From Harvey River (13 page)

When the red-head girl sat down to eat a huge plate heaped with curried goat, Margaret had stared in disbelief when the girl pronounced that the goat was not hot enough. The tender goat mutton had been seasoned and cooked by an East Indian man by the name of Gangalee, from the neighbouring parish of Westmoreland. Gangalee's skin was almost as black as that of the Africans. He was originally from Madras. “Me Madrassi,” he would say. “You a coolie,” said the African
Jamaicans. The night before, Margaret had watched him rub the curry powder into the pieces of fresh goat meat, curry that he had blended himself using turmeric, called tambrik by the African Jamaicans, coriander or curriana as the Jamaicans called it, cumin, sage, and his own secret special ingredients that the Jamaicans did not know, so they had no name for them. He had cut up onions, garlic, and what looked like dozens of hot country peppers and added this to the meat which had been left overnight to soak up the seasonings. The next day it was browned in iron pots of fragrant coconut oil and cooked down in big kerosene tins. You could smell the strength of the curry for miles. Gangalee was known to cook the best and hottest curry in the western end of Jamaica. Maybe it was the selfsame Gangalee who was immortalized in what became a popular Jamaican folk song:

There was a coolie man by the name of Gangalee

married to a coolie gal, them call her Cookie

send her to go boil rice and ackee

She disobey the order and boil rice and bajee

Now bajee is a thing that take plenty water

Bajee is a thing that take plenty fire

Get you curry, get you curriana, get you mussy

Get you mussiana, get piece a stick

Put it pan the kibba, hinder bajee from boiling over

Bamma beejee bajee, bajee o.

The girl demanded a Scotch bonnet pepper, which Howard brought to her. The pepper pieces fell from her fingers like burning sparks as she calmly sliced them into the already highly seasoned meat. Margaret watched in horror as the girl ate the red-hot flesh of one of the hottest peppers known to
man, without calling for water to cool her tongue. Not a tear came to her eyes as she chewed the vicious hot capsicum. “Scotch bonnet pepper, you know, the girl eat one whole Scotch bonnet pepper!” Margaret had remarked to David afterwards. David had laughed and said, “She is a better man than me.” For of all peppers, there are few as hot as the pepper shaped like a Scotsman's tam-o'-shanter; not the small deceptive little bird pepper, nor the hot finger pepper or jalapeno; maybe not even the wicked one called the habanero. It was this Scotch-bonnet eater that was causing Howard to go into Lucea that Sunday.

David and Margaret had warred over the way in which she was raising Howard. But he was not a child any more. “Leave him to be a man, what are you trying to do, turn him down? Keep him under your petticoat for the rest of your life?” David had also cautioned her against what everyone saw as her blatant favouritism. “How do you think the other children feel? They all think that you love Howard more than them.”

If only she could have hidden him under her petticoat that day. That morning she had again seen a line of red ants marching along her clothesline and knew that something terrible was going to happen.

She watched her son leave, dressed in his dark trousers and a gleaming white shirt that she herself had washed and ironed. He was wearing a felt hat, rakishly skeeted to one side, and he was stepping smartly in an almost-dance as he made his way down the path to the main road to catch the truck going into Lucea. When he got to the gate he turned and threw her a kiss. It floated across the hibiscus hedge, skipped on the flat white river stones which paved the pathway up to the front door, and hopped over the windowsill into Margaret's lap. She picked it up, knotted it into a corner of her handkerchief, and tucked it into her bosom. As she did this she found herself singing
one of her father's songs, “Down by the Sally Gardens, she bid me take love easy as leaves grow on a tree, but I was young and foolish and with her did not agree.” Over and over she sung those lines.

When they brought Howard in, bleeding from the head that night so that the inside of his felt hat was lined with thick blood and his white shirt was now mostly dark under the light of the lamps, she was moaning, “But I was young and foolish and now I'm full of tears.” They cleaned the wound with alcohol or overproof white rum, which caused him to cry out as it stung him even in his half-conscious state, and they bound the wound tightly with a clean cloth, torn from good white linen sheets, to try and staunch the head injury that was bleeding so profusely. How could one head contain so much blood?

All around the house on the acres and acres of land around them grew different herbs for bush medicine, a bush for every sickness, for every complaint. There was even a bush called “fresh cut” for new wounds. But who could find such herbs in the dark? Throughout the night they tried to doctor his head, to force teaspoons of sweet sugar and water down his throat to replace the vital energy draining away from him. They washed down his limbs with aromatic bay rum to quell the fever that was now rising through his pores, and David read psalms at the foot of the sickbed. Psalm after psalm, all except Psalm 90, which is the funeral psalm.

The nearest doctor was miles away, and Howard was in no condition to make the journey to the doctor's house along the rough, unpaved roads. It was best not to move him. All night they just kept staunching the wound and cooling his limbs until dawn broke. Now there was no choice. David went and found someone with a buggy who took his son, fevered and delirious, back into the town of Lucea to the hospital.

When he was brought back to Harvey River five weeks later, Howard was a shadow of himself. Margaret and David's handsome son had become a thin, gaunt, sad-eyed man who stepped tentatively from the back of the hired car that brought him home. Leaning on David's arm, he slowly made his way up the path to the front door, where he stopped, looked back, and gave a wan smile to all the friends and relatives gathered in the yard to welcome him. He raised his right hand in a feeble gesture of acknowledgement to them and then he went into the house, passed through the living room and into his bedroom, where he lingered for two months. Then one morning as he made his way towards the front door of the house, he stepped onto the floorboards and left the soles of his feet behind. Everyone knew that he would die before the day was over.

 

“Only a borrows, Miss Meg, you only got a borrows of him. He was God's own angel that God lend to you for a time.” “You think that I don't know that? Nobody know that more than me,” Margaret said to the woman.

David planted cinnamon and aloes near the grave of his first-born son. Cinnamon and aloes because they spoke of them in the Bible, in Proverbs 7:17: “I have sprinkled my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon. Let us enjoy the delights of love.” These words were spoken by loose women who sought to entice callow youths to their destruction. It was as if the words of the Bible had come to pass in David and Margaret's own lives. Their son had been killed by a man jealous over his red-haired woman, a man who was never caught and punished, for he fled and vanished into the thick country darkness the minute that Howard fell “like a wounded ox on the way to the slaughter house” (Proverbs). When Albertha and Rose returned from Montreal for a visit in the 1940s, they brought with them
bulbs of irises which they planted around Howard's tomb. The irises bloomed only as long as David and Margaret and their children lived in Harvey River.

David and Margaret Harvey in Harvey River, on the occasion of their fortieth wedding anniversary.

For months after Howard's death, my mother's mother, Margaret, could be found sitting in her big bentwood mahogany rocking chair by the window in the front room of the house. She wanted the man who had flung the stone to see her. To see her terrible agony. Maybe if she sat by the window which faced the street, he would pass by and see her, pass by and be moved to confess by the sight of her raw grief. At night, she railed at her husband to use his village lawyer skills to find the murderer, but try as they might David and his brother, Tom, could not find him. Some people believed that he stowed away that same night on a ship docked in Montego Bay.

Margaret wanted no one to forget about the terrible injustice done to her. Day after day she sat by the window through which she last saw him fully alive, walking his young man's bopping walk, throwing her that last kiss. For hours she would sit by the window and rock and stare, sometimes moaning her father's Irish songs. “She bid me take love easy as the grass grows on the weirs, but I was young and foolish and now I'm full of tears.” Sometimes she would imagine the body of the man who took her son's life hanging from a tree. Sometimes she would imagine her hands tight around his throat. Everyone passing by would comment on how hard Margaret was taking the loss of her son. Some would try to call out to her, sincere words of encouragement directed up the stone-paved path down which her son had gone forever. “Nuh mine, Mrs. Harvey. God knows best. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
” These words, intended to comfort, did not reach her. She just sat there locked into her grief, rocking, moaning out across the yard and into the bushes, where her grief notes came to rest in the trees and became indigo-winged solitaires, making low piping loss sounds.

It was Margaret's father, George O'Brian Wilson, who eventually put an end to her public demonstration of grief. He appeared outside her window early one morning, having walked up from the small cottage that David had built for him near the main house. He waited outside in the front yard for his daughter's household to stir. When Margaret took her seat by the front window, her face drawn and contorted from her night's crying, she saw her slim, dark-haired father, who by then sported a long pepper-and-salt beard, standing in the front yard like a stern Old Testament prophet. “Get the fock up, get up out of that blasted chair, and get on with your goddamned life. Your poor husband says he's tired of talking to you about just sitting there because you don't countenance a word he says. Get the hell up, I never raised you to be a weakling, to have these eedjits jabbering about you as if you were the village lunatic, sitting there like Our Lady of Perpetual Weeping by the window with your house all going to hell. Because of you that assistant Queen Victoria Cleodine has become the boss of all, coming here every day from her Castle Rose Cottage to order us all around. Telling them at the bar to stop selling me my white rum, as if my drinking is her goddamn business, all because you are no longer present. The boy is gone, get on with your life. Get the fock up, or I'll take a whip to your backside.”

That was the day that Margaret stopped sitting by the window and told Cleodine that it was too much work for her to run two houses and that she did not have to come to Harvey
River every day any more. Everyone agreed that George Wilson was the only one who could have made her get up from that window, reminding her that she had his Irish blood in her and that nobody, not even her grief, was going to be the boss of her.

 

George O'Brian Wilson, shoemaker and saddler, of

Lucea, Hanover, late occupation, bruk sailor.

E
very year on the seventeenth of March after Margaret's father came to live with her, the people of Harvey River would congregate in the road to witness the annual St. Patrick's Day party given by George O'Brian Wilson, for himself and for other Irishmen in the area. He made it clear that this party was not for anybody but the Irish, who would dress all in green and gather from early afternoon at the Harvey house to drink, play the fife, drink, play the fiddle, drink, sing, and drink.

With his half-Irish daughter Margaret as his assistant, George Wilson would cook a creolized Irish stew, substituting goat meat for mutton and adding turnips, onions, carrots, and potatoes. As he added herbs like fresh thyme, he would lament his separation from Ireland, often breaking into song as he stirred. He served the stew to his guests before they got down to the serious business of singing and drinking. Their Irish airs and reels would issue across the Hanover cane fields as they celebrated the day of their beloved saint, who, like most of the
people in Jamaica, had once been a slave. It is certain that some of these airs inserted themselves into the music of the Africans who were keeping the continent alive, “yerri yerri Congo,” in the hills of Hanover and all over Jamaica. So every seventeenth of March, George Wilson and his friends would rise up and praise St. Patrick in sweet spiritual tongues until they fell down senseless. The morning after, everyone in the Harvey household would wake to find so many green men sprawled, stale-drunk and damp with dew, in the front yard, coiled at the roots of breadfruit and mango trees, flat out in the grass, or blissfully resting under flowering shrubs after their annual tear down.