ANNA’S STERTEROUS BREATHING brings me back to the present. For a moment my eyes rest on the beads of perspiration glistening on her forehead. I get up, take a tissue from the box on the night table, and dab her brow.
Paul, where the hell are you? Why have you been doing this to us? Okay, so you’re punishing Ma. But me? I sit. My hands are cold but sweating, and sweat is trickling from my armpits.
Anna’s breathing is now part gurgle, part whistling rattle. Each time she exhales I smell the acetone in her breath. She’s stewing internally. I lean forward and enclose her right hand in both of mine. It’s glacial and limp. In the dim blue light from the tiny bulb over the head of her bed, I watch her struggling body and want to comfort her, to sing her favourite hymn: “Jesus, Saviour, pilot me / O’er life’s dark tempestuous sea,” but know I’ll sob if I start. Those hymns, singing them at home — about the only thing Paul’s bullying didn’t stop her from doing. Paul, where are you? Why are you doing this to us?
I let go of her hand and lean back into the chair, and my mind travels back to that trip that Ma and Grama took to Barbados. When Anna returned, she was constantly in tears and, one evening, not long after her return, Caleb struck her. Knocked her to the floor. He picked her up. Frightened. On occasion he’d hit her when he was beating me because she was interfering — and the bible instructed him never to spare the rod and spoil the child; and ‘He that knoweth the will and doeth it not shall be beaten with many stripes’; and God had ordained him head of the household; the bible said so: he was to give the orders, and she was to carry them out; he was man, she was woman. A woman’s role was to obey her husband and fulfill the needs of her husband and her children. It was what he instructed every couple he married: “The buck must stop somewhere”; and he laid down the law in his own home to set the example for his flock.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “Anna, you see what you made me lose my temper and do? You had no right to do this behind my back. I’m your husband. You’re under my rule. You shouldn’t o’ done this. Why your mother put you up to this? Why? That woman is Satan ownself. If she ever put her foot back in this house . . .” He stopped.
“Go ahead, say it, Mr. Almighty! Say it!”
He lifted his arm, ready to strike again, but checked himself. “That woman! She must never come back here. Thank God, we don’t depend on her anymore.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“You still taking money from her! You’re disobeying me and taking money from that . . . that . . .”
“You think the pittance you get from those stones or the nickels and dimes they give you on Sundays can feed and clothe your family? Think again.”
“You live too extravagantly!”
“Well I can’t change how I was brought up.”
“Then you married the wrong man.”
She didn’t answer.
“What’s tied can be untied. You will have to untie them.”
She didn’t answer.
“I say: you will have to untie them.” He held her by the neck with both hands and rocked her backward and forward.
She gasped, staggered, and let out a hoarse howl when he let her go.
“Shut up! You want to bring disgrace on me! Shut up, woman! Don’t raise the devil in me!” He ran to the doors and windows, closed them, and pulled the curtains.
“You will go to hell. Stop choking Ma! You big brute!” I shouted. He sometimes called me a little brute.
“Go to your room,” he ordered. “Go to your room before . . . ” I didn’t move. Caleb slumped to the floor on his knees and cried out: “Lord, how did I fail you? Lord, why are you punishing me? I am not Job. I am not Job.” He wiped his eyes with his hands and stared for a long time into vacant space.
In the rest of my conversation with Grama before I left for Canada, she told me that it was only after Caleb had knocked Anna down a second time that she’d found out about this first beating, and she hadn’t known about the occasional slaps. The second and final beating came about three months after the first, and Anna asked Grama to keep Paul and to lend her some money to go to Canada. “‘Mama, I have to leave him. God alone knows how much damage he’s done to Jay. I can’t let him do it to Paul too. I can’t, Mama. I can’t. He’s already hitting Paul to stop him from crying, leaving welts on his body.’ Jay, your mother was sobbing so loud and hiccupping, I had to hold her to my bosom and comfort her.”
That second beating. Caleb had been in my bedroom about to beat me to “rescue my soul from the wrath to come.” Anna shouted from the kitchen: “Caleb, leave Jay alone. Rescue your own soul, Caleb. Leave Jay’s alone. Hell doesn’t exist. I already told him so. Leave him alone! Stop terrorizing him!” I heard her fists pounding the kitchen counter. Caleb sped to her in the kitchen. I followed. Caleb let fly both hands in quick succession. “Satan! In my home! Not possible.” His arms flew. The slaps swayed Anna left and right, right and left. When she fell, it was backwards. Her head struck the kitchen counter; she slid to the floor, lay on the tiles, and was unconscious. Caleb called her name several times, and when she didn’t answer he dashed out of the house.
Years later I got the rest of the story. The Georgetown station sergeant who’d dealt with Caleb that evening was eventually posted to Havre. He bought supplies on credit from Grama, hung around the store sometimes, and took pleasure regaling the shoppers about colourful characters he’d arrested or dealt with. “Boy,” he would say to me, “I remember when your father Preacherman did come to the station and beg me to lock him up.” And he would enact the scene.
“Preacherman come in the police station and he say to me: ‘Sarge, lock me up.’
“‘What you do now, Preacherman? First you have to tell me what you do.’
“‘I say lock me up. Lock me up!’
“‘It ain’t so we does do it. We does have to know what you do first. Yes? Sit down there.’ I point he to a bench ‘gainst the wall from the station counter. ‘All you preacherman hot for the young girls in all you congregation. What happen: you done rape one?’ (I imagined him grinning, his two upper gold-capped incisors glinting.) ‘You done kill your wife or what? You catch a man on top o’ she or what? Too busy with God to satisfy your wife or what? That calypso not lying at all: ‘Man can’t take butt.’ Some men sure can’t. ‘Henry,’ I turn to the constable what was sitting by a desk a little way from the counter listening to the conversation. ‘Henry, you know where Preacherman live. Right? Go by his house and see if he done kill his wife.’ To Preacherman, I say: ‘Ah sending a constable to your home to see if you done kill your wife and thing.’ I don’t think Preacherman hear me yet.
“Boy, Henry meet your mother sprawled where Preacherman did done knock her down. She did regain consciousness and Eldica was putting ice on she cheeks. I hear is you” — he pointed to me — “that did have sense enough to run and get Eldica after your mother didn’t respond. When Henry come back to the station and give me his report, I tell Preacherman to go home and take care o’ his wife and to go easy on his fist. ‘Your wife jaw not like them stones you does break on the seashore.’ And I tell he we don’t does lock up men for beating their wife; is only in Canada and them places they does do that. But careful you don’t kill she, yes. ‘Cause then you won’t get off so easy. So tell me, nuh,’ — I couldn’t help teasing him little bit more — ‘Is what happen, Preacherman: why you knock she out? You catch another man on top o’ she or what?’
“‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go home.’ Sonny, that is how your father carry on. ‘It go be alright, man. I tell you, it go be alright.’ I tell he: ‘Things don’t does be bad as they look. Yes.’ Now I did start to feel sorry for him. I wasn’ laughing at him no more.”
***
Until the day Grama came to get me, I don’t remember much of what happened. She had to do a lot of asking around, because Daddy had left the manse and moved into a shack a few metres in from the beach about two kilometres north of Georgetown. Grama met him lying on the bare floor. He came out and sat on the middle one of three planks that formed the steps to the shack. He was unshaven and his eyes were red and haunted. At first he didn’t look her in the face, and when she told him why she’d come, he said nothing. She repeated what she’d said: “Mr. Jackson, Anna left for Canada this morning. She left Paul with me. I’ve come for Jay. He’ll be better off staying with me.” For about a minute their eyes locked, then he spat, re-entered the shack, and closed the door.
She came to get me at school. I was staying with Sister Simmons. Grama didn’t bother to pick up any of my things. “Whatever you need you’ll get from my store. We’ll make a clean start.” The following Saturday Sister Simmons brought my things to Havre and Grama told her to keep them. If she were alive today, I would ask her why.