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Authors: Anthony C. Winkler

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BOOK: The Duppy
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I hissed that she was being out of order in a house of worship and drew away. Miss B whispered that she had been moved by the spirit, adding that in heaven all body parts—from hood to eyebrow—participated fully and equally in formal worship.

We had a furious mouth-corner argument.

I indignantly maintained that my hood had had a good upbringing and had been raised to sneak out at night only in canepieces, behind a bush, in unlighted bedrooms, or in the backseat of a car hunched in the shadows of a country road; that it never came out on a public street unless drawn out by an unruly streetwalker in the middle of a heated dispute over price. Miss B coolly advised me to look around, and when I did I beheld that a sister racked by the spirit would joyously reach over and knead the privates of any convenient elder. I also saw that the elders patiently endured this ecstatic groping without raising objection or lodging complaint, many even smiling indulgently at these sisterly antics.

But I was determined that no woman would seize hold of my hood while I was in church without observing appropriate restriction. I whispered to Miss B, as she sidled up to me once again, that since it was evidently the custom and I was a stranger to the district and did not wish to depart from tradition, I would permit an inspirational feel-up during the service when the spirit moved her, but not while she clutched the hymnal. She hissed that this was a ridiculous colonial regulation, adding that she didn’t intend to draw out my hood into open air to play patty cake with it, she only wished to express her joyfulness by giving it a worshipful squeeze.

But I was firm: It was either hood or hymnal, not both. With a sigh, Miss B was therefore forced to reluctantly put down the hymn book whenever she felt moved by the spirit to paw me up, even though she fiercely rebuked me afterwards for fostering a backward colonial mentality.

For a good while—I don’t know how long, for time is hard to keep track of in heaven—Miss B and I lived in contentment. I helped her around the house and shop during the days. Come evening time, she would cook for me, boiling up some serious dumpling and giving me fatty pum-pum like it was locusts during the days of the Egyptian plague. During these happy times, no man in heaven was happier or slept sweeter than I, Taddeus Baps.

Sometimes at the end of the day, as Miss B was locking up, she would turn and bawl over her shoulder, “Baps, do me a favor! Run ’round to Miss Simpson and give her a good grind.

When you reach back, honey-bunch, you supper will be ready.

I cooking up some fry fish and bammy for you.”

In this way, she would occasionally lend me to Miss Johnson or Miss Shirley or Miss Higgins, who were her sturdy church sisters and quite used to sharing among themselves such staples as sugar, flour, hood, and tinned milk, making me occasionally feel like the district grinding post. Of course, I could have refused, for there is no slavery in heaven, but that would have made me into nothing better than a worthless dog-in-the-manger. So I did as I was told, and everyone was happy. Only my indoor parson was cross at this state of affairs, and one night as I was walking home from Miss Higgins’s house down a dark and bushy country lane, I heard him fuming, “Dis heaven is a land of pum-pum and dumpling. I wonder if we in hell.”

So things were running nicely between me and Miss B and everything was prospering.

Then one night I got the shock of my life, and everything between us suddenly mash up.

I had been peacefully snoozing on Miss B’s belly in the dingy back room, the croaking lizards, crickets, and whistling frogs lullabying me into the blissful sleep of the fully satisfied fornicator. I had enjoyed a long and sweet belly ride and had spent the past three hours toasting in the cozy creaminess of her blubber. She had been drowsily urging me to confess that when it came to lovemaking and reign over the connubial bed, a fatty was total queen, and I was in the middle of a good-humored joshing with her about it when I got the funny feeling that the tip of her head was being noiselessly sawed off.

It was puzzling to see a woman’s head disappearing in neat sections, and I stared long and hard at her until her brow was almost all gone before I gave a gasp of alarm and remarked casually that in the bad light it looked as if her headtop was disappearing.

Miss B catapulted upright. She flung me savagely off her belly and onto the floor, and groped wildly at her head. “Rass!” she bawled. “I crowning!”

“Crowning?” I sputtered from the floor, where she had pitched me.

“I getting born again, Baps!” she shrieked.

As she bellowed her anguish, she began frantically plucking at her head, which, before my eyes and in the glow of the night sky, was being cleanly sheared off like a cucumber chopped by an unseen cleaver.

“Help me!” she yelled.

“How? Wha’ happening?”

“I sliding through a birth canal. Grab me foot and pull me back!”

Jumping off the floor, I seized hold of her fleshy calves and began a fierce tugging that did nothing to slow the ghastly sectioning.

“I can’t stop you!” I cried helplessly, as her entire head vanished, leaving only a fatty neck stump wobbling headless atop her tree-trunk chest.

“I don’t want to born again!” Miss B howled, her voice echoing as if she were wedged in a narrow tunnel.

She had slid down past her bosom by now, and even as I-strained to hold onto her kicking legs her thighs oozed out of-sight with a nasty gurgling, leaving me grappling with two slippery and twitching feet. With a vicious kick they were suctioned violently from my grasp and her whole body had disappeared.

“Miss B?” I cried aloud to the empty room.

I heard nothing but the high-pitched piping of insects outside the window. When I turned up the flickering kerosene lantern, not even a coil of pubic hair remained of Miss B.

I sat down heavily on the bed, wondering what to do next, when suddenly in the jitterbugging lantern glow Miss B’s face broke the surface of the pillowcase and wavered there as if afloat in the puddle of linen.

“Is all right, Baps!” the face whispered. “I going back as a Jamaican! I borning again in St. Elizabeth! Hallelujah!”

“Request a change of venue to St. Ann! St. Elizabeth is a fart of a parish!”

“Hush you mouth, Baps!” she scolded patriotically.

“Miss B! I going talk to God! I going beg him to ease you up!”

She chuckled as if at a private joke. “God don’t have nothin’ to do wid dis, Baps. Walk good, me love!”

With the final burbling gasp of a drowning swimmer, she squinched up her face, closed her eyes, and rippled below the pillowcase.

“Miss B?” I cried, rubbing the spot where her face had just been afloat.

Blown on the wind as if from a distance, I heard a sharp slap followed by the shrill wail of a newborn infant and the sleepy grumbling of a midwife, “De pickney don’t to born into dis wicked world!”

Chapter 9

“Well, Baps, it look like you catch a heavenly shop!”

After a refreshing night’s sleep, that was the encouraging thought that popped into my head first thing the next morning.

For to tell the truth, in spite of Miss B’s violent rebirth, I had slept as soundly as an evangelist who had spent the night wrestling a big-boned church organist against a bedpost. This was not heartlessness, but the nature of heaven where no heart can feel troubled or heavy or lost, and every soul can do exactly what it wants because every wish or whim is cheerfully granted. Only the time or place of rebirth is not under a soul’s control.

I will give you a case in point.

In the village there was a youth who, having been killed on earth by a bus, developed such a fondness for the experience that he craved being knocked down weekly by a public passenger vehicle.

Now as everybody knows, Jamaican buses are willing to knock down a man in his prime of life if he clearly does not desire it. But let that same man request a knocking down for fun and see what he gets: bullheaded road courtesy and fanatical safe driving by every bus driver.

In heaven, however, the youth’s wish was gladly granted, and every Saturday at noon an overloaded bus punctually careened around a corner and knocked him for a six into a goat pasture, after which he would joyfully leap to his feet and hurl the ripest cuss words at the driver, who sped away laughing.

That is heaven’s way: no harm, hurt, sorrow, or regret. All is joyful and fun—even being licked down by a bus.

I washed my face and prepared to open the shop, for now that Miss B was gone, I instinctively knew that I was in charge, that the shop had become my responsibility, and that I had been led here in the first place because of my vast experience in retail management.

I sat down at a table in the back room and made notes of what I would do with the shop.

To begin with, I would throw away the charge book. From now on, everybody would pay for goods with cash money on the counter, not by signing a book.

I would immediately begin keeping two sets of accounts, one showing the right amount of money the shop had taken in every week, the other a bogus book intended for the government showing half the true amount. Being as I was in heaven and not hell, I saw no reason to depart from normal earth practice by keeping honest books and paying full tax.

So far I had not seen a tax collector and did not know if such a person existed in heaven. But I reasoned that with the government offering public services such as free pum-pum caulking and hood removal for Christians, somebody had to pay for it, and Baps should not be the one to do so with his hard-earned money. If an incoming Christian wanted her pum-pum caulked that was her business, but such a service, in my humble opinion, should be privatized, not funded with taxpayers’ dollars.

I decided, also, that to be a true Jamaican shop certain shortages and restrictions on the sale of goods had to be put into effect, to be waived at the discretion of the proprietor. What was the fun of owning a shop if the shopkeeper wasn’t in a position to make customers beg him to sell them goods?

I hand-lettered a sign announcing that no customer would be allowed to buy more than one pound of sugar per day.

There were other important matters that I needed to know about and on which Miss B had not enlightened me.

For example, where would I buy goods? I had never seen a wholesale salesman, but obviously such a person must exist or the shelves would soon be bare.

I decided to take stock, to see what inventory I had on hand.

I went into the shop and by the dawn light began a careful count of the tinned goods.

I was done with counting and, out of habit from my days on earth, felt to eat a tin of sardines for breakfast, although I was not hungry, for a heavenly belly always feels contentedly full.

There were three tins of sardines on the shelf. I removed one and carried it into the back room, intending to eat it at the table where I had been working.

I opened the tin and went back into the store for some harddough bread to squeegee up the oil on the plate.

It was then that I noticed that there were exactly three tins of sardines back on the shelf—the same number as before.

I stopped and looked and asked myself if I had miscounted.

Puzzled, I took one of the tins off the shelf and left the room with it. When I returned a few minutes later, I discovered that another had materialized in its place.

No matter how many tins of sardines I took off the shelf, I always had three remaining.

As I stood there marvelling at this replenishment, I realized that this was why Miss B had been so careless with her stocktaking—because she never could run out of anything! This was why she didn’t care about cash-and-carry—her goods cost her nothing!

Under the circumstances—controlling the only shop in the village and having no overheads plus an endless supply of free goods—I saw at once that the only sensible business move was to drastically mark up prices and gouge the shopping public.

It was still early when I threw open the front doors to an empty coil of village street that glistened in the dawn wisps.

My first customer shuffled in around 8:30 a.m. to buy some sugar, still wearing the slightly frizzy look of a woman who had been lately abed. When she saw the sign announcing the rationing of sugar, she looked puzzled.

“Sugar short?” she asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Yes,” I replied. “One pound per customer today.”

“Sugar can’t short in heaven, Mr. Baps. Nothing short up here.”

“We have to practice shortage. De socialists from the ’70s in Jamaica soon dead, and when dey reach heaven, sugar bound to short.”

She rubbed her nose and sniffed.

“Missah Baps, if it wasn’t for you, we up in heaven would forget ’bout de days on earth when sugar was short. We would just go along on our merry way knowing sugar can never short, and forget de times o’ tribulation when sugar used to short.”

“Mi dear, ma’am!”

“But you remind us, Missah Baps, dat sugar used to short, even though sugar can never short.”

“Quite so. Dat is why we must prepare for shortage.”

“I see you point, Missah Baps. Anyway, beg you to sell me two pound o’ sugar.”

I studied her long and hard before exercising due discretion.

“Since is you,” I said, “I will make an exception,” weighing out and wrapping the two pounds of sugar for her.

“Thank you, Missah Baps.”

Grabbing hold of my collar and drawing me close to her face, she darted a look around at the empty shop and village street and in a whisper urged me never again to weaken and break the discipline of rationing I was attempting to impose, no matter how much ole negar bawled and wailed about it.

Then she went away, after duly lamenting that the murderers back on earth always seemed to be slaughtering the same trash week in and week out and wondering why they couldn’t concentrate, once in a blue moon, on posting some of the better class of Jamaicans to heaven where they were sorely needed.

Happily babbling in this vein, she set off along the empty village street, furrowing a path through the swirling mists.

BOOK: The Duppy
10.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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