From Harvey River (30 page)

Margaret did not attend the wedding of her last daughter although the wedding was held in her house at Harvey River. If her husband, David, were alive, he would surely have prevailed upon her to put on a show of support for their child's wedding, for as he always said, “Things must be done decently and in good order.” But according to family lore, Margaret Aberdeen Wilson Harvey arose on the day of her last daughter's wedding and proceeded to go about her business as if that day were just any other ordinary Saturday. She dressed in one of the demoted church dresses which she usually wore around the yard, she put on her husband's old work boots, and she proceeded to attend to her usual domestic chores, paying no attention to the bride or groom or the assembled guests. Then at some point in the proceedings, she took up her usual seat in her rocking chair in the living room and right in the midst of the assembled guests, she proceeded to puff upon a long chalk pipe, blowing clouds of smoke over the wedding party.

The union did not turn out to be a success. Maybe it was the sight of swatches of her long silky black hair lying like question marks on her pillow when she raised up her head each morning, and what those swatches of hair told her, that made Ann eventually decide to leave her husband, for her hair was falling out from her grieving over her bad marriage. Whoever heard of reading hair? Well, some people can read cards and some can read tea leaves and coffee grounds. But hair reading?
As far as I know, my mother's sister Ann is one of the only people who knew how to read hair. This gift came to her during the course of her short marriage to a man who claimed that he had fallen in love with her because of her great capacity for happiness, for her bubbling over source of mirth, for her wonderful openness, her clear ringing laugh that summoned everyone who heard it to start laughing too. This man who through his irresponsible ways proceeded to snuff out her joy. But Ann grows able to read the future and to heed warnings sent to her by her guardian angels, who, three years after she married this man, begin to write frantic messages to her with her hair on the white tablet of her pillow.

Go Home
reads hair.
Go Home Now
.
Go Home before this bad marriage kills you.
And then,
Go Home, Your Mother needs you!

Margaret is sitting in the rocking chair by the window when the truck rolls up with Ann and the children. She tells Mina to go and help her daughter to bring the children inside. When a weeping Ann tries to explain to her why she has come back home, Margaret, sounding like the daughter of George O'Brian Wilson, cuts her off by saying, “What's done is done, you have children to raise, stop the damn bawling.”

After Ann helps her mother to get dressed for bed and assists her up the three steps into her big mahogany four-poster, Margaret says, “Ann Rebeker, do one last thing there for me, just rub my foot with some of that Canadian healing oil that your sister Rose send.” Margaret dozes off while Ann rubs her feet. Ann gets up and makes her way to the other side of the house to her old bedroom, where her children now lie sleeping. Before she leaves she makes sure to close the door of her parents' bedroom, where her father's jacket is still hanging in the wardrobe, his felt hat still resting on the bureau.

And Margaret would have woken up in the middle of the night, feeling blessed that she was no longer alone in the house. Pleased that once again she had children around her, and most of all relieved that her last child was safely back home, away from the dangers of a bad marriage. She would have talked to her dead husband about all this and told him how God moves in a mysterious way, for their youngest daughter is now a big help to her in her old age, that the house is much brighter with children around. How Ann seems more mature and responsible now, that she is a very good mother. “She much more considerate and obedient to me. The other day she just come and say to me, ‘Mummah, I want to thank you.' I say, ‘For what?' She say, ‘Because now I realize what you went through to bring me into this world and to raise me,' and I say, ‘Now you know what it is to be a mother, Ann Rebeker. Now you know what it is to be a mother.'”

 

F
or weeks my mother's mind had been running on Margaret. As she went about her wife and mother business, it was as if her own mother was beside her, reminding her how things were to be done. “Better you buy a small piece of meat without fat, and stretch it with vegetables than to get a whole heap of fatty meat.” “The first thing that a good woman do as she wake up is to put on water to make tea for her family.” “No child should rule a parent.”

And at night in dream after dream, she kept seeing her mother with her two long grey-and-white plaits, smoking her chalk pipe. In the most recent dream, the smoke from the pipe curled into her good eye and clouded it, then David's face appeared in the pupil of the eye.

Doris woke up washed in a cold sweat and shaking. She told Marcus that they should try to go to Harvey River to visit her mother, but he said he had to wait on his leave. By evening, the news of her mother's death reached her. It was brought to her in person by her brother Flavius.

On any other occasion she would have said, “Flavius Harvey, I long to see you till I short,” but when she saw her brother standing in the doorway of her sewing room that day, she knew that this was not a time for childhood jokes.

Flavius stood in the doorway, with his hat placed over his heart. “Dor, I have bad news, I come to tell you that our mother is gone,” was what he said.

“Gone? Oh my Lord, oh my God. When Flavvy, when?”

“Last night. Ann say she heard her cry out during the night ‘my head, my head,' and Ann run into the room just in time to see our mother fall back onto her pillow, stone dead.”

Doris, seated at her sewing machine, drops her head onto her chest; Flavius steps into the sewing room and sits down heavily on the trunk. He and Doris weep like small children.

Doris and her brother sit at the dining table and talk as if they were the only two people in the world. Every time one of my mother's children passes through the room, they mutter something like, “Sorry, Mama, sorry Uncle Flavy, sorry your mother dead.”

Except for the eldest siblings, Barbara and Howard, most of the children had no real memory of Margaret because their visits to Harvey River were so infrequent, but they always felt her presence, for Doris quoted her every day on all domestic matters, including the rearing of children.

Long into the night, Doris and her brother keep a wake for their mother. Flavius tells her how a few days before she died, their mother had sent to call him to tell him she had heard that he and his wife, Arabella, were quarrelling because she did not want to leave the Seventh-day Adventists and go with him to join the Jehovah's Witnesses. “‘Flavius, marriage is a give-and-take business,' she told me, ‘don't you expect to find God on earth and don't expect another human being to understand everything about you.' Those were the last words she ever spoke to me,” said Flavius.

It was then that Flavius told her about his recurring dream; the dream in which an angel of the Lord would appear to him
as he wandered in the desert, and whenever he was about to sit down at an oasis, the seraph would say, “Keep moving, Flavius, this is not where you should pitch your tent.”

He told Doris how his quest for the one true church had taken over his life. How sometimes when he prayed he found himself begging God to take him home so that he could see his Maker face to face.

Flavius said that his search for the one true religion had come about because of his need to really and truly know the Almighty, and that was what was causing him to change from one church to another. Since he had begun his quest, he said, he had received many visions in which his body moved or was moved in strange ways; and he was taken up to other worlds and shown things that he, like St. Paul, dared not speak of.

Doris sat there in silence for a while and then she reached across the table, took his hand, and said, “Oh poor you, no mine, no mine, I know that one day you will find what you are seeking for. We all have to stick together now. Now that we are motherless and fatherless.”

 

For weeks after they returned from my grandmother's funeral, my father came home early every night and paid special attention to his grieving wife. Every evening he brought her some small present like ice cream or cake, and he tried to cheer her up by bringing her stories. My mother, who loved nothing better than a good story, was sitting with her feet in his lap as he pared her nails one Saturday evening (she would never cut her nails on a Sunday as she considered it bad luck). “Dor,” he says, “guess what happen to me today? I had to make one quick swerve so as not to crash the telephone van because this man in the car ahead of me suddenly let go of his steering wheel. My God, the man give up on life right before me,” he
said. And then he paused for a moment before he said, “But you know, Dor, I can see with him.” There was a short silence, a slightly extended beat before my mother, outraged and appalled at the thought, rose up and roared like a great wounded mammal, “Never you say a thing like that again.” She wrenched her foot from my father's hands and stood up over him, shouting: “Nobody should ever take their own life, nobody. That is the biggest sin. The only sin that God will not forgive. The only way to die is to go when God call you like how He call my mother, Margaret Harvey!”

 

I
n the early morning hours of Monday, September 2, 1957, when the Montego Bay-into-Kingston train reared up off the tracks at Kendal and headed for grassland, my brother Howard's shoes flew off his feet. They were indigo-coloured suede and they had completed his dance outfit, a powder-blue zoot suit which perfectly suited his slim, six-foot-two frame. We, his brothers and sisters, had watched him admiring himself in the wardrobe mirror that Saturday evening, watched how he had put himself together just so. How when he finished straightening the lapels of his light blue suit, worn with a light blue shirt, and laced on his dark blue suede shoes, he had tenderly, carefully put on his midnight blue fedora, arranging it low on his forehead, slightly to the side. That Saturday evening he was bound for a dance at Forrester's Hall, 21 North Street, in Kingston. There he was to meet up with a group of sporting friends who'd convinced him to break one of my mother's commandments. There is no evidence that among his friends was a girl with red hair, but maybe he felt that the fundraising outing in Montego Bay the next day, which was organized by the nuns and priests of St. Anne's Roman Catholic Church, was sanctified and that a Papal blessing had the power to cancel out my mother's edict. Or maybe he was just feeling restless,
adventurous like any young man clad in a powder-blue zoot suit, his head crowned and protected by a midnight blue fedora. Besides, he was over twenty-one, and he could hardly tell his friends that his mother insisted he stay home on a Sunday. So he boogied, yanked, and shuffed all night and half-danced down to the railway station at Pechon Street and boarded the train from Kingston to Montego Bay in the early hours of Sunday morning, where he spent the whole of Sunday partying with his friends.

On Monday morning, the telephone at our house rang at about 3 a.m. It was one of my brother's friends.

“Hello, Mama Goodie, Howie at home?”

“Why are you calling at this hour of the morning to ask me a question like that?”

“Please, Mama Goodie, just look and see if he is there.”

My mother at that moment became fully awake, put the telephone down, and went to the room where her sons slept, to check if her eldest boy had come home in the early hours of Monday morning as he often did after a weekend of partying or “bleaching,” as Jamaicans call staying out all night. His bed was empty.

My brother's friend blurted, “Mama Goodie, I'm sorry to tell you, but I believe Howie was in the train that crash early this morning at Kendal and kill a whole heap of people.”

Calm, for some reason my mother became completely calm, her mind goes underwater, for the next few hours she will do everything as if she was swimming under the waters of the Harvey River. She woke up my father. They woke the whole house, consisting of their eight other children, who were all fast asleep. “Your brother Howard was on a train that crashed this morning.” My siblings and I always felt hurt and deprived, hard done by and wronged by my mother's ban on outings on
a Sunday or public holiday. When all our schoolfriends boasted of the grand time to be had at Alterry Beach, at Dunn's River Falls, or Puerto Seco Beach, all the Goodison children could do was keep quiet.

“See me tomorrow on the choo-choo train, sorry you won't be on it,” said our schoolfriend Jimmy, who was to come home from the Kendal crash without a leg.

In the cold before-day morning, my parents drive down to Kendal. The whole way there my mother sings over and over in an unsteady watery vibrato the same hymn, “God Is Working His Purpose Out.” They reach the site of the crash and hand in hand they make their way through the mass of maimed and dead bodies which had been flung violently down in the wet grass by the horrible capsizing of the derailed train. My father is openly weeping. My mother–who had tied a scarf over her long pepper-and-salt hair, which she had plaited as if she was going swimming–is singing softly. Over and over she rides the calming current of the hymn's words as she and my father look and look quickly away from the bodies lying in the wet grass, searching for their son.

Then my mother sees her tall first-born son walking towards her. His forehead is bloody where death clawed him, but he is walking towards them barefooted, the morning sun behind him. Flying glass had ripped open his head, but his best friend, Hoover, who was sitting beside him, received a fatal head wound. My mother would always wonder if the Angel of Death had mixed up their names, or if her brother Howard, guardian angel of the nephew named for him, had somehow intervened.