The Bigger Light (30 page)

“No!”

“Yesss, girl.”

“A-gaffa? A-gaffa! The A-gaffa we know? The same one who married we Henry? No, not she, not her, not the same A-gaffa who I blamed for killing-off Henry, poor fellow.”

“May he rest in peace.”

“Lord, have mercy.”

“Poor Henry. Yuh telling me ’bout Agaffa, and how you saw her this afternoon.”

“Did I say this afternoon?”

“I think so.”

“No, man. It was recently.”

“Recently, then.”

“Yes, recently.”

“Yuh know something, gal? We talking here ’pon this telephone just like back in the old days. You remember them days? The two o’ we up here in this country, lonely! How I would sit down in my room and call you up, and you up there at the Burrmanns. And we would talk, and lick we mouth, take the world apart and put it together again.”

“Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall!”

“A great fall. A great fall o’ loneliness. That is what it is.”

“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty back in one piece again.”

“Be-Jesus Christ, gal!”

“Dots, you still there? I won’t keep you much more longer, dear. But I wonder what time it must be now in Barbados? You ever, ever wonder about that? Or what the weather must be like?”

“It hot, gal. Hot as shite, too! Back there, now-so, you would be walking through the Lower Green bus-stand with a big basket in your hand, just come from shopping for supper for the missy, whoever you happen to be working for. Or you would be sitting down ‘pon the Explanade we just mentioned, with some European-woman child, chasing the flies outta his face or from getting into his mouth! Or you might be home in your own home, doing something or the other.”

“I was waiting for you to say I might be in my own home,” Bernice said. “Or even married.”

“In
Barbados?
”

“Or that I might be selling salt-fish and rancid butter from Australia, keeping shop in behalfs of one o’ them thiefing merchants down Swan Street, or Roebuck Street.”

“You are dreaming, gal.”

“I wonder sometimes. I sometimes wonder.” There was a pause in the conversation, during which there was heavy breathing. “I wonder, sometimes.”

“Yuh know why you are dreaming? I will tell you. I had this woman for a patient once. A woman from the States. The minute she heard my accent, she start talking to me. She spends all her holidays and good times in my island. I don’t grudge her for that. It is her damn money. And she told me she owns this big nightclub in Brooklyn, or New York, or the Bronx. They plays jazz. So she have the money to spend. But what really had me vexed as hell was the way she talked about
my
prime minister. That is where I draw the line. Just imagine. A
little Yankee bitch like her. She could haul her self from all up in Amer’ka where there is the biggest o’ race problems, and go down there in my peaceable country, and carry-on as if she owns the place. She is down there in kiddy-kingdom, and I am up here, me and you, Boysie, Henry … God bless his soul … the whole tribe o’ us immigrants from back home are up here, and we can’t pretend that we own a cement block in this country. That is what I mean?”

“What she did?”

“Did? Well, it is not a matter of did, Bernice. It is what she
thought
. And the thoughts that went along with the doing, which as far as I am concern, makes that doing even more worst than it was, if it had stop at the doing.”

“Tell me what she say, then.”

“Listen to this. This would change your mind about returning-back to that damn place, which we in times o’ distress and loneliness and discrimination up here calls home. This damn Yankee woman told me, told
me
, that she have this big car, the English car, man, what they call that kind o’ car that the Queen and Forbes Burnham in Guyana, and that little man from Grenada does drive ’bout in? You know that big powerful car? It is the kind o’ motto-car which is the first thing a prime minister down there does think ’bout driving-’bout in, when he start feeling he is the leader of the people.”

“Rolls-Royce? You mean a Rolls-Royce?”

“Thanks. She had one o’ them. She told
me
that. She now sell-out every damn thing she owned in Brooklyn, and New York, and she heading down to Barbados to live. Well, there ain’ nothing wrong with that. But hear this now. Listen to this thing now. This Rolls-Royce motto-car that she have, she intends to take to Barbados with her. And she ask me if I think, if poor-arse
me
, me a poor-arse black woman like me,
think the prime minister would buy it offa her? Do you know how much millions o’ we dollars that motto-car would cost? A car like that fit for a Queen to drive in
must
cost the taxpayers o’ Barbados every penny that still remain in that country. Just to clean and polish that Rolls-Royce must cost a thousand dollars a day.”

“Barrow would have more sense than that.”

“Barrow? Who Barrow?”

“Barrow.”

“That’s what I mean? Who is this Barrow?”

“Barrow. We prime minister. Errol or Dipper, as they does call him.”

“You don’t know that I am living away so long that I didn’t even know we had one’ them, a prime minister. And by the name o’ Barrow.”

“And yet, you still had them feelings ’bout the Rolls-Royce motto-car.”

“It is not a matter o’ feelings, Bernice. It is the principle of the thing. As my ex-mistress Mistress Hunter would say … God bless her soul …”

“She dead too?”

“Not really. I just say so for so. But as she would say, we have to see things through the correct
sperspective
o’ principles, always. So you see that when that Yankee bitch could leave Brooklyn or New York and go down there and cattawoul with a big important person like a prime minister, I am not talking about no ordinary person like a civil servant now. I mean a prime minister. A man like Trudeau or President Nixon, or the Queen. So when she could pick up her hot arse and wander down there and eat and drink with a prime minister, and then expect we prime minister to do what she wondered to me, as what she wanted him to do, Bernice there and then I write
Barbados clean-clean offa my books. Barbados then becomes in importance just like a little town in the north o’ Ontario. Barbados ain’ nothing, ain’t
neffing
to her!”

“Those is some harsh words, though.”

“The thruth, Bernice, the truth is always a harsh thing to speak, to hear and to listen to.”

“Still.”

“The thruth, the truth, or as we say, the trute.”

“But, wait. You know how long we been licking our mouth on this telephone? And I didn’t even tell you what I had to tell you.”

“Agaffa.”

“Yes. A-gaffa told me that she found out after all these years of asking herself who was really the person who wrote that letter to her, criticizing her concerning marrieding a black man, Henry. You remember? When the letter came? From somebody who didn’t sign her name at all? And how the poor girl was upset, just before the wedding.”

“Boysie told me ’bout it.”

“Guess who that letter came from?”

“I had always thought that Henry himself had write that letter to try to get outta marrieding Agaffa. But I wasn’t sure. From Agaffa’s ex-boyfriend?”

“The mother.”

“The mother?” Dots screamed the word through the telephone. Bernice was silent for a while.

“Her own dear mother!”

“That bitch?”

“That is a mother, sometimes. When she wants to keep tie-ing a girl-child. The lady I works for have a word for it.
Imbillical cords
. That imbillical cord is sometimes damn hard to cut off.”

“I was thinking today that I wish I hadn’ left the domestic scheme. No, wait and let me explain. Here I am as a nurse-aide, for years, and I still can’t make progress in the things I want to make progress in. Now, just listening to you and listening to the whole conversation we having, and especially that last
sperspective
you mentioned. I remember during some class at the Doctor’s when I was in training, that a doctor was saying something about this same ambillical cord. He was saying something that strike me as being funny funny funny. I wish I had the knowledge to really understand what a ambillical cord stands for, you know, the ins and outs. But it sound as if a ambillical cord is a damn serious thing. Ain’t it the thing that does join-on a child to its mother?”

“It is that.”

“And does connect life with death? Is that what it is too? I think that is what it is. Well, that ambillical thing is the
same
thing that is connecting my lack o’ progress in being a damn nurse-aide to my progress if I had remained a domestic and had take classes at night school. And you know why I saying this? Boysie. Boysie has move-ahead o’ me in this regards. Boysie has moved outta my life, through education. He isn’t taking no night courses at night school, but I think he is learning
something
, some-damn-thing, to make him change so. It isn’t the money so much that he is making. And he is making a damn lot o’ that. More than I ever expect him to make. It ain’t the money. I think it will have to be the
sperspective
. And the sad thing is that I am the person who first mentioned this sperspective-thing to him. But he is the first to use it. The same thing with you.”

“Me?”

“You and Lew. You is a servant. And he is a lawyer-man. I gone. I going hang-up. I gone.”

Dots was tired. She would come home from work and she would always be tired. She was working less overtime these days, but there was still this eternal fatigue in her body, all through her bones, and it limited the number of things she could do in the apartment. She thought of taking a tonic. Something like Geritol, which she had seen advertised on television when she would sit alone, with the cat curled up in her lap, waiting for the hours to pass, waiting for the television programmes to get more and more uninteresting, until eleven o’clock came when she could watch the CBC news, and during the most important part of the national news go into the bathroom to brush her teeth and to look at the black circles around her eyes, and come back outside into the living room just in time to hear “O Canada” being played, with the Queen riding a horse up in England and jet planes flying overhead, and she would always remember as they sped past her on the screen that two or three of them crashed at a Canadian National Exhibition some years ago; and then she would take the cat up in her hand, and go into the bedroom, and close the door behind her. And there she would spend her long time of night.

The cat would jump about in the bed, playing with the strings on her pink quilted housecoat, until it felt tired and purred itself to sleep in her lap, between her legs. And Dots would turn on the late-hour radio programme from CHIN, with its West Indian music, black American music, and the West Indian announcer from Jamaica who tried unsuccessfully to talk like an American from the deep South. The songs would be of love and of lovers: of love that was not returned, and of lovers who had not looked back; and somehow, it would make her feel less lonely, probably because she was sharing an eternal arrangement with the countless women out there, some of them living in the lighted apartment windows
surrounding her, on floors above hers, and floors below, to the right, to the left, in front and behind. So many people in one city, so many people so close to her, and she alone, at midnight in her apartment, with the cat and CHIN radio station.

She is ready for bed now. She gets up from lying down on top of the bedspread. Tonight the newspaper is still in the bed, folded and unread. She takes off her pink housecoat, and she is surprised that she is still wearing her nurse’s uniform. “Forgetful?” she says, and she could have been talking to someone, or to the cat, or even to Boysie. She stands in front of the mirror on the wall, and she looks at herself, only for a moment or so, and then she opens her drawer where she keeps one of the two silk scarves which she uses for tying her head before she takes any piece of clothing over her head. Sometimes she would wear one of them when she is taking a bath. Or sometimes when she is vacuuming the living room. She combs out her hair, and braids it up, and ties the scarf back on her head. She pulls a hair out of her chin with a badly working pair of tweezers.

She walks to the clothes cupboard, which is beside her side of the bed, and she opens it, and hangs up the housecoat on a nail which she has herself nailed there. She unbuttons the work dress, takes it off, takes the housecoat off the nail, throws it on the bedspread, and hangs the dress on the same nail. She dresses and undresses behind this door of the cupboard when Boysie is in the bedroom with her, and she does it even when she is alone, with only the cat lying on the bed watching her. She puts on the housecoat. But she has forgotten something, so she takes it off again. It is her slip. Then she puts the housecoat on again. If she was going to take a bath tonight, she would have walked into the bathroom with these clothes on, as she does all the time. But tonight she is too tired to take her bath.

Still standing behind the cupboard door, with her cat watching her from the slits of his eyes, she takes off her brassiere, and as if she is uncomfortable with the eyes watching her, she puts on the housecoat quickly, and closes the cupboard door, and sits on the bed. She runs her hands up and down her legs, and the pantyhose comes off in her hands, like old skin. Once (Boysie was in bed when she did this undressing; and he said, “What the arse! You know what you remind me of? A fucking priest dressing in robes! Look woman, I am your husband, so why you are hiding behind that door when you are taking off your clothes, every night?”) she spent the whole night sleeping in her housecoat and her work dress.

Tonight she merely takes off the housecoat, this time for the last time, keeps her panties on, and in her nightgown, the flannel one, gets into bed, under the covers, and continues to listen to the radio.

The lights are all burning. So she gets up and puts them out, one by one, all of them, except one which burns all night like a beacon to show Boysie the way between the furniture and the tricky centre tables, just in case he comes home drunk again. Back in the bedroom she peels the bedspread off the bed, and folds it and hangs it properly over the back of a chair. She fixes her furlike slippers side by side beside the bed on her side, she cuffs the pillows on Boysie’s side, and climbs back into bed. The radio is turned down, the lights are off in the bedroom, and she lies there thinking of Little Janey. The cat yawns and suddenly there is only the voice of a singer …