Dog War (6 page)

“Miss Precious!” Maud squealed. “Don’t write me down in no book, mum! All me say is—”

“Don’t say it again,” Precious threatened, “or I will have to write it down in two book.”

“Everything up to God, mum,” said Maud, hoping to sweet up her employer with religious argument.

“Exactly so,” seconded Precious.

And, as far as Precious was concerned, that was the end of a particularly vulgar line of thought. She would not burn down Theophilus’s dream house, and no amount of maid scheming would turn her into a firebug.

“You love to pull teeth, eh, Harold?” Precious asked her son on her last night under his roof.

She had said her goodbyes to the children, cemented an uneasy peace with Mildred, and now late into the evening with the rest of the household abed and migration staring her in the face, she was spending a final few fidgety minutes in the drawing room with her son.

He peered at her sharply. “Who tell you dat? You been talking to Mildred?”

Precious squirmed, not wanting any part in a domestic spat between her son and his wife. “I hear you have a shoe box full of teeth.”

Harold sniffed with pleasure. “And every one of them I pull out myself!” he declared proudly. “With these two hands.”

“Well,” Precious mumbled, feeling stupid, “at least you have plenty teeth to play with in you old age.”

Harold yawned, for the hour was late and he had spent the evening involved in the bustle of packing up Precious for shipment to America. Plus there had been a meal on this last night, and his belly was crammed full of egg foo yong and chop suey.

“Mummy, I sorry you and Mildred didn’t get along. But she is a woman with her own ways, you know.”

Precious shrugged. “Two woman can’t live under one roof.” She added gloomily, “Forty-seven years old and I’m going abroad for the first time in my life. Watch the plane crash tomorrow and kill me.”

Harold seemed not to have heard. He suddenly leaned forward in the chair with a strange light shining in his eyes.

“One of these days, Mummy,” he whispered after darting a furtive glance at the dark hallway over his shoulder, “I going pull one of Mildred’s teeth. You wait and see.”

“Almighty in heaven, Harold!” Precious yelped. “A husband not supposed to be sitting down in him drawing room planning to pull out his own wife teeth! You’re out of order!”

Harold shrank from this unexpected blast, looking hurt and puzzled. “So now you taking her side against me!”

“You men are impossible! Is not enough dat you always want pum-pum, now you want teeth, too! My motherly advice to you, Harold, is to leave Mildred’s mouth alone! A married woman mouth is her last refuge!”

Precious stood up to signify final opinion, stern motherly judgment, and the end of discussion. Harold remained glued to his chair, scowling and shuffling his feet like a chastised boy who thought his punishment overly harsh.

She withdrew down the dark hallway to her bedroom to lie-in bed staring fretfully at a ceiling and listening to the metronomic fluting of a whistling frog, who piped the same

Chapter 7

You get to Miami from Jamaica by crowding aboard a brushedmetal pipe outfitted with clumsy appendages and pretending that it is right-minded and Christian to sit with strangers thirty-thousand feet up in the breeze, as if beneath your feet is the comforting solidity of God’s good ground. Or so it struck Precious, who on the roaring and quivering take-off of her flight muttered a prayer aloud that drew an inquisitive stare from the businessman sitting next to her.

“I am ready to go,” Precious announced when she realized that the man was staring curiously at her.

“Go where?” he asked suspiciously, the pipe tilted at a dizzying angle and thundering into the sky.

“Up there.” Precious pointed at the sloped ceiling of the climbing aircraft. “If He calls, I am ready to join my husband.”

The man grasped her meaning and didn’t particularly like it. “Go where you want to,” he grumbled sourly. “I’m going to Miami. I not going anywhere else.”

“He leads,” replied Precious stoutly, “and I but follow. Where He leads, I go.”

Just then the aircraft shuddered and trembled as if it had hit a bad stretch of gravel road, and Precious gave a little squeak of terror, closed her eyes, and muttered a fervent prayer.

The man bolted up, gathered his briefcase, and shuffled up the aisle as far away from Precious as he could get.

“Thy Will Be Done,” said Precious aloud as the aircraft flew into a cloud that pummelled its riveted body with invisible fists.

“Amen, sister! Amen!” bawled an old Jamaican woman sitting behind her. The aircraft gave a sickly wobble. “If dis be de time, I am ready!” the old woman crooned.

“So am I!” Precious flung piously over her shoulder. “Ready as ready can be!”

“Show me to de land, oh Lord!” bellowed the old woman with a tinge of hysteria in her voice.

A stewardess hurried over to stand beside them. “Would you please not talk so loud!” she ordered briskly. “We’re in turbulence and you’re frightening the other passengers.”

“If dey be not ready, dey should well be frightened!” croaked the old woman.

“Amen!” seconded Precious.

“Hush you mouth!” hissed a young mother sitting across the aisle with her small child. “You frightening me pickney!”

“Lamb need not be afraid,” rasped the old woman. “It is craven old sheep dat should tremble.”

“Ladies, please!” pleaded the stewardess as the plane shuddered from a solid body-thump.

“Yes, sir!” squealed the old woman in a quaky voice. “We lick a good pothole dat time.”

“But no fear in we heart! For we know we destination,” reminded Precious, turning to mutter between the seats.

The plane rocked and dipped and yawed like a carnival ride. “Now is perfect time for a hymn!” the old woman croaked.

Then she began to sing “In the Sweet By and By,” joined in by-a shaky Precious whose usually melodious voice wavered and cracked with every lurch and shudder of the metal pipe in which she was sealed and fastened high up in the breeze.

When the plane finally landed with a jerk and taxied to a stop, the old woman breathed a loud sigh of relief and proclaimed, “Thanks be to God! We reach safe!”

But by then Precious had regained her sense of earthbound composure and was too embarrassed by her pushy airborne evangelism to offer any reply but the backslider’s halfhearted “Amen.”

The entire planeload of people shuffled through the tubular corridors that unwound to the mêlée of Customs and Immigration Clearance, Precious hangdog and blushing at the scowls and dirty looks darted at her by fellow passengers.

She arrived at Shirley’s house to a splatter of wet kisses from her two grandchildren, who danced and skipped gleefully at her coming to live with them, and a warm but reserved greeting from Henry, the too-too son-in-law, who was a doughy-faced white man with red hair and a freckled nose. The children paraded her through her new bedroom, prancing and jumping beside her with uncontrolled excitement and delight as though she were a new puppy. They showed her the bathroom, the closet, the kitchen, the cellar, squealing over every revelation. They took her to the backyard tree house, which both of them scornfully explained they were too old to enjoy anymore.

Cheryl-Lee, the younger daughter, confided in her about that nasty Timothy Pigeon who lived down the street and whom she intended to punch out next time he snickered at her in the school hallway. Henrietta, the older one, interrupted with superior criticism: As far as she was concerned, punching out a geek like Timothy Pigeon was not worth the trouble. Certainly, it was not worth detention. Precious lectured in a stern grandmotherly voice that Jamaican girl children did not punch out boys, but then she quickly bit her tongue when she remembered that she had once knocked out a boy with one thump outside the tuck shop after he had squeezed her batty without permission. Cheryl-Lee wanted to know what a girl in Jamaica would do if a Timothy Pigeon was always snickering at her, and Precious lied and said that she would ignore him. How could you ignore a geek? Cheryl-Lee asked insistently. Precious did not know what a geek was, and was about to ask when Henrietta suggested that instead of punching out Timothy Pigeon, Cheryl-Lee should drop a lizard down his pants. Cheryl-Lee thought that was a wonderful idea and asked her sister to help her catch a lizard for dropping down Timothy Pigeon’s pants, and the two children gambolled off down the street promising to return as soon as they had found the rightsized lizard.

Groggy with a hangover and befuddled at the newness all around her, Precious wandered back into the house where she found that Shirley had strapped on a gun under her armpit and was ready to leave for work. She kissed Precious goodbye and drove away after telling Henry not to cook any dinner for her since she would not be home until about 3:00 in the morning. Then Precious was left alone with Henry, wondering if she should warn him that his daughters were out looking for a lizard for Timothy Pigeon’s pants.

She decided that she shouldn’t interfere. Her brain was still-thirty thousand feet in the breeze. She was in a place which-struck her as strange as the moon and made her feel like a gate-crasher at a wedding.

She excused herself, went into her bedroom, closed the door, and crawled under the bed to catch her breath and take stock.

Precious took stock. Except for the distant burble of the-television in the drawing room, the household was quiet. From under the bed, America reminded her very much of Jamaica, the cobwebs under the bed being uncannily alike in either country. The stale mustiness of the mattress and the comforting dimness of the airless crawlspace between bedspring and floor were quite what she was accustomed to find under a Jamaican bed. If she didn’t know better, she would even think that she was under her own bed in Runaway Bay after a row with Theophilus.

It was still hard for her to believe that Theophilus was dead, but if he was dead under the bed, the one place where Precious always stared unflinchingly at the truth, then she could be quite sure that he would be just as dead in the open air. Her house in the Jamaica mountains was locked up and periodically tended by Maud, whom she had employed to tramp up the hill three times a week to dust and look after the dogs. She was still in a muddle about the house, but even her decision to let matters rest as they were for the time being didn’t seem so confusing under the bed.

At her age migration was certainly only a temporary measure. She did not really think that she would be living in America for the rest of her life, but she had had to get away from Harold’s house with the perpetual fussing and turmoil. Now that she was under a bed in America, she could plainly see that Mildred was wrong to snoop on Harold’s tooth-box and begrudge a hard-working man his hobby. But Harold was also wrong in his scheming to pull Mildred’s teeth. Yet Precious also had a sneaky feeling that Harold wanted to pull Mildred’s teeth because Mildred was being a Dog in the Manger with the pum-pum. Long experience had taught Precious that when a wife starved her husband of pum-pum, the husband was likely to plot to pull out her teeth.

Her reverie was interrupted by a creak of her bedroom door. She glanced over the cobwebbed floor and glimpsed a small brown face peeping inquisitively at her from the edge of the bedspring. The face melted in the bedside gloaming and, after a flurry of pattering feet, a child’s excited shriek of discovery rang through the house, “Grandma’s under the bed! Grandma’s under the bed!”

Precious hastened to wriggle out from under the bed just as-there was a rap on her door and the pasty face of Henry swivelled around the jamb.

“Precious,” he asked solicitously, “are you feeling all right?”

“I feel fine,” Precious declared with dignity.

“Cheryl-Lee said you were under the bed.”

Precious brushed herself off, opened her mouth to make an indignant denial, but resolved that migration and green card would not turn her into a liar.

“Dat is where I do my best thinking,” she sniffed.

Henry, looking scientifically interested in this new thinking technique, cocked his head and approached.

“I better make sure I dust and vacuum under your bed, if that’s the case. You might be spending a good deal of your time under there.” He bent down on his knee and peeked under the bed. “I’ll get the vacuum right now,” he announced.

“You don’t have to vacuum-.-.-.” Precious started to protest, but it was too late.

A few minutes later he returned and vacuumed thoroughly while Precious sat on the edge of the bed, twiddling her thumbs and feeling like a fool. He scurried down the hall and returned with a throw-rug, which he placed on the floor, saying that it would be easier for her to slide under the bed if she first lay with her back on the rug. He demonstrated by sliding smoothly under the bed with his back flat on the throw-rug.

“It’s rather snug under here,” he said from beneath the bed, his voice taking on a slight metallic bedframe echo.

He slid back out, stood, and carefully arranged the rug with his foot. “I must try thinking under a bed sometimes,” he chirped. “Maybe it’ll help me clear my head.”

Precious tried to make some noncommittal reply but managed only a disgruntled growl.

Cheryl-Lee stood in the doorway solemnly bearing witness to the whole proceedings. “Daddy,” she asked quietly, “can I think under Grandma’s bed, too?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry, looking nonplussed at Precious. “I think you better ask Grandma.”

“Grandma?” the child asked piteously.

Precious sighed, thinking that she had never before in her life met a man that she would rather thump down on the spot more than her American son-in-law.

“I suppose so,” she grumped.

The child giggled, lay on her back on the rug, and shot under the bed. “It’s dark under here!” she squealed.

She scooted back out and propped up her elbow on the rug. “Grandma, will you come under here with me?”

So Precious reluctantly had to get down on the floor and slide under the bed with the grandchild. Soon Henrietta popped in and demanded to think under the bed with Grandmother, and before long Precious found herself pinned under the bed between two squirming children while Henry bent down and shouted encouragement and thinking technique at them.