Annie John Read online

  One afternoon, in the rain, my mother and father took me to the doctor, my father carrying me on his back, my mother walking by his side with her head bent down. The doctor, a man from England named Dr. Stephens, and my mother were one in their feeling against germs, parasites, and disease in general, with my mother always on the lookout for signs in my father and me of things to report to him. When I came down with a case of hookworm, Dr. Stephens and my mother had held discussions on the several ways in which I could have picked it up, finally settling on my bad habit of going about without my shoes on—against my mother’s loudly expressed wishes. After he had pointed out to my mother the many places on a person’s body where germs might lodge themselves, she made a habit of cutting my fingernails every Saturday. Dr. Stephens now examined me from head to foot, poking me here and there, listening to my heart, my lungs, taking my pulse and temperature, peering into my eyes and ears. In the end, he could find nothing much wrong, except that he thought I might be a little run-down. My mother asked herself out loud, “How could that be?” and then told Dr. Stephens that she certainly would redouble her efforts at making me eat properly, feeding me more beef tea, more barley water, more vitamins, more eggs and milk, along with keeping me in bed until whatever it was that had come over me went away.

  Going home, there was the rain still. I could see the huge drops as they hit the ground, but I couldn’t hear the sound they made. The streets were empty; everybody was inside, taking shelter. My head rested on my father’s shoulder, my arms were wrapped tightly around his neck. I could feel that he drew extra breath just from the burden of carrying me such a long distance. Sometimes he would turn his head to say something to my mother, but I couldn’t make out what that might be.

  At home, my mother undressed me and put me to bed. Soon after, she brought me an egg cordial with two tablespoons of rum in it. Ordinarily, I had to be coaxed to drink this, so much did I hate the taste of rum mixed up with eggs, but I could not taste anything now, so it all went down with ease. My father came in, looked at me, and said, “So, Little Miss, huh? Hmmmm.” I knew that he would say this before the words came out of his mouth. When the words reached me, the “So” was bigger than the “Little,” and the “Miss” was bigger than the “huh,” and the “Hmmmm” was bigger than all the other words rolled into one. Then all the sound rocked back and forth in my ears, and I had a picture of it; it looked like a large wave constantly dashing up against a wall in the sea, and the whole thing made me feel far away and weightless. I could hear the rain on the roof, and it was still pinning me down. I looked inside my head. A black thing was lying down there, and it shut out all my memory of the things that had happened to me. I knew that in my fifteen years a lot of things had happened, but now I couldn’t put my finger on a single thing. As I fell asleep, I had no feeling in any part of my body except the back of my skull, which felt as if it would split open and spew out huge red flames. I dreamed then that I was walking through warm air filled with soot, heading toward the sea. When I got there, I started to drink in the sea in huge great gulps, because I was so thirsty. I drank and drank until all that was left was the bare dry seabed. All the water from the sea filled me up, from my toes to my head, and I swelled up very big. But then little cracks began to appear in me and the water started to leak out—first in just little seeps and trickles coming out of my seams, then with a loud roar as I burst open. The water ran back and made up the sea again, and again I was walking through the warm soot—only this time wet and in tatters and not going anywhere in particular.

  When I woke up, I was sitting in my father’s lap and I was wearing a different nightie from the one I had fallen asleep in. My mother, dressed in her nightie, was bent over my bed, changing my sheets. I must have asked my father what was the matter, for he said to me, “You wet, Little Miss, you wet.” My father was wearing only his undergarments, which by then I knew how to iron without leaving any unwanted wrinkles. His clothes smelled of his perspiration from the day before. Through the folds of my nightie, I could feel the hair on his legs, and as I moved my own legs back and forth against his the hair on his legs made a swoosh, swoosh sound, like a brush being rubbed against wood. A funny feeling went through me that I liked and was frightened of at the same time, and I shuddered. At this, my father, thinking I was cold, hugged me even closer. It dawned on me then that my father, except for when he was sick, slept in no clothes at all, for he would never sleep in clothes he had worn the day before. I do not know why that lodged in my mind, but it did.

  My mother finished making my bed, and she bent over and picked me up out of my father’s lap. I was fifteen years old, but the two of them handled me as if I were just born. In bed, I looked at them standing over me. I couldn’t hear the rain, but I knew it was still falling. My parents said things to each other, but I couldn’t make out what they said, either.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes in the morning (I knew it was morning, for a large white candle was lit, not my lamp), I saw my mother seated at the foot of my bed. Her head was tilted to one side, and she had a worried expression on her face. When she saw that I was looking at her, she smiled at me. She said, “How are you feeling today, Little Miss?” and “Did you sleep well?” Though I can’t be sure, I must have answered in a way that pleased her, for she kept bobbing her head up and down and said, “Good.” She had ready for me some soap and water in my basin, which stood on my washstand, and she helped me to brush my teeth and wash my face. She tried to comb my hair, but I must have cried out, because she then smoothed down my plaits and kissed my head. Propping me up in bed with some pillows, she placed on my lap a tray that had on it three pieces of bread; on the bread was a cheese spread made of grated cheddar cheese, eggs, and butter. Also on the tray was a cup of chocolate made with milk from which the cream had not been removed. This meal of bread and cheese spread, with chocolate in my milk (the chocolate came from my grandmother, Ma Chess, who grew the beans and then did all the steps herself to turn them into chocolate; she sent the chocolate to us in a big box, along with nutmeg and other spices, coffee, and almonds), was among the three or four things in the world that I most liked to eat. But now, looking at it, I only knew that I had liked eating it at some point in my life and that it was usually given to me for supper on Tuesdays, when I came home from Brownie meetings.

  Outside me, the word “Brownie” hung just before my eyes. Inside me, the black thing that was lodged in my head grew even more leaden. A part of the black thing broke away, as if it had been dropped to the ground, and a small yellow light took its place. Inside the yellow light, I was a Brownie, a small toy Brownie. It was me, all right, but made small. In truth, I belonged to the First Division troop of Brownies, which meant that in parades my troop marched ahead of all the other Brownie troops. A woman named Miss Herbert was our leader. She was a cashier in the hardware-and-lumber department of a store called George W. Bennet Bryson & Sons, and whenever I accompanied my father to that store, where he sometimes bought supplies, she would wait on us. I would curtsy to her in the special way that I was supposed to curtsy to anyone whom my parents had made a kind of guardian for me in their absence, and she would acknowledge me, though in a sort of gruff way, to show that even though I was a good Brownie, who won many citations for good deeds, I was not particularly in with her. She always said that she respected and liked us all equally, and I have to say that that attitude didn’t go down well with me, accustomed as I was to being singled out and held up in a special way. Our troop was divided into four groups of seven girls each: elves, pixies, fairies, and gnomes. I was an elf, so I wore an emblem of a mischievous, dancing elf just above the left breast pocket of my uniform. On my sleeves and on my shoulders I wore all sorts of stripes and other emblems and badges to show that I had excelled in one thing or another. On our yellow ties we wore a brass badge in the shape of a four-leaf clover. We began our meetings with the whole troop standing in the yard of the Methodist church, forming a circle around the
flagpole, our eyes following the Union Jack as it was raised up; then we swore allegiance to our country, by which was meant England. For an hour and a half, we did all sorts of Brownie things; then we gathered again around the flagpole to lower the flag and swear allegiance. Just before we parted, we crouched down with our hands on our shoulders, two fingers pointing up, and we said in unison, “Tu-whoo, to-whit, tu-whoo,” in imitation of the wise old owl that was the patron of our troop, and it was wished for us that as we grew old we would grow wise also.

  Lying on my sickbed, I saw the toy Brownie who was also me on the road going to and from Brownie meetings. I was all alone. There were no other Brownies around me; there were no other people around me; there was only me, coming and going on the big road, which remained its normal size. I didn’t know how long it would take me to come and go with my little toy steps. As I watched myself long and hard, I forgot everything, but eventually I could hear my mother’s voice. I still couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I could see some of the words as they landed in the air between us. There was “imagine,” “that,” “most,” “nicely,” “because,” “down,” “little,” “basket,” “connive,” “well,” “trust,” “behavior,” “beads,” “beasts,” “blight.” They danced around, in and out, as if around a maypole. Settling back in my bed, I looked up at the beams in the ceiling. I then sat on one of them and looked down at my mother and me. I closed my eyes, and the warm, black soot started to fall. I fell asleep.

  * * *

  The rain continued to come, sometimes in a heavy drizzle, sometimes as if, all along, we had been living with a dam overhead and someone had purposely made a huge gash in it. My father could no longer go off to work, so he built furniture in his shop. One day, he arranged to be somewhere else and Ma Jolie came. She made cross marks on the soles of my feet, on my knees, on my stomach, in my armpits, and on my forehead. She lit two special candles and placed one over the head of my bed and the other near the foot. She said that, with all the rain, it was impossible for anything meaning me harm to be living outside in the yard, so she would not even bother to look there now. She burned some incense in one corner of my room. She put a dozen tiny red candles—with white paper on their bottoms, to keep them afloat—in a basin of thick yellow oil. When she lit them, they threw a beautiful pink glow all over my room. In the basin with the candles she had placed scraps of paper on which were written the names of people who had wanted to harm me, most of them women my father had loved a long time ago. She told my mother, after a careful look around, that there were no spirits in my room or in any other part of the house, and that all the things she did were just a precaution in case anyone should get ideas on hearing that I was in such a weakened condition. Before she left, she pinned a little black sachet, filled with something that smelled abominable, to the inside of my nightie, and she gave my mother some little vials filled with fluids to rub on me at different times of the day. My mother placed them on my shelf, right alongside the bottles of compounds of vitamins and purgatives that Dr. Stephens had prescribed. When my father came in to see me, he looked at all my medicines—Dr. Stephens’s and Ma Jolie’s—lined up side by side and screwed up his face, the way he did when he didn’t like what he saw. He must have said something to my mother, for she arranged the shelf in a new way, with Dr. Stephens’s prescriptions in the front and Ma Jolie’s prescriptions in the back.

  * * *

  For the first two weeks of my condition, my mother and father did not live a regular life. They were up with me at all hours of the night, and my mother was afraid to leave me alone in the day. But then they must have suddenly decided to take everything in stride, and, without making too much of it, they went back to their usual routines. The rain was still falling, but my father went back to work, leaving our house at the stroke of seven by the Anglican church bell. One day, my mother left me alone and went to the fish market for the fish that was to be our dinner that night. Just before she left, she said, “Little Miss, try and get some rest”—the main thing both my parents said to me now.

  Once I was alone, suddenly some photographs that were in frames and arranged in a semicircle on the little table not far from my bed loomed up big in front of me. There was a picture of me in my white dress school uniform. There was a picture of me as a bridesmaid at my Aunt Mary’s marriage to Monsieur Pacquet. There was a picture of my father wearing his white cricket uniform, holding a bat with one hand, the other arm wrapped tightly around my mother’s waist. There was a picture of me in the white dress in which I had just been received into church and took Communion for the first time, wearing shoes that had a decorative cutout on the sides. When I had bought those shoes and showed them to my mother, she said that they were not fit for a young lady and not fit for wearing on being received into church. We had an enormous fight over the shoes, and I may have said unspeakable things to her, though I have forgotten everything except that at the end I turned and said, “I wish you were dead.” As I said it, I felt hollow inside. My mother then got such a bad headache that the turtleberry leaves she placed on her temples to draw out the pain had to be changed every two hours, so quickly did the heat of the pain scorch them. That night, I could hear her making some moaning sounds as she paced up and down the house, because the pain kept her awake. When she stopped, I was sure that she had died, and that the new sounds I heard were the sounds of the undertaker, Mr. Straffee, come to remove her body for burial.

  The photographs, as they stood on the table, now began to blow themselves up until they touched the ceiling and then shrink back down, but to a size that I could not easily see. They did this with a special regularity, keeping beat to a music I was not privy to. Up and down they went, up and down. They did this for so long that they began to perspire quite a bit, and when they finally stopped, falling back on the table limp with exhaustion, the smell coming from them was unbearable to me. I got out of bed, gathered them up in my arms, took them over to the basin of water on the washstand, and gave them a good bath. I washed them thoroughly with soap and water, digging into all the crevices, trying, with not much success, to straighten out the creases in Aunt Mary’s veil, trying, with not much success, to remove the dirt from the front of my father’s trousers. When I finished, I dried them thoroughly, dusted them with talcum powder, and then laid them down in a corner covered with a blanket, so that they would be warm while they slept. I got back into bed, and I must have fallen asleep, for the sound of my mother’s voice—a worried bleat, really—brought me back to just lying in my bed and looking up at the ceiling.

  My mother was on her hands and knees, trying to dry up the floor. When I washed the pictures, I had spilled water all over, and my nightie and my sheets were wet. The pictures were in a little heap off to one side of the room, and even in my state I could see that they were completely ruined. None of the people in the wedding picture, except for me, had any face left. In the picture of my mother and father, I had erased them from the waist down. In the picture of me wearing my confirmation dress, I had erased all of myself except for the shoes. When my father came home, I heard him say, “Poor Miss, she can’t even be left alone for a short while.”

  * * *

  So, once again, my mother arranged her duties in such a way that I was never left alone. A neighbor did her grocery shopping for her. Another neighbor was sent to market to buy our daily fresh provisions. The fish we ate regularly for our dinner was brought to us, already scaled, by either Mr. Earl or Mr. Nigel, the two fishermen who supplied us.

  One day, Mr. Nigel brought the fish, and after a little chat with my mother he came in to see me and to wish me a quick recovery. Since he was still wearing his fishing clothes (khaki trousers that were beautifully mended with patches all over, an old red chambray shirt) and covered with fish scales and blood, he remained in the doorway of my room and said a few things. I couldn’t make out all that he said, but I could see that he had brought me a fish that somehow he believed was my favorite. How pleased he looked
and how happy. Of the two fishermen, I had always liked him better. He reminded me of my father. He was quiet and thoughtful in the same way, and he liked being a fisherman the way my father liked being a carpenter. As I was thinking of how much he reminded me of my father, the words “You are just like Mr. John” came out of my mouth.

  He laughed and said, “Now, mind, I don’t tell him you say that.” His laugh then filled up the whole room, and it sucked up all the air, so that I had no air to breathe, only Mr. Nigel’s laugh, and it filled up my nostrils, my throat, my lungs, and it went all the way down until every empty space in me was just filled up with Mr. Nigel’s laugh. In this state, when I looked at him I could see all sorts of things.

  My father’s great-grandfather had been a fisherman, but he must have been a bad fisherman, for he never caught many fish in his fishpots. One day when he went out to search his pots, he found the usual two or three small fish, and it made him so angry that he picked up the fish, said to God to kiss his backside, and threw the fish back in the water. A curse fell on him, and shortly thereafter he took very ill and died. Just before he died, his skin burst open, as if he were an overfull pea shell, and his last words were “Dem damn fish.” I could see Mr. Nigel and Mr. Earl sitting under a tree, their heads bent over a net that they were mending, one starting a sentence, the other finishing it. Mr. Nigel and Mr. Earl shared everything. At sea, they shared the same boat, the same catch. At home, they shared the same house, with Mr. Earl’s entrance from the street and Mr. Nigel’s entrance through the yard. The house had a door inside that connected their two parts, but the door was never locked. They shared the same wife, a woman named Miss Catherine, and though she did not live with them completely, her own house was just a few doors away, and she visited them quite regularly, sometimes entering from the street, sometimes entering through the yard. There, Miss Catherine cooked food, and the three of them, sitting at a table, ate from the same pot with their bare hands. That was a sight all could see as they passed by. I liked Miss Catherine, because she used snuff, and it made her spit, and her way of spitting seemed as if it was the best way such a thing could be done. My mother did not like Miss Catherine, because she was barren, slightly crippled, and was always telling my mother the proper way to bring me up. My mother, though she thought this a secret, also did not like her sister, my Aunt Mary, and whenever they had a quarrel, usually by letter, my mother would call her a barren, crippled, interfering idiot. My aunt was barren, was crippled, and constantly told my mother how to bring me up. I never knew if Miss Catherine was a cripple from the day she was born, or if as a child she had had an accident, or if someone had willed her that way.