From Harvey River (14 page)

 

A man who feared neither God nor man, George Wilson would sometimes stand outside the door of his small house in thunderstorms and fire off shots from his rifle into the heavens, answering each thunderclap with a gunshot, screaming, “God above, god below.”

When he lay dying, George Wilson told his daughter that he was being plagued by the devil. Margaret asked him to describe in detail exactly how the devil was plaguing him. Always a practical woman, she intended to devise some drastic and appropriate strategy to defeat the horned one. George Wilson said that the devil was showing him two roads and advising him to take the shorter one. Margaret told him to tell the devil to go to hell because everybody knew that the road to heaven was the longer one. He thought it over and he seemed to accept this counsel. But a while later he asked the yardman to chop him some wood. When Margaret asked what he wanted it for, her father, being a man who was not averse to having a backup plan, said, “I'm going to build a fire and burn the devil's arse.”

When George O'Brian Wilson died, my grandmother Margaret sent a message to his Creole family in Lucea to tell
them of his passing. The family always made a point to never acknowledge Margaret or her mother, Leanna, and they did not acknowledge the message. So Margaret made arrangements to bury her father, whom she had tenderly taken care of in the last years of his life. On the day of the funeral, the entire village came out to pay their respects to the “white neega.” There was a certain tension in the church, because in life George Wilson and church were like the devil and holy water. “When a man dead him just dead. Look how him just lie down there in the coffin and make them call up Jesus name over him and he don't get up and curse them,” said the people of Harvey River. All through the funeral service there had been no sign of his legal wife and children. But at the burying ground, as they were nailing the coffin shut, Mrs. Wilson and her children drew up in a hired car and demanded that the coffin be opened so that they could pay their respects. Margaret remembered all the years they had refused to recognize her existence. She grabbed the hammer from her husband and drove the long ten-penny nails deeply and securely into the coffin lid, nailing it shut, and ordered that it be lowered into the grave at once.

 

part two

 

I
t was a cricket match that first brought Vivian Marcus Goodison to Harvey River, where he fell instantly in love with my mother, Doris Louise Harvey.

All important events that occurred in the village of Harvey River took place at the Harvey home, and on this Sunday my mother's parents were hosts to a visiting cricket team. Slim and of medium height with rich copper-coloured skin, Marcus Goodison had a movie-star smile and a wonderfully engaging manner. He had driven the cricket team from Malvern in the parish of St. Elizabeth to Harvey River, where he immediately took note of the fact that in the Harvey household there were some very attractive young women. Upon seeing this, he surrendered his place on the team and never played the cricket match. He just gave up his turn as the star batsman to some aspiring hanger-on who would never ordinarily get a turn at bat, a reserve member of the team who was only chosen to make up numbers, a batsman prone to making “agricultural” strokes, a “yamlikker” who used the fine linseed-oiled willow like a crude hoe. Unlike Marcus, who did everything with finesse, whose strokes were poetry in motion. On that fateful day in 1930, Marcus had no time for cricket, for he had sighted Doris.

He had begun at first to sweet talk Ann. Then he looked to the far side of the yard and saw Doris, who was watering some of Margaret's special plants with cold tea left over from their breakfast. He had gone up to her and asked her for a drink of water, then he had set about charming her and her parents, and by the time he was due to drive back to St. Elizabeth he had succeeded. He explained to them that he was employed as chauffeur to the manager of Barclays Dominion Colonial and Overseas Bank just so they would know he was a responsible man; and to make sure that Doris wouldn't forget him when he was gone, he left behind his maroon-coloured beret, which completed his outfit. That outfit consisted of cream serge pants and a maroon blazer, worn with a white shirt and a pair of two-tone brown and white shoes. The next Sunday he drove from St. Elizabeth to Harvey River ostensibly to collect his beret, and maybe he left something else that day too because he soon became a regular visitor. In between visits he wrote her passionate letters.

I went to town last week and I stood up on King Street and looked, Dor, but not one woman in the whole Kingston was lovely as you.

Dor, I hope and pray that you will consent to be my bride. If you say no, I don't know what I will do. Please don't hand me a left hand ticket.

Marcus, as always appropriately dressed, arrived one Sunday to formally ask for Doris's hand in marriage. David and Margaret had been expecting this day for months. The young man was so obviously in love with their daughter. I mean you had to be in love to drive from Malvern, St. Elizabeth,
to Harvey River, Hanover, almost every two weeks for a year. Driving over those rough, mostly unpaved roads, just to come and see a girl who was so shy that she never looked in your face when her parents were around for fear they might think her too bold.

David sees the car drive up and when he sees Marcus step out fully dressed in a navy blue suit and white shirt and tie, he tells Margaret,

“Mr. Man is here for your daughter's hand.”

“Then she is just my daughter all of a sudden?”

David goes to the door to meet him. He stands in the doorway and calls out to Marcus, whom he has never seen look nervous before.

“Mr. Man, where are you going so dressed up today?”

He loved the young man. He was a well put-together person, he made a good living, he was charming and possessed of a deep self-assurance, but at the same time kind-hearted. He was always trying to make the people around him happy. He would do his best to make his daughter happy, David felt that. But he couldn't just allow him to come in here and walk off so easily with his Clarabelle.

Marcus hears the serious tone in David's “Mr. Man” question. He is a little surprised because he has come to regard him as a friend and ally. He has become deeply attached to this man he hopes will become his father-in-law, because he never grew up with his own father.

Marcus dressed like a dandy because all he knew of his own father were the stories of the young man who changed his shirts two or three times a day, who always smelled of “4711” gentleman's cologne, and who favoured two-tone “John White” shoes, imported specially for his size nine feet. Marcus played the guitar like his father, Uriel; from him he got the gift of
music. My nightingale-throat father could sing too, and all wind and stringed instruments obeyed him. He was able to play virtually any musical instrument. He was glad of that gift from his father. So this is the Marcus who stands on the first of the three steps at the front door of the Harvey house.

“I have come to ask you an important question, Mr. Harvey.”

“Yes, what kind of important question you have to ask me, Mr. Marcus Goodison?”

Marcus takes one step up and says, “I would like to have your daughter's hand in marriage.”

“Which daughter would that be, Mr. Man. I have many daughters, you know.”

“Your daughter Doris, sir. Doris is who I want to be my wife.”

“You think that she will want you as a husband?”

“I hope and pray so, sir, because I…,” and here he almost breaks down crying, “because I have never met a nicer, kinder young lady in all my life, and my life will be worth nothing if she won't consent to be my wife, sir.”

And these last words he says in a low hoarse voice, looking up into David's face, begging with his brown eyes for him to accept him, to intercede for him to Doris, because for a man who lost his mother when he was a teenager, his heart tells him that this is the woman he needs to show him what kindness and caring are. He knows that if and when he lays down to sleep beside her he will rest as he has never rested before, that his absent father, who was named for one of the archangels, will come to him in dreams and say, “My own boy, you have chosen well.”

“Just know one thing, Mr. Man. If you form the fool you will have me to deal with.”

“I would take my own life before I hurt her.”

Marcus climbs up onto the top step and stands next to David, who then says, “Come my son, let us sit inside and talk.”

 

Marcus's own father, Uriel, was the second son of the wealthy Goodison family, who owned acres and acres of red lands in St. Elizabeth, lands that were eventually sold to bauxite mining companies. Some say the first Goodisons were two English buccaneers who settled in Jamaica and married Creole women, so Marcus's father was one of the playboy sons descended from a line of retired buccaneers. Some say that the Goodisons were Jewish merchants and that the family name means “Son of God.”

Marcus's mother, Hannah, had copper-coloured skin, blue-black hair, and deep tranquility. She looked like a painting of an Arawak Indian. She, like the Arawak Indians, had died early. Uriel, his father, also died young, and St. Elizabeth people said that his entire estate was meant to go to Marcus, who as far as anybody knew was his only child. But people also said it was squandered by Uriel's brother, an even bigger playboy than him, who hurried on his own end through riotous living in night clubs and brothels from London to Kingston and Havana. My father had received just enough money from his father's estate to buy himself a house in Malvern and a secondhand Model T Ford car. He was considered by the women of St. Elizabeth to be a good catch.

 

With her parents' consent, Marcus presented Doris with a diamond ring. My mother told me that for days after her engagement, all the young women in the village would come to the house and ask to see her diamond ring. However, not all of them were happy for her. At least one woman in Harvey River
was overcome by jealousy, and envied the love that had found Doris. This woman was a distant cousin who wanted to be married more than she wanted anything else in life. Someone swore that they once heard her say that she would give her life to be married just for one day. Well this young woman had looked at the engagement ring and had not been able to say anything except to ask how did they know if the diamond was real. She was overheard saying how unfair life was, that imagine, instead of herself “this little gal” was going to be the one to become a married woman.

My mother says that she fell asleep one afternoon wearing her ring, which did not fit tightly. When she awoke, the ring was gone. Such a commotion followed, with her bawling like a baby at the loss of her brilliant diamond engagement ring. Memories of her “bad luck” persona came back to her, the Clarabelle persona who cursed expressions and embarrassed herself, the girl whose long hair was chopped off had now lost her diamond engagement ring, she had come back to displace lucky, happy Doris, who was in love with and loved by a handsome young man named Marcus. Everyone searched the house and the yard, to see if it had slipped off while she did her chores. My mother kept crying, and insisting that she was wearing the ring up to when she fell asleep. She was sure of this because she had been staring into its centre, and had dreamt that she was bathing in a crystalline pool of water. But the ring was nowhere to be found. Doris was inconsolable. What kind of cross was this, what kind of sign, for sure this was a terrible omen!

But Margaret told her that she was not to think such thoughts. “What this is, is envy and bad mind,” she said, “and my dead father is going to see about it.” That was all she said; but she said it loudly enough for everyone who had come to
help search for the ring to hear, and those who heard told those who had not heard. Doris found her ring at her front door the next morning. They say that the woman who was possessed by envy flung the ring, knotted in the corner of a handkerchief, onto the verandah of the Harvey house that night. Somebody said they saw her run past the house at great speed and throw something that arced like a white bird across the night sky, as she ran without stopping out of the village.