Issue 34 | Denise Laidler

The taxi driver surveyed the tense faces of the crowd spilling from the sidewalk and staring down Washington Boulevard, slapped his hand against the outside of the taxi door and called out to no one in particular.

“Eyyii! Wha’ de man dem a gwaan wid up the road?”

“Traffic jam. Bashment party just over while funeral procession a pass through.” A boy in khaki pants chewing the end of a hibiscus stalk shouted an answer. “See it dey! Yuh can glimpse the casket a go through.” He pointed a stalk like finger.

It was often like that on the island; talking to one was talking to all. Indeed, held aloft on the white-shirted shoulders of six men in flowing robes and matching turbans was balanced a silvery blue casket. Among the similarly garbed women wailing a slow dirge behind the men were a coterie of women kitted out in glittering dancehall finery, decals on their batty riders winked unabashedly.

“Who dead?” The driver called out again.

“How we mus’ know?”  A woman waiting in the bus line answered then sucked her teeth. “Dead man pick wrong time fi bury; now everybody late. Day soon done!”

2002 Elections were months away in October and Kingston was tense, coiled. A shirtless boy-man pumped away on an antiquated bicycle, heaving against pedals that seemed weighted with lead. Not a trickle of sweat in sight. If Indigo bothered to rouse herself sufficiently, she could spot the offending coffin. Usually, the absurdist, uniquely Jamaican, roadside pantomime flitting outside the taxi window soothed her. Not today. Feet already dusted in a fine patina of road grit, the cotton of the sundress she’d meticulously chosen for this trip to Capo’s already damp against the vinyl of the taxi’s back seat, Indigo rolled down the window halfway, determined to ignore the degrading heat putting her body in a slow boil. A cane man wrangled his flatbed pushcart laden with cane stalks, jelly coconuts and who knew what else. As traffic idled, the taxi driver half turned his face toward her.

“Want a coconut?”

Bashment and funeral clash notwithstanding, surely they should be more than halfway to Capo’s new refuge in Bog Walk by now? Indigo shook her head and he hopped out of the car to deftly exchange coins for his jelly coconut and two bags of something she couldn’t make out. Suddenly, she considered the road ahead and shouted to the driver. “Two jellies, please. Two!”

As they waited for traffic to peter out, Indigo watched the driver peel a cane stick with his teeth as he chatted with the fruit vendor lobbing tops off coconuts. Something slippery and undefined shimmied. It wasn’t the state she’d find him in. Neither was it the riptide of desperation in her Adassa’s 3:00 a.m. phone call nine days before that had brought news of Capo’s current troubles.  Clearer than the long-distance static, her stepmother’s rum-soaked voice had trickled through Indigo’s pre-dawn brain fog.

“Lawd Indy, ’im sick bad. De docta dem say cancer, maybe. Time to come…”

Someone had taken a two by four to her head. Sick? Sick how? She’d felt blindly around the panic then recalled the nature of this tribe in its habitat and sighed.

“Is this the new Morse code for ‘send Western Union?”  

Adassa had trudged on. “He barely get out of bed, eat like a bird, can’t keep down a thing.”

No tree lives forever, you old crow, she’d thought, but instead had said, “He’s eighty-six end of the year; when he was born, it was pounds, not dollars. That’s what they do.”

“Is not age!” Adassa had hissed. “I knew you was going say dat!”

“Maybe this new baby mother or some little chickadee finally pushed you out of the nest.” She’d reached for the spite and cigarettes until the room righted itself.

“Who Jacinthe? Yuh mussi mad! That’s not it and neva ‘eva could be! You is Lena chile to de last! Two of you can’t wait to see him fall on ‘im knees so yuh can crow! Like yuh is God, lookin’ down on everybody else.”

“You must think so or you wouldn’t be calling. What’s wrong with him?”

“Sitting on the veranda in the middle of the night, hear ‘im talking to somebody. When I ask ‘im, he say is his mother and Papa. Smoking those Chesterfields ‘im Papa used to smoke. Wait ‘till I ketch who give ‘im!”

But maybe the jelly headed, wicked stepwitch was right. Reflexively, Indigo’s mind had run to Aunt Mercie. No volcano level family event escaped the unerring crystal ball her dreams reliably proved to be. But not a peep had come. Indigo relaxed against the pillow.

“Only you worried? Nobody else called.”

“Which one of yuh sisters yuh think care? Think yuh supposed to have more sense than everybody.”

“But he can’t call himself? It’s 2002 now and still not a word, letter or homing pigeon. Old leopard can’t change, I suppose.”

“I callin’, so it mus count for somethin’. What yuh want him to do? Come to you wid beggin’ saucer?”

“What about Claudine?”

“Like she care. Call them and yuh will see! For all yuh stinginess, Capo insist: you first. Think we don’t know you down here three, four times a year, but don’t set eyes on yuh owna fadda last five now.”

Fifth but first. Indigo smirked in remembrance at his little inside joke with the regulars at Ruckus. 

“Sell that one-way guilt trip somewhere else.”

She must be drunk now, Indigo had barely restrained herself from pondering out loud. She knew who and what Adassa was, never mind the knife she’d help twist in the back of her parents’ flailing marriage and the gold bit Capo had belatedly slipped on those nail eaten fingers so she could at last claim the decrepit title ‘Mrs. Wade.’ Didn’t this woman realise, or had she forgotten, that she’d seen her scratching and clawing in the dirt and straw dust behind the woodshop at the old house with Capo’s side girls she’d sniffed out? Oblivious to dusty skirts flying over press and curls turned chicken nest; dusty panties flashing, they’d fought like green lizards until one of the apprentice carpenters had thrown water on their writhing bodies with the stern admonishment, “Get up before Missa Capo come see dis behaviour!”

“When las’ yuh send a dollar, for all you have? Adassa had demanded. “Appear and disappear as yuh please!” Something had been smothered in the phone receiver before she’d continued. “Yuh know anything good and righteous ’bout ’im?”

Indigo examined the question, then flicked it away with cigarette ash. “Good and righteous? Like what?” Shame and upbraiding attempts from Drunk Already Adassa always fell on stony ground.

“Yuh know all the badness, neva talk nuttin good ’bout the kinda man ’im is. “Who yuh think ‘low yuh ‘fi talk loud and hear your own voice first in this world? Put yuh pn American soap box suh stranger can hear ‘im chil recite poem she write in school? Lena tell yuh dat? Every year, plus nuff times in between, ’im drive down inna de ghetto, down all de places government and Prime Minister forget and reach out to de suffering youth who live without mother and father and ’im give dem a likkle money, some clothes, shoes.”

“But nothing for the suffering of his own,” Indigo pronounced coldly, mind already sifting and calculating.

“Mine now, is still yuh father.” Her tone held a warning she had no right to give.

“So his memory still works. Just like old pipes: conveniently.”

“Poor Indigo, always blue.” Indigo could almost see the old woman’s head shaking. “Your father waan see you,” she insisted. “Come . . . before he go.”

Panic, revulsion and anger had taken turns with her insides. “Call his other children if you can find them. I’m neither miracle worker nor witch doctor. That I leave to you.”

“You,” she’d hissed. “Capo say you first.”

Twenty minutes later, the procession finally passed, traffic cleared and the taxi continued down Washington Boulevard toward Greenwich Farm Fishing village. Indigo chuckled as she half listened to the taxi driver hold court on the latest national outrage. Aesop, Aristotle, Kant weren’t dead. They’d reincarnated as Jamaican taxi drivers, who possessed and liberally dispensed Ph.D. level knowledge on a mix of microeconomics, game theory and geopolitical intrigue. This time yet another politician pilfering scandal. Something about energy saving light bulbs from Cuba disappearing into the ether only to materialize as hot and cold cash in her Cayman account. Corruption as usual.

“But my girl,” he slyly asked. “Who you know live a dem place? Nice girl like you, “Only one reason girl like you come a dem place;. Love or revenge. So me see it.”

For what she’d christened ‘Capo’s Rescue the Perishing’ mission, Indigo had risen obscenely early. Best to go, she’d reasoned, before his confederates arrived to hoist him on prideful shoulders and paraded exalted versions of him, none of whom remembered birthdays, graduations, current addresses. Fish tea, she’d decided. Start with fish tea. The way old midwives from Sav-la-Mar used to make it. Face pressed against the window of the jolting taxi, Indigo was pretzelising herself to commit this territory to memory, to finger trace the roadmap that had delivered her so far in distance and texture from Aunt Mercie’s home in Kingston, down this serpentine descent, past the sun-bleached ruins of the old Registrar General building, through the crumbling garrison hidden in the interior of Spanish Town and toward his house she’d never clapped eyes on; that he hadn’t thought to mention until after this latest girlfriend had birthed their twin torpedoes she’d seen only in polaroid images that arrived in her mailbox swathed in sheets of brown paper bag secured with duct tape. Strange that he’d ended up in a town none of his children knew, among disinterested strangers, suited out with spanking new daughters no-one his existing family recognized.

Four years previously, homesickness nipping at her heels, Indigo’s mandatory Jamaica fly-ins had begun with Christmas, then continued with Easter and Independence holidays. It hadn’t taken much to reconnect with friends from their prep and high school, she still recalled from nostalgia scented girlhood in Kingston. A clothesline of white-uniformed schoolgirls taking laconic, meandering walks through narrow, walled streets, a light breeze rustling their greyish blue ties, white skirts and dovetailed with their trilling voices.

After word had come that he’d had sold the house that had sheltered generations of Wades, Indigo couldn’t quite make out where home was. Its sale had been a poison to ward off, a generation before had promised, had sworn in the old kitchen over Capo’s grandfather’s bible never to allow. But other bodies lived there now, to whom all living Wades were strangers to guard against, at whom they’d look askance if any of the sisters showed up to point fingers, claim even a fence post. Even so, the Wade house had always felt abandoned to Indigo, even when reams of family streamed in and out of its rooms, or the floors shook from the exertions of the night. Traced in etch-a-sketch memory was the post-colonial balanced on termite-infested floorboards held together by memory. The walls were dotted with hazy pictures of dead aunts shrouded in wedding tulle and stiff, high collared dresses who Indigo half expected to show up around corners in the shuttered rooms she passed on her way to the bathroom at night. Scattered throughout the house had been mismatched Louis XIV furniture: sofas saturated with the easy dalliances of countless Saturday nights; tables watermarked with the food drink of champions. Always, there was the feel of a flimsy memory just over the curve of the shoulder, intermingled with a barely perceptible sniff of decay and neglect.

Her father, Cooper Wade had been the epicenter of his Arnette Gardens community in the hinterlands of Kingston. Somehow he managed to straddle a delicate line of independence, a hair’s breadth out of the pockets of the political leader and the ghetto don who ran the garrison and much of the surrounding community.