The Bigger Light (16 page)

He was quick to remember the feelings he had when he entered this same pawnshop about six years ago with Henry. Then he felt like a man on the way down, like a man who had failed, a man who was vulnerable to the slightest tug which would have pulled him down to the same level of the first step of any one of these houses or stores where he had seen other witnesses of that failure, drinking wine from the mouth of a brown paper bag, twirled around the top to fit the concealed bottle mouth. Now he was a man in a certain position, going into a pawnshop for the sake of going, slumming even. “Slumming? Heh-heh-heh! that’s what they call it, isn’t it? A man in my position coming down to this position!”, a man with a certain sophistication and style used in this case, when whatever he touches in a dark alley, with his foot or with his fingers, is being protected from touching his body, or his social status, or his personality. He was buying a gold pocket watch with cash.

Boysie selected the most expensive one he found in the glass showcase; and before the man asked him whether he wanted to buy it, he was fitting it into his waistcoat. He paid the man in twenty-dollar bills; the watch cost fifty dollars, which was pure robbery, but at least he could boast that he had bought an overpriced pocket watch from a pawnbroker’s; and he gave the man the receipt to keep, and went out into the fresh afternoon.

For it was afternoon now, the bells on the cathedral tower were ringing, or tolling (it didn’t make much difference to Boysie now), and there was a scampering along the streets of
men and women coming out for lunch from the businesses along the street.

He stood up. He could not move. He stood up where he was, and he was in the middle of the crosswalk, and cars were waiting for him. “Let them fucking wait! I am a pedestrian!” He was standing looking at six black women who were coming out of a building that looked as if it was some kind of government offices. He did not even know that there were black women working in this part of the city. He did not know they looked so good. He had forgotten all that. And he had not very often walked along the streets as he was walking today. A new life was opening up itself to him, and he was enjoying it. He just looked at the women and thought how nice they looked, and how sure of themselves and how they were not noisy. But he could have endured them, even liked them, had they been as noisy as the men and women in the Mercury Club.

Three of these women crossed the street (they did not have to) and walked purposely slow and soft and full of perfume as they came towards him, and he was sure that the most beautiful of them smiled with him. It was an emotion he did not wish to have proved, as he once would have done, and looked back and challenged the woman. But now, merely to think that she could have smiled was enough for him.

He turned the corner and came in front of the cathedral. In Barbados, there was one cathedral. There was another one, but it was a Catholic cathedral, and he did not consider it to be as important because he was not a Catholic. He did not know any Catholics back in Barbados, and in Canada he hadn’t met anybody who had to say he was Catholic. There was one cathedral in Barbados. And because in those days he did not wear shoes (there were shoes in his house, but they were left back from his father when he died, and Boysie’s feet never grew to
that size, so he never could step into his father’s shoes), he was not allowed to enter the cathedral by the sexton. Only the rich people went to the cathedral, even when church services were not being held. But he had always liked the cathedral and he would stand outside in the shade of the spreading tree, with the men who gambled with dice every other day of the week in the shadow of the cathedral, because they too did not wear shoes and to gamble in the sun would be punishment for their soles, and perhaps their souls, too; along with the women who sold “comforts” and “lollipops” and “sweeties” and “cocks,” red “cocks,” and white “cocks” (“Man, don’t laugh, man! I don’t mean
penises
. Cocks! A cock is a thing made outta sugar and things like that, and when it is cooled off, it is shaped like a fowl cock. That is what a cock is.” And the Canadian young fellow had laughed, and had afterwards laughed at his own ignorance, pickled in presumptuous sensuality. Boysie was satisfied now), and other things like roasted peanuts. Even whores used to congregate under that tree, under that shadow, from the broiling, relentless and rotting hot sun, near the cathedral, waiting to pick off the winnings of the winning gamblers.

The steps of this cathedral in Toronto are easy to climb. He can climb them without raising his shoes too high. And he can enter this one. And he knows he can enter this one without shoes on his feet, for he had seen hippies doing that during the summer months. “A man who ain’ accustom to shoes don’t walk-’bout without shoes, like how these young Northamericans does do, yuh! That is a different story altogether, yuh!” He was at the main portico, and he could hear people inside. There were actually people inside this cathedral talking! Now, back home in Barbados, you couldn’t talk in a church. Not
talk
, you had was to whisper in the white man church
back there, boy!
Whisper
, so you won’t wake up the holy spirits and the deads that was buried inside the walls of the cathedral-church, man. You couldn’t do
that
. Talk? In the white man church, godblindyou, and let a police come and throw a couple o’ bull-pistle lashes in your arse, and then lockup your arse for talking in the presence o’ God? Man, there wasn’t nobody, nobody at all, you hear me? nofuckingbody ignorant enough to talk even in a church, a ordinary church then, not to mention in that big cathedral that we have back there on Roebuck Street, or Crumpton Street, or is it in Bush Hall … anyhow, no man would be such a gorilliphant to have
talk’
even on the doorstep o’ that big powerful cathedral, with the choirs dressed so pretty in their crimpson robes with them ruffs looking so pretty just like a fresh white sugarcake, or like goat-milk from Mammy sheeps, and with the organiss parading ‘pon that blasted organ like if he is king self, and the Lord Bishship that man with the fat red face and the big belly, rolling-off them words offa his tongue in the prettiest Kings and Queens English and Latin from the Classicks, so blasted sweet that everybody who ever heard him, and those who didn’t have the privilege to have hear’ him, but only hear’ ’bout him through hearing and talking, man, that Lord Bishship from up in England could talk more prettier than the six o’clock news ‘pon the BBC radio! That was a Lord Bishship! And that was a cathedral!

But inside this cathedral there are people moving about, and just as Boysie took off his hat, to acknowledge his lesser mortality in the powerful hanging walls of banners and church regalia, before he could get accustomed to this heavenly gloom, this majesty, this strange-smelling presence, the organ was roaring from a cavern below him, deep down into the church basement and belly, and then climbing the walls with the
banners and other things hanging on them like ivy, rising, rising until his head started to spin.

So he sat down. This was too powerful to take while standing. Besides, he had always been ordered to sit in a cathedral. Only God was powerful enough, he was told, or his representative the vicar or the Lord Bishop, to stand up in a cathedral. “Boy, always remember, if it is the last thing outta all the decencies that I drive in your damn hard head, always remember to humble yourself in the presence o’ God, the Lord Jesus Christ.” He smiled. He could see the face of the lady in Apartment 101, and the face, from a distance, of the strange woman from the subway; and he could see his mother’s face, in that one smile. They all smiled alike. His mother: what is she doing now? He caught himself. His mind was straying again. His mother had died even before he left Barbados.

“Mendelsunn!”

He had to remember he was in a church, more than in a church, a cathedral. The organ was playing Mendelssohn. His eyes were opened by the music and the power inside it, by the surroundings, and he could see clearly that there was a wedding. The organ was playing the Wedding March. And he knew it, and it became very clear to him, the meaning of things in this context. He also remembered that he had not turned off his record player. But he was happy here. He even made a promise to himself, to come to church here one of these Sundays. But he was not too serious about this. He knew he would never come. He liked the music. The young couple of Canadian bride and Italian bridegroom came cautiously down the aisle towards him, carefully not treading upon the dress hem nor veil nor marching out of time to this very slow waltz whose time might or might not capsize their lives the moment they got outside the door, into the car, covered with
artificial flowers, the loud horn blowing, the homemade wine and the liquor flowing like Niagara Falls, and then eventually with the bridegroom too drunk to drive for better and the worse of his promises and oaths to the same Niagara Falls, to find out with this ironical legitimacy whether she was in fact intact, a virgin, as her parents said she was … and he was left alone, for hours afterwards, in the cathedral to ponder on these things, with the organist giving him a recital of various kinds of organ music, as if it was a command performance. And when it was all finished, when he was washed by the blood of the music, with the Iamb, from one of the hanging church banners now within his heart, his body cleaned-out and rinsed by the music, like Sunday castor oil, before he could decide to rise and put (as he had promised to do, in the fulfilled acknowledgement of the concert) a dollar into the Poor Box, the organist emerged from the darkness that is so common in temples, and when he got close to him, he said, himself bathed in the perspiration of the music, “Good afternoon!”

Bernice came to visit, and she brought along her young man. She had promised to do so. Boysie did not know they were coming, probably had not remembered, but Dots did. So when she went to answer, and let them in, Boysie took the opportunity to go to the bathroom. He had diarrhoea. After work last night, he had found himself in a bar on the main street in the city, where they had a rhythm and blues band from America; and he had gone in for his drink after work, to help take the taste of work out of his system, and had remained long past the time he would normally have spent. He was comfortable in all the noise and the laughter; and the West Indian men and the black Canadians, and some few men from America, judging from their antics when they walked and from their
speech, had not troubled him at all. He was at peace within all this noise. He could not give the reasons for this new inner security, but his happiness held him there drinking until the place closed. And he had had to breathe in deeply, and actually tell himself he was not drunk. The diarrhoea this morning had addled that enjoyment. The buzzer was pressed again. He was rushing into the bathroom again and closing the door. And when he got his trousers down, and had seated himself in the most comfortable position on the toilet bowl which Dots had covered with some imitation fur material that was white; and when he had taken a deep breath to control the thunder and the brown geyser (“Shit! I hate to have these runnings! And with strangers around!”), Dots was answering the door. Boysie closed the bathroom door more firmly. He reached over and grabbed the can of air freshener. Just then, he had forgotten to hold his breath, and the explosion occurred, and in his panic, he heard his wife outside shouting, “Come in, come in, come in, man. Come in!” She was covering up the evidence.

Boysie could not even relax in the bathroom. “I have to shit with a can o’ air freshener in my blasted hand!”

“How you?” Bernice’s voice came through the bathroom. If he could hear them out there, could they also hear him in here? So he tried to keep quiet, and pass the time and the Scotches and the chili con carne which he had eaten from an all-night stand on Yonge Street, and the gas that was in his system, hoping that Dots outside with the guests would anticipate each explosion and each eruption of the brown geysers inside his system, and raise her voice again to cover the evidence of sound. And then he broke out laughing. “Imagine me, in my own blasted apartment, and I can’t shit as I like for fear that people out there hear me! Jesus Christ!” But he held on more firmly to the air freshener and to his self-control.
Sound was one thing, he knew, but smell was another. “… and I thought you would like to meet …” He hadn’t quite heard the young man’s name, because the toilet bowl held the echo.

“You forget that I met …” That was Dots’s voice. He couldn’t mistake that voice anywhere. Dots’s voice was a trained voice.

“Oh, that’s right! I forget that you meet him already …” Boysie became alert. Where had she met him, this young man, before? But he had to concentrate on his business, and get outside to greet his guests, and he had to be careful that he had wiped properly, because “this kind of thing always bothers me to do clean …”

Bernice looked good. She was wearing another new dress. It was new to Dots. And to the young man, who had hinted to Bernice that she should wear her styles a few years younger. This one was too young. It was a short black dress, fitting almost too close about the waist, and bringing out the uneven bulges and form of her hips. If you looked closely, you could see the outline of her panties beneath the material. The sleeves were long, and the neckline was cut low, low enough for the eyes to wonder and the hand to wander, mentally, about what was contained deeper down. Her shoes were in the latest style, with thick soles; and Dots saw that her pantihose were charcoal grey, and when she reached down to pick up Bernice’s scarf which had fallen as she took off her spring coat (although spring was not yet here, but the day was pleasant in its temperature and disposition), that Bernice’s calves were still firm, and that the blue veins were hardly visible.

This bitch looking more younger than me! This young man must be good for her. “Come in, come in, come in, and have a seat,” Dots said, with both their coats in her hands, showing the man to a seat. “So, how Lew is, today?”

“Fine, thank you,” the young man said, not quite at ease. He had watched Dots closely as he came in, and he had stolen a glance at Bernice, and in the comparison, he was a bit uneasy that he was going with a woman so old. For even although Bernice was taking great care to look younger, and was wearing her hair in the natural style, which though it was almost completely grey, still gave her a youthful look, he still was not unaware that he was taking his grandmother to bed. His own grandmother had been fifty when he left Jamaica ten years ago. Age meant something to him. But Dots, as he saw her, must be somewhere in her thirties … his mind was wandering.