Small Island (7 page)

No living person should ever see the underside of a tree. The roots – that gnarled, tangled mess of prongs that plummet unruly into the earth in search of sustenance. As I fled from the schoolhouse after the hurricane had passed, the world was upside-down. The fields to my left, to my right, undulated with this black and wretched chaos. Trees ripped from land that had held them fast for years. Branches that should have been seeking light snuffled now in the dirt – their fruit splattered about like gunshot. Tin roofs were on the ground while the squeaking wheels of carts rotated high in the air, disordered and topsy-turvy. I stumbled through this estranged landscape alarmed as a blind man who can now see.

At first I only saw four people huddled around an upright tree, pointing and shaking their heads. Then others came – five, six, seven. Some running from across the field. Some shouting at others to come. All stopping to stare when they reached the old tree. Then, round the legs of a tall man, over the heads of two small children and past the white handkerchief of a woman who dabbed at tears in her eyes, I saw the body of Mr Ryder.

He was dead. Wrapped around the base of the tree like a piece of cloth. His spine twisted and broken in so many places it bent him backwards. He was naked, his clothes torn from him by the storm with only one ragged shirt sleeve still in place. His mouth was open wide – was it a smile or a scream? And around him his butchered insides leaked like a posy of crimson flowers into a daylight they should never have seen.

I believe I might have screamed. I think I screamed, ‘He is a jealous God.’ I might have held my head and yelled, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.’ For the small crowd looked on me for a brief moment, frowning, before they resumed their yapping: ‘Where is Mrs Ryder? . . . Mrs Ryder should be informed . . . Someone must bring Mrs Ryder.’ I cannot be sure whether the howling that I heard was only in my head. But I am sure of what I said next. I am certain of what I said, out loud for all to hear. I can clearly recall what I said, in my strong and steady voice – for I said it until all were staring on me.

‘Mrs Ryder is alone in the schoolhouse with Michael Roberts.’

There was confusion when I finally reached home. Was it the same crowd of people who had been looking on the broken body of Mr Ryder who were now crowding the veranda of our house? Was it the same woman dabbing at her eyes with a white handkerchief? Was it the same tall man? Or were they different people who now jostled around a grave and sombre Mr Philip, waiting to hear what he could do about the fuss in the neighbourhood? And was Miss Jewel sobbing at the death of Mr Ryder? Or did her tears flow because the crowd was whispering, ‘Michael Roberts – have you heard about Michael Roberts?’

Miss Ma grabbed my wrist to pull me past the crowd and into the house. As she closed the door on an empty room she slapped my face so hard I fell to the floor. ‘Did you know what my son was doing with that woman? Did you know my son was committing a mortal sin with Mrs Ryder – a married woman?’ I tried to run from the room but she held me back with the strength of fury.

‘Why are you treating me like this?’ I asked.

‘My son with that woman.’ She had lost her senses. She hit me again, this time her hand rounded as a fist. ‘My son was found in an ungodly embrace with that woman,’ she screamed.

Suddenly her strength left her. She collapsed, falling on to a chair as her body returned to that of a frail old woman. I looked on her and gently placed my hand on her shoulder. As fast as a snake she puffed herself up again. Her eyes fixed on mine, her hand raising to strike me. But I escaped from the room. I ran to the henhouse and squeezed my adult body in with the bewildered hens. There I sat a quiet vigil, looking out on the turmoil through the hole in the wood that was once used to spy on me.

I went to the town to stay awhile in the now empty schoolhouse. I had to make sure the school was safely closed up. And to turn back the children who might arrive for their school term. I pinned a notice to the door concerning the tragic accident. Mr Ryder was not yet in the ground. Mrs Ryder was abiding with the preacher from the evangelical church, waiting on the day when her sister would arrive to carry her far away from this island. But all around the town rumours flew on the breeze. How had Mr Ryder died? Was he trying to feel the power of the hurricane? Was he caught where he should not have been? Some said that Mr Ryder’s death was not an accident. Gossip appeared in the newspaper – a picture of Mrs Ryder’s grieving face with Michael caught in the flashlight’s glare. And everywhere I walked the whispered name of Michael Roberts became as familiar as birdsong.

It was three days before I finally returned home from the schoolhouse. The man who came and sat at the dinner table was Mr Philip. Still short, still with a round belly plump from plantain and his beloved dumplings. But he had no Bible. His empty hands shook as they hung above his knife and fork. His water glass wobbled and spilt its contents, the liquid dribbling down his chin, which remained unwiped. Miss Ma sat down and placed her napkin neatly in her lap. But there was no grace spoken even though we looked on Mr Philip to start the prayer. There was no thanking of the Lord. And there was no Michael. No Michael staring on me from across the table. No Michael attempting to catch my eye.

As usual Miss Jewel came in the room with a bowl steaming with rice. But after she had placed it on the table she laid her two hands on my shoulders and held them there for all to see before returning to her work. I could still feel the warmth of her touch long after Miss Ma had stopped staring her open-mouthed surprise at the two of us. It was then that, for the first time in my living days, I dared speak at that table. ‘Where is Michael?’ I asked. Mr Philip raised two weary eyes to look on me before lifting himself from his chair. Leaving his plate of food untouched he withdrew from the room.

Miss Ma did not look in my eye when she said, ‘Michael has gone.’

‘Gone?’ I said.

‘Yes, Michael has gone.’

‘Gone?’ I shouted.

‘Hush, child, this is still the table.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’ I had no reason to talk calmly.

‘England,’ Miss Ma said, casually lifting an empty fork to her mouth.

‘England!’ I rose from the table. ‘England?’ I screamed.

‘Child, hush yourself or you will feel my hand. Sit. Sit and eat.’

I sat down again to ask quietly, ‘England?’

‘Of course England,’ she said, as if he had not travelled an ocean but just walked into town. ‘Michael has been planning to go to England from a long time ago.’

‘When did he go to England?’

‘This morning – if it is any business of yours.’

‘He did not tell me.’

‘You think he tells you everything? It should be obvious that my son does not tell you all his business. He is a man.’ She went on: ‘He has gone to England with the purpose of joining the Royal Air Force.’ I could do nothing but watch her lips as they formed words that made no sense to me. ‘They need men like my son. Men of courage and good breeding. There is to be a war over there. The Mother Country is calling men like my son to be heroes whose families will be proud of them.’

‘But for how long has he gone?’

Again, she lifted the empty fork to her mouth, then realising I could see she was eating no food she laid the fork down and dabbed at her cheeks with a napkin. But she gave me no answer.

I heard the gentle drip, drip, on to my plate before I felt the tears on my cheeks. Was my last view of Michael Roberts to have been that shadow on a wall? Or the snatched flashlight picture in the newspaper? Michael was gone? No matter how hard I dug my fingernails into my hand this time I could not stop myself from weeping.

Four

Hortense

I never knew that electric light could be used so extravagantly. At home just one bulb came and went with the whim of the weather. One single bulb that attracted every buzzing, flying, irritating insect from the district to flutter mesmerised in its timid glow (and also Eugene, a feeble-minded man who would trek miles from the fields in his bare feet to stand gaping in our yard until the light was turned on). The two-storey college building was illuminated by lamps that could have made a blind man cover his eyes. Cars attracted by the brightness arrived at the gates bringing pretty-dressed girls who also buzzed around in the light, giggling and chattering and hugging up old friends.

I was tired and hungry from my journey in the
Daily Gleaner
van. I had sat on what looked to me to be an upturned bucket. Eustace White, the driver, had somehow attached this implement to the floor for his passengers to sit on. All feeling was lost from both my buttock cheeks before the wretched van had even left Savannah-La-Mar. When I complained of the paralysis in my hind region, Eustace White informed me bluntly that he was not meant to take passengers in the newspaper’s van and only did so to supplement his income so he might have money to pay for the treatment of his mother’s eye complaint. Going on to explain the past, present and future of this eye condition in unnecessary detail for the rest of the long journey. By the time we arrived in Kingston my eternity had been lived listening to this man – I was convinced I had had no other life than that which took place on the upturned bucket in the
Daily Gleaner
van. The winding path from the road to the college grounds bumped and jiggled me for an infinity before leading us out into that floodlit fairyland that glowed before my eyes like salvation.

Mr Philip and Miss Ma had taken no more notice of my leaving the homestead than if I were a piece of their livestock whose time had come to be sent for slaughter. Had they forgotten that my father was Lovell Roberts? A man whose picture had been pinned to parish walls. Their cousin who, somewhere, was still a man of honour, still noble in a way that made him a legend. Those diligent years of my upbringing – feeding me with the food from their plates, dressing me in frocks made of cotton and lace, teaching me English manners and Christian discipline – were they to mean no more than the fattening of a chicken on best coconut, which, after they had feasted on its carcass, stripping it of all goodness, they threw out as waste? And their son, Michael, could have been anywhere on God’s earth: flying across the English Channel, sipping coffee in a Paris café, taking tea in London. The only place I could be sure he was not was at that joyless home, where the tamarind tree, the henhouse and the dusty walk from town were the only things that ever spoke softly to me of missing him.

It was Miss Jewel alone who waved me off when I departed for the teacher-training college in Kingston, standing in her best blouse, her legs bowed so that the hem of her skirt nearly touched the floor. As the van collected me, crunching along the stones of the path as always, she handed me a tiny parcel.

‘A likkle spell?’ I asked.

The parcel contained one well folded pound note and two shiny shillings tied in a white handkerchief that had been stitched, unevenly, with my initials in blue and red. ‘You nah need a likkle spell, me sprigadee. De Lawd haffe tek care a yuh,’ was all she said.

Like butterflies, we new girls dazzled in our white gloves, our pastel frocks, our pretty hats. Girls from good homes from all across the island. Girls who possessed the required knowledge of long division, quadratic equations. Girls who could parse a sentence, subject, object, nominative, and name five verbs of manner. Girls who could recite the capital cities of the world and all the books of the Bible in the perfect English diction spoken by the King. We new girls were to be cultivated into teachers and only after three years of residential study would we be ready for release into the schools of Jamaica.

The hall in which we waited on that first evening was loud with the silence of fear. Fidgeting was kept to a minimum, only necessary when someone needed to straighten the hem of their garment to prevent it creasing or wipe away a tear of sweat that had developed with the heat. Only one girl coughed.

Outside this room there was great commotion – the older pupils going about their business as raucous and shrill as parrots on a branch. Until, in one instant, it stopped as if, suddenly, all the parrots had expired or taken flight. The principal was making her entrance, parting girls to her left, to her right, like Moses through the Red Sea. She was tall and broad with a top lip that carried such a profusion of dark hair that the impression she gave was of a man in an all-too-inadequate disguise. She walked with dainty yet lumbering steps – full of feminine grace that nevertheless shook the floor beneath us. And following on behind in the gap that her ample gait created were five teachers. In the shadow of this colossal woman those attendants looked as flimsy and puny as leaves blown in by the wind. The teachers mounted the stage and faced we new girls. They were all white women but their complexions ranged – as white people’s tend to do – through varying shades of pink depending on how long they had been on the island. The principal carried a seasoned ruddy glow on her cheeks while others bore the blotchy roaring-red of newcomers.

A smile should light up a face so that a person might seem friendly and kindly disposed to those they are smiling at. Unfortunately the principal, Miss Morgan, had a smile that was so unfamiliar to her face that it had an opposite effect – rather like the leer of a church gargoyle, it made her look sinister. She first smiled after the words, ‘Welcome, girls, to our teacher-training school. You have a hard yet stimulating three years of study ahead. If each of you attends to your work with diligence and courage I am sure you will get on well with us here.’ Her voice rang with a soft, gentle lilt as if soon to break into song, yet her smile made me recoil. But it was during her second grin, after the register of names had been taken by her bashful deputy, that I made the contrary vow never to do anything that would cause her to smile on me directly.