Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood

“WELL, THAT’S THAT, THEN,” SAID MARDI, and it was more by the fold of her arms in front of her, a gesture unusual for her, than by her actual words that I knew, possibly we all knew, that an era had ended, a way of the world had ceased, poems wouldn’t be poems any more, or painters really artists, or music journeying contrapuntal as hips towards the wordless, transforming flight of Philomel, or pines sighing, or solitaires crying from an inviolate solitude. All that was now debased. It was July 1969, and man had arrived on the moon. Mardi’s moon. Which didn’t have a man in it, and wasn’t made of blue cheese, but was actually a woman, an echo of the sun’s flame, who established her own nocturnal domain; a woman I had always assumed was mad, rather like the woman in the attic at Mr. Rochester’s house in Jane Eyre.

“Dem lie, dem lie like Lucifer!” Zethilda spat this out without once closing her distracted mouth, so that it seemed her eyes, darting back and forth from the television set to each of us, were actually pronouncing the words.

We were at Regardless, watching an annoyingly snowy, ethereal picture on a small black and white television, since the grander original one had been relinquished in Pardi’s gesture.

Mardi stood watching through unsympathetic eyes. Pardi sat back, hands propped on the armrests, fingers pressed to the narrow groove above his lip as though they were made to fit there. His eyes looked only mildly interested as they watched something he deemed irrevocable.

A dreamy figure that could have been the Michelin man or St. Nicholas in a snowstorm drifted through the crackling, indistinct screen.

Mardi looked bristly and defensive, as though guests had arrived unannounced. “I’d rather not have seen this,” she said.

“Well, Pie?” he seemed to say, but he actually didn’t say anything. He didn’t speak a lot nowadays, just seemed to attach his eyes to some comfortable point on the horizon and focus as though trying to keep his balance. I had become impatient of his poor hearing, embarrassed by his stumbling and bumping into things. The day before, he had knocked his knee on the glass-topped coffee table and I had turned on him. “Why can’t you look where you’re going? You don’t make any effort.”

“You know, if I thought it was that … if I thought my mind just wasn’t in control … I’d shoot myself!”

I knew that he meant this. I knew his mind was still like iron, while the rest of him melted around it, the flesh softly falling away from the bone. But I couldn’t bear to watch the physical manifestations of his age. The teeth in the glass, the slow dust-on-tile shuffle of his tired old shoes, the edges of yellow wax on his hearing aid, the small wet spot on the toilet seat or the front of his pants. I didn’t want to see any of this. I didn’t want my friends to see it. I didn’t want to know how it all turned out. And I knew I would never forgive myself for what I had just said, or for feeling what I felt.

“What a waste of money,” I declared, looking at the screen. Actually I couldn’t connect with what I saw there. It did seem unreal, maybe because the picture was so bad or maybe because it suggested those science-fiction movies we knew not to believe. But I was young enough to know it was real. It was the moon of my geography lessons with Miss Batt that was there on the screen.

But it wasn’t the same moon that had followed me through my youth, like one of my ancestors. That moon had looked down on me from the window at Drumblair, though as a child I believed Nomdmi was its home, for it was brightest there; it had chased me in cars till I got carsick making sure it still followed me; it had been the subject of many of Mardi’s carvings and drawings, and of course all her childhood stories to me, in which there was never a man in the moon, always a woman.

Pardi placed his hands in his lap. The fingernails were long, and as he gazed at them I was reminded of something I had heard: that a person’s nails and hair go on growing after death.

“Dem lie!” Zethilda repeated. “No man cyan go to de moon, Barrista, not even a ’mericaman!”

“A God light lef’ on at night, sah … man doan ’ave no business in dat!”

She swatted the back of the chair disagreeably with a yellow duster and went on cleaning and complaining all the way back to the kitchen.

Her departure stirred the air, and I caught a whiff of a putrid odour. I looked up to see Batiste gesticulating at the door.

“Same t’ing, a sure sign, dat… a de end o’ de world coming. Man nu fi tell lie ’bout no moon….” Zethilda stood in the doorway with a gleeful look, her eyes for once shining with vindication. Her every prophecy was fulfilled, and the dead cat was the signifying omen.

A few days before, someone had inadvertently driven the car over a cat belonging to my Czech friend, who was still in university. I had arrived at Regardless very upset, with the squashed animal in a plastic bag, and Mardi had tactfully stuck the problem in the kiln so everyone could forget about it. But she’d forgot to tell Batiste, whose job it was to bury animals in the garden. Now she explained the anomaly, and asked him to dispose of it.

“Have you heard man has landed on the moon, Batiste?” asked Pardi, as Batiste stepped out on the veranda. The gardener came back to the door.

“Man has just walked on the moo-oon.” Mardi lengthened the word as though making it eternal. She was reassured by the fact that Batiste evidently didn’t care.

Batiste stepped forward to think about this for a moment, scratched his head and cocked it to one side. “De moon t’ing? Miss Tildy seh a dat weh cause de cat to dead in Modor’ stove.” He started to laugh so hard that he had to excuse himself, chuckling on his way out to retrieve the body for burial.

Batiste decided to bury the cat at the site of the plastic Aztec god, between the roses and the plumbagos. He propped the bag against a stone in the circle of a garden bed, covered by the speckled shade of the woman’s-tongue tree, and began digging. Pardi, who had moved out to the patio for peace, watched him for a while and then moved slowly over the lawn towards him.

“Nice place to bury,” Batiste acknowledged. “Look over ’pon Drumblair.” He looked up at Pardi for recognition of a common bond.

Batiste was referring to National Heroes Park, with its memorials to Garvey, Bogle, and Gordon. Pardi didn’t like memorial parks; the red and yellow cannas made him think of rows of war dead marked by stark white crosses. They reminded him of his brother Roy.

Pardi looked over to the right and shaded his eyes from the relentless shine of Aunt Muriel’s flat white roof. “You know, doctor believes in reincarnation … that we become something else in the next life.”

Years later, my father could not remember why he came over that evening, but he vividly recalled sitting with his father on the patio. Pardi looked as though he had thrown himself into the chair as one would toss taken-off clothes. He sat in a sealed zone of silence. He looked at his son with a frown, not so much of dissatisfaction—more the way one shies from sudden light. Michael couldn’t think of anything to say and, feeling awkward, he sat there trying to decipher the name on the cover of a book spread-eagled over the wide wooden arm of a chair.

That was what Pardi said. The final word was expelled from the collapse of his diaphragm, arriving with such violence that Michael instinctively flinched. And it made perfect sense to him; his father who filled every waking minute of every single day. The endless hours of work, of research, of practice, of knowing the whole heart of a case, of a problem, of the law or the rule, the sum or the context, caring in every way that caring counted; who entered every event of a sport, and ventured all those he could, specializing in all things, who braved the extremes and still couldn’t sleep those few hours left at night; the activist who filled even holidays with a boat, or planting one tree and cutting down another, sometimes the wrong tree, the carpenter, the punter, the farmer, the institute maker, the mouth organ player, and he still found time every night to read … the philosopher …

Here, after all those years and wearing and tearing, his body, exhausted, betrayed him. That’s how Michael understood it.

Michael held onto this memory as though it were a bead he would require later, when he came to string together the story of his father.

July had started with our birthdays; Pardi turned seventy-six and I turned twenty-two. When I suggested to Mardi that we pool our resources to buy him either a pair of pajamas or his annual red shirt, I found her response puzzling: she looked startled. Although she quickly regained her composure, something in her spontaneous reaction made me think that, in a rare and indiscreet moment of practicality, she had judged the gift futile. As though dropping a marker in the sand against the wash of time, I gave him instead a photograph taken of myself the year before.

Our friend Jessie, sister of the late novelist Roger Mais, threw a big party spanning the generations to celebrate our birthdays. Jessie’s hillside house was full of flowers, which made Mardi cough a lot. Just after Pardi and I cut the cake, I slipped a disc in my neck. I had attached many hairpieces, lavishly curled, to the top of my head. Then, clad in a sea-green gown whose shoulder straps kept slipping off, I thrust my chin up in the air to receive an embrace. From that position, I tried to retrieve a dress strap, and felt a pain in my neck—the sheer weight of my hairpieces had caused the accident. We had to return home, where a doctor manipulated my head and someone held my feet firm till I felt a snap in my neck.

That was the first time I heard it: a piece of music that seemed to be arguing with itself. It sounded desperate. It reminded me of a bird locked in a room, looking for an open window, looking for a way out to its freedom. Its effect on me was haunting. Pardi was listening to it in the living-room.

“It’s Mahler’s tenth,” Mardi said in exasperation, as if I would understand some cryptic implication in this, and she stroked my ankle as though that would soothe my neck.

“He wrote it while fighting his final cardiac illness,” she explained. “Pam calls it Mahler’s heartbroken farewell to life. He keeps playing it….” She made a decision, which brought her instantly to her feet and to the doorway.

“I do beg you, dear, please turn it off… it makes me so terribly sad … why do you listen to it? It’s like listening to hear if your heart will stop.”

He turned it off then, but the sound of that music often filled the house after that, and like a wistful coda, it followed me all through July.

The day after the moon landing, before I left, I received a slip of typed paper as slight as its information; a lower second degree. I handed it to Pardi like a truce.

“Pie got her BA,” he said very quietly, as though I were no longer there in the room with him, maybe no longer even part of his life, but with a tenderness that expressed both the joy of our years of comradeship, and something other. Maybe regret, maybe nostalgia.

“I’m going to have a ball in the Bahamas, and then I’m going to become an air stewardess,” I declared defiantly.

His eyes disturbed me. He reminded me of an old grandfather star that had been in the sky longer than the others, for his light was dimmer and yet somehow more unyielding in its steadiness-or maybe he was just farther away in the universe.

“You know”—and he stopped to clear his throat and blow his nose, rubbing it impatiently as though it got in his way—“one eventually discovers that the least interesting premise upon which to base a life is oneself.”

Mardi always said that Zethilda cooked Pardi his last supper. The items of food changed year by year, story by story, depending on what Mardi felt would have been good for him, or suitable at that time. It was always a soft supper, for by that time his partial upper plate, which included his front teeth, was permanently in the bottom of a glass, in some liquid that smelled like Listerine.

His last supper was a few days before he died. He came out and sat at the table for it, I’m told, for I wasn’t back yet. He probably had steamed fish. Manley men never seem to be partial to fish, disliking the tedious business of small bones. And I don’t remember him being partial to steaming or boiling unless it was to do with a diet fad. But Mardi had always felt fish was recuperative, light food. Since this is the menu she most often remembered, I imagine he did get steamed fish.

After that he announced matter-of-factly that he had a train to catch, and went back to bed.

“But why, Norman?” Mardi enquired. “What train? We don’t want you to go anywhere, Norman, we need you here,” she pleaded.

She tried to get him to write in his diary. She felt she must keep him awake, keep him conscious—as though he had taken an overdose of something.

He co-operated once or twice, and each time simply wrote lists of ortaniques for grocery shops, or copious lines detailing gallons of gas for the Benz, or kerosene for up the hill. One day he made a note about something to do with the party which he must speak to Michael about. Another day he wrote that he wished “Rachel would do something sensible with her life” and “When is Doug coming home?” On another, “Uhuru needs worming.”

The doctors kept coming and going. His blood pressure rose higher and higher, his delicate ankles were bloated from water retention. They believed his kidneys were failing. He hated hospitals, and the specialist felt that admitting him would serve no purpose, and that he would be more comfortable at home. I don’t think anyone actually said he was dying. Neither did Pardi. He knew how to keep his own counsel.

The last day of August was a Sunday. September the second was the day of the by-election to fill the seat in St. Andrew South left vacant by Pardi’s resignation, and Kenny McNeil, who was often called on to give Pardi medical advice now, was contesting the seat for the PNP. Michael had been extremely busy with the by-election, checking each day on his father over the phone, and on one occasion having to organize money for Mardi because Pardi kept signing his cheques with mathematical equations or dates and times. He came to visit him that morning and was surprised to find his father in a hospital-style bed, but apart from a very insistent vein throbbing in his temple, Pardi’s face seemed quite relaxed. He almost looked well.

“How is the voting going?” he asked, and Michael noticed that his voice trembled.

“No, today’s only Sunday … remember …. elections aren’t on Sundays….”

When Michael returned that evening, two doctors were there and Pardi once again asked for a train schedule. He looked much weaker.

“Why go by train, Dad? Wait till tomorrow—it’s late now and it’s raining—tomorrow we’ll take you in your own car. Don’t you want to go in the Benz?”

Mardi followed my father out the room. They would handle it all gently, they decided. The doctors and Michael left.

“I don’t think I know—I’m not quite sure—but I have to catch it. My suitcase is there and I know just the clothes I want to wear—they are there in the cupboard. I must catch the train.”

“Why don’t you stay with us—we all want you—don’t bother with the train—stay with us.”

He was silent for a long time and then he looked at her very tenderly, penetrating her every nerve and fear.

I arrived at the house late on the Monday night with an infected foot. I didn’t see Pardi that evening. Mardi, who seemed overwhelmed and confused, said he was sleeping. As we sat on the old couch, she latched onto incidentals: the plane? How deep in my leg were the sea-eggs? Did I see that long island, Eleuthera? Not with any real interest, but as though they provided a diversion from something frantic within herself. I sensed she wished that the world would go home and I would just settle, settle down and sleep, “I’ll make you a cup of warm Milo”; that the night would settle under the watch of the announcing crickets, the wakeful dogs, the peenie-wallies’ flashing beacons. I felt my presence was depriving her of something. She wanted the house back for herself.

She wanted the night back. She must be in the middle of a carving, I thought, for the gestation of creativity always made her veer wildly between resentment towards the world and guilt.

Early the following morning, I crossed the narrow passage to their room. The room had changed; the hospital bed and a handsome nurse in white had transformed it into a set. My grandmother sat on the other bed, a silent audience, peripheral and detached from responsibility. Uhuru lay on the floor.

The early English upbringing which Mardi had long since subdued or discarded would surface at the oddest times, almost instinctively, to meet a moment, reducing it to a subterfuge of bland but respectable superficiality.

Pardi was in his blue pajamas. They seemed so familiar and unforeboding. For a while I just kept looking at the pajamas, comforted by the safety of the cotton and the soft colour. Farther up on the bed lay his face, whose sleep had no peace. I remember it well. Although his eyes were closed, there seemed such struggle, such determination behind them. Yet I knew instinctively that for us there would be no response. I sensed no hope in the room.

Mardi sat noncommittally beside the storm battling behind his face, his chest giving an occasional arabesque of breath, his once beautiful hands filling up till the skin shone beneath the polite cuffs of his sleeves. Looking at her, I felt suddenly angry. But looking back at me was a greater rage than my own. Her lips were fixed into that state of disappearance common to the family. They were fixed the way she fixed them when, sometimes failing to get her own way in manipulating us, she would announce her intention to pack it all in and die. And I realized that he was defying her; in his dream he was a runner struggling over a last hurdle, waning muscles struggling to fulfil the will’s final intention. She knew his struggle was not for life but for death.

I saw his brush, the blue-backed, nylon-bristled Addis that he loved to scrape against his skull. It was lying with its familiar grey strands on the bookcase beside his bed. I picked it up and brushed the hairs clinging damply to each other. I wondered why he had fever.

“He’s simply given up.” Mardi shrugged matter-of-factly, almost arching one unarchable grey eyebrow. I didn’t know anyone could die of simply giving up, but she had the sharp edge of anger that made her on occasion brittle and nervous, which I disliked. I did not understand what I saw as Pardi’s surrender; maybe I did not want to.

I stopped brushing after a while and squeezed the swollen fingers of his hand, and without looking at his face—let there be no last time, I thought—I left the room.

She wasn’t in the middle of a carving. She had done no more than sketches in a small notebook she now kept beside her bed, along with her big diary, which she had moved across from the studio. Sometimes she drew, sometimes she wrote. When she drew what she meant to be future carvings, she either outlined large stones across a river or swept her charcoal around large wings that flew over water or hills. One of these wings she discovered belonged to a man who at first she thought was Pardi, but when she drew him turned towards her on the page he had no face, and carried a small figure safely tucked into one protective wing.

And now, on Tuesday morning, she had seen the face, implacable and beyond appeal. She knew it was the face of an angel, and she knew why he was there. She felt the tears so near her heart that, when she remembered her husband’s presence and checked to see if he was aware of what was happening, she was surprised to find heavy wells in the corners of her eyes. She squeezed them away with her thumb and index finger and, quite without meaning to, she trailed them damply onto the drawing book before her. The tears mingled with the traces of charcoal. The smudge, shaped like a wishbone, seemed to her like the desire of her husband’s endless sleep. She recognized it as the frown on the forehead of the angel.

Tossing her head, she reached for her diary. She did not want him to know she had cried. If the future was so upsetting, she would turn to the past instead.

The clouds are hanging low over the house in the mountains and the air is still and very silent … no sounds at all. A man has walked slowly … summoning the end of his strength … from the house to the glass-doored study that stands a little distance away.

Gravely, he moves to the desk and takes a seat in the swivel chair; his long sensitive hands move to the drawer and quietly he opens it… bending to look inside. He closes it … and gently he touches the objects on the desk … slightly rearranging them with care.

With great effort he pulls himself to his feet … and moves to the bookshelves, drawing his fingers across the backs of the books on his way to the great plate-glass doors.

For a long pause he leans against them, his eyes going far across the crumpled mountains that are his country. He stands quite still … his face and particularly his eyes brooding and withdrawn.

The woman beside him can bear it no longer and draws him away down the path through the pine trees to the waiting car. He alone knows it was goodbye.

She turned round and walked over to the window. She moved close to the grey louvers and wound the handle at the base till the opening before her tilted up to the sky and she could squeeze the metal edges out of her vision.

“There, now …” she said, with a note of optimism that barely made its way through the drowning in her throat.

It was a bright, tense morning with an everyday, harmless enough looking sky which she gratefully breathed in—a sky that, having produced no hurricane by September, was reluctant to call attention to itself. There were only a few small, white, tightly packed clouds.

It was hard to imagine that anything could bring about the end of the world. There were so many worlds going on simultaneously. If you missed one show, you could join another, even if you had to sit through some of what you had seen already.

She must inform the family. They would have to keep it quiet till the polls closed, for it might affect the vote.

Before she reached the door, she stopped for a moment beside the bed and lightly, for she thought it wasn’t hers any more, touched Pardi’s hand.

No one seemed to agree why Pardi died. The doctors thought it was renal failure. My father thought it was boredom. I feared it was a consequence of my not loving him enough.

Douglas thought it was probably his final nervous breakdown. His father’s death had come strangely to him; rather than taking him away, it had given him back his father. He was in Africa, asleep in his bed, when something woke him. There at the foot of the bed was his father, his father who through the course of his life Douglas never once remembered anywhere near his bed or even in his room. “Dad,” he said, surprised, and started to get up, but his father told him to stay where he was. “It’s going to be all right now, son,” he said, and very slowly, as though not wanting to leave his son, or to frighten him, he faded into the darkness.

To this day Douglas, the family sceptic, swears that the vision came to him at the exact hour that his father died back in Jamaica.

Although publicly Mardi always blamed Jamaica for Pardi’s death—“He died of a broken heart,” she’d say—I think it was really her husband she blamed. She felt it was the most stubborn and bloody-minded he had ever been. It may have been the worst battle of wills they ever had.

I walked into the small blue room that had been their bedroom. The door opened slowly, unwinding ribbons of breeze. A new light entered with me, slightly altering the shadows. An inner life of its own repose had been disturbed, as though eyes half awoke for a moment and then rested again. The fat white telephone lay curled like a dog asleep without a master to call.

The beds faced each other from opposite walls, their linen bedspreads, bright blue with yellow pineapples, neatly wrapped around them. They were the comfort and conclusion of so much, and muffled the energy and agony already spent, like circumspect housekeepers.

The familiar cupboard, with its wooden sliding doors, sprawled across the far wall. I wondered what was left of Pardi’s belongings, and tried to move one of the doors. I had forgotten how heavy and uncooperative they were. I shoved harder, leaning my shoulder against it with a heave, and it ground along its dusty rail reluctantly. Some of his shirts and suits hung over wooden frames. In the gloom of the inner floor the size-eleven leather shoes, narrow and laced, hosts to years of such strength and elegance, now cracked around damp envelopes of air. The old man’s feet were gone.

This room had contained the last of a great sorrow, but also the memories of an extraordinary journey. I had been only a very small part of this, and yet this was everything I knew, everything I was. A door had been closed; though the breeze would return to flirt with the curtains, or the light slant in to reveal a new shadow of dust, some sustaining, glorious occupation was now complete. I was old enough to vote and I had lost my grandfather.

The road disappearing, the wings of a journey, the implacable face that takes with it only one soul, says Mardi.

The Lord giveth and He taketh away, says wise old Batiste as he tends Pardi’s roses.

Oh, I miss the old house, says Miss Boyd, while she straightens her hair and readjusts the pins.

Aunt Muriel says she should have been next. She doesn’t care about life any more.

17

September Second