“Don’t Mummy me. You think you fool everybody? You nearly fool me too until me see say me missing a few ingredients. Special ingredients. Things you mix and brew if you want a certain bitch out of the picture.”
“Out of the picture, Mummy?”
“Go on, play fool to catch wise, but I know you. It start sweet you, don’t it? Me see it in you face. You starting to like how blood taste. Make sure what happen a night no come back in day.”
Lucinda sat alone at her desk for the rest of the year, never approached by anyone.
Adolescence was brutal for all except Clarence. His looks were miraculous, especially considering the ugliness of both parents. Pretty and ugly were loose words in Gibbeah, and as such, his beauty had as much to do with light skin and pink lips as anything else. Pity about the picky negro hair, his mother would say. His growth was a matter of pride, and shame for others. Clarence knew this from the day the boys stopped bathing together. They had stripped naked as they always did and dove into the frigid water screaming and laughing. But as Clarence climbed out, the other boys knew for the first time that he was different. They saw a patch of hair where there wasn’t before, hair that they didn’t have, and it was red. Lucinda saw the red hair too. A day would not pass where she did not sneak down to the river and hide under the cover of banana leaves as she watched the boys frolicking naked in the water. She watched as day by day all the boys stopped coming to the river except Clarence.
“Them things you want to do, you can do to me,” she said to him from the river bank, half hiding in the shadow of banana trees. Clarence knew where to look. He had been watching her watching him for months.
“Oh? You think so? You don’t even have titty yet,” he said. He waded through the water toward her. Lucinda tried not to look at his red patch.
“Is not titty you goin use, or you didn’t know?”
“What? Look yah, cross-eye chi-chi, me know everything.”
“Then show me, nuh?”
“You want me to show you big-boy things? You think you ready for big-boy things? Alright, big girl, see me here.”
“No now. Tonight.”
“Little girl catch her fraid.”
“Me not fraid! Is you fraid. Me say tonight.”
“Tonight, then.”
“Me want it in the cemetery.”
“The cemetery?”
“The cemetery. Or you nah get the pokie.”
It turned out that Clarence knew nothing of female genitals. He cursed her tightness for minutes until he remembered that he too had an anus. When he finally stuck her aright, he pushed her down on a dirty concrete grave. His hips slammed into hers a few times before he pulled out and sprayed her thighs with semen. Then he left her in the cemetery. She heard her papa’s footsteps. Lucinda cried for days.
A week before Lucinda’s twenty-second birthday, her mother found Jesus. She told Lucinda to throw away all the witchery things, and she did, keeping only some of the jars and potions for herself. She spent the next two years beside her mother, wearing white as she wore, standing when she stood, shaking when she shook, and screaming Hallelujah! when she screamed. Her mother had a second stroke, but was still coming to church — praise God. Now if only Lucinda would go get herself a man before her pokie dry up and she can’t have no pickney. Look how she make good man like Mr. Greenfield get way and go married that Mary girl who live in her dead mother house.
“Lucinda, go cream you hair.”
“Lucinda, God don’t need no wife.”
“Lucinda, you think is only pissing it make for?”
“Lucinda, what you doin round the back? If me catch you with no spirit business, I goin broke up you backside in this house.”
“Damn fool you is, fi make man like Mr. Greenfield get way. And a town man at that. You know say him buy Mary Palmer house from Mr. Garvey and give she?
“Lucinda?”
“Me reading me Bible, Mummy.”
As a Kingston man who had experienced piped water, Mr. Greenfield resented bathing by the river. But he and Mary Palmer were not married and she would not have a man getting naked in her mother’s house. At least he was alone. As he washed himself, what should he hear but the indelicate splashing of Lucinda, who had come to wash herself too? Her polka dot dress around her neck, hanging like a noose.
“Me know you want to do nastiness with me,” she said.
She was a church-going sister who was known as such. Nobody who knew Day Lucinda could find out about Night Lucinda. But as she released her buttocks to his coarse hand, a feeling came over her that in the past had only come from spirits. Lucinda reached to embrace, but he kept her away and they stood apart at the head, apart at the feet, slamming in the middle. When he came, he stepped away and spilled his seed into the river. She went over to him, rubbing her breasts on his shoulder. “So me and you goin married now?”
Greenfield looked at her eyebrows, raised for pity above her crossed left eye. He burst into a laugh that bounced all over the gorge through which the river ran. He pushed her away and she lost balance. When she fell backways in the river he walked off, not bothering to dress himself beyond a towel. She could hear him laugh all the way up to Mary’s house.
Not long after that, on the day Lucinda helped her wash, her mother collapsed in the river. Bowing under a pregnant noon sun, the left side of her body went dead and she stumbled into rough water. Her mouth was half speaking, her eyes half blind, and her body half asleep. Lucinda watched as river currents ran over her mother and she drowned. Despite having use of only half her body, the woman might have saved herself were it not for Lucinda, whose pinning foot never left her mother’s head until water forced its way into her lungs and killed her in jerks. There was to be no funeral. The night welcomed Lucinda back. In a bonfire she threw lizard skins, cat skeletons, and a dog’s paw that her mother had saved in vinegar. Mary and Mr. Greenfield were married the next day.
Lucinda, having resigned herself to never again experience the misery of a man, took over Sunday school. Mary Greenfield would never have children and her marriage died long before her husband did, killed by stillbirths, mistrust, and jealousy.
Both women now found themselves compelled by men they barely understood. The wind nudged the Widow from her sleep and blew toward the church. Outside, noon burnt in silence. She knew that something had happened. The Widow ran to the church.
THE RECOVERY
The Widow Greenfield and Lucinda met in the church as they came to take their men away. Both men were unconscious and the building was at peace. The Rum Preacher lay in the aisle with benches scattered all around him. His white suit was covered in dirt and filth and his body had the heaviness of death. The christening pool at the rear of the church had been toppled over and water covered the floor. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled.
Lucinda screamed. She could not find the Apostle. There was a tower of rubble at the altar from the broken podium, wood planks that had been forced free, tapestries that had been torn down, and pieces of the organ. At the bottom was a stiff hand that pointed two fingers. She leapt over chairs and benches and pulled away with the strength that came with panic. The Apostle had a gash above his forehead and a line of blood that divided his face. Lucinda turned and glared at the Widow, but she was almost out the door. The Widow pulled the Rum Preacher through the door as the wind waited. Outside, John Crows had gathered on the steeple and the cross. The road was empty.