I turned to leave for the boarding house but my father gripped my arm tightly. ‘Some time with my boy,’ he said.
Jonah looked surprised; my father was never one to ask for slack if there was still work to be done. ‘Sure, Dante.’ He clapped my father on the back, gently, waved us on. I’d noticed recently how he’d started giving the younger boys the heavier loads.
My father pulled me for several paces along the sea wall before letting go of my arm and then he kept walking. I followed. Fed well by America, I’d grown quickly this year and my father seemed suddenly smaller to me, more tired, his strength diminishing as mine grew. When we were out of earshot he said, without catching my eye, ‘I know where she is.’ I stared at him but still he looked away.
‘Where?’
‘Walk with me, boy.’ We cut through the market and into the curandero’s alley to the sari-sari store. Rico and his boys weren’t around which meant, no doubt, that Suelita wasn’t on duty. I felt both disappointed and relieved.
Fidel was at the hatch chewing gum. He was reading a komik and started when my father rapped on the counter with his knuckles. My father opened his mouth to speak but already Fidel was ducking beneath the partitioning curtain. We heard him call out to his mother. Missy was on the stoop in an instant, a half-gutted fish in one hand, a knife in the other. When she saw my father, she raised the fish in acknowledgement. She stepped back inside and we listened as she snapped orders at her son to deposit the fish in the Frigidaire, to sluice water over her hands as she scrubbed them at the pail in the yard, to bring the rubbing alcohol from her midwife’s bag, to put it back.
Missy Bukaykay might have been slight but her frailty was a deception. She had a certain kind of doggedness about her, slow-grown like a callus on skin. Inevitable perhaps for the eldest of nine, born of peasant farmers who made their way to Puerto when they lost their land: a teenager when she came for the first time to the city. Missy had never undertaken any official training to become a midwife. Still, it was said she’d never lost a baby, even in the worst of conditions, so no one paid much mind to the details of her state midwifery licence, which was displayed on the wall of the shack and was several years out of date.
She was back on the stoop within minutes, her midwife’s bag in hand. She sniffed at her fingers. ‘Better not arrive today. Be a shame for that to be the first thing to smell on coming into this world.’ She held out her fingers for my father to sniff but he waved them away, smiling.
‘Baby will either love fish for life or hate it,’ he said.
‘Better be love because we’re no distance at all from the sea.’
She walked ahead of us through the alley towards the basilica, turning off into the street of my father’s apartment. She didn’t hesitate as she entered his building and climbed the stairs to the room where my mother had lived and died.
Inside, the room was dark, the curtains drawn. A small fan hummed on the dining table. As we walked in, my father called out ‘Lorna— ’ but the rest of his words died on his lips. In the corner of the room Lorna squatted, legs apart, dress pulled up around her breasts, naked from the waist down, one arm gripping the table, her eyes like cornered prey. She was moaning. Around her feet, the floor was wet and between her legs I could see something, a dome with soft black hairs and beside it what looked like a tiny hand.
My father and I froze. Missy snapped into action, barking at us for towels, cloths, clean water. We obeyed, fumbling through each task. She lay Lorna down on the floor and I watched, nauseous now, as she pinched and pushed the baby’s fingers until the hand withdrew inside Lorna’s body. Missy’s hand seemed to follow it and I looked away. The smell filled me, something raw and pungent, like ammonia. The room was full of noise: Lorna’s moans and Missy’s commands to breathe, push, fetch this thing or that, the sound of my own heartbeat shaking my body. The child emerged slowly at first and then in a rush, and when it was out and in its mother’s arms my father sank into a chair and put his head in his hands.
Missy beckoned me over and together we moved mother and baby to the bed away from the blood and the mess and the smell. I gathered the dirty towels and sheets into a ball and went to fetch a pail and some phenol with which to scrub the floor.
As I passed my father’s chair, I saw that he was trembling and, my senses still overwhelmed, numbed by everything that had just occurred, I registered as I would register the heat, the rain, the presence of a fly, that he was crying.
Mother and Child
My father spoke quickly, anxious to explain. He’d gone that morning to the cemetery to visit my mother, as he had every morning since hearing about Eddie Casama’s consortium. He fell silent now thinking about it, and Lorna, without lifting her eyes from the baby, started up in his stead. She’d seen him there, she said, and followed him without his knowledge. She’d watched from behind the larger crypts as he wept quietly, privately, without display. She looked up at me. ‘I went to the priest first, after I left the jetty. The one with the yellow hair. He told me they could help me find a home for my baby but I don’t want to give her away.’ She lowered her head gradually as she spoke so that these last words were murmured into the baby’s scalp.
The apartment was clean now and smelled of disinfectant. Missy had left, but she’d promised to return later after Lorna had had time to rest. But Lorna, eager that I should first understand that my father was not at fault, pushed herself upright in the bed so that she would not succumb to sleep, and continued. ‘For two nights I lay down between the crypts, in the shadows where the sun hardly touches the grass and where there’s moss so the ground is soft. It was cold. I didn’t sleep at all. Every sound woke me: the men drinking nearby, the dogs sniffing around. I was afraid of the living, not the dead. I don’t know why I followed your father this morning. What else was there for me to do? When he went to the church to pray and he cried again, I decided right then that I wasn’t going to spend another night in the cemetery.’ When he got up to go to work, she’d approached him, seizing the fabric of his shirt as she asked for his help. She offered to cook and clean for him, to wash his clothes. She even offered herself — at which my father shook his arm free in fury and she had to run after him into the churchyard and almost halfway down the street, begging him to listen, before he stopped again. He agreed, finally, to take her home, though he wouldn’t promise that she could stay. He left her there, after making sure she ate something, to go to work. He was late at the jetty for the first time since my mother had died, and he looked so tired, so preoccupied, that Jonah didn’t persist with his questions.
Before leaving her, my father had told Lorna that when he returned he’d bring her parents with him, but she’d begged him not to and eventually they’d compromised on Missy, the midwife, for the baby’s sake. My father was relieved at that, the weight of such a secret sitting rather heavily with him. Missy was more forceful with the girl than my father would have dared to be and Lorna, worn out from the labour, agreed quickly that her parents ought to know of her whereabouts. Besides, by then my father had acceded that, if Lottie and Lando agreed, she could stay. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing to bring life into this place again,’ he said. He went through my mother’s things, the few that remained, and took out a dress that, till now, he’d been unable to part with. He gave it to Lorna while Missy was still around to help her get into it, so that she would look clean and rested when her parents came, her own dress being stained beyond remedy.