Even awake, Lenworth found that his mother was present again, along with his sister this time, their images projected on his brain like a movie in 3D, both so vivid, so real he removed his glasses and tried to rub the vision from his eyes. Not that he could. He rubbed and yet they returned, their images still bitingly vivid: his mother more wrinkled, more worn than he remembered, and his sister, a plumper version of the young woman he remembered, also worn.
After all these years, why had they come to haunt him now? Of course, he had failed them too, walked out on them, repeated the pattern of his country’s migrant men who sailed to Panama in the early 1900s to labor on a canal. When work on the canal dried up, they went to Cuba or Costa Rica to cut cane and harvest bananas. Still later, they went to England, the mother country that preferred not to mother the colonized migrants who washed up on its shores, and to America that invited but seemed to resent the very farm workers it requested, and to many a country in between. Some returned with the symbols of wealth they had sought. Some came back broken, some disappointed. Some, like his father, didn’t return at all. Instead, his father invited them—Lenworth, his sister, his mother, his brother—into his life only through occasional packages that came to them via someone returning home, and letters and photos of an unrecognizable man bundled up against the cold. With scarf and hood framing his face, he could be anyone. Certainly he wasn’t the father Lenworth barely remembered. Maybe his father didn’t have the papers that would allow his easy movement from one country to another. Maybe he preferred his new life and wanted no reminder of the old. Maybe his father, like his son, had committed a misdeed he couldn’t explain. Without intending to, Lenworth had turned out exactly like his country’s migrant men and like his father. In truth, Lenworth was like a migrant worker or runaway who left women in limbo—three of them to be exact. Only Lenworth’s departure hadn’t been noble at all. And he had promised nothing.
Why now, he asked again. But he could only imagine the worst, an impending death or death itself, a restless spirit hovering and haunting because it could not rest without being appeased. Those were the kinds of beliefs he had set aside. A man like him, educated, an escapee from a small and poor country town, couldn’t believe in his ancestors’ version of the spirit world, couldn’t believe in duppies—the restless ghost or spirit of the dead, or the ancestral spirit who remained in limbo appearing at will or when called upon to help the family still living. He couldn’t believe at all what his mother would believe, that the problems that had befallen him his entire life were the result of obeah, some evil spell set upon him, which he could reverse by having a more powerful obeahman counteract the effects of the spell. He couldn’t, and he wouldn’t, believe.
Yet he knew there had to be a reason his mother and sister played so prominently in his thoughts now. And because he couldn’t believe in his ancestors’ spirit world, he thought their presence could only mean one thing: His past was catching up to him. But he didn’t know how to prepare.
For the moment, Lenworth had a funeral to plan and a family to console. He went about the business of planning the funeral as if that was all that mattered. He was again at his parishioner’s house, around the dining table this time, listening as her sister recounted the dead woman’s last meaningful conversation, her life in a small, mountain town and the countless children she helped through school. How, with a disabled and then dead husband, nothing but a primary school education, two children to feed and clothe and educate, she sent off her children one by one, to homes of a teacher and a nurse, so each could have an opportunity she could never provide.
Lenworth heard his mother’s story, or something so similar to it, and he almost cried. His mother had done the same, sent him off to another family, only he had looked at it not as his mother attempting to ensure he had opportunities she didn’t have, but a throwback to another time when those who had no agency, slaves and their immediate descendants, were sent like property from one master to another. This squandered opportunity, his misreading his mother’s and his benefactors’ intentions, had led to Plum, his seventeen-year absence from his family, this haunting, this sense of doom that sat upon his chest like a heart ticking slowly toward an explosion.
Lenworth sat upright, a hand to his chest, for he recalled that a sense of impending doom was a cardiac symptom. He shifted in his chair, not wanting to alarm, not wanting to wait, anxious for the moment when he could slip away, make his way to his doctor’s office and ask to be seen, or directly to the emergency room. He made a point of looking at his watch.
“She never complained,” Evelyn’s sister was saying. Then, “You have to go. I know we keeping you too long.”
Relieved, Lenworth said, “I have another funeral to attend to.”
“Carmen, bring the paper with the hymns and scriptures.”
He blew deep breaths, made a point of thinking about his breathing, realizing, as he sucked in the air, that despite what he taught his parishioners about being ready to meet their maker, he wasn’t ready to die.
In the doctor’s office, the smell of antiseptic stung his nose. “This is probably nothing, but I feel like something horrible is going to happen. And, no, I’m not depressed. But I’ve heard that people having heart attacks sometimes feel a sense of doom. So since I can’t shake it off, I wanted to check it out.”
“Of course, just a precaution.”
The doctor went about his business as if he suspected something more. “Chest pain?”
“No.”
“Indigestion?”
“No.”
“Heartburn?”
“No.”
“Any coughing? Dizziness?”
“No.”
“Deep breath. Again. We’ll run an EKG and maybe set you up for a stress test.”
Alone, he felt foolish but assured. Lying with his arms stretched out beside him, leads taped to his body, he assured himself that his panic was only a momentary lapse. Lying there, he made note of the color of the walls, a shade of beige. The color reminded him of sand, and he thought of crabs that were that color. Long ago, on a beach in Montego Bay, he had watched the crabs, their nearly translucent skin and black bulging eyes, how they crawled sideways across the sand then scampered back to their holes in the ground to shield themselves from any suspected threat. At the shoreline, he found yet another species of crabs—tiny hermit crabs—pulling their bodies up and into their shells. So completely did the crabs hide themselves that he didn’t know until after he had picked up the shell that a living being was within.
Underneath it all, his thoughts of crabs, their physical presence—spotted or striated shells, translucent bodies—what he really contemplated was the ability to escape quickly and easily from perceived or real threats. Which is exactly how he had lived his entire adult life, like a crab, not so much retreating but escaping fully and completely, assuming a new identity when necessary, protecting himself to the very end.
The doctor returned. “Do what you tell your parishioners: put everything in God’s hands.”
He knew he should. But he couldn’t.
Home again, the little drummer boy still tapped a staccato rhythm in his chest, and that feeling of doom still rode alongside the drummer boy’s rhythm. Inside the rectory, Lenworth found chaos: the two boys with plastic swords jousting, dancing round the furniture and over the back of the sofa, and the television playing out the fight they were mimicking and exaggerating; in the kitchen, a kettle on the verge of whistling and Pauline inches from Opal’s face demanding to know where she had gone and why.
“You think you’re a grown woman, right? Coming and going as you please?” Pauline’s voice an octave higher, piercing and cracking under the emotion. “Where were you all evening?”
“At the library.”
“Don’t lie to me, you know.”
“Why do you think I’m lying?”
“Don’t come to me with that attitude.” And to him. “You need to talk to this girl. She can’t come and go as she please. Not in my house.”
They had had this argument before, in this very location with Pauline moving between kitchen and dining room, and Opal rooted in place but looking for a way to escape. He glanced at Opal. Her watering eyes held a pleading, desperate look, so like her mother’s. He remembered the two of them—he and her mother—on a shop piazza right after a fight. At that moment, he had wanted to get away to let things calm. But Plum had looked at him, her eyes saying, “don’t leave me,” her lips quivering, her body leaning toward him, one hand outstretched. Back then, he had stayed.
Now, he didn’t let his eyes linger on the girl who looked just like her mother, didn’t allow himself to see the plea in her eyes. He said nothing, just waved his hand as if swatting away something inconsequential. “We’ve been through this before,” he said to Pauline, and turned back toward his office at the front of the house leaving the two of them to sort it out.