Father Ignatius patted her shoulder. “I’ll see you at Sunday Mass,” he said and blessed her.
She locked the front door and returned to her husband. His head was down over his chest, his hands tightly clamped onto the chair. Nervously she felt for his pulse. She frantically placed her hand over his breast. She threw her head heavenward and bawled out, “OH, GOD!”
Bury your mother
by Jaime Lee Loy
Palmiste
When a holy person dies, black butterflies float like ash to tell the heavens of their coming. When someone like you dies, my mother confides, gray vultures dig to their death in the soil. You will never make it to God, she hisses. Children pay for the sins of their fathers.
Unearthing years of rubbish from my mother’s cupboard, we find a rotting crib, my father’s wedding tie, his Playboy magazines, his underwear. After nineteen years the widow shows me her wares.
“What de ass I keeping all this here for? Dead and gone.” She speaks of things I will never have. She insists he never loved me. “If I didn’t have you,” she mutters, “Parker woulda marry me long time. And to think I was the one who wanted a girl.” Distracted, she thumbs the pants my father wore the evening of his death.
Sudden and violent, crashing to the bedroom floor.
Aneurysm.
“Stop it!” a little girl screams. She is sitting on a chair, her fingers scissoring the ears of her stuffed rabbit, needling at its fur with her nails. Like a tree being felled, a big man died, leaving his little girl screaming. Everyone else on the porch having a Carib, telling stories of strongman Dennis pulling up a devious kingfish with ease. Everyone beginning to ask, “But where Dennis gone, man?” “Dennis man! But where he gone?” When they find her she is turning purple, hitting her head methodically, her mouth opening and closing like a choking fish. Her mother appears, moaning like a wounded dog, scraping at his clothes. At the funeral they have to hold May back. She is bawling like someone is cutting her open.
Unlike the fuzzy-rimmed nature of dreams, distinct memories of my father resurface in the corners of late evening. I remember fussing from my crib and his insistence that she deal with the problem. I remember him beating me and my fragile, then soft-spoken mother sweeping me away to their room. I remember her crying, the sound of the rocking, and the colors on her dress. I remember what she has told me to remember.
Yet when people speak of him, their voices break. They recount their version of strongman Dennis with the gentle heart... You can think you know a man when he doesn’t live in your house or share your bed. Women are more transparent. May can smile through cracked lips and caking lipstick, squint joyfully through scraggly eyeliner, but people see the scowl.
“The man dead and leave me here to mind you.” May continues unearthing her hoard. “Why you think Parker won’t marry me? Who want a woman with another man child?” Parker. Parker, who has a habit of looking at my friends. Measuring them with his eyes and saying they are growing up nicely. He used to ask me to call him Daddy. I think back to the first time...
I am in my mother’s room. He turns the handle on the door, then leans back against the wall, perusing me from head to toe. I’m caught between him and my reflection, and he watches me lasciviously from both sides. I do not yet have hair between my legs. I am still a girl, uncomfortable in my flesh. Water dripping onto the floor; Parker is blocking my path to the cupboard. His mustache twitches as he funnels his fingers through his hair, his slanted eyes smug beneath bushy eyebrows. I scream out for May, who is putting on her makeup. “You should stop leaving your towel in this room,” she says without turning. Minutes pass. I am crying as I stand between them, one seated by the dresser, one standing by the cupboard smiling casually.
Half-Chinese, half-black, a drizzle of Indian. More than a drizzle of pervert and five years younger than my mother. It is the playful giggle he lets escape that irritates her. My mother steupses loudly, her half-Trinidadian, half-Chinese accent crashing together. “Why you always trying to make me jealous, boy?” She shakes her head and turns to me. “As if you are anything compared to me. Next time, bring a damn towel with you. You know the man have keys. He could come at anytime and you wouldn’t know.” My stomach turns.
She turns to him. “Parker, is this little girl you watching? Don’t let her get to you.” And just like that he slips outside. No spectacle.
He just oh-so-slowly disappears behind the door, saying, “You getting big fast.” Making a subtle sucking noise, “Aye, Marie?”
May’s mention of Parker is purposeful. She sucks the curve of her teeth. It is Friday, her night for cooking and washing his clothes. Parker will leave his mother’s house in Debe seeking the services of our home in Palmiste. He craves a house away from the main road, away from the greasy air of the doubles stands. Away from the restlessness. He will come bearing baskets of laundry, then perch proudly like an overstuffed pigeon at our dining table. As if by magic, bowls of Chinese noodles, lemon chicken, and fish in black bean sauce will appear. When the pigeon is full to tipping, May will usher him to her room.
When they have gone, I will sneak into the kitchen with my plastic containers and metal spoons. I will hide the food I have stolen and then leave the house to eat with my neighbors. Swapping the roofs of these friends each evening, I leave no chance for them to tire of me too quickly. They shake their heads and gossip about strange Chinese people, pitying me my shop Chinee mother who, they whisper, keeps both money and man in her underwear.
Until the next Friday, dishes will sit in the sink, recline on countertops, and stink behind cupboards. Mounds of pots filled with water, week-old food floating in its sour. The air is stained with a stench of unclean habits.
“This blasted waste-a-time child I have! No cooperation. None, none!” I am evading her eye, watching movement behind her. A solitary cockroach slips behind the door. I think of all the roaches and mice I have seen in this room, this room that smells like the kitchen sink. I should be happy we are selling this house. But a tiny insect burrows deeper into my heart, ripping away at flesh and chewing through soil. It scurries through my veins, leaving dust inside my blood. Flattening itself at the corners of my mouth, turning the red in my lips to purple.
I do not tell her I am pregnant. The scandal would crumble her standing at church, my eighteen years proving me a middle-class slut. Four months and a flat stomach. Thank God. I want badly for it to be my boyfriend’s child. He is my first lover. The uncertainty is worrying.
Getting pregnant was rough. One day I was his girlfriend, the next a knocked-up bitch. After years of waiting to have sex, he was disappointed this could have happened on the first try. He was even more disappointed I didn’t bleed.
My boyfriend sees our new burden as something I have caused. Yet he is willing to afford me the comforts of air-conditioning and sterilized instruments. He says that I will escape the back-room experience and the refusal at the public hospitals. And that I owe him for this proof that he really does love me. “You won’t have to go San Fernando General,” he declares, “or alone to St. Clair Medical or Westshore.” He says that terminations are on Thursdays only. Awed at his own generosity, he watches me and smiles.