The Origin of Waves (2 page)

“The blasted tube, man!” John reminded me. “The tube!” John was hopping on one leg, waving his hands and pointing to the black inner tube of the car tire which was our lifeguard. “Swim, man! Swim-out and save the blasted tube!”

I remembered the “moses,” the small boat my uncle used to shuttle and push himself over the soft, placid water near the shore, level as glass, and how he guided himself in this small boat with one oar into the deeper water, to reach his fishing boat. His fishing boat was tied with a thick piece of rope that he made stronger by rubbing it with some something the local joiner and cabinet-maker had given him; and tied at the sunken end of the rope, far far down into the sea you could not see from the surface, was a piece of concrete, heavy as iron, which he called his anchor. I remembered how he would hop into the “moses” as if he were hopping onto a passenger bus to escape paying the fare, and before I could blink my eyes twice, in the twinkling of an eye, “before you could say Jack-Sprat!” as my mother always said about his shuttling from the land to the deep sea in the fragile “moses,” before I could twink an eye, he would disappear amongst the climbing waves, higher than the steeple of the church, higher than any hill in Barbados, and then I would hold my breath; and when I released it, the “moses” would be like a hat thrown into the sea, or a leaf, dancing in a frolic upon
the steadying waves. “The sea is a bitch!” he would say, when he emerged from the glistening, shiny, silver waves, after having toiled all night in the thick, oily blackness out of sight of land. He would come back with only one cavalley, one barracuda, and six flying fish as his reward, flat and squiggling on the bottom of the large boat made with his own hands. “A bitch, boy!” But it was enough. Enough to feed even his family, not counting the three outside-children that he had, and a few women on the side. Friends and lovers in equal proportion of commitment and pleasure always shared his catch. “This sea,” he would say, pointing back to the vast beautiful water which the early evening sun had made glorious, “
That
sea? Is a bitch!” Then, at last, before my loss of breath and patience, he would reach the fishing boat, which he had christened
Galilee with
a bottle of white rum that contained only one gill. He had drunk the rest before the ceremony. He was a deacon in the Church of the Nazarene, when he was not catching jacks and sprats, flying fish and sharks, dolphins and conger eels, and other “breeds,” as he called them. He didn’t go to church too often; but he never ventured into the sea on Sundays to fish, except early Sunday morning, just a few hundred feet from the shore, to fetch-back the fish-pots from the rewarding sea, pots filled with after-morning-church dinner of barbaras, cavalleys, ning-nings, sea-eggs when they were in season, and when it was still illegal to catch them during those months whose names did not end in “er.”
But the last syllable in the name, the “er,” was always disregarded by him. And once, to our religious joy, one bright Sunday morning, the fish-pots blessed us with a lobster. It weighed twenty pounds, one ounce.

“Jesus Christ!” the other fishermen and two women sitting on the sand with baskets and buckets screamed.

“A twenty-pung, one-ounce lobster, man?” my aunt had said, hefting the thing in her left hand, and with a stick in her right, ready to strike it dead if it wriggled the scissors of its big and little claws too close to her face. “Man, whoever hear of a lobster this size, that weigh twenty pungs, one ounce? You not ’fraid God strike you dead? And on a Sunday morning, to-boot?”

“Well, not that in the real sense I mean that this lobster which I catch tip the scales at twenty pungs avoirdupois, plus one ounce,” he said, respectful, though relishing his use of big words, which he loved as much as he loved his sister. But he had no scales. He never relied on them, but weighed everything, fish, potatoes, and mangoes, by hand, hefting them. “When I say that she tipping the scales at twenty pungs, one ounce, assuming that I did-have a blasted pair o’ scales, is only a way o’ speaking, girl. Only a way o’ speaking!”

It was just two weeks after that Sunday morning that they brought him back, as if he were a shark he himself had caught, out in the darkness, putting an end to his fishing on the Sabbath, as he called Sundays, although he did not know what the difference meant.

“Swim-out! Swim-out!”

John’s voice, meanwhile, is ringing in my ears, but I am seeing the “moses” drifting in the trough of waves; then
Galilee;
then the darkness; then the blowing of the conch-shell horn that killed the smaller signals from the doves-of-the-woods; and then the bruised sand over which they are dragging my uncle’s body, bloated by water, bloated with more water than my teacher in elementary school had told me was the correct proportion for a human carcass; and then the darkness.

“Swim-out! Swim-out!”

I stood my ground. I saw the black tube do the same dance as the “moses” used to do. I saw it disappear. I saw it reappear. I saw it get small and smaller, smaller still, until it was the same size, the same black mark, as one of the ten needles of the cobbler in the pink skin of John’s heel. That was the last time I saw the tube. That was the last time I ever sat on the sand with John. That was the last time, before I left the island, with John following soon behind, when we did almost everything together or had it done to us: birth, baptism, christening, and confirmation; leaving elementary school for the Combermere School for Boys where they trained us boys and turned us into senior civil servants and junior civil servants too; times when we joined the choir of St. Michael’s Cathedral Church, after St. Matthias, where we learned to memorize Roman numerals before we could follow the announcement of Psalms at matins and at evensong, and then find them in the red leather-bound Psalter; times in Scouts,
cadets, Harrison College, a first-rate school for boys also, and only, and for turning us into barristers-at-law, and doctors, and priests to replenish the Anglican church, and secondary school teachers at our old school and college; for early, forced marriedhood, if girl friends were made pregnant by an error of youth and passion; and for university. Canada for me, because my money was too short to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean on a boat and go to Oxford; and Amurca for John, because his ship-working uncle was now docked and hiding in Brooklyn, for ten years, among the waves of other daring, risk-taking men, and was safe between the waves of the Stars and Stripes …

I
am walking in the snow now. The snow is deep. And my legs are heavy from pushing aside the tiring snow, which the plough that passes beside me is barely able to do; and I feel I am walking in frozen water. I have not remembered to take my shoes to the shoemaker to cover the hole in the middle of the left sole. So many things that I plan to do, late at night, and the night before, and put them down in diaries, and I forget them all, in this clenching and undying snow and cold, when morning comes. And I am slipping. I am moving one heavy foot no match for the cold leaking through my left sole; moving one foot at a time, at the same pace as the old blackened sail I used to see far out at sea, on that same beach where
we sat, John and I, forty-fifty years ago, counting the steamers and the Canadian lady-boats and inter-island schooners which brought strangers and thieves, whose language was French and broken English, and “pahweemangoes” and bananas and nutmegs, weaving through the string of pearls and water surrounding us, to our shore. It is about eleven o’clock now, a time when there would be sun above my head; but here there is no sun overhead, and today, in December, almost noon, it feels as if it is night. Time in this city has made this walking sail old and worn and tattered, so that when the wind is cold and strong as it is today, holes in the sail you can put your fist through appear; and the wind can go through them, and delay the motion and the speed of arrival. But I am going nowhere in particular. I have no destination. I have no hour of an appointment; for the sail that gives me movement is patched with the words of an old song, in the voice of a woman. I can hear her voice now, whenever I walk these streets in winter … walking and seeing a light shining. When I walk there is no light. I can’t even remember the words … something about being released, being released any day. Any day now, I hope to be released from this snow. I walk and people are passing me by, and I say hello, as I have been taught to do, back in the island, but still I can see nobody waving back hello, for my eyes can only look at you … Lang … It is not an ordinary face that I look out for, as I walk these streets.

This snow I am walking in now is anticipated and wished for with fierce resolution every December, just before Christmas, when I wish and pray and plan and curse and vow that this Christmas will be the very last, when I dream it is going to be my last. And I have conversations of reproof with myself, for having remained amongst its whiteness for so long, so many winters, all these forty or fifty years; and still I find myself today, this afternoon in December 1996, walking in the same snow, on the same lonely street which remains clean for the short lifetime of its whiteness, a second after the snow hits the pavement.

I say to myself on the twenty-sixth of December every year, as I have been saying for forty-fifty years, “I am going back home, I am going back home, I am going back home,” recalling the three times written in a legal warning.

And then myself says to me, “You’re damn right! You should haul your arse outta this damn country. What has this goddamn country given you? With all the richness and racism building up, year by year?”

And I argue back with myself, “I have a house. Don’t have to rent from no blasted landlord. I have no children. Never had a wife: but a good woman, one short time, filled with flowers and summer; and she died too soon, and she ain’t here, no more! Made a living. Making a living …”

And myself would argue back, “On that Rock where you born, boy! On that Rock, you can walk down the
road, any road, without anybody looking at you the wrong way, and smile and say hello, and hear the greeting coming back, ’cause home is home.”

And I would have the final word in this interminable two-timing monologue, forty-fifty years long. “Who do I know still, back home? They’re all dead. Or gone-away. Living in Britain; one in Germany as I read in a foreign newspaper; a few in Italy; thousands in Amurca; and tens of thousands unknown to the Immigration authorities, also living in Brooklyn. I do not see them; I see their cousins every year here, in the last week in July and the first week in August; here in Toronto, with their strange, loud, over-sized clothes and thin shins; and gold round their necks, their wrists, their ankles, forgetting the first enchainment in ships; and now they come with gold on all ten fingers sometimes, beating the authorities and the rate of exchange, and in enough quantity and shininess to fill many tombs in Egypt that used to be inhabited by Pharaohs, but not all of the same quality.

Each December, the snow becomes thicker and my resolution thinner, and more difficult to walk on; and it seems to stick to my body like old white paint, except that it has more weight than paint; and I move just like
Galilee
, that overladen fishing boat we used to watch far out in the waves which made it behave as if it was sliding between hills and valleys. John and I spent hours and hours on the warm sand of that beach the colour of the old conch-shell, looking out at those
waves, wondering where they went to after they were born at our feet, after they left us, and left our eyesight; wondering how many ships, steamers, Canadian lady-boats, inter-island schooners, and brave fishing boats had passed over those same waves; wondering which wave would bear a woman in its hold that we would truly love, and which ship would carry us from our governors and pageantry and fun and parades and colonialism.

“We’s colonials,” John said. “And as colonials, we have to leave this place.”

“And go where? Where to?” I asked.

“Anywhere.”

“We are not really colonials, are we? This is our home. We born here. And after Cawmere School, and Harsun College, we’d be
fixed
. For life.”

“The meaning of a’ island,” John said, “is that you have to swim-out from it, seeing as how it is surrounded by water. And anything surrounded by water is a place you really don’t know the size of, like you have to swim-way far from it, and then you would know the measurements of the place. That is the meaning of borning in a’ island. There is a book in the Public Library that I was reading; and what I just tell you I was reading is in that book.”

“What it name?” I asked John, who was always reading in “reading-races” with me, with books we borrowed every Saturday morning from the Library in Town. “What is the name of that book?”

“Man, I read it in a book, man,” he said, “and if I read it in a book, it is true. So I don’t have to tell you
nothing
more! The only important thing for you to know is that it is printed in a book. Books don’t lie.”

“But you really thinking of not living in this place?”

“The minute I finish school, out-goes-me! I gone!”

“To where?”

“Brooklyn, New York, with my uncle. Europe. Any place. But I know I will not be living in this place.”

“Me, too,” I said. And it scared me because I did not know where I could go; and it scared John that I was thinking along the same lines.

Of course, we did not live through those times knowing it was anything like colonialism. We watched the Governor drive through our neighbourhoods, in his black, polished Humber Hawk, on his way to parades; and going to friends to drink rum and soda, and gamble with cards; and when his car stopped within touching distance, we stared at its glamour, and saw our faces in the sparkling bonnet. And once we caught him at a hotel, the Colony Club, where men who governed the island, although they were not governors, but only played polo, and drank whisky and soda, and lived in large houses, met to drink after a game; and we saw our faces again, and our grinning teeth in the bonnet of the glimmering Humber Hawk, while the chauffeur, a man elevated from our village, and dressed like an officer in evening uniform of black, deep black, stood beside the car, rubbing it down with a yellow chamois
cloth, as if he was rubbing down a woman’s thighs, as if he had not rubbed it down for hours, one hour before he left the Governor’s House, making it shine, from any distance, like a dog’s stones on a dark night.