No Safeguards (25 page)

“Then why didn't you do better in biology? Mrs. Bensemana got you out of police custody a couple o' times. You even had fantasies of screwing her.”

“She's a good teacher and a good person. I'll grant her that. One time she was on duty when Alfred was picking on Milford and John — two Black, openly gay geek guys with lockers close to us — and the other guys were egging him on, and she told Alfred: ‘You're seeing in them something that is in you. Deal with your problem and leave them alone.'” He stares at the floor, his forehead screwed up. “She shouldn't have let Bégin suspend me. Take Madame Loubier. One time we were doing this assignment on verbs that end in ‘er'. One of the sentences we had to make was with the words
sucer
,
bébé
and
pouce
. My sentence was: ‘
Maintenant le bébé suce son pouce. Quoi sucera-t-il lorsqu'il sera grand?
' You know what Madame Loubier did? She ticked the first sentence correct and ignored the rest. You know why? She knew that was hormone blabber. But Mrs. Bensemana — some biology teacher —she couldn't let it go. Had to humiliate me. Push me to the wall. And I had to get even. I just had to get even.”

“Paul, get real! You told her you wanted to screw her. And you gave your classmates copies of your request. And when she first ignored you, you went after her again. If you were adult, you'd have been accused of stalking. So you failed biology to punish
her
?” I chuckle.

“I attended her classes — a lot more than I did for the courses I failed outright. I loved her class. I just didn't do the assignments. I got 88 on the provincial exam, zero for class work, and 62 after they normalized it. I didn't fail biology. Well for me — my standards — a 60 is a failure . . . Jay, you saw how I howled when I looked at Grama lying in the casket. Afterwards I had nightmares in which she stared at me in silent anger.”

Silence. Paul opens and closes his fingers the way Anna did when she was flustered.

“
Metamorphoses.
Sometimes we escape into traps. Daphne escaped Apollo's lust and became a tree. I fell into that depression when I knew I'd trapped myself. You set fire to your enemy's house and end up burning down your own. You discover that the people you see as enemies are really friends. Our intellect and our instincts are at war. Intellect loses and later punishes us with the knowledge that we were daft. Addicts must know this . . . These are thoughts I explore in my journal under the heading Self-Amputation. You too could benefit from similar self-exploration.”

“Maybe, Paul. But we hope that common decency trumps all else. Think back to the fairy tales Grama read to you. Witchery in them was just another name for cruelty — cruelty that turns beauty into ugliness. But kindness, love, and justice turn even frogs into princely human beings. It's why some people love Christianity. It's a lovely fairy tale for adults who need it. And all of us need a fairy tale at times.”

Paul sneers, tries to hide it, and gives a yes-and-no headshake. “Then here's something I think you should know. Remember that asthma attack I had at the police station? Well, a month after the incident Mrs. Mehta pushed me to get involved in a mentoring programme the cops were trying to establish with inner-city high schools. Ma had to agree. I told her I wouldn't do it if she told you. Did she tell you?

“No, she never did.”
Of course, she told me.

“You see, that's how much I looked up to you. I didn't want you to know that I'd sunk so low. I had one outing with the cops, François and Nadine. Both French-Canadian. François looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties: youngish face, hair completely grey, kind brown eyes — not eyes you associate with cops. Nadine was young, late twenties, brown eyes too, face like a hatchet. Tall. As tall as François. Dressed in civvies, they came to the school one Thursday just before lunch hour. I was in English class. Mrs. Mehta talked with them outside the door. I got into the car, not a police cruiser, and they took me to a fast food joint outside Côte des Neiges. François told me that my teachers said I was very bright, but they were worried I might go delinquent. He showed me pictures of his three children — a boy 19 in CEGEP, a girl 16 just finishing high school, and a girl 11. He'd sent all his children to Collège Français, a private school. His wife taught in a private school on the South Shore. Nadine asked me about St. Vincent. I told them about Grama, Cousin Alice, Aunt Mercy, you, and Ma. They already knew about you. Guess Mrs. Mehta had filled them in. François did most of the talking. He gave me his phone number and arranged for me to go see a film with his children the following Saturday. I didn't go and I never called.” He falls silent for a long time, swallows a few times. “My classmates would have put a price on my head. They'd have branded me a snitch, a
délateur
.” He bites his lower lip and swallows. “That's no fairy tale.

“For a while I'd see François around, and he'd wave to me and smile, or just honk the horn. One day I was on Isabella near Victoria, and he came by with a male partner, and he pulled over and motioned for me to come to the car window. He wanted to know if I was staying clean. Then he said, he understood. ‘
Tes paires! C'est toujours le même problème. Je comprends. C'est pas facile.
' Then he disappeared from Côte des Neiges.”

Anna had predicted that nothing would come of it, that Paul had pretended to go along to please Mrs. Mehta.

Paul's breathing is loud. This is stressing him. A long silence. “I'm tired, Jay. I need to go lie down.”

I
T'S 1:12 PM
June 29, 2007. Paul and I are in the sitting room. Everything that can be boxed is in cartons. The movers will be here in three hours. Seated in the armchair, I stare at the wall ahead. There used to be a blown-up print there: boisterous white waves and green swaying coconut palms in the foreground, grey mountains in the background, the sea a washed-out blue: a panoramic photo of the Georgetown Coast. Anna had bought it from a Vincentian photographer one year when she went with a colleague to the annual St. Vincent and Grenadines Thousand Islands Park Picnic. The space the picture covered is a clean rectangle in a sea of smudge.

Paul, his head thrown back on the sofa, is staring sideways at the floor.

It has come to this. We must all go off to our separate lives. In two days Jonathan begins a tenure-track appointment at the University of Moncton. In August he'll defend his dissertation.

“I'm hungry. Let's order some food,” Paul says.

“I'm not hungry.”

Paul gets up from the sofa, walks across to me, and taps me on the shoulder. “Cheer up, Bro. It's not a funeral. You and I are still here . . . for each other.”

Jonathan remained hopeful that he and I would get together. He was willing to accept a CEGEP job offer and remain here, if I would agree to become his partner: sacrifice a university tenure-track position to enter into a hopeless relationship.

“Jonathan, there's no magic formula anywhere to imbue friendship with erotic desire.” I felt bad right after saying so.

We were sitting near a street window in a café near Bleury and Saint Catherine — a grey, late, Thursday April afternoon. I had turned in my grades for Introduction to History earlier that day and felt like celebrating. Saint Catherine Street was thronged with people heading home from work or to the shops.

In the tense silence, I recalled parts of the conversation we'd had the Sunday after we'd seen
CRAZY
.

“Jay,” Jonathan said, “I've told you over and over, I'll be patient.”

You'll be patient, but I'm exasperated.

“I'll make this deal with you. You don't have to have sex with me.”

I wondered what fanciful planet he inhabited. “And if it doesn't work out?”

“It will be my fault, not yours.”

I shook my head and tried to tamp down my frustration. “Jonathan, this horse stopped breathing a long time ago. In fact, it never breathed. Take the job in Moncton. Focus on putting the finishing touches on your dissertation.” I hated my bluntness.

His face taut, his frown lines deep, Jonathan turned his head to the left in the direction of the counter so I wouldn't see how pained he was. “Why did you give up?”

“My mother's death, Paul's disappearance. For a long time I felt stunned.”

“You think you might go back to it in a few years?” He turned to look at me now. “Teaching history might rekindle the urge.”

“Who knows? Right now I feel like my guts have been scooped out.”

We slipped into another silence, I into a reverie. Jonathan rapping his knuckles on the table broke it. “You're far away. I want you here, beside me, in my arms, if you'd let me.”

People came and left. Neither of us felt like getting up.

“So,” Jonathan said, his eyes glassy, “this is how it ends?”

“No, Jonathan. There's no ending. We'll remain brothers. I want you to be happy. Be adventurous until you find the right person. I'm like the brother you'll share your joys and grief with when you need to. We'll celebrate our triumphs and mourn our failures.”

“You frustrate me. Why can't we do all that and be a couple too?”

“Lovely exteriors — in fairy tales they're made of candy — conceal witches. Sirens lure mariners to their deaths. Beautiful maidens in castles make knights abandon their quests.”

“You're speaking in codes. I don't understand what you're saying.”

“Neither do I. It's logorrhoea. Let's go. You have my new address. As soon as I know the telephone number, you'll have it. You'll have no excuse not to visit me when you're in town. When you get hitched, your boyfriend will be welcome too.”

That night and the following night I dreamed the same dream: that I murdered someone through the mail with neurotoxins, that the police are investigating, that I think cameras are recording my movements, and that one of my friends knows the facts. And now last night's dream.

It begins with Jonathan and me alone in the basement of Jonathan's house. At some point it changes to me at eight. Anna, her cheeks swollen, her head bandaged, sends me off to school. At lunch hour I come home; she isn't there, and there's no food. At some point a missionary from the States, the station sergeant, and Caleb enter the dream. Caleb staggers while the station sergeant handcuffs him, and the missionary shouts: “He's a fraud. Lock him up.” Then there's an open door that gives way to the street and reveals the profile of Jonathan, pacing back and forth.

What should I make of this dream? I'd blamed myself for the second beating that Caleb gave Anna. Did I blame Grama for the first? I'd known that Grama had made her do something that Caleb thought was wrong, that the something meant she would have no more children. That much I'd understood until Grama told me the full story. Was that why I felt so distant from her? Now I see Anna's abandonment — from clumsiness or panic, not cruelty, I'm sure. I must have accepted it as a just punishment for causing the beating. Between my father's coming to Sister Simmons' place at the beginning and Grama's coming to get me at school, I remember nothing, not even how I ended up at Sister Simmons'. Now I remember Anna saying a second time that she didn't want to die before making amends — and I'd cut her off. Told her to stop it. Felt I couldn't go through another episode about how she'd wronged Paul. Maybe it wasn't about Paul after all. And what's the connection to Jonathan?

Paul's phoning for food brings me back to the present. I wonder what Paul dreams about. At least he's putting his life back together. Bill persuaded him to go back to school. To Concordia to study creative writing. They were pleased with his writing portfolio and accepted him.

***

Three months ago, two weeks after Paul's return from a visit to see “Maria,” he and I went to St. Vincent to put Aunt Mercy into a nursing home. Dementia had come upon her suddenly. She couldn't understand, she'd say, why Cynthia had gone to town and stayed so long. We told her Grama was dead. She said she knew. But a few minutes later she would wonder why Cynthia had stayed so long. “I certain-sure Lucy getting worried. Nobody to relieve her for her lunch.” We told her the store had been sold. We asked her if she remembered Anna. She said yes. “She in Canada with two beautiful boys, one the spitting image o' Cynthia.” She'd stopped cooking, insisting that she was waiting for Cynthia to bring the groceries, and wouldn't let anyone cook for her.

It was during the March reading week, at the peak of the dry season. We were on the front porch. The air turned misty beige whenever the breeze gusted; the soil was powdery and golden, the grass and weeds were shrivelled, the rose bushes speckled with blight and many of the flowering plants dead. The bougainvillaea, blooming lusciously when I went home to bury Anna's ashes the year before, now looked scraggly and struggling. Aunt Mercy's sudden dementia made her forget to water them. Mr. Morris would have done it but now he spent most of his days in a wheelchair on his front porch. Nine months before he had come to Anna's funeral looking quite strong. Now he was a paraplegic. I stared at the houses stretching up the steep slope, many many more than when I lived in Havre, some perched precariously on the lower precipices. Looming above the town and girding it as they had always done were the sheer black and limestone cliffs, looking now like semi-bald pates because of the shrunk foliage.

“Jay.” Paul broke the reverie and then paused to suck apple juice through a straw from a two-litre bottle. He was shirtless and barefoot, the fat folds in his waist and stomach prominent. He pointed to the main door at my back, to a horseshoe nailed at the top, just above where the glass ended. “Know how that got there?”

I shook my head.

“Aunt Mercy put it there. A lot of people put horseshoes on their front doors and slept with their bibles open at the 23
rd
psalm with a pair of scissors in the form of a cross on it. That's what Aunt Mercy told me.

“Remember Jestina? Used to crow like a cock and curse with rapping speed. Talked like a man too sometimes, with a deep-deep voice. Like an old woman too: cracks in her voice. Clucked like a baby. The works. No joke. She'd run after people and try to butt them, like a bull. And people believed the horns were there, only invisible. After she started pelting people with shit, her family began tying her up.”

“You remember all that?”

“Because I saw it all.”

“Did Grama know you went?”

He shook his head.

“
You
sneaked away and went!”

“Aunt Mercy took me. She told Mr. Morris that she was going up the hill to see the happenings. I begged her to carry me and promised to keep it a secret, so she took me.

“Jay, you don't remember the Sunday when everybody in Havre took sago palms and coconut fronds and surrounded Jestina's house and beat the ground and the house walls, inside and out?”

I shook my head. “I remember it caused a commotion, but not the specifics.”

“Some weird shit, man. To frighten the spirits and drive them away. Afterwards they washed down the inside and outside of the house and sprinkled the yard with turpentine and Dettol. There was an account of it in the newspapers.”

“Did Grama go?”

“No. In the store next day she argued with a woman called Eloise about it. Grama told her that educated people said evil spirits don't exist.

“Eloise gasped. ‘Ma Kirton, shame on you! You don't know that people what educated plenty serve the devil! They belongs to the Anti-Christ Legion. I will tell Pastor Boatswain to come and enlighten you ‘bout the ways of the educated.'

“‘Eloise, all that light will blind me.'

“‘Ma Kirton, since you doubting what everybody see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears, and now you even refusing help — you sure is not you that put the jumbie-them in Jestina?'

“‘You want me to put one in you, Eloise? How about my husband's? He will give you lots of loving, make you work hard, and save your money.' Then she told Lucy to dispatch Eloise quickly, that all that jumbie talk was threatening to turn her into a jumbie too.

“Jay, wait till you hear this.” Paul went inside and returned with a bound notebook from the two boxes of Grama's papers that we would be carrying back, and began to read:

August 16, 1995

Everybody is afraid to venture out after dark. Havre has gone crazy. Jumbie this and jumbie that! Jumbie! Jumbie! Jumbie! Every single newspaper has it in their headline. You mean to tell me there's nobody intelligent enough in these newspaper offices to go ask a psychiatrist to explain what this poor child is going through? That child is suffering from multiple personality disorder. Somebody she trusted probably did something terrible to her. Anna, you better send for these children quickly. They won't stay a day longer in this benighted place if I could help it.

“You know what, Jay: Grama was too hard on Haverites. I saw how Catholicism works in Guatemala. Cofradias. Maximo. San Simon. You just have to admire the naive faith of those Mayans and Ladinos. Stuff they've elaborated to help them in their dire lives. If Ma were still alive, I'd be patient with her. You were right, Jay. I know now that she found companionship in her church. Going back to her beliefs in God was the price she paid to have it.

“Jay, I plan to use Grama's journals in my writing. You won't mind, would you?”

I shook my head.

“And I'm coming back here to comb the newspapers for stories like Jestina's. One day I'll write a novel in which the community believes that Grama sold her soul to the devil to get rich. I'll probably throw in as well the speculation that she and Aunt Mercy were lovers. That way there'll be two motives for the community's dirty work.”

For a while we said nothing.

“You remember Millington?” I said.

“Millington. Millington.”

“The light-skinned fellow, lighter than me, almost white; narrow face; deep set, bright eyes, a wiry body; and very straight, overly long legs. Come on, you must remember him?”

Paul frowned.

“He went to Kingstown Secondary with me. He used to come here and we'd study together. Sometimes he and I went to the land together. Come on, you must remember him.”

“How could I forget?” Paul slapped his forehead. “When that teacher flogged you and you came home with your back all cut up and wouldn't tell Grama why, she walked up the hill and asked him. I went with her. Oh yes, Millington. You and he were on the back porch sometimes. A mixed-race fellow.”

“I hear he's now a Methodist minister in Barbados. He was Jestina's neighbour. He said Jestina's father used to try to beat the evil spirits out of her, and her parents force-fed her pepper, corila, and mauby-bark concentrate to make her blood bitter and unpalatable to the spirits. One day Father Henderson came here to collect a donation from Grama to bury a woman who'd left no burial money, and Grama and he got to talking about Jestina. Grama begged him to intervene to get psychiatric help for Jestina. He said that God lets these things happen to test the faithful and make them better Christians.”

Paul nodded. “Grama has an entry about it.” He turned the pages of the notebook and read: ‘Henderson. God's servant! Tell me about it. He's as hollow as bamboo and has the compassion of an ice-pick.'”