The Duppy (12 page)

God shone His lovely light into my eyes and murmured, Baps, you are a saint.

“No, God!” I protested modestly. “I’m no saint. A saint would keep much neater notes dan dis!”

He glanced again at the rough scribbles and unpolished scratches I had haphazardly made in an exercise book and said, True, there was a white man named Saint Augustine who used to raise Cain in Carthage before he gave up woman and who definitely kept neater notes.

“Well, God,” I muttered, my feelings hurt at this implied criticism, “I did de best I could. And unlike dat white saint you mentioned, I never did give up woman. Let it be said dat I loved dem and grind dem faithfully through thick and thin to de bitter end.”

God said, True, nobody in his right mind could ever accuse me of that.

“Because I noticed dat when a Christian repent, de first thing him give up is woman! Even if woman have nothing at all to do with him criminality.”

God said that it was plain to Him that I had never attended Catholic school.

We took an Air Jamaica jet to New York. We could have flown on our own, because all citizens of heaven can fly, but we wanted to travel in style and cock up our foot during the journey.

Plus, we Jamaicans are a funny people. If we didn’t fly on earth we just don’t feel to fly in heaven. It’s like a woman told me up there, she said, “Baps, I not flying. I’m no damn mosquito or John Crow. If you ever see me flying it mean only one thing: Gunman push me off a precipice. When I travel, I take jet plane.”

So we flew to New York by regular heavenly jet.

We landed in New York where we were processed by immigration officials and given visas for two months with the option of lengthening our stay into permanent status so long as we were willing to be dehooded and bleached white.

The man was polite and friendly but he was also firm and made us sign a paper agreeing to the conditions. He explained that visitors to America who retained their hoods were not allowed to exceed a two-month stay, for even a glimpse of earthly privates dangling from a crotch gave heavenly sheep trauma. Unbleached black visitors were also confined to a-limited stay because black skin likewise gave sheep the heebie-jeebies.

While the man was checking us through immigration, the philosopher gaped around with amazement, puzzling no doubt about how all these many and varied wonders could fit inside his poor overcrowded brain.

We were in a cavernous building that shimmered with a moonlit softness, and up near the rafters lolled some white men and women from a harp band who were on a break, squatting on a fleecy white cloud that hovered near the ceiling like an overhead bandstand. In the background wafted an annoying hallelujah like a whine of mosquitoes.

All the officials wore enormous wings complete with a full set of feathers, and all were dressed in billowing white robes that looked as if they had been spun from spiders’ webs.

“Lawd God, what a way de music noisy!” Egbert complained, drawing a stern frown from the immigration official who reminded us that we were now in American heaven and should conduct ourselves in an appropriate way. He was in the middle of this scolding when a fat and fluffy sheep wandered into the cubicle and licked his knee with a friendly baa.

“Rass! Look ’pon dat sheep in de airport building!” Egbert bawled.

“This is my sheep, and I am his shepherd,” the official said, rubbing behind the ears of the animal. “Say ‘Baaa’ for the tourists,” he urged the sheep, and the animal turned toward us and obediently baaed.

“Good heavens!” the philosopher muttered.

“Have a nice eternity,” the official said, handing us our documents and turning back to the sheep that rubbed up against his leg beside a desk.

As we headed out of the terminal we heard him murmuring to the animal, “Did you safely graze today? Come, sit by my side. I will shelter thee from the wolf.”

“Baps!” croaked Egbert, as we shuffl ed down the airport concourse. “I need a white rum bad!”

New York on earth is a sinkhole of human wastes, with towering buildings that make people feel like ants and air so dirty that it curdles in the crowded streets like a fart at a tea party.

But the New York of heaven has no skyscrapers, no cramped and smelly narrow streets with nasty asphalt tongues licking at the foundations of shiny glass buildings.

Centuries ago, I found out later, heaven’s New York used to look just like earth’s. Then, because of Christian objections that the city wasn’t properly biblical, New York was razed, and what we now stood gaping at, built in its place.

Before us sprawled an old-time biblical city you might see in a child’s bedtime tale, with a stone castle here and there squatting among single-story red clay structures interlaced with unpaved streets on which a few white-robed pedestrians carrying shepherd’s crooks quietly trudged. Fluttering above the-streets was a steady flock of winged men and women dressed in fleecy white robes, carrying harps and crook sticks, their flapping wings making a breezy whoosh. The whole city—in fact, as I would find out later, all of heavenly America—looked fuzzy like beaten egg white.

We were gaping at the overhead river of flying people when all of a sudden the sky was filled with millions of wobbling wafers that came fluttering onto the streets like pin feathers.

“Baps!” Egbert bawled, covering his head with his hands. “Snow falling.”

“It isn’t snow, Pilgrim,” chuckled an elderly robed gentleman who was walking past, “it’s manna. It’s lunch time.”

Then he opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue as he sauntered away, gulping down the thickly falling flakes.

“Baps,” Egbert wailed, “dis place weird! I want go back to Jamaica!”

The philosopher, meanwhile, was chomping on a mouthful of manna while the flakes piled up in thick drifts on the sidewalk.

“Hey! This is good!” he exclaimed.

We settled that first night in an inn off a quiet, treelined street. Naturally, we could have caroused all night, sleep in heaven being very sweet but not a necessity, except that after reaching new ground the first thing I always do is see how it sleeps. Plus, from what I could see, there was no place to carouse.

So I told Egbert that we should get an inn and catch a sleep, and he said he didn’t mind so long as it was next to a rum bar or a dancehall. I explained to him that such things did not exist in American heaven, as far as I knew, and he grumbled, “So what de backside we doin’ here?”

We slept well because everyone sleeps well in heaven, but all night long we heard a noisy bleating outside our window. The philosopher got up, opened the window, and peered out into what looked like a backyard meadow teeming with a sea of fluffy sheep baying at the moon. Then he muttered that his brain was certainly funny and crawled back into bed.

“Baps,” Egbert whispered in the darkness, “you don’t hear dem sheep?”

“Yes,” I said gruffly, “I hear dem.”

“Baps, why you think dey have so much sheep in American heaven?”

“How would I know? Is you create dis place, not me.”

“I never create nothing, Baps! What you talking ’bout?”

“Don’t make no joke with me, you hear, God,” I said. “Dis is serious. You know why dem have sheep up here.”

“Baps,” he said after a long moment filled up with sheeply baaing in the night, “you’re a joker, you know dat?”

I lay in my bed and tried to think while the sheep bleated in the night and the philosopher snored.

Egbert shuffled out of bed, padded to the window, opened it, and yelled into the darkness of the backyard meadow, “Shut up you rass mouth, sheep!”

“Hi, Egbert!” I protested. “Behave yourself, man!”

A man dressed in shepherd’s robes emerged out of the shadows and bawled up at the window, “Pilgrim, why dost thou bully my sheep?”

“Because dey baaing like bitch!” Egbert yelled back.

“Pilgrim,” the man answered solemnly, “this is heaven. It is written that in heaven sheep shall graze and baa.”

He muttered, “Written you rass,” banged the window shut, and flopped back into bed.

I groaned and said to myself, “Baps, you only just come to dis place called heaven, and look what you already do—mash up God and turn Him into ole negar. Dis is why you dead?”

Chapter 16

We went exploring the next morning, strolling through New York neighborhoods.

Every house had a cloud floating above it like a kite, and as soon as the people walked out into the street and had their breakfast manna that rained down from the sky, they flew up to their private backyard cloud, sat down on it wearing white robes, and began harp-plunking.

Sometimes they flew up there carrying a sheep or two under their arms, and as we walked past we heard plunking and baaing drifting down from the same cloud. In some neighborhoods the sheep would peer over the edge of the cloud as we walked past and baa at pedestrians. Egbert didn’t like the cloud baaing and one time as a sheep baaed at him he turned around and bawled, “Hush you rass mouth, ole sheep!”

A robed shepherd stopped his harp-plunking and peered down at us over the edge of his cloud. “Foreigner,” he cried, “wouldst thou like to sit on my cloud with me and my sheep?”

“Not a backside!” Egbert bawled. “I not sitting with no sheep ’pon no cloud! I am a Jamaican duppy! We don’t walk wid sheep, we curry dem! We don’t play fool-fool harp! We don’t sit ’pon cloud!”

“You don’t have to go on so bad, you know, man!” I hissed at him through the corner of my mouth. “Dis is dere country.”

“I’ll sit with you,” cried the philosopher, floating up to the cloud, where we saw him peering over the edge beside the stranger while the sheep blasted a powerful nosehole baa right into his armpits. “It’s nice up here!” he yelled down to us.

“I going take a look,” I said to Egbert.

He grabbed me by the arm. “Baps, is you bring me to dis madhouse! Now you goin’ pitch on a backyard cloud and leave me alone inna de street?”

“Listen,” I whispered, “you’re God. Nobody can trouble you.”

“My name is Egbert Adolphus Hackington! I am a cultivator. Just because a man own a few acres o’ land and a couple cow don’t make him God, you know, Missah Socialist?”

It was no use arguing, ole negar personality had God so completely in its grip.

I flew up into the cloud, which was pink and stringy like cotton candy, there was fluffiness underfoot, and you could feel a gentle breeze. The sheep came over, sniffed at my crotch, gave a buck, and bawled out a nasty baa.

“Foreigner, are you genitaled?” the cloud owner asked suspiciously.

“Of course. So what you do with youself up here all day?”

The man looked nervous and uncomfortable. He flicked an edgy glance at the sheep that had backed up to a far corner of the cloud, where it sat glaring at me and carrying on with a disgruntled baaing.

“Foreigner, you are frightening my sheep. He doth not abide shepherds who are genitaled.”

“Tell him him safe. We weewee in chamber pot, not ’pon ole sheep.”

The philosopher, meanwhile, had dropped flat on his back on the cloud and was wallowing in it like a hog in mud.

I walked over to the sheep and tried to pat the brute on the head but he gave a vicious buck and shied away, bouncing into the harp with his rump, causing it to tumble off the cloud and crash on the pavement next to where Egbert stood, peering up at us.

“Hey, you sheep!” Egbert bawled crossly. “You nearly bust me head wid you harp! You want me cook up you rass in a stewpot?”

We strolled up and down the city, and saw the same dreary sights everywhere we went.

We saw no cars, no buses, no trucks, no taxis, no motorized transportation of any kind. Occasionally some dignitary would ride past on a donkey or a mule, and on Fifth Avenue we saw a bearded old gentleman sitting atop a camel plucking a portable harp as the beast swayed down the cobbled street.

We wandered into Central Park.

The park benches were gone, as was all the playground equipment and the tennis courts. But sheep abounded like weed.

Sheep was grazing on the walking trails, on the lawns, beside the lake, baaing up a storm. Where on earthly New York you were bound to find a mugger lurking in the bush to lick you down and thief you money, you found a sheep grazing with his shepherd strolling nearby, lugging a crook stick.

We shuffl ed out of the park and onto the street. Manna began falling in a thick rain of flakes.

“Kiss me neck!” Egbert grumbled. “It drizzling bread crumb again.”

Around 7 o’clock in the evening, we heard a tap on our door and the mistress of the house asked us if we’d like to attend a communal Last Supper. I stood hesitantly at the doorway and told her I didn’t like the sound of that, but she said every night in households all over American heaven the Last Supper was celebrated as a daily custom. The philosopher, who was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, ambled to the door and said we’d come, and the three of us joined other guests at the supper table.

We were served bread and grape juice the color of red wine, and around the large banquet table the foreigners who were wearing ordinary clothes looked out of place with the native Americans, all of whom were biblically robed.

An old gentleman from Turkey was sitting on my right. He said his belly button was almost fully grown, and he had travelled to the city to spend his last few weeks in heaven enjoying the brutality of New York’s finest. He said that every day he’d been beaten up by the New York police, and on Wednesday he’d been pounded twice in the morning and afternoon, and so far it was the most joyful vacation he’d ever had. Yesterday, in addition to having his head busted with a policeman’s club, he’d been kicked down a gully by a patrolman’s horse, and he thought he would die, the pain was so sweet.

Our landlord heaved a weary sigh at the head of the table.

“That is what’s wrong with this country!” he said in an exasperated voice. “There’s no real pain. There’s no discomfort. Everything is immoral pleasure. And it’s all God’s fault!”

“No, it’s not,” contradicted the philosopher with a boasty smirk, nibbling on a crust of bread. “It’s my fault.”

“Hush up you mouth,” I hissed at him.