Red Jacket (32 page)

Two Widowers in Barcelona

Amphitheatre full of dark bodies, cheering. Grace in the purple kiloli they gave her when she came to graduation at Tindi, her afro glowing around her head like the halo of the angel in Manokouma's window. The weaving women who came to the centre had made the cloth on an old-fashioned loom under Sister Tekawitha's guidance, not for Grace, just against the day when cloth for a special occasion would be needed. Sœur Monique padded the hem and embroidered on it, in Kufic script, a pattern made from the words “good woman.” Grace sobbed and hugged Monique when she explained the meaning.

She accepts her award from the chancellor, a shell carved in luminous pink stone, a lantern glowing in the last light of a prize Christophian sunset, when her right arm swells, the skin leaving the flesh and becoming a huge, shiny bladder. It explodes, scattering bits of bloody tissue, leaving only a skeletal appendage of white bone, bent at the elbow in its gesture of acceptance. The shell falls, but it does not break.

He shoots up in bed. It is a dream, prescient, for sure, but not as clearly present as usual, and he hasn't had a fit, nor become ill — at least not yet. All of which he takes to be a good sign. But he has to go to her, for sure.

He is in Barcelona, old port city, with its fabulous Sagrada Familia, forever-building cathedral, its ordinary old streets, its simply ornate buildings, its pensións tucked into impossible corners, its scallywags come from all over to relieve other poor of their pennies. Billeted on this hill, Gaudi's Parc Güell up the road, the Monastery of Saint Joseph next door to the residence where he is, he knows for sure that Iberia is African, not Moorish; the entire country's ancient provenance. He'd trod its hard-packed earth all over the northern part of the continent.

The wall clock in his room says four-thirty. He will call Rome at six to talk to his psychiatrist, Fra Mucelli, and Benke, perhaps to get Leviticus Kitendi out of bed. Levi, Benke's new bishop, has just replaced one of his handlers. The third man, Padre Alonso, is here in the monastery. He has to get to St. Chris fast, but before he leaves he will try to observe the protocol. If he doesn't find Mucelli and Kitendi, he is going anyway. Alonso can tell them.

Mass is at five. He'll see Alonso there. He should hurry.

He is glad he'd been there when they found Jeremiah in her belly; grateful she'd been with him the night he'd foreseen the slaughter in Rwanda, foul corpses mucking up his sandals, rancid flesh clinging between his toes. He'd trudged through fields of headless, limbless torsos, scattered body parts, gourds of skulls mouldy with putrid brain matter, the whole a banquet for swarms of flies who clothed their dinner with a shimmering coat, glinting green and murmurous.

The pills she'd given him then had prevented a second trance. He'd be forever grateful that she'd come in time to stop him from going back to that horrific place, though sometimes he wondered whether, if he'd returned and seen some sign, noticed some clue to where it was, whether he might have helped prevent the massacre.

“Padre, teléfono.” The boy waylays him on his way back to his room.

“Gracias, Tomás. Ya vengo.”

In the office, he takes up the phone. “Hello? It's Father Atule. I'm calling about that flight, Barcelona to Heathrow? Have you managed that? Thanks so much. And to St. Chris? Yes? Perfect. Many thanks.”

He goes back to the church and, having brought Alonso up to speed, slips into Joseph's chapel. Two widowers, Jesus's father and he, chaps who'd married wives and had dreams that plunged their lives into chaos. The bearded builder looks at him across a vase of dead flowers, as tired as the saint must so often have been. Over time, Joseph told Jimmy his story. The foster-father carpenter, who could have come from any Mabuli village, had been near fifty with three male children by his first wife, all grown and gone. His two girls, nine and ten, needed a mother's care, though. The woman, Mary, cleaned, cooked, and ran a house on swift, assiduous feet, minding his Ruth and Rachel with a sweet cunning, as if they were all girls together. And once he folded her in his arms, his blood danced. But Jehovah himself had wanted Mary for breeding and how could he face that competition?

He isn't fighting anyone for Grace. Mark Blackman is Jeremiah's parent by blood, but he, Jimmy, still loves the child and loves his mother too, perhaps in a way he didn't understand, but so what? They are colleagues, friends, but he also finds her physically attractive, not in the way that Nila or Rita Rose had been, but in ways that drew them together, tethered them tight. They've navigated afflictions of body and spirit, a bond embracing and transcending the erotic. He smiles. Never mind what he's told himself since then, he might well have made love to her that night, save for Jeremiah in situ.

There is a way, Joseph keeps saying, always a way. A month after John's death, a plane ticket had come. In Rome he'd begun seeing a grizzled Italian friar, Pedro Ponti, a psychiatrist. For years Ponti, in his eighties, had ministered to mystics and stigmatics, including the saintly Padre Pio. Who'd have thought there were enough of those to make a life's work? The friar treated him for six months, designing a way to negotiate the visions through meditation, writing him the first scripts for Diazepam. When Ponti retired, Friar Mucelli succeeded him. So far, so good with the pills: he's been grateful for a way to muddle through. Once his handlers knew of the nightmare he had when Grace visited Mabuli for the first time, it became their affair to manage. They elected to hold a watching brief, and Rwanda began five months later.

He'll be airborne in an hour. He is still hoping to speak to Mucelli and Kitendi, but he has to go. The dream about Grace gives him hope this trance at least might help keep someone alive.

It is Mucelli who suggested that his closeness to people is what enabled him to sense their impending deaths.

“Once upon a time, Giacomo, there was a cat called Ascension that lived in a home for old priests in Assisi. Anytime it climbed into the bed of one of the old men, he died within days. People swore it had a demon, but the priests loved the cat, welcomed her putting them on notice, so they could have the last rites, summon their families, say goodbye.” Mucelli suggested Jimmy might be like the cat who knew and loved the old men so well that she breathed in tandem with their lives. For sure Mapome and he had been thick as thieves. As for Nila, whom he'd loved more than life, if what killed her on that snowy hillside was some infirmity he'd intuited, he'd have some peace. And this time, Grace.

“Padre, el taxi!” Tomás, his dark head bobbing as he dances across from the residence, arrives at the chapel door with his backpack.

“Adiós, amigo.” He takes the bag, hugs the child and goes out.

An Unexpected Trip

“Grandma Phyllis, gottagoagain.”

“Are you going to come with me into the Ladies?”

“No, Grandma. Is not for men.”

“And you're a man?”

“Yes. I need a papa so I can pee.”

“I'm not a papa, Jeremiah. I'm a grandma, and I can't go into the men's bathroom, so I think we have a problem.”

“We have a problem.”

Jimmy hears the conversation before he catches sight of the speakers. He sees Jeremiah stop unexpectedly, so Phyllis nearly trips over him. They are in the midst of Heathrow's morning turbulence, with a stream of bodies, people, and occasional dogs eddying about them, but the child's eyes find him in the confusion with the swiftness of a homing device.

Jeremiah runs to Jimmy, throws his arms around the priest's legs, and shrieks “Tuuuules! Jeremiah going with Tules!”

“Hello, Jeremiah Carpenter.”

“Gottagoagain, Tules!”

“Jeremiah! What kind of greeting is that? Jimmy, what are you doing here? Not that I'm not glad to see you. And I'm sorry for this young man's forwardness.”

“Tules! Gottagoagain!”

“He's been wanting to go every ten minutes and fussing about using the women's. I've been having a time of it.”

“Give us one twitch of a monkey's tail. We'll be right back.”

Jimmy returns minutes later, the child asleep in his arms, his little-boy frizz of hair damp on his head.

“Thanks, Jimmy. What did you do?” Phyllis unfolds the child's stroller.

“Breathed Mabuli desert air on him.”

“When does your plane leave?”

“I'm actually on the flight to St. Chris.” He settles into the seat beside her. “I decided,” he looks at his shoes, “to join Grace for the big day.”

“Well, seems like she decided at the last minute that she wanted everybody at the party.”

“It is a very big day.”

Half an hour later, Chrisair calls the flight. Jimmy lifts the child from the pushchair, Phyllis gathers their paraphernalia and they head for the gate. The priest settles into the seat by the window in the bulkhead with Jeremiah beside him, and Phyllis sits in the aisle seat. The plane is full, the passengers mostly tourists.

“Are we going to have to be really quiet so we don't wake the prince here?” Jimmy asks. “Or is he a pretty sound sleeper these days?”

“We woke before five to get the plane here, so he should sleep,” Phyllis hesitates, “which is good, for I'd like to talk to you. Serious matters.”

“For sure.” They've gained altitude, but still haven't cleared the clouds.

“I been on a greasy pole with Grace for months now: up,
swish
, down, only to begin climbing again. She told you we had a fuss?” She makes a querulous face, looking at him for confirmation.

He smiles, doesn't answer. “Why don't you tell me the trouble, Phyllis?”

“She's angry about a barrel full of things, but most of all because I say she's exactly like her father. The minute it come out my mouth, I know I should never say so. I don't think about her father. I never have the two of them in my mind at one time. But true is true, and when she's ready, Grace behave own-way exactly like Ralston.”

“You're worried about her?”

“Worry not the right word. That girl have so much education and still so foolish. Sensible people take lessons from experience, and look to consequences, but crazy people do neither. Sometimes I think that even though she do her work so well, is like she just going from one thing to the next without it really involving her. Like she there and not there at one and the same time. You don't have to agree with me, Jimmy, but you understand what I mean?”

“Yes, I think so.” He remembers Grace's unburdening at the novitiate the day he showed her the Manakouma windows in the chapel. He'd tried to tell her about letting past things go so she could wallow joyfully in the present. She'd smiled, shaken her head, said, “Too esoteric for me.”

“At the convent Sister Mary Agnes was always saying experience is not the same for everybody,” Phyllis continues. “Some people have twenty years' experience, others have one year's experience twenty times. Well, Grace clearly learn from her work, but I not sure she learn from her life.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Two times now Grace just throw any semblance of sanity to the winds. The first time is obvious, with the result sleeping beside you. But now she won't tell the child's father about him. Does that make sense?”

“I've told her that myself.”

“I don't see how she can enjoy that child while she is hiding him from his father. Better she let everybody know, share him with all concerned, especially since it going to happen eventually anyway.”

“There's a lot of wisdom in that.”

“You know what start the fuss?” It isn't a question — just a prelude to the story Phyllis wants to tell, which he already knows. “I meet the child's father's wife one morning in the park near our house in Geneva. Jeremiah is running up and down after ducks, and this woman just arrive and announce Jeremiah is her husband's child! I nearly faint, but my state was nothing compared to hers. She was slobbering and bawling so bad, I invite her home with us. That is over two years gone, and Grace won't get over it. She think I was out to cause trouble, and if anything, it was the exact opposite.”

“I would have been upset too, if I were Grace.”

“I don't say no, Jimmy. But till now she won't let me explain. And me, all the time minding this child, seeing him watch other children's fathers, sure he is wondering where his father is. You yourself hear him just now say he need a papa to pee. Which is not to say I was thinking about all that when I asked the woman home. It just seem like the decent thing to do. What was I to do? Say, ‘Oh well, is your husband's child, but you better get over it?' ”

He nods, non-committal. He's glad he can't look at her directly on account of a brilliant shaft of sunlight coming through the window opposite.

“Anyway,” Phyllis is an indignant storyteller, “that is how it went. I suppose I was thinking the child could do with a father, and if his papa were willing to be involved in his life, it would be a good thing. Furthermore, if after she foolishly go and have a baby for a married man, his wife turn out to be decent and reasonable instead of jealous and vindictive, that is more than a blessing.”

“I'd say that was lucky, and pretty unusual, yes.”

“Grace was royally upset when she find out who the woman was, and I'm not saying she didn't have a right. We had a discussion about it the same day … ”

“Discussion?” The light has moved and he is smiling at her.

“Okay. Quarrel. She won't listen, just keep insisting that it's her child, and she can do what she like. It get heated, and I liken her to her father.”

“He's dead, isn't he?”

“Long time aback.”

“And Grace never knew him or anything about him?”

“She was eighteen when Mr. Carpenter, her adopted grandfather, told her about me. At that time he made her to know that her father was a wicked man.”

“Lots of people say that about lots of fathers.”

“If Mr. Carpenter say he was a bad man and St. Peter say he was a angel, she would believe her grandfather.”

“So it's natural that she was hurt when you compared her to this man her Grandpa said was so bad?”

“I tell her I was sorry if I upset her or cause Jeremiah any distress. I even offer to go back to New York. She move right past it, don't want to talk about it, tell me is her business who the child's father is, she not admitting it's Mr. Blackman and we must just pick up where we leave off, go on as usual.”

“Do you think that's what she's done, as far as her relationship with Jeremiah's father is concerned?”

“Seem to me that's how she deal with all her personal problems: never identify whys and wherefores. Just pass through, swallow like medicine and press on.”

“Medicine should make you better.”

“Maybe not medicine, then, maybe spit. The thing is, when she talk about her first boyfriend, Charlie — not that she say much, mark you — or when she speak of her visits to you in Mabuli, she turn into somebody different, or maybe she turn into her real self, I don't know, but she is another person those times.”

Jimmy scribbles this down mentally as something to think more about. “She's not told me a lot about Charlie either. Losing him the way she did must have been hard and she and he seem to have worked very well together. As for Mabuli, she knows we think of her as family, and she sees the difference she makes in the lives of many people. That may have something to do with it.”

“Well, I suppose that could be why. I just hope she figure it out soon. I must say I have a lot of sympathy for Mrs. Blackman. She want to stay in touch and keep seeing Jeremiah, and I didn't see how I could say no. Jeremiah is her step-son. If the man ever decide to take the case to court, dog nyam Grace supper. So Mona and I write and talk on the phone. Not behind Grace back neither. I tell her I was doing it.”

“That's as it should be.”

“I tell her that my keeping in touch with Mrs. Blackman would cause no problems, which I knew it wouldn't. After that, Mona stop by the park and visit us when she come to Geneva. It wasn't so often — maybe four times since the first time. Jeremiah know her good. He never talk to his mother about her, though I don't tell him not to. I suppose children just know not to do some things.”

The priest yawns, then hastily apologizes.

“I can see you are tired Jimmy, and I soon finish, but I need help deciding what to do. I don't ever talk to Mona about the ins and outs. It's not my business. But it's not right where Jeremiah and his father are concerned. His step-mother too.”

“You keep encouraging Grace to tell his father?”

“But after this child is not going grow up, graduate from university, and get married without his father finding out that he exist!”

“It would be unlikely.”

“Then this year, the university write to say … ”

“ … they were giving her the DIS Award.”

“I can't understand why she never tell them no. Can't you say no to these things?”

“You can, but that would create awkwardness, especially given Grace's line of work.”

“Well, she tell them yes, she accept, and that is what lead to the most recent disturbance.”

The plane bounces as if on cue. It is a drop of maybe twenty feet. The seat belt sign goes on, and the captain announces there will be turbulence for several minutes. Jeremiah stirs, flaps a hand as though to brush away some creature bothering him, then settles down.

“Don't repeat that last word,” Jimmy shakes his head, pretends to warn, wagging his finger.

“If she was going to get this award, that mean St. Chris papers, regional papers, maybe even the overseas papers would be researching her life, doing articles about her, and so on. I decide I better tell her, for if it was to take her by surprise, I wouldn't forgive myself.”

“Tell her what, Phyllis?”

“That her father was my half-brother, which I expect she told you. But there is more she doesn't yet know.”

The plane is surfing another series of big air waves.

“How did she respond to what you told her about her father?”

“She don't talk to me so much these days, which is okay, in a way, for it's Jeremiah I'm most concerned about. These are grown-ups, responsible for a child's life!”

“Is Grace certain Jeremiah's father doesn't know about him?”

“I'm sure he doesn't. That's why I don't understand this alteration of plans. When she said she wasn't taking Jeremiah to St. Chris, I assumed she didn't want his father to find out about him.”

“You were right. She didn't change the plan. It was I who arranged for you both to come. But go on. You said there was something you hadn't yet told Grace.”

“After it come out that I was making a baby, old Mr. Carpenter visit my grandma to see if he could help, and he and Ralston take a walk up a hillside near where we live.”

“What happened?”

“Some say Ralston lose his life in a accident; some say Gramps push him, and good riddance!”

It is a brilliant one o'clock. Clouds like the meringues Mapome used to whip up in her blue earthenware mixing-bowl are just mounting the northern sky, a basin paler than he remembers from his last time in St. Chris. He gets them quickly through immigration, takes Jeremiah to the bathroom again, and then installs the still half-sleeping child in his stroller. While Phyllis changes his clothes and coaxes him to drink something, Jimmy finds the bags, loads up a cart, and leads the three of them out of the airport.

“We're going to The Xooana Inn, please,” he says to the cabbie, then turns to Phyllis. “I made bookings there. Grace's office pulled rank. They'll move her into a suite big enough for you and Jeremiah. Graduation is at four-thirty. We'll make it just in time.”

At half-past one their taxi is rattling down the slope of the promontory on which the airport stands. Jimmy sees the bridge across Boatman's River, rusty girders like strings of a huge old harp, and the highway that goes up into the hills to the UA campus.

Jeremiah is awake, staring out through the window at a huge bird, flying escort. “Look, Grandma. A big duck!”

“That's a good guess, Jeremiah, but it's actually a blue-crested gull. It's the national bird of St. Chris.”

“Whazaanashnalbird, Grandma?”

“It's a bird that all the people love and want to represent their island.”

“Whazanisland Grandma?”

“It's a small country that has water all around it. Look out through the window. See the water?”