As if mothers were dolls one could pick up in a store, not long after Sister Ivy’s death and Opal’s question about her absent mother, Lenworth came back with one: a mother without wings, a new mother for a motherless, wingless child.
He’d met her—Pauline—at a bus stop as she waited for a bus going past Anchovy and on to Black River on the south coast. They sat together on the crowded bus, his legs pressed against hers, and her tangy sweet breath near his ear.
“Not even sardine pack up so,” Pauline muttered, referring to the number of passengers already jammed in the bus. “Pack us up like sardine, and ‘cause sardine don’t cry, they think we won’t cry too.”
“How you know so much ’bout how sardine feel?”
Pauline smiled and shook her head. “You take serious thing make joke. All joke aside, there should be a limit on how many people the driver and conductor can pack up in a bus. It no right to pay you money and can’t get no comfort.”
“True.”
“All the way to Black River pack up so. That no right.”
The bus pulled away from the stop, the passengers lurching forward and back, and the tires screeching.
“See it there now. We not even lef’ Mobay, and he want kill we already. He going kill we today. And me not even live my life yet.”
“Yet?” Lenworth asked. “What you waiting on? Young girl like you.”
“Young? Thirty-three,” Pauline said. “Seven girls my parents have and I am the only one who not married and don’t have any children yet.”
“Seven girls?”
“Seven girls. My father wanted to try again for the boy and my mother say no, take what God give you and give thanks. By the time she was thirty-three, my mother had had her last child. So by that standard, I am old.”
“You aren’t old,” Lenworth said, and he let his gaze drop to her bosom, her ample breasts straining against her shirt.
She smiled. “You too rude.” She tapped at his arm, playfully.
A week later, they met again, Pauline timing her trip and her departure from Montego Bay to coincide with Lenworth leaving Montego Bay High School, where he had indeed taken the job as carpenter and general handyman. She knew he left at 4:30 and she waited till he arrived, smiled, and said, “So we meet again.” And so began their courtship on the bus ride between Montego Bay and Anchovy, Pauline finding reasons to journey from one coast to the other, Lenworth looking out day after day for a glimpse of her, until at last Lenworth said, “We have to stop meeting like this. Make it more permanent.”
“But I barely even know you,” Pauline said.
“That’s not a hard problem to fix.”
“How you plan to fix it?” She looked at him with her brows raised. A half-smile stretched her lips.
“Give me a chance to show you.”
“I’m not living with no man who isn’t my husband,” Pauline said.
“So we’ll get married.” Lenworth spoke as if marriage was a simple thing.
“I’m not marrying a man who my family don’t know.”
“Saturday then. I’ll come meet your father. If you promise he won’t chase me off with a stick or set his dogs on me.”
But Pauline turned shy again, and by then the bus was in Anchovy, slowing at the railway crossing, and Lenworth was scrambling to extricate himself from the middle of the bus, away from Pauline and his newfound dream.
Two weeks passed without Lenworth seeing Pauline, without their impromptu meetings at the bus stop. As quickly as the courtship began, he gave up the dream.
“Tell me again about my mother.” Opal was looking up at Lenworth, her face like a flower opening.
“What you want to know?”
“Where is her birdcage?”
“I don’t have that anymore.”
“Was she little like a parrot, or big like an ostrich?”
“Like an ostrich.”
“Ostriches can’t fly,” Opal said it so matter-of-factly, Lenworth thought she was testing the veracity of his story.
But she was much too young to connect the fantastical elements of his story about a bird woman with the reality of flightless birds.
“Where you learn ’bout ostriches?”
“Mrs. Wilson has a big book with lots of birds it. She said ostriches are too big to fly.”
“What else you learned at school today?”
“Nothing.”
Lenworth turned back to the pan of white shirts he had left in the sun to bleach the stains. Soap suds spread on his arms like a sprinkling of powder.
“If my mother was big like an ostrich, how did she fly away?”
Rather than answer, Lenworth took the clothes outside. “Go get a book and come and read it to me,” he said, as he was walking out. But inside his heart beat furiously. Sooner or later, he thought Opal would catch him in a lie and figure out for herself how unrealistic his story was.
A month passed before he saw Pauline again, not at the bus stop this time, but at Montego Bay High on the verandah outside the principal’s office.
He had been summoned, as he often was, to fix a broken chair or table, and he walked up to the administrative building with a tool bag. He whistled as he walked, forgetting for a minute that his voice carried, and the students, easily distracted, would look through the windows at him. Pauline stood on the verandah, breaking into a smile as he walked toward her.
“What you doing here?”
“Come to look for you.”
“You disappeared on me.”
“Just didn’t come out this way for a while. And since I never had any way to find you, I come up here to look for you.”
“Glad to see you.”
“Sometimes you have to take a chance,” Pauline said.
Lenworth knew without asking that she meant taking a chance with him.
“All right,” he said, and with that word it was settled.
Three days later, under a cloud-filled sky, Lenworth and Opal went by bus to Black River. Opal sat on Lenworth’s lap, her face to the window, her eyes glued to the shifting shades of green in the hillsides and the valleys, and her finger pointing out women walking to or from a market or farm with a full basket balanced perfectly on their heads. A cotta, a circular pad of banana leaves, the only thing between the baskets and their heads. She pointed to a donkey pulling a cart, a rarity in those days even for Lenworth. Through town after town, there was something else that held her gaze.
How little he had exposed her, Lenworth thought, and he realized that most of what Opal had learned outside of school had come from Sister Ivy.
“We soon reach?” Opal looked up at him, her eyes so brown, so like her mother’s that he looked away immediately.
“Soon.”
Pauline was there in front of the bakery as she had said. She led them to a taxi, which took them away from the sea and the river, up a road filled with potholes to a small community clinging to life. Chickens roamed the yard, pecking at the dirt, and from further away he heard the distinct squeals of a pig.
“Everybody waiting,” Pauline said.
Indeed, her parents were on the verandah, her mother standing with her back bent slightly as she leaned forward to hold up a tottering child. And her father, in an undershirt and stained pants, looked up at Lenworth with a probing gaze. Only then did he think he should have brought something, whether a bunch of bananas or plantains, or pears or breadfruits or a set of bowls he had made. Almost immediately he dismissed the thought, for he didn’t want her family to think he was buying their approval.
“Good afternoon, sir.” Lenworth held out his hand, pulled Opal forward. But she wouldn’t budge, simply stood behind him and peeped around his legs at the three strangers and baby.
One by one Pauline’s sisters came, and they too looked at him as if he were an unusual specimen or such a rarity for a sister to take a man home to meet the family.
“So, the little girl, what happen to her mother?” Pauline’s mother stopped cooing at the child long enough to ask about Plum.
“Died in childbirth,” he mouthed, and nodded thanks for the belated condolences. He had also come to expect the look of pity directed at Opal.
“Anchovy, eh? Long time I don’t go that way.” Pauline’s father spoke. “Used to go that way all the time. You know a fellow name Thomas White?”
“No.”
“He used to own an auto parts shop.”
“No. Can’t say I know him.” Lenworth’s heart quickened. He expected more questions like this, more indirect probing of his life and story. It wouldn’t take much, he knew, for his story to fall apart.
“He probably gone long time now.”
“Anchovy where your people from?”
How skillfully he got around the details. “Had a granduncle named Orville Ramsey, who had property out there from the '30s or early '40s. His house I living in now. Old house with problems, but when you starting out . . .”
On he went, sifting the truth, establishing himself as motherless and without siblings, a hard-working carpenter and general handyman. “Next time, I’ll bring you one of the bowls I make. Coconut shell,” he said. “So pretty when you polish it.”
But that would be Lenworth’s only trip to Black River. He left with Pauline, who packed her life into two bags and glided away from her parent’s house and her plump and satisfied sisters.
Pauline was nothing like Plum, an inadequate replacement really. Lenworth realized early on that the woman he had married was a version of his sister and mother. She had no independent goals; her identity now was simply wife. She had waited her whole life for this, not him necessarily, but a man to give her the role she thought she was groomed to play. At that moment, Lenworth was content to let her play that role, if only to give Opal the mother he thought she deserved, and hold at bay Opal’s questions about the bird woman who disappeared.
And even Opal seemed instinctively to know Pauline’s inadequacies. She would not smile at Pauline. Instead, like she did as a baby, she looked at the spaces around Pauline as if she still expected to see someone else there—a bird woman with wings, perhaps.