THE DRIVER OF the tiny white van stopped and offered me a lift as I made my way across the shopping plaza towards the taxi stand. As soon as I had managed to climb in and wedge my body sideways in the narrow, shallow shelf of a backseat, she exchanged a knowing smile with the older woman seated next to her in the passenger seat. The older woman turned to me and said, ‘You are going to live long, we were just talking about you.’

Hints. Learn to take hints, to read signs. Sometimes they are just there, right up in your face; sometimes people even tell you straight; if you choose not to believe them, then you have nobody but yourself to blame.

I’d read this in a book: say you are a houseplant, and that you are kept indoors in a small clay pot. You are watered enough, given just enough light to do your plant duty, but your roots have grown so much that they are straining against the bottom and the sides of the pot. You have gone as far as you can go as a houseplant. The only thing to be done then, is for someone to take you outside, break the clay pot (very painful) shake off your roots and plant you in an open space where you just might, given enough encouragement from rain and sunshine, grow into a gorgeous flowering tree.

They dropped me off at my gate, and the driver and her passenger sped off, no doubt immediately resuming their ‘susu’ (gossip) about my latest personal ‘autoclaps’, which is what Jamaicans call misfortune and tragedy.

I noticed that the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation had sent a work crew to cut down the overgrowth in the open lot next door. Everyone on the street had been calling them to report that the lot was becoming a health hazard, a breeding ground for mosquitoes, vermin and criminals. Now that the KSAC had finally come and bushed the lot, the owner would receive a bill in the mail.

The KSAC crew had chopped down everything in the open lot except the tree where the silver patoo lived.

Another thing that I’d read somewhere: when you hear the ‘patoo’ (owl) call your name you will die.

I’d been standing by the gate feeling sad and sorry for myself after the little white van drove off. With tears in my eyes I gazed over at the open lot, to see the patoo staring at me between the large heart-shaped leaves of the Bauhinia variegata, aka the poor man’s (and woman’s) orchid, also known as the mountain ebony, or camel’s foot tree.

Me: ‘My life is a joke, they are laughing at me because I have tried to build some sort of life for myself and I’ve utterly failed again. Just like the time before, and the time before that, and all the times before… What about you? Are you going to hoot and laugh at me too? Hoot and mock and call, call my name?’

Of course, the patoo said nothing. Not a ‘too-whit to-who’ in that gargling way of owls. It just saucer-eyed me.

I went inside and made my will. A short will.

That night I stood by the fence again. This time the owl spoke:

Patoo: ‘Bush your yard.’

Me: ‘What?’

Patoo: ‘Bush your yard. Bush your yard. Bush your…’

Me: ‘Alright, alright, I’ll do it. Just don’t call my name, please.’

I wrote my old life a letter giving it notice. I put a stamp of a flowering tree on it and posted it between the pages of a book of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems. The poem it faced was ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord if I contend’:

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

      Wert Thou mine enemy, O Thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See banks and brakes

Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build – but not I build; no but strain,

Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

As if the letter was prostrating itself before the poem, just as I was prostrating myself on the floor of my room calling over and over to the Rainsource to direct some rain to my roots.

‘Only after you bush your yard,’ hooted patoo.

I heard somewhere that when sea captains have to turn massive ocean liners, they have to turn and turn the wheel for some time before the ship re-positions itself and begins to head in the right direction. During this process the ship is also liable to go badly off course.

More about bushing that yard. Some seemingly healthy plants are going to go right along with the rank weeds when you bush your yard.

So bush bush. Bush here, there it all goes. Weed and flowering bush and peppermint, right along with cow itch and cerasee.

No, I can’t come to breakfast or lunch or tea or dinner.

No, I don’t want to talk on the telephone because you will be sifting my carefree chatter for kernels of foolishness to pop to your posse as soon as you hang up the phone.

No, I have no opinion on that matter because in the past I had a habit of thinking out loud, and many is the time that my half-digested reasonings have provided you with proof that they stopped providing Jamaicans with a good colonial education at exactly 6.45 one Monday morning; the same exact morning that I first went to school.

Nope, I’m no longer providing the meat for you to dine out on. Not the meat, not the seasoning. From now on I will confine my reasoning to my writing. Who knows, with me gone, your sharp-fanged dinner guests might even turn to chaw chawing your flesh. That’s it, friends – not again – show done. Yard bushed.

‘What will I be left with?’ I asked patoo.

‘Wait and see. Wait and see. Wait and see.’

I did not have to wait long. One morning I woke up early with the final line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’ on my mind. I reached for the notebook I’d taken to keeping on the bedside table, and taking the last line as the title, I wrote:

And one day the rains came; and the replenishing floods descended.