne accepted this gladly. This was the moment of his death. He complied readily, abandoning the room, the prostitute, and his street clients without as much as a word of farewell. He had summoned Ferron to help him move his things. These were not the few possessions he had in the Molynes Road room, but his old furniture and books which he’d kept for years in a storage area downtown. They discovered a hurricane a few years before had damaged the building and much of the furniture had been ruined. The books were either completely mildewed or being devoured by termites. They abandoned most of that stuff in a dumpster outside the warehouse.

  It was hard for Ferron’s family to accept the news of Uncle Wayne’s virtual death, though there were compensations. A good number of his other books had been stored in their house, abandoned there after he’d shacked up with them following one of his most damaging legal wrangles. They’d become a regular obstacle to the washroom, but every time someone threatened to toss them out, the reminder would come: “Uncle Wayne says he will come and get these books soon.” When he announced his death, they could at least give up on the prospect of his return and the books were taken to the abandoned chicken coop in the backyard—Ferron’s mother’s experiment with “self-help” farming during the socialist seventies (a mongoose had killed most of the chickens and the rest were stolen by the neighbors). For a while, the coop had been a clubhouse for a short-lived neighborhood gang: the Seven Black Bottles. Squabbles, dwindling interest, and school eventually thwarted their efforts. The coop was again abandoned—the black bottles (Red Stripe bottles painted with cheap black powder paste) still gathering dust on a roughly constructed shelf—and converted into a storeroom for garden tools and other items that were truthfully junk, but had that peculiar quality of seeming to be worth something. Eventually, Uncle Wayne’s books were housed in it—and ravaged by the elements and by roaches. Clarice and Ferron had explored the boxes. They found intriguing documents—legal briefs, curious memos to himself, long legal affidavits, news clippings, and letters of varying lengths and interest that confirmed what the old man had muttered about Uncle Wayne: that he had, single-handedly, and without remorse, completely devoured the once-substantial fortune of the Ferron family. The anger and resentment that his brothers and sisters felt toward him was not unwarranted.

  The damage was impressive: at one stage the grandparents owned five houses in Kingston, all in fairly well-to-do suburban areas. They also owned three houses in the country—two in St. Ann and one in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. One of the St Ann houses was the family home where the children grew up and attended Teacher Ferron’s school. It was a two-story building with a complex of verandas that their light-skinned grandmother had lined with a shock of greens—vines, potted plants, hibiscus bushes, creating a cool greenness—verandas that offered wonderful views toward the sea on one side, and into the hills on the other. The other house was even more expensive and attractive. It was built a little lower down the hill on a small plateau. It was a bungalow with something like eight bedrooms and a detached house for the maids. Beside it was a sweet-water well, which was still used to supply water for washing although a more modern plumbing system had been put in place. There was a time, years ago, when his grandmother was alive, that Ferron remembered when myriad distant cousins and friends would come to the house for Christmas. People would fill up all the rooms and then spill out into the yard. There was no day or night. Time was spent eating, drinking, sleeping—in no particular order. His father drank a lot during those days, and then he would disappear into the hills with a bunch of the men—mainly laborers who revered the late Teacher Ferron—to carry out some rituals that brought him back days later with a weary look of purest satisfaction. This was soon after his return from abroad. With his reputation in the newspapers and his publications, the community saw him as Teacher Ferron returned. (Uncle Wayne was not highly regarded, and the sisters not held in much esteem since both had remained unmarried and childless.)

  The Blue Mountain house was no more than a small cottage that had been the first of a series of similarly designed cottages built by a clever entrepreneur to create low-income retreats for middle-class Jamaicans. Wayne never sold the cottage but relied on a modest income from renting it out. Ferron had used the cottage for his personal retreats as well, and occasionally he arranged for friends of his—church and university friends—to retreat there. It would be ideal for Mitzie and him. There were no family memories locked up there; he wanted to stay far away from any such memories while with Mitzie.

  All the Kingston houses had been sold by Uncle Wayne to pay off his debts. Ferron had only really thought about this after his father died and his only legacy was a debt of ten thousand dollars. They were leaving behind their well-furnished rented house. Ferron had taken for granted that the old man would leave nothing behind. He did not. But Uncle Wayne’s years of plenty became a point of some resentment. As the only child then still at home in Jamaica, he’d had the task of managing their widowed mother’s affairs. He sold everything he could to support a celebrity existence. A barrister of some fame, he would work when he felt like it and with whom he wanted. When the money was gone, he tried to take on more work, but became embroiled in an embezzlement scandal. The Bar came down hard on him and encouraged his suspension. It was the first of three suspensions before he was finally banned from practicing law in the midseventies. He started to drink heavily, still living off the money from the sales. By the time Ferron’s father had returned to Jamaica to look after his mother, all the money was gone. Ferron’s father had to take in his mother and his brother, both now virtually destitute. They fought a lot in those days about where the money had gone. Wayne was completely unrepentant. He had stayed; he had buried the old man; he had watched his blindness and death; he had comforted the mother, while the others were traveling. He deserved it all.

  The country house
s were not sold. Ferron could never understand why, and Uncle Wayne dismissed the question as silly. He liked the houses, and anyway, people were living there. He had ensured, however, that the homes were signed over to him, so he owned them. He rented one, the house on the hill, to people in the village, and the other was leased to the Jamaica Tourist Board. He got good money for these arrangements. No one was sure where the money went, or what he planned to do with the places when he died. But he was willing to let his nieces and nephews use the Blue Mountain cottage during the off-seasons. This was usually why Ferron saw him. This was why Ferron was taking the trip this time. He and Mitzie would go through Mandeville, visit the scene of his father’s passing, and then travel to the cottage. It was all he could manage now—a way out of the madness of these last few days.

  Wayne sat in the backyard that spread in carefully undulating landscaping to a twelve-foot link fence. Beyond the fence was the Constant Spring Golf Course. The huge shade trees cooled the smooth cement patio on which deck chairs were placed every morning for breakfast. Uncle Wayne ate mangoes with a knife and spoon. It was an operation that he carried out with meticulous efficiency. When Ferron entered he had consumed one of five Bombay mangoes—squat green fruit with a sharp nipple at the end that looked like a bloated comma. He had the mangoes lined in a row.

  Ferron sat down at the table, waiting for Uncle Wayne to acknowledge his presence. He looked something like his father might have looked in a few years had he lived. Uncle Wayne wore a lavender silk dressing gown over his pajamas.

  His delicate fingers worked quickly, efficiently. His gray-brown eyes bulged slightly—a family trait that made the women look bold, alluring, as if their eyes were in constant dilation. His mouth moved quickly as he chewed the soft flesh. The tangy sweetness of the Bombay mango drifted into Ferron’s nose.

  First he selected a mango and weighed it in his right hand, as if trying to determine what attitude would shape his eating of this particular one. Then he put it on the saucer and picked up the sharp-bladed kitchen knife, which he wiped carefully with an already mango-stained napkin. Picking up the mango, he cut a circular line around its middle, slicing down to the seed. Tiny droplets of juice dripped onto the saucer. Placing the knife on the table, he held the mango at both ends and twisted it as if opening a bottle. A quick sucking sound and he had two pieces, one a hollow cup lined with glowing flesh, and the other holding the seed, which jutted out almost obscenely. Uncle Wayne cleaned his teaspoon with the napkin, and ate the cupped half, scooping lumps of flesh and slipping them into his mouth quickly. He scraped the inside of the cup until it became almost transparent, showing light through the green membrane. He picked up the second half, the grotesque piece. This time, he clutched the seed with his fingers and twisted it sharply until it plopped out of the skin, leaving behind a thick lining of mango. He lifted the seed delicately to his mouth and chewed and sucked on it until the seed was almost white in its nakedness. He then ate the final cup with the spoon—like a custard. Slowly this time. Burping softly, he placed the seed neatly in line with the others he’d eaten.

  “Doctors say the skin is good for roughage, but I shit like clockwork.”

  Ferron stared at the spoils of his meal; in the bright light they looked like a carefully arranged still life, complete with the dappled shade and light from the overhanging trees—and that treacherous-looking knife. All that was missing from this picture was a carefully penned suicide note in sepia ink. This would complete a perfect symbol—grotesque, surreal—the bald white death of the seed: spent youth, a spilling of seed, fleshless after the carne-val of a wayward life.

  “Always money, eh?” Uncle Wayne said.

  “What?”

  “Even when yuh dead, money determines your damn fate. Bury my ass, yuh hear? Bury every part of me. I want to reach heaven with my cock still attached, damn you.” He laughed at his joke. “Anyway, who the hell want an eighty-year-old anything these days. They could buy them things in India cheap-cheap—young parts, you know? He gave his parts?”

  “I don’t know,” Ferron lied. The old man’s body had been ravaged for useful parts before the cremation. He would have wanted it that way.

  “Well, bury my rass, you hear?” He began the third mango.

  Ferron hesitated. He was waiting for a good moment to ask for the keys. Uncle Wayne knew why he was there; this ritual was just his way of making Ferron squirm—his bout of morning entertainment.

  “So, you inherited big house and land, eh?” He chuckled.

  “You know . . .” Ferron began. Then he saw the grin and felt foolish. “Yes, six houses, over a hundred acres of good land in St. Ann, a couple of cars, but we still fighting over the jet—that sister of mine is so damned greedy . . .”

  “Not a damned thing, eh?” Wayne said.

  “You know how it go.” Ferron shrugged.

  “I told you about socialists. Not a damned thing. Now you, you’re a Christian, right? Running around with all them American evangelist type, doing your tongues business and all that, yes? Well, good. You better off with that kind of thing, you hear? You ever see a poor American preacher yet? Now, a preacher have the whole thing right—none of this socialist business. Leave that to the damned Catholics who got the Vatican to feed them when they are hungry . . . Every jack one of us is going to dead sometime, anyway. And if nobody is going to take the trouble to look back at your sorry life and write a book about it or some shit like that, then all you have is the life you lived—not no damned legacy, just the actual life. You think your father enjoyed his life, eh? No, no. That man was waiting for the book to come out about him, waiting for some accolade, some crown. But what does he get?”

  Ferron thought of Femi and his plans—the process of canonizing Old Man Ferron. This was the book, but reduced to a series of contrived articles; a narrative about a heroic death that was already beginning to seem absurd. Five years before, at the height of the intrigues of the seventies, the story would have had greater value—not so much that it would have been believed then, for it was believed now—but because nobody cared these days about radical heroes with a commitment to Africa and Blackness. Femi’s mission would have interested Uncle Wayne, but he did not read the current papers; he only read old magazines.

  Uncle Wayne had stopped talking. He was staring directly at Ferron. Ferron could not keep his eyes off the tiny black moles that lined the puffed bags under the mischievous gray-brown eyes. Wayne was waiting for Ferron to take the bait, to mount a defense of his father, but he simply smiled and nodded. He turned and looked out to the golf course instead. A sprinkler had started to spray arcs of rainbowed droplets on the green. Crows circled above the trees. Back here, the serenity suggested another time, another place altogether—far from the snap of gunshots at night, the uncertainty of the knock on the door, the indiscriminate machete slash, the flame of madness. It was a different country, a tourist cliché of hummingbirds, flowers, and fruit trees. Uncle Wayne had seen enough, smelled enough, swallowed enough reality for a lifetime. At night, the home became a veritable fortress, a tomb locked from the inside, where old people drifted between dream and death, floating to the melancholy wash of some old ska music scratching its way through the hallways from Uncle Wayne’s ancient gramophone player. He’d asked Ferron to bury him to the sounds of anything by Don Drummond or the Wailers that was recorded before 1965.

  Rituals of predictability. That was what Uncle Wayne desired. Death, of course, had its own rituals in the home. The dead would lie there for a few hours before one of the nurses would come in and clean them up, humming a hymn—always a hymn. The body would be removed at lunch—always the next lunch period after the death—nobody explained why, but it was done this way, always. A band of pink ribbon would be placed on the bedhead until someone else replaced the deceased. No one spoke of the dead. After all, that is what they were all waiting for.

  One afternoon Ferron heard an old very dark man of some girth arguing with a doctor who wore a
white coat over his shorts and flowery T-shirt: “I don’t want you cut off that damned foot too. I lost one already, that was enough, and still I going die, right? What I want, you know what I want? I want to sit out there on my porch, right, just sit out there and look on them hummingbirds, look on them trees, and look into that blue sky, and then I can just dead, you know. I don’t want no damn amputation, alright?”

  “But you will,” the doctor started.

  “Dead,” the old man said, smiling. “What you think we here for, eh? This is not no damn convalescent home, man.”

  The man died the next day. A pink ribbon was on his bed. Ferron had seen so much death since his father’s death. Death—in a way he had never noticed before—now appeared before him, defining itself, demystifying itself.

  Uncle Wayne’s reaction to his brother’s death was laughter and an intense amusement at the irony of it all. He could muster little else. Today he was less giddy about it, but he brought up the business of avoiding the old man’s habits again. Ferron found himself feeling a bit irritated. It may have been the growing heat on his neck as the sun shifted.

  “They say he was killed . . .” Ferron secretly hoped that this would throw Uncle Wayne.

  “We are all killed, you know?” Wayne said, without even missing a beat. He was smiling. “When we die, most of us, somebody harbors murder in their hearts for us—somebody wishes us dead—even if not callously or vindictively. I believe that the moment someone can imagine a world without you, a livable world without you, you are in danger. They can wish these things into being. I may have killed him, you know. You too.”