Bivouac Page 6

  She returned to the car and sat down. They stared into the night. He knew she was thinking about Lucas and what he had said. Maybe they did push the old man, maybe, but he was dead long before that. Ferron knew that this was what she wanted to tell Lucas in the room, but could not. He had died and they had killed him, killed his desire to continue, his dignity, sapped everything from him. At his bedside she had asked him why he did not fight harder, but she knew the answer. All he had left were his dreams, his much repeated fictions of things to come.

  “He was going to take us back to Oxford. Those were very green days, Oxford. Very green days, eh?” She spoke in that same distant voice. “He was always a dreamer, that man.”

  Ferron could feel her smile glowing against the side of his face.

  “You keep the ashes, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Delores.” She paused. “She still won’t let you . . . ?”

  “I don’t think it will work out. It’s this country; the fear. She keeps thinking about it, you know.” Ferron knew he was preparing everybody for something he planned to do.

  “She needs your support,” Mother said, turning to Ferron.

  “I know.”

  “Sometimes it takes awhile, you know.”

  “She thinks I should have done something.” Ferron had not said this to anyone, but he knew it was a good time. “She would never come right out and say it, but . . . She keeps . . . She keeps at me now. Can’t do a thing right . . .”

  “Takes time, sometimes,” Mother said. Her voice trailed. She had returned to the old man.

  “Yes,” Ferron said, ending it.

  Mother kept looking out. Ferron heard a car coming up the hill. He remembered their vulnerability. He was thinking of the fair-skinned one who kept his gun tucked away, the one who said: “Believe you me, it real as hell, an’ ’member, Cato don’ tek it out unless it mus’ use, de ting too damn heavy.” Cato used the heavy object to knock him to the ground, his head bleeding. He could hear Delores and Cynthia screaming even when he was still unconscious.

  Ferron started the car. They drove down the hill with the radio playing old rocksteady hits. Mother hummed along. They entered the sordid belly of the jewel.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  The deputy editor is obviously a newspaperman, skilled and knowledgeable, and I do not understand why he was not made editor, or rather, I do understand. He is a pleasant man and he holds the paper together whatever the assistant editor might suppose. He is younger than the assistant editor, which must add mightily to the a.e.’s gall. The Star editor is the saddest case in this office. He has massive experience in the news world but there are two things against him—he is not a Jamaican and he is not a university man. He drifts and that publication reflects a mind that has serious philosophical concerns; but he is politically ambiguous. Perhaps that is a healthy thing, but those types disgust me.

  There are three men who run around the office. I do not understand why it should be necessary to run if you plan your day properly and allow for the unexpected. The most remarkable runner is not in the editorial office. He is a Rhodes Scholar (president of the Oxford Union in his fourth year—his scholarship was for three years) who seems to be trying to catch up with himself. He occupies an office on the fourth floor (where the managing director, a pleasant man, rules) and is editing a directory of directors—the ultimate, on the face of it, in snobbery. It is the easiest and simplest of jobs but he has built it into a task of Hercules. He is director of special projects who gets nothing done. The Rhodes selectors obviously made a mistake, as they sometimes do. The other runner is the news editor. He seems an experienced man who never dreamed of becoming news editor and he, too, is catching up on himself and clearly does not plan his day. He forgets things—bad in a news editor. The third runner is the office manager, who is straight out of Dickens (he would be delighted to hear this). He is obviously imitating, in speech and smile and the nodding of the head, some ancient white worthy, and as office manager he has so much work to do that it is an effort to keep up. He is particularly concerned about crumbs of food around the office.

  I am intrigued, at the tail end of my life—for it has to be the tail end—with the problem, which everyone faces in this open office, of how to appear to be working for eight hours a day. You can be seen by everybody. The dodges are transparent. Should it not be a rule in a newspaper office that if you have nothing to do, you should read an approved book? This would probably add more to the good of the country than the misrepresented news. But no, the telephone is the principle dodge—that most unreliable instrument—and the news is further distorted. I hate using the telephone to try to get accurate information. Information should be typed or printed or handed out.

  (Incidentally, the office manager can hardly be efficient. When I arrived it took him a week to get a typewriter for me and he has not yet found any keys to my desk. Again, he makes his judgments on the status of the red chair. He must save the company a lot of money, but you can be sure that he won’t get any of it when he retires.)

  ten

  The next morning Ferron went down to the funeral home to make arrangements for the cremation. Clarice drove him down. She wouldn’t pick him up afterward as she had some business to do in Ensom City. She would not evict her tenants; they paid the mortgage; instead, she would move in with her boyfriend’s family. They lived in Mona. People would understand.

  “You should take a cab out,” she said, stretching across to lock the passenger door. “This place looks kinda dangerous.”

  The sun was directly overhead, beating down. He watched her maneuver her Datsun past two huge speaker boxes set up in the middle of the road. A group of children played “scrimmage” with a stuffed-up orange juice box outside the funeral home. The entry of the building was guarded by a wrought-iron grille painted gold. Inside was a tinted-glass doorway with the words Abrams and Son Ltd painted in a golden arc in bold Gothic lettering. The paint was peeling. To the side of the building was a solid black iron gate, open on one side. This is where they had backed the Volvo to deliver the body the week before. Ferron walked by the gate looking in. He could see the small chapel tucked into the far end of the courtyard which was shaded by the interlocking branches of several mango trees. A fair-skinned man, with a jungle of light-brown hair, sawed a plank on a workbench in the middle of the courtyard. He glanced at Ferron and then continued to saw. Sawdust and leaves covered everything.

  The children scattered as he neared the door. The grille was unlocked. He pulled it away and pushed the inner door open. It was cool in the office.

  She smiled constantly, this high-brown woman with wispy gray hair who fidgeted a lot. Ferron thought of the man in the back. Her brother or her son? They looked alike. The man was lighter-skinned, but the heavy foreheads were identical.

  “I am the son,” she said, her voice high and lilting in that St. Andrew middle-class accent. He did not get it. “The sign: Abrams and Son; I am the son,” she laughed.

  Her colorful dress strained against her bulk, uneven at the shoulder. She kept pulling it at her stomach. The dress would roll up again whenever she moved. She kept a pink handkerchief tucked into her heavily powdered freckled bosom, which she pulled out to wipe her palms whenever she had to write anything.

  “The boys didn’t like the business.” She fidgeted with her skirt and then her gold-framed glasses that rested on an angular nose. “It takes getting used to.” Removing her glasses, she dabbed her face. Ferron noticed a thin green vein that curved down the bridge of her nose and vanished into her cheek. She looked quickly at the kerchief to check for makeup. She smiled up at Ferron. He was still standing.

  “Sit, sit, man,” she said, waving him to the chair. She bent over, disappearing behind the huge black desk, the kind of thing that could sell as an antique. Piles and piles of paper were strewn about it. “Morgan, right?”

  “Yes.” Ferron could see into the courtyard. Occasionally, th
e tangled hair of the fair-skinned carpenter would bob past.

  She emerged with more paper. Light, piercing through the trees, caught her glasses which kept shifting up and down as she read the papers which she now held in both hands. Occasionally, she would swing around in the squeaky black chair to look into the driveway. The room smelled of rosewater and lavender. She started talking as she passed him form after form to fill. Ferron worked quickly, trying at the same time to nod, as if he were listening to her.

  “Oh, we go back a long way.” She was talking about his father. “He wouldn’t remember me, but I remember him. Cricketer. Oh yes. Boy in his whites and blazer, child. They would strut. In those days, boys were gentlemen. But if you asked him, he probably wouldn’t remember me. Ferron Morgan. Hurt me so bad when I heard. Yes . . . that one too.” She pointed to another sheet of paper. Ferron signed.

  “Vineyard Town.” The chair squeaked as she leaned back. “That used to be a residential area one time, you know? Oh yes. But these people start to move in there in the late sixties. Any and anybody. The place is virtually a ghetto now. I mean, I should know, our place is still there and those people are a real worthless set a tenants. But tell them that, nuh. Tell them and them liable to just shoot you. And people say it’s our fault for moving out. We had to move. Had to. You notice how it is with Kingston, now. The ghetto, it moves. Now it reach Half Way Tree and still moving. Five years ago, we had to get city council to put up a big wall right in the middle of my street in Barbican. At least it’s safer. They know not to come beyond that point.” She stopped talking and turned to look through the window. Ferron stared at the pictures on the wall. The old man, her father, was darker than she was. He sat in a black suit with a cane in one hand and a pipe in his mouth. In his other hand he held his gold watch. His eyes looked faded. Patriarch.

  She turned around.

  “Do I have to fill in everything?” Ferron asked.

  “’Fraid so, unless one of my people did it, but you wouldn’t trust them. They buried the wrong person once. Not a lie.” She laughed. “Sometimes you have to laugh at these things, you know?”

  “I suppose.” Ferron continued writing.

  “Your grandmother was Morgan, nuh? Yes? She lived there, just her alone. Nobody else . . .” She paused, waiting for Ferron to help. He didn’t. She continued: “Well, a nice lady. A teacher. We buried her. I think Papa did her himself. Wouldn’t let anybody else touch her. My mother said black people sometimes don’t really know how to fix the white faces. It can be an art. For him, it was an art. For me, it’s just business. Finished with that one?” She took the sheet, and pushed another in front of him. He was filling in the same details: date of birth, place of birth, date of death, place of death, relatives, funeral chapel.

  “It’s the same information,” Ferron complained.

  “You will thank me for this, dear.” She sounded like a schoolteacher. She looked at the form. “Born in Nigeria? Oh yes. I remember now. She was a missionary, not a teacher. From Africa, right? They came from Africa. Wait, wait.” She got up and hurried out of the room. As she moved past Ferron he could smell a thick, sweet mixture of sweat and perfume. He stopped writing and watched as one of the hearses drove in slowly. The gate was locked.

  She came back in with a black folder overflowing with old newspaper clippings. She sat behind the desk and began to rummage through, quickly. “I am sure I put it here. We like to keep records. It is here . . . Oh, this goes so far back. Henriques; you know the Henriques family? We did the grandfather. Nice man.” She continued to search. Ferron wrote.

  Last known address: Unknown.

  Occupation: Former university professor.

  Last employer: He started to write Vera Chen, then erased it. Instead, he wrote self-employed.

  “Here it is. Look, look.” She held up a large clipping from the Gleaner. He reached for it and she pulled it back quickly. “Oh, sweet savior, it’s your grandfather indeed. Spitting image!” Then she let him look at it.

  A man dressed in a thick black suit and tie smiled broadly into the camera. Clean-shaven, his face was barely distinguishable because of how dark he was. Ferron recognized the nose, the bulbous eyes, but the animated smile was different. The man looked happy. He held up two elaborately designed West African shields. In front of him was a table of assorted sculptures, masks, material, tools, and weapons. Beside him was a light-skinned woman, short and very thin. She was dressed in a frilly white dress. Her eyes were closed. She held the pelt of a spotted animal away from her body as if trying her best to ensure that the camera captured it. The caption read, Reverend and Mrs. Morgan, of St. Ann, display African artifacts from Africa. The Morgans are missionaries who have returned from the “dark continent” with good tidings.

  This was the second picture of his grandfather that Ferron had seen. The other was a faded and water-stained photograph taken outside the old house in the St. Ann hills when the old man was just a baby in a dress. The flash from the camera had dilated his grandfather’s eyes. Ferron always noticed his gnarled right hand clenched in a fist. The left held the narrow handle of a cricket bat. He wore a straw hat that was firmly set on his head. Ferron had always thought it odd that he was about to play cricket with a bow tie on. But those were the times.

  In this photograph, his grandfather was a younger man, and his gaze was softer—there was something hopeful and almost restless about his smile. Ferron kept staring at this strange photograph, trying to make contact. The woman reached for it and pulled it away from him. “Wait,” he said, taking it back. He wrote the details of the newspaper on a sheet of paper that he stuffed into his breast pocket.

  “Missionaries. I tell you. This exhibition. Oh, we went. Hundreds and hundreds of things they brought. Stools, sandals, everything. The people were so grateful to your grandparents, they gave them everything. We have done a lot for Africa, you know. People don’t know that, they just don’t know.” She smiled. “Never seen this before, eh?”

  “I just don’t have a copy,” Ferron lied.

  “I like to do this. Bring people back. Sometimes I put on the gramophone and play some of those old-time songs from the thirties and forties, and people just sit here and cry. Sometimes they dance, especially the older women. They like to remember how the men used to be, young, carefree, healthy.” Ferron had finished filling the forms, but the woman wanted to talk. He sat back. She leaned forward. “Some people think it is strange, me, a woman, doing this kind of business, but it is the most natural thing. I think it is good for a woman to do the business, because only women really know. It is a gift from God. Once I had a couple here—well, the man was dead, and the girl wouldn’t eat and she was ready to just die. When I finished with her, she was laughing and dancing, and we ate dinner right over there where we have the coffins. Most people just want some mothering, you know. Most people want to have nice memories, funny memories. I can do that. Look and me and you now. I gave you something special, just like that, and you feel better, right?”

  Ferron nodded. If he indulged her, she would stop.

  “My father couldn’t mother. People came in here and the place was dark, and they would walk out bawling and bawling—which is bad for business, because people hate to spend money when they are sad, eh?” She gathered the papers he had signed. “Cremation, right?”

  “Yes. On Friday,” Ferron said.

  “Yes. Cheaper. Simpler. Some people feel funny about the ashes, but they don’t have to keep them in the house, you know. Some people just bury them—we can arrange that . . .” She waited for Ferron to request it. He was silent. “Some just throw the ashes away. Spiritual thing, eh. Anyway, it is cheaper—we don’t burn the clothes, that way you save a good suit. Just underwear. And then, after that . . . it’s finished.” She looked at him as if trying to read his mind. Ferron stood up.

  “Can you show me the coffins?” he asked, tucking his shirt into his pants. His back was wet with sweat.

  “You don’t talk much,
my son,” she said, walking around the desk pulling at her dress. He could see her white slip. “That would worry most people, but you must understand that I spend a lot of time with people who don’t have a whole lot to say.” She laughed heartily at her joke, completely unconcerned about Ferron’s blank look. He respected her for that self-assurance.

  She led Ferron through the dark corridor lined on one side by a row of caskets with plush velvet linings and well-varnished finishes. They were locked behind a thick, black iron grille. On the left was a raw plyboard wall stained with huge brown blotches. Through a doorway, he could see a group of simple wooden caskets; unadorned, unvarnished, and empty. She did not show those to him. They walked along the tiled floor. She opened the grille to show the display of coffins.

  He chose one with a white inner lining. He had wanted to chose the cheapest one, which looked just as good, but she would have been embarrassed. His father belonged to a world that she thought she knew and understood. That world was made of people who would be buried expensive.

  “I will show you the chapel. I know you picked a place already, but in case, you know. The larger churches can charge a lot.” She was already walking toward the other end of the building. “I am very proud of it.”

  They were in the back compound which he had seen from the gate. It was colder there than in the coffin room. The chapel was a makeshift altar, a podium with a huge Bible on top, and several pews. She called the man with the hair—Alphonso—to come and tell Ferron about the chapel. He spoke in a dry monotone, repeating with a slow, painstaking care the history of the chapel.

  “This year make it fifty-five years. All kind of people buried here. Rich people, poor people, politician, professor, lawyer, and,” here he slowed down and thought, “leaders of the churches from all denomination. To bury here, you can make arrangement and we will even provide a minister. If you want, some of our people will witness the ceremony and it will be done in a God-fearing way. No hearse not involve, no whole heap of flowers, we have these,” indicating artificial flowers, “but can order good one for you . . .”