Bivouac Read online

  At about ten o’clock, the men walked past them and faded into the shadows of the tree-filled yard.

  The three men stood apart, muttering into the night. Occasionally they would laugh, turning around with their bodies bent. At about midnight, Femi walked away from the group. He was in full white cloth and it glowed in the moonlight. He raised his arm and began to speak. Ferron did not understand the language, but there were constant references to Ferron, the old man. Femi dipped his hand into a bowl of ice water and threw sprinklings of it around. He looked skyward, muttering as if in prayer. He sent another arc of water.

  Quackoo and Kamau nodded reverently. Nobody moved.

  Then Femi took the unopened bottle of rum and broke the seal. He let it spill onto the lawn, once, then again, and again. With each pouring, he made a fresh incantation. Then he put the bottle to his mouth and drank. He passed it to the others. They drank. Ferron let the liquor touch his lips. He held it. Kamau noticed that he was uncomfortable and took the bottle from him.

  Femi took off his sandals and walked farther away. He was talking slowly now, and nodding. The words were barely audible. He was there for about five minutes, talking, sometimes laughing. The other two nodded knowingly. Then Femi wrapped his cloth around himself and walked back rubbing his bare feet in the grass with a look of peace on his face.

  “My brother,” he said, his eyes glowing, “we will miss you.” This he said turning to face the darkness. “We will miss you. And we are sorry.”

  “They have met him?” Quackoo asked.

  “They have met him,” Femi replied.

  Kamau said, “Amen.” And the three laughed.

  “J. Christ Esquire!” Femi shouted, and they all joined him. “J. Christ Esquire!”

  Ferron laughed with them. Mother smiled and Theresa moved closer to where the men were. Ferron turned to see Lucas standing at the front door. He was not smiling.

  “You think he understood the Yoruba?” Quackoo asked Femi.

  “He always understood it, brother. He just pretended,” Femi laughed.

  “Yah. I think he spoke Swahili too,” Kamau added. They laughed.

  Lucas went inside. The strains of Andraé Crouch’s gospel “Go Ahead” floated out onto the lawn. The men did not notice. They were still laughing. Ferron saw the light go on in Lucas’s room. Mother turned to look as well. The record played until it stuck. Mother went in quietly and took it off the turntable. She let the radio play oldies all night. Theresa kept drinking in the yard. Femi sat beside her.

  * * *

  They drank rum through the night, speaking of the old man with tears and laughter. As the sun came up, Ferron, who had barely slept, found the men sitting in the yard. Kamau and Quackoo went inside for breakfast. Femi winked at Ferron, nodding his head to the driveway. Theresa was sitting in her Accord, waiting for him. Mother came out to see where Femi was.

  “You know these women,” Femi said to her. “She said she cooked for me. So if I don’t go I will be a man of terrible morals and deep unkindness.” His laugh bellowed through the silent morning. He promised Mother, kissing her, that he would come back. She laughed and warned him about his age. He winked again at Ferron and muttered something else about women. Ferron wanted to ask what the old man had said out there on the lawn that night. But he was afraid to. The morning seemed so different. The magic that allowed him to believe that the old man had been sitting out there on the lawn, Buddha-like, witnessing his own wake, was gone. But Ferron wished there was a message for him.

  All Femi would say was: “We were not the best friends for him, we did not come when he needed us, but he still talks to me.” He had said this to Mother early on Saturday morning when the sun was crawling over the hills. The orange lit up Femi’s white cloth. “We are here, sister, eh. It is our job.” Mother cried quietly. Nobody spoke, they just watched her do what she had to do. She sang a hymn softly and rocked. The men nodded as they had done when Femi was in the bushes. Theresa kept wiping her eyes, but she did not reach to touch Mother. It was not necessary. They all knew that.

  Then Mother stood up and walked to the house. Everybody followed except Theresa and Femi, who spoke for a few minutes before he came into the house alone. No one could say for certain whether Theresa left the house. But she was parked outside waiting for him when he woke. The others slept until four in the afternoon.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  The question of lunch bothers me. There is my diet but I cannot go on being hungry all day. A new canteen concessionaire is expected soon and there is money involved. One must work something out. Two patties should be enough, and water, but I shudder at sending out messengers. There is a depth of uncertainty. I remember being quite as unsettled as this in my first six months of work when I returned to this country. Much of it was driven away in liquor, but to have known that there were so many really hostile people around made me try to leave on several occasions. What would have happened, I wonder, if I had gone to work with those politicians—perhaps as an advisor? Nothing much more than happened to some of the others, but I would have financial security if I were still alive. These are prudent socialists—they understand the value of investment and the doors that political position can open. Who can blame them, anyway? The pension for a parliamentarian is a joke. I have no stomach for that kind of thing, though. I would have worried about being killed. A silly thought, of course, since none of them are dead. None of the politicians are dead despite the terror we all feel. These gunmen have made a simple calculation: to kill a politician would be like killing a white man in Jamaica. One never gets away with that kind of thing. They will kill me now, though. I am neither a white man nor a politician. I feel no terror. After all, it is the tail end of my life.

  It is incredible that they could not have found, by some maneuver, a safe place for me. The job at the university still puzzles me. They made no appointment. No outsider from the Caribbean would have been allowed in. I applied in 1973. With five years I would have written any number of books and articles. They sat there, my Oxford “friends,” the VC himself. At the same time, had I gone there I might have ended up with the left wing of that institution, but I would still be there. Instead, I accepted a lack of security in the confident hope that at some time I would have been able to slide out or be eased, by a sympathetic government, into a comfortable old age. That government was inefficient and unsympathetic. Does anybody realize how very selfish the former prime minister is, how much he dislikes those friends of his who maintained a distance from school? He will punish you for not believing in the myth and for breaking the legend by going to Oxford, for instance, without anyone’s blessing or permission. We have a sad country. The new leader is a nobody—from the dry-goods store, no basis in this country, not even his relationship to the Hanson-Bustamante circle, nothing except Harvard (just what is Harvard, anyway?) and some prodding from M.G. Smith (who cannot escape positive blame); but the Jamaican people, who reiterate that they are slaves, will never recover. We, as a people, are quite dead. I look around me and can find none of the promise that I saw in the colonial secretary’s office in 1946. They had been picked for color or subservience, but they were going to be themselves, not (most of them) anybody else’s man.

  But not in 1980. They sold themselves deeply down the drain. Nothing would have happened like a communist takeover, etc. We would have had to go back to the IMF and it would have been a hard, uphill struggle in which everybody would have suffered. Except those who still steal away millions to Miami. There is a kind of middle road which can be maintained with sheer efficiency and guts. The PDP was woefully lacking in those things. But what is the alternative? We still are boggling and we really do not know where we are going—except back to being a colony with Reagan’s economy supporting some of us. But we asked for it. No amount of skulduggery could, by itself, have caused that defeat.

  You would think that I do not have children who must live beyond this. You would think I cannot hea
r Bob Marley wailing on the airwaves. You would think I have already decided that I am dead and there is simply no hope. Perhaps there is hope. But I have no idea what it looks like. And yet, I think my son, Ferron, might make something of himself. I worry for him. He lacks dogma. Perhaps that is why he will survive. At least he knows he is an African. That must count for something. He avoids me. As if he fears that I might taint him somehow. I can’t blame him.

  twelve

  The one called Cato looked darker in the photograph. His eyes were set deep and he had a beard. The other two, whose names Ferron did not know until then, were the same. Tough, hardened men with eyes half-closed—casual. Typical mug shots. Earnshaw, aka Bullet, and Laidley, aka Fling weh, Tougher, and Marky. All three were dead. Cornered during a raid in Rema, they had run out onto Spanish Town Road, stolen a car at gunpoint, and led a chase through the city, shooting wildly ahead of them and behind them. Finally, somewhere on the Mandela Highway, they were killed. Cato’s bullet-riddled body was displayed on the front page just above the mug shots, bullet wounds indicated with arrows. There were wounds under his armpit. His common-law wife, whose picture was also displayed, was suing. She said he was shot while surrendering.

  There was a brief mention of the rape at the bottom of the page where they listed the five weeks of “mayhem and terror” unleashed by the three. Ferron read the story several times. He felt nothing. He wondered about the fourth one, the younger boy who kept fidgeting nervously, changing the gun from hand to hand. Every shadow shift was someone coming. He did not say much, just kept biting his lower lip and flashing his bloodshot eyes around. At times he would smile at Cato’s witticisms. He walked off with Cato and two others into the darkness with the women. The other stood guard over Ferron, and then with a warning, left after the screaming had subsided. Delores said he did nothing, the boy. Just watched. The article said he was still at large. The police files had no photo of him.

  Ferron had sat on a wooden bench in the Matilda’s Corner Station staring at the slowly rotating fan. His head was still bleeding. His body was fatigued. He had half walked, half run the four miles from the university to the station, all the time wondering where the girls were, all the time muttering, “Please, God, don’t let them be dead.” The police had already heard of the incident. The girls, alive, had been through the station and filed a report. They thought Ferron was dead. It was the receptionist, a dark woman with grease-slick processed hair and very red lipstick, who confirmed that Delores and her friend were raped, but alive. They were at the hospital. Someone had brought them in. “Look bad, real bad. I tell them all the time, you know. Don’ fight dem guys, man, don’ fight at all. Jus tek it—after all, it better dan fe dead, you know.”

  They wondered how come he was just getting to the station. He tried to explain, dabbing the wound with a kerchief. He started to describe the men, when an officer showed him the three photographs. He nodded.

  “Jesus Christ! Again. Cato son of bitch strike again! I know it, man. I know it.” It was almost in admiration. He was smiling. “Who the hell we send out thereso tonight? To the dance?” he asked the receptionist.

  “Nobody. Is Hermitage Station business, sah. It was at the Union, right? The dance?”

  Ferron nodded.

  “I know it, man,” the officer said on his way back to the office.

  Ferron sat unsteadily. The woman watched him closely, as if expecting him to collapse. She did not plan to move to help him. She did not need that kind of excitement. She gave him a hard look, hoping he would understand that she was ordering him not to collapse. “You better go up a UC, master. You can dead from loss a blood too, you know.”

  * * *

  At the hospital, Delores kept screaming at Ferron, “Where were you? Where the hell were you, eh? Eh?”

  The doctor said she was just a bit hysterical. Ferron was shaken.

  “I said it was dangerous . . .” he started, then he noticed that she had withdrawn completely. Her eyes glazed over.

  “It will calm her down. The other one is doing alright, now.” He knew the doctor well. They had been at the university together. He looked tired and genuinely disturbed. He stood with Ferron as they watched Delores and the friend climb into her mother’s car and drive out. The doctor then took Ferron inside and looked at the wound, repeating, “Hell of a thing. Hell of a thing, man.”

  Ferron felt sweat seeping into his eyes. He blinked at the sting of salt.

  “Alright. Take some Tylenol or aspirin. Should be alright,” the doctor said, after. “Girlfriend, eh? Fiancée?”

  Ferron nodded.

  “On the pill, and all that?” He did not look directly at Ferron.

  “Yes, I think so,” Ferron said.

  “Good, good. Not that there would be a problem, but sometimes, you know . . . Complicated business.” He stopped with a dismissive wave of a hand. “Nice, though, real nice.” The doctor winked. Ferron felt sick.

  He took a taxi home.

  * * *

  It was Clarice who asked about the incident in the morning. He said little. Delores’s mother called and provided the rest of the details. In that scenario, Ferron was careless and a coward. Ferron thought of the blood he had shed.

  There was no further investigation by the police; the case was closed.

  * * *

  It was as if he were meeting figures from that incident after the article appeared. In Parade, a few days later, he was sure he had seen the living boy, sitting on a van staring into the floor, his toes tapping to the rattle of the van. He must have felt Ferron’s stare. He looked up, straight at Ferron. There was the blank of nonrecognition in his gaze. Ferron looked down. He was not sure. Then that afternoon, while walking through the medical school, he ran into the doctor friend who had seen Delores on the night of the rape.

  “Hey, look, sorry to hear ’bout you old man. Hell of a thing.” The doctor shook his head, a grimace on his face.

  “Yeah, a freak thing,” Ferron muttered. He felt the acid turning in his stomach. It was going to be a longer night.

  “Damn country hospitals, man. What it was, a simple concussion?”

  Ferron nodded.

  “Damn country hospital, man. Somebody was telling me that you people might sue . . .”

  “For what?” Ferron started listening again.

  “Well, maybe is just better to leave well enough alone, eh? But still, sometimes you have to put some fire up them ass. That nurse should lose her work.” The doctor was wrapping up the conversation.

  Ferron wanted to hear more. He felt in a daze still, and he wasn’t sure he was hearing what was being said. He thought of Lucas and his questions.

  “Yeah, leave well enough alone.”

  “But what did you hear?” Ferron asked. He was trying to sound as if he knew more than he did. “I mean, what is the buzz around here?”

  “Usual business, you know. I hear the nurse gave him sucrose or something—to sober him up . . .” He laughed and then made a peculiar sound with his teeth. “Now if the man was alert when they took him in, that would certainly lock him into the coma, and after that, is anybody’s business.”

  “So why give him that?” Ferron felt a wave of queasiness again.

  “Hey, you alright? You looking weak, man. You alright?”

  “Jus’ tired, you know? So tell me now, this business with the sucrose—why give it?” he asked, trying to relax his whole body.

  “If him was drunk, you know? To sober him up. Maybe she never believe it was no head injury, you follow? Never check . . . Deadly thing that . . .”

  Ferron imagined the hospital at night. The old man had lain at the bottom of the steps for several hours before one of the boys arrived drunk and stumbled on him. According to the owner of the house, the old man was conscious when they found him, just a bit groggy. Ferron imagined the attempts to straighten him out, to send him to bed, and then the blood—maybe it was the blood that made them decide to take him to the hospital —the bl
ood and his dizziness. The night would have been dark—absolutely black with no streetlights—just that palpable darkness of the country. And these strange men carried his father to the car—the last journey of the old man in the arms of strangers, bleeding, his eyes unsteady—life seeping from him. The ride to the hospital would have been bumpy as the two men argued with each other about some woman or about some task to be done. One would have been saying over and over again, “You alright, master? Just try get some res’, now, you hear? Jesus Christ. Why yuh never look firs’?” And the older one would be telling the other to shut his arse and drive the damn car and not to crash it with his drunken self. At the clinic, sleeping in the late hours, nobody moving except maybe a guardy shaken out of his sleep, they tried to get attention from someone. The duty nurse came in and saw the three men—one bleeding, the other two red-eyed with rum. She hissed her teeth, and in that slow, nonchalant way of women who are not interested in what they are doing, she led them to a room. They explained confusedly what had happened. She saw drunk men, sent to try her nerves, make her night a trial. The old man answered questions in a slur—age, date of birth, address—everything was answered; Ferron had seen the sheet. She might have heard the polished quality in his diction and his voice, and she might have dismissed him for a man so drunk he was starting to think himself better than his station. The bloodstained bush jacket, the worn shorts, and the slippers on his feet made him look at least careless. Drunk, she probably thought. But he tried to answer the questions. He had even signed his name. He was conscious when he went in. Then she muttered something about drunkenness, and injected the syrup of sugar into his blood. Like a man finally finding some peace, the old man, in the presence of strangers, in a strange place, so far away from family, from his children, from his wife, from everything that made sense to him, went into a deep sleep, that coma, never to return.