The Origin of Waves (7 page)

“I don’t have one.”

“Don’t have a family? Every man have a family! Even if it’s a rotten family. What you been doing? All this
time, in this place, what you been doing? Wasting time with all these beautiful broads I see walking-’bout Toronto? I see them even in the hospital. No family? A man have to have a family, some kind o’ family. I show you mine. Where yours is?”

“I don’t have a family.”

“Goddamn! I kinda figured as much from the way you talk, as if you’re talking to somebody who isn’t there. And the way you answer questions. You answer all my questions with another question. I happen to know from my work as a therapist that a man who does-live by himself which you say you does-do, which is not the same thing as living alone, mind you! But a man who lives by himself is a man who don’t find it necessary to talk or answer questions. Or feel he should. Now, take a man like me. Accustom to so many pickneys round the goddamn house, a man like me is a man that can’t stop talking. But I was talking, talking, talking from since I was small. You know that. So, no wonder I like studying people and psychology. You
don’t
have a family? Never wanted one? So, who is this Chinese broad in the photograph that is cracked along the face? Who is she?”

“She not a broad!”

“Hey, hey, hey! Lady, then.”

“Was.”

“What the fuck …?”

“A woman,” I say.

“In all the years you spend in this place, and no family? And only one picture of a Chinese woman in
your wallet that’s faded and cracked? This is
all
you have to show for all that time, that you been walking-’bout the streets of Toronto? This Chinese woman would gotta be something more than just a woman!”

“A woman.”

“I
know
she is a woman. But it got to be more!”

“What is the time?” I say.

“Time?”

“The hour?”

“You live here. Not me!”

“You remember
Galilee?
”

“And skinning scuffings?”

“Diving-off …”

“And the scuffings we used to skin, diving-off the side of
Galilee? And
diving into the sea? And in all that time, you couldn’t swim!” He laughs again. And the men and women in the bar, now beginning to get full, look at us, smile at our words they cannot understand, and go back to their own joviality, the clinking of glasses and the flicking of cigarette lighters.
“Galilee
, your uncle’s boat, was as big as a schooner.”

“My aunt sold the boat to another fisherman when my uncle drowned. And that evening when they brought him in, swelled-up with the water in his body, he looked so big and so much younger, like a wrestler. And when they lay him down on the sand, I was sure that one of his fishermen-friends was going to stand on his stomach and force-out the water through his mouth. But I think they only took him in a hired car
straight to the undertakers, and left him there for two or three days, before they brought him back home. When they brought the body back home, they laid-him-out in the front-house on a thing that looked like two folding chairs, and he was in the coffin, a mahogany coffin that the joiner had-made, with silver things, ornaments all round the box. He didn’t look like the same man they dragged-out the sea that evening. I always wondered why he looked so young, younger when he was dead, than when he was living and fishing and running up and down the beach in the early mornings, exercising. And then at the funeral …”

The laughter of the two women rises, and I stop talking. I can hear cars splashing along the street outside. In here it is warm and rich with a lighting like in a church just before evensong.

“Yes, but before the funeral, you remember how they laid-him-out in his black serge suit that he used to wear to funerals and weddings and lodge meetings, and while he was the deacon in the Nazarene Church? I can see him laid-out in that black suit, in that coffin, with his face looking more blue than black, as if they had bathed the body in water with ashes in it, or had-rubbed blue powder in his pores in his face. He looked more bluer than black, to me, than the black of his natural skin when he was running up and down the beach exercising in the mornings at dawn, doing his morning exercises and calisthenics. Wonder why black men of his complexion always look so blue when they are dead?”

“The blues, must be … The dirty blues!”

“Funerals back-then was such a lovely occasion, with the thrildren coming in the front-house of the house, and standing-up round the coffin, looking down into the coffin, through the oval hole that was always in a coffin at the top part, to see the dead. He had-on his favourite tie-pin pinned to his black tie, the tie-pin made out of tortoise shell. He had one black tie in all his life, for funerals and christenings. And one black suit, for funerals, weddings, Services-of-Songs and lodge meetings. But it was the smell of the water the undertakers had-bathe him in, after he was dead, the water that has the smell of lavender, that I remember. I remember the lavender water. And the smell he had when he was dead. A smell like camphor balls he used to put in the inside of the pockets of his serge suit to keep-away the moths. What is the name of the sprig of flowers they had in his lapel? Something old-something lace? Old woman’s lace? Married-women’s lace? Whatever the name is, it was, it looked like a sprig that was still growing on a branch. Everything else was dead except that piece of lace, that flower that my aunt had-picked and had-put in his lapel. But it wasn’t like a funeral, a real funeral like the ones we sang at in the choir of the Cathedral on Friday afternoons before school was lay-by, and on Saturday afternoons. This funeral of my uncle was more like a Service-of-Song. And the moment his fishermen-friends enter the house, and look at him, peaceful, and stretch-out on his back,
and quiet in his coffin, and
dead
, they start-up singing ‘Those in Peril on the Sea.’ It was suitable for a man dead or drowned at sea, like during the War. And they followed this with ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ending …’ ”

“Is
ended
!
Not
ending.”

“The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended …”

“The darkness falls at Thy behest,”
John says in a voice as if he is singing.

And I take up the next line:
“To Thee our morning hymns ascended …”

“Thy praise shall sanctify our rest
. Hymn four-seven-seven. In
Hymns Ancient & Modern
,” John says, imitating the sonorous voice of the Vicar whose words came through his nostrils, and then John, as if he is still the Vicar, conducting the ceremony for the Burial of the Dead, at the side of the grave, intones,
“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower …”

“Like a flower
. I wish I knew the name of that white flower.”

“And is cut down like a flower …
,” John continues, and he catches the spirit of a funeral and the ceremony for the Burial of the Dead in the small graveyard, amongst stones, falling headstones, and rich, tall growth of grass and no growing flowers except those in bottles and vases, beside the small Anglican church on the hill near Paynes Bay beach. And he is the small boy in the choir, dressed in the black cassock with the white ruff
round his neck on which hangs the large silver cross; and we are singing.
“We thank Thee that Thy Church unsleeping …”

“He was laid-out all that morning, Thursday morning, until the evening, when the men and his fishermen-friends full-up the house, and start the Service-of-Song for the dead, and the oldest fisherman was the chairman of the Service. The drinking and singing, singing as they went-through three jimmy-johns, a gallon each, of dark rum, as they went-through almost all the appropriate hymns in the book of
Hymns Ancient & Modern
, and my aunt lowered the wicks in the kerosene-oil lamps and the house was
plunge
in darkness, and the singing rose and got sweeter and mournful, and my God, the next evening, the Friday, at the funeral in the church at the service, all that black; black dress and black suit and black hats, and mauve; and the choir in black and the Vicar in black, and the skies I remember them was black too, just like the water at the shore where
Galilee
was resting on its side, up the beach, as if it
knew where
its captain was; and when those fishermen and his friends and cousins lowered him in the grave, the last thing was his wife, my aunt, who threw the flower, the same kind like the one that was in his lapel, on the coffin just before the last shovelful of dirt hit the top o’ the coffin in such a loud sound, my God … that was the end. Then, the weeping.”

“Jesus Christ!” John says. And, still standing in his black cassock, with the choir, in his mind, bringing this
back, makes the sign of the Cross on his chest. His index finger of his right hand touches his expensive custom-made suit, at four dotted points.

The bar is quiet. Dead. Our voices have killed the chatter. Some eyes are turned in our direction. The barman is looking at us, wondering. And without request, he comes with two double Scotches on his brown, round plastic tray. The woman who had laughed now starts to cough. The bar returns to its silence.

“Where you was going when I bounced-into you?” John says.

“Nowhere.”

“A man have to go
somewhere
. You can’t just be walking and not going nowhere! You can’t be just going from one place to the next, and not going
anywhere!
You must have some direction, even if only in your mind. A man just don’t walk that way. You just can’t walk from one spot to another spot, and still not be going anywhere! Goddamn!”

“Every day, at the same time, in any kind of weather, I leave my house and walk down Yonge Street heading straight for the Lake, and back from the Lake up again on Yonge Street and back to my house, walking the streets, seeing people passing, and sometimes, I try to smile with them …”

“I heard these words before!”

“I can’t remember where they come from.”

“From a song.”

“They come to me when I walk.”

“Goddamn!”

“I walk this street outside there, day in and day out, and I still can’t rightly say I am going anywhere. I pass stores. I know that. I pass the same stores in winter as I pass in the summer, the spring, the fall. All the time. I see people …”

“Smiling and saying hello,” John says, trying to remember. “Watching people passing by? Why won’t it come back, this goddamn song? I know a song with words like these.”

“Not always the same people. But people just the same. I see faces that I do not know, and I see people who are not related to me, except that, like me, they are people too, and nobody that I pass as I walk day in and day out knows me or recognizes me and I don’t recognize anybody or know anybody …”

“Goddamn!”

“…  there is nothing, nothing that I see that has any bearing, any relation, any connection to me. Did you know that not
one
street in this city has a similar name to
any
street back home? So, I don’t even see
that
connection.”

“You’re nothing but a walking ghost.”

“I look in store windows and in stores, and I see my reflection in the glass, and a funny thing, just a few minutes before I bounced-into you, it crossed my mind to consider going back home.”

“Back home? Man, there ain’t no goddamn home back home!”

“Perhaps. But just to sit on the beach and spend my time looking out into the sea, at the tourist ships and the cruise-liners and the inter-island schooners, if they still have schooners, and the fishing boats. Perhaps buy-back and recondition
Galilee
and do a little fishing myself.”

“But you can’t even goddamn swim, fella! What kind o’ fisherman you would make?”

“Most fishermen can’t swim. That’s why so many drown.”

“That’s for goddamn sure! Like your uncle!”

“True. There’s nowhere to go for me. In this city, or back home.”

“Take me, for an instance. Now, I am a man who live in the goddamn States, after knocking-’bout for years in Europe, France, Croatia, Belgium, Italy,
Deutschlanduber-alles
, Wess Germany and East Germany, now just-plain-Germany. But after a while, I got goddamn fed-up with European cultures and civilization, ‘specially their goddamn
hot-cuisine
, where you hardly have enough food on your goddamn plate to fill a’ ant! But the Germans? Gimme the goddamn Germans, the Nazzis, anytime! They like a lotta food and bittle that’s heavy. Not this
hot-cuisine
like the French and the
parlez-vous
woman. So, I leave Brooklyn in New York where all of us settle at first, and I head straight for the goddamn South, in the heart of Dixie, y’all! Got my ass outta Brooklyn quick! Too many Barbadians and Jamakians living there now. I can’t stomach any more reggae and
Barbadians with their spooge-songs and all that goddamn noise! All that noise. So, I high-tail my ass down South, y’all, to face the
real
thing! The real McCoy. And that’s where I learn to make a man of myself. In the goddamn South. As a goddamn black Dixiecrack! I am a black Dixiecrack. If you see what I mean. In the South, they say a man is not a man if he be black, but I found myself as a man in the goddamn South, and made something of myself as a
black
man. I make sure I behave
and
talk as a Wessindian-black and
not
as an Amurcan-black. If you see what I am saying. Right there in the heart o’ Dixie, I live a more better life than any black man or Wessindian in Brooklyn, than I did when I was hustling in Brooklyn-New York. I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you what I mean. After I leff Europe, divorce three times, from three different wives, and with them behind me, I tried to practise the profession of a psychiatrist in the States. The States is a big place that likes big people, big ideas, and that take big risks. I am a big man. I live big. A man could hide in the South. And that is exactly what I did. I couldn’t as a black man, playing around with therapy and psychiatry, hide in Brooklyn-New York. Tummuch goddamn Barbadians and Jamakians willing to report my arse to the Man! And since I did not have my three wives with me, ’cause they was back in Europe, I tried to piece-together my fucked-up life, what was leff of it. So, I opened a little clinic, just an office, a hole in the wall, and I took a big risk, practising as a therapist. You can take big risks in
the States. My therapist business took off. And then, I had the nerve to set myself up as a psychiatriss. You’re goddamn right! A psychiatriss. Well, really, as a therapist. Shit, what do I really know about being a therapist? But you gotta take risks. Big risks, big success. And bigger bucks. Or land in jail. But me? You’d be goddamn surprised what a little jazz-up furniture, in a’ office, fancy telephones, those old-fashioned ones from England in the nineteenth century, like the ones you see in books, or in murder movies with Sherlock Holmes and Dickens, things you come across in library books. You would burst your ass laughing. But this ain’t no goddamn laughing matter, this is taking risks. Big risks in a country with a big vision. My ass could be in jail, in a federal penitentiary any morning, even tomorrow, if I slip-up, if they catch me practising without a licence. But Amurca is Amurca; and only in Amurca, they say, anything can happen. After that, I had my hand in a little real estate, a venture or two, and after a few years, with one thing and the other, and not having a real-estate licence, I made a little money, a few Amurcan
smackeroons
, and today I can’t complain. Meanwhile, I take care of all my thrildren, every last one o’ those bastards,
lovely
thrildren really. And the wives, too. Not that they make me pay alimony, ’cause I am here, and they are there. But I send the three o’ them a little something, regular. By U.S. Postal Money Order. Have the bread to do it. Not that I goddamn like the idea of all this bread leaving the States for Europe. Goddamn!