“No buts, dear. It is final. Next week you traveling on that damn white boat to the city to see your sister’s doctor. Write a quick letter telling her you’re coming to spend a few days, and don’t raise no issue of the damn bread. The bread business going to be here when you come back. You not going to die and leave me all alone here like a hermit.”
Mary had known that the writing on the wall was there for quite a while. She had resisted her husband for as long as she could, fully knowing that the bread excuse was not the reason for her obstinacy. She had harbored doubts about hospitals and doctors for a long time. She even boasted, “I never cross the doorstep of any doctor’s office and hope I don’t ever have to.”
Previously, in the final stage of her pregnancy, her feet had become extremely swollen, and her pallor was pale, and a worried husband had beseeched her to travel to the Cockatara hospital to give birth.
“I’m staying right here. Midwife Pollard from Yaroni will do just fine.”
It was. She birthed a healthy eight-pound baby, Jason, without any complications. Whenever she felt under the weather enough to raise John’s concern, the question of her seeing a doctor was always brushed aside. It was not really an obsession about the places and persons providing medical care but the lingering fear of the probing and testing done to find something for which there might be no cure. She reasoned, “What you don’t know can’t worry you.” Mary did eventually travel by steamer to Georgetown and stayed a full week with her sister, Cleo, and son, Jason, in the small house on James Street.
It was a memorable week, aside from the dreaded visit with the doctor and x-rays and blood tests. Mary enjoyed immensely the time spent bonding with her sister after many years and was reinvigorated and pleasured by Jason, who sat close to her on the Berbice chair in the evenings, reading verses of poetry he had written, a habit he had recently cultivated. She was impressed by Jason’s ability to enunciate, his clear, strong voice in full flow. How enthralling for her to observe this new side of Jason. He read aloud.
Barely audible
A tiny voice squeaks a silent word over the river
And into a life injected.
Down a lonely highway a man limps towards the shade shaking anger.
All fruits of reaping dispersed
Leaving for another crop.
As shifting sands disturb the reef
Pastures loaned
Cow dung raising a stench to heaven (or hell)
Failure to find driftwood on the turbulent way or
Stubs on feet in vacant spaces
And fear at the margin lending onto want
Stinging
Hurting
Must flame the forest
Run the river red
And leave bones on carcass drying in the sun.
Her eyes shone brightly, and with a clap of the hands, she remarked, “Beautiful! Jason, you are our pride and joy. Stay close to your auntie. Learn your lessons. The world is at your fingertips.” And with her characteristic broad smile that showed a couple of missing molars, she then retired to the bed she shared with Cleo.
Mary did not tell either her sister or son about the results of the tests or the diagnosis and prognosis of her illness. She was her cheerful self. On the day before she returned to Tenaboo, after a final visit with the doctor the day before, she remarked, “Everything is fine. Just a hard chest cold I got that get chronic. Just like what John said, standing up in front of that damn mud oven, day in and day out, is really proving to be too much”.
Mary returned to Tenaboo, to John, and the daily routine of kneading and baking bread. She fed John the same false story she had told before, going about her business as if she did not have a care in the world.
*****
“Jason! You’re sleeping all night in the Berbice chair and leaving your pillow and cover tossed all over the place like you back in Tenaboo. You’re almost a man. Just now is your seventeenth birthday, and you’re behaving like you come from off the streets. Another thing, I notice these days you’re slacking up and coming home later and later in the afternoon,” Cleo bellowed as her nephew packed his lunch and books into the old haversack before leaving for school.
“I am late, lady. Stop the preaching. I’m off.” With barely a glance at his auntie, he hastened through the doorway and onto James Street for the short walk to the public road, to catch a minivan taxi on its way to Charles Secondary School in Georgetown.
Cleo was dumbfounded by her nephew’s attitude. She noticed a slow but rising tide of resentment toward her, the occasional excuse for missing Sunday church, and on weekends, instead of helping her to sell custard blocks, he left early in the morning, came home late in the afternoon, and when asked, he answered, “I’m going to the library.” But he never had books with him, not even a pen or pencil.
“Lady, the library got everything I need. Where else do you think I’m going? I need my space.”
She attributed the changes in Jason to his adolescence and perhaps to a country-boy-come-to-town syndrome. Had she been wrong all along? Cleo wondered whether her lack of experience in child-rearing was at the root of the problem. Had she been too harsh? Too soft? Too indulgent? The thought of Jason going astray under her watch weighed heavily on her. It was unthinkable to disappoint her sister, who relied on her and trusted her. On her knees, on the hard linoleum floor, she poured out her soul to her maker:
“Lord God, your humble servant comes before thee in great distress. I have no one to turn to, for you are all I know. I thank you for allowing my sister’s son to come and stay with me, to bring some joy and happiness in the evening of my life. Now I don’t know what is becoming of this young man. He is slipping away from your loving arms. Help him make it back to you. You are the only one who can do it, Lord. Let him find the peace that passeth all understanding and a refuge in the eye of a storm. Praise be to your holy name. Amen.”
Cleo kept a close watch on Jason. She questioned him at every turn. He reciprocated with brief answers and, at times, sulking and sucking his teeth, always in a hurry to go somewhere. He stopped addressing her as auntie, just lady.
*****
A month after his seventeenth birthday, Jason left home hurriedly in the morning for school. His auntie was preoccupied in the kitchen, pouring the custard mix into the trays before placement in the refrigerator. Jason left without a word.
“This boy getting beside himself,” she muttered. “I will teach him a lesson in manners this afternoon. He’s becoming too big for his shoes.”
It was late in the afternoon. Jason had not returned. She wondered, “He must be held up somewhere, or maybe an accident. Oh God! I hope nothing bad happened.”
She sat on the Berbice chair and waited until darkness. A fear of the unknown crept into her consciousness.
“Where could this boy be at this hour?” She sat up, paced the floor, and all the while, prayed for her nephew’s safe return.
It
