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NOTES:
OPEN SHORT STORY: SPRING 2008 - SECOND PLACE WINNER
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"Good-boned, and Kind-hearted"
by Raymond Lashley - London, England
SECOND PLACE IN THE "OPEN" CATEGORY, SPRING 2008
In Martin’s Bay,
fumes from the ocean’s bowels slithered thickly through the morning air. Both
ferrous and iodine, its tropical rawness dominated the soft breeze, while not
far from the shore, diving from their boats over and over again, fishermen in
grease-stained shorts broke the ocean’s supple skin. It could mean only one
thing: sea-egg picking month had arrived.
Beneath a patch of shingled roof held aloft by six greenheart posts, the concrete slab upon which fishermen’s wives beheaded, gutted and boned fish, lay bare; there would be no fish today, all energies would be focused solely on sea-eggs. Her fingertips resting on the concrete’s cool surface, the Jam Woman waited silently for her order, watching the fish wives down on the beach cleaning the sea-eggs, their excited children running circles around them and racing along the shore in a game of tag. Leaning forward with their legs wide apart, the women sat on low stools around a large hole dug into the sand from which a mound of sea-egg shells, already knee-high, was protruding. With rusty knives they cracked the white sea urchins in half, each the size and shape of a freshly baked bun. Dipping them into buckets of sea water, they washed away their primitive digestive systems and removed the plump, yolk-coloured roe lining their insides, flicking it into empty ice-cream tubs they had saved. Flecks of violet seaweed streamed from the concentricity down to the sea – food the creatures had consumed before their capture. Amid the women’s gossip and laughter, mobs of gluttonous flies crawled through the heap of sea urchins, lapping juices from the spines which continued dancing in the feeding frenzy, long after their brittle bodies had been broken. The few customers present were all locals, though most of the haul would go to restaurants on the other side of the island. The red-skinned woman, who was dealing with the Jam Woman’s order, beckoned one of the children over to her side, spoke to him as she continued filling a tub, then sealed it and handed it over. As the boy made his way towards the Jam Woman, she could already taste the emulsion of salty milkiness in her mouth – like most locals, she preferred sea-egg fresh and raw.
“Mummy say dat you is a good Christian-heart woman, an’ dat you don’ bother nobody, an’ dat all you got is jam an’ no man, not a soul tuh help yuh raise dat teenage boy of yours, and tuh give yuh a special price. Oh… an’ dat you ain got a bad bone in you body. Fifteen dollars please,” the boy blurted out, as he handed the tub to the Jam Woman.
“T’anks love,” she replied with a chuckle, as she passed him the money. His mother would have been embarrassed beyond belief if she had heard him. Well… from the mouth of babes… the Jam Woman always maintained, proven right yet again. “And tell yuh mother t’anks very much, too,” she yelled to him as he made his way back down to the circle of women.
Both delight and anxiety opened this season: delight in a delicacy whose flavour brought back memories of times gone, when sea-egg could be bought from vendors on the beach, wrapped in grape leaves shaped into cones, all year long. And anxiety that next year there would be even less sea urchins to be found. The claim that the depletion was due to over-fishing, and not pollution from hotels and villas on the other side of the island, meant that the fisheries authority had limited their reaping to one month a year. And these poor people, poorer than the Jam Woman herself, with hardened palms continued scraping barbed corals for the merest pulse of sustenance.
Even after all the Jam Woman had been through in her life, as she observed these women, that age old pity, that empathy that had overflowed in some areas but remained deficient in others, pierced her belly. Yes, it had been two-hundred years since her people’s emancipation, but these poor-whites, backra-johnnies, red-legs, white-niggers, these inbred sons and daughters of indentured servants, who were known by many worse epithets, remained in perpetual purgatory: no marrying big-up whites, no marrying any blacks. The latter, they fooled themselves was their choice, but everyone knew that even the poorest blacks were not interested. And now, a revelation dragged the Jam Woman down. She suddenly realised her purgatory was conjoined with theirs. But hers was secured by secrets, and something worse, something that thrived on those secrets: acute self-awareness, and the paradoxes this fertilised. She was an enclave of purgatory within purgatory, a minority of one, which she knew perfectly well was some people’s definition of insanity.
Removing some sea-egg from the tub, the Jam Woman sucked it between her lips and caressed it with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Looking back out to sea, she watched the boats gently rocking, lost herself in the rhythm of fishermen diving and others dragging their bulging net-bags aboard. From the boy’s comments just made, the Jam Woman’s mind digressed, backtracked through the strangeness of her life.
Good-boned and kind-hearted.
There were those groundless rumours again.
Female, rural, black and fat: oh how those attributes had served her so well. Cleansed in showers of flagrant stereotypes, she walked the streets a myth made flesh by her own silence. Except, of course, for other rural females, who also happened to be fat and black. Their judgements may have been somewhat more discerning. Those were the ones to whom she kept her distance most.
Over the years the Jam Woman had struggled to redeem herself. But she was still in doubt as to what lay waiting for her at the Pearly Gates. The Angel Gabriel might issue her with a slap – another slap. And then what would she do? Would she turn the other cheek or cold-shoulder him too, till she truly was in hell? Or did both actions amount to the same thing? How dearly she had loved her husband, even with all his misunderstandings. And, how greatly he had disappointed her. But, he was just a man.
“What yuh want tuh mix-up with dem people fuh? Dey ever do anyt’ing fuh yuh?” he used to chastise her whenever he returned home from his job of overseeing the cane cutters, liquor-soused and trembling. Hearing of her visits to the poor-whites in the village, he couldn’t understand her charitable endeavours, especially to that lot, without even a touch of material reward.
“Lef muh ‘lone, do. Yuh sound just like yuh father used tuh. And where it get he in de end? A good dose o’ liver cancer. If yuh know what’s good fuh yuh, move yuh drunken self and stop harassing muh soul. If not der won’t be a crumb o’ food pun dat table dis evening.” And the bawling would commence. Their raked nerves disbanding, her husband would retreat, eyes down and abandonment heavy in his empty belly; her breasts spontaneously lactating. “Look what yuh gone an’ done. I just get him tuh sleep. It ain good fuh a newborn to hear all dis commotion in de house. Yuh gein plant strife in his heart,” she would finish, oblivious to the disenchantment and loneliness in his heart, as she walked off shaking her head from side to side.
That was where the row would always end, always with her husband feeling emasculated and unfed. In their bedroom he would ease his solitude into one of the plumped up pillows on their bed; wait for dinner while listening to her lullaby their son back to sleep. The Lord made all men equal, but women, well they were a different story, they couldn’t afford to be equal, they had to be better. Eve didn’t corrupt Adam, he burdened her with the fruit picking, then blamed her when it went pear shaped, when he hadn’t even lifted a finger, not even to scratch his head – her reasoning exposed during the sophisticated spicing of her jam making.
It hadn’t always been that way. In fact, a major part of her husband’s initial attraction to her had been the same charitableness he criticised, which in those days he saw as loving. But for some reason, upon the birth of their son, her charitableness suddenly became a threat. Even the attention she lavished over their child, if her husband had been truly honest with himself, bred an insecurity that previously he had never felt. And so, after work he would find himself in a rum shop with the boys, hiding from himself, brewing feelings of frustration he never spoke of with anyone, which nevertheless seeped out in heated debates about cricket.
Though the Jam Woman always rose to the occasion, always answered her husband back with double the force of his attack, in actuality she had no problem with his machismo. She dismissed his petty complaints and worries as manly jealousy, territorial behaviour which proved his love for her.
Until, the day he slapped her.
That slap, ringing in her ear, wringing her back into the past: the delirium of frantic jam making, recent drought, and now this poor-white child’s words, forced her to remember how her penchant for nurturing had developed, how its origins weren’t so good-boned and kind-hearted.
On that particular evening, her husband had returned home drunker than usual. His body teetering from side to side, and that peculiar gait of his, which seemed to have become more peculiar over the years, was more pronounced than ever. At first she ignored his usual sermon; kept stirring her pot and adding spices she thought would make him nauseous and throw-up, so she could strike back when he was sober enough to remember her words. If it was the influence of the men at the rum shop or not, she didn’t know, but what he did next changed both of their lives forever.
“Woman, yuh don’ listen?! Listen tuh me!” he demanded, with a vehemence she had never before heard from his tongue.
Her patience lost, she turned to retaliate, and his open palm connected sharply with her cheek, welts rising with her astonishment.
The echo slowly dispersed.
And silence descended.
Oscillating his lankiness, he waited, waited for her to prove her love for him with reprisal. But it never came. At least not in the way he desired. Without a single blink, she stared up into his supercilious eyes, thawed them from arrogance to uncertainty to embarrassment to regret, which lingered for some time before humility finally made its presence felt. It was from garrulous afternoon chat shows that she had learnt the power of silence, from their lack of it. And now she was going to practice it, with devotion comparable only with that of the nuns she had heard of in cloistered convents perched on mountains in Europe. Strolling from the kitchen with her head neither high nor low, she went to the playpen where their son had started to cry. Shuffling behind her, the smell of her jam brought tears to her husband’s eyes: “Honey, I sorry, I sorry. Fuhgive me. I real sorry. I get carried away,” he pleaded, hunching over as he kissed the nape of her neck while she rocked their child in her arms.
Nothing. She gave him absolutely nothing in return, tempered her conflicting feelings into an acute angle of jam and dribble. And again, he withdrew, flaccid with lassitude, and put himself to bed. He knew that when she came to bed he could hold her, that she wouldn’t brush him off, but he also knew that his tenderness would be unrequited, leaving him empty, tossing and turning throughout the night.
One week later, and still, nothing. Not a single word had she said to him. Her domestic chores still always completed, even more conscientiously than before, every evening she had set his place at the table without a word. This Sunday evening, he approached her in the kitchen, his hands still trembling and gait still contrived, though he was sober for the first time since the birth of their son: “How long dis going tuh go on? I say sorry so many times. What yuh want muh tuh do, nuh? Just tell me.” And it was then, while she continued to ignore him as she tasted some jam on her finger, from a new recipe she was trying, that he realised there was nothing he could do. Nothing, like the ball of nothingness tossing inside of him. No matter what he said, there would be no appeasing her. Whatever thoughts she was having, be they hot or sweet, they would never be shared with him again.
As some weeks passed, he became the one who was overflowing with chatter, the one who filled the house with aimless babbling about anything that popped into his head, anything except the poor-whites. He had stopped going to the rum shops, and started talking. With what he would have called woman’s blabbing, he spoke for both of them, answered his own questions in the way he would have liked them to have been answered: gently, lovingly and full of hunger. His hunger, to hear her voice, he tried to satisfy by listening to her baby-talk and sing lullabies to their son as the evenings drew in. But it was fruitless, his emptiness only ruptured to produce more emptiness.
For nearly a year and a half, her stoical silence eroded his heart.
Until his day of silence came.
It wasn’t his liver that proved to be his undoing, but the trembling, and those peculiar self-conscious strides, which the Jam Woman had put down to excessive drinking. By the end of that year and a half, he was immobile, mute and dribbling.
Parkinson’s puffed him out, and then slowly sucked the puffiness back in, to the point that the struggle to keep meat on his bones became a mortal battle. But she never gave in – nursed him at home to the very end. And yes, she even started speaking again, though of course, even if he wanted to, he couldn’t reply.
But perhaps he was happy at last. Perhaps. Because even though his face was emaciated and mouth constantly dribbling, you could see a sparkle had returned to his eyes, and even make out a sort of smile in his gormless expression. Nothing his body threw at her swayed her determination; the greater his humiliation, the stronger her constitution grew. Even when the muscles of his rectum expired, and she had to scrape the faeces out with her own bare hands, still she remained unfazed, chatted to him casually about what the newspapers said and how cute their son was becoming and about any new jam recipes she had been trying. And in those hundreds of one-way conversations, never once did she mention anything about the slap. Do what yuh have tuh, she always said to herself. And so, she did what she had to.
Knowing the truth made no difference. Nothing progressed, nothing evolved. Knowing, made the relationship between knowing and not knowing symbiotic. The secrets she amassed fattened the emptiness in others’ knowledge; conversely, their emptiness rendered her knowledge morbidly obese. Like the nothingness she had force-fed her husband on his deathbed, this nothingness repeated in her heart as guilt. But what choice did she have? None. Life was not what you made it – her earlier choices, seemingly based on her concern for the fate of others, now determined her own fate.
The Jam Woman attempted to redeem herself from the merciless way she had treated her husband, until his merciful death. Yes, his death had been merciful, but even there she defeated her effort. For in that death, still she saw selfishness, her own selfishness. At the time she had thought it compassionate, had seen it as his release from a body that was no longer his. But over the years her belief had grown a second, more poignant, head. The more she thought about it the more she believed his death was due to her failing, her weakness, her inability to contend with suffering.
Do what yuh have tuh. All those years ago, and still her husband’s dying face haunted her: vanilla ice-cream drizzled with warm jam, and a-little-bitter-something-else. Do what yuh have tuh, she had also said then, and thought no one knew. But what she had omitted in tales to me, her son, she had unwittingly revealed in epic sleep talking.
This was how she had arrived here, trapped in an arena brimming with onlookers’ imprecise perceptions, and her futile attempts to make them true. There was no escape, nowhere she could runaway to.
She turned around, looked inland, looked towards the cemetery where her husband, my father, lay in eternal release, and inhaled deep, her back to the whispering sea.
The breeze ceased.
The heat mounted.
Copyright (c) 2008 by Raymond Lashley - do not reproduce
without the author's written permission!
COMMENTS FROM OUR COMMISSIONING EDITOR, Jo Holloway:
A delicious, rich experience for the reader who loves to soak in good writing! Excellent use of descriptive techniques; lovely resonance. Not so much a story as a situation painted in vibrant colours on a word-canvas by a master painter. Better use of paragraphs here and there could have improved flow slightly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
“Shot out like a bullet into paradise.” – that’s how my mother puts it. On the 17th of October, 1968, I was born in Barbados. With colonial ancestry dating back to the 1600’s, nepotism should have determined my destiny. But there was no accounting for Romanticism.
In that refulgent oasis of flicky haired surfer dudes, pseudo-Rastas, racial divides, middle-American rock, sexist calypso and homophobic ragga (at the time these did not feel like generalisations), I was compelled to prowl graveyards until I metamorphosed into the only Goth in Eden. That was the better option – imitation, for the sake of camouflage, would not have been flattering.
Dreaming of lower skies, waterlogged irony, fog and urban spookiness, under the ruse of furthering my education I fled the tropics for that place anyone fond of dark fabrics and anaemia is drawn: London.
During my studies (BA [Hons] in Theatre Design at Wimbledon School of Art), I realised that my rather elaborate designs were not only rewriting plays, operas, musicals and ballets, but they were also performers in their own right. That was when I first began to suspect I needed a more all encompassing outlet.
It wasn’t until I was in a relationship, with a rather obsessive-compulsive Scotsman, that I put aside my paintbrush and began writing as a practical way to express my creative urges – pen and paper leave no mess on floors or light switches. Thank you, what’s-your-name (long expunged).
Many a job later (all rent related rather than conducive to art), I left the UK to go travelling in Brazil. It was there that I began my second novel, which is still under the bed hibernating with the first one.
Upon my return, I came down with a potentially fatal illness. So, I popped over to Easter Island – childhood fantasies materialise at death’s door. There I met a Japanese woman who had not heard of Easter Island until she had had visions of its coordinates. She had tossed in her job and journeyed there with a psychic she hardly knew. Clichés abounded as I thought to myself: How brave you are. Life is so fleeting. I’ve known the coordinates for ages, yet I’ve waited for something as hackneyed as death to shove me here. Since then, still out on a limb, my sway continues to be erratic… but invigorating.
More recently, I have completed a diploma in Social Anthropology and am considering going on to take an MA in the same field. Currently I live in London with my wonderful partner and Jazz (an old lady border collie). These days all Goth-isms are internal or on paper, and health-wise I’m robust to rumbustious – you can take the boy out of the Caribbean but you can’t take the rum out of the boy.
"Good-boned, and Kind-hearted" is a condensed version of a subplot from my third novel (unpublished), for which I am currently seeking representation. It seems that to be published is one hell of a difficult damnation to attain. Thank you very much, Sunpenny Publishing, for taking me a step further towards my goal!
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