The Last Warner Woman (6 page)

Shhhhhhhhh

Listen: it was Bishopess Herbert who did plant herself under a guava tree. It was Bishopess Herbert who said she wasn’t leaving that spot come hell or high water. And she bear the scorn of her neighbors the way Jesus bear the cross. She was calling out this name that was put onto her spirit: Adamine. She never meet me in her whole life, but in her spirit she know I was out there, and she wait for me with love the size of a lion. She stand up in that yard for days, in front of the shanty house. And people laugh at her. They say she lose her mind. One man even try to chase her out of the yard, saying she was nothing but an obeah woman. But she stay there calling out Adamine, Adamine. And finally, O lamb of God, I did come, I come. When she see me, the Bishopess embrace me like the hundredth lamb that did loss and finally reach back to the flock. So after Agatha Lazarus, she was now my second mother. Is she who learn me how to listen; learn me how to make God’s voice my own; learn me how to be full up of the ’61 spirit and give warning. Is she who make me to know that my calling was to be a Warner Woman. And maybe when I come to England and they lock me up for madness, maybe I get other mothers then—for the matron and all the nurses treat me like I was a little pickney, but I not studying that right now.

Shhhhhhhhh

As for fathers, I have none but the Lord. I never find out who my earthly father was. I more sure of who it was not. 1) It was not Monsignor Dennis. I get his story piece piece from Mother Lazarus and Miss Lily and Maas Paul. It is true that you would always find him in the garden, but you would never catch him doing work himself. According to them he was not the type to stoop over no bush and put eggshells in the dirt. Instead he was always standing up over the yardboy. The yardboy change like how some people change underwear. It was always these tall, mawga boys and Monsignor Dennis would stand up over them and instruct them to sweep up here, or to plant this or plant that. Mother Lazarus say the Monsignor did hate her because she always come to him when he was out there giving his instructions and labrishing, talking away like his tongue did catch fire. Mother Lazarus put the question to me,
what else I could do, child? I couldn’t go up to him at no other time because that was all him do the livelong day.
Mother Lazarus tell me when him see her coming he would say,
Miss Lazarus, don’t you see I’m out here talking to so-and-so.
Sometimes she hold her tongue but other times she answer him brave and say,
yes, I can see. And I can hear too. Even in the wee hours of the morning, I hear things you think I can’t hear.
Mother Lazarus tell me that whenever she say something like that the yardboy would start doing pure stupidness, like he was nervous, and Monsignor Dennis would turn twenty shades of red that not even the sun could turn him. 2) My father was not the Jamaican hero, Alexander Bustamante. Everybody did wish they was the child of that tall brown man, especially after he march with the workers downtown, and when the police come to shoot black people it was Bustamante who climb up on the statue of Queen Victoria and tear off his shirt and show them his chest, and say you will have to shoot me first. After he say that, everybody wish their chest was as big and as broad as his, and they call him Father Busta. They said he was father of the nation. And maybe that’s why I get his name, because I never have a real father, so they just name me after the man who was father to everybody. 3) My father was not Mr. Mac, the driver who come on Saturday evenings with supplies, and leave with my mother. Mother Lazarus tell me Mr. Mac was a good-looking fellow in those days, before he drink a river’s worth of beer and rum and put on plenty weight. Mr. Mac tell me himself that that all my mother wanted from him was a drive into town and so he would drop her there on Saturday nights, but all the try that he did try to take it further, the most he ever get from her was a kiss on the cheek. 4) My father was not a leper, not Maas Paul, 5) nor Maas Johnson, 6) nor Maas Johnny. When she was pregnant these three men was suddenly cool toward my mother, like they never business bout her again. Her belly was a reproof unto them, for all of them was a little bit in love with my mother, but her belly make them know they wasn’t quite man enough for she.

Shhhhhhhhh

More than likely my father was a simple, forgettable man. I imagine my mother did meet him on a Saturday night when she had gone into town. I try to imagine her in that big city, Pearline Portious, as beautiful as the Rose of Sharon, mesmerized by all them lights. I see she walking into a dance and every man’s eye is suddenly set upon her, watching with man-hunger while she dance up a storm and sweat trickle down into her bosom. She would always find her own way home, but it happen that one night she must have taken a long way, cause she come back pregnant. No shame in that. She was her own big woman after all. But who it was that did the breeding I cannot tell you, because I did not ever ask it of Pearline Portious, because she was not around to tell me.

I
F YOU HAD BEEN AROUND BACK THEN IN 1941, YOU
would not have spotted in Mother Lazarus the usual signs of fatigue. There were no droopy eyes, no sluggish movements, no yawns the size and decibel of a roar. She displayed no symptoms, and yet more than anything else Mother Lazarus wanted to sleep. She had not slept for eighty years.

Her insomnia started at the age of ten when a traumatic event—to put it plainly, a rape—kept her wide awake for seven days straight. When Agatha did not return home one evening, her mother began to wail and wail, and the sound was like a siren over the cane. Every woman responded by pushing her man out of bed, if he hadn’t already risen by himself, and sent him toward the wailing to see what had happened. The men formed themselves into a search party and told Agatha’s mother to stay put, understanding even then that it would not be good for her to find her own child, see the possibly mangled and lifeless body and receive a shock great enough to send her to the grave as well.

It was dawn when the men found Agatha. One man immediately vomited up the tea and bread he had eaten before setting out, for Agatha was lying in a pool of congealed blood and mud. Two men picked her up as gently as their calloused hands could manage. She didn’t make a sound, didn’t resist, and if it were not for her eyes that even then were wide open, and her chest, which continued to rise and fall, they would have believed her dead.

They marched back to the wattle-and-daub house in which her mother waited. She saw the search party coming from afar and could make out the body of her daughter dangling from their arms. At first she pressed herself as deep into the house as she could, trying to slip into its shadows. “Lord Jesus!” She shouted, “Not mi daughter. Lord Jesus, take the case!”

“Take heart, Mumma,” the men called back, “take heart. She is alive.”

They had to say it a few more times before the words finally made sense. At last the mother lifted herself from the wall and ran toward the group. One man stepped out to block her. He held her in his arms.

“Let me go. I need to see her. I need to know that she alive for true.”

“Take heart, Mumma. We tell you that she is alive. But we find her in a bad bad way.”

“Let me see her,” the mother cried, but she was shaking, her strength leaving her.

“We find her in a bad way, Mumma. Her panty did tear off and fling to one side, and …”

“Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.”

“Mumma, we have to tell you before you see her … I sorry. The whole of her pum-pum was out-a-door. We never did want to see the young girl like that at all, but that is how we find her. Mumma, don’t faint on we now. Keep strength and take heart. I tell you she is alive. But she in a bad way for true.”

So it was, the little girl was delivered into her mother’s arms and for one whole week she did not blink. Her unfocused eyes made people think she was staring into another world; they worried that the child was looking at her own death and walking toward it. They tried to tempt her back to the land of the living through a number of ways: by the strategic placement of small mirrors all around her (what the obeah man had told them to do, advising them that the child needed to be surprised by her own reflection); by throwing red string in front of her, then drawing it away slowly (what the myal woman had told them to do, advising them that an evil spirit in the form of a cat had possessed the girl and needed to be lured out); by walking round the house seven times and banging a pot with a wooden spoon (what the old brother-man who lived in the cave by the river had told them to do, advising them that this was the sure way of frightening bad spirits).

But none of it worked. She had become a zombie—the living dead. Agatha’s mother was inconsolable.

“When I find that dutty bwoy who do this evil unto my daughter, him owna sister, I going to kill him! With my own two hands I going to kill him.”

Her mother took time off from the sugar factory where she worked. She stayed at home and held Agatha in her big hands and sang to her: “Come back, Gatha. Come back yah. Water come a mi eye. Come back, Gatha. Come back yah. Water come a mi eye.”

And maybe what the obeah man, and the myal woman, and the brother-man who lived in the cave by the river had not bothered to say, but which everyone knew, was true—that there were some things, some evils, some curses in this world, that will take either three, or seven, or nine days to cure. For it was on the seventh day of her mother’s song that Agatha finally relaxed in her embrace and the fear that had prevented her eyelids from descending finally lifted.

Some of the damage, however, was deeper and could not be cured. She was now able to blink; she could close her eyes whenever she wanted, but the ability to fall asleep had been lost. Agatha would lie on her cot each night only to please her mother. She would close her eyes and breathe deeply. But she never truly drifted into sleep. She was acutely conscious of every passing minute, every second that ticked away, and in this way she began to learn the exact sounds of darkness, the precise measure of night. She knew what belonged where and when. So if she heard, for instance, a particular flutter of wings in the daytime, she would look up startled and ask of the creature, Mr. Rat-bat, what are you doing up at this time? This is not your hour.

For eighty years Agatha Lazarus had lived in this somniphobic state. Life had been one everlasting day. And then there came a strange moment in 1941.

She had been in the middle of complaining to Monsignor Dennis, explaining to him that they were out of sugar, out of rice, out of antiseptic, but most humiliatingly, out of tissue. She said that she didn’t understand why they had to be completely out of things before they could be replaced, and that furthermore … And then she stopped, in mid-flow. She had suddenly become aware of a new sensation in her body. A deep scowl clouded her face and even Monsignor Dennis asked whether she was all right. She nodded her head and said yes, yes, she was fine and continued with her protests. But it was from that moment on that she became slightly distracted. This new sensation was curious. What she felt was a slight tingling in one of her little fingers. It lasted for two days and then, instead of disappearing, it jumped straight across her body to the other little finger. It was as if a swarm of tiny insects were buzzing inside those two digits. The insects began to grow in number and to move out. Some migrated to the other fingers, her thumbs, and soon her entire hand was tingling. Eventually they traveled farther, across her shoulders, up to her neck, then to her face, where they seemed to be most particularly drawn to her eyelids. They stayed there for so long that she thought they had settled permanently, but then one morning a whole battalion plunged deep into her stomach, then to her hips, and then, at last, to her feet and her toes.

Not having felt this sensation for eighty years, she did not recognize it as acute fatigue. But soon her thoughts began to lose their solidity, changing form as quickly as ghosts. She would look at a tree, for instance, consider its bark, and this would make her think of the color brown and people who were the color of trees, which in turn made her think of people as mahogany or cedar or pine or blue mahoe or even the poisonous manchineel. Then all at once she would become worried about what kind of tree she was and where she should be planted. She would touch her hair and think
my leaves have turned gray! Who ever heard of gray leaves!
And finally she knew that this was the beginning of what people called a dream. After eighty years, she had regained the ability to fall asleep. So she smiled. She was going to do it after all. One night when she really wanted to, she would do it. But she understood, just as her waking hours had felt like an eternity, so too would her sleep be eternal. She would never wake up from it, and this made her smile all the more. Mother Lazarus had begun to fear that she might never die, and so the fact of an irreversible state of sleep into which she could descend whenever she wanted came as something of a relief.

Still, things had to be done correctly. Arrangements had to be made. Someone had to be hired. So this is what Pearline Portious was for Mother Lazarus—a part of her big plan. She knew that a night would come soon when, after everyone had fallen asleep, she would step outside into the night breeze and slowly walk the mile-long perimeter of the colony. She would nod good-bye instead of hello to the bats and the peeniwallies and the patoos and the moths with their enormous faith, always fluttering around excitedly as if tonight was the night when they would finally reach the moon. After she had checked that everything and everyone was in their rightful place, she would go back inside, into her room, and she would put on a fresh nightgown. It would be a nightgown she had never worn before. She would blow out the candle, climb into her bed, and pull the sheet up over her. She would rest her head on the pillow and look one last time into the comforting darkness, and then she would surrender herself to it. She would close her eyes, knowing that she would never open them again.