From Harvey River (12 page)

Wherever she went in Montreal, men were drawn to her–always the wrong men. On the bus some bank clerk or a graduate student attending McGill University would sit beside her and get off at the wrong stop just to follow her home, calling out after her, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, I will die if I do not see you again.” Her doctor fell in love with her, and kept arranging for her to come and be examined for sundry suspected illnesses. As a result of this unfortunate experience, she lost faith in the medical profession and pursued alternative forms of healing. She ate healthy foods and exercised every day and grew more and more beautiful and attracted more and more unsuitable men. Men who would forget to mention their wife of twenty years and their five children. Men who would threaten to commit suicide if she did not return their love, and who would then disappear after a few months, sending her notes that read: “My Beautiful Rose. You are too good for me, you deserve someone much better.”

Perhaps the father of the son born to Rose when she was in her early forties wrote such a letter to her before he disappeared from her life. Nobody ever knew who he was, for Rose carried the secret of his identity with her to the grave. But in 1951, Rose gave birth to a beautiful, healthy boy child, whom she christened David after his grandfather. When everyone saw a photograph of the boy, they all said he looked like an angel that had been sent to make Rose happy. Here was one man who would surely love her and stay with her as long as she lived.

 

I
t could be said that uncle Flavius spent his life trying to find and keep God. His true quest began one Friday night in the village square, when he, being at a loss to find suitable amusement for himself in quiet, peaceful Harvey River, decided at the urging of his brother Edmund and other locals boys to accompany a band of mockers on a mission to harass a group of Salvation Army evangelists. This was the best that they could do to provide themselves with some form of Friday-night entertainment.

When they got to the meeting, the Salvation Army band was in full swing; the trumpets were blasting and the kettle drums were booming as the white uniforms of the Army members gleamed under the light of bottle torches. The band of mockers gathered and started singing along with the Salvation Army chorus, dragging out the words of the hymns. “I weeeel cleeeeeeeeg to theeee ooooooole ruggeeeeed crooooooosss,” they sung, clinging to each other, shaking their heads and twitching their bodies as if convulsed by the Holy Spirit.

Flavius, like all other members of the Harvey family, was a talented actor, and he began wowing the crowd with a spirited virtuoso performance, causing his scoffer friends to laugh uproariously, ridiculing the efforts of the valiant band of
Salvationists who had walked miles across rocky roads to bring the word of God's army to the Hanover people. The leader of the Salvationists was a tall, indigo-skinned man with a powerful baritone voice. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that gleamed in the night. He had a shock of white hair and he played the big kettle drum. When the boys started their heckling, his response was to beat the drum hard. Harder and harder he hit the stretched goat skin until the drumbeat began to overpower the heartbeats of many of the people gathered in the square.

People stopped laughing at the mockers and stood trans-fixed by the power of the drum sound being pounded out by the man with the hair that stood out in the darkness like a halo around his head. The lenses of the man's glasses were throwing back reflections from the blazing bottle torches, so that his eyes looked as if they were on fire. He began to stare straight at Flavius, and the next thing you know, Flavius fell down, calling out, “Jesus, Jesus, O Lord Jesus.” At first everyone thought that he was joking, still mocking the Salvationists, and then they all fell silent.

“Flavy, stop form fool now, the joke gone too far, come make we leave and go home before them lock we out,” said his brother.

Flavius lay silent on the ground, unmoving, not responding to Edmund's voice or his gentle, then not so gentle, shaking.

“Lord have mercy, what is this pon me now. Flavy, gittup.”

Eventually Flavius did stir, but this was only after people in the crowd doused his face with water and passed a bottle of white rum back and forth under his nostrils.

“Duppy box him. Me tell you say duppy box him, see how him rally when we sprinkle the white rum, everybody know say duppy fraid a white rum.”

Flavius rose up and walked over to the band of Salvationists and asked if he could join them. He marched off singing with them into the dark Hanover night, returning late to his father's house. From that fateful night he spent the rest of his life seeking the Almighty with great zeal and fervour. During the course of his life he held membership in every known church in Jamaica, except for the Church of Rome and the African-based Myal, Revival, and Pocomania sects. Over and over again, he recreated that conversion experience as he joined one church after the other, each time convinced that he had found the perfect one to suit his spiritual needs. After much searching, he finally found a home in the Christadelphian Church, having fallen out over doctrinal differences with the Anglicans, Salvation Army, Baptists, Wesleyans, Moravians, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals, and Brethren–Open and Closed.

His father, David, blamed Edmund for what happened to Flavius. “It's because of you why Flavius now has no abiding city, he would never go and tease any Salvation Army people if you did not put that idea in his head. Flavy is a respectful boy, he was perfectly happy in the Anglican Church, where he was born and raised. It is you, you Mr. Edmund, who encourage him in that mischief, now look at him walking up and down shaking tambourine–because he has no other musical ability–in a Salvation Army band!”

Although his father's anger at Flavius's conversion really made Edmund want to leave Harvey River–which Edmund had never liked in the first place–even more, his reasons for
leaving soon became more urgent. It had to do with a girl from Chambers Pen.

“Fall her, your son fall my daughter, Mr. Harvey.”

That is what the girl's father had said when he came to report his daughter's condition to David, who confronted Edmund about the matter when he came in late that night.

“You are going to do what is decent and honourable, as befits a son of mine.”

Two weeks before the wedding, Edmund ran away to Kingston. Margaret accused David of chasing away her son. She wept and cursed her husband for days. “How you know if this child really belong to Eddie? What I was saying was we should wait till it born and see if it have the Harvey little toe, every Harvey child have the same shape little toe, if the child don't have it, it is not a Harvey, if it have it, then of course, Eddie must face up to his responsibility, now as it stands, you threaten him, him catch him fraid, and now him run gone and I might never see my boy child again!”

After Edmund fled Harvey River, it would be three whole years before they heard from him. He eventually wrote to his mother from Kingston, telling her he was now driving a big Ford taxi. Thereafter he would send her letters containing a few pound notes and the occasional photograph of himself standing with one foot on the running board of his taxi. But as they say in Jamaica, “what is fi you, cannot be un-fi you.” Seven or so years after Edmund fled by night from Harvey River to avoid a shotgun wedding, he saw the woman who was to have been his bride walking up East Queen Street in the city of Kingston, where she had come on a shopping trip. And he could not do it, he could not just drive his taxi past her. He stopped and offered the mother of his son a drive.

He had been sending money to support the boy Neville, who was indeed born with the Harvey little toe, and who from his photographs one could tell was big for his age, bright, and well-mannered. Edmund begged the mother of his son a thousand pardons. He told her that people had told him things about her to turn his mind from her and that had made him confused. He apologized for the fact that she had been humiliated, shamed, and mashed-up by his desertion. She told him that she had read certain psalms for him in order for bad things to happen to him. She cursed him like a dog as she sat there in the front seat of his taxi and he kept saying that he was sorry. Then he asked her if she wanted something to eat. “My God, you must be hungry after you curse me so.” And when he said this she had laughed. He took her for a meal at Arlington House Hotel, where Alexander Bustamante, who had come back from his stint in the Spanish Foreign Legion and who would later become the first prime minister of independent Jamaica, used to take his meals. She went home with Edmund that night and two months later he married her and a year later they had another son, Roy.

But the marriage did not last. Taxi men just do not make good husbands. They are always on the go, they don't thrive in normal domestic situations. Eventually, Edmund's wife immigrated to England and sent for their two sons. He never spoke of their brief marriage again.

 

All the river water could not cool

the fatal furnace within

W
hen the soles of his feet remained behind on the floorboards as he tried to walk to the front verandah, it was as if my uncle Howard had shed the last of the attachments that bound him to the earth. They were lying there on the polished mahogany as if he had traced his feet on cardboard and cut them out to send to Canada for his sisters Albertha and Rose to buy him new shoes. For weeks his skin had begun to appear more and more translucent, parchment-like and luminous. Then all his soft black curls fell off, and later his teeth and his fingernails came out. He died one January, after the feast of the Epiphany. When the three wise men were coming, he was going.

Except for my uncle Howard and, later, my aunt Albertha, the eight living children born to David and Margaret Harvey all died in the exact order in which they came into the world and they lived to be well over eighty years old. My uncle Howard died after a mysterious accident involving a woman and a stone flung one dark night by a jealous man. The stone
broke his forehead open and let in fevers, confusion, and sickness so wasting that he became the first Harvey to jump the queue and disturb the order in which they all came into and departed the world.

“Mas Howie, don't bother to go to Lucea today. Today is Sunday, heavy rain might fall and you know how bad the road is when the rain fall.” Margaret had told her first son this as he prepared to leave the house on that late October afternoon. He was whistling as he stood at the mirror in the hall, combing his slick black curls that were still wet from his bath in the Harvey River. Her heart “rose up” whenever she looked at him, so tall and slim-bodied, his skin the colour of a perfectly baked biscuit, his nose straight as a knife blade, and those brown eyes with the long sweeping lashes. None of her daughters had such lashes. Everybody said that he was the most handsome young man that anyone had ever seen, that he looked like God had made him personally with no help from assistant angels, so well put together was he. Margaret's grey eyes welled up every time she saw him. Imagine, that she could have brought such perfection into the world.

He had nice ways too. Affectionate, kind like his father, David. He was always funning and making jokes. He was the only one who could make such jokes with agate-eyed Margaret, who did not run jokes for spite. “Mummah,” he would say, “come and dance with me,” and he would hold her at the waist and waltz with her in circles as she protested, around the room. “Come and do the Lambeth walk with me, my sweet Mummah.” “Boy, go away and find somebody your own size to play with,” she would pretend to scold, but she actually did waltz with him, even as she swore that the only time she had ever danced was on the day of her wedding, and where did this boy come from, harassing his own mother so? “David,” she
would call out to her husband, “come and talk to your son.” And David would stand there in the doorway and laugh as he watched his wife, who was not given to overmuch gaiety, being spun around the floor by their son who had grown taller than his father. He had the height of his English grandfather, William Harvey.

“Why you have to go to Lucea today, a Sunday, Howard?”

“Aye, Mother, I can't tell you my business.”

He didn't have to tell her his business, for his business surely involved that woman, that red-head girl who had come from Lucea to attend a wedding in the village last week. The girl's skin caught fire from the time she saw Howard, best man for the groom, who was one of his cousins. All during the wedding reception, which was held at David and Margaret's house, the young woman was burning like a fire lantern. Her hair was coir red and her skin like burnished copper. She was a vamp from Montego Bay, who was now living in Lucea. Dressed in her orange voile dress, she looked like fire itself when she moved, her tiered skirt fanning out like flames around her as she insisted on dancing with him. “Come Howie, let me show you this move, I'm sure this step don't reach to country yet.” Anyone could see she was just dying to lay herself careless before the first son of the first family of Harvey River, and he was like a rain-fly drawn to her flame.