I don’t believe it because my father had lived all his life in Cunupia and he knew that you really couldn’t push the Cunupia people around. They are not tough people, but they think nothing of killing, and they are prepared to wait years for the chance to kill someone they don’t like. In fact, Cunupia and Tableland are the two parts of Trinidad where murders occur often enough to ensure quick promotion for the policemen stationed there.
At first we lived in the barracks, but then my father wanted to move to a little wooden house not far away.
My mother said, ‘You playing hero. Go and live in your house by yourself, you hear.’
She was afraid, of course, but my father insisted. So we moved to the house, and then trouble really started.
A man came to the house one day about midday and said to my mother, ‘Where your husband?’
My mother said, ‘I don’t know.’
The man was cleaning his teeth with a twig from a hibiscus plant. He spat and said, ‘It don’t matter. I have time. I could wait.’
My mother said, ‘You ain’t doing nothing like that. I know what you thinking, but I have my sister coming here right now.’
The man laughed and said, ‘I not doing anything. I just want to know when he coming home.’
I began to cry in terror.
The man laughed.
My mother said, ‘Shut up this minute or I give you something really to cry about.’
I went to another room and walked about saying, ‘Rama! Rama! Sita Rama!’ This was what my father had told me to say when I was in danger of any sort.
I looked out of the window. It was bright daylight, and hot, and there was nobody else in all the wide world of bush and trees.
And then I saw my aunt walking up the road.
She came and she said, ‘Anything wrong with you here? I was at home just sitting quite quiet, and I suddenly feel that something was going wrong. I feel I had to come to see.’
The man said, ‘Yes, I know the feeling.’
My mother, who was being very brave all the time, began to cry.
But all this was only to frighten us, and we were certainly frightened. My father always afterwards took his gun with him, and my mother kept a sharpened cutlass by her hand.
Then, at night, there used to be voices, sometimes from the road, sometimes from the bushes behind the house. The voices came from people who had lost their way and wanted lights, people who had come to tell my father that his sister had died suddenly in Debe, people who had come just to tell my father that there was a big fire at the sugar-mill. Sometimes there would be two or three of these voices, speaking from different directions, and we would sit awake in the dark house, just waiting, waiting for the voices to fall silent. And when they did fall silent it was even more terrible.
My father used to say, ‘They still outside. They want you to go out and look.’
And at four or five o’clock when the morning light was coming up we would hear the tramp of feet in the bush, feet going away.
As soon as darkness fell we would lock ourselves up in the house, and wait. For days there would sometimes be nothing at all, and then we would hear them again.
My father brought home a dog one day. We called it Tarzan. He was more of a playful dog than a watch-dog, a big hairy brown dog, and I would ride on its back.
When evening came I said, ‘Tarzan coming in with us?’
He wasn’t. He remained whining outside the door, scratching it with his paws.
Tarzan didn’t last long.
One morning we found him hacked to pieces and flung on the top step.
We hadn’t heard any noise the night before.
My mother began to quarrel with my father, but my father was behaving as though he didn’t really care what happened to him or to any of us.
My mother used to say, ‘You playing brave. But bravery ain’t going to give any of us life, you hear. Let us leave this place.’
My father began hanging up words of hope on the walls of the house, things from the Gita and the Bible, and sometimes things he had just made up.
He also lost his temper more often with my mother, and the time came when as soon as she entered a room he would scream and pelt things at her.
So she went back to her mother and I remained with my father.
During those days my father spent a lot of his time in bed, and so I had to lie down with him. For the first time I really talked to my father. He taught me three things.
The first was this.
‘Boy,’ my father asked. ‘Who is your father?’
I said, ‘You is my father.’
‘Wrong.’
‘How that wrong?’
My father said, ‘You want to know who your father really is? God is your father.’
‘And what you is, then?’
‘Me, what I is? I is — let me see, well, I is just a second sort of father, not your real father.’
This teaching was later to get me into trouble, particularly with my mother.
The second thing my father taught me was the law of gravity.
We were sitting on the edge of the bed, and he dropped the box of matches.
He asked, ‘Now, boy, tell me why the matches drop.’
I said, ‘But they bound to drop. What you want them to do? Go sideways?’
My father said, ‘I will tell why they drop. They drop because of the laws of gravity.’
And he showed me a trick. He half filled a bucket with water and spun the bucket fast over his shoulder.
He said, ‘Look, the water wouldn’t fall.’
But it did. He got a soaking and the floor was wet.
He said, ‘It don’t matter. I just put too much water, that’s all. Look again.’
The second time it worked.
The third thing my father taught me was the blending of colours. This was just a few days before he died. He was very ill, and he used to spend a lot of time shivering and mumbling; and even when he fell asleep I used to hear him groaning.
I remained with him on the bed most of the time.
He said to me one day, ‘You got the coloured pencils?’
I took them from under the pillow.
He said, ‘You want to see some magic?’
I said, ‘What, you know magic really?’
He took the yellow pencil and filled in a yellow square.
He asked, ‘Boy, what colour this is?’
I said, ‘Yellow.’
He said, ‘Just pass me the blue pencil now, and shut your eyes tight tight.’
When I opened my eyes he said, ‘Boy, what colour this square is now?’
I said, ‘You sure you ain’t cheating?’
He laughed and showed me how blue and yellow make green.
I said, ‘You mean if I take a leaf and wash it and wash it and wash it really good, it go be yellow or blue when I finish with it?’
He said, ‘No. You see, is God who blend those colours. God, your father.’
I spent a lot of my time trying to make up tricks. The only one I could do was to put two match-heads together, light them, and make them stick. But my father knew that. But at last I found a trick that I was sure my father didn’t know. He never got to know about it because he died on the night I was to show it him.
It had been a day of great heat, and in the afternoon the sky had grown low and heavy and black. It felt almost chilly in the house, and my father was sitting wrapped up in the rocking chair. The rain began to fall drop by heavy drop, beating like a hundred fists on the roof. It grew dark and I lit the oil lamp, sticking a pin in the wick, to keep away bad spirits from the house.
My father suddenly stopped rocking and whispered, ‘Boy, they here tonight. Listen. Listen.’
We were both silent and I listened carefully, but my ears could catch nothing but the wind and the rain.