But this Sunday there was just a few young people getting them First Communion, in a heavy heat because the ceiling fans wasn’t doing a thing to help. So people was sitting there fanning themselves and listening to the priest tell the young people that now they received the body of Christ, Christ was inside them and they should behave like Christ. That people interpret everything from within the worldview they have, and therefore they cannot understand another perspective unless they suspend their own past experience and what they think they know, and seek to understand what they see. And that Christ would help them to do that, like a uncle or godfather.
Afterwards, when I see Michael, I give him the envelope I bring for him. He take it and look at me and say, ‘What is this?’
‘That is the arrangements for my funeral.’
‘Your funeral!’
‘I reckon it time I sort a few things out. I not going live for ever.’
When he go to open it I stop him. ‘There will be plenty of time for that when it happen. You can let the glue rest till then.’
Him look at me sorta quizzical so I say, ‘I feel like I come to a new place what with Zhang and Ma and Henry and Cicely gone. And then a while back I had to go ask a man for a favour. A man that I distrusted my whole life. And I discover that maybe my life don’t have to be all ducking and weaving and manoeuvring. Maybe I could afford to take my foot off the gas, especially after I get a fright about how all of this could end, and manage to make it through OK. So I think it time for me to count my blessings and stop reaching after something that maybe was nothing more than a idea I had about myself. Maybe it time I just be who I am and settle for something that is real.’ And then I laugh and say, ‘That is till the time when the Almighty make up his mind to come for me.’
Michael just sit there and look at me kindly like him taking confession. And then I say, ‘I get a letter from Mui. She going come home. She done with all the excitement of them big important cases that keeping her busy this last little while and she say it time she come home and make herself useful. After all these years, eh? Anyway, I thought you would want to know if she not already tell you herself, that is.’
And right then I think to myself I glad I keep the knife and little notebook for her. Maybe when she come home she can decide what she want to do ’bout Helena Meacham.
42
Sun Tzu say, ‘ Of the five elements, none is always predominant; of the four seasons, none lasts for ever; of the days, some are long and some are short; and the moon waxes and wanes .’
Gloria decide she going have a party for the baby. It nuh make no sense to me but she say, ‘So what, we can’t have a party to celebrate our granddaughter’s birthday?’ And I just agree to go along with it even though I can’t see how a little thing like that going know the party for her, and we going have all these grown people just standing ’round the place with a piece of cake and bowl of ice cream in their hand. But that is what Gloria want. And maybe I feel like I have something to celebrate as well because since Miss Cicely go leave us the supermarkets and wholesalers and such, and since we get the vacation and cosmetics business on a right footing, we legal now. We completely legitimate. No more driving chickens and cigarettes ’round town. In fact I can’t even remember the last time I go over the Blue Lagoon.
We have the party up in the house in Ocho Rios and in truth I don’t think Gloria is celebrating the baby at all. I think she celebrating a new life. A new life for me and her. Maybe the life we should have had all along.
Everybody come up to the coast. Finley and his wife, Hampton and Ethyl, Clifton, Merleen Chin and John Morrison, George and Margaret, Milton, Marcia and the two other girls from Gloria’s East Kingston house. Even Margy Lopez show up with some woman we none of us ever see before. And then we have the guests of honour, Esther, Rajinder and baby Sunita. It was family.
I stand on the veranda and look out at the calm, blue Caribbean and I think how glad I was that I manage to sort out that wharf thing with DeFreitas and how only last week I tell Gloria ’bout the arrangements I make for her and Esther if anything should happen to me, and she just laugh and slap me on the arm and say, ‘What going happen to you?’
And then I realise that I wouldn’t complain if I happen to drop down dead right there. I start picture the whole thing, how they take me to the hospital and start go through my pockets. A pocket-knife with two blades and a bottle opener, a cigar packet with three Flor de Farach Farachitos, two wads of notes – Jamaican dollars and US dollars – some wooden toothpicks in a silver container, and a black leather photo wallet with the figure of a crane under a pine tree engrave on it, and inside a photograph of Mui in her barrister wig and gown and opposite it one of me sitting down holding baby Mui, and Xiuquan standing next to the chair.
I think about my life and how hard I tried to find something to believe in. Something that would mean something to me, like how Zhang had his stories of China and the masses throwing out the foreigners and making a life of their own. Like how Mr Manley say, Jamaicans had to make an identity, and dignity and destiny for ourselves. But it wasn’t the same for everybody. Like Gloria was always telling me, not everybody had their sights set on building a nation. Some people just wanted to put food on the table. And I suppose that was me as well because even though I talk Zhang’s high ideals I was still busy just making money and fixing any problem that anybody wanted to bring to me. I try hard to believe that out of many we could be one people, but when the shooting start I couldn’t make up my mind to go get myself killed over it. Not like my father did in China.
But like Zhang was always telling me, everything got consequences. Everything you do or don’t do is connected to everything else. So any time you do something you making another thing that will be waiting for you ’round the corner. And then I start wonder if Michael is right ’bout God and all of that, and how the Almighty is fixing to punish me for all the things I done.
Gloria come out on the veranda and stand next to me and we listen to the gentle lap of the Caribbean on the shore. She got a smile of contentment on her face. And then she reach out and take my hand and look off into the distance where she tell me, on a clear day, she can see Cuba. I think well, out of the many Sunita is the one so maybe I make a contribution after all. I can hear a commotion inside and Michael’s voice greeting everybody.
And then I think ’bout Mui coming home after this long time. And I think if I drop down dead right now that is the only thing it would grieve me to miss. And then I think no, I would miss that I never find a way to have nothing with Karl even though him and me exchange a few lines from time to time. And I would miss the possibility that me and Fay ever cross paths again.
That is when I realise that I not dead yet, so maybe it not all lost. And I remember how Zhang rest his palm flat on my chest one time and say to me, ‘Everything is in your own heart.’
Author’s Note
Han Suyin once wrote that we Chinese are history-minded. And as the world knows, we Jamaicans are politics-minded. Perhaps it is no surprise, therefore, that this book, my first work of fiction, should turn out to be a political history. Not only because every story has a context, but also because context creates the possibilities of what might be, fashioning the circumstances of people’s lives so that they decide to do one thing rather than another, making their story unfold in this way rather than that.